The polls show Clinton pulling away from the pack. One blogger doesn’t get it:
You wouldn’t know about that lead in the polls from the early morning visibility around Hanover. Dropping off our son at kindergarten this morning, it was all Obama, all the time, with all four corners of the intersection at Wheelock and Park Streets boasting Obama supporters. I think the chase is on–we’ll know more this evening.
An update from Defense Tech:
All of this makes perfect sense, save one thing. Why the secrecy? If the Syrians have nuclear facilities, the Israelis should be delighted to make it public. Frankly, so should the United States, since the Bush administration has always argued that nuclear proliferation to rogue states, including Syria, is one of the key problems in the world. The Syrians should be spinning the story like crazy as well, denying the nuclear program but screaming about unprovoked Israeli-U.S. aggression. The silence from one or two parties makes sense. The silence from all parties makes little sense.
…
Whether the Israelis found out about the material through their own intelligence sources or North Korea provided a list of recipients of nuclear technology to the United States is unclear. The Israelis have made every effort to make it appear that they knew about this independently. They also have tried to make it appear that they notified the United States, rather than the other way around. But whether the intelligence came from North Korea or was obtained independently, Washington wants to be very careful in its handling of Pyongyang right now.
It’s a touring photo exhibit of high school and college athletes who are openly gay. These teens and college students are on the frontlines of the civil rights movement today. And they get to play sports as well. More details about the exhibition here.
"I’ve been able to get a lot of Republican and independent support in this campaign," she said on Fox News Sunday. Hmmm. Over to Gallup’s Frank Newport:
In our latest head-to-head poll pitting Clinton against Rudy Giuliani, Clinton gets only a lowly 8% of the Republican vote. Furthermore, a special analysis of over 7000 Gallup poll interviews conducted from June through September of this year shows that Hillary Clinton has only a 15 percent favorable, 83 percent unfavorable rating among Republicans. (She does better among independents.) That does not appear to be "a lot" of Republican support.
Tallaganda Range, Australia, 10.30 am.
The responses yesterday to Senator Clinton’s acceptance of an occupation of Iraq through what would be her first four years in office were fascinating. Some, like me, are somewhat astonished that Bush has succeeded quite as well as he has in ensuring that America occupies Iraq for the indefinite future. If Clinton is conceding all this in a primary campaign where she faces an anti-war base, you can imagine what she is privately expecting and will be forced to say next year. And she’s not wrong. By not getting out now, we are, I think, effectively deciding to stay for ever.
By "for ever", I don’t mean literally for ever. I mean around 100,000 troops for at least another five years, and, I suspect, much longer. This is the only logical consequence of the current state of play in Iraq and America, after Petraeus’s and Bush’s triumph over the Senate’s Republican doubters. If Iraq were a viable country, and its government a viable government, and it was asking the US to be present as a friendly support in the region, such a massive long-term commitment would not be alarming. (It would also, of course, not be necessary.) But it’s clear to me that the civil war within Iraq – at various levels of heat – will not end within the next generation. and therefore our military commitment, presage on preventing a civil war, will not end within the next generation either. The civil war goes too deep. Hewitt talked to John Burns about this, and Burns helpfully argued that the current post-surge delusion – a stabilized soft partition – is not, alas, in the cards:
I’m a little suspicious of that, because I think that the contending parties in Iraq are identified by one thing that they do have in common, which is that they view this as a winner takes all game… We’re dealing here with a problem that has its origins right at the very earliest stages of Islam, 1,400 years ago. And Iraq sits right on the fault line of that schism between what we now know as the Sunni and the Shia.
What happened when the American invasion of Iraq occurred in 2003 was lifting the weight of terror which Saddam Hussein had managed to suppress that schism, if you will, has exposed it. And the notion that Sunni and Shia in Iraq can resolve differences which are so deeply rooted in history, as their more recent experience on the Shia side of repression, and on the Sunni side of seeing their ruling power usurped, the notion that that can be resolved in any brief period of time, I think, is entirely notional. I think it’s going to be a very long time before there is what you might describe as a lasting settlement.
Hewitt asks a revealing question:
Do you expect that that same sort of restiveness will endure, even if some kind of rapprochement is worked out over the next four, five, six years in Iraq, between Shia and Sunni?
That’s the most insanely optimistic time-line (this is Hewitt, remember): four, five, six years. A more realistic timeline is somewhere near forty, fifty and sixty years. We have to acknowledge this cold fact: if we stay in Iraq, it is for ever. And it is an occupation of a country in a civil war – for ever. There is absolutely no guarantee that in five years time, exactly the same dangers of chaos would not exist were we to withdraw. In fact, there’s no reason to believe that the current arguments against withdrawal won’t apply just as well in twenty years’ time as well. If you believe the army and police will overcome sectarian divisions before the people do, then you have a case. But please. You think?
If we are committing ourselves to this, then we need to do so openly. The president and his supporters and the pro-occupation candidates owe it to us to explain why a thirty year occupation of the most dysfunctional "country" in the Middle East in the process of a slow-burn civil war is in our interests.
The latest news reports from Burma are grim:
At Shwedagon Pagoda, riot police charged against the protesters, leaving a number of monks and nuns covered in blood, some of them apparently seriously injured.
British embassy sources say at least 100 monks were beaten and arrested. Demonstrators were dragged away in trucks.
One BBC News website reader in Rangoon says armed and plainclothes police can be seen at key sites across the city. At City Hall, police are holding photos of the monks leading the protests, the reader says.
Two prominent dissidents, U Win Naing and popular comedian Zaganar, were arrested overnight.
My morning round-up of commentary, blogs and news from Burma can be found here. Stay tuned.
New Yorkers tell you he’s flat-out bonkers. I’m still trying to figure out if that cell phone call from Judith was planted or not. Was it an elaborate device to prove to voters that he’s a family man? Or is it a function of someone so monomaniacal and self-centered that his impulses always trump those around him, including people listening to him give a speech. The WSJ notes:
During one event in Oklahoma, we’re told he took two calls, at least one from his wife, and chatted for several minutes as the audience waited.
I get the feeling it’s pure megalomania. Now pay attention: if this guy has this big a head and this major an attitude before he’s president of the United States, imagine what we could have in the Oval Office. If you think Bush doesn’t listen to advice, has a Napoleon complex and is unable to concede error, then wait for Giuliani. He’s Cheney without the humility and grace.
(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)
"My assessment is that we have a crisis in national political leadership. When will America recognize the danger we face? When will the corrosive partisanship of American politics end and allow for a bipartisan solution to arguably the most dangerous threat our nation has faced in over 60 years?" – general Ricardo Sanchez, former ground commander in Iraq.
Today, NRG Energy corporation will apply to build two new nuclear reactors in Texas, the first such application anywhere in the US in almost 30 years. More please.
