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In the NYTimes, Sharon LaFraniere describes bleak living conditions in North Korea.
… A six-day visit to Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, that ended last Tuesday offered carefully monitored glimpses of a land where reality and fantasy are routinely conflated. While there were no obvious signs of impending collapse or political intrigue swirling around the fate of North Korea’s ailing leader, the visit offered hints of why the North might be particularly eager now to resume international aid and trade.
For nearly four years, an unrelenting barrage of government propaganda has promised that North Korea will be strong and prosperous by 2012, the centennial of the birth of Kim Il-sung, the nation’s founder and the father of the current leader, Kim Jong-il.
That is now 18 months away. And prosperous is the last word one would use to describe North Korea’s shuttered factories, skimpy harvests and stunted children.
Perhaps with that deadline in mind, North Korea’s leaders last week made what might be a bid to reduce their isolation. They offered concessions that could help open up and limit the country’s increasingly sophisticated nuclear program.
And after promising to retaliate militarily should South Korea renew artillery drills near disputed waters, they have reacted — so far — only with words. But North Korea has made conciliatory gestures before, to extract aid at times of economic need or political transition, only to turn hostile later.
Of the nation’s 24 million citizens, the three million in Pyongyang are the most privileged. North Koreans need a special permit to live or come here. Still, signs of hardship are evident. …
…Economists say coal production is, at best, half that of two decades ago, and Pyongyang has regular power shortages. At the elite Foreign Language Revolution School, students warmed themselves around stoves fed by coal or wood. In much of the city, residents report only a few hours of electricity daily.
…Elsewhere, especially in northern provinces, residents report that child beggars haunt street markets, families scavenge hillsides for sprouts and mushrooms and workers at state enterprises receive nominal salaries, at best. Workers in Pyongyang are said to be much better compensated. …
Jennifer Rubin blogs that liberals still don’t understand why America doesn’t want socialized medicine.
Jill Lawrence writing in Politics Daily personifies liberal cluelessness on the subject of ObamaCare:
The biggest mystery of 2010 may be Democrats’ failure to explain and sell their landmark health law, and the public’s sustained resistance to it despite the popularity of many of its components. …
A mystery? Well, yes, the left can’t fathom why people would be disenchanted with a bill that requires them to buy insurance whether they like it or not, that constitutes another weighty entitlement program, that is now acknowledged not to bend the cost curve downward and that is already causing employers to dump or change their employees’ health-care coverage. But for those of us remotely in touch with the public zeitgeist, it’s no mystery at all.
Moreover, the contention that the Democrats’ problem is a communication one is a persistent fable that underscores just how sheltered the ObamaCare spinners remain from public antipathy toward a program that, among other things, is going to slash Medicare Advantage and impose a raft of mandates on new business. Obama graced us with hundreds of speeches and press conferences, and even a health-care forum. The more the voters heard the less they liked. …
Rubin also comments on Obamacare poll numbers.
…If there is a silver lining for the White House in the CNN poll, it is that although 54 percent oppose ObamaCare, that is down five points from a high in March, while support is up to 43 percent. Yes, those are still rather dismal figures for such an “historic” piece of legislation.
…The House will hold an up or down vote on repeal. Then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will have a problem: does he allow a vote, thereby exposing his members to the wrath of voters? And if so and a number of those moderate Democrats bolt, where does that leave Obama’s argument that there is broad-based support for his legacy legislation?
Last time around, the White House and the Democratic leadership convinced their members to ignore the polls and vote for ObamaCare. But in the wake of a midterm election wipeout, will Democrats again defy the will of the voters? Stay tuned.
In Commentary, Tevi Troy reviews how Democrats forced Obamacare on an unwilling nation.
…The stronger case to be made, however, is that health care did in fact drive the election results. According to GOP pollster Bill McInturff, “This election was a clear signal that voters do not want President Obama’s health-care plan.” McInturff looked mainly at the battleground elections rather than including the heavily Democratic safe districts and found that in the 100 most closely contested House districts, 51 percent of voters described their votes as a message to the president on health care. In addition, more than half of independent voters told McInturff that they were voting against the health-care law. Independents supported Republicans over Democrats by a margin of 18 percent.
Another analysis, by Jeffrey Anderson, found that in “comparable districts, anti-Obamacare Democrats won reelection at twice the rate of pro-Obamacare Democrats.” According to Anderson, this meant that Democratic House members in swing districts who voted for the health-care bill “cut their chances of gaining reelection approximately in half.”
…Republicans are taking over the House of Representatives with a justified belief that the American people have given them a mandate to “repeal and replace” the health-care bill. They can’t succeed at it. Even if a repeal vote passes the House—and it is likely that such a vote will take place early in the year—Republicans will not be able to get that bill through the Democratic-controlled Senate, and President Obama would veto it in any event. As a result, House Republicans will have to spend the next two years making the case for repeal, using the tools of the majority—gavels, more staff, and subpoena power—to highlight the case.
There are, however, two possible means of repeal. There is actual legislative repeal, passed by both Houses and signed by the president, which cannot happen until 2013 at the earliest. And there is effective repeal, in which the body politic rejects the substance of the bill, seeks waivers and exemptions, supports defunding important provisions, and challenges it in court, all of which would have the effect of making the whole scheme unworkable. This could be the ultimate fate of Obama’s signature legislation. …
James Delingpole, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, blogs about some global warming conspirators who had predicted no more snow for the UK.
…Here, for example, is a quote from a book published as recently as 2004: (H/T Ishmael2009)
…It was the traditional British winter, everyone’s dream of a white Christmas. And what no one knows – or likes to admit – is that it’s probably gone for good.
I haven’t seen snow like this for over seven years in Oxford, which isn’t too far from where I grew up. … In fact snow has become so rare that when it does fall – often just for a few hours – everything grinds to a halt. In early 2003 a ‘mighty’ five-centimetre snowfall in southeast England caused such severe traffic jams that many motorists had to stay in their cars overnight. Today’s kids are missing out: I haven’t seen a snowball fight in years, and I can’t even remember the last time I saw a snowman.
Like the Christmas snow, the holly and the ivy may soon be distant memories.
The book was called High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis. And it’s by Mark Lynas. This would be the same Mark Lynas who has done very nicely thank you out of advising the Maldives Government on its ‘climate change’ strategy…