Homeland Security

In the wake of the terror attacks in Madrid, Jeff Jarvis and Josh Marshall are advising Kerry to start talking about national security. They are right.

And Tom Friedman has a nice column in Sunday's NY Times linking the two big issues of this election, offshoring and terrorism. I really like the way Friedman thinks. He reduces complex issues to their basic elements and that makes sense to me.

Comments

[Charlie Sierra]

The more important NYT editorial is Safire's "On Phony Toughness".

Eight months is a long time for a candidate to screwup.

I think Bush should back off Kerry and just let him twist in the wind of irrelevance, because the ankle-biting is quite tiresome.

As the Maryland v. Duke game showed, what matters is the result, not an early lead.

see: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/15/opinion/15SAFI.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=

re: Friedman

He's not as bad as the others, but his recent columns from India are dopey beyond belief (not that anybody can believe anything from the NYT anymore).

India and Outsourcing are just the most recent aftershocks from the collapse of the USSR. India was nominally aligned with Russia to counter China, etc. Now that Russia has fallen, all the satellites on their own, and India has chosen to reform itself. (althought they just bought an old USSR carrier ship with hard currency, no doubt from america)

I was very privileged to grow up and travel the world at an early age, Brazil, Germany, France, Jamica. I can remember the old days when, if you took the train from Frankfurt to Berlin it only traveled at night, so you couldn't see the countryside, and both sides of the track were lined with a fence.

American outsourcing is very similar to the re-unitification of Germany. The Labor market is flooded all at once with new capacity. Germany has never recovered is economic growth.

Now add the telecom revolution (another Clinton bubble??), global labor capacity has swollen like never before.

The saddest thing for the american worker is that their own government has priced them out of the market, and even our government can't impose its will on the market.

Only the Bond market rules the world.

To compete, America must defeat Kerry and reject all attempts to continue the Nanny state.

These are interesting times.

[suonerie polifoniche]

Ciao

[chervokas]

Even before the Madrid bombings I thought the Dems were in dangerous territory by downplaying the war on terrorism.

We really are at war, after all, a new kind of international guerilla war vs. a loosely organized NGO. Like his policy in every other area, Bush policy on the war on terrorism has been a disaster. Kerry should go right after him. Jihadi terrorism and nuclear proliferation really are the most important issues in this election, not healthcare or even jobs.