Pursuing False Victories In The Absence of Common Sense

Obama tells us dots were not connected and our intelligence system failed.

There will be other terrorist attempts to bring havoc to our nation and, like with Fort Hood, some will be successful. The president, any president, cannot be blamed for every failure but every president can be held accountable for the tone he sets, the people he selects and the realistic way in which he addresses threats. On every count this president, to date, has fallen short.

First, Obama dismissed terrorism in words and tagged such actions as isolated. His dismissive attitude, his laid back coolness set a tone and his appointments reflected his diffident level of care and concern. Obama was too busy mocking GW, attacking FOX, Limbaugh and Cheney and thinking he was still on the campaign trail scoring political points.

If the system failed and dots were un-connected then there are people who have to be held responsible and should be sent out to pasture. In previous instances this president has shown himself quite capable of throwing people, even innocents, under the bus. It will be interesting to see can/will he do so now.

One way Obama could demonstrate he is beginning to see the light is to pardon The Navy Seals before they endure more legal costs, personal trauma and court martial. (See 1 below.)

Is this author racially biased for pointing out racial bias and how is the best way to improve the lot of those on the bottom?

I believe through tough education and holding people accountable.

But then, how can you educate someone who has no background or family that supports education? Can you hold them accountable for their behaviour when all they are doing is mimicking what they see? (See the movies Preecious.) If not, then the lawless facet of society will grow and eventually impact the freedom of everyone - it already has.

Though, we are still paying for the cancerous sins of slavery and segregation it must not be allowed to metastasize - it already has.

Reverse discrimination, however, is not the way to overcome past sins of discrimination.(See 2 below.)

Emanuel says U.S. fed up with Palestinians and Israel.

Pressing for what was not structurally obtainable is also part of the problem. Obama cannot duck the fact that he pursued an unrealistic and untimely goal and added to the problem about which he now complains through his surrogate. He did so because, as with the health care bill which he is allowing to be rammed down our throats, he felt compelled to seek false victories in the absence of common sense. (See 3 below.)

Has it now reached the absurd point that IDF lawyers will determine military tactics and strategy?

No matter what Israel does to defend itself it will remain a nation subject to bias, second guessing and calumny.

The deck is stacked and starts with U.N. poker players.(See 4 below.)

If the new proposed health care bill were a condiment would you want it spread on your sandwich bread? Even worse, were it a condom would you feel protected?(See 4 below.)

Intellectuals and society by Tom Sowell - another chapter in his unfolding thesis. Ideas have consequences.( See 5 below.)

Democrats, like the Walls of Jericho, have begun falling on their arrogant, dismissive swords.

Having drunk their own bath and Potomac water they became deaf to Tea protesting voters.

Being intellectually superior, they knew what was best for scruffian like voters.

After all, passing legislation to which they are not themselves subjected, places them in a position of omnipotence and leaves them only a few steps removed from immortality.

Dodd, Dornan have opted out. Now its on to Pelosi, Reid, Murtha, Boxer, Walters, Rangel and a host of others who have lied, cheated and become overly imbued with their own feeling of self importance.

While I am suggesting the cleansing effect of throwing Democrat rascals out I would be remiss if I did not suggest voters do the same with those Republicans who are Democrats in disguise.

It would be far better to have a distinct two party system standing on principles that can move us closer to the middle than resurrecting the dashed and false hopes associated with a third party effort.


Will Democrats keep running against GW in 2010? If they do they may find most voters will ask GW who?

One thing for sure, retiring from Congress is financially easy because they have fabulous pensions which insure their comfort for the rest of their retirement years and of course they have a number one health plan to boot.

Don't you wish you enjoyed such security? (See 6 below.)

Were Churchill alive would he also consider Obama an enigma wrapped in a puzzle as he did Russia?

Certainly Obama's cadenced speaking is more like a 'rappers.'(See 7 below.)

Meanwhile, the Messiah cops out as I suspected he would all along. Is it because he realized he could get nothing through in the Security Council even though he caved in to Russia getting nothing in return, could not budge China and/or never really intended raising the ante?

Is Israel now off the hook to do what it might feel compelled to do or will the Messiah take them down with his own feckless state of mind? Stay tuned - it is going to be a long year.

When will the Messiah next claim he has been attacked by a rabbit? (See 8 below.)


Dick


1)One 'Allegedly' Too Many:In her raw and disastrous way, Janet Napolitano is revealing.
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ


Shocking though it was, the Christmas Day terror attempt by a 23-year-old Nigerian has only hardened Americans' awareness that they confront an implacable enemy in a war whose end is nowhere in sight. It is a hard-won new sense of reality and an invaluable one, achieved event by embittering event. The holy warrior assigned to blow up that passenger plane and who almost succeeded has, we learn, been granted the chance to strike a deal. His attack effort had come on the heels of the all-too-successful terror assault by that other Soldier of Islam, Maj. Nidal Hasan who murdered 13 fellow members of the American military. This, even as it was becoming clear that the number of our homegrown jihadis involved in terror plots, or who had enlisted in training toward that goal, had increased markedly.

It wasn't always easy to preserve a healthy sense of reality about terrorism in the years since 9/11, as the comments of ethical counselors, privacy advocates and civil liberties sentinels aghast at the possibility of government snooping have reminded us in the last week. They were around in force for media interviews, equipped as ever with a variety of arguments for the sanctity of privacy rights, warnings against surveillance that threatened the rights of citizens in a democracy. Day after day came the same breezy assurances—we had only to balance our security needs with privacy rights. As though, in this deadly war or any other, sane people could consider the values equivalent. The latest threat to privacy rights, advocates charged, was the use of full body scanners: the technology that would have immeasurably decreased the chances someone like Umar Abdulmutallab would have been able to get past security wearing his terror panties—intimate underwear, that is, in which 80 grams of PETN had been concealed.

It was that prospect of images revealing intimate areas of the body that apparently disturbed Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican and sponsor of a House measure banning the use of full body scanners other than as a "secondary device"—i.e. to be used on select subjects. He didn't think, he told a New York Times reporter, "anybody needs to see my 8 year old naked in order to secure that airplane." A useful bit of reassurance, that, for the plotters of terror assaults who have in the past shown no compunction about the use of children as suicide bombers.

Another argument we heard frequently held that no matter what technology was put in place, our dauntless enemies would find ways to get around it. The picture was clear. With an unbeatable, ever resourceful enemy working night and day devising ingenious strategies, what point could there be in developing better detection capacities? Historians of the future may one day well ponder the powerful streak of defeatism in the U.S. in the era of its terrorist wars—and the superhuman characteristics Americans ascribed to their enemies in that 21st century battle against terrorism: a view in no small way nurtured in their media and political culture.

No guardians of privacy rights had weighed in earlier against the body imaging scanners than the American Civil Liberties Union. In October, 2007, the ACLU issued a statement decrying the use of this technology as "an assault on the essential dignity of passengers." "We are," the agency declared, "not convinced it is the right thing for America." This reasoning is clear. The right thing is for America to reject the scanners. Its citizens may then face increased risk of being blown up in mid-air but their privacy would remain inviolate to the end. Who could ask for anything more?

It took the president a second speech to weigh in on the issue of the security, or lack thereof, that had nearly led to tragedy. The first speech, two and a half days after the event, was in its own way noteworthy. In it the president observed that a passenger on the plane had "allegedly tried to ignite explosives. . . ." Mr. Obama's use of a familiar legalistic evasion would, it was soon clear, raise hackles—though the term is one routinely used in crime reporting. No matter. It was one "allegedly" too many in the world, jarring coming from the president in this circumstance.

Consider the justly famed speech an enraged American president delivered the day after Pearl Harbor. Then try imagining that address by Franklin Roosevelt—a leader to whom Mr. Obama has been compared—as it would sound in Obama language.

"Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date that will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces allegedly from the Empire of Japan . . . Yesterday the Japanese government allegedly launched an attack on Malaya. Last night Japanese forces allegedly attacked Hong Kong. Last night Japanese forces allegedly attacked Guam . . ."

Still it wasn't the president's comments but those of Janet Napolitano that reverberated. It wasn't the first time the Homeland Security chief's struggles to utter the kind of views she understood to be fitting for an Obama administration official ended in trouble—this time with interviews in which she made her now famous assertion that the airport security system had worked. She followed up, the next day, with retractions and clarifications that ended, as such things do, sounding worse than the original.

Asked in an interview with the German magazine "Der Spiegel" last March why she had avoided using the word "terrorism" in her testimony to Congress, she explained that she had instead preferred to use another term: "man-caused disasters." That choice of words demonstrated, she said, that "we want to move away from the politics of fear." The idea now, she added mysteriously, was to be prepared for all risks that could occur. There was nothing mysterious about the intended point. In the new forward looking administration she served—its leader had after all travelled far tendering apologies for his country's past sins and arrogance toward other nations—emphasis on terrorism was to be dispatched, along with the words war on terror and terrorists. The use of such references was to be equated with the low, the deceitful, the politics of fear, with indeed, a false claim of danger.

Ms. Napolitano would go on in other ways to prove the potency of man-made disasters—of which she was clearly proving one. In April, she issued a report seeming to target military veterans as potentially dangerous right-wing extremists. She soon apologized. In the same month she managed to suggest that the 9/11 terrorists had entered the U.S. through Canada, which appalled Canadian leaders. Apologies and clarifications followed.

Mr. Obama can't be happy with his Homeland Security chief. It's fair to say no president deserves an appointee so extravagantly unequipped for her job. Still there is much in Ms. Napolitano's attitudes and pronouncements, including talk of "the politics of fear," that reflect with glaring accuracy the Obama team's values, ideology and prime political targets. In her disastrous and raw way she is its voice revealed.

Terrorism will continue to provide its hardening education, though not entirely from terrorists themselves. We have before us now the spectacle of Jihadi Abdulmutallab, lawyered up, with full rights as though a U.S. criminal defendant. The impossibly expensive, dangerous, and unavoidably chaotic trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and associates still lies ahead, slated for a Manhattan courtroom. Even now a majority of Americans can't fathom the reason for their government's insistence that the agents chiefly responsible for the 9/11 attack be tried under the U.S. criminal justice system with all due rights and constitutional privileges, instead of in a military court. That insistence itself is answer enough—an unforgettable testament to the ideological drives and related evasions of reality that shape this administration's view of the world.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal's editorial board.

2)Racial Spoils in Obama's America
By George Picard

"There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America," declared Barack Obama at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. "There's the United States of America.''


One year has passed since Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress were swept into power. We felt our racial sins had been washed away as millions of whites pulled the lever for Barack Obama. He promised us unity and clearly implied that he would govern in a color-blind way.


This promise, like so many others, has been broken.


The administration and Congress have passed policies clearly based on favoritism. They have further appointed, approved, and empowered key officials who have displayed a strong desire to benefit African-Americans over the interests of all Americans.


Disparate Impact and Disparate Treatment


There are two ways this agenda has been promoted: steps that have a disparate impact in favor of African-Americans, and those that are designed to specifically favor African-Americans (disparate treatment).


Disparate impacts are outcomes that benefit African-Americans because they are compose a higher proportion of a particular group. These include:


efforts to gut the workfare requirement that was the signature achievement of Bill Clinton in the area of welfare reform;
giving a blank check to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Authority to expand home "ownership" among lower-income people and income redistribution on a massive scale (via tax hikes and stimulus bills -- and by the way, stimulus views vary by race, with African-Americans far more in favor of it than whites, Hispanics, or Native Americans); and

health care "reform" (including expanding the ranks of those who qualify for Medicaid) despite all the polls showing that most Americans are happy with their own medical care and do not want the intrusion of government, the massive deficits, and the tax increases that will come with such "reform."
Because African-Americans make up a high proportion of the disadvantaged, they will disproportionally benefit. This is an agenda at work.


Don't believe me? Listen to Barack Obama when he spoke to a friendly crowd of minority journalists in 2008 about why he favored universal care:
If we have a program, for example, of universal health care, that will disproportionately affect people of color, because they're disproportionately uninsured.


Stealth Reparations?


Obama expressed support for reparations (retracted during the campaign) and expressed frustration that the Constitution and the Warren Court presented roadblocks to redistributing wealth to blacks (do you recall his "spread the wealth around" gaffe during the campaign?). As Barack Obama has said, "Words matter." Listen to his own words in a 2001 radio interview. Maybe by the time he is done with the Supreme Court, that will be less of a problem.


In his 2006 book, Obama outlined a plan for essentially a government bailout of the inner cities, which he describes as "repositories for all the scars of slavery and violence of Jim Crow." (I urge readers to peruse "Obama's Stealth Reparations," written by Paul Sperry, a Hoover Institution fellow.) Some of these ideas are being implemented now via the stimulus bill and other measures.


Those views (and goals) were buried by the campaign, but they are preserved and readily available on the internet for those willing to look and to see. (By the way, Google "Reparations by way of Health Care reform" to further explore this topic.)


But even that type of gaming is not enough. We also have disparate treatment on display if one can sift through over a thousand pages of legalese (some of the most creative writing comes out of D.C. these days, not Hollywood).


The Senate health care reform bill has been ginned up with a raft of provisions that will send money flowing to medical schools that offer preferential admissions to underrepresented minorities (read: quotas that exclude Asians) and that are geared towards sending doctors and nurses to "vulnerable populations" in "underserved areas" or "populations experiencing health disparities." Six federal agencies must create an "Office of Minority Health."


(Plus there is a big dollop of dollars for community organizing groups that have "existing relationships ... with uninsured and underinsured consumers" -- can anyone spell A-C-O-R-N?)


In other words, ObamaCare legislates racial discrimination to such an extent that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was compelled to send letters to the president and congressional leaders warning about the "racially discriminatory provisions" in the Senate's health care bill.


Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who rammed this new entitlement though the House, chimed in recently at a NAACP conference: "It is a moral issue for our country to reduce health disparities."


A fine goal...but why not have a national conversation (and make Eric Holder happy -- see below) regarding how best to accomplish that? And why obscure the goal by speaking of it only in front of the NAACP?


Is it any wonder that Jesse Jackson declares, "You can't vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man"?


What is the end result of this type of gaming? The answer is a "new racial spoils system," according to Linda Chavez of the Center for Equal Opportunity, and we see this spoils system emerging both from the Oval Office and Capitol Hill. And if there is any politician who knows how to work a spoils system, it is one hailing from the Windy City.


Why should we be surprised? After all, Democrats (like Republicans) reward the special-interest groups that help elect them: unions, trial lawyers, teachers, and yes, African-Americans. Why should any special-interest group be shielded from scrutiny?


Despite the near-total media silence on this topic, maybe people are beginning to suspect the worst. Barack Obama's approval rating has plummeted among white Americans (almost in a free-fall), yet it holds steady among African-Americans.


There are important reasons for this continuing support.


Both racial groups are seeing things more clearly than many in the media. Perhaps people are asking themselves: Whose interests are being served? Whose interests are being sacrificed? Who are the winners and who are the losers?


Who can give us the answer?


Maybe Barack Obama can -- yes he can! Hasn't he given fulsome praise over the years to Pastor Jeremiah Wright, Jr., the anti-white race-baiter whom he chose to give sermons to his own daughters? Obama talked derisively of the "typical white person," pontificated on racial stereotyping as he denigrated the white policeman who had a run-in with Professor Henry Gates, and participated in Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March (and Farakkhan himself received an award from, and is friends with, the aforementioned Wright).


Other key Obama appointees seem to have joined this chorus.


The Attorney General


Attorney General Eric Holder infamously declared in his maiden speech to the Justice Department that the United States was "a nation of cowards" who "simply do not talk enough with each other about race." That call brought about this article.


What better place to start than the Justice Department? It is Ground Zero of a plan to use the levers of government to reengineer race relations in America (Democrats have a fetish for reengineering society).


Abigail Thernstrom in "Lani's Heir: The new, old racial ideology of the Holder Justice Department" explores Holder's views toward race and the law. She informs us about a card that Holder carries in his wallet on which is written "a black man's race defines him more particularly than anything else." Holder explains its meaning:


I am not the tall U.S. Attorney, I am not the thin U.S. Attorney. I am the black U.S. Attorney ... There's a common cause that bonds the black U.S. Attorney with the black criminal or the black doctor with the black homeless person." All blacks share a "common cause."


And that cause seems to have impelled Holder to use the Justice Department to tilt what should be a level playing field into one that disproportionally favors African-Americans. He is betraying the principle of equal rights -- a fundamental principle enshrined in our Constitution.


How? Let us count the ways.


Holder's Justice Department shields the new Black Panther Party from punishment for intimidating voters during last year's campaign, suddenly dropping three of the four charges in a layup of a case and penalizing the final one with a laughable tickle on the wrist. Then he stonewalls congressmen and the Civil Rights Commission, who want to get to the bottom of this miscarriage of justice. To top off the audacity, the lawyer who pursued the action against the New Back Panther party has been "reassigned" and is less available to answer subpoenas being ignored by Holder.


Could Holder claim a lack of manpower to answer claims regarding this scandal? No, because he has vastly expanded the Civil Rights Division to pursue, among other things, voting rights cases. It just doesn't seem to interest him when perpetrators of voting-rights violations are African-Americans or are believed by him to benefit African-Americans.


Why has ACORN escaped investigations for conspiracy across state lines? Perhaps it's for the same reason that Justice has ruled that ACORN is eligible for federal aid -- despite all the scandals surrounding the group. Recall that the Obama campaign paid ACORN hundreds of thousands of dollars in registration and get-out-the-vote efforts.


Conversely, Holder and the political appointees Obama has made since his inauguration are using the reins of power to help ensure that African-Americans are able to elect the candidate they want in the mixed community of Kinston, North Carolina by fixing the rules in a very blatant manner. They are also working across the country to loosen registration requirements that states have enacted to ensure the integrity of the voting process. In the case of Georgia, Holder vetoed the state's verification law because the DOJ claimed it would have a "disparate impact on minorities" -- a claim belied by the facts. The Department of Justice is also focusing energy on Missouri's voter registration laws. This is just the beginning.


As Hans Spakovsky, former counsel at the DOJ, wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
All of these decisions seriously undermine confidence in the rule of law and our election process. Under the Voting Rights Act, the Department of Justice is charged with protecting voters, no matter what their racial or ethnic background.


Justice's objection defies common sense, manipulates federal law, and shows a complete disregard for the integrity of our election process and is a sign that the "current administration is trying to stop verification of voter registration information."


Is a double standard at work? Jennifer Rubin asks, "How vigilant is Holder's department when the perpetrators are African-American[?]" Why has the Department of Justice been AWOL over the controversial firing of Inspector General Walpin -- who was on the case against the African-American mayor of Sacramento (and ally of Obama's), accused of corruption?


The corollary question might be, "How far will the DOJ go to empower African-Americans, even if it means ignoring facts on the ground?" Will Justice monitor census counts, for example? There was a reason this White House broke all precedents when it sought to bring the census operations under its own control. Funny numbers are a White House specialty -- especially when they are under the control of Chicago politicians who can manipulate the process to benefit one group over another. Sampling and estimating, rather than an actual enumeration, for example, has the prospect of greatly enhancing the counting of minorities (at the expense of accuracy).


What will be the focus of all those civil rights attorneys that Holder has hired? They will push the Justice Department into the most important areas of American life, including voting rights, housing, employment, bank lending practices, and redistricting after the 2010 census.


How about pressuring businesses to hire minorities, regardless of any evidence of racism? For added measure, Obama's Labor Secretary Hilda Solis has announced that affirmative action will be a focus of her department.


Tom Perez, the head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, recently telegraphed these plans by promising to "bring plenty of disparate impact lawsuits -- those are the ones where practices that are not discriminatory in their terms, intent or application are still challenged because they yield politically incorrect numbers." Perez "holds extreme views of civil rights law and has long advocated racial quotas even for jobs for which merit should be the sole criterion (e.g., doctors, firefighters)," Jennifer Rubin writes. (Rubin also predicted that Christopher Coates, the Voting Section chief who has championed the application of civil rights laws in a racially fair and neutral fashion, and who pursued the New Black Panthers case, might be forced out.) She believes that this would be an indication that the Obama administration has adopted "the Left's view that the laws only run in one direction -- against white perpetrators." In fact, that occurred on the verge of New Years Eve, a perfect time to kill someone's career without much notice.


Quotas


Quotas are coming, big time. Such are the joys of racial spoils.


How else will the scales be tipped? How about appointment to lifetime positions of judges who believe one's race or heritage should inform legal decisions (a clear violation of all legal principles)?


Sonia Sotomayor is one of the judges who ruled in Ricci v. DeStefano that white firefighters did not have their rights violated when they were denied promotions because the fire department wanted minorities to have them instead (despite minorities' failures on the test needed for the promotion). Sotomayor saw nothing unjust about the decision; perhaps, as she famously said, a "wise Latina woman" can reach a better legal conclusion than a "white male who hasn't lived that life."


Sotomayor is just one of the more visible judges that Obama has nominated. But other recently nominated judges also share the view that racism is pervasive in America and that a judge's own ethnic and racial background has a bearing on his or her legal decisions .


Is this ideology a job requirement for the bench? Is identity-politics playing a role in the choosing of judges? It seems so.


As of October 12th, Obama had nominated ten appeals court nominees: three African-Americans, one Asian-American, and four women. He has also nominated ten district court nominees: four African-Americans, three Asian-Americans, one Latino, and four women.


Was Time magazine columnist Mark Halperin being flippant or prophetic when he penned a column regarding nominees for judgeships titled "White Men Need Not Apply"?


There are other levers of power that Barack Obama and his supporters in Congress are pulling to help minorities. At the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Obama created something called the Chief Diversity Officer (so much for the government budget). The first person to hold this position is Mark Lloyd, who has spoken publicly of getting white media executives to "step down" in favor of minorities. He spoke of the limited number of these powerful positions and then expounded,
... unless we are conscious of the need to have more people of color, gays, other people in those positions, we will not change the problem. But we're in a position where you have to say who is going to step down so someone else can have power". He added, for good measure, "there are few things, I think, more frightening in the American mind that dark-skinned black men. Here I am ...


(He and Holder seem to consider much of white America racist.)


The FCC controls licensing decisions for broadcast outlets (including talk radio, a conservative bastion). Lloyd co-wrote a study for the Center for American Progress (the training ground for many Obama appointees) that detailed how licensing rule changes could be used to change the political balance of talk radio. The study also argued in favor of concepts called "ownership diversity" and "localism" that would use government power to put more minorities on the air.


(Coincidentally, Democratic congressmen may have recently come to the rescue of a major minority-owned radio station empire: Inner City Broadcasting Corporation, which was co-founded by Percy Sutton, Malcolm X's lawyer and a friend of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who owned thousands of shares of Inner City Broadcasting. The Congressional Black Caucus boycotted [shook down?] a key House committee vote and threatened to abandon support for banking reform unless billions were added to budget bills to help minority-owned auto dealerships and banks that lend in African-American communities, as well as promote more government advertising in minority-owned media. Will Inner City be blessed with tax dollars, as was OneUnited, a bank that has among its major shareholders Congresswoman Maxine Waters -- a member of the Congressional Black Caucus?


Americans should be concerned that when the late African-American leader Percy Sutton's Inner City radio empire [one of the leading minority broadcasters] was in danger of collapse, the Congressional Black Caucus came to his rescue by threatening to block congressional voting on banking reform and then went to the White House to meet with Obama's Chief of Staff and Treasury Secretary. They "demanded that the Administration squeeze Sutton's biggest creditors to renegotiate the nearly $230 million in debt choking" the company. The tactics worked, and Goldman Sachs announced that it would "renegotiate" its loans with Inner City, a company that has failed to pay taxes owed to the state and that, according to lawsuits, has been looted by the Sutton family.


Will this type of activity become a blueprint for empowering African-Americans in Obama's America? Stay tuned.)


Then there is Van Jones, the so-called Green Jobs Czar, who was forced to leave his position (where he was to work with all departments and government agencies to advance the president's agenda) when his views became known to Americans outside the Obama inner circle. He, again, seems to be simpatico to the views held by Holder and Lloyd. (If Obama was truthful during the campaign regarding the need to bring us all together, then why does he empower those who view white Americans with such disdain? Maybe now we can better appreciate why he stayed in Wright's pews for so long.)


Van Jones has accused "white polluters" and "white environmentalists" of "steering poison into the people-of-color community" when in fact, there is scant evidence of "disparate" environmental harm to minorities. But he did want to work with Marxists to get a million black prisoners released. Where would they go? He had, along with Obama, the idea of having released felons receive taxpayer dollars to install insulation in American homes (a program now being funded via the stimulus act).


The Obama team also has sent social engineers to Westchester County, New York, to pressure the community to settle a lawsuit brought by liberal activists over "affordable" housing. The deal requires Westchester County to spend $50 million dollars to build hundreds of affordable units and market them aggressively to minorities. As the Wall Street Journal noted, "the lawsuit was clearly a solution in search of a problem."


The Housing and Urban Development agency went on war footing. Deputy Secretary Ron Sims declared that "there was a significant amount of racial segregation" in Westchester. This is false. The county's population of minorities already mirrors that of the nation's population as a whole. Minorities do cluster in certain communities and are relatively absent in the higher-income areas, such as Scarsdale. This replicates the history of social migration in America, whether by Jews, Italians, or African-Americans themselves. As incomes increase, people move to nicer areas. In fact, even in the wealthier areas of Westchester, African-Americans are only slightly underrepresented. Regardless, the county settled to avoid the enormous costs of tangling in court with the Obama administration.


HUD has made its goals clear. Any community that accepts federal funds for housing development will have to toe the line regarding minority housing. "They are now on notice," said HUD Deputy Secretary Ron Sims. "That means in suburban areas, we're going to ask that they provide that opportunity for choice so people are able to enjoy what I call the fruits and benefits of an established neighborhood." The Westchester case could provide a new tool for fair-housing advocates fighting what they allege are discriminatory policies by cities and suburbs nationwide. The settlement marked a significant shift in federal efforts to enforce fair-housing law, particularly in suburban areas.


Indeed, Sims has said that the Westchester settlement "can serve as a model for building strong, inclusive sustainable communities in suburban areas across the United States."


Incidentally, Attorney General Holder's also criticized America for being "voluntarily segregated." So will we now be involuntarily integrated?


A Wall Street Journal editorial ("Color-Coding the Suburbs") points out a peril of this brow-beating approach:


The bigger concern, however, is the Obama Administration's intention to promote housing policies that have a history of dividing communities and creating racial tension. Integrated neighborhoods are an admirable goal, but how you get there matters.


In the 1960s, Chicago's Gautreaux Program moved several thousand inner-city residents to the suburbs over the objections of whites and black community leaders alike. The move stoked racial unrest and resulted in unprecedented "white flight." In the 1970s, the Philadelphia suburb of Mount Laurel, New Jersey was ordered to build subsidized housing. Local opposition was so strong that municipalities ultimately were permitted to pay into a fund and have much of the housing built in places like Newark and Camden instead.


Blacks have long populated Westchester towns such as White Plains, New Rochelle, and Mount Vernon, and the administration is assuming that low percentages of racial and ethnic minorities in places like Scarsdale are a result of discrimination. Yet there's no pattern of fair housing complaints or other evidence showing that black families with incomes similar to whites in more upscale neighborhoods were barred from those jurisdictions. History also demonstrates that racial and ethnic minorities have incurred far less resistance when they move into neighborhoods where they can afford to live.


In fact, much of what Sims claims to be true regarding Westchester and the benefits of mandating government-subsidized "affordable housing" in affluent neighborhoods is simply wrong. But why let facts get in the way of the agenda?


Will the use of taxpayer dollars and government power to forcibly integrate neighborhoods spark strife and provoke racism in the years ahead? Westchester County voters have already shown their anger by voting out the county executive who agreed to this coercive settlement -- perhaps presaging the future of politicians who become handmaidens to Obama's agenda.


Did we sign up for such social engineering when we voted for Barack Obama? Recently, senior White House officials declared that "we are not in disagreement with the Congressional Black Caucus of any part of their agenda." Any?


Maybe Barack Obama and the Democratic powers that be in Congress have just dismissed the white vote. Perhaps that is why immigration "reform" that will provide a path to citizenship for twelve million illegal immigrants is being fast-tracked in 2010.


What we have seen so far certainly belies Obama's claim that he would unite us or that he was the symbol of post-racial politics. That was all so 2008. The agenda for 2009, 2010, and beyond seems to reflect a shift of priorities to bring health care, stimulus money, housing, jobs, voting power, and a range of other benefits to African-Americans as African-Americans, not just as Americans. This may be a worthwhile goal, but then maybe we should have a national conversation about this agenda instead of it being played out behind the scenes and under the radar.


Is racism stoked when critics of Barack Obama or his policies are called "racists," or when Congressman Charles Rangel says that opposition to health care reform is a "bias, a prejudice, an emotional feeling"?


After a while, this type of name-calling exacerbates racism. We have seen that race card played too often by Obama's allies and satraps. Barack Obama, a poker player, should realize that it has become a type of tell that someone's interests are being sacrificed on behalf of someone else's agenda.


Does this administration promise to be, as Victor Davis Hanson writes, "the most polarizing administration we have seen in matters of race since the 1920s"?


George Picard is the pen name of an author who fears retaliation for writing this article.


3)Emanuel: U.S. is fed up with Israel, Palestinians

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel recently told the Israeli consul in Los Angeles that the Obama administration is fed up with both Israel and the Palestinians, Army Radio reported on Wednesday.

Emanuel met with Jacob Dayan, consul general of Israel in Los Angeles, about two weeks ago, after which Dayan briefed the Foreign Ministry.

Emanuel told Dayan the U.S. is sick of the Israelis, who adopt suitable ideas months too late, when they are no longer effective, according to Army Radio.

The U.S. is also sick of the Palestinians who never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, Emanuel reportedly said.

Emanuel added that if there is no progress in the peace process, the Obama administration will reduce its involvement in the conflict, because, as he reportedly said, the U.S. has other matters to deal with.

Emanuel reportedly said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly acknowledged the two-state solution too late, and that the freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank came only after months of U.S. pressure.

The report added that both sides reportedly rejected the peace plan proposed by former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, but that if there is progress in peace talks, Obama might visit Israel and the region.

4)IDF to seek legal advice during future conflicts
By Anshel Pfeffer

IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi has issued an order requiring the Israel
Defense Forces to consult with the army's legal advisers while military
operations are underway and not just when they are being planned.

Ashkenazi imposed the stricter regulations despite opposition by several
commanders, including members of the General Staff.

In making that decision, Ashkenazi has essentially accepted the viewpoint of
Military Advocate General Avichai Mendelblit. However, in an effort to keep
the legal advisers from disrupting the combat, the IDF has decided they will
work only with the divisional headquarters while operations are underway -
rather than with brigade or battalion headquarters, as is common in some
Western armies, including the U.S. military.

During Operation Cast Lead and in some other major IDF operations, legal
advisers took part in the planning as well as the selection and approval of
targets for destruction. However, legal advisers were rarely consulted once
the combat began.

Last winter's operation in the Gaza Strip saw a gradual change on this
issue, but it was only in recent months that the chief of staff reached a
definitive position.

Meanwhile, greater emphasis has been placed on training officers in the
rules of war and international law, as part of officer training courses at
the level of company, battalion and brigade commanders.

In recent months, the IDF and Foreign Ministry have been cooperating
increasingly closely on their interactions with foreign government and
international organizations regarding the IDF's efforts to ensure the
legality of its operations and to carry out investigations on the operations
after they are over.

As part of this effort, Mendelblit has traveled to Washington for meetings
with officials in the Obama administration, and to the United Nations
headquarters for talks with officials there.

Part of the Israeli effort is to formulate understandings with foreign
governments and armies on legal regulations that pertain to asymmetrical
warfare, particularly involving fighting non-state entities in areas
populated by civilians - the kind of combat that has characterized the IDF's
battles with Hezbollah and Hamas, and those of NATO armies in Afghanistan
and Iraq.

In the wake of the release of the United Nation's Goldstone report accusing
Israel and Hamas of war crimes during the Gaza war, as well as efforts to
issue warrants abroad for the arrest of senior IDF officers and former
ministers, some Israeli officials have said the international rules of war
need to be changed to better reflect the realities of asymmetric warfare.

Legal advisers at the Foreign Ministry and the military advocate general's
office have opposes such initiatives, saying it is unlikely that most
countries would accept a reformulated Geneva convention.

However, efforts are being made to reach understandings with Western
democracies and other countries, including India, to adopt what some call a
dynamic interpretation of existing rules of war that would be better suited
to the changing realities. Such rules would not restrict armies from
countering the threat of terrorism because of concern that its officers or
political leadership would be accused of war crimes.

5)Fasten Your Seatbelts: Bumpy Ride Ahead
By Paul Greenberg


Winston Churchill was talking about Russia when he spoke of "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma," but he could have been describing the 2,000-page heath-care bill now past the U.S. Senate and into law — after it's been melded with one just as big and indecipherable out of the House. Then the two mysteries will be twice as tricky.

The country won't find out about all the special clauses, side agreements, sweet deals and arcane exemptions tucked away in the final version of the bill till it's the law of the land. If then. But if a dazed observer of this semi-secret process had to sum up what has happened, this would be my best guess/stab in the dark:

The country's broken system of health care won't be fixed, but it'll be broken on a much bigger and more confusing scale. Which figures. After all, this unsystematic system has been patched together willy-nilly over the past half-century, one addition and expansion piled atop another without any clear, comprehensive, unifying plan. It's not unlike making a coat out of patches.

Yes, more people will have insurance one way or another, which is a good thing. They'll have to have it. It'll be the law. Even those who don't want it, or will be hard-pressed to afford it, will be required to buy it. Which may be one of the few realistic aspects of the administration's approach, much as Barack Obama opposed it back in last year's presidential primaries. There's no other way to have the young and healthy pay the premiums that will cover the medical costs of the old and ailing. That's the only way a universal system of health insurance can work.

But after that bow to reality, the view grows dim, and dizzying:

While the new, expanded system will cover some 30 million more Americans, the new bureaucracies, higher taxes and crushing deficits required to run it will go on approximately forever. The administration says it's going to save money by spending more. That approach has been tried before with a signal lack of success. See the massive deficits that Medicare and Medicaid are piling up even now.

As the years go by, it will become harder and harder for patients who are dependent on those programs to find doctors and hospitals financially able to accept them. Especially as hundreds of billions are cut from Medicare to finance this latest expansion — without a concomitant expansion of the number of physicians, nurses and hospitals in the country.

Health insurance is going to be more available, all right, but not health care. On the contrary, it could grow scarcer as more and more dollars chase fewer and fewer medical services — the very definition of inflation. Never mind. We're supposed to believe this administration has repealed common sense. Congress will just cut benefits in the future to make up the deficits. And the sun will start rising in the west.

Some of us would have preferred a reform that gives patients more choices and more responsibilities. Instead, this approach will expand government's role in almost everything to do with health care, from financing it to regulating it to running ever larger deficits to finance it.

Some of us would have liked to see the government require insurance companies to offer lower rates to people with healthier habits, like non-smokers. But the administration's proposals have little to do with improving the health of the American people; they focus on insuring the sick, not creating incentives for Americans to stay healthy.

Real reform would have allowed consumers to buy insurance across state lines and let Americans reap the considerable benefits of wider competition, but not this "reform."

Real reform would have done something to control the costs of lawyering that physicians now have to work into their fee schedules. It's called practicing "defensive medicine" — not in order to serve the patient but to guard against frivolous lawsuits. This not so little problem goes unaddressed, too. Democrats collect too much in campaign donations from plaintiff's lawyers to tackle it.

Final result: The country will wind up with another sprawling layer of health-care legislation added to all the others that have been enacted over the years without any real vision or comprehensive change. Ring out the old; ring in a lot more of the same.

5)Intellectuals and Society: Part II
By Thomas Sowell




Ideas are such intangible things that it is hard to believe that they have had a huge impact on the lives of people who are not intellectuals and who, in many cases, have paid little attention to those ideas. Yet both secular and religious ideas have moved the emotions of many — and have moved leaders who moved armies.


When we look back on the Spanish Inquisition, on the Crusades of the past and the Jihads of the past and present, we see chilling examples of the effects of ideas. But the secular ideologies of the 20th century killed millions more people in Germany, Russia and China — and similarly in pursuit of higher goals, even if those ideals were used cynically by those with power, as in the past.


If there is any lesson in the history of ideas, it is that good intentions tell you nothing about the actual consequences. But intellectuals who generate ideas do not have to pay the consequences.


Academic intellectuals are shielded by the principles of academic freedom and journalists in democratic societies are shielded by the principle of freedom of the press. Seldom do those who produce or peddle dangerous, or even fatal, ideas have to pay a price, even in a loss of credibility.


Who blames Rachel Carson, an environmentalist icon, because her crusading writings against DDT led to the ban of this insecticide in countries around the world — followed by a resurgence of malaria that killed, and continues to kill, millions of people in tropical Third World countries?


Even political leaders have been judged by how noble their ideas sounded, rather than by how disastrous their consequences were. Woodrow Wilson — our only president with a Ph.D. — was an academic intellectual for years before entering politics, and his ideas about a war to end wars, making the world safe for democracy, and the right of self-determination of peoples, have been revered in utter disregard of what happened when Wilson's notions were put into practice in the real world.


No one today takes seriously the idea that the First World War was a war to end wars, and many now see it as setting the stage for a Second World War. Indeed there were those who predicted this result at the time. But they were not listened to, much less lionized, like Woodrow Wilson.


Like many intellectuals, Woodrow Wilson assumed that if things were bad, "change" would automatically make them better. But the autocratic governments in Russia and Germany that Wilson abhorred were followed by totalitarian regimes so oppressive and murderous that they made the past despots look almost like sweethearts.


As for the self-determination of peoples, that turned out in practice to mean having whole peoples' fates determined by foreigners, such as Woodrow Wilson, who joined in the dismemberment of empires, with dire consequences in the 1930s, as Hitler picked off the small and vulnerable newly created nations, one by one — an operation that would have been far more dangerous if he had had to face the larger empires of which they had been part before the First World War.


To this day, we are still living with the consequences of carving up the Ottoman Empire to create far more unstable and dangerous states in the Middle East.


But Woodrow Wilson's words sounded great — and that is what he and other intellectuals are judged by.


It may seem strange that so many people of great intellect have said and done so many things whose consequences ranged from counterproductive to catastrophic. Yet it is not so surprising when we consider whether anybody has ever had the range of knowledge required to make the sweeping kinds of decisions that so many intellectuals are prone to make, especially when they pay no price for being wrong.


Intellectuals and their followers have often been overly impressed by the fact that intellectuals tend, on average, to have more knowledge than other individuals in their society. What they have overlooked is that intellectuals have far less knowledge than the total knowledge possessed by the millions of other people whom they disdain and whose decisions they seek to override.


We have had to learn the consequences of elite preemption the hard way — and many of us have yet to learn that lesson.

6)Dems' Only Hope For 2010: Make The Race About The Other Guy: Democratic incumbents face the most threatening political environment since the Republican landslide of 1994 -- and they know it.
By Thomas Edsall

The trends are all moving in the wrong direction. Voters are shifting to the right; white antipathy to the President has intensified; the popular consensus backing Obama and his agenda has collapsed in less than a year; and a growing number of center-conservative House Democrats are jumping ship. It's not that voters are suddenly becoming big fans of the Republican Party -- its poll numbers are falling just as rapidly as the Democrats' -- but political scientists and strategists from across the spectrum agree that simply by virtue of being the opposition, the GOP is positioned to make large gains on November 2. There's even an outside chance they'll wrest back control of the House.

Most recently, the failed Christmas day bombing by an alleged Al Qaeda operative of a flight to Detroit has spurred Republicans to revive the national security fears that served them so well in the 2002 and 2004 elections.

"If the election were held today, we'd lose the House," says Democratic campaign consultant Tom King, a view shared, off the record, by a number of his colleagues.

So what should Democratic candidates do to survive 2010? A strong consensus has emerged among Democratic operatives, based on a strategy developed under the guidance of pollster Geoff Garin. Garin declined to be interviewed for this story, but other party strategists say the most crucial order of business in each contest is to prevent Republican challengers from turning the race into a referendum on the Democratic candidate, the Democratic Party, President Obama, or all three. Rather, they say, Democrats need to turn the public's attention to the failings of the Republican candidate and the national GOP.

Democratic pollster Celinda Lake says that as soon as her clients know who their opponents will be, her advice is "to get them [the Republican candidates] defined." Democratic candidates, Lake and others say, should pre-empt Republicans seeking to present a positive image to the public. Among the techniques to achieve this goal are floating negative stories in the press, taking full advantage of sympathetic bloggers to create a hostile portrait of the GOP opponent, and actively using "less visible" means of communication such as phone banks, direct mail, and canvassers.

In this atmosphere, consultants say the key advice for Democratic incumbents is: "Don't get on the defensive, don't allow [the Republican] to define you." Along similar lines, Joe Trippi, who has managed a host of campaigns, including overseeing Howard Dean's 2004 presidential bid, says that any incumbent facing a challenger emerging from the Sarah Palin, Tea Party wing of the GOP "should make sure that's known right away, before they get up populist steam."

Another Democratic consultant with clients running in House, Senate and gubernatorial races, speaking on background, says "basically it comes down to one thing. You've got to kick the shit out of somebody."

The burden for a Democratic incumbent is to "make it a 'choice' not a 'retention' election. The voters need to be thinking a whole lot about the other guy, not about you," this consultant says. Party operatives agree that an election conducted on disputes over the deficit, health care legislation, the stimulus, the bank bailout, and/or climate change will work to the disadvantage of Democrats.

Unemployment will inevitably be a major factor in the November election but Democratic strategists also stress that independents angry about government spending may be the key swing voters in some districts. As a result, when Congress returns later this month, Democrats in battleground districts will face intense cross-pressures over proposals to expand federal job creation programs. Consultants break it down this way: in districts with unemployment rates exceeding the 10 percent national average, active support of federal spending to create jobs is a plus; conversely, in many competitive districts with lower unemployment, particularly those south of the Mason Dixon line where conservative-leaning independents are deeply concerned about the growing deficit, it's a minus.

"This is not an easy question, and you have to look at it district by district," one consultant noted. Reappropriating some of the money roughly $200 billion still available for bank bailouts in TARP funds -- and putting it toward public works, teachers' pay, and pumping up police forces -- could buy those skittish Dems some cover. By comparison, voting for extending unemployment coverage and COBRA health care subsidies -- widely recognized as essential for those now out of work -- is a no-brainer.

Concerns about red ink also make claiming credit for bringing federal money home -- traditionally, one of the great benefits of incumbency -- a little trickier than usual. "Be project-specific," advises King. "Cite the number of jobs created, the problems fixed. If the money went to repair a bridge, point out how past traffic jams have been eliminated, that commuters get to the job half an hour faster. Be concrete."

John Lapp, who was the executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006, argues that in making a case for re-election, an incumbent should put the real names and faces of individual district residents in ads to make indisputable claims that government programs are working in behalf of constituents. Testimonials from actual voters who are benefitting from a congressman's intervention -- in obtaining a visa for an international adoption or resolving a dispute with Medicare or Social Security -- can take the wind out the sails of ideological attacks from Republican adversaries.

King says that many voters have forgotten that Democrats got them a tax cut in 2009, and need to be reminded of that. And because there is a widespread belief that the vote on the bank bailout, TARP, was the "single worst vote that anybody made," any incumbent who voted against TARP should make sure voters know about it. As for those who voted for TARP, there is a rough consensus that the best strategy is to call attention to votes or policy stances that show antipathy toward Wall Street and a willingness to break with the Obama administration on occasion.

Republicans, for their part, believe most of these efforts will prove futile and that Democrats running in 2010 will be unable to disengage from the national party in what both side agree is a powerfully anti-Democratic environment. "Good luck," says GOP pollster Whit Ayres. "The election already is nationalized."

Political scientists are generally predicting that the Democratic majority will survive in both houses, although with the margin of control dropping substantially. In the Senate, that means the Democratic caucus would no longer be able to defeat Republican filibusters, even when it sticks together.

Democrats currently control the House by a 257-178 margin. "I'd say a loss of 20-30 seats, but not yet in the high 30s to make change of control a probable outcome," says University of Wisconsin political scientist Charles Franklin, who bases his prediction on historical precedents. "Presidential support needs to be in the low 40s to predict a very large loss of seats, based on post WWII data. Also, the GDP [Gross Domestic Product] per capita should be in decline or very small gains. At the latest revision of 2.2% in the third quarter, we are low but not as low as in worst midterms for parties."

The economy remains the crucial unknown: "If GDP grows at a three percent or so rate through the election, I think approval will turn up into the 50s, and that probably leads to Republican gains of 15 to 20 seats, which historically wouldn't be bad for the Democrats," Franklin says. If GDP begins to decline, "then approval will fall more and Democrats could be looking at 30-plus lost seats -- still a stretch for Republicans to gain control, but not out of reach."

The polls, however, are sending powerful signals to Democrats. "What's really exceptional at this stage of Obama's presidency is the extent to which the public has moved in a conservative direction on a range of issues," says Andy Kohut, president of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.

The ideological shift to the right is readily visible in poll results on a whole gamut of issues from declining support for the government safety net, climate control, health care reform, abortion rights, and gun control, combined with what Kohut describes as "a lack of passion among Democrats -- and liberals in particular."

In an analysis of George Washington University's December 2009 Battleground Poll,
Lake wrote: "The gap in enthusiasm between the two parties at this early stage is the most striking dynamic framing the 2010 cycle. Just under two-thirds (64%) of Democrats say they are 'extremely likely' to vote in the upcoming elections, compared to 77% of Republicans and independents....The political environment for Democrats running in 2010 is becoming increasingly more treacherous. For the first time in several years, the generic Republican leads the generic Democrat in the Congressional horse race."

There are, however, a number of factors that suggest 2010 will be quite different from the Democratic rout of 1994 -- the so-called Gingrich Revolution. "First, 1994 was the culmination of the South moving into the Republican column; there's no equivalent regional shift trending against Democrats in this cycle. Second, the GOP brand is still in terrible shape relative to 1993-1994," says Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at the University of Michigan.

One key Democratic strategist playing a central role in the preparations for 2010 -- who asked to remain anonymous -- makes the case that that the political environment has deteriorated with such extraordinary rapidity over the past eight to nine months that it is impossible to predict with any certainty what will happen in November. Last May, this strategist says, he and others thought Democrats could actually pick up as many as two seats in the Senate and keep House losses to the low teens. Now, he notes, Democrats appear almost certain to lose three or four Senate seats, with the possibility of losing as many as six. In his view, if House losses are kept to 20 or so seats, that would be a major victory.

One of the major distinctions between the political situation now and the parallel situation in the year before the 1994 Republican overthrow is that this time Democrats will not go into the election unprepared for potential disaster. "There are several differences with 1993," says the University of Virginia's Larry Sabato. "First, Democrats then didn't believe it was possible for them to lose the House; now they know better and are more cautious." In addition, he says, there have been fewer retirements this year; the Democratic base after Obama's 53 percent win is stronger than it was when Clinton only won a 43 percent plurality in 1992; and the public image of the GOP was much better in the early 1990s than it is now.

Republicans, needless to say, have their own spin: Ayres, the GOP pollster, claims that this round Republicans have it easy: "Democrats are doing such a wonderful job of flying a suicide mission, we are not going to have do to a hell of a lot. . . . They are spending like they have no concept of where money comes from, how you produce it, or if there is any limit on it. People are scared."

Some Democratic strategists are indeed fearful. "I hate to say it, but he's right," said one, after hearing Ayres' comments. "That is just what we have to be worried about."

But Trippi contends that in this bleak-for-Democrats setting, 2010 losses may not be as devastating as some expect because Republican incumbents could also lose in droves. "This could turn out to be the most scorching anti-incumbent year we have ever seen," Trippi says -- in which case the Democratic gains in Republican seats could make up for some, but not all, of the Democratic losses.



7)The Whirlwind of Obama's Ambiguity
By David Paul Kuhn

Barack Obama has long compared himself to a Rorschach test. Liberals saw a progressive savior. Moderates saw a practical change agent. Americans saw promise of a post-partisan, post-racially divisive era. The projection was notably always considered positive.

But Rorschach tests were meant to measure a negative condition. And after nearly one year in office the Rorschach politician is, as president, facing the whirlwind of his ambiguity.


We still don't know this president's core. His guiding maxims are elusive. He has refused to draw principled redlines on the big fights or invest himself deeply in those fights. We have yet to see the grit in the man.

As liberal New York Rep. Anthony Weiner put it to Politico, Obama failed to express "at the outset" his "values" on some of the "important issues" of the times, like health care. Consequentially, "most people in the country don't know what you want and don't feel they should rally to your side."

Candidate Obama did not need to define those values. He won the presidency as the disciplined surfer on a wave of discontent. But that wave has shifted against him. And without a clear sense of Obama's core principles, he is nearly rudderless to push on against the tide.

The enigmatic politician was once a magnet for nebulous emotions like "change" and "unity." Obama is now a president complicated by competing senses of "disappointment" and "division." Obama has struggled to consummate the very themes that rocketed him from a state legislator to president in four years. And that failure has shifted many voters to the polar view. It's often this way with unfulfilled expectations. So goes the modern political sausage grinder. But Obama's team insisted he was different. He was "change you can believe in."

Leaders from almost every bloc of Obama's base—black, gay, labor, Hispanic and liberal constituencies—now increasingly accuse Obama of failing to fully champion the change they most desire: from gay rights to immigration reform to Obama's refusal to fight for a more progressive health care bill.

Obama began 2009 hoping to emulate the giants of reform. "Not since Lyndon B. Johnson and Franklin D. Roosevelt has a president moved to expand the role of government so much on so many fronts," led one February Los Angeles Times article.

But Obama is without the big first-year legislative feats of LBJ (Civil Rights Act) and FDR (financial/New Deal reforms). Meanwhile, the big health care legislation crawls exhaustively nearer to law — ailing, piecemeal and flawed, struggling to be worthy and hold 60-vote proof.

Rank-and-file liberals have stuck with Obama. But disillusion is visible among activist leaders like Howard Dean, who called the bill not "real reform." Andrew Stern, Service Employees International Union president, wrote his membership in December that Obama "must fight for the reform." Stern's implication, Obama thus far has not.

Obama's political opposition has also shifted. One year ago, Republicans were off balance. House Minority Leader John Boehner began 2009 warning Republicans to hold their tongue. By autumn, Boehner was accusing Obama of "subverting the constitution." Boehner once affirmed Obama's bipartisanship. He now, like his party, rails against Obama's divisiveness. A slim majority of conservatives approved of Obama in his first week; only about a quarter do today.

So the inkblot remains formless. The longer this is the case, the more difficult it will be to reconcile opposing views. Where liberal leaders saw hope, some convey a degree of disillusion. Where conservatives once spoke of Obama in quasi-bipartisan tones, they mostly today see their political bête noire.

Themes most important to independents have been particularly tarnished. Obama's inauguration address spoke of the promise to move beyond the ideological "worn out dogmas" that have "strangled our politics." The words matched his 2008 image. Now many independents believe Obama is stuck in old dogmas. It's the core reason independents approval of Obama fell below 50 percent as early as summer.

Liberal leaders want the progressive president who will spend big. Independents sweat the return of the big spending liberal. No bloc sees the man they once saw. Cue the adage: try to please everyone, please no one.

Then there is the economy. The general rule of presidential politics is that economy matters most when it really matters (as during recessions). That means that if this president is akin to a Rorschach test, he is especially vulnerable to these hard times.

Yet Obama's 2008 image is not lost, only sullied. The Pew Research Center found last month that 53 percent of adults still believe Obama has a "new approach" to Washington politics. But two-thirds believed in that "new approach" last February. Importantly, independents belief has fallen from 62 to 48 percent over that period.

The American public is roughly split on Obama's accomplishments, according to a December CNN poll. Half believe he has "fallen short" of their expectations and half believe he has "met" or "exceeded" expectations.

Perhaps more importantly, for the professed bridge builder, a December Wall Street Journal poll found that only 12 percent view 2009 as a period of partisan "unity." One year earlier, 52 percent said they expected party "unity" in the coming year.

The American mind cannot escape the gap between expectations and reality. And because of Obama's Rorschach persona, neither has he.

David Paul Kuhn is the Chief Political Correspondent for RealClearPolitics and the author of The Neglected Voter.

8) Obama finally forswears tough sanctions on Iran. Jerusalem says nothing

Letting Iran off the US hook

Taking advantage of the ado surrounding the failed airliner bombing and the new prominence of the al Qaeda peril, the Obama administration has finally given up its sanctions strategy for averting the rise of a nuclear-armed Iran. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton was tasked with the public announcement: "The Obama administration wants to keep the door to dialogue open with Iran," she said Jan. 4, then added a remark which let Iran off completely of the American hook: "…although the United States has avoided using the term deadline, it cannot wait indefinitely to hear form Iran."

Her words explicitly backtracked on statements by other senior administration officials, including National Security Adviser James Jones, in recent interviews that Tehran's deadline for responding to international proposals expired on Dec. 31Iranian sources report. Tehran sees Washington as so eager to reach the negotiating table that it is falling back from effective penalties step by step, including an embargo on refined oils and benzene, and even willing to forgive Iran's failure to meet a highly publicized international deadline.

"Our goal is to pressure the Iranian government, particularly the Revolutionary Guards elements without contributing to the suffering of Iranians," Clinton explained.

Threatening Iran's Revolutionary Guards instead of its regime is nothing but a feeble face-saver, our Iranian sources maintain, since the IRGC, whose financial operations and its management of Iran's nuclear program subsist on alternative "black market" economic mechanisms is hardly vulnerable to international sanctions.

The Guards command a world network of thousands of straw companies, which defy investigation - even by American experts. Their funds are not moved through banks but around the illegal channels of international crime and drug cartels in countries outside US scrutiny. The IRGC is therefore not afraid of the fading US threat of sanctions.

In Jerusalem, the Netanyahu government persists in clinging to the Obama administration's coattails on the Iranian nuclear menace, keeping up the pretence that sanctions are still a viable option. On Jan. 2, a senior Israeli diplomat in Washington was quoted as saying that in back-channel conversations “Obama has convinced us that it’s worth trying the sanctions, at least for a few months.”

Another official, deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon, predicted confidently to an interviewer: "The US will impose sanctions against Iran within a month."

Two days later, the Clinton statement showed Israeli officials to be woefully lagging behind the times with regard to decision-making in Washington. There, the Iran crisis has been taken back a whole year to square one. Obama administration wasted this year in barren diplomatic engagement against Tehran's iron resistance to any changes in its nuclear objectives, while the Netanyahu-Barak government frittered the year away by playing follow-the-US leader and keeping Israel on the sidelines of any initiative against an avowed enemy.

By contrast, Iran spent the year celebrating another leap forward in developing its nuclear weaponry and missiles, the while binding its ally Syria and proxies Hizballah and Hamas to mutual defense pacts should the US or Israel conjure up the temerity to strike its nuclear facilities after all.