Tom Friedman Is Full Of Himself & "Himself' Is Full of----!

Caught a little of tonight's debate and I keep liking the way Huntsman handles himself and I also thought Romney did well. Newt was Newt and he did well also.
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New York Times' offers Netanyahu a chance to rebut their negative editorials and he responds by basically telling them to 'take a hike.' His rejection was also intended as a rebuke to Tom Friedman for his comments.

Tom Friedman is full of himself and 'himself' is full of something else!

Does Friedman feel he achieves credibility by currying favor and misjudging Israel or worse, is he ashamed of being Jewish?

Either way, his analysis has been consistently wrong. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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According to Krauthammer, appeasement comes with a price. (See 3 below.)
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I remain suspect as does Comstock Partners.

Europe is slowing and it will have an effect upon us. China is also slowing and that will have an effect on both the world economies and commodities so for the moment inflation may not be the problem but ultimately it will be because of all the monetizing.

The recession 'ain't over til its over.' Thus, the odds of a double dip remain.(See 4 below.)
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Dick
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Turkey and Syria are creating tensions for each other. (See 1 below.)
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1) Turkish military on war preparedness after Syrian Scud Ds moved to border


Turkish armored vehicles head for Syrian border

War tensions around Syria rose alarmingly Thursday night, Dec. 15, when Turkey's top military council convened "to review the armed forces' preparedness for war" in response to the deployment of Syrian missiles, some tipped with chemical warheads, on their common border. Military sources report the meeting was led by Turkish President Abdullah Gul and Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.

The Assad government also rushed armored units in two directions - to the Turkish frontier and also to the Jordanian border opposite the US special operations units from Iraq newly deployed to defend Jordan against a Syrian attack.

Our sources report that 21 Syrian missile launchers, five of them Scud D with chemical warheads, are deployed in northern Syria opposite the Turkish Hatai (Alexandretta) district. They were moved up in broad daylight to make sure Western spy satellites and Turkish intelligence surveillance saw them. More are on the way.
In Israel, the IDF announced it was reconstituting the special command for operations behind enemy lines under the command of Brig. Gen. Shay Avital.

Before the military council convened in Ankara, Turkey placed its border contingents, air force and navy on war preparedness.

The official statement said the high military council had "assessed Turkish army needs and necessary steps to address these requirements…"

The Turkish press repeated a statement by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu in an interview two weeks ago that Turkey does not want to consider a military option for intervention in neighboring Syria as Damascus cracks down on popular protest, but it is ready for any scenario.

The Turkish army has prepared operational plans for seizing parts of northern Syria if the situation there continues to deteriorate. Those plans would essentially carve Syria into two entities, with the Turkish army holding the north and protecting opposition and civilian populations, while the Syrian army and Assad loyalists would remain in control of the central and southern regions.
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2)Netanyahu declines New York Times offer to run op-ed after NYT runs 19 anti-Israel and only 1 pro-Israel op-ed
By HERB KEINON


Prime minister "respectfully declines" to pen an op-ed piece for 'NYT'
citing newspapers negative spin on Netanyahu government.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is refusing to pen an op-ed piece for The
New York Times, signaling the degree to which he is fed up with the
influential newspaper’s editorial policy on Israel.

In a letter to the Times obtained by The Jerusalem Post on Thursday,
Netanyahu’s senior adviser Ron Dermer – in response to the paper’s request
that Netanyahu write an op-ed – wrote that the prime minister would
“respectfully decline.”

Dermer made clear that this had much to do with the fact that 19 of the
paper’s 20 op-ed pieces on Israel since September were negative.

Ironically, the one positive piece was written by Richard Goldstone –
chairman of the UN’s Goldstone Commission Report – defending Israel against
charges of apartheid.

“We wouldn’t want to be seen as ‘Bibiwashing’ the op-ed page of The New York
Times,” Dermer said, in reference to a piece called “Israel and Pinkwashing”
from November. In that piece, a City University of New York humanities
professor lambasted Israel for, as Dermer wrote, “having the temerity to
champion its record on gay rights.”

That piece, he wrote, “set a new bar that will be hard for you to lower in
the future.”

Dermer’s letter came a day after NYT columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that
the resounding ovation Netanyahu received in Congress when he spoke there in
May had been “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

With Friedman clearly – but not solely – among those in mind, Dermer wrote
that “the opinions of some of your regular columnists regarding Israel are
well known. They constantly distort the positions of our government and
ignore the steps it has taken to advance peace. They cavalierly defame our
country by suggesting that marginal phenomena condemned by Prime Minister
Netanyahu, and virtually every Israeli official, somehow reflect government
policy or Israeli society as a whole.”

Dermer also took the paper to task for running an op-ed piece by Palestinian
Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in May that asserted that shortly after
the UN voted for the partition of Palestine in November 1947, “Zionist
forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in
the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further
expulsions ensued.”

Those lines, Dermer wrote, “effectively turn on its head an event within
living memory in which the Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan
accepted by the Jews, and then joined five Arab states in launching a war to
annihilate the embryonic Jewish state. It should not have made it past the
most rudimentary fact-checking.”

That it did find its way into the op-ed pages of the “paper of record,” he
wrote, showed the degree to which the paper had not internalized former
senator Daniel Moynihan’s admonition that “everyone is entitled to their own
opinion, but... no one is entitled to their own facts.”

Furthermore, Dermer wrote, the paper’s sole positive piece about Israel
since September – the Goldstone piece rejecting the apartheid charges –
“came a few months after your paper reportedly rejected Goldstone’s previous
submission. In that earlier piece, which was ultimately published in The
Washington Post, the man who was quoted the world over for alleging that
Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza fundamentally changed his position.
According to The New York Times op-ed page, that was apparently news unfit
to print.”

Dermer wrote that the paper’s refusal to run positive pieces about Israel
was not because they were in short supply. In fact, he said he understood
that in September the paper had turned down a piece cowritten by House
Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer
(D-Maryland), expressing bipartisan support for direct Israeli-Palestinian
negotiations and opposition to the PA’s statehood gambit at the UN.

“In an age of intense partisanship, one would have thought that strong
bipartisan support for Israel on such a timely issue would have made your
cut,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, Rep. Steve Rothman (D-New Jersey) called on Friedman to apologize
for saying the congressional ovation Netanyahu received in May was “bought
and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

Rothman said he gave Netanyahu a standing ovation not because of “any
nefarious lobby,” but because it is in the US’s vital strategic interest to
support Israel.

“Thomas Friedman’s defamation against the vast majority of Americans who
support the Jewish state of Israel is scurrilous, destructive and harmful to
Israel and her advocates in the US,” Rothman said. “Friedman is not only
wrong, but he’s aiding and abetting a dangerous narrative about the
US-Israel relationship and its American supporters.”


2a)Friedman is wrong
By JPOST EDITORIAL

His misunderstanding of Israel is evident in his underlying assumption that appears in his columns repeatedly: that were Israel to just leave the settlements, peace would flow like a river.

For the past several years, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, that guru for American Jewish liberals, has shown that he doesn’t really understand Israel or the region.

His misunderstanding of Israel is evident in his underlying assumption that appears in his columns repeatedly: that were Israel to just leave the settlements, peace would flow like a river.

Well, Israel uprooted all 21 settlements from Gaza in 2005, but instead of peace, received an unending barrage of missiles in return.

The settlements are a consequence of the conflict, not its cause. The PLO, if anyone has forgotten, was established in 1964, three years before the Six Day War and any thought of a West Bank settlement.

As for Friedman’s failure to understand the region, readers need look no further than his breathless “Postcard from Cairo” columns at the outset of the Arab Spring last February. To have read Friedman then was to believe this was 1989 all over again, and that Hosni Mubarak would be deposed and replaced by the Egyptian version of Vaclav Havel.

In one piece, he castigated Israel for not being more supportive of the protesters in Tahrir Square. “The children of Egypt were having their liberation moment,” he wrote, “and the children of Israel decided to side with Pharaoh – right to the very end.”

Wrong. Israel wasn’t supporting Pharaoh, but rather deeply concerned that following the Egyptian revolution, Sinai would turn into a terrorist base, the Egypt-Israel gas pipeline would be a constant target of attack, the Israeli Embassy in Cairo would be ransacked, and the Muslim Brotherhood – and Salafists to their right – would win the country’s parliamentary election.


Now, in his latest piece on Israel that appeared Wednesday entitled “Newt, Mitt, Bibi and Vladimir,” Friedman demonstrated that he also doesn’t know America.

In a line that could have come straight from the pens of AIPAC-bashers Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, Friedman wrote that he hoped Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, whom he loathes, understood that the standing ovation he got in Congress earlier this year was not for his politics, but rather one that was “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

That’s right – that wicked, despicable Israel lobby.

According to Friedman, anybody who supports Israel must be on the nefarious Jewish lobby’s payroll. Otherwise, how could they dare? Maybe Friedman should consider the possibility that the ovation was the result of America’s elected officials – in tune with the feelings of their constituents – seeing in Israel a plucky little country that shares their own basic values and is trying to survive in an awfully bad neighborhood.

Maybe Friedman should consider that the ovation was the result of politicians understanding that this conflict is not about one settlement, or one Jerusalem neighborhood, but rather over the Jewish people’s right to a homeland.

No, that can’t be. In fact, writes Friedman – always concerned about Israel’s soul – were Netanyahu to go to the University of Wisconsin, many students, including Jews, would stay away because they are confused by Israeli policies: the current spate of right-wing Knesset legislation, the segregation of women on buses, the settlements.

And then came the kicker. Friedman’s proof that Israel is merrily heading down the path toward the abyss is that radical left-wing Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy says so.

Dubbing Levy a “powerful liberal voice, writing in Haaretz,” Friedman quotes from a recent Levy column: “What we are witnessing is w-a-r. This fall a culture war, no less, broke out in Israel, and it is being waged on many more, and deeper, fronts than are apparent. It is not only the government, as important as that is, that hangs in the balance, but also the very character of the state.”

Friedman’s use of an extremist such as Levy to prove his point is akin to taking the writings of America-bashing left-wing linguist Noam Chomsky as proof that America is bad.

The problem with Friedman and those sharing his sentiments about Israel is that they take an exception and make it the rule.

This school of thought takes a sex-segregated bus in Mea She’arim and turns the whole country into Iran; takes rocks thrown by bad, misguided youth at an IDF base and turns Israel into a country on the brink of civil war; and takes the government’s refusal to bail out a failing commercial television station as putting Israel on the fast track to Soviet Russia.

What is needed is some proportion. The burning of mosques by Jewish hooligans is deplorable, but it is no more representative of the country – or the direction it is going – than Florida Pastor Terry Jones’ burning of a Koran in May was a reflection of America. Friedman should know this.
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3)The wages of appeasement
By Charles Krauthammer


Fair enough. Barack Obama didn’t appease Osama bin Laden. He killed him. And for ordering the raid and taking the risk, Obama deserves credit. Credit for decisiveness and political courage.

However, the bin Laden case was no test of policy. No serious person of either party ever suggested negotiation or concession. Obama demonstrated decisiveness, but forgoing a non-option says nothing about the soundness of one’s foreign policy. That comes into play when there are choices to be made.

And here the story is different. Take Obama’s two major foreign policy initiatives — toward Russia and Iran.

The administration came into office determined to warm relations with Russia. It was called “reset,” an antidote to the “dangerous drift” (Vice President Biden’s phrase) in relations during the Bush years.

In fact, Bush’s increasing coolness toward Russia was grounded in certain unpleasant realities: growing Kremlin authoritarianism that was systematically dismantling a fledgling democracy; naked aggression against a small, vulnerable, pro-American state (Georgia); the drive to reestablish a Russian sphere of influence in the near-abroad and; support, from Syria to Venezuela, of the world’s more ostentatiously anti-American regimes.

Unmoored from such inconvenient realities, Obama went about his reset. The signature decision was the abrupt cancellation of a Polish- and Czech-based U.S. missile defense system bitterly opposed by Moscow.

The cancellation deeply undercut two very pro-American allies who had aligned themselves with Washington in the face of both Russian threats and popular unease. Obama not only left them twisting in the wind, he showed the world that the Central Europeans’ hard-won independence was only partial and tentative. With American acquiescence, their ostensibly sovereign decisions were subject to a Russian veto.

This major concession, together with a New START treaty far more needed by Russia than America, was supposed to ease U.S.-Russia relations, assuage Russian opposition to missile defense and enlist its assistance in stopping Iran’s nuclear program.

Three years in, how is that reset working out? The Russians are back on the warpath about missile defense. They’re denouncing the watered-down Obama substitute. They threaten not only to target any Europe-based U.S. missile defenses but also to install offensive missiles in Kaliningrad. They threaten additionally to withdraw from START, which the administration had touted as a great foreign policy achievement.

As for assistance on Iran, Moscow has thwarted us at every turn, weakening or blocking resolution after resolution. And now, when even the International Atomic Energy Agency has testified to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Russia declares that it will oppose any new sanctions.

Finally, adding contempt to mere injury, Vladimir Putin responded to recent anti-government demonstrations by unleashing a crude Soviet-style attack on America as the secret power behind the protests. Putin personally accused Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of sending “a signal” that activated internal spies and other agents of imperial America.

Such are the wages of appeasement. Makes one pine for mere “drift.”

Even worse has been Obama’s vaunted “engagement” with Iran. He began his presidency apologetically acknowledging U.S. involvement in a coup that happened more than 50 years ago. He then offered bilateral negotiations that, predictably, failed miserably. Most egregiously, he adopted a studied and scandalous neutrality during the popular revolution of 2009, a near-miraculous opportunity — now lost — for regime change.

Obama imagined that his silver tongue and exquisite sensitivity to Islam would persuade the mullahs to give up their weapons program. Amazingly, they resisted his charms, choosing instead to become a nuclear power. The negotiations did nothing but confer legitimacy on the regime at its point of maximum vulnerability (and savagery), as well as give it time for further uranium enrichment and bomb development.

For his exertions, Obama earned (a) continued lethal Iranian assistance to guerrillas killing Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, (b) a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador by blowing up a Washington restaurant, (c) the announcement just this week by a member of parliament of Iranian naval exercises to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, and (d) undoubted Chinese and Russian access to a captured U.S. drone for the copying and countering of its high-tech secrets.

How did Obama answer that one?

On Monday, he politely asked for the drone back.

On Tuesday, with Putin-like contempt, Iran demanded that Obama apologize instead. “Obama begs Iran to give him back his toy plane,” reveled the semiofficial Fars News Agency.

Just a few hours earlier, Secretary Clinton asserted yet again that “we want to see the Iranians engage. . . . We are not giving up on it.”

Blessed are the cheek-turners. But do these people have no limit?
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4)Market Facing Strong Headwinds


Recent Market Commentary:
12/15/11 Market Facing Strong Headwinds
12/8/11 Additional Liquidity Is Not A Solution
12/1/11 Central Bank Action Not A Solution
11/17/11 Euro Crisis At A Tipping Point?
11/10/11 Euro Crisis Enters Dangerous Stage
11/3/11 Fed's Outlook Nothing To Cheer About
10/27/11 Another Bear Market Trap
10/20/11 The Market Is NOT Cheap
10/13/11 More Important than Historical Statistics--Private Debt Decline
10/6/11 Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! Business Roundtable and Challenger
9/29/11 What are the Driving Forces for the Economy?
9/21/11 Total Private Market Debt's Decline Should be a Glaring Warning Sign
9/15/11 Questionable Rally
9/6/11 This Week's Comment will be a Special Report. (click on Comstock Special Reports on the left)
9/1/11 Have a Great Labor Day Weekend
8/25/11 Debt is the Problem and Private Debt is Even More of a Problem
8/18/11 Bear Market Far From Over
8/11/11 Lengthy Bullet Points on our Bear Case Regardless of Interim Rallys
8/4/11 Suddenly It All Matters
7/28/11 No Good Outcome From The Debt Ceiling Crisis

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Most U.S. portfolio managers seem to view the EU sovereign debt crisis as they would a pesky mosquito that refuses to fly away. If only the mosquito would leave, the asset managers could concentrate on the U.S. where the economy is said to be showing so much improvement and stocks are incorrectly perceived to be cheap. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The EU crisis is part of a developed world credit crisis brought on by too much debt that must be deleveraged, a process that will take many years in both the EU and the U.S. It should clearly be realized that the EU debt problems are not going away soon, that it will impact the U.S. and that the U.S. economy has its own serious problems as well. In addition, there are signs that the global economy is slowing down as well.

The EU sovereign debt crisis is leading to greater fiscal austerity and is rapidly pushing most of Europe into recession. As was the case with subprime mortgages, this will not be an isolated event. The EU nations combined constitute the largest economy in the world and are major importers from both the U.S. and the emerging nations. A significant reduction of EU imports will therefore have a major impact on global GDP. In addition, the need for European banks to strengthen their balance sheets and raise capital will impair credit availability and world trade. Goldman Sachs estimates that the EU crisis could cut U.S. GDP by 1%. They state that "A reduction in the lending of foreign banks to U.S. counterparties could have a meaningful impact on U.S. growth."

A front-page article in today's Wall Street Journal states that European bank problems are already straining global financial markets. France's third largest bank, Credit Agricole SA, is leaving 21 of the 53 countries in which it operates. Germany's Commerzbank is negotiating to transfer suspect assets to a government-owned "bad bank". This is probably only the tip of the iceberg, as massive loan losses can severely impair the ability of the European banking system to function. Even a nation as far away as Australia has warned that the problems could impact the price and availability of credit.

The U.S. economy has its own serious problems as well, despite the improvement in recent economic releases. Consumer spending has been propped up mainly by a decrease in the household savings rate from 5% of DPI in June to 3.5% in October. For longer-term perspective, we note that the savings rate averaged 9.6% in the 1970s, 8.6% in the 1980s, 5.5% in the 1990s and 3.3% in the 2000s with a low near zero. In order to deleverage debts, the savings rate will have to resume its rise with the associated negative effect on spending. Consumers will also be restrained by the slow rise in DPI, continuing high unemployment, slow wage growth, lack of credit availability and low house prices.

Housing continues to be a serious problem for the economy. As a result of the robo signing scandal, foreclosures have been declining, but as these are being gradually cleared up, the backlog of potential foreclosures will emerge once again. Scheduled auction sales for November were up 13%, a nine-month high. As many as 6 million mortgage borrowers have missed payments, 3.5 million for 90 days or more. The majority of these defaults will result in foreclosure and resulting lower house prices. Housing is by far the most important asset for the middle class. Falling home prices mean lower consumer spending, reduced property tax revenues for local governments and less valuable collateral for small business loans.

GDP growth for 2012 is also likely to be pressured by tightening fiscal policy. The number of tax and spending measures expiring at year-end can reduce GDP by an estimated 1.7%. Of this amount, the 2% payroll tax reduction and the emergency unemployment insurance program account for 0.9%. If one or both of these programs are extended, the hit to GDP could be reduced, but only if there are no offsets elsewhere in the budget.

All in all, the negative fallout from the EU sovereign debt crisis and the outlook for the U.S. economy are likely to have a strong downward pull on the stock market. Rather than reflecting fear, the market seems unusually complacent as investors are overconfident that the world financial authorities can pull a rabbit out of the hat at the last minute. In fact, investors seem at least as fearful of missing the next bull market as they are of a major decline.
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