If Obama Is Not Scary Then Maybe I am Paranoic!

Populism carries a blow back feature and the way Obama lectured the Supreme Court Justice invitees at his State of The Union evening tells an awful lot about this paranoiac president.

At the very least his conduct evidenced boorish, churlish behaviour and for a Law Professor a total lack of knowledge of the decision. One does not scold seated guests who cannot respond. At the extreme and carrying it a step further, and with Obama you can because it is repeated part of his behaviour pattern, his conduct suggests a pathological fear of those with whom he disagrees or of those who disagree with his own ideology.

I have written time and again about Obama the 'Pinata president.' His State of The Union Address was rife with instances of a puerile need to attack his many 'theoretical'enemies. Obama is no healer though he would have us believe his words imply he is.

Obama is a divider and appears conquered by his own self-doubts - by an inner sense he is out of his element, way beyond his ability to cope with the awesome responsibilities demanded by the office. Mr. Cool seems to be cracking.

Frankly, I no longer see Obama as a youthful inexperienced person whose on the job training has led to some mistakes one could term - minor peccadillo's. I believe Obama is dangerous and his reactions downright scary much less his policies.

Maybe I am the one who is paranoid! (See 1, 2, 3 and 4 below.)

If one turns to the substance of Obama's speech it gets even more pathetic. Such addresses should be used as an opportunity to sketch broad themes the administration hopes to accomplish and to explain the state of the nation's economic and mental health.

This speech did more to reveal the president's overall state of health and it is not looking good.

Not only did Obama spend a great deal of time inveigling but he also ended by attacking the very ones he sought to cajole. But why stop there? He had the misplaced need to also blame everyone else for his own mistakes and inability to get any legislation passed. He rambled for well over an hour in a disconnected un-thematic way that left me confused as to any clear focus.

I hope and pray the nations is strong enough to withstand more of what we have been experiencing.

Another retreat coming down the pike will be the way the civil trials of terrorists will be conducted. (See 5 below.)

And then there is Iran and its nuclear development.

POGO Was Right - WOE IS US! (See 6 below.)

Our involvement in Yemen is expanding by jiminy! (See 7 below.)

Israel being 'ham' strung of all things. (See 8 below.)

According to Caroline Glick, enlightened nations are taking a "Starbuck" break. (See 9 below.)

Dick


1)Bonfire of the Populists: The president's anti-Wall Street rhetoric is not good for the economy, and may hurt his party politically.
By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

The problem with fires is that they can blow in any direction. Consider the White House, which is seeing a backdraft from the anti-Wall-Street flame it has been dousing with gasoline.

His agenda on the ropes, President Obama made a calculated decision to pivot to populism. The Massachusetts Senate race highlighted a fed-up public. The White House strategy: Channel that anger away from itself and to easier targets. Its opening shots were a new tax on banks, new restrictions on banking activities, and Mr. Obama roaring, "We want our money back!"

The president fed the fire with his State of the Union address. Americans are angry at "bad behavior on Wall Street." It is time to "slash the tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas." Lobbyists are trying to "kill" financial regulation. American "cynicism" is the result of "selfish" bankers, CEOs who "reward" themselves "for failure" and lobbyists who "game the system." (No mention of Cornhusker Kickbacks or backroom union deals, but never mind.)

For an administration that claims to know its political history, the White House appears to have misread at least one decade. FDR was re-elected in 1936 for many reasons, but among them was his fiery denunciations of "economic royalists," "economic tyranny," and "economic slavery." Business knew it was in the president's crosshairs and put its capital on strike. The economy didn't recover until the war.

Team Obama is already witnessing a repeat. The U.S. economy ought to be flying out of recession. Yet bank lending is sluggish. Companies refuse to hire. Business is going elsewhere to raise capital: China last year outstripped the U.S. as a center for initial public offerings. The market gyrates on Washington's latest political drama.

A venture capitalist recently remarked to me that the uncertainty the administration has created is "nothing short of paralyzing." Nobody will invest in an industry that might be the next to be overtaxed, overregulated, or publicly disemboweled.

Add to that uncertainty the administration's new populist bent, and it's a recipe for a continued capital freeze. "People in the economy are thinking about whether to invest or take risks when what they are seeing are early signs of Hugo Chávez economics," says Wisconsin GOP Rep. Paul Ryan. With the White House's political fortunes fundamentally tied to economic recovery, this populist fire is an act of self-immolation.

The blowback is already hobbling the White House's own economic team. Senate Democrats, following presidential example, have been newly eager to skewer their own "symbol" of Wall Street. The nearest to hand happened to be Mr. Obama's own Fed chief, Ben Bernanke. Majority Leader Harry Reid spent two weeks putting down a reconfirmation revolt, helping save Mr. Obama from his own antibank rhetoric.

In the House, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was meanwhile called to answer questions about AIG disclosure and counterparties. He left accused by Democrat Edolphus Towns of aiding Wall Street banks in "looting the corpse" of the insurer. Talk about a populist liability. The two men survive only as damaged goods, more susceptible to congressional pressure, less able to make tough decisions. And should Mr. Obama cut Mr. Geithner loose, the White House's tough talk narrows the pool of experienced hands it can nominate as replacements.

Policy-wise, too, the administration is boxing itself in. In keeping with the populist swerve, a feisty Mr. Obama this week upped the ante on financial regulation, warning Congress he'd veto anything less than "real reform." Yet it is precisely a stick-it-to-them bill that will have the most trouble passing a frayed Congress in an election year. And heaven help the administration if there is another financial meltdown, one that truly poses systemic risk. Could this White House dare write another bailout check to "Wall Street"?

And for what? The administration made the mistake of leaking that its new strategy was pure politics, designed to re-energize the public and put Republicans on defense. That somewhat robbed it of its authenticity. Americans have also watched this White House prop up moribund auto makers, float Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and cut deals with pharmaceutical companies. The bank war appears a bit disingenuous. The country's growing investor class is not impressed by the sort of business mau-mauing that pummels their 401(k)s.

As for those Republicans, they are hardly cowering in fear. They watched Scott Brown bat away the president's bank tax, explaining it would be passed on to consumers and hurt lending. His victory suggested the public is open to free-market explanations, and the GOP is feeling more emboldened to make them.

Not all populism is bad. There is indeed an anti-establishment anger in the nation. But the majority of it is directed at a Washington that is foisting an unpopular agenda on the country, and at the cavalier treatment of the free market that creates jobs. The president might try tapping into that.

2) Reactions split on Obama's remark, Alito's response at State of the Uniion: Another look at the Obama-Alito flap
By Robert Barnes


President Obama called out the Supreme Court. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. winced at the accusation and muttered, "Not true." And then official Washington and the legal community went to the tape, and examined it frame by frame.

What they saw -- either a president gratuitously criticizing the silent black-robed justices sitting in front of him or a conservative jurist injudiciously reacting to a man who had voted against his confirmation -- depended on from where they started.

"Rude," Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said of the president. "Inappropriate" was the verdict on Alito from Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.).

And legal experts said they had never seen anything quite like it, a rare and unvarnished showdown between two political branches during what is usually the careful choreography of the State of the Union address.

"I can't ever recall a president taking a swipe at the Supreme Court like that," said Lucas A. Powe Jr., a Supreme Court expert at the University of Texas law school. The closest precedent most could find was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's criticism of the court in his 1937 address to Congress.

Roll Wednesday night's tape.

Obama was near the end of his speech when he turned his attention to the court's decision last week in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The ruling overturned two precedents and left corporations free to use their profits to support or oppose political candidates.

"With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that, I believe, will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections," Obama said.

"I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests or, worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people. And I urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps correct some of these problems."

Democratic lawmakers and Obama Cabinet members, surrounding the six of nine justices who turned out for the event, stood and applauded.

The justices, in the front and second rows of the House chamber, sat motionless and expressionless. Except for Alito.

"Not true, not true," he appeared to say (other lip readers think he said, "That's not true") as he shook his head and furrowed his brow. It is unclear what part of Obama's statement he was objecting to, although he started shaking his head after the president said "special interests."

3).The Obama Contradiction: Washington is sick and broken—and it can solve all our problems.
By PEGGY NOONAN

When you watch a president give a State of the Union Address on television, you're always watching three people: the president at the podium, and the vice president and House speaker on the rise behind him. As a TV shot it's awkward. The vice president and the speaker have been instructed by media professionals not to let their eyes do what they want to do, which is survey the doings in the chamber. Instead they must stare unwaveringly at the back of the president's head. This is so that they appear to be fascinated by what he's saying, as if he's so interesting that they can't take their eyes off him. It's also so that you, the viewer, don't become distracted by wondering whom they're looking at in the audience.

It's uncomfortable for them, and boring. You, as a member of the TV audience, get to watch the president. The speaker and the vice president get to think, "Huh, he's getting a little gray in the back." The reason Nancy Pelosi often seems a little dart-eyed in these circumstances is that she's always trying to get a look at the chamber when she thinks the camera isn't on her. Joe Biden seems happy to be the fascinated person with crinkly eyes and shining teeth. But for Mrs. Pelosi it's a challenge. This is her chamber, all her people are here, and she wants to be looking at John Boehner's face and Harry Reid's and see who's cheering and who's wearing what.

But the three-shot the other night was also the president's problem. It underscored that he gave the first year of his presidency to the Democrats of Congress, that they wrote the costly and unpopular health-care and spending bills.

James Baker, that shrewd and knowing man, never, as Ronald Reagan's chief of staff, allowed his president to muck about with congressmen, including those of his own party. A president has stature and must be held apart from Congress critters. He can meet with them privately, in the Oval Office. There, once, a Republican senator who'd announced opposition to a bill important to the president tried to claim his overall loyalty: "Mr. President, you know I'd jump out of a plane for you if you asked, but—"

"Jump," said Reagan. The senator, caught, gave in.

That's how you treat them. You don't let them blur your picture and make you more common. You don't let them call the big shots.

***
President Obama's speech was not a pivot, a lunge or a plunge. It was a little of this and a little of that, a groping toward a place where the president might successfully stand. It was well written and performed with élan. The president will get some bounce from it, and the bounce will go away. Speeches are not magic, and this one did not rescue him from his political predicament, but it did allow him to live to fight another day. In that narrow way it was a success. But divisions may already have hardened. In our current media and political environment, it is a terrible thing to make a bad impression in your first year.

There were strong moments. Of what he frankly called the "bank bailout," he observed: "I hated it. You hated it." His unfancy language was always the most interesting: "We don't quit. I don't quit." The president conceded, with striking brevity, having made mistakes, but defensively misstated the criticism that had been leveled his way. He said he was accused of being "too ambitious." In fact he'd been accused of being off point, unresponsive and ideological.

They've chosen a phrase for the president's program. They call it the "New Foundation." They sneaked it in rather tentatively, probably not sure it would take off. It won't. Such labels work when they clearly capture something that is already clear. "The New Deal" captured FDR's historic shift to an increased governmental presence in individual American lives. It was a new deal. "The New Frontier"—we are a young and vibrant nation still, and adventures await us in space and elsewhere. It was a mood, not a program, but a mood well captured.

"The New Foundation" is solid and workmanlike, but it attempts to put form and order to a governing philosophy that is still too herky-jerky to be summed up.

The central fact of the speech was the contradiction at its heart. It repeatedly asserted that Washington is the answer to everything. At the same time it painted a picture of Washington as a sick and broken place. It was a speech that argued against itself: You need us to heal you. Don't trust us, we think of no one but ourselves.

The people are good but need guidance—from Washington. The middle class is anxious, and its fears can be soothed—by Washington. Washington can "make sure consumers . . . have the information they need to make financial decisions." Washington must "make investments," "create" jobs, increase "production" and "efficiency."

At the same time Washington is a place "where every day is Election Day," where all is a "perpetual campaign" and the great sport is to "embarrass your opponents" and lob "schoolyard taunts."

Why would anyone have faith in that thing to help anyone do anything?

The president did not speak of health care until a half hour in. "As temperatures cool, I want everyone to take another look at the plan we've proposed." Then, "If anyone has a better idea, let me know." Those bland little sentences hidden in plain sight heralded an epic fact: The battle over the president's health-care plan is over, and the plan will not be imposed on the country. Waxing boring on the virtues of the bill was a rhetorical way to obscure the fact that it is dead. To say, "I'm licked and it's done" would have been damagingly memorable. Instead he blithely vowed to move forward, and moved on. The bill will now get lost in the mists and disappear. It is a collapsed soufflé in an unused kitchen in the back of an empty house. Now and then the president will speak of it to rouse his base and remind them of his efforts.

As the TV cameras panned the chamber, I saw a friendly acquaintance of the president, a Republican who bears him no animus. Why, I asked him later, did the president not move decisively to the political center?

Because he is more "intellectually honest" than that, he said. "I don't think he can do a Bill Clinton pivot, because he's not a pragmatist, he's an ideologue. He's a community organizer. He mixes the discrimination he felt as a young man with the hardship so many feel in this country, and he wants to change it and the way to change that is government programs and not opportunity."

The great issue, this friendly critic added, is debt. The public knows this; Congress and the White House do not. "To me the Republicans are as rotten as the Democrats" in terms of spending. "Almost."

"I hope we have big changes in 2010," the friend said. Only significant loss will force the president to focus on spending. "To heal our country we need to get the arrogance out of the White House and the elitists out of the Congress. We need tough love. We need a real adult in the White House because we don't have adults in the Congress."

4)Doubts grow over Obama's stalled leadership.
By Tim Reid, From: "The Australian"

HOURS after he used his first State of the Union address to criticise Congress for putting politics above the plight of ordinary Americans, President Obama took to the road yesterday to proclaim his new message of job creation.

He travelled to Florida to announce $US8 billion for a new nationwide network of high-speed railways - a project the White House claimed would create tens of thousands of new jobs - after scolding Republicans for thwarting his agenda and imploring Democrats to stiffen their resolve.

The State of the Union address came as Mr Obama seeks to relaunch his stalled presidency. Yet rather than retreat from his ambitious agenda - one that has been soundly rejected by voters - he vowed to pursue it, leaving some Democrats worried that it was a speech of political folly rather than one of Churchillian defiance.

The 71-minute address was consumed by the themes of jobs and the economy, after election defeats in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts demonstrated voter anger at Mr Obama's focus in the past year on health reform. He vowed to put millions back to work, and struck a far more populist tone, casting himself as a fighter for suffering Americans.

"Jobs must be our number one focus in 2010," he said. "People are out of work. They are hurting. They need our help."

Snap polls showed that a majority of voters approved of the speech, but Democratic strategists conceded that only if unemployment drops significantly from its current level of 10 per cent will Mr Obama's problems ease.

Having expended an enormous amount of time and political goodwill on his still fruitless drive to provide universal healthcare, Mr Obama conceded that there had been setbacks in the past 12 months.

When he first addressed a joint session of Congress after taking office, Mr Obama's approval rating was 70 per cent and his aides believed that within a year he would have passed historic health reform, financial regulation and energy legislation, shut Guantanamo Bay and reduced unemployment to below 8 per cent.

None of that has occurred and after losing the late Edward Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat last week, Mr Obama faced a Congress and American public far more hostile to his policies and sceptical about his ability to govern effectively. Acknowledging that new reality, Mr Obama laid down the gauntlet to both parties.

He first chided his fellow Democrats, who are bracing themselves for big losses in this November's midterm congressional elections, and who, because of the Massachusetts defeat, lost their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, which threatens to thwart his entire domestic agenda.

"I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve problems, not run for the hills," Mr Obama said, looking down on his own party.

Then to stony-faced Republicans, who have run a remarkably successful obstructionist agenda and spent much of the night sitting on their hands, he declared: "Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics but it's not leadership." Trying to recapture some of the anti-Washington sentiment and populist anger that propelled him into office, he laced the speech with criticism of the city's political culture and Wall Street greed.

He said that he hated the Government's bailout of Wall Street banks - although he insisted that it had been necessary. He also conceded: "I campaigned on the promise of change, and I know there are many Americans who aren't sure if they still believe we can change or that I can deliver it."

Mr Obama vowed to keep pursuing health reform and energy legislation, but gave no new strategies of how to overcome the political gridlock that has stalled his agenda.

He urged politicians to "take another look" at the health issue, once temperatures had cooled. In his most defiant line of the night, he declared: "We don't quit. I don't quit."

Republicans showed no interest in co-operating. Bob McDonnell, the new Republican Governor of Virginia, summed up the opinions of many voters who are dismayed by the exploding deficit: "The federal Government is trying to do too much."

The Senate yesterday voted 60 to 40, along party lines, to allow the Government's borrowing to expand by $US1.9 trillion to $US14.3 trillion. The Government spent a record $US1.4 trillion more than it collected in the last fiscal year, and a similar sized deficit is expected in the current fiscal year which ends on September 30.

John Boehner, the senior Republican in the House, said: "The American people were looking for President Obama to change course tonight, and they got more of the same job-killing policies instead."

Mr Obama offered little in the way of new policies. He proposed plans to provide small businesses with tax breaks and better access to bank loans. He called for construction of new nuclear power plants and new offshore oil drilling, policies welcomed by Republicans and which could help the President to pass legislation designed to limit carbon emissions.


5)The Real Detainee Scandal
By Charles Krauthammer

The real scandal surrounding the failed Christmas Day airline bombing was not the fact that a terrorist got on a plane -- that can happen to any administration, as it surely did to the Bush administration -- but what happened afterward when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was captured and came under the full control of the U.S. government.

After 50 minutes of questioning him, the Obama administration chose, reflexively and mindlessly, to give the chatty terrorist the right to remain silent. Which he immediately did, undoubtedly denying us crucial information about al-Qaeda in Yemen, which had trained, armed and dispatched him.

We have since learned that the decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab had been made without the knowledge of or consultation with (1) the secretary of defense, (2) the secretary of homeland security, (3) the director of the FBI, (4) the director of the National Counterterrorism Center or (5) the director of national intelligence (DNI).

The Justice Department acted not just unilaterally but unaccountably. Obama's own DNI said that Abdulmutallab should have been interrogated by the HIG, the administration's new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.

Perhaps you hadn't heard the term. Well, in the very first week of his presidency, Obama abolished by executive order the Bush-Cheney interrogation procedures and pledged to study a substitute mechanism. In August, the administration announced the establishment of the HIG, housed in the FBI but overseen by the National Security Council.

Where was it during the Abdulmutallab case? Not available, admitted National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, because it had only been conceived for use abroad. Had not one person in this vast administration of highly nuanced sophisticates considered the possibility of a terror attack on American soil?

It gets worse. Blair later had to explain that the HIG was not deployed because it does not yet exist. After a year! I suppose this administration was so busy deploying scores of the country's best lawyerly minds on finding the most rapid way to release Gitmo miscreants that it could not be bothered to establish a single operational HIG team to interrogate at-large miscreants with actionable intelligence that might save American lives.

Travesties of this magnitude are not lost on the American people. One of the reasons Scott Brown won in Massachusetts was his focus on the Mirandizing of Abdulmutallab.

Of course, this case is just a reflection of a larger problem: an administration that insists on treating Islamist terrorism as a law-enforcement issue. Which is why the Justice Department's other egregious terror decision, granting Khalid Sheik Mohammed a civilian trial in New York, is now the subject of a letter from six senators -- three Republicans, two Democrats and Joe Lieberman -- asking Attorney General Eric Holder to reverse the decision.

Lieberman and Sen. Susan Collins had written an earlier letter asking for Abdulmutallab to be turned over to the military for renewed interrogation. The problem is, it's hard to see how that decision gets reversed. Once you've read a man Miranda rights, what do you say? We are idiots? On second thought ...

Hence the agitation over the KSM trial. This one can be reversed and it's a good surrogate for this administration's insistence upon criminalizing -- and therefore trivializing -- a war on terror that has now struck three times in one year within the United States, twice with effect (the Arkansas killer and the Fort Hood shooter) and once with a shockingly near miss (Abdulmutallab).

On the KSM civilian trial, sentiment is widespread that it is quite insane to spend $200 million a year to give the killer of 3,000 innocents the largest propaganda platform on earth, while at the same time granting civilian rights of cross-examination and discovery that risk betraying U.S. intelligence sources and methods.

Accordingly, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. Frank Wolf have gone beyond appeals to the administration and are planning to introduce a bill to block funding for the trial. It's an important measure. It makes flesh an otherwise abstract issue -- should terrorists be treated as enemy combatants or criminal defendants? The vote will force members of Congress to declare themselves. There will be no hiding from the question.

Congress may not be able to roll back the Abdulmutallab travesty. But there will be future Abdulmutallabs. By cutting off funding for the KSM trial, Congress can send Obama a clear message: The Constitution is neither a safety net for illegal enemy combatants nor a suicide pact for us.



6)March of the Peacocks
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Last week, the Center for American Progress, a think tank with close ties to the Obama administration, published an acerbic essay about the difference between true deficit hawks and showy “deficit peacocks.” You can identify deficit peacocks, readers were told, by the way they pretend that our budget problems can be solved with gimmicks like a temporary freeze in nondefense discretionary spending.

One week later, in the State of the Union address, President Obama proposed a temporary freeze in nondefense discretionary spending.

Wait, it gets worse. To justify the freeze, Mr. Obama used language that was almost identical to widely ridiculed remarks early last year by John Boehner, the House minority leader. Boehner then: “American families are tightening their belt, but they don’t see government tightening its belt.” Obama now: “Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.”

What’s going on here? The answer, presumably, is that Mr. Obama’s advisers believed he could score some political points by doing the deficit-peacock strut. I think they were wrong, that he did himself more harm than good. Either way, however, the fact that anyone thought such a dumb policy idea was politically smart is bad news because it’s an indication of the extent to which we’re failing to come to grips with our economic and fiscal problems.

The nature of America’s troubles is easy to state. We’re in the aftermath of a severe financial crisis, which has led to mass job destruction. The only thing that’s keeping us from sliding into a second Great Depression is deficit spending. And right now we need more of that deficit spending because millions of American lives are being blighted by high unemployment, and the government should be doing everything it can to bring unemployment down.

In the long run, however, even the U.S. government has to pay its way. And the long-run budget outlook was dire even before the recent surge in the deficit, mainly because of inexorably rising health care costs. Looking ahead, we’re going to have to find a way to run smaller, not larger, deficits.

How can this apparent conflict between short-run needs and long-run responsibilities be resolved? Intellectually, it’s not hard at all. We should combine actions that create jobs now with other actions that will reduce deficits later. And economic officials in the Obama administration understand that logic: for the past year they have been very clear that their vision involves combining fiscal stimulus to help the economy now with health care reform to help the budget later.

The sad truth, however, is that our political system doesn’t seem capable of doing what’s necessary.

On jobs, it’s now clear that the Obama stimulus wasn’t nearly big enough. No need now to resolve the question of whether the administration should or could have sought a bigger package early last year. Either way, the point is that the boost from the stimulus will start to fade out in around six months, yet we’re still facing years of mass unemployment. The latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office say that the average unemployment rate next year will be only slightly lower than the current, disastrous, 10 percent.

Yet there is little sentiment in Congress for any major new job-creation efforts.

Meanwhile, health care reform faces a troubled outlook. Congressional Democrats may yet manage to pass a bill; they’ll be committing political suicide if they don’t. But there’s no question that Republicans were very successful at demonizing the plan. And, crucially, what they demonized most effectively were the cost-control efforts: modest, totally reasonable measures to ensure that Medicare dollars are spent wisely became evil “death panels.”

So if health reform fails, you can forget about any serious effort to rein in rising Medicare costs. And even if it succeeds, many politicians will have learned a hard lesson: you don’t get any credit for doing the fiscally responsible thing. It’s better, for the sake of your career, to just pretend that you’re fiscally responsible — that is, to be a deficit peacock.

So we’re paralyzed in the face of mass unemployment and out-of-control health care costs. Don’t blame Mr. Obama. There’s only so much one man can do, even if he sits in the White House. Blame our political culture instead, a culture that rewards hypocrisy and irresponsibility rather than serious efforts to solve America’s problems. And blame the filibuster, under which 41 senators can make the country ungovernable, if they choose — and they have so chosen.

I’m sorry to say this, but the state of the union — not the speech, but the thing itself — isn’t looking very good.

7)CIA chief Panetta in Cairo and Israel for secret talks on Yemen

CIA chief Leon PanettaThe director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, paid secret visits to Cairo and Jerusalem Thursday, Jan. 28, to prepare the ground for expanding US military intervention in Yemen against al Qaeda strongholds, thereby opening a fresh front in the war on Islamist terror organization.

In Cairo, he met Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, defense minister Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi and intelligence minister Gen. Omar Suleiman. They discussed an Egyptian expeditionary force for Yemen to fight al Qaeda combatants alongside US special forces. Panetta requested for the use of Egyptian military airfields as jumping-off bases for US air strikes against the terrorist strongholds.
In Jerusalem, the CIA chief exchanged evaluations on the Yemen front with Israel's intelligence leaders.

Intelligence sources report American military intervention in Yemen is already substantially broader than admitted. US special operations members of the CIA's combat units and drones armed with missiles, operated from Langley, Washington, are already installed at a big American base under construction near the Yemeni Red Sea port of Hodeira.

President Barack Obama resolved to expand America's involvement in Yemen after local and Saudi armies proved unequal to dealing with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula - the AQAP.


8)The negative wave: Israel’s ability to cope with enemies becoming increasingly constrained
Danny Rothschild


Countless words have been written summing up the past decade and even more so written about the decade to come. Close examination of geostrategic trends does not leave much room for optimism. The farther into the horizon one focuses, the greater the threats and optimism declines.


The Israeli architects of the coming decade will have to cope with the impending and ever intensifying negative wave. An examination of Israel’s national strength on the commencement of the new decade indicates a decline in most of its key elements.


Israel is facing growing international pressure. Although the official attitude of the industrialized countries has not changed, they have adopted a de facto active policy toward realizing their interests. The US, Israel’s closest strategic ally, is leading a policy aimed at balancing between its growing need to forge an alliance with the moderate Arab countries and its traditional support of the Jewish state.


The range of threats against Israel is also growing. Our ability to cope in a creative and independent way with those who seek to harm us is becoming more and more constrained. Between the balance of international interests and division of the declining global economic resources Israel’s position is getting ever less favorable.


In a realistic analysis of the geopolitical situation our weakness stands out in the light of the inferiority of our moral ground. International understanding towards Israel’s need to cope with Islamic terrorism is eroded in the face of the distorted propaganda forwarded by terrorist organizations. The growing hold of terrorist organizations in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip where they entrench themselves among civilian populations makes conventional military responses difficult.


The military balance that is so vital to the survival of Israel in light of strategic threats becomes a liability in an incessant confrontation with the tactical dimension of Palestinian terrorism.


Renaissance revolution needed
Despite the threats and challenges, Israel has not learned to handle the weakness of body and soul from within that makes it hard to take advantage of opportunities and realize them. Our system of governance is ill and malignant. The result is that Israel lacks a national strategy, and in the rare cases where there is a constant policy, it is almost impossible to implement it due to our weakness in imposing strategic discipline.


An ostensibly stable government is purchasing a defensive margin in the opposition because it is not confident of its governing majority. The size of the government and the number of portfolio holders do not reduce the threat of losing its ability to govern.

The State of Israel in the second decade of the 21st century had not yet decided about its nature, character and values. It continues to go from one crisis to the next; between fighting an existential threat and coalition pressures; emergency tax on water and hasty purchase of flue vaccinations. The national educational system does not enjoy the preference it should have had; a smaller part of the population fulfill their civil duty of military and national service although the existential threat has not disappeared; the Jewish essence of the state has not been secured and its democratic nature is too often being tested.


Zionism is an activist movement. Its power resides in changing reality rather than being the captive of the existing situation. The Zionist movement must find the strength to look at Israel internally. In light of this challenge, it must generate a deep Renaissance revolution. Only the crystallization of true principles that express the boundaries of agreement and compromise within the Zionist majority would secure the survival of the Jewish state and renew the ethos that is so badly needed for the people of Israel in the 21st century.


Maj. Gen (res.) Danny Rothschild, Director of the Institute for Policy and Strategy, Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya and Chairman of the Herzliya Conference Series

8)Enlightened nations of the world are on a coffee-break from enlightenment

By Caroline B. Glick


"Never again!"

So declared Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu as he spoke at Auschwitz-Birkenau on Wednesday, the 65th anniversary of its liberation.

Netanyahu used his speech at the notorious death camp to nudge what he referred to as "the enlightened nations of the world," to recognize that "murderous evil" has to be stopped as early as possible to prevent it from achieving its aims. Unfortunately, the events of the past week show clearly that evil is on the march, and "the enlightened nations of the world" are on a coffee-break from enlightenment.

As Netanyahu addressed the world from the site of the most prolific genocide factory in human history, at the place where over a million Jews were gassed, starved, beaten, raped, frozen, shot and hanged and then burned in ovens, Iran's leaders were declaring loudly that they intend to finish what the Nazis started. They will destroy the Jewish people.

Iran's dictator supremo Ali Khamenei used a photo op with Mauritania's President Mohammed Ould Abdel Aziz — who cut his own country's diplomatic ties with Israel last January -- to renew his pledge to commit yet another Holocaust. As he put it, "Surely, the day will come when the nations of the region will witness the destruction of the Zionist regime… When the destruction happens will depend on how the Islamic nations approach the issue."

And as he spoke, "the enlightened nations of the world's" ability to deny that the Iranian regime is building a nuclear arsenal was finally and utterly wiped away. On Monday Germany's Der Speigel reported that evidence gleaned from document intercepts and from the testimony of two senior Iranian defectors who were involved in Iran's nuclear program, proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Iran's nuclear program is not a peaceful one. The Iranians are designing and building nuclear warheads for their Shihab-3 ballistic missiles. According to a summary of the findings now circulating through the halls of power, Iran will have the wherewithal to build nuclear warheads by 2012.

So the Der Spiegel report showed that Iran is developing the capacity to carry out a second Holocaust in under a hundred years. And yet, in the face of their sure knowledge that evil is on the march, as they did 70 years ago, the "enlightened nations" of Europe are siding with evil against its would-be victims.

On a popular level, as Sunday's release of the Jewish Agency's annual report on global anti-Semitism documented, there were more anti-Semitic attacks in Europe in 2009 than there had been in any single year since the Holocaust. The report stated that the attacks were carried out by Jew haters on both the Left and the Right.

Europe's anti-Semites wasted no time in proving the report was accurate. Monday Polish Catholic Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek said that Jews have "expropriated" the Holocaust as "a propaganda weapon." Jews, he claimed, "enjoy good press because they have powerful financial means behind them, enormous power and the unconditional backing of the United States and this favors a certain arrogance that I find unbearable."

Then we have the political alliance of Leftist anti-Semites with Muslim anti-Semites. Together they not only attack Jews, they provide political cover for expanding those attacks by rejecting Israel's right to exist and justifying violent attacks against Jews outside Israel as the logical outcome of their politically correct anger at Israel for refusing to destroy itself. Case in point is Ilmar Reepalu, the mayor of Malmo, Sweden.

Malmo is one of the most dangerous places for Jews in Europe. The city's small Jewish population is fleeing. The situation in Malmo was graphically demonstrated last March when Israel's tennis stars Amir Haddad and Andy Ram faced off against Swedish rivals at a Davis Cup tournament in Malmo and Swedish authorities closed their game to the public. Malmo's Muslim residents and their post-Christian partners on the Left threatened to attack them. Malmo's authorities didn't think it was their responsibility to protect their Israeli guests. So Haddad and Ram were forced to play to an empty stadium.


Interviewed in a local paper this week about the rise of anti-Semitic attacks in his city, Reepalu blamed Israel. In his view, the violence against Jews in Malmo by the far left and Muslims, "spilled over from Gaza." By his lights the Jewish national liberation movement is just as bad as the Jewish annihilation movement. As he put it, "We accept neither Zionism nor anti-Semitism. They are extremes that place themselves above other groups they think are less important."

Reepalu then blamed Malmo's Jews for their victimization by his fellow Leftists and his Muslim comrades. As far as he is concerned, the Jews brought the violence on themselves last March when they responded to Haddad's and Ram's treatment by holding a demonstration supporting Israel. In his view, Malmo's Jews need to separate themselves away from Israel, not support it.

Since the Holocaust old-style right wing anti-Semites in Europe have had a hard time getting political traction for their desire to see Jews suffer. But by conflating Jews with Israel, their colleagues on the Left have made sticking it to the Jews, our state and our supporters the easiest way to score political points. So it was that in her first speech as the EU's new foreign policy chief, Britain's Catherine Ashton went out of her way to condemn Israel for building in Jerusalem, closing its border with Hamas-controlled Gaza and defending itself from Palestinian terrorists in Judea and Samaria.

As for Israel's friends, they are hounded, driven out of Europe and where possible placed on trial. Dutch MP Geert Wilders, the head of Holland's Freedom Party is one of Israel's greatest supporters in Europe. Today Wilders is on trial for publically criticizing what he views as the endemic anti-Semitism of the Koran.

Against the backdrop of the persistence of right-wing Jew hatred, and the politically ascendant Red-Green alliance of anti-Semites, it makes sense that Europe will not raise a finger to prevent another Holocaust.

And so, not surprisingly, in the wake the Der Spiegel report, the EU's foreign ministers got together and decided not to support any new sanctions against Iran — unless they are passed by the UN Security Council. Since Europe's foreign ministers all know full well the UN Security Council will not pass sanctions against Iran because veto-wielding China has announced that it will veto any sanctions against Iran, this week the EU's foreign ministers got together and said their okay with another Holocaust.

With Europe out, and with "enlightened" Asian, African and South American countries never really in the game, the only "enlightened" country that might be expected to stop murderous evil before it can carry out its aims is the United States. But unfortunately, like the Europeans, the Americans don't feel like being responsible. President Barack Obama, his administration and many of his fellow Democrats would rather take on Israel.

This week 54 Democratic members of Congress wrote Obama a letter asking him to apply pressure on Israel to remove its restrictions on the import of goods -- including dual use goods like construction materials -- to Hamas-controlled Gaza. Never mind that under US law it is legally problematic to provide any aid, (including the $300 million Obama has pledged) to Gaza in light of the fact that it is controlled by a terrorist organization.

For its part, the administration apparently believes that there is no reason to seek the overthrow of Hamas simply because the US is required by US law and binding UN Security Council resolutions to do so. The US Treasury Department has reportedly just removed all but one Hamas official from its list of known terrorists and so paved the way for Hamas to receive funding from Europe.

As for Israel, during his trip here this week, Obama's Middle East envoy George Mitchell came up with a revolutionary new idea. In the face of Palestinian intransigence, Mitchell introduced the earthshaking concept of pressuring Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians.

This week Mitchell asked Israel to stop all of its counter-terror operations in Judea and Samaria, and allow Palestinian forces to operate not only in the Palestinian areas, but in predominantly Israeli areas as well. Specifically, Mitchell asked Israel to allow Palestinian forces to deploy in what the arguably defunct Oslo agreements refer to as Area C, where the Palestinian Authority has no security authority whatsoever.

When it comes to Iran, the Obama administration behaves as though the jury is still out on whether the mullahs are even seeking nuclear weapons. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last Thursday that Iran might face some tough statements from the world if it continues to refuse to be appeased by the Obama White House, although she couldn't say whether any actual steps would be taken to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons which she wouldn't acknowledge the mullahs are developing.

And at his State of the Union address on Wednesday, Obama himself made clear that the US will do nothing to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. As far as Obama is concerned, the nuclear arsenal in most urgent need of evisceration is the US's nuclear arsenal.

All of this just goes to show that at the end of the day, now when the chips are down, there is only one "enlightened" nation in the world that may actually do something to prevent the advance of murderous evil. And Israel unfortunately is of two minds on the issue.

On the one hand, we have Netanyahu, who is clearly focused on preventing another Holocaust of Jewry. But on the other hand, we have Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who on Tuesday claimed that the absence of peace with the Palestinians - not Iran - is the greatest threat that Israel faces today. As he put it, "The lack of defined boundaries within Israel, and not an Iranian bomb, is the greatest threat to our future."

Barak's outrageous pronouncement is a succinct encapsulation of the great aspiration of the Israeli Left. If he could only be right, then Israel would be able to singlehandedly solve all the problems of the region and be immediately adored by the likes of the EU and the Obama administration just by making itself smaller.

So with the scourge of moral and strategic blindness rampant not only in Europe and America, but within his own government, Netanyahu rapidly approaches his moment of truth.

In what will undoubtedly be the most fateful decision of his life, he will have to decide whether Iran will become a nuclear power, or whether Israel, standing alone, will prevent it from becoming a nuclear power. Was his declaration of "Never Again," at Auschwitz just the bloviating of yet another "enlightened" leader who lacks the courage of his convictions? Or was it a solemn vow that Zionism's promise will be kept?


Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.