China’s New First Couple

This WSJ piece profiles the presumptive next leader of China, XI Jinping. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204573704577186992329708730.html  Among other things, we learn that his father was purged by Mao, and that Xi spent his teenage years living in a cave during the Cultural Revolution acquiring proletarian values (and learning to master his resentments).  Deng Xiaoping rehabilitated his father, who eventually helped launch China’s economic revolution in the first “Special Economic Zone” in Guangzhou.

Unlike China’s colorless present leadership, who are engineers, Xi was a biochemist (which means that he’s probably smarter), and married a glamorous Chinese singer, who is also a Major General in the Peoples Liberation Army (!!), Peng Liyuan. His last posting before being sent to Beijing was as party boss in one of China’s most freewheeling coastal provinces, Zhejiang Province, where he presided over an explosive economic expansion.  This is a formidable person with broad bandwidth, charisma and intelligence. 

No-one has the faintest idea of how Xi will govern,and how he will deal with the volcanic instability of China’s economic growth and its political consequences. It is hard to imagine Xi leading a crackdown on entrepreneurs (since he himself was jailed three times during the Cultural Revolution).  He might be just the person to crack down, however, on local party corruption which has damaged the legitimacy of the Party.  

While we decide which moderate technocrat will lead the US for the next four years, China appears to be leaning forward.  Xi visits the US on February 15. 

Death of Bipartisanship in Washington?

This POLITICO article highlights a prominent Washington meme, which is that there is declining popular support for bipartisan solutions to national problems, and that people want government control unified under one political party. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/72132.html   The authors cite Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a ruthlessly efficient partisan warrior when he was in Congress, “We need to take on the mythology that divided government produces progress.  Divided government produces divided government.”

With respect to da Mare, our last two experiences with unified government (during George W Bush’s first term and the first two years of Obama) produced, respectively, the Iraq War and a deeply unpopular Health Reform law.  The controlling parties were decisively repudiated in subsequent Congressional elections.  While it is rhetorically satisfying to push for political hegemony, it is precisely the attempt by these two intellectually bankrupt parties to aggrandize political power that so infuriates an electorate nearly forty percent of whom are neither Republican nor Democrat but independent. These two minority parties are turning off the nation, not mobilizing it.

Where do we get solutions to our pressing national problems (an unsustainable deficit, a looming entitlement crisis, underinvestment in infrastructure, etc.) when, as seems highly likely, 2012 returns a divided government to Washington?  Wait for 2014 or 2016? 

Where Was This Photo Taken?

Tehran? Moscow? Cairo?  

Nope, it was downtown Oakland Saturday night.  Angry Occupy Oakland protesters broke into City Hall,  trashed a YMCA (??),  skirmished with the local authorities, and burned an American flag.  Four hundred were arrested. 

WTF??

Republican Nomination Trainwreck

These  people were Iowa Republicans watching their potential Presidential nominees, prior to an inconclusive caucus vote early this month.  In the Wall Street Journal this morning, Bret Stephens argues convincingly that Republicans are  squandering a golden opportunity to send a vulnerable Barack Obama home to Chicago: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203806504577178594236642420.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories

Italian Captain Claims He “Tripped and Fell into the Lifeboat”

In a classic blame-avoidance strategy, the Captain of the doomed Costa Concordia cruise ship claimed that he wasn’t actually abandoning the ship he steered onto a Tuscan reef, but rather “tripped and fell into the lifeboat”.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/world/europe/costa-concordia-italy-cruise-ship-rescue-suspended.html?_r=1&ref=global-home&gwh=C9D6ED1424F04BF8E70D99E82CE3D612

Sort of makes you think that Silvio Berlusconi might have an encore career opportunity in cruise ship navigation.  After all, he successfully navigated a country onto the rocks. And think of the trysting possibilities for all those empty staterooms … 

North Korean Leadership Photo!

This is a test.  Who’s in charge in this photo of the new North Korean “leader” Kim Jong Un?  Looks like a hostage situation to me…

Kevin Pearce Returns!

Talented snowboard aerialist Kevin Pearce made a remarkable recovery from a near-lethal head injury.  See video of this beloved boarder:  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/45892841#45892756

Congress Extends Winless Streak!

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse in Washington, Congress deadlocks over how FAR to kick the can down the road…

US Skiers Destroy Competition!

No she isn’t falling- she’s going 80 miles an hour and killing the rest of her World Cup competitors!  Lindsey Vonn is simply crushing her opponents, winning four straight World Cup gold medals- some races by 40-50 meters.  So are the rest of her teammates, both men and women.  It’s a great sports story most Americans will never hear: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204770404577082591817947110.html?grcc=970366a9b0cb9e683e53b75a94c13dfaZ3&mod=WSJ_hps_sections_sports

Eleven years ago, I spent a week at Portillo, Chile in August, watching the US and Austrian mens downhill teams training.  The Austrians were so arrogant. (Hermann Meier, their bull-like superstar, pretended to be someone else when I asked him to autograph my helmet).  The young American team I rode up on chairlifts and lifted weights with complained that downhill skiing was no longer cool anymore (all their friends snowboarded) and it was like no-one seemed to care about what they were doing. And they were getting smoked in their training runs by their Austrian “older brothers”. 

Eight years later, it’s the Austrians who are praising (and losing to) them.  One of them said, “We see them as super-cool because they are having so much fun.  With the Americans, it comes from the heart”.  Too bad we’re distracted by all the televised spectacles and superstar egos. Our skiers are amazing…

US is now Net Energy Exporter!

If you’re scrabbling around for good news, chew for a moment on this chart.  For the first time since 1949, the US exported more energy than it imported (primarily to Latin America).  Admittedly, some of this is because our economy is depressed, but it’s also because of dramatic strides in energy efficiency, and also new sources of domestic energy supply (a North Slope sized oil discovery in North Dakota and the shale gas explosion in the northeast and Texas).

Moreover, according to the Wall Street Journal, it’s likely to continue for a while.  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203441704577068670488306242.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories

So we’re not irrevocably tied to the Middle East for energy supply.  There is actually a lot of good economic news just now, but this is really stunning.