“A Tale Of Two Leaders - Hotair.com” plus 4 more

A Tale Of Two Leaders - Hotair.com
Young foreigners travel to China to hunt for jobs as home markets ... - Los Angeles Times
General Motors exec reassures truck buyers on availability - detnews.com
Basketball's Admirable Admiral - Wall Street Journal
NFL Headlines - Rotoworld.com

Posted: 20 Sep 2009 08:42 AM PDT

A Tale Of Two Leaders

posted at 10:36 am on September 20, 2009 by Mitch_Berg
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Earlier this week, on the seventieth anniversary of the Soviet Union's invasion of Poland at the beginning of World War II, President Obama announced that the United States is reneging on a promise to build a missile defense shield against future, likely Iranian nuclear missiles. This program was started under Bush, enacted in Poland and the Czech Republican at the cost of immense political capital to the Polish and Czech governments.

The date, of course, was Vladimir Putin's way of telling the recalcitrant, west-leaning, NATO-joining Poles that he's watching them.

But the reverse on the missile program? That was all Obama. The President seems to think, as Jimmy Carter did, that if he just gives a few more concessions to Putin, to the Mullahs, to the world's thugs and gangsters, that eventually even they'll start believing in all the Hope and Change.

Of course, as we saw earlier this summer, earnest promises of Hope and Change didn't stop the mullahs from gunning down protesters in the streets of Teheran.

What a contrast with thirty years ago, as <a href="http://spectator.org/archives/2009/06/18/obama-is-no-reagan-the-polish/1″>Jeffrey Lord noted earlier this summer</a> in American Spectator:

One need look no further than President Obama's cautiously timid response to the demands of freedom from Iranians. Contrast this with Reagan's response to similar demands from Poles in the 1980s and the miserable inadequacy of the Obama foreign policy is thrust into a stark and shameful relief.

Finding historical parallels is a slippery slope that leads to madness. But sometimes they're illustrative:

When Reagan took office in January of 1981, Poland had been a Soviet satellite for almost four decades. The American foreign policy establishment had long since settled into an acceptance of moral equivalency between the United States and the Communists. The policy was acted out in a thousand different ways ranging from so-called "détente" (a relaxing of tensions) to a vast, arcane arms control process which over time had substituted the process itself instead of the unconditional victory of freedom as America's chief foreign policy goal.

Sound familiar?

As opposed to the example from the last time we had a thug-ocracy beating freedom-loving demonstrators in the streets, I mean?…:

Reagan had campaigned on a completely different idea, a very old principle when dealing with an adversary. He phrased it this way to his first national security advisor, Richard Allen: "We win, they lose." It was this goal that Reagan sought, and thus caused him to speak bluntly about America's adversary in the Cold War. An "Evil Empire" is how he early-on famously described the Soviet Union, completely horrifying the Obama-like striped-pants set in the State Department and Establishment foreign policy circles…

Joe Biden said during the campaign that Obama would face a foreign policy "test". Well, Ronald Reagan certainly did:

One of the very first items that arose on Reagan's watch was the rising demand for freedom from the Polish people. On January 21, his first full day in the Oval Office, word reached the White House that a young shipyard worker and union leader named Lech Walesa had informed the Communist government of Poland he had called a series of strikes in four Polish cities, beginning the next day. Within 24 hours hundreds of thousands of Poles in ten cities — not four — were publicly defying the Polish Communist dictator, General Wojciech Jaruzelski.

A fight for freedom was on — and Ronald Reagan had zero intention of standing on the sidelines…Liberals all over Washington paled. This, they insisted, was no way to conduct diplomacy. One just does not say these things in public. But Reagan had only just begun.

And we all know how that ended - in this case, with a free Poland; a nation that reveres the Reagan legacy; a place that is probably the best place in Europe to be an American; a place that has repaid Reagan's efforts many-fold, by becoming not just a leading voice for freedom, but a leading supplier of muscle to defend it; Polish troops were among the largest allied contingents in Iraq.

Iran today and Poland in 1980 aren't perfect analogues - but the similarities are strong enough to help us gauge the character of our nation's leadership.

Which is bad news for Obama:

As Walesa and his fellow Poles demanded the most basic of human liberties, Moscow responded by sending troops on maneuvers along the Polish border, then installing a military government with instructions to stop Walesa in his tracks.

Distinctly unlike Obama's reaction to the demonstrators filling the streets of Iran, Reagan looked at similar crowds in Poland and said the sight was "thrilling." Said Reagan: "I wanted to be sure we did nothing to impede this process and everything we could to spur it along."

And so he did. In a stiff note to Soviet boss Leonid Brezhnev, Reagan said that if the Russians kept up their thuggish response to Poland they "could forget any new nuclear arms agreement." Gone too would be better trade relations, and in their place would be the "harshest possible economic sanctions" if they even thought of invading Poland as they had done with Czechoslovakia in 1968 or Hungary in 1956.

Of couse, Reagan did much more; he formed an unlikely alliance (according to Dinesh D'Souza) with Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and AFL-CIO president Layne Kirkland to send financial as well as moral aid to Solidarity.

Hope and change didn't come for free in 1980, either; as tensions ratcheted up, Reagan took the occasion of the normally-pacific Christmas speech to stump for the Poles…:

… "We can't let this revolution against Communism fail without offering a hand," he wrote that day in his diary. "We may never have an opportunity like this in our lifetime."

Christmas or not, Reagan proceeded to write Brezhnev about the "recent events in Poland." Warned the President: "Attempts to suppress the Polish people-either by the Polish army or police acting under Soviet pressure, or through even more direct use of the Soviet military force — certainly will not bring about long term stability in Poland and could unleash a process neither you nor we could fully control." Reagan said the Soviets were encouraging "political terror, mass arrests and bloodshed" and they must either halt this behavior or "we will travel a different path."

On Christmas morning, Reagan had a heated, angry reply from Brezhnev. Furious, he accused the President of "defaming our social and state system, our internal order." It was a charge, Reagan said, "to which I pleaded guilty."

Words were followed by actions - sanctions against Poland and the USSR - and then by years of committed agitation to bring down, not Poland, but the USSR itself. These efforts paid off almost twenty years ago, as first the Poles, and then the rest Eastern Europe, and finally the Russians themselves cast off the Communists. History's bloodthirstiest regime fell without a shot in less than ten years, because of a show of backbone and resolve.

And some people know it:

Lech Walesa went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize and later become the freely elected President of a democratic Poland. In 2007, Walesa's successor as President of Poland traveled to the Reagan Library to present Nancy Reagan, who accepted on behalf of her late husband, The Order of the White Eagle, the oldest and highest honor within the gift of the Polish people. Today one can visit Ronald Reagan Square in Krakow, a Reagan statue is planned for Warsaw and Reagan streets and parks dot the country. He is considered, in the words of the Polish president, the "architect of democracy."

Compare and contrast:

This is a lesson that one realizes the Obama White House simply doesn't have the courage to embrace. As over a million Iranians fill[ed] the streets of Tehran, the message from this President of the United States is that he is afraid to be seen as "meddling" — precisely the charge Reagan faced down from Brezhnev. Instead Obama backs away from standing up for freedom, saying (as if Iran were a free country): "It is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran's leaders will be. We respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran." He does say he is "deeply troubled."

As those Iranians who seek freedom are literally shot dead in the streets, Obama observes cautiously that "the democratic process, free speech, the ability of people to peacefully dissent — all those are universal values and need to be respected." Instead of dealing with the mullahs of Iran in the fashion Reagan dealt with Brezhnev and the Polish Communist puppets, Obama refers deferentially to Ayatollah ali Khamenei, as the "Supreme Leader."

And so inside a generation, American leadership has gone from embracing and pressing for freedom, to equivocating and waffling - and, worse, betraying it, allowing Vladimir Putin not only to use the symbol of Poland's subjugation before the Soviets to deliver his message, but carrying Putin's water for him. Obama's selling-out of Poland in the face of Putin's pressure was the sort of thing that might make pragmatic sense to those diplomats more allied to "process" than to the goal of liberty…

…and it's the sort of thing that wouldn't have gotten on Ronald Reagan's short list.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

Young foreigners travel to China to hunt for jobs as home markets ... - Los Angeles Times

Posted: 20 Sep 2009 09:11 AM PDT

In this photo taken Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2009, foreigners looking for work as English teachers in China take part in a training session in Beijing, China. Young foreigners are coming to China to look for work in its unfamiliar but less bleak economy, driven by the worst job markets in decades in the United States, Europe and other Asian countries. (AP Photo/Andy Wong) (Andy Wong, AP / August 25, 2009)

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General Motors exec reassures truck buyers on availability - detnews.com

Posted: 20 Sep 2009 09:11 AM PDT

Scott Burgess / The Detroit News

General Motors Co. will stay ahead of future federal regulations regarding vehicle fuel economy to make sure customers will be able to buy the vehicles they want, the company's top product planner said this week.

Tom Stephens, GM's vice chairman and head of global product development, assured future pickup buyers that GM, which builds the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra, would continue to meet the new federal standards.

When the new proposal was announced, GM spokesman Scott Fosgard said many GM customers became worried that the automaker would limit pickup sales to make the fleet numbers. But Stephens said GM will not have to limit anything.

"We won't restrict customer choice as a result of the regulations," Stephens said. "We intend to be ahead of the new fuel regulations."

Stephens said GM would meet the 2016 requirements with traditional gasoline engines.

The new rules proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would require a fleet average of 35.5 miles per gallon in the next six years; however, those rules vary depending upon how many kinds of vehicles a manufacturer builds.

The rules were heralded by consumer and environmental groups as being able to clean up tailpipe emissions and save fuel costs.

"This historic proposal moves America further down the road to cleaner, more fuel-efficient vehicles," said Roland Hwang, vehicles policy director for the National Resource Development Council, an environmental special interest group.

"Working together, the Obama administration, states, the auto industry and environmental leaders have come to an agreement that will enable carmakers to meet the challenges of the 21st century, while protecting our planet and our health."

Carmakers will employ a variety of technologies to improve fleet fuel economy, such as using smaller-displacement engines and building hybrids and electric vehicles, experts said, and this will mean future vehicles will have higher price tags.

Stephens said the additional costs would be "north of $1,000."

The driving concern for GM's future products, he added, was to continue to prepare for higher fuel prices, which influence consumers.

"That's what really is driving my thought process of putting this technology in the new vehicles: higher fuel prices," he said. "That's going to push people into smaller vehicles more than any government regulation."

Next year, GM will introduce the Chevrolet Cruze, a compact car with a fuel economy near 40 mpg, to replace the compact Chevy Cobalt. Additionally, GM recently launched the Chevrolet Equinox and its brother, the GMC Terrain, which offer the best highway mileage in the compact crossover segment.

GM has seen its market share erode over the past decade. Its product revival, which started under the guidance of Bob Lutz, current vice chairman of marketing, lost much of its momentum when the U.S. economy collapsed last year and the car market plummeted, industry experts said.

Now, freshly emerged from bankruptcy in July, it needs a hit streak as long as Joe DiMaggio's.

"GM has a lot going for it and a very strong lineup right now," Joe Phillippi, an industry analyst for Auto Trends Consulting Inc.

The company also will launch the electric Chevrolet Volt at the end of 2010 with a range-extending gas generator on board. The four-passenger car has collected a lot of praise, but it remains to be seen if it will be a success. It will cost around $40,000 and be able to travel 40 miles on a full charge before the gas operated generator turns on.

The Volt, Stephens said, needs to be launched on schedule so the company can refine it and make it more affordable.

"The Volt isn't going to have a big impact until we can lower its costs, and that's going to take time," he said.

Until then, Stephens said, "we will continue to offer a full line of vehicles to everyone."

sburgess@detnews.com (313) 223-3217

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Basketball's Admirable Admiral - Wall Street Journal

Posted: 20 Sep 2009 08:35 AM PDT

By GREG CORCORAN

Amid all the hoopla last weekend, basketball fans might have been forgiven for thinking David Robinson was just the really tall guy standing next to Michael Jordan at the Basketball Hall of Fame induction ceremonies. Of course, that would be unfair to the 44-year-old Mr. Robinson, who has a glowing resume of his own: He won two National Basketball Association titles with the San Antonio Spurs (1999, 2003) and was named in 1996 as one of the 50 greatest players in NBA history. He played on the legendary U.S. Olympic "Dream Team" in 1992 and won a second gold medal in Atlanta in 1996. He also was a two-time All-America while at the U.S. Naval Academy and earned 1987 college Player of the Year honors.

Reuters

David Robinson speaks during the Basketball Hall of Fame Class of 2009 enshrinement ceremony in Springfield, Mass., Sept. 11.

This from a man who entered the Naval Academy in 1983 at 6-foot-7 and was more interested in mathematics than in basketball. Of course, Mr. Robinson quickly spurted to 7-foot-1 and his last game as a collegian was a 50-point effort against Michigan in the NCAA Tournament.

Since retiring in 2003, Mr. Robinson has been kept busy raising his three boys (ages 16, 14 and 12), leading a private school he founded in San Antonio and, more recently, entering the field of private equity. He is co-founder of Admiral Capital Group, a company that calls attention to his nickname as a player. WSJ.com caught up with Mr. Robinson by phone to talk with the tallest member of the Hall of Fame's Class of 2009. Excerpts:

The Wall Street Journal: When you entered the Naval Academy, what were your basketball aspirations?

Mr. Robinson: None. I had talked with the coaches at the Naval Academy about playing. I had played one year of high-school basketball. I though it might be a way to pursue a college scholarship, but that was the limit.

WSJ: Bill Walton was always listed as 6-foot-11 because he thought 7-feet had a certain freakish stigma. You grew to 7-foot-1 in the Naval Academy. How did you feel about that?

Mr. Robinson: I embraced the freakishness. I was always a good athlete. I was never the awkward tall guy, because I had done a lot of gymnastics as a kid. Everyone has their strengths. Mine was that I was tall and lithe. There was never any awkwardness to it, except on the living side, you know, taking a shower and the shower head hits you in the stomach. But there is just something about being tall that commands attention.

WSJ: When did you realize that more was possible for you in basketball?

Mr. Robinson: Probably the first game into my pro career. My summer-league games were rather unremarkable. But I remember my first game, playing the Los Angeles Lakers, with Magic Johnson, and I put up some good numbers. I thought, wow, this wasn't actually all that hard, that I can do this every single night. I think I can be one of the best players in the league. And we had such good coaches. [Current Spurs Head Coach Gregg] Popovich was so good at teaching me about the game. Really, I've had some ridiculous coaches all along the way, Chuck Daly, Mike Krzyzewski, Lute Olson, Paul Evans. Every one of them taught me something about how to play the game of basketball.

WSJ: What would you have done if basketball hadn't developed the way it did?

Getty Images

Along with his two titles, David Robinson posted career numbers of 21.1 points, 10.6 rebounds and 3 blocks per game in 14 seasons with the Spurs.

Mr. Robinson: I would have been perfectly happy doing what I was doing. I had planned to spend my five years in the Navy after graduation as a civil engineer, then probably moving to a firm. I've met a lot of my Academy friends and there isn't one who hasn't done well. Accomplished in business, president of a company. I just figured I'd be one of those guys.

WSJ: You were something of an electronics nerd and even built your own television. How did that happen?

Mr. Robinson: It was supposed to be a project that me and my father did together. But my father had gone to sea for a few months with the Navy, and the kit was just sitting there. I started on it. I had just finished a shop class in high school and had learned how to solder. And I'm the kind of guy who, once I start something, I've got to finish, which I did before my father got home. Professionally built TVs are so neat, the wires all wrapped together. I had wires going in every direction. And when I first turned it on there was just a flat line on the screen. It took me a few hours to discover that I had this one circuit put in backward. After that, it worked fine.

WSJ: What was your favorite moment in professional basketball?

Mr. Robinson: I'd have to say the last moment. I remember thinking as I was walking off the court, holding my children and having won an NBA championship, that this is the way to leave. I had known that this was going to be my last season, so being able to walk off the court that way was the most ridiculously great moment.

WSJ: You are one of four players officially credited with a quadruple-double, or registering double figures in four statistical categories in 1994. What does that feel like? Do it feel like you are involved in, or dominating, every play?

Mr. Robinson: That was my hope. As a defensive-minded player, I wanted to do a little bit of everything. The team wanted me to score, which I could do. But I also wanted to accomplish as much as I could on the defensive end of the floor. It was a pretty cool accomplishment. Generally, I'm not into individual statistics. Even when I scored the 71 points in a game (to win the NBA scoring title in 1994, beating out Shaquille O'Neal), I wasn't very interested. But my coach, John Lucas, told me before the game that he wanted me to get the ball every time so that I would have a chance to take the scoring title, because he said this was a great opportunity for me. I was like, ahhh, OK. You don't shoot for those kinds of individual awards, but when it happens, afterward, you are glad you did it.

WSJ: What was the lowlight of your pro career?

Mr. Robinson: The NBA semifinals loss to the Houston Rockets in 1995 in Game Six on their floor. It had been built up as kind of a me-versus Hakeem [Olajuwon] thing, and I thought I had failed [Mr. Robinson outscored Mr. Robinson 39-19.]. And I remember sitting in the locker room afterward and hearing on the loudspeaker in the background, the announcer telling Houston fans when NBA Finals tickets would be going on sale, and I remember thinking that this was the worst you could feel in basketball.

WSJ: So here you are, named one of the 50 greatest NBA players ever in 1996. You are in this year's Hall of Fame inductees, you have two NBA championships to your credit, and all the attention seems to go to Michael Jordan?

Mr. Robinson: To me, it was just an incredible honor, and having Michael Jordan in my class made it even better. If people thought the rest of us were afterthoughts, well, it wasn't that way for me. Well, maybe for my son. He's just 14, so when we talked about my going into the Hall he said, "Aw, that's easy." But to sit up there on the dais and to see Meadowlark Lemon, guys like Moses Malone, such great players and wonderful accomplishments, it was very cool for me.

WSJ: What has your career been after basketball?

Mr. Robinson: Starting off, I was a minister at church, and was trying to be a dad in a way I hadn't been able to be as a professional athlete. My wife had done a great job, but kids needs a dad, too. We don't realize how much we miss when we are away. All those years on the road, I thought I had been there a lot. But when you are around everyday, as I am now, you realize how much you missed.

I have been able to expand now. Real estate. The private-equity fund.

WSJ: Why private equity? How did this happen?

Mr. Robinson: A friend of mine, Daniel Bassichis, who I got to know through a friend from the Naval Academy, worked at Goldman Sachs Group. He started helping out at the Carver Academy. He understood my mentality, like in basketball, that I see business as a great way to impact the community. And where we invest, we will have partnerships that facilitate investment in the surrounding communities as well. We started Admiral Capital in 2007. At first, the timing seemed awful, with the financial crisis. But we were fortunate. We had a little bit of money out there at work but we weren't hurt. Now there are going to be opportunities galore. Who knows when they are going to be there, but this is a really exciting time.

WSJ: And you helped found the Carver Academy, a private elementary school in San Antonio. How is that going?

Mr. Robinson: It's been great. This is our ninth year of operation. I'm a teacher at heart, and graduating from the Naval Academy and being a part of that great history and sense of service. I said, "Why can't I start teaching kids this about serving beyond self when they are four or five?" We started as pre-kindergarten through second grade, adding a grade a year. And we have had four graduation classes. I think we might stop when we get to eighth grade. But there is much more to do. Most of our kids are on scholarship. And the endowment now is something like $4 million. We would like to get that to $50 million. I am the board chairman now, so I do a lot of fund raising and traveling for fund raising, but I try to be a daily presence.

Write to Greg Corcoran at greg.corcoran@wsj.com