Tag Archives: China

News

Obama administration complains about Arizona immigration law to China

3 Comments

From CNS News.

Excerpt:

In a “candid and constructive” human rights dialogue with officials from the People’s Republic of China last week, Obama administration officials brought up Arizona’s new immigration-enforcement law, telling the Chinese Communists it was an example of a “troubling trend” in the United States and an indication of “discrimination or potential discrimination” in American society.

Ironically, the State Department’s most recent report on human rights in China indicates that the government there restricts the internal travel of its own citizens.

[…]On Fox News Tuesday morning, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley–trying to defend Posner’s comments – was asked if he had read the ten-page Arizona law. He said he has not read it, although he did criticize it.

Attorney General Eric Holder, who is weighing a constitutional challenge to the law, admitted last week that he has not read it; and Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano on Monday told a Senate panel that she had not read the law, either.

The People’s Republic of China is “an authoritarian state in which the Chinese Communist Party constitutionally is the paramount source of power,” according to the State Department’s 2009 Human Rights report on China.

The report also states, “Individuals and groups, especially those deemed politically sensitive by the government, continued to face tight restrictions on their freedom to assemble, practice religion, and travel.”

China is one of the biggest violators of basic human rights on the planet. So what do the Democrats do? They go to the major human rights violators and tell them that the United States is just as evil. We’re evil because we protect our borders and enforce our immigration laws. China murders people for their religion and sells their organs, and we’re equal to China – at least according to Democrats.

UPDATE: Republican senators are demanding that the Obama administration publicly retract their outrageous comments.

Commentary

What caused Silicon Valley companies to outsource jobs?

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Article from the center-right Manhattan Institute.  (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Silicon Valley faces a serious threat, however: the fiscal and regulatory earthquakes rocking California, which verges on becoming a failed state. Measured by per-household state and local government spending, California ranks third-highest in the nation, behind Alaska and New York. The state government is trying desperately to squeeze money out of any profitable activity to meet the crippling costs. Further, California continues to impose onerous regulations on the private sector. High taxes and stifling regulations give companies a strong incentive to move elsewhere. In this increasingly business-hostile environment, will Silicon Valley’s unique entrepreneurial spirit survive?

[…]California has piled every imaginable burden on businesses. Minimum-wage laws are among the highest in the country, and health and safety regulations are among the strictest; cities like San Francisco and San Jose require businesses to offer employees health insurance; labor laws are extremely union-friendly; environmental policies drive up energy costs—and on and on. Small firms have the toughest time in this business-toxic climate. A recent study by Sanjay Varshney, dean of the College of Business Administration at California State University in Sacramento, estimates that the cost of state regulations in 2007 reached an average of $134,122 per small business—the equivalent of one job lost per company. And it’s not just the small guys: Google, which uses colossal amounts of electricity, is building its data centers in other states or abroad, where energy is much cheaper.

Hank Nothhaft is the CEO of Tessera, a firm in the field of semiconductor miniaturization. He shows me the vacant office parks and empty lots around his company’s San Jose factory. Silicon Valley, he observes, lost more than a quarter of its computer, microchip, and communications-equipment manufacturing jobs from 2001 to 2008, and Tessera proved no exception. The company has kept some of its assembly lines and industrial operations going here, but it now produces two-thirds of its nanotechnology chips in less expensive North Carolina and in various countries overseas, with China becoming the latest contender for a production facility. Just back from a trip there, Nothhaft says that he has been offered terms he “cannot decently refuse.” Using the Internet and videoconferencing, he can manage Tessera factories around the globe without leaving his San Jose office. “The business environment is becoming awful in California,” Nothhaft complains—just by moving his headquarters to Nevada, he’d save $5 million a year in taxes.

I quoted the interesting part of the article above, the rest is just more details about the past, present and future of Silicon Valley.

News

Is the Obama administration deliberately weakening our military?

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Who needs air superiority? Not Obama

Consider this article from the Weekly Standard. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

When Secretary of Defense Robert Gates went to Chicago last summer to make the case for killing the F-22 — the world’s premier air supremacy fighter and the only “fifth generation fighter” currently in production anywhere — he argued that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter would be a more cost-effective alternative. Though the JSF “has had development problems to be sure,” Gates said, “It is a versatile aircraft, less than half the total cost of the F-22, and can be produced in quantity with all the advantages produced by economies of scale – some 500 will be bought over the next five years.”

[…]But the oddest thing about Gates’s speech last summer was his assertion that competitors to the United States, specifically China, would be unable to produce their own fifth-gen fighters any time soon. “Consider that by 2020, the United States is projected to have nearly 2,500 manned combat aircraft of all kinds,” Gates said, while “China, by contrast, is projected to have no fifth generation aircraft by 2020.”

[…]We know now that Gates’s estimate of U.S. procurement last summer was bogus. We will be nowhere near 2,500 fifth-gen aircraft (F-35s and F-22s) by 2020. And now Gates has conceded that China will, in fact, have produced a fifth-generation stealth fighter by 2020. How many will they have produced? How many will we have produced? We can only be sure of two things: Gates doesn’t know, and he killed the F-22 based on a faulty assumption that the number of Chinese stealth fighters in 2020 would be zero.

I am a HUGE fan of the F-22 and I hate the F-35.

China should not be underestimated

And what about this article from Investors Business Daily?

Excerpt:

From the Battle of Midway to President Reagan’s 600-ship fleet that helped win the Cold War, naval supremacy has been critical to the protection and survival of our nation.

Which is why we find the recent remarks of Defense Secretary Robert Gates to the Navy League at the Sea-Air-Space expo so disturbing. He seems to think naval supremacy is a luxury we can’t afford and that, like every other aspect of our military, an already shrunken U.S. Navy needs to downsize.

“As we learned last year, you don’t necessarily need a billion-dollar guided missile destroyer to chase down and deal with a bunch of teenage pirates wielding AK-47s and RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades),” Gates quipped.

We are not laughing.

Pubescent pirates aren’t the only threat we face. Last month, a Chinese naval task force from the East Sea Fleet — including the imposing Sovremenny-class guided missile destroyers, frigates and submarines — passed through the Miyako Strait near Okinawa, a move that sent shock waves through Japan.

Sovermenny vessels are DDGs not DDs. That means that they have guided-missile capability via the SS-N-22 surface-to-surface platform. That missile has a range of 160 nautical miles, flies at Mach 3, and is fairly dangerous. Fire enough of them and one is bound to get through. What if these weapons were sold to our enemies and used to menace commercial and civilian shipping? It’s the next level of piracy.

We need more carrier battle groups, not less. Carrier battle groups are the most visible way of projecting American power abroad in theaters where we face dangerous repressive regimes like North Korea and Iran. It’s good that countries like India are stepping up by building two new conventionally-powered aircraft carriers and support vessels, but we have to pull our own weight, too.