Daniel Lubetzky

The coolest figure by far at the Republican National Convention (at an otherwise sometimes robotic display of partisanship – "Drill, baby, drill!" was the cry of the audience at one point) was John McCain’s Mom – vibrant, elegant, and enthusiastic in every molecule of her 96-year-old body.

Fred Thompson was a bit too partisan, but did an extraordinary job highlighting the soundness of conservative fiscal policies.  He was the Hillary of Republicans, a Presidential candidate whose energetic Presidential performance at the Convention was far stronger than any performance during the campaign trail.

Thompson pointed out the fallacy of Democratic pandering by claiming they won’t raise people’s taxes, only "businesses", as if raising taxes on "businesses" wouldn’t have an impact on those who consume the products of the businesses.  "You see, we are not going to take water from your side of the bucket.  We are going to take water from the other side of the bucket."

While in Texas, I received a big dosage of pro-Palin views, rooted in her willingness to stand up to big government.  She is certainly a good speaker, which Obama has been "accused" of also.  I was almost convinced.  But if half of the things in this editorial are correct – saying the war in Iraq and a $30bb Alaskan pipeline she wants are "God’s Will"; trying to ban books in the public library; making a point in her acceptance speech about her rejection of the "bridge to nowhere" pork-barrel earmark but in fact supporting it and accepting the funding from the federal government – I am very worried about Senator McCain’s judgment.

[Read more →]

Worthwhile excerpts of President Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention:

Our nation is in trouble on two fronts. The American dream is under siege at home, and America’s leadership in the world has been weakened. Middle-class and low-income Americans are hurting, with incomes declining, job losses, poverty, and inequality rising, mortgage foreclosures and credit card debt increasing, health care coverage disappearing, and a very big spike in the cost of food, utilities, and gasoline.

And our position in the world has been weakened by too much unilateralism and too little cooperation…

… by a perilous dependence on imported oil, by a refusal to lead on global warming, by a growing indebtedness and a dependence on foreign lenders, by a severely burdened military, by a backsliding on global nonproliferation and arms control agreements, and by a failure to consistently use the power of diplomacy, from the Middle East to Africa to Latin America to Central and Eastern Europe.

Clearly, the job of the next president is to rebuild the American dream and to restore American leadership in the world.

…As president, he will work for an America with more partners and fewer adversaries. He will rebuild our frayed alliances and revitalize the international institutions which helped to share the cost of the world’s problems and to leverage the power of our influence.

…The choice is clear. The Republicans in a few days will nominate a good man who has served our country heroically and who suffered terribly in a Vietnamese prison camp. He loves his country every bit as much as we do. As a senator, he has shown his independence of right-wing orthodoxy on some very important issues.

But on the two great questions of this election — how to rebuild the American dream and how to restore America’s leadership in the world — he still embraces the extreme philosophy that has defined his party for more than 25 years.

And it is, to be fair to all the Americans who aren’t as hard- core Democrats as we, it’s a philosophy the American people never actually had a chance to see in action fully until 2001, when the Republicans finally gained control of both the White House and the Congress.

Then we saw what would happen to America if the policies they had talked about for decades actually were implemented. And look what happened.

They took us from record surpluses to an exploding debt; from over 22 million new jobs to just 5 million; from increasing working families’ incomes to nearly $7,500 a year to a decline of more than $2,000 a year; from almost 8 million Americans lifted out of poverty to more than 5.5 million driven into poverty; and millions more losing their health insurance.

Now, in spite of all this evidence, their candidate is actually promising more of the same.

Think about it: more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans that will swell the deficit, increase inequality, and weaken the economy; more Band-Aids for health care that will enrich insurance companies, impoverish families, and increase the number of uninsured; more going it alone in the world, instead of building the shared responsibilities and shared opportunities necessary to advance our security and restore our influence.

To the many well-intentioned Iran scholars who wistfully point out that Ahmedinajad’s rants can be discounted because true power lies in Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the ‘Supreme Religious Leader,’ his recent defense of Ahmadinejad, including of his nuclear policy and confrontational style, should cause pause.

[Read more →]

Totally unrelated to silly Republican attacks against Obama for being too popular and too hip, the Obama campaign (to which, though an independent, I’ve contributed the maximum allowed) some times seems to not quite get the need for a bit more gravitas.  I just got an email (the umpteenth one in the last week) asking me to send $30 and be the first to get an Obama-Biden T-shirt.  The subject of the email:

First Edition Obama-Biden T-shirt

Really?  Is that the message the campaign should be disseminating?

Now, if some putz out there wants to hawk political campaign t-shirts as epochal collectors items, that’s fine.  But the official campaign team?

Show your support for the Obama-Biden ticket today. Make a donation of $30 or more and you will receive a first edition Obama-Biden T-shirt.

This follows a neat idea to have Obama supporters be the first to get an email advising who Obama had selected as his VP – and in Biden he made a great choice with gravitas.  That was a smart choice.  And it is great that the campaign can be "with it" and appeal to the young and use all necessary tech tools. 

But let’s hope the Obama team doesn’t get too enamored with itself and it’s appeal to the new generation.  It also has to appeal to the older generations.

A few weeks back I attended a play hosted by Stanford Law School, a one-man-show by Lawrence Fishburne about Thurgood Marshall.  At the end, retiring Justice Marshall quotes a poem from his classmate Langston Hughes:

Oh, let America be America again

The land that never has been yet —

And yet must be — the land where

every man is free.

The land that’s mine

— the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME —

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Oh yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me.

And yet, I swear this oath —

America will be!

The full poem is here.

[Read more →]

From the ever-incisive and amusing Michael Kinsley, trying to decode the Democratic Party’s "platform":

Translating the document is no simple task. First, an alarmist note. Democrats favor “tough, practical and humane immigration reform.” And, “We will provide immediate relief to working people who have lost their jobs, families who have lost their homes and people who have lost their way.” It’s not clear what that third item refers to. Tax credits for G.P.S. devices? Presumably, “people who have lost their way” doesn’t mean illegal immigrants trying to find the border.

[Read more →]

Underscoring the depth of the challenge to freedom as we know it, no less than NYT Editor Bill Keller led the Week In Review with an analysis of China and Russia’s rise:

If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: Springtime for autocrats, and not just the minor-league monsters of Zimbabwe and the like, but the giant regimes that seemed so surely bound for the ash heap in 1989.

[Read more →]

Russia’s authoritarian dictator-in-building Vladimir Putin has been getting high on the fumes of oil revenues that Russia is reaping from the West (US consumers are propping him and others like Iran’s Ahmadinejad and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez up). The oil boom has helped Russia’s economy thrive for the last few years. This, plus weak leadership from the US and Western Europe, has combined with Putin’s ruthless KGB past to make him into a formidably arrogant threat to democracy and freedom.

His so-far unchecked invasion of Georgia is a threat to the world, with consequences potentially as grave as any development our globe has witnessed since the walls of the Soviet empire crumbled down.

Is the West going to rise to the challenge? Are leadership and principle going to stand? Is civil society going to mobilize? Is media going to do a better job at awakening the world to these dangerous developments?

At a minimum if Russia does not reverse its aggression, it needs to be ousted from the Group of 8.  No nation that behaves the way Russia has over the last few years – like a bully – deserves such newly anointed role.

Georgia’s President Saakashvili is not blameless. But nothing Georgia has done merits Russia’s aggression. And if the world does not react forcefully, Russia’s imperialist instincts will only grow stronger and eventually catch up with those who stand by today.

[Read more →]

The NYTimes Week In Review had two excellent articles on the situation in Russia today and its conflict with Georgia.

[Read more →]