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OBAMA AND 'JUST WAR'

OBAMA AND 'JUST WAR'

President Obama  was in Oslo yesterday to accept his Nobel award. He acknowledged that he has done little to justify the award and admitted that there are other people who are more deserving. However, he also laid the foundations for what is being called 'the Obama doctrine'  by saying that 'peace sometimes must be achieved through violence.'

BIPARTISAN CLIMATE DEBATE

Senators are working on a compromise climate change bill to tackle the use of coal and greenhouse gas emissions.

OBAMA & GOP SPAR OVER JOBS

President Obama and leading Republicans have clashed over how to best to reduce unemployment, with both sides accusing the other of using scare tactics.

BLACKWATER AND THE CIA RAIDS

Blackwater private guards in Iraq and Afghanistan had exceeded their role of guarding CIA officers by taking part in highly sensitive missions.

CONGRESS TO RAISE DEBT LIMIT

Democrats in Congress are preparing to raise the nation's debt limit to a new high of $1.8 trillion dollars rather than wait till next year when it may dominate the Congressional elections.

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Seen and heard


Your morning papers

Friday, March 19, 2010 The essential political bits from this morning's newspapers

The disarmament president

"On the other hand, Mr. Obama also didn't disappoint the Norwegians, who in giving the award had cited his "work for a world without nuclear weapons." He repeated his commitment to that cause, starting with his effort to rework the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 1991 that expired December 5. So it's worth checking in to see how his disarmament vision is faring in the rougher world of rogues and national interest. The answer is not so well."

Review and Outlook

The tax that won't die

"Republicans and willing Democrats shouldn't give up on eliminating the death tax. The Kyl-Lincoln amendment to create a permanent 35% rate is far better than the confiscatory House bill. But the best strategic outcome now is to let the death tax expire in January as scheduled under current law, and return to this debate next year when the tax rate is zero. Then let liberal Democrats explain to voters on the eve of elections that they must restore one of the most despised of all taxes."

Review and Outlook

The EPA's carbon bomb fizzles

"Bottom line: At least some congressional Democrats view this as breathing room, a further reason to not tackle a killer issue in the run-up to next year's election. Mr. Obama may emerge from Copehagen with some sort of "deal." But his real problem is getting Congress to act, and his EPA move may have just made that job harder."

Kim Strassel

Worse than the public option

"In the case of Medicare, this means expanding a program that is already going broke. Medicare reimburses doctors and hospitals at rates 70% to 80% below those of private insurers, which means below the actual treatment costs in many cities and regions. Providers either eat these losses—about half of U.S. hospitals are running a deficit or close to it—or they raise prices for private payers. This cost-shifting isn't dollar for dollar, but all empirical research shows that it adds tens of billions of dollars to consumer health bills, and this will accelerate if several million new patients are added to Medicare. That means higher prices for health insurance."

Review and Outlook

A Nobel speech unlike any other

"President Obama accepted the Nobel for peacemaking by delivering an eloquent, often grim treatise on the nature and necessity of warfare. Anyone who doubts his commitment to the war in Afghanistan, which he has escalated with an "extended surge" of 30,000 new U.S. troops, should read a transcript of the Oslo speech. Hawks who suspected -- and doves who hoped -- that Obama was a secret pacifist will see that although he did not set out to be a "war president," he has accepted his fate.Obama's major speeches often lay out not just what position he is taking or what decision he has made, but also the thinking process that led him there. Listening to his lecture Thursday, I had the sense that we were hearing arguments and counterarguments that might have been running through his mind during the long policy review leading to the Afghanistan surge."

Eugene Robinson

The new socialism brewing in Copenhagen

"Socialism having failed so spectacularly, the left was adrift until it struck upon a brilliant gambit: metamorphosis from red to green. The cultural elites went straight from the memorial service for socialism to the altar of the environment. The objective is the same: highly centralized power given to the best and the brightest, the new class of experts, managers and technocrats. This time, however, the alleged justification is not abolishing oppression and inequality but saving the planet."

Charles Krauthammer

An American triumph in Oslo

"Obama's speech, an artful balance of realism and idealism, was both a Judeo-Christian epistle, conceding the moral necessity of war, and a meditation on American exceptionalism. He was, in other words, the unapologetic president of the United States and not some errant global villager seeking affirmation.The speech was a signal moment in the evolution and maturation of Obama from ambivalent aspirant to reluctant leader."

Kathleen Parker

A better plan for creating jobs

"That's why Republicans have offered common-sense solutions to break down barriers to economic growth and help small businesses create jobs, starting with a recovery plan focused on encouraging investment and allowing families and small businesses to keep more of what they earn. Instead of the national energy tax, Republicans would implement an "all of the above" strategy to create jobs, lower energy prices and clean up our environment."

John Boehner

Ben Bernanke's unfinished mission is to create jobs

"So if we’re going to have any real good news, someone has to take responsibility for creating a lot of additional jobs. And at this point, that someone almost has to be the Federal Reserve.I don’t mean to absolve the Obama administration of all responsibility. Clearly, the administration proposed a stimulus package that was too small to begin with and was whittled down further by “centrists” in the Senate. And the measures President Obama proposed earlier this week, while they would create a significant number of additional jobs, fall far short of what the economy needs."

Paul Krugman

The Hanukkah story

"But there is no erasing the complex ironies of the events, the way progress, heroism and brutality weave through all sides. The Maccabees heroically preserved the Jewish faith. But there is no honest way to tell their story as a self-congratulatory morality tale. The lesson of Hanukkah is that even the struggles that saved a people are dappled with tragic irony, complexity and unattractive choices."

David Brooks

Obama's Japan headache

"In short, the need for the Japan-U.S. alliance is real even if the Japanese urge for liberation from its more demeaning manifestations is growing. That says to me that everyone should take a deep breath. U.S. impatience should be curbed along with the pie-in-the-sky “world of fraternity” musings of elements in Hatoyama’s party. Be flexible on Futenma but unyielding on the strategic imperative binding America and Japan."

Roger Cohen

President Obama in Oslo

"Accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on Thursday, President Obama gave the speech he needed to give, but we suspect not precisely the one the Nobel committee wanted to hear. Mr. Obama was appropriately humble. He said that “compared to some of the giants of history who have received this prize,” his accomplishments “are slight” and suggested that he had been chosen not so much for what he had done but for what he is expected to do."

Editorial

John McCain, critic-in-chief?

"Barack Obama began his presidency with an open hand toward the man he had just defeated in a race that was at times bitter. "There are few Americans who understand this need for common purpose and common effort better than John McCain," said Obama at an inauguration-eve tribute dinner to his former foe. But in the year since that evening of comity and collegiality, McCain has emerged as one of the leading critics of the new president. On foreign policy, his traditional area of expertise, and domestic affairs, where McCain has shown new passion, the 72-year-old Arizonan is making it plain that he has no plans to serve out his years in the rank-and-file, as a politician known more for what he lost than what he will yet accomplish."

Martin & Raju

Moderates uneasy with medicare plan

"Two days ago, the Medicare proposal appeared to be the elusive bridge between liberals, who were being forced to give up a public health insurance option, and moderates, who said they couldn’t vote for a bill that included one. But by Thursday, the shine had dimmed, as senators grew restless over a lack of information and declined to commit their vote until they could review the legislative language and the Congressional Budget Office cost estimate. Republicans also stepped up their criticism of the plan."

Carrie Budoff Brown

Conservative praise for Nobel speech

"President Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech Thursday is drawing praise from some unlikely quarters – conservative Republicans – who likened Obama’s defense of “just wars” to the worldview of his predecessor, Republican George W. Bush. It’s already being called the “Obama Doctrine” – a notion that foreign policy is a struggle of good and evil, that American exceptionalism has blunted the force of tyranny in the world, and that U.S. military can be a force for good and even harnessed to humanitarian ends."

Eamon Javers

Salazar claims Bush slept through climate change

"Interior Secretary Ken Salazar joined the Obama administration’s charm offensive in Copenhagen on Thursday — and took some shots at the Bush administration in the process.“As much as the world awoke to the dangers of climate change, the political leadership of the United States simply slept,” Salazar said in a briefing at the U.S. center here. “Confronting the impact of climate change was simply not a priority.”He said things have changed since the election of Barack Obama."

Louise Roug

Israeli settlements are more than legitimate

"Many who allege that Jewish communities in the West Bank violate international law cite the 4th Geneva Convention, Article 49. It states that an occupying power "shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." But Julius Stone, like Rostow a leading legal theorist, wrote in his 1981 book, "Israel and Palestine: An Assault on the Law of Nations," that the effort to designate Israeli settlements as illegal was a "subversion . . . of basic international law principles."

Eric Rozenman

Helping Iran's student protesters

"Students played a key role in toppling the shah in 1979 with street protests in Iran and abroad, challenging the regime and galvanizing international opinion against it. Then, as now, many of the students were secular democrats, while others were devout Shiite Muslims. They were part of a broad movement that included radical leftists, liberal democrats and religious leaders, not the least of whom was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Paris-based exile who returned to become the first supreme leader of the Islamic Republic. The religious students made their biggest headlines after the shah's fall, when they held Americans hostage in the U.S. Embassy for 444 days, paving the way for clerics to consolidate power in Iran. Ahmadinejad was part of the religious student leadership."

Editorial

Obama's faith in diplomacy backed up with firepower

"The ideas he outlined Thursday for achieving world peace aren't new; they were also articulated by President Kennedy, who called not for a revolutionary change in human nature but "a gradual evolution in human institutions." Toward that end, Obama laid out three key steps: a stronger commitment to meaningful international sanctions against regimes that threaten the peace, unswerving support for human rights and freedom worldwide, and pursuit of economic development in poor countries. We've heard such sentiments many times before, but Obama's special gift is to make them seem achievable by appealing to our higher nature."

Editorial

Variety putting 'pay wall' to the test

"Those are reasonable concerns, but Variety's response to them may not provide much guidance for the media world. The few publications that have successfully charged for news online have typically been specialty outlets aimed at business niches, whose subscribers could write off the costs as a business expense. Because Variety's goal is to hold onto the subscribers it already has, it has no qualms about driving casual readers off its site. The mere fact that it's a trade publication, however, is no guarantee that Variety can make the pay wall work. As its readers migrate from print to digital, they'll find a growing number of publishers offering free, ad-supported reporting on Hollywood. In short, even Variety has to compete with free. Its pay wall may keep nonsubscribers out, but it remains to be seen whether subscribers stay in."

Editorial