Even if Obama Wins - Born1776 Died 2008?

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The Wall Street Journal(Sessions) sizes up Obama - They've Got Him Figured Out and I am delighted to have Sessions present my case.

We are a Republic, we are governed by The Rule of Law. Obama is ambivalent to the law when it disagrees and is in opposition to his thinking and desire to cause radical change. This is dangerous, this is how anarchy begins as we now are witnessing. This is how we will lose our Republic form of government. Perhaps that is his goal. Certainly it is the goal of many of Obama's fellow travelers, ie Alinsky, Axelrod, Soros, etc. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Walter Williams is a black college professor and believes Obama wins hands down for reasons he articulates in this article and which are the reasons I too believe America's prospects are bleaker than I would wish even if Williams is wrong. (See 2 below.)

Then the other side. (See 2a below.)
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Where Ivy Education is going? See PJTV.Com: "Instavision: Harvard Envy: How the Quest for University Prestige Is Feeding the Education Bubble

Schools are turning their campuses into resorts in an effort to attract students. From fancy cafeterias to climbing walls, some of the big college costs have nothing to do the learning. Who foots the bill ultimately? Taxpayers. Hear more as Andrew S. Rosen, the author of Change.edu explains the real costs of a college education, and the big changes ahead for higher learning. "
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Mel Brooks is hilarious but there is a serious side to him as well.

That said, I worry what he has written is no longer our driving force. I believe we are watering down the qualities that made us who and what we are as we embrace the secular values of the world more than the ones that connected us to God. Thus, the majority's love affair with Obama, I submit, proves my point. To vote for Obama is a vote for death to the ideals that made us who and what we once were.(See 3 below.)
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Sent to me by a dear friend, a fellow memo reader but also a devotee of the New York Times. It is a snarling article by Miss Snarly herself - Maureen Dowd. (See 4 below.)
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He came, he saw, he ducked! Maybe we can reinstitute getting NATO to pick our cotton? (See 4 below.)
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The Iron Dome provide tin eared and blind politicians a cover. (See 5 below.)
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Does Rhode Island and Greece have something in common? (See 6 below.)
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Obama has decided the winning combination for re-election is to engage in class warfare and run against a do nothing Congress. So he has chosen to be pro-active an spend more tax payer money allowing those whose home prices are underwater to get out from under with bailouts. (See 7 below.)

Also, Obama is on another spending spree and this time he will try and repurchase the youth vote.

They may be dumb enough to sign up again for the "plucking." (See 7a below.)
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Dick
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1) Article from the Wall Street Journal - by Eddie Sessions:

"I have this theory about Barack Obama. I think he's led a kind of
make-believe life, in which money was provided and doors were opened, because at
some point early on somebody or some group took a look at this tall, good
looking, half-white, half-Arab, young man with an exotic African/Muslim name,
and concluded he could be guided toward a life in politics, where his
facile speaking skills could even put him in the White House.

In a very real way, he has been a young man in a very big hurry. Who else
do you know has written two memoirs before the age of 45? "Dreams of My
Father" was published in 1995 when he was only 34 years old. The "Audacity of
Hope" followed in 2006. If, indeed, he did write them himself. There are
some who think that his mentor and friend, Bill Ayers, a man who calls himself
a "communist with a small 'c'" was the real author.

His political skills consisted of rarely voting on anything that might be
deemed controversial. He went from a legislator in the Illinois legislature
to the Senator from that state, because he had the good fortune of having
Mayor Daley's formidable political machine at his disposal.

He was in the U..S. Senate so briefly, that his bid for the presidency was
either an act of astonishing self-confidence or part of some greater game
plan, that had been determined before he first stepped foot in the Capital.
How, many must wonder, was he selected to be a 2004 keynote speaker at the
Democrat convention that nominated John Kerry, when virtually no one had
ever even heard of him before?

He outmaneuvered Hillary Clinton in primaries. He took Iowa by storm. A
charming young man, an anomaly in the state with a very small black
population, he oozed "cool" in a place where agriculture was the antithesis of cool.
He dazzled the locals. And he had an army of volunteers drawn to a charisma
that hid any real substance.

And then he had the great good fortune of having the Republicans select one
of the most inept candidates for the presidency since Bob Dole. And then
John McCain did something crazy. He picked Sarah Palin, an unknown female
governor from the very distant state of Alaska . It was a ticket that was
reminiscent of 1984's Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro and they went down
to defeat.

The mainstream political media fell in love with him. It was a schoolgirl
crush with febrile commentators like Chris Mathews swooning then and now
over the man. The venom directed against McCain and, in particular, Palin, was
extraordinary.

Now, nearly a full 2+ years into his first term, all of those gilded years
leading up to the White House, have left him unprepared to be President.
Left to his own instincts, he has a talent for saying the wrong thing at the
wrong time. It swiftly became a joke that he could not deliver even the
briefest of statements without the ever-present Tele-Prompters.

Far worse, however, is his capacity to want to "wish away" some terrible
realities, not the least of which is the Islamist intention to destroy
America , and enslave the West. Any student of history knows how swiftly Islam
initially spread. It knocked on the doors of Europe , having gained a
foothold in Spain .

The great crowds that greeted him at home or on his campaign "world tour"
were no substitute for having even the slightest grasp of history, and the
reality of a world filled with really bad people with really bad intentions.

Oddly, and perhaps even inevitably, his political experience, a cakewalk,
has positioned him to destroy the Democrat Party's hold on power in Congress
because in the end it was never about the Party. It was always about his
communist ideology, learned at an early age from family, mentors, college
professors, and extreme leftist friends and colleagues.

Obama is a man who could deliver a snap judgment about a Boston police
officer who arrested an "obstreperous" Harvard professor-friend, but would warn
Americans against "jumping to conclusions" about a mass murderer at Fort
Hood who shouted "Allahu Akbar." The absurdity of that was lost on no one.
He has since compounded this by calling the Christmas bomber "an isolated
extremist" only to have to admit a day or two later that he was part of an al
Qaeda plot.

He is a man who could strive to close down our detention facility at
Guantanamo , even though those released were known to have returned to the
battlefield against America . He could even instruct his Attorney General to
afford the perpetrator of 9/11 a civil trial when no one else would ever even
consider such an obscenity. And he is a man who could wait three days before
having anything to say about the perpetrator of yet another terrorist
attack on Americans, and then have to elaborate on his remarks the following
day because his first statement was so lame.

The pattern repeats itself. He either blames any problem on the Bush
administration or he naively seeks to wish away the truth.

Knock, knock. Anyone home? Anyone there? Barack Obama exists only as the
sock puppet of his handlers, of the people who have maneuvered and
manufactured this pathetic individual's life.

When anyone else would quickly and easily produce a birth certificate, this
man has spent over a million dollars to deny access to his. Most other
documents, the paper trail we all leave in our wake, have been sequestered
from review. He has lived a make-believe life whose true facts remain hidden.

We laugh at the ventriloquist's dummy, but what do you do when the dummy is
President of the United States of America ?"


1a) The following is a Letter to the Editor in the Sunday edition of the
Savannah Morning News.

'The "Evict the Occupiers" Manifesto

As I read the demands of the "Occupy Wall Street" manifesto, I came up
with some demands of my own. I call it the "Evict the Occupiers" manifesto.

1) You're the sum total of the choices you make, and you must endure those
choices.
2) If you go to college and get a degree in epistemology, don't whine to me
because no one will pay you to be an epistemologist.
3) If you don't like what you get paid, get a different job or live with
your career choice.
4) If you have a nose ring, profane words tattooed on your neck and haven't
showered in weeks - I don't have to hire you.
5) If you have a plasma TV with satellite or cable, a smart phone, a laptop,
don't tell me you can't afford health insurance.
6) If you ever said "I would NEVER do (fill in the blank)" for a living,
then you're unemployed by choice.
7) If you bought a house/car/boat/gizmo that you knew you couldn't afford,
it's your fault, no one else's.
8) If you're willing to show up, work hard, promote the business and not
complain, SOMEONE will hire you.
9) If you think welding, plumbing, carpentry, engine repair, electrician
services or truck driving are lesser pursuits than a college degree, you're
an elitist snob.
10) If you think Herman Cain is racist, you need to look in a mirror and ask
"What's wrong with me, and how did I get so stupid?"
11) Government is the problem. Personal responsibility is the answer.
12) Your rights end where mine begin, and my rights end where yours begin.
13) If you're waiting for government to bail you out of your bad choices,
you're a big part of the problem.
14) If you don't think this is the greatest country in the world, please go
and find another one.

I think I'll go to New York, paint this manifesto on a sign and prepare
to be embraced by all the open minded and tolerant "Occupiers".

Tom Woiwode
Savannah, GA
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2)No Matter What
By Dr. Walter Williams

Can President Obama be defeated in 2012? No. He can't... I am going on record as saying that President Barak Obama will win a second term.

The media won't tell you this, the following, because a good election campaign means hundreds of millions (or in Obama's case billions) of dollars for them in advertising.


But the truth is, there simply are no conditions under which Barak Obama can be defeated in 2012.

The quality of the Republican candidate doesn't matter. Obama wins
Nine percent unemployment? No problem. Obama is elected.
Gas prices moving toward five dollars a gallon? He still wins.
The economy soars or goes into the gutter. Obama is re-elected.
War in the Middle East ? He wins a second term.


America 's role as the leading Superpower disappears? Hurrah for Barak Obama!
The U.S. government rushes toward bankruptcy, the dollar continues to sink on world markets and the price of daily goods and services soars due to inflation fueled by Obama's extraordinary deficit spending? Obama wins handily.


You are crazy Williams. Don't you understand how volatile politics can be when overall economic, government, and world conditions are declining? Sure I do.


And, that's why I know Obama will win. The American people are notoriously ignorant of economics. And economics is the key to why Obama should be defeated.


Even when Obama's policies lead the nation to final ruin, the majority of the American people are going to believe the bait-and-switch tactics Obama and his supporters in the media will use to explain why it isn't his fault. After all, things were much worse than understood when he took office.


Obama's reelection is really a very, very simple math problem. Consider the following:

1) Blacks will vote for Obama blindly. Period. Doesn't matter what he does. It's a race thing. He's one of us,

2) College educated women will vote for Obama. Though they will be offended by this, they swoon at his oratory. It's really not more complex than that,

3) Liberals will vote for Obama. He is their great hope,

4) Democrats will vote for Obama. He is the leader of their party and his coat tails will carry them to victory nationwide,

5) Hispanics will vote for Obama. He is the path to citizenship for those who are illegal, and Hispanic leaders recognize the political clout they carry in the Democratic Party,


6) Union members will vote overwhelmingly for Obama. He is their key to money and power in business, state and local politics,


7) Big Business will support Obama. They already have. He has almost $1 Billion dollars in his reelection purse gained largely from his connections with Big Business and is gaining more every day. Big Business loves Obama because he gives them access to taxpayer money so long as they support his socialistic political agenda,

8) The media love him. They may attack the people who work for him, but they love him. After all, to not love him would be racist,


9) Most other minorities and special interest groups will vote for him. Oddly, the overwhelming majority of Jews and Muslims will support him because they won't vote Republican. American Indians will support him. Obviously homosexuals tend to vote Democratic. And lastly,


10) Approximately half of independents will vote for Obama. And he doesn't need anywhere near that number because he has all of the groups previously mentioned. The President will win an overwhelming victory in 2012.

Dr. Walter Williams

IN ADDITION TO THE VOTING BLOCKS HE MENTIONS, THERE IS ANOTHER HUGE GROUP: THE NEARLY ONE-HALF OF ALL ADULTS DO NOT PAY ANY TAXES AND, IN FACT, MOST OF THEM RECEIVE ENTITLEMENT MONEY FROM THE GOVERNMENT. THESE PEOPLE DO NOT WANT TO "SHAKE THE BOAT" TO DO ANYTHING TO STOP THE FLOW OF TAXPAYER MONEY TO THEMSELVES. (Dr.JohnW)

Note: Do not forget the angry people who vote. Angry for no reason other than they are professional Pessimists. Liberals, Socialists, Democrats and the devils that walk among us thrive in pessimism, feeding off the angry peoples negative energy. Yummy, yummy.

The above, more than all the rest, is the reason America will fall. Greed, something for nothing. Promise anyone something for nothing ("Fall down and worship me and I will give you..." Satan) and they will follow.
Historical facts, Garden of Eden, The Golden Calf, Marks--Lenin--isms, Obamas' Socialism, are all examples of "Something for nothing" and all failed because they are of greed.

America's Obituary: Born 1776, Died 2008


Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law in St. Paul , Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning the last Presidential election:


• Number of States won by: Obama: 19 -- McCain: 29
• Square miles of land won by: Obama: 580,000 -- McCain: 2,427,000
• Population of counties won by: Obama: 127million -- McCain: 143million
• Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Obama: 13.2 by McCain: 2.1


Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory McCain won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of the country.

Obama territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in low income tenements and living off various forms of government welfare..."


Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the "complacency and apathy" phase of Professor Tyler's definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation's population already having reached the "governmental dependency" phase.


If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegal's - and they vote - then we can say goodbye to Freedom in fewer than five years and Hello to Socialism.

2a) America rising
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

World power swings back to America

The American phoenix is slowly rising again. Within five years or so, the US
will be well on its way to self-sufficiency in fuel and energy.

Manufacturing will have closed the labour gap with China in a clutch of key
industries. The current account might even be in surplus.

The making of computers, electrical equipment, machinery, autos and other
goods may shift back to the US from China.

Assumptions that the Great Republic must inevitably spiral into economic and
strategic decline - so like the chatter of the late 1980s, when Japan was in
vogue - will seem wildly off the mark by then.

Telegraph readers already know about the "shale gas revolution" that has
turned America into the world's number one producer of natural gas, ahead of
Russia.

Less known is that the technology of hydraulic fracturing - breaking rocks
with jets of water - will also bring a quantum leap in shale oil supply,
mostly from the Bakken fields in North Dakota, Eagle Ford in Texas, and
other reserves across the Mid-West.

"The US was the single largest contributor to global oil supply growth last
year, with a net 395,000 barrels per day (b/d)," said Francisco Blanch from
Bank of America, comparing the Dakota fields to a new North Sea.

Total US shale output is "set to expand dramatically" as fresh sources come
on stream, possibly reaching 5.5m b/d by mid-decade. This is a tenfold rise
since 2009. [what's this]

The US already meets 72pc of its own oil needs, up from around 50pc a decade
ago.

"The implications of this shift are very large for geopolitics, energy
security, historical military alliances and economic activity. As US
reliance on the Middle East continues to drop, Europe is turning more
dependent and will likely become more exposed to rent-seeking behaviour from
oligopolistic players," said Mr Blanch.

Meanwhile, the China-US seesaw is about to swing the other way. Offshoring
is out, 're-inshoring' is the new fashion.

"Made in America, Again" - a report this month by Boston Consulting Group -
said Chinese wage inflation running at 16pc a year for a decade has closed
much of the cost gap. China is no longer the "default location" for cheap
plants supplying the US.

A "tipping point" is near in computers, electrical equipment, machinery,
autos and motor parts, plastics and rubber, fabricated metals, and even
furniture.

"A surprising amount of work that rushed to China over the past decade could
soon start to come back," said BCG's Harold Sirkin.

The gap in "productivity-adjusted wages" will narrow from 22pc of US levels
in 2005 to 43pc (61pc for the US South) by 2015. Add in shipping costs,
reliability woes, technology piracy, and the advantage shifts back to the
US.

The list of "repatriates" is growing. Farouk Systems is bringing back
assembly of hair dryers to Texas after counterfeiting problems; ET Water
Systems has switched its irrigation products to California; Master Lock is
returning to Milwaukee, and NCR is bringing back its ATM output to Georgia.
NatLabs is coming home to Florida.

Boston Consulting expects up to 800,000 manufacturing jobs to return to the
US by mid-decade, with a multiplier effect creating 3.2m in total. This
would take some sting out of the Long Slump.

As Philadelphia Fed chief Sandra Pianalto said last week, US manufacturing
is "very competitive" at the current dollar exchange rate. Whether intended
or not, the Fed's zero rates and $2.3 trillion printing blitz have brought
matters to an abrupt head for China.

Fed actions confronted Beijing with a Morton's Fork of ugly choices: revalue
the yuan, or hang onto the mercantilist dollar peg and import a US monetary
policy that is far too loose for a red-hot economy at the top of the cycle.
Either choice erodes China's wage advantage. The Communist Party chose
inflation.

Foreign exchange effects are subtle. They take a long to time play out as
old plant slowly runs down, and fresh investment goes elsewhere. Yet you can
see the damage to Europe from an over-strong euro in foreign direct
investment (FDI) data.
Flows into the EU collapsed by 63p from 2007 to 2010 (UNCTAD data), and fell
by 77pc in Italy. Flows into the US rose by 5pc.

Volkswagen is investing $4bn in America, led by its Chattanooga Passat
plant. Korea's Samsung has begun a $20bn US investment blitz. Meanwhile,
Intel, GM, and Caterpillar and other US firms are opting to stay at home
rather than invest abroad.

Europe has only itself to blame for the current "hollowing out" of its
industrial base. It craved its own reserve currency, without understanding
how costly this "exorbitant burden" might prove to be.

China and the rising reserve powers have rotated a large chunk of their $10
trillion stash into EMU bonds to reduce their dollar weighting. The result
is a euro too strong for half of EMU.

The European Central Bank has since made matters worse (for Italy, Spain,
Portugal, and France) by keeping rates above those of the US, UK, and Japan.
That has been a deliberate policy choice. It let real M1 deposits in Italy
contract at a 7pc annual rate over the summer. May it live with the
consequences.

The trade-weighted dollar has been sliding for a decade, falling 37pc since
2001. This roughly replicates the post-Plaza slide in the late 1980s, which
was followed - with a lag - by 3pc of GDP shrinkage in the current account
deficit. The US had a surplus by 1991.

Charles Dumas and Diana Choyleva from Lombard Street Research argue that
this may happen again in their new book "The American Phoenix".
The switch in advantage to the US is relative. It does not imply a healthy
US recovery. The global depression will grind on as much of the Western
world tightens fiscal policy and slowly purges debt, and as China deflates
its credit bubble.

Yet America retains a pack of trump cards, and not just in sixteen of the
world's top twenty universities.

It is almost the only economic power with a fertility rate above 2.0 - and
therefore the ability to outgrow debt - in sharp contrast to the demographic
decay awaiting Japan, China, Korea, Germany, Italy, and Russia.
Europe's EMU soap opera has shown why it matters that America is a genuine
nation, forged by shared language and the ancestral chords of memory over
two centuries, with institutions that ultimately work and a real central
bank able to back-stop the system.

The 21st Century may be American after all, just like the last.
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3)Mel Brooks on being a Jew......

I may be angry at God or at the world, and I'm sure that a lot of my comedy
is based on anger and hostility...It comes from a feeling that as a Jew and
as a person, I don't fit into the mainstream of American society.

Feeling different, feeling alienated, feeling persecuted, feeling that the
only way you can deal with the world is to laugh - because if you don't
laugh you're going to cry and never stop crying - that's probably what's
responsible for the Jews having developed a sense of humor. The people who had the greatest reason to weep, learned more than anyone else how to laugh.

Based on the accomplishments of individual Jews, Nobel Prize winners and
heroes of modern culture, as well as the amount of attention Jews get in the
media, you'd never believe the correct answers: There are little more than
13 million Jews in the world, comprising less than 1/4 of 1% of the world's
population !!!!

Do you think it's just a coincidence? Twenty-one percent of Nobel Prize
winners have been Jews, even though Jews comprise less than one-quarter of
one percent of the world's population. Choose any field, and you will find
that Jews have excelled in it.

Think of the names of many modern-day figures most responsible for the
intellectual turning points in history - MARX, FREUD, EINSTEIN - and you
will find proof of the Biblical verdict: "Surely this is..a wise and
understanding people." There simply is no way to deny it.

Jews really are smart. There must be a reason - and I can give you
three:

HEREDITY, ENVIRONMENT and A UNIQUE VALUE SYSTEM:

HEREDITY - Historians have pointed out a fascinating difference between Jews
and Christians. In Christianity, as well as in many other religions,
holiness was identified with asceticism, great spirituality with the
practice of celibacy. For centuries the finest minds among Christians were
urged to join the church and become priests. That effectively condemned
their genetic pool of intelligence to an untimely end.

Jews, on the other hand, took quite seriously the first commandment to
mankind - to be fruitful and multiply. Sex was never seen as sinful, but
rather as one of those things created by God that he surely must have had in
mind when he declared, in reviewing his work, that "Behold everything was
very good."

Among Jews, the most intelligent were encouraged to become religious
leaders. As rabbis, they had to serve as role models for their congregants
as procreators and "fathers! of their countries." Brains got passed on from
generation to generation, and Jews today reap the benefits.

ENVIRONMENT - If challenge and response are the keys to creativity and
achievement, it's no surprise that Jews are smart; they've been challenged
more than anyone else on earth. The school of hard knocks is a wonderful
teacher. Jews had no choice but to learn to be better since the odds were always so very much stacked against them.

When you're born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you tend to get fat and
lazy. When you're born with the lash of a whip on your back, you quickly
learn to become crafty, street smart, and knowledgeable in everything that
will help you make it through life.

A UNIQUE VALUE SYSTEM - We still haven't touched on the most important
reason of all. Jews are smart because they have been raised in a tradition
that treasures education above everything else, that considers study the
highest obligation of mankind, and that identifies the intellect as part of
us created in "the image of God." To be illiterate was unheard of in the
Jewish world, not only because it was a sign of stupidity, but, more
significantly, because it was a sin.

Jews are obligated by law to review the Bible in its entirety every year,
dividing it into manageable weekly sections. The widespread custom when a
child turned three years old was to write the letters of the Hebrew alphabet
on a board in honey and have the child learn them as he licked them off,
equating their meaning with the taste of sweetness.

Jews studied the Midrash, and it taught them: The Sword and the Book came
from Heaven together, and the Holy One said: "Keep what is written in this
Book or be destroyed by the other." Jews studied the Mishna and it taught
them, "Say not when I have leisure."

Philosophical Tevye , that delightful creation of the Yiddish writer Shalom
Aleichem and the star of Fiddler On The Roof, explained that Jews always
wear hats because they never know when they will be forced to travel. What
he didn't say, which is probably more important, is that they always made
sure to have something under their hats and inside of their heads - because
physical possessions could be taken from them, but what they accumulated in their minds would always remain the greatest" merchandise" a Jew possesses.
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4)Anne Frank, a Mormon?
By MAUREEN DOWD

At an appearance at George Washington University here Saturday night, Bill Maher bounded into territory that the news media have been gingerly tiptoeing around.

Magic underwear. Baptizing dead people. Celestial marriages. Private planets. Racism. Polygamy.

“By any standard, Mormonism is more ridiculous than any other religion,” asserted the famously nonbelieving comic who skewered the “fairy tales” of several faiths in his documentary “Religulous.” “It’s a religion founded on the idea of polygamy. They call it The Principle. That sounds like The Prime Directive in ‘Star Trek.’ ”

He said he expects the Romney crowd — fighting back after Robert Jeffress, a Texas Baptist pastor supporting Rick Perry, labeled Mormonism a non-Christian “cult” — to once more “gloss over the differences between Christians and Mormons.”

Maher was not easy on the religion he was raised in either. He referred to the Roman Catholic Church as “an international child sex ring.”

But atheists, like Catholics and evangelical Christians, seem especially wary of Mormons, dubbed the “ultimate shape-shifters” by Maher.

In a Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll released on Tuesday, people were asked what single word came to mind for Republican candidates. For Herman Cain it was 9-9-9; for Rick Perry, Texas; and for Mitt Romney, Mormon. In the debate Tuesday night, Romney said it was repugnant that “we should choose people based on their religion.”

In The Times on Sunday, Sheryl Gay Stolberg chronicled Romney’s role as a bishop in Boston often giving imperious pastoral guidance on everything from divorce to abortion.

Stolberg reported that Romney, who would later run for Senate as a supporter of abortion rights against Teddy Kennedy and then flip to oppose those rights in Republican presidential primaries, showed up unannounced at a hospital in his role as bishop. He “sternly” warned a married mother of four, who was considering terminating a pregnancy because of a potentially dangerous blood clot, not to go forward.

Another famous nonbeliever, Christopher Hitchens, wrote in Slate on Monday about “the weird and sinister belief system of the LDS,” the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Aside from Joseph Smith, whom Hitchens calls “a fraud and conjurer well known to the authorities in upstate New York,” the writer also wonders about the Mormon practice of amassing archives of the dead and “praying them in” as a way to “retrospectively ‘baptize’ everybody as a convert.”

Hitchens noted that they “got hold of a list of those put to death by the Nazis’ Final Solution” and “began making these massacred Jews into honorary LDS members as well.” He called it “a crass attempt at mass identity theft from the deceased.”

The Mormons even baptized Anne Frank.

It took Ernest Michel, then chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, three years to get Mormons to agree to stop proxy-baptizing Holocaust victims.

Mormons desisted in 1995 after Michel, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported, “discovered that his own mother, father, grandmother and best childhood friend, all from Mannheim, Germany, had been posthumously baptized.”

Michel told the news agency that “I was hurt that my parents, who were killed as Jews in Auschwitz, were being listed as members of the Mormon faith.”

Richard Bushman, a Mormon who is a professor emeritus of history at Columbia University, said that after “the Jewish dust-up,” Mormons “backed away” from “going to extravagant lengths to collect the names of every last person who ever lived and baptize them — even George Washington.” Now they will do it for Mormons who bring a relative or ancestor’s name into the temple, he said.

Bushman said that “Mormons believe that Christ is the divine son of God who atoned for our sins, but we don’t believe in the Trinity in the sense that there are three in one. We believe the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are three distinct persons.”

Kent Jackson, the associate dean of religion at Brigham Young University, says that while Mormons are Christians, “Mormonism is not part of the Christian family tree.”

It probably won’t comfort skeptical evangelicals and Catholics to know that Mormons think that while other Christians merely “have a portion of the truth, what God revealed to Joseph Smith is the fullness of the truth,” as Jackson says. “We have no qualms about saying evangelicals, Catholics and Protestants can go to heaven, including Pastor Jeffress. We just believe that the highest blessings of heaven come” to Mormons.

As for those planets that devout Mormon couples might get after death, Jackson says that’s a canard. But Bushman says it’s part of “Mormon lore,” and that it’s based on the belief that if humans can become like God, and God has the whole universe, then maybe Mormons will get to run a bit of that universe.

As for the special garment that Mitt wears, “we wouldn’t say ‘magic underwear,’ ” Bushman explains.

It is meant to denote “moral protection,” a sign that they are “a consecrated people like the priests of ancient Israel.”

And it’s not only a one-piece any more. “There’s a two-piece now,” he said.

Republicans are the ones who have made faith part of the presidential test. Now we’ll see if Mitt can pass it.
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4) He Came, He Saw, He Led from the Rear
By J.R. Dunn

Obama is getting a lot of praise for his recent successes in foreign policy, particularly the new and clever doctrine of "leading from behind," which, we're assured, is superior to the practice of earlier presidents such as FDR and Harry Truman. Along with the usual left-liberal suspects we've heard from John McCain, who really should know better. (The latest on record is the great Geraldo Rivera, who paused from interviewing dolphins or whatever he's been doing lately to inform us that Obama has mastered the most "efficient" foreign policy of any president -- granted that "efficiency" is not the first thing to come to mind in this context.)

Of course, the actual target is George W. Bush and his handling of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns. With his negative domestic record, Obama the Conqueror is, ever so ironically, attempting to fill the gap with foreign victories, over and above all in Libya, which was gained without pressure, without loss, without worry...

...without even being involved, if the record means anything. If one thing is clear, it's the fact that U.S. forces were at no point meaningfully engaged in the Libya uprising. The bulk of foreign intervention -- mostly air strikes, with limited special forces activity and operational planning assistance -- was carried out by the U.K. and France, with minor assistance from other NATO states. Even this came reluctantly. Both David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy waited the better part of a month before taking action. Much of this time was taken up by obtaining a resolution from the U.N., without which no one dares rescue a cat from a tree these days.

Even then, intervention was undertaken with extreme reluctance, and in large part only to avoid the moral condemnation that would have followed the wholesale massacre of civilians after a Gaddafi victory. A month into the revolt, his troops had driven the rebels into Cyrenaica and were closing in on the last few rebel-held cities.

The March 18th NATO intervention prevented that horror. It was at this point that U.S. involvement peaked with a handful of fighter-bomber sorties. Apart from some strange reports of U.S. aviators flying off the carrier De Gaulle with French squadrons, that was the extent of participation by American personnel. (Some U.S. drone strikes were also carried out, to the number of 94 -- not a lot over an eight-month period.)


But NATO's action came at the cost of a stalemate. Britain and France were both unable and unwilling to make the necessary moves to defeat Gaddafi outright. They ran out of dumb bombs after the first week's action, a shortage that had to be made up by the U.S. (It is this supply role that probably accounts for the billion-dollar cost to the U.S. taxpayer.) NATO was also reluctant to press the limits of U.N. Resolution 1973, which authorized only the protection of the civilian population. Numerous legal positivists of the halfwit type in both media and elsewhere insisted that this "forbade" any effort to overthrow Gaddafi, as if the resolution somehow amounted to a retroactive pardon for his various crimes and atrocities.

It was the rebels, acting virtually alone (possibly with the aid of British planners, still the gold standard even in this day and age), who broke the stalemate. Their enthusiasm and élan overcame lack of training, poor leadership, and inept execution to slowly push back Gaddafi's loyalists, better-armed and trained but without much reason to put their lives on the line. After a seesaw campaign throughout the spring and summer, the rebels at last broke through, taking Tripoli, moving on to the southwestern desert, and pushing up the coast to Sirte, where Gaddafi was rousted from his culvert and executed. (They all go the same way, don't they, these hard men, the killers of millions? Whining and broken, not an ounce of spirit among them. Hitler cowering in his bunker, Saddam Hussein strung up like a horse thief. Only Mussolini, the last one you'd expect, broke the pattern with his manly and honorable attempt to save his young mistress from execution.)

Clearly, this victory belongs to the rebels. As amateurish as they might have been, and no matter how they may fumble it now, they earned their triumph. A polite round of applause must also go to Cameron and Sarkozy, for not folding up. But as for Obama -- he deserves exactly what "leading from behind" would have earned him in the days of the horsemen. (Back then it was an insult, reserved for commanders too cowardly to mix it with the rest of the troops.)

But there's also a deeper issue: the fact that the campaign was a botch from beginning to end. From the point of view of the West, the Libya revolt was fought almost completely with political considerations overriding all tactical and operational concerns. As a result, it went on longer, cost more, and was more destructive and disruptive than it had to be. People are dead today because NATO couldn't handle it right. To think that 25 years ago this outfit thought it could take on the Soviet Union!

The operational problem involving the use of irregular troops is straightforward. Supporting forces must make up for whatever weaknesses the irregulars might display. In Afghanistan, this was accomplished by using U.S. strategic airpower in the form of heavy bombers to wipe out Taliban concentrations, after which Northern Alliance troops, with a stiffening of American special forces, swept in to mop up. These tactics wrapped up the campaign in short order. (The ensuing insurgency is something else altogether.)

The process of evening the odds was rendered more difficult In Libya due to the fact that Gaddafi's loyalists were trained and well-armed, particularly as regards artillery and armor. Gaddafi's armor was nullified, but rather late in the game -- it should have been the first order of business. The artillery proved a tougher nut. Gaddafi's Soviet-era guns were a major reason for the seesaw battles that marked the campaign. Loyalist troops driven from an urban area would shell the rebels relentlessly until they broke, with the process beginning anew the next day. Towns like Misrata and Ziwaya were transformed into shattered wastelands by this style of combat.

The third problematic element was the perennial challenge of air support. Lacking artillery and armor, the rebels required constant close air support. They seldom got it. The difficulty here is that air support is time-sensitive. Aircraft when needed are needed immediately, with as little delay as possible. NATO fighter-bombers flying in from bases in Italy were taking half an hour or more to arrive in the battlespace, by which time the tactical situation would be certain to have changed. This rendered them next to useless in the air-support role, and doubtlessly cost the rebels a number of victories. Until late in the day, the rebels also lacked trained Forward Air Controllers (FACs) to direct the incoming planes. Without such assets, you cannot run a useful air campaign.

The solution would have been use of naval air power -- carriers only a few miles offshore, cutting the response time to a minimum, and increasing aircraft loiter time over the battlefield. Trained FACs traveling with rebel troops could have provided targets and also guided in precision weapons with lasers. This would in short order have destroyed Gaddafi's armor and artillery and broken the morale of his forces. The revolution would very likely have been wrapped up within a matter of weeks, with far less mortality and property damage than actually occurred.

It failed to happen that way for a number of reasons. The U.K. had only recently decommissioned the Ark Royal and its Harrier squadrons that could have provided support. While the French De Gaulle took up some slack, at 38,000 tons, the ship is scarcely a third the size of a Nimitz-class carrier and fields fewer than half the aircraft. The De Gaulle also has a lot of operational problems, and French pilots are neither trained nor experienced in air support. (This may well explain the otherwise incomprehensible reported presence of U.S. Navy pilots aboard the De Gaulle.) The solution would have been the appearance of a Nimitz-class carrier with its 90+ aircraft contingents and experienced pilots. But this, of course, never happened.

It never happened because Obama didn't want it to happen. A U.S. carrier would have established too major and noticeable an American presence. We would no longer be "leading from behind" or exercising "smart power," but acting with that bad old "shock and awe" attitude of the Bush era.

So American power was curtailed, and as a result the war dragged on with many Libyans who might otherwise have lived being killed.

The Libyan intervention is not a model for anything. It is not a feather in Obama's cap, and it will quite rightly do nothing for his dismal reelection chances. As in the case of the economy, health care, and [put-your-favorite-fiasco-here], people who know what they're doing have been booted aside in favor of hacks who will do it Obama's way without asking questions or making suggestions. Fortunately, it didn't cost us much this time -- the Libyans paid our way -- but if it's attempted again in a more critical situation, it could very well blow up in our faces. The effort to create an Obama the Great, conqueror on the cheap, needs to be cut short. It has cost lives already, and it should cost no more of them.

The overthrow of a tyrant should be a moment of pride for the West, and the U.S. in particular. We've done it a lot over the past seventy years, and we should be getting good at it. But if we are to continue -- and we should (as the standard-bearer for democracy we can do no less) -- we need to avoid the example of people who turn everything they touch into a circus.

J.R. Dunn is consulting editor of American Thinker.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5)Iron Dome in Action: A Preliminary Evaluation
by Uzi Rubin

BESA Center Perspectives Papers No. 151, October 24, 2011

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The "Iron Dome" anti-rocket active defense system was
first used by Israel in April 2011 with great technical success. This
prompted defense officials to finally make public the strategic objectives
and limitations of the system, which, until then, had not been divulged. It
also expanded the public debate on missile defense from one that focused on
the threat to Sderot and the Gaza envelope communities to a debate that
included the threat of longer range rockets on larger cities deep within
Israel. It can reasonably be concluded that the Iron Dome system has
succeeded in saving lives and reducing damages, thus providing more
flexibility to the political leadership for containing the fighting with the
Hamas government in Gaza.

Introduction

Israel's new "Iron Dome" anti-rocket active defense system made its
operational debut in southern Israel in two rounds of escalation in the
fighting along the Gaza strip (April and August 2011). The development of
active defense systems in Israel that started with Arrow in the early 1990's
and in which Iron Dome is the latest chapter has always been accompanied by
acrimonious public debate and behind-the-doors battles within the defense
establishment. These battles have been mainly between the political
leadership and the professional military echelons – which resisted the
diversion of resources from offensive to defensive weapons.

This operational debut of Iron Dome, which can be characterized as a
technical success, provides an opportunity to evaluate its performance and
the degree to which it fulfilled its expectations. There exists a
significant degree of ambiguity about the technical and strategic
expectations from the system, since Israel's defense establishment never
specified them publicly. Similarly there exists significant ambiguity about
the actual performance of the system in battle, as practically no official
data was released. Yet the very appearance of Iron Dome on the battlefield
generated world-wide interest and was widely reported in Israel and abroad.
The wealth of public domain reports permits a preliminary evaluation of its
performance and implications.

Objectives and Goals

The shock of the 2006 Lebanon War was a catalyst for Israel's decision to
develop an anti-rocket system. In February 2007, Iron Dome was selected as
the preferred system, though by that time, daily life in northern Israel had
returned to normal. In the south, however, the tempo of the rocket offensive
from Gaza was increasing. Accordingly, the public debate on Iron Dome
revolved around its effectiveness in the lower limit of its capacity –
namely rockets fired from 4 km away – and its ability to destroy mortar
shells. Sderot, the city that suffered most from increasing Qassam rocket
attacks, was the focal point of discussions on Iron Dome. The public debate
barely touched on the need to defend larger cities deeper within Israel,
despite the fact that longer range rockets from Gaza had been targeting
Ashkelon since mid-2006.

Initially, much uncertainty surrounded Iron Dome's role in the overall
response strategy to the rocket and missile threat on Israel. Its
fundamental goals – what was it expected to defend against, who or what
would be defended, and what were the required defense levels – were withheld
from the public. From its laconic statements one might have concluded that
the defense establishment saw the role of Iron Dome as limited to the
defense of the Gaza envelope against Qassams.

For example, at the end of 2007, Ehud Barak, Israel's Minister of Defense,
assumed that “within two and a half years we will be able to deploy the
first system in Sderot.”1 It was only after the initial success of Iron Dome
in April 2011 that senior officials in Israel's Ministry of Defense (MOD)
elaborated on its strategic objectives and limitations. Brig. Gen. (res.)
Ophir Shoham, Director of the Ministry of Defense (MOD) Directorate for
Research and Development (known by its acronym MAFAT), said that the
system's strategic goal is to allow the political leadership room for
maneuver and to provide an alternative to escalation.2

Then-head of MAFAT's R&D Division Brig. Gen. Danny Gold stated more
specifically that the rationale for the system was threefold: ethical,
economic and strategic. Ethically, the system represents the state's
obligation to protect citizens’ life and property. Economically, the system
prevents the paralysis of the nation's economy. And strategically, “[the
system] is a response to the main threat from the enemy" – a way to "avoid
costly military operations and allow the political leadership to have
alternative courses of actions other than escalation.”3

As for the defensive capacity of Iron Dome, the program's manager at Rafael,
Yossi Drucker, warned that no system guarantees 100 percent protection. The
head of the MOD program office, Lieutenant Colonel C. similarly cautioned,
"No system is hermetic; the citizens should avoid complacency,"4 and
Israel's Minister of Defense Ehud Barak warned that "(Iron Dome) does not
provide a 100 percent answer."5 In a wider perspective, MAFAT Director Ophir
Shoham declared that "We do not presume to shoot down thousands of rockets.
Rather, we aim to minimize the damage and let the Israel Defense Forces
(IDF) do other things…"6 Such objectives are much wider than simply
protecting the town of Sderot.

It is unclear whether such MOD considerations played a role in the decision
to launch the development of Iron Dome in February 2007 or whether they were
adopted only more recently. It is reasonable to assume, however, that such
or similar arguments were made behind the scenes during the acerbic
confrontations between the High Command and the political leadership about
the need for active defense in general and Iron Dome in particular. Be it as
it may, Iron Dome is now officially tasked to fulfill three goals:
Protecting Israeli life and property, providing new flexibility to the
political leadership, and giving the IDF extra time to prepare for offensive
operations

Iron Dome in Action

The first operational use of Iron Dome in April 2011 was in reaction to an
escalation in rocket attacks from Gaza on Israeli targets. After the IDF's
offensive responses failed to stop the accelerated and deep-reaching
attacks, a decision was made to deploy one of two available Iron Dome
batteries over Beersheba. At this time, Iron Dome was not yet declared to
have Initial Operational Capability. The deployment was completed on March
23, 2011 and was called an "operational experiment." As tensions continued
to rise and with exchanges of fire along the Gaza border, the second
available battery was deployed on April 4, near Ashkelon.

On April 7, as revenge for the targeted killing of three senior operatives,
Hamas fired an anti-tank missile at an Israeli school bus, killing a
16-year-old boy. In response, the IDF ratcheted up its attacks on
Palestinian targets while Gaza terrorist groups (not Hamas) launched
long-range rockets at Ashkelon. The Iron Dome battery that had been deployed
there achieved its first interception of a Palestinian rocket that day. Over
the next couple of days, Iron Dome successfully destroyed several other
rockets launched at Ashkelon, while the other battery, stationed in
Beersheba, was first activated on April 8, destroying at least one Grad
rocket aimed at the city. Media sources reported that the new system had
destroyed eight of the nine rockets that it engaged. (According to the
director of MAFAT, the success rate was nine out of 10). On April 11, the
Palestinians declared a ceasefire and southern Israel returned to a state of
tense calm.

The next period of escalation began on August 18, 2011 when Palestinian
terrorists attacked several vehicles on the highway to Eilat, killing eight
Israelis. In swift retaliation the IDF killed five senior operatives of the
Popular Resistance Committees, held responsible by Israel for the
cross-border raid. This led to an intensified rocket offensive from Gaza on
Ashkelon, Beersheba and other areas deep within Israel. The two batteries
defending Beersheba and Ashkelon destroyed a significant number of incoming
rockets (but rockets fired at Ashdod, Kiryat Gat, Kiryat Malachi and other
towns were not engaged because no additional batteries were available).

On August 20, the Palestinians fired the largest yet salvo of rockets (the
media reported 11 simultaneous launches) at Beersheba. While many of the
rockets were destroyed in mid-air, one penetrated the defense screen,
killing an Israeli civilian and wounding 10. The next day, another three
salvoes were fired at Beersheba. No Israeli was injured, but one rocket hit
an empty school that was likely located within the protective radius of Iron
Dome. Seemingly then, this rocket managed to penetrate the defense screen.

The Palestinians declared another ceasefire on August 28, but the targeted
killing of an Islamic Jihad operative spurred renewed rocket fire. This did
not cause any further casualties in Israel and several more rockets were
successfully intercepted. The IDF reacted with restraint and the rocket fire
subsided after several days. According to the media, Iron Dome destroyed
between 18 and 20 rockets during this period of escalation, but the Israeli
defense establishment declined to provide official information on the
success rate. The sole official statement came from Israel's ambassador to
the US, who cited an 85 percent success rate.7

Evaluating Iron Dome's Technical Performance

It seems that the achievements of Iron Dome in April pleasantly surprised
the IDF and the Israeli public, yet its performance in August somewhat
disappointed the public (but not the IDF). The initial successes created an
unjustified perception among the public of a hermetic, leak-proof defense
system. The few rockets that subsequently penetrated the system during the
August fighting dispelled this perception and caused a degree of
disillusionment.

In the absence of official figures, our system performance evaluation must
rely on indirect evidence. A total of 300 to 350 rockets of all kinds were
fired by the Palestinians at Israeli targets near Gaza and deeper into
Israel in the course of the two cycles of violence. Only one Israeli was
killed, which means then that the effective lethality of the rockets in the
two events was 300 rockets per fatality (RPF).8

The lethality of the Gaza rockets during the eight-year (2001-2009)
offensive on the Gaza envelope communities averaged 254 RPF9 – however,
when the 300th rocket hit Israel, four fatalities had already been incurred,
hence the initial RPF stood at 75. In the 2006 Lebanon War, the initial RPF
stood at 50 (it later dropped to 75).

In both cases, initial lethality was higher than the average since it took
some time for the public to comply with civil defense instructions and take
shelter upon alerts. Media reports on the public's behavior during the two
cycles of escalation in 2011 show that it resembled the initial pattern of
the eight-year rocket offensive, with a sizable proportion of the public
failing to take cover. Hence, it is legitimate to compare the effective
lethality of the April and August 2011 cycles of attacks to the initial
lethality of the two previous campaigns. From this perspective, the initial
lethality in the 2011 escalations with an RPF of 300 was extraordinarily
low.10 Since this cannot be attributed to public discipline or compliance
with civil defense instructions,11 it must have been Iron Dome's
effectiveness that reduced the rockets' lethality by about two thirds. It
seems, then, that Iron Dome has achieved a significant technical success.

Israeli and Palestinian Reactions

Initial reports of Iron Dome's success in April 2011 were received with some
skepticism in Israel and even attributed by some commentators to pure luck.
Nevertheless, when the April escalation ended with no Israeli casualties and
the full extent of Iron Dome's capabilities was realized, euphoria
prevailed.

Throughout this round of escalation, the pattern of rocket attacks from Gaza
was markedly different than in the past. Sderot, previously a magnet for
Qassam attacks, enjoyed relative calm, suffering only one rocket impact
throughout the April fighting. The Palestinians, instead, evidently
preferred to launch longer range rockets at larger cities deeper within
Israel. This facilitated the task of Iron Dome since it had to deal with
longer range targets.

During the next cycle of violence in August, the Palestinians maintained
their new policy of attacking larger, more distant cities. Sderot was
"neglected" once again, with only two rocket impacts. It seems that the
Palestinians chose this time to attack cities defended by Iron Dome in order
to probe its weaknesses and attempt to penetrate its defensive screen,
thereby gaining "points" among constituents for any Israeli casualties. The
heavy salvo on Beersheba on August 20 – that may well have been aimed at the
equidistant, undefended city of Ashdod – lends credence to this theory.

The public responses in Israel following this second cycle of escalation
were more muted than previously. This time, praises for the system's
performance were accompanied by some criticism. Reuven Pedatzur, a Haaretz
defense analyst and a long-time critic of missile defense in Israel (and
abroad), declared that the Iron Dome concept collapsed because, among other
things, "it was shown that civilians under attack could not maintain their
daily life without fear".12 A similar sentiment was expressed by former
Israeli Minister of Defense Moshe Arens, who lauded the system's technical
achievement but pointed out that despite the active defense, "the rockets
forced the residents of southern Israel to run for shelter."13

Considering the warning of senior defense officials that Iron Dome cannot
provide a hermetic, leak proof shield and the constant pleading by the
Homeland Defense Command for the public to take cover even in cities
defended by Iron Dome, it is difficult to see why both critics nurtured the
mistaken notion that Iron Dome was supposed to provide "normal daily life
without fear" under rocket fire.

Israel's defense establishment continued praising the system after the
August events while mayors in southern Israel clamored for Iron Dome's
deployment to their cities as it evoked a sense of security.14 Defense
Minister Ehud Barak ordered the prompt deployment of a third Iron Dome
battery to Ashdod and promised a fourth battery would be delivered by the
end of 2011. It seems then that both the defense establishment and the
general public regarded Iron Dome's performance in the August fighting as a
success, despite the Beer Sheba casualties. It also appears that the IDF
overcame its historical distaste for missile defense, embracing Iron Dome
with some enthusiasm.

Palestinian officials kept silent about the debut of an active defense
system in the arena. Yet some sense of the mood in Gaza can be deduced from
media reports on Gazans’ reactions. A Palestinian resident of Beit Lahia was
quoted as saying: "People in the northern Gaza Strip can clearly see Iron
Dome in action. The uselessness of our rockets was never as evident to the
people as it is now."15

Strategic Implications

About two months after the April 2011 fighting, a senior Israel Air Force
officer declared, "The success of Iron Dome saved the IDF another major
operation in Gaza."16 In his view, the successful performance of the system
provided decision makers with an added degree of freedom and gave them an
alternative to a major offensive action. The enemy did not achieve its goal,
became frustrated and ceased firing. The IDF has apparently concluded that
its newly introduced active defense arm achieved its strategic goals:
protecting Israeli life and property, providing new flexibility to the
political leadership, and giving the IDF extra time to prepare for offensive
operations. In the view of the above quoted officer, there was one further
achievement: A dissuasive effect that was brought about by the enemy's sense
of frustration, motivating him to cease his fire.

It is still too early to judge how accurate this evaluation is. Iron Dome
did indeed save lives and protect property. It can also be reasonably
concluded that the low number of civilian casualties allowed the political
leadership to act with restraint and minimize its aerial attacks on Gaza,
thereby reducing collateral damage and containing the situation.

However, it is hard to see how Israel would otherwise have risked a major
ground offensive in Gaza when the collapse of the Mubarak regime has
strained it relations with Egypt, when Israel was gearing up for a
diplomatic battle over the Palestinian UN bid for statehood, and when the
political damage from Operation Cast Lead was still fresh in mind.

As for the alleged dissuasive effect of Iron Dome, this did not prevent
Palestinian armed organizations in Gaza from launching large-scale rocket
attacks in August. In fact, Iron Dome may have challenged them to ratchet up
their fire in an effort to break through the defensive shield.

Another lesson from the two recent periods of escalation was the race
between the offense and defense. The lively public debate about Iron Dome
focused exclusively on its capability to defend Sderot and other Gaza
envelope communities, neglecting the growing threat on larger cities deeper
within Israel. It is now clear that the system's architects were correct in
designing it against both the shorter and longer range threats.

In conclusion, the jury is still out on the full implications of active
defense for the Israeli-Palestinian battlefield. More data must be gathered
(hopefully not too soon). Nevertheless, having already saved the lives of
Israeli civilians and soldiers, and having helped the political leadership
contain the fighting – which apparently it did – Iron Dome has already made
a significant contribution to Israel's security.

Uzi Rubin was head of the Israel Ministry of Defense "Arrow" defense program
against long-range missiles, and is the author of the recent BESA Center
study: The Missile Threat from Gaza: From Nuisance to Strategic Threat.

BESA Perspectives is published through the generosity of the Greg
Rosshandler Family.

_________________________________
1 Amos Harel: "Minister of Defense: A missile defense system will protect
Sderot within two and a half years," Haaretz, December 24 2007
2 Anshel Pfeffer: "Ophir Shoham, Is it cost effective to intercept a rocket
with a 100000 shekels interceptor?" Haaretz, April 11, 2011.
3 Noam Barkan, "Ruling the Dome," Yediot Aharonot, April 11, 2011.
4 Ibid.
5 Hanan Greenberg and Elior Levi, "Barak on Iron Dome: Does Not Provide a
100 Percent Answer," Ynet, March 25, 2011.
6 Ibid.
7 Eli Lake, "Israel Iron Dome Missile Defense System Hits 8% of Targets,"
Washington Post, August 29, 2011.
8 Lethality is reciprocal to RPF. A large RPF means that more rockets are
needed to cause one fatality, and vice versa.
9 See "From Harassment to Strategic Threat" by the present author, BESA
publication no. 87, page 17 fig. 3 (Hebrew).
10 According to a Ministry for Foreign Affairs website detailing Palestinian
rocket and mortar fire on Israel, the number of rockets hitting Israel in
April 2011 was 65, and in August 2011 149 – a grand total of 214 rockets.
See
http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-+Obstacle+to+Peace/Hamas+war+against+Israel/Palestinian_ceasefire_violations_since_end_Operation_Cast_Lead.htm.
It is not clear whether this source is more reliable than general media. In
any case, even with this lower estimate of the total number of rockets, the
main conclusions herein remain valid.
11 The victims of the Beersheba rocket attack on the night of August 20
failed to take cover when the rocket hit, see "ZAKA volunteer: the killed
and wounded were not sheltered within a protected space"
http://news.xoox.co.il/item_691648.htm
12 Reuven Pedatzur, "The Collapsed Dome," Haaretz, August 26, 2011.
13 Moshe Arens, "An Imperfect Pride," Haaretz, August 31, 2011.
14 The mayor of Ashdod, Yechiel Lassri, told the Walla news website that
"…the deployment of Iron Dome…is good news for the residents of Ashdod and
adds to their sense of security," August 31, 2011.
15 Amira Hass, "In the Gaza strip they erected mourning huts for the victims
of (Israel's) air raids, but not for the perpetrator of the (Eilat road)
raid," Haaretz, August 25, 2011.
16 Amos Harel, "A senior IAF officer: the success of Iron Dome saved another
IDF operation in Gaza," Haaretz, July 26, 2011.
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6)Rhode Island: Athens of America?
Walter Russell Mead

Rhode Island is looking more and more like Greece, and not in a good way. That is one message of this important piece by Mary Williams Walsh in the New York Times. Years of blue social policy have wrecked local and state government finance in the country’s smallest state, and now the bills are coming due. Services are being cut to the bone and elderly retirees are losing money they thought was secure.

In Rhode Island, it is Democrats, not nasty union-hating Republicans, who are doing the dirty work. Democratic mayors are telling their unions that there isn’t any money — not because they are vicious corporate stooges who hate working people and want to see them suffer, but because There. Isn’t. Any. Money.

Because Rhode Island listened to timeserving blue politicians too long, and union leaders and public sector workers lost their grip on any mathematical realities beyond the numbers at the ballot box, the pension system grew more and more out of control. State and local governments lurched into a crisis. Vote yourself a raise, vote yourself a pension: why not?

But there is financial math as well as political math and in any war with financial arithmetic, the money numbers win. If there isn’t any money, the checks won’t clear. Ultimately, you will have to fire existing workers, stop paying pensions or a mix of both. That is where Rhode Island is now: its economy can’t generate the revenue to support its existing governance system and to pay its pension obligations.



The Ostrich Party has long ruled Rhode Island; their heads planted firmly in the sand - if not in even darker and damper regions – Rhode Island politicians, government and union officials have done everything possible to conceal the true state of affairs from the voters, the bondholders, retirees and even themselves. Unrealistic assumptions about rates of return helped hide the ugly truth about the looming pension meltdown — and anybody who tried to raise the alarm about the coming crisis was hooted down as an enemy of the workers. Even now the true blue firing squads are assembling to shoot the messenger; Mary Williams Walsh can expect angry push back from a whole sector of American political life that thinks this whole problem will go away if we tax the rich, clap our hands and all say together, “I believe in government”.

But “objectively”, as our Marxist friends would say, the union leaders and their political chums were the worst enemies of the workers: they told state workers that their benefits were secure even as it became increasingly obvious that, as a matter of arithmetic, they were not.

Let’s be crystal clear about this. To tell a 50 year old pretty lies about the soundness of a pension plan is one of the most wicked and irresponsible things you can do without actually shedding blood; people who believe these phony promises will not make the extra savings, work the extra years or otherwise take steps to protect themselves until it is too late. Telling those pretty lies is exactly what Rhode Island’s establishment has been doing for some time; it is what Ostrich Party legislators, trade unionists, journalists and governors are still doing across much of the country.

Reasonable reforms could have made things much less painful, but the unions typically threaten to destroy the careers of any politician who tampers with the pension system until the truck actually starts falling over the cliff. Now the long fall has begun and Rhode Island and its retirees are caught in a cascade of bad news, lawsuits, and financial crisis. No Rhode Island retiree can rely on getting the benefits promised; nobody can predict how this will all work out.

That is not the kind of uncertainty that 70 year old retired teachers and firefighters should have to face. A decent society would not let that happen — but the blue social model in its decadent late shark-jumping years of fake promises is anything but decent. Political chicanery, fuzzy math, denial, rhetoric, ambition: this is how a union betrays its members, this is how politicians betray their constituents.

To give the devil his due, this monumental crack up was the result, in its early stages, of ignorance and complacency more than anything else. The union leadership and the statehouse pols took growth for granted. They had grown up in the post war boom; good times were what they expected. They believed that the American economy would continue to grow richer every year and that there was a never-failing cornucopia of “more” somewhere that would somehow make sure that there was always enough money in the kitty to redeem the promises made. You could always squeeze another quart out of the milk cow.

This was a natural mistake to make — in 1972. But state and local government ignored a generation of warnings that the wheels were coming off the car of the blue social model, and especially in rust belt states like Rhode Island. Factories closed, the economy changed, the state fiscal picture grew steadily worse, but these facts were not allowed to penetrate the closed shop in which the union leaders and their political allies made plans for the future. The state’s economy would continue to grow at a rate which would make it possible to pay new state workers higher and higher salaries even as a growing number of retirees could collect increasingly generous pensions — adjusted, of course, for inflation every year. You could tax the rich, defer maintenance, hit the bond markets — and when all else failed, you could assume that your underperforming pension reserves were invested in magic growth beans that would automatically gain 8.5 percent in value forever.

The union leadership in Rhode Island, as in the majority of US public and private workplaces, failed in the first task of the stakeholder: they failed to undertake and support changes that would ensure the health of the enterprise down the road. This is partly about wages, pensions and work rules: making unrealistic demands only stores up trouble down the road. But more profoundly it is about not thinking seriously about the future of the company or, in Rhode Island’s case, of the state.


What economic development options did Rhode Island have to build a sustainable new economy as the old one withered away? Locked into the assumptions of the blue social model, Rhode Island planners, like their counterparts across the country, fell for white elephant concepts like convention centers, those cliched “new urbanism” pedestrian malls and downtown redevelopments that never seem to work, Solyndra style industrial policy and all the other failed nostrums that strike upper middle class social engineers as cool but that rarely make anything as vulgar and utilitarian as money.

There was a lot of expensive churn, many consultants deposited checks, but the underlying economy never turned around. The serial failure of one plan after another to regenerate solid growth, turn around the population trend, put Medicare on a sustainable path, and reverse the decline of the cities never led to a questioning of basic assumptions — and it never led the Ostrich Party to think through the implications of economic stagnation and decline for the state’s pension system and its future budgeting.

More care and foresight could have spared Rhode Island’s workers and retirees some of the sacrifices that will now have to be made. But that would have forced the many members of the Ostrich Party to pull their heads out of the warm and comfortable dark in order to look around and act. Denial was psychologically more comfortable and politically safer. The more untenable the old system became, the more tightly they shut their eyes and closed their minds.

The lesson goes farther than Rhode Island. As Walsh points out in the Times, Rhode Island style pension meltdowns look increasingly possible in hard pressed cities and states across the country. Can public sector union leaders in other states begin to think proactively about how to build a post-blue economic future and put their muscle behind genuinely forward looking development ideas or will they wait, as in Rhode Island, for the truck to go over the cliff?

We can dream. Yes, we can.

After Rhode Island, What Next?
As the American political system attempts to grapple with the growing pension, debt and entitlement crisis, three types of responses seem to be emerging. There is the true blue ostrich approach of the unions themselves and their closest allies: denial and rage. There is the attitude of more centrist Democrats like Governor Cuomo and Mayor Emanuel: make prudent cuts, hold the line on spending, work to quietly make government more efficient without jumping into a full scale confrontation with the unions. And there is the Scott Walker, dragonslayer approach: take them on.

The rage and denial crowd in the Ostrich Party, rumps in the air, have nowhere to go. Both the Cuomo and the Walker approaches have their merits — though it seems to me that neither is exactly what we need. Cuomo style gradualism may soften the hard landing, but it doesn’t do enough to reverse the decline of the blue state economies. Upstate New York is in desperate shape, and it cannot prosper without a radical reduction of its cost structure. New York City is simply becoming more and more of an appendage to Wall Street, even as public opinion in the city turns against the one healthy industry it still has. Governor Cuomo’s policy mix holds out hope to slow the decline — but there is little to suggest that New York can go back to the innovation and leadership that once made it the country’s most dynamic growth engine and a wonder of the world.

The Cuomo/Emanuel Democrats want to fight the unions and the government lobby over specific issues, but they don’t want to pay the ideological and political costs of taking on the worldview behind the blue model machine. I think leadership today has to do more: political leaders need to talk to the public about what has changed and why, and talk also about where we can go from here. Intelligently managing the decline of the blue social model is better than nothing, but what is really needed is to prepare a transition to a new kind of growth.

But if the Mama Bear New Democrats serve their porridge too cool, the Papa Bear Republicans like Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and Ohio’s John Kasich risk serving it too hot.

Polarizing politics and demonizing state and local government workers is not a good idea. It is unfair for one thing; it is bad politics for another. Toxic blue model legacy costs are the problem: rigidly bureaucratic government structures, unrealistic costs, years of underfunded pension plans, regulations that choke growth and initiative, outdated progressive ideas about how change works — these are the roots of our problems, not the middle school teacher down the street or the retired post office worker living modestly on a pension that may be underfunded but is hardly a bonanza.

The fifty year old teacher, fireman or police officer may have been naive to believe his or her union leaders, the politicians and the journalists who all said there was nothing to worry about — but most of those workers cannot be called “greedy” or “selfish”. They are victims of a complex, multi-player Ponzi scheme and have been lied to by a lot of people for a long time. They also face some serious financial costs. Not only are their pensions likely to be less generous and solid than they were led to expect; they may well face layoffs and wage freezes as states struggle to cope with legacy costs.

Reform cannot and should not be understood simply as an assault on state and local government workers — although these workers cannot be insulated from the general consequences of a major failure of our political system. The problem is not that teachers and firefighters earn “too much” money; the problem is that we have developed a dysfunctional social system which cannot pay its bills. The public economy needs to be rationalized and restructured, but the most important job is to revitalize and energize the private sector.

Ultimately the only solution is for the country to move on to a new post-blue economic model that can generate enough wealth to cover our existing debts. In the absence of a serious growth agenda, both the Cuomo and the Walker approaches can’t get the job done. And what the country needs is a competition between growth strategies, not a contest between strategies for cutbacks.

In the meantime, there is one thing that state and municipal workers and taxpayers can and should demand: honest and transparent accounting standards that make absolutely clear and explicit what the state of public pensions systems really are, what the assumptions are that underpin them, what the chances are that the systems may fall short, and what the fiscal consequences of any shortcomings are likely to be. Those reports ought to be annual, they ought to be impartial, they ought to be conducted in accordance with the strictest accounting principles, and the results ought to be public.

This is something that everybody should support: from the Tea Party to OWS and beyond; accurate public reporting on the state of worker pensions should be a no-brainer. If we can’t solve our problems overnight, let’s at least have a no-denial zone when it comes to public pensions.

Defend your country: kick an ostrich.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------7).Administration Proposes Changes to Mortgage Refinancing Program
By Gene J. Puskar


The federal government said on Monday that it would overhaul a program that lets homeowners refinance mortgage loans at lower interest rates to address problems that have limited participation to less than a million borrowers, far below the lofty estimates when the program started in 2009.


The refinancing program announced on Monday will let people qualify for new loans no matter how far the value of their homes have declined.

The White House described the changes as part of a broader plan to boost the economy through measures that do not require legislative action, reflecting a pragmatic recognition that Congress is deadlocked on economic issues, and a political effort to blame Republicans for the standoff.

“We have far too many Americans who have paid their bills and done everything right on their mortgages and yet they’re still stuck with interest rates of 6 or 7 percent,” said Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development. The existing program, he said, “has not reached the scale that we had hoped and the scale that it needs to reach.”

The broader refinancing program, which will still take months to implement, will let people qualify for new loans no matter how far the value of their homes have declined, and without regard to their financial situations so long as they have made at least six consecutive monthly mortgage payments. The plan also will reduce the fees that borrowers must pay, for example by dispensing with the need for an appraisal in many cases and by automatically transferring mortgage insurance to the new loan.

The plan also seeks to encourage banks and mortgage companies to participate by eliminating their legal responsibility for problems with the original loan, a significant financial benefit in many cases.

But the government maintained the narrow focus of the original program, significantly limiting the potential impact of the changes. The refinancing offer only applies to loans in the portfolios of the government-owned mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It only applies to loans that they acquired before May 31, 2009. And it only applies to loans worth more than 80 percent of the value of the home. In other words, it does not matter how deeply a homeowner is underwater — the loan can be worth twice the value of the home — but owners with more equity are not eligible.

The government estimates the revised program will allow perhaps 1 million homeowners to refinance — less than it once projected would benefit from the original program.

The changes announced Monday address a series of problems that lenders and outside experts warned from the outset would undermine the original program. In particular, the high cost of refinancing proved a formidable barrier to many homeowners struggling to pay their bills. So did the strict income requirements, which in many cases created the odd situation that a person who had never fallen behind on their mortgage payments was unable to qualify for a loan with a lower monthly payment.

The terms of the program are set by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, an independent agency that administers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and that had resisted calls to broaden the program because it said its primary responsibility was to staunch the losses at the two companies. The agency said Monday that it had agreed to make the changes because doing so would contribute to that goal.

“Our goal in pursuing these changes is to create refinancing opportunities for these borrowers, while reducing risk for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and bringing a measure of stability to housing markets,” said the agency’s acting director, Edward J. DeMarco.

Some of the most important changes concern technical issues deep inside the machinery of the mortgage process. For example, borrowers who took two mortgage loans, and cannot afford to repay the second loan, cannot refinance the first loan without the permission of the second lender. The government has now negotiated a blanket grant of permission from many lenders.

Gene Sperling, director of the president’s National Economic Council, said the mortgage industry had shown a new willingness to facilitate refinancing, making the broader program possible.

“What has changed and made this more viable and led the president to push all of us even harder was that there was a growing awareness among all the stakeholders” that this problem needed to be addressed, Mr. Sperling said on a conference call Monday to discuss the announcement from the federal housing agency.





7a)Can the Youth Vote Be Bought For a Trillion Dollars?
By Bill Frezza

In the realm of economic stimulus proposals, none is as audacious, as Machiavellian, and as transparently designed to buy the votes of a critical electoral demographic than the proposal to forgive all student loans. Even if it fails, as it likely will, the seamless coordination between members of Congress, leftist advocacy groups, and the media to try to sell this idea is a perfect example of how brilliantly certain factions play their hand in the high-stakes game of crafting the dominant political narrative.

Launched into the teeth of the Occupy Wall Street movement, where unemployable art history majors share tents with urine soaked street bums, Rep. Hansen Clark's (D-Mich) bill to forgive outstanding student loans is finding strong resonance among young people who want their voices heard. Those protesting bailouts are now shouting, "I Want Mine."

MoveOn.Org recently came on board, hanging a "Free Money" sign on its website. This allowed the group to collect the email addresses of over 630,000 twenty-somethings. Attracted to add their names to a petition to Congress for free tuition, they first had to sign up to receive the never ending flow of emails emanating from the MoveOn meme machine. You couldn't buy a better mailing list of receptive minds eager to propagate their catchy slogans.

For those not paying close attention, outstanding student loan debt will soon pass the trillion dollar mark, exceeding the nation's total credit card debt. Following the arc of the now-nationalized home mortgage market, the student loan market has evolved from being privately managed to government subsidized, to government guaranteed, and finally to government owned and operated.

And, like subprime mortgages, loans to aspiring college students are driven by government social policies that take no consideration of any relevant indicators of the ability to repay. Thus, gender studies majors get the same deal as aspiring petroleum engineers.

As the surplus of college graduates with no marketable skills grows, all colleges, from the for-profit education mills to the Ivy League, benefit from the inflation-outpacing price increases which government subsidies fuel. And, like any business run by Uncle Sam that is allowed to accumulate off- balance sheet debt, the now centralized program has become yet another powder keg waiting to explode in taxpayers' faces.

With an election looming and the federal student loan default rate creeping up toward 10%, why wait for the explosion and its consequences when incumbent politicians can instantly transform a festering fiscal disaster caused by progressive social policies into a Keynesian solution to our economic ills?

Voilà-a stimulus program that requires no current cash appropriations! Why should young people send loan payments to Washington when they could be adding "aggregate demand" to a stalled economy by upgrading to the latest iPhone, if you can persuade them not pay down their credit card bills or save for their own futures.

And what better group to appeal to than the once-idealistic youth that turned out in force to put Hope and Change in the White House, now drifting disillusioned through the malaise of the actual Obama presidency?

Thanks to the magic of the smoke-and-mirrors accounting standards under which our federal government is permitted to operate, no one will ever be able to pin the cost of such a massive default on the parties actually responsible. Too few seem to care enough about the long term moral hazard generated by this-or any other-federal bailout to raise a principled objection.

And if this "well-intentioned" amnesty effort is derailed before it becomes law, petition signers are certain to receive emails telling them exactly which stingy legislators to blame when they go to the polls. Hats off to the perpetrators of this scheme; you can't concoct a better heads-I-win, tails-you-lose strategy.

Someday the forces of fiscal sanity, limited government, and personal responsibility might learn to manipulate public opinion as effectively as those leading us down the road to ruin. But I wouldn't count on it. The silent majority working overtime trying to dig the country out of this mess has neither the time nor the tools to compete in the war of words with the entrenched intelligentsia, ever ready to throw another brick on their load. That's one instance where I'd be happy to be proved wrong.


Bill Frezza is a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and a Boston-based venture capitalist. He can be reached at bill@vereverus.com.
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