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Don't get me wrong. I love blondes, brunettes and women in general but you gotta admit blondes are more fun to poke fun at!
“Help...Help, my pilot just died!"
A blonde is on board a small two-seater airplane when suddenly the pilot dies. Not knowing how to fly a plane she grabs the radio.
"Mayday! Mayday! My pilot just died!"
Ground control receives her call for help and answers back, "Don't worry, Madam. I'll talk you down, just do as I say. First I need you to give me your height and position."
"I'm 5’2” and sitting in the right front seat."
---
Bob walked into a sports bar around 9:58 PM.
He sat down next to a blonde at the bar
And stared up at the TV.
The 10 PM news was coming on.
The news crew was covering the story
Of a man on the ledge of a large building
Preparing to jump.
The blonde looked at Bob and said,
"Do you think he'll jump?"
Bob said,
"You know, I bet he'll jump."
The blonde replied,
"Well, I bet he won't."
Bob placed a $20 bill on the bar and said,
"You're on!"
Just as the blonde placed her money on the bar,
The guy on the ledge
Did a swan dive off the building,
Falling to his death.
The blonde was very upset,
But willingly handed her $20 to Bob.
"Fair's fair. Here's your money."
Bob replied,
"I can't take your money.
I saw this earlier on the 5 PM news,
So I knew he would jump."
The blonde replied,
"I did, too,
But I didn't think he'd do it again."
Bob took the money.
Finally: "Why is a person who plays the piano called a pianist, but a person who drives a race car is not called a racist?"
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Response to latest memo from very bright and dear friend and fellow memo reader: "One of your best. I especially agree with your assessments of Powell and Rice, and GW (contra Maggie) going wobbly down the stretch.
Cheney is still the most qualified person in public life to be president. Too bad he was savaged by the press."
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Is it time for the people paying for the free stuff to tell the people receiving the free stuff to stuff it! You decide! (See 1 below.)
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Golfers say fore. What do investors say? You decide.
And what happens should the well run dry? (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Obama believes in green and apparently threw 500 million green dollars at Solyndra and now it has turned bankruptcy brown. Well at least a few hundred were employed for a year. Now that's change!
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This investment sage has given encouragement to those with a long term outlook and no doubt there is statistical evidence to support his case.
I have been to many investment meetings and whenever the audience was polled about the long term they always are more favorably inclined than when asked about the short term. Why? Hope springs eternal and most people are optimistic about the future but more reticent about the near term and particularly when the near term outlook is less than positive. (See 3 below.)
From an investment standpoint I have been a proponent of energy stocks and most particularly those in Canada. If Obama and Greens truly wanted energy independence combined with high paying employment they would allow development of America's oil sands as well. (See 3a below.)
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My courageous and bright friend, Bret Stephens, highlights the moral depravity and hypocrisy of those who question and attack Israel for defending itself against enemies who have disrupted world peace for decades. (See 4 below.)
Clowning around and exposing U.N. hypocrisy.
Rest assured wars begin because supposed moral nations turn into wimps in the guise of Chamberlain etc.
The U.N. is about to vote to establish a Palestinian State that refuses to recognize its neighbor and Alan Dershowitz sets forth the case. (See 4a, 4b and 4c below.)
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Obama's contribution to the mess in which we find ourselves. The price of incompetency will comes very high. Back to a bleak future.(See 5 and 5a below.)
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More evidence what government touches it destroys, fails to meet targets whatever. Why? No profit incentive, no bottom line. (See 6 below.)
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Has Netanyahu made a classical mistake believing common sense will prevail? Time will tell. You decide. (See 7 below.)
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Dick
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1) THE REAL PROBLEM WITH OUR GOVERNMENTAL SYSTEM - - - -
The folks, who are getting free stuff, don't like the folks who are paying for the free stuff, because the folks, who are paying for the free stuff, can no longer afford to pay for both the free stuff and their own stuff.
And, the folks who are paying for the free stuff want the free stuff to stop.
And the folks, who are getting the free stuff, want even MORE free stuff on top of the free stuff they're already getting!
Now, the people who are forcing the people who PAY for the free stuff, have told the people who are RECEIVING the free stuff, that the people who are PAYING for the free stuff, are being mean, prejudiced, and racist. not paying their fair share so, the people who are GETTING the free stuff, have been convinced they need to HATE the people who are PAYING for the free stuff by the people who are forcing the people who are PAYING for the free stuff and GIVING them the free stuff in the first place.
And that's the straight stuff!!!
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2) Germany may be getting ready to give up on Greece.
After almost two years of fighting to contain the region’s debt crisis and providing the biggest share of three European bailouts, Chancellor Angela Merkel is laying the groundwork for what markets say is almost a sure thing: a Greek default.
“It feels like Germany is preparing itself for a debt default,” Jacques Cailloux, chief European economist at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in London, said in an interview. “Fatigue is setting in. Germany could be a first mover, or other countries could be preparing too.”
Officials in Merkel’s government are debating how to shore up German banks in the event that Greece fails to meet the budget-cutting terms of its aid package and is unable to get a bailout-loan payment, three coalition officials said Friday. The move capped a week of escalating German threats that Greece won’t get the money unless it meets fiscal targets and investors raising bets on a default.
Ring-fencing their banks and a hardening of rescue terms risk isolating Germany and unnerving global policy makers already fretting that the region’s political tussles are roiling markets and threatening growth. Underscoring the tone of weekend talks of Group of Seven finance chiefs, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told Bloomberg Television that European authorities must “demonstrate they have enough political will” to end the crisis.
Credit Risks
European bank credit risk surged last week to an all-time high and the euro fell by the most against the dollar in a year. Investors have doubts whether Greece, whose two-year notes now yield 57 percent, will implement austerity moves fast enough to get a sixth payment from last year’s 110 billion-euro ($151 billion) bailout.
The Greek government’s top priority is “to save the country from bankruptcy,” Prime Minister George Papandreou said in a speech Saturday in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki. “We will remain in the euro” and this “means difficult decisions,” he said.
More evidence of rifts at the heart of policy making was exposed with Friday's unexpected announcement that Juergen Stark, a German, will quit the European Central Bank’s executive board over his opposition to the ECB’s purchases of bonds from debt-laden countries.
“Stark’s departure could be seen by financial markets as another indication of growing disenchantment in Germany towards the euro,” said Julian Callow, chief European economist at Barclays Capital in London. “This could complicate Germany’s involvement in additional bailout programs.”
Marseille Gathering
At the G-7 gathering in the French port of Marseille, ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet and European Union Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn said they knew nothing about the talk in Germany of the so-called Plan B to protect banks. French officials said they weren’t working on a parallel proposal and Bank of France Governor Christian Noyer said his country’s banks have the capital to withstand a Greek default.
BNP Paribas SA, Societe Generale SA and Credit Agricole SA, France’s largest banks by market value, may have their credit ratings cut by Moody’s Investors Service as soon as this week because of their Greek holdings, two people with knowledge of the matter said on Saturday.
Moody’s said in June that the three banks were placed on review to examine “the potential for inconsistency between the impact of a possible Greek default or restructuring,” and the companies’ current rating levels.
Deutsche Bank
German banks were the biggest holders of Greek government bonds at the end of 2010 with $22.7 billion, according to data from the Bank for International Settlements. As of June 30, Deutsche Bank AG, Germany’s biggest bank, had 1.15 billion euros of net sovereign risk to Greece, down from 1.6 billion euros at the end of 2010.
The aim of the contingency plan is to shield German banks from losses from a possible Greek default, which has a more-than 90 percent change of happening, prices for insurance against default show.
The plan involves measures to help banks and insurers that face a possible 50 percent loss on their Greek bonds if the next portion of Greece’s bailout is withheld, said the three officials, who declined to be identified because the deliberations are being held in private. The successor to the government’s bank-rescue fund introduced in 2008 might be enrolled to help recapitalize the banks, one of the people said.
Merkel Policy
The discussions aren’t intended to shove Athens out of the euro, said Klaus-Peter Flosbach, budget-policy spokesman of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union in parliament.
“It would be of central importance to keep the possibility of contagion in the euro zone as low as possible,” Flosbach said in an e-mail. “In any case, we’re not looking into pushing Greece out of the euro zone.”
Fredrik Erixon, head of the European Centre for International Political Economy in Brussels, said Germany’s concern is broader than Greece, which is in its third year of a deepening recession, and centers on how its banks and economy would cope if the debt crisis spreads.
“Germany is preparing for the worst, which is that the crisis in the euro zone is going to be much bigger for everyone,” Erixon said.
German Critics
German lawmakers, who are scheduled to vote Sept. 29 on a second Greek aid package and revamped rescue fund, stepped up their criticism of Greece after an international mission to Athens suspended its report on the country’s progress two weeks ago.
“There can be no doubt” that Greece must fulfil the terms of aid to receive it, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said in Marseille. “Everybody must stand by the agreements.”
With a loss in her home state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania this month, Merkel’s coalition has been defeated or lost votes in all six state elections this year as voters reject putting more taxpayer money on the line for bailouts. Merkel has also antagonized markets and fellow leaders by initially holding out against aid for Greece and demanding investors pay a share of the assistance.
Fifty-three percent of Germans oppose further aid for Greece and wouldn’t save the country from default unless it fulfils terms of the rescue agreement, Bild am Sonntag reported, citing an Emnid poll of 503 respondents conducted Sept. 8.
Greek Response
After European markets closed last week, Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos dismissed “rumors” of a default and said his nation is committed to “full implementation” of the terms of the July accord for a second aid package.
Venizelos told reporters in Thessaloniki yesterday that budget measures, including a special levy on real estate, will be enough to meet targets set for 2011.
The market fallout served as the backdrop for the G-7 talks where Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said Europe’s woes were the “number one” topic and that Greece may even need to quit the euro if it can’t consolidate its budget. Geithner said authorities “need to do whatever they can do to calm these pressures” and that rich European nations need to provide “unequivocal” support for their weak neighbors.
G-7 officials vowed to “take all necessary actions to ensure the resilience of banking systems and financial markets,” and to make a “concerted effort” to support a flagging world economy. They detailed no new policies.
2a)Analysis: Financial Crisis May Destroy PA
The PA‘s growth has been fueled by handouts, but the World Bank reports that dry financial wells may cause an “acute fiscal crisis.”
By Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
The Palestinian Authority’s growth has been fueled by handouts, but the World Bank reports that dry financial wells may cause an “acute fiscal crisis.”
The latest report, which contradicts previous glowing accounts of how the Palestinian Authority (PA) can maintain itself as stable country, warns of an economic slowdown in the PA, primarily due to the lack of donor countries fulfilling their pledges to fork over billions of dollars to Ramallah.
The World Bank also cited Israel’s security checkpoints as a reason for the PA’s financial problems, but unlike previous reports, the security measures were mentioned as a secondary problem.
Foreign donors, particularly the European Union, have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars to pay Arabs to take over land that had been under Israeli control until the mid-90s. Thousands of Arabs living in Judea and Samaria have received new vehicles to help them criss-cross the country, often skirting Israeli checkpoints that are designed to halt illegal smuggling of poultry, eggs and vegetables as well as to stop terrorists.
The World Bank noted that contributions to the PA from Arab countries in the first half of this year were only one-third of the amount in 2010 and slightly more than 15percent of the $62 million donated in 2009.
The World Bank does not mention the new financial crisis that is spreading over Europe, threatening to bankrupt Greece and other countries.
Slow growth and the possibility of a recession in Europe could further hamper the ability of the European Union to financial the PA, which has been reliant on it for payingsalaries to its inflated work force.
A fiscal crisis could undermine the "promise of...institution-building measures,” according to the World Bank.
"Ultimately, in order for the Palestinian Authority to sustain the reform momentum and its achievements in institution-building, remaining Israeli restrictions must be lifted," the report said. However, the major roadblock is the PA itself, by virtue of the four-year-old split between Ramallah, headed by Fatah leader and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, and Gaza, ruled by its de facto Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas
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3) A Long-Term Case for Stocks
By E.S. BROWNING
As stocks plunged last week, investors focused on the risk of recession and another market collapse.
Richard Sylla sees something very different over the longer term: the much-longer term.
Prof. Sylla is a financial historian at New York University's Stern School of Business, studying market behavior all the way back to 1790. By analyzing patterns detected years ago with two colleagues, he accurately predicted in 2000 the decade of overall declines that haunted investors.
Now, Prof. Sylla has made a new forecast at the request of The Wall Street Journal. Better days lie ahead, he says. If past market patterns hold true, as they did in the last decade, stocks should bottom out during the next few years and begin a recovery.
"People ought to take a longer view and think in terms of years and even decades," Prof. Sylla says. "Most people are quite pessimistic right now. I am saying: The market may go down from here. It may go up. But if you look at the long sweep of history, this seems like a good time to buy because the average return is down near the bottom" and is likely to go up.
Last week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2.2% to 10992.13. If the market sticks to its long-term pattern, Prof. Sylla says, the Dow Jones Industrial Average could climb to 20250 by the end of 2020, up 84% from today. The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index might hit 2300, up 99% from Friday's close of 1154.23.
Prof. Sylla isn't trying to predict short-term behavior. He doesn't know whether stocks will be higher or lower at year end, and he isn't losing sleep over Greece, the sputtering U.S. economy or other problems now haunting stocks.
His long-run focus parallels that of financial planners, many of whom urge clients who aren't about to retire to tune out the stock market's volatile swings.
"Not that you want to be unaware of what is happening day-to-day, but to have to worry about reacting to what is going on when you are not going to be using this money for 20 years is kind of silly," says Reed Rinderknecht, a financial planner at Foster Group in West Des Moines, Iowa. More than 90% of the firm's clients "understand that and are able to go back to work and not worry about what is going on," he says.
Using 10-year averages of annual market returns, including dividends and adjusted for inflation, Prof. Sylla and his colleagues found that U.S. stocks have risen and fallen in surprisingly consistent waves for more than 200 years. The pattern has become even steadier since World War II.
When 10-year-average annual returns dip below 5% and especially when they turn negative, as they did in 2008 and 2009, markets tend to bottom out and begin a recovery, the figures show. Years later, returns top out as investors get overconfident, with average returns above 15%. The market patterns might be related to swings of economic performance and investor confidence.
In 2000, when returns were at the high end of his range, Prof. Sylla found that a decade of zero average annual returns would fit the past trend. He was right, and stocks suffered.
Now a recovery with 6.5% average annual returns, equal to the historical inflation-adjusted average, would fit, he says. He isn't saying stocks will rise that much each year, just that this could be the average.
Prof. Sylla does see a 25% chance that the next decade could fall well short of that. Japan suffered meager stock returns for more than 20 years after its real-estate and stock bubbles burst in 1990. Still, "my guess is that even if we had a couple more years of bouncing around, 2013 to 2022 would be much better," he says.
Investors with long time horizons should focus on where stocks could be in 10, 20 or even 30 years, Prof. Sylla says. That doesn't mean they should buy stocks to the exclusion of all else, just that they shouldn't give up on them.
"There is a lot of excessive short-term thinking about the stock market: 'What did [Federal Reserve Chairman Ben] Bernanke say today?' " he says. "In the 1980s, it looked terrible with those low returns, but I always tell my students that wasn't such a bad time to buy stocks."
Prof. Sylla based his work on the S&P 500, for which data have been estimated back to 1871, as well as calculations he did with his two colleagues for the period from 1790 to 1860, and the work of Bryan Taylor of Global Financial Data for the intervening period.
The reason business and stock cycles were shorter and more volatile before World War II is probably that stocks were focused then on the growing industrial economy, he says. Since then, they have tracked the growing service economy, which tends to be less volatile. In addition, stock returns during the 19th century came mainly from dividends. Now, price gains provide most of the fuel.
Of course, stocks could lurch higher and lower in the short run. And things could get worse before they get better. Prof. Sylla says the current period resembles a downturn period in the late 19th century.
"We may not be able to get enlightened government policies until things get worse than they are now, which isn't a happy thought," he says. But in the longer run, "I think the country is going to recover and go on to prosperity again as it always has."
3a)Canada's Oil Sands Are a Jobs Gusher
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
For all its soaring rhetoric, President Obama's "jobs speech" last week didn't demonstrate a lick of insight into why economies grow or how wealth is created. It was merely trademark Obamanomics: using government diktat to move money that's over here, over there.
Having spent an hour the day before with Ron Liepert, the energy minister from the Canadian province of Alberta, I found it especially disturbing to hear nothing in the speech about reversing the administration's anti-fossil-fuels agenda. Canada has recovered all the jobs it lost in the 2009 recession, and Alberta's oil sands are no small part of that. The province is on track to become the world's second-largest oil producer, after Saudi Arabia, within 10 years. Meanwhile Mr. Obama clings to his subsidies for solar panels and his religious faith in green jobs.
U.S. unemployment is high because capital is on strike. Short-term offers to coax investors into taking new risks aren't going to cut it when they have been forewarned that the president intends to pay for it all by raising taxes in the out years. The market dropped over 300 points the day after Mr. Obama's speech.
On the regulatory front the picture is even gloomier. Much of America's vast untapped energy potential lies dormant because Mr. Obama's regulatory watchdogs have spent the past three years throwing sand in the gears of the permitting process for exploration and exploitation on federal lands. Separately, TransCanada has been trying since September 2008 to get a permit to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf Coast. The Environmental Protection Agency has so far blocked it.
A glimpse of what all this has cost the U.S. economy can be seen by looking north to Canada, where animal spirits have been unleashed in the energy sector. Canada's close economic ties to the U.S. have traditionally meant that when the U.S. gets the sniffles, Canada gets swine flu. This time it's been different. Part of the reason is that Canada's housing market was not poisoned by a federal government push to put unqualified borrowers into homes they could not afford. After the 2008 collapse of the housing bubble in the U.S., the Canadian financial sector remained strong.
That alone was not enough to protect Canada from the effects of the U.S. recession. The manufacturing sector was hit hard, and in the first quarter of 2009 the economy contracted by an annualized 7.9%.
Yet Canada has outperformed the U.S. since then. In 2010, according to the International Monetary Fund, Canada grew at 3.2% versus 2.9% in the U.S. In 2011, the IMF estimates Canada will grow at 2.9%; unemployment is now 7.3%. The IMF's U.S. growth forecast is 2.5% this year, and U.S. unemployment is 9.1%.
One explanation for Canada's more robust growth is its strong commitment to energy, which has become more valuable in U.S. dollar terms under Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's inflationary policies. Alberta is now producing two million barrels per day but expects that number will grow to four to five million within a decade.
Alberta's oil and gas industry supports more than 271,000 direct jobs and hundreds of thousands of indirect jobs in sectors such as construction, manufacturing and financial services. The province has an unemployment rate of 5.6%. There are also some 960 American companies involved in Alberta energy, supplying equipment and technology, among other things. As an example, Mr. Liepert says, "dozens of Caterpillar tractors, made in Illinois and Michigan and costing $5 million a piece" work the oil sands. He says the region is on track to create more than 400,000 direct American jobs by 2035. The Bakken region of North Dakota, where private land ownership gives drillers relief from federal obstructionism, shares a similar, if smaller, story. Oil production there is booming, and North Dakota unemployment is 3.3%.
The Americas in the News
Get the latest information in Spanish from The Wall Street Journal's Americas page.
.TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline, if the U.S. ever issues the permit, will mean $20 billion in investment. The company says the construction phase will require 13,000 direct hires and indirect new jobs could total 118,000 in the U.S.
But Keystone XL is only a fraction of the potential that could be released if Mr. Obama changed his energy policy. In a study commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute and released last week, the energy consultancy Wood MacKenzie estimates that pro-development policies could, by 2030, "support an additional 1.4 million jobs, and raise over $800 billion of cumulative additional government revenue."
On the other hand, according to the study, current policies "which slow down the issuance of leases and drilling permits, increase the cost of hydraulic fracturing through duplicative water or air quality regulations, or delay the construction of oil sands export pipelines such as Keystone XL, will likely have a detrimental effect on production, jobs, and government revenues."
A serious jobs proposal would address these issues. Mr. Obama doesn't have one.
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4)Israel's Predicament
By BRET STEPHENSLike this columnist
What is Israel's predicament? It is this: It is surrounded on nearly all sides by enemies who are aggressively committed to its destruction. And too many people who call themselves its friends are only ambivalently committed to its security.
Consider the month that Israel has just had:
• On Aug. 18, eight Israelis were killed in a sophisticated cross-border ambush near the frontier with Egypt.
• From Aug. 18-24, some 200 large-caliber, factory-made rockets and mortars were fired at Israel from Gaza.
• On Sept. 1, the head of Iran's atomic energy agency announced that it was moving the bulk of its enrichment facilities to a heavily fortified site near the city of Qom.
• On Sept. 2, the United Nations released a report on the May 2010 Turkish flotilla incident, which defended Israel's right to enforce a naval blockade on Gaza and noted that Israeli commandos faced "organized and violent resistance." The Turkish government responded by yanking its ambassador from Tel Aviv and expelling Israel's from Ankara.
• On Sept. 4, the U.S. made a final appeal to the Palestinian Authority to drop its bid to seek statehood recognition at the U.N., a bid that sends to the rubbish bin decades of international agreements that a Palestinian state can be established only on the basis of negotiations. The PA rebuffed the American entreaties.
• On Sept. 8, Turkey's prime minister announced that Turkish warships would escort future Gaza-bound flotillas.
• On Sept. 9, thousands of hooligans stormed and nearly sacked the Israeli embassy in Cairo. Israel evacuated nearly its entire diplomatic mission from Egypt the following morning.
One other item: On Sept. 5, an organization called NGO Monitor reported that an associate director of the New Israel Fund, cited in a February 2011 State Department cable released by Wikileaks, said that "the disappearance of a Jewish state would not be the tragedy that Israelis fear since it would become more democratic." The NIF describes itself as a group "dedicated to a vision of Israel as both the Jewish homeland and a shared society at peace with itself and its neighbors."
Maybe the case of the (now former) NIF official is a relatively rare one. Or maybe it's just rare to have such off-the-record candor find its way into the public domain.
Not rare, however, is the idea that Israel's legitimacy is a function of its moral performance, and that judgment of its performance lies in the hands of its foreign critics and their designated Israeli scolds. Should the legitimacy of Pakistan or Zimbabwe be called into doubt on account of the wretched mess they have made of their existence as self-governing states? Nobody says this. Nor do many people say that the Palestinian Authority—half of which is ruled by a terrorist group and the other half by a president whose elected term in office expired more than two years ago—hasn't quite earned the moral right to statehood.
Only Israel is on perpetual trial. Only Israel, by way of this or that policy, is routinely held to moral account for the terrorist outrages committed against it. Only the Jews, as Eric Hoffer put it in 1968, are expected to be "the only real Christians in the world."
But then the argument is made that Israel is occupying somebody else's country. And risking its own future as a Jewish democracy, on account of well-known demographic trends. And all of this is corrosive, so it is often said, to Israel's soul.
Yet the purported concern for Israel's soul would be more convincing if it were joined by some decent respect for Israel's mind. Israel today labors under the invidious stereotype that it is too clever to blunder militarily or politically—and therefore that any such blunders are, in fact, acts of malice aforethought. But Israel also labors under the stereotype that it is too stupid or shortsighted to recognize its own strategic interest in coming to terms with a Palestinian state.
Will it some day dawn on Israel's so-called friends that 18 years of abortive efforts to come to terms with the Palestinians—the spurned statehood offers in 2000 and 2008, the withdrawal of the settlers from Gaza in 2005, the experience of what a "liberated" Gaza soon became—has soured Israelis on the idea of a Palestinian state? Or that the long-term demographic threat is worth risking in the face of the immediate threats of a near-nuclear Iran, a newly hostile Egypt, and a still-irredentist Palestinian leadership? Or that a professed commitment to Israeli democracy means, among other things, some regard to the conclusions Israelis have drawn about the prospects of peace by way of their electoral choices?
No democracy in the world today lies under a darker shadow of existential dread than Israel. And the events of the past month ought to demonstrate that Israel's dread is not of shadows only. Israel's efforts to allay the enmity of its enemies or mollify the scorn of its critics have failed. But is it too much to ask its friends for support—this time, for once, without cavil or reservation?
4a) StandWithUs to Demonstrate against UN Durban III Conference
Durban three-ring circus of hypocrisy will confront a three-ring circus exposing it
A StandWithUs-sponsored "circus" will expose the shocking hypocrisy of the United Nations when the UN puts on its third "Durban conference" against racism on September 22 in New York City. The circus and clowns StandWithUs is sponsoring will appear in front of UN headquarters on Sept. 22 from noon until 2 PM, just when the three-ring circus known as the Durban III conference is under way. Leading democratic nations have severely denounced the previous two Durban conferences, held in 2001 and 2009, for demonizing Israel and for flagrant anti-Semitism.
"One good way to counter the Durban conference`s hypocritical travesty of human rights is with parody. Sometimes humor reveals the deepest truths. There is no possible rational response to the Durban conference`s perverse distortions. They are too divorced from any reality. In fact, they turn reality upside down. We plan to fight the UN `clowns` with actual clowns that expose their hypocrisy and perversity," explained Roz Rothstein, CEO of StandWithUs.
4b)Lessons from the embassy takeover
By Caroline Glick
We are able to consider the lessons of the weekend's mob assault on the Israeli embassy in Cairo because the six Israeli security officers who were on the brink of being slaughtered were rescued at the last moment and spirited out of the country. If the Egyptian commandos hadn't arrived on the scene at the last moment, the situation would have been too explosive for a sober-minded assessment of the rapidly deteriorating situation with our neighbor to the south.
Any assessment of the weekend's events must begin by recounting a few key aspects of the assault. First, this was the second mob attack on the embassy in so many weeks. During the first assault, an Egyptian rioter scaled the 20-story building where the embassy is housed, tore down the Israeli flag, and threw it to the frenzied mob below which swiftly burned it. Rather than being arrested for the crime of assaulting a foreign embassy, the rioter was embraced as a hero by Egypt's military regime. The governor of Giza awarded him an apartment and a job.
Second, for six hours after the assault on the embassy began on Friday evening, Israel's leaders tried desperately to contact the leaders of the Egyptian military junta to request their intercession on behalf of the trapped security officers.
Field Marshal Muhammad Tantawi refused to speak with either Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu or Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
Third, Egyptians authorities refused to intervene to save the lives of the Israeli security officers until after the Americans intervened directly on their behalf.
That is, Israel's entreaties, and Egypt's international legal obligations were insufficient to move the Egyptian authorities to act to save the embassy personnel from the mob. Only the apparent threat of direct US action against Egypt convinced them to act.
The behavior of the Egyptian mob and military junta alike served as a wake-up call for two key constituencies.
Until last weekend, both the Israeli Left and the US foreign policy establishment believed the situation in Egypt was not significantly worse than it had been under deposed president Hosni Mubarak.
Most Israelis awoke to the fact that Israel's border with Egypt is no longer a peaceful one three weeks ago. After the Egyptian-Palestinian terror cell infiltrated Israel from Sinai on August 18 and massacred eight Israelis on the highway to Eilat, most Israelis recognized that relations with Egypt had been ruptured.
But until the weekend, Israel's Left insisted there was a distinction between the lawless Sinai and the more orderly situation in Cairo. They argued that all that was needed to calm the situation in Sinai was for the military junta to assert its authority in Sinai as it does in the rest of Egypt. Hence, the Left argued that it is in Israel's interest to amend the peace treaty and allow the Egyptian military to remilitarize the Sinai.
Since the weekend, these claims have been notably absent from the discourse. After the Egyptian military allowed the mob to take over the embassy, residual leftist faith in the junta's moderation and commitment to the peace with Israel is swiftly evaporating.
As for the Americans, unlike Israel, American foreign policy hands from across the conservative-liberal divide supported the mob in Tahrir Square that called for Mubarak's overthrow. The Americans hailed Mubarak's demise as a triumph of liberal democratic forces in the Arab world. But in the aftermath of the weekend's assault on the embassy, voices from across the political spectrum in the US are calling for a reassessment of US relations with Egypt.
For his part, Obama's willingness to intervene on behalf of the besieged security guards at the embassy was probably not divorced from his assessment of the political fallout likely to ensue from the slaughter of Israeli embassy guards by the Egyptian mob.
In such an event, the American public would immediately equate Obama's support for the "democratic, revolutionary" mob against longstanding US ally Mubarak with his predecessor Jimmy Carter's support for the "democratic, revolutionary" Iranian mob against the US-allied Shah of Iran in 1979.
The fact that Obama recognizes the political significance of the developments in Egypt signals that he too may be willing to consider adopting a different policy towards Egypt in the months to come.
All of this is important.
In the absence of a reassessment of the situation in Egypt by the Israeli Left and the American policy establishment alike, the chance of anyone adopting rational policies towards the strongest Arab state would remain small.
Any rational policy must be based on an accurate assessment of the dynamics of the post- Mubarak political situation. Specifically, is the junta part of the mob or is it simply unable or unwilling to manage it?
Apparently it is a bit of both.
Like its treatment of the rioter who tore the Israeli flag from the embassy building two weeks ago, the regime's arrest in June of the dual Israeli- American citizen ` on trumped-up espionage charges is an example of the junta acting as part of the mob.
On the other hand, the regime's decision to try Mubarak and his sons in contravention of Tantawi's solemn pledge to Mubarak is an indication that Tantawi and his generals are led by the mob.
As for Grapel - and to a lesser degree Mubarak - the US's ultimate success in forcing the junta to rescue the Israelis trapped at the embassy demonstrates that the US still has significant leverage against Egypt. When it is sufficiently adamant, Washington can force the junta change its behavior.
It is not clear how much this leverage is dependent on continued US financial and military assistance to Egypt. Obviously, an assessment of its significance should guide any US consideration of reducing or cutting off that aid.
As for Israel, the mob's ability to determine the course of events in Egypt and the junta's refusal to stand up to the mob on Israel's behalf is a strong indication that the peace treaty is doomed.
After the junta stood back and allowed the mob to storm the embassy, it is impossible to believe the junta will defy the mob's demand to abrogate the treaty.
The fact that the treaty is doomed doesn't mean that Israel will immediately find itself at war with Egypt - although the prospect can no longer be ruled out. The US's continued leverage against the regime - like NATO's leverage against Turkey - may very well convince the Egyptians to maintain a ceasefire with Israel.
On the other hand, US leverage may end after November's elections. The Muslim Brotherhood and its allies are expected to win a parliamentary majority and the presidency.
Given the explosiveness of the situation, it is imperative that the US not repeat its rush to action from January where without considering the consequences of its actions, Washington hurriedly sided with the Tahrir Square mob against Mubarak. The US shouldn't support elections or oppose them. It shouldn't cut off aid or increase it. It shouldn't condemn the junta or embrace it.
The Americans should simply monitor the situation and prepare for all contingencies.
As for Israel, it must prepare for the possibility of war. It must increase the size of the IDF by adding a division to the Southern Command. It must train for desert warfare. It must expand the Navy.
Thankfully, all Israeli personnel were safely evacuated from Cairo. But this happy circumstance must not blind anyone to the dangers mounting in Egypt.
4c)The Palestinians' U.N. Agenda
Encouraging another Palestinian intifada should be the last thing anyone wants.
By ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ
As Egypt and Turkey increase tensions with Israel, the Palestinian Authority seeks to isolate the Jewish state even further by demanding that the United Nations accord Palestine recognition as a "state" without a negotiated peace with Israel. President Mahmoud Abbas described his playbook for seeking U.N. recognition while bypassing the step of negotiating a two-state solution: "We are going to complain that as Palestinians we have been under occupation for 63 years."
What exactly happened 63 years ago? The U.N. recommended partitioning the former British mandate into two states: one Jewish, the other Arab. Israel and most of the rest of the world accepted that partition plan, and Israel declared itself the nation-state of the Jewish people. The United States, the Soviet Union and all the great powers recognized this declaration and the two-state solution that it represented.
The Arab world unanimously rejected the U.N. partition plan and the declaration of statehood by Israel. The Arab population within Israel and in the area set aside for an Arab state joined the surrounding Arab nations in taking up arms.
In defending its right to exist, Israel lost 1% of its population, many of whom were civilians and survivors of the recent Holocaust. Yet the current Palestinian leadership still insists on calling the self-inflicted wounds caused by its rejection of a two-state solution the "nakba," meaning the catastrophe.
By claiming that the Palestinians "have been under occupation for 63 years" (as distinguished from the 44 years since the Arab states attacked Israel in 1967 and Israel occupied some lands of the invading nations), the Palestinian president is trying to turn the clock back to a time prior to Israel's establishment as a state based on the U.N.'s two-state proposal. In other words, the push for recognition by the U.N. of Palestine as a state, based on Mr. Abbas's complaint that the Palestinians have been under occupation for 63 years, is an attempt to undo the old work of the U.N. that resulted in Israel's statehood 63 years ago.
Mr. Abbas's occupation complaint also explains why he is so adamant in refusing to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. Every Arab state is officially a Muslim state and yet, as in 1948, none of them is prepared to accept the permanent existence of a state for the Jewish people in the Middle East. Certainly some, including the Palestinian Authority, are prepared to mouth recognition of Israel as a state, so long as the so-called right of return remains for four million so-called refugees who, if they were to return in mass, would soon turn Israel into yet another Arab state.
Mahmoud Abbas is generally a reasonable man, and many of the things he has recently said about the need for the two-state solution are also reasonable. But he talks out of two sides of his mouth: one for consumption by the international community and the other for consumption by the Palestinian street. His complaint about a 63-year occupation is clearly designed to signal to his constituents that he won't give up on the ultimate goal of turning Israel into a Palestinian state.
If the General Assembly recognizes Palestine as a state without the need to negotiate with Israel, it will, in effect, be undercutting many of its own past resolutions, as well as many bilateral agreements reached between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Such recognition would set back the prospects for a negotiated peaceful resolution and would encourage the use of violence by frustrated Palestinians who will gain nothing concrete from the U.N.'s hollow action but will expect much from it.
We saw what happened when the Palestinian people came close to achieving statehood in 2000-'01—a prospect that was shattered by Yasser Arafat's rejection of the Clinton-Barak peace plan. Arafat's rejection, which even the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. at the time, Bandar bin Sultan, later called a "crime" against the Palestinian people, resulted in a bloody intifada uprising among Palestinians in which thousands of Palestinians and Israelis were killed. The U.N. will be responsible for any ensuing bloodshed if it stokes the flames of violence by raising Palestinian expectations while lowering the prospects for a negotiated peace.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has urged the Palestinians to return immediately to the negotiating table without any preconditions. There is no downside in doing so, since everything would then be on the table for negotiation, including the borders, the right of return, recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, the settlements and anything else the Palestinians would seek as part of a negotiated two-state peace.
The job of the U.N. is to promote peace, not to retard it. So instead of discouraging negotiations by promising recognition, the U.N. should be demanding that the Palestinian leadership and the Israeli government begin negotiations immediately without any preconditions. That would be a positive step.
Mr. Dershowitz is a law professor at Harvard. His latest book is "Trials of Zion" (Grand Central Publishing, 2010).
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5)Obama Has Aggravated Muslim Extremism
By James Lewis
We have the first administration in American history that's both fabulously incompetent and anti-American to boot.
This weekend Charles Krauthammer said on Fox News that Obama is simply in over his head. But Rush Limbaugh thinks BHO is blowing up the economy on purpose.
Well, how about both? Maybe this is the Keystone Kops trying to commit national hara kiri?
Domestically, we're in the longest recession in the last sixty years. And if that's not enough, take our foreign policy. Please.
The howling fanatics who just stormed the Israeli Embassy in Cairo happen to be the same old Blind Sheikh gang that truck-bombed the Twin Towers in Manhattan in 1993. That was the first NYC attack by Radical Moos, remember? Eighteen years ago. Fortunately, that bomb didn't do structural damage to the buildings, but it led straight to 9/11/01.
Bill Clinton managed to ignore the Blind Sheikh for two whole terms until "those chickens came home to roost" on 9/11/01, to use Rev Wright lingo.
National Review's Andy McCarthy was the federal prosecutor for the Blind Sheikh, and has spent years writing about all the chances we've blown against Jam'a al-Islamiya. Today they look stronger than ever, or they wouldn't be storming the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, with Egypt's boss General Tantawi refusing to answer the phone.
This attack represents the complete breakdown of the 30-year Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. It would never have happened if Obama had just left President Mubarak in peace. Mubarak kept the Moo Bros out of power.
But no...Obama's Alinsky Reflex got triggered by those pictures of big crowds in Tahrir Square, and the New York Times told all the mediots that this had to be the "Arab Spring." CBS News promptly sent comely correspondent Lara Logan into Tahrir Square, where the Moo crowd turned on her and committed gang rape. Score another historic first for Obama and liberal insanity.
See, under Obama those peace-loving Muslims really like the United States of America. It's because Obama shows respect.
On the other hand, if our mediots are going to peddle lies about 1,200 years of Islamic head-chopping, it's only right for them to personally test the sincerity of the Religion of Peace. I therefore nominate Chris Matthews to test the peaceful intentions of, ummm, the Taliban in Hamand Province? The Al-Shabab head-choppers in Mogadishu? The new bin Laden guy in Yemen? How about the Moo Bros in Cairo?
There are so many trip options for our media.
Don't bring the U.S. Marines to protect you, Chris. Just follow your own advice about peace and love in the Age of Obama. In fact, I'll take up a collection to pay for your flight, any place where the mobs are running in the Muslim world. (One-way fare only.)
I don't know if anybody is counting the victims of the Arab Spring, but it has to run into the tens of thousands of dead and wounded, if you add up Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and all the places the media don't even bother to phone any more.
So far not a single democracy has dawned. Spring has turned to summer and fall, and not a single flower of freedom is visible, contrary to the New York Times and Barack Hussein Obama.
Just the opposite. Turkey is threatening a naval war against Israel, the Egyptian Moo Bros are promising war as soon as they beat their enemies in the military, and that skinny maniac in Tehran has a radioactive glint in his mad little eyes.
For the first time in 30 years Egypt has lost control over the Sinai Desert, and four hundred al-Qaeda are reported to be blowing up natural gas lines there, in collusion with the local Moos. Even the CIA has reached a total of 2,000 Taliban and AQs killed in its targeted assassinations. Some Arab Spring.
Egypt was the pillar of peace in the Middle East for thirty years. But Obama had to demand Mubarak's overthrow, in public, over and over again until the 82-year-old Mubarak had a heart attack, a stroke, and cancer (all according to media reports), resigned, got jailed by the military, and was put on a public show trial for the international press, lying in a thick steel cage in his white hospital bed.
How's that for community organizing? I can see the whole Muslim world getting organized already. Waddaguy.
Muslim radicalism is more powerful today than when Obama took over. In every country where it was suppressed, Muslim radicals are now in the open and making a serious grab for power. That goes for Turkey, Egypt, the PA, Jordan, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco -- not to mention those 53 million Muslims in Europe. In several cases, Obama has acted in public to make things worse.
One of the few voices of sanity today is Prof. Niall Ferguson, who is now warning about worse to come. Why? Because big countries like Egypt don't grow enough food. Local capital has been escaping to safer places. Stuck without money to import grain, Egypt's population will start seeing bare food shelves soon. That applies to Syria and other large, poor countries, too. In Southern Europe, Greece, Italy, and Spain are having historic budget crises, and the EU is forcing Greece to go into bankruptcy.
Hunger doesn't stop riots, wars, and revolutions. It makes them worse.
That's community organization for ya.
Waddaguy.
5a)Back to the Future?
By Thomas Sowell
Those who are impressed by words seem to think that President Barack Obama made a great speech to Congress last week. But, when you look beyond the rhetoric, what did he say that was fundamentally different from what he has been saying and doing all along?
Are we to continue doing the same kinds of things that have failed again and again, just because Obama delivers clever words with style and energy?
Once we get past the glowing rhetoric, what is the president proposing? More spending! Only the words have changed -- from "stimulus" to "jobs" and from "shovel-ready projects" to "jobs for construction workers."
If government spending were the answer, we would by now have a booming economy with plenty of jobs, after all the record trillions of dollars that have been poured down a bottomless pit. Are we to keep on doing the same things, just because those things have been repackaged in different words?
Or just because Obama now assures us that "everything in this bill will be paid for"? This is the same man who told us that he could provide health insurance to millions more people without increasing the cost.
When it comes to specific proposals, President Obama repeats the same kinds of things that have marked his past policies -- more government spending for the benefit of his political allies, the construction unions and the teachers' unions, and "thousands of transportation projects."
The fundamental fallacy in all of this is the notion that politicians can "grow the economy" by taking money out of the private sector and spending it wherever it is politically expedient to spend it -- so long as they call spending "investment."
Has Obama ever grown even a potted plant, much less a business, a bank, a hospital or any of the numerous other institutions whose decisions he wants to control and override? But he can talk glibly about growing the economy.
Arrogance is no substitute for experience. That is why the country is in the mess it is in now.
Obama says he wants "federal housing agencies" to "help more people refinance their mortgages." What does that amount to in practice, except having the taxpayers be forced to bail out people who bought homes they could not afford?
No doubt that is good politics, but it is lousy economics. When people pay the price of their own mistakes, that is when there is the greatest pressure to correct those mistakes. But when taxpayers who had nothing to do with those mistakes are forced to pay the costs, that is when those and other mistakes can continue to flourish -- and to mess up the economy.
Whatever his deficiencies in economics, Barack Obama is a master of politics -- including the great political game of "Heads I win and tails you lose."
Any policy that shows any sign of achieving its goals will of course be trumpeted across the land as a success. But, in the far more frequent cases where the policy fails or turns out to be counterproductive, the political response is: "Things would have been even worse without this policy."
It's heads I win and tails you lose.
Thus, when unemployment went up after the massive spending that was supposed to bring it down, we were told that unemployment would have been far worse if it had not been for that spending.
Are we really supposed to fall for ploys like this? The answer is clearly "yes," as far as Obama and his allies in the media are concerned.
Our intelligence was insulted even further in President Obama's speech to Congress, when he set up this straw man as what his critics believe -- that "the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everybody's money, and let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they're on their own."
Have you heard anybody in any part of the political spectrum advocate that? If not, then why was the President of the United States saying such things, unless he thought we were fools enough to buy it -- and that the media would never call him on it?
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6)What Job 'Training' Teaches? Bad Work Habits
A 1969 government study warned that teens in federal jobs programs 'regressed in their conception of what should reasonably be required in return for wages paid.'.
By JAMES BOVARD
Last Thursday, President Obama proposed new federal jobs and job-training programs for youth and the long-term unemployed. The federal government has experimented with these programs for almost a half century. The record is one of failure and scandal.
In 1962, Congress passed the Manpower Development and Training Act (MDTA) to provide training for workers who lost their jobs due to automation or other technological developments. Two years later, the General Accounting Office (GAO) discovered that any trainee in this program who held a job for a single day was counted as "permanently employed"—a statistical charade by the Department of Labor to camouflage its lack of results. A decade after MDTA's inception, GAO reported that it was failing to teach valuable job skills or place trainees in private jobs and was marred by an "overriding concern with filling available slots for a particular program," regardless of what trainees actually needed.
Congress responded in 1973 by enacting the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). The preface to the new law noted that "it has been impossible to develop rational priorities" in job training. So instead of setting priorities, CETA spent vastly more money, especially on job creation. Notorious examples reported in the press in those years included paying to build an artificial rock for rock climbers, providing nude sculpture classes (where, as the Pharos-Tribune of Logansport, Ind., explained, "aspiring artists pawed each others bodies to recognize that they had 'both male and female characteristics'"), and conducting door-to-door food-stamp recruiting campaigns.
Between 1961 and 1980, the feds spent tens of billions on federal job-training and employment programs. To what effect? A 1979 Washington Post investigation concluded, "Incredibly, the government has kept no meaningful statistics on the effectiveness of these programs—making the past 15 years' effort almost worthless in terms of learning what works." CETA hirees were often assigned to do whatever benefited the government agency or nonprofit that put them on the payroll, with no concern for the trainees' development. An Urban Institute study of the mid-1980s concluded that participation in CETA programs resulted in "significant earnings losses for young men of all races and no significant effects for young women."
After CETA became a laughingstock, Congress replaced it in 1982 with the Job Training Partnership Act. JTPA spent lavishly—to expand an Indiana circus museum, teach Washington taxi drivers to smile, provide foreign junkets for state and local politicians, and bankroll business relocations. According to the Labor Department's inspector general, young trainees were twice as likely to rely on food stamps after JTPA involvement than before since the "training" often included instructions on applying for an array of government benefits.
For years the Labor Department scorned the mandate in the 1982 legislation to speedily and thoroughly evaluate whether the programs actually benefitted trainees. Finally, in 1993, it released a study that showed participation in JTPA "actually reduced the earnings of male out-of-school youths." Young males enrolled in JTPA programs had 10% lower earnings than a control group that never participated.
The Workforce Investment Act (WIA) replaced JTPA in 1998. Congress required a thorough evaluation of the law's impact on trainees by 2005. At last report, the Labor Department is promising it will be completed by 2015.
In his speech to Congress, Mr. Obama called for funding hundreds of thousands of summer jobs for teens, which he labeled "investing in low-income youth and adults." Yet such programs have been blighting work ethics for decades.
The GAO warned in 1969 that many teens in federal summer jobs programs "regressed in their conception of what should reasonably be required in return for wages paid." A decade later, it reported that most urban teens "were exposed to a worksite where good work habits were not learned or reinforced." And in 1985, a National Academy of Science study found that government jobs and training programs isolated disadvantaged youth, thus making it harder for them to fit into the real job market.
More recently, Mr. Obama's 2009 stimulus package expanded federally funded summer jobs. And so young men and women used puppets to greet aquarium visitors in Boston. Teens in Washington, D.C.'s Green Summer Jobs Corps maintained "school-yard butterfly habitats." And summer workers in Florida, the Orlando Sentinel reported, "practiced firm handshakes to ensure that employers quickly understand their serious intent to work."
Did any of this "investing" work? There's no evidence it did.
Mr. Obama also wants a new federal initiative to be based on Georgia Work$, which the president describes as a program in which "people who collect unemployment insurance participate in temporary work as a way to build their skills while they look for a permanent job." But Georgia Work$ has produced far more headlines than jobs—fewer than 200 this year, according to a recent article in Politico.
Begun in 2003, Georgia Work$ gives people a chance to "train" at an employer for eight weeks. They receive no salary but continue collecting unemployment compensation and as well as a $240 weekly stipend from the state of Georgia. Last year, the stipend was increased to $600 a week and anyone who said they needed a job was allowed to participate. After costs exploded, Georgia Work$ was scaled back early this year.
Mark Butler, Georgia's current labor commissioner, stated that the program suffered from a "lack of oversight" before he took over in January. At last report, only 14% of trainees were hired by employers—a success rate akin to other unemployed Georgians who do not participate in the program.
Earlier this year, the Government Accountability Office reported that there were 47 different federal employment and training programs, costing taxpayers $18 billion a year. There is massive overlap and duplication, and few programs seriously evaluate their impact on trainees.
If federal job training efforts worked, Congress would not have thrown out the programs it has created every decade or so and enacted new ones. In reality, government training has always been driven by bureaucratic convenience, or politicians' re-election considerations. There is no reason to believe the latest round of proposals will be any different.
Mr. Bovard, the author of "Attention Deficit Democracy" (Palgrave, 2006), is working on a memoir.
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7)Netanyahu on Turkey crisis: Common sense will prevail
PM suggests 'cold calculations' will ultimately overpower Turkish PM's hostile attitude
By Elior Levy
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wished to diffuse the tension surrounding the Israel's diplomatic crisis with Turkey on Tuesday, telling reporters that "Common sense and cold calculation" will ultimately prevail.
Netanyahu made the statements while touring Israel's southern border.
In light of Erdogan's increasingly hostile remarks on the straining ties between Ankara and Jerusalem, Netanyahu said that "we shouldn't cling to all kinds of comments," and expressed confidence that "common sense and cold calculation are working overtime on our side, and from my understanding, not only on our side."
Netanyahu travelled south to observe the progress made in the construction of a security fence on the Israeli-Egyptian border, which was infiltrated by terrorists last month. The assailants attacked multiple targets, killing eight Israelis.
According to the prime minister, the fence is to be completed by September 2012, three months ahead of schedule.
"Our border with Egypt is a peaceful border," Netanyahu said. "To continue in peace, we need security, and for that we need a fence. Hasty construction is pertinent for peace and for security."
Meanwhile, Erdogan, who is visiting Cairo in pursuit of improved ties with Egypt, said in an interview with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Shorouk that while his country does not seek a military confrontation with Israel, the "Turkish Navy is prepared for every scenario – even the worst one."
In an interview with Egyptian newspaper al-Shuruq, Erdogan defended his recent comments about deployment of warships in the Mediterranean: "All we said is that warships will protect Turkish boats from an attack in international waters.
"It's our legitimate right, and no one can deny us. This statement angered Israel, because it wants to maintain its control over the international waters in the Middle East," Erdogan noted.
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