How many rogue nations can President Obama hold in one hand?

In his Inaugural Address, President Obama spoke directly to the world’s rogue nations. “[W]e will extend a hand,” he said, “if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

Question: How many rogue nations can you hold in one hand? Let’s try to count.

Iran remains rogue No. 1. The world is riveted by the expanding Iranian nuclear threat, and one might expect a mess of this magnitude would occupy most of the diplomatic energies of any presidency. But this one has time for more.

The Monday after last Friday’s bombshell that Iran has a hidden nuclear site, the State Department announced the start of a “direct dialogue” with Burma’s hopeless junta. The administration has dispatched a special envoy to Sudan and its genocidal leader, Omar Hassan al-Bashir. Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad got his own Obama envoy, plus a visit from John Kerry.

At the Summit of the Americas, Mr. Obama himself did meet and greets for “dialogue” with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and reached out to Cuba’s Raul Castro. Mr. Obama then dropped in on Russia’s leaders for a “reset.”

There is something slightly weird about all this activity. If the Obama team wanted to make a really significant break from past Bush policy, it would say it was not going to just talk with the world’s worst strongmen but would give equal, public status to their democratic opposition groups. Instead, the baddest actors in the world get face time with Barack Obama, but their struggling opposition gets invisibility.

An Iranian pro-democracy rally asks the right question

Iran’s extraordinary and brave popular opposition, which broke out again this week at two universities, seems to have earned these pro-democracy Iranians nothing in the calculations of U.S. policy.

With Iran, one could argue that stopping the mullahs’ nuclear program trumps the aspirations of its population. What about poor, harmless Guinea?

In July, Mr. Obama made a historic journey to Africa, giving a widely praised speech in Ghana in support of self-help and self-determination. In August, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton grandly visited seven African nations with a similar message. Three days ago in Guinea, government troops fired on a pro-democracy rally estimated at 50,000 in the capital of Conakry, killing more than 150 people. The State Department got out a written statement of condemnation. Why is it not possible for President Obama or Secretary of State Clinton, having encouraged these aspirations, to speak publicly in their defense, rather than let democratic movements rise, fall and die?

In trying to plumb why the U.S. won’t promote or protect its own best idea, one starts with Mr. Obama’s remarks at the “reset” visit in Moscow: “America cannot and should not seek to impose any system of government on any other country, nor would we presume to choose which party or individual should run a country.”

Setting aside that no one is talking about the U.S. literally “imposing” a government in this day and age, what is one to make of a left-of-center American political leader taking such a diffident stance toward democratic movements? The people who live under the sway of the top dog in all the nations that have earned high-level Obama envoys are the world’s poor, and one would expect the social-justice left to support them. That may no longer be true on the American or European left.

Transforming dictatorships into nations with reasonably competitive democracies increases the odds that their people in time will find a competent leader, such as Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe, who will introduce productive economic policies. That makes it more likely these peoples will join the global trading system, raising their incomes.

For the American left, now fused to financial support from domestic labor unions, the world’s dispossessed represent a threat—less costly labor selling goods into the high-cost world.

Active help for democratic oppositions in Venezuela, Syria, Egypt, Iran or even Guinea hardly serves this interest. Today, social justice stops at the water’s edge. Even as Mr. Obama extends his hand to a Chávez, Morales or Castro, he makes no effort to finish free-trade agreements with certifiably democratic Colombia and Panama.

The one thing the Obama tack of talking to dictators and slow-walking free trade assures is that many of these populations may be run indefinitely by economically incompetent psychopaths who pose no threat to the interests of American labor and their Democratic dependents. This anti-democratic protectionism of course has fans on the xenophobic right in the U.S., too.

This is a risky business. What if the new authoritarian, make-believe democratic model gains? Our dictator chat partners are getting brazen about staging and then rigging elections. Iran’s mullahs proved there will be no sustained push-back from the U.S. or Western Europe to a fraudulent election. Instead the great powers’ energies go into pounding tiny Honduras, which tried to save itself from the Chávez- and Castro-admiring Manuel Zelaya.

What if the world’s real democrats, after enough bullets and dungeon time, lose belief in the American democracy’s support for them on this central idea? They may come to regard their betters in the U.S. and Europe as inhabiting a world less animated by democratic belief than democratic decadence.

Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574444890430083018.html

George Bush succeeded in Iraq by talking to his generals regularly.

So our top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that he has spoken with President Barack Obama only once since June.

This is a troubling revelation. Right now, our commander in chief is preparing to make one of the most important decisions of his presidency—whether to commit additional troops to win the war in Afghanistan. Being detached or incurious about what our commanders are experiencing makes it hard to craft a winning strategy.

Mr. Obama’s predecessor faced a similar situation: a war that was grinding on, pressure to withdraw troops, and conflicting advice—including from some who saw the war as unwinnable. But George W. Bush talked to generals on the ground every week or two, which gave him a window into what was happening and insights into how his commanders thought. That helped him judge their recommendations on strategy.

Mr. Obama’s hands-off approach to the war seems to fit his governing style. Over the past year, he outsourced writing the stimulus package to House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, washed his hands of Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to reinvestigate CIA interrogators, and hasn’t offered a detailed health-care plan.

Mr. Obama’s aloofness on the war will be a problem if the recent airing of Joe Biden’s views on Afghanistan is a tipoff that Mr. Obama will rely on his vice president’s guidance. According to reports in the New York Times and other publications, Mr. Biden supports reducing troop levels in favor of surgical attacks—mostly launched from offshore—and missile strikes against al Qaeda, especially in Pakistan.

Such an approach would almost certainly lose the war. Actionable intelligence—key to defeating an insurgency—would dry up. Tribal chieftains would cut deals with the Taliban and al Qaeda. The Afghan government would probably collapse, and the Afghan people would have little choice but to swing their support to the Taliban. Pakistan would likely come to see us as a fair-weather friend and increasingly resist U.S. attacks against al Qaeda on its soil. American credibility would be shattered. And militant Islamists would gain a victory.

Mr. Biden has a record rare in its consistency and duration of being wrong about big national security questions.

In his first U.S. Senate campaign in 1972, he called for cutting and running from Vietnam. He later voted to cut off funding for South Vietnam and spoke out against the war. After we did withdraw, communist forces conquered South Vietnam as well as Cambodia, where Pol Pot carried out a campaign of genocide.

In the 1980s, Mr. Biden opposed President Ronald Reagan’s national security approach on almost every front, including funding for the Contras in Nicaragua, building missile defenses, and increasing military spending. In the 1990s, apparently willing to cede Kuwait to Saddam Hussein, he voted against the first Gulf War. Over the past decade, Mr. Biden opposed the surge that put us on the path to victory in Iraq. Instead called for a “soft partition” that would have divided Iraq into three countries.

Mr. Biden has been right about Afghanistan at least once. In 2002, he said, “Security is the basic issue in Afghanistan. Whatever it takes, we should do it. History will judge us harshly if we allow the hope of a liberated Afghanistan to evaporate because we failed to stay the course.”

The responsibility for the outcome of the war in Afghanistan rests squarely with Mr. Obama. Until now, he seems to have treated the conflict as a distraction from his efforts to nationalize our health-care system. But the war is now front and center. He has been told by Gen. McChrystal that America needs more boots on the ground to win.

In the past, when Mr. Obama has moved left, he moved fast and far to the left—witness his willingness to push health-care legislation even if it only has Democratic support. But when he has played to the center—as on Afghanistan, when he decided in last year’s campaign that he needed to be tough on at least one of the wars America was engaged in—he has looked for appealing half-measures that ultimately prove unworkable.

It was easy in 2008 to criticize Mr. Bush’s war leadership. But winning a shooting war requires a commander in chief’s constant, direct and deep involvement. Mr. Obama could show he understands this if he uses his trip to Denmark this week (where he will serve as pitchman for Chicago to get the 2016 Olympics) to make a surprise visit to Afghanistan.

Refusing to provide all the troops and strategic support that his commanders are requesting will be to concede defeat. We’ll soon know whether Mr. Obama has the judgment and the courage to win this war.

Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

Karl Rove, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574444981640430364.html

New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt’s latest column tackles the ACORN scandal — or as Times readers know it: “What ACORN scandal?”

In “Tuning In Too Late,” Hoyt criticized the Times for its lack of coverage of the juicy ACORN imbroglio, an omission that has prodded the paper into creating a new semi-position. It’s assigned an editor to monitor opinion media and catch stories like this earlier (apparently not a single television at Times headquarters is tuned to Fox News, where they could have caught it quite easily.)

Hoyt summarized the video sting in which ACORN workers at several branches across the country were captured giving advice on child sex trafficking and tax evasion to a gaudy pimp and a hot-pants prostitute (actually conservative activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles). The tapes, whose gradual release were masterfully mediated by Andrew Brietbart at his new website BigGovernment.com, resulted in ACORN being cut off from federal funding and losing its ties to the Census Bureau and IRS. Yet the Times took little interest in the scandal and the consequences:

“But for days, as more videos were posted and government authorities rushed to distance themselves from Acorn, The Times stood still. Its slow reflexes — closely following its slow response to a controversy that forced the resignation of Van Jones, a White House adviser — suggested that it has trouble dealing with stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs.

“Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire. But others do, and a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself.

This is quite misleading. The Times already monitors opinion media for story tips. It’s just that they only monitor the left side of the blogosphere. Lachlan Markay provided some stark examples at NewsBusters on Sunday:

“The Times consistently cites liberal blogs far more than ones on the right, undermining the claim that they missed these two stories because they don’t monitor online media. A Nexis search reveals 477 combined mentions of five of the left’s top blogs: Huffington Post, Think Progress, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, and Media Matters.

“But a search for five of the right’s top blogs, Hot Air, Pajamas Media, NewsBusters, RedState, and TownHall turns up only 18 combined mentions from the Times.”

The left-wing Talking Points Memo, run by Josh Marshall, was recently praised by Executive Editor Bill Keller. It’s a favorite source for Times reporters. Liberal columnist Maureen Dowd took its name too literally when she plagiarized it. And the online version of Monday’s front-page profile of Elizabeth Cheney links to left-wing media watchdog Media Matters as its source for an unflattering anecdote.

The Times’s hesitation to pick up news from conservative media didn’t start with ACORN, of course. Before missing the outcry over Obama environmental adviser and 9-11 Truther Van Jones, the paper ignored the affair of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards during the 2008 presidential campaign, until he admitted it in a television interview. Hoyt even criticized the paper for not taking the Edwards affair story seriously in an August 2008 column. Apparently no one listened.

Hoyt quibbled with the paper’s delayed first story on ACORN, which ran under the headline, “Conservatives Draw Blood From Acorn, Favored Foe.”

“The article said that conservatives hoped to weaken the Obama administration by attacking its allies and appointees they viewed as leftist. The conservatives thought they had a “winning formula,” the article said, mobilizing people “to dig up dirt,” then trumpeting it on talk radio and television….I thought politics was emphasized too much, at the expense of questions about an organization whose employees in city after city participated in outlandish conversations about illegal and immoral activities.”

Hoyt’s criticism echoes what Times Watch wrote the day the article appeared:

“Scott Shane’s “Conservatives Draw Blood From Acorn, Favored Foe” hit the high points but overplayed the ideological angle, as the headline hints. There are six conservative labels in the story, not including the headline, and Shane portrayed the scandal in pure political terms, with “the right” as “gleeful” in claiming its “latest scalp,” as opposed to expressing outrage over a tax-funded leftist organization with connections to the Census Bureau and IRS (!) encouraging tax evasion and child prostitution.”

Hoyt then quoted Managing Editor Jill Abramson pretty much admitting the paper is not in tune with what right-leaning people are thinking, blaming “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” Then the big news:

“She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies. Keller declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.

“”Despite what the critics think, Abramson said the problem was not liberal bias.”

Abramson also previously admitted the paper was “a beat behind” in its Van Jones coverage, but blamed the Labor Day weekend and also denied any liberal bias.

Clay Waters, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574445150781555702.html

Scientists have found new evidence to explain how female insects can influence the father of their offspring, even after mating with up to ten males. A team from the University of Exeter has found that female crickets are able to control the amount of sperm that they store from each mate to select the best father for their young.

The research team believes the females may be using their abdominal muscles to control the amount of sperm stored from each mate. Their findings are now published in the journal Molecular Ecology.

Female crickets mate with several different males, including their closest relatives. In general, offspring produced with close relatives are more likely to have genetic disorders. Different animals employ a range of behaviours to avoid this, such as not mating other animals from the group they grow up in. Crickets do not avoid mating with relatives, but this research shows that they produce more offspring fathered by males that are unrelated to them.

To conduct their study, the researchers bred field crickets in the laboratory. They used new DNA-based techniques to determine the quantity stored by each the female. They found that the females stored a higher content of sperm from unrelated males. They then tested young crickets to determine their paternity. The results showed that, regardless of the order in which they had mated, an unrelated mate was more likely to become a father. This must have been under female control, because the methods the team used meant that males could not influence the amount of sperm they passed to the female.

Though the study focused on field crickets, the findings are likely to be relevant in other insect species and possibly other sections of the animal kingdom. For example, chickens are known to store more sperm from dominant males.

Lead author Dr Amanda Bretman of the University of Exeter said: “Our study shows that even after mating, female insects control who fathers their offspring. We’re only really just beginning to understand the reasons for the different mating strategies in the insect world and that is thanks to new techniques.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090908124621.htm

A first-time novelist imagines an America made wonderful by Warren Buffett, Phil Donahue and Yoko Ono.

Here’s the bad news: Ralph Nader has written a novel. Here’s the good news: There’s no sex in it. Wait. That’s not strictly true. At the end of its 700 pages, one of the characters hooks up with Yoko Ono.

Maybe I should start at the beginning.

Ralph Nader has written a novel. Well, he doesn’t call it a novel—he calls it “a practical utopia.” In it, he spins a fictional vision of what might happen if the country’s super-rich got together with assorted influential people and worked to transform American culture and politics into something more to Ralph Nader’s liking.

In Mr. Nader’s tale, billionaire investor Warren Buffett is so dismayed by the ineffectual and chaotic government reaction to Hurricane Katrina that he hatches a plan to “redirect” American society. He summons a brace of moguls—Ted Turner, Barry Diller, Ross Perot and George Soros, among others—to a secret Maui location, along with such celebrities as Bill Cosby, Yoko Ono and Warren Beatty. As they confer together, they find that they all—surprise! —agree that Something Must Be Done.

The news media soon dub this cabal, in one of Mr. Nader’s typically tin-eared phrases, “the Meliorists.” The “something” that they all agree must be done involves, naturally, increasing regulation, raising taxes and punishing heartless multinational corporations. It’s easy, apparently, once you’ve made a billion dollars in international business and finance, to denounce international business and finance.

But the Meliorists realize that before any real reform can take place they must first win over America. They have to wake up the country. And that process fills the first 200 pages—out of a total of 700 (I mentioned that, right?)—of this very long, very odd, very Nader book.

Here, for instance, is an actual passage from “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!”: “As promised, Ted Turner and Phil Donahue had put their heads together to brainstorm about a mascot for the group’s efforts. Ted’s thoughts naturally ran along avian lines, and it wasn’t long before they hit on the idea of a parrot. . . . Patriotic Polly hit the airwaves in fifteen-second spots shown on thousands of stations, and it was an immediate smash.”

The parrot, see, appears on TV and squawks, “Get up! Don’t let America down!” Then there’s an email address for viewers to use to join the movement to redirect America. Which the viewers do, and off we go.

Because that’s what it takes, really, to get America to agree with you, according to Ralph Nader: a parrot, a couple of TV spots, some billionaire’s cash. Why so easy? The premise of the novel is that ordinary people love Ralph Nader’s politics. They all agree with his progressive, left-wing agenda—even though, for some reason, they didn’t vote for him, in huge numbers, in two presidential elections. But with a little Hollywood pixie dust and some community-organizing money, the entire grocery list of left-wing causes from 1960 to 2009 can be enacted. The whole story is presented with such sweet earnestness that it almost seems mean to laugh at it. Almost.

In fact, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” reads less like a novel or “practical utopia” than a dream journal. At the Maui summit, for instance, Phil Donahue rises to address his fellow do-gooders: “Phil pulled a letter from his jacket pocket. ‘This is an offer from the head of NBC. He wants to give me a national talk show, and get this—he specifically wants me to deal with injustice, hard solutions to the nation’s problems, bold doings among ordinary people, and the plight of millions of Americans who get pushed around or shut out while they do the essential, grimy, everyday work that keeps the rich and famous sitting pretty on top. He says NBC wants a “new Dr. Phil” for the new burgeoning civil society.’ ”

And that’s only page 68! (There are 700 pages total, in case I forgot to mention that.) The spine is barely creased and already there’s a sensational parrot, a new TV talk show . . . oh, and a movement to change the national anthem to the more peaceful, labor-friendly “This Land Is Your Land.” But even a first-time novelist like Mr. Nader knows that the story would begin to drag if he simply narrated a tale of how the country seamlessly eased into an idyllic state of pure Naderism, in which Ralph Nader’s vision is finally realized and everyone sounds like Ralph Nader.

And so he throws a few hurdles in the way of the Meliorists. Following the unionization of Wal-Mart, there’s some predictable push-back from corporate fat cats and power brokers. You know the type: the ones who force decent Americans to use energy-hogging lightbulbs and to sing a complicated national anthem. But then there’s push-back against the push-back, which is eventually (spoiler alert!) successful, thanks to Yoko Ono’s deployment of her ravishing personal beauty to dazzle and distract the guy leading the corporate opposition. His name, by the way, is Lancelot Lobo. It may be a blessing that Mr. Nader populated his book with so many famous people.

By novel’s end, American society is thoroughly Naderized. Warren Beatty sits in the governor’s mansion in Sacramento; the president has signed on to the Meliorist program; and Americans have embraced a new life that is dimly lit by awful fluorescent curlicue bulbs. But curiously, for a futuristic utopia, it all seems so tired. So old. So Jimmy Carter. This is a novel that should have been written in 1976. Honestly, though, it’s feeling more like 1976 every day.

Mr. Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood.

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574440954001791002.html

More than 850 new species, from blind fish to diving beetles, have been discovered under the Australian outback.

A millipede of the genus Stygiochiropus

The largely blind creatures first went underground due to climate change tens of millions of years ago and have survived since in total darkness.

Scientists believe the finding represents only a fifth of the thousands of species that could be living in tiny caves and caverns beneath the desert.

Evolutionary biologist Professor Andy Austin, of Adelaide University, said the insects were survivors from a time 20 to 30 million years ago when rainforest covered much of Australia.

“Central and southern Australia was a much wetter place 15 million years ago when there was a flourishing diversity of invertebrate fauna living on the surface,” he said.

“But the continent became drier, a process that last until about one to two million years ago, resulting in our current arid environment.

“Species took refuge in isolated favourable habitats, such as in underground waters and micro-caverns, where they survived and evolved in isolation from each other.”

Prof Austin said spiders, small crustaceans, worms and woodlice were found in the four year survey. The results were announced at a conference in Darwin to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin

“Virtually all are blind and completely lack eyes, and lack pigment, so they are pale or white in colour,” he said.

“The insects in caves often have long legs and antennae — most sense vibration and use chemical senses, as they cannot see in the pitch black.”

The new species, which represent a whole new element of biodiversity in Australia, are now under threat from mining and ranching.

Prof Austin and his team have only examined 10 per cent of the areas that are likely to have underground species and will carry on searching as well as investigating the genetics of the creatures and how they reacted to climate change millions of years ago.

“What we’ve found is you don’t have to go searching in the depths of the ocean to discover new species of invertebrate animals — you just have to look in your own backyard,” he said.

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Full article and photo: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6246660/Subterranean-spiders-among-new-species-discovered-under-Australian-desert.html

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See also:

Researchers Go Underground To Reveal 850 New Species In Australian Outback

Some of the 850 new species discovered in underground water, caves and micro-caverns across outback Australia.

Australian researchers have discovered a huge number of new species of invertebrate animals living in underground water, caves and “micro-caverns” amid the harsh conditions of the Australian outback.

A national team of 18 researchers has discovered 850 new species of invertebrates, which include various insects, small crustaceans, spiders, worms and many others.

The team – led by Professor Andy Austin (University of Adelaide), Dr Steve Cooper (South Australian Museum) and Dr Bill Humphreys (Western Australian Museum) – has conducted a comprehensive four-year survey of underground water, caves and micro-caverns across arid and semi-arid Australia.

“What we’ve found is that you don’t have to go searching in the depths of the ocean to discover new species of invertebrate animals – you just have to look in your own ‘back yard’,” says Professor Austin from the Australian Center for Evolutionary Biology & Biodiversity at the University of Adelaide.

“Our research has revealed whole communities of invertebrate animals that were previously unknown just a few years ago. What we have discovered is a completely new component to Australia’s biodiversity. It is a huge discovery and it is only about one fifth of the number of new species we believe exist underground in the Australian outback.”

Only half of the species discovered have so far been named. Generically, the animals found in underground water are known as “stygofauna” and those from caves and micro-caverns are known as “troglofauna”.

Professor Austin says the team has a theory as to why so many new species have been hidden away underground and in caves.

“Essentially what we are seeing is the result of past climate change. Central and southern Australia was a much wetter place 15 million years ago when there was a flourishing diversity of invertebrate fauna living on the surface. But the continent became drier, a process that last until about 1-2 million years ago, resulting in our current arid environment. Species took refuge in isolated favorable habitats, such as in underground waters and micro-caverns, where they survived and evolved in isolation from each other.

“Discovery of this ‘new’ biodiversity, although exciting scientifically, also poses a number of challenges for conservation in that many of these species are found in areas that are potentially impacted by mining and pastoral activities,” he says.

The research team has reported its findings at a scientific conference on evolution and biodiversity in Darwin, which celebrates the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin: http://www.evolutionbiodiversity2009.org.

The team’s research has been funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Environmental Futures Network.

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Full article and photo: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090928095214.htm