Friday Coffee--Zimbabwe

It may be the day Curtis Le May cried. The United States and Russia reached their first major arms deal in 20 years. They announced 1/3rd cuts in nuclear arsenals, leaving each side with 1,550--still enough to blow up the world several times. President Obama and Medevev will sign the treaty in Prague and I am sure it will not be passed by the Senate.

Bin Laden released one of his lamest radio tapes yet. He warned the United States he would kill any American Al Qaeda captures if any of the 9/11 plotters are executed. At the present, he doesn't have any Americans in captivity. Gone are the old days of promising Armageddon but maybe he's also aware of Tan Man Boehner and can't think to top that rhetoric. I take his message as a sign his gang is seriously depleted.

Bibi didn't make out so well on his trip to Washington. Yes, he received a standing ovation at AIPAC but he was told by Obama "here's your hat, what's your hurry." as the President opted for dinner with his wife and children rather than to hear Bibi stonewall him. Apparently, Bibi didn't bring the promised concessions and only wanted bunker-buster bombs to drop on Iran. He also reiterated in his meetings here his commitment to building more Levittowns in Jerusalem. He is doing this for the big bankroller of the Likud Party, Miami-based billionaire Irving Moskowitz. He and Mr. Edelman, the billionaire casino ower in Las Vegas, are the two encouraging new settlements from the outside.

The issue here is actually serious. The Arab League is meeting and the pro-American Arab states are being confronted by the pro-Tehran countries on the issue of Iran's nuclear facilities. The lack of progress on the Middle East Peace Talks isn't helping the pro-American states on the issue of further sanctions.

David Frum's wife has weighed in on the AEI firing saying that the conservative movement has become like the doctrinaire Left it used to mock. The intolerance of dissent has been dubbed "the closing of the conservative mind".

As a way of apology for cancelling his Indonesian trip until June, President Obama gave an interview with an Indonesian journalist, where he reminisced about his childhood experiences there. He admitted to breaking a boy's arm in a bicycle accident. He said he didn't tell a teacher he wanted to be president, instead he wanted to be a fireman. I'm sure conservatives can make hay out of the interview because he spoke Indonesian and even admitted he once had been fluent.

Bill Clinton was wrong. He said that Obama's ratings would jump 10% with the passage of health care. According to RS2000, they only jumped 5 points and his negatives fell. The same poll saw the enthusiasm gap narrow between Democrats and Republicans. 55% of Dems are enthusiastic about going to the polls; 62% of Republicans.

In a piece I posted last week, I noted that teabaggers e-mailed the home address of Virginia congressman Tom Perriello, who voted for healthcare. And they got it wrong. But what has transpired is that the address was his brother's who found that his propane gas lines had been cut. The FBI is investgating as a serious attempt to kill the congressman. Two more members of Congress have also reported death threats today.

The next big item to solve is social security. It appears that with so many taking early retirement because of the recession social security will now run out of funds in 2016. Given my financial situation, this is just my luck. As I have said too many times, the solution to this is rather easy if people get over their tax phobia. President Obama is supposed to receive the recommendations on this matter from his debt commission in early December. Erskine Bowles, one of the Democrats on the commission, told a North Carolina business meeting that the commission will recommend cuts in Medicare and Social Security.

If Congress begged off any more serious reforms this year, who could blame them? Having been in session for much of the year and meeting around the clock, there is a high burnout rate among the staff. But look for bank reform to be debated after the break and the first run made at immigration reform. Republicans would rather opt for naming more people to appear on postage stamps.

Whenever the world seems to be turning elsewhere, the North Koreans always make a play for attention. Today it looks like they torpedoed a South Korean naval vessel with 100 aboard. It seems they used up all their rockets for another test to see whether they can reach Hawaii.

The King of Derivatives, former Senator Phil Gramm, writing in the Wall Street Journal, says that the healthcare debate is not over yet, by any means. Senator Gramm was the one who said during the collapse of the economy in the fall of 2008 that Americans were just whiners. Speaking of the Wall Street Journal, they are going to charge for reading them on line. So now they become like the Financial Times, another newspaper I no longer read.

Working on something work related, I was reviewing a list of projects being conducted by USAID in various countries abroad. All worthwhile. But in looking them over, an awful thought occurred to me-- virtually none of these programs would be allowed by the New Republican Party as government programs in the United States. The commonsense consensus that has been created over the years about development and democracy would not be tolerated by the new authoritarians. And many of these programs were initiated by the last administration.