C. African Republic leader dismisses son

DAMARA, Central African Republic (AP) — The embattled president of Central African Republic has dismissed his son as the country's defense minister.
The move late Wednesday comes as President Francois Bozize faces a coalition of rebel groups who are seeking his ouster.
National radio announced that his son Francis Bozize will no longer be the defense minister.
Chief of Staff Gen. Guillaume Lapo is also leaving the government, according to the announcement.
Francois Bozize has been in power since 2003 and in the past month he has faced a growing threat as rebels have seized 10 towns across the north.
Bozize has announced he's willing to negotiate with the rebels but he said he will not leave office before his current term ends in 2016.

Read More..

Ivory Coast stampede survivors blame barricades

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP) — Survivors of a stampede in Ivory Coast that killed 61 people, most of them children and teenagers, after a New Year's Eve fireworks display said Wednesday that makeshift barricades stopped them from moving along a main boulevard, causing the crush of people.
Ivory Coast police said unknown people put tree trunks across the Boulevard de la Republique where the trampling took place.
"For security, because there were so many important people at the event, we closed certain main streets," said a police officer who was overheard briefing Ivory Coast President Alassane Outtara on the incident. The police officer said the tree trunks were put out unofficially by people who are not known.
"After the fireworks we reopened the other streets, but we had not yet removed the tree trunks from the Boulevard de la Republique, in front of the Hotel Tiana near the National Assembly (parliament) building," she said. "That is where the stampede happened when people flooded in from the other streets."
Ouattara ordered three days of national mourning and launched an investigation into the causes of the tragedy.
Two survivors, in interviews with The Associated Press, indicated why so many died in what would normally be an open area, the Boulevard de la Republique. An estimated 50,000 people had gathered near the Felix Houphouet Boigny Stadium and elsewhere in Abidjan's Plateau district to watch the fireworks. As they streamed away from the show some encountered the blockades.
"Near the Justice Palace we were stopped by some people who put blockades of wood in the street," 33-year-old Zoure Sanate said from her bed in Cocody Hospital. "They told us we must stay in the Plateau area until morning. None of us accepted to stay in Plateau until the morning for a celebration that ended at around 1 a.m.
"Then came the stampede of people behind us," she said. "My four children and I were knocked to the ground. I was hearing my kids calling me, but I was powerless and fighting against death. Two of my kids are in hospital with me, but two others are missing. They cannot be found."
Another hospital patient, Brahima Compaore, 39, said he also was caught in the pile of people stopped by the roadblock.
"I found myself on the ground and people were walking on me," said Compaore. "I was only saved by people who pulled me onto the sidewalk."
Local newspapers are speculating that thieves put up the roadblocks so that pickpockets could steal money and mobile phones from the packed-in people.
Ouattara pledged to get answers. Some observers wondered why police did not prevent the tragedy.
"The investigation must take into account all the testimonies of victims," he said Wednesday. "We will have a crisis center to share and receive information."
Ouattara also postponed the traditional New Year's receptions at his residence, which had been scheduled for Thursday and Friday.
The leader of a human rights organization said that deadly incidents were predictable because the police and civil authorities had not taken adequate protective measures.
"The situation is deplorable," said Thierry Legre, president of the Ivorian League of Human Rights. "It is our first tragedy of 2013 but in 2012 we could already see possibility of such a tragedy because there are not adequate authorities patrolling our roads and waters."
Legre said the New Year's stampede "exposes our weak and dysfunctional civil protection system. This must be corrected immediately. The government cannot invite people to this kind of public gathering without taking adequate precautions to protect their safety and their lives."
He called on the government "to implement measures to avoid such tragedies in the future by reinforcing the civil protection system."
The government organized the fireworks to celebrate Ivory Coast's peace, after several months of political violence in early 2011 following disputed elections.
Just one night before the New Year's incident, there had been a big concert at the Felix Houphouet-Boigny Stadium where American rap star Chris Brown performed. That Sunday night event was for the Kora Awards for African musicians. No serious incidents were reported from that event.
In 2009, 22 people died and over 130 were injured in a stampede at a World Cup qualifying match at the Houphouet Boigny Stadium, prompting FIFA, soccer's global governing body, to impose a fine of tens of thousands of dollars on Ivory Coast's soccer federation. The stadium, which officially holds 35,000, was overcrowded at the time of the disaster.
Another African stadium tragedy occurred on New Year's Eve in Angola where 13 people, including four children, died in a stampede during a religious gathering at a sports stadium in Luanda, the capital.
Angop, the Angolan news agency, cited officials as saying Tuesday that 120 people were also injured. The incident happened on New Year's Eve when tens of thousands of people gathered at the stadium and panic ensued. Faustino Sebastiao, spokesman for the national firefighters department, says those who died were crushed and asphyxiated.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed "deep sorrow" at the heavy human toll and put "a medical team and all available logistical means at the disposal of the government," to help deal with the situation, U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said.

Read More..

Tennis-More woe for Sydney organisers after Tsonga withdrawal

SYDNEY, Jan 5 (Reuters) - Fresh off losing their top two men's seeds, Sydney International organisers were left with a nightmare scenario on Saturday when their top two local hopes were drawn against each other in the first round.
Just hours after top seed Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and his French compatriot Richard Gasquet withdrew from the Australian Open warmup tournament, Australian number one Marinko Matosevic was drawn against compatriot Bernard Tomic in the first round.
The 27-year-old Matosevic, who was the ATP Tour's most improved player last year after jumping from 201 to 49th in the world, has moved ahead of Tomic, who faded in 2012 after a meteoric rise in 2011 and finished the year ranked 52nd.
The 20-year-old Tomic, who was also dumped from the Australian Davis Cup team because of doubts about his commitment, has actually been in good form at the Hopman Cup in Perth, winning all three singles matches, including a 6-4 6-4 victory over world number one Novak Djokovic.
World number eight Tsonga was earlier forced to withdraw from the Sydney tournament with a hamstring injury that he sustained at the Hopman Cup and he will be facing a battle to be fit for the Jan. 14-27 Australian Open in Melbourne.
"Unfortunately Jo-Wilfried Tsonga sustained an injury in Perth and has been forced to pull out ... with a left hamstring injury," Sydney tournament director Craig Watson said in a statement.
Gasquet, who would have been top seed after Tsonga's withdrawal, pulled out for "personal reasons", Watson said.
The 10th-ranked Gasquet reached the final of the Qatar Open against a resurgent Nikolay Davydenko and possibly felt he had enough match practice under his belt before the year's first grand slam begins at Melbourne Park on Jan. 14.

Read More..

Tennis-Li gets Melbourne boost with Shenzhen title

Jan 5 (Reuters) - Top seed Li Na survived a mid-match meltdown to overcome Czech Klara Zakopalova 6-3 1-6 7-5 in the final of the inaugural Shenzhen Open on Saturday, earning the Chinese a seventh career title.
World number seven Li, who won the 2011 French Open, looked in danger of disappointing the home fans after surrendering her serve in the first game of the deciding set.
Li, who beat fellow Chinese Peng Shuai 6-4 6-0 in Friday's semi-finals, hit back to win five of the next six games but from 5-2 up allowed fifth seed Zakopalova to draw level at 5-5.
In a topsy-turvy finish encapsulating the match, Li collected herself to put together two solid games and give her a boost ahead of the Australian Open, which begins on Jan. 14.
Li reached the final of the year's first grand slam in Melbourne in 2011 before going on to become China's first major singles champion in Paris.
Saturday's victory was Li's second WTA title in China, following her breakthrough at Guangzhou in 2004 when she became the first Chinese winner on the women's tour.
The $500,000 Shenzhen tournament became the third event in China on the WTA calendar for 2013 as tennis continues to expand in the country after Li's recent success.

Read More..

Li gets Melbourne boost with Shenzhen title

Top seed Li Na survived a mid-match meltdown to overcome Czech Klara Zakopalova 6-3 1-6 7-5 in the final of the inaugural Shenzhen Open on Saturday, earning the Chinese a seventh career title.
World number seven Li, who won the 2011 French Open, looked in danger of disappointing the home fans after surrendering her serve in the first game of the deciding set.
Li, who beat fellow Chinese Peng Shuai 6-4 6-0 in Friday's semi-finals, hit back to win five of the next six games but from 5-2 up allowed fifth seed Zakopalova to draw level at 5-5.
In a topsy-turvy finish encapsulating the match, Li collected herself to put together two solid games and give her a boost ahead of the Australian Open, which begins on January 14.
Li reached the final of the year's first grand slam in Melbourne in 2011 before going on to become China's first major singles champion in Paris.
Saturday's victory was Li's second WTA title in China, following her breakthrough at Guangzhou in 2004 when she became the first Chinese winner on the women's tour.
The $500,000 Shenzhen tournament became the third event in China on the WTA calendar for 2013 as tennis continues to expand in the country after Li's recent success.

Read More..

Murdoch's KGB-Friendly Series

In August, Rupert Murdoch's FX picked up a Cold War series set in the 1980s titled "The Americans." Liberals might have braced themselves for the worst. It sounded like some kind of Chuck Norris-style "jingoistic" homage to freedom-loving intelligence agents. But this is Hollywood, so the show instead focuses on KGB spies who speak perfect English, working to destroy Reagan-era America, which is not altogether a bad thing to people in Hollywood.
Joe Weisberg, who worked for more than three years at the CIA, first wrote a script about two CIA case officers stationed in Bulgaria. Fox bought that script, too, but that project was deep-sixed. Boring. But exploring the daily joys and sorrows of undercover Soviet agents, that just thrills the Hollywood Left. Some things never change.
FX couldn't create a series based on real history because that would entail real heroes, and real villains, like CIA traitor Aldrich Ames, who was a drunk who took on a feverishly overspending second wife, and for enough pieces of silver, he sold state secrets to our mortal enemy. There's plenty of drama in that real-life story, but instead FX set out to find nice-looking fictional Marxist-Leninists that Americans could learn to love.
TV Guide previewed the new series, which debuts Jan. 30, like this: "It's the early 1980s, the Cold War rages and President Ronald Reagan's sabre-rattling has the Soviet Union really nervous." The show's writer, Joe Weisberg, let his radicalism out: "Most of us in the U.S. thought Reagan was just being bombastic, but the Soviets thought he was crazy and feared he would initiate a nuclear strike ... This series, to a large extent, is told from the perspective of the KGB and the Soviets. We're making them the sympathetic characters. I'd go so far as to say they're the heroes."
"The Americans" isn't about Americans. It's about heroic defenders of expansionist communist tyranny. The "heroes" are those who killed tens of millions. That's morally sick. But at FX, sickness sells.
The main characters, who are given the names Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, were trained since their teenage years to be communist spies and were placed in an arranged marriage and run a travel agency in northern Virginia as a front. Once placed in America, they have children who have no idea of their treasonous double lives. There's tension in this arranged marriage, since TV Guide explained "she's passionately loyal to the motherland, while he's starting to prefer the American way of life."
FX president John Landgraf sounded apolitical about it: "We're proud to welcome 'The Americans,' a taut series that crackles with incredible performances rooted in character perspectives never explored on a U.S. television series." But focus on the phrase "character perspectives never explored" as code for "sympathetic communist spy characters," words they cannot bring themselves to say.
This is not the first FX series to deal with spies, only the first drama. The animated adult comedy "Archer," soon to launch its fourth season, is centered on Sterling Archer, a vaguely 1960s-era American spy with the International Secret Intelligence Service. Naturally, this agent is comically inept. Last season, Archer was assigned to guard a prominent KGB defector, but the high-value asset was killed in an explosion while Archer left the building for a sexual encounter with a co-worker.
FX is a network stuffed with antiheroes. It has thrived on dramas that glorified corrupt cops ("The Shield"), unethical, oversexed plastic surgeons ("Nip/Tuck"), firemen who rape their wives and pressure their teenage daughters to have sex ("Rescue Me"), mutilating and murderous motorcycle gangs ("Sons of Anarchy") and now domineering, perverted nuns ("American Horror Story: Asylum").
They are not alone. NBC has closed a deal for a pilot about Soviet spies in Israel titled "M.I.C.E." The title is an acronym for Money, Ideology, Coercion and Ego, factors in understanding the motives of spies who betray their own countries.
The show is copied from an Israeli series called "The Gordin Cell." In that show, set in the present, a patriotic and decorated Israeli Air Force officer has no idea his parents were Russian spies. Their handler then appears, demanding they recruit their son into betraying Israel. The officer is left to choose between his family and his country.
Producer Peter Berg (who made "Friday Night Lights" for NBC) said the original plot "lends itself very easily to an American reinvention" as a drama set in the United States. "There are still real issues between the U.S. and Russia — they're spying on us, we're spying on them."
Somehow the Left can never acknowledge the horrors that the Soviet Union visited upon its own people and the people in its puppet states. No network would ever consider a drama about sympathetic Nazi spies undermining America during World War II. Nazi genocide is inhuman. Communist genocide is not.

Read More..

The Truth About Bin Laden

At the very beginning of Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty," the audience is told that the movie they are about to see is "based on firsthand accounts of actual events." Then we hear tapes, terrifying if familiar, of those final calls being made by those trapped on 9/11.
Then comes the torture.
Bigelow has defended the scenes, which leave audience members rooting for our heroes (who are doing the torturing) as a "part of our history." If you believe the movie (and you shouldn't), torture was key to finding and killing Osama bin Laden.
Except it wasn't. This is a movie masquerading as a true telling when in fact what it tells is a lie.
Others, including Jane Mayer in The New Yorker and Glenn Carle on the Huffington Post, have detailed what's wrong in "Zero Dark Thirty" — what's wrong about the efficacy of torture (which tends to produce false information or none at all) and what's wrong about the role of torture in the killing of bin Laden. (The key name did not come from a detainee in CIA custody, according to former CIA Director Leon Panetta, who knows more about the "actual events" than Bigelow or screenwriter Mark Boal.)
And contrary to the defense being offered by the filmmakers in the aftermath of such criticism, the film does not, in Boal's words, "show the complexity of the debate" about torture. There is no "debate" in the movie. Everyone in it — hero and heroine and their bosses — is for it. The only contrary voice is a clip of President Obama in the background, whose condemnation of torture seems, while you're watching it, to be the voice of a legalistic priss.
But the problem with this movie isn't just that it's wrong. Plenty of movies are wrong. Oliver Stone's movie about President Kennedy's assassination is wrong.
The problem is that it's dangerously wrong, and not simply because it is distorting the debate here at home about torture ("Look, Mom, it works," you'll hear some conservatives boast.), but potentially and much more seriously because it could endanger the lives of Americans who are already risking their lives for our country.
This movie won't be seen only by those who know that what they're seeing is fiction. It won't be seen only by Americans. Entertainment is America's biggest export. The myth that Americans support torture, that we depended on it for our greatest military operation, will be seized upon not only by those in the world who already hate us but also by those who might grow up to hate us and those who are still not certain about how much they hate us. Just as we are lulled into supporting torture, they will be lulled into hating us for it.
The "myth" — and that is what this movie is selling, pure and simple — that torture is what allowed us to kill bin Laden insults the hard work of the Americans who risked their lives and also endangers those who follow in their footsteps. It arms the extremists with far more powerful propaganda than anything their own machines are capable of producing. It cements the view that there is no limit to the evil we will engage in to suit our goals, and that in this respect we are no different from our enemies.
At one point, one of the heroes/torturers tells the detainee that if he doesn't cooperate, we can send him to Israel. Even in the midst of the film's drama, I cringed. The point was: We'll send you to Israel, and they'll kill you. The danger of gratuitous lies is not limited to Americans.
Another scene in the movie, one of the doctor knocking on the door of the "safe house" in the hopes of collecting information under the guise of giving polio vaccines, provoked a collective chuckle in the theater. Except that there really isn't anything funny about it. There was, reportedly, such a doctor, who is being held in a Pakistani prison. But the myth that polio programs were created by the CIA to gather intelligence has led to the suspension of such programs in Pakistan and elsewhere and has blocked efforts to wipe out that scourge. And we're laughing? We are better than that.
The First Amendment protects the right to make movies, including this one, not because words are harmless but because they aren't. They have power. With power should come personal responsibility for how it is used.
I wanted to see a movie about the hunt for bin Laden. I wanted to feel proud of the Americans who risked their lives to hunt him down. If it's just a movie, as its defenders have urged, it should not pretend to be based on "actual events." It isn't. But God help us if it leads to them.

Read More..

Are We Becoming European?

Following the fiscal cliff melodrama, Senator Richard Shelby appeared on television to declare that we are becoming European. "We're always wanting to spend and promise and spend and borrow but not cut. We've got to get real about this. We're headed down the road that Europe's already on."
There's no "heading" about it. We're there. Prof. John J. DiIulio, writing in "National Affairs", outlined the true size of American government. When state and local government expenditures are added to federal outlays, government spending as a share of GDP easily competes with European nations. In fact, per-capita government spending in the U.S. is higher than in France, Germany and the United Kingdom, and our debt to GDP ratio is higher than most European states.
The Obama administration has set records for deficit spending in peacetime, but there is no question that the growth of government at all levels has been a decades-long process. In 1960, total government spending (local, state and federal) amounted to 27 percent of GDP. In 2010, it was about 42 percent. State spending has been almost as irrepressible as federal, leaving only nine states that can now boast AAA credit ratings. Many states are facing crises over unfunded pension liabilities that have the capacity to engender strikes and social unrest in the not too distant future.
Though President Obama and the Democrats are fond of citing the "two wars on a credit card" and the Bush tax cuts as drivers of our debt, the truth is that the first Obama term added $4.5 trillion to the national debt in just three years — more than the total debt amassed by the United States government in two centuries. DiIulio writes: "Add our annual debt per capita (about $49,000 in 2011) to total annual government spending per capita (about $20,000 in 2011), and we have a rough 'big government index' of nearly $70,000 for every man, woman, and child in this country."
The difference between Americans and Europeans is that we aren't honest about our appetite for big government. We hide it through a variety of proxies, private contractors, and public/private partnerships. Leaving aside the Department of Defense, which employs 3.2 million Americans, government employs more than 20 million civil servants. Only 2 million of those are full-time federal workers. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, employs 188,000 federal bureaucrats, but also 200,000 privately contracted employees. Medicaid doesn't employ an army of civil servants but instead pays private employees of medical practices, hospitals, and nursing homes.
The EPA employs between 16,000 and 18,000 full time personnel. It has been able to expand its regulatory reach though by cooperating with 50 state EPA equivalents and by hiring tens of thousands of private contractors.
Most non-profits receive few government subsidies. But the largest ones with the biggest budgets are heavily government-dependent. One-third of all non-profit dollars come from government. Catholic Charities USA, for example, a marquee "private-sector" charity, received two-thirds of its funding in 2009 from Uncle Sam.
Americans prefer small government to big government — in the abstract. But 60 million receive Medicaid benefits, 54 million collect Social Security, 48 million participate with Medicare, 45 million receive Food Stamps, 7 million are in prison, jail, or on parole/probation, more than a million have de facto government jobs working for defense contractors, nearly a million children participate in Head Start and about 40 percent of K-12 students receive free or reduced price meals. There's some overlap in those categories, but it still adds up.
Taking a government check goes down much more easily when you can persuade yourself that you're only withdrawing money that you have faithfully paid in over the course of a lifetime. Indignant elderly callers to C-SPAN constantly invoke the "I paid for my Social Security" myth.
They didn't. The average beneficiary will receive far more in Medicare and Social Security benefits than he paid for in taxes.
We are, in short, a socialist-style society just like Europe. And Obamacare has yet to kick in.
The road to recovery begins with admitting you have a problem.

Read More..

Can John Boehner regain control of the GOP?

Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) narrowly won a second term as Speaker of the House on Thursday, with 12 of his fellow Republicans either voting for somebody else or abstaining from supporting anyone. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) fared much better with her Democratic caucus, says Libby Spencer at The Impolitic, and during the roll call she "was actually tied with Boehner several times and at least once was briefly in the lead before he managed to lock down his win" with a bare 220 votes, teasing the improbable spectacle of "a total GOP meltdown with Nancy winning the gavel by default."
Some commentators, like Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway, dismiss the failed conservative coup against Boehner as "nothing more than a disorganized rant by petulant children." But the defection of a group of vocal conservatives almost sent the House Speakership election to a second round, something that hasn't happened since 1923, and it marks an ominous change from two years ago, when Boehner received all 141 Republican votes. Boehner is well-liked within his caucus but not feared, and this "warning shot from conservatives," says Sheryl Gay Stolberg at The New York Times, was "a sobering reminder that while he may hold one of the most powerful jobs in Washington, his power is greatly diminished. His Republican ranks are thinner in the new Congress, and many of those who retired or were defeated are moderates who ordinarily backed him."
SEE MORE: The culture war is over, and conservatives lost
That raises an important question, with broad implications for the next two years, and not just in Washington: Will Boehner, the country's highest-ranking Republican, be able to control his majority in the House?
No. The Speaker is now toothless: Boehner's pledge to not negotiate with President Obama sounds principled, but it's mostly just a reflection of the new reality, says Greg Sargent at The Washington Post. Combine his narrow speakership victory and humiliating fiscal cliff "Plan B" flop in December, and its clear that Boehner "can't get enough support from within his caucus for negotiating with the president." In practical terms, that means when it comes to big votes on big issues like deficit reduction, immigration reform, and tax reform, Boehner will have to rely on "large blocs of Democratic support" to pass legislation — a big no-no in the GOP. And that will just weaken him further.
"Weakened Speaker Boehner means tough governing road ahead"
SEE MORE: Tim Scott: A 'token' black senator for the GOP?
Boehner will be much stronger this time around: The decision to "stop negotiating secret, back-room deals" is the best thing Boehner has done in two years, says John Hinderaker at Power Line. That bodes well for his future. Forging closed-door compromises with Obama and his Democrats just let them off the hook and blurred the ideological differences between the parties, to the GOP's detriment. Boehner should have realized in 2011 that his Republican-led House should only pass Republican bills, but "let's let bygones be bygones. As far as Speaker Boehner is concerned, better late than never."
"Better late than never: Boehner swears off secret deals"
Check back two months from now: You have to feel a little bad for Boehner, say Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake at The Washington Post. "A pragmatist and institutionalist at heart," the GOP leader "is naturally drawn to making a deal." But as we've learned over the past two years, "he 'leads' a group that is simply not interested in compromise" — the very "definition of a no-win situation." His allies insist that he wanted a second term to get big things accomplished regarding America's fiscal fix, and if that's true he may well "stick around to see if he can regain control of what is a decidedly unruly House conference." But if that fails — and watch what happens in the looming debt-ceiling battle — Boehner might find it more rewarding to "step aside before the next election to pursue a lucrative post-congressional career as a lobbyist/rainmaker.

Read More..

5 hopeful signs the 113th Congress will be better than the last

Dispirited Americans don't appear all that optimistic that the new Congress will get much done, either. Well, buck up, America!
With some pomp, a bunch of cute kids, and plenty of entertainment from Vice President Joe Biden, the new Congress was gaveled into session on Thursday. "Welcome 113th Congress!" says Chris Cillizza at The Washington Post, summing up the conventional wisdom: "Here's the first thing you need to know: People hate you." Or rather, people really hated the 112th Congress — The Week rounded up 10 of the best insults heaped upon the historically unproductive 112th, and Gallup records it as the most unpopular in modern history — and "there's every reason to believe things in Congress will get worse in the next few months." Public Policy Polling has this bracing reminder, from its new (ongoing) survey:
 PublicPolicyPolling@ppppolls
Congress is less popular than colonoscopies, used car salesmen, and Nickelback but it's at least beating out Gonorrhea and N. Korea so far
4 Jan 13 ReplyRetweetFavorite
But America is not, by nature, a pessimistic nation. We fervently believe in new beginnings. And the incoming freshman lawmakers — 82 new members of the House (47 Democrats, 35 Republicans) and 13 new senators (eight Democrats, four Republicans) — are upbeat about the 113th Congress' ability to work together to solve America's problems. Here, four reasons for optimism about the near-term future on Capitol Hill:
1. The Tea Party era is at an end
There's "rational reason for optimism" that "the ideological excesses and obstructionism of the Tea Party class of 2010 are over," says John Avlon at The Daily Beast. The Do-Nothing 112th "was elected by a narrow but intense slice of the electorate — the anti-Obama, recession-fueled rage of the 2010 midterm election landslide," but this Congress was ushered in with a message from voters to "stop fighting and start fixing." And by all appearances, they got the message. That doesn't erase the stark ideological differences in Washington, but the tone and approach of the Class of 2012 "is likely to be very different from the radioactive 'us-against-them' rhetoric we heard from departing Tea Party stars like Allen West."
SEE ALSO: To boldly slice...
2. Unprecedented diversity makes for less rigidity
"If there is reason for optimism that this Congress might be able to get beyond a 12 percent approval rating and record lows of bills passed, it might rest in the fact that the incoming class is more diverse than any other in history," says Allen McDuffee at The Washington Post. Any way you slice it — religion, gender, sexual orientation, age — "the 113th Congress will be the closest to resembling American diversity thus far." This remarkable shift in demographics, says The Daily Beast's Avlon, "is a good thing in terms of bridging all our interesting differences to find a way to work together based on our shared civic faith as Americans first."
3. The Gingrich crash suggests a coming détente
Perhaps the best reason for "cautious optimism" about the 113th Congress is a look back at the 104th Congress, says Greg Sargent at The Washington Post. Like the just-finished Congress, the 104th (1995-1997) featured "dozens of self-styled revolutionary Republicans, bent on bulldozing a Democratic President of the United States for whom they had little if any respect." Led by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, they shut down the government — and suffered "a total defeat" to Bill Clinton. The 105th Congress? "The revolutionaries were mostly quieter and almost tamed." Here's hoping that the diminished House GOP "rejectionist caucus" similarly starts to see "that losing symbolic votes, or winning them in the House only to see bills die in the Senate, is pretty much a waste of time," and the lower chamber's larger number of "mainstream conservatives finally decide that the cost of making the House — and the GOP as a whole — an object of ridicule is higher than the cost of risking a RINO label."
SEE ALSO: Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf: Remembering a distinctive military career
4. Numerology
"It has been two centuries since the United States had a Congress enumerated with lucky 13," says Michael Koenigs at ABC News. That would be the 13th Congress, which served 1813 to 1815, during the James Madison administration. That Congress was mostly notable for ratifying the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812, but the number 13 is considered charmed in the sports world and in Italy (even if Friday the 13th is considered unlucky by most Americans). As the 113th Congress kicks into gear, says Koenigs, let's "ask ourselves something Clint Eastwood said before he started talking to chairs, 'Do I feel lucky?'"
5. It would be hard to be worse than the 112th
This is the safest reason to expect better things from the 113th Congress: "With only about 10 percent of Americans approving of their lawmakers, there's not much room left to go down," says Taegan Goddard at The Week. The fiscal-cliff battle may have sent the 112th out on an especially low note, says Walter Shapiro at Yahoo News, but actually, Congress' top two Republicans — House Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) — "deserve credit for the last-minute fortitude they displayed in ending the dispiriting deadlock over extending the Bush tax cuts." Their courage wasn't on par with Lincoln saving the Union, but Boehner and McConnell put "legislating over posturing" and they "deserve muted, but sincere, applause" for giving us hope for more rational days ahead.

Read More..