Obama minus democracy

The most surprising thing about the first half-year of Barack Obama’s presidency, at least in the realm of foreign policy, has been its indifference to the issues of human rights and democracy. No administration has ever made these its primary, much less its exclusive, goals overseas. But ever since Jimmy Carter spoke about human rights in his 1977 inaugural address and created a new infrastructure to give bureaucratic meaning to his words, the advancement of human rights has been one of the consistent objectives of America’s diplomats and an occasional one of its soldiers.

This tradition has been ruptured by the Obama administration. The new president signaled his intent on the eve of his inauguration, when he told editors of the Washington Post that democracy was less important than “freedom from want and freedom from fear. If people aren’t secure, if people are starving, then elections may or may not address those issues, but they are not a perfect overlay.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed suit, in opening testimony at her Senate confirmation hearings. As summed up by the Post’s Fred Hiatt, Clinton “invoked just about every conceivable goal but democracy promotion. Building alliances, fighting terror, stopping disease, promoting women’s rights, nurturing prosperity—but hardly a peep about elections, human rights, freedom, liberty or self-rule.”

A few days after being sworn in, President Obama pointedly gave his first foreign press interview to the Saudi-owned Arabic-language satellite network, Al-Arabiya. The interview was devoted entirely to U.S. relations with the Middle East and the broader Muslim world, and through it all Obama never mentioned democracy or human rights.

A month later, announcing his plan and timetable for the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, the president said he sought the “achievable goal” of “an Iraq that is sovereign, stable, and self-reliant,” and he spoke of “a more peaceful and prosperous Iraq.” On democracy, one of the prime goals of America’s invasion of Iraq, and one toward which impressive progress had been demonstrated, he was again silent.

While drawing down in Iraq, Obama ordered more troops sent to Afghanistan, where America was fighting a war he had long characterized as more necessary and justifiable than the one in Iraq. But at the same time, he spoke of the need to “refocus on Al Qaeda” in Afghanistan, at least implying that this meant washing our hands of the project of democratization there. The Washington Post reported that “suggestions by senior administration officials . . . that the United States should set aside the goal of democracy in Afghanistan” had prompted that country’s foreign minister to make “an impassioned appeal for continued U.S. support for an elected government.”

In early April, former New York Times correspondent Joel Brinkley summed up the administration’s initial performance:

Neither President Obama nor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has even uttered the word democracy in a manner related to democracy promotion since taking office more than two months ago. The State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor has put out 30 public releases, so far, and not one of them has discussed democracy promotion. Democracy, it seems, is banished from the Obama administration’s public vocabulary.

At a glance, Obama’s motives seemed readily apparent. Former State Department official J. Scott Carpenter observed that it was “obvious and understandable” that “the Obama administration wanted to distance itself from the tone and perceived baggage of the Bush administration.” But there were two reasons why this explanation did not satisfy.

For one, Obama might have put his own stamp on the issue without turning so sharply away from the goals of human rights and democracy. In 1981, Ronald Reagan came to the presidency with a mandate analogous to Obama’s, namely, to undo the works of an unpopular predecessor. At first, Reagan was inclined to eschew human rights as just another part of Jimmy Carter’s wooly-minded liberalism. In an early interview, Secretary of State Alexander Haig announced that the Reagan administration would promote human rights mostly by combating terrorism. But soon Reagan had second thoughts: instead of jettisoning the issue, he put his own distinctive spin on it by shifting the rhetoric and the program to focus more on fostering democracy.

In a similar vein, Obama could have faulted the Bush administration for its ineffectiveness in promoting democracy and promised that his own team would do it better. Indeed, Michael McFaul, who handled democracy issues in the Obama campaign, declared after the election that the new administration would “talk less and do more” about democratization than Bush had done. But when McFaul was appointed to the National Security Council staff, he was given the Russia portfolio rather than the job of overseeing democracy promotion. The latter task, which had been entrusted to senior staff during the Bush years, was given to no one.

The other reason why Obama’s tack cannot be understood merely by his impulse to be unlike Bush is that his disinterest in democracy and human rights is global. The idea of promoting these values did not originate with Bush but with Carter and Reagan, reinforced by Bill Clinton. Bush’s innovation was to apply this to the Middle East, which heretofore largely had been exempted. Repealing Bush’s legacy would have meant turning the clock back on America’s Middle East policy. But Obama scaled back democracy efforts not only there; he did it everywhere.

Thus for example, Clinton, on a first state visit to China, told reporters she would not say much about human rights or Tibet because “our pressing on those issues can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis.” Amnesty International declared it was “shocked and extremely disappointed” by her words. Unfazed, Clinton moved on to Russia, where she glibly presented its dictator, Vladimir Putin, with a toy “reset button” even while the string of unsolved murders of independent journalists that has marked his reign continued to lengthen.

To be sure, China and Russia are powerful countries with which Washington must do business across a range of issues, and because of their importance, all U.S. administrations have been guilty of unevenness in lobbying them to respect human rights. However, the Obama administration has downplayed human rights not only with the likes of Beijing and Moscow but also with weak countries whose governments have no leverage over America.

For example, Clinton ordered a review of U.S. sanctions against the military dictatorship of Burma because they haven’t “influenced the Burmese government.” This softening may have emboldened that junta to place opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi on trial in May after having been content to keep her under house arrest most of the last eighteen years. The government of Sudan is even weaker and more of an international pariah than Burma’s, but the Obama administration also let it be known that it was considering easing Bush-era sanctions applied against Khartoum in response to the campaign of murder and rape in Darfur. According to the Washington Post:

Many human rights activists have been shocked at the administration’s apparent willingness to consider easing sanctions on Burma and Sudan. The Obama presidential campaign was scornful of Bush’s handling of the killings in Sudan’s Darfur region, which Bush labeled as genocide, but since taking office, the administration has been caught flat-footed by Sudan’s recent ousting of international humanitarian organizations.

While it is hard to see any diplomatic benefit in soft-pedaling human rights in Burma and Sudan, neither has Obama anything to gain politically by easing up on regimes that are reviled by Americans from Left to Right. Even so ardent an admirer of the President as columnist E. J. Dionne, the first to discern an “Obama Doctrine” in foreign policy, confesses to “qualms” about “the relatively short shrift” this doctrine “has so far given to concerns over human rights and democracy.”

Whether or not there is something as distinct and important as to warrant the label “doctrine,” the consistency with which the new administration has left aside democracy and human rights suggests this is an approach the president has thought through. Following his meeting with the Organization of American states in April, Obama told a press conference: “What we showed here is that we can make progress when we’re willing to break free from some of the stale debates and old ideologies that have dominated and distorted the debate in this hemisphere for far too long.” His secretary of state echoed the thought: “Let’s put ideology aside,” she said. “That is so yesterday.”

his begs the question of exactly which ideologies are passé or whether all are equally so. Communism, which so roiled the twentieth century, is certainly on its deathbed. Democracy, on the other hand, has flourished and spread in recent decades as never before, to the point where more than sixty percent of the world’s governments are chosen in bona fide elections. To lump together these “ideologies” is gratuitously to belittle democracy.

Obama seems to believe that democracy is overrated, or at least overvalued. When asked about the subject in his pre-inaugural interview with the Washington Post, Obama said that he is more concerned with “actually delivering a better life for people on the ground and less obsessed with form, more concerned with substance.” He elaborated on this thought during his April visit to Strasbourg, France:

We spend so much time talking about democracy—and obviously we should be promoting democracy everywhere we can. But democracy, a well-functioning society that promotes liberty and equality and fraternity, does not just depend on going to the ballot box. It also means that you’re not going to be shaken down by police because the police aren’t getting properly paid. It also means that if you want to start a business, you don’t have to pay a bribe. I mean, there are a whole host of other factors that people need . . . to recognize in building a civil society that allows a country to be successful.

Whether or not the President was aware of it, he was echoing a theme first propounded long ago by Soviet propagandists and later sung in many variations by all manner of Third World dictators, Left to Right. It has long since been discredited by a welter of research showing that democracies perform better in fostering economic and social well being, keeping the peace, and averting catastrophes. Never mind that it is untoward for a President of the United States to speak of democracy as a mere “form,” less important than substance.

The trend of downgrading democracy and human rights has already been evident in some important actions abroad. When Venezuela’s would-be dictator, Hugo Chavez, held a referendum to set aside the country’s long tradition of presidential term limits, the U.S. government went out of its way to endorse the process. The Associated Press reported:

The Obama administration says the referendum that cleared the way for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to run for re-election was democratic. It was rare praise for a U.S. antagonist after years of criticism from the Bush administration. U.S State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid noted “troubling reports of intimidation.” But he added Tuesday that “for the most part this was a process that was fully consistent with democratic process.”

While focusing on lack of irregularities in the polling, this response studiously ignored the larger issue. Term limits have been a pillar of democracy across Latin America, where there is a lamentable history of elected leaders holding onto office by unscrupulous means.

However punctilious the procedure, this constitutional maneuver on the part Chavez, who makes no secret of his ambition to serve as president for life, posed a dire threat to the preservation of democracy in that country.

Perhaps the clearest shift in U.S. policy has been toward Egypt. By far the largest of the Arab states, and the most influential intellectually, Egypt has also been the closest to Washington. Thus, the Bush administration’s willingness to pressure the government of Hosni Mubarak was an earnest sign of its seriousness about democracy promotion.

For their part, Egyptian reformers urged the U.S. to make its aid to Egypt conditional on reforms. The Bush administration never took this step, but the idea had support in Congress, and it hung like a sword over the head of Mubarak’s government. Obama has removed the threat. As the Associated Press reported: “Egypt’s ambassador to the U.S., Sameh Shukri, said last week that ties are on the mend and that Washington has dropped conditions for better relations, including demands for ‘human rights, democracy and religious and general freedoms.’”

“Conditionality” with Egypt “is not our policy,” Secretary of State Clinton said in an interview with Egyptian TV earlier this month. “We also want to take our relationship to the next level.”

While promising unimpeded assistance to the regime, the Obama administration backed away from aiding independent groups, something the Bush administration had insisted on doing despite objections from the authorities. Announcing the elimination of programs directly supporting Egyptian civil-society organizations, the U.S. ambassador, Margaret Scobey, explained that this would “facilitate” smoother relations with the Egyptian government. The New York Times summarized the Obama administration’s steps:

The White House has accommodated President Mubarak by eliminating American funding for civil society organizations that the state refuses to recognize, and by stating publicly that neither military nor civilian funding will be conditioned on reform. This has provoked alarm from liberals, from scholarly experts and from activists in the region.

As the popular young Egyptian blogger, “Sandmonkey,” irrepressibly irreverent and scatological, put it: “Let’s face it, [Obama] ain’t going to push on human rights and democracy. That era is gone. We are all about diplomacy and friendship now, and that’s what the American people want, even if the price is that the democracy activists in Egypt get f—ed.”

This formed the backdrop to the president’s much-anticipated speech to the Muslim world delivered in Cairo on June 4. Of the many thorny issues he was expected to address, the setting necessitated that he spell out his views on democracy and human rights in Middle East more explicitly than before. In the New York Times, James Traub formulated the question this way:

Egypt was the central target of President Bush’s Freedom Agenda . . . . But when an opposition Islamist party did well at the polls, Egypt’s security apparatus cracked down. The Bush administration, concerned about pushing a key ally too far, responded meekly. . . . President Obama’s words in Cairo are presumably being framed in the context of that episode. Should Mr. Bush have pushed harder for democratic reform in Egypt and with other allies? Should his administration have spoken more softly, less publicly? Should he, like his father, have devoted less attention to the way regimes treat their citizens, and more to winning cooperation on America’s national security objectives?

In the speech, Obama tackled the issue head-on, making “democracy,” “religious freedom,” and “women’s rights” three of the seven “specific issues” that he said “we must finally confront together.” On democracy, he spoke with eloquence:

All people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas; they are human rights. And that is why we will support them everywhere.

Strong as this was, its ultimate import remained elusive. Obama followed these words immediately with the caveat that “there is no straight line to realize this promise.” And while he asserted his belief in “governments that reflect the will of the people,” he added, “Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know what is best for everyone.”

This, alas, is very much the claim advanced by many authoritarian regimes, including the absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia, which Obama had visited the day before. Nowhere did the president make the critical point that elections are the only known way to determine the will of the people. That, apparently, would have been “presumptuous.”

When he turned to women’s rights, Obama’s strongest words were that women should be educated and free to choose whether or not to live in a traditional manner. Here, too, he was at pains to avoid sounding as if America had a worthier record than the nations he was addressing or had something to teach them. To the contrary: “Women’s equality [is] by no means simply an issue for Islam. In Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, we’ve seen Muslim-majority countries elect a woman to lead. Meanwhile, the struggle for women’s equality continues in many aspects of American life, and in countries around the world.”

At three different points in the speech, Obama defended a woman’s right to wear the hijab, apparently as against the restrictions in French public schools or Turkish government offices or perhaps in the U.S. military, which insists on uniform headgear. But he said not a word about the right not to wear head covering, although the number of women forced to wear religious garments must be tens of thousands of times greater than the number deprived of that opportunity. This was all the more strange since he had just arrived from Saudi Arabia, where abbayas—head-to-toe cloaks put on over regular clothes—are mandatory for women whenever they go out. During Obama’s stop in Riyadh the balmy spring temperature was 104 degrees; in the months ahead it will be twenty or thirty degrees hotter. The abbayas must be black, while the men all go around in white which, they explain, better repels the heat.

Nor did Obama mention either directly or indirectly that all Saudi women are required to have male “guardians,” who may be a father, husband, uncle or brother or even a son, without whose written permission it is impossible to work, enroll in school or travel, or that they may be forced into marriage at the age of nine. Speaking on women’s rights in Egypt, he might—but did not—also have found something, even elliptical, to say about genital mutilation, which is practiced more in that country than almost anywhere else.

On religious freedom, Obama invoked Islam’s “proud tradition of tolerance.” In one of his more prodding passages, he declared that “the richness of religious diversity must be upheld—whether it is for Maronites in Lebanon or the Copts in Egypt.” One of the two institutions co-hosting his speech was Al-Azhar University, which Obama saluted in his opening paragraph as “a beacon of Islamic learning.” This may be so, but Al-Azhar admits only Muslims. Foreign as well as native adherents to the message of the Prophet may attend, but Egyptian Christians are excluded. Perhaps this could be understood if it were only a school of Islamic learning (although, even then, why?), but today Al-Azhar offers degrees in medicine, engineering, and a panoply of subjects. Its tens of thousands of students are subsidized by state funds provided by Egyptian taxpayers, ten percent of whom are Copts, barred from Al-Azhar.

In these passages, as throughout the speech, Obama’s method was to induce his audience to swallow a few perhaps-unwelcome truths by slathering them over with a thick sauce of soothing half-truths, distortions, omissions and false parallels.

Thus, the Cairo oration was a culmination of the themes of Obama’s early months. He had blamed America for the world financial crisis, global warming, Mexico’s drug wars, for “failure to appreciate Europe’s role in the world,” and in general for “all too often” trying “to dictate our terms.” He had reinforced all this by dispatching his Secretary of State on what the New York Times dubbed a “contrition tour” of Asia and Latin America. Now he added apologies for overthrowing the government of Iran in 1953, and for treating the Muslim countries as “proxies” in the Cold War “without regard to their own aspirations.”

Toward what end all these mea culpas? Perhaps it is a strategy designed, as he puts it, to “restor[e] America’s standing in the world.” Or perhaps he genuinely believes, as do many Muslims and Europeans, among others, that a great share of the world’s ills may be laid at the doorstep of the United States. Either way, he seems to hope that such self-criticism will open the way to talking through our frictions with Iran, Syria, China, Russia, Burma, Sudan, Cuba, Venezuela, and the “moderate” side of the Taliban.

This strategy might be called peace through moral equivalence, and it finally makes fully intelligible Obama’s resistance to advocating human rights and democracy. For as long as those issues are highlighted, the cultural relativism that laced his Cairo speech and similar pronouncements in other places is revealed to be absurd. Straining to find a deficiency of religious freedom in America, Obama came up with the claim that “in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation.” He was referring, apparently, to the fact that donations to foreign entities are not tax deductible. This has, of course, nothing to do with religious freedom but with assuring that tax deductions are given only to legitimate charities and not, say, to “violent extremists,” as Obama calls them (eschewing the word “terrorist”).

Consider this alleged peccadillo of America’s in comparison to the state of religious freedom in Egypt, where Christians may not build, renovate or repair a church without written authorization from the President of the country or a provincial governor (and where Jews no longer find it safe to reside). Or compare it to the practices at the previous stop on Obama’s itinerary, Saudi Arabia, where no church may stand, where Jews were for a time not allowed to set foot, and where even Muslims of non-Sunni varieties are constrained from building places of worship.

In short, while it may be possible to identify derogations from democracy and human rights in America, those that are ubiquitous in the Muslim world are greater by many orders of magnitude. If democracy and human rights are held as high values, then all societies are not morally equal. This is a thought that cuts sharply against Obama’s multicultural sensibilities.

America not only embodies these values, it is also more responsible than any other country for their spread. Many peoples today enjoy the blessings of liberty thanks to the influence of the United States, thanks to its aid, its example, and its leading role in bringing down the Axis powers, the Soviet Union and European colonialism. Moreover, the advancement of human rights and democracy requires the exercise of American influence and in turn may serve to strengthen that influence—neither of these, it seems, processes to be welcomed by apostles of national self-abnegation.

In Cairo, once again, President Obama criticized the Bush administration for having acted “contrary to our ideals” when it infringed rules of due process in the course of the war against terror and authorized “enhanced interrogation techniques” that many believe are tantamount to torture. At worst, these infringements were bad answers to questions to which there were no good ones. Some of these practices may have been wrong, but there has not been a single serious allegation that any official employed them for any ulterior purpose, that is, for anything other than the goal of protecting our country in a time of war and national peril.

To dwell on this subject, as Obama has done, is to place great emphasis on humane values. How odd, then, to remove human rights and democracy from the agenda of our foreign policy. This is not the place to enter the debate about torture, but even if Khaled Sheikh Mohammed—the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks who was the main victim of waterboarding—and others were abused, there is little doubt that they were up to evil. It is hard to understand vociferating over their treatment even while silencing America’s voice on behalf of such brave liberals as Ayman Nour and Sa’ad Edin Ibrahim, persecuted by the government that hosted Obama in Cairo for the peaceful advocacy of democracy. In this can be found neither strategic nor moral coherence.

Only those not in the "know" will be affected

Somehow I don't quite think that the article below about Switzerland and the I.R.S. demands for tax disclosure is the whole story.

Many Americans are holding duel citizenship, or are incorporated entities, and if not an American corporation in whole, would have no responsibility to report to U.S. tax collectors.

There's always more than one way to skin a cat. And I for the life of me cannot believe that the I.R.S. is going to stop or prevent people who for years have been doing business with Swiss banks from continuing in some form of tax circumvention if that is their main purpose.

As are many tax scare articles printed in main stream media news just prior to April 15t every year. The article is not all inclusive of events that have happened as a result of the I.R.S. imposing its will on Swiss banks.

It would be my guess that the only people truly affected by this new move by the I.R.S. are those who are by comparison more wealthier than others but not super rich, and without slick accountants.

I get the impression that the article is more of an obligatory notice to any newbee's thinking of doing business in Switzerland for the purposes of avoiding U.S. taxes. Rather than to the veterans who have been keeping their money in Swiss banks for many years past.

After all if this new attempt to collect taxes for the I.R.S. were really going to work, where would the Democrat's who have been stealing money from the government for years stash theirs ?



By Warren Giles

June 29 (Bloomberg) -- Swiss banks are shutting the accounts of Americans as the U.S. Internal Revenue Service accelerates the hunt for tax dodgers.

UBS AG and Credit Suisse Group AG, the country’s biggest banks, have told Americans to move their money into specially created units registered in the U.S., or lose their accounts. Smaller private banks such as Geneva-based Mirabaud & Cie. are closing all accounts held by U.S. taxpayers.

While the banks declined to say how many people are affected, more than 5 million Americans live abroad, including about 30,000 in Switzerland, according to estimates from American Citizens Abroad in Geneva. Swiss banks must register with the Securities and Exchange Commission to provide services for those customers.

“My bank doesn’t want to do that, so we wouldn’t accept an investment account for a U.S. person,” said Pierre Mirabaud, chairman of Mirabaud & Cie. and the Swiss Bankers Association, during a lunch at the American International Club of Geneva.

SEC registration means clients don’t enjoy the protection of Swiss banking secrecy laws, which make it a crime for money managers to disclose the names of clients without their consent. Switzerland said in March it would cooperate with international tax evasion probes after Zurich-based UBS admitted helping U.S. clients avoid taxes.

The IRS has since increased pressure on Americans to disclose offshore accounts as it seeks to recoup an estimated $50 billion in unpaid taxes. The agency set a deadline of Sept. 23 for taxpayers to declare all foreign accounts or face possible criminal prosecution that could result in as much as 10 years in prison and $500,000 in penalties.

‘Typhoid Mary’

The U.S. has also proposed increasing reporting and oversight requirements for so-called qualified intermediaries -- foreign banks that withhold taxes on behalf of the IRS. That may increase the cost of compliance and the risk of violating U.S. laws, said Charles C. Adams, managing partner at the law firm Hogan & Hartson LLP in Geneva.

“American citizens are starting to feel like they’re Typhoid Mary,” said Adams who hosted a 2008 fundraiser for Barack Obama that featured actor George Clooney. “The Swiss simply don’t want American customers because it requires so much infrastructure and hassle that they don’t make any money.”

Sandra Dysli, an American who has lived in Geneva for 40 years, said Bank Zweiplus AG, the Zurich-based joint venture of Basel-based Bank Sarasin & Cie. and AIG Private Bank, and a Geneva branch of Raiffeisen International Bank-Holding AG refused to open investment accounts for her.

“I was told that I cannot legally be a client because I’m an American,” said Dysli, who retired from the United Nations in 2001. “I couldn’t get an investment account and had everything in cash.”

45-Day Notice

UBS said last July it planned to stop all offshore banking and investment services for people subject to U.S. taxes, except through U.S.-registered units.

The company notified U.S. clients in a March 27 letter that it would close accounts within 45 days. Customers were asked to transfer assets to entities registered with the SEC, and asked to consult an adviser about the U.S. tax consequences, according to a copy of the seven-page letter seen by Bloomberg News.

“UBS will no longer be able to continue to provide services to you through your current account,” the letter said.

A spokesman for UBS, Dominique Gerster, declined to comment on how much progress the bank had made in moving U.S. clients or closing their accounts.

“We offer domestic and international wealth management services in compliance with all applicable laws, regulations, and policies,” said Jan Vonder Muehll, a Zurich-based spokesman for Credit Suisse.

‘Prudent’ Banks

Mirabaud is closing the “few remaining” accounts held by Americans, a company spokesman said, without providing additional details.

“We have to be prudent,” Pierre Mirabaud said during last month’s lunch at the American International Club. “There is absolutely no problem for U.S. persons to open an account in Switzerland as long as they are prepared” to sign a form that gives the bank the details it needs to report to the IRS.

Bank Sarasin offers U.S. expatriates investment and asset management advice only through its SEC-registered unit in London.

“It’s up to individual banks to work out which citizens it wants to do business with,” said James Nason, a spokesman for the Basel-based Swiss Bankers Association. “The reporting obligations certainly aren’t going to go down as the IRS is considering extending the QI, exporting its tax laws and trying to turn Swiss banks into agents of the IRS.”

Congressional Questions

Two members of the U.S. Congress, Carolyn Maloney and Joe Wilson, wrote a May 27 letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner saying that if the QI requirements are extended to cash or deposit accounts, “taxpaying Americans living abroad will have no place to bank.”

“If neither foreign nor American banks will take American customers, how will the millions of citizens living abroad bank?” wrote Maloney, a New York Democrat, and Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, who are co-chairmen of the Americans Abroad Caucus.

There is “massive” failure by U.S. citizens and green card holders overseas to make filings with the IRS, said Matthew Ledvina, an international tax lawyer in Zurich, adding that Americans have become “pariahs because they’re risky.”

Presumption of Guilt

U.S. citizens must file tax returns, report offshore accounts that contain more than $10,000 and pay tax on any income earned, no matter where they live. To take advantage of the amnesty program, taxpayers must file six years of returns, plus pay back taxes and a penalty, according to the IRS.

“The presumption is that you’re a bad person avoiding taxes if you live overseas,” according to Andy Sundberg, who founded Geneva-based American Citizens Abroad in 1978. “The IRS rhetoric is alienating and vindictive.”

The deadline and the UBS case have been the catalyst for a stream of Swiss banking clients who are seeking help to ensure they comply with U.S. tax rules, said Milan Patel, a former IRS litigator turned tax lawyer at Geneva-based Withers LLP. That includes “accidental Americans,” such as green card holders who live outside the U.S., he said.

“People come in asking, ‘How much am I going to have to pay?’” Patel said. “The real goal for voluntary disclosure isn’t about how much is it going to cost, but avoiding going to jail. The only legal option is voluntary disclosure.”

Farewell Billy, and that makes three.

Well that makes three. Although Billy Mays may not have been as big or as popular as Michael Jackson or Farrah Fawcett the icons, he was quite icon infomercials,
t.v. commercials and Oxyclean stints, fans will miss him. He was always up beat and booming

Farewell Billy!.

The Irish have a saying about all bad things happening in threes and this weekends most recent passing brought that to a conclusion for celebrity deaths , I hope.

As a matter of fact it was my youngest son's birthday this weekend and his mother whom I have been divorced from for about 12 years wanted to help out in a small celebration. For the entire weekend she too has been plagued with bad luck.

The three C's as they have come to be known plagued her as well .

First she had a Fed Ex truck back into her car on Friday morning.
That evening she lost her paycheck and has not found it. And then on Saturday before my sons party she dropped her cell phone into the toilet and while trying to dry it after the fact lost the battery for it in her car.
We spent two hours last evening combing the floorboards and seats, to no avail. However we did have cake and ice cream first.

Collision, Check, and Cellular. That is where the three C's comes from .

Maybe you are not superstitious. I know I try not to be, but every so often I am witness to such events. Especially as the Irish fear when it comes to death.

Once again RIP Billy Mays, another familiar and welcoming face.

Cap and Trade: It’s The Corruption, Stupid!

Update: Cap and Trade passes the House. This article appeared two days ago but it is still worth reading. This has been my contention all along. It is this new wave of corruption that bothers me the most and the imposition of another huge tax burden on the American working class under the guise of saving the ecological world balance.

Just how stupid are people? Well this bill was much closer than most thought so the public is not that! stupid. And as has been the modus operandi with the Obama administration "openness" or "transparency" is not what it is all about.
This is the second largest bill passed and the largest tax increase in the history of the world which is now headed to the Senate. Both bills were rammed through without proper review and discussion.

The American people are being exposed to a coup and many are still not aware of what the hell is going on.


by Francis Cianfrocca

You could be forgiven for supposing that this week’s big news is the debate over the government takeover of the health insurance industry, with a side dish of political theater over the Fed’s role in Bank of America’s takeover of Merrill Lynch.

But in the dead of night, with a minuscule amount of public debate, it appears that full-floor votes will be taken in the House of Representatives today on the Waxman-Markey Act, the so-called “cap-and-trade,” or national energy tax bill. How on earth did this thing get so far, so fast? Does it have a chance of passage? And most important, what’s in it?

We know very little for sure about this legislation. We know that if it passes in Congress and the Senate, the President is sure to sign it into law. We also know that not a blessed one of the people’s representatives in Washington is likely to have read and fully comprehended the whole thing. This is no way to make law.

Obama came to office promising cap-and-trade as one of his most important legislative priorities. It’s also long been a stated goal of Henry Waxman, the hyper-left-wing Congressman from Beverly Hills who was installed as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a backroom coup by Speaker Nancy Pelosi.


I was sure for many months that cap-and-trade would be among this year’s legislative casualties. Obama, Waxman and Pelosi aren’t people you associate with anything that’s good for the health of the private economy. And the way they originally sold the idea made it seem unlikely to have broad appeal.

And how did they sell it? Remember during the Presidential campaign last year, when Obama was caught in a rare moment of candor on the subject? It’s on tape. He said that under cap-and-trade, electricity rates would “skyrocket” (he literally used that word), and that anyone seeking to build new coal-fired electric capacity would face bankruptcy. To candidate Obama, this economic damage was a perfectly acceptable cost of trying to reduce emissions of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

But this year, you didn’t hear a lot about sharply raising the cost of carbon-based energy as a way of reducing global warming. In February, the talk was all about using cap-and-trade to fund nationalized health care. You see, it was anticipated that cap-and-trade would produce almost a trillion-dollar revenue stream over the next several years.

How was cap-and-trade supposed to extract up to a trillion dollars from the economy and make it available to fund health-care? By strictly limiting the amount of carbon that drivers, industrial companies, farms or electric utilities would be allowed to emit, and then letting companies trade their emission permits among each other. The revenue was supposed to come from auctioning those permits to the highest bidders.

Now I’m sure you’ve heard the standard critique of cap-and-trade from business publications and from right-wing commentators. If we put a big new tax on carbon-based fuels, we make everything more expensive, from driving your car to buying food and manufactured goods. There would have been no way to escape a huge negative impact on the economy.

And it would have been a disparate impact too, especially punishing farm states and regions like the Midwest that use a lot of coal for electricity generation. It would also have punished the Canadians, who have a lot of energy in the Alberta oil-sands that they’d like to sell us.

You’d think that a US cap-and-trade regime would be simple to evade: just move as production (and jobs) out of the country, to more carbon-friendly places. But the legislation’s authors thought of that trick. Countries with carbon-tax regimes that are not substantially in line with ours can expect to suffer punitive import tariffs. In this way, the US can and will export a very expensive energy policy to the rest of the world.

Now don’t you think I was right in supposing that something so economically destructive would have a very hard time making it into law? There is so much going on this year, and Congress isn’t known for doing too many things at once. And besides, what about all the people who would suffer under cap-and-trade? Many of them come from states and districts with Democratic representatives too.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the floor of the House. The Waxman-Markey Act went through an array of very significant changes. For one thing, about 85% of the emissions permits will not be auctioned off in the early years of the law’s operation. Instead, they will be gifted to politically-favored businesses, in states and districts with lawmakers critical to the bill’s passage. Farmers and certain electric utilities will particularly benefit.

This amounts to an outsized transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to private industrial interests. Why is such a thing being allowed with nary a word of debate or public outrage?

And besides, don’t the giveaways mean that in the early years at least, cap-and-trade won’t produce enough revenue to fund national health care? That must be why Obama has gotten onto selling the idea that national health can be funded entirely by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse.”

There are also preferences for certain industries, like steel-making, that are deemed to face unreasonable competition from foreign producers if they’re required to pay a tax on their energy usage. Now doesn’t that tell you right there that the authors of cap-and-trade fully understand the adverse impact of what they’re doing? In an ironic twist, domestic oil refiners like Exxon-Mobil and Valero Energy have mounted a PR push to get some of the same preferences, warning that cap-and-trade will cause them to import more finished fuels rather than refine them here.

On top of all that, a whole raft of special giveaways have been larded onto the bill as a way of insuring its passage without debate. Many of these are intended to buy the votes of so-called “Blue dog” Democrats, who come from districts that usually elect Republicans. These people know their constituents will hate them for voting in a national energy tax, and they need bon-bons to offer in return.

I can’t say with a straight face that the opponents of cap-and-trade have the better of the argument. I think it’s a red herring to debate the economically destructive aspects of this idea, which is so large and so far-reaching that in a normal year it would have consumed much of the available bandwidth for public debate.

Instead, I think Waxman-Markey has been distorted far beyond its original objectives. It’s also become a cesspool of special-interest giveaways to rival anything that Congress has ever passed. Who knows what its real impact on the economy will be over time?

And who wrote the thing in the first place? There are over a thousand pages of in there. It’s bigger than the national-health act. Waxman and Markey didn’t write it themselves, in their evening free-time, sitting together over cigars and single-malts, with American Idol running on the TV in the corner.

If it’s like most of what Congress imposes on us, the drafting process was supervised by committee staffers, with a lot of input from the special interests that will be affected by it. Much of the cap-and-trade national energy tax law was likely written by lobbyists.

There’s a lot more to this moment in history than the presence of an historic economic crisis, which in Rahm Emanuel’s deeply obnoxious words must not be wasted. It’s also a moment in which there is essentially no significant opposition in Congress. Because of electoral setbacks, self-inflicted wounds and existential uncertainty, the Republicans will have no impact whatsoever on what happens with cap-and-trade.

It’s stupefying that Congressional Democrats feel confident enough to try to push through a spectacular transformation of the US economy and of global trade, in the dark of night. There’s no way to tell how likely it is that the bill will pass either the House or the Senate. Because there’s been no public debate, there’s no sense for how the public wants its representatives to vote.

Is this hubris? Maybe. But there’s obviously more to it. The current rare moment, which combines an urgent economic crisis with a complete lack of political opposition, will not last. It’s not wise to expect that voters will allow Congress to be so radically left-wing after the mid-term elections. And Senators and Representatives will spend all of next year trying to get re-elected. That’s why, as Rahm Emanuel and Henry Waxman know, it’s now or never.

This is the wrong way to make law. If Waxman-Markey is enacted, the United States and the world will be regretting unforeseen consequences for decades to come. This is a law that can only be passed while the public’s attention is being overloaded with debate on other subjects.

The reek of special interests stealing from us hangs over cap-and-trade like clouds of poisonous fumes. Every American should be disgusted. It’s not a bad time to remember just exactly why some people oppose the big, activist government which has come back into vogue: It’s The Corruption, Stupid!”

Health Care and Individual Rghts

Cross posted at American Thinker

June 27, 2009
Socialized Healthcare is a Severe Threat to Individual Liberty
By Andrew Foy and Brenton Stransky

The doctrine of the safety net, to catch those who fall, has been made meaningless by the doctrine of fair shares for those of us who are quite able to stand. - The Economist

The Declaration of Independence grants every individual the inalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." According to the classic liberal definition, an "inalienable right" is something you have unless someone takes it away from you. It is easy to understand that if someone physically harms you or steals from you then they are infringing upon your rights. Therefore, to secure these rights the framers designed a government with the purpose of protecting people and their property.

Nowhere in our founding documents does the provision for government-funded healthcare appear -- mainly because one individual's health cannot be taken away by another. (In cases where it can be, individuals are entitled to remuneration through the law.) This piece will address the common liberal argument in support of socialized healthcare and explain why socialized healthcare represents a severe infringement on the individual rights our founding documents were established to protect.

What if someone argues, "There are some things in life that capitalism should not be allowed to structure for profit. Human life and quality of life are two such things. How can you look someone in the eye and tell them that their bank account dictates that they aren't worth helping?" This argument is severely flawed. One, it assumes that if you are against socialized healthcare then you are against the concept of a safety net; two, it ignores the fact that healthcare is already provided to those threatened by poverty and old age; and three, it fails to recognize that the amount of healthcare a person consumes over the course of a lifetime is significantly correlated with how much responsibility they take for their own health.

In a recent WSJ Editorial Steven Burd, founder of the Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform, stated that 70% of all healthcare costs are the direct result of behavior. How can a government pretend that it can determine the correct level of taxation and healthcare appropriation that will be fair to every individual based on their behavior? Quite simply, it can't. What the government can do is determine the average amount of spending for an individual of a given age and then determine the amount of taxation necessary to keep the system solvent. On top of this, it can increase taxation on the younger/healthier to lessen the burden on the older/sicker and ration medical care to instances where the state finds it appropriate.

Regarding shifting costs to younger/healthier patients: Isn't this what private insurers do when they pool risk for large companies? Yes, however, an individual can opt out of this risk pool and purchase insurance coverage that may be more tailored to their needs that will ultimately cost them less - sometimes much less. Low premium, high deductible healthcare plans are structured to cover individuals in catastrophic circumstances. By not paying completely or sharing in the cost of routine healthcare consumption these plans are structured like a "fee for service" model and are able to maintain affordable premiums and reward healthy behavior whereas a government run healthcare system cannot.

Let us consider two hypothetical characters under a socialized healthcare system: Jack and Sam who are both construction workers. Jack eats an unhealthy diet, does not exercise, smokes a pack of cigarettes a day, and drinks 3-4 beers 4 or 5 nights a week. Sam eats a healthy diet, exercises 5 days a week, does not smoke, and drinks alcohol on social occasions. It is pretty obvious that over the course of a lifetime, unless Jack has incredibly good genetics, that he will consume more healthcare than Sam; however, they will have paid about the same amount in taxes - does this seem fair to Sam? The answer is obvious but the exercise is necessary to prove the point that healthcare consumption is tied to personal behavior and therefore, a government cannot determine the level of individual taxation fairly.

To take this example further, let us assume Jack is on 6 medications to treat diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure and Sam is on no medications. Jack will be on these medications for life and in all likelihood will require more as time goes on. Jack will also require multiple hospitalizations when these chronic conditions are exacerbated. When Sam is 65 he sprains his knee chasing his grandkids. While the damage won't kill him, he's upset he can't do the activities he enjoys anymore and would likely benefit from an elective orthopedic procedure. Unfortunately, Sam's procedure is not considered medically necessary and therefore denied. Sam has not only paid the same as Jack over the course of his lifetime and consumed much less medical care but when a medical need arises it gets denied - does this seem fair to Sam? Again, the answer is obvious but proves the point that the government cannot allocate resources fairly.

This hypothetical example demonstrates two serious infringements on individual liberty that happen on a regular basis where socialized medicine exists. The money that Sam could have saved on taxes represents real lost-opportunity costs to Sam - he could have used it to invest in starting his own business, buy a bass boat, go on a few extra vacations, donate to charity, put it in a medical savings account to pay for his knee operation, or a million other possibilities of his own choosing. In addition to lost opportunity, when Sam actually could have used coverage, he was denied and had no choice in the matter.

To be clear, the plan Obama and the Democrats are offering is not a complete socialization of our healthcare system but it minas well be. A broad-based tax increase will be necessary to pay for the new public "option" (that private insurers won't be able to compete against). While this public option may benefit some it will come at the expense of others and therefore be fraught with all the same threats to individual liberty that socialized medicine has to offer.

Over the previous weeks and months, there have been many excellent reports detailing why the Administration's healthcare plan will increase total government spending on healthcare without improving overall healthcare outcomes. Unfortunately, this information alone is not enough. In Radicals for Capitalism Brian Doherty stated Ayn Rand's belief that, "people don't care if something doesn't work as long as the dominant morality of altruism tells them that it is right." For opponents of government-run healthcare to succeed they must not only convince the public that the Administration's plan will fail to deliver on its promises but also explain how the plan will severely infringe on individual liberty, which the government of this country was designed to protect.

The Cap and Tax Fiction

Democrats off-loading economics to pass climate change bill.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has put cap-and-trade legislation on a forced march through the House, and the bill may get a full vote as early as Friday. It looks as if the Democrats will have to destroy the discipline of economics to get it done.

Despite House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman's many payoffs to Members, rural and Blue Dog Democrats remain wary of voting for a bill that will impose crushing costs on their home-district businesses and consumers. The leadership's solution to this problem is to simply claim the bill defies the laws of economics.

Their gambit got a boost this week, when the Congressional Budget Office did an analysis of what has come to be known as the Waxman-Markey bill. According to the CBO, the climate legislation would cost the average household only $175 a year by 2020. Edward Markey, Mr. Waxman's co-author, instantly set to crowing that the cost of upending the entire energy economy would be no more than a postage stamp a day for the average household. Amazing. A closer look at the CBO analysis finds that it contains so many caveats as to render it useless.
[Review & Outlook] Associated Press

Henry Waxman

For starters, the CBO estimate is a one-year snapshot of taxes that will extend to infinity. Under a cap-and-trade system, government sets a cap on the total amount of carbon that can be emitted nationally; companies then buy or sell permits to emit CO2. The cap gets cranked down over time to reduce total carbon emissions.

To get support for his bill, Mr. Waxman was forced to water down the cap in early years to please rural Democrats, and then severely ratchet it up in later years to please liberal Democrats. The CBO's analysis looks solely at the year 2020, before most of the tough restrictions kick in. As the cap is tightened and companies are stripped of initial opportunities to "offset" their emissions, the price of permits will skyrocket beyond the CBO estimate of $28 per ton of carbon. The corporate costs of buying these expensive permits will be passed to consumers.

The biggest doozy in the CBO analysis was its extraordinary decision to look only at the day-to-day costs of operating a trading program, rather than the wider consequences energy restriction would have on the economy. The CBO acknowledges this in a footnote: "The resource cost does not indicate the potential decrease in gross domestic product (GDP) that could result from the cap."

The hit to GDP is the real threat in this bill. The whole point of cap and trade is to hike the price of electricity and gas so that Americans will use less. These higher prices will show up not just in electricity bills or at the gas station but in every manufactured good, from food to cars. Consumers will cut back on spending, which in turn will cut back on production, which results in fewer jobs created or higher unemployment. Some companies will instead move their operations overseas, with the same result.

When the Heritage Foundation did its analysis of Waxman-Markey, it broadly compared the economy with and without the carbon tax. Under this more comprehensive scenario, it found Waxman-Markey would cost the economy $161 billion in 2020, which is $1,870 for a family of four. As the bill's restrictions kick in, that number rises to $6,800 for a family of four by 2035.Analysis Waxman-Markey

Note also that the CBO analysis is an average for the country as a whole. It doesn't take into account the fact that certain regions and populations will be more severely hit than others -- manufacturing states more than service states; coal producing states more than states that rely on hydro or natural gas. Low-income Americans, who devote more of their disposable income to energy, have more to lose than high-income families.

Even as Democrats have promised that this cap-and-trade legislation won't pinch wallets, behind the scenes they've acknowledged the energy price tsunami that is coming. During the brief few days in which the bill was debated in the House Energy Committee, Republicans offered three amendments: one to suspend the program if gas hit $5 a gallon; one to suspend the program if electricity prices rose 10% over 2009; and one to suspend the program if unemployment rates hit 15%. Democrats defeated all of them.

The reality is that cost estimates for climate legislation are as unreliable as the models predicting climate change. What comes out of the computer is a function of what politicians type in. A better indicator might be what other countries are already experiencing. Britain's Taxpayer Alliance estimates the average family there is paying nearly $1,300 a year in green taxes for carbon-cutting programs in effect only a few years.

Americans should know that those Members who vote for this climate bill are voting for what is likely to be the biggest tax in American history. Even Democrats can't repeal that reality.

R.I.P. Farrah Fawcett

I am saddened at the passing of Farrah Fawcett. Again the world has lost someone who was just a good person.

I can't remember ever reading where Mrs. Ryan O'Neil as of last weekend, ever said anything malicious about anyone else, that was meant to be harmful.

She was always just Farrah even by Hollywood standards.

The world and your family will miss you.

My hat goes off to Ryan O'Neil as well, for hanging in there til the fight ended. Not many real men left in Hollywood these days.

Sir, I am sorry for your loss.

Buffett's gloomy economic predictions

Hey Warren Buggett didn't become the 1st and 2nd wealthiest man in the country because he doesn't have a clue whats going on!

My money is on him, and what he says. Now granted he has a bias but all in all he knows the ropes better than most and could give more than a few pointers as to how to fix things.

So when he says the worst is yet to come, I think he is pretty much right on. I too have been waiting for the other shoe to drop, at which time I believe I will make my own move for placement in a bit more secure location to usher in my retirement years.

Did I say retire ? Well maybe I should refrase that as simply say my senior years. I don't think I will ever really retire. Golf is not my forte and since leaving the service and departing abruptly from other government service.

I have been an avid entrepreneur trying to structure my careers(meant to be plural) around what I am happiest at doing. Other than the financial disruptions of divorce I have not been to terribly bad at being successful. The problem has always been too many divorces bring about too much financial ruin. Starting over is a bitch.

Well that is one reason why this de-cession doesn't freak me out so much. Hell I already know what it means to be poor, and start over. Secondly anyone who has ever been in business for themselves and survived has had to deal with mini recessions in the normal business cycle before the current dip came about and if they did not see it coming well shame on them.

I think the only people who are suffering the most are those of the new school of learning. By this I mean those among us who are geared to live their lives in total debt all of the time. Denial of nothing, abundance of I.O.U.'s The mindless minion of mass consumerism."I need that".


Here is a borrow, from one of the mass media's and already I have forgotten which one
sorry.

The Oracle of Omaha says the worst is yet to come.
Posted by Kim Peterson and Catherine Holahan on Thursday, June 25, 2009 10:04 AM

Warren Buffett doesn't see the "green shoots" Ben Bernanke and other bullish investors have spoken of in recent months. In fact, the billionaire investor believes the economic picture will grow darker before things improve.



"Everything I see about the economy is that we have had no bounce," Buffett told CNBC anchor Becky Quick in a televised interview Wednesday. "There were a lot of excesses to be wrung out and that process is still under way, and it looks to me that it will be under way for quite awhile. In the annual report, I said that the economy would be in shambles this year and probably well beyond, and I think that is true."



Unemployment, said Buffett, will continue to drag the economy down. He told Bloomberg news that unemployment is "very likely to go above 10%." About 9.4% of the population -- about 14.5 million people -- was unemployed in May, the last month for which statistics are available. High unemployment will continue to depress consumer demand for everything from energy to cars and homes, Buffett said.



Wednesday's news about new-home sales supported Buffett's argument. New-home sales fell 0.6% in May, dashing the hopes of many bullish investors who believed the economy and credit markets had turned around enough to fuel big ticket purchases.



Buffett has had bad luck, too




Buffett himself has not been unscathed by the economic downturn. His company, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A), reported its first loss this year since 2001.



Before things get better for investors, Buffett believes the government will need to continue to take steps to reduce unemployment.



"It looks like we're going to need more medicine, not less," he said in an interview with Bloomberg News, adding that the country may need a second stimulus package to pull out of the current spiral. "The recovery really hasn't gotten going."



Buffett cautioned that some of the "medicine," though crucial, may have adverse side effects down the road. Inflation, he believes, could become a big problem. But, it will also likely push investors to buy stocks since rising prices would erode the value of cash.



"We have done things that raise the probability of high rates of inflation at some point," he told C

Check this out !

Hey I agree with the video entirely, even if it is the Republican's grandstanding. It needs to be said and I for one want it said.

One thing though! Has anybody ever told these guys about the dangers of tanning booths?

After all it's me the tax payer who foots their medical bills.Republicans respond to the "O" hour

The Iranian Election and the Revolution Test

As much as many countries who struggle for human and civil rights would like to see the demise of the current regime in Iran, it is not going to happen anytime soon.

Could Obama have effected anything differently had he encouraged the people of Iran to demonstrate even more forcefully by showing that he really cared about the outcome? About free elections and the like. Perhaps, but now we will never know.

Had he shown more support for their cause I think that the Iranian people opposed to Almadinijhad, would have grown and been more threatening in numbers, but he didn't.

Once again Obama appears to be a pragmatist, when actually he is just incompetent and naive when it comes to himself and those he surrounds himself with who are molding his foreign policy.

Even Hilary was muffled on this one.

The Reality

Successful revolutions have three phases. First, a strategically located single or limited segment of society begins vocally to express resentment, asserting itself in the streets of a major city, usually the capital. This segment is joined by other segments in the city and by segments elsewhere as the demonstration spreads to other cities and becomes more assertive, disruptive and potentially violent. As resistance to the regime spreads, the regime deploys its military and security forces. These forces, drawn from resisting social segments and isolated from the rest of society, turn on the regime, and stop following the regime’s orders. This is what happened to the Shah of Iran in 1979; it is also what happened in Russia in 1917 or in Romania in 1989.

Revolutions fail when no one joins the initial segment, meaning the initial demonstrators are the ones who find themselves socially isolated. When the demonstrations do not spread to other cities, the demonstrations either peter out or the regime brings in the security and military forces — who remain loyal to the regime and frequently personally hostile to the demonstrators — and use force to suppress the rising to the extent necessary. This is what happened in Tiananmen Square in China: The students who rose up were not joined by others. Military forces who were not only loyal to the regime but hostile to the students were brought in, and the students were crushed.
A Question of Support

This is also what happened in Iran this week. The global media, obsessively focused on the initial demonstrators — who were supporters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s opponents — failed to notice that while large, the demonstrations primarily consisted of the same type of people demonstrating. Amid the breathless reporting on the demonstrations, reporters failed to notice that the uprising was not spreading to other classes and to other areas. In constantly interviewing English-speaking demonstrators, they failed to note just how many of the demonstrators spoke English and had smartphones. The media thus did not recognize these as the signs of a failing revolution.

Later, when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke Friday and called out the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, they failed to understand that the troops — definitely not drawn from what we might call the “Twittering classes,” would remain loyal to the regime for ideological and social reasons. The troops had about as much sympathy for the demonstrators as a small-town boy from Alabama might have for a Harvard postdoc. Failing to understand the social tensions in Iran, the reporters deluded themselves into thinking they were witnessing a general uprising. But this was not St. Petersburg in 1917 or Bucharest in 1989 — it was Tiananmen Square.

In the global discussion last week outside Iran, there was a great deal of confusion about basic facts. For example, it is said that the urban-rural distinction in Iran is not critical any longer because according to the United Nations, 68 percent of Iranians are urbanized. This is an important point because it implies Iran is homogeneous and the demonstrators representative of the country. The problem is the Iranian definition of urban — and this is quite common around the world — includes very small communities (some with only a few thousand people) as “urban.” But the social difference between someone living in a town with 10,000 people and someone living in Tehran is the difference between someone living in Bastrop, Texas and someone living in New York. We can assure you that that difference is not only vast, but that most of the good people of Bastrop and the fine people of New York would probably not see the world the same way. The failure to understand the dramatic diversity of Iranian society led observers to assume that students at Iran’s elite university somehow spoke for the rest of the country.

Tehran proper has about 8 million inhabitants; its suburbs bring it to about 13 million people out of Iran’s total population of 70.5 million. Tehran accounts for about 20 percent of Iran, but as we know, the cab driver and the construction worker are not socially linked to students at elite universities. There are six cities with populations between 1 million and 2.4 million people and 11 with populations of about 500,000. Including Tehran proper, 15.5 million people live in cities with more than 1 million and 19.7 million in cities greater than 500,000. Iran has 80 cities with more than 100,000. But given that Waco, Texas, has more than 100,000 people, inferences of social similarities between cities with 100,000 and 5 million are tenuous. And with metro Oklahoma City having more than a million people, it becomes plain that urbanization has many faces.
Winning the Election With or Without Fraud

We continue to believe two things: that vote fraud occurred, and that Ahmadinejad likely would have won without it. Very little direct evidence has emerged to establish vote fraud, but several things seem suspect.

For example, the speed of the vote count has been taken as a sign of fraud, as it should have been impossible to count votes that fast. The polls originally were to have closed at 7 p.m. local time, but voting hours were extended until 10 p.m. because of the number of voters in line. By 11:45 p.m. about 20 percent of the vote had been counted. By 5:20 a.m. the next day, with almost all votes counted, the election commission declared Ahmadinejad the winner. The vote count thus took about seven hours. (Remember there were no senators, congressmen, city council members or school board members being counted — just the presidential race.) Intriguingly, this is about the same time it took in 2005, though reformists that claimed fraud back then did not stress the counting time in their allegations.

The counting mechanism is simple: Iran has 47,000 voting stations, plus 14,000 roaming stations that travel from tiny village to tiny village, staying there for a short time before moving on. That creates 61,000 ballot boxes designed to receive roughly the same number of votes. That would mean that each station would have been counting about 500 ballots, or about 70 votes per hour. With counting beginning at 10 p.m., concluding seven hours later does not necessarily indicate fraud or anything else. The Iranian presidential election system is designed for simplicity: one race to count in one time zone, and all counting beginning at the same time in all regions, we would expect the numbers to come in a somewhat linear fashion as rural and urban voting patterns would balance each other out — explaining why voting percentages didn’t change much during the night.

It has been pointed out that some of the candidates didn’t even carry their own provinces or districts. We remember that Al Gore didn’t carry Tennessee in 2000. We also remember Ralph Nader, who also didn’t carry his home precinct in part because people didn’t want to spend their vote on someone unlikely to win — an effect probably felt by the two smaller candidates in the Iranian election.

That Mousavi didn’t carry his own province is more interesting. Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett writing in Politico make some interesting points on this. As an ethnic Azeri, it was assumed that Mousavi would carry his Azeri-named and -dominated home province. But they also point out that Ahmadinejad also speaks Azeri, and made multiple campaign appearances in the district. They also point out that Khamenei is Azeri. In sum, winning that district was by no means certain for Mousavi, so losing it does not automatically signal fraud. It raised suspicions, but by no means was a smoking gun.

We do not doubt that fraud occurred during the Iranian election. For example, 99.4 percent of potential voters voted in Mazandaran province, a mostly secular area home to the shah’s family. Ahmadinejad carried the province by a 2.2 to 1 ratio. That is one heck of a turnout and level of support for a province that lost everything when the mullahs took over 30 years ago. But even if you take all of the suspect cases and added them together, it would not have changed the outcome. The fact is that Ahmadinejad’s vote in 2009 was extremely close to his victory percentage in 2005. And while the Western media portrayed Ahmadinejad’s performance in the presidential debates ahead of the election as dismal, embarrassing and indicative of an imminent electoral defeat, many Iranians who viewed those debates — including some of the most hardcore Mousavi supporters — acknowledge that Ahmadinejad outperformed his opponents by a landslide.

Mousavi persuasively detailed his fraud claims Sunday, and they have yet to be rebutted. But if his claims of the extent of fraud were true, the protests should have spread rapidly by social segment and geography to the millions of people who even the central government asserts voted for him. Certainly, Mousavi supporters believed they would win the election based in part on highly flawed polls, and when they didn’t, they assumed they were robbed and took to the streets.

But critically, the protesters were not joined by any of the millions whose votes the protesters alleged were stolen. In a complete hijacking of the election by some 13 million votes by an extremely unpopular candidate, we would have expected to see the core of Mousavi’s supporters joined by others who had been disenfranchised. On last Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, when the demonstrations were at their height, the millions of Mousavi voters should have made their appearance. They didn’t. We might assume that the security apparatus intimidated some, but surely more than just the Tehran professional and student classes possess civic courage. While appearing large, the demonstrations actually comprised a small fraction of society.
Tensions Among the Political Elite

All of this is not to say there are not tremendous tensions within the Iranian political elite. That no revolution broke out does not mean there isn’t a crisis in the political elite, particularly among the clerics. But that crisis does not cut the way Western common sense would have it. Many of Iran’s religious leaders see Ahmadinejad as hostile to their interests, as threatening their financial prerogatives, and as taking international risks they don’t want to take. Ahmadinejad’s political popularity in fact rests on his populist hostility to what he sees as the corruption of the clerics and their families and his strong stand on Iranian national security issues.

The clerics are divided among themselves, but many wanted to see Ahmadinejad lose to protect their own interests. Khamenei, the supreme leader, faced a difficult choice last Friday. He could demand a major recount or even new elections, or he could validate what happened. Khamenei speaks for a sizable chunk of the ruling elite, but also has had to rule by consensus among both clerical and non-clerical forces. Many powerful clerics like Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani wanted Khamenei to reverse the election, and we suspect Khamenei wished he could have found a way to do it. But as the defender of the regime, he was afraid to. Mousavi supporters’ demonstrations would have been nothing compared to the firestorm among Ahmadinejad supporters — both voters and the security forces — had their candidate been denied. Khamenei wasn’t going to flirt with disaster, so he endorsed the outcome.

The Western media misunderstood this because they didn’t understand that Ahmadinejad does not speak for the clerics but against them, that many of the clerics were working for his defeat, and that Ahmadinejad has enormous pull in the country’s security apparatus. The reason Western media missed this is because they bought into the concept of the stolen election, therefore failing to see Ahmadinejad’s support and the widespread dissatisfaction with the old clerical elite. The Western media simply didn’t understand that the most traditional and pious segments of Iranian society support Ahmadinejad because he opposes the old ruling elite. Instead, they assumed this was like Prague or Budapest in 1989, with a broad-based uprising in favor of liberalism against an unpopular regime.

Tehran in 2009, however, was a struggle between two main factions, both of which supported the Islamic republic as it was. There were the clerics, who have dominated the regime since 1979 and had grown wealthy in the process. And there was Ahmadinejad, who felt the ruling clerical elite had betrayed the revolution with their personal excesses. And there also was the small faction the BBC and CNN kept focusing on — the demonstrators in the streets who want to dramatically liberalize the Islamic republic. This faction never stood a chance of taking power, whether by election or revolution. The two main factions used the third smaller faction in various ways, however. Ahmadinejad used it to make his case that the clerics who supported them, like Rafsanjani, would risk the revolution and play into the hands of the Americans and British to protect their own wealth. Meanwhile, Rafsanjani argued behind the scenes that the unrest was the tip of the iceberg, and that Ahmadinejad had to be replaced. Khamenei, an astute politician, examined the data and supported Ahmadinejad.

Now, as we saw after Tiananmen Square, we will see a reshuffling among the elite. Those who backed Mousavi will be on the defensive. By contrast, those who supported Ahmadinejad are in a powerful position. There is a massive crisis in the elite, but this crisis has nothing to do with liberalization: It has to do with power and prerogatives among the elite. Having been forced by the election and Khamenei to live with Ahmadinejad, some will make deals while some will fight — but Ahmadinejad is well-positioned to win this battle.

Media Laud Title IX; Ignore Dark Side

Sixty-five percent of broadcast discussions focus on gains by female athletes and white-wash the negative effects on men.

June 23 marks the 37th anniversary of the passage of Title IX. Despite the distinct un-roundness of 37, the Obama Administration for some reason has decided to celebrate it. United States Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice celebrated the anniversary of Title IX by describing on the White House blog how the lessons she learned through sports participation have served her well in her professional endeavors. Alongside a photo of her during her high school basketball days, Rice encouraged other women to submit photos of their “own Title IX days.”

Rice did not encourage men to submit photos of their “Title IX days,” perhaps because they have none.

Title IX hurt men’s sports, and despite ample evidence of it, the media have neglected this important story.

The 1972 law states, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

Title IX appears fair on the surface but has tilted the playing field it was supposed to level in favor of women by the application of the law.

Alison Kasic of the Independent Women’s Forum summarized in a 2008 column the three-prong test established in 1979 used to demonstrate adherence to the law. “Schools could provide proportional representation in their programs based on enrollment,” she wrote, “show a history of expanding programs for the underrepresented sex, or demonstrate that their programs meet the interest and abilities of the underrepresented sex.”

Problems arise from these measures because only the first, proportionality, is a quantitative measure. According to the first prong, if 65 percent of the school’s student body is female, than 65 percent of the school’s athletes should be female. This application has essentially turned Title IX into a mandate of sex-based quotas and resulted in decreased athletic opportunities for men.
Prong two is entirely subjective in nature. Prong three is useless without a commitment to seeking students’ feedback on their athletic interests. The Title IX lobby has criticized efforts to quantify “demonstrated interest” through surveys. Jessica Gavora, vice-president of policy at the College Sports Council, characterized arguments against such surveys as groups thinking “it doesn’t really matter if women are as interested in sports as men. It’s up to colleges and universities to create that interest.”

A 2007 study by The College Sports Council found that the total number of men’s collegiate-level sports teams declined 17 percent between 1981 and 2005. Since 1995, the total number of women’s sports teams has surpassed men’s teams.

Broadcast networks are fully complicit in the effort to laud Title IX for women’s achievements and whitewash its negative effects on men. A Nexis search revealed 23 segments within the past five years that discussed Title IX and only four looked at the negative effects. Fifteen of the segments aired championed Title IX for its role in women’s success.

Favoring Girls, Ignoring Boys

Only one network report acknowledged that colleges do cut men’s sports programs due to Title IX restrictions, despite the dramatic drop in the total number of men’s available opportunities.

ABC aired the only report of a college cutting a men’s team as a result of Title IX, about the University of Northern Iowa’s decision to eliminate its men’s baseball team. Correspondent Eric Horng reported during the May 3, 2009 “World News Sunday” broadcast, “Cutting baseball, with its large roster and travel budget, will save $400,000. The athletic director says Title IX gender equity laws meant he couldn’t cut a women’s program, leaving him few options.”

CBS covered a negative effect of Title IX: more injuries to female athletes as a result of more frequent sports participation. “Evening News” anchor Katie Couric introduced the October 2, 2007 segment, “When Congress passed Title IX back in 1972, it led to an explosion of girls playing school sports that were once considered for boys only. But that meant getting some of the same injuries as well.”

At other times, such as during a June 23, 2007 interview on NBC’s “Today,” advocates quickly dismissed concerns of Title IX’s harmful effects on boys and men.


WNBA president Donna Orender clung to the proportionality prong and disregarded the interest-prong in a 2007 interview with Campbell Brown, then a weekend co-host on NBC’s “Today.” After exclaiming she “didn’t really understand” the criticism of Title IX compliance at the collegiate level focusing more on quotas than on the actual interest in women’s sports team, Orender continued, “When you look at 56 percent of college attendees are women…and yet only 41 percent of the…opportunities to participate in sports are for women, there’s still these inequities there.”

Two other NBC reports from 2006 cited Title IX as a reason for the decline in boys’ educational achievement. “Today” co-host Matt Lauer asked on June 14, “Back in the ‘70s federal law, Title IX, forced schools to provide equal opportunities for girls in education and athletics…supporting girls in areas in which they traditionally struggles like math and science. But what about the boys?” Educational expert Michele Borba, told Lauer that in the past 30 years, “we changed our educational system in our classrooms to make it a little more conducive to girls. But what we did is we put the picture off of the boys. We didn’t look at that spot, and as a result our boys continue to fail, not only in school, but they’re going to be failing in life.”

Borba’s observation echoed a similar view held by Newsweek’s Peg Tyre, who stated in a January 23, 2006 interview with Lauer, “Thirty years ago the playing field really wasn’t level for girls. Girls didn’t have the same educational opportunities and Title IX, some federal laws, really changed that. And girls got the opportunities and they went straight to the head of the class, and now boys are lagging a bit.

Tyre argued “the reduction of physicial education” hurt boys. Similarly, one of Borba’s recommendations to help boys included, “encouraging an element of competition.”

Yet, nobody made the connection between cutting men’s sports programs, a true “element of competition” and the statistic that “42 men for every 58 women go to college.”

Celebrating Women’s Athletic Achievements
Marcia Greenberger, an attorney and co-president of the National Women’s Law Center, told Charles Gibson on November 30, 2004, that “Title IX protects boys as well as girls, young women as well as young men, female as well as male employees of schools. So, it works both ways.”

Why then, is the positive coverage of Title IX centered mostly around girls and women?

Sixty-five percent of the segments analyzed lauded Title IX as positive for girls.

Former Congresswoman Edith Green and Sen. Birch Bayh, the authors of Title IX, made Child magazine’s list of 20 people who changed children’s lives forever. Child’s editor-in-chief Miriam Arond told NBC’s Ann Curry in a September 19, 2006 interview that the lawmakers “were going to stop federal funding to any colleges that discriminated against girls. But that actually filtered down, so that now high school and elementary school girls were very involved in academics as well as in sports.” Arond did not note that Title IX helped establish educational roadblocks for boys.

Earlier that month, Charles Gibson hailed tennis player Billie Jean King, and observed that the night she beat Bobby Rigs in a tennis match, “was a seminal moment in sport” and that she “was also instrumental in winning the fight for Title IX that opened opportunities for girls in sports.” Gibson continued, “Before Title IX, three hundred thousand schoolgirls participated in school athletics. Now, it’s in the millions. And young female athletes take their opportunities for granted.”

ABC’s Bob Woodruff reported during the 2004 Olympics, “There is no more dominant force than the U.S. women.” He continued, “There are many reasons for the U.S. Women’s Olympic success. The federal law, known as Title IX, that was passed more than 30 years ago, forced U.S. colleges to add hundreds of women’s teams.”

Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the pro-family Eagle Forum, viewed Title IX’s effect on the Olympics differently. She argued that its mandates actually hurt America’s chances of success at the Athens Games:

Since Title IX was interpreted in 1979 by the Carter Administration to require quotas (under the code word proportionality), our percentage of Olympic medals has repeatedly declined (not counting 1984 when top medal-winning countries boycotted the games). In 2000, our share of medals fell to its lowest ever for Olympics that the U.S. attended.

Schlafly continued, “Title IX is holding us back, interfering with dedicated athletes and wasting money on the less motivated. It sets the tone of mindless equality of result, rather than the Olympic spirit that rewards the best athlete.”

Even Sarah Palin said she was “a product of Title IX” during her September 12, 2008 interview with Charles Gibson.

And now, Title IX is used to describe body shapes. For Robin Givhan, fashion editor at The Washington Post, Michelle Obama’s arms are a triumph of the federal legislation.

Givhan told NBC’s Brian Williams on Inauguration Day, Obama “beautiful, sculpted arms. I kind of call them post-Title IX arms. You know, they’re arms from someone who really looks like an athlete, moves with the grace of an athlete, I think, and has that sort of body presence that you get from athletics. We haven’t seen that.”

Voting Present on Iran

by Victor Davis Hanson
Apparently the Obama administration is quietly watching the situation, serially voting present, and unwilling to say much until the final outcome is certain. Meanwhile, debate here centers around whether Bush’s past “Axis of Evil” approach to Iran’s theocracy, or Obama’s “We are sorry for what we did in the past” lamentation is the better course for dealing with a thug like Ahmadinejad. Some thoughts:

1. Conventional wisdom insisted that we had “empowered” Iran by removing Saddam and allowing the Shiites to gain democratic majorities in Iraq. It is at least as possible that we are destabilizing the autocracy in Iran by promoting Iraqi democracy that is no longer just a warning about civil chaos, but a positive view of a Shiite-majority democratic society unknown in Iran. The notion of two large contiguous oil producing democracies in the Middle East is unacceptable to the radical Islamists and most of the Sunni Arab dictatorships as well.

2. When one apologizes to a contemporary terrorist-sponsoring regime for events that occurred 60 years ago at the beginning of the Cold War, and does so without context of the past, then naturally one is self-censored, and will be reluctant to comment on contemporary events in Iran — relegated to a bystander watching the flow of events, predicating the response on who wins.

3. We are seeing in Washington that the multiculturalism impulse — one does not use Western paradigms to judge others — is far stronger than the supposedly classical liberal idea that human freedom is a universal concept that trumps culture. In other words, multicultural foreign policy is a sophisticated and politically-correct version of the old, far more intellectually honest realist notion that we let the bastards do what they want to their own people, and then deal with the thug that emerges in the real world of mutual self-interest.

4. For the probable majority of Iranians who voted against Ahmadinejad, the idea that the U.S. was reaching out to him, despite his subsidies to terrorist killers in Lebanon and Iraq, and his brutality at home, was not necessarily a sign of American good will. If the prior policy of disengagement with the Iranian theocracy, while appealing to the good will of the Iranian people was so flawed, why was it, then, that despite America’s bad global PR, the Iranian people remained far more pro-American than did the Arab Street, whose autocrats about four years ago we ceased pressuring to liberalize?

For at least a decade, liberal icons like Bill Clinton (”Iran today is, in a sense, the only country where progressive ideas enjoy a vast constituency. It is there that the ideas that I subscribe to are defended by a majority … (It is) the only one with elections, including the United States, including Israel, including you name it, where the liberals, or the progressives, have won two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote in six elections … There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.)”, Jimmy Carter and New York Times columnists have tried to make cute points that our worst enemy in the Middle East, Iran, was in fact the most democratic — ridiculing the notion of others that rigged plebiscites, pre-screened candidates, the absence of a truly secret ballot and free press, organized thuggery against dissidents, suppression of women’s rights, etc. were hardly democratic.

Iran, let us now confess, understood the America utopians very well, offering them both the thin veneer of “democracy” and at the same time the notion of revolutionary opposition to “imperialist” and “capitalist” America. When Clinton in 2005 said that nonsense at Davos he was simply playing to the international politically-correct Western bunch, the subtext was “hey, that awful Bush is running things now in the U.S., and it is a lot worse over here than it is in the Iran that he demonizes (cf. Clinton’s flourish: “…certainly not my own”). That Iran was killing soldiers in Iraq, sponsoring killers in Lebanon and the West Bank, trying to get a nuke to do worse to Israel did not mean all that much to Bill Clinton, at least if he could sound nuanced, neat, and contrarian among the international drones at Davos.

I’ll take axis of evil and evil empire any day to serial apologies to this creepy regime, and “certainly not my own” comparisons.

Worse than Slick Willy ! The game of semantics

As a senator, Barack Obama denounced the Bush administration for holding "secret energy meetings" with oil executives at the White House. But last week public-interest groups were dismayed when his own administration rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for Secret Service logs showing the identities of coal executives who had visited the White House to discuss Obama's "clean coal" policies. One reason: the disclosure of such records might impinge on privileged "presidential communications." The refusal, approved by White House counsel Greg Craig's office, is the latest in a series of cases in which Obama officials have opted against public disclosure. Since Obama pledged on his first day in office to usher in a "new era" of openness, "nothing has changed," says David -Sobel, a lawyer who litigates FOIA cases. "For a president who said he was going to bring unprecedented transparency to government, you would certainly expect more than the recycling of old Bush secrecy policies."

The hard line appears to be no accident. After Obama's much-publicized Jan. 21 "transparency" memo, administration lawyers crafted a key directive implementing the new policy that contained a major loophole, according to FOIA experts. The directive, signed by Attorney General Eric Holder, instructed federal agencies to adopt a "presumption" of disclosure for FOIA requests. This reversal of Bush policy was intended to restore a standard set by President Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno. But in a little-noticed passage, the Holder memo also said the new standard applies "if practicable" for cases involving "pending litigation." Dan Metcalfe, the former longtime chief of FOIA policy at Justice, says the passage and other "lawyerly hedges" means the Holder memo is now "astonishingly weaker" than the Reno policy. (The visitor-log request falls in this category because of a pending Bush-era lawsuit for such records.)

Administration officials say the Holder memo was drafted by senior Justice lawyers in consultation with Craig's office. The separate standard for "pending" lawsuits was inserted because of the "burden" it would impose on officials to go "backward" and reprocess hundreds of old cases, says Melanie Ann Pustay, who now heads the FOIA office. White House spokesman Ben LaBolt says Obama "has backed up his promise" with actions including the broadcast of White House meetings on the Web. (Others cite the release of the so-called torture memos.) As for the visitor logs, LaBolt says the policy is now "under review."

Often overlooked always dangerous, "The Arbitration Clause"

Grumblings about mandatory arbitration -- the requirement that people settle a dispute before an arbitrator rather than go to court -- are common. That's because arbitration is often a closed process, and according to one study, consumers usually lose.

But now a series of incidents has brought the system under additional scrutiny. They include:

Alleged sexual assault on the job: Jamie Leigh Jones says she had been in Iraq four days when she was given a date-rape drug and was gang-raped by co-workers. Although no criminal charges have been filed, Jones is suing her former employer, KBR. The former Halliburton subsidiary says that under her employment contract, the case must be settled in arbitration. Find out why.

Hers may not be an isolated case: Mary Beth Kineston, Tracy Barker and Pamela Jones all allege sexual abuse by employees of KBR. A congressional committee looked into the matter.

Retracted job offers: Donald Lagatree says he refused to sign a binding arbitration agreement when he was offered a job as a legal secretary by a California law firm, and the job vanished. Lagatree, saying he didn't think he should have to sign away his rights, sued.

Mandatory arbitration clauses don't apply just to employment. They could be among the legal papers you sign when you enter a nursing home or sign up with a credit card company.

Health care: After Joyce Gott died in a nursing home in Illinois, special administrator Sue Carter sued, saying that the facility had failed to take proper care of her. SSC Odin Operating Co. said the case had to be settled in arbitration. See what the courts said.

Services: Former AT&T Wireless customers allege that when their provider combined with Cingular, they were given second-class treatment. Although AT&T said arbitration was required, a judge disagreed.

Congress is considering the Arbitration Fairness Act.

A father and his family hard at work creating a dream.

Here is a happy father who includes his family in his dreams. Check it out.

I have the greatest admiration for folks like these, constantly working on family happiness together.

Obama and Father's Day

Obama say's men should be better father's than his own.

Hmmmm, perhaps he should take his own advice and let others figure out how fatherly they need to be.

Like everything else that utters from his mouth Obama is obsessed with telling others how they should be instead of reflecting upon himself as to how he is in comparison .

Today on Fathers day I have been writing notes to myself about what it means to be a father, the memories of my own father and how much he meant to me.

How I remember him for the things he did for me way more than the things he said to me. Nothing about how I should be, in fact he never ever told me how I should be.

He told me about what it meant to be a man, and the responsibilities that came with the job. He never shared his thoughts as to what was necessary to be a father. He just lived his fatherhood as a major part of his responsibilities to his family.

My Dad was older and wise. I often swore I would never be as old as he when I had any children of my own and I wasn't. I was younger to start, and I was older than he, when my youngest was born.

Many times when my little one was 4 or 5 strangers would make the unconscious mistake of referring to me as his grandfather at which point he would abruptly correct them to their embarrassment

I am not going to share what I wrote about my dad earlier upon rising today. Because it would take all day to write the way I would really like to express it, so perhaps by next year I will have gotten it all correct. And because I want those memories for myself right now, to use as my measuring stick in fixing my own defects of fatherdom.

What I don't find odd is how I look at my father and how Obama looks at his, I only wish I could be as good a father to my children as my father was to me. I'm not 1/2 the man in many ways that he was, but in other ways I am the man he would have hoped I would become.

One thing is absolutely for sure and that is the things my children remember about me. The everyday thoughts in of life with me, my actions, and words of wisdom are the lessons I have passed on, and applied by example. They came directly from my father that way to me, and from me on to them.

These are the universal truths of humankind about how to live a full and rewarding life. How to be a responsible adult to your children without ever leaving home.