RattlerGator Blog

I, NeoCon!

I do love the tendency in so many to spout something and then insist on its truthfulness because, well, because they just said it. From the political left, right and center there has been no shortage of critique hurled upon neoconservatives in the last few years. Bret Stephens, in the Wall Street Journal, writes an international piece illuminating what was thought to be (just a few months ago) the most discredited wing of an ostensibly brain-dead conservative movement:

[Russia's] ambassador to the U.N. last week bellyached that the U.S. "continues to be a rather difficult negotiating partner"—and that was after Mr. Obama cancelled the missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic. Thus does the politics of concession meet with the logic of contempt.

All this must, at some level, come as a surprise to an administration so deeply in love with itself. "I am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world," Mr. Obama told the U.N.'s General Assembly last week with his usual modesty. He added that those expectations were "rooted in hope—the hope that real change is possible, and the hope that America will be a leader in bringing about such change."

Yet what sounds like "hope" in, say, Toronto or Barcelona tends to come across as fecklessness in Warsaw and Jerusalem. In Moscow and Tehran, it reads like credulity—and an opportunity to exploit the U.S. at a moment of economic weakness and political self-infatuation.

For those much-scorned neocons, none of this comes as a surprise. Neoconservatives generally take the view that the internal character of a regime usually predicts the nature of its foreign policy. Governments that are answerable to their own people and accountable to a rule of law tend to respect the rights of their neighbors, honor their treaty commitments, and abide by the international rules of the road. By contrast, regimes that prey on their own citizens are likely to prey on their neighbors as well. Their word is the opposite of their bond.

That's why neocons have no faith in any deals or "grand bargains" the U.S. might sign with North Korea or Iran over their nuclear programs: Cheating is in the DNA of both regimes, and the record is there to prove it. Nor do neocons put much stock in the notion that there's a "reset" button with the Kremlin. Russia is the quintessential spoiler state, seeking its advantage in America's troubles at home and abroad. Ditto for Syria, which has perfected the art of taking credit for solving problems of its own creation.

Where neocons do put their faith is in American power, not just military or economic power but also as an instrument of moral and political suasion.

Amen!

I have faith that we'll be done with Barack and Michelle soon enough. Soon enough. The sky is not falling and all damages inflicted under this bizarre administration can be undone. Given that we cannot possibly opt out of our leadership position in the world, nor can we possibly wash our hands of foreign entanglements, neoconservatives will be proven not simply technically correct in the broad sweep of their prescriptions but self-evidently prudent in those same prescriptions. Academics, business elites or left-leaning defense experts who didn't have nearly enough faith in American neoconservatives but far too much faith in China or Russia, Syria or Iran, will be proven to be the educated fools that they are.

Poland and Israel, yes. India and Australia, yes. Indonesia, Ethiopia and Botswana, yes. Some of these places Barack is insisting we cozy up to? Hell no!

All we have to do is remain vigilant, keep the faith, keep living and stay active.

A Cure for Color Blindness Coming Soon?

I suffer from red-green color blindness and thus have to be careful with my clothing combination's and I must be especially attentive when I visit a new city while driving -- how are the lights configured, how deep is the color of the red or green light, etc. -- so you'll understand why this next story from UF caught my attention. I'm posting the complete release.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Florida used gene therapy to cure two squirrel monkeys of color blindness — the most common genetic disorder in people.

Writing online Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists cast a rosy light on the potential for gene therapy to treat adult vision disorders involving cone cells — the most important cells for vision in people.

“We’ve added red sensitivity to cone cells in animals that are born with a condition that is exactly like human color blindness,” said William W. Hauswirth, a professor of ophthalmic molecular genetics at the UF College of Medicine and a member of the UF Genetics Institute and the Powell Gene Therapy Center. “Although color blindness is only moderately life-altering, we’ve shown we can cure a cone disease in a primate, and that it can be done very safely. That’s extremely encouraging for the development of therapies for human cone diseases that really are blinding.”

The finding is also likely to intrigue millions of people around the world who are colorblind, including about 3.5 million people in the United States, more than 13 million in India and more than 16 million in China. The problem mostly affects men, leaving about 8 percent of Caucasian men in the United States incapable of discerning red and green hues that are important for everyday things like recognizing traffic lights.

“People who are colorblind feel that they are missing out,” said Jay Neitz, a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Washington. “If we could find a way to do this with complete safety in human eyes, as we did with monkeys, I think there would be a lot of people who would want it. Beyond that, we hope this technology will be useful in correcting lots of different vision disorders.”

The discovery comes about 10 years after Neitz and his wife Maureen Neitz, a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Washington and senior author of the study, began training two squirrel monkeys named Dalton and Sam.

In addition to teaching the animals, the Neitz research group worked with the makers of a standard vision-testing technique called the Cambridge Colour Test to perfect a way the monkeys could “tell” them which colors they were seeing.

The tests are similar to ones given to elementary children the world over, in which students are asked to identify a specific pattern of colored dots among a field of dots that vary in size, color and intensity. The researchers devised a computer touch screen the monkeys could use to trace the color patterns. When the animals chose correctly, they received a reward of grape juice.

Likewise, decades were spent by Hauswirth and colleagues at the University of Florida to develop the gene-transfer technique that uses a harmless adeno-associated virus to deliver corrective genes to produce a desired protein.

In this case, researchers wanted to produce a substance called long-wavelength opsin in the retinas of the monkeys. This particular form of opsin is a colorless protein that works in the retina to make pigments that are sensitive to red and green.

“We used human DNAs, so we won’t have to switch to human genes as we move toward clinical treatments,” said Hauswirth, who is also involved in a clinical trial with human patients to test gene therapy for the treatment of Leber congenital amaurosis, a form of blindness that strikes children.

About five weeks after the treatment, the monkeys began to acquire color vision, almost as if it occurred overnight.

“Nothing happened for the first 20 weeks,” Neitz said. “But we knew right away when it began to work. It was if they woke up and saw these new colors. The treated animals unquestionably responded to colors that had been invisible to them.”

It took more than a year and a half to test the monkeys’ ability to discern 16 hues, with some of the hues varying as much as 11-fold in intensity.

Dalton is named for John Dalton, an English chemist who realized he was colorblind and published the first paper about the condition in 1798.

“We’ve had Dalton and Sam for 10 years. They are like our children,” Neitz said. “This species are friendly, docile monkeys that we just love. We think it is useful to continue to follow them — it’s been two years now that they’ve been seeing in color, and continuing to check their vision and allowing them to play with the computer is part of their enrichment.”

With the discovery, the researchers are the first to address a vision disorder in primates in which all photoreceptors are intact and healthy, providing a hint of gene therapy’s full potential to restore vision.

About 1 in 30,000 Americans have a hereditary form of blindness called achromatopsia, which causes nearly complete color blindness and extremely poor central vision. “Those patients would be targets for almost exactly the same treatment,” Hauswirth said.

Even in common types of blindness such as age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy, vision could potentially be rescued by targeting cone cells, he said.

“The major thrust of the study is you can ameliorate if not cure color blindness with gene therapy,” said Gerald H. Jacobs, a research professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the research. “There are still questions about safety, but in these monkeys at least, there were no untoward effects. Those who are motivated to ameliorate their color defect might take some hope from the findings.

“This is also another example of how utterly plastic the visual system is to change,” Jacobs said. “The nervous system can extract information from alterations to photopigments and make use of it almost instantaneously.”

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Eye Institute, the Harry J. Heeb Foundations, The Posner Foundation and Research to Prevent Blindness.

Why Lane Kiffen Was A Genius

Florida 23, Tennessee 13. Not what we wanted, but it will do.

Ever since Lane Kiffen began his buffonish antics, I've tried to convince Gator fans that he was being purposeful and it was a very smart thing to do. This has usually provoked derision and Kiffen jokes, etc. I kept trying to say to friends Kiffen was setting up a situation where it would be very difficult for him to "lose" in the big picture even if he actually lost the game, especially because he was always very likely to lose the game anyway.

Hell, my younger brother seriously wanted Florida to put 75 points up on the board! Obviously, that didn't happen and across the nation today, Lane isn't the idiot he was proclaimed to be all summer long. Yesterday, the proof was in the pudding. No, he isn't an idiot.

Give Lane Kiffen his props.

He has assembled an extremely competent staff of good coaches and great recruiters. Give him two more seasons and he should have them back to where they were. Sure, they laid an egg against UCLA last week and will probably lay a few more this season but . . . they were ready for Florida.

Because their coach laid so much out there all off-season!

We were on the verge of the expected 30-point victory and then Tim (who obviously really wanted this game and that fact threw him off a bit, along with an apparently excellent defensive scheme -- score another one for Kiffen) and then Superman fumbled near the goal line.

Needless to say, that was a huge change in momentum.

It was then and there that I gave up on the 30-point victory and decided to be satisfied with the victory instead. Urban, however, is the master chess player and he probably knew all along how well-focused Tennessee would be. He certainly wouldn't have had difficulty recognizing how over-hyped the fanbase and probably the players were. So he reverted to being a methodical, if unimpressive, machine after trying an initial over the top pass play. Cool with me.

South California did lose yesterday, didn't they? BYU did get smacked yesterday, didn't they?

Survive and advance. Three up, three down.

Go Gators!

And kudos to you, Lane Kiffen. It may be a little late but . . . welcome to the family.

The Era of Big Government is Over!

You do remember those words from Bill Clinton, don't you?

The era of big government is over!

Quick, somebody go run and tell Barack before it's too late. Thanks to a nice prompt from Cris Mattoon, I've been directed to a good piece from the chair of the California Republican Party, Ron Nehring, that highlights the dilemma currently facing Barack Obama because he has declined to travel the centrist road paved by Bill Clinton:

Concurrent with the President's plummeting approval ratings, a new Rasmussen Reports poll shows 51% of Americans believe Congress is too liberal, while only 22% believe it's too conservative. [RattlerGator: think about that for more than a few minutes, please]

Health care marks the end of this phase of the Obama presidency.

Next week the President will attempt to reshuffle the deck with a speech to a joint session of Congress. With broad majorities in both chambers it's something he shouldn't have to do, yet it's something he must do, for while the liberal leadership in Congress may support the health care plan, the American people do not. The President will attempt to change the terms of the debate to get his way despite the objections of so many Americans.

Going into 2010, Republican victory is not yet assured. We have to work for it. The President's numbers are unlikely to remain in the tank forever, and when they tick up a bit there will be a long line of liberals in the media to talk about the "comeback."

That comeback, however, is likely to be limited by what Bill Clinton possessed and Barack Obama lacks: an ability to put aside liberalism when it's a loser with the public. It was in 1994, and it is today.

Naturally, I agree. We'll see what he does in this speech. Does he tell the hyena's on the far-left to take a hike? Or will he double-down and roll with the cult-of-personality freaks?

Not long ago I submitted a comment at Thomas P.M. Barnett's blog that (last I checked) they declined to accept. It mentioned (as I recall) the fact that America remains a center-right nation and that Barack has failed to remain true to the tenets he sold to the American public in order to get elected (Post-racial? BS! Post-partisan? Double BS!). I suspect the comment was declined because many of Obama's supporters are frustrated at what they believe "should" be happening as opposed to what they now see is, in fact, occurring with BHO. I saw him clearly for what he was, and I continue to see him clearly for what he is, but for those independent-minded Americans who still desperately want to believe in him (like Barnett) -- they may as well go ahead and accept the obvious: Obama will continue to be punished for as long as he kowtows to the far-left.

As he should. There's still plenty of time for him to straighten-up, etc., but I just don't think he's going to be able to bring himself to do it.

The Upcoming Obama Speech

I am on record as being absolutely flabbergasted by the swooning over the supposedly gifted oratory of Barack Obama. The man hasn't given a great speech since that Democratic Convention speech in 2004 when no one knew who he was.

That's it.

All of his hyped speeches since then have been demonstrably off -- except for helping him stay on course to win the Presidency (admittedly, an exception that nearly renders my point meaningless -- nearly). But great? Memorable? Please! They've been the effective delivery of a cherry-picked proxy but nothing more. So here's Mickey Kaus, no right-winger, wondering what I'm wondering about this upcoming speech before Congress:

[T]he best evidence that Obama's health reform might be sliding down the Liverpool Care Pathway is his decision to address a joint session of Congress next week. Obama can give one more of these stunt speeches, maybe, before their effectiveness is radically diminished. Why do it now? Especially when he doesn't seem to have anything new to say. ... And when his last attempts mainly proved that what Politico calls "the most gifted explainer of anyone to occupy the Oval office since Reagan or Roosevelt" (please) was stunningly ineffective as a salesman--especially when it came to reassuring seniors worried about rationing. ... When even if Obama is atypically persuasive the best that will happen, in the ensuing days, is that the bill will get out of a Senate committee, leaving a long slog ahead. ...

It's possible that White House aides are deluded about Obama's persuasive powers. It's possible that they're deluded about the impact of invoking Senator Kennedy's legacy two weeks after his death.

It's also possible that they aren't deluded, and they know that despite all the optimistic stories planted in the MSM, they are in big trouble--that public support has fallen dangerously low. ... The speech itself seems a sign of weakness. ... Update: Implausible but inventive alternate theory.

Okay, Barack. I've really not listened to or watched anything he has done since the inauguration, not intently anyway. This speech, I will.

You'd better make it good.

The Regressives

Following up on my last Obama-bashing post, today I offer something of another. Bashing, perhaps, but definitely true.

Back in the days when I thought being a successful trial lawyer in the style of Willie Gary was my destiny, I remember reading some book called "The Art of Verbal Warfare" or something like that. Since then I've been somewhat conscious of how groups spin concepts and words to their advantage. With that as background, it will not surprise you that John Steele Gordon's post on Obama's Backward Progressivism resonated with me:

[T]hree hundred years later, despite the vast changes that have taken place, the basic political divide in the world remains between those who believe in empowering the state to do good for all and those who believe in empowering the individual to do good for himself under the rule of law while letting the invisible hand do good for all thereby.

With many fits and starts, individual power has been winning around the world and will, I am sure, continue to win. Thus, Obama’s idea of how the country should be run is really a throwback to an earlier world view. But in the greatest triumph of public relations in the history of politics, the Left succeeded some one hundred years ago in labeling its ideas as “progressive” — i.e., new and innovative. In fact they are deeply regressive. Louis XIV’s France, after all, was characterized by an autocrat who ruled with the help of a council that served at his pleasure and with the support of a small and vastly privileged elite; the great mass of the people had no rights whatever. How does that differ from Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union? Other than the autocrat being chosen by heredity, not at all (and North Korea has even eliminated that difference).

Is there much difference between Barack Obama’s vision for America and Clement Atlee’s vision for Britain sixty-four years ago. Not really.

Going back to an idea that failed more than two generations ago may be “progressive” but it’s not progress.

I hereby nominate the following course of action by all conservatives: never allow for the mention of political "progressives" to pass without correcting the record and accurately calling them "regressives."

That's what they are, and that's what they've been for hundreds of years now.

Least Gracious

Well, I've settled into a rut of hit-and-run on Obama so why change right now? Hmmm? Jennifer Rubin makes the point:

I wonder how the “temperament” cheerleaders feel now. That temperament, according to many pundits, was the primary justification for voting for the seriously under-qualified candidate. No, he didn’t have legislative accomplishments nor any executive experience. He had written memoirs, not policy books. But that was OK, we were assured. He had judgment and a superior temperament — calm under fire and the uncanny ability to remain above the fray. While John McCain suspended and unsuspended his campaign, Obama was serene during the financial meltdown.

Well now he’s “shrill,” as Will puts it, an angry and frantic figure full of accusation and fear-mongering. The candidate whose “judgment” was to make up for a deficit in experience has made a host of judgment errors — from deferring to Congress on legislative drafting, to believing that the recession changed Americans’ fundamental political aversion to big government, to sullying the White House with a lot of classless name-calling.

Among the many things the media cheerleaders got wrong (Obama’s political “moderation” is the other great canard), the fawning over Obama’s temperament turns out to be one of the most glaring. He is, with regard to his predecessor and political opponents, among the least gracious presidents in memory, rivaling perhaps only Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon in smallness of spirit. He hasn’t demonstrated any of the promised ability to rise above the fray.

Okay. Least gracious. Smallness of spirit. Those will hang around the neck of Barack Obama from here on out. He has been tagged, successfully. And we're just waiting for a Michelle eruption -- sure to come before the 2010 elections have come and gone.