---This evening I had the pleasure of attending a meeting at which: Raphael Danziger, Ph.D. spoke. Rafi is an expert on The Middle east.
He spoke about the problems Israel faces and emphasized the main problem is Iran.
Rafi stated sanctions have been working to the extent that they have curtailed Iran's ability to move their nuclear program forward. Iran must now purchase much of their nuclear equipment needs in the black market and this has allowed various sources to throw mud into the gears and delay their progress. He cited the Stuxnet, the recent explosion in their rocket making facility that killed their head military officer in charge etc. as prime examples. He also reminded us that America developed an atomic weapon in four years and the Iranians have been at it for well over 15 and still have no workable nuclear bomb.
The question is whether Iran will succeed in becoming a nuclear possessor but more important is Ayatollah's desire for the regime to survive. In this regard, again, sanctions are putting pressure on the government to assuage the demands of their citizens to enjoy basic needs at a cost that is within their government's ability to provide.
Rafi acknowledged that more should and could be done, such as sanctioning trading with Iran's Central Bank, but doing so was not easy to co-ordinate and created repercussions. (I cited Avi Jorisch's report, in a previous memo, challenging Obama's claims regarding sanctions effectiveness and citing where they were falling short in many cases.)
The problem beyond Iran is they are the financier of Hezballah and Hamas and Rafi explained how The Sinai has come under total control of various Bedouin renegade tribes and all efforts, on the part of Egypt to control the area, have failed. Sinai has become the equivalent of our own once roaring Outlaw West.
Iran supplies Hamas with weaponry assembled in Gaza and shipped in through the various tunnels which I have reported on in the past.
The second problem Israel faces is with Egypt and whether those in control, after the elections are complete, will honor the 30 plus year old peace treaty. The forecast does not look favorable in view of the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood should basically wind up with more than a solid majority of Egypt's Parliament.
The picture in Lebanon is also a dire one as long as Iran is able to work with Syria to control events in Lebanon and thereby, continue supplying Hezballah with weapons etc.
The picture in Syria is fluid and should the regime fail and the Sunni's rise to power that would be a positive because the Sunni and Shia/Alawait are in opposition. This could serve as a restraint on Iran.
Moving to Jordan, the picture is one in flux as the King has been forced to temper his relationship with Israel in view of the downside results of the so called Arab Spring which has sprung a leak.
Turkey also has become a thorn but seems, for the moment, to understand if they align themselves totally with the radical Islamists they might be doing so at the expense of their relationship with the West and their NATO membership.
Rafi answered a host of questions but these were the main points I thought worth reporting.
For what it is worth my own take is that Obama still does not fully grasp the extent to which his policies are wrong headed. He obviously, as a result of his Sec. of Defense's recent demands on Israel,believes the entire problem is due to the settlement issue which was never one until he made it so because of his own naivety.
Demanding Israel get to the 'damn' conference table to negotiate with those who have nothing to offer and seek every concession is a prescription for failure.
The truth is, as long as the West remains dependent upon Middle East oil no rational policy approach is likely to be forthcoming. America can apply pressure on its ally Israel and therefore, Arabs can and will remain intransigent. If Iran eventually gets a nuclear weapon then all bets are off because our declining influence will have sunk around our ankles.
The only thing Arabs understand is power and the willingness to use it and as long as the West remains over their barrel of oil nothing positive is likely to happen and another war is probably a matter of time.
---
My theory:
Politicians take money from the top in order to expand government.
Government is more interested in the bottom because expanding the bottom is how bureaucrats survive, grow and thus, thrive.
Bureaucrats have no interest in actual solutions only their appearance for if they did they would ultimately have less to serve and eventually diminished job opportunities .
Also, expanding government provides jobs for the underclass disproportionate to their population and this provides psychological nourishment for the pay back crowd for all the alleged social wrongs (some real and many imagined and/or claimed.)
Finally, economic expansion benefits the top and is difficult to sustain because that would necessitate maintaining sound economic principles and good governance. Therefore, it is much easier to wreck the economy and, in so doing, spread the diminished wealth (or increased poverty) and thus, the need for more government solutions and bureaucrats.
This is what Obama is about and he has been effective at accomplishing.
If you think otherwise please explain Obama's many actions which support my theory, ie. postponing our energy independence, expanding the welfare state and bureaucracy, overspending , adding new rules and regulations overseen by unelected officials, ie. czars and the list is virtually endless.
Re-elect him at further peril to The Republic. (See 1 and 1b below.)
---
Dershowitz takes on Mearsheimer and, by indirection, 'ole Jimmy. Two peanuts in the same pod. (See 2 below.)
---
Then Taranto on Gingrich. (See 2a below.)
I wrote early on about the infatuation with Gingrich's debating style and his tough stance. Yes, Newt is no patsy by any manner of means but he can be a bully and has proven more than capable of self destructing because his ego is bigger than his out sized head and brain.
I continue to warn Republicans not to fall in love with Gingrich because he might out debate Obama. As I recently wrote, then what? A president must also govern and to do that you need voters to make the sacrifices required of them and get those on the opposite aisle to join in the voyage of going against their philosophy. Not an easy task under normal circumstances and an even more difficult one for a nation on the verge of financial, social and educational bankruptcy.
Notwithstanding the above, I would vote for Gingrich in a heart beat were he the final choice, though Romney is more preferable, because getting rid of Obama is my sole mission until after Nov. 2012.
---
Gaffney and Glick on Obama, Egypt and the recent election which elevated The Muslim Brotherhood!
One more hyped Obama-Clinton diplomatic success that ends in a fiasco.(See 3 and 3a below.)
---
Sent to me by a friend, fellow Marine and memo reader.
In total agreement with everything this theoretical young girl writes except the last proposal which is probably unconstitutional.
Her thinking is what made our nation what is once was and we are no longer able to afford what progressive thinking has brought upon us and we can/should no longer sustain. (See 6 below.)
---
Dick
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)If the Lights Go Out
Regulators are letting EPA compromise U.S. electric reliability.
Say what you will about Obama Administration regulators, their problem has rarely been a failure to regulate. Which makes the abdication of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission especially notable—and dangerous for the U.S. power supply.
Last week FERC convened a conference on the wave of new Environmental Protection Agency rules that are designed to force dozens of coal-fired power plants to shut down. The meeting barely fulfilled the commission's legal obligations, but despite warnings from expert after expert, including some of its own, the FERC Commissioners refuse to do anything about this looming threat to electric reliability.
The latest body to sound the EPA alarm is the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), which last Tuesday released its exhaustive annual 10-year projections. "Environmental regulations are shown to be the number one risk to reliability over the next one to five years," the report explains.
NERC's forecasts are the gold standard for the U.S. power system because they are built from the bottom up, starting with finely grained data from individual plants. NERC has been doing this work since 1967, and since 2005 it has operated under the FERC umbrella as an "electric reliability organization" similar to Finra, the securities regulator with quasi-governmental duties.
The threat is that the EPA is triggering what NERC calls "an unprecedented resource-mix change," with utilities switching to natural gas from coal. For the first time in U.S. history, net coal capacity is in decline. On top of the 38 gigawatts of generation that is already being run below normal levels or slated for early retirement, NERC predicts another 36 to 59 gigawatts will come offline by 2018, depending on the "scope and timing" of EPA demands. That could mean nearly a quarter of all coal-fired capacity.
According to the report, "the nation's power grid will be stressed in ways never before experienced" and reliability depends on building new power plants to cover the losses. But the electric industry has only three years to comply under one EPA regulation known as the utility rule that is meant to target mercury and is due to be finalized soon, while many other destructive rules are in the works.
Replacing power is not like replacing a lost cellphone. There are bottlenecks in permitting, engineering, financing and building a new plant and then tying it to the electricity network. Over this same three-year window, NERC estimates that between 576 and 677 plants will need to be temporarily shut down to install retrofits like scrubbers or baghouses.
All of this has been obvious to anyone paying attention. In its draft utility rule the EPA itself warned that "sources integral to reliable operation" may be forced to shut down, before it sanitized these concessions from the final proposal. Twenty-seven states say their regional reliability is at risk, concerns echoed by FBR Capital, Credit Suisse, Fitch, Bernstein Research and several grid operators. FERC's own Office of Electric Reliability produced an alarming study, before its work was disowned by Chairman Jon Wellinghoff, as we reported in the September 26 editorial "Inside the EPA."
Southern Co., the utility that covers states from Mississippi to Georgia, says the EPA's timeline can't be met "at any cost" and that in its region "reliability cannot be maintained without load shedding"—that is, rationing power to large industrial consumers. American Electric Power, which operates in 11 Midwest states, says that option may be a "last resort" as well. This is the kind of political overhang that harms economic growth.
Keep in mind that the EPA estimates that the benefits to society from the mercury reductions in the utility rule max out at $6.1 million, total, while imposing $11 billion in compliance costs annually. That is a crazy tradeoff even if it didn't endanger the electric grid.
The best option would be to kill the utility rule and put the EPA on probation, but second best is a longer phase-in to give utilities more time to comply. FERC could do some practical good by formally issuing a "215 finding" that the EPA utility rule endangers reliability. Or the White House budget and regulatory office could require the EPA to repropose the rule with more flexibility. Or President Obama could declare that the rule endangers national security. Or Congress could block the rule, though that would take more fortitude than Senate Democrats have shown so far.
None of this is likely to happen because it would interfere with the larger Administration priority to kill as much coal power as rapidly as possible to serve the global warming agenda. But when the brownouts and cost-spikes occur, don't blame the utilities. Blame their regulator.
1b)Debt and Taxes: Settled Science
By Randall Hoven
When a Democrat says he is serious about our debt problem, what he means is that he's pleased as punch to have another way to sell you on a tax increase. Democrats, being smarter than Republicans, use math and logic to make the case: if you raise tax rates, you get more revenue; if you get more revenue, you decrease the deficit; decrease deficits and you get debt under control.
It all sounds so simple and unassailable: debt is the disease and taxes are the cure. Colin Powell calls it algebra.
However, the hidden assumption behind all those syllogisms is everything else equal. Unfortunately, everything else does not stay equal. Believe it or not, humans tend to change their economic behavior when you change their economic circumstances. (Hard to believe, I know.) To understand that, one needs to go beyond the Music Man's "think method" and look at real-world data.
The first syllogism, that raising tax rates yields more revenue, can be demolished by one simple graph: the federal government's top tax rates and tax revenues over time. The top rate has varied between 28% and 92%, yet total federal revenues have been consistently about 18% of GDP since World War II.
For those who refuse to think for themselves and need a credentialed authority, I give you an academic study saying the same thing: the Laffer Curve is real. Science says.
But let's move beyond that first syllogism, and assume you actually get more revenue, however you managed to do that.
If debt is the disease and revenue is the cure, we can simply look at a bunch of countries and see if more revenue leads to less debt in the real world. If it does, Democrats, Colin Powell, and other tax-lovers might be onto something.
The International Monetary Fund has the numbers we need. There are 26 countries that the IMF calls "advanced economies" for which it has both government revenue and debt data. Here is the plot of that data for 2011.
The data seem mixed. There are low-debt countries at both ends of the revenue spectrum, with plenty of high-debt countries at most levels of revenue. If you think you see a slightly downward trend, you would be right. However, that trend is not statistically significant.
Politicians take money from the top in order to expand government.
Government is more interested in the bottom because expanding the bottom is how bureaucrats survive, grow and thus, thrive.
Bureaucrats have no interest in actual solutions only their appearance for if they did they would ultimately have less to serve and eventually diminished job opportunities .
Also, expanding government provides jobs for the underclass disproportionate to their population and this provides psychological nourishment for the pay back crowd for all the alleged social wrongs (some real and many imagined and/or claimed.)
Finally, economic expansion benefits the top and is difficult to sustain because that would necessitate maintaining sound economic principles and good governance. Therefore, it is much easier to wreck the economy and, in so doing, spread the diminished wealth (or increased poverty) and thus, the need for more government solutions and bureaucrats.
This is what Obama is about and he has been effective at accomplishing.
If you think otherwise please explain Obama's many actions which support my theory, ie. postponing our energy independence, expanding the welfare state and bureaucracy, overspending , adding new rules and regulations overseen by unelected officials, ie. czars and the list is virtually endless.
Re-elect him at further peril to The Republic. (See 1 and 1b below.)
---
Dershowitz takes on Mearsheimer and, by indirection, 'ole Jimmy. Two peanuts in the same pod. (See 2 below.)
---
Then Taranto on Gingrich. (See 2a below.)
I wrote early on about the infatuation with Gingrich's debating style and his tough stance. Yes, Newt is no patsy by any manner of means but he can be a bully and has proven more than capable of self destructing because his ego is bigger than his out sized head and brain.
I continue to warn Republicans not to fall in love with Gingrich because he might out debate Obama. As I recently wrote, then what? A president must also govern and to do that you need voters to make the sacrifices required of them and get those on the opposite aisle to join in the voyage of going against their philosophy. Not an easy task under normal circumstances and an even more difficult one for a nation on the verge of financial, social and educational bankruptcy.
Notwithstanding the above, I would vote for Gingrich in a heart beat were he the final choice, though Romney is more preferable, because getting rid of Obama is my sole mission until after Nov. 2012.
---
Gaffney and Glick on Obama, Egypt and the recent election which elevated The Muslim Brotherhood!
One more hyped Obama-Clinton diplomatic success that ends in a fiasco.(See 3 and 3a below.)
---
Sent to me by a friend, fellow Marine and memo reader.
In total agreement with everything this theoretical young girl writes except the last proposal which is probably unconstitutional.
Her thinking is what made our nation what is once was and we are no longer able to afford what progressive thinking has brought upon us and we can/should no longer sustain. (See 6 below.)
---
Dick
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)If the Lights Go Out
Regulators are letting EPA compromise U.S. electric reliability.
Say what you will about Obama Administration regulators, their problem has rarely been a failure to regulate. Which makes the abdication of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission especially notable—and dangerous for the U.S. power supply.
Last week FERC convened a conference on the wave of new Environmental Protection Agency rules that are designed to force dozens of coal-fired power plants to shut down. The meeting barely fulfilled the commission's legal obligations, but despite warnings from expert after expert, including some of its own, the FERC Commissioners refuse to do anything about this looming threat to electric reliability.
The latest body to sound the EPA alarm is the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), which last Tuesday released its exhaustive annual 10-year projections. "Environmental regulations are shown to be the number one risk to reliability over the next one to five years," the report explains.
NERC's forecasts are the gold standard for the U.S. power system because they are built from the bottom up, starting with finely grained data from individual plants. NERC has been doing this work since 1967, and since 2005 it has operated under the FERC umbrella as an "electric reliability organization" similar to Finra, the securities regulator with quasi-governmental duties.
The threat is that the EPA is triggering what NERC calls "an unprecedented resource-mix change," with utilities switching to natural gas from coal. For the first time in U.S. history, net coal capacity is in decline. On top of the 38 gigawatts of generation that is already being run below normal levels or slated for early retirement, NERC predicts another 36 to 59 gigawatts will come offline by 2018, depending on the "scope and timing" of EPA demands. That could mean nearly a quarter of all coal-fired capacity.
According to the report, "the nation's power grid will be stressed in ways never before experienced" and reliability depends on building new power plants to cover the losses. But the electric industry has only three years to comply under one EPA regulation known as the utility rule that is meant to target mercury and is due to be finalized soon, while many other destructive rules are in the works.
Replacing power is not like replacing a lost cellphone. There are bottlenecks in permitting, engineering, financing and building a new plant and then tying it to the electricity network. Over this same three-year window, NERC estimates that between 576 and 677 plants will need to be temporarily shut down to install retrofits like scrubbers or baghouses.
All of this has been obvious to anyone paying attention. In its draft utility rule the EPA itself warned that "sources integral to reliable operation" may be forced to shut down, before it sanitized these concessions from the final proposal. Twenty-seven states say their regional reliability is at risk, concerns echoed by FBR Capital, Credit Suisse, Fitch, Bernstein Research and several grid operators. FERC's own Office of Electric Reliability produced an alarming study, before its work was disowned by Chairman Jon Wellinghoff, as we reported in the September 26 editorial "Inside the EPA."
Southern Co., the utility that covers states from Mississippi to Georgia, says the EPA's timeline can't be met "at any cost" and that in its region "reliability cannot be maintained without load shedding"—that is, rationing power to large industrial consumers. American Electric Power, which operates in 11 Midwest states, says that option may be a "last resort" as well. This is the kind of political overhang that harms economic growth.
Keep in mind that the EPA estimates that the benefits to society from the mercury reductions in the utility rule max out at $6.1 million, total, while imposing $11 billion in compliance costs annually. That is a crazy tradeoff even if it didn't endanger the electric grid.
The best option would be to kill the utility rule and put the EPA on probation, but second best is a longer phase-in to give utilities more time to comply. FERC could do some practical good by formally issuing a "215 finding" that the EPA utility rule endangers reliability. Or the White House budget and regulatory office could require the EPA to repropose the rule with more flexibility. Or President Obama could declare that the rule endangers national security. Or Congress could block the rule, though that would take more fortitude than Senate Democrats have shown so far.
None of this is likely to happen because it would interfere with the larger Administration priority to kill as much coal power as rapidly as possible to serve the global warming agenda. But when the brownouts and cost-spikes occur, don't blame the utilities. Blame their regulator.
1b)Debt and Taxes: Settled Science
By Randall Hoven
When a Democrat says he is serious about our debt problem, what he means is that he's pleased as punch to have another way to sell you on a tax increase. Democrats, being smarter than Republicans, use math and logic to make the case: if you raise tax rates, you get more revenue; if you get more revenue, you decrease the deficit; decrease deficits and you get debt under control.
It all sounds so simple and unassailable: debt is the disease and taxes are the cure. Colin Powell calls it algebra.
However, the hidden assumption behind all those syllogisms is everything else equal. Unfortunately, everything else does not stay equal. Believe it or not, humans tend to change their economic behavior when you change their economic circumstances. (Hard to believe, I know.) To understand that, one needs to go beyond the Music Man's "think method" and look at real-world data.
The first syllogism, that raising tax rates yields more revenue, can be demolished by one simple graph: the federal government's top tax rates and tax revenues over time. The top rate has varied between 28% and 92%, yet total federal revenues have been consistently about 18% of GDP since World War II.
For those who refuse to think for themselves and need a credentialed authority, I give you an academic study saying the same thing: the Laffer Curve is real. Science says.
But let's move beyond that first syllogism, and assume you actually get more revenue, however you managed to do that.
If debt is the disease and revenue is the cure, we can simply look at a bunch of countries and see if more revenue leads to less debt in the real world. If it does, Democrats, Colin Powell, and other tax-lovers might be onto something.
The International Monetary Fund has the numbers we need. There are 26 countries that the IMF calls "advanced economies" for which it has both government revenue and debt data. Here is the plot of that data for 2011.
The data seem mixed. There are low-debt countries at both ends of the revenue spectrum, with plenty of high-debt countries at most levels of revenue. If you think you see a slightly downward trend, you would be right. However, that trend is not statistically significant.If we remove those four Scandinavian countries from the list, the graph looks like this.
Now the trend is up, meaning the more revenue collected, the more debt endured -- the exact opposite of Colin Powell's algebra. (Although the correlation is still weak -- not statistically significant.)
I'm not sure what the Scandinavian countries are doing right, but here are two things they have in common: (1) relatively flat tax structures and (2) significant cuts in the levels of government spending since 1993.
The Tax Foundation used OECD data to look at the tax progressivity of 24 OECD countries. Specifically, they looked at the ratio of taxes-to-income of the top 10% of income-earners. The most progressively taxed country of those 24 was the U.S., with a ratio of 1.35. Norway came in at only 0.95, a slightly regressive tax structure. Sweden came in with a ratio of 1.00, perfectly flat. Denmark was 1.02, virtually flat also. Finland was 1.20, a tad progressive, but not nearly as progressive as the U.S.
Just to be clear, a progressive tax structure means the rich (by income) pay a higher percentage of their incomes in taxes than the non-rich do. The Scandi countries certainly have high taxes, but they are paid in almost equal percentages across income groups. If you want to be like them, it would mean raising taxes most significantly on the non-rich. The Scandis don't get their revenues from the 1%; they get them from the 99%! (Funny, where are Norway's occupiers?)
On the spending front, Sweden's government spent 68% of Sweden's GDP in 1993, the highest in Europe at the time. By 2011 it was spending 48% (below France and Italy, for examples). While not a low number, that is a cut of 20% of GDP. The amount cut was the equivalent of the entire federal government of the U.S.! (Like a 200-pound man losing almost 60 pounds.)
Since 1993, Sweden cut government spending by 20% of GDP. Finland cut 11%, Norway cut 5%, and Denmark cut 3% of GDP. In contrast, the high-debt countries of Greece, Japan, France, Portugal, the U.K., and the U.S. all grew spending as a fraction of GDP since 1993. The U.S. in particular is at record levels of spending for peacetime.
To summarize: the everything-else-equal algebra of Colin Powell does not hold up in the real world. There's virtually no relationship between level of revenue and level of debt among advanced economies. Outside Scandinavia, higher revenue leads to higher debt, if it has any effect on debt at all.
And if you want to imitate the low-debt countries of Scandinavia, raise taxes on the non-rich most, and cut government spending.
Democrats, and those who love to compromise with them, advocate the exact opposite policies. Their "think method" syllogisms are all wrong.
High tax rates don't mean high revenues.
High revenues don't mean low debt.
Progressive tax structures don't mean either high revenues or low debt. In fact, the correlation seems just the opposite.
Any new revenues will have to come most from the 99%, not the 1% already highly taxed.
Cutting spending seems to be a good way to avoid debt, just like the Tea Party said from the beginning.
Here is my tip to Democrats, global warming alarmists, and other "think method" aficionados: the real world should drive your models, not vice-versa.
Randall Hoven can be followed on Twitter.
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2)Shunning an academic endorser of anti-Semitism
By Alan Dershowitz
Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz criticizes John Mearsheimer’s praise of a controversial text on Jewish identity.
Imagine your son or daughter is admitted to the University of Chicago, one of the world’s most elite institutions of learning, and tells you that he has been lucky enough to have a course with one of the university’s most prominent professors, John Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Then imagine your child tells you that his favorite professor has just recommended that everyone should read a “fascinating and provocative” book that makes the following assertions of fact:
While the Holocaust “was not at all an historical narrative,” the “accusations of Jews making matzo out of young Goyim’s blood,” may be true (page 175, 185).
Jews caused the recent credit crunch, which the author calls “the Zio-punch” (page 22).
The American media “failed to warn the American people of the enemy within” because of money (page 27).
“[M]ore and more Jews are being pulled into an obscure, dangerous and unethical fellowship” (page 21).
If Iran and Israel fight a nuclear war that kills millions of people, “some may be bold enough to argue that ‘Hitler might have been right after all’” (page 179).
The “new Jewish religion…could well be the most sinister religion known to man…” (page 149).
The author of the book containing these statements has told students that he cannot “say whether it’s right or not to burn down a synagogue. I can say that it is a rational act.” He has also apologized to the Nazis for having earlier compared them to Israel:
“Many of us including me tend to equate Israel to Nazi Germany. Rather often I myself join others and argue that Israelis are the Nazis of our time. I want to take this opportunity to amend my statement. Israelis are not the Nazis of our time and the Nazis were not the Israelis of their time. Israel is in fact far worse than Nazi Germany and the above equation is simply meaningless and misleading.”
He has written that we “must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously,” and that “with Fagin and Shylock in mind, Israeli barbarism and organ trafficking seem to be just other events in an endless hellish continuum.”
The scenario described above—a prominent professor endorsing the content of a blatantly anti-Semitic book—is not imaginary. John Mearsheimer has in fact written a glowing endorsement (this “fascinating and provocative” book “should be widely read.”) of a virulently anti-Semitic book by an infamously bigoted author.
The book is titled The Wandering Who? and has just been published by Gilad Atzmon, a British saxophonist and well-known bigot, who acknowledges that many of the “insights” in his book come from a man who “was an anti-Semite” and a hater of “almost everything that fails to be Aryan masculinity” (page 89-90). He declares himself a “proud self-hating Jew” and writes of his “contempt” of “the Jew in me” (page 94). Mearsheimer’s endorsement appears prominently on the first page of the book. He is not merely defending Atzmon’s right to publish this anti-Semitic book; he is endorsing the book’s content.
Mearsheimer was joined in his endorsement of this anti-Semitic book by Richard Falk, the Milibank Professor of International Law Emeritus at Princeton University. Falk’s endorsement, which appears on the cover of The Wandering Who?, calls the book “absorbing,” “moving,” and “transformative.” He says the book has “integrity” and should not only “be read but reflect[ed] upon and discuss[ed] widely.” One wonders precisely which part of the book Falk wants his students to discuss widely: that the Holocaust is “not an historical narrative”? That Jews may be guilty of “making matzo out of young Goyim’s blood”? or the possibility that “Hitler may have been right after all”?
I have certainly seen strong academic endorsements of books that are extreme in their hatred of Israel, but never in my long professional life have I encountered prominent American academics endorsing blatant anti-Semitism. A red line has been crossed for the first time, and this dangerous and unprecedented crossing must be noted and responded to.
Professor Mearsheimer should neither be fired nor censured for his endorsement of the world’s oldest bigotry, because his academic freedom gives him the right to endorse anti-Semitic views and to endorse any book he chooses.
But unless Mearsheimer publicly withdraws his endorsement, he should be shunned by his colleagues and his students for collaborating with evil. Mearsheimer may not be an anti-Semite himself, but he has given aid and comfort to anti-Semitism by urging his students to take seriously the content of The Wandering Who?
The sad reality is that Mearsheimer is not being shunned. He is being supported by his colleague, Brian Leiter, the Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School, who says that the criticism of Mearsheimer is “hysterical” because Atzmon’s “positions [do not mark him] as an anti-Semite [but rather as] cosmopolitan.” Mearsheimer is also being supported by my Harvard colleague, Professor Stephen Walt and several other American academics.
Therein lies the shame—and the danger.
Alan Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
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2a) Strange Newt Respect
By James Taranto
Will Newt Gingrich be the next president of the United States?
Back in the spring, when his campaign seemed to be imploding in hilarious fashion, it was a question nobody was asking. Over the past few weeks, however, Gingrich has become either the main GOP challenger to front-runner Mitt Romney or the front-runner in his own right.
Among the four states with the earliest nomination contests, Romney leads only in New Hampshire. (As Nate Silver notes, Romney also had a comfortable Granite State lead a month before the 2008 Iowa caucuses, but he went on to lose to John McCain.) Gingrich is now up in Iowa, South Carolina and Florida. Let's focus on the last, since it's a crucial swing state with 29 electoral votes.
Last week a survey of likely Republican primary voters from Public Policy Polling, a respected Democratic firm, found Gingrich ahead in Florida with 47%, to just 17% for Romney. Herman Cain, now an ex-candidate, took 15%, and nobody else topped 5%.
The same firm's general-election poll of registered voters, however, gives Romney the advantage as an opponent to President Obama. The president leads the former Massachusetts governor by just 45% to 44%, "and given that the undecideds skew largely Republican he'd probably lose to Romney if the election was today," declares the PPP press release. But Obama leads Gingrich 50% to 44%. Among independents, Romney leads Obama by a point, whereas Gingrich trails the president by seven.
PPP declares: "This Florida poll is just one more piece of evidence: if the Republicans actually want to beat Obama they need to nominate Romney, love him or not."
That seems to us wildly overconfident, both in Obama's political strength and in the predictability of an election that is still 11 months off. Even so, we agree with PPP to the extent that we would say Romney is the safer candidate for the GOP because more independents see him than Gingrich as an acceptable alternative.
To be sure, Gingrich convinced many Republicans to give him a second look, mainly by performing very well in debates as Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain were flaming out, and Tim Pawlenty and Rick Perry failing ever to ignite. Why? The answer is not entirely obvious.
The main Republican objection to Romney is that he is inconstant, and thus not a true conservative. But is Gingrich really any better in this regard? In the past he has endorsed the individual mandate for medical insurance and even made a global-warmist video with Nancy Pelosi in which the two ex-speakers share a love seat!
Gingrich has cited his record as Speaker, during which he led the House in producing welfare-reform legislation, balanced budgets and a cut in capital gains taxes. But Gingrich was the beta to Bill Clinton's alpha, and all of these measures were in the service of Clinton's positioning himself as a centrist. When Clinton and Gingrich clashed over the budget in 1995-96, Clinton won handily (unlike the much weaker Obama, who started losing confrontations with Congress before the GOP even took over the House).
The next president? Just maybe.
It seems to us that Gingrich's appeal to the primary electorate is best explained by reference to an earlier period in his career: 1989-94, when he was House minority whip. He was an extremely effective insurgent leader, helping to bring down two Democratic leaders, Speaker Jim Wright and Majority Whip Tony Coelho, by calling attention to their ethical problems.
As the Orlando Sentinel reported in May 1989, just after the latter announced his departure: "House Democratic whip Tony Coelho said Sunday that Republican whip Newt Gingrich was trying to destroy the Democrat-controlled House in order to rebuild it with a GOP majority." Five and a half years later, mission accomplished.
It seems to us that what has appealed to Republicans about Gingrich in this year's debates has been his willingness to challenge the assumptions of the (usually) liberal moderators. In one of the best examples, noted by NewsBusters.org, the ex-speaker "schools" Scott Pelley of CBS on the laws of war.
As it happens, Gingrich was defending the Obama administration for having killed al Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki. The point, however, is that he was aggressive in refusing to accept Pelley's smug presumption of moral and intellectual superiority--a left-liberal presumption that rankles conservatives, that is very common among the leaders of cultural institutions, and that Obama very much personifies.
Matt Lewis of the Daily Caller summarizes it as well as we've seen anybody do:
A lot of people I talk to can't fathom why Newt Gingrich is actually winning. The latest narrative--and I think there's truth in it--is that voters are hungry for someone who will "take it to Obama." Clearly, Gingrich's debating ability is key. Republicans are champing at the bit to see him debate Obama. But I think this urge is deeper than a desire to simply watch him beat up or attack the president rhetorically--they also want him to intellectually flatten him--to out-debate him.
The left has a different set of explanations for Gingrich's rise. Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman says it's because GOP voters are "totally clueless" and "committed to demonstrably false beliefs." E.J. "Baghdad Bob" Dionne says the "Republican establishment" has "sold its soul to the Tea Party" and "sat by silently as extremist rhetoric engulfed the GOP." Krugman colleague Charles Blow says it's because the GOP is "bankrupt of compassion and allergic to accuracy."
While these statements are all foolish and obnoxious, they fit right into our thesis. Gingrich is popular among conservatives because he refuses to be browbeaten by liberal bullies. One can easily imagine him bringing out the least attractive qualities of Obama, who does not like to be challenged.
On the other hand, it could backfire. Gingrich has a tendency to bully back rather than respond with weary condescension à la Ronald Reagan ("there he goes again"). He may need to modulate his tone if he is to win over those skeptical independents.
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3)Obama pressure leads to predictable fiasco
By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
The Egyptian elections have resulted in a rout for the throngs whose springtime hopes for freedom are facing the prospect of a nuclear winter at the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood and its fellow Salafists. These Islamists appear to have garnered at least 60 percent of the seats in the next parliament and the opportunity to shape the country's new constitution in line with their ambitions to impose the totalitarian doctrine of Shariah nationwide. That will be bad news for the people of Egypt, for Israel and for us.
This fiasco was made predictable in early February, when President Obama announced that Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak had to leave office at once. It was clear even then that the most organized, most disciplined and most ruthless group would prevail in the ensuing, chaotic electoral environment. Apart from the military, that group has been the Muslim Brotherhood, basically since its founding in 1928.
Press reports indicate that the Obama administration spent $200 million to help non-Islamist parties organize and compete in last week's elections. If true, that adds insult to injury. The money was wasted, not only because the liberal and secular elements to whom much of it reportedly was given were hopelessly outgunned by the Brotherhood. More important, it was squandered because Team Obama, in the person of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, made a point in the run-up to the vote of welcoming the Muslim Brotherhood's participation in the "political dialogue" in Egypt.
In so doing, the Obama administration not only signaled that it could do business with the Brotherhood, it belied any pretense of concern about the Islamists' role in the massacre of Coptic Christians (which will be the subject of an important hearing in the House of Representatives' Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission on Wednesday).
Now the trend is up, meaning the more revenue collected, the more debt endured -- the exact opposite of Colin Powell's algebra. (Although the correlation is still weak -- not statistically significant.)
I'm not sure what the Scandinavian countries are doing right, but here are two things they have in common: (1) relatively flat tax structures and (2) significant cuts in the levels of government spending since 1993.
The Tax Foundation used OECD data to look at the tax progressivity of 24 OECD countries. Specifically, they looked at the ratio of taxes-to-income of the top 10% of income-earners. The most progressively taxed country of those 24 was the U.S., with a ratio of 1.35. Norway came in at only 0.95, a slightly regressive tax structure. Sweden came in with a ratio of 1.00, perfectly flat. Denmark was 1.02, virtually flat also. Finland was 1.20, a tad progressive, but not nearly as progressive as the U.S.
Just to be clear, a progressive tax structure means the rich (by income) pay a higher percentage of their incomes in taxes than the non-rich do. The Scandi countries certainly have high taxes, but they are paid in almost equal percentages across income groups. If you want to be like them, it would mean raising taxes most significantly on the non-rich. The Scandis don't get their revenues from the 1%; they get them from the 99%! (Funny, where are Norway's occupiers?)
On the spending front, Sweden's government spent 68% of Sweden's GDP in 1993, the highest in Europe at the time. By 2011 it was spending 48% (below France and Italy, for examples). While not a low number, that is a cut of 20% of GDP. The amount cut was the equivalent of the entire federal government of the U.S.! (Like a 200-pound man losing almost 60 pounds.)
Since 1993, Sweden cut government spending by 20% of GDP. Finland cut 11%, Norway cut 5%, and Denmark cut 3% of GDP. In contrast, the high-debt countries of Greece, Japan, France, Portugal, the U.K., and the U.S. all grew spending as a fraction of GDP since 1993. The U.S. in particular is at record levels of spending for peacetime.
To summarize: the everything-else-equal algebra of Colin Powell does not hold up in the real world. There's virtually no relationship between level of revenue and level of debt among advanced economies. Outside Scandinavia, higher revenue leads to higher debt, if it has any effect on debt at all.
And if you want to imitate the low-debt countries of Scandinavia, raise taxes on the non-rich most, and cut government spending.
Democrats, and those who love to compromise with them, advocate the exact opposite policies. Their "think method" syllogisms are all wrong.
High tax rates don't mean high revenues.
High revenues don't mean low debt.
Progressive tax structures don't mean either high revenues or low debt. In fact, the correlation seems just the opposite.
Any new revenues will have to come most from the 99%, not the 1% already highly taxed.
Cutting spending seems to be a good way to avoid debt, just like the Tea Party said from the beginning.
Here is my tip to Democrats, global warming alarmists, and other "think method" aficionados: the real world should drive your models, not vice-versa.
Randall Hoven can be followed on Twitter.
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2)Shunning an academic endorser of anti-Semitism
By Alan Dershowitz
Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz criticizes John Mearsheimer’s praise of a controversial text on Jewish identity.
Imagine your son or daughter is admitted to the University of Chicago, one of the world’s most elite institutions of learning, and tells you that he has been lucky enough to have a course with one of the university’s most prominent professors, John Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Then imagine your child tells you that his favorite professor has just recommended that everyone should read a “fascinating and provocative” book that makes the following assertions of fact:
While the Holocaust “was not at all an historical narrative,” the “accusations of Jews making matzo out of young Goyim’s blood,” may be true (page 175, 185).
Jews caused the recent credit crunch, which the author calls “the Zio-punch” (page 22).
The American media “failed to warn the American people of the enemy within” because of money (page 27).
“[M]ore and more Jews are being pulled into an obscure, dangerous and unethical fellowship” (page 21).
If Iran and Israel fight a nuclear war that kills millions of people, “some may be bold enough to argue that ‘Hitler might have been right after all’” (page 179).
The “new Jewish religion…could well be the most sinister religion known to man…” (page 149).
The author of the book containing these statements has told students that he cannot “say whether it’s right or not to burn down a synagogue. I can say that it is a rational act.” He has also apologized to the Nazis for having earlier compared them to Israel:
“Many of us including me tend to equate Israel to Nazi Germany. Rather often I myself join others and argue that Israelis are the Nazis of our time. I want to take this opportunity to amend my statement. Israelis are not the Nazis of our time and the Nazis were not the Israelis of their time. Israel is in fact far worse than Nazi Germany and the above equation is simply meaningless and misleading.”
He has written that we “must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously,” and that “with Fagin and Shylock in mind, Israeli barbarism and organ trafficking seem to be just other events in an endless hellish continuum.”
The scenario described above—a prominent professor endorsing the content of a blatantly anti-Semitic book—is not imaginary. John Mearsheimer has in fact written a glowing endorsement (this “fascinating and provocative” book “should be widely read.”) of a virulently anti-Semitic book by an infamously bigoted author.
The book is titled The Wandering Who? and has just been published by Gilad Atzmon, a British saxophonist and well-known bigot, who acknowledges that many of the “insights” in his book come from a man who “was an anti-Semite” and a hater of “almost everything that fails to be Aryan masculinity” (page 89-90). He declares himself a “proud self-hating Jew” and writes of his “contempt” of “the Jew in me” (page 94). Mearsheimer’s endorsement appears prominently on the first page of the book. He is not merely defending Atzmon’s right to publish this anti-Semitic book; he is endorsing the book’s content.
Mearsheimer was joined in his endorsement of this anti-Semitic book by Richard Falk, the Milibank Professor of International Law Emeritus at Princeton University. Falk’s endorsement, which appears on the cover of The Wandering Who?, calls the book “absorbing,” “moving,” and “transformative.” He says the book has “integrity” and should not only “be read but reflect[ed] upon and discuss[ed] widely.” One wonders precisely which part of the book Falk wants his students to discuss widely: that the Holocaust is “not an historical narrative”? That Jews may be guilty of “making matzo out of young Goyim’s blood”? or the possibility that “Hitler may have been right after all”?
I have certainly seen strong academic endorsements of books that are extreme in their hatred of Israel, but never in my long professional life have I encountered prominent American academics endorsing blatant anti-Semitism. A red line has been crossed for the first time, and this dangerous and unprecedented crossing must be noted and responded to.
Professor Mearsheimer should neither be fired nor censured for his endorsement of the world’s oldest bigotry, because his academic freedom gives him the right to endorse anti-Semitic views and to endorse any book he chooses.
But unless Mearsheimer publicly withdraws his endorsement, he should be shunned by his colleagues and his students for collaborating with evil. Mearsheimer may not be an anti-Semite himself, but he has given aid and comfort to anti-Semitism by urging his students to take seriously the content of The Wandering Who?
The sad reality is that Mearsheimer is not being shunned. He is being supported by his colleague, Brian Leiter, the Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School, who says that the criticism of Mearsheimer is “hysterical” because Atzmon’s “positions [do not mark him] as an anti-Semite [but rather as] cosmopolitan.” Mearsheimer is also being supported by my Harvard colleague, Professor Stephen Walt and several other American academics.
Therein lies the shame—and the danger.
Alan Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
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2a) Strange Newt Respect
By James Taranto
Will Newt Gingrich be the next president of the United States?
Back in the spring, when his campaign seemed to be imploding in hilarious fashion, it was a question nobody was asking. Over the past few weeks, however, Gingrich has become either the main GOP challenger to front-runner Mitt Romney or the front-runner in his own right.
Among the four states with the earliest nomination contests, Romney leads only in New Hampshire. (As Nate Silver notes, Romney also had a comfortable Granite State lead a month before the 2008 Iowa caucuses, but he went on to lose to John McCain.) Gingrich is now up in Iowa, South Carolina and Florida. Let's focus on the last, since it's a crucial swing state with 29 electoral votes.
Last week a survey of likely Republican primary voters from Public Policy Polling, a respected Democratic firm, found Gingrich ahead in Florida with 47%, to just 17% for Romney. Herman Cain, now an ex-candidate, took 15%, and nobody else topped 5%.
The same firm's general-election poll of registered voters, however, gives Romney the advantage as an opponent to President Obama. The president leads the former Massachusetts governor by just 45% to 44%, "and given that the undecideds skew largely Republican he'd probably lose to Romney if the election was today," declares the PPP press release. But Obama leads Gingrich 50% to 44%. Among independents, Romney leads Obama by a point, whereas Gingrich trails the president by seven.
PPP declares: "This Florida poll is just one more piece of evidence: if the Republicans actually want to beat Obama they need to nominate Romney, love him or not."
That seems to us wildly overconfident, both in Obama's political strength and in the predictability of an election that is still 11 months off. Even so, we agree with PPP to the extent that we would say Romney is the safer candidate for the GOP because more independents see him than Gingrich as an acceptable alternative.
To be sure, Gingrich convinced many Republicans to give him a second look, mainly by performing very well in debates as Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain were flaming out, and Tim Pawlenty and Rick Perry failing ever to ignite. Why? The answer is not entirely obvious.
The main Republican objection to Romney is that he is inconstant, and thus not a true conservative. But is Gingrich really any better in this regard? In the past he has endorsed the individual mandate for medical insurance and even made a global-warmist video with Nancy Pelosi in which the two ex-speakers share a love seat!
Gingrich has cited his record as Speaker, during which he led the House in producing welfare-reform legislation, balanced budgets and a cut in capital gains taxes. But Gingrich was the beta to Bill Clinton's alpha, and all of these measures were in the service of Clinton's positioning himself as a centrist. When Clinton and Gingrich clashed over the budget in 1995-96, Clinton won handily (unlike the much weaker Obama, who started losing confrontations with Congress before the GOP even took over the House).
The next president? Just maybe.
It seems to us that Gingrich's appeal to the primary electorate is best explained by reference to an earlier period in his career: 1989-94, when he was House minority whip. He was an extremely effective insurgent leader, helping to bring down two Democratic leaders, Speaker Jim Wright and Majority Whip Tony Coelho, by calling attention to their ethical problems.
As the Orlando Sentinel reported in May 1989, just after the latter announced his departure: "House Democratic whip Tony Coelho said Sunday that Republican whip Newt Gingrich was trying to destroy the Democrat-controlled House in order to rebuild it with a GOP majority." Five and a half years later, mission accomplished.
It seems to us that what has appealed to Republicans about Gingrich in this year's debates has been his willingness to challenge the assumptions of the (usually) liberal moderators. In one of the best examples, noted by NewsBusters.org, the ex-speaker "schools" Scott Pelley of CBS on the laws of war.
As it happens, Gingrich was defending the Obama administration for having killed al Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki. The point, however, is that he was aggressive in refusing to accept Pelley's smug presumption of moral and intellectual superiority--a left-liberal presumption that rankles conservatives, that is very common among the leaders of cultural institutions, and that Obama very much personifies.
Matt Lewis of the Daily Caller summarizes it as well as we've seen anybody do:
A lot of people I talk to can't fathom why Newt Gingrich is actually winning. The latest narrative--and I think there's truth in it--is that voters are hungry for someone who will "take it to Obama." Clearly, Gingrich's debating ability is key. Republicans are champing at the bit to see him debate Obama. But I think this urge is deeper than a desire to simply watch him beat up or attack the president rhetorically--they also want him to intellectually flatten him--to out-debate him.
The left has a different set of explanations for Gingrich's rise. Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman says it's because GOP voters are "totally clueless" and "committed to demonstrably false beliefs." E.J. "Baghdad Bob" Dionne says the "Republican establishment" has "sold its soul to the Tea Party" and "sat by silently as extremist rhetoric engulfed the GOP." Krugman colleague Charles Blow says it's because the GOP is "bankrupt of compassion and allergic to accuracy."
While these statements are all foolish and obnoxious, they fit right into our thesis. Gingrich is popular among conservatives because he refuses to be browbeaten by liberal bullies. One can easily imagine him bringing out the least attractive qualities of Obama, who does not like to be challenged.
On the other hand, it could backfire. Gingrich has a tendency to bully back rather than respond with weary condescension à la Ronald Reagan ("there he goes again"). He may need to modulate his tone if he is to win over those skeptical independents.
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3)Obama pressure leads to predictable fiasco
By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
The Egyptian elections have resulted in a rout for the throngs whose springtime hopes for freedom are facing the prospect of a nuclear winter at the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood and its fellow Salafists. These Islamists appear to have garnered at least 60 percent of the seats in the next parliament and the opportunity to shape the country's new constitution in line with their ambitions to impose the totalitarian doctrine of Shariah nationwide. That will be bad news for the people of Egypt, for Israel and for us.
This fiasco was made predictable in early February, when President Obama announced that Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak had to leave office at once. It was clear even then that the most organized, most disciplined and most ruthless group would prevail in the ensuing, chaotic electoral environment. Apart from the military, that group has been the Muslim Brotherhood, basically since its founding in 1928.
Press reports indicate that the Obama administration spent $200 million to help non-Islamist parties organize and compete in last week's elections. If true, that adds insult to injury. The money was wasted, not only because the liberal and secular elements to whom much of it reportedly was given were hopelessly outgunned by the Brotherhood. More important, it was squandered because Team Obama, in the person of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, made a point in the run-up to the vote of welcoming the Muslim Brotherhood's participation in the "political dialogue" in Egypt.
In so doing, the Obama administration not only signaled that it could do business with the Brotherhood, it belied any pretense of concern about the Islamists' role in the massacre of Coptic Christians (which will be the subject of an important hearing in the House of Representatives' Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission on Wednesday).
Similarly, the president and his subordinates appear determined to ignore the Brotherhood's virulently supremacist and jihadist creed. They also evidently are indifferent to the strategic plan issued in 1991 by the Brotherhood's American arm and the phased approach for realizing its goal of "eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within." Documents enshrining these ambitions were introduced uncontested into evidence by federal prosecutors in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial.
At the same time, the Obama administration is reaching out to and empowering Muslim Brotherhood front groups as its exclusive interlocutors with Muslims inside the United States. Incredibly, the Department of Homeland Security recently promulgated guidelines that effectively require all trainers and their training material to be approved by "community leaders" - read: officials of organizations such as the Islamic Society of North America and the Council on American Islamic Relations that the federal government has identified as tied to the Brotherhood.
One wonders about the extent to which such fatally flawed policies reflect the influence exercised on senior administration officials by people with deep ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. For example, Mrs. Clinton's deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin, has a mother (Saleha Abedin) and a brother (Hassan Abedin) who have been linked, respectively, to the Muslim Sisterhood and Brotherhood. Could such associations be coloring Mrs. Clinton's judgment about, notably, the advisability of having the Brotherhood come to power in Egypt and the reliability of the Islamist government of our NATO "ally" Turkey?
Perhaps such influences are also shaping Mrs. Clinton's willingness to engage next week in Washington with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in an effort to bridge differences between the United States and Islamists bent on its submission to Shariah. The issue involves one of our most fundamental liberties - freedom of expression. Unfortunately, it is hard to see how this conclave will do anything but impinge upon that constitutionally protected right.
After all, the OIC has been seeking for years to secure worldwide acceptance of its Shariah-adherent prohibition on expression that offends Muslims. The Obama administration already has associated itself with a watered-down version of this initiative. Now it seems intent on finding a way to deny free speech to those whom the Islamists depict as "Islamophobes."
Given this agenda, it is ironic that Vice President Joseph R. Biden lately has been touting the importance of free speech - most recently during a visit to, of all places, Turkey. He seems to epitomize the old saw that "somebody always doesn't get the word." Neither the veep nor Mrs. Clinton, who started her dialogue with OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu in Istanbul in July, seem to have noticed that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is in the process of completing the Islamization of his country and snuffing out what is left of independent media that dare to challenge him.
In fact, what is happening in Turkey right now is a road map for what is to come in Egypt - and wherever else the Muslim Brotherhood or its ilk comes to power. The willful blindness of the Obama administration to the reality that such Islamists are determined to impose Shariah at the expense of freedom has facilitated that outcome in Cairo - as was predictable and predicted. If it persists, such malfeasance will simply substitute the despotic misrule of clerics for the despotic misrule of secular autocrats, to the detriment of the people most immediately affected and, in due course, of Americans as well.
3a)An ally no more
By Caroline B. Glick
With vote tallies in for Egypt's first round of parliamentary elections in it is abundantly clear that Egypt is on the fast track to becoming a totalitarian Islamic state. The first round of voting took place in Egypt's most liberal, cosmopolitan cities. And still the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists received more than 60 percent of the vote. Run-off elections for 52 seats will by all estimates increase their representation.
And then in the months to come, Egyptian voters in the far more Islamist Nile Delta and Sinai will undoubtedly provide the forces of jihadist Islam with an even greater margin of victory.
Until the US-supported overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt served as the anchor of the US alliance system in the Arab world. The Egyptian military is US-armed, US-trained and US-financed.
The Suez Canal is among the most vital waterways in the world for the US Navy and the global economy.
Due to Mubarak's commitment to stemming the tide of jihadist forces that threatened his regime, under his rule Egypt served as a major counter-terror hub in the US-led war against international jihad.
GIVEN EGYPT'S singular importance to US strategic interests in the Arab world, the Obama administration's response to the calamitous election results has been shocking. Rather than sound the alarm bells, US President Barack Obama has celebrated the results as a victory for "democracy."
Rather than warn Egypt that it will face severe consequences if it completes its Islamist transformation, the Obama administration has turned its guns on the first country that will pay a price for Egypt's Islamic revolution: Israel.
Speaking at the annual policy conclave in Washington sponsored by the leftist Brookings Institute's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hammered Israel, the only real ally the US has left in the Middle East after Mubarak's fall. Clinton felt it necessary — in the name of democracy — to embrace the positions of Israel's radical Left against the majority of Israelis.
The same Secretary of State that has heralded negotiations with the violent, fanatical misogynists of the Taliban; who has extolled Saudi Arabia where women are given ten lashes for driving, and whose State Department trained female-hating Muslim Brotherhood operatives in the lead-up to the current elections in Egypt accused Israel of repressing women's rights. The only state in the region where women are given full rights and legal protections became the focus of Clinton's righteous feminist wrath.
In the IDF, as in the rest of the country, religious coercion is forbidden. Jewish law prohibits men from listening to women's voices in song. And recently, when a group of religious soldiers were presented with an IDF band that featured female vocalists, keeping faith with their Orthodox observance, they walked out of the auditorium. The vocalists were not barred from singing. They were not mistreated. They were simply not listened to.
And as far as Clinton is concerned, this is proof that women in Israel are under attack. Barred by law from forcing their soldiers from spurning their religious obligations, IDF commanders were guilty of crimes against democracy for allowing the troops to exit the hall.
But Clinton didn't end her diatribe with the IDF's supposed war against women. She continued her onslaught by proclaiming that Israel is taking a knife to democracy by permitting its legislators to legislate laws that she doesn't like. The legislative initiatives that provoked the ire of the US Secretary of State are the bills now under discussion which seek to curtail the ability to foreign governments to subvert Israel's elected government by funding non-representative, anti-Israel political NGOs like B'Tselem and Peace Now.
In attacking Israel in the way she did, Clinton showed that she holds Israel to a unique standard of behavior. Whereas fellow Western democracies are within their rights when they undertake initiatives like banning Islamic headdresses from the public square, Israel is a criminal state for affording Jewish soldiers freedom of religion. Whereas the Taliban, who enslave women and girls in the most unspeakable fashion are worthy interlocutors, and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which supports universal female genital mutilation is moderate, Israel is an enemy of democracy for seeking to preserve the government's ability to adopt policies that advance the country's interests.
The unique standard to which Clinton holds the Jewish state is the standard of human perfection.
And as far as she is concerned, if Israel is not perfect, then it is unworthy of support. And since Israel, as a nation of mere mortals can never be perfect, it is necessarily always guilty.
CLINTON'S ASSAULT on Israeli democracy and society came a day after Panetta attacked Israel's handling of its strategic challenges. Whereas Clinton attacked Israel's moral fiber, Panetta judged Israel responsible for every negative development in the regional landscape.
Panetta excoriated Israel for not being involved in negotiations with the Palestinians. Israel, he said must make new concessions to the Palestinians in order to convince them of its good faith. If Israel makes such gestures, and the Palestinians and the larger Islamic world spurn them, then Panetta and his friends will side with Israel, he said.
Panetta failed to notice that Israel has already made repeated, unprecedented concessions to the Palestinians and that the Palestinians have pocketed those concessions and refused to negotiate. And he failed to notice that in response to the repeated spurning of its concessions by the Palestinians and the Arab world writ large, rather than stand with Israel, the US and Europe expanded their demands for further Israeli concessions.
Panetta demanded that Israel make renewed gestures as well to appease the Egyptians, Turks and Jordanians. He failed to notice that it was Turkey's Islamist government, not Israel, that took a knife to the Turkish-Israeli strategic alliance.
As for Egypt, rather than recognize the strategic implications for the US and Israel alike of Egypt's transformation into an Islamic state, the US Defense Secretary demanded that Israel ingratiate itself with Egypt's military junta. Thanks in large part to the Obama administration, that junta is now completely beholden to the Muslim Brotherhood.
As for Jordan, again thanks to the US's support for the Muslim Brotherhood and its aligned groups in Libya and Tunisia, the Hashemite regime is seeking to cut a deal with the Jordanian branch of the movement in a bid to save itself from Mubarak's fate. Under these circumstances, there is no gesture that Israel can make to its neighbor to the east that would empower King Abdullah to extol the virtues of peace with the Jewish state.
Then there is Iran, and its nuclear weapons program.
Panetta argued that an Israeli military strike against Iran would lead to regional war. But he failed to mention that a nuclear armed Iran will lead to nuclear proliferation in the Arab world and exponentially increase the prospect of a global nuclear war.
Rather than face the dangers head on, Panetta's message was that the Obama administration would rather accept a nuclear-armed Iran than support an Israeli military strike on Iran to prevent the mullocracy from becoming a nuclear-armed state.
Clinton's and Panetta's virulently anti-Israeli messages resonated in an address about European anti-Semitism given last week by the US Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman. Speaking to a Jewish audience, Gutman effectively denied the existence of anti-Semitism in Europe. While attacks against European Jews and Jewish institutions have become a daily occurrence continent-wide, Gutman claimed that non-Muslim anti- Semites are essentially just all-purpose bigots who hate everyone, not just Jews.
At the same time, the Obama administration is reaching out to and empowering Muslim Brotherhood front groups as its exclusive interlocutors with Muslims inside the United States. Incredibly, the Department of Homeland Security recently promulgated guidelines that effectively require all trainers and their training material to be approved by "community leaders" - read: officials of organizations such as the Islamic Society of North America and the Council on American Islamic Relations that the federal government has identified as tied to the Brotherhood.
One wonders about the extent to which such fatally flawed policies reflect the influence exercised on senior administration officials by people with deep ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. For example, Mrs. Clinton's deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin, has a mother (Saleha Abedin) and a brother (Hassan Abedin) who have been linked, respectively, to the Muslim Sisterhood and Brotherhood. Could such associations be coloring Mrs. Clinton's judgment about, notably, the advisability of having the Brotherhood come to power in Egypt and the reliability of the Islamist government of our NATO "ally" Turkey?
Perhaps such influences are also shaping Mrs. Clinton's willingness to engage next week in Washington with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in an effort to bridge differences between the United States and Islamists bent on its submission to Shariah. The issue involves one of our most fundamental liberties - freedom of expression. Unfortunately, it is hard to see how this conclave will do anything but impinge upon that constitutionally protected right.
After all, the OIC has been seeking for years to secure worldwide acceptance of its Shariah-adherent prohibition on expression that offends Muslims. The Obama administration already has associated itself with a watered-down version of this initiative. Now it seems intent on finding a way to deny free speech to those whom the Islamists depict as "Islamophobes."
Given this agenda, it is ironic that Vice President Joseph R. Biden lately has been touting the importance of free speech - most recently during a visit to, of all places, Turkey. He seems to epitomize the old saw that "somebody always doesn't get the word." Neither the veep nor Mrs. Clinton, who started her dialogue with OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu in Istanbul in July, seem to have noticed that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is in the process of completing the Islamization of his country and snuffing out what is left of independent media that dare to challenge him.
In fact, what is happening in Turkey right now is a road map for what is to come in Egypt - and wherever else the Muslim Brotherhood or its ilk comes to power. The willful blindness of the Obama administration to the reality that such Islamists are determined to impose Shariah at the expense of freedom has facilitated that outcome in Cairo - as was predictable and predicted. If it persists, such malfeasance will simply substitute the despotic misrule of clerics for the despotic misrule of secular autocrats, to the detriment of the people most immediately affected and, in due course, of Americans as well.
3a)An ally no more
By Caroline B. Glick
With vote tallies in for Egypt's first round of parliamentary elections in it is abundantly clear that Egypt is on the fast track to becoming a totalitarian Islamic state. The first round of voting took place in Egypt's most liberal, cosmopolitan cities. And still the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists received more than 60 percent of the vote. Run-off elections for 52 seats will by all estimates increase their representation.
And then in the months to come, Egyptian voters in the far more Islamist Nile Delta and Sinai will undoubtedly provide the forces of jihadist Islam with an even greater margin of victory.
Until the US-supported overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt served as the anchor of the US alliance system in the Arab world. The Egyptian military is US-armed, US-trained and US-financed.
The Suez Canal is among the most vital waterways in the world for the US Navy and the global economy.
Due to Mubarak's commitment to stemming the tide of jihadist forces that threatened his regime, under his rule Egypt served as a major counter-terror hub in the US-led war against international jihad.
GIVEN EGYPT'S singular importance to US strategic interests in the Arab world, the Obama administration's response to the calamitous election results has been shocking. Rather than sound the alarm bells, US President Barack Obama has celebrated the results as a victory for "democracy."
Rather than warn Egypt that it will face severe consequences if it completes its Islamist transformation, the Obama administration has turned its guns on the first country that will pay a price for Egypt's Islamic revolution: Israel.
Speaking at the annual policy conclave in Washington sponsored by the leftist Brookings Institute's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hammered Israel, the only real ally the US has left in the Middle East after Mubarak's fall. Clinton felt it necessary — in the name of democracy — to embrace the positions of Israel's radical Left against the majority of Israelis.
The same Secretary of State that has heralded negotiations with the violent, fanatical misogynists of the Taliban; who has extolled Saudi Arabia where women are given ten lashes for driving, and whose State Department trained female-hating Muslim Brotherhood operatives in the lead-up to the current elections in Egypt accused Israel of repressing women's rights. The only state in the region where women are given full rights and legal protections became the focus of Clinton's righteous feminist wrath.
In the IDF, as in the rest of the country, religious coercion is forbidden. Jewish law prohibits men from listening to women's voices in song. And recently, when a group of religious soldiers were presented with an IDF band that featured female vocalists, keeping faith with their Orthodox observance, they walked out of the auditorium. The vocalists were not barred from singing. They were not mistreated. They were simply not listened to.
And as far as Clinton is concerned, this is proof that women in Israel are under attack. Barred by law from forcing their soldiers from spurning their religious obligations, IDF commanders were guilty of crimes against democracy for allowing the troops to exit the hall.
But Clinton didn't end her diatribe with the IDF's supposed war against women. She continued her onslaught by proclaiming that Israel is taking a knife to democracy by permitting its legislators to legislate laws that she doesn't like. The legislative initiatives that provoked the ire of the US Secretary of State are the bills now under discussion which seek to curtail the ability to foreign governments to subvert Israel's elected government by funding non-representative, anti-Israel political NGOs like B'Tselem and Peace Now.
In attacking Israel in the way she did, Clinton showed that she holds Israel to a unique standard of behavior. Whereas fellow Western democracies are within their rights when they undertake initiatives like banning Islamic headdresses from the public square, Israel is a criminal state for affording Jewish soldiers freedom of religion. Whereas the Taliban, who enslave women and girls in the most unspeakable fashion are worthy interlocutors, and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which supports universal female genital mutilation is moderate, Israel is an enemy of democracy for seeking to preserve the government's ability to adopt policies that advance the country's interests.
The unique standard to which Clinton holds the Jewish state is the standard of human perfection.
And as far as she is concerned, if Israel is not perfect, then it is unworthy of support. And since Israel, as a nation of mere mortals can never be perfect, it is necessarily always guilty.
CLINTON'S ASSAULT on Israeli democracy and society came a day after Panetta attacked Israel's handling of its strategic challenges. Whereas Clinton attacked Israel's moral fiber, Panetta judged Israel responsible for every negative development in the regional landscape.
Panetta excoriated Israel for not being involved in negotiations with the Palestinians. Israel, he said must make new concessions to the Palestinians in order to convince them of its good faith. If Israel makes such gestures, and the Palestinians and the larger Islamic world spurn them, then Panetta and his friends will side with Israel, he said.
Panetta failed to notice that Israel has already made repeated, unprecedented concessions to the Palestinians and that the Palestinians have pocketed those concessions and refused to negotiate. And he failed to notice that in response to the repeated spurning of its concessions by the Palestinians and the Arab world writ large, rather than stand with Israel, the US and Europe expanded their demands for further Israeli concessions.
Panetta demanded that Israel make renewed gestures as well to appease the Egyptians, Turks and Jordanians. He failed to notice that it was Turkey's Islamist government, not Israel, that took a knife to the Turkish-Israeli strategic alliance.
As for Egypt, rather than recognize the strategic implications for the US and Israel alike of Egypt's transformation into an Islamic state, the US Defense Secretary demanded that Israel ingratiate itself with Egypt's military junta. Thanks in large part to the Obama administration, that junta is now completely beholden to the Muslim Brotherhood.
As for Jordan, again thanks to the US's support for the Muslim Brotherhood and its aligned groups in Libya and Tunisia, the Hashemite regime is seeking to cut a deal with the Jordanian branch of the movement in a bid to save itself from Mubarak's fate. Under these circumstances, there is no gesture that Israel can make to its neighbor to the east that would empower King Abdullah to extol the virtues of peace with the Jewish state.
Then there is Iran, and its nuclear weapons program.
Panetta argued that an Israeli military strike against Iran would lead to regional war. But he failed to mention that a nuclear armed Iran will lead to nuclear proliferation in the Arab world and exponentially increase the prospect of a global nuclear war.
Rather than face the dangers head on, Panetta's message was that the Obama administration would rather accept a nuclear-armed Iran than support an Israeli military strike on Iran to prevent the mullocracy from becoming a nuclear-armed state.
Clinton's and Panetta's virulently anti-Israeli messages resonated in an address about European anti-Semitism given last week by the US Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman. Speaking to a Jewish audience, Gutman effectively denied the existence of anti-Semitism in Europe. While attacks against European Jews and Jewish institutions have become a daily occurrence continent-wide, Gutman claimed that non-Muslim anti- Semites are essentially just all-purpose bigots who hate everyone, not just Jews.
As for the Muslims who carry out the vast majority of anti-Jewish attacks in Europe, Gutman claimed they don't have a problem with good Jews like him. They are simply angry because Israel isn't handing over land to the Palestinians quickly enough. If the Jewish state would simply get with Obama's program, according to the US ambassador, Muslim attacks on Jews in Europe would simply disappear.
Gutman of course is not a policymaker. His job is simply to implement Obama's policies and voice the president's beliefs.
But when taken together with Clinton's and Panetta's speeches, Gutman's remarks expose a distressing intellectual and moral trend that clearly dominates the Obama administration's foreign policy discourse. All three speeches share a common rejection of objective reality in favor of a fantasy.
In the administration's fantasy universe, Israel is the only actor on the world stage. Its detractors, whether in the Islamic world or Europe, are mere objects. They are bereft of judgment or responsibility for their actions.
There are two possible explanations for this state of affairs — and they are not mutually exclusive. It is possible that the Obama administration is an ideological echo chamber in which only certain positions are permitted. This prospect is likely given the White House's repeated directives prohibiting government officials from using terms like "jihad," "Islamic terrorism," "Islamist," and "jihadist," to describe jihad, Islamic terrorism, Islamists and jihadists.
Restrained by ideological thought police that outlaw critical thought about the dominant forces in the Islamic world today, US officials have little choice but to place all the blame for everything that goes wrong on the one society they are free to criticize — Israel.
The second possible explanation for the administration's treatment of Israel is that it is permeated by anti-Semitism. The outsized responsibility and culpability placed on Israel by the likes of Obama, Clinton, Panetta and Gutman is certainly of a piece with classical anti-Semitic behavior.
There is little qualitative difference between accusing Israeli society of destroying democracy for seeking to defend itself against foreign political subversion, and accusing Jews of destroying morality for failing to embrace foreign religious faiths.
But when taken together with Clinton's and Panetta's speeches, Gutman's remarks expose a distressing intellectual and moral trend that clearly dominates the Obama administration's foreign policy discourse. All three speeches share a common rejection of objective reality in favor of a fantasy.
In the administration's fantasy universe, Israel is the only actor on the world stage. Its detractors, whether in the Islamic world or Europe, are mere objects. They are bereft of judgment or responsibility for their actions.
There are two possible explanations for this state of affairs — and they are not mutually exclusive. It is possible that the Obama administration is an ideological echo chamber in which only certain positions are permitted. This prospect is likely given the White House's repeated directives prohibiting government officials from using terms like "jihad," "Islamic terrorism," "Islamist," and "jihadist," to describe jihad, Islamic terrorism, Islamists and jihadists.
Restrained by ideological thought police that outlaw critical thought about the dominant forces in the Islamic world today, US officials have little choice but to place all the blame for everything that goes wrong on the one society they are free to criticize — Israel.
The second possible explanation for the administration's treatment of Israel is that it is permeated by anti-Semitism. The outsized responsibility and culpability placed on Israel by the likes of Obama, Clinton, Panetta and Gutman is certainly of a piece with classical anti-Semitic behavior.
There is little qualitative difference between accusing Israeli society of destroying democracy for seeking to defend itself against foreign political subversion, and accusing Jews of destroying morality for failing to embrace foreign religious faiths.
So too, there is little qualitative difference between blaming Israel for its isolation in the face of the Islamist takeover of the Arab world, and blaming the Jews for the rise of anti-Semites to power in places like Russia, Germany and Norway.
In truth, from Israel's perspective, it really doesn't make a difference whether these statements and the intellectual climate they represent stem from ideological myopia or from hatred of Jews.
The end result is the same in either case: Under President Obama, the US government has become hostile to Israel's national rights and strategic imperatives. Under Obama, the US is no longer Israel's ally.
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6)Put me in charge . . .
*Written by a 21 year old female*
Put me in charge of food stamps. I'd get rid of Lone Star cards; no
cash for Ding Dongs or Ho Ho's, just vouchers for 50-pound bags of rice
and beans, blocks of cheese and all the powdered milk you can haul
away. If you want steak and frozen pizza, then get a job.
Put me in charge of Medicaid. The first thing I'd do is to get women
Norplant birth control implants or tubal ligations. Then, we'll test
recipients for drugs, alcohol, and nicotine and document all tattoos
and piercings. If you want to reproduce or use drugs, alcohol, smoke
or get tats and piercings, then get a job.
Put me in charge of government housing. Ever live in a military barracks?
You will maintain our property in a clean and good state of repair.
Your "home" will be subject to inspections anytime and possessions
will be inventoried. If you want a plasma TV or Xbox 360, then get a
job and your own place.
In addition, you will either present a check stub from a job each week
or you will report to a "government" job. It may be cleaning the
roadways of trash, painting and repairing public housing, working a government vegetable garden for your food or whatever we find for you. We will sell your 22 inch rims and low profile tires and your blasting stereo and speakers and put that money toward the“common good..”
Before you write that I've violated someone's rights, realize that all
of the above is voluntary. If you want our money, accept our rules..
Before you say that this would be "demeaning" and ruin their "self-esteem,"
consider that it wasn't that long ago that taking someone else's money for doing absolutely nothing was demeaning and lowered
self-esteem.
If we are expected to pay for other people's mistakes we should at
least attempt to make them learn from their bad choices. The current
system rewards them for continuing to make bad choices.
AND While you are on Gov’t subsistence, you no longer can VOTE! Yes
that is correct. For you to vote would be a conflict of interest. You
will voluntarily remove yourself from voting while you are receiving a
Gov’t welfare check. If you want to vote, then get a job.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The end result is the same in either case: Under President Obama, the US government has become hostile to Israel's national rights and strategic imperatives. Under Obama, the US is no longer Israel's ally.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6)Put me in charge . . .
*Written by a 21 year old female*
Put me in charge of food stamps. I'd get rid of Lone Star cards; no
cash for Ding Dongs or Ho Ho's, just vouchers for 50-pound bags of rice
and beans, blocks of cheese and all the powdered milk you can haul
away. If you want steak and frozen pizza, then get a job.
Put me in charge of Medicaid. The first thing I'd do is to get women
Norplant birth control implants or tubal ligations. Then, we'll test
recipients for drugs, alcohol, and nicotine and document all tattoos
and piercings. If you want to reproduce or use drugs, alcohol, smoke
or get tats and piercings, then get a job.
Put me in charge of government housing. Ever live in a military barracks?
You will maintain our property in a clean and good state of repair.
Your "home" will be subject to inspections anytime and possessions
will be inventoried. If you want a plasma TV or Xbox 360, then get a
job and your own place.
In addition, you will either present a check stub from a job each week
or you will report to a "government" job. It may be cleaning the
roadways of trash, painting and repairing public housing, working a government vegetable garden for your food or whatever we find for you. We will sell your 22 inch rims and low profile tires and your blasting stereo and speakers and put that money toward the“common good..”
Before you write that I've violated someone's rights, realize that all
of the above is voluntary. If you want our money, accept our rules..
Before you say that this would be "demeaning" and ruin their "self-esteem,"
consider that it wasn't that long ago that taking someone else's money for doing absolutely nothing was demeaning and lowered
self-esteem.
If we are expected to pay for other people's mistakes we should at
least attempt to make them learn from their bad choices. The current
system rewards them for continuing to make bad choices.
AND While you are on Gov’t subsistence, you no longer can VOTE! Yes
that is correct. For you to vote would be a conflict of interest. You
will voluntarily remove yourself from voting while you are receiving a
Gov’t welfare check. If you want to vote, then get a job.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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