Sebelius Is The Boob Who Needs Examining!

A NUMBER OF SENATORS WERE RECENTLY ASKED WOULD THEY BE WILLING TO BE SUBJECT TO THE SAME HEALTH CARE PROGRAM THEY ARE PASSING FOR 'WEE PEOPLE.' THEIR RESPONSE WAS."WE WILL THINK ABOUT IT." AND THEY DID.

IT HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED THE "KENNEDY HEALTH CARE BILL" WAS WRITTEN INTO THE NEW HEALTH CARE REFORM INITIATIVE INSURING THAT CONGRESS WILL BE 100% EXEMPT !

SO, THIS GREAT NEW HEALTH CARE PLAN IS GOOD FOR YOU BUT NOT CONGRESS. (See 1 and 1a below.)

Kim Strassel writes a tongue in cheek piece suggesting what the qualifications should be for the new job Czar/Czarina!

I proffer: Obama shuld hire one of the Dallas Cowboy Cow Girls to be our job czarina Why? Because they know how to employ their assets!(See 2 below.)

Two Republican Representatives write why the prospect of a strong recovery looks dim. (See 3 below.)

They walk amongst us - just a little pre-holiday cheer! And then more from our sport giants. Talk about turkeys! (See 4 and 4a below.)

Harry Reid needs to be returned to Nevada where he can do his own gambling. In D.C. he is busy gambling with our health and lives. (See 5 below.)

Most politicians consistently hose their constituents and are generally all wet. Meanwhile, Israel gets kudos for water conservation technology. (See 5a below.)

One's formative years do reveal a lot about one's character and development. We are a composite of our experiences. Though this article by Thomas Lipson is conjectural it nevertheless is worth a read. (See 6 below.)

Indecision can be costly. (See 7 below.)

Politicians are not listening to voters who are sending signals and it might ultimately be to their undoing.

Does this mean the prospects for a third party are gathering momentum?(See 8 and 8a below.)

More disconcerting news for Obama, as Egypt abruptly shuts down its commitment to patrolling arms smuggling in the Gaza area. Furthermore, Egypt does so without notifying either the U.S. or Israel and fails to respond to subsequent questions asking to explain. (See 9 below.)


Does Holder have a hidden agenda? Mona Charen thinks he does. (See 10 below.)

Sibelus was in tune with his times and Sebelius' strikes a bad chord. Her timing was politically disastrous, her decision was arrogant and highlights the downside of health care dispensed by bureaucratic omnipotence.

To tell below 50 women they do not need to have mammograms could have tragic consequences and indicates a decision based on monetary considerations not empirical evidence. It smacks of rationing. Sibelius is the boob that needs examining. (See 11 below.)

Dick



1) Although most people are against the ''Public Option'', many do not understand the way the government plans to use it. If the bill passes and a public option is offered as promised,, it will act as a new insurance agency. This public option insurance agency will bait citizens to reject their standing policies because it will offer the same coverage for a much lesser price. That is the trap!. Once people start shifting to the public option, the private insurance companies will have to fold for lack of customers. Not having the private choice, eventually everybody will have to go with the government public option. Now the government, with no competition, has the monopoly in its hands and will raise the prices to whatever level they want, and you have no recourse. Remember, by law you will have to have coverage, and they will get your premiums directly from your bank account.


Does this remind you of a domino effect? These dominoes seem to have been placed in perfect order so they all fall down.

1a)Democrats Woo Voters With New Benefits: Senate Leaders Recognize Unease Over Health Bill Is High Going Into 2010 Election; GOP Says Country Can't Afford Overhaul.
By GREG HITT and NAFTALI BENDAVID


Senate Democrats touted the immediate benefits their health bill would bring to some Americans, aware that the cost and reach of the bill may already be turning off some voters ahead of the 2010 elections.



Should the Senate pass the bill?

Many of the benefits of the bill, such as the new government subsidies that would help lower-income Americans buy insurance, won't take effect for several years, while some of the tax changes to raise money take effect sooner.

But Democrats pointed to popular changes for consumers that kick in quickly. They include an immediate ban on insurers imposing lifetime caps on benefits and a ban on terminating coverage because an enrollee falls ill.

"After all the debate, we want to show tangible results to people," Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic whip, said Thursday. Sen. Chris Dodd (D., Conn.) said the changes would help "build support for the bill" by giving lawmakers something to take home immediately. "People are wondering what you've done for them," said Mr. Dodd, who faces a tough re-election battle in 2010.

The Senate is moving toward a pivotal vote Saturday that would seek to shut off the first Republican efforts on the Senate floor to block action on President Barack Obama's top domestic priority.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid unveiled the health bill late Wednesday. It would spend $848 billion over 10 years to extend insurance to more than 30 million Americans who lack coverage. The Congressional Budget Office projected it would reduce the federal budget deficit by $130 billion over a decade, in part thanks to new taxes.

Republicans called that projection shaky and said the U.S. can't afford a broad expansion of health benefits. At a conference of Republican governors, Texas Gov. Rick Perry said the bill -- which expands Medicaid, the federal-state program for the poor -- would force states to spend more and raise taxes.

"Many of these Democrat governors up for re-election this year are facing some pretty massive budget gaps," Mr. Perry said. "This bill they're debating in the United States Senate today is just going to make it worse."

Senate Democratic leaders said they hoped the immediate benefits would help corral the support of wavering Democrats, including centrists looking for reasons to back the legislation. Those benefits in the Senate bill also include tax credits to help small businesses buy insurance, and new assistance to help defray the cost of prescription drugs for seniors.

Mr. Reid crafted the legislation over the past several weeks, at a time when polls showed voters were anxious about the direction of the White House-backed initiative on Capitol Hill. In a presentation to Senate Democrats this week, Mr. Reid, himself up for re-election, billed the changes as "immediate deliverables," according to 22-page summary of his presentation.


Speaking to reporters Thursday, Mr. Reid portrayed the legislation as a historic opportunity to make good on a decades-old goal of the Democratic Party. "We've been working to reform health care since the first half of the last century," Mr. Reid said. "We're now in the home stretch."

Republicans wasted little time unleashing attacks on the Reid bill. Sen. Judd Gregg (R., N.H.) contended Democrats were artificially lowering the cost by acting separately on legislation that would suspend already-planned cuts in Medicare payments to the nation's physicians.


The House Thursday approved a $210 billion bill that would prevent a 21% drop in physician payments slated to take effect in January. The Senate voted 53-47 against proceeding to a similar bill in October.

Mr. Gregg, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, said the Senate bill "is the wrong solution for America's health-care crisis, and it would have dire fiscal consequences for the future generations who will be saddled with the costs of this massive new entitlement."

Republicans argued that a vote to shut off their delaying tactics was tantamount to voting for the underlying legislation, a notion Democratic leaders disputed. "This is a vote to go to the bill, to begin debate," said Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad (D., N.D.). "This doesn't conclude anything."

—Peter Wallsten and Patrick Yoest contributed to this article.

2)Help Wanted : The Democratic Party seeks a wildly optimistic individual to oversee a national jobs-creation program.
By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

Wanted: National Jobs Czar

Employer: The Democratic Party

Job Type: Crisis Management/Complex Mathematics/Mental Health Professional

Start Date: Now. Like, Right Now.

Description: The Democratic Party seeks a wildly optimistic individual to oversee a national jobs-creation program. Jobs can be real, or not, so long as the public thinks the party is "doing something." The National Jobs Creator will have at his disposal Congress to pass new "jobs legislation" (aka The It-Is-Not-Another-Stimulus Act of 2009).

The NJC will oversee a dynamic team whose side responsibilities include selling this to the public and saving our behinds in next year's election. This is a potential career status position.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Masters Degree from an accredited program in communications/spin. Candidate must be able to explain to the public why "new jobs legislation" is necessary despite assurances the "old jobs legislation"—a $787 billion "stimulus"—is working. Applicant must demonstrate ability to explain why, despite a global recession, we continued socializing health care, and only just noticed that, wow, Houston, we have a problem. (Candidate might consider researching McDonnell, Bob, Gov.-elect of Virginia, who just kicked us in an election and did it talking about "jobs." That got us wondering.)

Candidate must explain the "new jobs legislation" to a wary public. Candidate must clarify how extending unemployment benefits will create jobs; how extending health insurance for the unemployed will create jobs; how taxing financial transactions to pay for this will create jobs. Candidate is responsible for immediately restoring party credibility on this issue, despite all past failed Keynesian spending and, let's be honest, some (holy moly!) embarrassing stimulus "job counting."

• Ph.D. in imaginary numbers: Candidate must demonstrate a better ability than those currently in charge to translate past stimulus pork into current countable jobs. Applicant must show working knowledge of fictitious congressional districts. (Example of interview question: Show how, using the white board and string theory, an $890 shoe order creates nine new jobs.) Candidate must be able to dismantle audits showing the White House's 640,000 "saved or created" jobs are as real as the Easter Bunny. These skills will also prove necessary in outlining the benefits of "new jobs legislation." Candidate must be able to explain, numerically and cosmically, why 10.2% unemployment is no different than the 8% ceiling we promised.

• Expert knowledge of "the deficit," a $1.4 trillion concept we like to describe as "investing in the future." When the White House says it will apply unused TARP money to pay down the deficit, and Congress says it will use unused TARP money to help fund a "new jobs program," candidate must make both true at the same time.

Candidate is required to conduct hourly meetings with Blue Dogs who, after that health-care vote, are so freaking out just because we are asking them to also charge a Medicare doctor fix, a highway bill, and possibly our "new jobs legislation" to the federal credit card. Candidate must explain to Blue Dogs they lost their reputation years ago.

• Significant understanding of the concept of "saved or created jobs." The party is aware no legitimate economics department recognizes this theory, so we do not require a degree. Candidate must explain to public that it is just not true that no part of the country has seen job creation. The federal government has hired at least 25,000 new employees since January.

• Profound people skills. Candidate must be able to walk into a circular firing squad and calm volatile personalities that range from panicked to uncorked to dazed.

Example 1: When a Wisconsin congressman (who wrote the stimulus bill) loses his cool because the administration came up with this "jobs saved or created" thingy and is now making said congressman look bad with its "job" counts, the candidate must say, "There, there; 40 years is longer than most people get to serve in the House."

Example 2: When a vice president pops off that the stimulus is working "better" than we "expected," candidate must pack No. 2 off to a golf course.

Example 3: When the White House director of "stimulus" communications becomes so frazzled by bogus job numbers that he responds to the press: "Who knows, man? Who really knows?" candidate must re-hire.

Disqualifications: Candidates with an interest in pro-growth policies, or a desire to provide certainty to investors, consumers or the business community. Candidates who believe the private sector creates jobs.

Salary: The balance of the "quick hit" $787 billion stimulus or the balance of last year's "temporary" TARP program—whichever is greater in 2050. Subject to approval by pay czar Ken Feinberg.

To Apply: Electronic submissions preferred (our phones are a bit busy). Résumé required. Letters of recommendation encouraged from Jimmy Carter, Paul Krugman, or the dude who oversaw Japan's "Lost Decade."


3)Why No One Expects a Strong Recovery:

When you repeal sound economic policies you repeal their results..
By JEB HENSARLING AND PAUL RYAN

One of the strongest factors promoting recovery from our 10 post-World War II recessions was an unshakable conviction that, regardless of the immediate trouble, the American economy is fundamentally strong. Based on this underlying confidence, recessions and recoveries roughly conformed to the principle of the bigger the bust, the bigger the boom, and vice versa.

Thus real growth in the four quarters following postwar recessions averaged 6.6% and 4.3% over the following five years. As the chief economist for Barclays, Dean Maki, said in this newspaper on Aug. 19, "You can't find a single deep recession that has been followed by a moderate recovery."

That may no longer hold. Since the current recession has lasted a record seven quarters—and has been marked by a near-record average GDP decline of 1.8% per quarter—we should be witnessing the start of a powerful and sustained recovery. Yet forecasts of a 2% recovery in growth are only one-fourth as strong as postwar experience suggests. Meanwhile, unemployment sits at a generational high of 10.2%.

Why all the pessimism? The source appears to be a growing fear that the federal government is retreating from the free-market economic principles of the last half-century, and in particular the strong growth policies that began under Ronald Reagan. A review of the economic policies instituted by President Barack Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress lends credibility to this concern.

Exhibit A is the economic stimulus package signed into law by President Barack Obama in February. Even among previous stimulus efforts, the 2009 stimulus stands out for its ineffective targeting and sheer size. With interest, it is $1.1 trillion, double the size of Roosevelt's New Deal spending as a percentage of GDP.

Virtually none of the stimulus spending was directed towards encouraging broad-based private investment, and thus failed to encourage true economic growth. An analysis by economists John F. Cogan, John B. Taylor and Volker Wieland, published on this page on Sept. 17, suggests that while the stimulus succeeded in temporarily and marginally increasing disposable personal income, it left personal consumption spending virtually unchanged.

Meanwhile, $112 billion of its $300 billion tax relief was in the form of payments to people who paid no income taxes. These payments, akin to a one-time welfare check, do not change the incentives to save and invest, and do not effectively promote broad-based economic growth.

Exhibit B is tax policy going forward. It is a near certainty that Democratic-controlled Congress will allow most of the tax cuts of 2001-2003 to expire on Dec. 31, 2010. Marginal income tax rates, capital gains rates, dividend rates and death-tax rates will increase—significantly. Hardest hit by these increases will be small businesses that file under the individual income tax code as sub-chapter S corporations, partnerships and proprietorships. Yet these are the very people whose investment and hiring decisions either drive or starve recoveries.

Exhibit C is the administration's intervention in the GM and Chrysler reorganizations. Upsetting decades of accepted bankruptcy law, the administration leveraged TARP funds to place unsecured and lower priority creditors like the United Auto Workers union in front of secured and higher priority creditors. This intervention has arguably had the effect of stifling investment as wary investors watched political considerations trump the rule of law.

As Warren Buffett said at the time, "We don't want to say to somebody who lends and gets a secured position that the secured position doesn't mean anything." Gary Parr, deputy chair of the mergers and acquisitions firm Lazard Freres & Co., stated the problem more directly. "I can't imagine the markets will function properly if you are always wondering if the government is going to step in and change the game," he was quoted in The Atlantic Online in September.

Health care, the administration's signature issue, is Exhibit D. Disregarding its impact on quality and access, its plan will surely cost well over $1 trillion over the next decade. The House-passed version includes an 8% "pay or play" payroll tax and a half-trillion dollar surtax on incomes over $500,000, much of which will strike small business. Both taxes will tend to depress investment and the creation of new jobs.

And looming down the road is the proposed cap-and-tax legislation, which will cost taxpayers $800 billion.

Beyond instilling tremendous political uncertainty into economic decision-making, these policies ensure that deficits will shatter all previous records. In the Office of Management and Budget's 2009 Mid-Session Review, the administration projects a decade of deficits averaging 3.3 times the postwar norm of 1.8%. Yet its projections assume that interest rates will be less than half the postwar norm for interest rates, and that economic growth will be almost 10% higher than the high-growth 1980s. Never in the postwar era have such high deficits, low interest rates and high growth rates occurred simultaneously.

If one substitutes the Blue Chip Economic Forecast's interest-rate forecast for that of the administration, deficits will increase by an additional $1.2 trillion over the administration's projected deficits. If the next decade's interest rates climb to match those of the 1980s, then the deficit would increase another $5.3 trillion. If higher interest rates then slow economic growth, the impact on the deficit would be much worse.

Anyone who believes the Democratic Party's recently expressed concern over the deficit should look at the relentless growth of spending on its watch. Total nondefense spending set an all-time record this year—20.2% of GDP—double federal spending as a percentage of GDP during the height of the New Deal in 1934. Even without this year's stimulus bill and last year's bailout of the financial system, nondefense discretionary spending authority still grew by 10.1% in fiscal year 2009 and is projected to rise by another 12% in fiscal year 2010. Forty-three cents of every dollar of this spending is borrowed money.

Given the magnitude of federal borrowing, there is good reason to expect higher interest rates and strong inflationary pressures in the future.

It is hardly surprising that many investors are reaching the conclusion that this administration and Congress favor policies that virtually guarantee the economy will not return to the climate of low interest rates, benign inflation and strong growth that we knew from 1982-2007. These investors understand a simple truth that current Washington policy makers fail to grasp: When you repeal the Reagan economic program, you repeal its results.

Messrs. Hensarling and Ryan are Republican representatives from Texas and Wisconsin, respectively.

4)You can't make this stuff up!


NEW YORK - resident Kathy Evans brought humiliation to her friends and family
when she set a new standard for stupidity with her appearance on the popular TV show, 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.'

Evans, a 32-year-old wife and mother of two, got stuck on the first question
and proceeded to make what fans of the show are dubbing 'the absolute worst use
of lifelines ever.' After being introduced to the show's host Meredith Vieira, Evans was posed with a typically easy initial $100 question.

The question was: 'Which of the following is the largest?'

A) A Peanut
B) An Elephant
C) The Moon
D) Hey, who you calling large?

Immediately Mrs. Evans was struck with an all consuming panic as she did not
readily know the answer. 'Hmm, oh boy, that's a toughie,' said Evans,
as Vieira did her level best to hide her disbelief.'I mean, I'm sure I've heard of some of these things before, but I have no idea how large they would be.'

Evans made the decision to use the first of her three lifelines, the 50/50.
Answers A and D were removed, leaving her to decide which was bigger, an elephant or the moon. However, faced with an incredibly easy question, Evans still remained unsure.

'Oh! It removed the two I was leaning towards!' exclaimed Evans... 'Darn. I think I better phone a friend.'Mrs. Evans asked to be connected with her friend
Betsy, who is an office assistant.

'Hi Betsy! How are you? This is Kathy! I'm on TV!' said Evans, wasting the first seven seconds of her call.'Ok, I got an important question. Which of the following is the largest? B, an elephant, or C, the moon. 15 seconds hon.' Betsy quickly replied that the answer was C, the moon. Evans proceeded to argue with her friend for the remaining ten seconds. 'Betsy, are you sure?' said Evans. 'How sure are you? Duh, that can't be it.'

To everyone's astonishment, the moronic Evans declined to take her friend's
advice. 'I just don't know if I can trust Betsy. She's not all that bright.
So I think I'd like to ask the audience,' said Evans.

Asked to vote on the correct answer, the audience returned 98% in favor of
answer C, 'The Moon.' Having used up all her lifelines, Evans then made the dumbest choice of her life.

'Wow, seems like everybody is against what I'm thinking,' said the
too-stupid-to-live Evans. 'But you know, sometimes you just got to go with
your gut. So, let's see... I'm going to have to go with B, an elephant. Final answer.'

Evans sat before the dumbfounded audience, the only one waiting with bated breath -
and was told that she was wrong, and that the answer was in fact, C, 'The Moon.'
Caution...they walk among us!





They Walk Among Us!
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Some guy bought a new fridge for his house. To get rid of his old fridge, he put it in his front yard and hung a sign on it saying: 'Free to good home. You want it, you take it.' For three days the fridge sat there without anyone looking twice.
He eventually decided that people were too mistrustful of this deal. So he changed the sign to read: 'Fridge for sale $50.'

The next day someone stole it!

They walk amongst us!
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I stopped at Mc Donald’s and ordered some fries. The girl behind the counter said “would you like some fries with that?”

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*One day I was walking down the beach with some friends when someone shouted....
'Look at that dead bird!' Someone looked up at the sky and said....'where?'

They walk among us!

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While looking at a house, my brother asked the estate agent which direction was north because he didn't want the sun waking him up every morning. She asked, 'Does the sun rise in the north?' My brother explained that the sun rises in the east
and has for sometime. She shook her head and said,'Oh, I don't keep up with all that stuff......'

They Walk Among Us!
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My colleague and I were eating our lunch in our cafeteria, when we overheard an admin girl talking about the sunburn she got on her weekend drive to the beach.
She drove down in a convertible, but said she 'didn't think she'd get sunburned
because the car was moving'.

They Walk Among Us!
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My sister has a lifesaving tool in her car which is designed to cut through a seat belt if she gets trapped. She keeps it in the car trunk.

They Walk Among Us!
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I was hanging out with a friend when we saw a woman with a nose ring attached to an earring by a chain. My friend said, 'Ouch! The chain must ripout every time she turns her head!" I had to explain that a person's nose and ear
remain the same distance apart no matter which way the head is turned...

They Walk Among Us !
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I couldn't find my luggage at the airport baggage area and. went to the lost luggage office and reported the loss. The woman there smiled and told me not to worry
because she was a trained professional and said I was in good hands. 'Now,' she asked me, 'Has your plane arrived yet?'....(I work with professionals like this.)

They Walk Among Us!
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While working at a pizza parlor I observed a man ordering a small pizza to go. He appeared to be alone and the cook asked him if he would like it cut
into 4 pieces or 6. He thought about it for some time then said 'Just cut it into 4 pieces; I don't think I'm hungry enough to eat 6 pieces.

They Walk Among Us!

4a)Boobus Americanus - H.L. Mencken

1.. Chicago Cubs outfielder Andre Dawson on being a role model: "I want' all dem kids to do what I do, to look up to me. I wan' all the kids to copulate me."

2. New Orleans Saint RB George Rogers when asked about the upcoming season: "I want to rush for 1,000 or 1,500 yards, whichever comes first."

3. And, upon hearing Joe Jacobi of the 'Skin's say: "I'd run over my own mother to win the Super Bowl," Matt Millen of the Raiders said: "To win, I'd run over Joe's Mom, too."

4. Torrin Polk, University of Houston receiver, on his coach, John Jenkins: "He treats us like men. He lets us wear earrings.."

5. Football commentator and former player Joe Theismann: "Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein."

6. Senior basketball player at the University of Pittsburgh : "I'm going to graduate on time, no matter how long it takes." (Now that is beautiful)

7. Bill Peterson, a Florida State football coach: "You guys line up alphabetically by height.." And, "You guys pair up in groups of three, and then line up in a circle."

8. Boxing promoter Dan Duva on Mike Tyson going to prison: "Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton ."

9. Stu Grimson, Chicago Blackhawks left wing, explaining why he keeps a color photo of himself above his locker: "That's so when I forget how to spell my name, I can still find my clothes."

10. Lou Duva, veteran boxing trainer, on the Spartan training regime of heavyweight Andrew Golota: "He's a guy who gets up at six o'clock in the morning, regardless of what time it is."

11. Chuck Nevitt , North Carolina State basketball player, explaining to Coach Jim Valvano why he appeared nervous at practice: "My sister's expecting a baby, and I don't know if I'm going to be an uncle or an aunt." (I wonder if his IQ ever hit room temperature in January)

12. Frank Layden, Utah Jazz president, on a former player: "I told him, 'Son, what is it with you? Is it ignorance or apathy?' He said, 'Coach, I don't know and I don't care.'"

13.. Shelby Metcalf, basketball coach at Texas A&M, recounting what he told a player who received four F's and one D: "Son, looks to me like you're spending too much time on one subject."

14. In the words of NC State great Charles Shackelford "I can go to my left or right, I am amphibious."


5)The Foundation

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." --Thomas Jefferson


Harry Reid claims his 2,000-page bill will reduce the deficit. He's quite the comedian. It's an accepted fact that no government program comes in on budget, and this maxim likely won't change with the health care legislation that recently passed the House. Republican analysis of the bill in the Senate Budget Committee reveals that a more realistic price tag for the House version, after the benefit provisions are figured in, comes to $3 trillion over 10 years, not $1 trillion as Democrats claim. The disparity comes from the fact that the taxes and fees meant to pay for the bill occur immediately, while major aspects of "reform" won't be implemented until at least 2013. Thus, the true cost of the plan won't reveal itself until well after the current president has stood for re-election.

Despite Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) assurances that the bill will lower health care costs, another report released this week by the nonpartisan Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services found that the House plan would actually raise costs by $289 billion over 10 years. Furthermore, Medicare would be cut by half a trillion dollars, leading to reduced benefits and services.

On that note, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-IA) introduced the Senate's 2,074-page, $849 billion version of the health care takeover plan. Reid has laid out an ambitious plan to pass HarryCare by Christmas.

The Senate bill clocks in a tad cheaper than the House version in part because many major provisions, such as the public option, would be delayed until 2014 -- one year later than the House bill. Reid also claims the bill will reduce the federal deficit by $650 billion in its second 10 years. A 2,000-page bill will reduce the deficit? That Reid is quite the comedian. Besides, while the Congressional Budget Office says the bill will reduce the deficit by $130 billion over 10 years, CBO cautions that its effect on the deficit over the following decade would be "subject to substantial uncertainty." That's comforting, isn't it?

Notably, the Senate bill includes a 40 percent tax on high-deductible "Cadillac" insurance plans (though, naturally, Congress' Cadillac plan is exempt) as opposed to the House's tax on the "rich." It also includes a 5 percent tax on elective cosmetic surgeries (how will Nancy feel about that?), which apparently helps pay for providing -- surprise -- federal subsidies for abortion.

Reid wants to hold a vote to begin debate as early as this weekend. He has "promised" not to use the procedural tactic of reconciliation, which would allow him to pass the bill with only 51 votes instead of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster -- but experience shows how little we should trust Democrats' promises.

As for that prized debate, Harkin referred to a Republican call to read the full bill on the Senate floor as a political tactic, and he threatens that Democrats will hold a live quorum to keep everyone in the chamber while the reading is taking place -- which sounds awfully like a political tactic to us.

It's interesting that both parties seem to view the public reading of the bill as some sort of parliamentary game. Perhaps if public readings of proposed legislation took place all of the time, we would actually know what Congress is up to. What a novel idea.

Democrat senators who pride themselves as being deficit hawks will have a tough choice to make in the coming days and weeks. Will they support HarryCare, which makes them look like hypocrites when they face the voters next year and in 2012? Or will they do the right thing and stop this runaway entitlement before it shoots out of the gate?

The BIG Lie
Where is the constitutional authority for a federal mandate that individuals must buy health insurance?

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) says that one's easy: "The very first enumerated power gives the power to provide for the common defense and the general welfare. So it's right on, right on the front end."

For those who don't follow Sen. Merkley's brilliant explication, he refers to the Constitution's Preamble, which, among several other things, says that the Constitution was written to "promote the general Welfare," though the Preamble doesn't list enumerated powers.

Furthermore, James Madison, primary author of the Constitution, vehemently disagreed, writing, "If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions."

Thomas Jefferson likewise stated that if Congress could "do anything they please to provide for the general welfare ... [i]t would reduce the whole instrument [the Constitution] to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please." For the simpletons in Congress, Jefferson concluded, "Certainly no such universal power was meant to be given them." Regardless of what Senator Jeff Merkley says.

This Week's 'Braying Jackass' Award
"We even have blacks voting against the health care bill. You can't vote against health care and call yourself a black man." --race hustler Jesse Jackson, calling out Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL), the only member of the Congressional Black Caucus who dared to stray from the Democrat Plantation by voting against PelosiCare

Faith and Family: Shut Up, She Explained
Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO), like every other Democrat, could use a constitutional education. Oddly enough, though, the part of the Constitution DeGette needs brushing up on is the Left's favorite part: The First Amendment. Leftists have abused it for decades to hammer their agenda into our laws and culture. But they have also intentionally ignored its guarantee of the free exercise of religion. To them, the Constitution is just a scrap of paper written by dead white men. It's old and irrelevant today except for the few phrases that can be used to promote their socialism.

Regarding the health care legislative monstrosity working its way through Congress and the input of religious groups, DeGette said that "religiously-affiliated groups ... should be shut out of the process" because of their opposition to federal funding of abortions. "Last I heard, we had separation of church and state in this country," she sulked. "I've got to say that I think the Catholic bishops and all of the other groups shouldn't have input."

As Family Research Council President Tony Perkins observed, "According to her, if a group of people who are in association with one another because of their Christian faith, they should not have a voice in the crafting of public policy. What she is asserting is that if your ideas and actions are a product of your faith, you're a second class citizen and your voice should not be heard."

Notable Legislation
The House passed Medicare "doc fix" by a vote of 243-183 Thursday. The bill would permanently fix the way doctors who provide care for Medicare patients are reimbursed. The projected cost of the fix is $210 billion over 10 years and it doesn't include a way to pay for it, meaning that while Barack Obama has changed his tune and is now decrying the deficit, the House is busy adding to it.

Legacy of the American Revolution
"Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood. ... A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever. Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives." --John Adams

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5a)Israeli Companies Unveil Water-Saving Technologies

Israeli companies will unveil this month an array of new technologies that will conserve and maximize use of the world's most valuable resource: water, Reuters reported. The systems range from a drone that flies 900 feet above ground to detect water leaks, to a petroleum gas storage system that sits on the ocean floor. Water technology is one of the things Israel does best. Two-thirds of the country is arid, and its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, famously declared that Israel would only survive if it could "make the desert bloom." Since then, Israeli companies have been pioneers in the field, and many of their developments have penetrated the global market.

6)Obama's Expatriate Years
By Thomas Lifson

Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the crucial years Barack Obama spent growing up in Jakarta, Indonesia from 1967 to 1971, ages 6 to 10 in his life. These formative years, in which a child first spends significant time in the wider world beyond his family environment, must have taught him many lessons about America -- some of them very unpleasant, given the particular situation of his family.


It would have been brutally difficult for any child, including young Barry Soetoro as he was then known, to be uprooted from Honolulu, where his single mother raised him with her parents' aid, and plunked down in a completely different culture. But his family's circumstances were very different from other Americans' then living as fellow expatriates in the teeming and desperately poor third-world metropolis. In this set of circumstances lies a possible explanation for Obama's animosity toward corporate America and its executives.


After being deserted by Barack Obama, Sr., Stanley Ann Dunham Obama obtained a divorce and then married another foreign graduate student, Lolo Soetoro from Indonesia. In 1967, Lolo needed to return to Indonesia and, according to Dreams From My Father, was conscripted to fight the communist insurgency. Afterwards, he took a job with Mobil Oil. However, the job was not a high-paying executive position such as was usually occupied by expatriate employees dispatched overseas. Instead, it involved smoothing affairs with governmental and other local entities -- very much a support staff function of the type performed by much lower-paid local employees.


Relatively few Americans are familiar with the overseas lifestyle enjoyed by American corporate expatriates, particularly during the 3rd quarter of the 20th century, when the dollar was strong and America's companies were the unchallenged world leaders of most industries. In the long postwar boom, as American businesses expanded overseas, they faced many problems that enticed their able executive and technical staff to travel to far-off countries, especially poor ones, and manage local operations that frequently were more lucrative and faster-growing than those in the more mature home market. As a result, compensation packages grew to include often-lavish allowances for luxurious residences with American-style amenities, private schools for children, and club memberships for families at luxury recreation facilities. And, of course, there were servants in the low-wage countries.


Any global corporation -- American, German, Japanese, British, or Korean -- needs to maintain a clear class structure, distinguishing expatriate careerists from local employees hired on the spot. Because the expatriates incur many extra costs and inconveniences, they are usually rewarded far more than locals who may even be performing similar tasks, but who lack the background and expert knowledge the expatriates bring from home.


Given the depth of poverty of Indonesia in the late 1960s, the gap between the locally-based staff and the American oil company executives and technical staff resident in Jakarta must have been huge. With a young Caucasian-American wife, a young stepson, and his own daughter Maya, born in 1970, it is highly likely that the Soetoro and his family were invited to functions at places like the American Club of Jakarta, where they saw a lavish lifestyle enjoyed by the Caucasian corporate elite. This was a lifestyle denied to them, and a universe apart from the abject poverty of most Jakartans.

Any young child seeing other children enjoying stuff that is out of bounds to him experiences real pain. Being told that the other kids have stuff because their fathers are American while his stepfather is not would no doubt fuel particularly acute resentments. Seeing (and probably being told) that he still had far more wealth than the local kids made the lesson in class structure doubly painful.


The class structure of rich white Americans on top must have grated on Obama very roughly. This could well be the moment in which deep resentments were planted.


There is some anecdotal evidence that Barry Soetoro had a rough time of it during these years. An illuminating Al Jazeera news report interviews a classmate of his in the second school he attended in Jakarta, an elite public school serving a wealthy district.

According to Bandung Winardijanto, Barry Soetoro was "naughty," particularly to girls...so much so that he was once tied to a tree as a means of restraint. Once, when running away from some girls he was harassing, Barry ran through and destroyed a bamboo fence on the school grounds. One anecdote does not a troubled childhood make. But coming on top of abandonment by his biological father, the entry of a new stepfather, and being uprooted to Indonesia on a tight budget pegged to local living standards, little Barry Soetoro had plenty of reason to act out.


So if Barack Obama sees America as a deeply flawed, even shameful nation, it should not be too surprising. His class resentments were formed early and went deep during his expatriate years.

Thomas Lifson is editor and publisher of American Thinker.

7)Obama's Indecision
By Ken Blackwell

"Cost of indecision about Afghanistan is mounting." That's not a headline in Human Events or some conservative blog. It's the title of a column by the dean of liberal Washington pundits, David Broder. Even David Broder is concerned about President Obama's failure to decide on a proper course of action in what the president himself called "a war of necessity."


Broder points to the drawn-out indecision as making the war on the ground more dangerous. He believes that the American people and, most significantly, America's allies, are being demoralized by what the White House calls a process.


Our NATO allies joined us in Afghanistan because the U.S. had been attacked by al-Qaeda. It was an acid test of the NATO alliance: For the first time since 1949, NATO went to war. Can we afford this extended failure to act?


What will become of NATO, the most successful example of Democratic Party leadership? Let's not forget that it was Harry Truman and his party who put NATO together. Ohio's "Mr. Republican," Sen. Bob Taft, wanted no part of NATO. That's why Ike challenged Taft and beat him for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination.


All of that is now at risk. Well, liberal Obama supporters say that Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai is corrupt. Right. And have you heard that Churchill drank too much? That's what opponents of a forceful U.S. policy in World War II said in defending their indecision. The Karzai regime is guilty of human rights abuses, liberals say. I wonder how long the allies considered Joe Stalin's crimes before pledging aid to "the Russian people."


After Hitler's unprovoked attack on the USSR on June 22, 1941, Churchill responded with speed. "If Hitler invaded Hell," said the Prime Minister, a lifelong anti-communist, "I would at least make favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."


Al-Qaeda did not invade hell; they invaded our homeland. We had the full support of NATO in going after them where they lived -- Afghanistan. Even the French rushed to our side in pressing that war.


This is the war that candidate Obama accused George Bush of neglecting. He charged that Bush "took his eye off the ball" to pursue the destruction of Saddam Hussein. Well?


Now Obama seems unable to even find the ball. We should not be surprised. In early 2008, candidate Obama produced a 52-second YouTube video to send to the "Peace Caucus" attendees in Iowa.


You have only to google "52 seconds" and "Obama" and you can watch it. Candidate Obama promises not to "weaponize space." He seems unaware that ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads have been traveling through space since 1957 -- four years before this youthful and inexperienced candidate was born. He pledges "a world without nuclear weapons." So did Reagan. But Reagan would make sure that the U.S. possessed a nuclear shield -- his famous Strategic Defense Initiative -- before lowering our nuclear sword.


Notice how this most fluent of speakers stumbles over the word quadrennial. It means he's reading a script. No harm in that. Many candidates do. But it also means he had not spent enough time in the corridors of power even to recognize the word. QDR -- the quadrennial defense review -- is a phrase as familiar to national security experts as GDP -- gross domestic product -- is to budget analysts.


Obama was unprepared then. He's still unprepared. Harry Truman was also a liberal Democrat thrust suddenly into the White House. But Harry could make a decision. He put a sign on his desk: "The Buck Stops Here." Obama should read that sign.


Ken Blackwell is a senior fellow at the Family Research Council and a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

8)Americans Are Messaging Each Other 'S.O.S.'
By Lee Cary

In many and varied ways, Americans are tapping out the international distress signal to each other since Washington, D.C. isn't listening.


To all except the most zealous supporters of the Democratic Party, the intentions of the party in power have become clear in less than a year. It's also clear that there's not much we citizens can do about it until the 2010 elections. For now, we hunker down and watch the train wreck in slow motion. This is not defeatism. For now, it's reality.


Meanwhile, the noise surrounding the decline of the U.S. economy has taken on a contradictory surrealism of sorts.


In the Globe And Mail, economist Nouriel Roubini writes,
The story of the U.S. is, indeed, one of two economies. There is a smaller one that is slowly recovering and a larger one that is still in a deep and persistent downturn ... So, while the United States may technically be close to the end of a severe recession, most of America is facing a near-depression. Little wonder, then, that few Americans believe that what walks like a duck and quacks like a duck is actually the phoenix of recovery.
On the flip side, Law & Order actor Sam Waterston, a certified liberal, narrates a financial firm's TV ad wherein he suggests that the recession is showing signs of being over. He mentions "green shoots" and hints that now's the time to jump back into the market. Of course, it's all qualified with maybes and could bes. Most of us are not seeing short shoots by a long shot.


The president has recently declared himself concerned about the federal deficit. It rings as hollow as if Willie Sutton had said, "I've stopped robbing banks, even though I know that's where the money is and I still like saying 'stick em' up.'" The national debt will climb boldly through the foreseeable future. It's no longer the elephant in the room. It is the room.


Meanwhile, to divert our attention, NYC will pitch the big tent that'll host a three-ring international show trial. The media circus will keep people entertained for months while the dollar shrinks and inflation stirs. It will be a perversion of Bob Hope's honorable gift to the U.S. military across many holidays and continents: Use a show to take their minds off the war.


Those Americans who align themselves with the GOP have watched their elected officials awaken to the warning signs many of us saw back during the election. Now Senator Lindsey Graham offers sound-bite criticism in his questioning of Attorney General Eric Holder, a man he once voted to confirm. Graham thinks the NYC terrorist trial is a bad idea. Like Detective John McClane, who in the movie Die Hard finally manages to alert the police to a hostage situation by dropping a terrorist's body on a patrol car from several stories up, our message to Graham is "Welcome to the party, pal." His friend John McCain, who wouldn't use candidate Obama's middle name during the campaign, is now so bold as to say the s-word: socialism. Welcome to the party, John.


In many and varied voices, Americans tapped out their S.O.S. to Democrat politicians at town hall meetings during the summer recess. Congressman Alan Grayson (D-FL) is the poster-boy for the overall discounting of constituents' opinions. We've written letters, waved homemade signs, phoned congressional offices, and gathered in large groups. But the train slows not.


Fact is, all that remains for the wreck to begin is for Democrats to make peace with each other, since they've had all the votes they need for a year. It's just a matter of lining them up with the proper promises, threats, and payoffs. Persuasion, Chicago-style.


Most of us probably have a friend or two who explained his or her pending vote for Obama by offering assurances that Obama would move to the center if elected and govern in bipartisan cooperation with a Republican Congress. That analysis looks silly and naïve in retrospect.


So it's neither to Republican nor Democrat politicians that many Americans are tapping out their S.O.S. We're messaging each other. Occasionally, even complete strangers. The angst felt by many for the future of the country, and for some the future that awaits children and grandchildren, grows daily. There are fewer jokes on the street about Obama than there were about Bush. For many of us, none of this has a humorous edge to it. Satire, occasionally. But humor, so little now as to be none.


Now that Joe Biden's caravans have gone to running over people and things, already killing one, it's even hard to find much that's funny about the guy assigned to ride herd on the impact of the stimulus bill. It's an impact now being felt in jobs saved and jobs created within imaginary congressional districts. Forrest Gump would be ashamed of the accounting.


It's clear that the clowns are in charge, and they're quickly giving away the circus.


So we're messaging each other, tapping out . . . _ _ _ . . . to the like-minded, regardless of any political party proclivity, any status in life or community, any vocation, any color, anything. Their name is Legion, for there are many of them. And their numbers are growing.


This should alarm the career politicians of both parties, for it makes their future much less predictable.

8a)Economy Is Weak, Voters Are Angry -- Time for Third Party?
By Mort Kondracke

‘The mood of America is glum. Two-thirds of the public is dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country" and voters' anti-incumbent mood is approaching 1994 and 2006 levels, when control of Congress changed hands.

So reported the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press on Nov. 11, summarizing its latest poll.

I think there's reason to believe that the public's anger is even deeper than Pew's estimate because voters believe - correctly - that "the way things are going" is not getting better.

If so, and with Republicans and Democrats fighting all the time and improving nothing, there's an opening for a third-party challenge as strong as Ross Perot's in 1992.

Running against deficits, free trade and the inadequacies of the two major parties, the quirky industrialist led the field with 39 percent of the vote in June 1992, dropping to just 18.9 percent in November because he torpedoed his own campaign.

The likeliest figure to seize upon this opening is populist demagogue (and self-styled "Mr. Independent") Lou Dobbs, formerly of CNN, so let's hope a better alternative appears - or the direction of the country improves.

But, right now, the prospects are dismal. My favorite economic guru, David Smick, editor of International Economy magazine, summarized them in a speech last week at the Colony Club of New York, soon to be excerpted in Commentary magazine.

"Americans are worried," he said, "about a pending national fiscal nightmare that could doom the U.S. economy to slow growth and second-rate status.

"They instinctively sense we may be becoming like Britain after the Second World War, quickly fading in relevance, our currency losing credibility, our industrial and entrepreneurial edge dulled, our people deeply frustrated."

For one thing, he said, for unemployment to fall from 10.2 percent to 5 percent, the economy would have to produce 250,000 jobs a month for the next five years, whereas the average monthly job growth rate over the past 20 years has been 90,000.

"Reducing unemployment to where it was before the [current] crisis may be impossible," he said. "So get ready for an American work force full of long-term anxiety - and anger."

Smick, once chief of staff to the late Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.) and a 1996 presidential campaign adviser to Democratic Sen. Bill Bradley (N.J.), added that the barely recovering economy is burdened by "a 300-pound backpack of personal and public debt."

"Within a decade," he said, "the U.S. will be borrowing $722 billion a year just to pay interest" on the national debt.

"We're about to enter a fiscal trap, chasing our tail just to pay off our creditors. That's the experience of Third World regimes. Their currencies lose all credibility. They suffer from high and crushing interest rates, ending up as wards of the International Monetary Fund."

Smick is an expert on all this. He's made a fortune as an international trader and he wrote a best-selling book, "The World Is Curved," on the dangers of the unregulated world financial system.

Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama ("George W. Obama") have made matters worse, he said.

"Both proposed huge new entitlements with no way of paying for them. Both are at a loss at understanding the means of creating new private sector employment opportunities. ...

"Both offered the big Wall Street banks an incredible $700 billion in taxpayer funding with no stipulation that the banks lend the money, which today they are not doing."

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Smick says, is trying to keep the economy afloat by holding down interest rates - but all that means is that big banks borrow at zero, invest (often overseas) at 3 percent or 4 percent, make huge profits and refuse to lend to small U.S. businesses, which create 70 percent of new jobs.

Smick thinks the Obama administration should have forced banks to lend their bailout money before paying it back and included an investment tax credit for business in its stimulus package.

"What Washington can provide is a climate conducive to innovative risk," he said. "But that's not today's climate, where the tax, regulatory and financial future are as terrifyingly uncertain as at any time in postwar history."

Smick agrees that the moment is ripe for a third-party candidate - "a problem-solving, no-nonsense leader who can come to Washington to clean out the swamp created by both political parties."

"We need to reignite America's fires of innovation, daring and confidence. If the current crowd in Washington lacks this vision, the American people, I can assure you, will find someone who has it."

He's not talking about Lou Dobbs here. Or former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R). And unfortunately, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) and Gen. David Petraeus don't seem to be running. But there is an opening. Help wanted.

Mort Kondracke is the Executive Editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill since 1955. © 2007 Roll Call, Inc.



9)Egypt's abrupt shutdown of operations against tunnels revives missile flow to Gaza


Tuesday, Nov. 18, Egypt's special forces and engineering units suddenly shut down operation against the smuggling tunnels to Gaza without warning to Washington or Jerusalem, military sources report. US and Israeli requests for clarifications from Cairo, which must have ordered the stoppage, were not answered. So the Obama administration signaled Egypt that if it continues to violate the international accords governing the status of the Egyptian-Gazan border, there will be consequences.

Washington is put out particularly because Cairo did not bother to notify the American engineering corps officers and men working with Egyptian troops in Sinai since early 2009 in a concerted effort to eradicate the tunnels that their mission was cut short.

Washington sources report that the congressional subcommittees responsible for approving US economic and military aid appropriations to Egypt have been informed of the Egyptian violation.

Our military sources report that the stoppage is pretty comprehensive:

1. Egyptian forces have been pulled out of northern Sinai and Rafah, the town split down the middle between Egyptian Sinai and the Gaza Strip and under which most of the smuggling tunnels run. The trucks carrying heavy weapons for the Palestinians in Gaza can now unload directly into the tunnel openings without interference.

2. The network of sensors and security cameras installed with the help of American military engineers in northern Sinai and along the Philadelphi border corridor were all deactivated as of last Tuesday.

3. The Egyptians discontinued a major project for driving huge iron beams 16 meters deep into the tunnels as an obstruction to traffic. Some of the shafts caved in.

4. Those beams were effective for disabling the 200-250 tunnels used to smuggle mostly civilian merchandise into the Gaza Strip because they are no more than 10-15 meters deep.

However, the roughly 50-60 "strategic tunnels" for the transportation of military hardware including heavy guns and missiles run 50-60 meters underground and are outside the range of the iron beams. They are moreover strong structures with reinforced concrete walls and ceilings, electric wiring, ventilation and safety hatches. Since the Egyptian troops' unexplained pullback from their border positions, hardware has been passing through those conduits freely and straight into the hands of Palestinian terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip.

10)Holder's True Motive
By Mona Charen

Attorney General Eric Holder adopted a tough guy pose when he announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others will be tried in federal court for the most heinous terror attack on Americans in history. "After eight years of delay," he intoned, "those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September 11 will finally face justice. It is past time to finally act."

Where to begin? The claim that the Bush administration was somehow dilatory sets a new standard for gall, particularly coming from Eric Holder. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy points out, "The principal reason there were so few military trials is the tireless campaign conducted by leftist lawyers (including Holder) to derail military tribunals by challenging them in the courts."


Those lawyers threw up hundreds of roadblocks. Military detentions and tribunals violated, they claimed, the U.S. Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Litigating all this has taken years.

At last clearing those obstacles, the government initiated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's military trial in Guantanamo in September 2008. In December, KSM pleaded guilty and asked to be executed.

But now, the attorney general puffs out his chest and declares that by trying KSM in an Article III federal court, he has chosen the forum "most likely to lead to a positive result."

The mind reels.

This is an excruciatingly awful decision that no hanging judge talk of "the ultimate penalty" can perfume. What about the increased risk of terror attacks on New York during the trial? The city is "hardened" against attacks Holder assures us. Really? Like Fort Hood?

By granting a civil trial to KSM, while Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who bombed the USS Cole in Yemen, will receive a military tribunal, the U.S. telegraphs this message to terrorists: Wherever possible, attack our civilians. You'll get more lawyering and a better deal than if you attack our military. (And by the way, you'll get more rights than a member of our military who commits a crime.)

Attorney General Holder is keen to prove to a supposedly skeptical world that America lives up to its values (never mind that granting the full rights of citizens to enemy combatants is not part of our creed -- nor anyone else's). Yet he has also repeatedly asserted that a not-guilty verdict is unacceptable. "Failure is not an option. These are cases that have to be won." Whoa. In the first place, it isn't at all beyond imagination that the government could lose this case. KSM was waterboarded. No evidence thus obtained is admissible. A liberal judge who disliked the Bush administration might exclude other key evidence as well.

But Holder says he'll be found guilty. Isn't that a perversion of our jurisprudence? If a not-guilty verdict is impossible, then the trial is a sham. "Sentence first -- verdict afterward" said the Red Queen.

Moreover, the Justice Department has assured Sen. Jon Kyl that "we will not release anyone into the United States if doing so would endanger our national security or the American people." So in the event that KSM is acquitted, it's the position of the Obama Justice Department that we would continue to hold him? How does that outcome burnish the reputation of our justice system?

And while we're on the subject of not thinking things through, at a Senate hearing, Holder could not answer Sen. Lindsey Graham's question about how we would deal with Osama bin Laden if we caught him tomorrow. Would he be Mirandized? Would we give him a lawyer? Isn't that the precedent this decision sets?

There are dozens more reasons (including the intelligence bonanza this will confer on al-Qaida) that this decision is among the worst to emerge from a terrible presidency. What did they hope to achieve? Perhaps they have thought it through -- at least as far as how the trial would unfold. With no defense (he has boasted about his mass murder), what will KSM do? He will put the CIA and the Bush administration on trial. Prepare for lurid accounts of his and others' mistreatment.

Is that the nub? To satisfy the revenge fantasies of American leftists who have lusted to put the Bush administration on trial, the Obama administration is willing to sacrifice logic, justice, national security, and honor?

When KSM's star turn in the courtroom goes viral on the Internet and inspires thousands of new jihadis, the Obamaites can console themselves that at least they stuck it to George W. Bush.

11)Sebelius's cave-in on mammograms is a setback for health-care reform
By Steven Pearlstein


Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius did a marvelous job this week of undermining the move toward evidence-based medicine with her hasty and cowardly disavowal of a recommendation from her department's own task force that women under 50 are probably better off not getting routine annual mammograms.

This is an old issue that has not only sharply divided the medical community for more than 20 years, but also taps into deep resentments among women who, over the years, have felt neglected by a male-dominated medical establishment. And there's no doubt that the advisory panel's recommendation came at a politically inconvenient time, just as Congress enters the crucial final phase in a health reform debate in which opponents have successfully stoked fears of medical rationing.

But rather than showing the leadership necessary to lead a grown-up national discussion on how to eliminate unnecessary or wasteful procedures, Sebelius simply disowned the task force and ran for political cover. Just as the hysteria over "death panels" killed any chance that Medicare recipients and their patients might be encouraged to engage in an intelligent conversation about end-of-life care before it becomes an issue, the mammogram brouhaha is likely to set back efforts to dramatically increase research into what really works and what doesn't, and use the results to revamp the way medical care is delivered and paid for.


I should acknowledge that I have no idea who should and should not get routine mammograms. But I know enough about statistics to say that the issue is not settled just because you know of someone in her 40s whose breast cancer was detected by a mammogram and cured. As economists and medical researchers are fond of saying, the plural of anecdote is data.

To make a valid scientific finding of who should be screened and how often, you'd have to take into consideration how big the risk is that women are likely to develop cancer at any particular age; how fast tumors are likely to grow and how likely they are to be cured once they are caught; what is the likelihood that a tumor detected by mammogram might be found some other way; what is the probability that a suspected tumor turns out not to be pre-cancerous, or that doing a biopsy on it will actually increase the chance that it could become dangerous later. You'd also have to weigh the benefits of routine screening -- deaths avoided and years of life extended -- against the medical problems caused by complications that arise from biopsies, along with the mental anguish that goes along with the large number of false positives that crop up on mammographies of women in their 40s.

All that, of course, is exactly what the task force did, based on numerous studies done in different countries using different methodologies. In the end, it found that while some lives might be saved each year, the benefits of annual screening of women in their 40s were outweighed by the costs -- and that's without even getting into the financial costs, which run to several billion dollars a year.

As is often the case in such matters, those raising the most fuss were those with greatest financial interest in mammography (the radiologists and the makers of mammography machines) and the disease groups (in this case, the American Cancer Society), which tend to resist recognizing limits on how much time, money and attention is devoted to their cause.

"How many mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, daughters and friends are we willing to lose to breast cancer while the debate goes on about the limitations of mammography?" Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, asked in an op-ed article in Thursday's Washington Post. Dr. Brawley cleverly didn't answer his own question, but the clear implication of his question was that the only acceptable number should be zero. And it is that very attitude, applied across the board to every patient and every disease, which goes a long way in explaining why ours is the most expensive, and one of the least effective, health-care systems in the industrialized world.

The political argument from the White House was that it was necessary to duck this fight over evidence-based medicine in order to save it. The better approach would have been to see this as one of those teachable moments that could be used to reaffirm the entire rationale for reform. For while debate continues over whether some women may be getting too many mammograms, there is evidence that there are women who, because they lack insurance, are getting too few -- and dying unnecessarily as a result. What health reform is about is correcting that imbalance while devising new mechanisms for improving health outcomes and getting better control over costs.

Put in that context, it would have been perfectly reasonable for Sebelius to have announced that she was delaying implementation of the task force recommendation for a year in order to give it more time to seek a broader consensus among researchers, doctors and patients. That would have made clear that the administration remained committed to a health-care system driven by the best medical evidence but one that is also sensitive to broad public opinion. This is a tough-love message the country, and the Congress, need to hear.

Getting and Spending We Lay Waste Our Powers!

(See 1 and 1a below.)

We must not criticize. We must stay mute and let our politicians run roughshod over us. They must always have the last word. It is called ''reform-ism and change' and it accords with the dictates of PC'ism. (See 2 below.)

All great nations have had their ups and downs and some have declined permanently never to recover. America remains a great and powerful nation but there are ominous signs our decline is gaining momentum. We are spent economically, militarily and now lack strong leadership.


As Thanksgiving approaches, signs of our celebratory meal - the turkey - are everywhere. This year, based on accomplishments, the biggest Tom resides in the Oval Office.

Our president has spent his first year in office traveling a good bit but accomplishing little beyond degrading our nation in the eyes of his peer group. His recent return from Asia even anticipated our next major holiday - Christmas - he came back with an empty stocking.

Democrats in Congress also have a bag full of goodies awaiting our nation but the majority of Americans are not pleased with the offerings from our 'wise men' in D.C. In fact most would like to sack these elves.

Then we have the recent decision to try terrorists, who want to destroy our nation and who were captured on the field of battle, being tried in a civilian court and thus entitled to all the legal rights and privileges of an American citizen. In this instance the Obama Administration is not even seeking the death sentence for a terrorist who killed over 3,000 Americans.

A conviction is not a certainty though the terrorist being tried has acknowledged his guilt. Why? Because he was water-boarded, ie tortured, and not read his Miranda Rights. In other words, it is possible this terrorist could walk if our system of justice recognizes the legitimacy of his defense arguments. He could then apply for American Citizenship and maybe move to Michigan whose many mosques are a potential breeding ground for domestically bred terrorists.


So why did Obama and Atty General Holder choose this route? One can only speculate but it appears the reason is to show the world what evil things GW resorted to in keeping our nation safe, ie. GW allegedly trashed our laws in order to protect and defend our nation. GW was a bad person according to Obama and Obama is committed to remind us of this fact as often as circumstances permit.

I suspect four years from now when Obama runs again for his second term he will still be bashing Bush.

It is not a very HO HO HO TIME! (See 1 and 1a below.)

A former Israeli Ambassador expresses his thoughts regarding Abbas. (See 3 below.)

A comprehensive analysis of Pelosi's health care proposals and prospective legislation, a thumb nail on Reid's Senate plan and the Republican response. (See 4, 4a and 4b below.)


Dick

1)Remember When
By Matt Spivey

President Obama has meant a lot of things to a lot people this year.

After a bumpy year with our new president, it seems appropriate to reminisce about the many labels he assumed for himself and was granted by his admirers. At first, being anyone not named Bush was enough to get him pretty far. But then Obama became a promise of a refreshing future as well as the potential reincarnation of some of our history's most influential leaders.

Remember when we elected the next Lincoln?

Our first black president was going to transcend race and bring racial harmony to a scarred America. He was the answer to all our questions about how far our nation has come since our tainted past. He was a wiry lawyer from Illinois with a knack for eloquent speeches and a high-minded vision for our country.


In fact, CBS News ran entire piece about the similarities between the two men.

Obama rode Lincoln's famous train route to Washington, D.C. and was sworn in on Lincoln's Bible. Obama even vowed to surround himself with tough thinkers who would not necessarily follow his beliefs, much like Lincoln's "team of rivals." And he promised to bring unity to our partisan nation, much like Lincoln holding the union intact through America's deadliest war.

However, a new Gallup poll shows that optimism in race relations has actually decreased since Obama's election. Turning on any news channel at any time of day clearly shows that our nation seems to be more politically partisan than ever. And the advisers with whom Obama has surrounded himself seem to be either tax-evaders or Communist sympathizers.

A train ride and a well-crafted speech do not a great leader make.

Remember when we elected the next Kennedy?

Barack Obama was so elegant, so stylish, so...cool. He was young and attractive, yet real and accessible. He was everything we had been waiting for to help us forget the stodgy white guys who had been dominating our government since JFK.

Democrats overwhelmed newsstands for months.


However, Kennedy's comparatively conservative economic policies and his ardent fight against Communism stand in stark contrast to Obama's impending tax hikes and inability or unwillingness to firmly stand against terrorism. Under Kennedy, the GDP expanded, inflation remained steady, and unemployment decreased. Kennedy believed the best stimulus package of all was to lower taxes. In foreign policy, Kennedy fought Communism in Cuba, Latin America, and Vietnam. Obama seems unable to decide whether more troops would help us win a difficult war, and he refuses to condemn Islamic extremists as terrorists, even after one murders thirteen soldiers on American soil.

A nice suit and a handsome family do not a great leader make.

Remember when we elected the next FDR?

With intentions of creating public projects and ensuring entitlement programs, Obama was every Keynesian's fantasy. He was the candidate with the answers to the failing economy and the toughness to discipline Wall Street. He would pull us out of a recession with shovel-ready jobs while providing for the nation's poor and elderly.

Democratic strategists still repeatedly say, "Obama is the greatest economic president since Franklin Roosevelt."

But he has fudged his job creation numbers. He has brought the deficit to record levels. And he has taken over financial institutions, car companies, and soon health care entities. Where will his long arm of government influence reach next? While vaguely defining "saved" jobs may have impressed some, those of us actually living in the real world tend to rely on hard evidence and economic freedom.

In the first year of Obama's reign, the economy remains stagnant, inflation will soon spike as the dollar continues to plummet, and the unemployment rate he vowed would not reach 8% has now soared past 10%. And his stimulus package -- the meager portion that has actually been spent -- has turned out to be decidedly "unstimulating."


Massive spending and big promises do not a great leader make.

So now, here we are. Unemployment is higher, confusion about the war is greater, and division in our country is fiercer. The platitudes of hope and change are gradually being replaced by the pragmatism of liberty and responsibility. While of the real hope for America lies in the nation's people, too many people in this nation have put their hope in one man. Someday, we will look back on this administration, quizzically scratch our heads, and with an embarrassed grin, ask, "Remember when we elected Barack Obama?"


1a)Obama’s Popularity Is Higher Than His Policies, Poll Finds
By Jeff Bliss

President Barack Obama is more popular than his policies, according to a poll released today.

Almost three-quarters of American voters, 74 percent, surveyed in a Quinnipiac University poll liked Obama as a person while 47 percent agreed with most of his policies.

Fifty-three percent disapproved of his handling of health care compared with 41 percent who backed the president.

Most Americans “might like to have a beer” with Obama, said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. Still, many who voted for him “aren’t crazy about the kind of change he is trying to bring.”

Voters opposed by 51 percent to 35 percent health-care legislation that was supported by Obama and passed by the House of Representatives on Nov. 7, the poll showed. At the same time, voters favored allowing people to be covered by a government-run insurance plan, a part of the House measure, and are against provisions that would make it harder to get the option, according to the poll’s findings.

Quinnipiac University released a poll yesterday that showed Obama’s approval had fallen below 50 percent for the first time.

Voters in the latest poll backed a so-called public option program to compete with private insurances by 57 percent to 35 percent. Forty-nine percent were against letting states opt out of the public option while 43 percent supported the idea.

Respondents opposed 47 percent to 38 percent a trigger provision, which would let people get the public option only if private insurance didn’t cover enough Americans.

The poll, taken from Nov. 9 to Nov. 16, has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.


2)Iran is advancing on dual nuclear bomb track: uranium plus plutonium

Military sources report that the UN inspectors' October visit to Iran turned up dual-track progress in support of its nuclear weapons program: Feverish activity was registered in the production of plutonium at Isfahan as an alternative to the Fordo enriched uranium plant near Qom which starts up in 2011.

The IAEA experts discovered 30 metric tons-IS of heavy water hidden in 600 tanks, each holding 13 gallons, according to the report they handed in last week to agency headquarters in Vienna.

From the shape of the tanks and other indications, the experts concluded that this stock had not come from the heavy water plant at Arak but was imported.

Metric tons-IS measure the amount of energy a given quantity can release. The force and types of nuclear bombs are gauged in kilotons or megatons. The American nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II was equal to 20 kilotons of TNT. By this standard, the amount of heavy water discovered at Isfahan would be enough to make at least one plutonium bomb when the plutonium reactor under construction near the Arak heavy water facility is finished.

Other than its civilian uses, heavy water may be used to produce tritium, which intensifies the explosive force of nuclear warheads. The discovery of quantities of heavy water at Isfahan confirms the suspicions surrounding Iran's nuclear program in three respects.

1. The long concealment of the Fordo site suggested to the UN inspectors that Iran has more hole-in the-corner nuclear facilities in the country. The discovery of a stock of heavy water further confirmed that Tehran is working hard to attain a nuclear weapon capacity on more than one track and at additional covert sites.

2. The IAEA wants to know who is selling Iran heavy water in violation of Security Council resolutions banning the sale or export of nuclear materials to Iran.

The very fact that some government or outside entity is willing to flout UN resolutions demonstrates that any further international sanctions would be ineffective for halting Iran's nuclear drive, even assuming that President Barack Obama gained Russian and Chinese backing for such penalties. This backing has so far been withheld.

Sources report from Vienna that on November 10, IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei sent a request to the Iranian Nuclear Energy Committee asking it to confirm the presence of the heavy water and document its origin with a full explanation. Tehran has yet to reply.

3. The presence of the heavy water tanks at Isfahan is additional proof that the reactor at Arak is designed for military purposes, not a peaceful installation as Tehran claims.

3) A wheelless cart before a lame horse
By Zalman Shoval

One should never underestimate the propensity of the Palestinians for shooting themselves in the foot, to wit, the situation Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has put himself in with regard to the peace process. True, this may not have been entirely his fault - mixed signals from abroad also had something to do with it, but Abbas seems to be bent on doing everything to get himself into an even deeper hole by adopting ever more intransigent positions. Then there was his zigzagging on the Goldstone Report, after first having asked Israel during the Gaza war to "smash" Hamas.

Now someone has come up with the idea of unilaterally declaring Palestinian statehood. Palestinian Prime Minister Salaam Fayad had earlier broached the idea of building up Palestinian governance - a plausible concept in itself - but what the Palestinian functionaries around Abbas intend now is something completely different, amounting to putting a wheelless cart before a lame horse.

They had tried it before; back in 1999 Yasser Arafat, who as a result of the Oslo agreement was back in the country, announced that the Palestinians would forthwith declare their independence - only to be quickly disabused of this idea when the US and most of the Europeans made it clear to him that the declaration would not be recognized by the international community.

In the present case, there will probably be a replay of this scenario, there being indications that neither the US nor most members of the European community as well as others would legitimize a unilateral declaration by according it recognition. Even the support of Russia and China is in doubt, given that the former has not recognized the unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo, and that the latter is facing the threat in its own backyard of the Muslim community in Xinjiang declaring independence.

Someone should have explained to Abbas that this plan would in effect annul all past agreements including those which had granted legitimacy to the Palestinian Authority as part of the Oslo agreement. Also, any unilateral act regarding borders and territory could immediately trigger parallel annexations in the territories on the part of the State of Israel. In essence, a unilateral declaration of statehood would be in violation of international law and might be deemed an act of aggression, giving Israel the right to act in response, militarily or otherwise.

SO WHY does the official Palestinian leadership still threaten to go ahead with an act which so obviously goes against its own interests? It could be to pave the way towards a new wave of violence, as Arafat had planned and acted upon after the failure of the Camp David conference. But there may also be another, more immediate reason, namely, to bring about the elimination of UN Security Council Resolution 242. This resolution, which is the only agreed basis for all the agreements and initiatives to bring about a settlement of the conflict between Israel and its neighbors, including the Palestinians (and of course, Syria), also determined that Israel was not required to withdraw from all the territories it holds as a result of repulsing Arab aggression in 1967, and that furthermore, future borders should be based on considerations of security. In other words, the dividing line between a future Palestinian state and Israel would not necessarily be commensurate with the former temporary armistice line called the "Green Line."

This then, as senior PLO and Fatah official Yasser Abd Rabbo has confirmed, is their real and immediate agenda: get the Security Council of the UN to adopt a resolution to say that the future Palestinian border would be the Green Line - thus, in effect, replacing Resolution 242 and making the latter null and void. Israel's diplomacy thus has its job cut out for it in coming months, but one trusts that the US and others too are aware of the Palestinian stratagems and that they will not lend a hand to an initiative which would seriously exacerbate the political situation in the Middle East and return any chance of peace to square one.

The writer is the former Israel Ambassador to the US, and currently heads the Prime Minister's forum of US-Israel Relations.

4)Roadmap to Victory: Providing a contrast would best expose the weaknesses of the Democratic health bills.
By Tevi Troy & Jeff Anderson

By proposing a health-care bill of their own, Senate Republicans can throw the extraordinary weaknesses of the Democratic bills into stark relief. In the wake of the Congressional Budget Office’s recent scoring of aspects of the House Republican bill, there is now an opening for Republicans to provide a clear contrast with the proposed Democratic overhaul.

The Democratic bills are polling badly, even though they’ve been running largely unopposed in the eyes of most Americans. But continuing to let them run without competition would be a major political error, in both the short and long term. Republicans need to show how health-care reform should be done, improving on the unsustainable status quo while reflecting the political realities of the moment.

The House Republican bill, while imperfect and incomplete, provides a roadmap to victory. Even the New York Times recognizes as much, writing that “a ‘cheaper’ alternative” (the Times puts it in quotes) could scuttle the passage of the proposed Democratic agenda. The Wall Street Journal strikes a similar theme, writing that in the aftermath of the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections, Republicans “have an opening” to “give obviously anxious voters an alternative.”


The Democrats are attempting to decrease the number of uninsured through mandates and requirements — at the tradeoff of raising costs. Americans recognize this. As a recent poll in the Economist shows — by the overwhelming margin of 50 to 9 percent — Americans think they would personally have to pay more if the Democrats pass a bill.

That is why the CBO’s evaluation of the House Republican alternative is so encouraging. The Republican approach is to focus on lowering costs, which in turn would make coverage easier to afford — and the CBO says this approach would succeed. It estimates that the Republican bill would lower Americans’ insurance premiums — by 5 to 8 percent in the small-group market, up to 3 percent in the large-group market, and 7 to 10 percent in the individual market — while increasing the number of insured by 3 million.

The House Republican bill also has an obvious weakness, as the New York Times and Washington Post were quick to note. While it would reduce the number of uninsured by far more per dollar spent than the Democratic bills would, it would not lower the total number of uninsured by nearly as much.

But the CBO score for the House GOP bill was also extremely positive in another way: It said that the bill would reduce deficits by $68 billion. This, in tandem with the verdict that the bill would lower premiums, provides a prime opportunity for Senate Republicans to advance a proposal that does a better job of reducing the number of uninsured.

Here’s how: Senate Republicans should take the House Republican bill and add a $2,000 per person ($4,000 per family) tax credit — refundable, advanceable, and usable only to buy insurance — for those without employer-based health coverage. Currently, those who buy health insurance on the open market have to buy it with income that’s already had taxes taken out of it, while those who get insurance through their employer get it tax-free. This inequality is unfair, and it makes no sense when trying to solve the problem of the uninsured.

Elsewhere, Senate Republicans should more or less mirror the spending proposals of the House Republican bill, though they would be wise to spend more on state-run high-risk pools and less on incentives for innovations by states. They should save money by putting their legislation into effect no sooner than 2014 (just like 98.3 percent of the Senate Democrats’ bill). Importantly, while adding a tax-credit for the uninsured, the Senate proposal should leave the tax status of those with employer-provided insurance entirely untouched. (Millions of Americans are worried that their employer-provided insurance will be jeopardized by the Democrats’ proposed “public option,” and they want to know that their employer-provided insurance will remain secure.)

The CBO has already scored such a tax credit, albeit with somewhat different terms. Based on that prior CBO scoring, this proposal would likely reduce federal revenues by about $190 billion by the end of 2019, while increasing the number of insured by about 12 million. (If it were to insure more, it would reduce revenues by more, and the inverse is also true.) These 12 million people would largely be in addition to the 3 million newly insured from the House Republican bill, and would put a significant dent in the number of uninsured.

According to the Census, there are 28 million uninsured Americans — 46 million, minus 9 million non-citizens, minus 9 million Medicaid recipients that the Census admits were falsely tallied as uninsured. (Note: The CBO has consistently been using the wrong number on this, failing to adjust for the Census’s admitted Medicaid undercount.) President Obama seemingly agrees with this analysis, having said in his address to a joint session of Congress on September 9 that there “are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage.” This proposed Senate Republican bill would cut that number in half.

So, how to pay for this? The CBO has already floated and scored the idea to convert Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) payments into block-grant payments to each state. DSH payments help compensate private hospitals for losses from treating the uninsured. With fewer uninsured, DSH payments need not expand at the same rate. Following the basic outlines of the CBO’s proposal, the Republican bill should set the block grant at 80 percent of each state’s current level of federal DSH funding and index it to the consumer price index minus one percentage point. Based on CBO scoring of a very similar proposal, this would increase revenues by about $135 billion from 2014-19.

Between this $135 billion and the net $68 billion surplus from the other provisions of the House Republican bill, $203 billion would be available to cover the $190 billion tax-cut for the uninsured, leaving a small surplus.

So, let’s compare the results.

The Senate Democratic bill — as passed by the Senate Finance Committee and now in the hands of Senator Reid — would raise taxes and fines on Americans by over half a trillion dollars. A Republican bill along the lines of the one proposed here wouldn’t impose any new taxes or fines.

The Democratic bill would provide strong incentives for people not to buy insurance until they are already sick or injured, raising premiums for everyone else in the process; the Republican bill would provide strong incentives and opportunities for people to buy insurance, letting them shop across state lines for the best values from coast to coast.


The Democratic bill would fail to end runaway medical-malpractice suits, which cause doctors to practice costly defensive medicine, stop practicing in certain areas, and pass along expensive malpractice premiums to patients; the Republican bill would end such runaway suits, saving the federal government $54 billion over ten years, according to the CBO, and likely saving Americans many times that in health costs.

The Democratic bill would funnel those without employer-provided insurance into government-run exchanges, where plans would look similar because the government would tell companies how they have to look; the Republican bill would keep alive and even expand the private market. The Democratic bill would perpetuate the federal government’s counter-productive limits on allowing private companies to offer lower premiums for healthier lifestyles; the Republican bill would welcome these Safeway-style cost-cutting efforts.

The Democratic bill would require younger Americans to subsidize the premiums of older Americans, banning private companies from offering plans to younger people at their true price; the Republican bill would not impose this heavy burden on young adults. The Democratic bill would limit the use of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), making it harder for people to control their own health-care dollars and forcing them to pay money to their insurance companies rather than directly to their doctors; the Republican bill would encourage HSAs, private control, and price-consciousness.

The Democratic bill would result in an additional 27 million Americans (29 million people) having insurance, at a cost of $31,000 per newly insured American; the Republican bill would result in about 15 million more Americans having insurance, at a cost of less than $15,000 per newly insured American. Otherwise stated, the Republican bill would newly insure about 15 million Americans per $200 billion spent, compared to fewer than 7 million per $200 billion under the Democratic bill.

The Democratic bill would siphon over $400 billion out of already-barely-solvent Medicare; the Republican bill wouldn’t touch Medicare (aside from the proposal regarding DSH payments). The Democratic bill says that it would cut doctors’ Medicare payments by 25 percent and never raise them back up — making it harder for Medicare patients to find doctors willing to see them; the Republican bill would leave doctors’ payments alone.

If Congress doesn’t follow through on the Democratic bill’s Medicare cuts — and the CBO is plainly skeptical that it will — the CBO says the bill would increase our deficits by over $300 billion, as dealing with doctors’ payments alone would cost roughly $250 billion; the Republican bill would be deficit-neutral and would even provide a slight surplus.

Finally, the Democratic bill would likely raise Americans’ insurance premiums substantially; the Republican bill would lower Americans’ insurance premiums significantly — according to the CBO.

The Republican bill would have no obvious weaknesses. Aside from inefficiently and expensively increasing the number of insured, the Democratic bill would have no obvious strengths.

By taking the House Republican bill, adding a tax cut for the uninsured, and adopting a variation on the CBO’s proposal to convert DSH payments into block grants, Senate Republicans could offer an extraordinary — and extraordinarily popular — health bill. This bill would meet both widely stated goals of health-care reform: lowering costs and decreasing the number of uninsured. And it would do so sensibly, affordably, and unobtrusively.

In comparison, the Democratic bill would appear all the more plainly irresponsible, profligate, and counterproductive.

The Republican bill could help convince some centrist Democrats that there in fact is a better way. If not, if would help further convince the American people of this fact. It would provide an important alternative for Americans to consider all the way through the 2010 and 2012 elections — where the fate of any legislation that the Democrats dare to pass on a near-party-line vote would ultimately be decided.

— Tevi Troy, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, was the deputy secretary of health and human services (HHS) from 2007–09. Jeffrey H. Anderson, director of the Benjamin Rush Society, was the senior speech writer for Secretary Mike Leavitt at HHS from 2008–09.

4a)Reid lays out $849B Senate health care bill
By John Fritze


Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid unveiled an $849 billion health care bill Wednesday that advanced President Obama's broad vision to revamp the health insurance market but left key moderate Democrats uncommitted.

Introduction of the bill — which Reid said represented "the last leg of this journey we've been on for a long time" — cleared the way for a vote this week on whether to start debate on health care as Senate leaders race to finish a bill by year's end.


Obama called the bill, which combines separate legislation passed by two Senate committees, "another critical milestone" and said he looked forward to getting legislation "to my desk as soon as possible."

The latest iteration of the massive health care legislation, which Reid said would cost $849 billion over the first 10 years, came after weeks of behind-the-scenes negotiations. It would provide coverage to 31 million Americans who wouldn't otherwise have it and would cut federal budget deficits by $127 billion, Reid said.

Largely similar to a bill narrowly passed by the House on Nov. 7, the legislation would require virtually every American to buy a health insurance plan, would expand Medicaid enrollment by millions and would provide subsidies to help low- and moderate-income families afford premiums.

Among the provisions included in the Senate bill:

•A government-run insurance program similar to Medicare that would compete with private insurers. Individual states could opt out of offering the public plan, and the government would negotiate, rather than dictate, how much to pay for medical services.

•Prohibitions against using taxpayer money to pay for abortions. Insurance companies would be required to segregate private premium money from government subsidies and to use only private money to pay for abortions. The same rule would apply to the public option.

•A half-percentage-point increase in the Medicare payroll tax for individuals who earn more than $200,000 and couples who take in more than $250,000 a year. Insurance plans that exceed $8,500 for individuals and $23,000 for couples would be taxed 40%, and elective cosmetic surgeries would be taxed 5%.

•Companies with more than 50 workers that do not offer insurance would pay $750 for each employee that receives a government subsidy for insurance.

"What's not to like about this bill?" asked Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who is the chairman of the Senate's health committee.

Hours before the bill was unveiled, Reid was courting moderate Democrats he will need to bring the bill to the floor for debate — a procedural effort that in this case will require 60 votes.

Emerging from a rare evening meeting of Democratic senators to review the proposal, Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., said he is reserving judgment. "It's one thing to talk about it," he said. "It's another thing to actually have the legislation in your hands." Democratic leaders posted the text of the legislation late Wednesday.

Republicans were critical of the legislation. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called the bill "another trillion-dollar experiment."

4b)Republicans blast 'bait and switch' health bill
By DAVID ESPO

Digging in for a long struggle, Republican senators and governors assailed the Democrats' newly minted health care legislation Thursday as a collection of tax increases, Medicare cuts and heavy new burdens for deficit-ridden states.

Despite the criticism, there were growing indications Democrats would prevail on an initial Senate showdown set for Saturday night, and Majority Leader Harry Reid crisply rebutted the Republican charges. The bill "will save lives, save money and save Medicare," he said.

The legislation is designed to answer President Barack Obama's call to expand coverage, end industry practices such as denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions, and restrain the growth of health care spending.

Republicans saw little to like.

"It makes no sense at all and affronts common sense," said Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, one of several Republicans to criticize the measure. He added that a plan to expand Medicaid, the state-federal program for the poor, was a "bait and switch" with states as the victims.

GOP governors, meeting in Texas, agreed. "We all know a sucker play when we see one," said Mitch Daniels of Indiana. The bill would expand the Medicaid program, which provides health care for the poor, and leave the states with part of the additional cost beginning after three years.

In the Capitol, Reid answered Republican delaying tactics with an initial test vote set for Saturday evening. A 60-vote majority is required to advance the bill toward full debate, expected to begin after Thanksgiving.

Counting two independents, Democrats control 60 Senate seats. Three moderate Democrats have been cagey about their intentions, although none of them has announced a plan to defect. Officials disclosed during the day that Reid had included in the bill a political sweetener for one of the three, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, in the form of $100 million to help her state cover health care costs for the poor.

While the struggle was forming, there were limits. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., backed off his threat to force the 2,074-page bill to be read aloud in the Senate chamber, a move that would have eaten into the Senate's Thanksgiving-week vacation.

Given the political stakes, there was disagreement even about the bill's cost.

Democrats put the price tag of the 2,074-page measure at $979 billion, higher than the $849 billion figure they had cited Wednesday as the cost of expanding coverage to 31 million who now lack insurance. Republicans calculated it at more like $1.5 trillion over a decade, and said even that was understated because Reid decided to delay implementation of some of the bill's main features until 2014.

Officially, the Congressional Budget Office said the measure would reduce deficits by $130 billion over the next decade with probable small reductions in the 10 years that follow — forecasts that cheered rank-and-file Democrats. Among the cost-cutting provisions would be creation of an Independent Medicare Advisory Board which could be required to recommend steps limiting the growth of the program that provides health care to millions of seniors. The recommendations would go into effect automatically unless Congress blocked them.

CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf has said previously that type of arrangement would be one of the most potent weapons Congress would have to restrain the growth of Medicare, a fast-expanding program supported in part by a trust fund that is dwindling.

But CBO also cautioned the bill includes "a number of procedures that might be difficult to maintain over a long period of time."

The Democrats' cost estimates of slightly below $1 trillion was considerably smaller than a House-passed bill's price tag of between $1.2 trillion to $1.3 trillion.

In part to reduce costs, the legislation would delay until Jan. 1, 2014, creation of so-called insurance exchanges in which individuals and small businesses could shop for affordable coverage. The House would set up its version of the exchange one year earlier.

Both bills would allow consumers to choose between private insurance policies and coverage sold by the government.

The two bills also include billions of dollars in subsidies to help lower-income Americans afford the cost of coverage.

Under the Senate measure, CBO figures show about 19 million people would receive subsidies averaging $5,500 in 2019, at the end of the decade. By comparison, the House bill is projected to provide subsidies to 18 million, an average of $6,800.

Republicans said little if anything about subsidies during the day, instead focusing much of their criticism the bill's tax increases and its curbs in Medicare spending.

Democrats included a new tax on high-value insurance policies, an attempt not only to raise money but also to dampen the appetite for costly coverage. In addition, Reid included a payroll tax increase of .5 percentage point on income greater for $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples. Medical device manufacturers, insurance companies, drug makers and recipients of elective cosmetic surgery would also face new or higher taxes.

About half of the bill Reid unveiled Wednesday would be financed by curbs in projected Medicare spending. While providers such as home health care agencies would absorb some of that, the biggest blow would fall on private Medicare plans. Studies show the government pays about 14 percent more to cover patients enrolled in those plans than in the traditional Medicare program.

Associated Press writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Erica Werner in Washington and Liz Sidoti in Austin, Texas, contributed to this story.

T Shirt Diplomacy - Asia Rains on Obama's Parade!

Pelosi's jet and commentary. Sent to me by a fellow memo reader and attributed to Gov. Sanford. (See 1 below.)








This Jet is the USAF C-32, Boeing 757, that MADAME PELOSI uses.


ADL challenged for wandering off the reservation. (See 2 below.)

From a friend and fellow memo reader. Revelations about Ft Hood terrorist and possible connections to Obama's Homeland Security Agency - page 29 of report. (See 3 below.)

Obamacare a threat to seniors? You decide. (See 4 below.)

What terrorists needs are more rights and Attorney General Holder is willing to assure they have them. (See 5 below.)

As independents seem to be bolting our change artist president are Democrats going to be able to shut the barn door before they all have escaped? (See 6 below.)

Palestinians losing support because the Arab/Muslim world is tiring of their incompetent leadership. Egypt seems more interested in their national soccer team. (See 7 below.)

Asia smells blood - ours. T-shirt diplomacy. (See 8, 8a and 8b below.)


Muck and mire help is what Obama has been offered by our generals according to Ralph Peters. (See 9 below.)

Seven deadly sins? (See 10 below.)

Dick

1)Subject: FW: Fwd: Pelosi's Jet

This is beyond outrageous!!

And Democrats talk about Sarah's dress??? Conservatives! Are you out there?

Madame Pelosi wasn't happy with the small jet USAF C-20B, Gulfstream III, that comes with the Speaker's job...no, Madame Pelosi was aggravated that this little jet had to stop to refuel, so she ordered a Big Fat 200-seat USAF C-32, Boeing 757 jet that could get her back to California without stopping!


Many, many legislators walked by and grinned with glee as Joe informed everyone that Nancy's Big Fat Jet costs us, the hard working American tax payers, thousands of gallons of fuel every week. Since she only works 3 days a week, this gas guzzling jet gets fueled and she flies home to California , cost to the taxpayers of about $60,000, one way! As Joe put it, 'Unfortunately we have to pay to bring her back on Monday night.' Cost to us another $60,000.


Folks, that is $480,000 per month and that is an annual cost to the taxpayers of $5,760,000. No wonder she complains about the cost of this war...it might cramp her style and she is styling, on my back and yours. I think of the military families in this country doing without and this woman, who heads up the most do-nothing Congress in the history of this country keeps fueling that jet while doing nothing.


Madame Pelosi wants you and me to conserve our carbon footprint. She wants us to buy smaller cars and Obama wants us to get a bicycle pump and air up our tires. These people are nuts.


If you think this is outrageous, forward it to all those on your email list! Keep in mind the figures above do NOT include cost of plane or crew, just fuel!


One wonders what her total package cost us? And she wants to tax our IRA's & 401 K's!
Gov Mark Sanford
South Carolina




2)ADL Crosses the Line with Report Bashing Obama Critics
By Jonathan S. Tobin

Denunciations of the harsh tone of political discourse are an old
standby of American commentary. Though presidents of the United States
have been subjected to absurd and often vicious attacks for more than
200 years, it has been generally understood that the derangement
engendered by extreme partisanship is an unavoidable if regrettable
feature of our political life. But if the Anti-Defamation League has
its way, the election of Barack Obama will herald a changing of the
rules. Opponents of this president are apparently going to have tread a
lot more lightly or face all the opprobrium that this group can muster.

Why is this so? As was the case with many of those who opposed his
Republican predecessor, some of those speaking up against President
Obama’s policies have engaged in uncivil discourse. While the far Left
embraced conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war,
the far Right wastes time pondering the president’s religious faith or
where he was born. And some on the Right have tried to brand the object
of their opposition as a new Hitler, just as some on the left did to
Bush.

Such appalling statements should be condemned. But just as it was wrong
— as well as politically tone-deaf — for conservatives to have assumed
that opponents of the war in Iraq could be put down as merely the
fellow travelers of the insane Left, where the Code Pink/Cindy Sheehan
crowd dominated, it would be foolish for the Left to make the same
mistake about the groundswell of opposition against Obama’s policies.
Yet as misguided as such an approach may be for the Democratic party,
it is quite another thing when an organization tasked with monitoring
genuine threats to democracy, as well as anti-Semitism, steps into this
mess. But that is exactly what the ADL has done with its new report,
“Rage Grows in America: Anti-Government Conspiracies,” issued on
Monday. The report claims that those who are disgruntled with the
president have unleashed a “toxic atmosphere of rage in America” since
Obama's election.

Some of the ADL’s work here is unexceptionable. Informing the public
about scary fringe groups like the armed “militias” mentioned in the
report is the sort of task for which the ADL was invented. But “Rage
Grows in America” isn’t content with smoking out the nuts. Its goal is
to link them to the broad spectrum of activists, writers, and thinkers
who are less than enthralled with the age of Obama. For the ADL, the
“rage” is the result of a three-headed monster: “mainstream political
attacks,” “grass roots hostility,” and “anti-government extremists."

The first of these threats to American democracy — the word
“mainstream” appears in the report in quotes as if to disparage the
notion that such opinions are widespread, while simultaneously paying
lip service to the fact that strong criticism of Obama is entirely
legitimate — is the result of “partisan attacks against the Obama
administration by some conservative politicians and media figures.
Upset and anxious about their loss of power following the 2008
elections, they seek primarily to energize their political base and to
delegitimize the Obama administration at the same time."

This passage ought to prompt disinterested readers to ask whether a
defeated political party’s criticism of their opposition deserves
mention in a report about extremism. After all, conservatives have
attacked Obama on the issues not because they want to overthrow the
government but because they disagree with him. The ADL then attempts to cover itself by saying that, “for the most part,” such mainstream
critics “eschew the conspiracy theories and more outlandish notions and
tactics propagated by others. Some of their activities parallel
Democratic tactics during the Bush administration. These mainstream
political attacks fall outside of the bounds of this report."

The mere mention of such Republican activities in this context,
however, serves to reinforce the very conclusion that the ADL claims it
wishes to disavow. Indeed, the report then goes on to say: “One of the
most important effects of these activists, however, is to help create a
body of people who may be predisposed to believe the assertions and
claims of more extreme individuals and groups."

So, according to the ADL, one of the “most important” things about
criticism of the stimulus package, ObamaCare, appeasement of Iran,
dithering over Afghanistan, and perhaps even the president’s
confrontational attitude toward Israel is to lay the groundwork for
extremist conspiracy theories!

In one tidy package, the ADL links not only “mainstream” critics but
radio and television talkers like Glenn Beck and peaceful “tea party”
protests against higher taxes with those who talk of armed resistance
to the government and even those responsible for the 1994 Oklahoma City bombing. Seen in this light, those who merely cry that they “want their
country back” from the Democrats while standing outside a town-hall
meeting become the thin edge of the wedge of a new threat to democracy
and, by extension, a threat to the Jews.

The point is that the “tea parties” and protests at town halls are no
more a threat to democracy than were the anti-Iraq-war protests of just
a few years ago, where one was just as likely, if not more likely, to
encounter not veiled anti-Semitism as the report implies about
right-wing activities, but open vicious Jew hatred and Israel-bashing,
as well as portrayals of Bush and Dick Cheney as Nazis.

More important, what the ADL seems to forget is that the right of the
people to feel “anger and resentment” against the government of the day
— be it Republican or Democratic — is what we call democracy in this
country. The group is standing on firm ground when it calls on
Republicans, as it recently did, to condemn those who outrageously link
Obama with Hitler. Of course, Republican leaders have done exactly
that. But had the ADL issued a report a few years ago that began by
accusing Democrats of creating resentment against Bush and then linked
opposition to the GOP to extremists who supported Hamas or rationalized or even denied al-Qaeda’s role in 9/11, Democrats would have cried foul
and been right to do so. That never happened. But by choosing to frame
its report denouncing this brand of extremism in such a way as to
associate all those who have opposed Obama’s policies in one way or
another with the far Right, the ADL has stepped over a line that a
nonpartisan group should never cross.

Jonathan Tobin is executive editor of COMMENTARY.

3)Now we have a little insight into why Obama said to not jump to conclusions about Nidal Hasan and why Congressmen were not briefed before the press leak..

This murdering Muslim Terrorist who killed and wounded the soldiers and civilians at Ft Hood, Texas was an advisor to Obama's Homeland Security team. Look on page 29 of the Homeland Security Institute link below.

I wonder how many more skeletons there are to come to of the cupboard. Who else is there in the government or its numerous advisors or Czars that will harm our country and citizens?


http://www.gwumc.edu/hspi/old/PTTF_ProceedingsReport_05.19.09..pdf Goto page number 29, scroll down toward the botton on the Left Column


4)ObamaCare Will Impose Massive Healthcare Rationing on Senior Citizens

It is time to cut through the deceptions and bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo about ObamaCare.

If either the House Bill (H.R. 3962) or the Senate Bill (S. 1796) is enacted into law, ObamaCare will be paid for on the backs of senior citizens.

The president already has widely advertised his “cut-Medicare-first” strategy to pay for ObamaCare by proposing to cut $500 billion out of the program, which both the House and Senate Bills adopt. These cuts are slated to come primarily out of Medicare Advantage Plans, which currently provide 10 million seniors a wide range of private insurance choices.

These advertised Medicare cuts are only the tip of the iceberg.


What the president hasn’t told the public about, however, are the far greater Medicare cuts that seniors will experience at the hands of the Medicare Commission (Senate version) or the Medicare Center (House version), which will be used to ration healthcare by allowing bureaucrats to determine which senior citizens can receive what health treatments, services, procedures, medications, devices and so forth.

The State of Washington already tried this kind of bureaucratic healthcare rationing back in 2003 to control the cost of its state-run healthcare plan. The Wall Street Journal describes how it works:

“So far, the [Washington] commission has banned knee arthroscopy for osteoarthritis, discography for chronic back pain, and implantable infusion pumps for pain not related to cancer. This year, it is targeting such frivolous luxuries as knee replacements, spinal cord stimulation, a specialized autism therapy and MRIs of the abdomen, pelvis or breasts for cancer. It will also rule on routine ultrasounds for pregnancy, which have a ‘high’ efficacy but also a ‘high’ cost.

“Currently, the commission is pushing through the most restrictive payment policy in the nation for drug-eluting cardiac stents—simply because bare metal stents are cheaper, even as they result in worse outcomes. If a patient is wheeled into the operating room with chest pains in an emergency, doctors will first have to determine if he's covered by a state plan, then the diameter of his blood vessels and his diabetic condition to decide on the appropriate stent. If they don't, Washington will not reimburse them for ‘inappropriate care.’”

The State of Oregon has a similar bureaucracy to ration healthcare to control the costs of its state-run healthcare system. It is a veritable death panel. For example, in 2008 Oregon bureaucrats decided the some cancer patients seeking chemotherapy didn’t “qualify” for the treatment because the patients didn’t score high enough on Oregon’s bureaucratic criteria—sick Oregonians have ceased to be persons and are now simply “negative economic units.” Although Oregon denied the cancer patients’ chemotherapy claims, the State offered instead to pay for physician-assisted suicide, a chilling corruption of medical ethics.

The Senate ObamaCare Bill goes even further to squeeze the life out of senior citizens. It actually establishes a “global budget” for Medicare expenditures, which would force bureaucrats on the commission to ration healthcare to stay within the spending limits. It will work this way. The Medicare Commission—to be comprised of 15 members appointed by the President—will have to ration healthcare to keep Medicare expenditures from growing more rapidly per Medicare enrollee than inflation; after 2019, Medicare benefits would have to be rationed even more to keep government expenditures from growing faster than the economy plus one percentage point, regardless of the inflation rate.

This is nothing more than a scheme to squeeze the life out of Medicare and the senior citizens enrolled in the program. The Senate Bill doesn’t contain death panels; it doesn’t need them. The Medicare Commission’s global budget will deliver the coup de grâce without counsel or notification.

No healthcare for you, old one.

As the Wall Street Journal explained the Senate version of the Medicare Commission:

“The hard budget cap means there is only so much money to be divvied up for care, with no account for demographic changes, such as longer life spans, or for the increasing incidence of diabetes, heart disease and other chronic conditions.
“Worse, it makes little room for medical innovations. The commission is mandated to go after ‘sources of excess cost growth,’ meaning treatments that are too expensive or whose coverage will boost spending. If researchers find a pricey treatment for Alzheimer's in 2020, that might be banned because it would add new costs and bust the global budget. Or it might decide that ‘Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller,’ as President Obama put it in June.”

5)Holder's al Qaeda Incentive Plan
By WILLIAM MCGURN

When it comes to terrorists, you would think that an al Qaeda operative who targets an American mom sitting in her office or a child on a flight back home is many degrees worse than a Taliban soldier picked up after a firefight with U.S. Army troops.

Your instinct would be correct, because at the heart of terrorism is the monstrous idea that the former is as legitimate a target as the latter. Unfortunately, by dispatching Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al Qaeda leaders to federal criminal court for trial, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will be undermining this distinction. And the perverse message that decision will send to terrorists all over this dangerous world is this: If you kill civilians on American soil you will have greater protections than if you attack our military overseas.

"A fundamental purpose of rules such as the Geneva Conventions is to give those at war an incentive for more civilized behavior—and not targeting civilians is arguably the most sacred of these principles," says William Burck, a former federal prosecutor and Bush White House lawyer who dealt with national security issues. "It demolishes this principle to give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed even more legal protections than the Geneva Conventions provide a uniformed soldier fighting in a recognized war zone."

We don't often speak of incentives in war. That's a loss, because the whole idea of, say, Geneva rights is based on the idea of providing combatants with incentives to do things that help limit the bloodiness of battle. These include wearing a uniform, carrying arms openly, not targeting civilians, and so on.

Terrorists recognize none of these things. They are best understood as associations of people plotting and carrying out war crimes, whether that means sowing fear with direct and indiscriminate attacks on marketplaces, offices and airlines—or by engaging enemy troops without distinguishing uniforms, so that the surrounding civilians essentially become used as human shields. Terrorists reject both the laws of war and the laws of American civil society. To put it another way, they reject both the authority and the obligations their legal rights imply.

None of this seems to bother Mr. Holder. Since he dropped his bombshell on Friday, much commentary has focused on the possibility that KSM might be found not guilty. That, however, is unlikely: Mr. Holder is not a fool, and everyone in the Obama administration appreciates the backlash that would occur if a KSM trial results in an acquittal. Thus, the men he will send for trial will be those against whom he has the most evidence.

The perversity here is that the overwhelming evidence of their war crimes gain them protections denied a soldier fighting in accord with the rules of war.

It even gains them more protections than their associates who attack military targets. This double standard means that the perpetrators of the USS Cole bombing are sent to military tribunals while the perpetrators of 9/11 are sent to federal court.

Andrew McCarthy has a unique perspective on the move to criminal trials. As an assistant U.S. attorney in 1993, he successfully prosecuted Omar Abdel Rahman (the "blind sheikh") for the first bombing of the World Trade Center. Even though the cases were somewhat different—that plot was conceived, plotted and carried out on U.S. soil—Mr. McCarthy says the experience persuaded him that federal trials are a bad way of handling terror.

"At first, I was of the mind that a criminal prosecution would uphold all our high-falutin' rhetoric about the constitution and majesty of the law," says Mr. McCarthy. "But when you get down to the nitty gritty of a trial, you see one huge problem: The criminal justice system imposes limits on the government and gives the defendant all sorts of access to information, because we'd rather have the government lose than unfairly convict a man. You can't take that position with an enemy who is at war with you and trying to bring that government down."

By going down this line, says Mr. McCarthy, Mr. Holder has invited any number of dangers: making the Manhattan courtroom a target for terrorist attack, inviting the disclosure of sensitive intelligence, opening the possibility that some al Qaeda operative will be acquitted and released within the U.S., etc.

Worst of all, he says, is turning the laws of war upside down: Why fight the Marines and risk getting killed yourself or locked up in Bagram forever when you can blow up American citizens on their own streets and gain the legal protections that give you a chance to go free? With this one step, Mr. Holder is giving al Qaeda a ghastly incentive: to focus more of their attacks on American civilians on American home soil.

"It is foolish to think that al Qaeda does not train to our system and look for our vulnerabilities," says Mr. McCarthy. "Remember what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told his captors when we got him, 'I'll see you in New York with my lawyer.' It seems he knows our weaknesses better than our government does."

6)Dems alarmed as independents bolt
By: Alex Isenstadt


Mounting evidence that independent voters have soured on the Democrats is prompting a debate among party officials about what rhetorical and substantive changes are needed to halt the damage.

Following serious setbacks with independents in off-year elections earlier this month, White House officials attributed the defeats to local factors and said President Barack Obama sees no need to reposition his own image or the Democratic message.

Since then, however, a flurry of new polls makes clear that Democrats are facing deeper problems with independents—the swing voters who swung dramatically toward the party in 2006 and 2008 but who now are registering deep unease with the amount of spending and debt called for under Obama's agenda in an era of one-party rule in Washington.

A Gallup Poll released last week offered a disturbing glimpse about the state of play: just 14 percent of independents approve of the job Congress is doing, the lowest figure all year. In just the past few days alone, surveys have shown Democratic incumbents trailing Republicans among independent voters by double-digit margins in competitive statewide contests in places as varied as Connecticut, Ohio and Iowa.

Obama’s own popularity among independents has fallen significantly, too. A CBS News poll Tuesday showed the president’s approval rating among unaligned voters falling to 45 percent — down from 63 percent in April.

“We withdrew from the accounts of voters and now we need to pay them back,” said Nathan Daschle, executive director of the Democratic Governors Association. “We are having these conversations right now about what independents need to see and hear.”

Pat Waak, the chairwoman of the Colorado Democratic Party, said the party had so far failed to convince independent voters of the steps it had taken to improve the economy.

“I think the economy is at the base of the tension,” she said. “Quite frankly, we’ve got to do a better job of messaging. There’s a lot of work to be done to get independents more comfortable with what we’re doing.”

“Listen, it hasn’t been an easy time,” said T.J. Rooney, a former state legislator and the chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. “It’s almost like we’re a victim of our own success. When you’re governing, that changes the political dynamic.”

Andrew Myers, who polled for Democrats in Virginia House of Delegates races this year, said his analysis of exit polls indicated that voters had come to see Democrats as a party of high spending — too willing to make a rush for the pocketbooks and unable to effectively articulate how their health care reform push benefited independents, many of whom already have insurance plans.

“This is what’s particularly heartbreaking: There is a real sense that no one in Congress is standing up for them,” said Myers. “It’s a real problem for messaging for us.”

Nowhere was that more obvious than in Virginia and New Jersey, where GOP candidates captured governorships on Nov. 3 on the strength of landslide margins among independent voters.

In Virginia, Republican Bob McDonnell won a 65 percent to 34 percent victory over Democrat Creigh Deeds among independents in a state where President Barack Obama split the independent vote 49 percent to 48 percent against Republican John McCain just one year earlier.

In New Jersey, Republican Chris Christie won a 58 percent to 31 percent victory over Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine among independents — a stark contrast to Obama’s 51 percent to 47 percent win among independents in 2008.

“The perception of what’s happening in Congress is polluting what’s happening down below,” Myers said.

Michael Dimock, a pollster for the Pew Research Center — which reported in a new survey that only 45 percent of independents want their own representative to return to Congress — also believes Democrats have suffered for their inability to move the ball on key agenda items such as health care.


“I think it’s about action and not about words right now. The public wants to see action,” said Dimock. “I’m not sure words are going to help Democrats at this point. They’ve got to achieve some successes.”

“Independents are typically more frustrated with the political process,” noted Dimock. “They tend to have a real distaste for partisanship and ideology, and that’s about all they’re hearing right now.”

Some strategists, however, attribute the party’s weak Election Day showing among independent voters to changes in the composition of the independents who showed up at the polls.

“What we saw are more independents who are like Republicans and fewer independents who are like Democrats,” said Brad Lawrence, a veteran Democratic media consultant in New Jersey who worked for Corzine. “I think there was an enthusiasm gap.”

“This was not the same group of independents who showed up in 2008,” noted Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist. “For Obama’s election, the participating independents were more moderate; for Christie and McDonnell, the composition of the independents that came to the polls was more conservative. It’s this self-selection among the independent voter pool that helped the Democrats in 2008 and hurt them in 2009.”

Democrats also argue that with polls showing fewer voters identifying themselves as Republicans, the pool of independent voters is simply becoming more conservative than in the past, as those formerly Republican voters move into that camp. An October Washington Post/ABC News survey, for example, found just 20 percent of those polled identifying themselves as Republican.

“It looks a lot worse than it really is,” said John Anzalone, a veteran Democratic pollster. “Independents aren’t just falling away from Democrats.”

Still, Anzalone cautioned that with the party’s agenda under fire from Republicans and allied conservative groups, Democrats in conservative Southern and Western states need to be aware of the potential peril in alienating independent voters.

An automated survey released Monday by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling underscored that message with its finding that Democratic Rep. Vic Snyder, a seven-term Arkansas congressman, was only narrowly leading his little-known Republican challengers and held just a 30 percent approval rating among independents.

The erosion among independents, however, isn’t simply a regional problem. Democrats are anxious about the prospects of five-term Sen. Chris Dodd in Connecticut, who trails one of his GOP opponents by 28 percentage points among independents in a prospective head-to-head matchup, and Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter and Iowa Gov. Chet Culver, two Democratic incumbents with shrinking approval ratings among independent voters. A Des Moines Register poll released this weekend showed the first-term Culver trailing the GOP front-runner among independents by nearly 30 percentage points.

“It’s a challenge,” said Chris Redfern, the chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, referring to the current election environment. But, he added, “we don’t need all of them back. We just need a majority.”

Sen. Robert Menendez, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, acknowledged that the recent polls constituted “red flags” for Democrats. But he said voters remained unsatisfied with a Republican Party that, he said, had yet to demonstrate an ability to prove it has answers to the problems facing the country.

“I take this data with a grain of salt,” Menendez told POLITICO. “At this moment in time, we may not be doing as well with independents as I’d like, but Republicans aren’t doing well, either.”

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7)The world tires of the Palestinian cause
By Rami G. Khouri

The atmosphere in Cairo this week tells us much about the contemporary Arab world’s view of the Pa­lestine cause in relation to domestic issues in every Arab country. Ordinary Arabs and their governments alike seem fed up with the incompetence of the Palestinian leadership, while remaining strongly committed emotionally to the justice and rights of the Palestinian cause. This is emotionally satisfying for Palestinians, but not very promising politically.


The contrast is vividly reflected this week in the national frenzy over the Egyptian soccer team’s World Cup qualifying playoff match against Algeria in Sudan, in contrast with the little attention being paid to the condition of the Palestinians. Years ago, thousands would have marched in the streets of Cairo to express support for the Palestinians against Israel’s occupation and colonization policies. Today, it is a sign of the times that the Egyptian border with southern Gaza remains firmly locked. The Palestinian threat to seek support for an independent state at the United Nations Security Council has received only passing attention, while the authorities are busy organizing an air bridge to send supporters to cheer on their Egyptian national soccer team in Khartoum.

In many ways it is hard to criticize the Egyptians, who broke away from the Arab pack three decades ago and signed their separate peace agreement with Israel. This was followed 15 years later by the Jordanian-Israeli peace agreement, after the Palestinians tried to negotiate a permanent peace settlement with Israel via the Oslo accords. That attempt failed for many reasons, the primary ones being the Israeli lack of seriousness about ending the colonization of Palestinian land and Israel’s insistence on annexing much of Jerusalem and refusing to deal with the Palestinian refugees seriously. As for the Palestinians, their use of suicide bombings against Israelis represented a fatal blow to the negotiations.

Many attempts to negotiate comprehensive peace in the last three decades have failed, and each time Israelis and Palestinians have fallen back on the same rhetorical positions: Israel says it is prepared to discuss peace arrangements without preconditions (its colonization and strangulation of Palestinian land and society being set aside, presumably, as a non-reality); while the Palestinians accuse Israel of not being serious about negotiating peace. Because Israel is militarily stronger and in control of daily life arteries for Palestinians – like entry and exit points, water, food, electricity and fuel – it tends to define conditions on the ground. The Palestinian leadership, for its part, appeals to the world’s conscience and respect for international law, but with little impact and even less credibility.

The world has slowly tired of the Palestinians in their current political mode, and has focused on other issues, because the prospects of a negotiated Arab-Israeli peace appear slim, as diplomatic attempts to reach a full peace have repeatedly confirmed in the last three decades. It is no wonder that Egypt became weary with this, went its own way, and now cheers enthusiastically, and naturally, for its national soccer team, while keeping the gates to southern Gaza firmly shut.

The astounding thing is that the Palestinian leadership over the years has not woken up to the fact that however just and powerful is the cause of Palestine, it is not an inexhaustible well of emotional and political support in the Arab region or abroad. We are likely to witness this demonstrated again in the Arab and international shrug of the shoulders in response to the latest Palestinian idea of seeking Security Council recognition for the political fact and formal borders of a Palestinian state. It is hard to imagine a more unrealistic and fanciful idea than this, given that Israel controls the actual land where the borders should be drawn, and the United States, with its veto, controls the decision-making capacity of the Security Council.

It would have been much more productive for the Palestinian leadership to go to the UN and fight for adoption of the Goldstone Report on the atrocities committed mostly by Israel during the Gaza war last year. Having flip-flopped on the report and now threatening to make a meaningless approach to another UN body, the current Palestinian leadership persists in its legacy of living in a dream world. It is deeply detached from its own and fellow Arab people who should be its core support, totally disrespected by the Israeli government, and largely ignored by the rest of the world.

This prevails at a time when Israeli war crimes and colonization continue unabated, but are escaping attention politically because of the incompetence of the Palestinian leadership. No wonder more Arabs and others are turning away from the Palestine issue, giving it only perfunctory rhetorical support without making more costly political moves to oppose Israeli policies or help the Palestinians. Israeli national criminality and Palestinian political incompetence are a deadly combination.



Rami G. Khouri is published twice-weekly by THE DAILY STAR.

8)Circling Sharks Smell American Blood
By Victor Davis Hanson

On his recent trip to Asia, President Obama found China, Japan and South Korea - like many nations these days - in no mood to hear more American lectures.

Beijing is worried about owning so much American debt. Tokyo is tiring of an American military base in Okinawa, and wants to redefine its relationship with us. Seoul is starting to doubt American commitment to keep it safe from North Korea.

Why all the sudden pushback to our charismatic president?

Our dollar is crashing, while the price of gold is soaring. The budget deficit has never been worse - and the president wants to float even more debt for health-care and energy initiatives.

By the end of this presidential term, we may add another $9 trillion to our already astronomical $11 trillion debt. Unemployment has already topped 10 percent. This quarter's trade deficit reached a near-historic high. Our debtors and oil exporters talk of scrapping the dollar as the common international currency.

American hesitation abroad reflects the shaky economic news. In Afghanistan, we can't decide whether to seek victory or admit defeat -- or simply vote present by keeping the status quo. President Obama reached out to enemies like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. But so far they remain unimpressed, despite his apologizing for an assortment of supposed past American sins.

The Chinese don't listen all that much anymore to our sermons on their human-rights, coal-burning and free-trade abuses - not when they hold $1.5 trillion in U.S. assets. The president took a lot of flak for bowing to Saudi royals and the Japanese emperor. But why wouldn't he show deference - given America's huge dependence on foreign oil and Japanese imports?

France, of all nations, is now warning us to get a backbone with the Iranians. So far the theocracy has snubbed our new outreach efforts aimed at stopping its nuclear proliferation. Iran's Russian patrons now talk more nicely to us - but mostly because we caved on land-based missile defense in Eastern Europe, and got nothing really in return.

The Norwegians gave Obama the Nobel Peace Prize after less than a year in office and without any real accomplishments. They must suspect that such global recognition will flatter Obama to push a now-unexceptional America toward a more multilateral perspective in tune with the thinking at the United Nations.

The Obama administration announced a kinder, gentler approach to the war on terror. It serially promised to the world to shut down Guantanamo and loudly derided much of the Bush-era anti-terrorism protocols. We may put on trial former CIA interrogators, while we give civil trials and full American legal protection to the terrorist detainees who planned the 9/11 attacks.

Obama himself has praised the history and culture of the Islamic world, and even fudged the historical record to magnify its achievements.

Yet so far this year authorities broke up three radical Islamic terrorist plots inside the United States. And we lost 12 soldiers and one civilian (with others wounded) at Fort Hood; the accused, a member of our own military, has shown himself to be a Muslim extremist. Al-Qaida promises more attacks, and the Taliban feel that American commitment to a free Afghanistan is weakening.

Add it all up and there is a growing sense that America is in fact hemorrhaging - as both friends and enemies abroad smell blood in the water. The president through conciliation and concession - not to mention constant talk - is trying to superficially restore the influence we once earned by virtue of our economic power and self-confidence in our exceptional past and singular values.

But being both loud and vulnerable is not a winning combination, since political influence and military power are ultimately predicated on economic strength.

The United States needs to re-establish itself as financially credible and responsible so that when we lecture -- about everything from global warming to Iranian nukes -- we do so from a position of strength. That means, we need to stop borrowing other nations' money.

America also can't afford to keep importing high-priced oil that we won't produce at home. And we should stop promising ever more government entitlements to ever more voters that we can't even begin to pay for.

For as we continue in our self-indulgence, a more defiant world seems to be saying that the old rules of the game have changed. In response, America should keep quieter abroad - and try finding a bigger stick.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War."

8a)Obama goes to China, brings home a T-shirt


Characteristically, conservative critics made way too much of President Obama's harmless bow to Japanese Emperor Akihito at the outset of the U.S. president's trip to Asia. Perhaps they forgot that in 1971, President Nixon made a similar gesture to Emperor Hirohito. There's nothing wrong with showing a little cultural sensitivity and respect.

Had the critics been a bit more patient, they'd have found a more legitimate target in the way Obama handled his subsequent visit to China, during which he went out of his way to show that he's not his tough-talking predecessor, George W. Bush, but a kinder and gentler leader who listens to other nations instead of dictating to them.

Creating a climate of collaboration is a worthy goal, but Obama was deferential to the point of looking weak. He acceded to a joint news conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao in which no questions were allowed. Obama's "town hall" meeting with Chinese students in Shanghai was partially censored within China. In October, Obama sought to placate his Chinese hosts by refusing to meet with the Dalai Lama until after his China trip, the first time a president had snubbed Tibet's spiritual leader since 1991.

On three of the crucial issues Obama pressed Chinese leaders for movement — supporting tougher sanctions to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions, devaluing China's overvalued currency and making progress on human rights — the president got "no's" in varying degrees of bluntness.

Obama did manage to come away with a modest pledge by the Chinese government on global warming, a useful ingredient in persuading Congress to take on the issue but a relatively minor prize.

It's a sad reality that the balance of power has shifted since Bill Clinton frankly criticized the Chinese for the Tiananmen massacre during a joint press conference with President Jiang Zemin in 1998. China is now the USA's largest creditor, with $1 trillion in U.S. treasuries and other debt. With the U.S. continuing to run huge deficits, it's prudent not to snub your banker.

Foreign trips are optional, however, and skillful presidents usually manage to come home with some achievement or agreement, usually one that has been patiently worked out long before the visit. Rarely does a president come away looking weaker, so it's mystifying that the administration didn't at least stage-manage a better impression — one of cooperation, not acquiescence.

The risk is that Obama's manner could leave a dangerous perception among other tough actors around the world. JFK's unimpressive first encounter with Premier Nikita Khrushchev led the Soviet leader to conclude that the young U.S. president wouldn't object to Soviet missiles in Cuba, a misjudgment that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

Obama is, even for some detractors, an unusually likable man whose charm and intelligence are potent tools. So perhaps his approach will pay off in the long run with Beijing. And perhaps the China trip accomplished more behind the scenes than is immediately apparent.

But a truism of international relations is that it's better to be respected than liked. Judged by that harsh yardstick, Obama's first trip to China was more successful for its tourism than for its diplomacy.

8b)Obama's Iran sanctions strategy is routed by Chinese, Russian rebuffs


Chinese president Hu Jintao said clearly after meeting US president Barack Obama in Beijing Tuesday, Nov. 17, that their governments disagree on tougher sanctions for Iran - or any other issue relating to the Islamic republic sources report this rebuff has led Washington's efforts to round up big power endorsement of harsh penalties for Iran's continued intransigence on its nuclear program, such as an embargo on refined petrol products and gasoline, have come to a dead end. The efficacy of unilateral American sanctions, the only non-military option still left to Washington, is questionable.

Secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a last-ditch bid Wednesday, Nov. 18, to scale China's negative wall, before the US president left for South Korea. She tried to talk the Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo into at least issuing a Beijing statement on Iran. He refused outright.

The Chinese rejection followed a rebuff from Moscow in the form of a comment by Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov that it was premature to say that diplomatic efforts for defusing tensions over Iran's nuclear program had failed. He said it was too soon to talk about stepping up sanctions on Iran, if at all, so contradicting the supportive message Obama received from Russian President Dmitry Medvedev when they met in Singapore last week and agreed that time was running out for Iran to respond to international efforts to meet it halfway.

Tuesday, before Beijing and Moscow knocked sanctions on the head, Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu said optimistically that the Iranian nuclear issue should be left for the world powers and international community to deal with. In a few short hours, that option had melted away.

In the last 24 hours, Israelis have been too busy discussing the expansion of the Gilo neighborhood of Jerusalem to notice that their former and current governments, headed respectively by Ehud Olmert and Binyamin Netanyahu, have just suffered one of their biggest foreign policy defeats. They are now confronted with a most unwelcome dilemma.


9)What the generals won't tell the prez
By Ralph Peters

As our powerless secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, dutifully covers her head to attend the inauguration of an Afghan president so unpopular his ceremony has to be held behind closed doors, our AfPak (Afghanistan/Pakistan) policy isn't merely adrift. It's sinking.

President Obama inherited a mess, and promptly made it worse. But let's be fair: There's plenty of blame to go around in the ongoing Afghan nondecision debacle, as well as regarding our follies in Pakistan.

If the devalued buck stops at the president's desk, it's also true that the generals involved with AfPak have failed to fulfill their duties to the commander-in-chief.



Gen. Stanley McChrystal's August report, which called for more troops, was one thing -- the commander on the ground's legitimate assessment as to what he believed he needed to execute his mission.

The insubordination came later -- when President Obama asked for strategic options.

The Pentagon was obligated to respond with a full range of alternatives that re-examined the premises of the mission and offered genuine choices. It didn't.

Instead of serious alternatives, the president got slightly different versions of the single option the top generals liked. The issue was reduced to "How many more troops will you send, Mr. President?"

The brass have tried to bully the president on this one. No matter who the president is, that's wrong. When any president asks for options, he should get genuine alternatives, not variations on a theme.

Now what? We'll send more troops to Afghanistan. But we still won't have a strategy, just a new spin on old gimmicks. Far from thinking outside of the box, the generals are struggling to make the box even narrower.

This isn't a defense of Obama, whose vacillation and posturing are appalling. This is a defense of the office of the president: It's dereliction of duty for generals to stack the deck to get their way. They owe the Oval Office serious analysis, not Christmas lists.

Meanwhile, as Afghanistan comes apart, there's far bigger trouble next door in Pakistan -- where the region's future will be decided.

The year-old government of President Asif Zardari is on the political ropes. Corruption's the national sport. The military's vital offensive into South Waziristan has slowed to a pace that encourages the enemy to escape (part of the plan?).

Anti-Americanism has soared -- egged on by the media, parliamentarians and mullahs alike. Pakistan's "outraged" that our latest gift of $7.5 billion comes with questions about how it will be spent. We're villains for demanding accountability.

And I've been wrong about a fundamental issue. For years, I've insisted that, while the Pakistanis would never give us "their" Taliban (such as the Haqqani faction), they'd deliver Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri if they could.

Wrong, wrong, wrong: As the conflict dragged on, I failed to re-examine my conclusion and see what's become obvious: Osama bin Laden is the goose that lays platinum eggs.

If we killed or captured Osama and Zawahiri, the Pakistanis might not be able to milk us for more tribute money. We could draw down our troop presence next door. And the Pakistanis would lose the mighty profits squeezed from our supply route into Afghanistan.

The Pakistanis don't want us to remain in Afghanistan forever, but they're not ready to hit the brakes on the gravy train, either. They're of two minds -- and the greedy side tends to win in the short term.

And as long as we "need" Pakistan, Islamabad will be able to sponsor more terror attacks on India, counting on us to intervene before New Delhi retaliates.

Why on earth would they hand over Osama?

My mistake became clear with the passage of time: Eight years after 9/11, Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency must know where Osama hangs his turban. The ISI has connections even among the state's most virulent enemies. It's impossible to believe that, after this much time has elapsed, it has no idea where Osama's hiding. He could even be under the ISI's active protection.

We're such dupes. For the Pakistani government and the Afghan government. Secretary Clinton will show our support for Karzai in public, nag him a little in private, get a few worthless promises, bother Gen. McChrystal and fly home.

Mission accomplished.

Our president won't act, our generals won't think and our allies won't help.

God help our troops.

Ralph Peters' new book is "The War After Armageddon."

10)Will 2010 be the Perfect Storm?
By Bruce Walker

Seven different indicators suggest that 2010 will be a very tough year for the Obama Administration's plans to turn America into a Socialist People's Republic. If some of these indicators pointed one way and others pointed the other way, projections might be murkier. But all the winds seem to be blowing in the same direction and the result may be for Republicans the Perfect Storm. What are these seven different indicators?


1) Public opinion polls, led by the very accurate Rasmussen Poll, have shown in the summer a clear line in the "strong approve" and "strongly disapprove" of Obama. Although the figures waggle day to day, the trend is very clear: not only is Obama less and less popular, but the intensity of support for and against Obama, which will be critical in the low turnout mid-term elections, shows a huge negative gap for Obama.


The generic congressional ballots, which usually understate the size of the Republican vote in general elections, has shown a consistent Republican lead in Rasmussen since mid-June and this lead has now climbed to six points and Gallup now shows a four point lead for Republicans as well.


This dovetails with polls showing Republican candidates doing well in a number of individual races around the country. Almost everywhere and in almost every poll, Democrats are doing worse than in recent history and worse than would have been expected if 2010 was a normal mid-term election.


2) Elections corroborate polling data. This means more than just the dramatic Republican victories in Virginia and New Jersey this November. Republicans have been winning special state legislative elections all over the nation, often winning by wide margins districts that Democrats had held comfortably for many years. Even recent municipal elections in Democrat strongholds like Albuquerque have produced stunning Republican upsets.


But elections mean more than just the election of candidates for office. Democrats have yet to explain the stunning defeat of the establishment-backed propositions in California in May, which showed the Sacramento politicians losing for some of the propositions every single county in California. There is a pattern to ballot initiatives. Maine voters surprisingly defeated gay marriage, taking a stand directly contrary to their elected officials. All this suggests that fiscal and social conservatism are robust and alive in the hearts and minds of voters.


3) The polling data and election results seem to have had an effect on recruiting candidates. Mike Castle, a former governor and incumbent congressman in Delaware, was the only Republican who had a prayer of winning Biden's old Senate seat. Republicans persuaded him to run for that seat in 2010, giving Republicans an excellent chance to pick up a Democrat seat. Mike Kirk, a Republican congressman from the northern metropolitan area of Chicago, is the strongest candidate the GOP could recruit, and Democrats are still floundering for a candidate. John Kasich has an excellent chance to recapture the Ohio governorship, having passed up a run for the same office in 2006.


4) Recruitment also is helped by the enthusiasm of conservatives. The spontaneous uprisings at Tea Party and other gatherings shows that there should be no problem getting campaign workers and small contributors in 2010 for candidates who are running against Obama. Doug Hoffman's campaign in New York took off largely because of the tremendous grassroots support of conservative voters from throughout the nation. The percentage of Americans, according to Rasmussen, who "strongly disapprove" of Obama is at very high historic levels for this young a presidency.


Leftist advocates by contrast, see President Obama continuing (as everyone not on the far left understood) the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq. They see him compromising on health care issues, perhaps allowing some limitation on abortion in the bill. They listen to his rhetoric, which inevitably is less radical than they had hoped, and their enthusiasm melts noticeably.


5) Closely related to enthusiasm is the composition of the electorate who are supporting Republicans and the composition of the Obama voters. Senior citizens, who vote in nearly all elections, are alarmed by Obama's plans regarding Medicare. The young voters and the black voters who turned out in record numbers to elect Obama were conspicuous by their absence in November 2009. Obama will not be on the ballot in 2010. There will, instead, be a lot of old, white rich Democrat candidates trying to appeal to the center -- trying, in many cases, to sound more Republican than Republicans. As a consequence the electorate in 2010 will almost certainly be much more conservative than in 2008, and that will affect results.


6) Beyond all these factors, President Obama is showing an increasing tendency to fumble and to grope. The inexplicably silly remarks that Obama made when Cambridge police arrested Professor Gates in July revealed a highly parochial political instinct in which pummeling white police officers is considered good tactics. His bowing before foreign heads of state is another amateurish mistake. Obama went to Copenhagen to get the Olympic Games in Chicago and came back humiliated. The jobs putatively created by his stimulus bill now appear to have come in nonexistent congressional districts. The cumulative impact is to make Obama look more and more like Jimmy Carter, a man who cannot lead.


7) The seventh, and deadliest, problem for Obama in 2010 will be that he owns all the bad political problems of our country. Ft Hood was the first terrorist attack on American soil since September 11, 2001 -- Obama has not been able to do what Bush did. If there are more attacks, Republicans will force him to acknowledge the obvious: he is weaker than Bush on terror. Unemployment is at very high levels. Democrats are increasingly embroiled in scandals.


2008 may well prove to be the "Perfect Storm" for Democrats, united behind a smooth, handsome young black man and running against the last dying days of a much maligned George W. Bush Republican Party, and 2010 may prove the be the complete unraveling of an overstretched Democratic Party, yet to learn that conservatives are the huge majority of Americans.

Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie and The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.

Hageeite's vs Carterite's! A No Brainer For Me!

The above re-enforces my view that every time Obama goes out of the country to tell the world about America, I cringe. It also reminds me of the fact that we are becoming less and less relevant to the world because the change Obama has wrought makes Capitalism and our Republic form of government more and more irrelevant.

Connecting the dots and where it all leads according to James Simpson. (See 1 below.)

Every once in a while I experience an epiphany. Last night I went, with about 17 others, to Statesboro to attend a meeting of CUFI.Org on the campus of Ga. Southern. CUFI stands for 'Christians United for Israel' and was the brainchild of Dr. John Hagee. CUFI's main objective is to educate and build Christian support for Israel throughout America.

Most Liberal Jews are frightened by Hagee and his Fundamentalism. They use their expressed concern as an excuse to keep their heads in the sand and to ignore world trends. Norman Podhoretz discussed the growing antipathy of the Left towards Israel, how the Right have become outspoken supporters of Israel,how Liberal Jews purposefully ignore reality and why.

Hagee comes at his "Christian Zionism" from his literal interpretation of the written word in the bible - both old and new testaments - and his further belief that, in the name of Christ, great sins were perpetrated against Jews. Hagee decided to start a movement to exculpate his flock of the past sins, as he sees them, and to build a close bond with "the Chosen People." The honored speaker was a Hagee lieutenant . He made a humorous, stem-winding talk laying out the case why Israel has a right to survive, expand and our nation should support their right. It was 'right' out of George Gilder.

Those in attendance - about 200- , and I say this with no disrespect and in fact admiration, represent Grant Wood's America. They are not urban sophisticates - just down to earth, God fearing Americans, who epitomize what Newt Gingrich identified are the traits that encompass what it is to be an American. Yes, like all of us they have their prejudices but they have good hearts and have proven they are capable of change and rectifying past views that were morally incompatible with what Christ actually taught. Hagee is leading the way, to his undying credit!

Putting their money where their mouth is the crowd was asked to contribute and help defray the cost of a Sderot Trauma Facility. I did so and am joining CUFI as well.

What I have in common with members of CUFI is their belief in freedom, Capitalism, America and, not only Israel's right to exist and expand, but also the absolute necessity that it do so because another Holocaust will only serve to bring the world closer to an Armageddon. (See 1a and 1b below - Expansion has nothing to do with safety. It has everything to do with a nation's right to accommodate their citizen's desire/need to live where they wish within the boundary of law.)

Does this mean everything Israel has done is supportable - no but neither can I say that everything America has done is supportable. What I can say is that Israel is surrounded by nations and backward leaders of those nations who are out of sync with where the world must go if we are ever to achieve harmony among men on this earth.

CUFI has modeled itself after AIPAC and represents the schism that exists in the Baptist Sect, ie the Hageeite's versus the Carterite's. As far as I am concerned it is an easy decision for me as to where I plant my feet!

Have we reached the point again where the demonizing of another person can turn them into a Chernoble type danger? It is not the first time the Left has turned on another human - to be Borked is now in Webster's Dictionary as being Thomased should be.

I certainly have done my share of Clinton and Obama bashing. I believe the difference is that I have taken facts not mud as the basis of my criticism.

One would hope the hypocrisy of the Left would eventually boomerang. Maybe it will.(See 2, 2a and 2b below.)


Obama's idea has been sanctioned as he hits China's Great Wall? (See 3 below.)

This Wolffle writes, Obama should come home and in a hurry. (See 4 below.)

A tale of two economies. (See 5 below.)

It is getting clearer and clearer - America's image and reliability are getting murkier and murkier. (See 5a below.)

Dick



1)Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis
By James Simpson

America waits with bated breath while Washington struggles to bring the U.S. economy back from the brink of disaster. But many of those same politicians caused the crisis, and if left to their own devices will do so again.


Despite the mass media news blackout, a series of books, talk radio and the blogosphere have managed to expose Barack Obama's connections to his radical mentors -- Weather Underground bombers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis and others. David Horowitz and his Discover the Networks.org have also contributed a wealth of information and have noted Obama's radical connections since the beginning.


Yet, no one to my knowledge has yet connected all the dots between Barack Obama and the Radical Left. When seen together, the influences on Obama's life comprise a who's who of the radical leftist movement, and it becomes painfully apparent that not only is Obama a willing participant in that movement, he has spent most of his adult life deeply immersed in it.


But even this doesn't fully describe the extreme nature of this candidate. He can be tied directly to a malevolent overarching strategy that has motivated many, if not all, of the most destructive radical leftist organizations in the United States since the 1960s.


The Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis


In an earlier post, I noted the liberal record of unmitigated legislative disasters, the latest of which is now being played out in the financial markets before our eyes. Before the 1994 Republican takeover, Democrats had sixty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress - with substantial majorities most of the time. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?


Why?


One of two things must be true. Either the Democrats are unfathomable idiots, who ignorantly pursue ever more destructive policies despite decades of contrary evidence, or they understand the consequences of their actions and relentlessly carry on anyway because they somehow benefit.


I submit to you they understand the consequences. For many it is simply a practical matter of eliciting votes from a targeted constituency at taxpayer expense; we lose a little, they gain a lot, and the politician keeps his job. But for others, the goal is more malevolent - the failure is deliberate. Don't laugh. This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It describes their agenda, tactics, and long-term strategy.


The Strategy was first elucidated in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation magazine by a pair of radical socialist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. David Horowitz summarizes it as:


The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.


Cloward and Piven were inspired by radical organizer [and Hillary Clinton mentor] Saul Alinsky:


"Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one. (Courtesy Discover the Networks.org)




Newsmax rounds out the picture:


Their strategy to create political, financial, and social chaos that would result in revolution blended Alinsky concepts with their more aggressive efforts at bringing about a change in U.S. government. To achieve their revolutionary change, Cloward and Piven sought to use a cadre of aggressive organizers assisted by friendly news media to force a re-distribution of the nation's wealth.


In their Nation article, Cloward and Piven were specific about the kind of "crisis" they were trying to create:


By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention.


No matter where the strategy is implemented, it shares the following features:


The offensive organizes previously unorganized groups eligible for government benefits but not currently receiving all they can.
The offensive seeks to identify new beneficiaries and/or create new benefits.
The overarching aim is always to impose new stresses on target systems, with the ultimate goal of forcing their collapse.


Capitalizing on the racial unrest of the 1960s, Cloward and Piven saw the welfare system as their first target. They enlisted radical black activist George Wiley, who created the National Welfare Reform Organization (NWRO) to implement the strategy. Wiley hired militant foot soldiers to storm welfare offices around the country, violently demanding their "rights." According to a City Journal article by Sol Stern, welfare rolls increased from 4.3 million to 10.8 million by the mid-1970s as a result, and in New York City, where the strategy had been particularly successful, "one person was on the welfare rolls... for every two working in the city's private economy."


According to another City Journal article titled "Compassion Gone Mad":


The movement's impact on New York City was jolting: welfare caseloads, already climbing 12 percent a year in the early sixties, rose by 50 percent during Lindsay's first two years; spending doubled... The city had 150,000 welfare cases in 1960; a decade later it had 1.5 million.


The vast expansion of welfare in New York City that came of the NWRO's Cloward-Piven tactics sent the city into bankruptcy in 1975. Rudy Giuliani cited Cloward and Piven by name as being responsible for "an effort at economic sabotage." He also credited Cloward-Piven with changing the cultural attitude toward welfare from that of a temporary expedient to a lifetime entitlement, an attitude which in-and-of-itself has caused perhaps the greatest damage of all.


Cloward and Piven looked at this strategy as a gold mine of opportunity. Within the newly organized groups, each offensive would find an ample pool of foot soldier recruits willing to advance its radical agenda at little or no pay, and expand its base of reliable voters, legal or otherwise. The radicals' threatening tactics also would accrue an intimidating reputation, providing a wealth of opportunities for extorting monetary and other concessions from the target organizations. In the meantime, successful offensives would create an ever increasing drag on society. As they gleefully observed:


Moreover, this kind of mass influence is cumulative because benefits are continuous. Once eligibility for basic food and rent grants is established, the drain on local resources persists indefinitely.


The next time you drive through one of the many blighted neighborhoods in our cities, or read of the astronomical crime, drug addiction, and out-of-wedlock birth rates, or consider the failed schools, strapped police and fire resources of every major city, remember Cloward and Piven's thrill that "...the drain on local resources persists indefinitely."


ACORN, the new tip of the Cloward-Piven spear


In 1970, one of George Wiley's protégés, Wade Rathke -- like Bill Ayers, a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) -- was sent to found the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now. While NWRO had made a good start, it alone couldn't accomplish the Cloward-Piven goals. Rathke's group broadened the offensive to include a wide array of low income "rights." Shortly thereafter they changed "Arkansas" to "Association of" and ACORN went nationwide.


Today ACORN is involved in a wide array of activities, including housing, voting rights, illegal immigration and other issues. According to ACORN's website: "ACORN is the nation's largest grassroots community organization of low-and moderate-income people with over 400,000 member families organized into more than 1,200 neighborhood chapters in 110 cities across the country," It is perhaps the largest radical group in the U.S. and has been cited for widespread criminal activity on many fronts.


Voting


On voting rights, ACORN and its voter mobilization subsidiary, Project Vote, have been involved nationwide in efforts to grant felons the vote and lobbied heavily for the Motor Voter Act of 1993, a law allowing people to register at motor vehicle departments, schools, libraries and other public places. That law had been sought by Cloward and Piven since the early1980s and they were present, standing behind President Clinton at the signing ceremony.


ACORN's voter rights tactics follow the Cloward-Piven Strategy:


1. Register as many Democrat voters as possible, legal or otherwise and help them vote, multiple times if possible.
2. Overwhelm the system with fraudulent registrations using multiple entries of the same name, names of deceased, random names from the phone book, even contrived names.
3. Make the system difficult to police by lobbying for minimal identification standards.


In this effort, ACORN sets up registration sites all over the country and has been frequently cited for turning in fraudulent registrations, as well as destroying republican applications. In the 2004-2006 election cycles alone, ACORN was accused of widespread voter fraud in 12 states. It may have swung the election for one state governor.


ACORN's website brags: "Since 2004, ACORN has helped more than 1.7 million low- and moderate-income and minority citizens apply to register to vote." Project vote boasts 4 million. I wonder how many of them are dead? For the 2008 cycle, ACORN and Project Vote have pulled out all the stops. Given their furious nationwide effort, it is not inconceivable that this presidential race could be decided by fraudulent votes alone.


Barack Obama ran ACORN's Project Vote in Chicago and his highly successful voter registration drive was credited with getting the disgraced former Senator Carol Moseley-Braun elected. Newsmax reiterates Cloward and Piven's aspirations for ACORN's voter registration efforts:


By advocating massive, no-holds-barred voter registration campaigns, they [Cloward & Piven] sought a Democratic administration in Washington, D.C. that would re-distribute the nation's wealth and lead to a totalitarian socialist state.


Illegal Immigration


As I have written elsewhere, the Radical Left's offensive to promote illegal immigration is "Cloward-Piven on steroids." ACORN is at the forefront of this movement as well, and was a leading organization among a broad coalition of radical groups, including Soros' Open Society Institute, the Service Employees International Union (ACORN founder Wade Rathke also runs a SEIU chapter), and others, that became the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform. CCIR fortunately failed to gain passage for the 2007 illegal immigrant amnesty bill, but its goals have not changed.


The burden of illegal immigration on our already overstressed welfare system has been widely documented. Some towns in California have even been taken over by illegal immigrant drug cartels. The disease, crime and overcrowding brought by illegal immigrants places a heavy burden on every segment of society and every level of government, threatening to split this country apart at the seams. In the meantime, radical leftist efforts to grant illegal immigrants citizenship guarantee a huge pool of new democrat voters. With little border control, terrorists can also filter in.


Obama aided ACORN as their lead attorney in a successful suit he brought against the Illinois state government to implement the Motor Voter law there. The law had been resisted by Republican Governor Jim Edgars, who feared the law was an opening to widespread vote fraud.


His fears were warranted as the Motor Voter law has since been cited as a major opportunity for vote fraud, especially for illegal immigrants, even terrorists. According to the Wall Street Journal: "After 9/11, the Justice Department found that eight of the 19 hijackers were registered to vote..."


ACORN's dual offensives on voting and illegal immigration are handy complements. Both swell the voter rolls with reliable democrats while assaulting the country ACORN seeks to destroy with overwhelming new problems.


Mortgage Crisis


And now we have the mortgage crisis, which has sent a shock wave through Wall Street and panicked world financial markets like no other since the stock market crash of 1929. But this is a problem created in Washington long ago. It originated with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), signed into law in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter. The CRA was Carter's answer to a grassroots activist movement started in Chicago, and forced banks to make loans to low income, high risk customers. PhD economist and former Texas Senator Phil Gramm has called it: "a vast extortion scheme against the nation's banks."


ACORN aggressively sought to expand loans to low income groups using the CRA as a whip. Economist Stan Leibowitz wrote in the New York Post:


In the 1980s, groups such as the activists at ACORN began pushing charges of "redlining"-claims that banks discriminated against minorities in mortgage lending. In 1989, sympathetic members of Congress got the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act amended to force banks to collect racial data on mortgage applicants; this allowed various studies to be ginned up that seemed to validate the original accusation.


In fact, minority mortgage applications were rejected more frequently than other applications-but the overwhelming reason wasn't racial discrimination, but simply that minorities tend to have weaker finances.


ACORN showed its colors again in 1991, by taking over the House Banking Committee room for two days to protest efforts to scale back the CRA. Obama represented ACORN in the Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Fed. Sav. Bank, 1994 suit against redlining. Most significant of all, ACORN was the driving force behind a 1995 regulatory revision pushed through by the Clinton Administration that greatly expanded the CRA and laid the groundwork for the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac borne financial crisis we now confront. Barack Obama was the attorney representing ACORN in this effort. With this new authority, ACORN used its subsidiary, ACORN Housing, to promote subprime loans more aggressively.


As a New York Post article describes it:


A 1995 strengthening of the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to find ways to provide mortgages to their poorer communities. It also let community activists intervene at yearly bank reviews, shaking the banks down for large pots of money.



Banks that got poor reviews were punished; some saw their merger plans frustrated; others faced direct legal challenges by the Justice Department.


Flexible lending programs expanded even though they had higher default rates than loans with traditional standards. On the Web, you can still find CRA loans available via ACORN with "100 percent financing . . . no credit scores . . . undocumented income . . . even if you don't report it on your tax returns." Credit counseling is required, of course.


Ironically, an enthusiastic Fannie Mae Foundation report singled out one paragon of nondiscriminatory lending, which worked with community activists and followed "the most flexible underwriting criteria permitted." That lender's $1 billion commitment to low-income loans in 1992 had grown to $80 billion by 1999 and $600 billion by early 2003.


The lender they were speaking of was Countrywide, which specialized in subprime lending and had a working relationship with ACORN.


Investor's Business Daily added:


The revisions also allowed for the first time the securitization of CRA-regulated loans containing subprime mortgages. The changes came as radical "housing rights" groups led by ACORN lobbied for such loans. ACORN at the time was represented by a young public-interest lawyer in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama. (Emphasis, mine.)


Since these loans were to be underwritten by the government sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the implicit government guarantee of those loans absolved lenders, mortgage bundlers and investors of any concern over the obvious risk. As Bloomberg reported: "It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit."


And if you think Washington policy makers cared about ACORN's negative influence, think again. Before this whole mess came down, a Democrat-sponsored bill on the table would have created an "Affordable Housing Trust Fund," granting ACORN access to approximately $500 million in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac revenues with little or no oversight.


Even now, unbelievably -- on the brink of national disaster -- Democrats have insisted ACORN benefit from bailout negotiations! Senator Lindsay Graham reported last night (9/25/08) in an interview with Greta Van Susteren of On the Record that Democrats want 20 percent of the bailout money to go to ACORN!


This entire fiasco represents perhaps the pinnacle of ACORN's efforts to advance the Cloward-Piven Strategy and is a stark demonstration of the power they wield in Washington.


Enter Barack Obama


In attempting to capture the significance of Barack Obama's Radical Left connections and his relation to the Cloward Piven strategy, I constructed following flow chart. It is by no means complete. There are simply too many radical individuals and organizations to include them all here. But these are perhaps the most significant.





The chart puts Barack Obama at the epicenter of an incestuous stew of American radical leftism. Not only are his connections significant, they practically define who he is. Taken together, they constitute a who's who of the American radical left, and guiding all is the Cloward-Piven strategy.

Conspicuous in their absence are any connections at all with any other group, moderate, or even mildly leftist. They are all radicals, firmly bedded in the anti-American, communist, socialist, radical leftist mesh.


Saul Alinsky


Most people are unaware that Barack Obama received his training in "community organizing" from Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation. But he did. In and of itself that marks his heritage and training as that of a radical activist. One really needs go no further. But we have.


Bill Ayers


Obama objects to being associated with SDS bomber Bill Ayers, claiming he is being smeared with "guilt by association." But they worked together at the Woods Fund. The Wall Street Journal added substantially to our knowledge by describing in great detail Obama's work over five years with SDS bomber Bill Ayers on the board of a non-profit, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, to push a radical agenda on public school children. As Stanley Kurtz states:


"...the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago."


Also included in the mix is Theresa Heinz Kerry's favorite charity, the Tides Foundation. A partial list of Tides grants tells you all you need to know: ACLU, ACORN, Center for American Progress, Center for Constitutional Rights (a communist front,) CAIR, Earth Justice, Institute for Policy Studies (KGB spy nest), National Lawyers Guild (oldest communist front in U.S.), People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and practically every other radical group there is. ACORN's Wade Rathke runs a Tides subsidiary, the Tides Center.


Carl Davidson and the New Party


We have heard about Bomber Bill, but we hear little about fellow SDS member Carl Davidson. According to Discover the Networks, Davidson was an early supporter of Barack Obama and a prominent member of Chicago's New Party, a synthesis of CPUSA members, Socialists, ACORN veterans and other radicals. Obama sought and received the New Party's endorsement, and they assisted with his campaign. The New Party also developed a strong relationship with ACORN. As an excellent article on the New Party observes: "Barack Obama knew what he was getting into and remains an ideal New Party candidate."


George Soros


The chart also suggests the reason for George Soros' fervent support of Obama. The President of his Open Society Institute is Aryeh Neier, founder of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). As mentioned above, three other former SDS members had extensive contact with Obama: Bill Ayers, Carl Davidson and Wade Rathke. Surely Aryeh Neier would have heard from his former colleagues of the promising new politician. More to the point, Neier is firmly committed to supporting the hugely successful radical organization, ACORN, and would be certain back their favored candidate, Barack Obama.


ACORN


Obama has spent a large portion of his professional life working for ACORN or its subsidiaries, representing ACORN as a lawyer on some of its most critical issues, and training ACORN leaders. Stanley Kurtz's excellent National Review article, "Inside Obama's Acorn." also describes Obama's ACORN connection in detail. But I can't improve on Obama's own words:


I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career (emphasis added). Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work. - Barack Obama, Speech to ACORN, November 2007 (Courtesy Newsmax.)


In another excellent article on Obama's ACORN connections, Newsmax asks a nagging question:


It would be telling to know if Obama, during his years at Columbia, had occasion to meet Cloward and study the Cloward-Piven Strategy.


I ask you, is it possible ACORN would train Obama to take leadership positions within ACORN without telling him what he was training for? Is it possible ACORN would put Obama in leadership positions without clueing him into what his purpose was?? Is it possible that this most radical of organizations would put someone in charge of training its trainers, without him knowing what it was he was training them for?


As a community activist for ACORN; as a leadership trainer for ACORN; as a lead organizer for ACORN's Project Vote; as an attorney representing ACORN's successful efforts to impose Motor Voter regulations in Illinois; as ACORN's representative in lobbying for the expansion of high risk housing loans through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that led to the current crisis; as a recipient of their assistance in his political campaigns -- both with money and campaign workers; it is doubtful that he was unaware of ACORN's true goals. It is doubtful he was unaware of the Cloward-Piven Strategy.


Fast-forward to 2005 when an obsequious, servile and scraping Daniel Mudd, CEO of Fannie Mae spoke at the Congressional Black Caucus swearing in ceremony for newly-elected Illinois Senator, Barack Obama. Mudd called, the Congressional Black Caucus "our family" and "the conscience of Fannie Mae."


In 2005, Republicans sought to rein in Fannie and Freddie. Senator John McCain was at the forefront of that effort. But it failed due to an intense lobbying effort put forward by Fannie and Freddie.


In his few years as a U.S. senator, Obama has received campaign contributions of $126,349, from Fannie and Freddie, second only to the $165,400 received by Senator Chris Dodd, who has been getting donations from them since 1988. What makes Obama so special?


His closest advisers are a dirty laundry list of individuals at the heart of the financial crisis: former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson; Former Fannie Mae CEO and former Clinton Budget Director Frank Raines; and billionaire failed Superior Bank of Chicago Board Chair Penny Pritzker.


Johnson had to step down as adviser on Obama's V.P. search after this gem came out:


An Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) report[1] from September 2004 found that, during Johnson's tenure as CEO, Fannie Mae had improperly deferred $200 million in expenses. This enabled top executives, including Johnson and his successor, Franklin Raines, to receive substantial bonuses in 1998.[2] A 2006 OFHEO report[3] found that Fannie Mae had substantially under-reported Johnson's compensation. Originally reported as $6-7 million, Johnson actually received approximately $21 million.


Obama denies ties to Raines but the Washington Post calls him a member of "Obama's political circle." Raines and Johnson were fined $3 million by the Office of Federal Housing Oversight for their manipulation of Fannie books. The fine is small change however, compared to the $50 million Raines was able to obtain in improper bonuses as a result of juggling the books.


Most significantly, Penny Pritzker, the current Finance Chairperson of Obama's presidential campaign helped develop the complicated investment bundling of subprime securities at the heart of the meltdown. She did so in her position as shareholder and board chair of Superior Bank. The Bank failed in 2001, one of the largest in recent history, wiping out $50 million in uninsured life savings of approximately 1,400 customers. She was named in a RICO class action law suit but doesn't seem to have come out of it too badly.


As a young attorney in the 1990s, Barack Obama represented ACORN in Washington in their successful efforts to expand Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) authority. In addition to making it easier for ACORN groups to force banks into making risky loans, this also paved the way for banks like Superior to package mortgages as investments, and for the Government Sponsored Enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to underwrite them. These changes created the conditions that ultimately lead to the current financial crisis.


Did they not know this would occur? Were these smart people, led by a Harvard graduate, unaware of the Econ 101 concept of moral hazard that would result from the government making implicit guarantees to underwrite private sector financial risk? They should have known that freeing the high-risk mortgage market of risk, calamity was sure to ensue. I think they did.


Barack Obama, the Cloward-Piven candidate, no matter how he describes himself, has been a radical activist for most of his political career. That activism has been in support of organizations and initiatives that at their heart seek to tear the pillars of this nation asunder in order to replace them with their demented socialist vision. Their influence has spread so far and so wide that despite their blatant culpability in the current financial crisis, they are able to manipulate Capital Hill politicians to cut them into $140 billion of the bailout pie!


God grant those few responsible yet remaining in Washington, DC the strength to prevent this massive fraud from occurring. God grant them the courage to stand up in the face of this Marxist tidal wave.

Jim Simpson is a former White House staff economist and budget analyst. His writings have been published in American Thinker, Washington Times, FrontPage Magazine, DefenseWatch, Soldier of Fortune and others. His blog is Truth and Consequences.

1a)Obama: Expanding settlements won't make Israel safer

U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday said Israel's latest move to build hundreds of new housing units in a neighborhood claimed by the Palestinians complicates administration efforts to relaunch peace talks and embitters the Palestinians.

Obama told Fox News in an interview Wednesday that additional settlement building doesn't make Israel safer. He said such moves make it harder to achieve peace in the region, and embitters the Palestinians in a way that he said could be very dangerous.

"The situation in the Middle East is very difficult, and I've said repeatedly and I'll say again, Israel's security is a vital national interest to the United States, and we will make sure they are secure," Obama said in the interview.

Obama and the Palestinians have demanded that Israel halt settlement construction.

The Jerusalem city government moved forward Tuesday with plans to build a Jewish neighborhood in East Jerusalem, which Palestinians claim for their future capital.

An aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday dismissed U.S. anger at Israel's approval for new homes in a settlement near Jerusalem.

Netanyahu's aide also sent reporters a message calling the building plan "a routine process." He said Netanyahu does not normally review municipal building plans and saw Gilo as "an integral part of Jerusalem."

"Construction in Gilo has taken place regularly for dozens of years and there is nothing new about the current planning and construction," the aide added.

Netanyahu seemed keen to contain the fresh dispute with Washington over settlements, ordering cabinet ministers to show restraint after the White House said it was "dismayed" at the plan to build 900 new houses in Gilo.

An official said the order went out after a deputy minister was quoted by an Israeli news website as accusing the United States of "behaving like a bull in a china shop" for objecting to the building plan for an area in the West Bank that Israel sees as part of Jerusalem.

Publication of the government commission's blueprint for Gilo on Tuesday drew sharp rebukes from the Palestinians, joined by Washington, Europe and the United Nations.

Nabil Abu Rdaineh, aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, condemned the building plan, saying it "destroys the last chances for the peace process."

Abbas has said peace talks could resume only if settlement building stopped, a demand rejected by the United States which has echoed Israel in calling for negotiations, suspended for nearly a year, to start without preconditions.

Palestinian peace negotiator Saeb Erekat told an Israeli radio station on Wednesday that Netanyahu "has the choice - settlements or peace," and accused Israel of trying to decide the conflict by building instead of at the negotiating table.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, visiting Jerusalem, said France regretted Israel's decision.

Housing Minister Ariel Attias, trying to minimize the plan's significance, called it a "technical" matter, telling Army Radio it could be a year or more before building began.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said in a statement "at a time when we are working to relaunch negotiations, these actions make it more difficult for our efforts to succeed."

The United States also objects to continued evictions and the demolition of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, he said.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also deplored the Israeli move, spokesman Farhan Haq said. Ban "believes that such actions undermine efforts for peace and cast doubt on the viability of the two-state solution" for Israelis and Palestinians, he said.

Netanyahu has said he would avoid expanding existing settlements, but rejects demands to stop building in Jerusalem.

Gilo, where some 40,000 Israelis live, was built on West Bank land Israel captured in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed as part of Jerusalem.

Some 500,000 Jews live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, also captured in 1967, among 2.7 million Palestinians.

1b)Barack Obama's vision impossible
By Yisrael Harel


There is no place outside the US (where, in view of the likelihood of Senate approval of health reform, the situation is a bit different) where people are not disappointed in President Barack Obama. This is not an entirely justified disappointment: Anyone with eyes, particularly here in the Middle East, should have known that his commitments and style could not produce the results he promised. True, the man has vision, charisma and natural leadership qualities, but the trees he has climbed are too high.

If Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, for example, truly believed that Obama would succeed in completely ceasing settlement construction and then bring about the dismantling of the settlements and an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines, he provided Israelis and Arabs yet further proof that he is not a statesman.

And the Israelis quaking with fear, especially after Obama's Cairo speech, lest he abandon Israel on the altar of reconciliation with the Muslim world, did not understand the strategic and psychological constraints that would prevent him, even if he wanted to (and he doesn't), from sacrificing Israel.

IN MOST of the foreign policy arenas where Obama is unsuccessful in implementing his plans (except Iran), the main reason is that it's impossible to do so, unless he changes the rules of the game completely, particularly regarding the deployment of military forces several times larger than those currently in the region. Yet this contradicts both his ideology and his mandate. Besides, Congress would never approve, nor would the other powers, led by China and Russia.

In the Middle East, outside of Iran, there is no need for the American army. Diplomatic pressure will do, though even here Obama is beginning to realize that his vision enjoys no real support - aside from the rhetoric of a few so-called leaders - among the Israeli and Palestinian publics he is trying to serve. The vision, ostensibly so noble, has collided with reality.

Obama's vision, first formulated by the Israeli left years ago, is two states for two peoples. Had the president of the United States done his homework and not relied on an ideology without foundations or bowed to the pressures of his closest aides (themselves influenced by far-left Israelis trying to weaken their government through their access to the White House and other centers of power), he would have discovered that his vision is a nonstarter.

Those in the Arab world with the real influence and power - not just Hamas - oppose it forthrightly. Even the Israelis who pay lip service to the two-state vision, like Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in his Bar-Ilan speech, in fact reject it. Indeed, even the moderate Zionist left that used to believe in this solution now has its reservations - not because it opposes giving up territory, but because it has lost faith in the sincerity of the Palestinian offer to make peace with a Jewish state on the basis of two states for two peoples.

Accordingly, some of the proposals voiced in the media - and, lo and behold, taken seriously by the White House and State Department - to "deal head-to-head" with this or that leader (read Netanyahu) are not serious, even childish. Like Obama himself, Netanyahu, even if pressed to the wall, cannot bend beyond his own capacity for political survival. Hence he withstood the pressure of an impossible American diktat to freeze all settlement construction, including in Jerusalem.

With Abbas the situation is far worse. First, Obama's rhetoric thwarted
him: It raised his expectations to the sky and led him to make commitments, such as not meeting with Netanyahu until a freeze is in place, that he cannot keep if he wants to see any movement at all. In any case, his own status among his public is at best symbolic: Even without binding himself with rhetoric, he can't really make significant commitments in the name of Palestinians. When he has committed, for example regarding an end to terrorism, his opponents have proven with Kassam rockets and suicide bombers that the president of Palestine has no authority.

So what should Obama do? If he applies pressure, it will only generate more terrorism by Hamas and other Palestinian opposition groups, and this is the opposite of what he wants to achieve. Nor is toppling Netanyahu an option. That won't bring the Israeli left to power, but even if it did, there is today no leader there who can unite the public around a withdrawal to the 1967 lines and the dismantling of settlements - the American "vision."

In a way, Netanyahu is the only leader who can move, within limits, in coordination with the Americans and hope to survive. The "only the Likud can" slogan is spot on when it comes to making territorial concessions, as Menachem Begin did in Sinai and Ariel Sharon in Gaza. A left-wing government could not have done it; the right would have flooded the streets with tens of thousands of demonstrators to prevent the dismantling of settlements.

SO IS there a way out? Not for the moment. In the longer run, if there emerges a Palestinian leadership capable of committing all factions to its decisions and if the decision is to go for a two-state solution, I believe the Israeli public will offer its support, subject to the following minimal conditions. First, the Palestinians forgo the right of return. Second, the settlements remain in place. And third, Palestinians do not receive land inside Israel as "swaps" for the "settlement blocs."

After the trauma of the Katif bloc in which "only" some 10,000 settlers were removed, I doubt any Israeli government could remove all or even most of the settlers in Judea and Samaria in accordance with the Palestinians' (and Americans') minimal demand. Both the Palestinians and the Obama administration must recognize that the talk of "time is in the Arabs' favor" is in fact wrong. When Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Accords, there were around 150,000 Jewish settlers. Today, despite the (incomplete) settlement construction freeze, nearly 300,000 Jews live in the territories. They are determined soon to reach half a million - and they will.

Thus it is Palestinian time that is running out.

The writer heads the Institute for Zionist Strategy in Jerusalem and writes a weekly political column in Haaretz. He founded the Council of Jewish Settlements in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip and headed it for 15 years.



2)Why the left fears Sarah
By Bob Weir

Have you ever seen so much hatred for, and vitriolic criticism of, someone who had only a brief stint on the national political stage? More than a year after the presidential election in which Sarah Palin, as the GOP nominee for Vice-President, campaigned for about 3 months, she is still being pilloried by the leftwing loons as though she had been elected and was now actively engaged in dismantling the liberal establishment. Not a day goes by that we don't hear or read vicious attacks on a woman who represents the conservative, wholesome values of Middle America; values that have been insidiously and incrementally eroded during the last few decades.


There's an interesting contrast between Palin and Barack Obama. We keep hearing that she's not qualified to be president, but Obama is. Why? Some say it's because she didn't have enough experience in government. Yet, as Governor of Alaska, she earned executive experience, while the current Oval Office resident only had a few years of legislative work. Others point to the interviews with Katie Couric and Charles Gibson during the campaign last year.


Let's understand something: Couric and Gibson are liberal journalists who live for those gotcha moments when they can embarrass a conservative and get a round of high fives at the next penthouse cocktail party in New York's Central Park West. In contrast, Obama's interviewers seemed like they were more interested in dating him than they were in getting answers to questions. Obama's personal lapdog, MSNBC's Chris Mathews, gets a thrill up his leg from the chosen one. It's obvious that Mathews has some sort of unresolved intimacy issues to deal with.


In the liberal mind, Obama can do no wrong, mainly because he's black. If he fouls up with a misstatement or a faux pas, they'll cover up for him as though they were protecting a child with a debilitating disease. It reminds me of what Bush 2 used to refer to as "the soft bigotry of low expectations." Therefore, when one of those sycophants asks him a question, it's not only a softball, it comes with heavy breathing and dangling tongues.


Compare that to the lion's den that Palin walked into every time she sat down with one of Obama's obsequious panderers. Given the ideology of the interviewers, I already knew how it would turn out. What really impressed me was watching this woman muster the courage to face her liberal antagonists on national television. How much courage does it take for Obama to engage in one of those cozy love fests with his fan club?


What this country needs is a strong conservative leader with the courage of her convictions. Sensing those qualities in Sarah Palin, the liberal left is becoming frantic because they can't seem to halt her popularity. The reason they're panicking is because they're afraid of her connection with regular folks who work for a living, pay their taxes, attend a religious worship service regularly and believe that our country has lost the moral fiber that once united us. The book, Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy, covered several historical figures that stood up against the corruption surrounding them, and succeeded in defeating it. Sarah Palin did exactly that in her home state of Alaska. In a saner time in our history, she'd be a shoe-in for the White House.


But we're living in an era of in-your-face corruption; a time when elected officials rob us blind and dare us to do something about it. The powerful Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, New York Congressman Charles Rangel, is facing a growing investigation of ethics and tax scandals. When the man empowered with the responsibility to write our tax laws refuses to pay his, something terrible has happened to our country. With a laundry list of misbehavior attributed to him, Rangel boldly continues to keep his seat, his chairmanship, and is running for reelection.


This has become a pattern across the country. Whether the politicians get caught with their fingers wrapped around bribe money, or with their arms wrapped around someone else's spouse, they arrogantly tell the public that it will not deter them from running for reelection. Once upon a time in America, a politician might be unscrupulous, but if he got caught, he'd be history. Now, we have a President of the United States who appointed a tax cheat (Treasury Secretary Geitner) to his Cabinet and attempted to appoint another tax cheat (Tom Daschle) to lead Health and Human Services before it was discovered that the former Senate Majority Leader was also a tax cheat. Kathleen Sebelius, the Kansas Governor, ended up with the job after paying about $8,000 in back taxes.


I could illustrate hundreds of other examples of rampant corruption by people in elective office. Pointing to government decay is the job of the free press. But are they hounding any of the power hungry scoundrels that masquerade as symbols of decency and honor? No, they're engaged in a continuous merciless attack on a woman who has led the way in the fight against the very corruption that is being overlooked by those who have become blinded by their own ideology.


Palin is a threat because she symbolizes decency in a country that has been taken hostage by moral degenerates. If she isn't stopped, this country might end up reclaiming some of the values that made us the envy of the world.


Bob Weir is a former detective sergeant in the New York City Police Department. He is the executive editor of The News Connection in Highland Village, Texas. E-mail Bob.


2a)Fact Check This, Associated Press!
By Jack Cashill

"I think Obama's in a league with TR," observes historian and presidential biographer Douglas Brinkley. "He created his political reputation through the written word."


To be sure, no one has ever accused Sarah Palin, a defeated vice presidential candidate, of creating her reputation thusly. One has to wonder, then, why her book, Going Rogue, would merit a fact check by no fewer than eleven Associated Press reporters when neither the AP nor any other mainstream outlet has spent a moment vetting the books of the "author in chief," as President Barack Obama was anointed in a November GQ article, "Barack Obama's Work in Progress," by Tom Draper.


In an observant piece, the Road to Bali, blogger Tom Maguire addresses the implicit media balance. He does so by calling attention to just one relevant question that the media might have profitably asked our president: did you take new bride Michelle to Bali with you in 1993?


In the course of asking that question, not terribly significant in and of itself, Maguire sheds light on a more substantive question: why have the media paid so little attention to how Barack Obama came to write the book that would make his reputation, his acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father.


As source, Maguire turns to Draper, who has spent time with Michelle and Barack and written the most detailed account to date of the genesis of Dreams. Blinded by Obama's light, however, Draper fails to see the gaping holes in his own story line.


As Draper tells the story, a February 1990 New York Times article telling how Harvard has elected Obama president of the Harvard Law Review attracted the attention of a young agent named Jane Dystel. Draper implies that Obama's "irresistible" writing skills netted him the position, which is not at all true.


In fact, the election was a popularity contest held in racially charged environment. The culturally ambiguous Obama won on his race-healing talents, not on his literary ones. He would contribute only one leaden, unsigned case note to the HLR and has not written another legal article since.


According to Draper, on November 28, 1990, Poseidon Press, a Simon & Schuster imprint, issued "a six-figure contract" to Obama for a book tentatively titled Journeys in Black and White. In his recent book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of An American Marriage, Christopher Andersen specifies the amount at $150,000.


In the hope of recruiting Obama, the University of Chicago Law School offered him an office in the law school to use for finishing the book, and there he spent 1991 and 1992. Nearly two years passed, and Obama could not produce. "I just can't get it down on paper," Draper quotes an Obama confession to confidante Valerie Jarrett in 1992. "I'd much rather hang out with Michelle than focus on this."


Although Draper would never say so, this represented a failure of character as much it did a failure of talent. Obama had pocketed $75,000 of that advance and promised in return a manuscript by June 15, 1992. He had more than eighteen months to complete a memoir, the easiest of all genres. It required minimal research, no footnotes, and a narrative that needed not be factual as long as it was plausible.


As a point of comparison, I was offered a contract in April 2005 to write a memoir with a deadline of September 1, 2005. In other words, I had four months to do what Obama could not do in eighteen. To complicate matters mine was to be a story of growing up in the age of Muhammad Ali. So, in addition to writing, I read roughly 30-40 books on boxing and related subjects during that period and watched scores of fight films and documentaries.


I set as a goal a thousand words a day, and I made the September 1 deadline. It would have helped a lot if I had ever learned to type, but to me missing the deadline was unthinkable if for no other reason that I, like Obama, had signed a contract and accepted an advance. Although Sucker Punch was my fourth published book, I can assure you that my advance was considerably less than that of the untested Obama.


In any case, the June 15, 1992 deadline came and went without a manuscript from Obama. As Draper blithely notes, Obama had other things on his mind, namely his impending October 3rd marriage to Michelle. On October 20, 1992, according to Draper, Poseidon terminated Obama's contract.


Andersen adds a detail that mythmaker Draper chooses to omit. Obama feared that Simon & Schuster would demand the $75,000 already advanced. Writes Andersen, "But when Barack informed them that he had spent the money -- and that he and his wife were still chipping away at their massive student loan debt -- the publisher agreed not to press the issue." In other words, Obama asked for and received an undeserved bailout. A pattern was developing here.


The tenacious agent Jane Dystel managed to find another publisher, Times Books, and secured a smaller advance, $40,000. Draper tells us that Obama used the advance "to fulfill his outstanding financial obligation to Poseidon." Andersen's take sounds more credible.


"Now he's got to produce," writes Draper. "But how?" Although the sanctuary at the University of Chicago and a previous retreat to a friend's Wisconsin farm had done no good, Obama hit upon the idea of going to Bali to unblock. (For Sucker Punch, I went to my cabin on Lake Erie).


As blogger Maguire notes, the pre-election myth, advanced by the New York Times and others, is that Michelle accompanied him. Wrote the Times on May 18, 2008, Obama "eventually retreated to Bali for several months with his wife, Michelle."


A more recent and less romantic version, advanced by Draper and by the Times as well, is that Obama went by himself. "For a month," writes Draper, "he is a lone figure pacing on the white sand and hammering on his laptop. . . . "


Andersen describes the Obamas as "drowning in debt" during this period. How either Barack or Michelle could have afforded to go to Bali during this period, for one month or three, remains something of a mystery. Mysterious too is how the media could leave unresolved such glaring contradictions in the biography of the world's most famous man.


Maguire highlights still another hole in the Draper narrative. Incredibly, in a 5,000-word article on Obama's development as a writer, Draper says nothing about what happened between early 1993 when Obama returned from Bali to June 1995 when Dreams was published. Draper leaves the impression that the month-long Bali high was just what Obama needed to fire his synapses.


Andersen is much more credible here. As he tells it, Bali proved no more helpful than any other retreat. At the urging of Michelle, the "hopelessly blocked" Obama finally turned to "friend and Hyde Park neighbor" Bill Ayers to help him.


Andersen's details are specific. The Obamas were convinced of "Ayers's proven abilities as a writer." Barack particularly liked the novelistic style of To Teach, a 1993 book by Ayers. The key sentence in Andersen's account is the one that follows: "[The Obama family] oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers."


Adds Andersen, "Thanks to help from veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Books." Based on my own research, I would argue that Ayers actually wrote the book's best sections. Obama's published efforts before Dreams show not a wisp of the skill on display in Dreams. Not surprisingly, Draper overlooks those early efforts.


With his man crush trumping his critical insights, Draper chooses not to relate the fate of plucky agent Dystel. That story was hard to miss. The proudly liberal but seriously disgusted publisher Peter Osnos went public three years ago. According to Osnos, Obama dumped his devoted long time agent after Dreams took off and then signed a seven-figure deal with Crown, using only a by-the-hour attorney.


Obama pulled off the deal after his 2004 election to the U.S. Senate but before being sworn in as Senator, this way to avoid the disclosure and reporting requirements applicable to members of Congress. Osnos publicly scolded Obama for his "ruthlessness" and "his questionable judgment about using public service as a personal payday."


But that was in 2006, when Obama was mere mortal. Today, Obama is a literary god, however false, and challenging the gods is apparently above the AP's pay grade.

2b)Federal Judge Carter sets Trial Date for Obama's Eligibility!

The expedited trial has been set for Jan. 26, 2010!

Many concerned veterans and citizens attended the hearing in Federal Court in Santa Ana in the lawsuit against Barack Obama to determine his eligibility to be President and Commander in Chief. About 150 people showed up, almost all in support of the lawsuit to demand that Obama release his birth certificate and other records that he has hidden from the American people.

Judge David Carter refused to hear Obama's request for dismissal. He indicated there was almost no chance that this case would be dismissed. Obama is arguing this lawsuit was filed in the wrong court if you can believe that. Obama would prefer a "kangaroo court" instead of a Federal court! Assuming Judge Carter denies Obama's motion for dismissal, he will likely then order expedited discovery which will force Obama to release his birth certificate in a timely manner (if he has one).

The judge, WHO IS A FORMER U.S. MARINE, repeated several times that this is A VERY SERIOUS CASE which must be resolved quickly so that the troops know that their Commander in Chief is eligible to hold that position and issue lawful orders to our military in this time of war. He basically said OBAMA MUST PROVE HIS ELIGIBILITY to the court! He said Americans deserve to know the truth about their President!

The two U.S. Attorneys representing Barack Obama tried everything they could to sway the judge that this case was frivolous, but Carter would have none of it and cut them off several times. Obama's attorneys left the courtroom after about the 90 minute hearing looking defeated and nervous.

Great day in America for the U.S. Constitution! The truth about Barack Obama's eligibility will be known fairly soon - Judge Carter practically guaranteed it!

3)Obama's Iran sanctions strategy is routed by Chinese, Russian rebuffs


Chinese president Hu Jintao said clearly after meeting US president Barack Obama in Beijing Tuesday, Nov. 17, that their governments disagree on tougher sanctions for Iran - or any other issue relating to the Islamic republic. Sources report this rebuff has led Washington's efforts to round up big power endorsement of harsh penalties for Iran's continued intransigence on its nuclear program, such as an embargo on refined petrol products and gasoline, have come to a dead end. The efficacy of unilateral American sanctions, the only non-military option still left to Washington, is questionable.

Secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a last-ditch bid Wednesday, Nov. 18, to scale China's negative wall, before the US president left for South Korea. She tried to talk the Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo into at least issuing a Beijing statement on Iran. He refused outright.

The Chinese rejection followed a rebuff from Moscow in the form of a comment by Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov that it was premature to say that diplomatic efforts for defusing tensions over Iran's nuclear program had failed. He said it was too soon to talk about stepping up sanctions on Iran, if at all, so contradicting the supportive message Obama received from Russian President Dmitry Medvedev when they met in Singapore last week.

Tuesday, before Beijing and Moscow knocked sanctions on the head, Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu said optimistically that the Iranian nuclear issue should be left for the world powers and international community to deal with. In a few short hours, that option had melted away.

In the last 24 hours, Israelis have been too busy discussing the expansion of the Gilo neighborhood of Jerusalem to notice that their former and current governments, headed respectively by Ehud Olmert and Binyamin Netanyahu, have just suffered one of their biggest foreign policy defeats. They are now confronted with a most unwelcome dilemma.

4)Obama's Bad Trip
by Richard Wolffe

He bowed to Japan. He treaded lightly with China. And then Israel thumbed its nose at Obama’s calls to freeze settlements. Richard Wolffe on why the president can’t wait to come home.

To the president’s critics, this week’s White House trip to Asia has largely failed because of excessive deference. Obama bowed to the Japanese emperor, and he metaphorically genuflected to the Chinese leadership by refusing to confront them publicly about human rights.

Yet the president’s biggest foreign-policy setback of the week—by several orders of magnitude—came on the other side of Asia. And its negative impact was worsened by an administration policy that started with public confrontation, not compromise.



That setback came in the Middle East, where Israel ignored once again White House pressure to freeze settlements. Israel also ignored the much more positive message from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who recently offered effusive praise of the country’s offer to curb settlement growth.

Both approaches now look foolish, thanks to Israel’s decision to move ahead with plans to expand a Jewish sector of southern Jerusalem, on land captured in the 1967 war.

Once Israel ignored the White House position on settlements, the administration decided the best approach would be direct peace talks, including final-status issues of borders, Jerusalem, and refugees. Instead both sides seem to have decided to resolve some of the final-status issues on their own—either by seizing more land, or seeking international support for statehood.

The approaches by Obama and Hillary Clinton now look foolish, thanks to Israel’s decision to move ahead with plans to expand a Jewish sector of southern Jerusalem, on land captured in the 1967 war.

More Daily Beast contributors on Palin’s book tour. Small wonder that the White House issued an unusually heated statement on Tuesday, placing the words in the mouth of the hot-headed press secretary, Robert Gibbs. “We are dismayed at the Jerusalem Planning Committee’s decision to move forward on the approval process for the expansion of Gilo in Jerusalem. At a time when we are working to re-launch negotiations, these actions make it more difficult for our efforts to succeed,” he said. “Neither party should engage in efforts or take actions that could unilaterally pre-empt, or appear to pre-empt, negotiations.”

For the White House—and the traveling press corps—Israel’s actions stepped on a carefully crafted script. The unraveling of the administration’s Middle East strategy is a relatively slow-moving story taking place nowhere near China, Japan or Singapore. For the reporters trailing Obama overseas, it was a chance to cut away from the spoon-fed diplomatic events and cover an escalating conflict.

The sudden intervention of Israel on the agenda did provide a distraction. The coverage of Obama’s tour of China thus far has focused largely on the lack of concrete accomplishments. The two countries did move a small step closer toward setting goals for carbon-emission cuts in advance of the Copenhagen climate talks in December. But China remained hesitant to sign up for sanctions against Iran, Obama shied from tough human-rights talk—at least in public—and there was no mistaking the changed balance of power whenever the subject of currency, loans, and debt arose.

Most have compared Obama’s trip unfavorably to his predecessors, citing President Clinton’s discussion of human rights, and President Bush’s repeated efforts to pressure the Chinese for religious freedom. But neither Clinton nor Bush succeeded in advancing either cause, no matter how high-profile their challenge to Beijing. Obama may have taken a different tack in largely avoiding public criticism of China, but it’s not clear whether he’s coming home any more empty-handed than 42 and 43 did.

The one advance made on Obama’s trip: getting Russian president Dmitry Medvedev to express publicly his impatience with the pace of the talks about Iran’s nuclear program. “In case we fail,” Medvedev explained darkly, “the other options remain on the table in order to move the process in a different direction.”

President Bush long claimed to have a private agreement with his Russian counterpart about the need to halt the Iranian nuclear program. But he rarely, if ever, secured that kind of public support.

Of course, Medvedev could yet pull back from his apparent backing of a united approach. But thus far, the Russian president, of all people, has provided the clear highlight of what has been a rather difficult trip.

Richard Wolffe is Daily Beast columnist and an award-winning journalist, and senior strategist at Public Strategies. He covered the entire length of Barack Obama's presidential campaign for Newsweek magazine. His book, Renegade: The Making of a President, was published by Crown in June.

5)A tale of two American economies
By Nouriel Roubinio

.While the United States recently reported 3.5 per cent GDP growth in the third quarter, suggesting that the most severe recession since the Great Depression is over, the American economy is actually much weaker than official data suggest. In fact, official measures of GDP may grossly overstate growth in the economy, as they don't capture the fact that business sentiment among small firms is abysmal and their output is still falling sharply. Properly corrected for this, third-quarter GDP may have been 2 per cent rather than 3.5 per cent.

The story of the U.S. is, indeed, one of two economies. There is a smaller one that is slowly recovering and a larger one that is still in a deep and persistent downturn.

Consider the following facts. While America's official unemployment rate is already 10.2 per cent, the figure jumps to a whopping 17.5 per cent when discouraged workers and partially employed workers are included. And, while data from firms suggest that job losses in the past three months were about 600,000, household surveys, which include self-employed workers and small entrepreneurs, suggest a number above two million.

Moreover, the total effect on labour income – the product of jobs times hours worked times average hourly wages – has been more severe than that implied by the job losses alone, because many firms are cutting their workers' hours, placing them on furlough or lowering their wages as a way to share the pain.

Many of the lost jobs – in construction, finance, and outsourced manufacturing and services – are gone forever, and recent studies suggest that a quarter of U.S. jobs can be fully outsourced over time to other countries. Thus, a growing proportion of the work force – often below the radar screen of official statistics – is losing hope of finding gainful employment, while the unemployment rate (especially for poor, unskilled workers) will remain high for a much longer period of time than in previous recessions.

Consider also the credit markets. Prime borrowers with good credit scores and investment-grade firms are not experiencing a credit crunch at this point, as the former have access to mortgages and consumer credit while the latter have access to bond and equity markets.

But non-prime borrowers – about one-third of U.S. households – do not have much access to mortgages and credit cards. They live from paycheque to paycheque – often a shrinking paycheque, owing to the decline in hourly wages and hours worked. And the credit crunch for non-investment-grade firms and smaller firms, which rely mostly on access to bank loans rather than capital markets, is still severe.

Or consider bankruptcies and defaults by households and firms. Larger firms – even those with large debt problems – can refinance their excessive liabilities in or out of court, but an unprecedented number of small businesses are going bankrupt. The same holds for households, with millions of weaker and poorer borrowers defaulting on mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, student loans and other consumer credit.

Consider also what is happening to private consumption and retail sales. Recent monthly figures suggest a rise in retail sales. But, because the official statistics capture mostly sales by larger retailers and exclude the fall by hundreds of thousands of smaller stores and businesses that have failed, consumption looks better than it really is.

And, while higher-income and wealthier households have a buffer of savings to smooth consumption and avoid having to increase savings, most lower-income households must save more, as banks and other lenders cut back on home-equity loans and lower limits on credit cards. As a result, the household savings rate has risen from zero to 4 per cent of disposable income. But it must rise further, to 8 per cent, in order to reduce the high leverage of the household sector.

To be sure, the U.S. government is increasing its budget deficits to put a floor under demand. But most state and local governments that have experienced a collapse in tax revenues must sharply retrench spending by firing policemen, teachers and firefighters while also cutting welfare benefits and social services for the poor. Many state and local governments in poorer regions are at risk of bankruptcy without a massive federal bailout.

Moreover, income and wealth inequality is rising again. Poorer households are at greater risk of unemployment, falling wages or reductions in hours worked, all leading to lower labour income, whereas on Wall Street, outrageous bonuses have returned with a vengeance. With the stock market rising and home prices still falling, the wealthy are becoming richer, while the middle class and the poor – whose main wealth is a house rather than equities – are becoming poorer and being saddled with an unsustainable debt burden.

So, while the United States may technically be close to the end of a severe recession, most of America is facing a near-depression. Little wonder, then, that few Americans believe that what walks like a duck and quacks like a duck is actually the phoenix of recovery.

Nouriel Roubini is professor of economics at New York University's Stern School of Business and chairman of RGE Monitor.

5a)Copenhagen died on Obama's Asia trip
By: Steve Clemons


He did it! During his trip to China, President Barack Obama mentioned human rights and the importance of free thinking, and China didn’t dump its massive pile of U.S. dollars. America must still have some sway left in the world.

Perhaps Obama is now on a roll and will score a last-minute deal with China on climate change reduction targets or revaluing the Chinese yuan to get the global economic order rebalanced. Not.

Despite all this Asia trip fanfare, the truth is, America is foundering beneath Obama’s sizzle. The world doubts America’s ability to achieve objectives that it has set for itself — and this includes several key goals Obama had before going on his wide cut through Northeast and Southeast Asia.

Among Obama’s goals for this trip were, first, to convince Asians that the region is a U.S. priority at the presidential level. Box checked. Second was to get into the race of multilateral trade that Australia, China and Japan are each spearheading in their own way. Trans-Pacific partnership — check (but a pathetically sized check).

Third was to secure support for serious, binding targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050, particularly for China. Missed target — sizzle fizzled. Fourth was to strike a deal with China and other key Asian nations to structurally re-engineer their economies to prioritize consumption over production — and to encourage them to buy American products on the way to rebalancing the global economy. Another big fizzle.

Obama is a mesmerizing force on the global stage. His presence and open-minded, swaggerless posture, his way of framing opportunity and hope not just for the U.S. but for the world, are all welcomed by other nations and their citizens. But the world is interconnected in exactly the ways that Obama described during the campaign.

That means that America’s being stuck in a worsening quagmire in Afghanistan and pricked hard as it tries to adjust its forces out of Iraq have created doubt in allies about U.S. dependability, along with an appetite for change among global foes.

If America is perceived as weak militarily — and, after exporting toxic financial products to the world, dethroned economically — and also morally doubted given the ongoing drama at Guantanamo and memories of Abu Ghraib, then nations will not easily be moved to a course Obama is encouraging.

The reaction around much of the world is that the Copenhagen climate change meeting in December will be a soft summit, not a hard one that moves beyond pretense to action.

Given expectations and Obama’s own early declarations of its importance, Copenhagen is now dead. But what killed it is a fundamental error of the Obama White House: that it can be all things to all causes.

Obama’s attentions are spread too thin. It is vital for the White House to demonstrate an ability to accomplish goals, be they in reorienting Iran’s course, establishing a Palestinian state, ending the embargo of Cuba, creating a new global management pact with China, establishing a Manhattan Project for the next generation or developing renewable energy — anything that might create a “Nixon goes to China” strategic leap out of the incrementalism and inertia driving America’s course now.

But Obama has pulled off nothing big yet, and until he shows an ability to change the way gravitational forces have pulled global affairs out of equilibrium, then the world will resist America’s most benign entreaties to collectively solve problems that face all of us — particularly climate change.

Steve Clemons directs the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and publishes the political blog The Washington Note.

Abbas - We Need You!

Several clear messages and proposals. (See 1 and 1a below.)

Scratch the surface and you often find the truth. (See 2 below.)

A somewhat extreme view of cultism and poverty of the spirit. You decide. (See 3 below.)

Iran has a nuclear helper. (See 4 below.)

Ironically that Israel is trying to persuade Abbas to remain and negotiate. Why? The alternative could be worse. I wrote earlier that Abbas might back Obama into a corner and take Netanyahu with him.(See 5 and 5a below.)

Terrorism and the 4th Amendment. (See 6 below.)

Was White House Counsel also thrown under the bus buy an administration that campaigned claiming transparency and openness is its primary goal. (See 7 below.)


It is one thing to keep bowing to foreign rulers but bowing to world opinion has even more boomerang consequences. (See 8 below.)
Dick



1)A clear message to Congress and The President: Listen to your constituents, OR GET EVICTED!
By Carey Baker


Here are the Nine Grievances we've listed in the Declaration of Eviction:

You have broken your contract with America by violating your oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States by expanding the powers of the Government in exchange for our God-given Liberties.

You have ignored the pleas of the majority of Americans by forcing a takeover of our private health care industry and exchanging it for a bureaucratic nightmare.

You are attempting to control our economy by empowering "Pay Czars" to regulate the income of workers.

You are increasing taxes on small business owners, the life blood of our free economy, while bailing out the banking industry.

You are overstepping your Constitutional Boundaries by agreeing with this present Administration to seize control of private industries, such as banking, automobile manufacturing, and health care.

You have jeopardized the international value of our currency with deficit spending.

You have failed to secure our national defense by refusing to tap the vast natural resources within our own borders and off our own shores.

You have punished citizens and private business establishments with further regulation with hysteria and false claims of "climate change".
You have borrowed against our children's future for political gain today.

1a)Propose this in 2009: START A BILL TO PLACE ALL POLITICIANS ON SOCIAL SECURITY


SOCIAL SECURITY: Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions during election years.

Our Senators and Congresspeople do not pay into Social Security and, of course, they do not collect from it. Social Security benefits were not suitable for persons of their rare elevation in society. They felt they should have a special plan for themselves. So, many years ago they voted in their own benefit plan.

In more recent years, no congressperson has felt the need to change it. After all, it is a great plan.

For all practical purposes their plan works like this:

When they retire, they continue to draw the same pay until they die.
Except it may increase from time to time for cost of living adjustments.

For example, Senator Byrd and Congressman White and their wives may expect to draw $7,800,000.00 (that's Seven Million, Eight-Hundred Thousand Dollars), with their wives drawing $275,000.00 during the last years of their lives.

This is calculated on an average life span for each of those two Dignitaries.

Younger Dignitaries who retire at an early age, will receive much more during the rest of their lives.

Their cost for this excellent plan is $0.00. NADA..! ZILCH...

This little perk they voted for themselves is free to them. You and I pick up the tab for this plan. The funds for this fine retirement plan come directly from the General Funds;

"OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK "!

From our own Social Security Plan, which you and I pay (or have paid) into, every payday until we retire (which amount is matched by our employer). We can expect to get an average of $1,000 per month after retirement.

Or, in other words, we would have to collect our average of $1,000 monthly benefits for 68 years and one (1) month to equal Senator Bill Bradley's benefits!


Social Security could be very good if only one small change were made.

That change would be to: Jerk the Golden Fleece Retirement Plan from under the Senators and Congressmen.. Put them into the Social Security plan with the rest of us. Then sit back..... And see how fast they would fix it.

2)Health Care and the Moral Imperative
ByJoseph C. Phillips

I am always troubled by those in government claiming they have a moral imperative to enact this or that policy. A little digging often reveals that their motives are more self serving than moral. I am doubly troubled when those raising the moral banner tend to reject the very idea of an objective morality applicable to all men at all times.

Such is the case with liberal Democrats and their insistence that the moral laws of the universe – laws that have been with us since God breathed life into man (or as some would have it when we rose from the primordial soup) – command Government to supply every citizen (and many that aren’t) with health insurance.

But as is generally the case all we need do is scratch the surface and the truth reveals itself.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, John Cassidy of the New Yorker lets the cat out of the bag when he writes on The New Yorker website that we must be clear about what the reform amounts to. "The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment," Cassidy writes. “The Obama Administration . . . is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind." And why are they doing it? Again the WSJ quotes Cassidy: Because “ObamaCare serves the twin goals of making the United States a more equitable country" and furthering the Democrats' "political calculus." In other words, the purpose is to further redistribute income by putting health care further under government control, and in the process making the middle class more dependent on government. As the party of government, Democrats will benefit over the long run.”

That might explain why this massive 2000 page bill uses the command “shall”- business “shall” do this, you “shall” do that -- 3,345 times; creates 111 new government boards, commissions and bureaucracies all overseen by a healthcare czar and subjects every aspect of healthcare to government regulation; all this at a whopping cost to taxpayers of $1.5 trillion over 10 years, which will be paid for through a host of new taxes, penalties and fees. In spite of rumors to the contrary; there is no free lunch.

This bitter pill might be easier to swallow if the new left was at least honest in admitting that the cost of seeing this imperative through will be paid for in freedoms. These new Knights Templar have defended their cause with constant references to affordability and yet under their plan what is affordable ceases to be a subjective measure that each man can make for himself according to his individual needs and priorities. Rather it becomes an objective measure defined by the new “Commissioner of Health Choices.” Every American will be forced to purchase an insurance policy. The government will decide what benefits those policies must include. Even if you are happy with your current insurance plan you will have to switch to a policy that includes the government mandated benefits even if you don’t want them, will never use them and their inclusion will increase the price you pay for coverage. And suppose you decide for whatever reason that you are simply not going to pay? Well the house bill specifies “a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.” Imprisonment…whereupon you will of course receive free government healthcare.

There is nothing quite like morality imposed at the point of a gun, or which benefits some at the expense of others.

The Pelosi bill narrowly won passage in the house after Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) offered an amendment prohibiting abortion coverage in the public option as well as any private plans accepting people receiving taxpayer subsidies. But be not dismayed; Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the Democrats’ chief deputy whip in the House of

Representatives has promised that she and other pro abortion democrats will work overtime to ensure that the Stupak amendment is not included in the final version of the health care bill. During an appearance on MSNBC Wasserman Schultz declared, “I am confident that when it comes back from the conference committee that that language won't be there.” That’s right; those claiming a moral imperative to reform healthcare are the same folks that believe they also have a moral right to murder children in utero AND force others to pay for it.

It seems obvious why those claiming the mantle of righteousness chose to pass this monstrosity of awfulness under cover of darkness. Thankfully -- to quote the pop star Jeffry Osborne -- “I really don’t need no light to see through you.”

3)Obama's Mind Game
By Robin of Berkeley

We're playing those mind games together
Pushing the barriers,
Planting seeds
Playing the mind guerrilla
Chanting the mantra, peace on earth
-John Lennon

It's a chilling moment when the light goes out in someone's eyes. A once-radiant child hardens from abuse. A woman's heart shrinks after her husband's abandonment.


The person looks the same, maybe acts the same. But something is gone, and what's lost is irretrievable. It's like when a person dies: in a heartbeat, the soul vanishes.


I witnessed this alteration recently when I visited my goddaughter, a radiant girl. Her mom, a hardcore progressive, has started exposing her to the darkest elements of the left. And the last time I looked in the girl's eyes, the light had gone out. Disappeared. Just like that.


I see this phenomenon every day: a light dimming. The friendly shopkeeper snaps at me. My cheerful neighbor seems flattened.


And you hear it in the news: people acting strangely, going off the deep end. The most bizarre behavior becoming the new normal.


A thug bites off a finger. Sarah Palin's church is torched. Bullies intimidate voters.


Last week, an esteemed Columbia University black architecture professor punched a white female coworker in the eye for not doing more about white privilege.


He has no history of violence. So why now?


Why now? This may be the most important question of our time. Why are some people reaching the boiling point? Why do many others look vacant, like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The shootings at military bases, from Little Rock to Fort Hood -- why now?


It's Obama, of course.


Liberals will excoriate me for writing this. They'll insist that bad behavior is not Obama's fault. He's a man of peace.


But study the phenomenon of cults, and the dynamics are always the same. The leader can incite violence without ever getting his hands dirty. Obama is controlling the marionette of the masses.


If Obamamania is a cult, then Obama is the cult leader. Cult leaders routinely pull the strings of their followers. The most extreme example is Charles Manson. He rots in prison for murders he never committed. He didn't have to do the dirty work. His brainwashed charges did his bidding.


I'm not saying Obama is a Charles Manson. There are varying degrees of manipulation, from using sexy blondes to entice men to buy cars all the way to hypnotizing them to drink poisoned Kool Aid. But there's a common denominator in all mind control: manipulating people through mind games.


As soon as Obama came on the scene, the programming began. His face was plastered everywhere like Mao. In his speeches, Obama lulled audiences with a melodious voice and feel-good phrases repeated over and over. And he began inciting people with his charming smile.


First, the vultures starting swooping down on Hillary. Obama chose not to call off the dogs.


Then thugs invaded caucuses. Again, silence.


Which led to vicious misogyny against Sarah Palin and threats on her life. From Obama: not a peep.


We even saw armed thugs at polling places. Ignored and not prosecuted by Obama's Attorney General.


The moment Obama became president, he upped the signals. At the swearing in, the entire family eerily chose to wear black and red, colors associated with communism and black nationalism. Obama's first radio address was broadcast in the Arab world.


Obama returned Britain's gift of a Winston Churchill statue while embracing dictators. He gave a white police officer a dressing down for doing his job, in effect calling him a racist.


Obama's greatest magic trick? Brainwashing the masses to believe that racism is a greater danger than radical Islam, and that Obama himself is in constant peril.


Opposing health care means you oppose Obama. Oppose Obama and you're part of a vast right-wing racist conspiracy.


Thus, more and more people are finding themselves on the receiving end of a fist, figurative or literal. After the White House released a directive for his followers to strike back hard, a frail, diabetic black man at a Town Hall was beaten up.


Even women can get slugged in the face. Obama signaled during the primary that women were fair game.


Obama and the Left are making sure that there ia an increasing number of persuadable people. By displacing workers, panicking business owners with Draconian laws, and whipping up rage and paranoia, they amass more lackeys.


The American Hard Left knows how to create a cult because it is a cult, one with a violent history. The Black Panthers, Symbionese Liberation Army, Weathermen, Black Muslims -- all nefarious cults.


Members of the Weathermen, for instance, had their spirits broken through forced wickedness, such as animal abuse. Patty Hearst morphed into bank robber Tania after weeks of isolation, rape, and beatings by the SLA. Huey P. Newton sent his Black Panthers to the hospital or to the grave if they didn't practice total obedience.


So what's the end game here?


The first goal is power. The Left has an insatiable need to control every aspect of our lives.


But there's a deeper reason, one much more insidious.


The Left wants to tear Americans down. Just as the Weatherman did to those naïve lost kids, they want to break our spirits. This goal of degradation is more crucial than their one-world government.


The progressives want to turn us into them, to make us feel as deprived and depraved and deadened. It's the only way that they can silence the roar of shame and self-loathing.


What they don't understand is this: it's not going to happen. There are too many of us who won't be hypnotized.


We can see right through them. We know who they are: the most piteous of human beings, and the most dangerous. Men without a country, orphans far from home. The forsaken and disowned.


They're "hungry ghosts," to use a Tibetan phrase: tormented beings who are starving to death from their inner nothingness.


Mother Teresa was once asked how she coped with serving the poorest of the poor in Calcutta. She responded that what she saw in the cities of the United States was much more disturbing, because it was a "poverty of the spirit."


Poverty of the spirit. No truer words can be spoken of the progressive Left.

4)Iran's nuclear helper
By Ed Lasky

Trita Parsi, the controversial founder and head of the National Iranian American Council (that may or may not have failed to follow the law in its failure to register as a foreign lobbyist) seems to have had a bit of career advocating one thing the Iranian regime wants very much: the right to continue its rapidly accelerating enrichment program. Once their enrichment program spins ahead, Iran will accumulate enough nuclear material to have the potential to develop a nuclear arsenal. Such an arsenal would not only pose a mortal peril for Israel, but would further endanger stability throughout the Middle East. And that would pose a huge risk for America -- the big Satan to the little Satan that is Israel, in the ayatollahs' eyes.


Parsi has tried to obscure his support for Iran's enrichment program of late, but there is a history here. For example:
To address the root causes of the conflicts in the region, Washington must venture beyond its enrichment fetish and its fixation with superficial elections. Tensions in the Middle East are born out of a region in geopolitical flux in which the only country capable of bringing stability no longer views that as a desirable goal. By ignoring the context of these conflicts and the United States' responsibility in the region, the Bush administration risks making America a part of the problem rather than the solution.


Washington's best option is to give diplomacy a fair chance. By recognizing that the attainment of key American objectives-including peace in Lebanon and security for Israel-has been made all the more difficult by refusing unconditional negotiations and by solely viewing Iran through the enrichment prism, a critical and long-overdue step can be taken to address one of the root problems of the Middle East: America's non-relationship with Iran.

The "enrichment fetish"? The United Nations Security Council has issued resolutions demanding that Iran halt its enrichment program.


But there is much more: he has called demands for suspension less sensible because, in his words, such a suspension would make it more likely that Iran would develop a nuclear weapon That reasoning is a bit inscrutable but he ventures that such a suspension would ease the intensity of the attention of the Security Council. A bit far-fetched, but he is entitled to his opinion, as are the mullahs in Tehran.


In The Nation, he states that trying to get Iran to agree to stop its enrichment program is a goal that is not possible, and that zero enrichment is not the only route to avoid an Iranian bomb. Well, it may not be the only route but it is a damn good one, since enrichment leads a nation further down the learning curve, allows it to develop a stockpile of weapons-grade nuclear uranium (or worse, plutonium), and once that stockpile has accumulated, the temptation to put that uranium to bad use is a temptation that few nations with hegemonic aspirations, led by leaders who taunt other nations with their upcoming destruction, would deny themselves.


Then again, maybe Parsi just merely wants to redefine what suspension means. (This sort of "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" sophistry can just go on and on while Iranian centrifuges spin away).


Parsi even tries to justify his position by stating that unnamed State Department officials privately admit Iran's right to enrichment. Ah, the old unnamed (fill in the number) officials privately (fill in what you are advocating) sort of argument! Parsi has spent a long time in Washington , after all


He also thinks enrichment should just be one of many issues we can discuss with Iran (see his argument by fetish rationale above), thereby dismissing its importance, because enrichment does not mean weaponization, in Parsi's own words. Of course, making enrichment just one of many issues means that talks can be spread out extended indefinitely ( I have shopped in a bazaar -- trust me this would happen; we have certainly seen this dynamic at work as Europe and the IAEA negotiate with Iran).


In his view, zero enrichment is a dead end-as he told the Iran-friendly English newspaper The Guardian and mere suspension should not be a pre-condition for talks either.


Of course, Trita Parsi does support one action that occurred during the Bush presidency: the release of the terribly flawed 2007 National Intelligence Estimate report that all but absolved Iran of accusations that it was pursuing a nuclear weapons program. That NIE report was not only heavily criticized when it was released, but subsequent disclosures (the Qom plant, among them) have rendered its conclusions even more clearly wrong.


But Parsi's made his own views even clearer during an interview on the Diane Rehm Show on NPR where he plaintively asks "why can't the Iranians enrich?" and goes on to actually provide a rationale for why Iran should develop nuclear weapons because they "live in a tough neighborhood."


Trita Parsi has tried to obscure his past, including his support for Iran's nuclear enrichment program. This advocacy for Iran's enrichment program takes place against a backdrop of violations of United Nations Security Council Resolutions, commitments made as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and promises made to European nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Parsi also leaves unanswered the question of why Iran -- a storehouse of clean burning natural gas and oil -- would even need a nuclear program.

As Iran hurtles toward nuclear power status, Trita Parsi can claim credit for at least helping forestall a decisive American reaction to its enrichment program. He may not legally be a lobbyist for a foreign nation (one that is our adversary, yet) but he sure does a good job of seeming like one.



5) US, Israel act to stop Abbas quitting for fear of alternatives


The Obama administration and Netanyahu government are bending over backward to dissuade Mahmoud Abbas from going through with his decision to retire from public life both as chairman of the Palestinian Authority and head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which he now says is final, Washington and Jerusalem sources report.

In closed meetings Monday, Nov. 16, the Palestinian leader tried to impress on visiting US senators that he was serious about quitting in the coming weeks. Asked what would happen after he was gone, Abbas said he doesn't want to know.

US and American intelligence experts see Abbas being succeeded by his new deputy, Abu Maher Ghneim, who acted for 38 years as head of the Palestinian terrorist groups' manpower and finances from his self-appointed exile in Tunis. Earlier this year, prime minster Binyamin Netanyahu and defense minister Ehud Barak authorized his entry to the West Bank for the Fatah convention, at Washington's behest, although they were warned that the newcomer to Ramallah was a died-in-the wool rejectionist of peace diplomacy. He even opted to stay in Tunis to defy Yasser Arafat on the 1993 Oslo accords.

Now both the Americans and Israelis rue their decision, dismayed at the possibility of Abu Ghneim stepping into Abbas' shoes.

Abbas himself recently reshuffled his security services and named himself supreme commander of all armed forces, which means that his successor would take over this function too, another nail in the coffin of peacemaking, as one American source glumly admitted.

The Obama administration has therefore rallied to keep Abbas from stepping aside

Our sources report that Monday, he was this week promised a grant of$131 million to pay for four brigades that would double the size of his presidential security guard in Ramallah. If the Palestinian leader withdraws his resignation, US Gen.Keith Dayton will go straight into training the incremental troops. If not, the plan will be set aside.

Long familiar with Abbas' great strength, i.e. his weakness, Netanyahu and Barak have often propped him up before and may be expected to chip in with a fresh batch of concessions for the Palestinians to bring him round.

However, neither the US nor Israel will countenance a unilateral declaration of Palestinian independence. Netanyahu has said Israel would counteract to this step in kind, including annexations of West Bank territory and the suspension of existing accords.

Tuesday, Nov. 17, the European Union lined up with Washington to spurn a Palestinian request to recognize an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as "premature."

Speaking for the EU, Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt said: "I would hope we would be in a position to recognize a Palestinian state but there has to be one first. So I think that is a bit premature... We would be ready to recognize a Palestinian state but conditions are not there as of yet."

5a)Spoilers: The End of the Peace Process
Elliott Abrams and Michael Singh



In December 2000, the president had put forward his far-reaching set of parameters on all the final status issues. . . . He was even prepared to spend his last four days in office negotiating the deal. A desperate Barak was waiting for the call to a final summit meeting. Barak’s foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, was so keen to reach an agreement that he had gone beyond his instructions and informed Arafat that he could even have sovereignty over the Jewish Holy of Holies, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. But at the last moment, Arafat reneged.


Typically, explanations for the lack of progress in the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians revolve around disagreements over the “core issues,” insufficient diplomatic activism and pressure on Israel from the United States, and Israeli intransigence. Such views share one premise: that Israeli bargaining power overwhelms that of the Palestinians and must be compensated for by action on the part of the international community. They all fail to acknowledge one fact: the Palestinians’ repeated rejection of increasingly attractive Israeli offers.

A better explanation focuses instead on the true value—to both parties—of the agreement that analysts nearly unanimously agree has, in one form or another, been on the table for fifteen years but is today regarded by both sides as problematic. Israel, having little faith in the capacity or durability of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and embittered by recent clashes in Lebanon and Gaza, sees the yield of this agreement as offering diminishing returns relative to the sacrifice it would entail. Many Palestinians, while still placing faith in an agreement that would deliver their long-awaited statehood, see the alternatives—whether engaging in armed conflict or pushing for a single multiethnic state—as increasingly attractive.

Since the end of the Oslo process in 2000, the growing drift between these two positions has produced on the Israeli side a cynicism marked by paroxysms of despair, and on the Palestinian and Arab sides by a hardening of positions. This divergence is not the result of Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank. However emotionally charged settlements may be, the idea that they prejudice the final status of disputed territory is belied by the fact that Israel’s territorial offers have increased, rather than diminished, with the growth of settlements. No, the diminishing interest in negotiations comes as the result of demographics, regional dynamics, evolving political realities, and the increasing availability and sophistication of rockets and other asymmetric means of warfare. Overcoming all of this will require something more than diplomacy on the “core issues.”


Demographic trends in the region pose stark choices for both sides. The Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza has more than doubled from 1,728,334 at the time of the 1991 Madrid talks to 4,013,126 today, and is growing half again as fast as the Israeli population. (According to the CIA’s World Factbook, the West Bank’s population is growing at 2.2 percent, Gaza’s at 3.3 percent, and Israel’s at 1.7 percent.)

Many Israelis have concluded from these developments that for Israel to remain a democratic Jewish state, it must separate from the Palestinians and allow them their own state. But some Palestinians have reached the opposite conclusion. Given that the Palestinians currently living in the West Bank and Gaza (together with the 3 million refugees theoretically eligible to “return” to Israel) would be numerically overwhelming, why accept a Palestinian state that would be divided into two parts, the West Bank and Gaza, contain some Jewish settlements, consist of only 6,000 square kilometers, and lack resources? Why not push for a single unified state?

New regional dynamics in the Middle East also undermine the possibilities for compromise. The Palestinian cause remains a useful tool for regimes in the region concerned about the mood of their own populations; it can be used, and has been for decades, to deflect attention from their own shortcomings. Further, Iran, which was not a factor twenty or even ten years ago (the word “Iran” does not appear in the Mitchell Report as recently as 2001), is today a dominant factor in regional politics. With its calls for the elimination of the State of Israel, its support for Holocaust denial, and its assistance for terrorist groups fighting Israel, Iran provides ideological and military backing for a “rejectionist” front that many had thought died with Arafat. If Iran were to obtain a nuclear weapon or even be perceived to win significant concessions from the West in exchange for remaining at the nuclear threshold, this front would gain further power. Iran would seek to undermine any compromise peace agreement reached.

The third factor militating against the idea of negotiations are new and evolving political realities. The Fatah Party itself, for instance, which has never recovered from Arafat’s death and remains weak and divided, has officials but no leaders. The “Abus” who were Arafat’s acolytes for decades simply lack the legitimacy to make the serious concessions that peace will require—and the party has only recently begun to incorporate fresh faces. In Israel, the intifada that followed the breakdown of talks at Camp David and the violence following Israeli withdrawals from southern Lebanon and Gaza have tilted politics toward the right and disillusioned Israelis. Meanwhile, in the Islamic world more broadly, radical, extremist, and violent forms of Islam have grown stronger over the past decades, similarly making concessions to Israel far harder to defend safely. And in many parts of the West once sympathetic to Israel, being tough on Israel can now actually help win elections, a point European officials have made very openly to American diplomats.

All these developments have taken place against a weakening of the military superiority Israel has enjoyed for the past half century. After the Arab defeats in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, the peace treaties Israel signed with Egypt and Jordan, and the demise of the USSR, it seemed there was a greater chance for peace because Arab states now understood that they could neither destroy Israel on their own nor count on the Soviets to do it for them. But today the proliferation of rockets and other weapons of terror—and Iran’s nuclear program—gives greater leverage to Palestinian rejectionists who might otherwise remain on the fringe. The future deployment of missile defense systems might help restore Israel’s previous position. But for now cheap rockets smuggled into or assembled in Gaza (which bring more and more of Israel’s cities into range) and guided antitank missiles and other military-grade weaponry provided by Iran make those pulling the trigger less fearful of the consequences than traditional militaries would have been in the past. The most extreme forces among the Palestinians have been given a new power—first by initiating crises when peace prospects seem to be growing, and second by raising hopes of grinding down Israel’s will through endless low-level military conflict.

These new factors, rather than disagreement over the “core issues”—including the delineation of a border between Israel and a Palestinian state, the return of Palestinian refugees, and the division of Jerusalem—have truly blocked the path to peace in the Middle East in recent years. They are what make traditional diplomatic approaches—more international conferences like those in Madrid or Annapolis, more pressure on Israel to “freeze settlements,” more rounds of talks between Israeli officials and Fatah’s West Bank leaders—seem so rote and void of promise. And these factors also demand a very different set of reactions to rehabilitate and increase Israel’s confidence in the value and durability of a peace agreement while also diverting Palestinian leaders from the pursuit of futile and dangerous alternatives. The key to such a new approach would be to leave the negotiating to the two parties and focus U.S. and international efforts on improving the background for those negotiations—by, on one hand, helping build a constituency for peace, and, on the other, countering the designs of spoilers of the peace efforts.


Clearly, chief among the parties dedicated to killing an Israeli-Palestinian peace is Iran. By fomenting instability in the Levant, and putting Arab leaders who want a settlement on the defensive with accusations of collaboration, Tehran distracts Israel and weakens the Sunni Arab states that have dominated the region during the last half century. Syria and the terrorist groups Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad collaborate with Iran in achieving these ends. Their ideologies are disparate but their aims are congruent, and by acting in rough synchronicity, they diminish both Israel’s and the Palestinians’ willingness and ability to make concessions.

How to counter Iran and its client spoilers? First, greater pressure must be brought to bear on Iran in order to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, thus heading off a Middle East arms race that would multiply the region’s troubles and Israel’s insecurities. It is frequently asserted that progress in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will bolster the effort to negotiate Tehran out of its nukes, but this puts the cart before the horse. Iran has no real interest in the Palestinian issue and merely manipulates it to advance its own interests. In fact, a decisive resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian issue is not possible without a comprehensive and effective effort to curtail Iran’s nuclear and hegemonic ambitions. This is not to suggest that Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts should be postponed until all concerns with Iran are put to rest. But more must be done to constrain Iran and relieve the pressure its destabilizing activities place on Israel, the Arab states, and moderate Palestinian leaders.

Second, concerted multilateral action must be taken against terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas. Because they masquerade as political parties, the West is increasingly tempted to engage these groups or to treat as separate entities their military and political “wings.” And despite these groups’ close links with Iran and their undermining of state institutions across the region, many Arab leaders continue to fete and fund them. If they are to be neutralized as an obstacle to peace, these terror groups must be isolated diplomatically and financially, and the red carpets that have been rolled out for them in some Arab capitals must be rolled back up and stashed away for good.

Finally, the networks that bind Iran and its terrorist allies must be disrupted. Iran and Hezbollah lack a border with Gaza, so they use sea and land routes to smuggle arms into Gaza via the Gulf of Aden, Red Sea, Suez Canal, eastern African countries, and Egypt. Those Arab states that seek peace and stability in their regional neighborhood should seek to prevent all such activities, using force when necessary. Syria’s role is most important, and the United States, Israel, and their allies must compel the Assad regime to choose between Iran and the international community. Confronting Damascus with this choice will require a level of fortitude from the United States and European countries beyond anything they have mustered in the past.

But even if Iran’s ability to interfere in the region were contained and terrorist groups were denied access to advanced weaponry, major obstacles to peace would remain. Economic retrogression, inattention to the key tasks of state-building, and the effects of occupation have left Palestinians despairing and susceptible to radicalization, and decades of terrorism have left Israelis demoralized about the potential of negotiations. On this barren ground a constituency for peace must be built on both sides of the Green Line. This, too, requires a three-part approach.


First, leaders on both sides and in the United States must reaffirm their commitment to the two-state vision first articulated by President George W. Bush. The two-state vision is not a negotiating framework, but a fundamental commitment—on the Israeli side, to the end of the occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state; on the Palestinian side, to the abandonment of any notion of eliminating Israel. “Two states for two peoples” may sound like sloganeering, but it contains the principle of a just and lasting settlement: that Israel must yield control of much of the West Bank—and along with it a great part of the central landscape of Jewish history—and that the Arab world must acknowledge and permanently coexist with Israel as a Jewish state.

Second, more effort must be put into the building of sound institutions and a functioning economy for a future Palestinian state. On both of these dimensions, the performance of the international community so far has been disastrous. The IMF and World Bank have repeatedly noted that donors have been slow to disburse their billions of dollars in aid pledges, leading to severe PA budget shortfalls. The aid that has been delivered has failed to spur economic growth, but instead has left the Palestinian economy stagnant and increasingly dependent on external transfers. Palestinian per capita incomes in 2008 were 30 percent below their height in 1999, while foreign aid had grown to 32 percent of GDP in 2008, boosted from 25 percent just a year earlier. There are glimmers of hope—the IMF has predicted 7 percent economic growth in the West Bank in 2009—likely because of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s efforts and commendable work by Palestinian security forces to establish order in major cities. But much more will be needed.

This abysmal performance both of international institutions and the PA is partly the result of Israeli checkpoints, border closures, and other restrictions. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has admitted that these procedures must be eased to relieve Palestinians’ economic distress. However, the PA’s ineffectuality also derives from poor donor coordination and corruption within Palestinian political ranks, which cause funds to be spent haphazardly or on projects that will take years to unfold. The importance of quick-impact economic development and institution-building cannot be overstated: without jobs and a hope for a better future, Palestinians have nothing to lose; without legitimate institutions, they have nowhere to turn, except perhaps to gangs or militias. This was the meaning behind Salam Fayyad’s admirable motto: “building towards statehood despite the occupation.”

Finally, continued political reform is necessary to address Fatah’s waning popularity and legitimacy, and to involve the next generation of Palestinians in their own governance. This step is critically tied, as well, to economic reform and institution-building. It does no good to enact policies designed to give the Palestinian populace an interest in peace if their political leadership feels no accountability to promote these interests. Political reform also holds the key to the defeat of Hamas within the Palestinian polity. Hamas may promise a fight against corruption, but it cannot deliver peace and stability. A reformed Fatah, or its replacement by new moderate parties, can better meet the needs of the Palestinians (and thus more successfully earn their votes) than can Hamas.
But to work, these efforts will require a new approach from the Arab states. The Arab Peace Initiative, adopted by the Arab League in 2002, contained a welcome endorsement of peace. But it offered Israel (as well as the Palestinians, for that matter) a take-it-or-leave-it proposition when it required as preconditions for “normal relations” a complete Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines, a division of Jerusalem, the full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, and a right of return for all refugees. As such, the initiative risks reducing the maneuverability of each side in a number of ways. It forces Israel to appear to reject a moderate Arab overture; it handcuffs the PA with a rigid set of negotiating stances that put it in the uncomfortable position of having either to scuttle talks with Israel by refusing to bargain or to make concessions that compromise the consensus Arab position; and it discourages Arab states from reaching out on their own to Israel for fear of bucking that same consensus.

A better approach for the Arab states would be to focus their efforts on countering spoilers and improving the regional atmosphere for peace. Greater involvement by key Arab states—particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE—in ad hoc financial, shipping, and other sanctions against Iran could substantially increase the effectiveness of such measures. And actions by Arab states to curtail Hamas leaders’ ability to travel and raise funds could hamstring that organization, and expose its total reliance on Tehran.

The Arab states should also open an “Arab–Palestinian” track of peace negotiations to determine how a Palestinian state will relate to its Arab neighbors, and how it will be integrated into the region’s economic and security superstructure. This would not only boost the ultimate viability of a Palestinian state, but increase Israel’s confidence in the state’s ability to resist being hijacked by Hamas and other terrorists. Arab leaders should also substantially increase their financial support to the Palestinians. At the Paris Donor Conference, Arab countries gave only 20 percent of the total funds while the European countries gave 53 percent. Finally, Arab states should find ways to reach out to Israel beyond the confines of the Peace Initiative—whether by increasing commercial cooperation or by agreeing to visits and visible diplomatic exchanges, thus persuading Israelis that peace is possible and will yield concrete dividends.


The general outlines of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement have been clear for decades, but neither side wants to accept them—yet. Discussing the same terms one more time—at Madrid, Oslo, Camp David, Taba, Annapolis, or anywhere else—will not produce an agreement. International discourse on the Middle East conflict has largely ossified since 2000, leading to iterative discussions of the same old negotiating issues while the deeper dynamics dividing the parties are largely ignored.

If the international community wishes to contribute to a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it must stop trying to apply small solutions to big problems. Those problems—the destabilizing activities of Iran and its proxies, the lack of progress toward a viable economy and competent self-government in the Palestinian territories, and the need for movement toward a sustainable security architecture for the Middle East—dramatize both the need and opportunity for international involvement. Seriously and vigorously tackling these issues as the Israelis and Palestinians reengage in talks will help both parties to realize the value in a negotiated, two-state solution, and finally to embrace some variation of the deal that has been on the table so long.

Elliott Abrams, until recently a deputy national security adviser, is a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Michael Singh is a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

6)How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
By Steven Emerson


What rights, if any, should alleged terrorist financiers be afforded? This question has plagued federal judges since the Treasury Department first began targeting those believed to be providing financial support to terrorist organizations over a decade ago. One recurring issue has been whether the Treasury Department must seek a warrant prior to freezing the assets of those suspected of terrorist financing. Two recent, high profile cases — Kindhearts v. Geithner (N.D. Ohio) and al Haramain v. United States Department of the Treasury (D. Or.) — have set the stage for a possible showdown at the Supreme Court, where this question can hopefully be resolved.

Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), one of the lead agencies in the fight against terrorist financing, froze the assets of both al Haramain and Kindhearts in 2004 and 2006 respectively. In both cases, the defendant charities were accused of providing financial support to terrorist groups. Al Haramain allegedly funneled money to Chechen rebels and Kindhearts was accused of funding Hamas.

Neither of the asset seizures was conducted with prior judicial warrants, and consequently, defendants challenged the Treasury actions as a violation of the Fourth Amendment's proscription against warrantless seizures. Although both federal courts agreed with the defendants that the freezing of assets was a "seizure" for Fourth Amendment purposes, they diverged when determining whether an exception to the warrant requirement may apply to seizures of terrorist finances.

The government argued that asset seizures in counter-terrorist financing investigations are exempted from the warrant requirement. Relying upon the "special needs exception," the government explained that no warrant is needed where: (i) the primary purpose of the seizure is beyond criminal law enforcement; and (ii) a warrant and probable cause are impracticable. Applying these factors, the al Haramain court upheld the search on the grounds that a warrant was unnecessary, whereas the Kindhearts court found the exception inapplicable, and invalidated the seizure.

Considering the first factor, the judge in al Haramain explained that the primary purpose of asset seizure is not criminal prosecution, but rather:

"to deprive the designated person of the benefit of the property…that might otherwise be used to further ends that conflict with U.S. interests. Blocking assets of designated terrorists and their supporters prevents their possible use in the orchestration, assistance, or support of unlawful and dangerous global plots."

In contrast, the Kindhearts court found that simply based on the potential for criminal prosecutions, there must be a warrant. While it is true that a criminal prosecution may be the end result in a terrorist financing investigation, it is not the primary purpose of the forfeiture proceedings. Rather, Treasury acts to freeze the assets in order to preempt their use in financing acts of terrorism.

As to the second factor, regarding the warrant and probably cause, the court in Kindhearts ruled that the government had not provided an explanation as to why the warrant requirements were impracticable. In al Haramain, the court came to the opposite conclusion, explaining the impracticability of warrants in asset seizures of terrorist financiers. As the court explained, not only must the government act fast to prevent asset flight, but it would be nearly impossible "to meet the specificity requirements in an application for a warrant, and…to track down assets belonging to the designated individual and apply for a warrant in each jurisdiction in which the asset is located."

As the al Haramain court explained, the Supreme Court has never decided whether an asset seizure in a terrorist financing investigation is subject to Fourth Amendment protections. Recognizing that this question has never been resolved, these two cases present a unique opportunity for the Court to address this unsettled question of law. Moreover, such resolution is absolutely necessary. As it now stands, Treasury officials must seek warrants prior to instituting asset seizures in Ohio, but not in Oregon. In the event that the respective federal Courts of Appeal affirm the district court opinions, the divergent decisions could force the Supreme Court to take up the question. If, and when that happens, hopefully the Justices will agree with the Oregon court that not only is the primary purpose of asset seizures the prevention of future acts of terrorism, but that requiring a warrant prior to such action is not a viable option.


7)The Assassination of Greg Craig
by Steve Clemons

The White House counsel was done in by a scurrilous leaks campaign. So much for the Obama team's pledge to be transparent, forthright and accountable for their actions.

Gregory Craig, White House counsel to President Obama and national security advisor to Obama during the presidential campaign, resigned his post this past Friday. But when rumors broke Thursday of his imminent departure, Craig had not written his farewell note and may not have planned to leave–yet.

Since the summer, word had been leaking that Greg Craig’s days were numbered and that Obama campaign legal counsel Bob Bauer would be moving in to take Craig’s spot. But the situation seemed similar to the leaks about National Security Adviser Jim Jones’ supposedly tenuous hold on his job—which were either untrue, or turned around by Jones’ performance. The leaks about Craig also seemed unfounded—especially in light of direct statements from the White House that the statements were untrue and that he was not departing.

The sustained nature of the leaks and—and the fact that they ultimately proved to be true—indicates something quite disappointing for anyone who had hoped that the Obama White House would operate more transparently and honestly than the Bush team had.
Some observers are now calling this incident the Obama team’s first assassination by leak.

• Lloyd Grove: The Boys Obama Throws Under the BusSuch intrigue and innuendo stand in sharp contrast to the internal vow of key stakeholders in Barack Obama’s campaign, as reported in David Plouffe’s insider account Audacity to Win—whom he says vowed not to allow “@#%holes” and leaks and the blame game to disrupt any aspect of their campaign. When problems arose or mistakes were made, the president and his team were forthright and dealt with each other directly and confessed their sins, when they committed them, to the public.

Obama himself set a tone of a “No Drama Obama” campaign and worked hard to keep the campaign’s machinations on the high road and not in the political gutter.

What just happened to Gregory Craig should not have happened in Obama Land. It’s something from what Dick Cheney would have called “The Dark Side”--where insinuation and character assassination were leaked to undermine a foe. Think of the manner in which Scooter Libby and Karl Rove promulgated the revelation that Bush administration thorn Joe Wilson was married to a CIA covert operative.

I spoke to Gregory Craig in the summer when the first leaks began to break. While he suspected they were driven by someone in the White House who was frustrated with the slow progress on shuttering GITMO, Craig did not know who was out to get him. He had no idea.

But the sustained nature of the leaks and—and the fact that they ultimately proved to be true—indicates something quite disappointing for anyone who had hoped that the Obama White House would operate more transparently and honestly than the Bush team had.

In fact, leaks are becoming standard fare by key players in the Obama administration. Someone, most likely on the military/intel side of the president’s national security bureaucracy, leaked Afghanistan Commanding General Stanley McChrystal’s report to Bob Woodward. Recently, other political players infuriated U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry by leaking his eleventh-hour contrarian view on a U.S. force surge to the press.

But it’s quite hard to maintain the kind of Obama-esque upbeat tone of transparency and forthrightness and punish staff for leaking when the president himself is standing by and doing nothing as his closest advisors undermine one of their own.

NPR’s Nina Totenberg puts the finger on White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. “There doesn’t seem to be much doubt that these leaks came at least indirectly from Rahm Emanuel,” she reported. “What is the cause of the friction? It's very hard to say. Was it Rahm not wanting to have another power center? Was it their personalities? Was it Rahm seeing the GITMO stuff as a distraction from the president's agenda?"

If the leaks were, in fact, made with President Obama’s encouragement, they could have come from any number of others deep inside the team – including David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, or Denis McDonough. It almost doesn’t matter who among these insiders might have done the leaking. None of them would have engaged in such an effort to dislodge Greg Craig unless the president had lost faith in his counsel.

But that begs the question: Why didn’t the president himself have a direct discussion with his counsel? Why didn’t Rahm Emanuel, as the president’s Cromwell, put it straight to the GITMO-burdened White House lawyer? Obama might have been uncomfortable with dislodging a friend and someone who had been so valuable and close during the campaign. As for Emanuel, it may be that he excels in and enjoys political intrigue more than being up front.

Whatever the reason for pushing Craig out—be it his failure to put the dynamics in place to shut down the Guantanamo detention center in the first year of the Obama presidency, or something much more substantial than this—the White House counsel was on the outs with Obama, and few had the backbone to put it to him directly.

Now that the White House has opened the door to the political tradecraft of leaks, others on the Obama team may feel empowered to deploy these indirect assaults in their own battles against internal foes. Given the “team of rivals” Obama has assembled in nearly every policy arena, the coming policy wars in and around the White House will be fascinating to watch.

But what we just saw in Greg Craig’s firing was not “change we can believe in.” It was a sign that the dark side has taken hold at the White House.

Steve Clemons is Director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and publisher of the popular political blog, The Washington Note.

8)Bowing to "World Opinion"
By Thomas Sowell

In the string of amazing decisions made during the first year of the Obama administration, nothing seems more like sheer insanity than the decision to try foreign terrorists, who have committed acts of war against the United States, in federal court, as if they were American citizens accused of crimes.

Terrorists are not even entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention, much less the Constitution of the United States. Terrorists have never observed, nor even claimed to have observed, the Geneva Convention, nor are they among those covered by it.

But over and above the utter inconsistency of what is being done is the utter recklessness it represents. The last time an attack on the World Trade Center was treated as a matter of domestic criminal justice was after a bomb was exploded there in 1993. Under the rules of American criminal law, the prosecution had to turn over all sorts of information to the defense-- information that told the Al Qaeda international terrorist network what we knew about them and how we knew it.

This was nothing more and nothing less than giving away military secrets to an enemy in wartime-- something for which people have been executed, as they should have been. Secrecy in warfare is a matter of life and death. Lives were risked and lost during World War II to prevent Nazi Germany from discovering that Britain had broken its supposedly unbreakable Enigma code and could read their military plans that were being radioed in that code.

"Loose lips sink ships" was the World War II motto in the United States. But loose lips are mandated under the rules of criminal prosecutions.

Tragically, this administration seems hell-bent to avoid seeing acts of terrorism against the United States as acts of war. The very phrase "war on terrorism" is avoided, as if that will stop the terrorists' war on us.

The mindset of the left behind such thinking was spelled out in an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle, which said that "Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, will be tried the right way-- the American way, in a federal courtroom where the world will see both his guilt and the nation's adherence to the rule of law."

This is not the rule of law but the application of laws to situations for which they were not designed.

How many Americans may pay with their lives for the intelligence secrets and methods that can forced to be disclosed to Al Qaeda was not mentioned. Nor was there mention of how many foreign nations and individuals whose cooperation with us in the war on terror have been involved in countering Al Qaeda-- nor how many foreign nations and individuals will have to think twice now, before cooperating with us again, when their role can be revealed in court to our enemies, who can exact revenge on them.

Behind this decision and others is the notion that we have to demonstrate our good faith to other nations, sometimes called "world opinion." Just who are these saintly nations whose favor we must curry, at the risk of American lives and the national security of the United States?

Internationally, the law of the jungle ultimately prevails, despite pious talk about "the international community" and "world opinion," or the pompous and corrupt farce of the United Nations. Yet this is the gallery to which Barack Obama has been playing, both before and after becoming President of the United States.

In the wake of the obscenity of a trial of terrorists in federal court for an act of war-- and the worldwide propaganda platform it will give them-- it may seem to be a small thing that President Obama has been photographed yet again bowing deeply to a foreign ruler. But how large or small an act is depends on its actual consequences, not on whether the politically correct intelligentsia think it is no big deal.

As a private citizen, Barack Obama has a right to make as big a jackass of himself as he wants to. But, as President of the United States, his actions not only denigrate a nation that other nations rely on for survival, but raise questions about how reliable our judgment and resolve are-- which in turn raises questions about whether those nations will consider themselves better off to make the best deal they can with our enemies.













　

Unilateralism Works Two Ways & Palin :The Mixed Blessing!

It pays to know a president who is going to change things. Particular when the 'change' is being spent for your benefit. (See 1 below.)

Former Attorney General, laments what this administration is doing to the potential detriment of our nation. (See 2 below.)

We are having a Constitutional Moment according to this writer and he is excited at the prospect of testing our Constitution to see if it can be redeemed and made to work as intended. (See 3 below.)

Concerns regarding Obama's Asian trip. (See 4 below.)

According to Sarkozy, France is losing its soul as he lays down the law with respect to those who come there to create social problems. (See 5 below.)

Iran goes into a full and frantic missile silo digging and production mode. Israel captured an Iranian general and has been debriefing him about Iran's nuclear development. (See 6 and 6a below.)

Netanyahu warns Palestinians two can play the game of unilateralism. (See 7 below.)

Meanwhile slick Bill, smooth talks Israelis. (See 7a below.)

Palin the political mixed blessing. While she energizes the base she turns off the centrists.

Will she prove thew old adage about"hell hath no fury as a woman scorned" and sink the good ship lollipop?(See 8 below.)

Will the U.N. ultimately determine the rules by which all nations must abide? Certainly seems to be what the Obama Crowd would prefer. (See 9 below.)

Anita Dunn is out but her husband, Robert Bauer, has now been appointed White House Counsel. Bauer is big Acorn supporter. You get rid of one bad apple and a bushel of apples re-appear upon the scene. (See 10 below.)

Dick


1) We the People for the People - Vote them out in 2010.

Finally - Offshore Oil Exploration gets approved and funded - However ----- You need to read the "rest of the story" ......

This was NOT reported on any of the mainstream news outlets such as ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN or MSNBC. However, it was reported as follows:

On 20 August 2009, on a segment of the "Glenn Beck Show" on FCN (Fox Cable News) ... the following statement was read:

"Today even though President Obama is against offshore drilling for oil for this country. He signed an executive order to loan 2 Billion or more of our taxpayers dollars to a Brazilian Oil Exploration Company (Petrobras - which is the 8th largest company in the entire world) to drill for oil off the coast of Brazil. The oil that comes from this operation is for the sole purpose and use of China and not the USA . The Chinese government is under contract to purchase all the oil that this oil field will produce, which is hundreds of millions of barrels of oil".

We (the American People) have absolutely no gain from this transaction whatsoever.

Wait, it gets more interesting: Guess who is the largest individual stockholder of this Brazilian Oil Company, and who would benefit most from this ---??? It is American Billionaire, George Soros, the Liberal businessman who is a radical left wing supporter, finances "MoveOn.org" as well as other liberal programs, and was President Obama's largest and most generous supporter during his campaign.


Not a word of this transaction was on any of the other news networks.


Does anyone think this was the type of change Obama meant ---??? Or, maybe it was.

2) HOMELAND INSECURITy: Obama refusing 'to face facts' of war on terror
Trials in New York could bring 'murder' to the Big Apple
By Michael Mukasey

The former U.S. attorney general who as a judge presided over a trial following the 1993 terror attack on the World Trade Center says the decision by President Obama's Justice Department to bring terror suspects into the U.S. and put them on trial in New York City will raise the danger level for the Big Apple.

Attorney General Eric Holder today announced the decision to haul Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and several others now held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Manhattan for a courthouse trial not far from the former location of the World Trade Center, destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed nearly 3,000.

Holder said the suspects will be in New York "to answer for their alleged crimes in a courthouse just blocks away from where the twin towers once stood."

But former Attorney General Michael Mukasey said the decision reflects the administration's return to a pre-9/11 mindset, when such cases were handled in civilian courts. President Bush had planned a military resolution to the cases, since the defendants largely were apprehended by military troops as part of the nation's war on terror.

According to the Weekly Standard, speaking at the Federalist Society's National Lawyers Convention today, Mukasey said the decision was "not only unwise, but based on a refusal to face the fact that what we are involved with here is a war with people who follow a religiously-based ideology that calls on them to kill us, and to return instead to the mindset that prevailed before Sept. 11 that acts like the first World Trade Center bombing, the attacks on our embassies in Africa and other such acts can and should be treated as conventional crimes and tried in conventional courts."

Further, the Wall Street Journal reported Mukasey expects that by bringing terror suspects into New York, the Obama administration is risking turning the city into "the focus of mischief in the form of murder by adherents of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed."

Yet another danger he cited is the possible disclosure of intelligence secrets as part of the legal proceedings.

"I can't see anything good coming out" of Holder's decision, Mukasey said, the Journal reported.

Terror suspects at the trial over which Mukasey presided were convicted, but the Journal reported he was convinced during that time that federal courts were incapable of handling sensitive trials on terrorism charges.

Columnist Michelle Malkin reported immediately on the reaction to the administration's decision.

The Department of Defense Victim Witness Program notified survivors and relatives of victims of the terror attack about the announcement, prompting a recipient, "Tim," to announce, "We will fight with every remaining breath in our bodies both their bringing KSM and the rest of the 9/11 conspirators to federal courtrooms within walking distance of where they slaughtered our loved ones. And whomever finds Manhattan's federal courthouse near Ground Zero a 'sentimental favorite' for the 9/11trials is a damn fool and they ALL ought to be fired. Pass that message on, far, wide, and up and down the chain-of-command."

Added Malkin, "If this White House thought Tea Party activists were an 'angry mob,' wait until they see the backlash from 9/11 family members and their supporters nationwide. We're not going to sit down and shut up about the reckless, security-undermining Obama 9/10 agenda and conflict-of-interest-ridden AG Eric Holder."

3)Our 'Constitutional Moment'
By James Taranto

The New York newspaperman says our founding document is especially vital today, in an age of expanding state power


Seth Lipsky has a knack for seeing the bright side of things. A nearly 20-year veteran of this newspaper, including its editorial page, he cheerfully acknowledges the obvious: This is far from a golden age of free-market conservatism. Of President Obama, he tells me over lunch, "I sense that he has a very leftist, socialist-oriented worldview."

Yet this makes Mr. Lipsky anything but grim: "I for one find this very exciting. . . . We're just at a great moment."

Why? Because, he says, "America is in what I call a constitutional moment." Mr. Obama's efforts to expand government power raise basic questions about the constitutional limits of that power. "The enumerated-powers argument is enormous," Mr. Lipsky says. "It's just enormous, the ground that is open for contest here. . . . Right now, we're at a moment where we're not going to be able to turn to either the Congress or the executive branch for help on this." He believes "the only defense now, the only tool we have now, is the Constitution. That's why I call it a constitutional moment, as opposed to a political moment."

That makes it an auspicious moment for Mr. Lipsky's new book, "The Citizen's Constitution: An Annotated Guide." The U.S. Constitution is a brief document, taking up just 42 pages in a popular pocket-size edition from the Cato Institute. Mr. Lipsky expands it to 287 pages of 5 by 8 inches, by way of 327 lengthy footnotes in which he discusses each and every constitutional clause in the context of history, case law and current events. There are an additional 36 pages of bibliographic references, making it the only book I've seen in which the footnotes have endnotes.

Mr. Lipsky doesn't remember exactly when he thought of the idea, but he believes it was in the late 1980s. "I got into an argument over abortion and was talking to someone about the right to privacy," he recalls. "I looked at a pamphlet the government had issued with a text-only edition of the Constitution, and I realized I couldn't find the word 'privacy' in the Constitution. I began to think about a better edition." Mr. Lipsky's edition has an index, where the listing for "privacy, right to" directs the reader to the chapters on the Third, Ninth and 14th amendments.

As a newspaperman for 40-plus years—in addition to working for the Journal, he founded two papers of his own—Mr. Lipsky has built a career on the First Amendment. But his enthusiasm extends as well to the preamble, the original seven articles and the 26 other amendments.

"For years I've been sending memos to people who worked for me—desk editors, reporters, editorial writers—constantly trying to raise their consciousness about the usefulness of the Constitution in editorial work," he says. "Usually these memos that I would send would be simple memos, like, 'Where the hell does the Congress get the power to do that?' or, 'The New York Sun will not carry a dispatch about the Second Amendment which does not quote Justice Story as saying the Second Amendment is the palladium of our liberties.'"

In 1968, after graduating from Harvard, Mr. Lipsky took a reporting job at the Anniston Star in Alabama. He was there just seven months before he was drafted and sent to Vietnam, but it was long enough to provide a formative experience. He visited Frank Johnson, then a federal district judge, who had been a member of the three-judge panel that ordered the desegregation of Montgomery buses after Rosa Parks's arrest. Johnson also presided over Lee v. Macon County, a school-desegregation case that began in 1963.

He told Mr. Lipsky about the trial: "The school board was ready to accede when Gov. [George] Wallace heard about it and ordered them not to. So Johnson gets [Wallace] into court, and he says, 'On what basis are you objecting to this order?' [The governor] says, 'Well, I'm the ex officio chairman of the state board of education, and under that authority, I'm telling them not to integrate the schools.'

"Johnson says, 'As ex officio chairman of the state board of education, you have the power to tell the school board of Macon County, Alabama, that they can't integrate the school?' And the governor says, 'Yes, your honor, I do.' The judge says, 'Well, then, I'm ordering you to integrate all 67 counties in Alabama.'"

In Vietnam, Mr. Lipsky worked as a combat reporter for Pacific Stars and Stripes. Returning to civilian life, he joined the Journal in Detroit, with later postings in Hong Kong, New York and Brussels. He left in 1990 to start an English-language weekly edition of the Forward, a venerable Yiddish newspaper. In 2002, he founded the daily New York Sun—or rather he revived it, the original Sun having folded in 1950. The new Sun attracted a small but influential readership and gave many aspiring writers their start. It ceased publication last year, although Mr. Lipsky and a small stable of writers still publish occasional stories at nysun.com.

The optimism that drove Mr. Lipsky to start a daily newspaper in the Internet age also informs his view of the prospects for American governance. "One of the wonderful things about the Constitution is that anybody can play," he says. "Ordinary people asking simple questions have affected the country in enormous ways using this document. . . . It's just astounding the way individual predicaments and problems are used by the [Supreme] Court to lay down broad principles in the country."

To prove his point, he cites examples from the 1930s, the 1960s and the current decade.

The 1935 case of Schechter Poultry Corp. v. U.S. was decided at a time when the liberal political juggernaut looked even more unstoppable than today. Mr. Lipsky describes the facts: Enforcing the National Industrial Recovery Act, which gave the president vast powers to regulate business, "government thugs went into the kosher butcher shop of the Schechter family in Brooklyn, and they arrested its proprietor on criminal charges."

Among the charges: permitting a housewife "to pick which chicken she wanted." This measure provoked some levity during oral arguments at the Supreme Court: "The judges are asking a question about, 'How is the housewife supposed to pick out her chicken when she can't look at it?' Schechter's lawyer reaches over his shoulder into an imaginary cage and starts pitching around for a chicken, and the Supreme Court started laughing."

The justices ruled unanimously in Schechter's favor and declared the act unconstitutional. "They ended the New Deal," Mr. Lipsky says. Then, with more feeling: "They ended the New Deal!" (This overstates the case somewhat. The court later upheld the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act.)

Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) "involved this guy who was arrested in Florida for robbing a poolroom. He goes into the court and says, 'The Supreme Court says I have a right to a lawyer.' The judge says . . . something to the effect of, 'Not in the state of Florida, you don't.' He gets convicted; he gets sent to prison. While he's in prison, he goes to the prison library. This derelict basically writes an appeal to the Supreme Court . . . in pencil and paper—a pauper's petition that says, 'I have a right to a lawyer.' The Supreme Court notices it, assigns Abe Fortas"—who himself joined the court in 1965—"to defend him. He wins the right to a lawyer for everyone accused of a crime in America. The name of Clarence Earl Gideon will be remembered as long as there is a law."

Last year's District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own firearms, exemplifies Mr. Lipsky's point that the language of the Constitution retains its power even when long ignored. "We've had 200 years, and nothing's ever been done about this," he says. "For 50 of the 200 years, the New York Times has been sneering at the idea of an individual right, and everybody's been talking about how this right belongs to the 'militia.'"

Yet by carefully analyzing the language of the Second Amendment, the court cast aside that musty conventional wisdom. Mr. Lipsky, who describes himself as "a partisan of the plain-language school of the law," applauds not just the result but the method the justices, in an opinion by Antonin Scalia, employed to reach it: "They really get into the language. I mean, the actual grammar, the sentence structure, the subordinate and not-subordinate clauses, which—forgive me, but I've been arguing for a generation and a half as an editorial writer, the plain language of this thing is plain."

Although anybody can play, not everybody can win. In 2003, the high court ruled against Susette Kelo and allowed the city of New London, Conn., to seize her house under eminent domain and turn the land over to private developers.

It's just unbelievable, that case," Mr. Lipsky says—and all the more so in light of the latest development, or rather the lack of development. On Monday, Pfizer Inc., which was to have built offices on the now-barren site, announced that it was leaving New London altogether as part of a consolidation move.

Such disappointments notwithstanding, Mr. Lipsky's passion for the Constitution is a tonic for political depression. If ObamaCare does become law, to take an especially worrying example, it isn't hard to imagine a lot of Americans facing "individual predicaments," including threats to their lives from government rationing. It's some comfort to think they'll be able to petition for a stay—and to demand an answer to the question in that old Lipsky memo: "Where the hell does the Congress get the power to do that?"

Mr. Taranto, a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, writes the Best of the Web Today column for OpinionJournal.com.

4)Concerns Rise Around Obama Trip .
By JONATHAN WEISMAN

SINGAPORE -- President Barack Obama headed to Shanghai Sunday to press China on issues from climate change to economic restructuring, amid rising concerns that his first swing through Asia will yield more disappointment than progress on trade, human rights, national security and environmental concerns.

A flurry of actions here this weekend raised more questions than they resolved on a broad sweep of issues confronting both sides of the Pacific. On Sunday, leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum dropped efforts to reach a binding international climate-change agreement in Copenhagen next month, settling instead for what they called a political framework for future negotiations.

Mr. Obama became the first president to meet with the entire Association of Southeast Asian Nations, including the military junta of Myanmar, and White House officials say he personally demanded the country's leaders release political prisoners, including opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. But Mr. Obama failed to secure any mention of political prisoners in an ASEAN communiqué.

The U.S. and Russia now appear unlikely to complete a nuclear arms reduction accord by Dec. 5, when the current Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty expires. Mr. Obama met for closed-door consultations with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, but National Security Council Russia specialist Michael McFaul said major issues remain, and the two countries are working out a "bridging agreement" to extend previous arms-ratification rules.

On trade, the U.S. president committed this weekend to re-engage the Trans Pacific Partnership, a fledgling free trade alliance in the region. But a presidential shift in tone toward more trade engagement will face its real test Thursday when Mr. Obama visits South Korea to discuss a free trade agreement with that country that remains stuck.

More on APECAgreement on Currencies Evades APEC Heads U.S. Signals Shift on Asia Trade China Real Time: White House Strive for Uncensored Event .
And on Iran, Messers. Obama and Medvedev were left to warn leaders of the Islamic Republic once again that "time is running out." Iran has yet to agree to a Russian offer to provide nuclear material for research in exchange for the closure of a nuclear reactor that western powers say could be used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.

Half way through his Asian tour, Mr. Obama is confronting the limits of engagement and personal charm.

International efforts to combat climate change took a significant blow when the leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum conceded a binding international treaty won't be reached when the United Nations convenes in Copenhagen in three weeks. Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen flew to Singapore Saturday night to deliver a new, down-sized proposal to lock world leaders into further talks.

"Even if we may not hammer out the last dot's of a legally binding instrument, I do believe a political binding agreement with specific commitment to mitigation and finance provides a strong basis for immediate action in the years to come," Mr. Rasmussen told APEC leaders at a hastily convened meeting organized by Mexican President Felipe Calderón and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd Sunday morning.

The election of Mr. Obama, a believer in strict limits on greenhouse gas emissions, had raised hopes among environmentalists that Copenhagen would produce a tough, binding treaty to follow the Kyoto Accords of 1997. The landslide victory of Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's Democratic Party of Japan brought to power a new government pledging deeper emissions cuts than its predecessor. And Chinese President Hu Jintao proposed in September to adopt what he called "carbon intensity targets," the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere per unit of economic output. Emissions from surging economics like China's would continue to rise but at a slower rate.

But political opposition in the U.S. Congress over Mr. Obama's climate-change proposals and continuing resistance among developing countries to binding emission reduction targets slowed consensus ahead of the Copenhagen summit.

Mr. Rasmussen laid out in some detail his goals for the Copenhagen summit. He said leaders should produce a five- to eight-page text with "precise language" committing developed countries to reductions of emissions thought to be warming the planet, with provisions on adapting to warmer temperatures, financing adaptation and combating climate change in poor countries, and technological development and diffusion. It would include pledges of immediate financing for early action.

"We are not aiming to let anyone off the hook," Mr. Rasmussen told the leaders. "We are trying to create a framework that will allow everybody to commit."

But the leaders didn't say when a final summit would be convened to ratify a real treaty.

"There are two choices that we face, given where things are. One was to have a political declaration to say 'We tried. We didn't achieve an agreement and we'll keep on trying.' and the other was to see if we could reach accord as the Danish prime minister laid out," said Michael Froman, White House deputy national security adviser for international economics..

Mr. Obama, in a speech Sunday, took his appeal for a new world economic order to the leaders of Asia that must help make it happen. He said the United States would strive to consume less, save more and restructure its economy around trade and exports. But he appealed to Asian nations to make their own economies more dependent on domestic consumption that U.S. profligacy.

White House officials say a similar message will be delivered in Shanghai and Beijing, but it is unclear how hard the U.S. president can press Beijing to allow the Chinese yuan to appreciate. At the APEC summit, leaders "until the last moment" tried to secure a commitment to stabilize foreign-exchange markers, according to a top adviser to an APEC head of state. But disagreements between the U.S. and Chinese delegations kept any commitment on currency out of the APEC final statement.

A more valuable yuan would empower Chinese consumers to buy, while making Chinese exports less attractive to U.S. consumers. But Washington cannot afford to anger China, which it needs to float a U.S. budget deficit that reached $176.4 billion in October alone, a monthly record.

Indeed, the Asia trip is exposing the limits of Mr. Obama's policy of engagement. The U.S. president met with ASEAN, declaring that efforts to marginalize the government of Myanmar had failed. Human rights groups had hoped a communiqué out of the meeting would call for the release of Ms. Suu Kyi, who is under house arrest. Instead, it made a cryptic reference to a previous ASEAN foreign ministers communiqué that called for her release. Sunday's statement did say that 2010 elections in Myanmar must be "free, fair, inclusive and transparent."

The failure to single out Ms. Suu Kyi was "another blow" to dissidents who want more pressure on the Myanmar junta, said Soe Aung, a spokesman for the Forum for Democracy in Burma, a Thailand-based organization. "We keep saying again and again that the U.S. should not send a mixed signal to the regime."

A White House official said the president never expected the leaders of Myanmar to accept any mention of the Nobel Laureate opposition leader but did press for a mention of political prisoners.

U.S. officials had taken pains to reduce expectations for the meeting, which was part of a new initiative by the Obama administration to improve its ties with Southeast Asia and increase interaction with the Myanmar government. The U.S. imposes stiff sanctions on the country, also known as Burma. But many analysts view those sanctions as a failure as Myanmar has expanded trade with China and other Asian nations, and U.S. officials now believe they might have more influence over the country's leaders if they talk with them more regularly.

Myanmar's military has controlled the country since 1962, and is accused of widespread human rights violations while overseeing an economy that remains one of the least-developed in Asia. The country's profile has risen over the last year, however, amid reports of growing ties with North Korea. The regime plans to hold elections next year, the first since 1990, in a bid to boost its international reputation. But the U.S. and others contend the results cannot be fair unless Ms. Suu Kyi and her supporters – who won the last vote – are allowed to participate.

—Costas Paris contributed to this article.

5)French President Confronts Radical Islam Head-On
By: Kenneth R. Timmerman

French President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to start a dialogue with his countrymen about their national identity, a subject that would not have raised eyebrows 50 years ago but has engendered a fierce political debate today.


Martine Aubry, leader of the opposition Socialist party, contends Sarkozy is just playing electoral politics by appealing to his conservative base in advance of next year’s regional elections.


But Sarkozy showed he is serious during a 45-minute speech on Thursday that Elysee Palace had billed as being dedicated solely to farm subsidies and related issues.


What's more, he demonstrated that he is willing to wage a head-on battle against the forces of political correctness.


Recalling the worst moments of the Nazi occupation during World War II, Sarkozy said the French discovered that they had a national soul only when they were about to lose it.


Then he espoused a national identity that might resonate for Americans in the wake of the Fort Hood, Texas, massacre by a Muslim-American army major who reportedly espoused radical Muslim beliefs.


Sarkozy suggested that France could be on the verge of losing its soul because of a multiculturalism that tolerates radical Islamic fundamentalism.


France emerged as a nation state with a strong central government in the 17th century under Louis XIV but has changed its system of government many times since then. The current French state, known as the Fifth Republic, was established when Gen. De Gaulle returned to power in 1958.


Sarkozy warned that many of his fellow citizens have lost touch with the values that gave rise to the republic through a blind embrace of secular culture. No one should confuse the separation of church and state as the denial of religion or religiosity, Sarkozy insisted.


“There is not a single free thinker, Freemason, or atheist who doesn’t feel the tug of a Christian heritage that has left so many deep furrows in the French mind-set,” he said.


At the heart of the identity crisis plaguing today’s France is a significant immigrant population that refuses to become French, and a multicultural left that has allowed them to live isolated in ghettoes for decades, where many have fallen prey to Muslim preachers of hate.


About 10 percent of the French population is of Muslim origin. Most French Muslims emigrated from North Africa to France after Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia won their independence in the 1960s.


Although many have assimilated into French secular society, which Sarkozy applauded, others openly seek to transform France into a Muslim nation and have won allies in the multicultural left.


“France does not demand that you give up your history or your culture,” Sarkozy said. “But France demands of those who would link their fates to hers to also share her history and her culture. France is not hodgepodge of communities or individuals. . . Becoming French means accepting a form of civilization, values, and customs.”


Sarkozy’s definition of those values left no ambiguity from which direction he felt the danger was coming: “France is a country where women are free. France is a country where church is separate from state, and where the beliefs of each person are respected.


“But France is also a country where there is no room for the burka, and where there is no room for the subjugation of women under any circumstance or pretext.”


The French have debated for 25 years whether Muslim women should be allowed to veil themselves in public schools or in public workplaces, as radical Muslim preachers and their supporters on the left have demanded.


Sarkozy ended that debate scarcely one year after becoming president by outlawing the veil in public last year.


In announcing the reform at the time, Sarkozy said he was troubled by the “discriminatory and degrading” Islamist practice of veiling women.

“I don’t want certain neighborhoods to feel more like Kabul or Tehran than France,” he said.


The same day Sarkozy gave his speech on national identity, police turned away a group of women wearing Islamist veils as they attempted to enter the French National Assembly.


Sarkozy took direct aim at radical secularists as well. While calling on immigrants to share French values, he said French men and women have to believe in those values themselves.


“To open our doors to others, we have to have enough confidence in ourselves. We must be sure of our values and of our model,” he said.


“By giving in to moral equivalence that proclaims all values, behaviors and accomplishments to be the same, we strike a blow against the idea of civilization and against society itself,” he said.


And then he warned: “And it is for this reason, my fellow citizens, that anyone who comes to France to call for violence and hatred of the other will be deported.”


If France is having problems with integrating Muslims, “it is not our values that are at fault but our departure from them, at times even our denial of them,” Sarkozy said.

6)Iran digs hundreds of missile silos - some for misdirection


The Iranians are frenziedly digging hundreds of new missile launch silos in central and Western Iran in readiness for a US or Israeli attack on their nuclear installations, intelligence sources report. Some Western sources have noticed that they are creating more silo bases than they have operational missile batteries in order to mislead their enemies about the locations of the genuine launch pads. The dummy silos are fully equipped with air defenses including anti-air missiles which too are fake.

According to our military sources, the commanders of the two-week Juniper Cobra 10 joint US-Israel exercise which ended last week knew all about Iran's expanding silo project. It is managed by Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps which is responsible for its missile program.

The Iranians are working at the same frantic tempo to turn out Shehab-3, Shehab-4 and Sajil-2 ballistic missiles, as well as a fourth secret ICBM which is thought believed designed to carry a nuclear warhead. Our sources believe it is modeled on Pakistan's Ghauri 3, a three-stage weapon powered by solid fuel with a range of 3,000 km. If they can get this secret weapon off the production line, it would be the first three-stage missile in Iran's armory.

6a)Report: Missing Iran general abducted by Mossad, being held in Israel


A former Iranian defense official who disappeared in 2006 was kidnapped by forces collaborating with the Mossad and is currently being held in an Israeli prison, an investigative news website in Iran claimed on Sunday in a report picked up by Army Radio.

Ali-Reza Asgari, a onetime commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, went missing in Turkey in 2006.

Iranian officials and Asgari's family have claimed that he was abducted.


On Sunday, the Iranian website Alef reported that German, British and Israeli intelligence agencies were responsible for Asgari's disappearance.

"On the basis of a two-year investigation carried out by concerned bodies, Asgari was abducted by foreign intelligence services and is being held in a Zionist prison," the site reported, apparently referring to an Iranian intelligence probe into the matter.

The report claims Asgari was kidnapped in an effort to get information about Iran's nuclear program and about missing Israel Air Force navigator Ron Arad.

The report added after his questioning, Asgari was secretly transferred to a prison facility in Israel, where he is currently being held.

Hans Ruehle, a former chief of the planning staff of the German Defense
Ministry, wrote in a Swiss newspaper in March that Asgari told the West that Iran was financing North Korean steps to transform Syria into a nuclear weapons power, leading to an Israeli airstrike that targeted a site in Syria on Sept. 6, 2007.

The U.S. claims the site was a nearly finished nuclear reactor, but Syria denies that and says the facility was an unused military installation.

Ruehle said Asgari, who was instrumental in establishing the Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon, changed sides and provided information to the West on Iran's own nuclear program.

Iranian officials have said Asgari was not linked to Iran's nuclear program, but Western media reports have said he has cooperated with U.S. intelligence and is considered a high value defector.

Asgari, who became involved in the olive business after retirement, arrived in Turkey on a private visit from Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 7, 2006, and disappeared on Dec. 9, according to Iranian officials.

Ziba Ahmadi, one of Asgari's two wives, claimed at the time that her husband did not defect to Turkey and she believed some evidence showed he was abducted.

The Foreign Ministry has refused to comment on the report.

7)Netanyahu: Unilateral Palestinian path will unravel past agreements


PM tells Saban Forum there is 'no substitute' to negotiations, unilateral steps by Palestinians towards statehood will be met by 'one-sided Israeli measures.' Adds: Iran hell bent on destroying Israel


"There is no substitute for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and any unilateral path will only unravel the framework of agreements between us and will only bring unilateral steps from Israel's side," Netanyahu told the Saban Forum in Jerusalem.

Palestinian officials said earlier on Sunday they were planning on taking their quest for independence to the UN Security council, aiming to secure international support for a state.

Netanyahu said Israel was prepared to take concrete steps towards peace within the framework of the negotiations, adding that the Jewish state has already taken measures to ease Palestinian movement and daily life in the West Bank.

The Israeli leader called on the Palestinians to resume talks at once, saying Israel would agree to jumpstart negotiations with no preconditions.

Netanyahu said Iran was hell bent on destroying Israel and that the regime in Tehran will continuously work to sabotage any efforts to achieve peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The PM said thwarting Iran's nuclear ambitions would significantly weaken Hamas and Hezbollah, and therefore dramatically increase the chance for Mideast peace.

'Hezbollah rearming'
According to the PM, Hezbollah has rearmed itself with at least three times as many rockets as it had at the conclusion of the Second Lebanon War. He mentioned Israel's recent interception of an Iranian arms vessel that was carrying thousands of rockets and shells apparently destined for the Shiite group's operatives in Lebanon.


7a)Clinton: Peace will benefit both sides
Tovah Lazaroff

Both Israelis and Palestinians would only benefit from peace, said former US president Bill Clinton at the Saban Forum in Jerusalem on Sunday.

"You cannot get a divorce and move to another planet," Clinton told a gathering of high level American and Israeli policy makers.

The Palestinians, he warned Israel, are having children at a faster rate, causing demographics in the area to shift radically.

"If you want to be a democracy and a Jewish state you have to cut a deal," Clinton said, adding that there is a physical danger to a deadlocked peace process.

It is only a matter of time, Clinton warned, before Hamas is capable of putting a GPS system on the rockets that it continues to launch from Gaza against Israel's southern border.

"The trajectory of technology is not your friend, … you need to get this done and you do have partners," said Clinton.

The former US president stressed that "It is not too late to make peace" and urged the Palestinians to accept America's modification of its anti-settlement policy and to return to the bargaining table.

"Take where we are and the reformulation of the settlement issue and find a way" to move forward, he said.

The Palestinians were more likely to get a good deal through negotiations, said Clinton, warning against unilateral action.

By refusing to talk with Israel, he said, they risked irking the international community, which might then blame them for the stalled peace process.

His words were consistent with the policy of the US President Barack Obama's administration, which has backed Israel's call to the Palestinians to open an immediate dialogue without pre-conditions.

America has said it wants Israel to freeze settlement activity, but that Israel's refusal to comply with this demand should not stop the two sides from talking.

"We have to work with the politics we found in Israel just like we have to work with the politics we found with the Palestinians," Clinton said.

He added that he would not be shocked if Netanyahu's government "actually does make some kind of an agreement or makes a proposal that would be beyond anything anyone expects," Clinton said.

He repeated the praise his wife, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, made last month with regard to Israel's decision to curb settlement activity.

"This is the first time that any Israeli government has said we will not issue an new permits and not have any new settlements and that should be enough to open the door and start talking," said Clinton.

But in the process, he said, Israel should be careful "not to sound too victimized."

It should also believe that America is its friend and remains deeply committed to Israel and its security.

"You should not think that President Obama is your enemy," Clinton said.

He spoke in the aftermath of media reports of a strained relationship between Netanyahu and Obama as well as speculation that the US was about to step away from the peace process.

Clinton, however, stressed that the US, and Obama, remain deeply committed to the peace process.

"I think that when we meet someone new, in any context we are always looking for clues that will tell us something," said Clinton.

"No American president can serve in good conscience and not be committed to the security of Israel and not be committed to the security of Israel," said Clinton.

"The United States can not make you do something that you do not want to do," Clinton said. He added that if the US spends federal funds to support Israel's security needs, "than we owe it to you to say what the best way to achieve that security is."

He said that Israel should interpret America's rejection of the Goldstone Report which accused Israel of war crimes in Gaza as a strong sign of its commitment to Israel.

For America to be an effective partner in the peace process it is critical that Israel believes and trusts in the deep bonds between the two countries.

"As long as you believe that American is with you at some core emotional level, we can have a conversation about anything. If you ever stop believing that then it does not matter what our position is," he said.

He cautioned Israelis not to "over analyze the Obama-Netanyahu relationship."

With respect to a nuclear Iran, he said the largest danger is the nuclear proliferation that would follow Iran's ability to produce weapons of mass destruction.


8)Sarah Palin, the GOP's blessing and curse: The self-described 'rogue' is anathema to the party establishment but manna from heaven to the grass roots.
By Max Blumenthal



In a Republican Party hoping to rebound in 2010 on the strength of a newly energized and ideologically aroused conservative grass roots, Sarah Palin's influence is now unparalleled. She was the one who popularized the notion that Democrats advocated "death panels" as part of their healthcare plan, a charge that helped ignite conservative opposition to reform. More recently, in a special congressional election in upstate New York, Palin's endorsement of Doug Hoffman, an unknown, far-right third-party candidate, helped force a popular moderate Republican politician, Dede Scozzafava, from the race. And now, although her ghostwritten memoir, "Going Rogue: An American Life," won't be officially released until Tuesday, advance sales have kept it in the No. 1 position at Amazon.com for weeks.

But there is another side to Palin's power. During the 2008 presidential race, some Republican elders warned of her destructive influence. They insisted she was a polarizing figure whose extremism would accelerate the party's slide. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who had written glowingly of Sen. John McCain, said Palin represented "a fatal cancer to the Republican Party." Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for President Reagan and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, blasted Palin as "a dope and unqualified." Last June, Steve Schmidt, the former McCain campaign strategist, warned that Palin's nomination as the GOP's 2012 presidential nominee would be "catastrophic."

New polling data appear to support such doomsday prophecies. According to an Oct. 19 Gallup Poll, the former governor of Alaska has become one of the most polarizing and unpopular politicians in the country. Since she quit the governorship to work on her book, her unfavorability rating has spiked to 50% while her favorability has sunk to 40%, according to Gallup's figures. (The only national politician who is less popular right now, according to the poll, is John Edwards, the former two-term senator who fathered a child out of wedlock while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.)

If Palin is indeed a cancer on the GOP, why can't the Republican establishment retire her to a life of moose hunting in the political wilderness? Why has her appeal increased in the wake of her catastrophic political expeditions?

The answer lies beyond the realm of polls and punditry in the political psychology of the movement that animates and, to a great degree, controls the Republican grass roots -- a uniquely evangelical subculture defined by the personal crises of its believers and their perceived persecution at the hands of cosmopolitan elites.

By emphasizing her own crises and her victimization by the "liberal media," Palin has established an intimate bond with adherents of that subculture -- one so visceral it transcends rational political analysis. As a result, her career has become a vehicle through which the right-wing evangelical movement feels it can express its deepest identity in opposition both to secular society and to its representatives in the Obama White House. Palin is perceived by its leaders -- and followers -- not as another cynical politician or self-promoting celebrity, but as a kind of magical helper, the God-fearing glamour girl who parachuted into their backwater towns to lift them from the drudgery of daily life, assuring them that they represented the "real America."

Take Palin's daughter Bristol and her very public pregnancy. Bristol's drama caught vividly a culture of personal crisis that defines so many evangelical communities. A landmark congressionally funded study of adolescent behavior, "The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health," suggests that the Palin family's situation is not uncommon. It found that white, evangelical adolescents lose their virginity, on average, at age 16 -- earlier than any group except black Protestants. In Lubbock, Texas, where abstinence education has been mandated since 1995, the rate of gonorrhea is now double the national average, while teen pregnancy has spiked to the highest levels in the state.

Palin consolidated her bond with the movement by cradling her new son, Trig, born with Down syndrome, on the stage of the Republican National Convention. Palin's decision to carry the baby to term excited evangelicals and antiabortion activists, including James C. Dobson, who wrote a letter congratulating her for having "that little Down syndrome baby."

"What a way to emphasize your pro-life leanings there!" he exclaimed during a radio broadcast in which he endorsed the McCain-Palin ticket, even though he had denounced McCain as a "liberal" only weeks before.

After the stock market collapsed in the fall of 2008 and the McCain campaign ran off the rails, Palin untethered herself -- or, as her book title has it, she went "rogue" -- ignoring McCain's rules on attacking Obama. Instead, she lashed out at candidate Obama in her own distinctive way. "This is a man who launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist," she insisted. "This is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America."

With these two lines, apparently uttered without the permission of McCain or his top aides, Palin opened a deep schism in the campaign while unleashing a flood of emotions from the depths of the party faithful. And by "going rogue," she instinctively and craftily propelled her ambitions beyond election day.

Palin now represents both her party's future -- and the greatest danger it faces.

Max Blumenthal, a writing fellow at the Nation Institute and a senior writer for the Daily Beast, is the author of "Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party." A longer version of this article appears at tomdispatch.com.

9)WEAPONS OF CHOICE: Obama revives talk of U.N. gun control
NRA guests warn international treaty would strip 2nd Amendment rights
By Drew Zahn


Gun rights supporters are up in arms over a pair of moves the White House made last month to reverse longstanding U.S. policy and begin negotiating a gun control treaty with the United Nations.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton first announced on Oct. 14 that the U.S. had changed its stance and would support negotiations of an Arms Trade Treaty to regulate international gun trafficking, a measure the Bush administration and, notably, former Permanent U.S. Representative to the United Nations John Bolton opposed for years.

Two weeks ago, in another reversal of policy, the U.S. joined a nearly unanimous 153-1 U.N. vote to adopt a resolution setting out a timetable on the proposed Arms Trade Treaty, including a U.N. conference to produce a final accord in 2012.

"Conventional arms transfers are a crucial national security concern for the United States, and we have always supported effective action to control the international transfer of arms," Clinton said in a statement. "The United States is prepared to work hard for a strong international standard in this area."

Gun rights advocates, however, are calling the reversal both a dangerous submission of America's Constitution to international governance and an attempt by the Obama administration to sneak into effect private gun control laws it couldn't pass through Congress.

'Shooting Back' tells of lives saved from attackers. Learn the Bible's defense of bearing arms from a man who defended his church from terrorists

Bolton, for example, told Ginny Simone, managing editor of the National Rifle Association's NRA News and host of the NRA's Daily News program, "The administration is trying to act as though this is really just a treaty about international arms trade between nation states, but there's no doubt – as was the case back over a decade ago – that the real agenda here is domestic firearms control."

He continued, "There's never been any doubt when these groups talk about saying they only want to prohibit illicit international trafficking in small arms and light weapons, it begs the whole question of what's legal and what's not legal. And many of the implications of these treaty negotiations are very much in their domestic application. So, whatever the appearance on the surface, there's no doubt that domestic firearm control is right at the top of their agenda."

Brian Wood, disarmament expert for Amnesty International, explained in a Bloomberg report why his organization and others are pushing for the U.S. to join Arms Trade Treaty talks. Wood said the U.S. is the largest conventional arms trader in the world and the unregulated trade of conventional arms "can fuel instability, transnational organized crime and terrorism."

"All countries participate in the conventional arms trade and share responsibility for the 'collateral damage' it produces – widespread death, injuries and human rights abuses," said Rebecca Peters, director of the International Action Network on Small Arms in an Agence France-Presse interview. "Now finally governments have agreed to negotiate legally binding global controls on this deadly trade."

But Bob Barr, a former U.S. representative and presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party, explained in a separate interview with the NRA's Simone how a treaty that looks like it's all about fighting international crime will necessarily lead to erosion of Second Amendment gun rights:

"Even though [treaty advocates] all say, 'We are not going to involve domestic laws and the right to keep and bear arms, that won't be affected by all this,' that's nonsense," Barr said. "There's no way that if you buy into something like this and a treaty is passed regulating to ensure that firearms transfers internationally don't fall into the hands of people that the U.N. doesn't like, there's no way that that mechanism will work unless you have some form of national regulation and national tracking."

Bolton not only agrees with Barr's assessment but also sees the treaty as an Obama administration end-run around the Constitution:

"After the treaty is approved and it comes into force, you will find out that it has this implication or that implication and it requires the Congress to adopt some measure that restricts ownership of firearms," he said. "The administration knows it cannot obtain this kind of legislation purely in a domestic context. … They will use an international agreement as an excuse to get domestically what they couldn't otherwise."

Clinton's October statement of support for the treaty negotiations was filed with a caveat that the Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty operate under the consensus rule of decision-making, essentially that its provisions be adopted unanimously.

"Consensus is needed to ensure the widest possible support for the treaty," she stated, "and to avoid loopholes in the treaty that can be exploited by those wishing to export arms irresponsibly."

But Bolton warned gun owners not to think the consensus rule will stop the treaty from passing.

"Consensus at the U.N. is a way of saying unanimity, everybody agrees, but in fact, the U.N. in the last eight years could have been very close to consensus on exactly this kind of treaty but for the Bush administration," Bolton said. "So I don't think her comment about consensus offers Second Amendment supporters any consolation, because absent the United States, nobody is really going to put up an objection to this."

10 Rep. Steve King Sees ACORN Link in Anita Dunn's Departure

U.S. Rep. Steve King suggests there is more than a coincidence between the resignation of White House communications director Anita Dunn and a raid on ACORN's national office — pointing out that Dunn's husband is "a leading ACORN defender."

Dunn, who is stepping down at the end of the month, created controversy when she led an Obama administration attack on Fox News, calling it "a wing of the Republican Party."

King, an Iowa Republican and a vociferous critic of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, issued a statement on Tuesday under the headline "King: Dunn Departure a Coincidence?" It read in part:

"Four days after Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell raided ACORN's national office in New Orleans, seizing paper records and computer hard drives, White House communications director Anita Dunn — the wife of a leading ACORN defender — has resigned abruptly from her position.

"Dunn was the lead critic of Fox News for reporting on the ACORN prostitution scandal, which originally broke on September 10. Dunn subsequently launched a public attack against Fox News on October 11, and she even stated 'let's not pretend they're a news network' in reference to Fox. . .

"Not only has Dunn lavished praises on Chairman Mao and compared him to Mother Teresa, Dunn’s husband has a public record of protecting ACORN and protecting President Obama’s relationship to ACORN. . .

"Anita Dunn is married to Robert Bauer, who served as general counsel for Obama for America. In 2008, Bauer sent a letter to then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey arguing that Department of Justice should not investigate election-related fraud allegations against ACORN. . .

"The letter also claims that Republican concerns regarding ACORN-related fraud were 'manufactured.' Subsequent revelations have validated these Republican concerns and proven the existence of additional fraudulent activities."

Bauer may have figured into Dunn's resignation in another way. On Friday, he was named to replace Greg Craig as White House counsel, and the prnewser Web site observed: "Did [Dunn] have to clear room for her husband to join the administration and remove any potential concerns about conflict of interest?"

Rushing To Arrest What It Helped Encourage!

Obama visits Japan and keeps to his theme of America the bad boy on the internatinal block that seeks better relations with emerging nations whose own record on human rights is abysmal. (See 1 below.)

Trying to come to grips with distinctions among Islam, Islamism Islamists etc. (See 2 below.)

In a previous memo I reported the Obama Administration was aware Abbas was laying the foundation for establishing an independent Palestinian nation. The failure to arrest its forward development served to encourage the idea and now the administration is pulling out all guns to stop it. I also wrote, Obama was getting himself painted into a corner and would lose either way. Is the Palestinian camel now too far out of the barn? Will Obama be outmaneuvered by Abbas?(See 3 and 3a below.)

Now that some Quantanmo detainees are being tried in a civilian court will Obama and Holder back the nation and themselves into another corner. Do they care or is this part of their agenda?(See 4, 4a and 4b below.)

Big head does not fit well on an empty suit.(See 5 below.)

Lose independents and your political destiny is pretty well defined. (See 6 below.)

Dick



1)Obama Says U.S. Seeks to Build Stronger Ties to China
By Stephen Crowley

TOKYO — The United States is not threatened by a rising China, President Obama said Saturday, but will seek to strengthen its ties with Beijing even as it maintains close ties with traditional allies like Japan.

Mr. Obama spoke to an audience at Tokyo's Suntory Hall, stressing the shared interests of the U.S. and the nations of the Pacific Rim.

In a wide-ranging speech on his first trip to Asia as president, Mr. Obama drew on his own background to reassure the people of the fast-growing continent that even as the United States seemed preoccupied with conflicts in the Middle East and other regions, it was increasingly “a nation of the Pacific.”

“I know there are many who question how the United States perceives China’s emergence,” Mr. Obama told an audience in Tokyo’s Suntory Hall. But he added, “In an interconnected world, power does not need to be a zero-sum game, and nations need not fear the success of another.”

Declaring himself “America’s first Pacific president” (a description that somehow ignored Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, two Californians), Mr. Obama previewed many of the themes that will shadow him during his weeklong trip, which will also include stops in Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing and Seoul.

He called on North Korea to return to talks aimed at reining in its nuclear weapons program or face even greater isolation; he urged the military government in Myanmar to release the leader of the country’s beleaguered democracy movement, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (although he mispronounced her name); and he pledged to “never waver in speaking for the fundamental values that we hold dear.”

But at every turn of his address, Mr. Obama projected a more conciliatory America, which is trying to break from the past. On Myanmar, for example, he pledged that he would “be the first American leader to meet with all 10 Asean leaders.” Mr. Obama will be at the table in Singapore on Sunday with the leaders of Myanmar and the other countries that make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, an economic group.

And while Mr. Obama spoke at length about human rights, he never connected the pursuit of such rights specifically to China and Tibet, where Beijing-backed authorities have clamped down on religious freedom. Instead, Mr. Obama, clearly seeking to avoid alienating Beijing on the eve of his inaugural visit to China, struck broader themes, saying that “supporting human rights provides lasting security that cannot be purchased any other way.”

As he has on many of his trips abroad, Mr. Obama painted a picture of an America willing to learn from its mistakes. In particular, he said, the United States and Asia must grow out of the imbalance of American consumerism and Asian reliance on the United States as an export market, a cycle he called imbalanced.

“One of the important lessons this recession has taught us is the limits of depending primarily on American consumers and Asian exports to drive growth,” he said. “We have now reached one of those rare inflection points in history where we have the opportunity to take a different path.”

Mr. Obama seemed to speak directly to the new Japanese government’s efforts to build a tighter Asian economic sphere, and used his own history to deliver the message: Don’t exclude the United States.

“My own life is part of that story,” he said. “I am an American president who was born in Hawaii and lived in Indonesia as a boy. My sister Maya was born in Jakarta and later married a Chinese-Canadian. My mother spent nearly a decade working in the villages of Southeast Asia, helping women buy a sewing machine or an education that might give them a foothold in the world economy.”

“So,” he added, “the Pacific rim has helped shape my view of the world.” He even spoke of his first trip to Japan as a boy—“As a child, I was more focused on the matcha ice cream,” he said.

That drew laughs from the audience, which gave him a standing ovation both before and after his speech


2)'Islamism, or Islam?' 'Islamist or Islamic?'
By Andrew G. Bostom

During the autumn of 1843, in the heart of Istanbul, Turkey, Sir Henry Layard, the British archeologist, writer, and diplomat, witnessed the punishment mandated by the Shari'a, i.e., Islamic Law for apostasizing from Islam. He described this abhorrent spectacle as follows:

An Armenian who had embraced Islamism [emphasis added] had returned to his former faith. For his apostasy he was condemned to death according to the Mohammedan [Islamic] law. His execution took place, accompanied by details of studied insult and indignity directed against Christianity and Europeans in general. The corpse was exposed in one of the most public and frequented places in Stamboul [Istanbul], and the head, which had been severed from the body, was placed upon it, covered by a European hat.


Layard's narrative demonstrates how in mid-19th century parlance, "Islamism" and "Islam" were synonymous, and meant to be equivalent to "Catholicism," "Protestantism," and "Judaism"-not to "radical" or "fundamentalist" sects of any of these religions. Moreover, through at least the mid-1950s, scholars devoted to the formal study of Islamic doctrine and history were still referred to as "Islamists."

Turkey's current Prime Minister Erdogan, commenting in August, 2007 on the term "moderate Islam," frequently used in the West to describe his ruling political party, the AKP, stated, "These descriptions are very ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that's it." Erdogan's displeasure is ironic, even somewhat humorous, given the contemporary Western apologetic obsession to recast the terms "Islamism," and "Islamist," to denote, exclusively, "radical" or "immoderate" Islam, and its adherents. But the irony of Erdogan's ire aside, artificial distinctions between "Islamism" and Islam, "Islamist" and Islamic are logically incoherent, obfuscating irrefragable truths about living Islamic dogma, and its modern manifestations.

The 1990 Cairo Declaration, or "Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Islam"-not Islamism-was drafted and ratified by all the Muslim member nations of the Organization of the Islamic-not Islamist-Conference (OIC), a 57 state collective including every Islamic nation on earth. The OIC, currently headed by Turkey's Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, thus represents the entire Muslim ummah (or global community), and is the largest single voting bloc in the United Nations.


Its preamble and concluding articles (24 and 25) make plain that the OIC's Cairo Declaration is designed to supersede Western conceptions of human rights as enunciated, for example, in the US Bill of Rights. The preamble repeats a Koranic injunction affirming Islamic supremacism, (Koran 3:110): "Reaffirming the civilizing and historical role of the Islamic Ummah which Allah made the best nation..." The gravely negative implications of this Islamic Law (Shari'a)-based document ("There shall be no crime or punishment except as provided for in the Shari'a") are most apparent in its transparent rejection of freedom of conscience in Article 10, while articles 19 and 22 reiterate Shari'a principles stated throughout the document, which clearly apply to the "punishment"-death-for so-called "apostates" from Islam.


The Cairo Declaration-entirely consistent with Islamic Law-also introduces unacceptable discrimination against non-Muslims and women, while sanctioning the legitimacy of dehumanizing, Shari'a-compliant punishments, from flogging, to mutilation, and stoning.

And polling data from a rigorously conducted WorldPublicOpinion.org survey released April, 2007 demonstrate the Cairo Declaration's Islamic Law principles-antithetical to Western formulations of human rights-are embraced by the preponderance of the world's Muslims. Fully 2/3 of a representative sample of 4400 Muslims from Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia desired the ultimate jihad conquest imperatives: to re-create a unified supra-national Islamic state, or Caliphate, ruled by "strict application of Shari'a."

These quintessential goals of jihad were reiterated by the mass murdering jihadist psychiatrist Nidal Hasan as part of an erstwhile "medical grand rounds" given on June 27, 2007. Although Hasan merely reiterates salient aspects of classical jihad theory (i.e., see slides 35, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, and 49), this reality is understandably "shocking" to our willfully uninformed elites in the media, military, and government. Nidal Hasan's presentation concludes, in full accord with classical Islamic doctrine regarding jihad war, (slide 49), "Fighting to establish an Islamic State to please Allah, even by force is condoned by (sic) Islam."

Unapologetic observations from 1950 by a great 20th century "Islamist" scholar of the Shari'a, G.H. Bousquet, contextualize these ominous trends. Bousquet described Islam itself as "as a doubly totalitarian system," which, "claimed to impose itself on the whole world and it claimed also, by the divinely appointed Muhammadan law...to regulate down to the smallest details the whole life of the Islamic community and of every individual believer."

3)Obama Enlists Both Clintons to stop a Palestinian state


After US Secretary of state Hillary Clinton warned Mahmoud Abbas on Oct. 31 that he was going against the wishes of president Barack Obama, the White House hauled out a heavy contingent of big American guns to make him see reason. They visit Ramallah Sunday, Nov. 15, to lean hard on him to back off his plan for a unilateral declaration of the Islamic Republic of Palestinian within 1967 or 1949 borders with Jerusalem as its capital, following the Kosovo example of 2008, according Washington and Jerusalem sources.

Obama took advantage of the Sadan Forum's sixth session taking place in Jerusalem Saturday to assign key participants to this mission, including former president Bill Clinton, governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, five US congressmen and several presidential advisers including Dennis Ross.

It now transpires that Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas' dramatic resignation and his obstruction of peace talks by demanding that Israel first halt settlement activity were stunts behind which he and his aides have been actively lobbying world capitals to support his independence project.

Sources disclose the US president's objections are shared by Cairo and Riyadh. Still, Abbas refused to heed Secretary Clinton when they met in Ramallah, or Obama in two subsequent telephone conversations. He is so fixated on his plan that even if Binyamin Netanyahu were to stop all settlement construction on the West Bank and Jerusalem, Abbas would not come round. At best, he would let the Americans force him into a meeting and then abort it.

The details of his plan are simple: Ruling out further negotiations with Israel, the Palestinian Authority will unilaterally proclaim an independent state with Jerusalem its capital within the 1949 armistice borders, transitional boundaries which ended Israel's war of liberation. To obtain maximum international support, Abbas will refer to the 1967 - not the 1949 - boundaries in the first stage, thereby making the hundreds of thousands of Jews living in West Bank settlements and the Arab districts of Jerusalem sovereign Palestinian citizens.

Even before taking on the Obama administration, however, Abbas has his work cut out to beat his way through insurmountable thickets at home: Under the Palestinian constitution, his presidency, government and parliament are illegitimate. He first tried scheduling an election to Palestinian institutions for Jan. 24, 2010, to rectify this lacuna and make his government legal, only to discover that the legal difficulties besetting the Palestinian Authority and its rule of the West Bank (the Gaza Strip is ruled by Hamas) were even more complex than the status of Kosovo.

Even that Balkan territory only attained partial recognition (63 members excluding Serbia) for its self-declared independence; its de facto control of the territory does not include Serbian enclaves; and Kosovo's independence is still awaiting an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice for which Serbia has filed.

Meanwhile, the Albanians of Kosovo live under the interim administration of the European Union Rule of Law Mission which took over from the United Nations in Dec. 2008.

Most UN members have avoided recognizing Kosovo for the same fundamental reason they will deny Palestine majority recognition: the danger of a violent secessionist pandemic overtaking their own ethnic and religious minorities. The UN, including Europe, therefore stopped short of granting Kosovo's independence full recognition.

Even so, the Balkan enclave has a major advantage over the Palestinians; its people are united, whereas the Palestinian people are deeply split between two illegal entities, the Fatah-ruled West Bank and the Gaza Strip under Hamas rule.

And because Iran and Syria are also opposed to the Abbas unilateral independence initiative, they egged the Palestinian Hamas on to block elections, to deny the PA Chairman and his "Kosovo initiative," legal validity both domestically and internationally.

But none of this has stopped Abbas. Last week, he withdrew his candidacy for re-election. This was no bluff to bring hs backers running to hold him back, but rather a device to free his hands; he sees himself as the national figure who will go down in history as having delivered independence to the Palestinian people.

The Obama administration is determined to stop him.

Sunday, the formidable group led by Bill Clinton will present itself to Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad in Ramallah for two tasks: One is to show Abbas that he is not irreplaceable as the preferred Palestinian leader and the other is to persuade Fayyad to lead a general movement in the Palestinian leadership to force the PA chairman to give up his plan.

Saturday, Nov. 14, the Palestinian Authority's senior diplomat Saed Ereket said that the PA would ask the UN Security Council to recognize a unilaterally declared Palestinian state within 1967 borders and its capital of Jerusalem. He claimed the plan had won the support of Russia and the United Nations, but omitted to mention the United States. When he spoke, Erekat knew perfectly well that any such motion would run into an American veto and so die in its tracks.

He appears to have got the message from Washington that if Bill Clinton is against Abbas' unilateral move, the opposition it faces is formidable.. After all, Kosovars hold him up as the father of their independence; on Nov. 1, they unveiled a large statue portraying him as a hero.


3a)Erekat: PA may ask UNSC to recognize state on '67 borders

The Palestinian Authority is considering asking the UN Security Council to recognize the existence of a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines with its capital in east Jerusalem, top PA negotiator Saeb Erekat told the Palestinian Al-Ayyam newspaper in an interview published Saturday.

Erekat said that, in light of the long-stalled negotiations with Israel, the PA was currently busy enlisting the support of various countries for such a move. The Palestinians have already received the backing of Arab nations, and Erekat said he believed that Russia and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon would also support the call.

The Palestinian negotiator added that in recent meetings with EU and UN officials, responses to the idea had been positive. EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, he noted, was in support of the idea and had voiced it himself at a recent event.

Erekat said that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas would be lobbying for support of the plan in his upcoming visits to South American and European nations.

He noted that he had brought the idea up several times in meetings with US officials, and said that he would continue to do so.

Meanwhile, London-based Asharq Alawsat on Saturday quoted unnamed American officials as saying that the US will not push for peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians if the two sides are not interested in doing so themselves.

The US will not negotiate over negotiations, the officials said. They explained that the Obama administration would rather wait for now than progress on a track that may fail.

4)KSM Hits Manhattan—Again :Eric Holder's decision to move a trial on war crimes to American soil is morally confused, dangerous and political to a faultComing soon to a civilian courtroom blocks from Ground Zero: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the four other al Qaeda planners of 9/11. Be sure to get your tickets early, and don't forget to watch out for the truck-bomb barricades and rooftop snipers.

Attorney General Eric Holder, who dropped this legal bomb on New York yesterday, called his decision to move their trial on war crimes from a military courtroom at Guantanamo Bay to American soil "the toughest" he has had to make. Other words come to mind. For starters, intellectually and morally confused, dangerous and political to a fault.

This decision befits President Obama's rushed and misguided announcement on his second day in office that he would close Gitmo within a year. This was before the Administration had thought through what to do with the 215 prisoners there, though it did win him applause in Europe and on the American left. Yesterday's decision rids Gitmo of these meddlesome detainee cases in order to speed up this entirely political shutdown.

Please spare us talk of the "rule of law." If that was the primary consideration, the U.S. already has a judicial process in place. The current special military tribunals were created by the 2006 Military Commissions Act, which was adopted with bipartisan Congressional support after the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision obliged the executive and legislative branches to approve a detailed plan to prosecute the illegal "enemy combatants" captured since 9/11.

Contrary to liberal myth, military tribunals aren't a break with 200-plus years of American jurisprudence. Eight Nazis who snuck into the U.S. in June 1942 were tried by a similar court and most were hanged within two months. Before the Obama Administration stopped all proceedings earlier this year pending yesterday's decision, the tribunals at Gitmo had earned a reputation for fairness and independence.

As it happens, Mr. Holder acknowledged their worth himself by announcing that the Guantanamo detainee who allegedly planned the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole off Yemen and four others would face military commission trials. (The Pentagon must now find a locale other than the multimillion-dollar, state-of-the-art facility at Gitmo for its tribunal.)

Why the difference? Mr. Holder seemed to suggest that the Cole bombers struck a military target overseas and thus are a good fit for a military trial, while KSM and comrades hit the U.S. and murdered civilians and thus deserve a U.S. civilian trial. But this entirely misunderstands that both groups are unlawful enemy combatants who are accused of war crimes, whatever their targets. Mr. Holder's justification betrays not a legal consistency but a fundamentally political judgment that he can make as he sees fit.

The Military Commissions Act, by contrast, devised a careful, consistent legal process for every detainee. Remember when critics blamed President Bush for exercising too much executive discretion?

Mr. Holder expressed confidence that KSM and the rest will be convicted, but it is telling that he also delayed filing formal charges. Will KSM be formally charged with the 9/11 murders, or merely with "material support" for terrorism or some lesser offense? The specific charges may depend on how much evidence is admissable in a civilian courtroom. The MCA allowed for the reality that much of the evidence against enemy combatants may be classified, and it allowed for some hearsay evidence on grounds that they have been picked up on a battlefield, not in Brooklyn. There is no CSI: Kandahar. A civilian court has far tighter rules of evidence.

KSM and his co-conspirators so far have refused legal counsel and at one point tried to plead guilty. They may again. But an army of self-declared defenders of human rights from Yale Law and Sherman & Sterling will clamor to represent them. Those lawyers are certain to challenge all evidence obtained after KSM's March 2003 capture on grounds that it was produced by "torture," if you call waterboarding torture.

As he said at a hearing in 2007, "I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z." But even that admission will probably be challenged on grounds that the trauma of his "torture" means he wasn't capable of "informed consent." Oh, and once he got to Gitmo in 2006, he may not have been read his Miranda rights in full. The possibility exists that one or more of these detainees could be acquitted on procedural grounds, which would be a travesty of justice.

One certain outcome is that an open civilian trial will provide valuable information to terrorists across the world about American methods and intelligence. Precisely because so much other evidence may not be admissable, prosecutors may have to reveal genuine secrets to get a conviction. Osama bin Laden learned a lot from the 1995 prosecution in New York of the "blind cleric" Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman for the first World Trade Center attack. His main tip was that the U.S. considered bin Laden a terrorist co-conspirator, leading him to abandon his hideout in Sudan for Afghanistan.

Terrorists also love a big stage, and none come bigger than New York. Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, made his civilian trial a spectacle. Not even the best judge can entirely stop KSM and others from doing the same. And Mr. Holder has invited grave and needless security risks by tempting jihadists the world over to strike Manhattan while the trial is in session.

Most Americans, we suspect, can overlook the legal niceties and see this episode through the lens of common sense. Foreign terrorists who wage war on America and everything it stands for have no place sitting in a court of law born of the values they so detest. Mr. Holder has honored mass murder by treating it like any other crime.


4a)A loss for America
By KRIS W. KOBACH


Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees in civilian federal court in New York City is the latest in a long series of missteps in the war against radical Islamist terrorism.

KSM -- the notorious, self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks -- and the other accused terrorists will no longer face trial in military commissions, which the US government has historically used for such cases. The administration's decision is a blatantly political one -- intended to placate the ACLU and the radical Left -- that jeopardizes the interests of the nation.



The five main problems:

* Military commissions are the appropriate venue for trials of unlawful combatant. The US military seized these terrorists on foreign battlefields -- and so didn't read them Miranda rights. The evidence against them was collected by soldiers under war-fighting conditions -- not with sterile gloves and clear plastic bags. And much of the best evidence against them is classified, because making it public would compromise the sources and methods of US intelligence gathering.

In short, these cases do not fit the mold of a typical murder trial in a civilian court.

Military commissions were designed for this purpose. They provide a secure environment that allows for the introduction of classified evidence without making it public. Yet the accused still enjoys the right to an attorney, the right to make his case in full and all of the fundamental rights of due process.

The commissions are also the ideal forum for trying unlawful combatants-belligerents who make war without following the law of war. One of the central tenets of the law of war is that civilians must never be attacked. Since terrorists shatter this rule completely, they are appropriately tried before military commissions.

These commissions provide a fair forum that takes into account the military context of the terrorists' acts. Just because the government has enough unclassified evidence to win a guilty verdict in civilian court doesn't make the civilian court the right venue.

The last time the United States used military commissions in a comparable context was during the Second World War, for the trial of eight Nazi saboteurs transported here by German submarines under cover of darkness in 1942. They landed on US soil carrying explosives with the intent to engage in acts of sabotage. The Supreme Court ruled that the military commissions were an entirely fair and appropriate forum for their trial. They were "offenders against the law of war, subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals." The same is true of these five terrorists.

* The administration is again blurring the line between ordinary crimes and acts of war. Likening terrorists at war with the United States to common shoplifters is wrongheaded. These are not members of our society who refuse to obey our laws: They are enemies of the United States, engaged in war against America and all that it stands for.

* The administration has offered no clear criteria for deciding which terrorists will be charged as criminals in federal court and which ones will face military commissions. Attorney General Holder, in announcing the decision, suggested that the five cases were appropriate for civilian trial simply because the evidence against the terrorists is so strong that they'll surely be found guilty.

Choosing which terrorists will get civilian trials on the basis of who you can convict is not a principled way to administer justice. It also fosters the false impression that military commissions are unfair tribunals, where the government can win with a weaker case.

As the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, military commissions satisfy the Constitution's due-process requirements. The radical Left refuses to accept this fact -- and now the Obama administration is giving them rhetorical ammunition.

* A very real safety threat exists when a terrorist like KSM is tried in an urban area: The city becomes an enticing target for terrorists around the world.

Holder yesterday claimed that New York City is "hardened" and somehow secured against such terrorism. Yet he seemed to be focused on the courtroom itself. But US marshals' ability to protect the courthouse doesn't mean they can protect the whole city.

During the trial, every building in Manhattan becomes a target for the jihadists. They don't need to specifically hit the courthouse to make their point to the world.

*Finally, the trial will take many years to complete. Indeed it may not even start for five years or more.

Once these terrorists are placed into the civilian justice system, an avalanche of motions from their lawyers will ensue. Military commissions can avoid these delays.

It is often said that justice delayed is justice denied. For many who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks, those words ring painfully true. Obama's actions will only prolong their pain, for no good reason.

Holder insists that the government will win in these civilian trials. I'm sure he's correct. But winning a trial and winning the approval of the ACLU means little when so much more is lost.

Kris W. Kobach is professor of constitutional law at the Univer sity of Missouri (Kansas City). He served as a White House Fellow and as counsel to Attorney General John Ashcroft, 2001-'03.

4b)Hidden Agenda, cont'd . . . [Andy McCarthy]


This summer, I theorized that Attorney General Eric Holder — and his boss — had a hidden agenda in ordering a re-investigation of the CIA for six-year-old alleged interrogation excesses that had already been scrutinized by non-partisan DOJ prosecutors who had found no basis for prosecution. The continuing investigations of Bush-era counterterrorism policies (i.e., the policies that kept us safe from more domestic terror attacks), coupled with the Holder Justice Department's obsession to disclose classified national-defense information from that period, enable Holder to give the hard Left the "reckoning" that he and Obama promised during the 2008 campaign. It would be too politically explosive for Obama/Holder to do the dirty work of charging Bush administration officials; but as new revelations from investigations and declassifications are churned out, Leftist lawyers use them to urge European and international tribunals to bring "torture" and "war crimes" indictments. Thus, administration cooperation gives Obama's base the reckoning it demands but Obama gets to deny responsibility for any actual prosecutions.

Today's announcement that KSM and other top al-Qaeda terrorists will be transferred to Manhattan federal court for civilian trials neatly fits this hidden agenda. Nothing results in more disclosures of government intelligence than civilian trials. They are a banquet of information, not just at the discovery stage but in the trial process itself, where witnesses — intelligence sources — must expose themselves and their secrets.

Let's take stock of where we are at this point. KSM and his confederates wanted to plead guilty and have their martyrs' execution last December, when they were being handled by military commission. As I said at the time, we could and should have accommodated them. The Obama administration could still accommodate them. After all, the president has not pulled the plug on all military commissions: Holder is going to announce at least one commission trial (for Nashiri, the Cole bomber) today.

Moreover, KSM has no defense. He was under American indictment for terrorism for years before there ever was a 9/11, and he can't help himself but brag about the atrocities he and his fellow barbarians have carried out.

So: We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda's case against America. Since that will be their "defense," the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and — depending on what judge catches the case — they are likely to be given a lot of it. The administration will be able to claim that the judge, not the administration, is responsible for the exposure of our defense secrets. And the circus will be played out for all to see — in the middle of the war. It will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America's defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts. And the intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.

5)Obama’s swelling ego
By Jeff Jacoby


PRESIDENT OBAMA was too busy to attend the celebrations in Germany this week marking the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago. But he did appear by video, delivering a few brief and bloodless remarks about how the wall was “a painful barrier between family and friends’’ that symbolized “a system that denied people the freedoms that should be the right of every human being.’’ He referred to “tyranny,’’ but never identified the tyrants - he never uttered the words “Soviet Union’’ or “communism,’’ for example. He said nothing about the men and women who died trying to cross the wall. Nor did he mention Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan - or even Mikhail Gorbachev.

He did, however, talk about Barack Obama.

“Few would have foreseen,’’ declared the president, “that a united Germany would be led by a woman from [the former East German state of] Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent. But human destiny is what human beings make of it.’’

As presidential rhetoric goes, this was hardly a match for “Ich bin ein Berliner,’’ still less another “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’’ But as a specimen of presidential narcissism, it is hard to beat. Obama couldn’t be troubled to visit Berlin to commemorate a momentous milestone in the history of human liberty. But he was glad to explain to those who were there why reflections on that milestone should inspire appreciation for the self-made “destiny’’ of his own rise to power.

Was there ever a president as deeply enamored of himself as Barack Obama?

The first President Bush, taught from childhood to shun what his mother called “The Great I Am,’’ regularly instructed his speechwriters not to include too many “I’s’’ in his prepared remarks. Reagan maintained that there was no limit to what someone could achieve if he didn’t mind who got the credit. George Washington, one of the most accomplished men of his day, said with characteristic modesty on becoming president that he was “peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies.’’

Obama, on the other hand, positively revels in The Great I Am.

“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,’’ he told campaign aides when he was running for the White House. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that . . . I’m a better political director than my political director.’’

At the start of his presidency, Obama seemed to content himself with the royal “we’’ - “We will build the roads and bridges. . . . We will restore science to its rightful place. . . . We will harness the sun and winds,’’ he declaimed at his inauguration.

But as the literary theorist Stanley Fish points out, “By the time of the address to the Congress on Feb. 24, the royal we [had] flowered into the naked ‘I’: ‘As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress.’ ‘I called for action.’ ‘I pushed for quick action.’ ‘I have told each of my Cabinet.’ ‘I’ve appointed a proven and aggressive inspector general.’ ’I refuse to let that happen.’ ’’ In his speech on the federal takeover of General Motors, Obama likewise found it necessary to use the first-person singular pronoun 34 times. (“Congress’’ he mentioned just once.)

At this rate, it won’t be long before the president’s ego is so inflated that it will require a ZIP code of its own.

Then again, how modest would any of us be if we were as magnificent as Obama? “I am well aware,’’ he told the UN General Assembly in September, “of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world.’’

In 1860, writes Doris Kearns Goodwin in her celebrated biography “Team of Rivals,’’ an author wishing to dedicate his forthcoming work to Abraham Lincoln received this answer: “I give the leave, begging only that the inscription may be in modest terms, not representing me as a man of great learning, or a very extraordinary one in any respect.’’

Obama has often claimed Lincoln as a role model, but it only goes so far.

6)Obama Is Losing Independent Voters: A number of recent polls show the president would be wise to shift right
By SCOTT RASMUSSEN AND DOUGLAS E. SCHOEN


The announcement a week ago of 10.2% unemployment is a significant political event for President Barack Obama. It could well usher in a particularly serious crisis for his political standing, influence and ability to advance his agenda.

Double-digit unemployment drove Ronald Reagan's disapproval ratings in October 1982 up to a record high 54%. It was only when unemployment dropped to 7.3%, roughly two years later, that he was able to win a landslide victory over Democratic challenger Walter Mondale in the 1984 presidential election.

Similarly, Franklin Roosevelt's success in the 1930s in reducing the 25% unemployment rate he inherited down to the mid-teens was almost certainly responsible for his success in the 1934 midterm elections and in the 1936 presidential elections.

.Mr. Obama faces a similar challenge. A detailed look at the available survey data suggests that the difficulties may be more substantial than those suggested by the recent off-year elections.

Mr. Obama's approval among likely voters has dropped to the low-50s in most polls, and the most recent Rasmussen Reports poll of likely voters shows him slightly below the 50% mark. This is a relatively low rating for new presidents. Mr. Obama's approval rating began to slide in a serious way in early July, triggered by a bad unemployment report.

A look at more detailed data shows why Mr. Obama's ratings are likely to drop even further.

A CNN poll released Nov. 6 found that 47% of Americans believe the top issue facing the country is the economy, while only 17% say its health care. However, the bulk of the president's efforts over the past six months have been not on the economy but on health care, an issue in which he continues to draw negative ratings.

In a Rasmussen Reports poll taken after the House of Representatives passed health-care reform by the narrowest of margins last Saturday night, 54% of likely voters say they are opposed to the plan with only 45% in favor. Furthermore, in the all-important category of unaffiliated voters, 58% oppose the bill. That's one of the reasons why so many moderate Democratic House members opposed it.

The CNN poll also shows that in addition to health care, a majority of Americans disapprove of how Mr. Obama is handling the economy, Afghanistan, Iraq, unemployment, illegal immigration and the federal budget deficit. Put simply, there isn't a critical problem facing the country on which the president has positive ratings.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted from Oct. 22-25 found that the president's personal ratings have suffered a similar decline. His rating for being honest and straightforward has fallen eight points from January to 33% and his rating for being firm and decisive has fallen 10 points to 27%.

Even more fundamentally, a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted from Oct. 15-18 shows that the president has now reached a point where less than a majority of Americans believe he will make the right decisions for the country.

A Rasmussen Reports poll released Oct. 26 shows that only one-third of likely voters believe the stimulus package has helped the economy. And two separate Rasmussen Reports polls from earlier this month showed that less than half of likely voters approve of the health-care initiative, while a majority (55%) expect politics to become even more partisan in the coming year. Meanwhile, almost half of respondents told Rasmussen Reports that since Mr. Obama has been in office they are doing worse economically. Respondents by a 62%-27% majority respondents say they trust themselves over the president to make economic decisions facing the nation.

Until recently, Mr. Obama has been able to blame George W. Bush for the country's economic problems. October's NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows that while this is still a credible argument, it is less persuasive as the president's time in office increases.

The percentage of respondents who believe that Mr. Obama "inherited" the economic situation has dropped steadily over the year from a high of 84% in February down to 63% in this latest poll. This week's Rasmussen Reports poll shows an even bigger drop, with 49% of respondents blaming Mr. Bush and 45% blaming Mr. Obama. This is the first time in Rasmussen Reports' polls that less than 55% blame Mr. Bush for the country's economic problems. It is fair to conclude that by the beginning of next year, the problems of America will be Mr. Obama's problems, and references to his predecessor will increasingly fall on deaf ears.

What then, is Mr. Obama to do?

He has found himself in a false and arguably artificial conundrum on health care, with the two alternatives being his bill with a public option and a trillion-dollar price tag, or no bill at all. While the failure to pass a health-care bill could be devastating for his administration, polling suggests that ramming through an expensive bill with a public option (potentially using procedural techniques in the Senate) could divide America and not improve his standing with the public.

Voters would like to see compromises on key elements of health care to reduce costs, while the Democrats' plan has appeared to focus largely on expanding coverage. According to a poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports from Oct. 2-3, 61% of likely voters want Congress to act this year but only 45% favor the current plan. There is a clear, bipartisan majority who favor a less costly bill that incrementally increases coverage, provides insurance reform involving pre-existing conditions, and experiments with tort reform and competition across state lines.

Deficit reduction and reining in spending are critically important priorities for the vast majority of the electorate. Indeed, according to a Rasmussen Reports Poll conducted at the end of last month, voters say deficit reduction is most important and health care is a distant second.

Moreover, according to a poll released by the Kaufman Foundation in September, a plurality of voters (32%) think the federal government should cut tax rates on payrolls and businesses to stimulate employment, particularly at a time when unemployment is at double-digits. Mr. Obama campaigned on tax cuts for 95% of the American people, but according to a Rasmussen Reports poll released in mid-August, just 6% of likely voters expect to get a tax cut. Over 40% of respondents believe that they will get a tax increase.

The off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia were indeed a warning sign to Mr. Obama. While the presidents ratings aren't likely to dip much further by year's end—given the size and support of his base—by focusing exclusively on his base he could create lasting political problems that plague the remainder of his term.

Unless Mr. Obama changes his approach and starts governing in a more fiscally conservative, bipartisan manner, the independents that provided his margin of victory in 2008 and gave the Democrats control of Congress will likely swing back to the Republicans, putting Democratic control of Congress in real jeopardy.

Mr. Rasmussen is president of Rasmussen Reports, an independent national polling company. Mr. Schoen, formerly a pollster for President Bill Clinton, is the author of "Declaring Independence: The Beginning of the End of the Two Party System" (Random House, 2008).