Morning Bits By Jennifer Rubin

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/right-turn/2011/01/morning_bits_26.html#more

Joe Miller starts 2011 without his futile Senate race challenge.

China starts 2011 where it left off. “With the New START treaty ratified, the Obama administration can turn its attention to the real source of nuclear instability among the great powers: China’s buildup of conventional ballistic missiles. The latest destabilizing system is China’s anti-ship ballistic missile, the ‘carrier killer’ that the head of the U.S. Pacific Command, Adm. Robert Willard, deemed operational last week.”

Nate Silver starts 2011 with some realism about Sarah Palin. “On balance, these factors look somewhat less favorable to Ms. Palin than they did a year ago. In particular, it should be alarming to her how quickly some figures in the Republican establishment have turned against her. It is probably not a coincidence that these attacks began to escalate shortly after this November’s elections, in which Republicans were perceived as having sacrificed several Senate seats, like in Delaware and Nevada, because of having nominated unelectable candidates.” Right Turn readers figured this out a month ago.

Liberals start 2011 licking their wounds. “The real story of 2010 is that the voters were finally able to see and judge this liberal agenda in its unvarnished form. For once, there was no Republican President to muddle the message or divide the accountability. The public was able to compare the promise of 8% unemployment if the government spent $812 billion on ‘stimulus’ with the 9.8% jobless result. They stood athwart liberal history in the making and said, ‘Stop.'”

Obama starts 2011 where he left off in 2010 — appeasing Syria. Charles Krauthammer explains: “This is a regime that has been arming Hezbollah to the teeth [with] tens of thousands of rockets, violating every provision of the truce that was declared after the Second Israel-Lebanon War, [is an] ally of Iran, essentially an enemy of the United States, undermining all our activities and infiltrating itself into Lebanon out of which it had been kicked in 2005. All of this is happening and what does the administration do? It sends an ambassador in return for absolutely nothing. Returning an ambassador after withdrawal is a sign of conciliation and, in this case, appeasement.”

A new Republican House committee chairman starts 2011 with a long-overdue blast on our feeble policy toward Hugo Chavez. “The incoming chairman of the Western Hemisphere subcomittee at the House Foreign Affairs Committee said Thursday evening that the Obama administration revocation of the Venezuelan envoy’s visas should be followed by sanctions. ‘The revocation of visas for Venezuela’s envoy sets the stage for diplomatic isolation that must be followed up with the economic sanctions Venezuela has earned because of its support for terrorist groups such as the FARC, ELN, ETA and the IRGC Qods forces,’ Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) said in a statement. ‘It’s far past time for the Administration to name Venezuela a state sponsor of terrorism once and for all,’ he added.”

We should start 2011 with some perspective on the religious hate crimes. “The FBI hate crime statistics tell a similar story. Jews were the targets of 71.9% of all religious hate crimes reported in the U.S. last year. Conversely, Muslims were the target of 8.4% of religious hate crimes.” Read the whole thing.

Shouldn’t all universities start 2011 with a full restoration of ROTC prgrams on their campuses? “A disdain for the military at many elite schools has defined campus life for decades; Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) programs have been widely banned — initially, in reaction to the Vietnam War, with DADT becoming the fig leaf more recently. But with the Vietnam War’s having been over for some time and with DADT now scrapped, will the exclusion of ROTC continue?”