As we enter another year, many in this country and across the globe have had cause to wonder if recent events herald the end of America. It's not hard to see why, given the ongoing difficulties we've had and the hatred and anger of people in many parts of the world directed against us. Our recent financial meltdown and the biggest economic downturn in generations haven't helped, while the solutions adopted by an outgoing Republican administration, and promised by an incoming Democratic one, involving massive government financial intervention, can only give one pause. If deficits count, then this looks deadly because we're shelling out (and planning to shell out) trillions of dollars to shore up financial institutions and bail out the auto industry and, presumably, not a few other businesses now waiting in line.

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In the wake of City Councilman Joe Addabbo's recent win over controversial State Senator Serph Maltese (the former Republican Queens County leader who will shortly become a former State Senator as well), we're suddenly faced with an upcoming special election in the 32nd Councilmanic District. Sometimes it feels like these elections just never end. 

The Ozone Park based Addabbo, a Democrat who succeeded two term Republican City Councilman Al Stabile from Howard Beach, has been a likeable enough City Councilman for the western half of the Rockaway peninsula in a district that also encompasses Broad Channel, Howard Beach, Ozone Park and points north. But he's left a lot of his constituents in Rockaway feeling dissatisfied. Sure he's showed up at nearly all the big events and spent campaign and Council funds (think "member items") on outreach in Rockaway, just like other local pols. But he gave up his seat on the City Council Parks and Recreation committee, which is highly pertinent to beachfront communities like Rockaway, for the more powerful Civil Service and Labor committee when the opportunity came his way, leaving a lot of local folks feeling spurned and ignored.

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According to the Associated Press:

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - Five men charged with plotting the Sept. 11 attacks told a military judge Monday that they want to immediately confess at their war-crimes tribunal at Guantanamo Bay.

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They came by sea, as we have now learned, in small boats approaching an unguarded, vulnerable coast. Beaching their vessels without resistance they rushed into the streets, pushing locals out of their way, as they headed for their appointments with destiny and terror. For something like three days, at least ten terrorists (and maybe more) occupied civilian centers, took hostages, slaughtered civilians and held off security forces in India's most cosmopolitan city and financial center as the world looked on. Many in the U.S. and elsewhere couldn't help drawing comparisons with other terrorist attacks including our own traumatic moment on September 11th, 2001 in New York, Washington, D.C. and in the skies overhead. In the aftermath of the Mumbai massacre, some 170 (at last count) were left dead, countless others were hurt or in a state of shock, and India was reeling with recriminations and fear.

Why had these killers come? The usual reasons, of course: they were bent on finding and killing Americans, British and, as it turned out, Jews.  Not only did they seek out large hotels where the important and wealthy congregated, they targeted a small facility run by a sect of Hasidic Jews whose sole purpose was to provide a respite for backpacking Jewish kids traveling on the cheap, in the hopes of winning them back to a religious life. Lubavitcher hostels of this type are common in many places around the globe. Though they rarely win converts, they provide a respite for economy-class travelers and orthodox Jews seeking a kosher meal in distant lands. The terrorists went out of their way to find this particular place and kill its inhabitants, including the young rabbi and his wife who ran it.

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The other day some Republican activists I know asked me if I thought it a good idea to continue to go after Obama, now that he's won the presidency. The issue they had in mind was the ongoing dispute over whether Obama's Hawaii birth certificate, as posted on-line at his website, is legitimate or not. If it's not, of course, there are obvious concerns, starting with whether he can legally serve, under the Constitution, in the office to which he was elected.

Almost as serious, if he does serve and it later comes out that he wasn't qualified under the Constitution because he wasn't actually born in the U.S. (a seemingly archaic but legal requirement written into the Constitution for any president), then we will have a constitutional crisis on our hands. Even if the issue gains traction now, we could not avoid such a crisis. But it will be markedly worse if he is already governing.

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Since the recent election, a lot of ink's been spilled over whether the Republicans got what they deserved. After all they had majorities in Congress since winning national elections in 1994, a year into the Clinton administration, and they had the presidency since 2000 when Bush v. Gore was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

But in 2006, the Republican Congressional majority finally collapsed and now, in 2008, Republican presidential candidate John McCain went down in flames before Democratic political shooting star Barack Obama. With the consequent enlargement of the Democratic legislative majority the tides seem finally to have turned against the GOP. The post mortems in the media from pundits and politicians on both sides have been fast and furious.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, resident liberal columnist and author of What's the Matter with Kansas? (analyzing why Americans seem receptive to a conservative message), author Thomas Frank couldn't help crowing over what he deems the conservative collapse in the aftermath of the Obama win.

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Well, it's finally over -- and about time, too. After two years of seemingly endless campaigning and eight of partisan bickering and recriminations, the country appears to have turned an historic corner, giving us our first African-American president in a broad liberal sweep across the two major branches of government. Barack Obama, in his victory speech, brought many to tears among the tens of thousands gathered to hear him at Chicago's Grant Park as the election returns poured in.

He struck the right notes, too, graciously reaching out to John McCain and his supporters while promising to defend this nation against its enemies. For a few moments many of us who have anguished for months over the prospect of handing the Pelosi-Reid Congress a blank check to govern could forget that worry and lose ourselves in the music of this historic moment.

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For those of us who still remember World War II (either because we lived through it or because we grew up, as I did, in its immediate aftermath), what's happening today in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia looks strangely ominous. Not long ago I completed a book telling the story of a local Rockaway lady's remarkable survival as a girl of only fifteen in eastern Poland at the onset of World War II (A Raft on the River, Paul Mould Publishing, UK).

When Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia simultaneously invaded her native land to carve up and devour her country between them, little Miriam's family lost everything, including their lives. She, alone, survived to flee into the countryside and fend for herself, living off the land where she had to. Today, both Hitler's Germany and the Soviet Union are gone, of course, but Miriam's story remains to remind us of the horrors of naked nationalism when coupled with aggression.

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In 2004 local Republicans gleefully labeled former Democratic presidential aspirant and Massachussetts Senator John Kerry a "flip-flopper" for his numerous nuanced reversals. I watched with amusement at the Sugar Bowl in Breezy one evening as a group of Republican ladies pulled off their beach shoes and began rhythmically clapping them together to the refrain of "flip-flop, flip-flop" while candidate Kerry drearily intoned his message across the flat screen over the bar.

It was easy with Kerry, of course, given his tendency to sneer at his political opponents and the disdain that dripped from his voice as he droned monotonously on and on above our heads. His annoying self-righteousness was as palpable as his wannabe Kennedy hair style. But that was then and this is now.

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