Health Legislation - Another Big X'mas Tree on The Mall!

Two mostly diametric views on Obama and health care legislation.

It has been my experience legislators do not write legislation. Their anointed staff do and often the staff writes in little items that are especially important to certain legislators or even the staff members themselves. These items do not get readily revealed. It can take time for complex legislation to surface in terms of both its real intent and impact. When a bill is as major, long and contorted as the health care bill it will be many weeks and maybe longer before the true nature of what has been crafted is really understood.

In this particular instance, we were told by Pelosi and company the critical object was to pass and then correct it. Why? Though she did not say so, it can be inferred Obama needed a victory to save his presidency and whether it meant the nation losing, members of Congress who voted for it losing in the upcoming election that was secondary and maybe even tertiary to the political necessity - win one for the new 'Gipper.'

The legislation may address some of the critical issues that were debatd back and forth but for sure the emphasis was not on cost containment though it is being defended on that basis. This legislation will certainly add to our expanding deficit, it will not turn "emergency room" users into advocates of their own health care and will probably sink of its own administrative weight over time.

As for what Republicans can and/or will be able to do about it's revision remains to be seen. Seldom does momentous and dirty legislation passed in an ugly manner of this kind get the thorough washing it deserves so we are likely to be stuck with a radically altered health care system.

The degree to which the legislation is changed, if at all, will depend upon the willingness of voters to demand it and those opposed to offer rational alternatives. That is a big task which Republicans may accomplish but it will not be easy unless they are unified in their objections, sensible and steadfast in their efforts.

That is a tall order and particularly for Republicans who have, all to often, proven their expertise at shooting off their mouths and thereby, shooting themselves in their collective feet.



The ultimate tragedy of this legislation, as with far too many complex and over-reaching laws, is that those who vote for it never read it, never truly understand it and only know sort of second hand what they are voting on and, to make matters worse, most legislation does not accomplish what it is intended to do.

Finally, most legislation eventually serves as a Christmas tree on which more expanding social baubles are hung. This is a big tree and I have no doubt we have not seen the last of its lights and trinkets! (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Now that Obama has his health care fix he seems prepared to prove how sick he is of Netanyahu.


Meanwhile, Netanyahu seems willing to resist Obama's prescription and Obama seems prepared to shove it down his throat.

No doubt Obama holds more aces than Netanyahu but I suspect the world will ultimately get 'poked' by Obama's hubris, arrogance. Being the messiah, Obama comes across as believing he has the divine strong arm answers.

How sad, petulant and pathetic is the course Obama has chosen to take. (See 2, 2a and 2b below.)
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Reckless appointments have become an Obama stock in trade and particularly is this so when it comes to paying obeisance to unions. (See 3 below.)
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The Bully has stepped out of the pulpit. (See 4 below.)
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Defeating Charlie Rangel! (See 5 below.)
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Harking back to FDR! (See 6 below.)
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More diametric views and this time regarding Obama and Israel.

Former Israeli Consul General in New York sees Obama through a positive prism.

Then there are always other views.

Which is right? You decide and time will tell. (See 7, 7a and 7b below.)
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Dick
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1) HC Reform Less a Monument to Idealism Than Act of Hubris
By Cathy Young

While nobody knows what effects the health care reform bill passed by Congress will have on health care in America, the battle around this legislation is very likely to have disastrous effects on the nation's cultural health. Vitriol, hate, hysteria and dishonesty and stark political polarization have reached new lows even for our time, with each side in the debate bandying about accusations of murder.

Part of the reason this particular debate has reached such a pitch of intensity is that health care affects people on a deeply personal level; it is a matter not only of privacy on the most intimate of levels but also, frequently, of life and death. The idea of being unable to afford medical care for oneself or loved ones is terrifying; so is the idea of the government poking its nose in one's health care, and perhaps deciding who has access and who does not.


While the debate is often framed as one between European-style big government and American-style free markets, it is to a large extent a false dichotomy. Government is already more entangled in medicine in America than in almost any other part of the private sector, and there are strong arguments that many of the current problems - including out-of-control costs - are at least partly related to government-imposed market distortions.

At the same time, the life-and-death nature of medicine throws a major wrench into the libertarian paradigm.

Freedom of choice is an empty concept if one of the options is death or disability; whats more, this is one area where better and costlier goods and services may be a matter of necessity rather than luxury. Indeed, as with atheists and foxholes, there are (almost) no libertarians in emergency rooms. Some of the strongest critics of "ObamaCare," such as Fox News talk show host Bill O'Reilly, readily endorse the view that there is a basic right to health care, insofar as no one should be denied treatment for lack of funds. Most alternative health care proposals, even ones from strongly free-market think tanks such as the Cato Institute, assume a fairly extensive role for government and public subsidies through vouchers, for instance in ensuring access for the poor.

Another irony is that as far as access goes, health care is a victim of its own success. Recent decades have seen tremendous strides in medical research and practice but those strides have often brought with them costly drugs, devices, and procedures. Today, someone who would have been doomed to disability or premature death a generation or two ago can often lead a long and full life - and to deny them that opportunity because they (or, in the case of children, their parents) cannot afford it should be troubling even to the most pro-free-market among us.

Thats where the hard questions come in. What degree of income-based inequality in life-and-death matters can we accept and regard ourselves as a moral society? If we lack the resources to give everyone the best medical care on demand, do we find other ways to allocate and limit access whether by having longer waiting times for certain procedures or by having experts, government officials, or insurance companies decide who gets certain treatments and who doesn't, based on such factors as age and quality-of-life potential? If we know that the spiraling costs of medicine are partly related to unnecessary treatments, who gets to decide what unnecessary is?

No wonder, then, that the rhetoric on this issue has been more out of control than medical costs. Sarah Palin and some others on the right have whipped up hysteria about "death panels" that will deny lifesaving medical care to the less fit - claims that Cato Institute expert Michael Tanner, a strong critic of the reform legislation, has dismissed as unfounded. Not to be outdone, pro-health-care-reform blogger Ezra Klein charged last December that Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who was then threatening to filibuster the bill if it included a Medicare expansion provision, "seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people to settle a political score."

The misleading claims, too, have been rampant on both sides. Last year, when a government expert panel recommended scaling down mammogram screening programs for women 40 to 50, many on the right saw this as an ObamaCare-related ploy to cut costs at women's expense - even though the debate on the benefits of routine breast cancer screening in that age group has been going on for more than a decade.

Meanwhile, as the vote on the health care bill neared earlier this month, Amnesty International weighed in with a report on the slight rise in the rates of deaths in childbirth for American women in recent years, portraying this trend as an indictment of our current health care system and its injustices toward the poor. Leaving aside the question of how far the human rights group has strayed from its original agenda of championing political prisoners, the report grossly oversimplifies the problem: most of the increase in maternal mortality is due not to lack of medical care but to rising obesity, higher maternal age, and more Caesarean sections - that is, overtreatment.

The current reform legislation won't lead us into communism. Some other sky-is-falling predictions seem very unlikely to come true such as a health-care police state in which the governments new role in insurance regulation is used to silence critics through the threat of access denial. (This has not happened even in Western democracies that have gone much further down the road to socialized medicine than this bill would do.) But could this bill have less drastic negative effects, from driving up deficits to increasing health care expenditures for many middle-class Americans to discouraging innovation to tying up small businesses in more red tape? All of that is entirely plausible.

Clearly, the existing system has many inadequacies that needed to be addressed - failings that have driven people into bankruptcy due to an illness in the family, or forced them to forego medical care until their health has deteriorated and they need major emergency intervention. But there were ways of correcting these problems through targeted and limited measures to make insurance available to people with pre-existing conditions, to streamline the process of the poor and the disabled getting Medicaid, to close other loopholes.

Instead, President Obama has pushed for a health care revolution. What we got was a package that not only takes the drastic step of making health insurance mandatory, but contains so many provisions and clauses, most of them to be phased in over several years, that it is virtually impossible for citizens - or members of Congress, for that matter - to make sense of it. At a time when America's economy is still in bad shape and when we face numerous problems abroad, Obama has put the country through a shattering political battle - and, with legal challenges and promises of repeal, the fight may be just beginning.

This seems, at the moment, less a monument to idealism than to hubris.

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

1a)Principled and passionate: how Obama sealed his place in history. After a bruising first year, the president has seen off the cynics by remembering what drew him to seek office

These days, when you hear so much from people about what, or who, they are going to vote against, while they complain bitterly that no politicians or set of policies match their particular requirements, it is worth listening to the words Barack Obama used to rally his Democrat troops before the healthcare vote last week. They represent the highest political endeavour and give the sense of a cause that remains just and noble despite all the compromises he had to make.

"Every once in a while," he said, "a moment comes where you have a chance to vindicate all those best hopes that you had about yourself, about this country, where you have a chance to make good on those promises that you made in all those town meetings and all those constituency breakfasts and all that travelling through the district, all those people who you looked in the eye and you said, you know what, you're right, the system is not working for you and I'm going to make it a little bit better.

"And this is one of those moments. This is one of those times where you can honestly say to yourself, doggone it, this is exactly why I came here. This is why I got into politics. This is why I got into public service… we are not bound to win, but we are bound to be true."

What a wonderful phrase that is about vindicating all your best hopes for yourself and the country. This is the finest of political aspirations and as a whole the speech tells you a lot about the tough commitment required from politicians and the public to make democracy work properly today. The speech will bookmark the history of his presidency and do what the proclamation on the emancipation of slaves did for the presidency of Abraham Lincoln in 1862, and the Civil Rights Act for Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

There's still a long way to go on the new universal health insurance scheme, which will affect millions of black people and which caused such feeling between Republicans and Democrats that black members of Congress were subject to racist insults from protesters on Capitol Hill, but an irreversible change has occurred in the administration, as well as the country. Obama has become the president that he was elected to be. He slugged it out to win a bruising political victory for himself but greater equality and fairness for America's less well off too. There is a truly moving continuity of purpose that links 1862, 1964 and 2010.

Obama's first year or so, exactly like Lincoln's, has been characterised as consisting of disappointment, failed initiatives, false starts and what many regard as far too much deliberation. Americans of all colours and stripe were disgruntled. The Tea Party protest swelled with a strident, inchoate panic about un-American policies, a reflex that Lincoln and Johnson would both have recognised because this kind of allergic reaction was the measure of the changes they promulgated.

The presidency has a spring in its step, there is a halo of power that can only be won in battle and now suddenly the rest of the enormous canvas on which the modern US president operates seems broken with shafts of light that are as much due to the exercise of principle as to intrigue and low politics. Following his triumph on Sunday, Obama met Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday to discuss new settlements in east Jerusalem, which the administration has consistently opposed because they threaten progress on peace talks. Bibi didn't give an inch on the settlements, so Obama left him to his own devices while he had dinner, which, according to one Israeli newspaper, was the sort of treatment reserved for the president of Equatorial New Guinea. "I'm still around, let me know if there is anything new," said the chief, the man who knows that at the last count Israel receives $3bn in aid annually from the US, to say little of military hardware, intelligence and diplomatic favours. Did someone whisper the phrase "client state"? It certainly seemed so. Bibi and his defence minister, Ehud Barak, disappeared to their embassy muttering about insecure telephones.

Actually, the tough-minded Obama presidency has been coming into focus for a while now. Next month, 40 heads of state will attend a summit on nuclear security, one of Obama's key areas of policy, which now opens with an agreement, patiently and coolly reached between Russia and the US on missile reduction. George Bush shot his mouth off, bombed and spent a lot while doing nothing to tackle the great strategic issues. But Obama is moving with a steady gaze towards several big prizes, not all of which he is going to claim, but at least he knows what they are – "We are not bound to win, but we are bound to be true."

Last year, he met the Dalai Lama at the White House, causing the Chinese to have conniptions. There was a further chilling of relations on climate change, America's vast trade deficit with China, arms sales to Taiwan and a suspicion that China's currency the renminbi – or people's money – is undervalued to give China a trade advantage. This may harden into an accusation with next month's US Treasury Department report on exchange rate practices. Then there is Google's commendable withdrawal from the Chinese mainland because of censorship, which is certainly in keeping with Obama's stand on human rights in China. I mention this because while Rupert Murdoch's Fox News network in the US has been spewing out daily dose of mustard gas on the health bill, talking about freedom of choice and messy European socialism, another branch of Murdoch's unlovely empire – MySpace China – happily complies with the censorship of a socialist state.

That kind of naked self-interest – and hypocrisy – suddenly seems so old fashioned. There is a sense, too, that Republicans are chasing down some unfeasible evolutionary dead end and, although they may do well in the midterms next November, Obama is the one who will continue to make history.

There are some problems and doubts. Obama has committed to a project in Afghanistan which is probably not going to work and on the question of human rights, he has failed to find the solution to Guantánamo and has backed DNA testing on arrest in the US, which will ensure a racial bias in samples retained. I hate to say it but sometimes these blind spots, as well as the boldness, remind me of Blair.

Ted Kennedy wrote to Obama last May just before he died telling him that he was sure that Obama would be the man to sign the healthcare bill, the political cause of Kennedy's life, because Obama knew that at stake were "fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country". Last week was American politics in all its gruelling and imperfect magnificence. It's good to remember that things can change for the better, even in Britain, where we could do with some hard-nosed principle.
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2) Obama demands Netanyahu’s peace answers by Saturday
By HERB KEINON AND KHALED ABU TOAMEH


Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will convene his senior ministers on Friday to discuss the demands made by US President Barack Obama and his overall trip to Washington – a trip that, because of negative atmospherics and amid a paucity of hard information, has been widely characterized as among the most difficult in recent memory.

Officials in the Prime Minister’s Office continued to throw a blackout on the Netanyahu-Obama meeting, as well as give only very sketchy information about the commitments that the US is demanding of Israel as a precursor to starting the proximity talks with the Palestinians. The US, according to officials, wants these commitments by Saturday so it can take them to the Arab League meeting in Libya and receive that organization's backing for starting proximity talks.

According to a Palestinian Authority official in Ramallah, the US administration on Thursday informed the PA that the Netanyahu meetings in Washington did not produce any agreement on the issue of construction in east Jerusalem.

The official said that PA President Mahmoud Abbas met in Amman with David Hale, US deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, who briefed him on the outcome of Netanyahu’s talks with Obama.

“The American envoy said that the two sides failed to reach agreement on settlement construction in Jerusalem,” the PA official said.

Hale also told Abbas that the US administration would continue its discussions with the Israeli government in the next few days and weeks, in an attempt to solve the crisis that has erupted between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government.

Prior to leaving Washington late on Wednesday night, Netanyahu tried to put a positive spin on the meetings, saying that the two sides had made progress in finding a “middle path” between the “traditional policy of all Israeli governments [regarding building in east Jerusalem], and our will to also find a way to renew the peace process.”

US officials indicated on Thursday that Israel had bridged some of the gaps between the two countries during their marathon consultations, even though no final resolution was presented after Obama’s and Netanyahu’s staffs toiled late into the night on Wednesday for a second straight day.

“I think we’re making progress on important issues,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters on Thursday afternoon, but he declined to go into specifics.

US sources indicated that there seemed to be a good deal of movement on the contents of planned indirect negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.

Nevertheless, the administration’s treatment of Netanyahu during his meeting with Obama created the impression of a deep crisis in relations. As Jackson Diehl wrote in The Washington Post, the White House’s refusal to allow non-official photographers record the Obama-Netanyahu meeting, and the fact that no statement was issued afterward, led to the impression that “Netanyahu is being treated as if he were an unsavory Third World dictator, needed for strategic reasons but conspicuously held at arms length.”

According to various Israeli sources, the Obama administration is asking for Israel to commit to some type of limitation on building in east Jerusalem; to show a willingness to deal with the so-called core issues of borders, refugee and Jerusalem already in the indirect talks; and to agree to a number of confidence building measures, including the release of hundreds of Fatah prisoners.

There were also reports, not confirmed, that the administration had asked for a commitment to extend the moratorium on housing starts in the West Bank settlements beyond the 10-months originally declared.

One source in the Prime Minister’s Office said the goal of the dialogue with the US was to find a way to start the proximity talks and “put these problems behind us.”

The key problem with the US has to do with Jerusalem, with the administration making it clear in recent days that it did not accept Netanyahu’s declaration at the AIPAC conference on Monday evening that Jerusalem was not a settlement, but rather Israel’s capital, and that building would continue there.

“On the issue of Jerusalem,” one source in Netanyahu’s office said, “the truth is that this is a city of 750,000 people, and every couple of days there is going to be some kind of building, or zoning, or buying or planning and actual building. The whole idea that every time this happens dialogue will stop is a recipe for no peace process.”

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, one of the members of Netanyahu’s “septet” inner cabinet, told Channel 2 on Thursday that while Israel was not looking for a fight with the US, it would not give up on its “basic right” to build in Jerusalem. This sentiment was repeated by Netanyahu a number of times during his visit to Washington.

Lieberman, according to some reports, called the prime minister during his Washington talks to urge him not to bow to US pressure and not to sign off on any new commitments.

Regarding confidence building measures to the Palestinians, Netanyahu, according to senior officials, did not commit himself to a prisoner release, and said he would bring the matter to the security establishment in Israel to determine whether this was something they would recommend or not.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who accompanied Netanyahu on the trip, told the Americans – who reportedly had asked for an Israeli commitment to extend the housing start moratorium – that he was “disappointed” by the reaction to the original moratorium decision. He said he thought this would garner more positive reactions from around the world, as well as bring the Palestinians to the negotiating table. Instead, he said, the move made the Palestinians believe that if they held out, they could get even more.

Netanyahu, during his talks in the White House, asked the Obama administration why it was not placing the same kind of pressure on the Palestinians as it was placing on Israel, and asked where the “reciprocity” was. Netanyahu, according to senior officials, said that while the US held him responsible for the timing of the announcement to build 1,600 units in Ramat Shlomo, rather than holding Interior Minister Eli Yishai responsible, Abbas was not held responsible when it came to the PA – which recently presided over the naming of a square in Ramallah for the terrorist responsible for the Coastal Road massacre.

Meanwhile, the PA’s chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said that Israel was “damaging its credibility as a serious peace partner” by refusing to stop construction in east Jerusalem and West Bank settlements.

In response to the latest decision to approve the construction of 20 housing units at the site of Shepherd’s Hotel in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, Erekat said: “There is a growing sense of frustration among the international community with the measures and decisions taken by Israel.”

Erekat said that if Israel were serious about achieving peace with the Palestinians, it would stop building “illegal settlements,” as requested by the road map for peace in the Middle East and the Quartet.

“Why is Israel continuing to do what it’s doing at a time when everyone is urging it to do what is needed to achieve peace?” he asked.


The PA official said that the decision to build the new homes in Sheikh Jarrah was in the context of Israel’s policy to “end Palestinian presence in Occupied East Jerusalem” and destroy any hope of reaching agreement over the issue of the city.

Erekat said that the PA wanted to give the proposed proximity talks a chance to succeed, “because our obvious goal is to end Israeli occupation and [achieve] the establishment of a viable and independent Palestinian state within the pre-June 4, 1967, borders.”

2a)Israel 'to defy Barack Obama' over settlements
By Adrian Blomfield

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, convened an emergency session of his cabinet on Thursday night amid signs that the Jewish state was strengthening its defiance of the United States.


Mr Netanyahu and his ministers discussed a series of demands made by President Barack Obama to end a damaging row over Jewish building in east Jerusalem.

There was no word on what response the inner cabinet would formulate but there seemed to be little prospect of a resolution to the stand-off -- indeed, there were signs that relations between the United States and Israel, already at their most strained in many years, were deteriorating ever more rapidly.


"I thank God that I have been given the opportunity to be the minister who approves the construction of thousands of housing units in Jerusalem," Eli Yishai, Israel's hawkish interior minister, said ahead of the cabinet meeting.

Mr Netanyahu was subjected to a humiliating dressing-down at the White House on Tuesday during which Mr Obama reportedly presented him with a list of 13 demands the United States wanted fulfilled in order to end the crisis.

As he flew back to Israel on Thursday, Mr Netanhayu tried to sound upbeat.

"I think we have found the golden path between Israel's traditional policies and our desire to move forward to peace," he told reporters.

Yet, while Mr Netanyahu is likely to agree to make some "confidence building" gestures towards the Palestinians, a gulf remained on the key issue dividing Israel and the United States: Jewish construction in east Jerusalem.

White House officials acknowledged continuing "disagreements" between President Obama and Mr Netanyahu. Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, was blunter, saying that the prime minister had failed "to reach an understanding with the United States".

Mr Netanyahu's ministers urged him to stand firm by rejecting US calls to reverse the construction of 1,600 new homes in east Jerusalem's Ramat Shlomo settlement, the announcement of which triggered the row.

"If we blink now, we will lose everything, and when that happens the government will collapse," said Silvan Shalom, one of Israel's deputy prime ministers.

Were Mr Netanyahu to agree to halt Jewish building in east Jerusalem, seen by Palestinians as their future capital, there is a risk that at least one of the more radical parties in his Right-wing coalition could withdraw.

While aware of such a possibility, Mr Obama is understood to have told the prime minister that he can either choose to ingratiate himself with his coalition partners or commit to serious peace talks by accepting his demands.

The Palestinian leadership has indicated its unwillingness to join indirect peace talks unless settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is fully frozen, a step it says Israel is obliged to make under commitments made during previous negotiations.

The centrist Kadima party, which won the most seats in last year's general election, yesterday offered to join the ruling coalition should one its pro-settlement rivals pull out.

For the moment, at least, Mr Netanyahu has shown no inclination to modify his government and many members of his Likud party will bitterly oppose bringing Kadima into the coalition.

2b)With U.S.-Israel ties strained, Obama may make bold move
By Warren P. Strobel

WASHINGTON — After 14 months of frustration over the moribund Mideast peace process and nearly three weeks of open confrontation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Barack Obama shows no sign of backing down — and may be about to double his bets.

The clash began when Vice President Joe Biden visited Jerusalem on March 9 and Israel announced construction of 1,600 new apartments for Jews in disputed East Jerusalem. Biden condemned the decision, and Obama's top aides publicly dressed down Netanyahu for a step they called "insulting."

Hoping to capitalize on Israel's embarrassment, the administration sought concessions on Jewish settlements and other issues to set the stage for renewed talks with the Palestinians.

That, too, didn't work. This past week, first Obama, then his aides held closed talks with Netanyahu at the White House for two days running. No reporter was allowed near the talks, no joint appearances were made and no statements were released afterward.

An Israeli newspaper commented that Netanyahu had been treated as if he were the leader of Equatorial Guinea.

Obama, fresh from his legislative victory on health care, is planning an attempt to turn the current disaster into a diplomatic opportunity, according to U.S. officials, former officials and diplomats.

The administration is said to be preparing a major peace initiative that would be Obama's most direct involvement in the conflict to date, and would go far beyond the tentative, indirect Israeli-Palestinian talks that were torpedoed earlier in the month.

"It is crystallizing that we have to do something now. That this can't go on this way," said one of the officials who, like the others, wouldn't speak for the record because of the issue's sensitivity.

Because of the U.S. political calendar, Obama has limited time to press Israel before it becomes a major domestic political issue during midterm elections. Netanyahu, who this weekend confers with his closest allies, has limited political space in which to operate, if he wants to stay in power.

His coalition at home is populated with Israeli politicians who support Jewish settlements in the West Bank, oppose any concessions on Jerusalem and are skeptical of an independent Palestinian state next door.

One irony of the current confrontation is that the administration, which had laboriously organized indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinians, had planned to use Biden's visit to provide "strategic reassurance" to Israel, in hopes of improving relations with the closest U.S. ally in the Middle East after a year of strains.

Now, trust between the two sides seems to be at a very low ebb.

"There's not a great deal of trust that he believes deeply in the two-state solution," a former senior U.S. official in touch with the White House said of Netanyahu. "There's a belief that he's a reluctant peacemaker here."

The Obama administration is said to believe that Netanyahu has more control over Jewish settlements than he admits, and political flexibility to dump his right-wing partners and form a government with the moderate Kadima party if he chose.

"Fundamentally, he's going to have to decide between his coalition and his relationship with the United States," the former official said.

From the day of his inauguration and his first major appointment — former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine as his special Middle East envoy, efforts by Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Mitchell have been a study in frustration.

Netanyahu turned aside a U.S. demand last year for a comprehensive settlement freeze, offering a 10-month moratorium that excluded East Jerusalem. Even under President George W. Bush, whose interest was episodic, Israeli and Palestinian leaders held direct talks. Obama has struggled just to start "proximity talks," in which U.S. mediators would shuttle between the two sides.

So American anger was white-hot when the March 9 announcement left the proximity talks stillborn.

Mitchell, who labored for months during frequent Mideast shuttles "is a patient man. . . . but this has to be aggravating," one State Department official said.

Senior U.S. officials are said to debate whether the unveiling of the 1,600 new apartments at Ramat Shlomo was a deliberate attempt by Netanyahu to avoid peace negotiations, or merely symptomatic of his tenuous control over his own government. The Interior Ministry is run by the ultra-orthodox Shas party.

Either conclusion bodes poorly for Obama's attempts at diplomacy. Israeli officials say Netanyahu was as blindsided by the announcement as Biden was.

On Friday, March 12, Clinton and Netanyahu spoke by phone in a tense conservation, in which the secretary of state relayed U.S. anger at the move in Ramat Shlomo. She demanded that Israel take steps to revive hopes for peace.

The U.S. government has declined to list them, but they're said to include an end to provocative moves in East Jerusalem; removing checkpoints and otherwise easing conditions on the West Bank; and agreeing to immediately negotiate core disputes with the Palestinians.

Clinton and Netanyahu were both keenly aware that they were scheduled to speak on March 22 in Washington at the annual conference of the powerful Jewish-American lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Netanyahu called Clinton, who was in Moscow, on March 18 and delivered his response to the American demands. Israeli officials say he insisted that the Palestinians had to make concessions too, not just Israel.

Publicly, the administration moved to tone down the rhetoric, and meetings were arranged with Clinton and Obama, who had canceled an Asia trip to be in Washington for the health care vote.

Netanyahu's speech at AIPAC gave no ground. He declared: "Jerusalem is not a settlement; it's our capital" and described a limited U.S. role in the peace talks. The next morning, he went to Capitol Hill, where Democrats and Republicans alike showered him with promises of support for Israel.

It looked for a moment like the Israeli prime minister had weathered the storm.

At the White House, however, distrust of Netanyahu ran deep. Maps were prepared, showing how Israel had all but encircled Jerusalem's Old City with Jewish settlements and even religious theme parks — "facts on the ground" that would preclude a peace deal. Palestinians also claim the city as their capital.

By all accounts, the White House meetings went badly, both in substance and tone, as the Obama team pressed Netanyahu to make concessions on Jewish settlements and other issues. Netanyahu balked at some of the requests, which the administration hasn't made public.

Now, the ball is in his court.
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3)EDITORIAL: Out at recess Republican senators unanimously urged President Barack Obama last week not to use an Easter recess appointment to name a union lawyer to the National Labor Relations Board.

They worry Craig Becker, who has been a top lawyer for the Service Employees International Union and the AFL-CIO, would use the position to do an end-run around the reluctance of Congress to enact a "card-check" law, enacting by regulatory fiat sections of a proposal designed to allow labor unions to bypass secret-ballot workplace elections.


"His writings clearly indicate that he would use his position on the NLRB to institute far-reaching changes in labor law far exceeding the board's authority and bypassing the role of Congress," they wrote.

The GOP, led by Arizona Sen. John McCain, has blocked Mr. Becker's confirmation for months. Democrats could not muster 60 votes last month to move it forward.

Appointing him during a Senate recess would allow Mr. Becker to serve through next year without the Senate's OK.

Recess appointments are perfectly legal -- George W. Bush used the tactic numerous times. But the question here is not merely procedural; it's substantive.

In past writings, Mr. Becker reveals himself as a radical collectivist who questions the sanctity of private property, rails against "individualism" and argues that unions are necessary in order to combat the evils of "competition and contract."

At a time when the president should be bending over backward to reassure the nation's employers that he's not some Marxist out to further punish them, appointing a character of Mr. Becker's background is like handing the NLRB a pistol and saying, "Put them out of their misery."

The appointment would be reckless.

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4)Big Brother Becomes Big Bully
By Ed Lasky

The government in the Age of Obama has gone beyond the big brother that watches out and cares for us. Instead, it has becomes the big brother that torments and bullies us and then takes what is rightfully ours: our savings, our freedom, and our futures.


Liberals are often labeled as wanting to bring out the nanny state (the feminine version of a big brother). This is wrong. A nanny cares for her wards so they can mature into responsible adults able to take care of themselves.


But a bully has other desires. A bully cares only about himself and his own greedy will to power. A bully taunts and threatens. A bully holds others in contempt. A bully disregards not only the wishes of those around him but also the rules that may his restrain his power. A bully takes what is not his.


A bully will not stop until people rise up and put an end to him.


Has our government become a big bully? Let us count the ways.


Very early in 2009, the troika of Pelosi-Reid-Obama sought to expand the power of the federal government over states, businesses and us. They all but nationalized the American auto industry (save Ford), overriding debtor rights and decades of law. They have also taken over chunks of the financial industry and, via their control over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, much of the housing industry. Many salaries will be set by the White House. Education, a local matter, is increasingly becoming a federal one. The student loan industry has also been brought in-house; the White House, that is. That was merely a warm-up.


The smash and grab style of governing has since run rampant. Rules, regulations, taxes, and mandates; the proliferation of unelected czars; the orders and commands; the abuse of power; the diktats-all stuffed down our throats.


Does it feel like we are all being waterboarded?


The Department of Justice has hired a legion of lawyers for its Civil Rights Division. They will be busy investigating businesses across America for violations of civil rights laws. Fine -- but they will be using what is called a "disparate impact" standard. Under that criterion, any business that has job standards -- even legitimate ones -- that happen to result in fewer minorities being hired than the DOJ sees fit will be hit with the full might of the Justice Department, which has been staffed with a coven of radical lawyers. Not to be outdone, the Education Department will also be sending out investigators to ensure schools do not discriminate either. Discrimination is often in the eye of the beholder, and under Eric Holder I can guarantee you those eyes will see racism across the breadth of America (because, after all, we are a nation of racists). Businesses, local government, schools: all will be bullied in the years ahead.


But wait ...there's more.


The Environmental Protection Agency has gone mental -- off the deep end.


Eager to expand its power to bully businesses, the EPA is busy trying to regulate every carbon molecule out of existence (except those burned by Al Gore, John Edwards, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and their friends and allies, what with those massive homes, private flights, hothouse White House) even if it means circumventing Congress to do so.The climate con is being used to seize sweeping power over much of the economy.


Cap and tax is coming, as are shortages and price increases -- even though climate change (fictitious or not) is dead last in a list of public priorities in a recent Pews survey.


The Interior Department has all but killed drilling offshore and in vast parts of onshore America-despite Americans overwhelming desire to tap our nation's bounty of our concerns and of us. Adding insult to injury, the feds now may seek to seize vast swaths of land via "presidential proclamation."


The old smash and grab.


The bullies running our country don't care. They only care about themselves.


One could go on and on.


The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is on a hiring binge to make sure the height of the steps in your business is centimeter correct.


The Federal Communication Commission has become a playpen for those who want the airwaves filled with even more liberal claptrap than we have now. Obama and company have declared war -- not on Osama Bin Laden or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch, and remember, when they wanted our friends and neighbors to report "fishy" stories about Obama's agenda?


Bullies want only their voices heard.



The Labor Department has been outsourced to allies of the Service Employees International Union -- and these people know how to bully.


Obama will use his executive power to coerce businesses that receive government contracts to pay its workers what he decides, in his imperial wisdom satisfies him and his union pals and promoters. He enjoys issuing executive orders-skirting the legislative branch and quaint notions such as the separation of powers. He has also used signing statements to "sidestep" new laws passed by (a Democratic) Congress. Why should Congress and the little people tie him down? He will also reportedly circumvent the Senate confirmation process by naming Craig Becker (a leftist union ally) to the National Labor Relations Board via a recess appointment.


A bully fights in underhanded ways.


How will they know when is "enough" -- there is no such word in their vocabulary? These are people who have never had to meet a payroll, in the words of Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln, and are strikingly lacking in real-world business experience.


But who cares? It's not their money but ours. Bullies take and give to satisfy their whims and not our needs. They want to pay off their allies not our debts (can we console ourselves that it will all be funny money issued by a Banana Republic by the time they get done with us?).


Pelosi-to Reid-to Obama then moved into the major leagues: paving the way to the nationalization of health care.


Why?


American don't want ObamaCare, and the more they know, the more they rebel against it. The bullies that rule over us do not care. When they want our opinion, they will give it to us.


So why did Obama make healthcare reform the focus of the past year in face of a struggling economy and poor job numbers (not helped by the hyped-up so-called stimulus)? A crisis was just too good to waste (ask Rahm Emanuel), as was the filibuster-proof Democratic majority in Congress. Therefore, the massive redistribution of wealth that was a goal of Barack Obama all along (the, "spread the wealth" gaffe that was one of the few truthful sentences Barack Obama uttered in 2008) has been done behind the façade of health care. What a charade.


We have been subjected to a year-long spectacle that can best be described as a Congressional Grand Guignol -- a grotesque theatre of the absurd where arm twisting, bribes, payoffs, job offers, reconciliation trickery, loopholes and thuggery are substituted for genuine bipartisanship or even much discussion among Democrats themselves regarding the monstrosity of the so-called "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" (euphemism alert). Voters don't want ObamaCare and they don't want it done through strong-arm tactics that mock our democratic principles.


The three-headed hydra (Pelosi, Reid, Obama) just bullied it through, overcoming opposition among not just Republicans, some Democrats but also most Americans. They engaged in financial gimmickry that makes Bernie Madoff look like a piker .


They misused parliamentary procedures, customs, broke promises and rules.


So what? Nannies obey rules; bullies don't.


Or as Congressman Alcee Hastings of the House Rules Committee summed it up, "There are no rules here, we make ‘em up as we go along" (and he knows how to break rules; he was impeached as a federal judge for breaking them himself-hence, his spot on the House Rules Committee-makes sense?).


Now we are forced to buy health insurance (but not Congressmen or their staffers ). But that is just a relatively small loss of our freedom because the goal, according to Congressman Dingell, is for Obamacare to eventually "control the people."


The Constitution is just so much fish wrap to these Democratic leaders. Smash and grab.


Barack Obama himself admitted he saw it as an obstacle -- some Constitutional Law professor (lecturer, part-time) he must have been. No wonder he fled from conversations with other law professors.


So we have what may very well be an unconstitutional abuse of power in the form of the health care act. The mandates will be piled on us; as will the micromanagement of health care. There are at least twenty ways ObamaCare will take away our freedom, writes David Hogberg in Investor's Business Daily.


Will there be much freedom for us left after this takeover? Not freedom to earn, save, invest and spend as we see fit.


We have already seen local governments grasping for our money. Police are swarming the streets to raise cash via an epidemic of ticketing; traffic cams are proliferating; tax refunds are being held; states are mining IRS data as never before to extract money from citizens. Big brother/big bully wants to take or tax candy and soda pop from us, too.


But these are picayune. Wait ‘til the IRS gets into the game.


The Internal Revenue Service is yet another growth area of government. Even before the health care was on its way to passage and signing, the IRS was busy hiring more people. Now at least 17,000 more people will be hired to not watch out for you, but watch you (at the additional cost of one billion dollars per year and with reams of personal ainformation about you at their fingertips.
Scores of new federal mandates and fifteen different tax increases totaling $400 billion are imposed under the Democratic House bill. In addition to more complicated tax returns, families and small businesses will be forced to reveal further tax information to the IRS, provide proof of ‘government approved' health care and submit detailed sales information to comply with new excise taxes.


Thank you, Mr. President, Madame Speaker, and Mr. Majority Leader!


Recall, Barack Obama joked about unleashing the IRS on people before. He wasn't joking.


A bully does not care about your money, except in so far he schemes to make it his money.


Smash and grab.


We should have known how he would govern by how he campaigned. His focus group slogan may have been "Yes We can!" but that was for the yahoos. When he was off script he revealed his true style when he taunted that if his opponents "bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun." He echoed these comments when he was President when he confronted a Democrat who resisted the health care takeover with the warning, "Don' think we're not keeping score brother." In one generation the Democrats have gone from "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country" to "think about what I can do to you". Bully for him!


We should get used to these types of thrashings since, in the wake of the health care coup d'etat, Speaker Pelosi has promised that the passage (or as Pelosi put it, "the kick through the door") of the health "reform" act will empower the Democrats to push through more such "reform". Wonderful!


But in the end, bullies become hated figures.


We have reached that point.


Congress is held in very low esteem; generic Democrats poll badly; a recent poll found Pelosi has a 11% favorability rating which beats the pants off of Harry Reid's 8% favorability rating (and of the two, she wears the pants -- or designer pantsuits). Barack Obama himself is listing as well; his job disapproval rating tops his approval rating . His ratings have gone down and down and down. We just don't believe much of what he says anymore-and now recognize him for what he is: a bully who rules but does not govern.


Have we had enough of the bullying from big brother and are we prepared to defend ourselves from" the mugging of personal freedom"?


Will Howard Beale's cry, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" become this year's "Yes We can!"?


We may be there.


A CNN poll found that 56 percent of Americans believe that the government has become so powerful that it constitutes an immediate threat to the freedom and rights of citizens .


But it gets worse for the Democrats. A Rasmussen poll reveals that "only 21 percent of the people believe the US government is governing with our consent." Have any of our Democratic politicians ever read the Declaration of Independence? Such thoughts and righteous rage give rise to revolutions.


These are the leading indicators that the Democrats are in for a bad fall season.


How can the little people show the tyrants the door? How do people get rid of bullies who stomp all over us? We come together as we always have.


Hence, the Tea Party movement has emerged at this time and place in our nation's history and why the "Don't Tread On Me" flags are now flapping in the wind.


People are willing to fight to protect the freedoms and futures for themselves and generations to come.


Come November 2010 and 2012, they will be heard, loud and clear.


Ed Lasky is news editor of American Thinker.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

5)Charlie Rangel Faces His Scott Brown
By Mark J. Fitzgibbons

What better message to send to Washington than to defeat an old bull like Charlie Rangel?


Rangel is one of the principal symbols of the tolerance Washington has for corrupt insider politics. He is Chairman-in-school-detention of the House Ways and Means Committee pending efforts of Democrats to avoid the most devastating mid-term election defeat in history.


Because he usually doesn't have a serious challenger, Rangel is able to funnel in the neighborhood of a half million dollars every election cycle to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). Such political largesse protects corruption. Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats dole out committee chairs to, and overlook offenses of, big-money lieutenants like Rangel.


Last week at the Susan B. Anthony List dinner, I sat with Reverend Michel Faulkner, the career non-politician who announced as the Republican challenger to Charlie Rangel. That made a special night all-the-more special.


You see, a little over a week before, Bart Stupak was scheduled to receive a pro-life award at the Susan B. Anthony List dinner. Instead, he was ceremoniously dumped by the group's president Marjorie Dannenfelser for showing his commitment to his party and its corrupt, socialist ways was stronger than his commitment to the life issue.


Meeting him for the first time just that evening, my first impression of Rev. Faulkner is that he conveys his message in conversation rather than slogans, which struck me as refreshing. There was no, "I plan to introduce this bill," and certainly no rehearsed lines. The closest he came was, "The people in my district want jobs, not programs," but he said even that with the conversational sincerity of a friend or neighbor, not a candidate meeting someone for the first time.


He told me about himself. He's a pastor, and founded a nonprofit called the Institute for Leadership. He works with the poor and the homeless. He fosters leadership within his community. He is -- dare I say it? -- a community organizer, but one who believes in and practices the free market and the Gospel.


Later in the conversation, he said something that made me a sure supporter of his run. Politicians -- Republicans, nonetheless -- who recognized his outstanding work in the community, offered him government money for his nonprofit. Rev. Faulkner declined taking taxpayer money. He has wisdom, for he knows he who pays the fiddler calls the tune.


I asked him why he decided to run. He answered exactly as I had hoped. Things stink. The country's going in the wrong direction. We need new leaders, ones with principles who are willing to acknowledge their roles as responsive to the people, not the reverse. He spoke about freedom and the principles on which America was founded, and how far off course our leaders -- not our people -- have gone.


He said the people in his district are hard working, and they deserve someone representing them in Washington who doesn't have four rent-controlled apartments.


I then gave him the test I've recently learned about how to measure a candidate. I asked him, "Are you a boat rocker?" A welcoming grin came across his face saying, "Oh yeah. That, and more." He told me he doesn't want to go to Washington just to slow down the corruption and bankruptcy level spending of government.


So, Charlie Rangel has a problem. Michel Faulkner combines the best leadership qualities of being both brave and humble, a man who walks with the poor and the powerful, and most of all, someone who seems to be entering politics for the right reasons.


Will Charlie Rangel show the courage of the Korean War vet he is and debate Rev. Faulkner, or will the Washington-insider, tax-evading Rangel duck a debate?


Speaking of where we were from, I told him I lived far across the Potomac River in Virginia. He said he grew up in the Washington area. I asked him how he ended up in New York. Football. He played a year with the New York Jets. Not a massive man sitting down, he must have been a quarterback or defensive back, I thought to myself. At the end of the dinner when he stood up, I changed my mind. Definitely a lineman. That ended any notion I had of telling him I'm a New England Patriots fan.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------6)The Supreme Court and FDR's Power Grab
By J.R. Dunn

How great a chance do we have to overthrow ObamaCare in the courts? To answer that question we need to look into that bleak pit of falsehood and mendacity that America's left would like us to ignore at all costs, the historical record.


We need to look at the original effort to nationalize the American economy, the one attempted by Obama's model, Franklin D. Roosevelt, by means of the New Deal. FDR was never quite clear about what he wanted to do. He was clear about the goal, but not about how to get there. Not unlike Obama, he left that problem to various retainers, in this case the members of the Brain Trust.


The two key Brain Trusters were Adolf Berle and Rexford G. Tugwell. Both men were professors at Columbia, and both were of one mind concerning the solutions to America's economic problems: collectivism, centralization, and state control.


Berle was the author (with economist Gardner Means) of The Modern Corporation and Private Property, an influential economics text still read today. According to Berle, the American corporation had gone out of control and could only be tamed through government intervention. Tugwell had traveled to the USSR and fascist Italy and liked what he saw. Of Mussolini's Italy, he said, "It's the cleanest... most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen. It makes me envious." So overwhelmed was he that he was moved to put his feelings into poetry:


I have gathered my tools and my charts.
My plans are finished and practical.
I shall roll up my sleeves... and make America over."


That was the mentality that oversaw the establishment of the Roosevelt administration's major effort at overcoming the Depression, the National Recovery Authority. The NRA was the core organization intended to lead the United States back to prosperity. It also embodied the first serious attempt at the socialization of American society.


The NRA organized industries, from the largest corporation down to the shabbiest mom & pop store, into trade associations called "code authorities". Businesses were asked to accept a government-established "blanket code" of practice covering minimum wages, maximum hours, the abolition of child labor, and a commitment against raising prices. Each industry would then be allowed to write its own code governing operations and marketing.


What went unmentioned, then and later, was the fact that the NRA was adapted almost entirely from "corporatism", the economic system of Italian fascism. Italian industry was divided into state-run "corporatives", which set hours, wages, working conditions, and industrial policy, the same as the code authorities. (Curiously, coming from a diehard anti-cleric such as Mussolini, the concept was originally Catholic.) Mussolini considered the corporate state to be a "third way" between capitalism and socialism, providing all the benefits of government control with none of the drawbacks of expropriation as practiced in the USSR. Tugwell and Berle appeared to agree.


Much in the way of the amusing, obnoxious, and appalling went on under the NRA (including the hiring of an American Duce to run the thing, Nuremberg-type torchlight parades to celebrate its debut, and the establishment of a secret police force in New York to ferret out violators). Detailed accounts can be found in Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism and Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man. But what is of interest to us is what occurred when the NRA collided with the Supreme Court.


The proximate cause of the encounter was a gaggle of sick chickens. The Schecter Poultry Corporation was a New York company run by four brothers. In the summer of 1934, the Schecter brothers ran afoul of the NRA's Red Guards and were arrested for violating the Live Poultry Code. Among the numerous violations was a count of selling "unfit chickens". The Schecters were found guilty on eighteen counts with the verdict upheld on appeal. The brothers then took the case to the Supreme Court.


Arguments for the defense included a claim that the NRA code system represented an unconstitutional delegation of congressional power to the presidency. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who wrote the court's decision, agreed. The totalitarian nature of the NRA, in which the code system attempted to direct the entire national economy, represented, according to Hughes, "Delegation run riot." Justice Hughes added that the emergency conditions of the Depression did not provide grounds for expansion of government powers, and that the Schecter's company, limited as it was to the metro New York area, was an intrastate business not subject to regulation by Congress under the commerce clause. The decision was unanimous, a relatively rare event in a Supreme Court that was as ideologically divided as our current bench (along with conservatives like the chief justice, the Hughes court also featured liberals such as Louis Brandeis and Benjamin Cardozo).


The Schecter decision marked the end of the NRA, already tottering due to corruption, incompetence, and sheer unworthiness to exist. All the same, the Sick Chicken decision infuriated FDR to the point that he lost all perspective -- a rarity in his case -- and went after the court personally. In short order, he concocted his infamous "court-packing" scheme, in which all justices over 70 would be doubled with a shadow justice who would share in their decisions and counter their votes. This blatant power-grab marked the sole occasion in which the Roosevelt administration courted serious unpopularity.


By this time Berle, perhaps sensing which way the tide was turning, had left government. But Tugwell had shifted from industry to agriculture by way of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), another New Deal colossus intended to do for farming what the NRA had done for business. Tugwell's plans for the AAA involved an adaptation of the Soviet method of confiscation, in which food crops were taken at gunpoint from any group the Kremlin wanted to starve out. But rather than straightforward democide, Tugwell was hoping to shake up agricultural markets by restricting supply through confiscating excess production and destroying it as waste. The cash to pay for this effort was to be raised by taxing commodities processors. (A procedure that should sound familiar to fans of ObamaCare.)


Over a two-year period, while millions of Americans went hungry, the federal government spent over $700 million confiscating grain, slaughtering livestock, dumping milk, and burning textile crops. (Including the entire southern cotton crop, an action that sent tens of thousands of starving blacks on the highways headed north.)


This process, despite obvious shortcomings, might have continued as long as the health-care insurers... sorry; commodities processors were willing to play the game. But one, run by a man named Butler, was not. Declining to pay the tax, Butler instead took the government to court.


Butler won all the way up the line, with the feds appealing at every step. That game ended once again before the Supreme Court, with Justice Owen J. Roberts finding for Butler on much the same grounds as the Schecter decision -- that the federal government was acting far outside its legitimate constitutional role. Shortly afterward, the AAA disappeared into the same twilight as the NRA.


Tugwell was at the moment involved in applying another Soviet innovation to American life, the use of population relocation to shift the urban poor to remote rural districts. Sanity prevailed before this nightmare could unfold, with the program scaled back to the establishment of "greenbelt communities" for the resettlement of poor farmers, a program of particular interest to Eleanor Roosevelt. One such community, Arthurdale, was actually constructed, under the management of none other than Rex Tugwell. The man who had set out to "remake America" ended up overseeing one of Eleanor's hobby projects.


The Supreme Court's record in response to attempts to nationalize the U.S. economy is consistent and points in one direction. The Butler decision has been undermined over the decades to a degree that it can no longer serve as a precedent. But the court's conclusions remain clear: the Supreme Court does not care for top-down attempts to restructure American society. The court opposes federal takeover of entire industries, no matter what the purpose. It similarly frowns on end-runs around the Constitution in support of such efforts. Far from simple empiricism derived from case law, the court's stance appears to be based on principle. The court knocks these efforts down not because the chickens got sick or Tugwell screwed things up, but because they violate the very foundations upon which American society and government are built. As the court sees it, when the Constitution places limits on the degree and nature of government intervention, it means exactly that, and is not simply word-play that can elided by a cleverly-written law or Obama speech.


Courts change, and the Roberts court of today is not the Hughes court of 1936. But the Roberts court stands as the most centrist of any Supreme Court bench since that of Charles Evans Hughes himself. The days of the Warrens (Earl Warren/Warren Burger, and tell me history has no sense of humor after taking that in), in which the court acquiesced to or supported the interventionist tendencies of the other branches, are over. The focus of power, both intellectual and judicial, lies with the court's center-right members. The intellectual powerhouses sit on that side. The court's liberals are mediocre, ineffectual, or tired. They exhibit little in the way of crusading fervor, merely a fading inclination to defend past gains. Much as they might wish to take part in pushing forward Obama's agenda, such a role remains well beyond their grasp. We can be confident that the question of the constitutionality of ObamaCare will receive a full and rational hearing from this court. While we must still keep our powder dry and our teapots boiling, there is reason to hope for a legal remedy.

J.R. Dunn is consulting editor of American Thinker, and will edit the forthcoming Military Thinker.
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7)Obama is pro-Israel: President’s demands do not constitute radical change in US policy
By Alon Pinkas




US President Barack Obama is pro-Israel, even though he does not shower Israel with love on a daily basis, as was the case during 16 years of pampering under Clinton and Bush. In addition, the president does not mutter at every opportunity how deep America’s commitment is to Israel’s security and qualitative advantage; yet when it comes to all the parameters that count, Obama is pro-Israel.




The American president stood up at Cairo University and declared that the alliance with Israel is unshakeable. Moreover, before criticizing him for his “humiliating” attitude to Prime Minister Netanyahu, we should note that Obama maintains no warm personal ties with any foreign leader, including the French president, the British PM, the German chancellor, and even America’s neighbors, the Mexican president or the Canadian PM.


Netanyahu slams media coverage of crisis with Washington, says 'these are disagreements among friends, based on longtime relationship, tradition'
Full story


Obama is also not a romantic diplomat such as Jimmy Carter or an idealistic diplomat like Bill Clinton. He is a realist whose approach to foreign policy is much more similar to that of Republicans Richard Nixon or George Bush Sr. Obama, and the Washington officials in his camp, see US interests and regional balances before them: India-Pakistan, Iran-Iraq and the Gulf, and Israel and the Arab world. The aim of these balances is to produce or maintain stability.



Obama pledged to pull many of the US forces out of Iraq by August, he continues the war against al-Qaeda and its satellites and “franchisees,” and he attempts to formulate effective policy to counter Iran’s nuclear efforts. Hence, the US has an interest in seeing a strong Israel that would constitute part of the deterrence vis-à-vis the radical and violent bloc in the Arab-Iranian theater.



In light of the above, the criticism leveled at Israel by General Petraeus and again this past week by Secretary of Defense Gates is incisive: The absence of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, or at the very least a robust and ongoing diplomatic process pose challenges and produce problems in promoting America’s interests in the Middle East.



Reasonable price to pay

If we wish to sum up the criticism, Israel is turning from an asset to a burden. We do not have a Soviet Union here and a balance of power involving a superpower and a client state. We only have the US, allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, and an Iranian threat. In the view of many members of the establishment in Washington, Israel is not helping the US, and hence is not helping itself. After all, Israel’s national interest is to maintain the alliance and special relationship with the US. This is Israel’s greatest strategic asset and most amazing diplomatic achievement throughout its 62 years of independence.




To a large extent, America’s commitment to Israel is incommensurate with its regional interests, yet nonetheless, our relationship developed into what it is. Hence, Israel has an interest in a strong US, because a powerful America and a stable special relationship imply a strong Israel, clearly boosting our power and deterrence.



The price required of Israel is not genuinely high and does not undermine its vital interests. Beyond the dourness and cool reception accorded to Netanyahu by Obama, we should note that the Administration’s demands of Israel are not new and do not constitute a radical change in policy; rather, they constitute a repetition – which is certainly more incisive and unequivocal – of demands presented by previous Administrations.



Those who claim this is a policy change absolve themselves of responsibility for failing to comprehend the Obama Administration. Everything, and this includes everything, had been said in the weeks that passed between Obama’s swore-in ceremony and the general elections in Israel early in 2009.



Netanyahu’s survival in power, preservation of the current coalition, and ongoing construction in the settlements located outside the three large blocs and east of the security fence are legitimate interests for Netanyahu himself, yet it would be difficult to characterize them as vital interests for the State of Israel; it’s even more difficult to convince us that these interests justify a rift vis-à-vis the US.



There is no need to resort to doomsday scenarios in respect to our ties with the US; such scenarios are unlikely to materialize. It’s enough that the Arab world and Europeans are watching Netanyahu’s visit to Washington and that Israel’s isolation will grow.




There is no point in constantly analyzing the “implications of the crisis,” as millions of words had been devoted to the topic by no. There is also no point in again criticizing Netanyahu over the year that had been wasted without an Israeli initiative and about the tainted relationship. The same is true for stating that this is an especially volatile conflict as it combines fundamental gaps between Israel and the US as mutual mistrust. This statement does not constitute an answer for the following question: What do we do next?



At the end of the day, there two strategic Israeli interests are overwhelming here: Firstly, preserving the alliance with the US while undertaking adjustments that would reflect an understanding of US interests; secondly, a diplomatic process vis-à-vis the Palestinians, regardless of whether it is painted in hawkish or dovish colors. This is the agenda and that’s the president in power - and he’s pro-Israel in his “realist” approach.

Alon Pinkas, Israel’s former consul general in New York.

7a)New World's Record for Chutzpah: Obama's Seder
By Jonathan Tobin



Some 19 years ago, the first president Bush earned the enmity of American Jews with his rant about being "one lone guy" standing up against the horde of AIPAC activists exercising their constitutional right to petition Congress. Bush's statement symbolized the intolerance and enmity that his administration felt toward Israel and its American friends. But say one thing for that Bush and his secretary of state, James "f@#$ the Jews" Baker: at least they never pretended to be anything but what they were, country-club establishment Republicans who were not comfortable with Israel or Jewish symbols. Not so Barack Hussein Obama.


After a week spent beating up on Israel, blowing a minor gaffe into an international incident, subjecting Israel's prime minister to unprecedented insults that Obama would never think of trying on even the most humble Third World leader, and establishing the principle that the Jewish presence in eastern Jerusalem — even in existing Jewish neighborhoods — is illegal and an affront to American interests — after all that, Obama plans on spending tonight mouthing a few lines from the Passover Haggadah at a Seder held in the White House.


According to the New York Times, Obama will take part in a Seder in the Old Family Dining Room along with a band of court Jews such as David Axelrod. The Seder, as the newspaper notes, will end, according to tradition, with the declaration of 'next year in Jerusalem.' (Never mind the current chill in the administration's relationship with Israel.)"


There will, no doubt, be many American Jews who are still so insecure in their place in American society that they will feel flattered that even a president who has proved himself the most hostile chief executive to Israel in a generation will pay lip service to Judaism in this way. No doubt the planting of this sympathetic story on the front page of the Sunday New York Times is calculated to soften the blow of his Jerusalem policy and his disdain for Israel in the eyes of many of Obama's loyal Jewish supporters.


The vast majority of American Jews are not only liberals; they are, as they say in Texas, "yellow dog Democrats," meaning they would vote for a yellow dog if it were on the Democratic ticket. But surely a sycophantic article like the Times feature must grate on even their sensibilities. Can any Jew with a smidgeon of self-respect or affection for Israel think that having a president say "Next year in Jerusalem!" while sitting at a table with matzo and macaroons makes up for policies that treat the 200,000 Jews living in the post-1967 Jewish neighborhoods of their own ancient capital as illegal settlers on stolen land?




Perhaps Obama and his coterie of Jewish advisers think they are entitled to expropriate the symbols of Judaism to lend legitimacy to their anti-Israel policies. Of course, if Obama had any real sympathy for the people of Israel or the Jewish people, he might instead spend Monday night reevaluating a policy that appears to concede nuclear weapons to the rabid Jew-haters of Islamist Iran and reinforces the intransigence of the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority and its allies across the Muslim world.


This week, Alan Dershowitz, who still counts himself among Obama's supporters, warned the president that if he failed on Iran, his legacy would be indistinguishable from that of Neville Chamberlain, who appeased Hitler. He's right, but it looks as though Chamberlain is becoming Obama's model because, in addition to employing appeasement strategies, the president's diktat on Jerusalem and the West Bank is faintly reminiscent of the British White Paper of 1939, which forbade the entrance of more Jewish immigrants into Palestine as the Holocaust loomed and sought to restrict the Jewish presence in most of the country.


But like the elder George Bush, at least Neville Chamberlain had the good manners not to try to portray himself as a friend of the Jews by having a Passover Seder at Number Ten Downing Street while simultaneously pursuing such policies


7b)What's Next for the Anointed One?
By Jonathan Rosenblum

This Passover, we must remember that President Obama is not our master and will not determine our fate

The passage of Obamacare confirms Fouad Ajami's characterization of President Obama as America's first "cosmopolitian" president — i.e., the first to see the European model of governance by centralized bureaucracies as a model for emulation. Obamacare marks a transformative moment in the relationship of Americans to their government. It will vastly expand the federal bureaucracy and limit the freedom of choice of every "private" actor in the health care system — patients, doctors, and insurers.

America has embarked on the European path of economic stagnation and declining influence. Since 1945, Europe has depended on America to defend it, while spending ever smaller percentages of its GNP on defense. The huge budget deficits resulting from Obamacare will push America in the same direction.

The nearest American model to Obamacare, the Massachusetts health care plan, has plunged the state into near bankruptcy, and led to the election of the first Republican senator in nearly forty years. People and jobs are fleeing big government, bankrupt California and flocking to small government Texas.

Yet despite these cautionary tales, the Democratic-controlled Congress pushed ahead with Obamacare. Why? Because no matter how much crummier health care becomes for most Americans, no matter how much higher the taxes on the middle class, no matter how much larger the federal bureaucracy overseeing health care, no matter how great the shortage of doctors, as the profession becomes ever less attractive, and no matter how great the drag on the American economy of skyrocketing deficits — medical care will at least be equally crummy for everyone.

The Democrats pushed forward with the most ambitious possible revamp of one-sixth of the American economy, rather than opt for incremental steps aimed at specific aspects of the health care delivery system — e.g., the uninsured, spiraling costs — not despite the increase in the size of government entailed but because of it.

Every major government entitlement program has ended up costing many times more than initially projected, and the cost projections of the proponent's of Obamacare do not meet even minimal levels of credibility. In the first decade, they are skewed by the fact that four years of taxes will be collected before the major new benefits begin to bite. And the projected costs are predicated on half a billion dollars of annual cuts in Medicare. Those cuts will either be quickly rescinded, or a large group of angry seniors will find out that they can no longer find doctors willing to treat them.

World War II cost Britain its empire, and the huge budget deficits wracked up by Obamacare will likely force America to abandon its role as global policeman. That may be fine with Obama, whose bowing and scraping before despots reflects a profound unease with Pax Americana. Yet an American withdrawal will not leave a kinder, gentler world. A nuclear Iran will inspire many imitators and the retreat of the Great Satan will only whet the appetite of radical Islam. From these threats, the United Nations will not protect us.


PRESIDENT OBAMA promised to deliver on healthcare reform where all previous presidents failed. What next could satisfy the vaulting ambition of the most self-referential president ever, one who described his nomination, without a trace of irony, as "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal?" Cap-and-trade, which would intrude another massive federal bureaucracy into every area of the American economy, would fit the bill. But political suicide is by definition a one-time affair, and there will not be enough supporters left in Congress to pass cap-and-trade.

The next frontier, then, will be in foreign policy, which necessitates no messy negotiations with Congress. Foreign policy offers more opportunities as well for one who seeks to be remembered not just as the president of the United States but as the high priest of the "religion of humanity."

Obama seeks to deliver a Palestinian state — not to be confused with bringing peace to the Middle East. That is the meaning of the demand made on Prime Minister Netanyahu to commit to a Palestinian state within two years. Any peace other than that of the graveyard, would minimally require the Palestinians to accept Israel's existence and renounce the "right of return," ensure Israel's ability to prevent the West Bank from becoming another Gaza Strip within kilometers of its only international airport and major population center, and recognize that no Israeli government can uproot half a million Jews from homes built beyond the 1949 armistice lines.

None of these goals are subject to deadlines, and none are closer to attainment than they were at the outset of the Oslo process. The Palestinian Authority today refuses to even sit in the room Israelis. How can they make peace? Another generation of Palestinian children has been raised on a cult of martyrdom and the promise of Israel's eventual destruction. The Palestinian Authority — not Hamas, as Secretary of State Hilary Clinton erroneously stated last week — celebrates arch-terrorist Dalal Mugrahbi, architect of the Coastal Road Massacre.

Vice-President Biden says that it is hard for the Palestinians to stop incitement, even in the Palestinian Authority-controlled media and school system, just as it is hard for Israel to stop building in Jerusalem. But Israel never undertook not to build in Jerusalem. The Palestinians, however, undertook at the outset of Oslo to stop incitement. They are no closer to delivering on that promise today. If ending incitement is hard for the Palestinian leadership, that is only because the Palestinian street is not ready for peace and has never been prepared for it by its leadership.

But peace for Israel is far less important to Obama than a state for the Palestinians. No confidence-building measures are ever requested from the Palestinians. At every stage, new demands are placed on Israel to placate the Palestinians and convince them that the United States has the power to deliver a state on terms even they cannot refuse.

The Obama administration has made a final solution to the Palestinian-Arab conflict the centerpiece of its foreign policy — far more important than preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. It has long since been clear that the United States will take no serious steps to prevent a nuclear Iran, despite repeated representations by Sunni leaders that stopping Iran from going nuclear is a far greater priority for them than a Palestinian state.

The administration would never have invested so much energy in the Palestinian-Israel conflict unless it believed in the possibility of success. That belief is predicated on two assumptions. First, there is a solution to the conflict that is obvious to all "rational" men: Israel's return to its 1967 borders with minor adjustments. Palestinian intentions to live in peace are deemed irrelevant.

Second, that settlement can be imposed on Israel. Last May, National Security Advisor James Jones conveyed to a senior European official that "an endgame solution" would be formulated by the U.S., EU, and moderate Arab states, with Israel and the Palestinians relegated to the role of bystanders. He happily allowed that Israel would "not be thrown under the bus."

For the Obama administration, pressure on Israel is win-win. Even if the president fails to deliver a Palestinian state, the administration's evident hostility creates "the space" Obama told Jewish leaders last July he seeks between the United States and Israel. The realist prescriptions of Walt/Mearsheimer/Brzezinski, according to which Israel harms American interests, become more dominant in the adminstration's thinking by the day, most notoriously in the hints by a series of administration officials that Israel's actions are endangering American troops. The realist approach brings the cosmopolitan president in sync with Europe, for which Israel has long constituted a nuisance.

The hostility of Obama administration has not been merely a matter of tone, though there has certainly been nastiness galore, including hectoring demands from the Secretary of State of Clinton and humiliation rituals with Prime Minister Netanyahu left to consider the error of his ways while the President sups with his family. Clinton, channeling Obama, pronounced the announcement of approval of 1,600 new housing units in Ramat Shlomo "an insult to America." Yet when Syria's Assad and Iran's Ahmanijad met the day after the United States announced the resumption of diplomatic relations with Syria to blow contemptuous raspberries at the United States, she detected no insult worth mentioning. And she managed to maintain her icy smile when Russian President Putin called an impromptu press conference to unbraid her in front of reporters with a list of American misdeeds going back to the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment.

On the substantive ledger, Israel's quantitative military edge has been allowed to wither: According to the Jewish Instititute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), every Israeli request for upgraded weapons systems since Obama took office has been denied, while the Arab states, most notably Egypt, have been provided with numerous advanced systems on par with Israel's. Most recently, bunker busters necessary for any Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities were diverted. The only foreign policy agreement the current administration has succeeded in securing was a statement two weeks ago by the Quartet two weeks ago condemning Israeli building in Jerusalem. (A treaty with Russia to reduce nuclear arsenals, as French President Sarkozy dismissively pointed out to Obama, is profoundly unserious while rogue states like Iran and North Korea edge ever closer to going fully nuclear.)

Supporters of Israel are finally realizing that the President is not, as they say, "that into" us. Not by happenstance did he sit comfortably for decades listening to Jeremiah Wright's anti-Israel and anti-Semitic invective (including honoring Louis Farrakhan), or fill senior foreign policy posts with those with a long record of hostility to Israel, or say at a farewell dinner party for former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalid that if he ever attained high office he would redress past American foreign policy towards the Palestinians. The New Republic's Martin Peretz, who actively campaigned for Obama, now admits that "he doesn't particularly like Israel." Jackson Diehl, deputy editorial page editor of the liberal Washington Post,describes him as "vindictive and ideological" towards Israel.

Pesach celebrates G-d's removal of the Jewish people from servitude to flesh and blood to become His servants. The American people are Israel's strongest supporters and most important allies; we share with them defining values and vital interests. But this Pesach, we must remember that President Obama is not our master and will not determine our fate.
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