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I did not catch the debate last night because I was hosting a piano-cello concert but this is a summation for those who also did not take the time to see it.
Based on this summation it would appear CNN continues to seek out sensationalism rather than substance and this is why America is turning it off more and more.
The Third estate also has an obligation to protect and defend our nation as much as our president and Congress. Reporters and newscasters would be wise to do so in a less biased manner. However, that is expecting more than we will get considering they go to colleges and universities whose professors are mostly socialists and social bleeders ignorant of economics and statistics and who have a contempt for capitalism.
On the other hand it will not serve our nation well if we choose another debater who also possesses other characteristics that are questionable. We currently have a president who is a failure and the risk of two in a row might be more than our nation can withstand. On the other hand, Romney, though decent, is not inspiring.
No comments on the wealth of Pelosi or Kerry--nor how their wealth was amassed.
No comments on the Wall Street crowd now part of the BO administration.
No comments on Barbara Streisand's earning $20 million for a 2-hour concert.
But MITT ROMNEY IS A GREEDY CAPITALIST?????
Woe is us!(See 1 and 1a below.)
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Push comes to shove? (See 2 below.)
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The way to winning is to keep lying and dividing. (See 3 below.)
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We took some friends to see the fabulous African artifact collection of another friend today. One of the four in our group is a very astute reader of the market and turned bullish at the appropriate time several years ago and still remains positive. Why? Because the main nations of the world are concerned about the consequences of credit tightening and thus, as long as rates remain low, he expects significant market performance. He also acknowledges there will be modest reactions,from time to time, and favors those stocks that under performed as being the ones more likely to play catch up. He also allows for earnings of American companies exposed to Europe to experience some diminished earnings performance but still is positive on the market.
His financial and market background certainly qualifies him as someone whose opinions I respect and should have paid more attention to when he first turned positive.
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This beats 9 9 9: "HOW I LEARNED TO MIND MY OWN BUSINESS
I was walking past the State mental hospital the other day.
All the patients were shouting, "13, 13, 13."
The fence was too high to see over, but I saw a little gap in the
planks. So, I looked through to see what was going on.
Some idiot poked me in the eye with a stick.
Then, they all started shouting, "14, 14, 14"......"
Finally, five simple home remedies:
AMAZING, SIMPLE HOME REMEDIES: 1. Avoid cutting yourself when slicing vegetables by getting someone else to hold the vegetables while you chop. 2. Avoid arguments with the females about lifting the toilet seat by using the sink. 3. For high blood pressure sufferers ~ simply cut yourself and bleed for a few minutes, thus reducing the pressure on your veins. Remember to use a timer. 4. A mouse trap placed on top of your alarm clock will prevent you from rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button. 5. If you can't fix it with a hammer, you've got an electrical problem. |
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I still stay in touch with a dear political friend and inquired of him his thinking and this was his 'abridged' response: "Dear Dick: Good to catch up on your busy “retirement” activities... I have just returned from China with Henry Kissinger (celebration of 40th anniversary of Nixon visit), and I will journey to Germany in February, so – more than enough travel.
I, too, am concerned about our fiscal challenges, as yet not addressed by an increasingly dysfunctional Washington. Unfortunately, as the Washington dysfunction gets worse, the “crew” doesn’t need to be divided by the captain. They do that for themselves. As long as “compromise” is a dirty word and both parties are controlled by the extremes, progress is somewhere between difficult and impossible. The big question is how long the world will keep lending us money.
Enough gloom – I hope that 2012 is a great year for you and your family.
Sincerely,
My 'abridged' response: "... Your observations, regarding the political scene, are as cogent as ever but we got into this fiscal and social mess because of compromise. As you know, I always warned about this and do not believe half a loaf of bad bread is better than no loaf.
Maybe one day we will have the chance to further a discussion in that regard. Meanwhile, I also do not believe another crafty debater (Newt) is what we need. We tried that in 2008.
Romney ain't my 'cherce,' as Spencer Tracy once used the expression in a somewhat different context, but he is a decent man, no skeletons other than what his detractors are trying to get the public to believe. Yes, colorless but a solid family man and an achiever who created what he has on his own, more or less...
Woe is America!
Maybe one day we will have the chance to further a discussion in that regard. Meanwhile, I also do not believe another crafty debater (Newt) is what we need. We tried that in 2008.
Romney ain't my 'cherce,' as Spencer Tracy once used the expression in a somewhat different context, but he is a decent man, no skeletons other than what his detractors are trying to get the public to believe. Yes, colorless but a solid family man and an achiever who created what he has on his own, more or less...
Woe is America!
As always, Me
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Dick
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1)Gingrich Slams CNN for Marriage Question, Gets Ovation
Thursday, 19 Jan 2012 09:35 PM
By Paul Scicchitano
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich drew at least two standing ovations just moments into the final South Carolina GOP presidential debate tonight when he criticized CNN moderator John King for opening with “trash,” and accused the liberal media of attempting to protect President Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.
King began the two-hour debate from the North Charleston Coliseum with a question on accusations by Gingrich’s ex-wife, Marianne, that the former speaker had asked her for permission to have an "open marriage" after she learned he was having an affair with his current wife, the former Callista Bisek.
“As you know, your ex-wife gave an interview to ABC News and another interview with The Washington Post and this story has now gone viral on the Internet. In it she says that you came to her in 1999 at a time when you were having an affair. She says you asked her, sir, to enter into an open marriage. Would you like to take some time to respond to that?” asked King.
“No, but I will,” snapped Gingrich, who was visibly angered by the question. “I think the destructive, vicious negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office and I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate with a topic like that.”
Interrupted frequently by applause — including standing ovations similar to what he received at Monday’s debate — Gingrich strongly denied the accusation and said that he offered to give ABC News the names of “several” friends who knew him at the time he was married to his ex-wife and would support his contention that the story is false.
“Every person in here knows personal pain. Every person in here has had someone close to them go through painful things. To take an ex-wife and make it, two days before the primary, a significant question in a presidential campaign is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine,” he said. The audience roared.
Gingrich also pointed to support from his two daughters. “My two daughters wrote the head of ABC and made the point that it was wrong, that they should pull it. And I am frankly astounded that CNN would take trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate,” Gingrich told the host.
The two South Carolina debates this week appear to have done more to narrow the GOP field than either the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary as Texas Gov. Rick Perry suspended his campaign hours before Thursday’s debate and former Utah Gov. and U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman suspended his campaign on Monday — hours before that debate.
Republican strategist Bradley A. Blakeman, who served as a debate analyst for the Fox Radio Network on Thursday, proclaimed Gingrich the debate's big winner, largely due to his response at the outset.
“Gingrich was waiting for this. It’s like shooting ducks in a pond. He knew righteous indignation worked on Monday so try it again on Thursday,” Blakeman told Newsmax in an exclusive interview after the debate.
Blakeman said that Romney once again appeared to stumble over the release of his income tax returns, a major problem for him during Monday’s debate when he said he would consider, but did not immediately commit to releasing his tax returns around the April timeframe.
“I think if you balance it out, Romney had to do a much better job tonight, which he didn’t do. He didn’t make any major gaffes but on the other hand he didn’t do substantially better than he did on Monday especially with regard to the tax question,” said Blakeman, who served as a senior staff member for President George W. Bush.
“What he should have said was, ‘I’m going to release the 2010 [return] in two weeks.’ What he should have explained is my tax returns are extremely complicated and I want time to review them.”
Before the start of Thursday’s event, host King noted the dwindling number of podiums on the debate stage. “We had five in here at sun-up this morning. We’re down to four now,” he told viewers on CNN, which hosted the event. “That’s a little bit more cozy. There were seven candidates when I moderated back in June. There have been eight candidates at some of the debates. Now we’re down to just four.”
Gingrich surged ahead of Romney in four separate polls based largely on his performance in Monday’s debate, positioning him to not only do well in South Carolina but also in the Jan. 31 Florida primary.
Noted pollster and author Scott Rasmussen told Newsmax.TV earlier on Thursday that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s appeal as the “inevitable nominee” appears to be starting to wane based largely on Gingrich’s debate performance.
Pressed by King to weigh in on whether the accusations by Marianne Gingrich should be an issue in the campaign, his rivals also appeared supportive — if not uncomfortable — with the line of questioning.
“I am a Christian too and I thank God for forgiveness,” replied former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who is now believed to have edged out Romney by 34 votes in the final tally in last month’s Iowa caucuses.
“But these are issues of our lives and what we did in our lives. They’re issues of character for people to consider. But the bottom line is those are things for everyone in this audience to look at. And they’re going to look at me — look at what I’ve done in my private life and personal life, unfortunately. And what I say is that this country is a very forgiving country. This country understands that we are all fallen and I’m very hopeful that we will be judged by that standard and not by a higher one on the ultimate day.”
Like Gingrich, his chief rival heading into Saturday’s critical vote, Romney also appeared to be angered by the question. “John let’s get on to the real issues is all I’ve got to say,” he said to applause.
Texas Rep. Ron Paul used the opportunity to lash out at the media. “I think too often all of us are on receiving ends of attacks from the media,” he told the debate audience. “It’s very disturbing because sometimes they’re not based on facts and we suffer the consequences.
"You know, sometimes it reminds me of this idea of getting corporations out of running campaigns but what about the corporations that run the media?” he asked to applause. “The people have to sort this out but I think setting standards are very important, and I’m very proud that my wife of 54 years is with me tonight.”
When the spotlight turned to Romney’s tenure as CEO of Bain Capital, the former governor bristled at having to explain the math behind the number of jobs his former company helped to create.
“My view is capitalism works. Free enterprise works and I find it kind of strange on a stage like this — with Republicans, having to describe how private equity and venture capital work and how they’re successful and how they create jobs. But let me tell you that answer. We started a number of businesses — four in particular created 120,000 jobs as of today.
“We started them years ago. They’ve grown well beyond the time I was there, to 120,000 people that have been employed by those enterprises. There are others we’ve been with, some of which have lost jobs,” Romney responded, pointing to a net increase of more than 100,000 jobs.
“I’m very proud of the fact that throughout my career I have worked to try and build enterprises, hopefully to return money to investors. There’s nothing wrong with profit by the way,” he said to applause. “That profit went to pension funds, to charities. It went to a wide array of institutions. A lot of people benefitted from that. And by the way — as enterprises become more profitable — they can hire more people.
“I’m someone who believes in free enterprise . . . Throughout this campaign I know we’re going to hit it hard from President Obama but we’re going to stuff it down his throat and point out it is capitalism and freedom that makes America strong.”
Gingrich, earlier in the debate, had called on Romney to explain his model for investment, which he insisted was to “take over a company and dramatically leverage it, leave it with a great deal of debt, made it less likely to survive.”
While all four remaining GOP candidates threw jabs at Obama, Santorum in particular sought to raise his own profile, describing his own apparent change in fortune in Iowa, where officials had initially proclaimed an eight-vote victory for Romney.
Santorum played aggressor for much of the night, trying to inject himself into what seemed increasingly like a two-way race between Gingrich and Romney, accusing both men of "playing footsie with the left" when it came to health care — an accusation that both rivals rejected.
With respect to Gingrich, Santorum said, "you sort of have that worrisome moment that something's going to pop. And we can't afford that in a nominee.”
In a reflection of the complex political dynamics of the race, first Gingrich and then Santorum challenged Romney over his well-documented switch of position on abortion. Once a supporter of a woman's life to choose, he now says he is "pro-life."
Gingrich didn't specifically question Romney's change in position, but he didn't embrace it, either, saying, "He had an experience in a lab and became pro-life.”
Romney again bristled. "I'm not questioned on character or integrity very often. I don't feel like standing here for that."
Vying for votes in a state with 9.9 percent unemployment, the candidates were asked by Jane Gallagher of Mount Pleasant, S.C., to name three specific programs that would put Americans back to work.
Paul answered first. “Well most of the things the federal government could do to get us back to work is get out of the way,” offered the Texan, repeating common themes of his campaign. “I’d like to see the federal government have a sound currency. That creates a healthy economy. I would like to see massive reduction of regulations. I would like to see income tax reduced to near zero as possible. And that is what we have to do.”
He said that government must get out of the way.
“We have to recognize why we have unemployment and it comes because we have a deeply flawed financial system that causes financial bubbles. The bubbles burst and you have unemployment. Now the most important thing to get over that hump, that was created artificially by bad economic policies, is to allow the correction to occur, you have to get rid of the excessive debt and you have to get rid of the mal-investment,” he said.
“And you don’t do that by buying the debt off the people who were benefiting from it. So we the people shouldn’t be stuck with these debts on these mortgage derivatives and all. We need to get that behind us, which means the government shouldn’t be doing any bailouts so most of the things to improve the environment is getting the government out of the way and enforce contract laws and enforce bankruptcy laws.”
Gingrich began his response by pledging to fight for the repeal of Dodd-Frank. “There’s one easy thing to do at a national level and that’s repeal the Dodd-Frank bill, which is killing small business, killing small banks. That would help overnight,” he explained.
He pointed to three specific actions the government can take: “One there’s $29 billion plus of natural gas offshore. In Louisiana, jobs for that kind of production are $80,000 a year. That would help us become energy independent from the Middle East,” he said, noting that some of the royalties from the natural gas could be used to modernize the Port of Charleston and the Port of Georgetown.
“Charleston has to be modernized to meet the larger ships that will come through the Panama Canal in 2014,” said Gingrich. “One out of every five jobs in South Carolina is dependent on the Port of Charleston.
“The third thing you can do, frankly, is fundamentally, radically overhaul the Corps of Engineers. The Corps of Engineers today takes eight years to study — not to complete — to study doing the port. We won the entire Second World War in three years and eight months.”
Romney began his answer by pointing to the need to overhaul the tax code.
“Of course we’ve spoken time and again about our tax code that’s out of alignment with other nations,” he said. “We’ve spoken about the fact that regulation is overwhelming us, that we need to take care of our energy resources and become energy secure. We have to open up markets and we have to crack down in China when they cheat.”
He went on to accuse Obama of engaging in what he described as crony capitalism. “If you want to get America going again, you've got to stop the spread of crony capitalism. He gives General Motors to the UAW. He takes $500 million and sticks in into Solyndra. He stacks the labor stooges on the NLRB so they can say ‘no’ to Boeing and take care of their friends in the labor movement,” according to Romney.
“You go across the country with regard to energy — because he has to bow to the most extreme members of the environmental movement — he turns down the Keystone Pipeline which would bring energy and jobs to America. This president is the biggest impediment to job growth in this country and we have to replace Barack Obama to get America working again.”
While saying that he too believes in capitalism, Santorum also took an apparent jab at Romney. “I believe in capitalism too. I believe in capitalism for everybody, not necessarily high finance, but capitalism that works for the working men and women of this country, who are out their paddling alone in America right now — who have an unemployment rate two-and-a-half times those who are college educated and feel that no party cares about them because you have the Democratic Party and Barack Obama and all he wants to do is make them more dependent — give them more food stamps, give them more Medicaid,” he declared.
While speaking with an Iowa official recently, Santorum said, he was appalled to learn that the state is in danger of being fined because not enough people are being signed up for Medicaid. “This is what the answer is for the economic squalor that Barack Obama has visited on working men and women of this country and is creating more government programs and getting more dependent on those programs,” Santorum added. “We need a party that just doesn’t talk about high finance and cutting corporate taxes or cutting the top tax rates.
“We need to talk about how we’re going to put men and women in this country, who built this country, back to work in this country in the manufacturing sector of our economy.”
Santorum said that he would fight to make U.S. manufacturers more competitive. “South Carolina can compete with anybody in this world in manufacturing. We just need to give them the opportunity to compete and we are 20 percent more costly than our top nine trading partners. And that’s excluding labor costs,” he said.
“That’s why I said we need to cut the corporate tax of manufacturing down to zero. We need to give manufacturers a leg up so they can compete for the jobs — half of which we went from 21 percent of this country in manufacturing down to 9 – and we left the dreams of working men and women on the sideline. We need to show that we’re the party. We’re the movement that is going to get those Reagan Democrats — those conservative Democrats all throughout the states that we need to win — to win this election — to sign up with us and we’ll put them back to work.
1a)A GOP Candidate's Bitter Ex-Wife Receives More Coverage Than a Video of Obama Dining with Terrorist-Supporters
By Lauri B. Regan
As I watch the media circus surrounding Marianne Gingrich's interview regarding her relationship with her ex-husband and GOP candidate, Newt Gingrich, I am once again reminded of the double standard afforded to the Democrats and Barack Obama in particular. Coming on the heels of the Herman Cain melee in which the press had a field day parading one accuser after another before video cameras, it is difficult not to repeat the question of why the Democrats get a free pass. Why are calls for Mitt Romney to release his tax return not met with calls for Barack Obama to release his college transcripts -- something that is just as customary for presidential candidates?
However, of greater importance in my view is the silence, save for a few journalists and pundits on the right, regarding exposing a videotape recorded in 2003 of Barack Obama at the farewell dinner for terrorist-supporting Palestinian Rashid Khalidi. News of the videotape's existence came to light while Obama was a candidate, and the free pass given to him by the mainstream media was only just beginning to come to light when the enamored Chris Matthews' shared news of the tingle up his leg.
While the birthers' demands did draw some media attention, it was mostly negative and only made fun of the supposedly crazy loons on the far right who apparently were representative of all petty and irrational conservatives. No one seemed to notice that Obama had not written a single article while serving as editor of The Harvard Law Review, and no one pressed the issue of Obama's suppressed college and law school transcripts since it was a given that his brilliance was perhaps surpassed only by the likes of Albert Einstein.
But there is a videotape sitting in the vaults of the Los Angeles Times, and every American should be screaming from the rooftops for its release. In light of the Arab Spring, Obama's endless attempts to bully Israel into succumbing to all sorts of unprecedented and unsafe demands in the hopes that he would go down in history as the POTUS who made peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, and the administration's ineptness in addressing Iran's nuclear program and military threats, exposing this videotape is of utmost importance.
In April 2010, Roger L. Simon published an article on PajamasMedia entitled, "Why is the L.A. Times Burying the Obama/Khalidi Tape?" Of further consequence is why the media -- and Americans -- are not demanding that the L.A. Times immediately release the tape. Simon wrote:
The Khalidi tape could be of tremendous significance in revealing the provenance of Obama's views on the Middle East and the degree to which the public was misled on those views during the presidential campaign[.] ...
So what are we to think? We have an administration that not only ascribes most of the Middle East blame to Israel, but also has banned "Islamism" and all related words, even "Islam" and "jihad" from our national security documents. They're completely gone. Indeed, even the Fort Hood massacre, so clearly inspired by Islamic extremism, has now been shifted into the comfortable category of the lone, angry killer. Rashid Khalidi should be happy. And, in fact, he is.
Sometimes I want to yell and scream. What is wrong with the Los Angeles Times? Are they a news organization or the propaganda wing of some leftover unit of the IWW? No wonder subscribers are deserting them in droves.
While I am sure that Simon's questions were rhetorical, I will answer the obvious. Of course the paper is a propaganda tool. Were it not for the internet and cable television, true news organizations would no longer exist. It was recently reported that Jerusalem Post editor Steve Linde quoted Bibi Netanyahu calling The New York Times and Haaretz Israel's two main enemies because "they set the agenda for an anti-Israel campaign all over the world." Netanyahu denies making this exact statement, but there is no question that both papers' reporting reflects a bias that can be characterized only as anti-Israel propaganda. Taken a step further, there is no question that the mainstream media as a whole has become completely entrenched in propaganda, bias, anti-Israel and anti-American sentiment, and indoctrination based on liberal, progressive values that are completely out of the "mainstream."
The public will never understand that the Islamists taking over the Mideast are not moderate, will not promote democracy, are not friends of the United States, and wish the ultimate destruction of the West if the public reads and relies upon only The New York Times, L.A. Times, MSNBC, or similar tools of the left for its "news" and information. Americans will not understand the implications of four more years of a pro-Islamist president if they do not understand what Islamism is all about. And they will not know who is sitting in the White House making policy decisions based on personal biases if the media continues to promote Obama's agenda rather than investigate and report.
So why is the videotape of such paramount importance? Simon quotes from an article published in the L.A.Times discussing the tape and its contents:
[A] young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, "then you will never see a day of peace."
One speaker likened "Zionist settlers on the West Bank" to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been "blinded by ideology."
Furthermore, rumors abound regarding additional messages that may or may not have been openly shared at the dinner in Obama's presence. Ted Belman reported at Israpundit that he has a reliable source that "the audio tape clearly picks up the toast 'death to Israel'." Did Obama drink to the death of an American ally that he has been actively intimidating, browbeating, and dissing since he phoned Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on his first day in office? Does Obama liken Israelis living in the West Bank to Osama bin Laden, whose death he claims as his greatest foreign policy accomplishment?
Simon concluded his article with a request that readers send in suggestions on how to make the contents of the tape public. Apparently Donald Trump missed this request when he wasted the media's energy pushing for the release of Obama's birth certificate -- something with which Obama is still having fun as he mocked the birthers at the Golden Globe awards last week.
But I highly doubt that the POTUS, who had his worldview formed while sitting in the pews of Israel-bashing Jeremiah Wright and at the dinner table of anti-Semite Khalidi, will be mocking people who care enough to properly vet his credentials by urging the release of the tape. And I venture a guess that if the videotape is released, Barack Obama will be packing his bags at the end of this year. But that is a big "if" because until the media stops obsessing over the infidelities of the GOP candidates and starts doing its job, Barack Obama's chances of a second term continue to scare the living daylights out of those who understand its implications.
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2)Netanyahu: Iran has decided to become a nuclear state. Action needed before it is too late.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Thursday night, Jan. 19 that Iran had decided to become a nuclear state. He urged action before it was too late to stop Iran completing the construction of a nuclear weapon. His statement at the end of a visit to Holland gave Gen Martin Dempsey, on his first visit to Israel as Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the message he will be asked to take back to President Barack Obama. It also contradicted Defense Minister Ehud Barak's statement that Tehran had not yet decided to go nuclear.
Netanyahu has kept the Iranian cards close to his chest. His statement therefore caught wrong-footed the Israeli officials, including Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who in the last 48 hours had asserted that Iran had not yet decided whether to build a nuclear bomb and there was still time for US-led sanctions to work.
Gen. Martin Dempsey begins his first visit to Israel as Chairman of the Joint US Chiefs of Staff amid a major falling-out between the two governments over the handling of Iran's nuclear weapon potential. Military and Washington sources confirm that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands by the view that Iran is advancing its plans to build a nuclear bomb full speed ahead, undeterred even by the threat of harsher sanctions. Netanyahu therefore stands by his refusal of President Barack Obama's demand for a commitment to abstain from a unilateral strike on Iran's nuclear sites without prior notice to Washington.
The US president repeated this demand when he called the Israeli prime minister Thursday night Jan. 13. Netanyahu replied that, in view of their disagreement on this point, he preferred to cancel the biggest US-Israel war game ever staged due to have taken place in April. The exercise was to have tested the level of coordination between the two armies in missile defense for the contingency of a war with Iran or a regional conflict.
The prime minister was concerned that having large-scale US military forces in the country would restrict his leeway for decision-making on Iran.
In an effort to limit the damage to relations with the US administration, Defense Minister Ehud Barak struck a conciliatory note Wednesday, Jan. 18, saying, "Israel is still very far from a decision on attacking Iran's nuclear facilities."
Striking the pose of middleman, he was trying to let Washington know that there was still time for the US and Israel to reach an accommodation on whether and when a strike should take place.
Sources doubt that President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu are in any mood to respond to Barak's effort to cool the dispute. Obama needs to be sure he will not be taken by surprise by an Israel attack in the middle of his campaign for re-election, especially since he has begun taking heat on the Iranian issue.
Republican rivals are accusing him of being soft on Iran. And while the economy is the dominant election issue, a majority of Americans disapprove of his handling of Iran's nuclear ambitions by a margin of 48 to 33 percent according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll this week.
Wednesday (Thursday morning Israel time), President Obama responded by reiterating that he has been clear since running for the presidency that he will take "every step available to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon."
Echoes of Barak's arguments were heard in the words of US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Wednesday night: "We are not making any special steps at this point in order to deal with the situation. Why? Because, frankly, we are fully prepared to deal with that situation now."
Panetta went on to say that Defense Minister Barak contacted him and asked to postpone the joint US-Israeli drill "for technical reasons."
Before he took off for a short trip to Holland, Netanyahu instructed Barak and IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz not to deviate in their talks with Gen. Dempsey from the position he took with the US president, namely, no commitment for advance notice to Washington about a unilateral strike against Iran.
The Israeli prime minister is convinced that, contrary to the claims by US spokesmen and media, that current sanctions are ineffective insofar as slowing Iran's advance toward a nuclear weapon and the harsher sanctions on Iran's central bank and oil exports are too slow and will take hold too late to achieve their purpose.
In any case, say Israeli officials, Washington is again signaling its willingness to go back to direct nuclear negotiations with Tehran, although past experience proved that Iran exploits diplomatic dialogue as grace time for moving forward on its nuclear ambitions.
US spokesmen denied an Iranian report that a recent letter from the US president to Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei proposed opening a direct channel for talks.
Still those reports persist. American and European spokesmen were forced to deny a statement by Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi Wednesday on his arrival in Ankara that Iran and the big powers are in contact over the revival of nuclear negotiations.
Netanyahu fears that dialogue between Iran and the five powers plus Germany (the P5+1) will resume after bowing to an Iranian stipulation that sanctions be suspended for the duration of the talks. Once again, Tehran will be enabled to steal a march on the US and Israel and bring its nuclear weapon program to conclusion, unhindered by economic constraints.
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3) Obama’s Racial Politics
By Victor Davis Hanson
Never has America been more assimilated, integrated, and intermarried — as is evident in everything from politics to popular culture, from statistics to anecdotes. Yet from late 2007 to 2012, Barack Obama has been establishing new rules of racial referencing. In general, his utterances follow a disheartening pattern. When he is ahead in the polls, has won an election, and is not campaigning, then he emphasizes the unity of the country. But when he is running for president, or campaigning for others, or sinking in the polls, he and his closest associates predictably revert to charges of racial bigotry, albeit usually coded and subtle. America is redeemed when it champions the Obamas, but retrograde when it does not.
Obama’s race-based strategy is predicated on some unspoken assumptions: Any short-term damage incurred by engaging in racial tribalism can easily be later erased by soaring teleprompted speeches on racial harmony; the media will either not widely report his emphases on race or generally support his charges; a person of color can hardly be culpable of racial polarization himself given the history of racial discrimination in this country.
In a recent speech before a Latino audience, President Obama, in blasting congressional Republicans, recalled that he had run for office because “America should be a place where you can always make it if you try; a place where every child, no matter what they look like, where they come from, should have a chance to succeed.” The obvious conclusion from his increasingly frequent “look like” trope is that his critics predicate success in America on just the opposite criteria. That is, supposedly racist opponents do not wish every child to succeed, and so it certainly matters to them a great deal what Americans should “look like.”
Recently, First Lady Michelle Obama complained about a description of her White House infighting in an otherwise favorable account of the first family, written by a New York Times reporter. She suggested that the book’s criticism was unfair because “That’s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since, you know, the day Barack announced, that I’m some angry black woman.”
Oddly, the first lady did not cite anyone who, in fact, had tried to stereotype her as an “angry black woman.” To be sure, “people” have characterized her as “angry,” given her prominent role in the 2008 campaign, during which she repeatedly found herself in dramas of her own rhetorical making (saying Americans were “just downright mean”; never having been proud of America before the nomination of her husband; etc.). But no one suggested that her overt anger derived from being either “black” or a “woman.”
Again, these invocations of race always raise logical antitheses: Do only those who do not find Mrs. Obama “angry” escape her charge of racism? Second, the race-obsessed Mrs. Obama forgets that outspoken first ladies, especially those like herself who have refined tastes and are political infighters, are always natural media targets. The press savaged Nancy Reagan on topics as diverse as her purchase of new White House china, her reliance on astrology, and her legendary infighting with chief of staff Don Regan. Fairly or not, Mrs. Reagan never quite shook the stereotype that she had roamed the West Wing as a sort of Lady Macbeth with aristocratic appetites — a theme of Mr. Regan’s memoirs. It is likely that Michelle Obama will not either.
Attorney General Eric Holder has often found race a convenient refuge from criticism — most recently accusing his congressional auditors of racism, for their grilling him over government sales of firearms to Mexican cartel hitmen. Again, there is an obvious inference: To the degree that you do not criticize Eric Holder you are not racist; to the degree that you do, you may well be. Holder, remember, earlier called his fellow countrymen “cowards” for not sharing his own particular take on racial relations, as if all of a craven America had now become Barack Obama’s clueless Pennsylvania clingers. In exchanges over his office’s dismissal of voter-intimidation charges against New Black Panther Party members, Holder described African-Americans as “my people.” Again, note the natural corollary once we descend into these racial quagmires: If Holder can talk of his “people,” are those who do not share his racial heritage not then quite the attorney general’s “people”?
Our new racial profiling ripples out from the top. When Rick Perry referred to “a big black cloud that hangs over America — that debt that is so monstrous,” he was accused of racism; the second half of the quote was conveniently omitted. Chris Matthews referred to Perry’s support of federalism with the quip, “This is going to be Bull Connor with a smile.” Lee Siegel just wrote in the New York Times that “Mitt Romney is the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory.” Think for a minute of prominent public figures who at one time or another have been accused by the Obama team of either being racist or playing racial politics against them: Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Darrell Issa, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum. The list grows in direct proportion to the uncertainty of Obama’s political fortunes.
President Obama and his supporters insist that they deemphasize matters of race, but their record in just the last four years reveals a veritable obsession with it, in a manner that was never true of prior minority members serving in high office — think of Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, or Alberto Gonzales. We are not that far away from Obama’s appearance on the national scene as a serious presidential candidate in early 2008. Yet he has already reformulated racial discourse in America, most famously blasting Pennsylvania whites who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them,” and introducing “typical white person” into the national lexicon and the racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright into the national consciousness. The mythography of the 2008 campaign was that Barack Obama overcame the burdens of racism; the reality was that racial intemperance during that long year came principally from Barack Obama himself or his personal pastor — and, in our disturbed culture, even to acknowledge that fact earns the charge of “Racist!”
Obama has mainstreamed the practice of profiling friends and enemies on this reactionary basis of racial identity. In a Democratic National Committee video in April 2010, Obama called on “young people, African-Americans, Latinos, and women . . . to stand together once again.” Are those not included in his categories, then, not to stand “together” again? Shortly before the November 2010 congressional elections, Obama suggested told a huge audience in Philadelphia that Republicans “are counting on black folks staying home.” In one of his most surreal speeches before the Congressional Black Caucus, Obama in affected fashion adopted the supposed patois of Black America in defining collective interests by shared race: “Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’. We are going to press on. We’ve got work to do.” Separately, he appealed to Latino voters not to stay home from the 2010 election, but instead to “punish our enemies” — and not to fall prey to the Republicans’ “cynical attempt to discourage Latinos from voting.” I don’t think a president of the United States has ever, at least since the pre–Civil War era, openly called on a racial group to join with him to punish political adversaries.
Obama stereotyped the Cambridge police department as having “acted stupidly” for detaining his friend Henry Louis Gates, an African-American Studies professor at Harvard. He allegedly complained to political supporters that racial bias explains much of the Tea Party’s opposition to his administration. The wonder is not only that the president of the United States constantly refers to race, but that his serial obsession now earns snores rather than surprise.
Indeed, President Obama’s example has radically brought the politics of race into almost every conceivable forum. Members of the Black Caucus now routinely either allege outright racism or exhibit racist attitudes themselves if opposition arises to the Obama agenda. That is a serious charge, but it is one supported by numerous examples. For Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D., Mo.), white presidents must be “pushed a great deal more” to address black unemployment than would a black president. For Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D., Tex.), argument over the debt ceiling is proof of racial animosity toward Barack Obama; for Rep. Barbara Lee (D., Calif.), Republicans are trying to deny blacks the vote; for Rep. André Carson (D., Ind.), the Tea Party wishes to lynch blacks and hang them from trees; for Rep. Charles Rangel (D., N.Y.), Rick Perry’s job creation in Texas is “one stage away from slavery,” and on and on and on. Icons of popular culture — whether a Morgan Freeman (“It’s a racist thing”) or a Whoopi Goldberg (“I’m playing the damn [race] card”) — routinely accuse Americans of racism for their growing unhappiness over the record of the Obama administration.
What can we expect in 2012? Race all the time at every venue. In 2008, there were two general themes to the blank-slate candidacy of Barack Obama: (1) America could change history by electing its first African-American president, and (2) a vote for Barack Obama was a repudiation of the then-unpopular George Bush. But four years later there is now an Obama record of dismal economic growth, huge deficits, astronomical new national debt, high unemployment, fresh class and racial divisions, and a failed reset/outreach foreign policy that had promised breakthroughs with Iran, the Palestinians, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela, based on redefining traditional notions of friends and enemies.
Who would wish to run on a record like that?
But the alternative? In 2012, unlike 2008, there is less novelty in Barack Obama as our first black president. And George Bush is now four years into the past. For Obama, then, we are left with a demonized “them.”
Sometimes “they” are the suspect “1 percent” who enjoy their privileges through ill-gotten gains. Sometimes they are reactionary enemies of big government. And sometimes they are veritable racists — the sorts who stereotype minorities, who are cowards, who turn away voters from the polls, who do not like Americans who look different from them, who object to record debt largely as a way to disguise their own racial bias — and who surely need to be punished.
This is going to be an ugly campaign. The Obama team will revert to race unceasingly, in cry-wolf fashion, and thus cheapen the currency with every charge. In turn, the more we will hear allegations of “racism,” the less people will pay attention to them. And so all the more frequently will such discounted slurs have to be repeated — sort of like pushing about wheelbarrows of Depression-era inflated German marks to purchase ever fewer commodities.
There will be many legacies of Barack Obama. Racial divisiveness is proving the most disturbing.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of the just-released The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.
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To all my friends and supporters who came to last night's concert and to Minister Jim Giddens, Justin Addington and the church staff - Sam and Terry, thanks . I heard nothing but praise for the performers and richly deserved as well.
---Dick
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1)Gingrich Slams CNN for Marriage Question, Gets Ovation
Thursday, 19 Jan 2012 09:35 PM
By Paul Scicchitano
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich drew at least two standing ovations just moments into the final South Carolina GOP presidential debate tonight when he criticized CNN moderator John King for opening with “trash,” and accused the liberal media of attempting to protect President Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.
King began the two-hour debate from the North Charleston Coliseum with a question on accusations by Gingrich’s ex-wife, Marianne, that the former speaker had asked her for permission to have an "open marriage" after she learned he was having an affair with his current wife, the former Callista Bisek.
“As you know, your ex-wife gave an interview to ABC News and another interview with The Washington Post and this story has now gone viral on the Internet. In it she says that you came to her in 1999 at a time when you were having an affair. She says you asked her, sir, to enter into an open marriage. Would you like to take some time to respond to that?” asked King.
“No, but I will,” snapped Gingrich, who was visibly angered by the question. “I think the destructive, vicious negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office and I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate with a topic like that.”
Interrupted frequently by applause — including standing ovations similar to what he received at Monday’s debate — Gingrich strongly denied the accusation and said that he offered to give ABC News the names of “several” friends who knew him at the time he was married to his ex-wife and would support his contention that the story is false.
“Every person in here knows personal pain. Every person in here has had someone close to them go through painful things. To take an ex-wife and make it, two days before the primary, a significant question in a presidential campaign is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine,” he said. The audience roared.
Gingrich also pointed to support from his two daughters. “My two daughters wrote the head of ABC and made the point that it was wrong, that they should pull it. And I am frankly astounded that CNN would take trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate,” Gingrich told the host.
The two South Carolina debates this week appear to have done more to narrow the GOP field than either the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary as Texas Gov. Rick Perry suspended his campaign hours before Thursday’s debate and former Utah Gov. and U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman suspended his campaign on Monday — hours before that debate.
Republican strategist Bradley A. Blakeman, who served as a debate analyst for the Fox Radio Network on Thursday, proclaimed Gingrich the debate's big winner, largely due to his response at the outset.
“Gingrich was waiting for this. It’s like shooting ducks in a pond. He knew righteous indignation worked on Monday so try it again on Thursday,” Blakeman told Newsmax in an exclusive interview after the debate.
Blakeman said that Romney once again appeared to stumble over the release of his income tax returns, a major problem for him during Monday’s debate when he said he would consider, but did not immediately commit to releasing his tax returns around the April timeframe.
“I think if you balance it out, Romney had to do a much better job tonight, which he didn’t do. He didn’t make any major gaffes but on the other hand he didn’t do substantially better than he did on Monday especially with regard to the tax question,” said Blakeman, who served as a senior staff member for President George W. Bush.
“What he should have said was, ‘I’m going to release the 2010 [return] in two weeks.’ What he should have explained is my tax returns are extremely complicated and I want time to review them.”
Before the start of Thursday’s event, host King noted the dwindling number of podiums on the debate stage. “We had five in here at sun-up this morning. We’re down to four now,” he told viewers on CNN, which hosted the event. “That’s a little bit more cozy. There were seven candidates when I moderated back in June. There have been eight candidates at some of the debates. Now we’re down to just four.”
Gingrich surged ahead of Romney in four separate polls based largely on his performance in Monday’s debate, positioning him to not only do well in South Carolina but also in the Jan. 31 Florida primary.
Noted pollster and author Scott Rasmussen told Newsmax.TV earlier on Thursday that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s appeal as the “inevitable nominee” appears to be starting to wane based largely on Gingrich’s debate performance.
Pressed by King to weigh in on whether the accusations by Marianne Gingrich should be an issue in the campaign, his rivals also appeared supportive — if not uncomfortable — with the line of questioning.
“I am a Christian too and I thank God for forgiveness,” replied former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who is now believed to have edged out Romney by 34 votes in the final tally in last month’s Iowa caucuses.
“But these are issues of our lives and what we did in our lives. They’re issues of character for people to consider. But the bottom line is those are things for everyone in this audience to look at. And they’re going to look at me — look at what I’ve done in my private life and personal life, unfortunately. And what I say is that this country is a very forgiving country. This country understands that we are all fallen and I’m very hopeful that we will be judged by that standard and not by a higher one on the ultimate day.”
Like Gingrich, his chief rival heading into Saturday’s critical vote, Romney also appeared to be angered by the question. “John let’s get on to the real issues is all I’ve got to say,” he said to applause.
Texas Rep. Ron Paul used the opportunity to lash out at the media. “I think too often all of us are on receiving ends of attacks from the media,” he told the debate audience. “It’s very disturbing because sometimes they’re not based on facts and we suffer the consequences.
"You know, sometimes it reminds me of this idea of getting corporations out of running campaigns but what about the corporations that run the media?” he asked to applause. “The people have to sort this out but I think setting standards are very important, and I’m very proud that my wife of 54 years is with me tonight.”
When the spotlight turned to Romney’s tenure as CEO of Bain Capital, the former governor bristled at having to explain the math behind the number of jobs his former company helped to create.
“My view is capitalism works. Free enterprise works and I find it kind of strange on a stage like this — with Republicans, having to describe how private equity and venture capital work and how they’re successful and how they create jobs. But let me tell you that answer. We started a number of businesses — four in particular created 120,000 jobs as of today.
“We started them years ago. They’ve grown well beyond the time I was there, to 120,000 people that have been employed by those enterprises. There are others we’ve been with, some of which have lost jobs,” Romney responded, pointing to a net increase of more than 100,000 jobs.
“I’m very proud of the fact that throughout my career I have worked to try and build enterprises, hopefully to return money to investors. There’s nothing wrong with profit by the way,” he said to applause. “That profit went to pension funds, to charities. It went to a wide array of institutions. A lot of people benefitted from that. And by the way — as enterprises become more profitable — they can hire more people.
“I’m someone who believes in free enterprise . . . Throughout this campaign I know we’re going to hit it hard from President Obama but we’re going to stuff it down his throat and point out it is capitalism and freedom that makes America strong.”
Gingrich, earlier in the debate, had called on Romney to explain his model for investment, which he insisted was to “take over a company and dramatically leverage it, leave it with a great deal of debt, made it less likely to survive.”
While all four remaining GOP candidates threw jabs at Obama, Santorum in particular sought to raise his own profile, describing his own apparent change in fortune in Iowa, where officials had initially proclaimed an eight-vote victory for Romney.
Santorum played aggressor for much of the night, trying to inject himself into what seemed increasingly like a two-way race between Gingrich and Romney, accusing both men of "playing footsie with the left" when it came to health care — an accusation that both rivals rejected.
With respect to Gingrich, Santorum said, "you sort of have that worrisome moment that something's going to pop. And we can't afford that in a nominee.”
In a reflection of the complex political dynamics of the race, first Gingrich and then Santorum challenged Romney over his well-documented switch of position on abortion. Once a supporter of a woman's life to choose, he now says he is "pro-life."
Gingrich didn't specifically question Romney's change in position, but he didn't embrace it, either, saying, "He had an experience in a lab and became pro-life.”
Romney again bristled. "I'm not questioned on character or integrity very often. I don't feel like standing here for that."
Vying for votes in a state with 9.9 percent unemployment, the candidates were asked by Jane Gallagher of Mount Pleasant, S.C., to name three specific programs that would put Americans back to work.
Paul answered first. “Well most of the things the federal government could do to get us back to work is get out of the way,” offered the Texan, repeating common themes of his campaign. “I’d like to see the federal government have a sound currency. That creates a healthy economy. I would like to see massive reduction of regulations. I would like to see income tax reduced to near zero as possible. And that is what we have to do.”
He said that government must get out of the way.
“We have to recognize why we have unemployment and it comes because we have a deeply flawed financial system that causes financial bubbles. The bubbles burst and you have unemployment. Now the most important thing to get over that hump, that was created artificially by bad economic policies, is to allow the correction to occur, you have to get rid of the excessive debt and you have to get rid of the mal-investment,” he said.
“And you don’t do that by buying the debt off the people who were benefiting from it. So we the people shouldn’t be stuck with these debts on these mortgage derivatives and all. We need to get that behind us, which means the government shouldn’t be doing any bailouts so most of the things to improve the environment is getting the government out of the way and enforce contract laws and enforce bankruptcy laws.”
Gingrich began his response by pledging to fight for the repeal of Dodd-Frank. “There’s one easy thing to do at a national level and that’s repeal the Dodd-Frank bill, which is killing small business, killing small banks. That would help overnight,” he explained.
He pointed to three specific actions the government can take: “One there’s $29 billion plus of natural gas offshore. In Louisiana, jobs for that kind of production are $80,000 a year. That would help us become energy independent from the Middle East,” he said, noting that some of the royalties from the natural gas could be used to modernize the Port of Charleston and the Port of Georgetown.
“Charleston has to be modernized to meet the larger ships that will come through the Panama Canal in 2014,” said Gingrich. “One out of every five jobs in South Carolina is dependent on the Port of Charleston.
“The third thing you can do, frankly, is fundamentally, radically overhaul the Corps of Engineers. The Corps of Engineers today takes eight years to study — not to complete — to study doing the port. We won the entire Second World War in three years and eight months.”
Romney began his answer by pointing to the need to overhaul the tax code.
“Of course we’ve spoken time and again about our tax code that’s out of alignment with other nations,” he said. “We’ve spoken about the fact that regulation is overwhelming us, that we need to take care of our energy resources and become energy secure. We have to open up markets and we have to crack down in China when they cheat.”
He went on to accuse Obama of engaging in what he described as crony capitalism. “If you want to get America going again, you've got to stop the spread of crony capitalism. He gives General Motors to the UAW. He takes $500 million and sticks in into Solyndra. He stacks the labor stooges on the NLRB so they can say ‘no’ to Boeing and take care of their friends in the labor movement,” according to Romney.
“You go across the country with regard to energy — because he has to bow to the most extreme members of the environmental movement — he turns down the Keystone Pipeline which would bring energy and jobs to America. This president is the biggest impediment to job growth in this country and we have to replace Barack Obama to get America working again.”
While saying that he too believes in capitalism, Santorum also took an apparent jab at Romney. “I believe in capitalism too. I believe in capitalism for everybody, not necessarily high finance, but capitalism that works for the working men and women of this country, who are out their paddling alone in America right now — who have an unemployment rate two-and-a-half times those who are college educated and feel that no party cares about them because you have the Democratic Party and Barack Obama and all he wants to do is make them more dependent — give them more food stamps, give them more Medicaid,” he declared.
While speaking with an Iowa official recently, Santorum said, he was appalled to learn that the state is in danger of being fined because not enough people are being signed up for Medicaid. “This is what the answer is for the economic squalor that Barack Obama has visited on working men and women of this country and is creating more government programs and getting more dependent on those programs,” Santorum added. “We need a party that just doesn’t talk about high finance and cutting corporate taxes or cutting the top tax rates.
“We need to talk about how we’re going to put men and women in this country, who built this country, back to work in this country in the manufacturing sector of our economy.”
Santorum said that he would fight to make U.S. manufacturers more competitive. “South Carolina can compete with anybody in this world in manufacturing. We just need to give them the opportunity to compete and we are 20 percent more costly than our top nine trading partners. And that’s excluding labor costs,” he said.
“That’s why I said we need to cut the corporate tax of manufacturing down to zero. We need to give manufacturers a leg up so they can compete for the jobs — half of which we went from 21 percent of this country in manufacturing down to 9 – and we left the dreams of working men and women on the sideline. We need to show that we’re the party. We’re the movement that is going to get those Reagan Democrats — those conservative Democrats all throughout the states that we need to win — to win this election — to sign up with us and we’ll put them back to work.
1a)A GOP Candidate's Bitter Ex-Wife Receives More Coverage Than a Video of Obama Dining with Terrorist-Supporters
By Lauri B. Regan
As I watch the media circus surrounding Marianne Gingrich's interview regarding her relationship with her ex-husband and GOP candidate, Newt Gingrich, I am once again reminded of the double standard afforded to the Democrats and Barack Obama in particular. Coming on the heels of the Herman Cain melee in which the press had a field day parading one accuser after another before video cameras, it is difficult not to repeat the question of why the Democrats get a free pass. Why are calls for Mitt Romney to release his tax return not met with calls for Barack Obama to release his college transcripts -- something that is just as customary for presidential candidates?
However, of greater importance in my view is the silence, save for a few journalists and pundits on the right, regarding exposing a videotape recorded in 2003 of Barack Obama at the farewell dinner for terrorist-supporting Palestinian Rashid Khalidi. News of the videotape's existence came to light while Obama was a candidate, and the free pass given to him by the mainstream media was only just beginning to come to light when the enamored Chris Matthews' shared news of the tingle up his leg.
While the birthers' demands did draw some media attention, it was mostly negative and only made fun of the supposedly crazy loons on the far right who apparently were representative of all petty and irrational conservatives. No one seemed to notice that Obama had not written a single article while serving as editor of The Harvard Law Review, and no one pressed the issue of Obama's suppressed college and law school transcripts since it was a given that his brilliance was perhaps surpassed only by the likes of Albert Einstein.
But there is a videotape sitting in the vaults of the Los Angeles Times, and every American should be screaming from the rooftops for its release. In light of the Arab Spring, Obama's endless attempts to bully Israel into succumbing to all sorts of unprecedented and unsafe demands in the hopes that he would go down in history as the POTUS who made peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, and the administration's ineptness in addressing Iran's nuclear program and military threats, exposing this videotape is of utmost importance.
In April 2010, Roger L. Simon published an article on PajamasMedia entitled, "Why is the L.A. Times Burying the Obama/Khalidi Tape?" Of further consequence is why the media -- and Americans -- are not demanding that the L.A. Times immediately release the tape. Simon wrote:
The Khalidi tape could be of tremendous significance in revealing the provenance of Obama's views on the Middle East and the degree to which the public was misled on those views during the presidential campaign[.] ...
So what are we to think? We have an administration that not only ascribes most of the Middle East blame to Israel, but also has banned "Islamism" and all related words, even "Islam" and "jihad" from our national security documents. They're completely gone. Indeed, even the Fort Hood massacre, so clearly inspired by Islamic extremism, has now been shifted into the comfortable category of the lone, angry killer. Rashid Khalidi should be happy. And, in fact, he is.
Sometimes I want to yell and scream. What is wrong with the Los Angeles Times? Are they a news organization or the propaganda wing of some leftover unit of the IWW? No wonder subscribers are deserting them in droves.
While I am sure that Simon's questions were rhetorical, I will answer the obvious. Of course the paper is a propaganda tool. Were it not for the internet and cable television, true news organizations would no longer exist. It was recently reported that Jerusalem Post editor Steve Linde quoted Bibi Netanyahu calling The New York Times and Haaretz Israel's two main enemies because "they set the agenda for an anti-Israel campaign all over the world." Netanyahu denies making this exact statement, but there is no question that both papers' reporting reflects a bias that can be characterized only as anti-Israel propaganda. Taken a step further, there is no question that the mainstream media as a whole has become completely entrenched in propaganda, bias, anti-Israel and anti-American sentiment, and indoctrination based on liberal, progressive values that are completely out of the "mainstream."
The public will never understand that the Islamists taking over the Mideast are not moderate, will not promote democracy, are not friends of the United States, and wish the ultimate destruction of the West if the public reads and relies upon only The New York Times, L.A. Times, MSNBC, or similar tools of the left for its "news" and information. Americans will not understand the implications of four more years of a pro-Islamist president if they do not understand what Islamism is all about. And they will not know who is sitting in the White House making policy decisions based on personal biases if the media continues to promote Obama's agenda rather than investigate and report.
So why is the videotape of such paramount importance? Simon quotes from an article published in the L.A.Times discussing the tape and its contents:
[A] young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, "then you will never see a day of peace."
One speaker likened "Zionist settlers on the West Bank" to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been "blinded by ideology."
Furthermore, rumors abound regarding additional messages that may or may not have been openly shared at the dinner in Obama's presence. Ted Belman reported at Israpundit that he has a reliable source that "the audio tape clearly picks up the toast 'death to Israel'." Did Obama drink to the death of an American ally that he has been actively intimidating, browbeating, and dissing since he phoned Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on his first day in office? Does Obama liken Israelis living in the West Bank to Osama bin Laden, whose death he claims as his greatest foreign policy accomplishment?
Simon concluded his article with a request that readers send in suggestions on how to make the contents of the tape public. Apparently Donald Trump missed this request when he wasted the media's energy pushing for the release of Obama's birth certificate -- something with which Obama is still having fun as he mocked the birthers at the Golden Globe awards last week.
But I highly doubt that the POTUS, who had his worldview formed while sitting in the pews of Israel-bashing Jeremiah Wright and at the dinner table of anti-Semite Khalidi, will be mocking people who care enough to properly vet his credentials by urging the release of the tape. And I venture a guess that if the videotape is released, Barack Obama will be packing his bags at the end of this year. But that is a big "if" because until the media stops obsessing over the infidelities of the GOP candidates and starts doing its job, Barack Obama's chances of a second term continue to scare the living daylights out of those who understand its implications.
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2)Netanyahu: Iran has decided to become a nuclear state. Action needed before it is too late.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Thursday night, Jan. 19 that Iran had decided to become a nuclear state. He urged action before it was too late to stop Iran completing the construction of a nuclear weapon. His statement at the end of a visit to Holland gave Gen Martin Dempsey, on his first visit to Israel as Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the message he will be asked to take back to President Barack Obama. It also contradicted Defense Minister Ehud Barak's statement that Tehran had not yet decided to go nuclear.
Netanyahu has kept the Iranian cards close to his chest. His statement therefore caught wrong-footed the Israeli officials, including Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who in the last 48 hours had asserted that Iran had not yet decided whether to build a nuclear bomb and there was still time for US-led sanctions to work.
Gen. Martin Dempsey begins his first visit to Israel as Chairman of the Joint US Chiefs of Staff amid a major falling-out between the two governments over the handling of Iran's nuclear weapon potential. Military and Washington sources confirm that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands by the view that Iran is advancing its plans to build a nuclear bomb full speed ahead, undeterred even by the threat of harsher sanctions. Netanyahu therefore stands by his refusal of President Barack Obama's demand for a commitment to abstain from a unilateral strike on Iran's nuclear sites without prior notice to Washington.
The US president repeated this demand when he called the Israeli prime minister Thursday night Jan. 13. Netanyahu replied that, in view of their disagreement on this point, he preferred to cancel the biggest US-Israel war game ever staged due to have taken place in April. The exercise was to have tested the level of coordination between the two armies in missile defense for the contingency of a war with Iran or a regional conflict.
The prime minister was concerned that having large-scale US military forces in the country would restrict his leeway for decision-making on Iran.
In an effort to limit the damage to relations with the US administration, Defense Minister Ehud Barak struck a conciliatory note Wednesday, Jan. 18, saying, "Israel is still very far from a decision on attacking Iran's nuclear facilities."
Striking the pose of middleman, he was trying to let Washington know that there was still time for the US and Israel to reach an accommodation on whether and when a strike should take place.
Sources doubt that President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu are in any mood to respond to Barak's effort to cool the dispute. Obama needs to be sure he will not be taken by surprise by an Israel attack in the middle of his campaign for re-election, especially since he has begun taking heat on the Iranian issue.
Republican rivals are accusing him of being soft on Iran. And while the economy is the dominant election issue, a majority of Americans disapprove of his handling of Iran's nuclear ambitions by a margin of 48 to 33 percent according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll this week.
Wednesday (Thursday morning Israel time), President Obama responded by reiterating that he has been clear since running for the presidency that he will take "every step available to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon."
Echoes of Barak's arguments were heard in the words of US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Wednesday night: "We are not making any special steps at this point in order to deal with the situation. Why? Because, frankly, we are fully prepared to deal with that situation now."
Panetta went on to say that Defense Minister Barak contacted him and asked to postpone the joint US-Israeli drill "for technical reasons."
Before he took off for a short trip to Holland, Netanyahu instructed Barak and IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz not to deviate in their talks with Gen. Dempsey from the position he took with the US president, namely, no commitment for advance notice to Washington about a unilateral strike against Iran.
The Israeli prime minister is convinced that, contrary to the claims by US spokesmen and media, that current sanctions are ineffective insofar as slowing Iran's advance toward a nuclear weapon and the harsher sanctions on Iran's central bank and oil exports are too slow and will take hold too late to achieve their purpose.
In any case, say Israeli officials, Washington is again signaling its willingness to go back to direct nuclear negotiations with Tehran, although past experience proved that Iran exploits diplomatic dialogue as grace time for moving forward on its nuclear ambitions.
US spokesmen denied an Iranian report that a recent letter from the US president to Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei proposed opening a direct channel for talks.
Still those reports persist. American and European spokesmen were forced to deny a statement by Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi Wednesday on his arrival in Ankara that Iran and the big powers are in contact over the revival of nuclear negotiations.
Netanyahu fears that dialogue between Iran and the five powers plus Germany (the P5+1) will resume after bowing to an Iranian stipulation that sanctions be suspended for the duration of the talks. Once again, Tehran will be enabled to steal a march on the US and Israel and bring its nuclear weapon program to conclusion, unhindered by economic constraints.
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3) Obama’s Racial Politics
By Victor Davis Hanson
Never has America been more assimilated, integrated, and intermarried — as is evident in everything from politics to popular culture, from statistics to anecdotes. Yet from late 2007 to 2012, Barack Obama has been establishing new rules of racial referencing. In general, his utterances follow a disheartening pattern. When he is ahead in the polls, has won an election, and is not campaigning, then he emphasizes the unity of the country. But when he is running for president, or campaigning for others, or sinking in the polls, he and his closest associates predictably revert to charges of racial bigotry, albeit usually coded and subtle. America is redeemed when it champions the Obamas, but retrograde when it does not.
Obama’s race-based strategy is predicated on some unspoken assumptions: Any short-term damage incurred by engaging in racial tribalism can easily be later erased by soaring teleprompted speeches on racial harmony; the media will either not widely report his emphases on race or generally support his charges; a person of color can hardly be culpable of racial polarization himself given the history of racial discrimination in this country.
In a recent speech before a Latino audience, President Obama, in blasting congressional Republicans, recalled that he had run for office because “America should be a place where you can always make it if you try; a place where every child, no matter what they look like, where they come from, should have a chance to succeed.” The obvious conclusion from his increasingly frequent “look like” trope is that his critics predicate success in America on just the opposite criteria. That is, supposedly racist opponents do not wish every child to succeed, and so it certainly matters to them a great deal what Americans should “look like.”
Recently, First Lady Michelle Obama complained about a description of her White House infighting in an otherwise favorable account of the first family, written by a New York Times reporter. She suggested that the book’s criticism was unfair because “That’s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since, you know, the day Barack announced, that I’m some angry black woman.”
Oddly, the first lady did not cite anyone who, in fact, had tried to stereotype her as an “angry black woman.” To be sure, “people” have characterized her as “angry,” given her prominent role in the 2008 campaign, during which she repeatedly found herself in dramas of her own rhetorical making (saying Americans were “just downright mean”; never having been proud of America before the nomination of her husband; etc.). But no one suggested that her overt anger derived from being either “black” or a “woman.”
Again, these invocations of race always raise logical antitheses: Do only those who do not find Mrs. Obama “angry” escape her charge of racism? Second, the race-obsessed Mrs. Obama forgets that outspoken first ladies, especially those like herself who have refined tastes and are political infighters, are always natural media targets. The press savaged Nancy Reagan on topics as diverse as her purchase of new White House china, her reliance on astrology, and her legendary infighting with chief of staff Don Regan. Fairly or not, Mrs. Reagan never quite shook the stereotype that she had roamed the West Wing as a sort of Lady Macbeth with aristocratic appetites — a theme of Mr. Regan’s memoirs. It is likely that Michelle Obama will not either.
Attorney General Eric Holder has often found race a convenient refuge from criticism — most recently accusing his congressional auditors of racism, for their grilling him over government sales of firearms to Mexican cartel hitmen. Again, there is an obvious inference: To the degree that you do not criticize Eric Holder you are not racist; to the degree that you do, you may well be. Holder, remember, earlier called his fellow countrymen “cowards” for not sharing his own particular take on racial relations, as if all of a craven America had now become Barack Obama’s clueless Pennsylvania clingers. In exchanges over his office’s dismissal of voter-intimidation charges against New Black Panther Party members, Holder described African-Americans as “my people.” Again, note the natural corollary once we descend into these racial quagmires: If Holder can talk of his “people,” are those who do not share his racial heritage not then quite the attorney general’s “people”?
Our new racial profiling ripples out from the top. When Rick Perry referred to “a big black cloud that hangs over America — that debt that is so monstrous,” he was accused of racism; the second half of the quote was conveniently omitted. Chris Matthews referred to Perry’s support of federalism with the quip, “This is going to be Bull Connor with a smile.” Lee Siegel just wrote in the New York Times that “Mitt Romney is the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory.” Think for a minute of prominent public figures who at one time or another have been accused by the Obama team of either being racist or playing racial politics against them: Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Darrell Issa, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum. The list grows in direct proportion to the uncertainty of Obama’s political fortunes.
President Obama and his supporters insist that they deemphasize matters of race, but their record in just the last four years reveals a veritable obsession with it, in a manner that was never true of prior minority members serving in high office — think of Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, or Alberto Gonzales. We are not that far away from Obama’s appearance on the national scene as a serious presidential candidate in early 2008. Yet he has already reformulated racial discourse in America, most famously blasting Pennsylvania whites who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them,” and introducing “typical white person” into the national lexicon and the racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright into the national consciousness. The mythography of the 2008 campaign was that Barack Obama overcame the burdens of racism; the reality was that racial intemperance during that long year came principally from Barack Obama himself or his personal pastor — and, in our disturbed culture, even to acknowledge that fact earns the charge of “Racist!”
Obama has mainstreamed the practice of profiling friends and enemies on this reactionary basis of racial identity. In a Democratic National Committee video in April 2010, Obama called on “young people, African-Americans, Latinos, and women . . . to stand together once again.” Are those not included in his categories, then, not to stand “together” again? Shortly before the November 2010 congressional elections, Obama suggested told a huge audience in Philadelphia that Republicans “are counting on black folks staying home.” In one of his most surreal speeches before the Congressional Black Caucus, Obama in affected fashion adopted the supposed patois of Black America in defining collective interests by shared race: “Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’. We are going to press on. We’ve got work to do.” Separately, he appealed to Latino voters not to stay home from the 2010 election, but instead to “punish our enemies” — and not to fall prey to the Republicans’ “cynical attempt to discourage Latinos from voting.” I don’t think a president of the United States has ever, at least since the pre–Civil War era, openly called on a racial group to join with him to punish political adversaries.
Obama stereotyped the Cambridge police department as having “acted stupidly” for detaining his friend Henry Louis Gates, an African-American Studies professor at Harvard. He allegedly complained to political supporters that racial bias explains much of the Tea Party’s opposition to his administration. The wonder is not only that the president of the United States constantly refers to race, but that his serial obsession now earns snores rather than surprise.
Indeed, President Obama’s example has radically brought the politics of race into almost every conceivable forum. Members of the Black Caucus now routinely either allege outright racism or exhibit racist attitudes themselves if opposition arises to the Obama agenda. That is a serious charge, but it is one supported by numerous examples. For Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D., Mo.), white presidents must be “pushed a great deal more” to address black unemployment than would a black president. For Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D., Tex.), argument over the debt ceiling is proof of racial animosity toward Barack Obama; for Rep. Barbara Lee (D., Calif.), Republicans are trying to deny blacks the vote; for Rep. André Carson (D., Ind.), the Tea Party wishes to lynch blacks and hang them from trees; for Rep. Charles Rangel (D., N.Y.), Rick Perry’s job creation in Texas is “one stage away from slavery,” and on and on and on. Icons of popular culture — whether a Morgan Freeman (“It’s a racist thing”) or a Whoopi Goldberg (“I’m playing the damn [race] card”) — routinely accuse Americans of racism for their growing unhappiness over the record of the Obama administration.
What can we expect in 2012? Race all the time at every venue. In 2008, there were two general themes to the blank-slate candidacy of Barack Obama: (1) America could change history by electing its first African-American president, and (2) a vote for Barack Obama was a repudiation of the then-unpopular George Bush. But four years later there is now an Obama record of dismal economic growth, huge deficits, astronomical new national debt, high unemployment, fresh class and racial divisions, and a failed reset/outreach foreign policy that had promised breakthroughs with Iran, the Palestinians, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela, based on redefining traditional notions of friends and enemies.
Who would wish to run on a record like that?
But the alternative? In 2012, unlike 2008, there is less novelty in Barack Obama as our first black president. And George Bush is now four years into the past. For Obama, then, we are left with a demonized “them.”
Sometimes “they” are the suspect “1 percent” who enjoy their privileges through ill-gotten gains. Sometimes they are reactionary enemies of big government. And sometimes they are veritable racists — the sorts who stereotype minorities, who are cowards, who turn away voters from the polls, who do not like Americans who look different from them, who object to record debt largely as a way to disguise their own racial bias — and who surely need to be punished.
This is going to be an ugly campaign. The Obama team will revert to race unceasingly, in cry-wolf fashion, and thus cheapen the currency with every charge. In turn, the more we will hear allegations of “racism,” the less people will pay attention to them. And so all the more frequently will such discounted slurs have to be repeated — sort of like pushing about wheelbarrows of Depression-era inflated German marks to purchase ever fewer commodities.
There will be many legacies of Barack Obama. Racial divisiveness is proving the most disturbing.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of the just-released The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.
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