Pirates Have Rights Too - Just Robin Hoods on Water!

Yes, we have to share the world with Russia, China and many nations who are opposed to virtually everything we stand for but that does not mean we have to kiss their behinds in the mistaken belief doing so will make them 'change' or mend their ways to our liking.

When national self interests do not mesh it is better to accept reality and deal with it than attempt to appease and disarm in the hope that will work and bring peace and stability. (See 1 below.)

Sent by an old friend and fellow memo reader - a rebuttal to Netanyahu's hawkish view of Iran.

Yet, another view.(See 2 and 2a below.)

A great idea for political control freaks - take over colleges and universities that receive federal funds. This is why Hillsdale decided to build its endowment so it could attract students not going there on government loans. Why? Because the government wanted to tell Hillsdale what curriculum it must offer. (See 3 below.)

We are moving towards a society where more citizens have no skin the game - representation without taxation. And when that happens, America will be a radically different nation but since Capitalism is so evil why give a damn.

Socialism, Communism, Fascism have succeeded beyond one's wildest dreams in liberal theory but show me a nation where they have actuallly bettered lives.(See 4 below.)

Palestinians make their demands but disregard first Road Map Provision - stop terrorism against Israel before negotiations begin. Words have meaning but they become empty when Palestinians choose to ignore their commitments. (See 5 below.)

Krauthammer reminds Obama, America is his country as well. By disarming America Obama believes it will point the way towards world peace and stability. (See 6 below.)

A solid education is critical but not for D.C. kids. More empty words and hypocrisy from our education president. (See 7 below.)

Pirates have rights too, you know! After all, like Obama, they too are in the business of wealth transfer by taking - just Robin Hoods on water. (See 8 below.)

Have a great holiday weekend and take a pirate to lunch!

Dick



1) 'Reset' With Russia Has Complications
By Cathy Young

Barack Obama's meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at the G-20 summit in London has been hailed by many as a first step toward repairing the damage in the relationship between the United States and Russia, after several years of escalation toward a "new Cold War." Back in February, at an international security conference in Munich, Vice President Joseph Biden spoke of the need to "push the reset button" in U.S.-Russian relations. But many questions remain. "Reset" to what? In which areas can there be genuine cooperation? Can it exist without meaningful change in the Russian government?

Should we seek a "reset" to 1985 - the first meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, and the beginning of the end of the real Cold War? The world today is a vastly different place in which the state Gorbachev headed no longer exists. Even the disarmament tango, which Obama and Medvedev have attempted to revive, no longer has its Cold War-era urgency because no one seriously believes that Russia and the United States could lob missiles at each other; nuclear anxieties today focus mostly on Iran, North Korea, or nukes in the hands of terrorists. Moreover, in 1985, the Soviet Union was on the threshold of reforms that would ultimately bring down the Communist system. The Russian government today is a neo-authoritarian regime that, so far, clings to power.

Or should the "reset button" take us to 1991, when a new democratic Russia was born from the Soviet Union's ruins, with aspirations toward full integration into the West and partnership with the United States? But Russia's political establishment of today sees that brief period of genuine Russian-American friendship as a moment when a weakened and humiliated Russia was reduced to being a mere lackey of the West, and of Uncle Sam in particular.

For most of this decade, Vladimir Putin's regime in Russia - and its continuation, the Putin-Medvedev "tandem" - has promoted the view that Russia's strength and national dignity lies in rivalry rather than partnership with the West. The Kremlin treats pro-Western governments and politicians in former Soviet republics as presumptively anti-Russian and tends to view any increase in Western and especially American influence in the region as a weakening of Russian power. (Russia's pressure on Kyrgyzstan to kick out a U.S. air base that plays a vital role in American operations in Afghanistan is a stark example of this zero-sum mentality.)

The Kremlin has also used virulent anti-American propaganda as a weapon of domestic political control. This propaganda machine remains intact. Just a few days before the Obama-Medvedev meeting, prominent pro-government talk show host Maksim Shevchenko told a radio audience that American forces in Afghanistan were "perfectly positioned to strike at our Urals, our Central Asia, our Southern Siberia." More recently, the state TV channel Rossiya aired charges that the U.S. air base in Kyrgyzstan was being used for spying on Russia.

Obama and Medvedev have discussed the possibility of U.S.-Russian cooperation on missile defense. That could be a productive area of partnership. But unless the Russian regime drops anti-Americanism from its political tool set, it will probably see a far greater advantage in portraying missile defense as a nefarious American plot against Russia.

There is also a widespread belief that a cooperative Russia could help solve the Iranian nuclear problem. Yet Russia's friendly relationship with Iran in the past few years has been rooted mainly in a common interest in riling Uncle Sam. If a U.S.-friendly Russia tried to pressure Iran to scuttle its nuclear program, it would likely have little if any leverage. The Russians could stop providing Iran with helpful the technology, but there are always alternatives, particularly with North Korea around.

American foreign policy "realists" argue that we focus on opportunities for economic and political cooperation instead of pushing Russia too hard on democracy and human rights. This is the view expressed in the recent report of the Commission on U.S. Policy toward Russia, a non-governmental group co-chaired by Sen. Chuck Hagel (Republican of Nebraska) and former Democratic Senator Gary Hart. Yet the report acknowledges that lack of genuine democracy in Russia makes a good relationship difficult even from a pragmatic point of view - for instance, because "Russia's lack of Western-style checks and balances weakens internal mechanisms for critical scrutiny of government decision making."

That's not the only complication. Due to the peculiar nature of Russian "democracy," Obama cannot be sure that his Russian counterpart is the real leader of the country rather than a junior partner if not a puppet of Prime Minister Putin. If Medvedev is a champion of liberalization, his influence so far remains very limited. In Moscow, the Russian courts seem well on their way to railroading former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky in a blatantly political case. In the southern town of Sochi, the authorities are confiscating the campaign materials of liberal mayoral candidate Boris Nemtsov and denying him access to the media.

One may debate whether "democracy promotion" in other countries should be a part of U.S. policy. But experience shows that in Russia, contempt for freedom and human rights goes hand in hand with confrontational attitudes toward the West. As the Obama administration seeks to improve its relationship with Moscow, it should remember this simple fact.

Cathy Young writes a weekly column for RealClearPolitics and is also a contributing editor at Reason magazine.

2) Israel Cries Wolf
By ROGER COHEN


“Iran is the center of terrorism, fundamentalism and subversion and is in my view more dangerous than Nazism, because Hitler did not possess a nuclear bomb, whereas the Iranians are trying to perfect a nuclear option.”


Benjamin Netanyahu 2009? Try again. These words were in fact uttered by another Israeli prime minister (and now Israeli president), Shimon Peres, in 1996. Four years earlier, in 1992, he’d predicted that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 1999.
You can’t accuse the Israelis of not crying wolf. Ehud Barak, now defense minister, said in 1996 that Iran would be producing nuclear weapons by 2004.

Now here comes Netanyahu, in an interview with his faithful stenographer Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, spinning the latest iteration of Israel’s attempt to frame Iran as some Nazi-like incarnation of evil:

“You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.”
I must say when I read those words about “the wide-eyed believer” my mind wandered to a recently departed “decider.” But I’m not going there.

The issue today is Iran and, more precisely, what President Barack Obama will make of Netanyahu’s prescription that, the economy aside, Obama’s great mission is “preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons” — an eventuality newly inscribed on Israeli calendars as “months” away.

I’ll return to the ever shifting nuclear doomsday in a moment, but first that Netanyahu interview.

This “messianic apocalyptic cult” in Tehran is, of course, the very same one with which Israel did business during the 1980’s, when its interest was in weakening Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. That business — including sales of weapons and technology — was an extension of Israeli policy toward Iran under the shah.

It’s also the same “messianic apocalyptic cult” that has survived 30 years, ushered the country from the penury of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, shrewdly extended its power and influence, cooperated with America on Afghanistan before being consigned to “the axis of evil,” and kept its country at peace in the 21st century while bloody mayhem engulfed neighbors to east and west and Israel fought two wars.
I don’t buy the view that, as Netanyahu told Goldberg, Iran is “a fanatic regime that might put its zealotry above its self-interest.” Every scrap of evidence suggests that, on the contrary, self-interest and survival drive the mullahs.
Yet Netanyahu insists (too much) that Iran is “a country that glorifies blood and death, including its own self-immolation.” Huh?

On that ocular theme again, Netanyahu says Iran’s “composite leadership” has “elements of wide-eyed fanaticism that do not exist in any other would-be nuclear power in the world.” No, they exist in an actual nuclear power, Pakistan.
Israel’s nuclear warheads, whose function is presumably deterrence of precisely powers like Iran, go unmentioned, of course.

Netanyahu also makes the grotesque claim that the terrible loss of life in the Iran-Iraq war (started by Iraq) “didn’t sear a terrible wound into the Iranian consciousness.” It did just that, which is why Iran’s younger generation seeks reform but not upheaval; and why the country as a whole prizes stability over military adventure.

Arab states, Netanyahu suggests, “fervently hope” that America will, if necessary, use “military power” to stop Iran going nuclear. My recent conversations, including with senior Saudi officials, suggest that’s wrong and the longstanding Israeli attempt to convince Arab states that Iran, not Israel, is their true enemy will fail again.

What’s going on here? Israel, as it has for nearly two decades, is trying to lock in American support and avoid any disadvantageous change in the Middle Eastern balance of power, now overwhelmingly tilted in Jerusalem’s favor, by portraying Iran as a monstrous pariah state bent on imminent nuclear war.

A semblance of power balance is often the precondition for peace. Iran was left out of the Madrid and Oslo processes, with disastrous results. But that’s a discussion for another day.

What’s critical right now is that Obama view Netanyahu’s fear-mongering with an appropriate skepticism, rein him in, and pursue his regime-recognizing opening toward Tehran, as he did Wednesday by saying America would join nuclear talks for the first time. The president should read Trita Parsi’s excellent “Treacherous Alliance” as preparation.

The core strategic shift of Obama’s presidency has been away from the with-us-or-against-us rhetoric of the war on terror toward a rapprochement with the Muslim world as the basis for isolating terrorists.

That’s unsustainable if America or Israel find themselves at war with Muslim Persians as well as Muslim Arabs, and if Netanyahu’s intense-eyed attempt to suck America into a perpetuation of war-on-terror thinking prevails.
The only way to stop Iran going nuclear, and encourage reform of a repressive regime, is to get to the negotiating table. There’s time. Those “months” are still a couple of years. What Iran has accumulated is low-enriched uranium. You need highly-enriched uranium for a bomb. That’s a leap.

Israeli hegemony is proving a kind of slavery. Passage to the Promised Land involves rethinking the Middle East, starting in Iran.

2a) Obama abroad


This is day 81 in the countdown toward the 100th day of Barack Obama's presidency. The benchmark probably dates back to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who came into office with no particular ideology but promising "action, and action now" - and a readiness to pursue pragmatic policies.

Obama has returned to Washington after his most significant trip abroad since taking office. The president enjoys strong support from the majority of Americans who voted for him (Democrats give him an 88 percent approval rating) though he has made few strides in winning over John McCain's supporters (only 27% of Republicans think he's doing a good job). Obama's critics complain he spent too much time overseas in "excuse me, excuse my predecessor, or excuse my country" mode.

Still, Obama's message - "I'm personally committed to a new chapter of American engagement" - set a new tone for US foreign policy among Washington's ostensible allies in Europe, Turkey and Iraq.

•On the issues that most concern Israelis, paramount among them Teheran's nuclear ambitions, Obama reiterated that he had "made it clear to the people and leaders" of Iran "that the United States seeks engagement based upon mutual interests and mutual respect. Now, Iran's leaders must choose whether they will try to build a weapon or build a better future for their people."

•As the Netanyahu government conducts a policy review on Arab-Israel peacemaking, Obama said: "Let me be clear: The United States strongly supports the goal of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security." And Obama had a message for Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman: "That is a goal that the parties agreed to in the road map and at Annapolis. That is a goal that I will actively pursue as president."

•Finally, as the West's top "emissary" to a Muslim world where visceral loathing of Israel knows no bounds, the US president told students in Istanbul: "This notion that somehow everything is the fault of the Israelis lacks balance - because there's two sides to every question."

Obama made an unannounced (but not unanticipated) five-hour trip to Iraq where he was warmly received by US troops. He said combat forces would be pulled out by August 2010, and all US troops by the end of 2011. He told Sunnis and Shi'ites, who've lately ratcheted-up their intramural slaughter, to take responsibility for their country because America needs to focus on battling al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan-Pakistan.

In Ankara, he paid his respects at the mausoleum of Kemal Ataturk, the secularist founder of modern Turkey. Whatever Obama may think of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose politics are rooted in political Islam, he urged the EU to make room for Turkey.

He told the Turkish parliament and the wider Muslim world that the United States "is not and will never be at war with Islam. America's relationship with the Muslim community, the Muslim world, cannot and will not just be based upon opposition to terrorism," he said. "We seek broader engagement based upon mutual interest and mutual respect."

Obama has been convinced - partly by venerable cold warriors such as Sam Nunn and Henry Kissinger - that it might be easier to garner international support for stopping pariah states from going nuclear if the US shows a willingness to sharply reduce its own atomic arsenal.

So he parlayed news that North Korea had launched a ballistic missile into a far-reaching call for worldwide nuclear disarmament. "In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up… Terrorists are determined to buy, build or steal [a nuclear weapon]," he said.

THUS FAR into his presidency, it's already apparent that Obama seeks to harness idealism with pragmatism. Yet if the G-20 (on the economic crisis), NATO (on Afghanistan-Pakistan) and Russia (on Iran) remain unmoved by appeals to multilateralism, expect Obama, like Roosevelt, to go with whatever works.

What this means for Israel in pursuit of its highest national interest, blocking Iran from fielding a nuclear bomb, is that Binyamin Netanyahu needs to convince Obama that doing anything short of stopping the mullahs would be dangerously reckless.


3) Why Not Manage Universities, Mr. President?
By Paul Kengor

I hear it again and again, even from some pro-business conservatives:


Hey, I have no sympathy for AIG and the automakers and the banks. When you take government money, you can expect the government to tell you what to do. Besides, some of these companies are wasteful, charge too much, and their salaries are too high.


Well, if that's so, then why doesn't the government intervene to run our universities, which consume huge amounts of government money? Why don't President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress dictate marching orders to university presidents? Why not fire the bad ones? Why aren't Barney Frank and Chris Dodd calling in provosts to explain themselves?


Think about it: Few things in our society are as costly as college education. From the moment parents look into their newborn's eyes, they begin saving for college -- the single greatest expense in their child's life. Entire life savings are dumped into college educations. Even then, that's not enough; student loans, with interest, are necessary.


My master's degree alone cost me so much -- after my parents poured everything into undergraduate educations for my brother, sister, and me -- that it took 10 years at almost $1,000 per month to pay it off. Homes in California are bargains compared to our nation's colleges. The cost of a degree is obscene.


And what about the product -- assuming the product graduates? Economically speaking, few graduates will achieve the hourly salary of their professors. Educationally speaking, these degreed citizens perform miserably in basic civic and economic literacy. (Check out the recent survey by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.)


And yet, consider the salaries of those running these universities, particularly those accepting the most government funding. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, 59 public-university presidents received salaries exceeding $500,000 in 2007-8, up from 43 the previous year -- a healthy salary jack while many parents grappled with job losses.


Over at Barack Obama's and Bill Ayers' alma mater, Columbia University, President Lee C. Bollinger made $1,411,894 last year. John Sexton at NYU collected $1,324,874. Northwestern's Henry S. Bienen scraped by with $1,742,560. And Amy Gutmann of Penn raked in $1,088,786 -- a staggering 40% raise from the previous year, enough to make a Big Oil CEO green with envy.


And what about the Keynesian advising President Obama to deficit-spend our tax dollars to "prime the pump" during the recession? When Lawrence Summers recently left Harvard, he received a $2-million severance. That was on top of his annual salary of $714,005, not to mention his wife's salary (as a literature professor) of $179,056. Did I mention that Harvard provided the couple with a home?


Here's a question for Senator Chuck Schumer's staff: Have you compared the wage of these folks to the custodians who clean their offices? How about professors in Feminist Studies at Cal-Berkeley or at Columbia Teachers College vs. the stiffs who prepare their food in the cafeteria? The typical tenured professor spends under 10 hours per week in the classroom, and gets at least five full months of paid vacation. No one, from the little library lady to a GM fat-cat, enjoys those perks.


Talk about "Two Americas." If you boys on Capitol Hill want to fan the flames of class warfare, this is a tinderbox.


And yet, after all that, after taking tens of thousands of dollars per year from debt-ridden students and parents, on top of boatloads of government money, these colleges are screaming that they are broke. How can this be? Who's responsible? Why isn't Congress demanding hearings?


And I ask liberals: What could be as un-progressive as a mom and dad in Iowa, with a combined income under $60,000, sending their daughter to an elite Northeast university -- with their life savings not enough -- to float a bunch of PhDs who've accumulated more cash in 10 years than "mom and dad" in a lifetime?


So, why isn't President Obama reining in our colleges? Why isn't Nancy Pelosi demanding accountability?



Alas, here's the dirty little secret: Liberal Democrats see no reason to investigate universities. Why? Because colleges serve as the popular front for advancing the left's agenda. They are essentially recruiting grounds for Democratic Party voters and activists.


Our universities are the most monolithic institutions in America. There may be more ideological diversity in the Taliban. Here are few figures:


A 2007 study by sociologists Neil Gross of Harvard and Solon Simmons of George Mason University found that liberal faculty outnumber conservatives by 11-1 among social scientists and 13-1 among humanities professors. That's consistent with a long line of surveys, which tend to find self-identified liberals around 80-90% and conservatives around 10%.


It has been that way for decades. I have a folder jammed with studies. One of my favorites is an early 1990s poll that found 88% of "public affairs" faculty identifying themselves as liberal, 12% claiming to be "middle of the road," and, remarkably, 0% opting for the conservative label.


A 2003 survey by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture found these ratios of Democrats to Republicans: Swarthmore: 21-1. Bowdoin College: 23-1. Wellesley College: 23-1. Brown University: 30-1. Amazingly, the study couldn't identify a single Republican at the faculties of Williams, Oberlin, MIT, and Haverford, nor a single Republican administrator at Penn, Carnegie Mellon, or Cornell.


Analyses of Cornell found 166 liberals compared to six conservatives; at UCLA, 141 liberals vs. nine conservatives.


I could go on and on. Remember that academia champions "diversity."


Keep in mind, too, that these figures are fully out-of-sync with the public and parents who hand their children to these professors. For at least two decades now, the number of self-indentified conservatives among the overall population has ranged near 40%, whereas self-identified liberals hover around 20%, holding steady even in the last election that elected Barack Obama.


Thus, the liberal Democrats running the federal government have no complaint about our universities. They share the same worldview, and the professors pass the faith to the students.


Indeed, consider the results of the November 2008 election, in which college-aged voters came out in droves -- nearly one in five voters, or about 25 million ballots -- and went for Obama by more than two to one. As I noted in this space before, those voters alone well exceeded Obama's overall vote advantage. It was truly the college crowd that elected Obama.


So, this is perfect for Obama and his fellow Democrats. Why change a thing?


But actually, it's even worse than that. These professors funnel not only students to the Democratic Party. In 2004, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics found that the top two institutions in the country, in terms of employee per-capita contributions to presidential candidates, were Harvard and the University of California system -- both of which gave 19 times more money to John Kerry than to George W. Bush.


Another 2004 analysis, by Andrew Sullivan, found that of the nearly 800 donations made to the Kerry and Bush campaigns by Ivy League professors, 92% went to Kerry.


I haven't seen an analysis of 2008, but I'm sure it's worse.


Maybe I'm being unfair. Perhaps these learned institutions don't get enough money from the life-savings and bank borrowing of students and parents, and really do need a lifeline from Uncle Sam, plus a second lifeline from their states?


Nonsense. I teach at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, which takes no government money, the result of standing for its principles of faith and freedom before the U.S. Supreme Court. The college is not wasteful; our students graduate in four years with extraordinary placement in jobs and grad schools; our students get aid through a privatized loan program; the college is listed as one of the "best buys" in higher education; it is certainly no bastion of secular liberalism; and its students score exceptionally well in surveys and tests. (Grove City College scored second in the nation in the aforementioned ISI survey.)


Sadly, though, Grove City College is the exception. The rule is what our rulers in Washington desire.


So, don't expect any AIG-like show trials of college presidents, nor President Obama firing the president of Columbia. Don't expect higher taxes on cushy contracts. Don't expect a push to cap salaries or freeze tuition or regulate rising costs.


Nope, there will be no demonization of rampant "greed" in this sector of the American workplace. There are only angels running our universities -- liberal angels.



Paul Kengor is author of The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (HarperPerennial, 2007) and professor of political science at Grove City College.

4) Representation without Taxation
By Alan Aronoff

With the trillions in spending by the new Administration for the federal budget, and bailouts, our new President has two problems to solve:

1. He needs to keep and expand his support base, some quarters of which are uneasy with the magnitude of the spending.
2. He needs to raise a lot of money in taxes to pay for his initiatives.
The way this administration will address these problems will create winners and losers in new tax policy.


President Obama has already stated that income tax increases would not affect those making less than $250,000. This is called ‘economic justice' which requires the government, as the arbiter of fairness, to determine how the national wealth should be allocated. Income tax return data shows that removing the Bush tax cuts is not enough to pay for the higher level of government spending as called for in the Administration's budget. The future for tax revenue based on raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans can be seen in the results of California's tax structure -the most progressive income tax scheme in the country.


In calendar year 2004, California income taxes collected were $36B. Of that $36B, 14,850 tax filers paid $8.22B or 23% of the personal income tax collected in 2004. Consider the following two observations:


1. 2004 was good year economically, and many high income Californians generated much of their income from exercising stock options and stock sales.
2. 14,000 is a small number compared to the 35M people living in the state. If half of these wealthiest Californians moved out of state, California would face additional and significant tax shortfall.


As a voting block, the wealthiest 1% is not significant. Many of the wealthiest 1% of Americans are not opposed to bigger government because their wealth was inherited (e.g. Ted Kennedy), or they can afford to pay the taxes -- or at least afford to pay for tax avoidance with no detriment to their standard of living. In 2006, 41% of Americans paid no income taxes according to the Tax Foundation. These include low income tax filers, many of whom benefit from the Earned Income Tax Credit which provides a "refundable tax credit" (a check from the Treasury, not a write-off) for dependents of low income wage earners. 41% of Americans is a significant segment of the American voting public. According to the AFL-CIO website, 26% of American voters are union members and the AFL-CIO was strongly supporting Barack Obama for president. Unions that will especially benefit from Obama's spending plans include 1.4 million members of AFSCME, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, over 1 million members of the United Auto Workers, and the 1.4 million members of the American Federation of Teachers.

These beneficiaries will vote for increasing government since they benefit directly. By creating more beneficiaries of big government, Obama can create a sustainable majority voting block who will vote to raise other people's taxes. During 2006, Tax Foundation economists estimate that roughly 43.4 million tax returns, representing 91 million individuals, will face a zero or negative tax liability. That's out of a total of 136 million federal tax returns that will be filed. Adding to this figure the 15 million households and individuals who file no tax return at all, roughly 121 million Americans-or 41 percent of the U.S. population-will be completely outside the federal income tax system in 2006.
- Source: Tax Foundation

If you think that the forthcoming changes in tax law will only affect wealthiest, you are mistaken. To generate significant increases in tax revenue, the middle class must be hit -- and hard.


When beneficiaries of government policy do not sufficiently overlap the payers of those benefits, we have a governing system of representation without taxation. This type of system is not sustainable long term, but history suggests it may persist for some time under the pretext of ‘economic justice' unless soundly rejected by the American people.

5) Abbas to Quartet: Israel must commit for talks to resume


Palestinian president says Jerusalem must accept agreement signed at Annapolis, freeze settlement activities 'in order to have political negotiations.' Western diplomats: Unlikely scenario

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has made peace talks with Israel's new government conditional on it committing to previous agreements and freezing Jewish settlement growth, aides said on Friday.


Senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Abbas conveyed that message directly to the so-called Quartet of Middle East mediators - the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.


"It was conveyed to the Quartet that Israel must accept the two-state solution and agreements signed, including Annapolis, and freeze settlement activities, in order to have political negotiations. You cannot have political negotiations without that," Erekat said.


If Israel made such a commitment, Erekat added, Abbas would agree to resume the negotiations immediately.


Western diplomats said that seemed unlikely, at least for the time being.


Israel's new Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, has declared invalid statehood talks launched at a US-sponsored conference in Annapolis, Maryland in November 2007. He says peace efforts with the Palestinians have reached a "dead end" and that Israel should focus on other matters.


Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been more vague, saying his priority was to focus on economic and security issues instead of negotiating statehood borders, and the fate of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees.


That could put Netanyahu on a collision course with the administration of US President Barack Obama, who called this week for a Palestinian state alongside Israel as outlined in Annapolis, and said both sides needed to make compromises.


Netanyahu and Lieberman also support settlement growth despite US calls for a freeze.



The Quartet's special envoy, Tony Blair, has urged Netanyahu to resume statehood talks in parallel with a push to boost the West Bank economy and to let Palestinians control more of their territory. Abbas' Western-backed government is based in the West Bank.



Blair also urged Netanyahu to ease Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip, which Hamas Islamists seized in June 2007 after routing forces loyal to Abbas' secular Fatah faction.

6) It's Your Country Too, Mr. President
By Charles Krauthammer

In his major foreign policy address in Prague committing the United States to a world without nuclear weapons, President Obama took note of North Korea's missile launch just hours earlier and then grandiloquently proclaimed:

"Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something. The world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons. Now is the time for a strong international response."

A more fatuous presidential call to arms is hard to conceive. What "strong international response" did Obama muster to North Korea's brazen defiance of a Chapter 7 --"binding," as it were -- U.N. resolution prohibiting such a launch?

The obligatory emergency Security Council session produced nothing. No sanctions. No resolution. Not even a statement. China and Russia professed to find no violation whatsoever. They would not even permit a U.N. statement that dared express "concern," let alone condemnation.

Having thus bravely rallied the international community and summoned the U.N. -- a fiction and a farce, respectively -- what was Obama's further response? The very next day, his defense secretary announced drastic cuts in missile defense, including halting further deployment of Alaska-based interceptors designed precisely to shoot down North Korean ICBMs. Such is the "realism" Obama promised to restore to U.S. foreign policy.

He certainly has a vision. Rather than relying on America's unique technological edge in missile defenses to provide a measure of nuclear safety, Obama will instead boldly deploy the force of example. How? By committing his country to disarmament gestures -- such as, he promised his cheering acolytes in Prague, ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Really, now. How does U.S. ratification of that treaty -- which America has, in any case, voluntarily abided by for 17 years -- cause North Korea to cease and desist, and cause Iran to turn nukes into plowshares?

Obama's other great enthusiasm is renewing disarmament talks with Russia. Good grief. Of all the useless sideshows. Cut each of our arsenals in half and both countries could still, in Churchill's immortal phrase, "make the rubble bounce."

There's little harm in engaging in talks about redundant nukes because there is nothing of consequence at stake. But Obama seems not even to understand that these talks are a gift to the Russians for whom a return to anachronistic Reagan-era START talks is a return to the glory of U.S.-Soviet summitry.

I'm not against gift-giving in international relations. But it would be nice to see some reciprocity. Obama was in a giving mood throughout Europe. While Gordon Brown was trying to make his American DVDs work and the queen was rocking to her new iPod, the rest of Europe was enjoying a more fulsome Obama gift.

Our president came bearing a basketful of mea culpas. With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own people for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness, for genocide, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantanamo and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.

And what did he get for this obsessive denigration of his own country? He wanted more NATO combat troops in Afghanistan to match the surge of 17,000 Americans. He was rudely rebuffed.

He wanted more stimulus spending from Europe. He got nothing.

From Russia, he got no help on Iran. From China, he got the blocking of any action on North Korea.

And what did he get for Guantanamo? France, pop. 64 million, will take one prisoner. One! (Sadly, he'll have to leave his swim buddy behind.) The Austrians said they would take none. As Interior Minister Maria Fekter explained with impeccable Germanic logic, if they're not dangerous, why not just keep them in America?

When Austria is mocking you, you're having a bad week. Yet who can blame Frau Fekter, considering the disdain Obama showed his own country while on foreign soil, acting the philosopher-king who hovers above the fray mediating between his renegade homeland and an otherwise warm and welcoming world?

After all, it was Obama, not some envious anti-American leader, who noted with satisfaction that a new financial order is being created today by 20 countries, rather than by "just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy." And then added: "But that's not the world we live in, and it shouldn't be the world that we live in."

It is passing strange for a world leader to celebrate his own country's decline. A few more such overseas tours, and Obama will have a lot more decline to celebrate.

7) Obama Administration Stifles Favorable DC Voucher Study
By Deroy Murdock

Despite being “a skeptic of vouchers,” candidate Barack Obama promised this would not prevent him from “making sure that our kids can learn.” As he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, “You do what works for the kids.”

Last January 21, his first full day in office, President Obama declared, “My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.”

Just 10 weeks later, Obama has broken both these promises. And poor-but-promising minority kids suffer the consequences.

These 1,714 children -- 90 percent black and 9 percent Hispanic -- enjoy the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program. They each receive up to $7,500 for private or parochial schools outside Washington, D.C.’s dismal government-education system. Since its 2004 launch, 7,852 students have applied for these grants, or more than four children per voucher.

This program’s popularity notwithstanding, Obama stayed silent as Congress scheduled this initiative’s demise after the 2009 -- 2010 academic year. Both a Democratic Congress and DC authorities must reauthorize the program -- not likely.

Now it emerges that Obama’s Department of Education (DOE) possessed peer-reviewed, Congressionally mandated, research proving this program’s success. Though it demonstrates “what works for the kids,” DOE hid this study until Congress squelched these children’s dreams.

This analysis compared voucher users’ test scores to those of students who requested vouchers but lost the award lottery. Among DOE’s results:

*While they were no better at math, voucher recipients read 3.7 months ahead of non-voucher students.

*Student subgroups -- including high achievers, those from functional schools, and applicants between Kindergarten and grade 8 -- showed “1/3 to 2 years of additional learning growth.”

*While 63 percent of non-voucher parents gave their kids’ schools As or Bs, 74 percent of voucher parents so rated their children’s campuses.

This good news remained concealed, from the study’s conclusion last fall, through March’s Congressional debate, until April 3, when DOE finally released this report. That was a Friday afternoon, precisely when news whisperers issue stories they want journalists to miss in the mad dash for the weekend and citizens to overlook as Saturday’s papers vanish beneath ski equipment, movie tickets, and pitchers of beer.

Worse yet, DOE researchers reportedly were forbidden to publicize or discuss their findings. “You’d think we were talking about nuclear secrets, not about a taxpayer-funded pilot program,” the April 5 Wall Street Journal editorialized.

For Team Obama, this is transparency we can believe in.

One expects better from Obama who won a scholarship at age 10 to attend Hawaii’s prestigious, private Punahou school. “There was something about this school that embraced me, gave me support and encouragement, and allowed me to grow and prosper,” Obama has said.

DC voucher recipients want such life chances. If you want to bawl like a baby, visit VoicesOfSchoolChoice.org and watch the Internet’s most inspirational and simultaneously heartbreaking video.

“In my old public school, people screamed at the teacher, walked out of school during class, hurt me, and made fun of all my friends,” says Paul, age 11, imploring Obama to keep hope alive. “I love going to school, where I can learn and be safe,” says Breanna, 9. “I want to go to Morehouse College, like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” says De’Andre, 9. “I am going to grow up and be a good man.”

With young black kids themselves begging for vouchers, why would reputedly pro-poor, pro-black Democrats kill this popular and effective school-choice program?

Follow the money: Teachers’ unions’ paid $55,794,440 in political donations between 1990 and 2008, 96 percent of it to Democrats. Senator John Ensign’s (R ��" Nevada) March 10 amendment to rescue DC’s vouchers failed 39-58. Among 57 Democrats voting, 54 (or 95 percent) opposed DC vouchers.

As the late Albert Shanker, former American Federation of Teachers president, once said: “When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.”

When poor, black school kids start making political donations, Democratic politicians will start fighting for them.

Deroy Murdock is a New York-based columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution.

8) ANTI-PIRACY 101:FIRST: LOSE THE LAWYERS
By Arthur Herman


THE seizure of the Maersk Alabama and her American crew of 21 by pirates on Tuesday may finally be the wake-up call we need to deal with the ongoing piracy threat in the waters off Somalia.

To their everlasting credit, the Americans on board saved the Obama administration from its version of Jimmy Carter's Iran hostage crisis by turning the tables on their captors and taking back their ship. Can we hope that the US government will finally be as decisive -- and truly act against this growing threat to world trade?

The pirates prey at the Horn of Africa, by the convergence of two crucial highways of international sea-going traffic, the Suez Canal and the Cape of Good Hope. In this world recession, keeping those sea lanes open is more imperative than ever.

But only the US government can do the job: No one else has the force and will to apply the lessons in dealing with pirates taught by those past masters of enforcing law and order on the high seas, the British Navy.

Beginning in the mid-17th century, the Royal Navy cleared the world's oceans of pirates from the Caribbean to the Philippines, virtually single-handed. (The famed US attacks on "the shores of Tripoli" didn't stop the piracy; it took the Royal Navy to smash Algiers and finish the job.)

Before we can see any serious change in today's piracy situation, our diplomats and politicians need to assimilate the lessons the British learned then.

Don't leave it to the lawyers: There has been far too much talk about whether the Law of the Sea Treaty or the Geneva Convention can apply to pirates, or whether we need to call an international conference to study the problem, or how we can bring "the world community together." This is what happens when lawyers get involved in crises.

The British in the 1800s loved international agreements as much as any civilized nation. But they also knew that the best treaties -- like the one signed in Paris in 1856, which formally banned government-sponsored piracy and established the freedom of the seas -- came after the Royal Navy had done the fighting and the smoke was cleared, not before.

First stamp out the pirate bases; then talk.

Arm the crews: Every British merchantman that sailed in international waters in the 1700s and early 1800s carried cannon and crews trained to use them.

Today's merchant ships don't need Tomahawk missiles to protect themselves from pirates or terrorists. The crew of Maersk Alabama had no guns, yet still managed to wrest control away from their attackers. If they'd been carrying a couple of M-16s or even a mounted 50-caliber machine gun, the attackers in their flimsy boats would've never gotten close.

Crews of cargo vessels that enter Somali waters need to be trained to fight back (reports are that the crew and captain of Maersk Alabama all had anti-terrorist and anti-piracy training). If they need to shoot, let 'em shoot. If we have to bring in lawyers to alter international treaties, let them be changed to protect our ships and crews, not those who attack them.

Sea patrols can't do it alone: Even with helicopters and today's gas-turbine-driven warships, the distances are too great and the reaction times too short to allow even an enhanced naval presence to keep the peace.

Right now, an international combined task force patrols these waters, with more American, British, Indian and other nations' warships than ever. They still couldn't prevent pirates from taking Maersk Alabama or five other ships this week.

The Royal Navy knew that pirates could only be beaten from the land. It relied on the Royal Marines and Naval Brigades to land and wipe out the bases, and then to compel local governments to enforce the laws and keep their coastlines safe, if only to avoid being attacked again.

The problem in Somalia is the same as what the British faced in the Caribbean in the 17th century: that of a failed state that has descended into anarchy. In the Caribbean, the British simply picked out one of the pirates, Henry Morgan, and made him royal governor -- empowering him to destroy his erstwhile pals.

In the case of the Barbary pirates and the headhunting raiders who preyed on shipping around Borneo in the mid-19th century until the British Navy took them on, it required European colonial rule to finally stamp out the pirate scourge.

In Somalia, the options aren't so simple. But the first step will still have to be decisive military action. In today's world, that means the Marines, backed by an Amphibious Readiness Group of navy ships and landing craft.

Don't cut the navy: The British Navy was able to enforce the laws of the sea because it maintained a tradition of remaining superior to the next two largest navies combined. Then the US Navy took over that role, keeping the sea lanes free and clear.

Today, the Obama administration's plans for cutting the Navy defense budget may bring that essential role under threat.

Yes, for now the Pentagon will keep funding the Littoral Combat Ship, which is virtually designed for dealing with pirates or sea-going terrorists. But allowing the number of our carriers to shrink to 10 (when 15 is the minimum needed to secure the high seas) and slowing the program to update the Burke-class destroyers won't help our fleet to do its international job in the future.

For today's pirate problem, however, we have the tools to do the job. All we need is the will. The Obama administration claims it wants to restore the world community's respect and gratitude for the United States. Taking on the Somali pirates would be an important way to start.

Arthur Herman writes frequently on military matters and is the author of "To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World."