Rally For Sanity

Jon Stewart DC Sppech

And now I thought we might have a moment, however brief, for some sincerity. If that's okay - I know that there are boundaries for a comedian / pundit / talker guy, and I'm sure that I'll find out tomorrow how I have violated them.

So, uh, what exactly was this? I can't control what people think this was: I can only tell you my intentions.

This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith, or people of activism, or look down our noses at the heartland, or passionate argument, or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear--they are, and we do.

But we live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus, and not be enemies. But unfortunately, one of our main tools in delineating the two broke.

The country's 24-hour, political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder. The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen. Or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire, and then perhaps host a week of shows on the dangerous, unexpected flaming ants epidemic. If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.

There are terrorists, and racists, and Stalinists, and theocrats, but those are titles that must be earned! You must have the resume! Not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Party-ers, or real bigots and Juan Williams or Rick Sanchez is an insult--not only to those people, but to the racists themselves, who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate. Just as the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe, not more.

The press is our immune system. If it overreacts to everything, we actually get sicker--and, perhaps, eczema. And yet... I feel good. Strangely, calmly, good. Because the image of Americans that is reflected back to us by our political and media process is false. It is us, through a funhouse mirror--and not the good kind that makes you look slim in the waist, and maybe taller, but the kind where you have a giant forehead, and an ass shaped like a month-old pumpkin, and one eyeball.

So why would we work together? Why would you reach across the aisle, to a pumpkin-assed forehead eyeball monster? If the picture of us were true, of course our inability to solve problems would actually be quite sane and reasonable--why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our Constitution, and homophobes who see no one's humanity but their own?

We hear every damned day about how fragile our country is, on the brink of catastrophe, torn by polarizing hate, and how it's a shame that we can't work together to get things done. The truth is, we do! We work together to get things done every damned day! The only place we don't is here (in Washington) or on cable TV!

But Americans don't live here, or on cable TV. Where we live, our values and principles form the foundation that sustains us while we get things done--not the barriers that prevent us from getting things done.

Most Americans don't live their lives solely as Democrats, Republicans, liberals or conservatives. Americans live their lives more as people that are just a little bit late for something they have to do. Often something they do not want to do! But they do it. Impossible things, every day, that are only made possible through the little, reasonable compromises we all make.

(Points to video screen, showing video of cars in traffic.) Look on the screen. This is where we are, this is who we are. These cars. That's a schoolteacher who probably think his taxes are too high, he's going to work. There's another car, a woman with two small kids, can't really think about anything else right now... A lady's in the NRA, loves Oprah. There's another car, an investment banker, gay, also likes Oprah. Another car's a Latino carpenter; another car, a fundamentalist vacuum salesman. Atheist obstetrician. Mormon Jay-Z fan.

But this is us. Every one of the cars that you see is filled with individuals of strong belief, and principles they hold dear--often principles and beliefs in direct opposition to their fellow travelers'. And yet, these millions of cars must somehow find a way to squeeze, one by one, into a mile-long, 30-foot-wide tunnel, carved underneath a mighty river.

And they do it, concession by concession: you go, then I'll go. You go, then I'll go. You go, then I'll go. 'Oh my God--is that an NRA sticker on your car?' 'Is that an Obama sticker on your car?' It's okay--you go, then I go.

And sure, at some point, there will be a selfish jerk who zips up the shoulder, and cuts in at the last minute. But that individual is rare, and he is scorned, and he is not hired as an analyst!

Because we know, instinctively, as a people, that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light, we have to work together. And the truth is there will always be darkness, and sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn't the promised land.

Sometimes, it's just New Jersey.

President Obama made history with his appearance on Jon Stewart's show

Times of London Comments

Bracing himself for a brutal midterm report from America’s voters, President Obama has taken a red pen to the most effective political slogan of his career and of his generation. “Yes we can,” he admitted, is now “Yes we can, but . . .”

Mr Obama edited the rallying cry of his 2008 campaign in the first interview given by a sitting president to the Comedy Central cable channel, as the latest independent projection forecast a humbling 55-seat swing to the Republicans in the House of Representatives next Tuesday.

Chatting with the comedian Jon Stewart, the visibly exhausted President revised another mantra that helped to sweep him to the White House two years ago. “When we promised ‘change you can believe in’, it wasn’t ‘change you can believe in in 18 months’,” he said. “It was change you can believe in, but we’re going to have to work for it’.” He also became the first President to be called “dude” to his face on television.

Mr Obama’s appearance with Mr Stewart was short on laughs and long on serious appeals to the millions of young Americans who queued for hours to vote for him in 2008. Yet two years on, the messianic aura that clung to him as a candidate is a memory. His talents as a law professor are not in doubt, but his skills as an executive have been found wanting. His domestic record has been eclipsed by stubborn unemployment and the rise of the Tea Party, and the electorate is not sympathetic.

Polls show the Democrats’ task of heading off a midterm meltdown is becoming more daunting, not less, with four days until the election. They have moved inexorably against the party despite virtually non-stop coast-to-coast campaigning by Mr Obama, Vice-President Joe Biden, the former President Bill Clinton and a flurry of campaign stops by the First Lady.

Women, independents, graduates and blue-collar workers, all groups that sided emphatically with Mr Obama two years ago, are defecting in droves to Republican candidates, according to a survey published yesterday by The New York Times and CBS.

White House strategists have argued that if they can only boost turnout by election day they will confound predictions of a Republican takeover of the Lower House and possibly the Senate. Yet the data suggests a high turnout might only make things worse for the Democrats.

Twenty per cent more independents say that they will vote Republican than Democratic, the CBS poll found. Women are siding with conservative candidates by a margin of four points, college graduates by twenty and even workers on incomes lower than $50,000 a year by two points. A separate Bloomberg poll showed independents favouring Republicans by a margin of 13 points.

So far, Mr Obama’s efforts to cast this election as a choice between progressive and reactionary policies appear to have failed. Every recent national survey points to an “enthusiasm gap” of up to 20 points in favour of voters who see the contest as a referendum on the President and his accomplishments, which they want to reverse.

All 435 seats in the Lower House are up for grabs on Tuesday. Thirty-seven Senate races and the same number of gubernatorial elections will also be decided, along with a host of single-issue plebiscites from the Californian campaign to legalise recreational marijuana to a drive to ban “high- fence” hunting of elk and deer in North Dakota.

The Republicans need a net gain of 39 seats to win the House. The University of Virginia’s “Crystal Ball” survey, the first to project a Republican takeover, increased its forecast of the number of gains for the party from 47 to 55 yesterday. Two other leading independent analysts project a conservative swing of 45 to 55 and 48 to 60 seats respectively.

Most analysts expect the Democrats to cling on to their Senate majority by perhaps two seats, but the only public figures predicting that they will hold the House as well are the party leaders.

Mr Obama will return to the campaign trail tomorrow. The signs are that he can still boost turnout in friendly districts, but there are fewer of them than two years ago. In Ohio, which he won by 4 per cent in 2008, the Republican gubernatorial candidate now leads by nearly five times as much.

Senior Republicans said yesterday that Mr Obama had belittled his office by appearing with Stewart. At one point he said that his former economic adviser, Larry Summers, had done “a heckuva job”, words that haunted President Bush after he used them of his emergency management czar after Hurricane Katrina. Stewart responded: “You don’t want to use that phrase, dude.” The White House press secretary later insisted that Mr Obama did not mind; he had been called worse things in Washington.

American Account: Printing dollars upsets friends and foes
IRWIN STELZER London Times

America’s dollar-printing policy has left China decidedly unhappy — and the governor of the Bank of England worried about protectionism

The good news, as reported by the Federal Reserve Board survey of business conditions, is that “on balance, national economic activity continued to rise” in September and the beginning of this month.

The bad news is that the rise was only “at a modest pace”. In political language, that means the growth is insufficiently rapid to make a dent in the 9.6% unemployment rate that is adding to the country’s unhappiness with the incumbent politicians who have spent trillions in the hope of turning “modest” into “rapid”.

Manufacturing activity is up, according to some reports but not according to others. Demand for financial services is somewhere between stable and modestly up. Consumers are spending a bit more but only on well-priced necessities. Construction is falling in response to weakness in the housing and commercial property markets. Only farmers seem to be reaping as they sowed — in general, worldwide demand is good, crop yields are high, and prices for commodities such as corn are moving up.

Put it all together and it spells gloom. Citigroup reports that 86% of small-business owners fear a double-dip recession, and it is this group that everyone counts on to create the jobs needed to bring down the dole queues.

Little wonder that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke is about to launch a new stimulus, generally known as QE2, in the hope of getting the economy moving and avoiding deflation. The fear of a decade of falling prices such as Japan experienced looms large in Fed thinking. Its report notes that “prices of final goods and services were stable” last month, which once would have been good news for a central banker, but now is considered far less desirable than a 2% inflation rate.

But this new vessel, the QE2, might be designed somewhat differently than the first quantitative easing, the now-standard euphemism for printing money. The word out of Washington — disagreement in the Fed makes leaks the communication method of choice these days — is that instead of a huge purchase of government bonds, the Fed will dribble out dollars, a bit each month, and calibrate the next month’s output to the economy's reaction to each infusion.

German exports are increasingly the key to whatever growth the EU can muster
This is because, as the Lindsey Group puts it in a recent report, “central bankers ... have a high degree of uncertainty about what the actual outcome of QE is going to be”. Some economists who believe that printing money is not a sure path to economic growth are pointing out that by keeping interest rates low and capital cheap, the Fed is encouraging capital-intensive investment rather than job-creating labour-intensive ventures.

There is only one thing that economists feel they can say with certainty about the consequences of another round of quantitative easing:it will produce selling of the dollar.

Which takes us all the way from the Fed’s boardroom to Seoul, South Korea, and next month’s gathering of the G20.

America’s trading partners are decidedly unhappy with the prospects of another batch of dollars rolling off the presses. Economic recovery in Europe depends on the ability of Germany’s export machine to be the locomotive that pulls the EU out of the slow growth it is experiencing. Indeed, with Britain having joined the austerity-now group of nations — Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Greece, with riot-torn France trying to join the group — German exports are increasingly the key to whatever growth the EU can muster. And a falling dollar, or a soaring euro, is of no help on that score. Indeed, German exports have already started to decline in response to the weaker dollar.

The European finance ministers, who yesterday concluded their meeting to pave the way for the November 11-12 meeting of their bosses in Seoul, are not the only grumpy ones. The Brazilians are unhappy about the inflow of hot money seeking returns higher than are available from low-yielding US Treasuries. So they have announced a 6% tax on foreign purchases of their bonds to stem the capital inflow. And for whatever reason — pique seems the most likely — the Brazilian finance minister and central-bank chief have decided not to attend the G20 finance ministers’ meeting.

To add to the unilateral actions that are making it increasingly unlikely that any meaningful agreements will come out of Seoul, even the hosts have indicated they will curb capital inflows by holding down the won, which has already risen 40% against the dollar, and taxing foreign investors’ earnings on South Korean bonds. China, too, is decidedly unhappy about a dollar-printing policy that will reduce the value of the pile of dollars stored in the vaults of its central bank — and at the pressure it is facing to allow the value of its yuan to rise.

All of which has Bank of England governor Mervyn King worried that we will see a wave of protectionism “that could, as it did in the 1930s, lead to a disastrous collapse in activity around the world”, and Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh pleading for an end to the currency wars that have erupted since Bernanke began his public musing about the need for QE2. Singh wants to see a peaceful rebalancing of world trade, with trade-surplus nations such as China and Germany relying more on domestic consumption and less on exports, and America and other deficit nations doing the opposite. But that will require big changes in the economic policies of China, the US and other countries.

Not likely. This is the political season in America, and it won’t end with the congressional elections in nine days. On the tenth day the politicians will not rest, but begin the 2012 presidential race. That means China bashing by congressional and presidential candidates, especially Democrats desperate for trade union cash and foot soldiers. On the other side of the battle line, China, about to anoint a new leadership group, will keep up exports to provide jobs for an increasingly restive population. If that means a continued currency war, so be it. In short: don’t count on peace for our time.

Irwin Stelzer is a business adviser and director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute

Just Knock It Off

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN NY Times
Some of Israel’s worst critics are fond of saying that Israel behaves like America’s spoiled child. I’ve always found that analogy excessive. Say what you want about Israel’s obstinacy at times, it remains the only country in the United Nations that another U.N. member, Iran, has openly expressed the hope that it be wiped off the map. And that same country, Iran, is trying to build a nuclear weapon. Israel is the only country I know of in the Middle East that has unilaterally withdrawn from territory conquered in war — in Lebanon and Gaza — only to be greeted with unprovoked rocket attacks in return. Indeed, if you want to talk about spoiled children, there is no group more spoiled by Iran and Syria than Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia. Hezbollah started a war against Israel in 2006 that brought death, injury and destruction to thousands of Lebanese — and Hezbollah’s punishment was to be rewarded with thousands more missiles and millions more dollars to do it again. These are stubborn facts.

And here’s another stubborn fact: Israel today really is behaving like a spoiled child.

Please spare me the nonsense that President Obama is anti-Israel. At a time when the president has made it one of his top priorities to build a global coalition to stop Iran from making a nuclear weapon, he took the very logical view that if he could advance the peace process in the Middle East it would give him much greater leverage to get the Europeans and U.N. behind tougher sanctions on Iran. At the same time, Obama believed — what a majority of Israelis believe — that Israel can’t remain a Jewish democracy in the long run if it continues to control 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank.

On top of it all, while pressing Israel to stop expanding settlements for as little as 60 days, Obama ordered his vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. James E. “Hoss” Cartwright of the Marines, to lead a U.S. team to work with Israel’s military on an unprecedented package of security assistance to enable Israel to maintain its “qualitative edge” over its neighbors. And, for all this, Obama is decried as anti-Israel. What utter nonsense.

Given what Obama has done, and is trying to do, it is hardly an act of hostility for him to ask Israel to continue its now-expired 10-month partial moratorium on settlement-building in the West Bank in order to take away any excuse from the Palestinians to avoid peace talks. Israel’s prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, has been either resisting this request or demanding a payoff from the U.S. for a brief continuation of the freeze. He is wrong on two counts.

First — I know this is a crazy, radical idea — when America asks Israel to do something that in no way touches on its vital security but would actually enhance it, there is only one right answer: “Yes.” It is a measure of how spoiled Israel has become that after billions and billions of dollars in U.S. aid and 300,000 settlers already ensconced in the West Bank, Israel feels no compunction about spurning an American request for a longer settlement freeze — the only purpose of which is to help the United States help Israel reach a secure peace with the Palestinians. Just one time you would like Israel to say, “You know, Mr. President, we’re dubious that a continued settlement freeze will have an impact. But you think it will, so, let’s test it. This one’s for you.”

Yes, I know, Netanyahu says that if he did that then the far right-wingers in his cabinet would walk out. He knows he can’t make peace with some of the lunatics in his cabinet, but he tells the U.S. that he only wants to blow up his cabinet once — for a deal. But we will never get to that stage if he doesn’t blow it up now and construct a centrist coalition that can negotiate a deal.

Second, I have no idea whether the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, has the will and the guts to make peace with Israel. In fact, when you go back and look at what Ehud Olmert, Netanyahu’s predecessor, offered Abbas — a real two-state compromise, including a deal on Jerusalem — and you think that Abbas spurned that offer, and you think that Netanyahu already gave Abbas a 10-month settlement freeze and Abbas only entered serious talks in the ninth month, you have to wonder how committed he is.

But the fact is that the team of Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad have built a government that is the best the Palestinians have ever had, and, more importantly, a Palestinian security apparatus that the Israeli military respects and is acting as a real partner. Given this, Israel has an overwhelming interest to really test — that is all we can ask — whether this Palestinian leadership is ready for a fair and mutually secure two-state solution.

That test is something the U.S. should not have to beg or bribe Israel to generate. This moment is not about Obama. He’s doing his job. It is about whether the Israeli and Palestinian leaders are up to theirs. Abbas is weak and acts weaker. Netanyahu is strong and acts weak. It is time for both to step it up. And it is time for all the outsiders who spoil them to find another hobby.

Obama’s right where he wants to be — losing big

Andrew Sullivan London Times
An electoral meltdown for the Democrats in the upcoming mid-term elections will allow the president to call the right’s bluff on tax
The Sunday Times Published: 17 October 2010Recommend (0) Barack Obama faces a landslide of opposition next month that may well eclipse previous records of mid-term collapse.

Republicans will almost certainly win back the House and could win back the Senate. Moreover, the composition of the Republican legislature will be much further to the right than any recent Congress.

These are Republicans still wanting to repeal Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, backed by voters who believe Obama was born in Kenya.


They are Sarah Palin supporters who want to repeal health insurance reform, wanted the banks to be allowed to fail and opposed any attempt to prevent a second Great Depression.

I got into an argument with a cardcarrying Tea Party member in Indiana last week who was all of the above. “So you would have been okay with 30% unemployment?” I asked.

“Sure,” he responded. “If that’s what it takes to get back our freedom.”

In the face of this, in the final stretch, the president sat down with The New York Times last week and gave an interview in which he conceded that he had made political mistakes in his first two years. “Given how much stuff was coming at us, we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right,” he said.

“I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and PR and public opinion.”

His supporters, exasperated at his equanimity, desperate for him to go on the offensive, threw up their hands. “With a little over two weeks to go to the critical elections, why would the Obama White House want reporters (and voters) to fixate on what it got wrong in its first two years?” David Corn, the liberal writer, vented in Mother Jones, the political magazine.

I see his point. But he is, in my judgment, wrong, just as much of the left has been wrong about Obama from the beginning. The reason he was elected was not to turn the country radically to the left. It was because the previous administration had so spectacularly failed, because the economy was tipping into a second Great Depression and because he seemed like a pragmatic centrist capable of being an adult in a storm.

He never wanted to be a divisive polarising president — he wanted to be the opposite. But events conspired with a ruthless conservative opposition to push him off message. The recession required him to bail out the banks (begun by George W Bush, of course), to put a bottom under the economy’s slide in the form of a stimulus, to rescue the car companies (successfully, as it turned out) — and all this could be depicted as a big government liberal agenda.

Obama’s concession of his mistakes was a reminder of why he is not to be underestimated When the economy did not recover quickly enough, the mood soured even further. Health insurance reform was the one signature move that gave a semblance of credibility to the notion that he was indeed a closet commie Muslim.

But in reality it contained the first cuts — health entitlement for the elderly — to Medicare, the state-run health insurer; it was also to the right of the Clintons’ plan in 1993; it was to be phased in gradually and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would cut the deficit in the long run.

But by then the opposition had its simple message — he’s too left for America — and the die was cast.

That is not to say the Republicans have persuaded a majority. Obama’s approval rating is in the mid-forties — above Bill Clinton’s and Ronald Reagan’s at this juncture in their presidencies.

Obama’s ratings exceed any of his Republican rivals by a mile. What the Republican leaders have done is so rile up their own base that their turnout will probably vastly exceed the Democrats’ and so tip the scales far more radically than the real feelings in the country represent. That’s why I found Obama’s concession of his mistakes a reminder of why he is not to be underestimated, rather than an example of his political tin ear.

Take the worst-case scenario for the Democrats. The Republicans win back both Houses on a platform of cutting spending so that the budget is balanced. What then? Well, the president has a debt commission that includes Republicans which will issue a report in December.

It will almost certainly propose a blend of tax hikes and entitlement and defence cuts. The mix will vary. The timing is debatable. Both Obama and the Republicans say they want to tackle the debt, with Obama arguing that long-term tax increases are more necessary than big spending cuts. The Republicans, if they are to rule out tax increases and keep defence spending high, will have to back draconian cuts in healthcare and pensions — or be exposed as phoneys.

Who would you rather be? Look at the British government’s brave attempt to cut child benefit. Actually cutting spending — and not just vaguely talking about it — is very risky. The size of America’s debt and the Republicans’ opposition to any tax increases — even for those earning more than $250,000 (£156,000) a year — means drastic cuts in entitlements, including Medicare. The people likely to be hurt the most? The relatively well-off white retirees who form the base of the Tea Party.

No wonder Obama seems calm. No wonder he is reading The Clinton Tapes, the contemporaneous recordings that the former president made with Taylor Branch, the journalist. Despite his 1994 mid-term shellacking, Clinton ended his two terms with the highest ratings he ever achieved. And Clinton did not have such a substantive first two years to protect.

The scale of the laws passed under Obama is on a par with Lyndon Johnson’s first years. Legislatively, Obama does not have much more to do. What he will focus on is implementing health reform, which in its specifics is quite popular, and possibly immigration reform, which will drive the Republicans crazy but will cement the Democrats’ hold on the Hispanic vote. He can veto a repeal of the health bill, begin to withdraw from Afghanistan and keep pushing the Israelis and isolating Iran.

On the critical issue of debt, he can call the Republicans’ bluff. If he’s smart, he will not seem to be a tax-hiker but a compromiser. And, in my view on the debt, Americans will respond more positively to the person willing to compromise in a divided government than to the rigid ideologue refusing to do anything to solve the problem if it means a non-purist solution. Who does that sound like — Palin or Obama?

Obama thinks strategically; his opponents keep thinking tactically. They may win big next month and come to regret it.

Barbara Billingsley, Dies at 94

By MICHAEL POLLAK NY TIMES
Barbara Billingsley, who as June Cleaver on the television series “Leave It to Beaver” personified a Hollywood postwar family ideal of the ever-sweet, ever-helpful suburban stay-at-home mom, died Saturday. She was 94.

A family spokeswoman, Judy Twersky, said that Ms. Billingsley had died of polymyalgia, a rheumatoid disease, at her home in Santa Monica, Calif.

From 1957 to 1963 and in decades of reruns, the glamorous June, who wore pearls and high heels at home, could be counted on to help her husband, Ward (Hugh Beaumont), get their son Theodore, better known as Beaver (Jerry Mathers), and his older brother, Wally (Tony Dow), out of countless minor jams, whether an alligator in the basement or a horse in the garage.

Baking a steady supply of cookies, she would use motherly intuition to sound the alarm about incipient trouble (“Ward, I’m worried about the Beaver”) in their immaculate, airy house in the fictional town of Mayfield. (The house appeared to have no master bedroom, just a big door from which Ward and June occasionally emerged, tying their bathrobes.)

Along with the mothers played by Harriet Nelson (“The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet”), Donna Reed (“The Donna Reed Show”) and others, Ms. Billingsley’s role became a cultural standard, one that may have been too good to be true but produced fan mail and nostalgia for decades afterward, from the same generation whose counterculture derided the see-no-evil suburbia June’s character represented.

Ms. Billingsley, who had nothing but respect for June Cleaver, was a former model and career actress who was married three times and spent part of her career as a working single mother (of two boys, at that).

Yes, she acknowledged 40 years later, her role was a picture-perfect reflection of the times. “We were the ideal parents because that’s the way he saw it,” she said, describing the show as the world seen through the eyes of a child. (The pearls, incidentally, covered up a hollow in her neck. In the beginning of the show, she wore flats; the heels were an attempt to stay taller than the growing boys.)

June was no pushover; she could be quite a disciplinarian, Ms. Billingsley said in 2000, during an interview for the Archive of American Television. “She was a loving, happy stay-at-home mom, which I think is great,” she said. Ms. Billingsley also said that women who stay at home to care for their children may find in it the best — and most important — job they’ll ever have.

Ms. Billingsley was born Barbara Lillian Combes on Dec. 22, 1915, in Los Angeles, where she attended George Washington High School. She left Los Angeles Junior College to appear in a short-lived Broadway play, “Straw Hat.” She took her stage name from her first husband, Glenn Billingsley, a nephew of Sherman Billingsley, the proprietor of the Stork Club in Manhattan. They had two sons.

After working as a fashion model, Ms. Billingsley returned to Los Angeles, acted in local plays and was signed to a contract by MGM. In the 1940s and early ’50s, her film roles were mostly small. Her movies included “The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952) with Kirk Douglas, “Shadow on the Wall” (1950) with Ann Sothern and “Three Guys Named Mike” (1951) with Jane Wyman.

Of “Leave It to Beaver,” she later recalled, “It was a happy experience for me, and very timely,” adding that there was never a fight on the set in seven years. After the show ended its run in 1963, Ms. Billingsley, by then typecast, saw few acting roles. Many of her later guest appearances were either as June or in roles that made wry references to her. But she said she turned down scripts if they made fun of June.

“She’s been too good to me to play anything like that,” she said.

She is survived by her two sons, Drew Billingsley of Granada Hills, Calif., and Glenn Billingsley Jr. of Phillips Ranch, Calif.

Trade war looms as China digs in over yuan
Americans want Beijing to stop manipulating its currency to boost exports - and spend its trade surplus on building its military power
Irwin Stelzer The Sunday Times

China claims that if the yuan rises, its low-margin exporters will go out of business (AP)
Some 53% of Americans now say they don’t much like free trade, compared with 32% a decade ago. In part that is because of unhappiness with the jobs situation.

Last week’s jobs report might have cheered specialists who dig beneath the headline numbers: 64,000 private-sector jobs were created in September. But non-experts focus on the headline number: a net loss of 95,000 jobs as state and local governments laid off workers, and the construction and manufacturing sectors did the same.


The unemployment rate remains stuck at 9.6%. Almost 15m Americans are actively and increasingly desperately looking for work, with over 6m out of work for 27 weeks or more. Throw in those too discouraged to keep looking, and those involuntarily working short hours, and the total soars to almost 26.4m, 17.1% of the workforce.

But there’s more to rising protectionist fervour. Yes, Americans believe that China is manipulating its currency, which it is; that the manipulation keeps the value of the yuan artificially low, which it does; and that the undervalued yuan contributes to a flood of imports and joblessness in America, which it does. We also know that China has no intention of changing its policy. Responding to pressure from the US Congress and from the EU, China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, said the regime will not bend, because if the yuan rises, low-margin Chinese exporters will go out of business, causing “social and economic turbulence ... [that] would be a disaster for the world”.

More likely, as he preferred not to add, a disaster for a regime that, lacking democratic legitimacy, can survive only by delivering a better material life for the still-poor Chinese masses. So America’s appeal for support to the International Monetary Fund at this weekend’s meeting of finance ministers can only be met with, “We’d like to help if we could”.

When China is willing to use its minerals in the same way that Russia uses its natural gas exports, Americans have reason to be uneasy Still, even if China were to accede to its trading partners’ demands, Americans would be unappeased. They see not only an unfair trading partner, but a nation that is using the fruits of that unfair trading to threaten America’s position in the world. It’s no good calling this a new version of the old xenophobic fear of the “yellow peril” — this fear is well founded.

Let’s start with the fact that America’s fiscal deficit is adding to pressures to reduce military spending, just as it is with our European allies, in order to minimise the shrinking of their welfare states. At the same time, China is both expanding its military — to the point where the People’s Liberation Army is now an important player in choosing successors to the communist leadership and in shaping foreign policy — and becoming more belligerent.

So when a dispute with Japan over fishing rights erupted, it simply halted exports of rare earth minerals essential to the production of iPhones, hybrid cars and many other products. China controls about half the world’s output, and 90% of the related refining capacity, in part due to shutdowns of American facilities ordered by the Environmental Protection Agency. Few Americans heard about this, but they know that when China is willing to use its minerals in the same way Russia uses its natural gas exports — to cow America’s allies — they have reason to be uneasy.

They also might not have details about China’s use of its vast currency reserves, but they know that more countries are looking to the regime, and fewer to America, for leadership. It was Winston Churchill and Harry Truman who took the steps to prevent a communist takeover of Greece; it is Wen Jiabao who now makes the running by promising to buy Greek bonds when they are once again offered on world markets, and to help that bankrupt nation’s recovery with investments in its economy.

Oh, and it would be much appreciated if the EU would declare China a “market economy” so that it would be less subject to dumping charges.

This contrast between the expanding influence of China, now a favoured trading partner of Brazil and other Latin American countries, and the diminished influence of America is not all that is on Americans’ minds. They worry that China is locking up supplies of vital raw materials, from oil to food, by befriending Iran and other countries hostile to American interests. They see their president humiliated during his visit to China by the regime’s refusal to give him access to anything except hand-picked audiences and, later, at a climate-change conference in Copenhagen, being dressed down by a low-level Chinese official when he attempted to cut an international climate-change deal.

All of which means that the changes in the trade balance that might result from an appreciation of the yuan will do little to rekindle American enthusiasm for free trade. There is more to the irritation with China than the exchange rate, or even China’s persistent theft of American intellectual property. There is concern that a new enemy is emerging while, to borrow from Jack Kennedy, America’s political establishment sleeps.

The rest of the world is more narrowly focused on China’s currency manipulation. Since its trading partners can’t get China to increase the value of its currency, which is dropping in lock step with the dollar, they have decided to reduce the value of their own currencies in a competitive round of devaluations that bode ill for world economic recovery. Japan is intervening to drive down the yen, Brazil is taking steps to lower the value of the real, and France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, wants to put in place a new currency system that will prevent the euro from appreciating.

John Lipsky, first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said there is no currency war. Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, the sole survivor of Barack Obama’s original economics team, said: “We’re not going to have a trade war. We’re not going to have currency wars.” Unfortunately, those estimable gentlemen are confusing their hopes with reality: the early skirmishes in those wars have already been fought.

Irwin Stelzer is a business adviser and director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute