Opinions

The Associated Press reports:

A blind Chinese activist who sparked a diplomatic crisis by fleeing into the U.S. Embassy last month filled out a Chinese passport application and posed for a photo Wednesday, moving forward in his bid to study in the United States.

Paperwork for Chen Guangcheng, his wife, and two children was completed in the hospital where the family of four has stayed since he left the embassy in Beijing two weeks ago.

Chen said the officials who handled the paperwork were sent by the central government.

“I am sure they were sent by the central government, which appears to be fulfilling its responsibility,” he said.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry has said Chen is free to study abroad like any other Chinese citizen, but security officials have kept him under virtual house arrest in his hospital room for two weeks. Until Wednesday, there was no clear sign that the government would let him apply for a passport.

The State Department, in turn, “has taken all the necessary steps on its side to admit Chen Guangcheng, the Chinese human rights activist who ignited a diplomatic frenzy when he escaped house arrest last month. ‘We are ready when he and his government are ready,’ said Victoria Nuland, the U.S. State Department spokeswoman, on Tuesday. ‘We have been for more than a week now in terms of his visa to come pursue his studies.’ ”

Chen’s family and friends are another story, however. Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy reports that on Tuesday Chen, as he had earlier this month, called into the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Human Rights, chaired by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.).

In Iowa on Tuesday, Mitt Romney delivered an impressive speech on his theme of the week: the debt. Rather than making this only about dollars and cents, he turned the issue into one about values and President Obama’s deficient leadership.

Romney first laid out his case, explaining (in one of his more poetic phrases of the campaign) that a “prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation and every day we fail to act that fire gets closer to the homes and children we love.” He continued:

“The people of Iowa and America have watched President Obama for nearly four years, much of that time with Congress controlled by his own party. And rather than put out the spending fire, he has fed the fire. He has spent more and borrowed more.

“The time has come for a president, a leader, who will lead. I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno. We will stop borrowing unfathomable sums of money we can’t even imagine, from foreign countries we’ll never even visit. I will bring us together to put out the fire!

“A lot of people think this is a problem we can’t solve. I reject that kind of “can’t do” defeatist talk. It’s wrong.

“What’s happened here isn’t complicated. Washington has been spending too much money and our new President made things much worse. His policies have taken us backwards.

“Almost a generation ago, Bill Clinton announced that the Era of Big Government was over. . . .

“President Obama is an old school liberal whose first instinct is to see free enterprise as the villain and government as the hero. America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public-sector, gave billions of dollars to the companies of his friends, and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined.”

Romney then tied the debt to our “tepid” recovery and a host of other problems including long-term unemployment.

He cast Obama as a backward-looking liberal bereft of ideas. (“My point is this: as President Obama and old-school liberals absorb more and more of our economy into government, they make what we do more expensive, less efficient and less useful. They make America less competitive. They make government more expensive. What President Obama is doing is not bold; it’s old.”) He sounds not unlike Bill Clinton (to whom he compared Obama unfavorably) in 1992, pointing out how behind the times was President George H.W. Bush.

One reason why Wisconsin voters may be souring on the recall of Gov. Scott Walker may be the recall itself.

First there is the cost.Wisconsin officials tell me the total cost to state and local government will be $16 million. In a biannual budget of over $60 billion (from June 2011 to June 2013), that doesn’t sound like a lot. But consider this: The average Wisconsin teacher salary is about $52,000. Starting teachers make approximately $32,600. So the amount being spent on the recall could have paid for 307 average teachers or 490 starting teachers.

That expense and the budget savings Walker has achieved have allowed him to cast the Democrats as indifferent to the taxpayers and to the state’s financial health. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported:

On Monday, Walker said he expected job creation to take off if he wins the recall but to slide if Barrett wins. Employers are holding off on hiring until after the recall, Walker said, because they are concerned that their taxes will rise if Barrett is elected.

Sounding familiar themes, Walker said his curbs on collective bargaining have saved state and local taxpayers $1 billion. He also touted limits on property taxes that caused a drop in taxes on the median-valued home for the first time in 12 years.

But there is a more fundamental issue with the recap that handicaps Walker’s opponents.As a Republican strategist puts it:

You can’t say New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie doesn’t have a sense of humor — or a talent for self-promotion. His latest video will certainly go viral:

His bravado is engaging, but would Mitt Romney want a genuine a political superstar as his No. 2? Maybe not. But if not, there is little doubt he’ll be in a presidential race some day. Pity the boring, stiff-necked and self-reverential Republicans who will have to compete against him.

Michael Widlanski, a former journalist and Middle East negotiator, is out with a new book, “Battle for Our Minds: Western Elites and the Terror Threat.” His basic premise is that we have failed to fully appreciate the nature of our enemies, and therefore have set back our own security and opportunities for success in the war against Islamic terror. This is not just an academic exercise. In a lengthy Q and A with Right Turn he explained that, for example, in an effort not to give offense we curtail surveillance of certain mosques that may provide critical intelligence. Here is our Q and A:

Why did you write the book now — was the killing of Osama bin Laden the impetus?

This book has been building up inside me for years, like a visceral volcanic anger. Bin Laden’s death caused me to sharpen the opening sentence, because his richly deserved death came much too late. From three different angles, I watched how our best and brightest, our intellectual elites, the anti-terror forces in many countries, failed to face, much less defeat, terror — for years.

I studied and worked in America, Egypt and Israel on both sides of the fence — as a reporter, as an academic trained in Arabic and Islam and as a security official. I studied Arab terror and politics and even Jewish terror inside Israel. I looked at what moved terrorists and at what caused officials not to move. I could not escape my own anger and frustration watching how terrorists repeatedly made fools of the United States, Britain, France, Russia and even Israel. For me, there were several milestones — the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the terror escalation in the 1990’s, Israel’s deals with the PLO, the huge blow to America on 9/11, of course, and then the return to the pre-9/11 mindset, the politically correct environment in academia, in the press and most recently in the Obama administration, where even talking about Arab-Islamic terror is deemed a hate crime.