I know this is supposed to be the smartest administration ever,
but I’m sorry; if I were running a campaign with a fairly unpopular incumbent,
the last thing I’d do is have a reelection slogan whose initials were WTF.
Has our brilliant president outsmarted himself? Is president slick too slick for his and our own good? (See 1 below.)
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Impotent NATO about ready to finally push Qaddafi our of office? (See 2 below.)
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Sent by an old, old friend, fellow memo reader and verified by Snopes. I have no way of checking beyond this. It has also been out for a while.
Obama classmate at Columbia speaks out and warns us about Obama's intentions. (See 3 below.)
More warnings. (See 3a, 3b and 3c below.)
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Walter Russel Mead writes about how the Greens have been 'gored!' (See 4 below. )
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The Torah, The Constitution, Richard Stengel and Judge Learned Hand. (See 5 below.)
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Shoot the messenger of bad news or, at the very least, change the measurement. (See 6 below.)
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The best government money can buy and you will be surprised who funds it! (See 7 below.)
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Dick
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1)PRUDEN: No panic yet, but real fear
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By Wesley Pruden
The 2012 presidential marathon is on, and one mainstream pollster (Rasmussen) says a Republican apparition is opening up a lead on President Obama. (Any Republican 46 percent, Barack Obama 42 percent.) A growing number of Democrats figure that whoever can keep his head in the rattle and bang of unexpected events just doesn’t understand the situation.
Republicans tempted to indulge in excessive giddiness should remember this is akin to fantasy football. A poll is a snapshot, and snapshots can deceive. Tomorrow is another day, to quote the estimable Mrs. Scarlett O’Hara Butler, and the chickens of ‘12 are not nearly ready to count. But snapshots of Mr. Obama’s landscape, taken on the eve of the Fourth of July weekend, aren’t something he wants to post in the family scrapbook, either.
If the president is not yet in full panic mode, he’s right to be running scared. Class warfare is the Democratic default mode, and Mr. Obama is looking for the panic button earlier than incumbents usually do. He warns darkly of many bad things — “significant and unpredictable consequences” — unless Republicans agree to raise the debt limit and stand by to raise taxes.
Mr. Obama has dropped his trademark professorial approach to the bully pulpit, his long and convoluted sentences that loop, twist and turn in search of something to say. He’s serving up plainer speech. His aides explain that he has been studying Ronald Reagan for tips on how to better communicate, forgetting that the good-natured Great Communicator actually had something cheerful to communicate. This week, chiding Congress for taking too much time off, he employed his two daughters as stage props, saying their approach to getting their homework done on time could be a model for lazy congressmen working on the budget. He sounded less like the Gipper and more like Jimmy Carter turning to little Amy for advice on how to deal with the threat of “nukular” war. (We thought the president had a gentleman’s agreement with the press to keep presidential children - cute, feisty and able to set an example for their elders as they may be - out of the harsh politics of Washington.)
The president resorted to the politics of City Hall in his Wednesday news conference, railing six times against tax breaks for owners of corporate jets, and warning of gloom and doom for “a bunch of kids out there who are not getting college scholarships” if tax loopholes are not closed on corporate riders and oil companies “making money hand over fist.” The president also appears to have been studying the mayor who warned that “brutal” budget economy would force him to close the orphanage.
The president’s acolytes are howling calamity even louder than he is. Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York hops first on one foot and then the other in the manner of a little boy resisting the urge to dash to the bathroom. He boasts that the Democrats have the upper hand in the budget negotiations, but hops across the line into hysteria country to accuse Republicans of deliberately sabotaging the economy just to win the 2012 elections. “It is becoming clear that insisting on a slash-and-burn approach may be part of this plan … which they think only helps them in 2012,” he told the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
Bill Clinton, who is no longer president except in his own mind, suggests that the solution to the budget dilemma is to agree to both cut spending and raise taxes, but not actually do either one. “What I’d like to see them do is agree on the outlines of a 10-year plan and agree not to start either [raising taxes] or the spending cuts until we’ve got this recovery under way,” Bubba told ABC News in Chicago, where he is holding forth at something called the “Clinton Global Initiative.” Finally, a plan — promising something and then not delivering — any politician could master.
And here comes the apparition, slowly becoming flesh. The Republican field is sorting itself out, as presidential fields always do. Only a month ago, anyone would have imagined there might not be an audience this season because everyone was a player on stage. Now Mitt Romney, steady as she goes but a little shopworn; Michelle Bachmann, improving with experience; and Rick Perry, maybe a Texas messiah and maybe not, are all the buzz. Tim Pawlenty, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, like vaudevillians who couldn’t quite play Peoria, seem to have been jerked back to obscurity by the man with the hook. Of course, there’s always tomorrow.
• Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2) US and NATO prepare final assault on Qaddafi. He threatens terror
Qaddafi's game of chess - or end game?
Libyan Ruler Muammar Qaddafi may have been bluffing when he said "The Libyan people are capable one day of taking the battle to Europe and the Mediterranean [chiefly Italy and France]" if NATO continues its air strikes, and …"throwing ourselves on Europe like swarms of locusts or bees" to attack "your homes, your offices, your families [who] would become legitimate military targets because you have transformed our offices, headquarters, homes and children into military targets which you say are legitimate."
But the threat he relayed by audio to a huge pro-government rally in Tripoli Friday, July 1,may not be just a scare tactic but his last warning for NATO to abandon its large-scale, all-out military bid to kill or oust him, which military sources report is in its last stage of planning.
The coming coup de grace, expected in the next couple of weeks, is the hottest topic of discussion in the corridors of power and high-level military and intelligence get-togethers in London, Paris, Brussels, Moscow, Oslo, The Hague and Rome. It is expected to start in a couple of weeks with French and British troop landings on Libyan soil, to be followed in its last stages of by American forces.
Despite US President Barack Obama's denials of direct military intervention in the Libya war – "American forces are playing only a limited support role in the NATO operation" – US sources made the following disclosure Thursday June 30: "The US Air Force and Navy aircraft are still flying hundreds of strike missions over Libya."
Qaddafi views France's supply of weapons to Libyan rebels as the opening shot of the final act in the scenario for removing him. He is convinced now that NATO will not be thrown off course by diplomacy or political concessions – even his recent offer of UN-supervised elections to decide whether the Libya voter wants him to stay or go.
If nothing else avails for his survival, debkafile's military and counter-terror sources report that Qaddafi has the options and resources for making good on his threat before or after being forced out of power.
He could retire to the Sahel Desert, the desolate belt running north of the Sahara and stretching from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, and mount terrorist operations against Europe from there. He would operate from a sanctuary with the Tuareg tribes, which have links with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb – AQIM and many of whom have been fighting for him as mercenaries.
Incidentally, Western anti-terror agencies have never revealed that the July 7, 2005 London transport attacks, in which 56 people died and more than 700 were injured, were backed logistically by - and received their explosive devices from - al Qaeda's Tuareg followers.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Qaddafi was a notoriously proactive anti-West terror-master and facilitator who sanctioned such operations as the blowing up of the Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish village of Lockerbie in which 250 people died; and the La Belle discothèque explosion in Berlin which killed two US army sergeants.
Among the European and Asian extremists who were trained and supported by Libya were the radical left-wing Red Brigades' Italian, German and Japanese offshoots and the Irish Republican Army, the IRA.
Libyan agents also took a hand in the East German external intelligence branch's covert operations in Europe.
Some of the Libyan agents employed in this far-flung campaign of violence are still idle.
It is not known whether or not Qaddafi has decided to reactivate his terror machine which almost certainly retains sleeper cells in parts of Europe – either to pre-empt or to avenge the massive NATO end-game for his rule.
Saturday, July 2, in another bid to avert the offensive, the African Union announced Qaddafi had agreed to transitional negotiations between government and rebel representatives in Addis Ababa under the AU aegis. They would discuss "a consensual and inclusive transition" via an interim government and elections.
This initiative left the way open for Qaddafi to seek refuge on the continent but not to be removed by force.
But the Libyan ruler gave up on the NATO powers accepting any diplomatic solutions to the conflict after his own negotiations with rebel commanders in early June and the truce accord they reached urged the rebels to fight on.
In Madrid Saturday, July 2, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States and Spain won't let Qaddafi's threats of retaliatory attacks in Europe deter their mission to protect Libyan civilians and force him to leave power. "Instead of issuing threats, he should be putting the well-being and interests of his own people first," she said. "He should step down from power."
Qaddafi has often been called unpredictable. On June 12, Russian chess master Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, having just played a game against the embattled Libyan ruler, warned that he was capable of catching his opponents off-guard with surprise moves.
But in his war with NATO, he has just laid his pieces out on the table.
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3)Hard to comprehend that it is true!
Be sure and stay with it to the end.
By Wayne Allyn Root (OBAMA'S COLLEGE CLASSMATE SPEAKS OUT)
If he is re-elected in 2012, the US (as we knew it) is finished. The following is in simple language that everyone can understand. Not the gibberish that our government keeps telling people. Please read this carefully and make sure you keep this message going.
Wayne Allyn Root
To the contrary, he is brilliant. He knows exactly what he's doing.
He is purposely overwhelming the U.S. economy to create systemic failure,
economic crisis and social chaos -- thereby destroying capitalism and
our country from within.
( Columbia University , class of '83).
He is a devout Muslim - do not be fooled.
Look at his Czars...anti-business..anti- american.
As Glenn Beck correctly predicted from day one, Barack Hussien Obama is
following the plan of Cloward & Piven, two professors at Columbia University ..
They outlined a plan to Socialize America by overwhelming the system
with government spending and entitlement demands.
Add up the clues below. Taken individually they're alarming.
Taken as a whole, it is a brilliant, Machiavellian game plan to turn
the United States into a socialist/Marxist state with a permanent majority
that desperately needs government for survival ... and can be counted
on to always vote for bigger government.
Why not? They have no responsibility to pay for it.
Universal health care . The health care bill had very little to do with health
care. It had everything to do with unionizing millions of hospital and
health care workers, as well as adding 15,000 to 20,000 new IRS agents (who will join government employee unions).
Obama doesn't care that giving free health care to 30 million Americans
will add trillions to the national debt.
What he does care about is that it cements the dependence of those 30 million voters to Democrats and big government . Who but a Socialist Revolutionary would pass this reckless spending bill in the middle of a depression?
Cap and trade. Like health care legislation having nothing to do with
health care, cap and trade has nothing to do with global warming.
It has everything to do with redistribution of income, government control
of the economy and a criminal payoff to Obama's biggest contributors.
Those powerful and wealthy unions and contributors (like GE, which owns
NBC, MSNBC and CNBC) can then be counted on to support everything Obama wants.
They will kick-back hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions to
Obama and the Democratic Party to keep them in power. The bonus is that all the new taxes on Americans with bigger cars, bigger homes and businesses helps Obama "spread the wealth around."
Make Puerto Rico a state. Why? Who's asking for a 51st state? Who's asking for millions of new welfare recipients and government entitlement addicts in the middle of a depression?
Certainly not American taxpayers. (Not even Puerto Rico.) But this has been Barack Hussien Obama's plan all along.
His goal is to add two new Democrat senators, five Democrat congressman and a million loyal Democratic voters who are dependent on big government.
Legalize 12 million illegal Mexican immigrants.
Just giving these 12 million potential new citizens free health care alone could overwhelm the system and bankrupt America . But it adds 12 million reliable new Democrat voters who can be counted on to support big government.
Add another few trillion dollars in welfare, aid to dependent children, food stamps, free medical, education, tax credits for the poor, and eventually Social Security .
Stimulus and bailouts. Where did all that money go?
It went to Democrat contributors, organizations (ACORN), and unions -- including billions of dollars to save or create jobs of government employees across the country.
It went to save GM and Chrysler so that their employees could keep paying union dues.
A staggering $125 billion went to teachers (thereby protecting their union dues).
All those public employees will vote loyally Democrat to protect their bloated salaries and pensions that are bankrupting America .
The country goes broke, future generations face a bleak future, but Obama, the Democrat Party, government, and the unions grow more powerful.
The ends justify the means.
Raise taxes on small business owners, high-income earners, and job creators. Put the tax entire burden on only the top 20 percent of taxpayers, redistribute the income, punish success, and reward those who did nothing to deserve it (except vote for Obama).
Reagan wanted to dramatically cut taxes in order to starve the government. Barack Obama wants to dramatically raise taxes to starve his political opposition. With the acts outlined above, Barack Hussien Obama and his regime have created a vast and rapidly expanding constituency of voters dependent on big government; a vast privileged class of public employees who work for big government; and a government dedicated to destroying capitalism and installing themselves as socialist rulers by overwhelming the
system.
Add it up and you've got the perfect Marxist scheme -- all devised by my Columbia University college classmate Barack Hussein Obama using the Cloward and Piven Plan ..
"Correctly attributed" says snopes!
3a)The Community Organizer Who Would be King
By Clarice Feldman
I really have to stop reading MayBee's sarcastic comments just before bedtime. She was making fun of Michelle Obama's teleprompter speech to some lady donors:
"It's also pretty funny to picture them, actually sitting on a sofa in the WH residence, her in a designer dress with her Jimmy Choos kicked off in the corner, him with his WH brewed honey ale, reading the 10 letters for the day and saying, 'Michelle, it just isn't right, what people are going through.' 'Why, what do you mean Barack?' 'We have to fix it. I am tired, but I can't rest until this is fixed!'"
The next thing I knew I couldn't get the image of Kipling's The Man Who Would be King out of my head. You might remember it. It's the story of two men who travel to a place called "Kafiristan" (actually Afghanistan) where they offer themselves up as military advisers and trainers to the locals.
After helping them defeat their most hated enemy, one of the men (Danny) is treated as a god, a reincarnation of Sikander (Alexander the Great) by monks who mistake his Masonic Jewel for one worn by Alexander when he passed through the land centuries earlier. He's treated to treasures which once belonged to Alexander.
Then, he loses touch with reality and develops delusions of grandeur. By chance his intended bride, fearful of being wed to a god, punctures the myth by biting him and making him bleed. Since gods don't bleed, the Kafiristan denizens realize he is human and, angry at being misled, kill him.
I think we've reached a similar turning point in this presidency where (a) Obama's (and Michelle's) delusions of grandeur have become objects of ridicule; b) Obama's feet of clay are obvious. He may be the only person left in Washington who has not yet realized how inadequate he is to the tasks before him; (c) the people and the press are beginning to turn on him, and as his failures become even more obvious with each passing day, more people will feel free to attack him and his policies and their attacks will become ever more savage as the gap between the promise and reality grow ever more stark.
Obama entered office on a groundswell of a disconcerting mania, a mania in which voters imagined on this blank slate of a candidate all sorts of truly fantastic abilities and policies, none of which were warranted in his paltry, truly shabby history.
The man with no available school records, for example, was painted as a genius and his brief time as a University of Chicago adjunct (basically teaching assistant) puffed up to a professorship in constitutional law. The guy who cannot speak a logical, coherent, grammatical sentence on his own was pawned off as a literary genius to unsuspecting, foolish voters. It was inevitable that the reality of his time in office could never match the dream. It was unfortunately equally inevitable that he would prove inadequate to the difficult job of the presidency.
Still, which of those who voted for him could have envisioned the hash he's made of things in every respect? Unemployment far exceeds what he warned it would reach if we didn't pass his stimulus package; the housing market shows no sign of lift off; the dollar sinks more each day; manufacturing is at a virtual standstill, and Americans grow more pessimistic about the economy each day. The landmark legislation of his first (and I hope final) term, ObamaCare, is so badly conceived and drafted that Americans are likely to see the best medical service in the world destroyed unless it is soon repealed or ruled unconstitutional. In the meantime, as uncertainty about its future grows, more and more businesses are paralyzed and unable to plan for their futures.
Internationally, we keep alienating our allies and boosting our enemies. Like the Duke of York* in the nursery school rhyme, he had "10,000 men marched them up the hill and then marched them down again." He ordered a surge in Afghanistan, the place he argued in 2008 we really should be instead of Iraq, and then order pulling them out before the job is done, and in a manner sure to increase the danger to them. Without Congressional authorization, he's committed our troops and weaponry to a rather pointless fight in Libya; pushed Mubarak out of office in favor of heaven knows what successors; failed to do a thing to prevent Iran from going nuclear; done nothing to stop Syria's Assad from daily slaughtering his own people; and each and every day puts the life and welfare of our staunch ally Israel at risk.
This week's press conference revealed him as a man desperately clinging to the same rhetorical devices that have long worn thin: demagogic false choices, class warfare and a preposterous description of himself as the reasonable adult in the legislative process.
Fill in the blanks here, for this is the same speech we have been hearing for his entire term:
Republican leaders need to ask their constituents if they are willing to sacrifice the [ health, safety, welfare, future ]of their children for [you name it].
As William Jacobson writes:
This was typical throughout the press conference. He's the only reasonable one, the only one who cares about people, the only one trying hard to reach a "balanced" debt deal, and so on and so on, the facts be damned. Of course, if it seems to some that he's been detached, it's only because he's been so busy working on the Taliban, and bin Laden, and the Greece crisis.
He had the audacity to say with a straight face that his administration is trying to remove burdensome regulations, when in fact Obamacare and Dodd-Frank alone impose vast regulations (most of which have not been written yet, which freezes business investment) on virtually every area of the economy.
Not only does he not get it, he is ideologically incapable of getting it. He views the economy as a zero sum game, a point I have made before.
This reminds me of the failed luxury tax on yachts years ago, which devastated the shipbuilding industry in Rhode Island, leading to substantial layoffs; the choice was not between yacht owners and children, but between job creating industries or not.
The thumbs down on the address was rather universal, from National Review's Yuval Levin to Time's editor Mark Halperin.
It all had the feel of a childish tantrum by a person who desperately wishes he were living in a different reality - one in which he is the heroic man of action and his opponents are irresponsible and weak. But the fact is, the president and congressional Democrats have so far utterly failed to offer any path out of our fiscal problems - problems that they have greatly exacerbated. The president proposed a budget in February that would have increased the deficit, and then he retracted it in April and proposed nothing in particular in its place. Senate Democrats have not proposed a budget in two years; they now suggest they finally have one, though apparently it won't really be brought to a vote. Republicans, meanwhile, have proposed a specific path out of our fiscal mess - averting a debt crisis and setting the budget on a course toward balance through discretionary cuts, budget-process reforms, and gradual but significant entitlement reforms. Rather than negotiate over that budget, the president has chosen to play the demagogue, simultaneously insisting that the budget offers nothing and that it goes too far in cutting government services (medical research, food inspectors, and the weather service are apparently in particular danger, he said yesterday, providing a kind of Salvador Dali map of postmodern lifestyle liberalism).
Halperin was more succinct. Wanting his Morning Joe hosts to hear his honest assessment but hoping it would be bleeped out to lesser mortals, he indicated he thought the president sounded like a "dick."
I am starting to feel more and more optimistic that voters are catching on. Drudge's post speech headers signal that Obama's days as a not to be questioned or criticized or laughed at god are over and his days as president numbered:
He has no new economic message and we all know now that the old message of throwing trillions out the window or dreaming of a green revolution that would magically employ the out of work Americans was and is a sophomoric luftmensch dream.
His fundraising takes up more and more of his time and seems to be less and less productive. At last count the idiotic lottery to have lunch with him, Vice President Biden, the White House chef and anyone else not gadding about the world on taxpayer paid vacations was reduced from $5 to $3 a pop.
The "economy" proving to be a loser Obama message, his advisers cast about and appear likely to fall back on an already shopworn mediscare campaign.
James Taranto, as usual, sums it up elegantly, explaining why thinks this is not much of a winning strategy either .
"Fear of the unknown can be powerful, but sometimes so can fear of the known."
*The original ditty on which this rhyme was based featured the King of France, and 40,000 mean, a number much closer to Obama's Afghanistant surge. From Wikipedia:
The lyrics were not printed in their modern form until relatively recently, in Arthur Rackham's Mother Goose in 1913.[2] Prior to that a number of alternatives have been found including a note that in Warwickshire in 1892 the song was sung of both the Duke of York and the King of France; from 1894 that it was sung of Napoleon.[1] The oldest version of the song that survives is from 1642, under the title 'Old Tarlton's song', attributed to the stage clown Richard Tarlton (1530-1588) with the lyrics:
The King of France with forty thousand men,
Came up a hill and so came downe againe.
3b) Obama's Final Solution
By James Lewis
President Barack Obama is the most dogmatic and dangerous leftist we have ever seen in this country. He is not hard to understand. Obama is very simple. All his ideas were frozen in concrete a hundred years ago by Marxist-Leninism around 1920. In Dreams from My Father, Obama celebrates third-world Socialism, but that's just Marxist-Leninism with a racial overlay. Obama's ideas are all old and discredited. They have failed from the Soviets to Cambodia. North Korea is facing another mass famine today, so terrible that it can't even feed its own army. That is yet another failure of Marxist-Leninism. Over and over and over again. For radicals it doesn't matter. You have to break a lot of eggs to make that omelet.
Just as Jimmy Carter kicked over the Shah, a crucial pillar of support for American and Israeli security thirty years ago, Obama has just done with Egypt. By forcing Mubarak to resign, Obama has sabotaged the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of the last 30 years.
Turkey has also radicalized, and nobody in the American media seems to be taking notice. They must know the facts, but they are not telling us.
The United States is standing by or actively sabotaging the moderate Arab states while Turkey and Egypt fall into the "Death to Israel!" camp. Those are the three biggest states, with three of the most modern armies in the Muslim world. It means that some 200 million people from moderate or friendly states have joined the rejectionist camp, and that Obama has actually reversed the progress toward peace made in 30 years.
It is significant that Jimmy Carter hasn't said a word about the breakdown of a treaty he "negotiated" (or rather, Anwar Sadat and Menahim Begin did), which is the only foreign policy success of his presidency. Jimmy Carter being who he is, his silence speaks volumes. Carter is now a Hamas and Hezb'allah supporter. The only formal peace treaty of the last 30 years will be a dead letter if the Muslim Brotherhood takes over Egypt.
The window of opportunity for attacking Iran's fast-moving nuclear and missile development has now closed. This is equivalent to the Allies in World War II allowing Hitler to develop nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. In the field of nuclear proliferation, if you don't preempt, you are enabling proliferation. Obama has now reversed sixty years of American and Western efforts to reverse rogue nuclear proliferation. The horse of Armageddon is out of the barn.
Read that sentence again if you didn't quite get it the first time, because it's the biggest, wildest gamble an American president has ever taken.
It is a world catastrophe, and as far as I can tell, it has been done with malice aforethought.
At the same time, Obama has demanded, in public, that Israel give up defensible borders. The so-called "1967 borders" are in fact the ceasefire lines of the 1948 War of Independence, which left Israel nine miles wide at the waist. Obama has therefore actively legitimized sixty years of radical Islamist assaults designed to destroy Israel.
This must be purposeful.
When Obama publicly pushed Mubarak out of power, in the most flagrant act of public imperialism since the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, scuttlebutt is that there was a heated argument with Hillary behind the scenes. Obama must have been told what he was really doing in pushing over the biggest pillar of peace in the Middle East. I'll bet he was told a hundred times by Admiral Mullen and General Petraeus, even by Hillary, and he did it anyway. Malice aforethought.
Obama is thereby active aiding and abetting the whole "Death to Israel!" movement in the Muslim world. The mullahcracy in Tehran celebrated the fall of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, by sending two modern warships through the Suez Canal, where their anti-ship missiles can now deny maritime superiority to American and NATO vessels in the Eastern Mediterranean, where Israel happens to live. At the same time, another phony "peace flotilla" against Israel's coast is being organized, with Code Pink and Hamas elements involved. One of the ships is named The Audacity of Hope -- against which Obama has made no public protest. It is filled with Obama's personal and political friends, just like the last one was. Egypt is no longer enforcing the arms blockade against Gaza, so that Hamas will get a flow of missiles if the "peace" flotilla succeeds. The Israeli Navy that protects the coast is now vulnerable to Chinese anti-ship missiles positioned in Egypt, Gaza, and Lebanon.
Lt. Col (ret) Chuck Devore projects a coming blockade against Israel's two main Mediterranean ports, cutting the major lifeline to Israel's economy. Egypt has stopped natural gas deliveries already.
Against American Jews, Obama is running his usual Big Lie game. Liberal Jews are falling for it, because they never look at facts. They just listen to the feel-good rhetoric. When war comes, they will blame the victim, because they will not be able to face themselves.
These moves will no doubt lead to a major war in the Middle East, which DeVore predicts for September of this year. The purpose of Obama's moves, at best, is to put so much murderous pressure on Israel as to force major territorial concessions to the radical rejectionist front. That will put Obama in the driver's seat. By forcing Israel's back to the wall, Obama and the left (in cahoots with radical Islamists) believe they can dictate a "permanent peace."
Obama wants to be the hero who created peace, forever and ever, in the Middle East. As long as Israel is prepared to surrender as a defensible nation.
In the worst case, Obama is prepared to see the violent destruction of Israel. That's what he is gambling with, along with a giant hole in NATO defenses in the eastern Mediterranean and Europe. Obama is a high-stakes gambler with other people's lives.
This leaves Netanyahu and the Israeli government in a deadly double-bind. Israel's back is against the wall. Its strongest option is to go nuclear when Iran does. Israel can do that simply by (a) making an official statement that it is a nuclear power, or (b) follow India and Pakistan thirty years ago by exploding a bomb. However, if it makes either of those moves, Obama and the United States will turn against Israel at the United Nations, and place nuclear maniac Iran on the same moral footing as modern and democratic Israel. Israel has consistently avoided revealing its nuclear power to avoid just this kind of dilemma.
One rational choice open to Israel is to defy Obama and attack Iran directly -- Iran being the most suicidal regime since World War II Japan. Throughout human history there has never been a suicidal ideology equipped with nuclear weapons and missiles. In the next six months it will probably happen. When it does, the United States will do nothing. The Arabs will go nuclear to protect themselves against Iran's Shiite imperialism armed with a martyrdom creed and Armageddon weapons.
Since Israel's nuclear weapons are only to be used as a last resort, it is possible that Israel will turn them against its most dangerous and suicidal tormentor, Iran. With thirty years to prepare, no doubt Israel has thoroughly explored that Samson Option. However, Obama is quite capable of using the US military to protect Iranian nuclear weapons, rather than trying to stamp them out.
Nuclear proliferation to the Arab states is now a certainty. The Sunni Arabs are far more afraid of Iranian aggression than they fear Israel. Israel has no aggressive intentions, and they all know it. The Arabs never felt they needed nukes before. But when Iran gets its nukes and missiles, the Saudis and Gulf Arabs will import them from Pakistan, possibly along with Pakistani army units in case of Iranian ground invasion. Iran's Shiite radicals believe they should control the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and during the Khomeini years, they tried to overthrow the Saudi monarchy during the hajj.
The Pentagon has just released a humiliating admission that Obama's vaunted anti-missile defense for Europe against Iranian missiles is never going to work. George W. Bush negotiated workable anti-missile missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic, in the path of Iranian missiles to Europe's capital cities. Obama sabotaged that plan, leaving Aegis naval ships in various places as a fig leaf. The Pentagon has admitted that Europe is now undefended. Obama's purpose may be to force Europe to turn against Israel at the United Nations.
The Iranians are blatantly celebrating, and they are now explaining that both the Little Satan and the Great Satan (the United States) will soon be at their mercy.
This is Obama's Final Solution to the Jewish problem. Charles Krauthammer has defined it eloquently, but not completely.
Israel is now surrounded by lethal enemies on all sides. Egypt has collapsed. Lebanon has surrendered to Hezb'allah. Iran and Syria are in cahoots to achieve Khomeini's absolutist aims. Israel's Mediterranean coast is now threatened by Chinese anti-ship missiles, and its two lifeline ports are vulnerable to a blockade. Even Jordan is in the grip of a struggle among radical Islamists, Bedouins, and Palestinians. If all of Israel's enemies launched their missiles at the same time, the only option for Israel would be to go nuclear.
If Obama wanted to deliberately sabotage American power and Western security in the Middle East, he could have done nothing more destructive. What Obama has done to the American economy, he has now done to the Middle East. The only rational purpose for this strategic sabotage is to place all the decision power in Obama's own hands. The irrational purpose, if there is one, is to destroy the security of the United States and its closest allies in the Middle East and southern Europe.
All of America's allies, including Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, must be worried sick. If the United States destroys its own European defenses, what is to stop it from destroying its Asian defenses? Just as the Arab countries will soon go nuclear, so will Japan, South Korea, and possibly Taiwan.
By meeting with Ahmadinejad, Russia and China have jumped on what they judge to be the winning side. They have been sitting on the fence, because they don't want an Islamic martyr regime with nukes next door. Iran is only one hour's flight by airplane from Russia. Yet today, they have switched to an active pro-Iranian position. It is the biggest communist gamble since World War II and Mao's Great Leap Forward.
Obama's only skill is to be a community agitator, Alinsky-style. To that end he has his own house Jews, like Southern plantations used to have their own house blacks. They pop up all over leftist fronts like J Street and other fronts. The media try to legitimize those frauds, just like they legitimized a small minority of radical feminists decades ago.
What we are seeing today with Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin today is a "high-tech lynching," just as Clarence Thomas said at his Senate hearing about the way the media abused him with rumors of sexual misbehavior. High-tech lynching. Keep that in mind, because that's who these people are. They don't lynch people by accident, but with a very clear purpose. They are ruthless, and they have no decency. Domestically their purpose is to intimidate you and me, just as the KKK did in the Jim Crow South.
Media lynchings create an atmosphere of fear by hanging specific scapegoats from a tree. Watch it happen to Palin, Bachmann, Herman Cain, and everybody who becomes uppity against Obama. That is how the left aims to win a second term that Obama desperately wants.
Obama's Jewish problem is the existence of millions of Jews who feel loyal to (a) a genuine belief in God, or (b) a genuine love for Israel, or (c) both.
Obama is fine with self-labeled Jews if they are atheist leftists, and they are willing to risk Israel being erased from the planet. Some of his best friends are Jews In Name Only, as long as they are detached from Israel. And other religions, natch.
For Obama, America and Israel should not exist. They get in the way of his utopian nightmares. That's Obama's Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.
It's also his solution to every other problem.
Obama is fundamentally a very simple, extreme ideologue. He has only one answer.
Everything Obama does comes straight from the most stilted and destructive clichés of the left. The man has never had an original idea in his life, and wouldn't recognize one if it were served up on a plate with arugula. He is intellectually locked in concrete.
Free nations and free faiths are still the targets of the totalitarian left, because America and Israel prove them wrong every day they survive and thrive, and make life better for millions of people. The signs now look more dangerous than they have in the last sixty years. The totalitarian left is on the march again, with Islamic radicalism as its ally.
Israel's fate is therefore our own future as well.
3c)Obama’s Radical Pal Rashid Khalidi Releases Pro-Hamas Video Urging Obama’s Support of Gaza Flotilla II
By Jim Hoft
In 2008 The LA Times withheld a video that contained footage of Barack Obama celebrating with a group of Palestinians who were openly hostile towards Israel. Barack Obama reportedly even gave a toast to a former PLO operative, Rashid Khalidi, at this celebration. This was something the LA Times hid from the American public before the election. The media refused to release the video.
Terrorist Bill Ayers, Barack Obama and his good friend Jew-hater Rashid Khalidi
There were also reports that terrorists Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn were at the same Jew-bash.
Khalidi was thought to be connected to the PLO.
Last year the anti-Israel radical raised cash for a ship named “The Audacity of Hope” to smash through the Gaza Blockade. Well they finally raised enough cash and the American ship is ready to join this year’s Gaza-bound Freedom Flotilla 2.
Yesterday, Rashid Khalidi, Noam Chomsky, Ali Abunimah and others release a video urging the Obama Administration to free Gaza and allow bombs to be imported by the Hamas terror group.
Rashid Khalidi: This is an inhuman seige of a million and a half people who are cut off from the outside world… The policy of a president who started off by saying that he was going to offer a new beginning as far as dealing with the Palestine issue has been almost indistinguishable from the policy of his predecessors.
The noted leftists in his video talk about why “The Audacity of Hope” is one of the most crucial campaigns of our time.
Barack Obama has already reached out to the Taliban and Muslim Brotherhood. Now these ignorant leftist clowns want him to pamper Hamas too. They will never be satisfied until Israel is obliterated off the face of the Earth.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2011/07/obamas-radical-pal-rashid-khalidi-releases-pro-hamas-video-urging-obama-to-support-gaza-flotilla-ii/#comments
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4)The Failure of Al Gore Part Three: Singing the Climate Blues
By Walter Russell Mead
Some readers are wondering why I am spending so much time analyzing the political problems of a former vice president. It is not out of any personal animus toward Mr. Gore. Though I’m not expecting any invitations to any of Mr. Gore’s lovely homes, the doors to the stately Mead manor in glamorous Queens are always open should the ex-Veep want to drop in for a hot cup of joe.
My interest in the decay of the former vice president’s public position is partly because — like Jimmy Carter — he has had such an active post-Washington career. Not even Ronald Reagan won an Oscar, and Reagan (though he deserved it) never got a Nobel. Gore’s signature issue, the climate, is a major one, and Al Gore has been at the center of the most important movement of international civil society since the Nuclear Freeze movement of the 1980s.
The serial rise and fall of these vacuous civil society movements and the peculiar grip they exercise over the minds of some otherwise intelligent people is an important subject: why do so many people who want to help solve global problems waste so much time and money and, sometimes, do so much harm? Is there some way to harness that energy and idealism to causes and strategies that might do more good? What does the repeated rise and fall of clueless but well educated and well placed enthusiasts teach us about the state of our civilization and the human condition? Are there ways we could nip these Malthusian panics and idealistic feeding frenzies in the bud? Is there some way we could teach future generations to be a little smarter about politics and power so that the 21st century, which is going to have plenty of serious problems, might spend less time chasing mares’ nests?
More than that, the former vice president’s troubles don’t just reflect his personal ideas and limits. Gore’s errors are exemplary: by studying where he goes wrong we can see how a substantial section of our ruling elite has lost its way. Al Gore is steeped in the Blue Social Model that I’ve been posting about; his social imagination has been so molded by modern American progressivism and the liberalism of the late 20th century that he literally cannot conceive of solutions in any terms the conventional center-left wisdom doesn’t make room for.
The trouble and even the tragedy of Al Gore is that he comes at the tail end of this tradition; he is a living example of what you get when a worldview outlives its time. He presses the old buttons and turns the old cranks, but the machine isn’t running any more. The priests dance around the altar, the priestess chews the sacred herbs, but the god no longer speaks. Like President Obama watching a universal healthcare program that he thought would secure his place in history turn into an electoral albatross and a policy meltdown, Al Gore thought that in the climate issue he had picked a winning horse. Judging from his Rolling Stone essay he has no idea why the climate movement failed, and no clue at all about how he could re-think the issue.
“Climate of Denial,” Vice President Gore’s “Rolling Stone” essay is not, I am sorry to say, very useful as a guide to resuscitating the environmental movement. It is largely reduced to the classic loser sandlot complaints: the other side didn’t play fair, they had bigger kids and the refs were biased. Al Gore seems to want the climate movement to behave like the French Bourbons: to forget nothing in the way of grievances — and to learn nothing about how to do better next time.
But if “Climate of Denial” doesn’t teach us how environmentalists can have more success, it does help us understand what’s wrong with Mr. Gore. The essay begins with one of his earliest childhood memories when young Master Gore (as southern boys from the better white families were then still addressed) was taken to a professional wrestling match at the Fork River Elementary School gym in Elmswood, Tennessee.
Al Gore as a young man (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The boy was perplexed: the wrestlers seemed to be really fighting, but the whole thing somehow seemed scripted. Worse, the referees weren’t doing their jobs. When the bad guys hit the good guys with a metal chair, the referees were somehow not paying attention, but when, as Gore puts it, “the good guy — after absorbing more abuse and unfairness than any person could tolerate — committed the slightest infraction, the referee was all over him.”
For Gore, this is an eerily accurate representation of the current state of the climate debate and indeed of our society as a whole: the bad guys (Big Oil, coal companies, Republicans) commit all kinds of lies and infractions, and the crooked referee as played by the press only has eyes for the rare and venial slips of the good guys — the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri and of course the former vice president.
It is likely that Mr. Gore has no idea just how much this passage reveals about the limits of his social vision and political understanding. For one thing, then and now Gore misses the point of professional wrestling as popular entertainment. Among other things, professional wrestling works as a kind of folk satire — and well meaning progressives and professionals like Mr. Gore are among its targets. The clownish referee represents exactly the well intentioned bumblers who seek to arbitrate and rationalize the endless competition between the good and the bad guys. It is the way much of the working class looks at ivory tower intellectuals, nanny state do-gooders and what in Mark Twain’s day people could still call “the old women of both sexes” who fussed self-importantly around like New York Times editorial writers, levying moral judgments and thinking they were accomplishing something.
In other words, the referee in a professional wrestling match strikes a chord in popular culture in part because he is a representation of the class which sets itself up in our society as the arbiter and judge: the professional elite, the expert and the chattering classes. The referee at a wrestling match is a populist portrait of the FCC, the NLRB, NPR, the New York Times editorial board and everyone else who does exactly what Al Gore would like to spend his whole life doing: judging mankind impartially and ruling them well. The referee is part of the entertainment who is funny in part because he thinks he is above the fray.
Al Gore thinks of himself as a friend of the common man and a tribune of the people against the selfish and wicked elites (the bad wrestlers hitting the poor good guys with those horrid metal chairs); he wants to be an honest and competent referee in the wrestling match, bringing decorum and order and fairness to an anarchic sport.
Al Gore is rooted in two distinct but related American traditions: genteel Southern liberalism and the Northeastern establishment. His father, Al Gore Senior, was a relatively liberal Tennessee politician who served in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. (The senior Gore also worked for oil and coal companies and farmed tobacco; the younger Gore seems to feel he has much to live down.) The elder Gore was relatively liberal on civil rights — voting against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but supporting the 1965 Voting Rights Act and Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew denounced him as the Tennessee representative of the New England establishment.
The reality was more complex. There is a long tradition of relatively liberal Southern gentlemen who quietly but sometimes forcefully dissented from certain aspects of the region’s racial and political legacies. Think Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird defending the illiterate, disabled Negro against the mob of white trash, or Ashley Wilkes in Gone With The Wind. In real life, these men were often educated up North, usually at places like Princeton and Harvard and Yale, where their gentry Southern elitism was reinforced by the intellectual and socialism elitism of the Ivy League.
Ashley Wilkes, played by Leslie Howard (Souce: Wikimedia Commons)
Woodrow Wilson, the Virginia-born Princeton professor who ended up in the White House proposing global peace agreements as unrealistic as Gore’s climate treaty is the archetypal example of the blend of Southern and Northern elite WASP culture and politics. Wilson believed in democracy but not in the people; well educated, well intentioned and well behaved moral leaders needed to guide the masses lest in their ignorance and weakness they fall under the sway of unscrupulous demagogues. North and South the progressives believe that the masses need to be governed: they will drink too much without Prohibition, they will drive too much unless gasoline is heavily taxed, they will eat the wrong things, the poor weaklings, if we allow fried food in the school cafeteria.
Al Gore junior was as perfectly primed for the life of a gentry progressive as it is possible to be. The son of a senator, he was educated at St. Albans and Harvard. When, after working as a journalist investigating corruption (an honest referee in a dirty game), he learned that his father’s old House seat had become vacant, Al Gore ran and was elected. Atticus Finch, reporting for duty.
Unfortunately, Gore’s life has coincided with declining public interest in the kind of elite liberal leadership he was trained to provide. The shift of the white South away from the Democratic Party is sometimes portrayed as simple white flight from a Democratic Party that was embracing Black voters. This is a part of what happened; what also happened was that as Southern whites were gradually becoming better educated and more urban, they were no longer interested in the two types of leadership the Democrats traditionally offered: Atticus Finch and George Wallace. Neither the gentry progressive nor the race-baiting demagogue spoke to the white South very clearly anymore and the rise of the Republican Party in the South brought new kinds of discourse and new kinds of politics to a South that had less and less room for the Gores.
Beyond the South, the idea of better governance through specially trained and impartial experts has been losing favor from one end of the United States to the other. In 1911, only a handful of Americans had a college education. Southern sharecroppers and northern mill workers had little education and little leisure time for politics. Today growing numbers of Americans resent and reject the tutelage of well meaning elites — and they view with suspicion the claims of ‘experts’ to be dispassionate and disinterested custodians of the public good. They don’t see civil servants as unselfish and apolitical experts who can be trusted to regulate and rule; they see them as a lobby like any other, a special interest more interested in preserving fat pensions and easy working conditions — and at foisting their own ideological hobby horses and preferences on the public at large.
Al Gore is not wrong to see that the media is changing into something that feels more like professional wrestling than like the hallowed network news broadcast in the Cronkite era. The public at large increasingly sees journalists as entertainers rather than arbiters. “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” play this for all it is worth and increasingly the myth of the objective journalist is yielding to the idea of the engaged party frankly promoting an agenda. Mr. Gore may deplore this transition and yearn for the days when a handful of senior newsmen told the country what the news really was; millions of Americans don’t want to go back. They don’t think Dan Rather can be trusted and they feel that a news show which has a clear and even entertaining bias is more interesting and perhaps even more honest than one which cloaks itself in pretentious but questionable claims to authority and objective truth.
The tradition of politics and public service that Gore knows and believes in — a powerful government run by well educated technocrats and gentlemen protecting the masses from dangers they do not understand and which they cannot overcome on their own — periodically comes under attack from Jacksonian populists.
The most common thing that people who do not like Al Gore’s politics say about him is that they find his speaking method “condescending”. He often comes across like a middle school teacher trying to make a complicated point clear to his class. He likes his students; he wishes them well — but he is the adult in the room, the honest referee at the wrestling match, and the kids need to do what they’re told.
Gore’s social ethic was not a bad one in his youth. In a region divided into a handful of relatively prosperous and well educated whites, a larger number of poor and unschooled white farmers and laborers often dependent on rich whites, and a large mass of (mostly) even poorer, more dependent and less well educated Blacks, the quasi-feudal gentry liberalism of the young Al Gore made some sense.
But the South changed and the country changed, and it doesn’t make sense any more. Al Gore’s climate strategy — to invoke the authority of Science and Experts in the service of a grand global fix that would transfer huge amounts of power from elected officials and the people at large to unelected international bureaucracies — is classic Blue thinking. These days, that kind of thinking and that kind of strategy won’t work.
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5)The Torah, The Constitution, and the 4th of July
By Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater
In his speech that became known as "The Spirit of Liberty," delivered in New York City's Central Library, in the midst of World War II, the preeminent judge and judicial philosopher, Learned Hand, asked, "What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it." (As quoted in Time magazine, July 4, 2011)
There is a great deal of talk these days about the Constitution, about liberty and American values. In a cover story this week in Time, editor Richard Stengel asks if the Constitution still matters. Of course it does, but how we interpret it, how we try to understand what the framers meant, and how we apply it today is presenting us greater challenges than perhaps it did in the past. Stengel writes, "As a counterpoint to the rise of constitutional originalists (those who believe the document should be interpreted only as the drafters understood it), liberal scholars analyze the text just as closely to find the elasticity they believe the framers intended. Everywhere, there seems to be a debate about the scope and meaning and message of the Constitution. This is a healthy thing. Even the framers would agree on that." (ibid.) On this July 4th weekend, as we celebrate our country and all of the amazing contributions it has added to the world, including the ideals and values of the Declaration and the Constitution, I wanted to share some thoughts about how this struggle to understand the meaning of an original document, formulated in a different time, in a different era, by very different people, is a very Jewish idea, one that we in fact gave to the world thousands of years before 1776.
We don't have a constitution, but we do have a Torah. And, like the debate we are having today in regard to understanding what the framers meant when they crafted the Constitution, Jews have been arguing about the original intent of the Torah pretty much since...well, since the Torah itself! There are laws, statutes and directives in the Torah that have been subject to debate, discussion and overruling, starting with the daughters of Tzelofchad, which we will read about in a few weeks, who question the Torah's earlier ruling about inheritance only being for sons, and Moses inquires of God and the rule gets altered. There are verses in the Torah that were explained away by the rabbis of the Talmud as either not applying any longer, never applying or they get made so complex to enact that they eventually fall away. What the Jewish tradition has that almost no other religious tradition shares, and which a great deal of modern jurisprudence is based on, is the Talmud and all the subsequent later codes, all of which work to explain the meaning of the original document, the Torah, and what it's framer (or framers depending on your view) meant. The Torah condones the death penalty while the Talmud pretty much outlaws it. The Torah tells us to take our malcontent children to the gates of the city and if they can't be reformed by the elders, to stone them to death. The Talmud tells us that never happened and never should happen. Sorry!
And, in the reverse, the Torah is pretty clear about what keeping kosher should look like, and it is pretty simple, while the rabbis of the Talmud and later codes expanded the laws and made them quite complex. We have a long history of interpreting our Torah, redefining its meaning, and using very advanced and creative hermeneutical tools to either alter, or in some cases, downright change, what the original meaning seems to have been. We have the principle of PARDES, which is a rabbinic literary invention, whereby each word of the Torah has four levels of interpretation: the literal meaning, peshat, a more subtle or hinting reading, remez, a creative commentary, drash, and a totally hidden or mysterious meaning, sod. Through this technique, and many others, commentators, most famously Rashi, 11th century in France, have sometimes completely changed the text from what it literally says. Our tradition is incredibly fluid and flexible and always has been.
Today, both in American life and in our Jewish life, we are facing challenges from those that want to read both of our foundational texts, the Constitution and the Torah, in a literalist manner. I will leave the legal aspects of the Constitution and how to understand it to the lawyers and experts, but from what I have read and studied, the framers seemed to want a document that would grow and develop in meaning based on the growth and innovation of the new country they were founding. As Stengel writes in his Time article, "There have been few conflicts in American history greater than the internal debates the framers had about the Constitution. For better or for worse -- and I would argue that it is for better -- the Constitution allows and even encourages deep arguments about the most basic democratic issues." The Torah, I would argue, has a similar make-up, namely that we have been arguing about, discussing, and interpreting the meaning of the text for thousands of years. And, we know that the times were different for the framers of the Constitution as they were for the authors of the Torah. Cultures were different, practices were different, perhaps we might even say that morals were different.
The framers of the Constitution, while giving us freedom of religion and speech, also thought blacks were 3/5's of a human and slavery was okay. The Torah also thinks that slavery is okay, even as it seeks to give rights to slaves that never existed. And, in interpreting text for today, we are called upon to use our own minds, hearts and experiences to understand and apply meaning. Just as the Constitution didn't know from healthcare, military drones, the internet or globalized commerce, and so lawyers and judges must figure out how to legislate on these matters based on what they think the intent of the framers was, along with later precedent and case law, so too the Torah didn't know from many of the cultural and religious issues facing us today in modern American life: from end of life decisions that involve modern medicine to using technology to bring Shabbat services to homebound seniors. And, because it is so timely with New York's landmark marriage equality law passed just last week, I believe that the Torah verse from Leviticus that has been used for generations to deny gays and lesbians their equal rights in our tradition, must be finally read away with the same Talmudic logic and thinking that was used to read away killing our wayward children. We have changed, evolved, moved as a society and culture, even if some don't agree. Remember, plenty of people thought slavery was still okay, and the Civil War didn't finish the job when it comes to racial discrimination. As Judge Hand told us, we must sometimes trust our hearts and not our texts.
However, another timely issue that fascinates me, and directly relates to this discussion is that of circumcision. While this merits an entire sermon, I want to end with this thought: Why is it that this ritual, which appears in Genesis, is really, for the most part, one of the only so-called "primitive" rituals from the time of the Bible that we still follow and practice without any real challenge or dispute. Sure there are fringe groups of Jews that have always been against brit milah, but 99% of Jews, religious and secular, follow this ancient ritual without question. Sure, many moms have trepidation, but they still do it. We have never stopped doing it and today, in the face of ridiculous legal challenges, which have thankfully been abandoned in Santa Monica but continue in San Francisco, Jews of all stripes, along with Muslims and religious freedom advocates, are fighting for our right to continue this ancient practice, even as we don't do most of the ancient Biblical practices any longer. Why is that? Fascinating question.
And so, as we celebrate this 4th of July, let us be grateful that we live in one of the freest countries ever to exist, yet we are not perfect. The Constitution must never be allowed to become an idol, just as the Torah must never be allowed to become an idol. One midrash teaches that Moses shattered the first tablets as a reminder of that notion. We must always do battle between fear and liberty, between power and freedom. That is the great gift, and great challenge, of being human. Thomas Jefferson said it best, when he wrote, "All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which would be oppression." That is our great challenge, as Americans and as Jews. May we ponder deeply on this, our nation's birthday.
Shabbat shalom and God bless America.
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6)Change to Inflation Measurement on Table as Part of Budget Talks - Aides
By Corey Boles and Janet Hook
Lawmakers are considering changing how the Consumer Price Index is calculated, a move that could save perhaps $220 billion and represent significant progress in the ongoing federal debt ceiling and deficit reduction talks.
According to congressional aides familiar with the discussions, the proposal would shift how the Consumer Price Index is calculated to reflect how people tend to change spending patterns when prices increase. For example, consumers tend to drive less when gas prices increase dramatically.
Such a move is widely seen by economists as resulting in a slower rise in inflation. That would impact an array of federal programs that are linked to CPI including the Social Security program and income tax brackets set by the federal government.
The proposal could lower federal spending by around $220 billion over the next decade, based on calculations by last year's White House deficit commission, which recommended the change as part of its final report.
According to two congressional aides familiar with the budget negotiations, the shift is being "seriously discussed" as part of the ongoing talks to strike a budget deal, that would be used to ease the passage of a required increase in the country's debt limit.
Those talks involve Democratic and Republican lawmakers from both chambers and are led by Vice President Joe Biden. The group held its latest meeting Tuesday as they strive to reach the broad outlines of a compromise on federal spending by the end of the month.
In a press conference that took place before the meeting, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.) declined to comment on the specific proposal, other than to say that "a lot of things are on the table." But asked whether the proposal would be interpreted as a tax increase and therefore a non-starter for Republicans, Cantor said it could be seen as both impacting tax rates and benefits paid out by the federal government.
When asked about the idea after the meeting, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D., S.C.) said everything is being discussed.
It is a rare proposal in that it would likely lead to both lower benefits paid to seniors and higher taxes paid by most people who pay federal income tax. As such, it could allow Republicans to argue they are tackling federal entitlement programs such as Social Security, and permit Democrats to say they are increasing taxes as part of any budget deal that is reached.
It could be easier for both parties to agree on than a significant overhaul to the Medicare proposal or an increase of taxes on wealthier Americans.
"It's certainly something that is going to be considered," said James Horney, director of federal fiscal policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank. "There are questions whether it would be politically easy."
Several senators that are not party to the Biden-led talks voiced support for the proposal including Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D., N.D.), while Sen. John Thune (R., S.D.), a member of the Republican leadership team, said it should be looked at as part of the negotiations.
David again. I've said it before, and I'll say I again: In its degraded state, the government will do pretty much anything it can to keep the status quo going as long as it can.
A case in point is the iconic hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic circa the 1930s. It ultimately became impossible for businesses to keep ahead of the rapid price changes - at one point, things got so bad that in a three-day period the mark lost 4/5 of its value, and barter became a dominant form of exchange for those businesses that somehow managed to keep their doors open. That is, it worked until the government passed a measure requiring those business owners to keep their shops open and accept the state's paper marks in exchange for their tangible goods. The outcome was as predictable as it was catastrophic.
Unfortunately for the government, rigging the CPI to show lower numbers is not the same as actually lowering the numbers.
People know that inflation is already running at higher-than-reported levels, and to the extent that the government tries to say otherwise is only going to further damage its credibility. And the one thing a debt-laden government operating on a "trust us" monetary system can't afford is to lose its credibility.
But there's one more thing.
Contrary to popular misconceptions, in an economic depression it is not the poor who initially suffer the most, but the middle class. (The wealthy, of course, have sufficient ballast in their boats to weather pretty much any storm.)
It is when the ill effects of the depression begin eroding the narrow margin of existence of the poor (and the new poor) that the real trouble begins. And few ill effects hit the poor harder than those related to commodity inflation - as in when filling up a gas tank to get to a minimum-wage job requires trading off on food for the family.
We're reaching that point and will definitely reach it before this is over. At that time, almost anything will be possible, including widespread social unrest, followed by a military-style response.
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7)The Most Powerful Group of Political Donors in America
By Investing Answers
If you were asked to name the most powerful political fundraising industry in the U.S., who would you list?
Big Oil?
Big Pharma?
Attorneys? Defense contractors?
We can almost guarantee that you’d never guess what profession contributed more to House and Senate candidates in 2010 than any other: Retirees.
Individuals who labeled themselves as “retired” contributed almost $279 million to federal candidates in 2008 and over $159 million in 2010. By comparison, the next-largest industry, lawyers and law firms, donated $234 million in 2008 and almost $138million in 2010.
Political fundraising has turned into a multibillion-dollar industry. And it’s no secret why: In a country with an increasing number of special interests vying for the favor of only 100 senators and 435 representatives, the stakes have never been higher.
We’ve used information gathered by The Center for Responsive Politics to list the top-20 industries by amount donated to federal elections (as of April 25, 2011), along with an approximation of which party the industry tends to lean toward:
Big Oil?
Big Pharma?
Attorneys? Defense contractors?
We can almost guarantee that you’d never guess what profession contributed more to House and Senate candidates in 2010 than any other: Retirees.
Individuals who labeled themselves as “retired” contributed almost $279 million to federal candidates in 2008 and over $159 million in 2010. By comparison, the next-largest industry, lawyers and law firms, donated $234 million in 2008 and almost $138million in 2010.
Political fundraising has turned into a multibillion-dollar industry. And it’s no secret why: In a country with an increasing number of special interests vying for the favor of only 100 senators and 435 representatives, the stakes have never been higher.
We’ve used information gathered by The Center for Responsive Politics to list the top-20 industries by amount donated to federal elections (as of April 25, 2011), along with an approximation of which party the industry tends to lean toward:
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