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Andrew Malcolm posts on the shutdown.

… Here’s all you need know about Obama’s style of power politics: When his party controlled both houses of Congress, it took him 542 days to have the opposition’s Senate leader over for coffee and a chat.

With his party also controlling both houses, George W. Bush waited all of 96 hours to have Ted Kennedy and others of his brand into the Oval Office when there was no agenda but to talk about how they would talk. Bush aides were also not empowered to call Democrats terrorists and hostage-takers.

Yes, you say, but Bush had been a governor, a chief executive leader who had to develop a strategy and build teams and cooperation with opposition politicians in a legislature.

And Obama was, well, an opposition legislator, who never lead anything larger than a college protest and is so void of core beliefs he still requires a teleprompter to feed him the best poll-tested words to be seen saying.

If this president was a leader and had the country’s best interests in mind, he would have skipped golf last Saturday and invited legislative leaders in to see what little something they might agree on at that last minute of the expiring fiscal year. To get a deal working.

Instead, Obama called those legislators over two days into the partial government shutdown. And before they even arrived, he had his spokesman, Jay Carney, utter this long sound-bite:

“The President is not going to negotiate about how we can come to an agreement on our budget challenges, how we can come to an agreement about funding necessary priorities to ensure that we grow our economy and ensure that the middle class is protected and expanding, ensure that our kids are getting the best education possible, and then ensure that we reduce our deficit in a responsible way.”

So, no negotiations on anything of substance. Just coffee? A pointless meeting to create positive optics so critics can no longer say, “Obama won’t even meet with Congress.”

Last year Obama told the Russians he’d have more flexibility after his final election. Apparently, such flexibility does not apply to domestic affairs. …

Seth Mandel thinks Harry Reid has lost it.

“My staff has always said ‘don’t say this,’ but…” is a frightening disclaimer for the communications staffers of any member of Congress to hear. But it can be especially cringe inducing when the person reciting the line has a terrible habit of not only saying things over the warnings of his staff but also saying things he shouldn’t even have to be told not to say. Joe Biden falls into this category. And so does the author of the above line, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The full version of that quote, from 2008, is: “My staff has always said ‘don’t say this,’ but I’m going to say it again, because it’s so descriptive because it’s true. Leader Boehner mentioned the tourists lined up in summer, winter–long lines coming into the Capitol. In the summertime, because the high humidity and how hot it gets here, you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol. And that may be descriptive, but it’s true.”

Reid may have been channeling Biden with that “literally,” but it’s the sort of quote that Democrats like Reid and Biden give because they know they’ll get a pass from the media in the way a Republican never could and they seem to be engaged in a decades-long competition over who can be the first to make conservative bloggers’ heads literally explode. Today, Reid offered yet another example of this tendency. …

John Hinderaker from Power Line posts on the closing of the World War II memorial.

That’s right: the Obama administration dispatched more security guards to prevent World War II veterans from visiting the wide-open WWII memorial on the Mall than it stationed in Benghazi, notwithstanding the American Ambassador’s pleas for better security. Paul Bedard has the story:

“The National Park Service is sending so many officials out to shut down federal parks that it might have to suspend furloughs if the government closure continues.

Two examples:

– At the World War II Memorial on The Mall in Washington, where veterans have been staging protests to keep it open, Washington Examiner’s Charlie Spiering reports that at least seven officials were dispatched Wednesday morning to set up a ring of barricades to block tourists from the memorial. That is two more than the State Department had in Benghazi a year ago on the night of the terrorist attack that killed four, including the U.S. ambassador.”

Ouch. One might think that President Obama’s priorities are all screwed up.

“– National Park Officials closed down the educational Claude Moore Colonial Farm near the CIA in McLean, Va., even though the federal government doesn’t fund or staff the park popular with children and schools. Just because the privately-operated park is on Park Service land, making the federal government simply its landlord, the agency decided to close it.”

This is another instance where the Obama administration went out of its way, not to save money, but to inconvenience taxpayers by creating the illusion that the government “shutdown” is causing problems.

More from Power Line.

President Obama’s barricading of the World War II memorial on the Mall, to keep out veterans who had long planned visits to the memorial, was one of the dumbest PR moves of all time. …

And more.

… You can’t make this stuff up: World War II veterans come to Washington to see their monument, and the Obama administration tries to block them by putting up barricades. When that blunder starts getting media attention, the administration doubles down by paying union members $15 to march around, waving signs and protesting–as though that were a sure-fire way to generate sympathy for the nonessential federal employees who are getting the day off. Is it possible that the Democrats could be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory? …

Spengler says the US plays checkers while Russia plays chess.

Americans see individual pieces of geopolitical real estate in isolation, like hotels on the Monopoly board, while the Russians look at the interaction of all their spheres of interest around the globe.

Syria is of no real strategic interest to Russia, nor to anyone else for that matter. It is a broken wreck of a country, with an irreparably damaged economy, without the energy, water, or food to maintain long-term economic viability. The multiethnic melange left in place by British and French cartographers after the First World War has broken down irreparably into a war of mutual extermination, whose only result can be depopulation or partition on the Yugoslav model.

Syria only has importance in so far as its crisis threatens to spill over into surrounding territories which have more strategic importance. As a Petri dish for jihadist movements, it threatens to become the training ground for a new generation of terrorists, serving the same role that Afghanistan did during the 1990s and 2000s. 

As a testing ground for the use of weapons of mass destruction, it provides a diplomatic laboratory to gauge the response of world powers to atrocious actions with comparatively little risk to the participants. It is an incubator of national movements, in which, for example, the newfound freedom of action for the country’s 2 million Kurds constitutes a means of destabilizing Turkey and other countries with substantial Kurdish minorities. Most important, as the cockpit of confessional war between Sunnis and Shi’ite, Syria may become the springboard for a larger conflict engulfing Iraq and possibly other states in the region.

I do not know what Putin wants in Syria. I do not believe that at this point Russia’s president knows what he wants in Syria, either. A strong chess player engaging an inferior opponent will create complications without an immediate strategic objective, in order to provoke blunders from the other side and take opportunistic advantage. There are many things that Putin wants. But he wants one big thing above all, namely, the restoration of Russia’s great power status. Russia’s leading diplomatic role in Syria opens several options to further this goal. …

Reason reviews a book about the Wisconsin union fight written by two reporters from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

It’s not clear who first introduced the chant “this is what democracy looks like” to the epic early-2011 showdown in Wisconsin between angry public-sector union workers and newly elected Republican Gov. Scott Walker. The protesters shouting the phrase surely meant to insist that they were the true voice of the people. But despite the sheer size and raucous noise of the crowds that packed the Wisconsin State Capitol for weeks protesting Walker’s proposed legislation to roll back union benefits and prerogatives, the demonstrators ultimately lost every fight that mattered. They lost because the voting public in Wisconsin approved of Walker’s plan, albeit narrowly. 

The people had already spoken when they elected a Republican governor and legislative majority in 2010. Democracy then re-affirmed Walker’s controversial decisions even under the glare of a nationwide spotlight and a hostile press. Nevertheless, the sloganeers were correct, just not in the way they intended.

As Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporters Jason Stein and Patrick Marley note in their book More Than They Bargained For: Scott Walker, Unions, and the Fight for Wisconsin, “The citizens of Wisconsin and indeed the country as a whole, sometimes derided as apathetic and out of touch, showed that they were eager to engage on both sides, to defend the rights of workers and to safeguard the state’s financial future.” The engaged activists “marched, they sent hundreds of thousands of emails and tweets, and they overwhelmingly held themselves to a peaceful, democratic purpose, which asserted itself even in the face of the many exceptions to that general rule. Likewise, the police and authorities also managed to handle the protests without serious injury or loss of life on either side. When it came time to vote, citizens set turnout records.”

Engaged citizenry, vigorous debate, productive legislatures: This is everything that good-government types usually pine for. Yet most national media outlets viewed the Walker/union battle as something distasteful and unfortunate. “How did Wisconsin become the most divisive place in America?” clucked a New York Times headline. 

One of the greatest motivators for political participation, it turns out, is bitter division. As Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald (R-Beaver Dam) put it in February 2011, “Democracy isn’t pretty all the time.”

In their admirably evenhanded account, Stein and Marley leave readers to their own conclusions. …

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Jonathan Tobin suggests the shutdown may last longer than we think.

…He (obama) has been courting a shutdown since 2011 and clearly appears to believe that he can turn his sagging second term around by facing down the GOP and winning. Since he thinks the worse things get the better it will be for Democrats, he has no incentive to compromise even on the most reasonable of Republican demands about not exempting federal employees from the joys of ObamaCare.

But what the president may be about to discover is that he has backed the Republicans into a spot they also have no great incentive to abandon. The assumption that the Republicans will quail in the face of media opprobrium and sob stories about furloughed federal employees doesn’t take into account the fact that having stuck their necks out this far, a quick retreat may do them more harm than good. Not only would their base not forgive Boehner for cracking, but independents prepared to blame the Democrats or both parties equally for the problem might think worse of them for acting as if the whole thing was a charade.

If so, we may be in for a longer confrontation than anyone thought with consequences for both sides that are equally unpredictable. Fasten your seat belts; it’s going to be a bumpy shutdown.

Appearing on Morning Joe, Bob Woodward says if the economy suffers from the shutdown it is on the president’s head. Free Beacon with the story.

BOB WOODWARD: Can I enter in here just for a moment because I think it’s a good question. And there is something the president could be doing. He said he will not negotiate on the debt ceiling. A reasonable position. “I will not be blackmailed” he said. But he should be talking. They should be meeting, discussing this, because as I think Steve Ratner showed earlier, the American economy is at stake and the president, if there is a downturn or a collapse or whatever could happen here that’s bad, it’s going to be on his head. The history books are going to say, we had an economic calamity in the Presidency of Barack Obama. Speaker Boehner, indeed, is playing a role on this. Go back to the Great Depression in the 1930s. I’ll bet no one can name who was the speaker of the House at the time. Henry Thomas Rainey. He’s not in the history book it’s on the president’s head. He’s got to lead. He’s got to talk. And the absence of discussion here, I think, is baffling element.

Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics posts on the possible effects of the shutdown.

… 4. What happens to red state Senate Democrats? Of course, the real action for 2014 is not the House, where the GOP will continue to control the agenda except in the unlikely event that it loses 17 seats. The real fight is for control of the Senate, which in turn revolves around races in eight states: West Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, South Dakota, Louisiana, Alaska, Montana and North Carolina. Obama lost those states by, respectively, 27, 24, 23, 18, 17, 14, 14 and two points, respectively.

The politics of a shutdown in these states are very different than in the nation as a whole. We can try to estimate the popularity of a shutdown by taking as a national baseline CNN’s recent finding that 46 percent of voters would blame Republicans for a shutdown vs. the 36 percent that would blame Obama. If we adjust these numbers according to the results of the presidential election in 2012, we would estimate that the president would shoulder the blame for a shutdown in each of those states save for North Carolina, and that outright majorities would blame the president in West Virginia, Arkansas and Kentucky.

The last thing Democratic candidates in these states want is a public spat over a piece of legislation that is highly controversial, that might have a problematic rollout in the coming weeks and months, and that places them on the side of an unpopular president. If there’s an upside for the GOP, this is probably it. Even after the 1995-96 shutdowns, the GOP managed to gain Senate seats, largely by making gains in reddish states.

Of course, none of this should be read as advocating the shutdown, or predicting that it could not possibly have any negative consequences for the GOP. For starters, a government shutdown is essentially lighting a fuse without knowing exactly where it will go. This is something that could easily get out of control if the shutdown stretches out for weeks and bleeds into the debt ceiling battle, which could be potentially catastrophic for the county. …

Dan Pfeiffer, senior white house advisor, says the administration is “not for negotiating with people who have a bomb strapped to their chest.” The GOP as terrorists has become a left meme. Just for grins, let’s take a look at real terrorists. Brendan O’Neill of Telegraph, UK thinks it is time to talk about the barbarism of modern islamist terrorism.

In Western news-making and opinion-forming circles, there’s a palpable reluctance to talk about the most noteworthy thing about modern Islamist violence: its barbarism, its graphic lack of moral restraint. This goes beyond the BBC’s yellow reluctance to deploy the T-word – terrorism – in relation to the bloody assault on the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya at the weekend. Across the commentating board, people are sheepish about pointing out the historically unique lunacy of Islamist violence and its utter detachment from any recognisable moral universe or human values. We have to talk about this barbarism; we have to appreciate how new and unusual it is, how different it is even from the terrorism of the 1970s or of the early twentieth century. We owe it to the victims of these assaults, and to the principle of honest and frank political debate, to face up to the unhinged, morally unanchored nature of Islamist violence in the 21st century.

Maybe it’s because we have become so inured to Islamist terrorism in the 12 years since 9/11 that even something like the blowing-up of 85 Christians outside a church in Pakistan no longer shocks us or even makes it on to many newspaper front pages. But consider what happened: two men strapped with explosives walked into a group of men, women and children who were queuing for food and blew up themselves and the innocents gathered around them. Who does that? How far must a person have drifted from any basic system of moral values to behave in such an unrestrained and wicked fashion? …

… My penny’s worth is that this terrorism speaks to a profound crisis of politics and of morality. Where earlier terrorist groups were restrained both by their desire to appear as rational political actors with a clear goal in mind and by basic moral rules of human behaviour – meaning their violence was often bloody, yes, but rarely focused narrowly on committing mass murder – today’s Islamist terrorists appear to float free of normal political rules and moral compunctions. This is what is so infuriating about the BBC’s refusal to call these groups terrorists – because if anything, and historically speaking, even the term terrorist might be too good for them.

Furthermore, these people are engaged in a slaughter of Christians. Kirsten Powers posts in the Daily Beast.

Christians in the Middle East and Africa are being slaughtered, tortured, raped, kidnapped, beheaded, and forced to flee the birthplace of Christianity. One would think this horror might be consuming the pulpits and pews of American churches. Not so. The silence has been nearly deafening.

As Egypt’s Copts have battled the worst attacks on the Christian minority since the 14th century, the bad news for Christians in the region keeps coming. On Sunday, Taliban suicide bombers killed at least 85 worshippers at All Saints’ church, which has stood since 1883 in the city of Peshawar, Pakistan. Christians were also the target of Islamic fanatics in the attack on a shopping center in Nairobi, Kenya, this week that killed more than 70 people. The Associated Press reported that the Somali Islamic militant group al-Shabab “confirmed witness accounts that gunmen separated Muslims from other people and let the Muslims go free.” The captives were asked questions about Islam. If they couldn’t answer, they were shot.

In Syria, Christians are under attack by Islamist rebels and fear extinction if Bashar al-Assad falls. This month, rebels overran the historic Christian town of Maalula, where many of its inhabitants speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus. The AFP reported that a resident of Maalula called her fiancé’s cell and was told by member of the Free Syrian Army that they gave him a chance to convert to Islam and he refused. So they slit his throat. …

The Express, UK calls the perps “mindless youths,” but we know who is attacking planes in Great Britain with lasers.

THOUSANDS of planes coming in to land at Britain’s busiest airports are in danger of crashing because pilots are being ‘blinded’ by laser pen attackers.

Britain’s largest pilots’ union is so concerned by a recent spate of incidents it has issued an emergency bulletin to members advising them how to avoid being blinded and losing control of their planes.

The British Airline Pilots’ Association (Balpa) now wants the law changed so anyone caught in possession of the higher powered lasers without a “legitimate reason” to be jailed.

“Slaps on wrists and £150 fines are not enough – custodial sentences should be the norm,” a spokesman said yesterday.

Most of the attacks are on large commercial jets, but even military planes carrying injured troops home from Afghanistan to hospitals in the Midlands have been targeted.

Police helicopters chasing criminals over densely populated areas are also regularly hit.

In most cases the beams are being shone by mindless youths, but pilots and security experts worry terrorists could also use them.

The incidents are all contained in official reports logged with the Civil Aviation Authority and obtained by the Sunday Express.

Planes are being struck at the rate of five times a day by beams from high intensity laser pens that can be bought online from as little as £12.

The more powerful products emit bright green beams and cost about £400, with a range of up to 200 miles. ….