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| Be Careful What You Fish For Invasive Asian carp are threatening to upend the entire ecosystem of the Great Lakes. Their route of attack: the canals we built. feeds.nytimes.com |
Smalltown America's growing voice of rage is a force to be reckoned with | Gary Younge In poorer, isolated towns the rightwing protest movement is flourishing. Republicans as well as Obama must take noteOne of the paradoxes of being a foreign reporter in smalltown America is that within any one day, you will hear people insist that they stand at the centre of global affairs and simultaneously act as though they reside at the very fringes of international interest. As Americans, they feel their country stands as a beacon to the outside world – a showcase for freedom, liberty, democracy and material comfort. As inhabitants of smalltown America, they feel marginalised from the national narrative and isolated from the rest of the world. Within the span of a single conversation you will be told that America is the best country on earth and be asked why you – or indeed anyone – would come to their particular town.So it was last week in Leitchfield, a small town in central Kentucky. South-east of Louisville and south-west of Lexington, its 6,000 residents live between Nolin and Rough River lakes on the way to nowhere in particular. Leitchfield has known better days, but few here can remember when. Unemployment, long in double digits, has now reached 16%. One in five lives below the poverty line and the median family income is less than two-thirds that of the rest of the nation. Last year Republican presidential hopeful John McCain took the county handily, with 67% of the vote.On Monday night a young woman working at a local pharmacy first giggled at my accent and then asked what business I could possibly have in Leitchfield. When I asked her what young people do for kicks in a place that doesn't serve alcohol, she shrugged: "Some of them take drugs and have sex. I watch videos with my sister." Just a few a minutes later I was at a town hall event where Republican Senate hopeful Rand Paul lamented the impending demise of America's global supremacy."We as a country could go into great decline and slip into the second tier of nations if we don't change our ways," he said. "You cannot just continue to spend beyond your means. We've been doing that for a generation."Paul, the son of Congressman Ron Paul who attracted a huge libertarian following during the last year's presidential elections, is the insurgent candidate in May's Republican Kentucky primary. Virtually unknown when he joined the race against establishment candidate, Trey Grayson, a poll last month put Rand Paul narrowly in the lead. "2010 will be the year of the outsider," he says. "Someone who is not a politician, like myself, has a really good chance. A better chance than any other year."He could be right. Paul is riding the wave of the Tea party movement that emerged from the anti-tax protests earlier this year. His bid is being replicated in Republican primaries throughout the country. In Arizona, McCain could be in a tight race against anti-immigration zealot JD Hayworth. Polls show McCain, a four-term senator, in a statistical dead heat – all the more amazing given that Hayworth has yet to announce his candidacy. At the beginning of this year the moderate Florida governor, Charlie Crist, led unknown ultra-conservative Marco Rubio 57-4. By last month his lead had slimmed to just 47-37. Other hard-right challenges are brewing from New Hampshire down.There is some partisan symmetry in this. While Obama launched a electoral campaign that aspired to become a movement, the opposition has created a movement that is attempting to gain electoral expression. While members of the former found their focus via a candidate, the latter have no champion. It's not even clear they are looking for one.Whether they will upset or revive the Republican party has yet to be seen. What is clear is that they are a force to be reckoned with. A recent Rasmussen poll revealed that if the Tea party were an actual party it would eclipse the Republicans. In a hypothetical, three-way race, Democrats received 36% of the vote, the non-existent Tea party got 23% and Republicans got just 18%; a further 22% were undecided. The poll also showed that 73% of Republican voters think their leaders are out of touch with the party base. In downtown Little Rock last weekend, the heirs to the protests held a rally of several hundred with standing room only – all the Republican Senate candidates were there.Gradually a few things about the people in this movement are becoming clear. First, they are anxious to emphasise their economic conservatism. Their mantra is small government, their obsession the national debt. In more than an hour neither Paul nor any of the 35 audience members mentioned abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, creationism or religion in schools. "Remember when one of Clinton's aides said 'It's the economy, stupid'?" Rand Paul asked me afterwards. "It still is the economy … I'm not running for preacher. I'm running for office." That does not mean they are not socially conservative. It may be that social conservatives have such a stranglehold on the Republican party that social issues no longer have traction there.Second, they are almost exclusively white. In a town such as Leitchfield, which is 97% white, in a state such as Kentucky, which is 90% white, that is not really a problem. But in places such as Arizona, Florida, New Mexico or Nevada – key swing states where non-whites are more than a third – it virtually ensures defeat.That does not make them racist. But they have been a magnet for some racists, whose crude rhetoric and anti-Obama hysteria has made their lack of diversity a liability. On Thursday Paul's spokesman, Christopher Hightower, resigned after it was discovered that a picture of lynching, posted close to Martin Luther King Day and containing the message "Happy Nigger Day", had been on his Myspace page for almost two years.Third, their success in a general election is linked to Obama's failure. Their achievement is to have organised their rage into a viable force within the Republican party. How they fare beyond those boundaries is another matter. At present both Paul and Greyson would lose to either of the leading Kentucky Democrats. The more sustained difference the administration makes to peoples' lives, the less this anger makes sense.Finally, the movement's standard bearers seem keen to distance themselves from the more vocal, eccentric elements with which they have been associated. Asked whether he thought Obama was a Muslim and born in the US, Paul said he didn't know but: "Those are things that I would never bring up in a speech and don't have a belief that coincides with people who brought those up as issues." The trouble is, while they may find the birthers embarrassing, their challenge is not feasible without them."I call it the national open mic movement," jokes Paul. "It's kind of good in a way. Some people were tired of not being able to speak their piece. But I don't think it has a cohesion yet. It's yet to be seen whether it can transform itself." That will depend, in no small part, on who grabs the mic, who can pull the plug and whether Obama can attract more with his deeds than they can with their screeds.US politicsObama administrationBarack ObamaRepublicansUnited StatesGary Youngeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Iraq hostages: the tragic sideshow | Robert Tait Hostage-taking in Iraq is part of a great game being played out for Middle East hegemonyHow does Iran's involvement in the kidnapping of five Britons in Baghdad in 2007 – as revealed by the Guardian yesterday – affect the fragile diplomatic links between London and Tehran? Not much, judging by the Foreign Office response: "We are pretty clear there is no firm evidence that links Iran directly with the kidnappings." Iranian state TV, meanwhile, resorted to the standard official mantra in dismissing the disclosures as "part of a psychological war against Iran".Neither London nor Tehran, it seems, wants to know about these revelations – a rare example of British and Iranian policy in harmony, you would think, the implication that neither side wants relations to be damaged. Except that there is not much of a relationship left to damage.This week, Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, swapped the language of the diplomat for the argot of the street yob by threatening to give Britain a "slap" – all because David Miliband, the foreign secretary, had the temerity to speak out on behalf of Iranian demonstrators whose dissent against repression met with bullets during last Sunday's Ashura ceremonies. The Islamic regime, in its increasingly desperate quest to retain power, is trying to smear its domestic opponents as foreign-backed – and worse still, backed by Britain. It's just six months since the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, demonised Britain as the "most evil" of Iran's enemies. So forget about relations between London and Tehran "sinking to new lows". They're already at subterranean levels.The kidnappings – and the fates of the four British security guards believed to have been killed – should be viewed in the context of Iran's determination to end the US-British military presence in neighbouring Iraq and its view of kidnappings and hostage-taking as legitimate foreign policy tactics. Of this latter art, Iranian officials will argue – not without reason – that they are not the sole exponents.The kidnapping of Peter Moore, a British computer expert, and his four compatriots from the Iraqi finance ministry, took place during a period of seizures not only by Iranians of western citizens, but by the US against Iranian government operatives. Two months earlier, in March 2007, the revolutionary guards detained 15 Royal Navy and marine personnel on patrol in the Gulf. Weeks before that, a US citizen, Robert Levinson, a retired FBI agent, disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish, where he reportedly went to investigate tobacco smuggling. He has not been seen since.The Islamic regime was smarting at the time over the arrests and disappearances of some of its people. These included five men Tehran described as diplomats arrested in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil in January 2007 by US forces (the Americans insisted the five were Revolutionary Guards) and the abduction of a senior diplomat in Baghdad who, on being released, claimed he had been tortured by US captors. Most serious of all from Iran's viewpoint was the disappearance in Istanbul of a former deputy defence minister, Ali Reza Asgari, in December 2006. Western intelligence agencies say Asgari defected but Tehran insists to this day he was kidnapped.The seizures came at a time when the Bush administration was blaming Iran for a series of roadside bombings that had killed US troops. That controversy has passed but the seizures and disappearances continue. They are part of a great game being played out for hegemony in the Middle East as Iran asserts authority in its historic backyard. Against that backdrop, the deaths of four Britons are a tragic sideshow. But a blow to Anglo-Iranian relations? Forget about it.IranForeign policyPolitics and IraqIraqMiddle EastUS foreign policyRobert Taitguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Obama: Resetting Relations with Russia Obama administration seeking to reset America's relationship with Russia that became strained under President George W. Bush www1.voanews.com |
MPs' expenses: George Osborne ordered to repay £1,666 Commons watchdog finds that George Osborne breached rules over claims for mortgage on his second home. telegraph.co.uk |