Government Control - Shrinking Base Leads Where?

The mud slide gathers momentum as the West sleeps. Geert Wilders' name and circumstances are synonymous with Western capitulation.(See 1, 1a and 1b below.)

The Stimulus Bill, Obama is set to sign, seems to have stimulated more selling by investors. Perhaps they know more than the administration. Is it important for this nation to manufacture anything or can we roll along with government control of a semi-public service society?

Is The Stimulus Bill an example of Obama openness? Liberals stitched it together behind closed doors and it might take some time to unravel in public but keep your eyes open. Obama supporters are cheering him now for his swift action response to our economic morass. His high wire act carries a lot of risk for him, Pelosi , reid and the nation and in thirty more days he will own the economy. What do you think?(See 2, 2a, 2b and 2c below.)

Caroline Glick provides us with another worthwhile read and lists the various things Israeli leaders have done to shoot their country in the foot. (See 3 below.)

Dick


1)Here are some excerpts from an interview to Mohamed Sabaoui at the Universite de Lille, France:

Our peaceful invasion on the European stage has not yet reached its objective. We intend to act in all countries simultaneously. Since you are giving us more and more space, we would be stupid not to take advantage. We will be your Trojan Horse. You have become hostages to those human rights to which=2 0you claim to adhere. Thus, for instance, if you were to talk to me in Algeria or Saudi Arabia in the same manner as I am talking to you now, you would be, in the best case scenario, arrested on the spot.

You, French people, are unable to muster respect from our youngsters. Why would they respect a country that capitulates to them? One only respects what one fears. When we seize power, you won't see a single foreigner burn a car or vandalize a store. Arabs know that the inevitable punishment of a thief, in our way of thinking, is the amputation of one hand.

The laws of your Republic do not conform to the laws of the Koran and must not be imposed on Muslims who can only be governed by Sharia Law. We therefore intend to work on seizing this power which is owed us. We will start by Roubaix [a French city], which is at present a Muslim city at more than 60%. At the next municipal elections, we will mobilize our ranks and the next mayor will be a Muslim. Following negotiations with the State and the Region, we will declare Roubaix an independent Muslim enclave, and we will impose Sharia Law (God's Law) to the entire population. The Christian minority will have the status of Dhimmis. It will be a separate class which would be able to re-negotiate its freedoms and rights by way of a special tax. Moreover, we will do what is needed to bring them by persuasion into our fold. Tens of thousands of French men and women have already embraced Islam of their own wil l; so why not the Christians of Roubaix? At the present time at the University of Lille, we are organizing Faith Brigades whose task is to "convert" the recalcitrant Christians or Jews of Roubaix and bring them into our religion, because that is what God wants! If we are the strongest, it is because God has willed it. We are not handicapped by the Christian obligation of aiding the orphan, the weak or the disabled. We can and must, to the contrary, crush them if they constitute an obstacle, especially if they are infidels.


It was K..R. Popper, in "The Open Society and its Enemies", that first brought attention to the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against=2 0the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

1a)Britain's Surrender to Islamists There is a direct link between the 'Rushdie Affair' and the Wilders ban.
By DANIEL SCHWAMMENTHAL

This time, no fatwa was necessary. Two decades after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for Salman Rushdie's murder, U.K. authorities no longer need instructions in Shariah law. In pre-emptive submission to Islamist sensibilities, Britain barred Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders last Thursday from entering the country and speaking at the House of Lords.

His short anti-Islam video "Fitna," which juxtaposes Quranic verses calling for jihad with footage of Islamic terror, threatened "public security in the U.K," according to the Home Office. Since Mr. Wilder has never called for violence -- in his home country, the only life threatened as a result of his work is his own -- the imagined security threat could come only from people opposed to him, i.e. Muslim radicals. Britain is punishing Mr. Wilders not for his own actions but for the hypothetical actions of his adversaries.

What makes this surrender of free speech and fairness -- the most noble of British traditions -- particularly depressing is its totality. All main British parties support the Labour government's ban against Mr. Wilders -- the so-called Liberal Democrats just as eagerly as the Tories. Contrast this with the reaction in the Netherlands. All main Dutch parties -- although they too reject Mr. Wilders's unbalanced assault on Islam -- condemned the British decision.

It's a fitting coincidence that this suppression of free speech in the motherland of parliamentary democracy happened just two days before the 20th anniversary of the fatwa against Mr. Rushdie for penning "The Satanic Verses." Khomeini reportedly never read the book that so insulted him; rumors of its alleged offensiveness were enough for the leader of the Islamic Revolution. In an eerie parallel, rumors are also enough for the leaders of Britain. Foreign Minister David Miliband admitted on Friday to the BBC that he had not seen the film that he nevertheless found to be "hateful." It seems Britain has not only adopted Islamist standards of free speech but also Islamist standards of proof.

There is a direct line between Khomeini's 1989 death sentence against the British author and last week's detention of Mr. Wilders at Heathrow Airport. The "Rushdie Affair" was the first illustration of the West's conflict with Islamists who believe that the Quran is superior to any man-made law.

The protests in Britain sparked by "The Satanic Verses" contained all the elements of Islamist intimidation and Western appeasement with which we are now so familiar. British Muslims burned the book in the streets of Britain and called for Mr. Rushdie's murder, while the police looked on passively. Leftists began their defense of Muslim fanatics -- perfected today -- as the "real" victims who should not have been provoked. And radical Muslims and their apologists for the first time claimed to represent the British Muslim community, a questionable claim that the state made official by choosing them as their dialogue partners.

"Death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for him (Mr. Rushdie)," Iqbal Sacranie, founding secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said at the time. "His mind must be tormented for the rest of his life unless he asks for forgiveness to Almighty Allah." It is now "Sir Iqbal" as this "moderate" received a knighthood in 2005 "for services to the Muslim community, to charities and to community relations."

The Rushdie Affair was the first time Islamists not just ignored national and international law but acted, successfully, to supersede it. They didn't manage to stop the book's publication or to kill Mr. Rushdie -- although the Norwegian publisher and Italian translator were seriously wounded in separate attacks and the Japanese translator murdered.

But they managed to force Mr. Rushdie into hiding, foreshadowing the fate of later Islam critics -- including that of Mr. Wilders, who has been living for more than four years under 24-hour police protection. Because Khomeini's death sentence could have been carried out by any radical Muslim around the world, there was no escape for Mr. Rushdie, just as there is no escape for those on today's Islamic death lists. For Mr. Rushdie there was only the exile of "safe houses" and body guards.

His ordeal, and that of others, serve as a warning to any potential critic of Islam. This has led to what is euphemistically called "self-censorship" in the media, arts and politics, supposedly a sign of respect for Muslims' "religious feelings." But in truth such self-censorship is no act of courtesy but the result of intimidation and fear.

Islamists are relying not just on threats and violence, though. The 56-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference is pushing for changes to international law and national law in Western countries to make them conform with Shariah law. One of the main goals of the United Nations' "antiracism" conference in April in Geneva will be to commit member states to implement laws to stop the "defamation" of Islam.

No other major Western country seems to have internalized this Islamist mindset to the degree that Britain has. Radical Muslims -- homegrown and from abroad -- can freely preach hatred, but one of their critics has just been banned.

Britain's capital earned its "Londonistan" sobriquet -- supposedly coined by French counterterrorism agents in the mid-1990s -- when it became a center for Islamic radicals fleeing persecution in their Muslim home countries. These Islamists flocked to Britain precisely because of its tradition of tolerance. It's a cruel twist of history that radical Muslims have been allowed to use the freedom they found there to limit freedom for everybody else.

In October 2007, shortly after becoming prime minister, Gordon Brown gave a powerful speech on a central element of British identity: "From the time of Magna Carta," he said, " . . . there has been a British tradition of liberty -- what one writer has called our 'gift to the world.'" Mr. Brown's ill-advised tolerance of the intolerant is now threatening this treasured tradition.

1b)Geert Wilders Is a Test for Western Civilization If Rushdie should be defended, why not the Dutch pol?
By BRET STEPHENS

Twenty years ago, Andres Serrano put a plastic crucifix in a glass of urine, photographed it and called it art. Conservatives in particular weren't pleased: not with Mr. Serrano, not with his picture, and not with the National Endowment for the Arts, which had forked over $15,000 in taxpayer money to support this uretic gesture.

Also 20 years ago: On Valentine's Day, 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, condemning him to death for supposedly blaspheming Islam in his novel, "The Satanic Verses." Iran later upped the ante by severing diplomatic ties with Britain and putting a bounty on Mr. Rushdie's head. The fatwa remains in effect today by order of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei.


These twin anniversaries come to mind following the British government's decision last week to ban Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders from British soil as an "undesirable person." Mr. Wilders is also being prosecuted for hate speech in his native Holland, where he faces up to 16 months in prison if convicted. His alleged crime involves making a short film called "Fitna," which draws a straight line between Quranic verses and acts of Islamist terror. Mr. Wilders has also called for banning the Quran, which he labels a "fascist book" on a par with Hitler's "Mein Kampf."

Whatever else might be said about Mr. Wilders's travel ban and prosecution, it helps put into context the events of 1989. In the case of Mr. Serrano, liberal Americans went into a lather about defending his rights to artistic expression and freedom of speech against the parochial leaders of the religious right, men like Jesse Helms and Pat Robertson. Never mind that the worst of their threats involved withholding public funding; fundamental things were said to be at stake.

As for the Rushdie affair, after some initial hesitation most of the liberal intelligentsia on both sides of the Atlantic rallied to his cause. True, there were some dissenters: Jimmy Carter called "The Satanic Verses" a "direct insult to those millions of Muslims whose sacred beliefs have been violated" while feminist Germaine Greer declared that she "[refused] to sign petitions for that book, which was about his own troubles."

On the whole, however, the West held firm. A joint statement issued by the foreign ministers of the European Community insisted that "fundamental principles are at stake," adding that they "remain fully committed to the principles of freedom of thought and expression within their territories."

Fast forward to Mr. Wilders's situation and what's remarkable is that his most serious detractors -- those that aren't themselves Islamists or spokesmen for supposedly mainstream Muslim organizations -- tend to fall to the political left. In Holland, leaders of both the Socialist and Labor parties support the prosecution. In Britain, it's the Labour government of Gordon Brown that has enforced the travel ban. In Germany, the leftish Der Spiegel calls Mr. Wilders "pushy" and accuses him of making "hate-filled tirades." Elsewhere he is described as a "racist," an "Islamophobe," and so on.

For his part, Mr. Wilders says he hates Islam as an ideology, not Muslims as individuals, and categorically parts company with the neo-fascist European right typified by the late Jörg Haider. He has also traveled extensively in the Middle East; even Der Spiegel admits "he is not a dull racist and xenophobe."

But irrespective of Mr. Wilders's politics -- and I wouldn't be the first to point out that his calls to ban the Quran square oddly with his sense of himself as a champion of free speech -- his travails are no less significant than Mr. Rushdie's. And they present a test for both liberals and conservatives.

For liberals, the issue is straightforward. If routine mockery of Christianity and abuse of its symbols, both in the U.S. and Europe, is protected speech, why shouldn't the same standard apply to the mockery of Islam? And if the difference in these cases is that mockery of Islam has the tendency to lead to riots, death threats and murder, should committed Christians now seek a kind of parity with Islamists by resorting to violent tactics to express their sense of religious injury?

The notion that liberals can have it both ways -- champions of free speech on the one hand; defenders of multiculturalism's assorted sensitivities on the other -- was always intellectually flimsy. If liberals now want to speak for the "right" of this or that group not to be offended, the least they can do is stop calling themselves "liberals."

For conservatives, especially of the cultural kind -- the kind of people who talk about defending Western Civ. -- Mr. Wilders's case should also provoke some reconsiderations. It may not be impossible to denounce the likes of Mr. Serrano while defending the likes of Mr. Wilders. But a defense of Mr. Wilders is made a lot easier if one can point to the vivid difference between a civilization that protects, even celebrates (and funds!), its cultural provocateurs and a civilization that seeks their murder.

This is no small point. Western civilization is not simply the "Judeo-Christian tradition." It is also the civilization of Socrates and Aristophanes, Hume and Voltaire, Copernicus and Darwin; of religious schismatics and nonbelievers. This is the civilization that is now required to define itself, oddly enough, by the case of a flamboyant Dutch politician with inconsistent ideas and a bouffant hairdo. If he can't be defended, neither can Mr. Rushdie. Or Mr. Serrano. Liberals and conservatives alike, take note.

2) Obama's Tainted Win
By Rich Lowry

By his own standards, President Barack Obama's first major legislative victory was a tainted win.

At the outset of the stimulus debate, Obama said his package would set a "new higher standard of accountability, transparency and oversight." He wanted a bill free of earmarked spending for parochial projects, and talked of incorporating good Republican ideas. His team floated the goal of winning some 20 Republican votes in the Senate for legislation that -- if Obama's campaign pledges were met -- would have been posted for comment on the White House Web site for five days prior to passage.

As if deliberately setting out to make Obama look naïve, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid secured, at the last minute, $8 billion for high-speed rail, with an eye to building a magnetic-levitation line that he supports between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Representatives from Wisconsin and Indiana got a tax break benefiting motorcycle and RV manufacturers in their states. On it went. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer's defense was to say, sure the bill had "porky amendments," but no one really cares about such picayune matters.

The House wrote the bill with no Republican input, and when the House and Senate met in a conference committee to hammer out differences in the bills that had passed the different chambers, Republicans were shut out except for those lone three Republican senators who (out of 219 total Republicans in Congress) supported the legislation. Obama himself attacked Republicans for wanting to pass nothing, a blatant straw man.

When the House and Senate reached a deal, the 1,073-page bill was rushed toward passage in roughly 24 hours, with little opportunity for lawmakers, let alone the public, to review it. For sheer heedlessness, the process rivaled that of Franklin Roosevelt's Emergency Banking Relief Act. When FDR's team arrived at a legislative package in the middle of the night in March 1933, the chairman of the House Banking Committee took it onto the House floor, exclaiming: "Here's the bill. Let's pass it." Only three or four copies existed, Jonathan Alter writes in his history of the 100 days, The Defining Moment, and no one read it before passing it on a voice vote.

In short, the stimulus bill was sausage-making worthy of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Obama the good-government noodge should have been appalled that his earnest assurances of a new way of doing business were so quickly crushed underneath Nancy Pelosi's high (and highhanded) heel. If, that is, these were Obama's first-order concerns, and they aren't.

To govern is to choose, and Obama has chosen effectively to abandon his commitment to a different, more open process. It's more important to get the substantive achievement than to worry much over how it is achieved, even if it means tolerating legislative strong-arming reminiscent of Tom DeLay in his glory days. "My bottom line is not how pretty the process was," Obama told reporters last week, in complete reversal from three weeks ago.

At the heart of Obama's much-discussed pragmatism is a willingness to shift the means by which he attains his enduring ends -- namely, his political ambition and his policy goals. If his pledge to take public financing stands athwart his ability to bury John McCain under an avalanche of private donations -- well, out with the pledge. When the Rev. Jeremiah Wright can give him an entree into Chicago politics, he's a spiritual mentor; when he obstructs Obama's presidential ambitions, he's under the bus. Given the choice between -- as Ron Brownstein of the National Journal has described it -- passing more public investments in three weeks than Bill Clinton passed in eight years, or honoring the spirit of bipartisanship, it's not even close.

Obama is making the shrewd choice. No one cares about process as much as the impressionable young people and journalists he already has firmly in his hip pocket. All that matters is the state of the economy, and whether the stimulus bill ultimately lives up to its name -- tainted passage or no.

2a) Field General Obama
By Robert Shrum


Not since FDR has a new President achieved such far-reaching change as swiftly as Barack Obama. In office less than a month, he signs a $787 billion emergency stimulus bill into law. And remarkably, almost everything he was criticized for during the battle contributed to his victory.

He was assailed for letting the House Democrats write the bill instead of dispatching his own legislation to the Hill. He supposedly lost control to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and then to Senate Leader Harry Reid. The truth is, the original House version was very close to what the President wanted. Was it really conceivable that the gathering Obama Administration wasn’t constantly conferring with congressional allies? It was beyond naïve to think otherwise—or to suggest that Obama was the passive recipient of a proposal he didn’t favor or largely shape.

Republicans found psychic satisfaction in ritually chanting “Pelosi and Reid” on every cable honkfest, but they were unwittingly playing the President’s game. His apparent margin of separation from the congressional process allowed him to look flexible—and gave him room to maneuver. He swiftly dispensed with the House provision on family planning, a decimal point in the bill, which can readily be included in later appropriations measures. Unlike the Clintons with their health care proposal, he wasn’t forced to defend every element of a precast approach—which made it easier to get pretty much all that he preferred.

Obama’s bipartisan appeal, criticized as an utter failure in the House, fell far short of the 80 Senate votes some in the Administration had once envisioned. But on several counts, the bipartisan Obama had it both ways. He could negotiate with a Republican gang of three to rewrite the bill in the Senate—and later, in the conference where the Senate and House versions had to be reconciled, his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel could deftly orchestrate the restoration of most of the President’s original priorities.

Along the way, Obama won credit from the public for trying to reach across the aisle; as a by-product, so did the vilified Congressional Democrats, whose poll ratings emerged half-again higher than the opposition’s. Then, when the Republican fiction writers seemed to be successfully infecting the public dialogue—their know-nothing caricatures of the bill were too good not to be reported—the President had the political space to take them on without seeming like an angry partisan. He convincingly ridiculed the tired right-wing clichés: A spending bill? Well, duh—that’s what stimulus is.

Obama left the Beltway to carry his case to the country in the places and with the people hardest hit by the recession. He embarked on a series of “roadside chats” that had the feel and empathy of FDR’s fireside chats. The Republicans could fulminate, but they couldn’t compete.

The Obama forces may not have planned it all exactly this way, and afterwards there were a few publicly uttered second thoughts from advisors. But it is hard to see how the White House could have played it better than this legislative broken-field running, where others often appeared to be carrying the ball until the crucial moment when Obama himself stepped forward to take it across the goal. And he wasn’t absent when he was unseen; his top operatives were a constant, quiet presence in the deal-making, bending it to the Administration’s direction. Politico, which had earlier catalogued the President’s “set-backs,” eventually settled on a new headline: “Obama proposals mostly intact in bill.”

This reality was largely missed until the end because the press coverage followed the old rules, with Beltway froth trumpeted as more significant than real-world events. Thus the assumption was that Obama was “hurt” when Republican Senator Judd Gregg abruptly withdrew as the next Commerce Secretary. It was a “big” story — but for the fact that the country doesn’t much care who sits at Herbert Hoover’s old desk in the Commerce Department. Instead, the episode left Obama looking open, reasonable—and yes, bipartisan. By contrast, Gregg’s explanation for his about-face was somewhere between goofy and dishonest.

The Republicans, too, played by the old rules and they lost. One CNN analyst opined that at least they had found “their voice”—primarily in the brittle tones of Rep. Eric Cantor, now hailed as a 21st Century Newt Gingrich. Cantor obviously hopes to repeat the 1993-94 “revolution” during which relentless Republican opposition to Clinton stalled progress and shattered Democratic congressional majorities in the mid-term election. I suspect Cantor will prove only that those who simplistically remember history are condemned to misread it. There wasn’t an economic crisis then; today there is, and it’s urgent. Yet the Republicans are coming across as bitter and obstructionist, determined to bring the President down no matter what the cost to the country. This is not the architecture of a successful electoral strategy; it is a spasm arising from ideological rigor mortis.

The Republicans may have found their voice; but it is, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase, “like wind in dry grass.” These are “hollow men” who have nothing else to offer. In contrast, the President is cool, calm, strategic and focused on the critical issues and the long-term. He says correctly that he will be judged by “results.” It’s early, but the early achievement is breathtaking. Obama understands the uses of presidential power. If he brings that insight and the same instinct for what matters to healthcare, energy, and looming challenges like a half-lost war in Afghanistan, he can achieve change we can believe in—and live with for generations. In that case, the Reagan Era will be succeeded by the Obama Era.

2b) This is a Presidency on Steroids
By Eugene Robinson

This is a presidency on steroids. Barack Obama's executive orders alone would be enough for any new administration's first month: decreeing an end to torture and Guantanamo, extending health insurance to more children, reversing Bush-era policies on family planning. That the White House also managed to push through Congress a spending bill of unprecedented size and scope -- designed both to provide an economic stimulus and reorder the nation's priorities -- is little short of astonishing.

Now it's time for the administration to get to work. For his next act, Obama must set the parameters of a new presidential role that he did not seek but cannot avoid: managing the big chunks of the private-sector economy that are now more accurately described as semi-private at best.

This week, executives from General Motors and Chrysler are reporting on their progress in transforming themselves into lean, mean car-making machines, capable of leading American industry into a new golden age. They will also explain that they need some more money, and fast, or they'll crash and burn. GM, which got a $9.4 billion cash infusion from the government just two months ago, wants the remaining $4 billion that the Bush administration approved; Chrysler, which got $4 billion in December, needs another $3 billion urgently.

Maybe it's just baby boomer nostalgia for the car culture of my youth, but I think it's a good idea for the United States to have a domestic automobile industry. Is there a man or woman alive who believes these will be automakers' last requests for bailout money from Washington? GM, at least, has done a decent job of capturing market share overseas, so maybe that's a framework for the company to reinvent itself. Chrysler is so diminished that I wonder if there's any alternative except getting what's left of the company ready for sale.

Obama has abandoned plans to appoint a "car czar" to oversee government aid to the auto companies, giving the job instead to a high-level task force. So far, the president has declined to look a central question in the eye: Can GM and Chrysler ever thrive under present management? If the Big Three are not to shrink to the Big One -- Ford is managing to survive on its own -- Obama and Congress are going to have to oversee GM and Chrysler almost like a board of directors. Go ahead and laugh, but explain to me how even Washington could do a worse job with these two companies than Detroit is doing.

The auto industry problem is cheap and simple compared to what Obama faces with the financial sector. Thanks to an amendment that Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., inserted in the stimulus bill, Washington now has control over bonuses and severance packages at financial companies that have taken funds from the Bush administration's $700 billion TARP bailout program: no more eight-figure bonuses for Wall Street "geniuses" whose cleverness helped drive their companies, and a good deal of the economy, into the ground.

Dodd added a measure that makes it easier for firms that chafe at Washington-imposed restrictions -- on compensation, for example -- to pull out of TARP. The details are complicated, but what's important is that banks and other financial institutions that are relatively healthy may well begin to leave the program. The impression would be that the firms remaining in the program are relatively sick -- and people tend to be uncomfortable keeping their money in a bank that can be described as relatively sick.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has fought against transparency in the bailout program that would let everyone see which banks have pneumonia and which merely have a cold. My belief is that the pneumonia-versus-cold distinction was bound to become evident, with or without the Dodd amendment. In any event, if one of our big banks were seen to be in danger of failing -- becoming, in effect, a Dead Bank Walking -- the Obama administration would have few choices other than to nationalize it.

Then there's the housing problem, which may be the most difficult of all. Foreclosures and plummeting home values are at the heart of the economic crisis. Either millions of Americans are going to lose their homes, or millions of mortgage contracts are somehow going to be modified. That's not an attractive choice.

All Barack Obama wanted was to be president. He may have to become an auto executive, a banker, a mortgage broker and who knows what else before this crisis is done.

2c) Obama is Big on Symbolism
By Jack Kelly

At the battle of Asculum in 279 BC, the Greek king Pyrrhus defeated a Roman legion, but at frightful cost to his own troops. When sycophantic courtiers congratulated him on his "great victory," Pyrrhus responded: "one more such victory, and we shall be undone."

President Obama plans to celebrate his Asculum -- passage of the (at least) $787 billion "stimulus" bill -- with a signing ceremony in Denver Tuesday. Sycophantic liberal commentators hailed this as a great victory for the president, but it comes at the cost of the illusion Mr. Obama represents a change from the corrupt old ways of Washington.

Candidate Obama promised a new openness in government. But the biggest spending bill ever was drafted behind closed doors. Candidate Obama pledged to weaken the influence of lobbyists. But lobbyists received copies of the "stimulus" bill before lawmakers did. Candidate Obama pledged a bipartisan approach to government. But not a single Republican in the House, and only three in the Senate, voted for it.

Mr. Obama is fond of the appearance of bipartisanship. He nominated three Republicans to his Cabinet. He's dined with conservative columnists, and invited several GOP lawmakers to watch the Super Bowl with him.

But Mr. Obama is like a young man who expects a girl to put out if he buys her a hamburger and a beer. If he were more concerned about the substance of bipartisanship, he'd have insisted upon a stimulus package more Republicans could support, and he wouldn't now be looking for his third nominee for Secretary of Commerce.

Sen. Gregg withdrew, citing "irreconcilable differences" over the stimulus package. The more important reason was because the president had made it clear Sen. Gregg was just to be window dressing. The Commerce secretary has only one important job, to oversee the decennial census. If illegal aliens are counted as citizens, several House seats could be shifted from the Republicans to the Democrats after the next reapportionment. Cheating is the Chicago Way, but Sen. Gregg is both honest and a Republican. He couldn't be counted on to cheat. So the president announced oversight of the census would be shifted to the White House. This is probably illegal, and it made Sen. Gregg look like a chump. So he did the only thing an honorable man could do.

With so many of the president's nominees having to withdraw because of ethical problems, it was refreshing to have one withdraw because he had ethics. But several of the president's courtiers in the news media described Sen. Gregg's resignation, and the paucity of GOP votes for the porkalooza, as evidence of a Republican "war" against Mr. Obama.

"Their clear intent is to do all they can, however they can, to sabotage the new administration," wrote Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic. Mr. Sullivan and others of his ilk see nothing partisan in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's exclusion of Republicans from the drafting of the stimulus bill; in the president's refusal to make meaningful compromises, or in the transfer of census oversight to the White House.

President Obama is very big on symbolism. He is signing the bill in Denver, the city where he was nominated for president, on Tuesday (in violation of his pledge to have at least five days elapse between passage of a law and his signing of it to allow time for public comment), because Tuesday is four weeks precisely since his inauguration.

Symbolism is important. But presidents ultimately are judged on substance.

3) Israel's last ditch effort to destroy ... itself
By Caroline B. Glick

The outgoing Kadima-Labor government's anticipated decision to release a thousand terrorists, including several dozen mass murdering terror commanders, in the framework of a ceasefire deal with Iran's Palestinian proxy Hamas is simply the latest troubling legacy that the Olmert-Livni-Barak government is leaving its successor.

Once the deal goes through, Hamas will be able to quickly expand the threat it poses to Israel. The jihadist group is already using the political legitimacy Israel is conferring on it to reestablish its unity government with Fatah. When that government is formed, the US and Europe will move hastily to recognize the terror group.

Hamas will use its increased legitimacy as a screen behind which it will expand its offensive capabilitiesThis is particularly true in the field of ballistic weapons.

We know this will happen because we have already seen what happened with the last Iranian proxy that Israel signed a ceasefire agreement with. Since Israel agreed to UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and brought its war with Hizbullah to an end in August 2006, Hizbullah has reasserted its political and military control over south Lebanon and has taken over the Lebanese government. Moreover, it has massively expanded its missile capabilities not only by tripling the size of its arsenal, but by tripling the range of its missiles.

In 2006, Hizbullah's most powerful missile was a Fajr rocket with a 100 km range and a 50 kilogram warhead. Today, according to Avi Schnurr, executive director of the Israel Missile Defense Association, Hizbullah has an arsenal of Fatah-110 ballistic missiles with a range of 300 kilometers and a 600 kilogram payload.

While our media elites endlessly drone on about whether or not Likud is sufficiently "pro-peace" to satisfy Meretz and Kadima, our national discourse is ignoring the greatest threat this country faces: missiles.

Schnurr warns that today there are more missiles pointing at Israel in absolute numbers than at any other country on earth. While Israelis are properly concerned with suicide terrorism and Kassam rocket attacks, the fastest escalating threat that Israel faces come from ballistic missiles.

In addition to Iran's Hamas and Hizbullah proxies, its client state Syria has a massive missile arsenal housed in hardened silos. Syria's missiles are capable of attacking every square centimeter of Israeli territory. And of course, with its rapidly growing land and sea-based ballistic missile arsenal, Iran itself is the fastest growing missile threat facing Israel.


IN RECENT YEARS, rather than taking any immediate action to meet the growing threat, Israel has sufficed with launching long-term development programs that promise to provide protection for current threats in four to eight years. For instance, in response to Syria's medium-range missiles, Israel is developing the David's Sling anti-missile system that should be ready in eight years.

Israel could in the meantime upgrade its PAC-2 anti-missile batteries responsible for contending with medium-range missiles, with US-made PAC-3s. But the powers that be in the Ministry of Defense have decided that the PAC-3's $100 million price tag is too high.

Indeed far from installing upgrades, Israel is downgrading its existing anti-missile arsenals. According to Defense News, Israel is planning to end its involvement in the Arrow anti-missile program because it feels the maintenance costs of its Arrow batteries are too high. So as the number of missiles arrayed against it rises, Israel has decided not to bother increasing its anti-missile defenses.

Even more alarmingly, Israel has no medium-range or long-range conventional missile arsenals. Although Israel has the domestic capacity to produce both ballistic and cruise missiles, it has never bothered to build them. Consequently, its options for contending with rapidly escalating long-range threats from places like Iran are limited to manned aircraft and its suspected nuclear arsenal.

As Schnurr relates, Israel's decision to contend with the spiraling missile threat it faces by ignoring it extends to short-range missile threats as well. Israel has rejected relatively inexpensive existing anti-rocket and mortar systems that could provide immediate protection to Sderot among other places. It has preferred to leave Sderot and the Western Negev unprotected while awaiting the development of the Iron Dome system now being developed by the Ministry of Defense.

Israel does field advanced radar systems. The Green Pine radar is one of the best in the world and together with the X-Band radar system the US recently deployed in the Negev, Israel's ability to detect incoming missiles is significant. The problem is that all of Israel's radar systems are facing east - towards Iran. Last December Iran signed a strategic alliance with Eritrea that permits its Revolutionary Guards to set up bases in Eritrea, strategically located to Israel's south at the mouth of the Red Sea. Israel has no radars pointing to its south.



AFTER YEARS OF denial, today even US intelligence agencies acknowledge that Iran's ballistic missile program is part and parcel of its nuclear program. While most Israeli observers have devoted their energies to assessing the destructive capacity of a direct nuclear attack against the tiny country, and to the various delivery mechanisms - from the Shihab-3 missiles to Syrian Scuds to Hizbullah or Hamas death squads - that Iran could field against it in the event of a nuclear attack, the fact of the matter is that Iran has an indirect option for using nuclear weapons to attack Israel that would likely be more destructive than a direct nuclear attack. And it is an option that Iran can wield not only against Israel, but against every country in the world.

An electromagnetic pulse or EMP attack is an indirect nuclear attack. It has the capacity to destroy a target country's electricity grids and so revert a post-industrial, technology-based country such as Israel or the US to a pre-industrial condition. If an aggressor launches a nuclear device of whatever size and detonates it above the atmosphere and in the line of site of its target country, the x-rays and gamma rays emitted by the blast will cause an electromagnetic pulse, or wave a million times stronger than the strongest radio wave. That wave, which comes in three successive stages, will destroy a country's electrical grids and through them, its ability to function.

In 2000, concern about the EMP threat in the US caused Congress to mandate the formation of a commission comprised of the leading US experts on the issue to study it. The EMP Threat Commission's 2004 report warned that the effect an EMP attack would have on the US's national infrastructures "could be sufficient to qualify as catastrophic to the nation." As JWR contributor Frank Gaffney, President of the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, explained in his 2006 book War Footing, by destroying a country's electrical power systems, an EMP will destroy its economy since it will wipe out its banking system. All vehicles that operate with electronic systems - that is all vehicles made since the mid-1970s - would be rendered inoperable. Telecommunications would end. A country's ability to store food through refrigeration would end. Its ability to transport water and pump gasoline would also end.

Since almost no one would be killed in the immediate aftermath of an EMP attack, a threat of retaliation against the aggressor country would lack credibility because such an option would be politically unpalatable. But while an EMP attack would not kill many people directly, it would kill millions of people indirectly. As Gaffney notes, by wiping out a country's ability to support itself, an EMP attack would cause mass starvation and disease.

The threat of an EMP attack was not taken seriously by US military planners during the Cold War because they were concerned with the primary Soviet threat to annihilate the US and its allies by launching several thousand nuclear warheads against them. But as nuclear and missile technology has proliferated in the post-Cold War period, and more technologically primitive countries get their hands on missiles and limited nuclear capabilities, the threat of an EMP attack as become far more acute.

In Iran's case, the mullahs have signaled clearly through both word and deed that they find the option of attacking their enemies with an EMP attack attractive. An article published in Iran's security journal Nashriyeh-e Siasi Nezami in 1999 identified an EMP attack as a way to defeat the US as a military power and as a state. Then too, as William Graham, who headed the US's EMP commission explained in an interview with World Net Daily last year, Iran is openly building the capacity to carry out such an attack. Last year, Iran described a ship-launched test of its Shihab-3 missile in the Caspian Sea as "successful" in spite of the fact that like an EMP, the missile detonated in mid-launch.

More disturbingly, Iran's successful satellite launch earlier this month makes clear that the mullahs now have the technological capacity to effectively wipe out Western civilization. Three to five nuclear bombs of any size, launched into space on satellites and detonated above the US, Europe and Asia would send Western civilization back to the 19th century. Last week Iran announced it is building seven more satellites. Yet rather than recognize that once its nuclear arsenal is online Iran will represents a threat to all nations, the West ignored the significance of the satellite launch.

The US's EMP commission's report explained that to defend against such an attack, it is necessary to build redundant electrical systems and have difficult-to-build replacement parts like turbines on hand to replace ones destroyed by such an attack. Since the report was published, the US has made some modest progress in that direction.






THIS IS NOT the case, unfortunately in Israel. Although as a small country, Israel has the capacity to replicate its systems relatively cheaply and quickly, the outgoing government has paid no attention whatsoever to the growing threat. As a consequence, were Iran to attack Israel with an EMP attack, Israel would be rendered defenseless and at the mercy of Iran and the Arab world. For their part, they would undoubtedly be tempted to invade the Jewish state to finish what the Iranians started.

Through IMDA, Schnurr is trying to raise awareness of the growing missile threat and recommend ways to contend with it in the Defense Ministry as well as in ministries that control critical infrastructures. He has had some modest success, but to date, no one has taken any action.

With coalition negotiations only now beginning, it is hard to believe that soon we will be led by leaders more interested in contending with the threats we face as a country. But such a government is apparently on its way. In light of the growing conventional and unconventional missile threats facing us, one of the Netanyahu government's first actions in office must be to review and rapidly expand Israel's offensive and defensive missile systems, and quickly move to replicate critical national infrastructures to defend against EMP attack.