We were in Orlando this weekend and Palin was there as well. We did not pay any attention to politics but the neighborhood, where our kids live, is full of yard signs urging everyone vote against Proposition 4 and Grayson and for Webster etc.
Grayson is a strange homo sapiens but you really never hear much about him from the national media. They are too busy telling you about the woman running in Delaware. Don't believe Liberals and Democrats are bereft of lepers. (See 1 below.)
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NPR has practiced the rule of double standards for years and years. I listen to the symphony and news on NPR but I filter out their bias. That said I could live without it and as for its government funding I could easily live without my tax dollars going to finance their programs. (See 2 below.)
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Is the Left having a psychological meltdown?
The world will surely come to an end after Nov 2, should Liberals lose control of government.
Why Obama and tea do not mix? (See 3, 3a and 3b below.)
What these three articles reveal is what childish and petulant fools Liberals have been making of themselves lately all the way from Barbara Walters, Whoopi Goldberg to NPR, the NAACP and Soros among others.
America is no stronger because of Obama. America is no more respected because of Obama. America is no fiscally sounder because of Obama. Americans feel no significant change for the better because of Obama. Obama's competence rating are falling like a rock.
Am I missing something?
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Saudis turn on Hariri and consequently Lebanon could enter a dark and tumultuous period? (See 4 below.)
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Norwegian attitude towards Israel shifted when Israel began winning against all odds but Israel still has a true Norwegian friend in an editorialist names Selbekk. (See 5 below.)
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Iran will soon start fueling Bushehr. (See 6 below.)
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Leslie Stahl's brain stalled when it came to objectivity but then it is always Israel's fault for just about everything happening in the Middle East. (See 7 below.)
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Tunku Varadarajan laments the fact that we are a rudderless ship lacking leadership and what we have is confused and conflicted. (See 8 below.)
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France is catering because the French are not getting their promised entitlements. So rather than act like intelligent but disappointed citizens they are acting like who they always have been -The sick people of Europe.
As bad as France is I doubt Obama would swap with Sarkozy.(See 9 below.)
And in America, the equivalent of the French are our nation's union leaders. (See 9a below.)
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Dick
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1) America’s Worst Politician
The short, ugly career of Alan Grayson.
By Bill Clark
There are hundreds of plausible nominees for the title of America’s Second-Smarmiest Politician, but surely the top spot is un-contested. Americans of all political persuasions can come together in affirming one proposition: Public life would be improved by scrubbing Rep. Alan Grayson from it. This act of civic hygiene probably will be performed Nov. 2 by voters of Florida’s Eighth Congressional District. Polls indicate that a majority of them plan to deny Grayson, 52, a second term by electing his resonantly named opponent, Daniel Webster.
Grayson, never missing an opportunity to live down to his reputation, ridicules Webster’s “18th-century name.” Given Grayson’s relentless advertising of his intellectual shortcomings, it is surprising that he recognizes the name.
Grayson’s preferred name for Webster—he used it in an ad—is “Taliban Dan.” Grayson’s idea that whatever rhymes is witty is sophomoric. His innuendo is worse. Consider:
Webster, 61, the third-generation manager of his family’s air-conditioning business, served in Florida’s legislature for 28 years, becoming the first Republican speaker of the state House in 122 years—since Reconstruction—then serving in the state Senate until retired by term limits two years ago. A devout Christian who home-schooled his six children, in 2009 he addressed a religious conference of men in Nashville on the subject of how to be a good husband. Concerning relations with their wives, he urged the men not to focus on biblical verses that enjoin wives to be submissive: “Don’t pick the ones that say, ‘She should submit to me.’ That’s in the Bible, but pick the ones that you’re supposed to do. So instead, ‘Love your wife, even as Christ loved the church he gave himself for it’ as opposed to, ‘Wives, submit yourself to your own husband.’ ”
Grayson sliced and spliced a videotape of Webster’s words to depict Webster as saying, “She should submit to me. That’s in the Bible.” When asked about his lie-by-editing, Grayson blithely said, “These were his words.” Grayson’s ad says: “Religious fanatics try to take away our freedom in Afghanistan, in Iran, and right here in central Florida…Daniel Webster wants to impose his radical fundamentalism on us.” Hence “Taliban Dan.”
In another ad, titled “Draft Dodger,” Grayson, who never served in the military, falsely says that during the Vietnam War Webster “refused the call to service” and “doesn’t love this country.” The truth is that Webster, after receiving routine student deferments, reported for his draft physical but was classified as medically unfit for service.
10/21/10: Haven't been paying attention this election season? Here's everything you need to know in brief Grayson’s rhetorical style is schoolyard crude. He has said, “If you get sick, America, the Republican health-care plan is this: Die quickly.” He has compared Republicans to “knuckle-dragging Neanderthals” and Nazis burning the Reichstag. He has said, “I have trouble listening to what [Dick Cheney] says sometimes because of the blood that drips from his teeth while he’s talking.” He has referred to a high-ranking woman official at the Federal Reserve as a “K Street whore.”
Pity Florida. Like Grayson, Gov. Charlie Crist, a political contortionist of astonishing flexibility, has become a political sociopath. To rehearse his year of living ludicrously:
When seeking the Republican nomination for senator, he described himself as “a true-blue Reaganite Republican” and initially had a 30-point lead over his challenger, Marco Rubio, former speaker of the state House of Representatives. Rubio argued that Crist was not really a conservative and, when Rubio surged to a 30-point lead, Crist decided that he was not even a Republican. He began running as an independent, sprinting away from his previously held positions on a variety of issues, from education to marriage, and health care to taxes.
Crist has run an ad against Rubio featuring a headline “IRS Investigating Rubio Expenditures” and attributing the headline to National Review magazine, in an obvious attempt to injure Rubio with conservatives. But National Review Online—not the magazine—had merely quoted the St. Petersburg Times’s headline and the Rubio campaign’s response. The supposed investigation went nowhere.
Crist’s mendacity is mild compared with Grayson’s paltering with the truth, but one wonders: Do Florida broadcasters exercise any quality control over the political advertisements they air?
The vulgarity of Grayson’s brief congressional career validates the axiom that there is unseemly exposure of mind as well as of body. Concerning his nonstop anger, whether real or feigned, remember: “Anger is not an argument.” So said Sen. Daniel Webster (1782–1852).
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2)Comparing Jews to Nazis Meets NPR's 'Editorial Standards and Practices'
By Edward Olshaker
NPR's mindset has not changed since they blacklisted terrorism expert Steven Emerson in response to a complaint from a Hamas supporter...whom they invited to be a commentator.
"[Juan Williams'] remarks were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR."
- Statement issued by NPR
Remember what National Public Radio did to its foreign editor Loren Jenkins last year after he said, "Israel has used Gaza as a bombing target practice"?
They did nothing to him, for he was simply espousing the reckless anti-Israel hyperbole that is business-as-usual for NPR. Addressing an audience at an Aspen public radio event, Jenkins also said that Israel "created the biggest ghetto we've ever known" and is therefore responsible for the likelihood that Gazans "are all going to be turned into Palestinian terrorists because they have nothing else to do."
Andrea Levin of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), who reported on Jenkins' inflammatory falsehoods, also recounted his history of equating Jews with Nazis and softening the image of Palestinian terrorists:
How extreme are the NPR official's views? In the past, Jenkins has depicted Israelis as imperialists and interlopers in the Middle East and even linked Jews to Nazis in his writing. In a 1983 Rolling Stone article entitled "Palestine, Exiled" he wrote, for example, that an Israeli-administered south Lebanon prison was, in the words of a nameless Red Cross official, "a concentration camp. There is nothing else to call it." PLO leaders, in contrast, were characterized admiringly as freedom-fighters, as "modest" people, speaking in "soft and warm" voices. Of Yasir Arafat he said: "it is his liquid brown eyes that impress one the most..."
That Jenkins, who clearly harbors prejudicial views about Israel, remains ensconced at NPR with influence over what is broadcast about the Middle East should be a worry to those who care about decent and factual coverage of the region.
An earlier CAMERA study of NPR bias found its editors and reporters working on behalf of organizations that vilify the Jewish state:
... Significantly, Jenkins has regularly appeared at events sponsored by the stridently anti-Israel American-Arab Anti- Discrimination Committee (ADC), and [reporter] Kate Seelye was for a number of years beginning in the late 1980's the ADC's Manager of Media Relations.
In recent years Seelye has written for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, in one article accusing Israel of engaging in state-sponsored terrorism. The Washington Report is an extremist magazine which has referred to Jewish supporters of Israel as a "cancer" and as "Israel-firsters," and has carried ads for Roger Garaudy's notorious book, The Founding Myths of Israeli Policy, which denies the Holocaust. That NPR would hire a contributor to such a magazine, that it would welcome such extreme partisans, is testament to the network's own highly partisan agenda.
Not surprisingly, the report found, "[e]ntirely one-sided programs were commonplace, whether devoted to assailing Ariel Sharon as a 'war criminal,' to characterizing Israel as a 'Jim Crow' nation which should be done away with in its 'apartheid' form, or to blaming Israel for excessive violence, anti-American riots in Arab capitals and erosion of a supposed Arab commitment to peace."
NPR's blame-Israel mentality extends as far as blaming victims of terrorist atrocities for their own deaths. On May 2, 2004, Tali Hatuel was driving with her daughters -- Hila, 11, Hadar, 9, Roni, 7, and Merav, 2 -- when Palestinian terrorists opened fire and forced the car off the road. The gunmen then approached the vehicle, shot the eight-months-pregnant mother in the stomach, and shot the screaming girls repeatedly in the head. NPR's Julie McCarthy portrayed the mass murder as "ample evidence ... to show that [Jews'] continued presence in Gaza is provoking bloodshed." (It's astonishing what NPR's white reporters can get away with without worrying about losing their job.)
As Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe wrote, "In NPR's warped moral calculus, Tali Hatuel and her children are in early graves not because Palestinian culture celebrates the mass-murder of Jews, but because Jews have no business living among Arabs. If McCarthy had been reporting from Birmingham in September 1963, would she have blamed the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on the provocative ‘presence' of the four black girls who died in the explosion?"
Perhaps nothing reveals NPR's true colors more dramatically than their hiring of Hamas enthusiast Ali Abunimah (perhaps best-known as an early ally of President Obama on Mideast issues) as a commentator -- and their promise in 1998 to blacklist terrorism expert Steven Emerson when Abunimah demanded it. The Institute for Middle East Understanding, an organization that shares Abunimah's views, notes that in 1996, he
... began writing Chicago's NPR station about their lack of objective coverage. Months later, NPR asked him to appear on one of their shows to comment on Clinton's bombing of Sudan and Afghanistan. Since then, Abunimah has steadily become a common voice as an expert commentator and debater offering insight into a range of topics regarding the Middle East. He has appeared on CNN, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, C-SPAN, Democracy Now!, and numerous NPR stations ...
Jeff Jacoby noted that Steven Emerson had achieved the status of "the nation's foremost expert on Islamic terrorism" when Abunimah set out to have him silenced. Abunimah first demanded an apology from NPR for having interviewed Emerson, complaining that "Mr. Emerson is a well-documented anti-Arab, anti-Muslim racist." Producer Ellen Silva humbly apologized for having allowed Emerson to speak, but that was not enough. Abunimah also wanted Emerson permanently banned. Silva replied, "You have my promise he won't be used again. It is NPR policy."
Abunimah's views provide revealing insight into the nature of commentary that meets NPR's standards. Echoing NPR foreign editor Loren Jenkins' likening of Jews to Nazis, he has denounced Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority as "quislings" who run a "Vichy-style" government, terminology that casts Israel as the Third Reich and Hamas terrorists as the heroic Resistance. He divides Palestinians into "the minority who have cast their lot in with the enemy as collaborators on the one hand, and those who uphold the right and duty to resist on the other."
On PBS' Newshour, Abuminah told interviewer Gwen Ifill that Israel's government includes "people that called for the annihilation of the Palestinian people." On the "progressive" radio show Democracy Now!, broadcast on NPR, he emphasized that "we have to recognize and celebrate the [Hamas] resistance" and claimed that "what Israel is trying to do is a massive experiment in ethnic cleansing to get rid of a million-and-a-half people who do not fit its demographic desires." (Host Amy Goodman's response to the genocide claim was simply to go on to the next question.)
The mainstreaming of Islamic extremism is also increasingly evident in the major television networks. It was truly Orwellian and surreal to see ABC World News invite Nihad Awad, Executive Director of CAIR, to sit in judgment of Juan Williams. ABC falsely identified CAIR as a civil rights organization, when in reality it has been exposed as a Hamas front group, and neglected to mention that Awad has declared, "I am a supporter of the Hamas movement."
In vivid contrast to ABC's deference toward Awad and NPR's red-carpet treatment of terror apologists, Williams has been stigmatized, demeaned, and defamed as bigoted and crazy, proving that even a soft-spoken liberal will be subjected to the Palin/O'Donnell treatment if he strays slightly from the party line. Williams sounded surprised as he described being the target of a level of intolerance -- in this case, tax-subsidized -- he did not realize existed. The one silver lining to this story is that it might cause others to awaken as he has.
Edward Olshaker is a longtime journalist whose work has appeared in The Jewish Press, History News Network, FrontPage Magazine, and other publications.
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3) A Mass Nervous Breakdown of the Left
By Mark J. Fitzgibbons
The left can be mean, vicious, and deceitful. I've recently concluded, however, that the left is having, before our eyes, a mass nervous breakdown at the prospects of its collapse, exacerbated by the lost prospect of being on the verge of something really big. They thought they had won. Now, they're seeing it all crumble in a mountain of unsustainable debt, a loss of freedom, and an awakening of voter awareness of who's and what's at fault.
I first came to the conclusion that the left had crossed a sanity threshold to the point that its arguments were hurting its cause when President Obama and the patsy chorus on the left began attacking the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other very American entities, without proof, of using foreign money on political ads.
The president himself had taken contributions of questionable origin. The left raises money from multinational sources the same way as those they accuse, but the left probably has a problem twice as incriminating. That angle of attack was a tactical error that sane, strategically thinking people would not make. It's irrational.
There have been many other instances -- too many to mention in this piece -- but I don't recall ever seeing the like of the disproportionate, unhinged attacks on Christine O'Donnell for her statements addressing the Establishment Clause in her Widener Law School debate with Chris Coons.
The left couldn't possibly want that one Delaware Senate seat enough to match their vitriol.
It's important to understand the context in which the Establishment Clause issue was addressed at the debate. Chris Coons said that only evolution must be taught in schools, and that intelligent design is prohibited from being discussed, even as a dissenting footnote to the conclusion that man was not created by God (who, then, consistent with Marxist doctrine, cannot be the source of our rights).
As I and others have pointed out, Ms. O'Donnell was right about the Establishment Clause. The mere debate, though, unravels many on the left.
Our president, for example, has stubbornly and repeatedly removed reference to "the Creator" from his quotations of the Declaration of Independence. That omission does little to motivate his base, enough of whom still believe God is the source of our rights, but it is a frontal attack on our most fundamental American principle -- that we are endowed with rights by God -- and is therefore an affront to most Americans' sense of being and security.
The omission is an irrational act, like the false, vitriolic representations of Christine O'Donnell's Establishment Clause comments. Those attacks on our fundamental, existential notions of who we are have already begun to unleash a torrent of thoughtful articles, blogs, and discussions about the bastardization of the Establishment Clause and, concomitantly, why control by the federal Department of Education should be replaced by state and local controls.
If nothing else, eliminating the Department of Education, which has been with us only since 1980 and is neither essential nor necessarily constitutional, would result in many billions of dollars saved for the states and localities. There is no constitutional question about fifty state departments of education, and once people understand how much money is spent and wasted by the U.S. Department of Education, and by states complying with its mandates, wiser heads will prevail.
Also, the national debate that will evolve will expose how the separation of church and state doctrine has become an excuse by which the left actually under-educates our children and is used to impede real First Amendment freedoms.
Religion, education, and even science, properly and thoughtfully addressed, are not only compatible, but often are inextricably linked. That's rational. Those who say religion may not be addressed in schools have an agenda, but that agenda is collapsing. And there are enough people on the left who understand correctly that the separation of church and state doctrine was not intended to remove discussion of religion, for religion's good or for its misuse, from the public square or within schools.
Would, for example, it be permissible for the federal government to ban the teaching of how religion has played a role in America's history, that religion played a role in the art of Michaelangelo, or that religion played a central role in the motivations and science of Galileo ("I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use")?
Would such teachings violate the separation of church and state? Or would the absence of such teachings deprive students of real knowledge?
The media, by showing a consuming, irrational rage over one relatively inconsequential race, has opened Pandora's box. They have made a larger debate front and center. The Tea Parties and new, fresh candidates will challenge notions and assumptions that have not been challenged enough in decades by go-along Republicans.
The left will laugh and mock those attempts. That's good. That's what got them into trouble in the first place. They're too crazed to understand that.
In fact, many people never experienced personally the savage, disingenuous, doctrinaire political media attacks until they became active in the Tea Parties. A sane person on the left would understand that what the left is doing is actually fulfilling Christine O'Donnell's "I'm you" ad. Sane-thinking people don't do things intentionally that hurt their own cause.
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3a) Tide in the Affairs of America
By Lee Cary
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
- The Life and Death of Julies Caesar, Scene III, William Shakespeare
As the once-heralded Summer of Recovery yields to a Fall of Failure, there is a tide in the affairs of America which, if taken at the flood, could lead to a reversal of misfortune brought to us by a socialist-ideologue president, a tragic-comedian vice president, and a majority leadership team in Congress who are master and mistress of the martial arts of legislative cram-down.
Two years into this regime, their persistent blaming of Bush reflects an adolescent unwillingness to accept responsibility. With each advance in the calendar, their whining rings yet hollower.
Their chosen metaphor is that of a responsible adult, the Democrats, taking the car keys away from an irresponsible child, the Republicans, after the youth drove the country into a ditch. It's an elitist's analogy that negates the principle of this democracy. The car is a government that belongs to neither party, just as it was once owned by neither the Federalists nor the Whigs. Government here has always belonged to We The People. We decide who drives it, and to where.
And many of us are alarmed with the direction in which we're headed today. In one week, we'll find out just how many.
If the referendum on the last two years goes badly for the current regime, we know what to expect from the mainstream media. Their commentary template is already cast. It awaits only the intensity of the election results.
If the rejection of Democrats is decisive, the luminaries of the legacy media will lament mightily. Mainstream progressives, like Christine Amanpour, Chris Matthews, and Matt Lauer, will solemnly ask, "What becomes of our government now that the 'extremists' within the GOP have taken control of their party? Will America lose to gridlock because the Republicans won?" Media hand-wringing will abound.
The Clintonistas, like Paul Begala, James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, will highlight the failure of Obama to persuasively communicate his plan for America. Their allegiance is to Bill and Hillary. As Obama's stock declines, the Clintons' shares go up for 2012. Clintonistas will cry crocodile tears over a GOP victory.
Both camps are nothing if not predictable.
What we won't hear from the three-letter acronym networks is the acknowledgment that they aggressively promoted the candidacy of Barack Obama, as well as the Democrats' agenda during the last two years.
Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Anderson Cooper, and the rest will allege that anger, racism, and intransigence drove conservative voters to the polls. They'll rhetorically ask, "Does America now face violence in the streets because of Tea Party anger?" Ed Schultz will vent his substantial anger at the people he calls angry.
A substantial loss by the Democrats in a week won't just drive another nail in the coffin of the legacy media. It'll nail-gun in a whole pallet of tenpennies.
As for the GOP, the greater the victory it achieves, the greater will be the potential danger it will face going forward. If Republicans win big, millions of us will watch closely to see if we've merely passed the car keys from Thelma and Louise to Evil Knievel, may he rest in peace.
For its part, the Tea Party, which began as a movement named after a historical American event, has the potential to morph into a political organization that eclipses the Republican Party. A GOP that aims to mollify Tea Party supporters with the ol' Beltway shuffle, followed by cocktails with political adversaries at the Club, may eventually find itself walking amidst the ghosts of the Whigs.
All this and more comes against the backdrop of the abject failure of socialism in Europe.
Europe is entering the throes of a societal trauma born from decades of the socialistic governing that our current national leadership covets. Europe has invested great power in government under the guise of giving power to the people. As always, socialism is being revealed as a fraud.
We watch the French riot against a retirement age elevated to our standard minimum, unless the union contract or civil service rules override the market.
We see the Brits make dramatic cuts in their government workforce, except among the government's health care workforce -- the third-largest body of government employees on the planet, behind China's Red Army and India's railway workers.
We hear the German leadership speak frankly to its people about the failure of unassimilated, self-segregated immigrants who threaten Germany's national culture.
All these things portend ill wind in American's future, for on a full sea of political solemnity, we, too, are now afloat.
So in one week, remembering the president's fierce urgency of now, we face our own urgency of now, and we will choose whether to take the current when it serves or lose our way as a free people.
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3b)Why President Obama Can't Stand Tea
By Jack Curtis
Public education has been controlled by Progressives for eighty years; if education is truly the goal, it appears a likely candidate for the biggest, longest-lasting, most expensive and clearest utter public failure any American political group has ever brought about. If education isn't the true goal, it may represent instead a major political success -- but if so, it makes the Progressives in charge gigantic criminals and hypocrites, appropriating public resources and mal-educating children under false pretenses. Either way, that's the signature model for Progressive principles in action...and the U.S. spends more per pupil than any other developed country.
The Progressives disapproved of older styles of educating that had worked for hundreds of years; they threw them out and succeeded in bringing inarguable change to public education. The claim was that older teaching was too fact-centered and authoritarian; they got rid of the facts well enough, but the politically correct regime they imposed is past authoritarian, approaching totalitarian. The Obamacrats are extending that Progressive program over the rest of the U.S.
The Tea Party folk are pretty unorganized and include various views. They are Republicans, independents, and Democrats who share some things: they haven't been stirred up enough to be very politically active until recently, and they disapprove of big tax, big spend, big government, and bailouts. They tend to approve of the Constitution and American exceptionalism and don't want a government that controls their lives. You could say they represent traditional Americans, which helps explain why they flourish more in the middle than on the coasts. They like and are proud of America; they oppose makeovers.
Obama and his Progressives don't like America; they are ashamed of it. They disapprove of the country just as the Progressives disapproved of public education when they took it over. Why else would they want to impose change? Like the thought control imposed via political correctness in the schools, they use government power to impose their changes whether wanted or not, as the recent passage of ObamaCare demonstrated. That demonstration of political arrogance explains, too, why Obamacrats despise the Tea Party folk for clinging to everything the superior Progressives want tossed.
No way can a front man for Progressivism drink tea with the ignorant. The president versus the Tea Parties is an existential battle between those who aim to expand beyond the primitive, overly restrictive Constitution and those who seek to reimpose the Founders' vision; there's no room for compromise in such fundamental oppositions.
The president cannot long suffer the Tea Parties; they expose him too much. The Tea Parties are empowered by Obama; he's their best advertisement. But Obama has anti-Tea Party allies in the generally Progressive media to help demonize and dismiss the Tea Parties and more subversive help yet in the Republican leadership, who, though opposing Obama, are more sympathetic to his goals than to those of the Founders.
As though these conflicts were not complex enough, they are playing out in an economy gasping on deficit-financed life support, with both Democrats and Republicans terrified of being nailed as the next Herbert Hoover when reality sinks into the public mind or the money runs out. Neither party is willing to mention the existence, let alone the extent, of the remainder of the economic collapse still waiting, such leadership responsibilities as preparing the public for what it faces be damned, and the public along with them.
The Obamacrats and the Republicans have both tried to prop up the unaffordable social safety net and hide the resulting canyon of debt by papering it over with yet more borrowing plus Federal Reserve Fun Dollars; too many Tea Party balance-the-damn-budget stalwarts elected threatens to expose the Ponzi scheme and bring down the house before the current perpetrators have safely bailed. Both parties' leaders view the Tea Parties the way a vampire might examine a sharp stake.
President Obama is the Progressive's pride. He and the folk named for an action taken 237 years ago in Boston can't see each other; they aren't even looking in the same direction.
The president must be pleased (though that is not what he says) with the results the Progressives have achieved in public education since he is continuing to apply the same principles to the rest of the country. The Tea Parties exist not only to stop, but to reverse that. The president can't stand Tea; one of the two has to fail.
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4) Saudis push Lebanese PM Hariri to quit, Lebanon near abyss
In a sudden about-face, the Saudis Monday, Oct. 25, urged Lebanon's pro-Western Prime Minister Saad Hariri to step down without delay and make way for an administration dominated by pro-Syrian ministers and Hizballah. King Abdullah, according to Middle East and Beirut sources, sees no other way of saving Lebanon from tipping over into civil strife over Hizballah's demand to disband the international tribunal probing the 2005 murder of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri.
Last week, Hariri confided to US Deputy Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman he was close to resigning and giving way to the Saudi King, long a friend of the Hariri family, now siding with its antagonists. When Riyadh saw he was sticking to his guns, the Saudi mouthpiece Asharq al-Awsat published an article of a sort rarely seen in the Arab media telling the Lebanese prime minister in no uncertain terms that he had choice in the matter. Chief Editor Tariq Alhomayed warned Saad Hariri that he had run out of options and the only thing left him was to follow his father's example and resign as prime minister as Rafiq Hariri did in late 2004.
(A few months later, Rafiq Hariri was assassinated in Beirut.)
"Afterwards," said Alhomayed, "you will become, wherever you may be, a sanctuary" because only then will the Lebanese public and Arab leaders appreciate the threat against them.
Sources spell out this "threat" as the Iranian-Syrian-Hizballah conspiracy to break up the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in time to pre-empt the indictments of nine senior Hizballah security officials for involvement in the assassination due to be published before the end of the year.
Asharq al-Awsat acknowledged that no Lebanese leader stepping into Hariri's shoes would be able to invalidate the tribunal's legitimacy or dismantle it because this would condemn Lebanon to the anarchy of civil war. Nonetheless, the writer stood by the demand for Hariri to remove himself from office without delay as the only viable option left in the unfolding crisis.
A new Lebanese government under the thumb of Damascus and Hizballah will waste no time in annulling the tribunal and so be free to parrot the Hizballah charge that Israeli intelligence was behind the Hariri murder. When the tribunal asked Hizballah for evidence of its charge earlier this year, it received no answer. Raising it again may well have the effect of precipitating a renewed Lebanese-Israeli clash of arms which a new government would not raise a finger to prevent.
Also Monday, it was reported in Beirut that two employees of the Lebanese Alfa cell phone company had provided evidence under questioning that for the thirty-two days of the 2006 Lebanon War Israel had controlled the company's exchanges.
Intelligence sources report Hizballah is laying the ground for the speech its secretary Hassan Nasrallah is preparing to deliver in the coming days. He has promised to produce evidence that Israel was responsible for the Hariri murder and trumped up a case against Syria and Hizballah by means of its command of Lebanon's telephone system.
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5) Israel Has An Unexpected Norwegian Friend
By Ravid Oren
In Norway he's considered the odd exception – a pro-Israel newspaper editor. Four years ago Vebjørn Selbekk published Prophet Muhammad cartoons, resulting in countless death threats. In recent visit to Jewish state he explains why it is so important to him to champion Israel
Four years ago, Norwegian journalist Vebjørn Selbekk received an e-mail with two photos of burnt bodies. "Take a good look at these pictures and imagine yourself in their place. You are criticizing the Prophet Muhammad and therefore your destiny will match that of the man in the picture," the e-mail noted.
"It was a shocking moment. I suddenly realized that my life had changed in an instant, that from a regular journalist I have turned into man whose life and family were being threatened," Selbekk remembers. "My wife immediately left the office and rushed home to be with our young son who was only nine at the time, and I rushed to call the police."
Selbekk became widely known in 2006 when as the editor of the newspaper Magazinet he decided to run cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad which had appeared in a Danish newspaper three months earlier and sparked a worldwide uproar.
"We wanted to show our readers what the fuss was about in Denmark, to give them the opportunity to decide for themselves whether the cartoons were offensive. To do this we had no choice but to run them ourselves," he says.
That decision proved to have serious consequences and Selbekk's life was soon being threatened on a regular basis. "After the 50th time I just stopped counting. I received thousands of harsh messages: 'We'll behead you' 'We'll come to your bedroom and wipe you out.'"
The family's panic led national police and the Norwegian intelligence agency to take the threats seriously. "Not only did they guard my house for nine months, they also talked to my kids and tried to prepare them for the new situation in their lives. They taught them how to identify suspicious envelopes and how you find out someone put a bomb under daddy's car. When things got worse we had to flee the house. We went into hiding for a week and changed various hotels. We even moved houses."
Selbekk visited Israel last week together with senior members of his newspaper's staff who came to get a more intimate look at Israel and the personal and political aspects they cover in their stories. We accompanied them in a tour of the Old City in Jerusalem as they observed the dozens of soldiers patrolling the area. Selbekk points to kaffiyahs being sold at the market stalls. "In Oslo Jews never dare to wear yarmulkes," he says, part sad and part angry, "but the radical Muslims don kaffiyahs to be recognized."
Selbekk continues to warn against the growing power of radical Islam in Europe, particularly in Norway. "I'm not against Islam, but for freedom for all religions," he says. "But I do see the demographic change in Europe, particularly the change in Norway and we need to defend several important values on which democracy is based, such as freedom of the press, freedom of expression and religion."
Guilt trip
It is the journalist's 10th visit to Israel. Last year he came here with his wife and children and showed them the country whose image and right of existence he fights for in the Norwegian press. Selbekk's desire to champion Israel dates back to his first days as a reporter.
"My mother was born in East Germany and my grandfather was a soldier in the German army during World War II. They moved to Norway only later," he says. "I can't shake the thought of what was being done to Jews at that time. All Europeans have guilty feelings towards you. That's the main reason I decided I wanted to do something good for the Jewish people.
"As a child my parents would talk about the young new democratic state in the Middle East and followed was happening here with concern. Obviously my interest in Israel also grew being a religious person and as there's a connection between Judaism and the Christian faith."
How do Norwegians feel about Israel nowadays?
"Until the end of the 1960s there was a great amount of sympathy towards Israel, but Norwegians' image of Israel changed in the Six Day War. Suddenly it changed from a small country fighting for its existence and which must be protected at all costs, to a small country that succeeded in besting many enemies in six days. In time, the radical approach towards Israel also found its way into the political realm. Not to mention the fact that the Muslim minority in Norway, which is very anti-Israel, has an enormous effect on the national state of mind, which is seeping into the younger generation."
Selbekk adds that despite its image, modern day Norway is not anti-Semitic but anti-Israel and mainly pro-Palestinian. "I think that the majority of Norwegians are pro-Palestinian in respect to what is happening in Israel, certainly the political establishment and the media. But the riots and violence you see on the news only apply to a small group," he explains. "I am extremely worried about anti-Israel sentiments in Norway, but feel that the discourse on the growing power of Islam is beneficial for you.
"In my opinion, the Norwegians' fear of Islam is greater than their anger towards Israel. That is also the message I am trying to convey, that the anger and extremism we are experiencing happen on a daily basis in Israel. In fact, you're a democratic oasis in an area of dictatorships. Just like us, Israel as a nation and society is trying to succeed, only that your starting point is harder and we need to take that into account."
How do you explain the fact that Norway was very involved in peace efforts in the Middle East, such as the Oslo Accords, and now appears to be disconnected from such processes?
"Our partnership in the early 1990s, in the Oslo Accords, was unique and was made possible due to personal relations with Rabin and Arafat. But the partnership in the peace efforts went to our heads and created a sense that we, as Norwegians, know what's best for others. I don’t like this feeling we have now in Norway, that we're the world's conscience. Personally I also don't believe the Oslo Accords were good for Israel. Look what a mess and terror this created in Israel later on."
The low point
Radical responses to the cartoons were not only directed at Selbekk and his family but at the entire Norwegian people. Denmark and Norway's flags were burned in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Later the Norwegian and Danish embassies in Damascus were arsoned and the Norwegian embassy building in Tehran was raided by an angry mob.
"It was a huge shock to my people. They did not understand how anyone could burn Norway's national symbol, the country who made it its goal to make peace in the Middle East," he says. "Later when the embassies were burned, reactions towards me and my newspaper became disproportionate and the whole world started reporting on the chaos that was going on around us."
Even Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg publicly denounced Selbekk. "He told a major Norwegian newspaper that I should personally take responsibility for the burning of the embassy in Damascus. For me it was the low point in the whole affair, because he was pointing a finger at me. I felt abandoned. "
Have you spoken to him about what he said?
"Certainly. We met several time. He told me he didn't intend to turn me into the person responsible for what happened and that they didn’t handle the matter very well."
What are the limits of freedom of expression in your mind?
"Every society has different limits. Some are quite obvious. One cannot publish threats on people because of their race, religion or sexual orientation. But I believe that in a free society one can definitely criticize religions, discuss them and criticize the exploitations done in their names. The cartoons I published had a political message saying we must not accept the exploitation of religion to justify terror, to the gaining of political power or to the oppression of people."
Do you believe some things should not be published for fear of offending values which are sacred to others?
"That's the price we pay as a democratic society. I too am a religious person and when Christianity is being criticized I don't burn flags and throw stones. These values are important to Muslims too because they enable them to live by their religion. We even give them money to build mosques. I believe they should accept the Western world's set of values."
Despite having been pressured Selbekk says he never once considered apologizing for publishing the cartoons. "I just never felt the need because all I tried to do was maintain the freedom of the press. But a month after the cartoons were published, when things became more serious and we heard about violent clashes in Oslo and Copenhagen between young Muslims and neo-Nazis, we realized matters were getting out of control. We held a joint press conference with the Muslim leadership in Norway and politicians to calm matters. I said I was sorry if publishing the cartoons offended any religious feelings and that it was not our intent."
Leaving the Old City toward the Mamila Mall I ask Selbekk whether he has any plans to enter into politics.
"That's a dangerous questions," he laughs. "One must never mix work in the media and work in politics. If I become member of a political party it will end my career as a newspaper editor and that's not an easy decision. But the answer is yes, If the right opportunity presents itself, I would be happy to enter into politics."
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6)Iran plans to load fuel into Bushehr nuclear reactor
Iranian official: Despite US, EU efforts, policies to put sanctions on Teheran, fuel of power plant will be loaded into its core; celebrations expected to mark event.
Iran is set to move a step closer to the start-up of its first nuclear power plant on Tuesday as it is planning to load fuel into the core of the Bushehr reactor, a senior lawmaker said Monday.
According to Iranian officials the Russian-built nuclear plant will start producing energy as early as 2011 after years of delays.
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7) Jerusalem Syndrome: ‘60 Minutes’ is the latest ‘respectable’ outlet to join Arab Propaganda Bandwagon
By Ricki Hollander
Why bother fact-checking an overtly biased show like "60 Minutes"? Because illegitimate questions deserve legitimate answers.
One of the main obstacles in previous peace-making efforts has been Arab unwillingness to accept Israel as a Jewish state and Muslim denial of Judaism's historical and religious ties to Jerusalem. U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross complained that during the July 2000 negotiations at Camp David, Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat's only contribution was his refusal to acknowledge Jewish ties to Jerusalem, claiming the Jewish Temple never existed there. When talks resumed in Taba later that year, the Israelis agreed to full Palestinian sovereignty on the Temple Mount, but requested Palestinians acknowledge the sacredness of the place to Judaism. They refused. Moreover, Palestinian leaders not only deny the existence of Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem, they falsely allege that Jews are trying to takeover or destroy Muslim holy sites there. In that way, they follow the lead of Jerusalem Mufti and Nazi sympathizer Haj al Amin Husseini who so successfully incited anti-Jewish rioting in the1920's by making his battle cry "Defend Muslim Holy Sites."
The efforts to delegitimize Israel's claim to Jerusalem have generally been limited to Arab and Muslim leaders, but recently, international media outlets have jumped on board to support them. The latest one to join the fray is Lesley Stahl of CBS News's "60 Minutes" in an October 17th segment entitled "Controversy in Jerusalem: The City Of David."
Ms. Stahl did not apparently bother to engage in serious journalism, the kind that involves research and fact-checking. She simply followed the playbook of Time Magazine, the Economist, and BBC's "Panorama" with a "paint-by-numbers" exercise calling on the same cast of characters, repeating the same distorted claims and reading from the same overall script. Echoing colleagues at the aforementioned media outlets, Ms. Stahl demonstrated how to promote Arab political propaganda with shoddy and partisan journalism:
1) Characterize as "controversial" Israel's publicizing of archeological findings of Israelite history in Jerusalem, discredit the field of biblical archeology and dismiss archeological excavations as something run by a "settler organization."
According to Ms. Stahl:
It's controversial that the City of David uses discoveries to try to confirm what's in the Bible, particularly from the time of David, the king who made Jerusalem his capital…
and
…But for all the talk of King David, one thing is glaringly missing here at the City of David. There`s actually no evidence of David, right?
Ms. Stahl dismisses the field of biblical archeology, especially the City of David enterprise, by throwing out a red herring — that there is no archeological proof of a King David himself. But, while it is impossible to uncover archeological evidence of any single individual, there is strong archeological evidence for the existence of a Davidic Kingdom. Stahl omits mention, for instance, that in 2005, archeologist Eilat Mazar uncovered remnants of a massive palace in the City of David dating to the 10th century BCE which is believed to be King David's palace.
It is unlikely that Ms. Stahl would ever challenge Palestinians about the existence of Mohammed, or whether she would question Christians about the existence of Jesus, based on lack of direct archeological proof of those individuals. Her approach, of course, supports attempts by Arab and Muslim leaders to erase any evidence of Jewish history in Jerusalem, whether through the Waqf's unsupervised construction and dumping of artifacts, or whether through the riots that are incited whenever Israel excavates, builds or discovers evidence of its Jewish roots in Jerusalem's holy basin.
Ms. Stahl studiously avoided mention of this issue. She also did not bother to note that City of David archeologists, who are respected internationally for their scholarly contributions to the field, carry out their work under the auspices of the well-regarded Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). Nor did she elaborate on the strict protocols which govern their work.
Excavations must be supervised by scholars associated with recognized institutes of archaeology, where there is an infrastructure for research, laboratory treatment, and processing. These scholars publish all of their finds (both Israelite and others) according to accepted scientific standards, and they conserve each uncovered layer of the excavated area as required by the Conservation Department of the IAA. But Ms. Stahl chose to smear the excavations as governed by a "settler organization." According to the CBS reporter:
While a government agency oversees the excavations, the dig and the site are largely funded and run by something called El`Ad…which claims they`re not a settlers` organization, though, people we spoke to say they are.
2) Call it political "indoctrination" to teach Jews about their historical roots in Jerusalem.
According to Ms. Stahl:
Half a million tourists visit the site every year, with guides who try to bring King David to life. There's an implicit message: that because David conquered the city for the Jews back then, Jerusalem belongs to the Jews today….
and
…So archeology is being used as a political tool. I mean, I hate to use the word, but indoctrination…
Would Ms. Stahl similarly suggest that archeologists should avoid telling Arabs about their own history in the area? Should Americans not send their children to Washington to visit the Lincoln Memorial? By conveying the attitude that it is somehow sinister to strengthen Jewish knowledge about and connection to Jerusalem, Ms. Stahl reflects the Arab perspective where Muslim rights and connection to the Holy Basin are a given, while Jewish rights and connection to the area are considered dubious and an obstacle to peace.
Needless to say, Ms. Stahl does not mention anything about indoctrination by Arab leaders who deny that Jews have any history in the area.
3) Portray Silwan as an area that does or should belong to Arabs. Describe Jews as interlopers with no right to live or carry out excavations there and ignore "inconvenient" history – both of Jewish habitation there as well as Jordan's illegal and racist occupation that ended it.
According to Ms. Stahl:
Another problem is an inconvenient truth that biblical Jerusalem is not located in the western half of the city. It`s right under the densely-populated Arab neighborhood of Silwan. And according to the Clinton parameters, Silwan should be part of a Palestinian state…
and
…organizations that move Jewish settlers into Arab areas have infiltrated Silwan…
and
…El`Ad has raised tens of millions of dollars, half from the United States, and buys these homes on land the Palestinians claim for a future state……
What Ms. Stahl fails to report is that there was a community of Yemenite Jewish families in Silwan as early as 1882 in the neighborhood known as Kfar HaShiloach, and additional Jewish families from various countries joined them in the following years. In the early 1900's Baron de Rothschild bought several acres of land there for the Jewish community. Silwan's Jewish residents lived in the area until they were forced out by Arab attacks in the late 1920s. The City of David, situated in the Silwan valley, is still 60 percent Jewish-owned, including the area bought by Baron de Rothschild. And it is perfectly legal to continue to buy homes there.
The notion that this area must now be rendered Judenrein — free of Jewish habitation, with Jews prohibited from purchasing homes there — echoes the racist policies of Jordan's 19-year illegal occupation of the area, something that Ms. Stahl assiduously avoids mentioning.
4) Gloss over, minimize or ignore "inconvenient truths" that show Arabs as interlopers in the area.
Ms. Stahl discusses the plans to create a tourist park in King's Garden near the City of David, noting that this "requires demolishing twenty-two Arab homes in Silwan," something she suggests would be an "explosive" action.
Ms. Stahl attributes to the mayor the argument that the "Arab houses were built illegally," and that he plans to relocate them, but viewers are never informed that the land had been set aside as conservation parkland with residential building prohibited long before the Arab homes in question were illegally erected. Instead she concludes, "but the locals want to stay in their homes," as if describing them as "locals" is reason enough for them to be allowed to defy the law governing this archeologically-rich area.
The missing "inconvenient truth" can be found in an article by Ha'aretz journalist Nadav Shragai:
Progress has brought troubles along with it to the King's Valley. For hundreds of years floodwaters drained into the garden of the kings of Judea, east of the Shiloah Pool in Jerusalem. In winter it was a swamp, but in summer it became a blooming garden.
With a bit of imagination and with the help of varied historical sources it is possible to imagine King David strolling in the royal garden with its abundant greenery and water among the olive, fig, pomegranate and almond trees, singing Psalms.
According to one tradition, this is where the Book of Ecclesiastes was composed.
About 20 years ago, the Jerusalem municipality shored up the water runoff there, and in the open green area (al Bustan, in Arabic), which the Turks and the British took care to preserve for hundreds of years as a public area intended for preservation and development of parks and tourism, an illegal Palestinian outpost arose.
Within 18 years 88 buildings went up there, under the noses of mayors Teddy Kollek and now outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Under former mayor Uri Lupolianski, the construction was halted, after the municipality confiscated tractors and heavy machinery from the lawbreakers.
Last summer the director general of the Antiquities Authority, Shuka Dorfman, noted in a kind of "post mortem" that the construction in the King's Garden caused significant and irreversible damage to antiquities.
Representatives of the municipality and Dorfman admitted that they had no good explanation for what has happened in this lovely garden, which is described in the Books of Nechemiah and Ecclesiastes, in midrashim (rabbinic Biblical homiletics) and in many historical sources. Dorfman stressed that together with Tel David, the garden constitutes the only complete archaeological garden of first-rate importance.
5) Challenge Israeli statements with Palestinian accusations.
Ms. Stahl gave up all pretense of journalistic objectivity when she took on the role of court prosecutor with Israeli interviewees. She challenged them by echoing Palestinian allegations:
LESLEY STAHL: So El Ad is doing archaeology and settlements?
DORON SPIELMAN: We are doing archaeology, and we are buying homes and buying land.
LESLEY STAHL: But is it El Ad`s goal to ease the Arabs away from right where we are right now?
DORON SPIELMAN: Put it this way, if there`s a home that an Arab wants to sell and I have the money to buy it and I can move, enable a Jewish family to live there, and I can dig archaeologically underneath it, then I think that`s a wonderful thing to do.
LESLEY STAHL (voiceover): The Arabs say it`s a provocative thing to do.
……and
LESLEY STAHL: I heard you wanted to evict people. Where are-- where are those houses?
NIR BARKAT: That`s-- that`s just not true. To accept--
LESLEY STAHL (overlapping): Well, wait, but if you make a park, then those houses can`t be there anymore.
NIR BARKAT: They mustn`t have been there in the first place.
LESLEY STAHL: Yeah, but so-- so you will evict. You will evict.
NIR BARKAT: Not evict. When you improve their quality of life, the right word to say is that you`re dealing with improvement of quality of life.
LESLEY STAHL (voiceover): His park, he says, will upgrade the area, and he`ll allow the people who`ll be evicted to build new houses nearby. But locals tell us the only way to do that would be to build on top of other homes in Silwan…
…The European Union, the United Nations has criticized this plan to get rid of these twenty-two homes. Public opinion, especially while the peace talks are under way, is-- is looking at this and saying you`re trying to get rid- - move Arabs out of Jerusalem.
NIR BARKAT (overlapping): That`s not true.
LESLEY STAHL: But that`s the way it looks.…..
6) Do not challenge or fact-check any Palestinian statements. Instead accept, repeat and endorse them.
In sharp contrast to her prosecutorial attitude toward Israeli interviewees, Stahl accepts Palestinian statements without challenge.
LESLEY STAHL (voiceover): Palestinian Jawad Siyam was born in [Silwan] and says he can trace his roots here back nine hundred thirty years. He`s pessimistic about the Palestinians ever having their own state….
LESLEY STAHL (voiceover): Jawad says that El`Ad uses the dig`s archeological prestige to hide its aim of moving the locals out. And he believes that the tunneling is a way for El`Ad to extend its reach deeper into Silwan…
LESLEY STAHL (voiceover): There`s a feeling of encroachment. The Arabs feel it…
LESLEY STAHL (voiceover): But as with the dig, the local Arabs see this as another attempt to gobble up their side of Jerusalem…
7) Avoid mention of anything that might portray Palestinians and Arab leaders in a poor light, or as an obstacle to peace.
There was no mention of Jordan's ethnic cleansing of Jews from the region or their Judenrein policy during their illegal occupation, no mention of attempts by Palestinian and Muslim leaders to erase – both mentally (with denials) and physically (by destroying archeological remnants) Jewish history here. There is no mention of the deadly attacks by eastern Jerusalem Arabs against Jews both in eastern and western Jerusalem — a contributing factor to why Israel does not want Jerusalem divided.
While she mentions "escalating confrontations" near Silwan, Ms. Stahl focuses on one incident which she says "became violent" when a car driven by an Israeli who turned out to be "of all people, the head of Elad," struck two masked Palestinian youths who had been throwing stones. Of course, the incident was violent from the start, as masked Palestinian youths and adults surrounded the car, hurling stones at it. Three people, two of them minors and one adult, were subsequently arrested for thowing stones and smashing the window of a car. There were also many questions about the incident itself, particularly, why so many photographers had converged at the site well before the Israeli driver had entered the scene. Had they been alerted in advance? Had they been told that there would be dramatic distubances or confrontations they might want to photograph? Needless to say, Ms. Stahl did not explore any of this, as it did not support the story she was telling.
8) Suggest instead that it is Israeli actions – whether archeological excavations, purchasing of homes, or enforcing municipal laws – that obstruct the possibility of peace.
According to Ms. Stahl:
Settlements have been a stumbling block in peace negotiations of the past. And …could become the stumbling block again.
A decade ago, Chairman President Mahmoud Abbas went on record challenging Jerusalem's Jewish heritage and the existence of a Jewish Temple, adding that even if there were one, "we do not accept it, because it is not logical for someone who wants a practical peace." (Kul Al-Arab, August 25, 2000; Translation: MEMRI) Today, he refuses to accept Israel as a Jewish state.
But to Ms. Stahl and CBS, the Palestinians' refusal to recognize Israel and the attempt to erase Jerusalem's Jewish heritage are not the story she wants to tell. To her, the only obstacle to peace is Israel's commitment to its Jewish roots in Jerusalem.
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8) Economic Death match
By Tunku Varadarajan
The stimulators outnumbered the slashers at The Daily Beast Innovators Summit’s remarkably civilized economic panel, though it was clear that what the country is lacking most is strong, clear-eyed leadership. Tunku Varadarajan reports.
The political debate over the way in which we should vanquish the economic recession that besets us has taken on some of the flavor of "pankration," the ancient Greek Olympic sport in which wrestlers fought each other, no holds barred—often to the death. Or, put another way: One has only to read Paul Krugman in The New York Times, or a raft of writers on The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page, to find oneself in the midst of a full-blown ideological haka, the Maori dance in which open disdain is expressed for the opponent.
The economics panel at The Daily Beast’s recent Reboot America summit in New Orleans over the weekend was, by comparison, a remarkably civilized affair, in large part because "stimulators" vastly outnumbered "slashers," making a proper debate a little difficult. Nonetheless, Niall Ferguson, the Harvard professor of economic history who supports aspects of Paul Ryan’s Republican "Road Map," did find a way to lock horns with the hyper-liberal Joseph Stiglitz, an economics Nobel laureate, as well as with Sir Harold Evans, who has become an irrepressible popular advocate for stimulus spending (as he is for his fellow Englishman John Maynard Keynes).
The bitter truth hanging over a summit on innovation is that, in the economics sphere at least, we were, in part, laid low by innovation "M"—that of the myriad financial instruments, newfangled and arcane, that eluded proper oversight until it was too late.
Now, mired in recession, we need innovation much less than we need strong, clear-eyed leadership. And that, alas, we’re not getting, at least not in America. David Cameron in Britain and Angela Merkel in Germany offer a salutary contrast, and deserve great praise for their refusal to capitulate to President Obama’s insistent call to stimulate their respective economies. (This pressing of American policy on to sovereign states is, in some ways, comparable to the Bush administration’s insistence that our allies fall in line with us on Iraq. Of course, intrusions upon sovereign economic policy are more easily resisted than arm-twisting on foreign policy.)
The weakness in American economic leadership comes from the very top, of course. But the most glaring derelict is Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary.
Geithner has surrounded himself with Clinton cronies and chin-scratching academics. Almost no one from finance works with him, so there’s little diversity of views. Geithner also has not articulated why all those banks needed to be bailed out. And as many Americans now know, he has failed to get an effective mortgage-modification program going, not to mention his Ahab-like—and, frankly, idiotic—pursuit of the Chinese currency white whale. (I am tempted to say Geithner must be a huge believer in capitalism, because he thinks it can withstand everything he’s throwing at it.)
Finally, and most unforgivably, he has not proposed any long-term deficit solutions on entitlements, or anything else. Instead his focus has been squarely, and myopically, on pulling off a short-term stimulus.
Should there be another stimulus—the third, after the Bush and first Obama stimuli? As Pete Peterson told me at The Daily Beast Summit, "I can understand a relatively small stimulus, focused on infrastructure. But we shouldn’t use our preoccupation with the short term to lose our focus on the long term. The problems with the future debts and deficits are enormous." Is Geithner listening?
The Treasury secretary is fundamentally a wonk who is in a position for which he lacks the forensic depth and political maturity. People I speak to in D.C. say he might have made a great secretary 20 years from now. The position requires not so much smarts, of which he has plenty, but a kind of seasoned stature that comes from spending 30-plus years on Wall Street, and from having seen more than one bull and bear market. Also, he has had a difficult relationship with both Larry Summers and Obama. He owes his job to Summers, and has been reluctant to challenge him.
One also has the sense that Geithner and Obama are still essentially strangers who have never really clicked. Perhaps it would have been better to have put Summers back at Treasury in the first place and made Geithner head of the National Economic Council.
I spoke to the economist Bruce Bartlett, a Reagan-era supply-sider now turned apostate in the eyes of his former confreres, and he had an explanation for the rudderlessness of our economic leadership. Traditionally, the Treasury secretary has been the administration’s primary economic spokesman. But, says Bartlett, "that really hasn’t been the case in this administration. It has really had a troika of spokesmen—Summers, Geithner, and [former Council of Economic Advisers chairwoman Christina] Romer, not to mention Orszag at OMB. All are competent but have different mandates, responsibilities, and institutional constraints."
It would be better, Bartlett adds, "if the departure of Summers caused Obama to make Geithner his principal spokesman and let him take the lead. Austan Goolsbee is a nice guy but not a leader on policy. And whoever replaces Summers will probably be one of his deputies and therefore a wonk. That puts Geithner at the top of the pack, for good or bad. Obama might as well tell him he’s the guy and hope for the best."
What about that other pillar of our economic leadership, the chairman of the Federal Reserve?
There is no doubt that Ben Bernanke is brilliant. So it is too bad that he has his ego in check, seeking consensus from a too-wide variety of views, not all of them impressive. He also is too steeped in the Depression, so it is hard for him, perhaps, to see that the current situation is different. He is running out of actions to take and should press more for long-term deficit reduction rather than take the risks of another quantitative easing.
All that said, Bernanke’s weaknesses are primarily institutional. The Fed has been forced to deal with problems unprecedented in its history, and it has taken actions equally unprecedented. As a deeply conservative institution, fearful of change, this has been very unsettling for it. Add to that the departure of some key board members, such as Don Kohn, and some vacancies on the board that took much too long to fill, and it’s likely that Bernanke has felt he was not in a strong enough position to do some things he would, perhaps, have liked to have done.
“I can understand a relatively small stimulus, focused on infrastructure,” says Pete Peterson. “But we shouldn’t use our preoccupation with the short term to lose our focus on the long term.”
Ultimately, however, Bernanke’s fear of deflation could be our undoing: It could prove to be as unfounded as Alan Greenspan’s fear of deflation, a fear that inflated the Great Big Bubble in the first place. Bernanke has run out of weapons—he can’t lower interest rates further—but worse, at least in this writer’s opinion, was that he didn’t stand up to the stimulus-helps-jobs brigade, whose reasoning he could not possibly have bought without many sleepless nights. So he succumbed to politics and hopped aboard the stimulus bus for a ride.
The question is, will he help the drivers find the brakes? Make sure your seatbelt is on...
Tunku Varadarajan is a national affairs correspondent and writer at large for The Daily Beast. He is also the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Fellow in Journalism at Stanford's Hoover Institution and a professor at NYU's Stern Business School. He is a former assistant managing editor at The Wall Street Journal.
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9) The Spectacle of the Society
France's half-century social-spending spree is coming to an end -- and Nicolas Sarkozy is stuck holding the bag.
BY JAMES TRAUB
Four years ago, French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin proposed allowing employers to hire workers up to age 26 to their first job on a probationary basis and be able to fire them without the immense rigmarole imposed by France's elaborate labor laws. The French took to the streets in outrage; I was able to take my son to his first manif, or demonstration. The Socialist Party backed the protesters all the way; their candidate for president, Ségolène Royal, told me that it was unjust to provide job security for businessmen but not for first-time employees. President Jacques Chirac -- by then a depleted force -- withdrew the proposal, humiliating Villepin, who resigned in early 2007. Nicolas Sarkozy won the party's nomination for president and then trounced Royal in the election in March of that year.
Sarkozy vowed to haul France into the market-oriented world of the global economy, but most of the reforms he introduced in his first years in office were timid or clumsy. Now, after much hesitation, he has made good on his promise by proposing legislation to raise France's retirement age for minimum pensions from 60 to 62, still low by the standards of the European Union. And he has, inevitably, provoked the whirlwind, just as Villepin did: Unionized truckers have blocked gas stations and refineries; workers have taken to the streets; and high school students have racked up some very satisfying confrontations with the police. But the stakes today are much higher than they were in 2006; both Sarkozy's presidency and France's long-term economic health depend on the triumph of common sense.
The drama of rewriting the postwar social contract is taking place across Europe. Over the past generation, globalization has challenged Western economic dominance and forced wages downward throughout the industrialized world; the economic crisis that began in 2008 delivered the coup de grace. The crop of European leaders unlucky enough to hold office amid all this has been stuck with the unpopular job of offering solutions. British Prime Minister David Cameron has proposed a radical assault on the benefits of social democracy, including not just deep cuts in welfare spending, but the elimination of cherished middle-class subsidies. Cameron has also proposed raising the retirement age -- to 66. Greece, where a wildly intrusive and inefficient government brought the country to within a hairsbreadth of bankruptcy, has been convulsed by popular resistance to Prime Minister George Papandreou's proposed cuts. Germany is widely admired for having made painful changes to labor laws without endangering social peace, but the Social Democrats who drove those reforms were booted out of office in a spasm of public anger.
What Sarkozy is proposing is quite modest by comparison. Raising the minimum age to 62, and the age at which a full pension kicks in from 65 to 67, hardly solves the problem of a smaller and smaller number of workers supporting an ever increasing number of retirees. Even the Socialists have long acknowledged the need to make changes in social security, and both sides have agreed that workers' contributions to the system should not be increased. That leaves only increasing the retirement age and extending the number of years of employment required before workers can receive their pension -- which Sarkozy has also proposed. And as Gilles Andreani, a fellow with the German Marshall Fund, observes, pension reform is the ideal vehicle for sending a signal to financial markets "because it shows a dedication to reform and rigor, but doesn't endanger economic growth," as Britain's budget cuts do. Given this inexorable logic, why the melodrama?
First, Andreani says, Sarkozy dithered. Instead of getting the decision out of the way over the summer, as some of his advisors wanted, he let it drag on until the rentrée, the traditional season for street demonstrations. And melodrama in the face of social change is a French birthright. The French have the habit of deploying the revolutionary gesture in the service of the reactionary cause of stopping change. "There is no political life here," as Alain Touraine, a pillar of French sociology, told me back in 2006. "The French have a revolutionary world; everything is black or white." Modest reforms quickly become intolerable affronts to Justice, Equality, and so forth. Students of the best lycées, members of communist-run unions, bank tellers, and insurance agents alike can all become, for one glorious moment, resistants.
Sarkozy is also incredibly unpopular, with approval ratings of 30 percent. Weakened, he makes a perfect target for protests. And the president is seen as a friend of the rich, both because he swans around on yachts and because some of his earlier reforms involved lowering taxes on the well-to-do. Pension reform hurts the working man but not, of course, the banker. And retirement age is an especially sacred issue in France. "A lot of people in France live in pretty grim suburbs, cannot afford to participate in the luxuries of a city like Paris, and spend as much as four hours a day commuting," says Thomas Klau, head of the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. "For these people, the social contract is to look forward to an early retirement because you put your life on hold until the moment you stop working." Try driving around a soulless French suburb, and you'll see what he means.
Americans have no reason to feel smug on this issue. Experts in the United States have long agreed, as they have in France, that the social security system is unsustainable and will ultimately bankrupt the country. And yet both parties fall all over themselves to pander to voters on the protection of those benefits. I have recently been pelted with emails from a liberal, union-supported group called the Strengthen Social Security Campaign, which boasts that "over 135 members of Congress" have signed a letter to President Barack Obama opposing any cuts in benefits or any further increase in retirement age. Of course, all attempts to include serious cost-control measures in the health-care reform bill failed. Rewriting the social contract turns out to be very hard, no matter how obvious the need to do so.
Although the demonstrations in France have begun to spin out of control, with radicals and disaffected youth trashing cars and provoking confrontations with police, Sarkozy will not retreat on pension reform and is likely to win a vote on the issue. (Both houses of Parliament have approved the measure and are likely to take a final vote next week.) A victory would cement his claim of being a force for reform and modernization, and might even improve his dismal poll ratings. It would also forestall the (unlikely) prospect of France losing its AAA bond rating and thus falling victim to the frenzy of currency speculation that savaged Greece this year. The French tradition includes accepting the outcome with a shrug once you've done your all in the streets.
Still, something bitter will remain. The 2006 demonstrations were fueled in part by the French fear of and distaste for marketplace liberalism, insecurity, and risk. The economy has since become more open and entrepreneurial, even if the labor market remains fiendishly regulated. But the protests today are also rooted in a deep sense of injustice: Why are the rich getting away scot-free, while ordinary people pay the price? No senior executives of Société Générale, the giant bank brought low by the actions of a rogue trader in 2008, have been punished for blithely encouraging reckless behavior. As Klau notes, "The price for wresting capitalism from collapse is paid by the poorer and weaker sectors of society rather than those most responsible for the collapse, who continue to derive the most benefit from the system." It's actually surprising that the French, with their contempt for bosses and their famously inflamed class consciousness, have been content merely to simmer over Sarkozy without demanding that the rich share the suffering.
You have to wonder how long this forbearance will last as countries throughout the West adjust to their diminished conditions. The one populist movement in the United States, the Tea Party, opposes the inheritance tax, the repeal of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, and most economic regulation. Its agenda can barely be distinguished from that of the American Bankers Association. What happens when finally the time comes to pay the piper -- to reduce entitlement spending and increase taxes? Will the rich still enjoy their immunity? Not likely.
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9a)Obama's Phony Campaign-Cash Attack
By Mark McKinnon I
The out-of-control big-money donors this fall aren’t the U.S. Chamber of Commerce types, as the White House would have you believe. Mark McKinnon on the real culprits—union gifts to Democrats.
Team Obama’s message in the closing weeks of the campaign was completely eclipsed Friday by a union official who openly boasted in a story reported by The Wall Street Journal: “We don’t like to brag,” but “we’re the big dog” when it comes to campaign funding.
Big as in $87.5 million. Big as in the biggest spender of any outside group—all meant to protect the interests of unions, the new “privileged class.” But wait a minute: Team O led us to believe that honor went to the vilified U.S. Chamber of Commerce and all of its alleged contributions from “foreign money” sponsors.
A record $87.5 million has been spent by one union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, to elect Democrats. Paid not by voluntary contribution from its members, but by forced union dues from workers—who are paid by taxpayers.
I’m opposed to unlimited spending by any outside interest group or individual, and I believe full disclosure should be required on all campaign spending. Thanks largely to the Supreme Court ruling on the Citizens United case, however, the law encourages this political money pornography. But it’s laughable to hear President Obama and the Democrats suggest that this is somehow a Republican phenomenon.
Six of the top 10 overall political action committee spenders are union groups, with the vast amount of contributions supporting Democratic candidates. The spending by labor unions, with AFSCME as Exhibit A, makes a mockery of President Obama’s bogus boogeyman scare tactics about supposed shadowy foreign interests—a charge to which CBS anchor Bob Schieffer asked David Axelrod, “Is that all you got?”
Contrary to what Obama and the Democrats would have us believe, the Tea Party is largely fueled by small-dollar donations from American citizens in amounts of $200 or less.
Campaign spending by labor unions makes a mockery of President Obama’s bogus boogie-man scare tactics about supposed shadowy foreign interests. (Louis Lanzano / AP Photo)
Beyond being untrue and unproven, the Obama money charges against Republicans are completely hypocritical. The guy who promised to “change Washington” completely reversed his promise during the campaign to abide by the limits of public financing. The Obama campaign spent almost $1 billion—and $400 million was spent by outside groups on his behalf, most of which did not disclose their donors. Now we discover unions are the largest outside spenders in this election, not the Chamber or groups tied to Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie.
When Schieffer asked this weekend how the public interest was served by “these so-called outside independent groups,” Rove pointed out: “Bob, I don’t remember you having a program in 2000, when the NAACP spent ten million dollars from one single donor, running ads anonymous(ly)...attacking George W. Bush.
“...suddenly everybody is gone spun up about it this year when Republicans have started to follow what the Democrats have been doing...I don’t remember (Obama) ever saying that all these liberal groups were threats to democracy when they spent money exactly the same way we are.”
The Hill newspaper reports that the Democratic Party has raised more than $1 million from political action committees affiliated with foreign companies. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Democrats this year have received more money from PACs ($6.5 million) than Republicans ($5.6 million). And in the past two election cycles, liberal interest groups outspent Republicans by a considerable sum.
When you look at the money spent by labor unions for Democrats, it comes as no surprise the Democrats crafted a campaign-finance “disclosure” bill with the thresholds adjusted to exempt unions.
Six of the top 10 overall political action committee spenders are union groups, with the vast amount of contributions supporting Democratic candidates.
Team Obama may keep trying to scare voters with a bankrupt and hypocritical message about big money, but that dog won’t hunt. Because now we know: It is the union-funded Democrats who are “the big dog” when it comes to special-interest money.
As vice chairman of Public Strategies and president of Maverick Media, Mark McKinnon has helped meet strategic challenges for candidates, corporations and causes, including George W. Bush, John McCain, Governor Ann Richards, Charlie Wilson, Lance Armstrong, and Bono.
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