A dusting of snow and some freezing rain equals front page news...
Update: 2 to 4 inches of snow! Look out!
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Mike Huckabee continues to showcase his mean streak on the campaign trail. The target, this time, is Mitt Romney. Unfortunately, Huckabee used a toddler to try to score political points. I will be happy when he goes away.
Confronted by crying toddler on Tuesday, Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee quipped the child must be for his rival Mitt Romney.
"He's not the happiest boy today," Huckabee said, smiling for a picture with the boy and his brother and sister. "I think he must be a Romney voter. Look at him. He's so sad."
I would have had some words for Minister Huckabee had he said that to my child.
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File Under: Poetic Justice.
Mike Nifong has filed for bankruptcy. Next, hopefully, comes jail.
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Jonathan Cohen reports on the McCain and Romney campaigns in Michigan. Cohen focuses extensively on the theme of economic uncertainty and explains why he think the state might go for Romney. I am not a big fan of either candidate, but Cohen's article is worth a read.
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The Triangle Business Journal has a story on the proposed development on 751 across the street from Chancellor's Ridge. According to an email I received from a member of the development team this afternoon, the developers filed their plan with the city today.
The article notes:
A pair of one-time partners in Raleigh's Boylan Cos. are teaming up with entrepreneur Neal Hunter to bring a big mixed-use development to southern Durham.
The 164-acre project, thus far unnamed, would be off N.C. 751 between Stagecoach Road and the Chatham County line. It would feature between 1,200 and 1,300 residences and at least 500,000 square feet of commercial space, says Alex Mitchell, a former Boylan Cos. partner developing the site with Boylan President Tyler Morris.
The project, costing more than $50 million, would have civic buildings including a YMCA, an elementary school and a fire station. Mitchell and Morris are in talks to donate the land for the projects.
"It's a real kind of grade-A product, and I think it's going to be a top-notch deal for Durham," Mitchell says.
Hunter, a Durham businessman who co-founded lighting company Cree and is now CEO of LED Lighting Fixtures, sold the land for the project to Morris and Mitchell, his cousin.
Both Hunter and Mitchell declined to discuss the price of the transaction, but both said the deal was done at market value - about $100,000 per acre in southern Durham, Mitchell said, making the cost somewhere in the range of $15 million to $20 million.
Hunter is a minority, passive partner in Southern Durham Development Inc., the company Morris and Mitchell set up to develop the land. The site is about a mile from Colvard Farms, a 600-acre residential project Hunter developed.
and
Hunter, who owns another 86 acres of land nearby that he says he has no current plans to develop...
So, the person who sold the land and still has a huge financial stake in the development going ahead also owns another large parcel of land down the road, yet has no plans to develop it? It appears reasonable to assume that if this development goes through that it will only be the first shoe dropped by this group.
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Critical realignments happen infrequently, but this does not stop Paul Starr from trying examining the road map to a progressive realignment in American politics. I do not believe a critical realignment will occur regardless of who wins the presidency. In fact, I predict the next administration will find itself in much the same environment as the last one (country split roughly 45-45, insignificant margins for the majority in Congress to accomplish much, and angry wings of the base on both the liberal and conservative sides of the aisle).
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Judith Miller, formerly of the New York Times, explores the politics and future of the United Arab Emirates in an article in the winter edition of City Journal.
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Writing in the National Interest, Ted Galen Carpenter examines the latest episode of North Korean non-compliance with its nonproliferation obligations. In analyzing the situation, Carpenter notes:
It is possible that the North Koreans are merely engaging in bargaining tactics to obtain larger quantities of energy and financial aid than have already been promised, and if they gain further concessions, they will eventually make a full disclosure. But American and east Asian leaders also need to consider another possibility — that Pyongyang is merely stalling while it continues to build nuclear weapons from the plutonium it has already extracted from the Yongbyon reactor. For all of its promises to the contrary, North Korea may be determined to crash the global nuclear weapons party.
Carpenter misses the forest for the trees in this analysis. Simply, there is no benefit for North Korea to come in from the cold and give up its mantle as a rogue state. Such an action would lead to the demise of the regime. On the other end of the spectrum is all out confrontation with the US, which would also result in the destruction of the regime. The North Koreans have chosen a middle path that avoids the extremes and seeks to maximize the chances of regime survival. As such, North Korea has oscillated between conflict and cooperation, stick and carrot, and breaking then keeping promises. It is not clear to me what will end this pattern as North Korea benefits from keeping enough attention on it to bring in cash, aid, and prestige while at the same time remaining shy of all-out war.
The interesting question, to me at least, is whether the Bush administration fully realized this or whether they believed that North Korea could be permanently brought to heel with tough talk and tough actions or whether they simply sought to manage a bad situation as best as possible during their time in office.
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The U.S. - Iran naval shenanigans in the Straits of Hormuz garnered a significant amount of media coverage in recent weeks. Malcolm Nance, writing at Small Wars Journal, penned an informative and easy to follow post on the history, context, and ramifications of the incident.
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It is stuff like this that makes me so glad I have moved to North Carolina. No de-icer, no shovel, no scraper - thats the life for me.
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I recently posted about the possibility of a McCain - Lieberman ticket for president, but according to Robert Novak this is not going to happen. The chances of this happening were always close to zero, but I thought it might get some play given Lieberman's standing among Republicans and the past flirtation between Kerry and McCain during the 2004 elections season.
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The proposed Meadowmont on steroids development planned for 751 in Durham headed toward Jordan Lake strikes a little to close to home for me since I live in Chancellor's Ridge, which is across (the Townhomes) and just down the street from the proposed development.
When my wife and I moved to Chancellor's Ridge eighteen months ago, we liked that it was close to Southpoint and the amenities it offered. Equally important, however, was the presence of Jordan Lake and all the protected land headed down 751. When we moved in, our Realtor and nearly everyone else we talked with about the area stressed the lack of future development in the area as being a huge benefit to buying into Chancellor's Ridge. People cited both the protected lands, the Jordan Lake State Park, and the city and county of Durham's commitments regarding development. Unfortunately, it now appears that many of these assumptions were/are either flawed or directly under attack in the form of the new proposed development.
Bull City Rising, an excellent blog on all things Durham, which I found this morning has several posts relating this issue. This one, in particular, is worth a read. It summarizes events to date and also the community meeting that was held last night in Chancellor's Ridge.
I attended the meeting and did not walk away reassured regarding the benefits of the development for the environment, the people who live in the area, and the city/county as a whole. It is hard to believe that the development as planned will have a larger footprint than the Southpoint Mall!
I have intentionally tried to stay out of Durham and North Carolina politics since moving here, but it appears that this will likely be the event to change of all of that.
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The op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal by Senator John McCain and Senator Joe Lieberman provides a lot of grist for a lot of mills. In my reading of it, there are two things that stand out.
First, McCain and Lieberman write:
The question we face, on the first anniversary of the surge, is no longer whether the president's decision a year ago was the right one, or if the counterinsurgency strategy developed by Gen. Petraeus is working. It is...
The war for Iraq is not over. The gains we have made can be lost. But thanks to the courage of our troops, the skill and intellect of their battlefield commander, and the steadfastness of our commander in chief, we have at last begun to see the contours of what must remain our objective in this long, hard and absolutely necessary war -- victory.
The dramatic progress in Iraq represents a remarkable success for the United States and the credit can be shared by a lot of people ranging from the President to General Petraeus, the troops in the field, and those around the country who resisted calls to bring the troops home irrespective of the consequences for the U.S. and the Iraqi people. It certainly is something Senators McCain and Lieberman can be justifiably proud of given the heat they have taken and the progress that has been made in Iraq.
Notice that I left out the problems they identify as still ongoing and also their recommendations for what should be done in Iraq. While the points they make are worthwhile and, in some cases, insightful, these are not really the focus of this post.
The simple fact that the surge has worked causes tremendous repercussions for the presidential campaigns in the United States. Obviously, it gives McCain a significant boost as he was out in front of even the president on the utility of the surge (I will give him a mulligan for some of his earlier ideas on troop numbers which struck me as quite off the mark). It also pulls almost all of the other Republican candidates (Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee say hi) into lockstep on the questions of Iraq and the broader war on terror. This hurts someone like Rudy Guiliani, who had hoped to cater to the neo-con/hawkish/unilateralist yada yada wing of the party.
The success of the surge also will help President Bush, whose poll numbers looked downright Nixonian prior to the surge. It will likely make it even more difficult than it already was going to be for the next president to move dramatically away from almost any element of the Bush Doctrine. It also has bolstered a rather skittish Republican Congress. It would not surprise me at all if Iraq has had a significant effect on the recent uptick in Republican party identification numbers.
Obviously, this is bad news for the Democrats who, barring a dramatic change, are watching foreign policy become far less of a stick to wield in the general election. In watching the Democratic debates, its been interesting how they have increasingly focused on domestic policy issues and the generic idea of "change." The more the Democratic candidates talk about health care, trade, and corporate interests the better the chances for the Republicans in 2008.
Finally, the second major point I hoped to address centered on the authorship of the op-ed piece. McCain and Lieberman. Republican and (for all intents and purposess)Democrat. Centrists. Bipartisans. Well respected by independents. Tough on national security. Doesn't this potential ticket promise something both side's candidates have been talking about? You know, change?
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