American Jews continue to vote for Liberals but less so. Was the mid year election one step for mankind? (See 1 below.)
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Twenty-one Democrat Senators are up for re-election in the next two years and if they wish to retain their seats some obviously could become a bigger headache for Obama than Republicans.
Meanwhile, Obama's press conference reflects he continues to believe history will bail him and those who no longer have seats out and therefore, most likely he will continue to press forward with his progressive ideology.
I suspect Obama's believes forcing Republicans to do the heavy lifting and challenging them to gut programs that dependent Americans have come to use as their crutch will prove politically rewarding.
Therefore, the question boils down to whether Republicans will try and return our nation to its Constitutional roots and adjust our fiscal policies accordingly or do we continue to live by some foreign social and economic manifesto and pile up debt until the camel's back is broken?
Our narcissistic president just cannot understand how the American people could possibly reject his charisma, his brilliance and his progressive policies. (See 2 below.)
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This from a clever friend: "Maybe Obama will move the White House to California."
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Will Obama better understand Netanyahu's political vulnerability after our mid year election? If so will it matter or change anything? (See 3 below.)
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Like NAASCAR - Restart your engines! (See 4 below.)
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The U.S. targets a terrorist in Gaza and thwarts an attack on US personnel? (See 5 below.)
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Fear and bad wiring drove voters to the polls to send Obama a clear shocking message which he still cannot comprehend. (See 6 below.)
However, this Obama sympathizer does not see it that way.
You decide as the press and media sort it all out or the ensuing weeks.(See 6a below.)
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Dick
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1)Washington, D.C. (November 3, 2010) -- On election night, November 2, 2010, the Republican Jewish Coalition conducted a series of exit polls to measure the Jewish vote in two key Senate races (IL and PA) and three bellwether House races (NY-4, CT-4, and NV-3). The two statewide polls had sample sizes of 600 each and the three House polls had sample sizes of 400 each.
The results are encouraging and continue to reinforce that the GOP is making inroads among Jewish voters.
In Pennsylvania, our results showed that Pat Toomey received 30.7% of the Jewish vote, while Joe Sestak received 62%. In Illinois, Mark Kirk received 32.3% of the Jewish vote, while Alexi Giannoulias received 58.5%.
In the three House races, the results were as follows:
NY-4: Fran Becker (R) 26.8% / Carolyn McCarthy (D) 58%
CT-4: Dan Debicella (R) 30.5% / Jim Himes (D) 49.8%
NV-3: Joe Heck (R) 37.3% / Dina Titus (D) 54%
Since 1982, the historical average share for the GOP in mid-term elections among Jewish voters was 24%. The range has a low of 18% and a high of 30%. In every one of the contests the RJC surveyed, the Republican significantly exceeded the historic average level of support. We are encouraged by the Republicans' strong showing and the continued inroads being made. While the Jews remain a loyal Democratic constituency, that loyalty is weakening.
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1)On election night, November 2, 2010, the Republican Jewish Coalition conducted a series of exit polls to measure the Jewish vote in two key Senate races (IL and PA) and three bellwether House races (NY-4, CT-4, and NV-3). The two statewide polls had sample sizes of 600 each and the three House polls had sample sizes of 400 each.
The results are encouraging and continue to reinforce that the GOP is making inroads among Jewish voters.
In Pennsylvania, our results showed that Pat Toomey received 30.7% of the Jewish vote, while Joe Sestak received 62%. In Illinois, Mark Kirk received 32.3% of the Jewish vote, while Alexi Giannoulias received 58.5%.
In the three House races, the results were as follows:
NY-4: Fran Becker (R) 26.8% / Carolyn McCarthy (D) 58%
CT-4: Dan Debicella (R) 30.5% / Jim Himes (D) 49.8%
NV-3: Joe Heck (R) 37.3% / Dina Titus (D) 54%
Since 1982, the historical average share for the GOP in mid-term elections among Jewish voters was 24%. The range has a low of 18% and a high of 30%. In every one of the contests the RJC surveyed, the Republican significantly exceeded the historic average level of support. We are encouraged by the Republicans' strong showing and the continued inroads being made. While the Jews remain a loyal Democratic constituency, that loyalty is weakening.
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2) President Obama still doesn't get it. He continues to think the American electorate is merely impatient with the economy rather than scared by his policies, that the economy must be managed by government rather than freed from bureaucratic shackles. He's wrong on all counts.Tuesday's elections constituted the most stunning rebuke to an incumbent president in 72 years. Republicans campaigning against the Obama agenda gained at least 60 House seats, at least six Senate seats, nine governorships and a large number of state legislative chambers. Exit polls showed a desire for smaller government and repealing Obamacare. At yesterday's press conference, however, the president evaded questions about this tsunami being a strong rebuke to the substance of his leadership.
"We would be misreading the election," Mr. Obama claimed, "if we thought the American people wanted us to spend the next two years relitigating the decisions we made in the past two years." As Democratic pollster Patrick Caddell summed it up for Fox News, "He seemed absolutely tone-deaf." Clearly, the public hates Obama policies.
Across the country, Americans rejected bank bailouts, car-company bailouts, insurance mandates and almost everything else about Obamacare, oil-drilling moratoria and slowdowns and intrusive regulations in every facet of the economy. Americans rejected stimulus packages that - combined - exceed a trillion dollars, as well as trillion-dollar annual deficits. Americans rejected administrative fiat that gives special-interest tax breaks to trial lawyers and allows unions to organize without traditional secret ballots. Americans rejected politicized and race-based "justice" along with the president's radical judicial appointees and leftist social agenda, which - among other things - attempts to seed all levels of education with values antithetical to the American tradition.
Americans have come to resent Mr. Obama's denial of American exceptionalism, his kowtowing to this nation's enemies, his diminution of missile defense, his bizarre promotion of Islam throughout American government and his mollycoddling of suspected terrorist detainees. Even after this week's shellacking, the president refuses to listen.
Mr. Obama is right about one thing: The American people are furious about the shape of the economy. And in his press conference, he almost began to sound like he understood the public's message. "The only way America succeeds is if businesses succeed," he said. "We need a free market that is dynamic and entrepreneurial. ..." Then, in the next breath, he ruined it. "That free market has to be nurtured and cultivated," he said. "We must make sure to the business community as well as to the country that we boost and encourage our business sector and make sure they start hiring. We've got plans. ..."
That statement encapsulates exactly what's wrong with Mr. Obama's left-wing approach. The market shouldn't be "nurtured and cultivated" by government; it just needs consistent rules that are clear and unintrusive. Government shouldn't "boost and encourage our business sector" but instead just get out of the way. Government needs to stop foisting "plans" on the economy and leave entrepreneurs free to put their own plans into action.
Americans want their freedom back. Unless President Obama recognizes that central message, he will continue to flail around, rejected by the American people.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3)WILL OBAMA BETTER UNDERSTAND NETANYAHU?
There was an interesting piece in the Jerusalem Post in the wake of Tuesday's election by reporter Herb Keinon. Keinon, who visited Birmingham recently, wondered whether the political defeat suffered by President Obama's party Tuesday would make the president more sympathetic to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's political dilemmas.
"The starkness of the real political choices Obama himself will have to make after Tuesday may give him a better appreciation of the real political challenges Netanyahu is up against," Keinon wrote. "The Administration may no longer view Netanyahu's 'domestic political considerations' as just a convenient 'excuse' designed to wiggle out of having to negotiate."
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4)Tuesday's Election Was a Vote to Bring the 19th Century to an End
By J.R. Dunn
The 19th century was the nursery for contemporary politics. Every form of modern political activity -- fascism, communism, socialism, liberalism -- has its roots in that epoch. (Yes, I'm fully aware of such figures as Locke, Burke, Madison, and Jefferson, but their work was hijacked and twisted all out of recognition, in large part by French revolutionaries and assorted German academics. Edmund Burke was so appalled by this that, having invented modern liberalism, he turned around and invented modern conservatism.)
Anything coming out of the 19th century is going to be imbued with rationalism, the dominant intellectual credo of the period. Rationalism has nothing to do with rationality per se; it is instead an ideology (note that "ism" -- always a giveaway) based on a severe simplification of Cartesianism, humanist doctrine, and the results of modern scientific research. For our purposes, rationalism can be defined as a reductionist doctrine holding that the universe and everything within it is a mechanism, governed by simple laws easily discovered, understood, and manipulated. A rationalist is a very smart individual who, if he doesn't know all the answers, can tell you where to get them. A political rationalist is all this and more, since political rationalism is the arena in which the limitations of the ideology first became apparent. Namely, rationalism, taken to its logical extreme (and how could it be otherwise?), leads inevitably to chaos, misery, and death on continental scales.
Most leaders of the modern era were political rationalists: Lenin, Mussolini, Woodrow Wilson, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Clement Atlee, FDR, Lyndon Johnson, Harold Wilson, all the way down to Mr. Barack Obama, who lives in Washington in a building called the "White House." Whether communist, fascist, progressive, socialist, or liberal, all believed in the tenets of rationalism. Since the universe is a mechanism, and everything within it shares that quality, then society, in all its varied manifestations, was a mechanism to these rationalists as well. The social and political machinery was open to manipulation, along with all the little machines within -- humans, they were called. All were perfectible, and all could be made right with the proper formulae.
The doctrine of political rationalism remains in force today, even though it has been derelict for over a century. It got that way thanks to Planck, Einstein, and the new physics. The discovery of the quanta and its various tricks (still being uncovered to this day) rendered any consideration of a "rational" universe ludicrous. Particles (perhaps better called "entities") could be in two places at once, could move backwards in time, could interact though separated by billions of light years. (This implies that there is no such thing as a "universe" at all, at least one containing empty space, as far as the particle itself is concerned. Try to come up with a "rational" explanation for that.) While the universe does have rules, they are not our rules, and they do not follow any rational plan or formula. Physicists long ago threw in the towel and today think in terms of probabilities rather than absolutes (some very reluctantly, including Einstein himself, who argued for decades with Neils Bohr and others that the universe must have a deterministic basis).
There are many areas of modern life that this century-old news has not reached. This includes much of the educational establishment and even many areas of science itself, e.g., the descriptive schools such as zoology or botany. It also includes the world of politics, and specifically liberal politics. Liberals, whether American Democrats or European progressives, still insist that the world is a rational construct based on simplistic, easily understood rules, and that the levers can be successfully worked by the likes of Barack Obama and his czars, despite all evidence to the contrary. They continue following the same paradigm as did their 19th-century predecessors, exactly as if nothing at all has changed. You'd almost call them "reactionary."
It is a good thing that the universe is not a mechanism. It is a good thing because political rationalism has developed into one of the most destructive forces in human history. Rationalist political systems are the equivalent of natural catastrophes such as plague, earthquake, or an asteroid strike. During the 20th century, rationalist politics killed well over two hundred million people under such regimes as the Soviets, the Maoists, and the Khmer Rouge, along with social-nationalist offshoots such as the Nazis and the Italian Fascists. (Rationalism has killed no small number in the U.S. too, but in a quieter, more shadowy fashion. My upcoming book, Death by Liberalism, clearly demonstrates that such government programs as criminal justice reform, fuel standards, and environmental regulations have resulted in the death of at least 500,000 Americans in the past fifty years.) This seems a high price to pay for what amounts to a metaphysical error. But not only does pure rationalism go unrewarded, but it is evidently so alien to the actual nature of the universe as to be actively lethal. The Nazis and communists would have murdered no matter what the nature of their system. But even in the United States, operating according to high moral standards and with the best of intentions, political rationalism remains deadly.
It was this that American voters rejected at the polls Tuesday. Few things in history have been so profoundly and completely disproven as mechanistic politics. For reasons I do not completely understand, the death toll in this country has remained hidden. But a cursory glance at rationalist programs such as the New Deal and the Great Society, not to mention the nameless fumblings of Jimmy Carter (an engineer and a rationalist par excellence), are more than enough. Liberal politics is responsible for economic, social, and political damage on a historical scale, and the American people are aware of it.
Despite the record, as soon as Barack Obama got into office, he began enacting programs as clearly rationalistic as any ever attempted in this country, based on centralization, deficit spending, collectivism, and an unprecedented level of government control. All this would be easily recognized by the Fabians, the Progressives, and the Fascists.
The result has been as disastrous as any previous liberal effort: a dragging economy facing stagflation and possible further collapse, unemployment at highs not seen for decades, a level of new regulation that has all but paralyzed economic activity. And yet greater disasters will emerge tomorrow through ObamaCare, with its regulations and mandates already strangling the health care system even before they go into effect. Hope and Change is leading to the same results that anyone with even a superficial knowledge of the 20th century, with its New Deals, Five-Year Plans, Great Leaps Forward, and Great Societies, would have expected.
The voters have seen two years of it, and they have had enough. ObamaCare was the final straw. Obama, Zeke Emanuel (that's right, there are more than one of them), and Donald Berwick, rationalists all, appear hell-bent on making the mistakes identical to FDR's Brain Trust and the Great Society whiz kids (not to mention various commissars and Red Guards), whatever the cost in human misery and lives.
The voters refused to settle for that. They had heard the horror stories from Europe, had seen the rich Canadians racing across the border to Americans hospitals for treatments that somehow "weren't available" in the heath care utopia up north, and, more to the point, saw their own health care begin to deteriorate even as the ink of Obama's signature dried. They are not dialecticians or intellectual historians, but they know a stupid thing when they see a stupid thing, and they have voted to end it.
(One thing that Americans do not know about socialized health care, because it has been deliberately ignored in the "debate," is that the number of accidental deaths under the British National Health Service has skyrocketed to 95,000 per year due to filth, incompetence, and the effects of bureaucracy. The equivalent number in the U.S. would be 450,000 annually. Yet Donald Berwick, personally charged by Obama with "transforming" the American health system, says, "I am romantic about the NHS ... I love it!")
For generations we have been in the hands of men of certain strange limitations, men who evidently believe that the years still have 18s in front of them, men who think that nothing of import has taken place in the last century and a half, that no real progress in the intellectual, industrial, scientific, or medical senses has occurred. These men believe that the universe is a simple place, one created for them to meddle with. These men think they have the answers. These are men of such powerful self-delusion that they can ignore incredible levels of human misery, entire cities destroyed, wrecked economies, sections of continents reduced to near-barbarity, and mountain ranges of corpses in their eagerness to drive the "masses" onward, to push the ignorant peasantry toward that bright, glowing vision that beckons just out of reach.
The peasants will be driven no farther. This week, they voted an entire worldview dead. Not that it will simply lie down, zombie doctrine that it has been for a century or more. It will have to be beaten down, drawn, quartered, and burned, with the ashes scattered to the winds. The process will require years. But the old, failed paradigm has been given a death blow. American eyes have opened at last, and they will not close again. Plenty of battles remain, but it is safe to believe, in the words of one of the great modern conservatives, and Democrats, in the true sense: "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
Now if we can only get the GOP to let go of the 1950s. That'll be a hell of a battle.
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5)First US targeted assassination in Gaza pre-empts next Al Qaeda offensive
A missile fired from an American warship in the Mediterranean hit the car in which Muhammad Jamal A-Namnam, 27, was driving in the heart of Gaza City Wednesday, Nov. 3 and killed him, according to an exclusive counter-terror source. Namnam was an operational commander of the Army of Islam, Al-Qaeda's Palestinian cell in the Gaza Strip. He was on a mission on behalf of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula – AQAP to plan, organize and execute the next wave of terrorist attacks on US targets after last week's air package bomb plot.
According to sources, the Palestinian cell members were planning to infiltrate northern Sinai from the Gaza strip over the coming weekend and strike American personnel serving with the Multinational Force and Observers Organization – MFO, which is under American command and is stationed at North Camp, El Gorah, 37 kilometers southeast of El-Arish.
In a coordinated operation, Al Qaeda fighters hiding up in the mountains of central Sinai were to have attacked US Marines and Air Force troops stationed at the South Camp in Naama Bay, Sharm el Sheikh. The twin attacks were scheduled for Sunday, Nov. 7, or the following day.
Just as US-Saudi intelligence cooperation led to the interception of package bombs from Yemen last week, so too US intelligence-sharing with Egypt and Israel foiled a major Al-Qaeda terrorist attack on American personnel in Sinai. Egyptian intelligence picked up on Namnam's scouting forays of US forces and discovered him caching weapons and explosives ready for the Al Qaeda strike force's arrival from Gaza.
Israeli intelligence tracked Namnam's movements in Gaza City. It is quite likely, said a high-ranking Western military source in the Middle East, Thursday, Nov. 4, that the Israelis pinpointed Namnam for targeting by the US ship-borne missile that killed him.
Hamas security sources in Gaza now suspect Israel had its own reasons for permitting new cars to be imported to the Gaza Strip for the first time in two years, knowing that they would be commandeered for the personal use of the chiefs of armed organizations, including Namnam. They believe Israel planted tracking devices in those vehicles.
The Palestinian sources also say that the blast which killed the Army of Islam man was unusually powerful and reverberated through most of the enclave. Witnesses denied sighting Israeli UAVs or other aircraft over the skies of Gaza.
The Al Qaeda operative's death by a US missile is the first American targeted assassination in the Gaza Strip against an Al Qaeda target. Up until now, US missions of this kind took place in Iraq, Yemen and Somalia.
Military sources report that, even after the abrupt passing of Al Qaeda's operational commander in the Gaza Strip, the two MFO camps in Sinai remain on high terror alert. The Al Qaeda cell or cells assigned to hit the South Camp in Sharm el Sheikh are still at large, the objects of a massive manhunt by Egyptian forces. It is also feared that Namnam's own cells could split and sections head out to North Camp in northern Sinai to complete his mission.
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6)Battered Bam STILL thinks he knows best
By Michael Goodwin
Before President Obama started talking yesterday, the question was this: Will we now see an ideologue or a pragmatist?
An hour later, the answer was clear: Yes.
He will be a pragmatist only to the extent it helps him push his ideology. If he gets a free hand again, it's off to the radical races.
Any hope he is a chastened president, ready to work for the majority of Americans instead of against them, is another illusion.
He told us so himself. Asked if he still thinks the health-care takeover was the right policy, he said the process was an "ugly mess," but insisted firmly, "The outcome was a good one."
A glum President Obama yesterday tries to come to grips with the overwhelming Republican election victory that now leaves his agenda in tatters. But will he heed the lessons of the landslide?
There you have it. The signature policy he produced is "good," despite being unpopular, despite driving up costs and taxes, despite hindering job growth, and despite forcing companies to drop coverage or seek exemptions. Any more "good" like that and the USA will be down for the count.
Ah, quibble, quibble. Facts be damned, the guy believes what he believes.
He's a smart man and skillful politician who can certainly read election results. So, in theory at least, he knows exactly how the nation feels.
He gets it -- he just rejects it.
That explains his down-in-the-dumps demeanor. It wasn't contrition or remorse. That was self-pity.
He feels "bad" for those Dems who had the "courage" to vote with him and were defeated. If only he felt "bad" for Americans on the receiving end of his policies. Well, then he would be a different president, wouldn't he?
Still, thank heaven for small favors. He didn't pretend to be a new man or promise to be a better one, so we were spared the outrage of watching him dissemble.
Besides, if he had tried a flip-flop on what he believes, his prior statements could have been used against him. He said recently that "facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time because we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country's scared."
Even Tuesday, as voters were going to the polls to punish his party at every level of government, he warned against "special interests" and "the politics of cynicism."
His logic is circular and self-protective. People are scared because government hasn't done enough, so he has to do more, even though people don't want more because they're too scared to know better.
Bottom line: Barack knows best.
As for dealing with the new Republican House and more balanced Senate, Obama promised negotiations on all kinds of issues and claimed he is open to new ideas. Of course, he's said all that before, usually when he's trying to convince voters he's open when his mind is, in truth, locked shut. Remember tort reform?
His 2008 campaign was brilliant for its grace notes, his professed willingness to end partisanship and work for the common good.
All that went out the window the minute he put his feet up on the Oval Office desk. "I won," he declared the first time Republicans balked at his spending binge.
We already bought his bipartisanship promises once. We shouldn't have to pay for them again.
Conventional wisdom says he now must move toward the center and deal with people who see the economy and the world in very different ways. Even if he does, can we trust him?
Yes we can, as long as we remember what Ronald Reagan said about the Soviets: Trust but verify.
6a)Fear-mongers deliver victory for Republicans
They're partying in the House, but voters will suffer the hangover
BY MARY MITCHELL Sun-Times Columnist
A day after President Obama got what he called a "shellacking" in the midterm elections, he took full responsibility for the outcome that turned over the House to the Republicans.
Pundits will spend the next few days poring over the numbers. But judging from the questions reporters asked at the news conference, the defeat is being cast as a clear message from voters that Obama is going in the wrong direction.
I suppose that the president should not have revamped the health-care system, propped up the auto and banking industries and reined in Wall Street before coming up with a miracle that would have put the vast majority of those now unemployed back to work.
Apparently, two years ago, many of us were not listening.
During his campaign for the White House, Obama told Americans a cold-hearted truth that went in one ear and out the other:
Many of the jobs that have disappeared are not coming back.
The next time you drive through a tollbooth and get stuck behind someone who doesn't have the proper amount of coinage to put in the machine, ask yourself when human workers are coming back.
Think about these missing jobs the next time you call your credit card company and someone who you know is on foreign soil tries to sort out your issue.
Or try counting up the number of jobs that ended when it became customary for you to pay bills online, to deposit your checks in an ATM and to pay at the pump with plastic.
As an employee in an industry that is struggling to stay afloat, it is pretty clear to me that technology is both a blessing and a curse.
But that's not what Americans want to hear.
We want to believe the campaign ads that promise to create millions of jobs practically overnight.
That's why candidate after candidate told voters that if elected, they would create jobs, as if all these jobs were somewhere locked up in a vault just waiting for a GOP takeover.
Amazingly, it didn't seem to register with a lot of voters, and certainly not with those who sent at least 60 Republicans to the House, that more jobs were lost during George W. Bush's eight years in the White House.
The Obama's administration's relationship with the business community also is being called into question, and Obama took responsibility for any mistakes in that arena as well.
But some observers also are questioning why so many businesses have been reluctant to hire workers despite the signs of an economic recovery. Some people even believe that the inaction is a deliberate attempt to undermine the president's policies.
I don't tend to buy in to conspiracy theories, even though we live in an era where the most popular pundits are those who are experts at manipulation and character assassination.
Nonetheless, I can't help but wonder if something more sinister than voter frustration is behind the seismic shift in Washington.
Two years ago, the Obama touch was golden. On Tuesday, in Illinois at least, his support might as well have been the kiss of death.
Although the Illinois Democratic Coordinating Committee boasted that events featuring Obama, who was in Chicago three times rallying voters, would benefit the entire ticket, Democratic candidates fell like flies.
In other parts of the country, the Democratic Party also underestimated the damage that has been done by flat-out fear-mongering.
For the last two years, the electorate has been subjected to lies about Obama's religion, his heritage and his agenda. These deliberate falsehoods were designed to scare the bejeezus out of anyone who waves the American flag.
Unfortunately, Tuesday's midterm massacre was as much a victory for the fear-mongers as it was for the Republican candidates who sought public office for a noble cause.
Apparently a lot of voters drank up every drop of the Obama-bashers' Kool-Aid.
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