Uncertainty Growing More Certain!

The Western World is experiencing but stubbornly resists learning that radical Islamists are human termites. Like leeches their mission is to suck the blood out of Western societies.

Liberals hearken to the siren song of the radical Islamist message because Liberals, all too often, wear their hearts on their sleeve and are driven by an insane desire to self-destroy on the pyre of the milk of human kindness. Compassion and weakness does not work with those who march to a tyrannical drum beat. ( http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/06/pat-condell-on-ground-zero-mosque-is-it-possible-to-be-astonished-but-not-surprised.html)


Meanwhile, a recent poll reveals Americans remain confused about Obama's religion. His head may be in the bible but his heart is perceived to be in the Koran. You generally are judged by your actions since they speak louder than teleprompter words and Obama has a long list of actions that suggest his sympathies lie with Muslims so it becomes easy for some to extrapolate.

When you do not learn from history you live to repeat its mistakes. Like Willy Nelson we are well 'on that road again.'

Or:“The only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.” - G.B. Shaw


Yes, the wind has come out of Obama's sail and our ship of state continues to take on water. (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)
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Meanwhile, The State Department says direct talks are on tap between Israel and Palestinians. (See 2 below.)
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Economy continues to look bleak. The Fed sees uncertainty but economic weakness seem increasingly more certain. (See 3 below.)
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Had enough teachable moments?

Obama's philosophical love with expanded government intervention and control of the private sector and his contempt for corporate executives who he sees as greedy overpaid blood suckers is driving him and ourselves over a cliff.

Add a measure of incompetence, inexperience and a jaundiced sense of racial matters and you have a combustible mixture.(See 4 below.)
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Romer resigns and Obama roams around Cape Cod. (See 5 below.)
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A nation that spends itself into bankruptcy is not in a position to defend itself with vigor.

Obama brought change but so far not looking for the better.(See 6 below.)
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Our withdrawal from Iraq should not be viewed as a positive because Obama has withdrawn while that nation still lacks a viable government. Consequently,Obama's action will probably allow Iran to move closer to its long sought goal - becoming the dominant power in the Middle East.

Another mis-step by Obama that will cost us dearly down the road. (See 7 below.)
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Dick
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1)Skip the lectures on Israel's ‘risks for peace’
By George Will


In the intifada that began in 2000, Palestinian terrorism killed more than 1,000 Israelis. As a portion of U.S. population, that would be 42,000, approaching the toll of America's eight years in Vietnam. During the onslaught, which began 10 Septembers ago, Israeli parents sending two children to a school would put them on separate buses to decrease the chance that neither would return for dinner. Surely most Americans can imagine, even if their tone-deaf leaders cannot, how grating it is when those leaders lecture Israel on the need to take "risks for peace."

During Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's July visit to Washington, Barack Obama praised him as "willing to take risks for peace." There was a time when that meant swapping "land for peace" -- Israel sacrificing something tangible and irrecoverable, strategic depth, in exchange for something intangible and perishable, promises of diplomatic normality.

Strategic depth matters in a nation where almost everyone is or has been a soldier, so society cannot function for long with the nation fully mobilized. Also, before the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel within the borders established by the 1949 armistice was in one place just nine miles wide, a fact that moved George W. Bush to say: In Texas we have driveways that long. Israel exchanged a lot of land to achieve a chilly peace with Egypt, yielding the Sinai, which is almost three times larger than Israel and was 89 percent of the land captured in the process of repelling the 1967 aggression.

The intifada was launched by the late Yasser Arafat -- terrorist and Nobel Peace Prize winner -- after the July 2000 Camp David meeting, during which then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to cede control of all of Gaza and more than 90 percent of the West Bank, with small swaps of land to accommodate the growth of Jerusalem suburbs just across the 1949 armistice line.


Israelis are famously fractious, but the intifada produced among them a consensus that the most any government of theirs could offer without forfeiting domestic support is less than any Palestinian interlocutor would demand. Furthermore, the intifada was part of a pattern. As in 1936 and 1947, talk about partition prompted Arab violence.

In 1936, when the British administered Palestine, the Peel Commission concluded that there was "an irrepressible conflict" -- a phrase coined by an American historian to describe the U.S. Civil War -- "between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country." And: "Neither of the two national ideals permits" a combination "in the service of a single state." The commission recommended "a surgical operation" -- partition. What followed was the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939.

On Nov. 29, 1947, the United Nations recommended a partition plan. Israel accepted the recommendation. On Nov. 30, Israel was attacked.

Palestine has a seemingly limitless capacity for eliciting nonsense from afar, as it did recently when British Prime Minister David Cameron referred to Gaza as a "prison camp." In a sense it is, but not in the sense Cameron intended. His implication was that Israel is the cruel imprisoner. Gaza's actual misfortune is to be under the iron fist of Hamas, a terrorist organization.

In May, a flotilla launched from Turkey approached Gaza in order to provoke a confrontation with Israel, which, like Egypt, administers a blockade to prevent arms from reaching Hamas. The flotilla's pretense was humanitarian relief for Gaza -- where the infant mortality rate is lower and life expectancy is higher than in Turkey.

Israelis younger than 50 have no memory of their nation within the 1967 borders set by the 1949 armistice that ended the War of Independence. The rest of the world seems to have no memory at all concerning the intersecting histories of Palestine and the Jewish people.

The creation of Israel did not involve the destruction of a Palestinian state, there having been no such state since the Romans arrived. And if the Jewish percentage of the world's population were today what it was when the Romans ruled Palestine, there would be 200 million Jews. After a uniquely hazardous passage through two millennia without a homeland, there are 13 million Jews.

In the 62 years since this homeland was founded on one-sixth of 1 percent of the land of what is carelessly and inaccurately called "the Arab world," Israelis have never known an hour of real peace. Patronizing American lectures on the reality of risks and the desirableness of peace, which once were merely fatuous, are now obscene.



1a)The ‘disengagement’ disaster, five years on
By Jeff Jacoby


Five years ago this week, the Gaza Strip was forcibly purged of its Jews. In the largest non-combat operation in the history of the Israeli Defense Forces, 50,000 troops were deployed to expel some 9,000 residents and destroy the 21 pioneering communities in which some of them had lived for nearly four decades. (Four communities in northern Samaria on the West Bank were also evacuated.)

The name given to this expulsion by Israel's government, then headed by Ariel Sharon, was "disengagement." The name implied, and a majority of Israelis appeared to believe, that by totally withdrawing from Gaza they would no longer be trapped in a dysfunctional relationship with Gaza's hostile and sometimes violent Arabs.

"What will we have gained by destroying thriving communities, dividing Israeli society, and embittering some of our most idealistic citizens?" one thoughtful Israeli commentator, Yossi Klein Halevi, wrote at the time in The Jerusalem Post. "The most obvious . . . gain is what we will lose: We will be freeing ourselves from more than a million Palestinians."

Many Israelis -- and many supporters of Israel internationally -- bought this argument, persuaded, perhaps, by the Sharon government's sweeping vision of the blessings that would flow from so radical an act of ethnic self-cleansing. "It will be good for us and will be good for the Palestinians," forecast then-Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who was to succeed Sharon a few months later. "It will bring more security, greater safety, much more prosperity, and a lot of joy for all the people that live in the Middle East." Olmert prayed that with disengagement, "a new morning of great hope will emerge in our part of the world," and that Israelis and Palestinians together would make the Middle East "what it was destined to be from the outset, a paradise for all the world."

Had any of this actually come to pass, the trauma and destruction of the Gaza expulsion might have been justifiable. In fact, disengagement was a staggering failure, a disaster in every respect. It was seen by most Palestinians not as a courageous act of goodwill and an invitation to peace, but as a retreat under fire, much like the Israeli flight from southern Lebanon five years earlier. It led therefore not to less terrorism but to more, as Palestinian militants vastly expanded their arsenal of rockets, guns, and explosives, and launched thousands of attacks over the border into Israel.

Far from encouraging Palestinian moderation, disengagement energized Gaza's most extreme and hateful irredentists. Five months after the Jewish residents left, Hamas swept to victory in the Palestinian Authority elections; a year later, it seized total control in Gaza, routing Fatah in a savage civil war.

The fruit of disengagement was not the "new morning of great hope" that Sharon and Olmert -- and their countless enablers in the West -- envisioned. Instead, it was an erosion of respect for Israeli strength and deterrence. It was the Second Lebanon War of 2006 and the three-week Israel-Hamas war that began at the end of 2008. It was the entrenchment of Iran, via Hamas and Hezbollah, on Israel's northern and southern borders. It was the burning of Gaza's synagogues and the trashing of its famous greenhouses. It was the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, who has been a hostage in Gaza for more than four of the five years since Israel abandoned the territory to its enemies. It was the further blackening of Israel's international reputation. It was the immiseration of Gaza's Palestinians under a fundamentalist Hamas dictatorship.

Most Israelis who supported disengagement now express regret. But too many of them remain in the grip of the "peace process" delusion -- the Oslo chimera that peace with the Palestinians is achievable through diplomacy, concessions, and transfers of land. It isn't, and Israel and its friends must start saying so. Rather than endlessly professing its willingness to negotiate and its appetite for a "two-state solution," Israel should tell the truth: Peace will never be possible with "partners" that refuse to accept the permanent legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East.

Disengagement was an abomination for a lot of reasons, but for one above all: It began from the premise that any future Palestinian state must be wiped clean of Jews. Did Israel really need to learn the hard way that peace will never lie down that road?

1b)Obama's Point of No Return
By J.R. Dunn

There comes a moment in a failing presidency where the incumbent, through some single gesture, action, or statement, crosses a certain line from beyond which there is no return. Through his own will and behavior, he so underlines his failings, so frames his negative image, that no further action can ever erase it. Fate, accident, and circumstance have nothing to do with it. It is the president himself who puts the period at the end of his own sentence.


Such moments are obvious in retrospect, though not always at the time. With Richard Nixon, it was the "eighteen-minute gap." An oval office tape recording turned over to Judge John Sirica, who was overseeing the investigation of the Watergate incident, turned out to have a lengthy period of silence smack-dab in the middle of a conversation between Nixon and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman. The White House claimed that Rose Mary Woods, the president's secretary, had inadvertently hit the wrong button for those eighteen minutes. This might well have been true, but in light of Nixon's long reputation as Tricky Dick, it sounded like the cock-and-bull story to end them all. Nixon had been holding his own in the Watergate battle up to that point. The voting public viewed the uproar with bemusement rather than indignation. But the tape gap finished him. In less than a year, he was forced into resignation.


For Jimmy Carter, it was the "malaise speech" of July 15, 1979, in which he attempted to shuffle the blame for his tepid performance as president from his own administration onto the shoulders of the American people. Carter claimed that a national "crisis of confidence" (he never actually used the word "malaise") made it impossible for him to adequately grapple with the country's problems. It was America's fault, not Jimmy Carter's. The public reaction was open disgust and the abject collapse of any support for the Carter presidency.


With Obama, we have an abundance of riches: the multiple vacations, the legal harassment of the state of Arizona on behalf of illegals, the clownish response to the Gulf oil blowout. But when historians come to select the moment when Obama went over the edge of the world, I think they'll find the great Iftar mosque speech of August 13, 2010 hard to beat.


During a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan, the president found it appropriate to come out in favor of religious freedom. Not in support of Christians being attacked by janjaweed gunmen, or Bahá'ís tormented by Iranian mullahs, or Jews being stalked by assassins, or even American citizens being told that they cannot pray in public, but in favor of a shadowy foreign foundation with suspicious financing and disturbing jihadi connections that wishes to build some kind of victory monument congruent to the site of the 9/11 massacre.


These doomsday statements work by putting previous suspicions and surmises about the president -- always negative -- into sharp relief, acting as verification and confirmation. Nixon had suffered a reputation as a conniver since his knock-down, drag-out 1950 battle against Helen Gahagan Douglas (it was Douglas who coined the "Tricky Dick" nickname). The tape gap fit so perfectly into that narrative as to crowd out everything else. Carter's inept performance as president was rendered even harder to bear by his continual sanctimony and moral preening. The malaise speech merely added the patina of a whiner.


With Obama, suspicions have involved his status as an American. The foreign parentage, the registration in an Indonesian school noting him as a Muslim, the uproar over the birth certificate aroused misgivings that, despite media scorn heaped upon those noting them, he has never quite been able to put to rest. As of last weekend, his opportunities to do so are ended. Impressions trump arguments, and for most of the country, Obama will, from here on in, be a strange and untrustworthy figure -- a man who does not understand what Ground Zero means to America, who utilizes American law and custom to support foreign interests, who speaks to strangers more clearly than to his own.


Nothing either Nixon or Carter did enabled them to recover from their faux pas. Even as the tape gap story broke, Nixon was supervising a massive airlift of supplies and ammunition to Israel, which was involved in a life-or-death struggle against massive Arab attack in the Yom Kippur War. It gained Nixon nothing, scarcely earning a mention amid all the public speculation about Watergate. Less than three months after the Carter speech, Iranian "students" (actually professional revolutionaries under the control of the Ayatollah Khomeini) sacked the American embassy in Tehran, taking nearly a hundred American hostages. I can attest that I was not alone in thinking, "Great -- and we've got Mr. Malaise is charge." The year-and a-half-long hostage crisis, climaxed by the disastrous Eagle Claw rescue mission, hastened the collapse of the worst presidency of the later 20th century.


The past two years are the best Obama will ever see. The real crises of his presidency are still to come, and they are easily visible as they move toward us -- Iran, terrorism, the economy, the collapse of the national health care system hastened by his own policies. He will meet them under a cloud of his own making, attempting to overcome them as a president who takes endless vacations, who will not defend his country's borders, who sat out the Gulf oil crisis, who overlooks the sacrifices of his own countrymen in favor of dubious foreign figures.


Some lines of Shakespeare occurred to me while Obama was dawdling over a response to the oil blowout. They can also serve to cover the entire morass:


There is a tide in the affairs of men,


Which, taken at the flood, leads us to fortune;


Omitted, all the voyage of their life


Is bound in shallows and in miseries.


The tide has gone out for Barack Obama. It is all epilogue from here on in.

J.R. Dunn is consulting editor of American Thinker and will edit the forthcoming Military Thinker.
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2)U.S.: Israel, Palestinians 'very close' to direct Mideast peace talks
State Department says all parties, including the Quartet, will release separate but simultaneous statements saying the stalled talks will resume early next month.


The Obama administration said Thursday it is near to securing an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians to resume direct peace talks, while some U.S. officials said an announcement could be imminent.


The State Department said an agreement was "very, very" close but that details were still being worked out. Speaking privately administration officials familiar with the matter said an announcement could come as early as Friday or Saturday. Those officials spoke on condition of anonymity due to the delicacy of the ongoing diplomacy.

"We think we are very, very close to a decision by the parties to enter into direct negotiations," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters.


"We think we're well positioned to get there."

To that end, he said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had called Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad late Wednesday and spoken Thursday with Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the special representative of the Quartet of Mideast peacemakers - the U.S., the U.N., the European Union and Russia.

Officials said tentative plans call for Israel, the Palestinians, the Quartet and the U.S. to release separate but near simultaneous statements saying the stalled talks will resume early next month in either the U.S. or Egypt. The U.S. statement is expected to be issued in Clinton's name.

Crowley declined to comment on the arrangements but said that if "we reach the point we hope to arrive at ... we will demonstrate our support for the process and we will outline specifics of where we go from here."

Under a scenario now being finalized, the officials said Israel, the Palestinians, the Quartet of Mideast peacemakers and the United States would release separate but near simultaneous statements saying the stalled talks will resume early next month in either the U.S. or Egypt.


The State Department comment came after last week Haaretz quoted a senior U.S. official saying Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was about to announce the start of direct peace negotiations with Israel in "a matter of days."

"A number of minor details need to be clarified with Abbas and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that will open the way for direct talks," the official said at the time.

Contrary to the optimism in Washington, however, Israeli officials were trying to show toughness regarding preconditions, with one official saying that "Israel is not willing to agree to any preconditions from the back door via a Quartet announcement that will serve as a basis for the negotiations."

"As far as we know, the negotiations may begin in two days, but also in two weeks," the Israeli official added.

Abbas is demanding that the negotiations have a clear framework for the ideas that will be put in place; he also wants a commitment by Israel to cease settlement construction during the direct talks.

The Palestinian leader told Mitchell that the Quartet would reiterate its declaration from March that included a call for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and an end to the occupation that began in 1967.

There would be the establishment of an independent Palestinian state and an end to settlement construction. In addition, residents of Jerusalem would not be expelled from their homes and the two sides would not take any unilateral steps.

Palestinian sources said Mitchell did not reject the suggestions.

Speaking with Haaretz last week, the senior U.S. official said it was still unclear whether President Barack Obama would take part in the inauguration or whether the parties would be invited to Washington for a ceremony.

According to the Israeli official, the ceremony would be held in Egypt under the auspices of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak; the United States would be represented by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Over the weekend international leaders pressured Abbas to announce this week the resumption of direct negotiations.

Meanwhile, a senior Fatah official, Azam al-Ahmed, who is accompanying Abbas on a visit to Qatar, said on Saturday that the Palestinian Authority would announce on Sunday or Monday its position on resuming direct talks with Israel.
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3)Three more reasons to worry about the eceonomy

Commentary: Economic data looking weaker and First Take


Three disappointing, forward-looking reports on the U.S. economy drove investors away from stocks and back into bonds on Thursday, fearful that the economy could stagnate or fall back into recession.

Thursday's releases -- initial jobless claims, leading economic indicators and the Philly Fed index -- were only the latest in a series of reports showing the economic momentum flagging. Of this week's indicators, only one -- industrial production -- showed any growth, and that was due to special factors unlikely to be repeated.


Jobless claims ticked higher to the psychological threshold of 500,000, a nine-month high. See full story on jobless claims.

The leading economic indicators increased 0.1% in July, but have been essentially flat since March. See full story on the leading indicators.

And, worst of all, the Philadelphia Fed's survey manufacturing firms indicated that more firms say their business is worsening than say it's improving.

Manufacturing has been the backbone of the recovery so far, so if the weakness in the Philly region expands nationally, the economy could stumble.

The headwinds holding back the economy are strengthening just as impact of the inventory cycle and the stimulus are fading. Unless the economy can find its second wind soon, a self-reinforcing downturn could be inevitable.

With Congress paralyzed, the burden of supporting the economy further -- or not -- will fall to the Federal Reserve. Odds are mounting that the Fed will redouble its efforts to pump money into the economy via quantitative easing.
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4)Please, No More Teachable Moments
By Victor Davis Hanson

The president of the United States has it hard enough without needlessly wading into, and fanning, local controversies. The economy is battered by sluggish growth, high unemployment, record annual deficits and near unsustainable national debt. Over 50 percent of the people now disapprove of Barack Obama's handling of these problems.

So why weigh in on hot-button issues that can only polarize people without solving anything?

Last summer, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, a scholar of African-American literature and history, got into a silly dispute with a local policeman. For some reason, President Obama, the leader of the free world, rushed to judgment and gratuitously announced that police Sgt. James Crowley and the local Cambridge, Mass., police had acted "stupidly." For relish, he added that police wrongly stereotype in general. Obama supporters wrote off the entire psycho-drama as a "teachable moment."

Arizona recently passed a bill designed to enforce existing immigration law and stop the enormous influx of illegal aliens into the state. Various groups, including the federal government, quickly made plans to sue the state. Yet various polls indicated that 70 percent of Americans agreed with the Arizona law, and dozens of states were planning similar legislation.

Nonetheless, the president also jumped into that acrimony -- well before the law went into effect. Obama and his attorney general alleged that Arizonans were promoting stereotyping, even though police were forbidden to question the immigration status of those who had not come into prior contact with law enforcement.

Most recently, Obama pontificated about the proposed mosque next to Ground Zero in lower Manhattan, in what his supporters might call a "teachable moment." The issue is not a legal one. Both sides recognize the legal right of Muslims to build mosques anywhere that local zoning ordinances permit them. Instead, the controversy pertains to common decency, and the nature of the funding and proponents of the project.

No matter: The president instead lectured his mostly Muslim audience that America respects the rights of all religions -- again, not the issue in question. A day later, in embarrassment, he backtracked a bit.

Where to start with all these teachable moments?

All these controversies involve issues addressed at the state and local level, with presidential action unnecessary. In such contentious matters, why intervene when Obama cannot do much other than polarize millions?

We have learned that President Obama has a bad habit of impugning the motives of those with whom he disagrees. In the Gates case, he rushed to condemn Crowley and the police. Arizonans were not to be seen as desperate citizens trying to enforce federal law, but instead derided as bigots who harass minorities when they go out to get ice cream. And in the mosque case, the president disingenuously implied that opponents of a Ground Zero mosque wanted to deny the legal right of Muslims to build religious centers.

Note that all three issues poll badly for the president, and belie his former image as a conciliator and healer.

Again, why does Obama go off message to sermonize about these seemingly minor things that so energize his opposition and make life difficult for his fellow Democrats?

First, off-the-cuff pontificating on extraneous issues is a lot easier than dealing with a bad economy, two wars and heightening tensions abroad. Sermonizing is a lot different than rounding up votes in Congress, fending off reporters at press conferences or dealing with aggressors abroad -- and it can also turn our attention away from near 10 percent unemployment and a heavily indebted government.

Second, Obama has spent most of his life around academics, lawyers, journalists and organizers. That insular culture tends to pontificate and lecture others far more than do action-oriented business people, soldiers, doctors and farmers -- the doers who are few and far between in this administration.

Third, as an Ivy League-trained lawyer and former Chicago community organizer, Obama embraces an overarching race/class/gender critique of the United States; the story of America is not so much about an exceptionally independent and prosperous people, a unique Constitution or a vibrant national past in promoting global freedom, but about how the majority oppressed various groups. Clearly, these local instances of purported grievances have excited the president -- and almost automatically prompt his customary but unproven declarations that the majority or establishment in each case is biased or unfair.

Obama should remember that successful presidents build bridges to solve national and international problems. They leave polarizing local controversies to divisive community organizers and partisan activists.



Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War."
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5)Doubling Down On Failed Obamanomics?
By Larry Elder

The position of chair of the Council of Economic Advisers is open. How President Barack Obama fills it can tell us whether he's finally gone wobbly on Obamanomics -- maybe in time to arrest some of the damage.

Would President Obama, to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, ponder whether to nominate liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg or conservative Antonin Scalia? Would his finalists come down to Sonia Sotomayor or Samuel Alito? Elena Kagan or John Roberts?


Laughable, of course.

Such a range of choices would mean that the left-wing Obama does not know whether he wants a "constitutionalist" or a proponent of the "living, breathing document" school of jurisprudence -- whether he wants a "strict constructionist" or whether he wants a jurist who decides cases based, as he put it, on "empathy."

We know where he stands. And it is not on the side of Clarence Thomas.

Now, for the chair of the CEA, would Obama's list of possibilities include both the Obama-sympathetic left-wing economist Paul Krugman and supply-side economist Lawrence Kudlow?

Don't laugh. A Washington Post columnist actually suggested that Obama consider these two polar opposites. Honestly, Kudlow? To paraphrase press secretary Robert Gibbs, somebody needs drug testing.

Kudlow, a former member of the Reagan administration and current CNBC host and syndicated columnist, advocates lower taxes, free trade, smaller government and less regulation. Krugman, a Princeton professor and New York Times columnist, wants more "stimulus" spending and called the first package "too small and too cautious." They're as different as George Patton and John Lennon.

Obama wouldn't hire Kudlow to caddie his golf clubs, let alone to lead his team of economic advisers.

Obama is a community organizer, a person who, by definition, wants government to do more, not less. Obama rails against the "greed" of capitalism and believes that "at a certain point, you've made enough money." He urges higher taxes on the rich to "spread the wealth." He admits that higher capital gains taxes actually produce less revenue but supports a hike so that the rich pay a higher percentage -- a matter of "fairness." He doesn't understand that government subsidization of the housing market -- through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Housing Administration and the Community Reinvestment Act -- sparked the unsustainable run-up in home prices. He ignores the consensus among economists and says, "The American dream ... means that we raise the minimum wage not just every 10 years, but all the time."

This is not a man who plans to get in touch with his inner Milton Friedman.

"I was wrong," Obama would say by selecting Kudlow. "Unemployment is near 10 percent. It remains high despite the passage of several stimulus packages predicted to jump-start the economy, several extensions of unemployment benefits, takeovers of two domestic automakers, and bailouts of banks and other financial institutions. We are now going in a new direction."

The outgoing CEA chair, Christina Romer, pushed for the $787 billion stimulus and predicted that its passage would prevent unemployment from reaching 8 percent. When unemployment busted past that level, Romer reportedly lost power and influence.

Was she ever comfortable? When Obama chose her, some thought it a sign that Obama wanted to govern as an economic moderate. A San Francisco newspaper called Romer "decidedly centrist." OK, that's San Francisco. But she and her economist husband wrote a paper in which they sounded like Ronald Reagan: "Tax increases are highly contractionary. ... Tax cuts have very large and persistent positive output effects." But Obama believes President George W. Bush wrongly gave tax cuts to the rich, who "didn't need them and didn't even ask for them."

"Every economist who's looked at it," said President Obama, "says that the Recovery Act has done its job." This is true -- except for all the economists who think it failed.

Stanford economist Michael Boskin says, "The permanent government expansion and higher tax rate agenda is a classic example of what not to do during bad economic times." Heritage Foundation economist J.D. Foster says, "The problem with the idea of pump-priming the economy through deficit spending is that the government must first pump money out of the economy by borrowing it. Government spending increases public demand; government borrowing reduces private demand. Governments don't create purchasing power. They destroy it through inflation or transfer it through borrowing and spending."

What about Krugman? The Post columnist writes, apparently with a straight face: "Krugman is best known for his New York Times columns arguing that the $787 billion, debt-busting stimulus bill was not enough. ... Maybe it's time for Krugman to put his money where his mouth is. You think government needs to spend more to get us out of this funk? Okay, Paul. Here's the key to the car."

No, we've been driving that car for nearly two years. Voters elected a dangerous left-winger who trusts government to run health care, car companies, banks and the student loan program.

The driver-in-chief not only sees no need for a course correction, he wants to step on the gas.
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6)Time to Be Serious About National Security
By Thomas Sowell

One of the few campaign promises that Barack Obama has kept was this: "We are going to change the United States of America!"

As in many other cases, those who were thrilled by the thought of "change" seldom seemed to consider whether it would be a change for the better or for the worse. True believers in the Obama cult assumed that it had to be a change for the better.

Now it is slowly dawning on more people that it is a change for the worse-- runaway government spending, under the banners of "stimulus" and "jobs" is not stimulating anything except political pay-offs to special interests. As for jobs, the percentage of the population with jobs keeping on declining, even as the administration points to all the jobs it is creating.

It is of course not pointing to all the other jobs that it is destroying, whether by taking money out of the private sector or by loading so many mandates on employers that labor is made artificially too expensive for many employers to do much hiring.

But the most dangerous and most lasting damage that this administration has done to this nation has been in the international jungle, where it is alienating our long-time allies, dismantling our credibility by reneging on our commitments to putting up a missile shield in Eastern Europe and-- above all-- doing nothing meaningful to stop the leading terror-sponsoring nation in the world, Iran, from getting nuclear weapons.

We could deter the Soviet Union with our own nuclear weapons, but no one can deter suicidal fanatics, whether they are international terrorists of the sort that caused 9/11 or suicidal fanatics in charge of the government of Iran, who have long been supplying international networks of suicidal fanatics.

Threatening to launch nuclear retaliation against the people of Iran will not deter them. They have already shown how little they care about the people of Iran and how much they care about their fanatical beliefs and hate-filled agendas.

How much does our own administration in Washington care about the American people and their national security? This is not a question you would usually have to ask about any administration of either party. But this is not like any other administration, and Barack Obama is unlike any other President of the United States in having come from a background of decades of associations and alliances with people who resent this country and its people.

Against that background, the Obama administration's undermining of our long-standing international alliances with Britain and Israel, among others, while seeking to reach accommodations with nations hostile to this country, raises painful questions and even more painful possibilities for the future.

Gratuitous affronts to both Britain and Israel began early in the Obama administration, including a clear downgrading of state visits from their national leaders. These affronts were pitched at a level unlikely to be noticed by the general public but unmistakable to anyone familiar with international relations, including both our allies and our enemies. But most of the pro-Obama media said little to alert the public.

It is not only in our foreign relations that the administration's commitment to the national security of the United States is open to serious question. Domestically, as well, the same serious and painful questions arise.

After spending hundreds of billions of dollars on political pork barrel projects from coast to coast-- some frivolous beyond belief-- its only major cut in federal spending has been its move to cut $100 billion from the Defense Department's budget.

If there was ever a time when we needed a larger standing army, as distinguished from relying on National Guard troops, taken suddenly from civilian life and sent on multiple tours of combat duty, this is that time. We need a bigger and constantly modernizing military, not a bargain basement military, trimmed down to leave more money for pork barrel spending.

Sometimes small things can give you a better clue than large things. A recent editorial in Investor's Business Daily pointed out that hundreds of captured illegal aliens from terrorist-sponsoring nations were released on their own recognizance within the United States. Are these the actions of an administration that is serious about the national security of the American people?
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7)U.S. Withdrawal and Limited Options in Iraq
By George Friedman

It is August 2010, which is the month when the last U.S. combat troops are scheduled to leave Iraq. It is therefore time to take stock of the situation in Iraq, which has changed places with Afghanistan as the forgotten war. This is all the more important since 50,000 troops will remain in Iraq, and while they may not be considered combat troops, a great deal of combat power remains embedded with them. So we are far from the end of the war in Iraq. The question is whether the departure of the last combat units is a significant milestone and, if it is, what it signifies.

The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 with three goals: The first was the destruction of the Iraqi army, the second was the destruction of the Baathist regime and the third was the replacement of that regime with a stable, pro-American government in Baghdad. The first two goals were achieved within weeks. Seven years later, however, Iraq still does not yet have a stable government, let alone a pro-American government. The lack of that government is what puts the current strategy in jeopardy.

The fundamental flaw of the invasion of Iraq was not in its execution but in the political expectations that were put in place. As the Americans knew, the Shiite community was anti-Baathist but heavily influenced by Iranian intelligence. The decision to destroy the Baathists put the Sunnis, who were the backbone of Saddam's regime, in a desperate position. Facing a hostile American army and an equally hostile Shiite community backed by Iran, the Sunnis faced disaster. Taking support from where they could get it - from the foreign jihadists that were entering Iraq - they launched an insurgency against both the Americans and the Shia.

The Sunnis simply had nothing to lose. In their view, they faced permanent subjugation at best and annihilation at worst. The United States had the option of creating a Shiite-based government but realized that this government would ultimately be under Iranian control. The political miscalculation placed the United States simultaneously into a war with the Sunnis and a near-war situation with many of the Shia, while the Shia and Sunnis waged a civil war among themselves and the Sunnis occasionally fought the Kurds as well. From late 2003 until 2007, the United States was not so much in a state of war in Iraq as it was in a state of chaos.

The new strategy of Gen. David Petraeus emerged from the realization that the United States could not pacify Iraq and be at war with everyone. After a 2006 defeat in the midterm elections, it was expected that U.S. President George W. Bush would order the withdrawal of forces from Iraq. Instead, he announced the surge. The surge was really not much of a surge, but it created psychological surprise - not only were the Americans not leaving, but more were on the way. Anyone who was calculating a position based on the assumption of a U.S. withdrawal had to recalculate.

The Americans understood that the key was reversing the position of the Sunni insurgents. So long as they remained at war with the Americans and Shia, there was no possibility of controlling the situation. Moreover, only the Sunnis could cut the legs out from under the foreign jihadists operating in the Sunni community. These jihadists were challenging the traditional leadership of the Sunni community, so turning this community against the jihadists was not difficult. The Sunnis also were terrified that the United States would withdraw, leaving them at the mercy of the Shia. These considerations, along with substantial sums of money given to Sunni tribal elders, caused the Sunnis to do an about-face. This put the Shia on the defensive, since the Sunni alignment with the Americans enabled the Americans to strike at the Shiite militias.

Petraeus stabilized the situation, but he did not win the war. The war could only be considered won when there was a stable government in Baghdad that actually had the ability to govern Iraq. A government could be formed with people sitting in meetings and talking, but that did not mean that their decisions would have any significance. For that there had to be an Iraqi army to enforce the will of the government and protect the country from its neighbors - particularly Iran (from the American point of view). There also had to be a police force to enforce whatever laws might be made. And from the American perspective, this government did not have to be pro-American (that had long ago disappeared as a viable goal), but it could not be dominated by Iran.

Iraq is not ready to deal with the enforcement of the will of the government because it has no government. Once it has a government, it will be a long time before its military and police forces will be able to enforce its will throughout the country. And it will be much longer before it can block Iranian power by itself. As it stands now, there is no government, so the rest doesn't much matter.

The geopolitical problem the Americans face is that, with the United States gone, Iran would be the most powerful conventional power in the Persian Gulf. The historical balance of power had been between Iraq and Iran. The American invasion destroyed the Iraqi army and government, and the United States was unable to re-create either. Part of this had to do with the fact that the Iranians did not want the Americans to succeed.

For Iran, a strong Iraq is the geopolitical nightmare. Iran once fought a war with Iraq that cost Iran a million casualties (imagine the United States having more than 4 million casualties), and the foundation of Iranian national strategy is to prevent a repeat of that war by making certain that Iraq becomes a puppet to Iran or, failing that, that it remains weak and divided. At this point, the Iranians do not have the ability to impose a government on Iraq. However, they do have the ability to prevent the formation of a government or to destabilize one that is formed. Iranian intelligence has sufficient allies and resources in Iraq to guarantee the failure of any stabilization attempt that doesn't please Tehran.

There are many who are baffled by Iranian confidence and defiance in the face of American pressure on the nuclear issue. This is the reason for that confidence: Should the United States attack Iran's nuclear facilities, or even if the United States does not attack, Iran holds the key to the success of the American strategy in Iraq.

Everything done since 2006 fails if the United States must maintain tens of thousands of troops in Iraq in perpetuity. Should the United States leave, Iran has the capability of forcing a new order not only on Iraq but also on the rest of the Persian Gulf. Should the United States stay, Iran has the ability to prevent the stabilization of Iraq, or even to escalate violence to the point that the Americans are drawn back into combat. The Iranians understand the weakness of America's position in Iraq, and they are confident that they can use that to influence American policy elsewhere.

American and Iraqi officials have publicly said that the reason an Iraqi government has not been formed is Iranian interference. To put it more clearly, there are any number of Shiite politicians who are close to Tehran and, for a range of reasons, will take their orders from there. There are not enough of these politicians to create a government, but there are enough to block a government from being formed. Therefore, no government is being formed.

With 50,000 U.S. troops still in Iraq, the United States does not yet face a crisis. The current withdrawal milestone is not the measure of the success of the strategy. The threat of a crisis will arise if the United States continues its withdrawal to the point where the Shia feel free to launch a sustained and escalating attack on the Sunnis, possibly supported by Iranian forces, volunteers or covert advisers. At that point, the Iraqi government must be in place, be united and command sufficient forces to control the country and deter Iranian plans.

The problem is, as we have seen, that in order to achieve that government there must be Iranian concurrence, and Iran has no reason to want to allow that to happen. Iran has very little to lose by, and a great deal to gain from, continuing the stability the Petraeus strategy provided. The American problem is that a genuine withdrawal from Iraq requires a shift in Iranian policy, and the United States has little to offer Iran to change the policy.

From the Iranian point of view, they have the Americans in a difficult position. On the one hand, the Americans are trumpeting the success of the Petraeus plan in Iraq and trying to repeat the success in Afghanistan. On the other hand, the secret is that the Petraeus plan has not yet succeeded in Iraq. Certainly, it ended the major fighting involving the Americans and settled down Sunni-Shiite tensions. But it has not taken Iraq anywhere near the end state the original strategy envisioned. Iraq has neither a government nor a functional army - and what is blocking it is Tehran.

One impulse of the Americans is to settle with the Iranians militarily. However, Iran is a mountainous country of 70 million, and an invasion is simply not in the cards. Airstrikes are always possible, but as the United States learned over North Vietnam - or from the Battle of Britain or in the bombing of Germany and Japan before the use of nuclear weapons - air campaigns alone don't usually force nations to capitulate or change their policies. Serbia did give up Kosovo after a three-month air campaign, but we suspect Iran would be a tougher case. In any event, the United States has no appetite for another war while the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are still under way, let alone a war against Iran in order to extricate itself from Iraq. The impulse to use force against Iran was resisted by President Bush and is now being resisted by President Barack Obama. And even if the Israelis attacked Iran's nuclear facilities, Iran could still wreak havoc in Iraq.

Two strategies follow from this. The first is that the United States will reduce U.S. forces in Iraq somewhat but will not complete the withdrawal until a more distant date (the current Status of Forces Agreement requires all American troops to be withdrawn by the end of 2011). The problems with this strategy are that Iran is not going anywhere, destabilizing Iraq is not costing it much and protecting itself from an Iraqi resurgence is Iran's highest foreign-policy priority. That means that the decision really isn't whether the United States will delay its withdrawal but whether the United States will permanently base forces in Iraq - and how vulnerable those forces might be to an upsurge in violence, which is an option that Iran retains.

Another choice for the United States, as we have discussed previously, is to enter into negotiations with Iran. This is a distasteful choice from the American point of view, but surely not more distasteful than negotiating with Stalin or Mao. At the same time, the Iranians' price would be high. At the very least, they would want the "Finlandization" of Iraq, similar to the situation where the Soviets had a degree of control over Finland's government. And it is far from clear that such a situation in Iraq would be sufficient for the Iranians.

The United States cannot withdraw completely without some arrangement, because that would leave Iran in an extremely powerful position in the region. The Iranian strategy seems to be to make the United States sufficiently uncomfortable to see withdrawal as attractive but not to be so threatening as to deter the withdrawal. As clever as that strategy is, however, it does not hide the fact that Iran would dominate the Persian Gulf region after the withdrawal. Thus, the United States has nothing but unpleasant choices in Iraq. It can stay in perpetuity and remain vulnerable to violence. It can withdraw and hand the region over to Iran. It can go to war with yet another Islamic country. Or it can negotiate with a government that it despises - and which despises it right back.

Given all that has been said about the success of the Petraeus strategy, it must be observed that while it broke the cycle of violence and carved out a fragile stability in Iraq, it has not achieved, nor can it alone achieve, the political solution that would end the war. Nor has it precluded a return of violence at some point. The Petraeus strategy has not solved the fundamental reality that has always been the shadow over Iraq: Iran. But that was beyond Petraeus' task and, for now, beyond American capabilities. That is why the Iranians can afford to be so confident.
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