Then my two girls!
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Does the Federal Government have unlimited power to force citizens to enter into contracts or will The Supreme Court decide we should still be governed by a Constitution? They will decide not you.
Does our Republic hang in the balance because some modern day jurists, appointed for life, no longer believe men in pantaloons and wigs knew what they were doing or is applicable to today'? (See 1 below.)
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A rebuttal to Dershowitz. (See 2 below.)
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Is the impending bankruptcy of Detroit symptomatic of what happens when Democrats and unions continuously control a city for almost 100 years, cater to those in search of 'freebies' and business interests cave to irrational demands because federal laws virtually leave little choice?
This you can decide. (See 3 below.)
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I happened to catch snippets of a John Stossel (John is the son in law of a former client and an avowed Libertarian ) program about overboard legislation causing unintended consequences.
The three segments I saw related to laws which now prevent kids from learning about Capitalism through setting up lemon aide stands. (Another unintended consequence of bureaucratic banality would be limiting the saner America which was so beautifully captured on canvas by one of our great illustrator artists - Norman Rockwell.)
Then Stossel interviewed the largest cigar maker in our country. They discussed new proposed laws that will drive Cigar Bars out of business because cigar smoke is deemed offensive. Patel stated these bars cater to for those who voluntarily patronize and enjoy the art of cigar smoking. Th bar's air filtering systems provide fresh air every minute - Unlike the coughing dungeons in airports.
Finally, a new movie is coming out in July called "Frackination." Though its premise has been thoroughly proven false (fracking does not lead to water burning as depicted in the movie) there will be no elimination of this sequence. The person interviewed made the point that the bureaucrats who made the film are more interested in corrupt journalism than seeking truth.
His comment is a throwback to Al Gore's global warming movie award acclaimed by The Academy Award bureaucrats.
Stossel's point, in all three, is that:
a) Heavy handed legislation burdens small businesses which cannot afford their costs.
b) Small businesses are the main hirers in our nation.
c) We need entrepreneur willing to take reasonable business risks in order to increase employment.
d) Bureaucratic legislation is crippling Capitalism.
A woman representing The Heritage Foundation was then interviewed and pointed out three years of Obama legislation was more than triple GW's for the same period and had proven 5 times more costly ,ie. $8 vs $45 billion of new costs imposed on American business.
It is little wonder why the vitality of this nation is being sucked out by vacuuming politicians, bureaucrats and a president who never held a real job or employed anyone besides Czars and Czarinas!
More educational lunacy and lies because of politics. Bloom was right - "The Dumbing of America" continues. (See 4 and 4a below.)
Wake Up America and get rid of our demons!
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Romney should fire Etch-a-Sketch and hire Ki Strassel and/or Peggy Noonan or both. (See 5 and 5a below.)
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The only increasingly different appearance between Chamberlain and Obama is the former was white, the latter black. (See 6 and 6a below.)
Did Tom Friedman just come to his senses? You decide! (See 6b below.)
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The costs of placing a Dome over an attacked nation runs high and can have unintended consequences. (See 7 and 7a below.)
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Dick
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1)Liberty and ObamaCare
The Affordable Care Act claims federal power is unlimited. Now the High Court must decide.
Few legal cases in the modern era are as consequential, or as defining, as the challenges to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that the Supreme Court hears beginning Monday. The powers that the Obama Administration is claiming change the structure of the American government as it has existed for 225 years. Thus has the health-care law provoked an unprecedented and unnecessary constitutional showdown that endangers individual liberty.
It is a remarkable moment. The High Court has scheduled the longest oral arguments in nearly a half-century: five and a half hours, spread over three days. Yet Democrats, the liberal legal establishment and the press corps spent most of 2010 and 2011 deriding the government of limited and enumerated powers of Article I as a quaint artifact of the 18th century. Now even President Obama and his staff seem to grasp their constitutional gamble.
Consider a White House strategy memo that leaked this month, revealing that senior Administration officials are coordinating with liberal advocacy groups to pressure the Court. "Frame the Supreme Court oral arguments in terms of real people and real benefits that would be lost if the law were overturned," the memo notes, rather than "the individual responsibility piece of the law and the legal precedence [sic]." Those nonpolitical details are merely what "lawyers will be talking about."
The White House is even organizing demonstrations during the proceedings, including a "'prayerful witness' encircling the Supreme Court." The executive branch is supposed to speak to the Court through the Solicitor General, not agitprop and crowds in the streets.
The Supreme Court will not be ruling about matters of partisan conviction, or the President's re-election campaign, or even about health care at all. The lawsuit filed by 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business is about the outer boundaries of federal power and the architecture of the U.S. political system.
***
The argument against the individual mandate—the requirement that everyone buy health insurance or pay a penalty—is carefully anchored in constitutional precedent and American history. The Commerce Clause that the government invokes to defend such regulation has always applied to commercial and economic transactions, not to individuals as members of society.
This distinction is crucial. The health-care and health-insurance markets are classic interstate commerce. The federal government can regulate broadly—though not without limit—and it has. It could even mandate that people use insurance to purchase the services of doctors and hospitals, because then it would be regulating market participation. But with ObamaCare the government is asserting for the first time that it can compel people to enter those markets, and only then to regulate how they consume health care and health insurance. In a word, the government is claiming it can create commerce so it has something to regulate.
This is another way of describing plenary police powers—regulations of private behavior to advance public order and welfare. The problem is that with two explicit exceptions (military conscription and jury duty) the Constitution withholds such power from a central government and vests that authority in the states. It is a black-letter axiom: Congress and the President can make rules for actions and objects; states can make rules for citizens.
The framers feared arbitrary and centralized power, so they designed the federalist system—which predates the Bill of Rights—to diffuse and limit power and to guarantee accountability. Upholding the ObamaCare mandate requires a vision on the Commerce Clause so broad that it would erase dual sovereignty and extend the new reach of federal general police powers into every sphere of what used to be individual autonomy.
These federalist protections have endured despite the shifting definition and scope of interstate commerce and activities that substantially affect it. The Commerce Clause was initially seen as a modest power, meant to eliminate the interstate tariffs that prevailed under the Articles of Confederation. James Madison noted in Federalist No. 45 that it was "an addition which few oppose, and from which no apprehensions are entertained." The Father of the Constitution also noted that the powers of the states are "numerous and infinite" while the federal government's are "few and defined."
That view changed in the New Deal era as the Supreme Court blessed the expansive powers of federal economic regulation understood today. A famous 1942 ruling, Wickard v. Filburn, held that Congress could regulate growing wheat for personal consumption because in the aggregate such farming would affect interstate wheat prices. The Court reaffirmed that precedent as recently as 2005, in Gonzales v. Raich, regarding homegrown marijuana.
The Court, however, has never held that the Commerce Clause is an ad hoc license for anything the government wants to do. In 1995, in Lopez, it gave the clause more definition by striking down a Congressional ban on carrying guns near schools, which didn't rise to the level of influencing interstate commerce. It did the same in 2000, in Morrison, about a federal violence against women statute.
A thread that runs through all these cases is that the Court has always required some limiting principle that is meaningful and can be enforced by the legal system. As the Affordable Care Act suits have ascended through the courts, the Justice Department has been repeatedly asked to articulate some benchmark that distinguishes this specific individual mandate from some other purchase mandate that would be unconstitutional. Justice has tried and failed, because a limiting principle does not exist.
The best the government can do is to claim that health care is unique. It is not. Other industries also have high costs that mean buyers and sellers risk potentially catastrophic expenses—think of housing, or credit-card debt. Health costs are unpredictable—but all markets are inherently unpredictable. The uninsured can make insurance pools more expensive and transfer their costs to those with coverage—though then again, similar cost-shifting is the foundation of bankruptcy law.
The reality is that every decision not to buy some good or service has some effect on the interstate market for that good or service. The government is asserting that because there are ultimate economic consequences it has the power to control the most basic decisions about how people spend their own money in their day-to-day lives. The next stops on this outbound train could be mortgages, college tuition, credit, investment, saving for retirement, Treasurys, and who knows what else.
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Confronted with these concerns, the Administration has echoed Nancy Pelosi when she was asked if the individual mandate was constitutional: "Are you serious?" The political class, the Administration says, would never abuse police powers to create the proverbial broccoli mandate or force people to buy a U.S.-made car.
But who could have predicted that the government would pass a health plan mandate that is opposed by two of three voters? The argument is self-refuting, and it shows why upholding the rule of law and defending the structural checks and balances of the separation of powers is more vital than ever.
Another Administration fallback is the Constitution's Necessary and Proper Clause, which says Congress can pass laws to execute its other powers. Yet the Court has never hesitated to strike down laws that are not based on an enumerated power even if they're part of an otherwise proper scheme. This clause isn't some ticket to justify inherently unconstitutional actions.
In this context, the Administration says the individual mandate is necessary so that the Affordable Care Act's other regulations "work." Those regulations make insurance more expensive. So the younger and healthier must buy insurance that they may not need or want to cross-subsidize the older and sicker who are likely to need costly care. But that doesn't make the other regulations more "effective." The individual mandate is meant to offset their intended financial effects.
***
Some good-faith critics have also warned that overturning the law would amount to conservative "judicial activism," saying that the dispute is only political. This is reductive reasoning. Laws obey the Constitution or they don't. The courts ought to defer to the will of lawmakers who pass bills and the Presidents who sign them, except when those bills violate the founding document.
As for respect of the democratic process, there are plenty of ordinary, perfectly constitutional ways the Obama Democrats could have reformed health care and achieved the same result. They could have raised taxes to fund national health care or to make direct cross-subsidy transfers to sick people. They chose not to avail themselves of those options because they'd be politically unpopular. The individual mandate was in that sense a deliberate evasion of the accountability the Constitution's separation of powers is meant to protect.
Meanwhile, some on the right are treating this case as a libertarian seminar and rooting for the end of the New Deal precedents. But the Court need not abridge stare decisis and the plaintiffs are not asking it to do so. The Great Depression farmer in Wickard, Roscoe Filburn, was prohibited from growing wheat, and that ban, however unwise, could be reinstated today. Even during the New Deal the government never claimed that nonconsumers of wheat were affecting interstate wheat prices, or contemplated forcing everyone to buy wheat in order to do so.
The crux of the matter is that by arrogating to itself plenary police powers, the government crossed a line that Justice Anthony Kennedy drew in his Lopez concurrence. The "federal balance," he wrote, "is too essential a part of our constitutional structure and plays too vital a role in securing freedom for us to admit inability to intervene when one or the other level of government has tipped the scale too far."
***
The constitutional questions the Affordable Care Act poses are great, novel and grave, as much today as they were when they were first posed in an op-ed on these pages by the Washington lawyers David Rivkin and Lee Casey on September 18, 2009. The appellate circuits are split, as are legal experts of all interpretative persuasions.
The Obama Administration and its allies are already planning to attack the Court's credibility and legitimacy if it overturns the Affordable Care Act. They will claim it is a purely political decision, but this should not sway the Justices any more than should the law's unpopularity with the public.
The stakes are much larger than one law or one President. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Supreme Court's answers may constitute a hinge in the history of American liberty and limited and enumerated government. The Justices must decide if those principles still mean something.
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2)Dershowitz’s Two State Solution is No Solution
By Salomon Benzimra,
Professor Dershowitz assails the notion of a “one Jewish state solution” and characterizes it as “extreme right” as opposed to his preferred “two-state solution.” It is not a matter of “extreme right” vs. “extreme left” as he depicts it: it is a matter of right vs. wrong; a wrong that has proven to be totally divorced from reality, as the past two decades of the failed Oslo process can attest.
First, Prof. Dershowitz’s recipe crumbles on its own logic. If, as he says, “the Palestinians now seem unwilling to agree” to the cession by Israel of “all the territory captured in the defensive war of 1967”, what makes him believe that they will accept a far smaller territory consistent with Israel’s security requirements? According to a recent presentation by the JCPA, Israel’s security demands it retain the Jordan Rift Valley; control the Mountain Ridge; demilitarize the putative “Palestinian state”; and control its airspace and the main transportation networks. Does Prof. Dershowitz believe the “Palestinians” would now be more receptive to these drastic limitations on sovereignty?
Pursuing the UN Security Council Resolution 242 is now unwarranted. Israel has more than adequately complied with that Resolution by relinquishing 90% of “territories occupied in the recent conflict.” There is nothing in that Resolution that would remotely refer to any additional withdrawal for the purpose of creating a “Palestinian” state.
Prof. Dershowitz seems to believe that any annexation of the entire Judea and Samaria (let’s use the proper geographic and historic names, please, rather than the fabricated “West Bank”) should automatically award the Arabs living there “the right to vote and become citizens.” Citizenship has never been a right. It is a privilege bestowed by the sovereign power to its residents, and must be legislated to keep and promote the national character of the state. This is what Japan and Switzerland do, and these two countries cannot be tarred as “undemocratic.”
Prof. Dershowitz also opposes the one-Jewish-state solution on the grounds that “it would end in Israel’s delegitimation as the democratic nation-state of the Jewish people.” But he fails to appreciate that the present and growing delegitimation of Israel has its origin precisely in the “two-state solution” which he advocates. By supporting this pseudo-solution, he implicitly tells the world that Israel has no right to hold on to the main parts of its ancestral homeland; that large portions of Judea and Samaria are to be abandoned to their Arab inhabitants; and, by extension, that the whole of Israel is somewhat unlawfully occupied by the Jews. In that regard, Martin Sherman is absolutely right when he stated that “the support for a two-state solution has sown the seeds for the international delegitimization of Israel.” Even Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki perfectly understood the inevitabledislocation of the state of Israel should the two-state solution be carried out.
Many reasonable options have been proposed to settle the status of the Arab residents of Judea and Samaria, some of them by Prof. Martin Sherman in various articles he penned. But one pernicious myth must be dispelled before embarking in this effort. With the exception of a number of long established families, many Arab residents have a rather short history on this land. I hope Prof. Dershowitz would not embrace the same phony definition as the one crafted by UNRWA in 1950, namely, that the “Palestinians” are those Arabs who lived in Palestine from June 1946 to May 1948. This definition is what produced the currently registered five million “Palestinian refugees.”
Dershowitz rejects Sherman’s denial of a “Palestinian people” and he dismisses as “absurd” the necessity for such a people to exhibit specific characteristics of “language, script, religion, heritage or history.” Yet, the very definition of a “people” is listed as follows in the International Webster Dictionary, Third Edition: “A body of persons that are united by a common culture, tradition, or sense of kinship — though not necessarily by consanguinity or by racial or political ties — and that typically have common language, institutions and beliefs.” (emphasis added). Jews, Arabs, Chinese, Indians, Poles, Japanese and a myriad of other peoples meet this definition. But the “Palestinians”?
In the preceding paragraphs, I intentionally spelled “Palestinians” between quotes and this is how it should be. Martin Sherman, Newt Gingrich and anyone who observed – with an open mind untainted by political correctness – the spontaneous generation of this unheard of “people”, would immediately recognize the sham perpetrated by Yasser Arafat in the mid-1960s. Tutored by the KGB and schooled in Marxist ideology, Arafat redefined the “self-determination of peoples” away from its original Wilsonian premise, as Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, explained in a seminal article published in Commentary Magazine in July, 1989. The sole purpose of creating a “Palestinian people” was to frame it in the perennial struggle against “colonialism”, “imperialism” and “oppression” and to launch a “war of national liberation”, duly endorsed by the UN General Assembly, whose purpose, as Kirkpatrick aptly notes, is “collective legitimization” (of the “Palestinians” and other “underdogs”) and “collective delegimization” (of Israel). She added that this charade is “staged daily for credulous Western audiences whose sympathies are quicker than their comprehension.”
Finally, Prof. Dershowitz insists that “[T]he Palestinians are a people because they regard themselves as such and seek to govern themselves.” Not only “nationalism [often] invents nations where they do not exist” (in the words of anthropologist Ernest Geller), but Dershowitz’s assertion has been repeatedly contradicted by prominent Arab leaders since the 1950s (Ahmed Shukeiri, Zuheir Mohsen, Hafez-el-Asad, King Hussein, Azmi Bishara, etc.) who candidly admitted the concoction of the “Palestinian” sham described above.
But most importantly, recognizing the self-determination of the “Palestinians” is tantamount to an Israeli suicidal pact, as it dangerously compromises the Jewish people’s rights to the Land of Israel – rights that have been recognized in international law. Would Professor Dershowitz be willing to jettison these inalienable rights for the sake of accommodating the “Palestinians”? Or will he acknowledge, given the prevailing definition of the “Palestinian people”, that one cannot be pro-Israel and pro-“Palestinian” at the same time?
Salomon Benzimra,
Canadians for Israel’s Legal Rights – CILR
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3)Detroit teeters on brink of bankruptcy as state takeover looms
A state-appointed commission looking at ways to help Detroit avoid bankruptcy must deliver its report by Monday. A state takeover is a real possibility.
By Mark Guarino, Staff
A state-appointed commission on Wednesday declared that the city is in the midst of a “severe financial emergency," as city and state officials scramble to find a way to keep the city from bankruptcy.
Mayor's last-ditch effort to save Detroit would privatize 88,000 streetlights
Facing a budget deficit of $200 million, Detroit is burning up cash reserves for basic services. The 10-member financial commission, appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder (R), has until Monday to deliver an action plan, which could include a takeover by state government. Governor Snyder will have 10 days to make a decision.
Although the city has long been under financial duress, the crisis escalated Tuesday after Moody’s Investors Service issued two separate downgrades of the city’s bond rating. Moody's noted that key parts of Detroit's rescue plan "are yet to be secured,” including reliance on debt financing to stabilize city operations and ongoing labor-concession negotiations.
“Historically speaking, the situation has not been as serious” as right now, says Eric Scorsone, an economist at Michigan State University in East Lansing. “Detroit has gone through a number of periods where it has had financial trouble and had to borrow money, but this is the most serious partially because revenue declines have been so significant.”
To avoid the takeover of a state-issued emergency financial manager, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing and the City Council are assembling their own plan that would cede some control, but not all, to the state government. The city has yet to deliver the plan to Snyder, who told the Detroit Free Press Wednesday that Mayor Bing “should not expect to give us something and have us sign it. The key is … we need to have a dialogue.”
The relationship between Detroit and Lansing, the state capital, has been contentious in recent weeks. The key difference between opposing proposals is control of city finances and who can hire or fire key personnel.
For example, Bing wants the state’s financial advisory board to make recommendations but the City Council to have final say. Snyder’s plan gives that power to the state-appointed board, plus it gives the state the power to approve budgets, appoint key city officials as well as restricting the city from entering collective-bargaining agreements with public-sector unions.
Mr. Scorsone compares the relationship to that of cash-strapped Greece and the European Union, which agreed to bail out the country in early March.
“That local politicians want to maintain control is common in any of these situations. You want to get the aid and not lose control,” Scorsone says. However, in the case of Detroit, which is facing a $5 billion burden in unfunded pension and health-care liabilities, it will be difficult for the city to prove it can handle key financial decisions – a factor some say was confirmed by this week’s downgrade.
“Like Greece, Detroit doesn’t have much bargaining power at this point,” he says.
Bing’s proposal seeks $104 million in state aid for restructuring plus an additional $33 million to refinance the state debt by late April.
This week Snyder launched a website, Detroitcantwait.com, to make his case for his proposals and to solicit public opinion. “Instead of worrying about who gets blame or credit, we all need to work together to put Detroit back on the path to success,” he said in an online video.
The process hit a roadblock Tuesday after an Ingham County Circuit Judge ruled the state-appointed commission violated the state’s open meeting laws by meeting behind closed doors. The judge ordered a March 29 hearing, but that is three days after the committee planned to sign its plan.
On Wednesday, the state filed an appeal to the ruling. In a statement released Tuesday, State Treasurer Andy Dillon said the ruling “only services to delay a potential solution to Detroit’s financial crisis.”
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4)The Incredible Pliability of Fact and Statistics
By Clarice Feldman
This week's report is about energy and the crazy things the President, Democrats, media, college students, and professors believe about energy and why their inability to acknowledge reality and understand economics and statistical evidence places us in such great danger.
Do you believe that Presidents can affect the price of gasoline?
Well, sometimes the media thinks that he can and sometimes they think that, even though he can keep the waters from rising and the climate from changing, he can't. I'm talking, of course, about the disparate treatment the media gave George Bush when gasoline prices spiked to $3.51 per gallon -- even though he and Vice President Cheney tried desperately to override 
Democrat obstruction and increase production by opening ANWR, permitting drilling on the continental shelf, allowing the extraction of oil from tar sands on federal land and slashing red tape on new refinery and pipeline construction. Back then they blamed Bush.
Democrat obstruction and increase production by opening ANWR, permitting drilling on the continental shelf, allowing the extraction of oil from tar sands on federal land and slashing red tape on new refinery and pipeline construction. Back then they blamed Bush.But the media don't think that a president and head of a party which have done everything possible to reduce domestic petroleum production are at all responsible when after those efforts succeeded , the price of gasoline soars to far greater heights (right now about $5.00 per gallon)under Obama.
Do you believe that sitting in the first two rows of burlesque shows causes men to go bald? If you do, the AP "Fact Check" on the correlation of increased domestic energy production and increased gas prices is perfectly coherent.
Tom Maguire, I must note, doesn't share your acceptance of the AP's oh so shrewd analysis:
Oh, for heaven's sake - the question is, does additional US production result in lower prices than would have otherwise prevailed? If, just to seize an example, producers only ramp up US production in response to shortages and rising prices elsewhere, a simple statistical analysis such as done here will "prove" that more production is always associated with higher prices.Well - Obama's energy plan calls for more investment in clean energy and increasing automobile fuel efficiency standards. So we eagerly await the next AP "Fact Check" where they analyze the correlation of rising CAFE standards and clean energy output with gasoline prices.My guess - since we have a record level of solar and wind output yet gasoline prices are also at a record high, the statistical correlation will be clear - all this "clean energy" investment has increased gasoline prices.And has the AP failed to notice that gasoline prices have been spiking since electric cars hit the streets and Obama announced stricter fuel economy standards? Surely the conclusion is inescapable - this push for fuel efficiency is driving gasoline prices through the roof.
Do you believe that Obama is able to repeal the law of supply and demand?
The President says cutting demand will reduce prices but increasing production will not, and that we are producing too much oil and gas for our own good. Like me, Charlie Martin feels he's just not clever enough to sign on to Obama's way of thinking:
In the meantime, recently Obama has been on the stump, saying we can't drill our way to lower gas prices, because we can't expect that adding more oil production will drive oil prices down."Obviously, what we want to do is to get gas prices as low as we can, as quickly as we can, but the most important thing in order to do that is to reduce our demand on oil," Obama told WFTV. ....As for Republicans calling for increased drilling, the president said they are not telling the truth."The issue here is not that we're not drilling enough. The problem is we only have 2 percent of the world's oil reserves and we use 20 percent of the world's oil," he said.Now, at the same time, he's pushing various "green" initiatives which he says will help with oil prices by reducing the demand for foreign oil. And now, he's planning to release oil from the strategic oil reserve to keep prices down.So, if I've got this right, cutting demand will bring down prices, but adding supply won't, and drilling or building pipelines to add more production won't help, but taking oil out of the strategic oil reserve will.
Do you believe that the present Administration is not responsible "per se" for the half billion dollars they squandered on the failed Solyndra solar plant or is it the fault of Congress and the Chinese as Obama claims?
The geniuses at AP haven't yet to my knowledge "fact checked " this so I will. It's baloney. This is what the President said this week: (via Andrew Stiles, Washington Free Beacon)
"Understand, this was not our program per se," Obama said. "Congress-Democrats and Republicans-put together a loan guarantee program...to help start-up companies get to scale."APM: With all respect, it was a gutsy move I think to come to a solar facility. Your administration has staked a lot on clean technology, green jobs - the biggest item most people know about that strategy is, of course, a company named Solyndra, which your administration gave loan guarantees to, then went bankrupt and has been the subject of many investigations. Are you doing your 'all of the above' strategy right if that's what we have to show for it, Solyndra?OBAMA: We are doing the all of the above strategy right. Obviously, we wish Solyndra hadn't gone bankrupt. Part of the reason they did was because the Chinese were subsidizing their solar industry and flooding the market in ways that Solyndra couldn't compete. But understand, this was not our program per se.Congress-Democrats and Republicans-put together a loan guarantee program because they understood historically that when you get new industries-it's easy to raise money for start-ups, but if you want to take them to scale sometimes there's a lot of risk involved, and what the loan guarantee program was designed to do was to help start-up companies get to scale. And the understanding is that some companies are not going to succeed, some companies are going to do very well, but the portfolio as a whole ends up supporting the kind of innovation that helps make America successful in this innovative 21st century economy. Do I wish that Solyndra had gone bankrupt? Absolutely not. And obviously it's heartbreaking it happened for the workers who were there.
The Free Beacon and Fact Check org think it's baloney, too:
Obama has previously argued that the Department of Energy program used to finance a $535 million federal loan guarantee to Solyndra "predates" his presidency.That's an exaggeration of the truth, according to FactCheck.org: "Solyndra's loan guarantee came under another program created by the president's 2009 stimulus for companies developing 'commercially available technologies.'"
But there's a lot more to this bit of baloney. Earlier this year his own Secretary of Energy, the other gormless Nobelist in the Administration said in written testimony prepared for Congress:
"As the Secretary of Energy, the final decisions on Solyndra were mine, and I made them with the best interest of the taxpayer in mind," Chu has written in testimony prepared for his first appearance before Congress to answer questions about the failed loan."I want to be clear: over the course of Solyndra's loan guarantee, I did not make any decision based on political considerations," says Chu's prepared testimony, which was made public by his aides late Wednesday. "My decision to guarantee a loan to Solyndra was based on the analysis of experienced professionals and on the strength of the information they had available to them at the time."
It's also far from true that there were no political considerations in throwing half a billion dollars at the Obama campaign fund bundler. Hot Air reminds us why that claim is "false on its face." Ed Morrissey of Hot Air:
DoE auditors raised red flags on the Solyndra loan well before its approval, but got overruled by the political appointees, including Chu. Not only did Chu approve the loan, the DoE also got Solyndra a sweetheart deal on the rate. Even Solyndra's investors thought that it had turned into a risky bet, and the DoE was well aware of it at the time.Taking "responsibility" is an empty gesture. Of course Chu is responsible for the Solyndra loan; he's the Secretary of Energy, after all. He'd be equally "responsible" if the loan turned out well. We need to know why Chu and his staff overruled the auditors to push this loan at the same time that Obama bundler George Kaiser and his staff were paying visits to the White House to push subsidies for his company, and why the DoE interfered to keep Solyndra from announcing layoffs before the midterm elections, among many other questions. Chu's responsible for those actions, too - but we need to know whether that responsibility goes farther than Chu.
Do you believe that Obama's rushing out to Oklahoma to stand before some pipes, claiming that he is cutting through the red tape on Keystone Pipeline when he has just denied the application for completing a 1, 179 mile gap in the pipeline establishes that he is making construction of oil pipelines "a priority"? I think it's just an optical illusion as does Speaker Boehner, butRush was able -- without much searching I'm sure -- to find media representatives who believe that patent lie.
The President didn't change his tune one bit. He still thinks rising energy prices are the fault of Bush , the Chinese, you profligate SUV driving consumers for using gasoline, and Congress. He's blameless.
The truth is that Obama lobbied to kill the Republicans' effort to extend the Keystone pipeline and that he did so to assuage his rich environmentalist backers, people some wit (whose name I have unfortunately forgotten) now calls "Gang Green" and he is pretending otherwise because the voters hate his decision.
The Gang Green claimed the gas emissions from the production and pipeline spills , not their desire to impoverish us, are behind their demands to kill the pipeline. These are the same folks who rush to publicize every oil spattered bird and look the other way as windmills make pâté of 444,000 migratory birds. The Gang Green is proving the crony capitalists' best friends, aren't they?
What is behind this blinkered and unprecedented fight against petroleum products and waste of money on ineffective "green energy"? It is the even more idiotic claim that by doing so we can keep the climate from changing; besides a new rich vein of graft, it's based on a claim which is dubious.
Pulliam reports on Lord Monckton's appearance at an upstate NY college in which he educated the hostile students and faculty into recognizing the truth. Anthropogenic Global Warming is poppycock, on a par with what my friend Rick Ballard called "the Skydragon":
He moved on to show that the principal conclusions of each of the four IPCC "gospels" were questionable at best and downright fraudulent at worst. [snip]Next, Lord Monckton turned to climate economics and demonstrated that the cost of acting to prevent global warming is many times greater than the cost of inaction. The example of Australia's carbon dioxide tax showed why this was so..[snip] Because this reduction in CO2 concentration was so small, the warming abated over the 10-year period of the tax would be just 0.000085 C°, at a discounted cost of $130 billion over the ten-year term.Therefore, the cost of abating all of the 0.15 C° of warming that the IPCC predicted would occur between 2011 and 2020 by using measures as cost-effective as Australia's carbon dioxide tax would be $309 trillion, 57.4% of global GDP to 2020, or $44,000 per head of the world's population.[Emphasis supplied.] On this basis, the cost of abating 1 C° of global warming would be $1.5 quadrillion. That, said Lord Monckton, is not cheap. In fact, it is 110 times more costly than doing nothing and paying the eventual cost of any damage that might arise from warmer weather this century. [snip]Why had Lord Monckton bothered to deal with the science at all, if the economic case against taking any action to address global warming was so overwhelming? Lord Monckton replied that it was necessary to understand that there was no scientific case for action either, and that it was necessary for policymakers and governments to realize that key elements in the IPCC's scientific case - such as the supposedly "accelerating" warming that had been arrived at by the bogus statistical technique he had demonstrated with a sine-wave - were downright false. [snip]Another student asked, in that shrill tone beloved of environmental extremists everywhere, whether Lord Monckton was a statistician. No, he said, and that was why he had taken care to anonymize the data and send them to a statistician, who had confirmed the obvious: since the same technique, applied to the same data, could produce precisely opposite results depending upon a careful choice of the endpoints for the multiple trend-lines that the IPCC's bureaucrats had superimposed on the perfectly correct graph of 150 years of temperature changes that the scientists had submitted, the technique must be defective and any results obtained by its use must be meaningless.[snip]I asked Lord Monckton what he had thought of the strange conduct of the professor, particularly when he had abused his authority by asking his students to assent to the correctness of a statistical technique that he and they had known to be plainly false.Lord Monckton's reply was moving. Gently, and sadly, he said, "We shall lose the West unless we can restore the use of reason to pre-eminence in our institutions of what was once learning. It was the age of reason that built the West and made it prosperous and free. The age of reason gave you your great Constitution of liberty. It is the power of reason, the second of the three great powers of the soul in Christian theology, that marks our species out from the rest of the visible creation, and makes us closest to the image and likeness of our Creator. I cannot stand by and let the forces of darkness drive us unprotesting into a new Dark Age.
4a) Obama’s energy lies
Playing politics with gas prices and a pipeline
By JAY AMBROSE
In his weasel-worded decision to block a perfectly harmless pipeline that would have provided America with jobs, energy and hope, President Barack Obama betrayed his country, lied and then, just the other day, halfway reversed himself, once more fraudulently.
Not so long ago, this country was in a terrible energy fix. Thanks largely to China and India, world demand for oil was going up while supplies remained limited, meaning prices were soaring as dependence on production in the volatile Middle East grew. However, owing in part to new technology, we found vast new possibilities to obtain oil and gas in the United States, and our neighbors were discovering new resources, too.
Canadian tar sands, it turns out, hold 100 billion barrels of obtainable oil, which is to say, we have Saudi Arabia II sitting right next door. Stretching a pipeline from Canada to Texas refineries is no big deal in a country with 2 million miles of pipeline already. What’s more, there is good besides oil that would flow from it.
It would create thousands of jobs and experts note that a pipeline is far cheaper and safer than other modes of transportation, especially shipping it across the ocean.
The Keystone XL pipeline, in short, would assist in a bonanza of multi-billions, but some environmentalists were unhappy because this tar-sands oil has a lot of carbon dioxide in it, and, by their calculations, would contribute to global warming. There were answers to their concerns. One was that if we don’t use the oil, China will. China then gets all the advantages, and any increased global-warming risk would still be there.
Of course, in a regulatory system that allows no one to sneeze without prior investigations of earthquake dangers, we still had to quadruple-check everything, and so the State Department and 11 other agencies spent three years and endless scientific effort compiling eight volumes of evidence demonstrating there was nothing to worry about.
Obama had promised a decision by the end of last year, but then, on top of screams from environmental extremists, some Nebraskans complained that a physically impossible tainting of aquifer water might occur as the pipeline crossed their state. Obama was in a tough spot -- there was an election coming up and whatever decision he made would displease either environmental supporters or union supporters. He punted, saying the State Department was going to study a new path for the pipeline, and that this would take at least a year, by which time the election would be over. Political problem solved?
Not quite, because Republican senators said they would agree to a two-month payroll-tax decrease if Obama would move ahead with the decision, and Obama, eager to come back to another argument on a further 10-month extension of the payroll tax, said that compromise suited him fine. He got it, and we now have a pipeline decision in which he complains he was shoved into an arbitrary deadline for political purposes. That’s a lie. This man, who had once said he bowed to science, had snubbed his nose at science, skipping his original deadline for political purposes.
Because of the overly speedy process of more checking that would not be necessary with old routes, he said we could not be sure the pipeline was safe, another lie. He added we were meanwhile producing more natural gas, increasing our energy supplies without as much carbon-dioxide peril. That’s true, but that still leaves us with major energy deficiencies at present while the emissions reductions mean there’s less to worry about in any emissions increases from the tar-sands oil.
Suddenly, gas prices are up dramatically again, and Obama is in a political pickle. His Chevy Volt and Solyndra solutions are like putting out a forest fire with a squirt gun that doesn’t work. His record on denying drilling hither and yon, and a past, reported statement about not seeing oil as a solution to anything, hardly help the country, especially since he is thus sending oil markets signals to increase prices more. Increased production in our own land has happened despite him instead of because of him.
And now he is going to get out of the mess by promising half a pipeline that will accomplish zip without a northern part Nebraskans along with greenies particularly don’t want? If the American public is dumb enough to buy all that – and I don’t think so – we deserve this guy and the gas prices that come with him.
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers, is a columnist living in Colorado.
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5)-Romney's Health-Care Duck
He can reassure voters if he mans up to the failures of the health law he signed as governor of Massachusetts.
By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
Illinois has come and gone, and Mitt Romney's team is plotting how best to squeeze the magic number of delegates out of the remaining primary states. But the candidate's real problem isn't geography; it is history.
Friday is the two-year anniversary of Barack Obama's health-care law. Republicans spent this week highlighting this legislation's taxes, mandates, unintended consequences and partisan aims. On Monday the Supreme Court hears arguments about its constitutionality. Everywhere, the talk is ObamaCare.
Rick Santorum's strongest argument is that Mr. Romney won't provide a clear enough contrast with the president, and his strongest example is the Massachusetts health-care law Gov. Romney signed in 2006—which was a model for the federal law, and which he refuses to disavow. RomneyCare is why a significant contingent of Republican primary voters refuse to vote for the putative front-runner.
Mr. Romney had his chance to fix this via his big speech on health care at the University of Michigan in May, 2011. Yet fretful of furthering his reputation as a flip-flopper, he stuck by his law, hiding behind the 10th Amendment. "Our plan was a state solution to a state problem," he said, meaning that while it might look like ObamaCare and walk like ObamaCare and quack like ObamaCare, it was really just a harmless Massachusetts duck.
Mr. Santorum has been nimbly skewering this argument, pointing out that just because a state may have the power to institute a program, that doesn't mean it should. The law Mr. Romney signed, he says, is "government-run health care," pure and simple. Forcing citizens to buy a product, imposing new mandates, creating new health entitlement programs—these, he notes, are mistakes at both the federal and the state level. That Mr. Romney would agree to them on any level suggests he either doesn't understand health care or just does what is "fashionable." Both charges tap into existing voter fears that he has no core convictions.
What most surprises many conservative observers is that Mr. Romney hasn't taken the obvious steps to fix this mess. While he is not likely to do a U-turn, long primaries do allow candidates to slowly adjust their positions until they arrive in a new place. And Mr. Romney is not lacking the skill, or the opportunity, for some RomneyCare damage control.
Instead of using the "state solution to a state problem" trope as an excuse, he could use it as his argument. The more conservatives have been forced to think about health care, the more they've understood the merits of state experimentation. Jim Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute—a free-market think tank in Boston that has published a book on ObamaCare and RomneyCare titled "The Great Experiment: The States, the Feds, and Your Health Care"—argued in a recent conversation that the fundamental mistake of ObamaCare was in imposing a giant, untested law on an unwilling nation.
He contrasts this to the 1990s welfare reform, which came only after 20 years of state experimentation. By the time the federal law was passed, politicians on both sides of the aisle, he says, had come to a sort of "settlement" as to what generally worked. "The Great Experiment" argues that the GOP "alternative" to ObamaCare needs to be federal steps that give states the maximum flexibility to innovate and experiment with free-market health care.
Mr. Romney's health-care proposals embrace some of this, in particular his Paul Ryan-like plan to send Medicaid funds back the states via block grants. What he has yet to do is embrace Massachusetts as a lesson for what other states ought not to do.
This needn't be an exercise in humiliation. Mr. Romney can take credit for being a Republican willing to talk about health care when most of his party wouldn't. He can argue the mistakes Massachusetts made were one consequence of it being early to experiment. He can note, as the Pioneer Institute book does, that several programs he had intended to improve choice and competition, were instead hijacked by his Democratic successor, Deval Patrick, for the opposite purpose.
Mostly, Mr. Romney can argue he is better qualified than most to say what doesn't work. He can note that several of his vetoes in the bill that his legislature overrode—an employer mandate, expanded option benefits for Medicaid recipients—have been proven costly and counterproductive. He can say that, best intentions aside, his state is now living proof that individual mandates, health subsidies for the middle class, and government control over insurance plans, medical services, and prices (all hallmarks of ObamaCare) raise prices and squelch choice.
Mr. Romney has admitted that "our experiment wasn't perfect—some things worked, some things didn't, and some things I'd change." Having acknowledged as much, he may as well embrace his duck, and use it to his advantage. If Mr. Romney is looking for a breakthrough with voters, this is the place to start.
5a) Kvetch A Sketch
Etch-a-sketch artist Bryan Lee Madden draws Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. (Video: The Daily)
Mitt Romney is most frustrating. He always keeps you from celebrating him. Every time you want to—he sweeps Illinois, he gives a good acceptance speech—he gives you reasons not to. He should take to hiding out after victory.
He wins Jeb Bush's endorsement, he's flying high, and he immediately follows it with a full-body pander to George W. Bush and the first Wall Street bailout, which Republicans on the ground, many Democrats and independents, too, view with increasing distaste. Then his press guy does Etch A Sketch.
David Gothard
That last comment was unfortunate in two ways. One is that it reminded a lot of people—well, me—of how then-Sen. Barack Obama, in 2008, was widely viewed as a blank slate, an empty canvas on which people painted their hopes and yearnings. He knew it; he admitted it was part of his mystique. So he was a kind of Etch A Sketch too, only he let the voters turn the knobs. The other is that it illustrated with a disheartening vividness the essential Romney problem, which has never gone away after all this time: that he's making it up as he goes along, that he'll be one thing today and another tomorrow.
Actually, the vibration he's lately giving off is worse than that. He acts like a guy who can be captured. The world is full of mischief, full of groups, tongs, clubs and cabals, and this one says you have to back a certain fiscal plan, that one an environmental approach, and this one says you've got to go to war. And they are almost never thinking of America Overall, they are always thinking of their issue, their thing, and telling themselves—and you—that doing it their way will be better for America, overall. And if they think you have a soft, chewy center, every day of your presidency will be a bloody struggle to capture the Mitt.
Presidents have to have a sophisticated sense of others' agendas and know the implications of those agendas. They have to be able to imagine overall impact.
Does Mr. Romney have such sophistication? Another way of asking is to note a small but telling aspect of his public speaking style. There is something strangely uninflected there. He says very different things in the same tone. "Pass the mustard!" "This means war!" "Flowers are pretty!" "Don't tread on me!" It's all the same tone, the same level of import and engagement. Which it would be if you're sort of . . . well, if you see issues as entities to deploy as opposed to think about and weigh.
Are we too grouchy? Mr. Romney will, after all, be the Republican nominee. That at least became clear this week. How about a little possibly helpful advice?
Hmmm. Some short-term advice to all the candidates:
Get cable TV out of your head. All the campaigns are obsessed with and driven crazy by what the cable universe is saying. Ignore it. What you are having is a conversation with America. You are not having a conversation with MSNBC. You are not negotiating a relationship with the anchors of Fox News.
Their constant clamor gives you a distorted sense of reality. Their critiques leave you too high or low. You know who let cable in his head? President Obama, in the first years of his presidency. It's in Jodi Kantor's book. Do you need more proof of how cable can leave you confused, lost and ineffective?
Stop talking about political process. Every reporter in America wants to reveal the shallowness of your concerns. Why do you help them? Why do you answer their dreary, droning questions about what demographic you appeal to most, what part of the country you'll do best in, how much money you're raising, how you'll win over Hispanics?
They ask you these questions because they want you to be what they are: people for whom politics is all about manipulation. You are running for president. You're supposed to talk about things that matter and address big questions.
Every Republican candidate has been answering these questions for a year now. Stop it. Learn to say, "I have a well-paid idiot who answers some of those questions for me. Would you like to discuss welfare policy?" After the first 10 times it will work.
For Mr. Romney in particular:
Suit up and get serious. Now that everyone knows you'll be the nominee, get off the goofball express. Cheesy grits, jeans, singing, being compulsively pleasant, calling your opponents lightweights—enough.
Use the next few months to get back to basics. Why do you want to be president again? Is the answer, "Because I'm a great fellow and it's the top job"? Dig down deep for a better reason!
Here's something Americans intuit about motivations in presidential politics. When a candidate is on a mission to rescue the country, they can tell. When it's about the nation and not him, they can tell. When he has a general philosophy of government and politics, they will listen, and give a fair hearing.
Mr. Romney seems stuck in "I am extraordinary." But Mr. Obama does, too. He's proof that it's not enough.But when a candidate says, not blatantly but between the lines, "I want to be president because I'm an extraordinary and superior human and want you to see me that way too," well, that sort of subliminally gives a lot of people the creeps. They will see you as ego-driven, not purpose-driven. They may elect you anyway, but this year especially they won't.
It is not fatal that Mr. Romney has been tagged as Etch A Sketchy. Almost all of 2012 will come down to plans and policy, to which path seems likely to get us out of the muck. The American people are in a post-heroic presidential period. They just want to hire somebody to come in and fix some essential problems.
Mr. Romney should feel optimistic.
If the issue is our national economic life, the GOP will very likely win. If the subset of that issue is freedom and personal liberty, the GOP will win with meaning.
The Obama campaign knows this. That's why they'll do anything to throw Republicans off those subjects. Two weeks ago it was contraception, next week it will be another social question. They used to scorn Republicans for using wedge issues, but now their entire strategy is a tribute to the political hacks they hated. And if any Republicans were sad that contraception actually came up as the subject of public debate, they were not as sad as Democratic strategists, who were hoping to save it for September.
If the economy significantly rebounds between now and November, will that leave Mr. Romney without an issue? No. First of all, magic is not about to occur. But more important, if unemployment plummeted to 6%, the American people would think, "Nothing personal, but this didn't happen because of Obama, it happened in spite of him."
No one thinks he's got a good hand on the economy. No one, not even his supporters.
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6)Obama the Appeaser
By Elise CooperAlthough President Obama is not the Neville Chamberlain of the 21st century, he is rapidly moving in that direction. He is much too accommodating towards the U.S. 's adversaries. American Thinker asked some national security experts how they would characterize the President's recent foreign policy towards North Korea, Iran, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Russia. The unanimous answer; he showed weakness, not strength.
A few weeks ago North Korea and the US appeared to have come to an agreement to exchange food for nuclear concessions. The problem is that the agreement was made without the requirement that the North Koreans eliminate rather than suspend their program. Negotiations with the Koreans have occurred over the last two decades, starting with the Clinton Administration's deal in 1994.
Former Congressman and ranking member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), who is currently running for the Senate, does not want to give anything to the Koreans until they provide complete access to their sites, especially "since they never deliver at the negotiations, and do the same thing each time. These negotiations never work and are always violated. North Korea has fooled us four times now." This is no more evident than when North Korea announced last Friday plans to blast a satellite into space on the back of a long range missile. Many intelligence officials believe this is a test of an ICBM capable of delivering a nuclear payload to the US. What is a note of importance is that President Obama had made agreements without definable concessions: as part of the deal North Korea had agreed to a moratorium on long-range launches, something they obviously do not plan to honor.
Iran also requested a new round of nuclear negotiations, which was accepted by the global powers, including the US. President Obama felt his policy of a diplomatic approach and sanctions helped to get Iran to resume negotiations. Congressman Rooney (R-FLA) disagrees, stating, "This whole philosophy of showing we are not hostile towards them is wrong. The Iranians look at it as a sign of weakness and seize upon it." Since America has been talking to the Iranians about their nuclear program for over thirty years should this administration still be engaging them?
Former Ambassador and CIA Director James Woolsey pointed out that many of America's Presidents have tried to engage the Iranians to stop their nuclear program; yet "it has been a total and complete failure each time. It will never succeed with this government. By entering into formal negotiations we have given them status. Giving them status should be a no game. There are ways to talk with them privately, without formal talks, such as talks through intermediaries like our intelligence service. The formal talks will be to our disadvantage."
Three months ago the Taliban announced they were ready to enter into negotiations with the US. However, last week it announced that it was suspending the dialogue. The inference to these statements is that the Taliban appeared to be the ones in control, not the superpower, America. As the Taliban was suspending US talks, the President of Afghanistan was demanding that NATO forces pull back from the villages over the issues of the Koran burning by US soldiers and the killings of civilians by a deranged US soldier. All interviewed agreed that the President needed to speak to President Karzai and apologize for mistakes made. However, regarding the Koran burnings President Obama neglected to point out that the Muslim holy book was defaced by radical Islamists and therefore had to be burned.
Congressman Rooney would have liked the President to say, at the same time, "our soldiers have sacrificed their blood and lives to try to make Afghanistan a better place. By apologizing the way he did, he legitimized the riots. The only thing they respect is strength and by apologizing the way he did the President showed weakness not strength."
As the President was apologizing six American soldiers were killed. Did President Obama demand an apology or answers from Karzai? There have been many instances over the years when Afghan soldiers and their police force have fired upon American soldiers; yet, the President has never demanded an apology. There appears to be a double standard where the President's policy, according to Hoekstra, is to have a "bandwagon of apologies. This is the administration's new standard, an accommodating America where we appear humiliated."
Egypt, America's staunch ally just thirteen months ago, was accommodated through the payment of a ransom to get the American rights workers released. For each of the sixteen Americans, $300,000 was paid. Is this setting a bad precedent, encouraging kidnappings for money all over the world? Ambassador Woolsey would have advised the President to pay the bill to get the Americans out and then cut off a portion of the billion dollars of military aid to Egypt. He feels that if the administration does nothing but pay the ransom, "we are setting ourselves up for future hostage takers. This is why countries like Egypt have to be shown we will not put up with this kind of behavior."
Early in President Obama's administration he showed these signs of weakness when during the arms control negotiations with Russia he decided to unilaterally take out the missile defense programs in Eastern Europe and received nothing in return. Woolsey sees missile defense as very important and feels "this administration has shown weakness in dealing with the Russians. I am quite critical of the way this administration handled the missile defense program."
Fast forward to today when Russia has deployed an anti-terror squad in support of Syrian President Assad. Woolsey could not understand "why this administration was tougher on former Egyptian President Mubarak and Libyan President Gaddafi, who were terrible dictators but did not cause a lot of difficulty to the US, than we are on Assad. This is absolutely beyond me." Perhaps because the President embodies a weak America where Russia is able to gain the upper hand.
By constantly conceding points and apologizing President Obama has shown weakness, not strength and engagement. There appears to be the perception that America can be pushed around with no consequences. Pete Hoekstra summarized it best, "The President thought by pressing the 're-set button' for foreign policy our enemies and adversaries would reciprocate. His offering of the Olive Branch has not worked. The question that needs to be asked, 'does any American feel more comfortable today about the Middle East and other areas of the world than 3 1/2 years ago?'" The answer is an obvious no.
6a)Obama’s back-channel to Tehran bypasses allies Erdogan and Netanyahu
Barack Obama and Tayyip Erdogan get together
The countries benefiting from this concession are Britain, Germany Belgium, France, the Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Spain, Holland, Poland and Japan.
The news flew over the heads of Israelis who were too completely caught up in the terrorist attack on the Jewish school in Toulouse for it to register. Ankara took note - and umbrage. It was a cold shower on the high hopes Prime Minister Erdogan had entertained for his meeting with President Obama in Seoul, South Korea Sunday, March 25.
Their conversation was allotted six hours! The Turkish prime minister took that as a sign that he would be handed the starring role of Washington’s senior broker in the controversy over Iran’s nuclear program. This would be tantamount to US recognition of Turkey as the leading Middle East power bar none.
Erdogan also counted on his services in this regard winning US recognition by Turkey’s addition to the list of 11 nations enjoying exemptions from the new sanctions. Ankara needs this concession in view of the large quantities of oil it continues to import from Iran, and the use Iran makes of Turkish banks to facilitate its international oil sales.
Above all, Ankara is deeply engrossed in an effort to have the new Iranian and Iraqi pipelines to Europe routed through Turkey, reducing the Strait of Hormuz’s crucial importance as a primary route for the world’s oil supplies. This pipeline would also hurt Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf oil producers, all of whom are dead set against Erdogan’s hegemonic aspirations in the Middle East.
But for now no exemption appears to be on offer to Ankara.
Intelligence sources report that Erdogan had planned to fly straight from his long conversation with Obama to Tehran and hand Iran’s leaders a Turkish formula counter-signed by the US president for digging the nuclear dispute out of its crisis.
This might still happen. But, when he returns home, the Turkish prime minister will still have to explain why Turkey was left off the exemptions list.
Even worse, it only dawned on Erdogan belatedly that Ankara was not Washington’s main channel to Tehran as he had believed. In the past month, he had sent Hakan Fidan, the Director of Turkish intelligence, MIT, traveling in and out of Tehran to tie up the last ends of their understanding ready for his summit with Obama. Certain he would be the bearer of tidings, he was brought up short by discovering that the Obama administration and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s office had been in dialogue through a separate secret channel for some time.
On March 12, a close Obama associate, the former US Senator Chuck Hagel, virtually gave the game away when he said in an interview: “There may be back-channel talks, I don’t see any other way around this.”
Israel did not fare any better than Turkey at Obama’s hands.
While Defense Minister Ehud Barak stressed in an interview Thursday, March 22 that America and Israel were in close accord on intelligence evaluations of the state of Iran’s program, he omitted mention of the intelligence gap on the hidden US-Iranian negotiating track.
Hagel was also revealing on another question. Asked by the interviewer: So does this mean “Bomb Iran or live with Iran with a bomb?” He replied: "Exactly. We may eventually wind up with those choices. But I don’t think we’re there now.”
What he was saying was that the secret US-Iranian channel has not yet run its course. This may explain why no date has been set for the Six Power talks with Iran in Istanbul next month.
At all events, the Obama administration appears to be rethinking sanctions as a bludgeon for turning Tehran away from its nuclear weapon aspirations.
Those second thoughts were closely reflected in a new assessment coming from London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies Friday, March 23, which asserted that sanctions were having an effect – “but just not the effect they were supposed to have.”
They have made the Iranians more not less committed to pursuing a nuclear weapon, it was said, and “had the knock-on effect of pushing oil prices to levels threatening the global economy.”
To put things into perspective, Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said Saturday, March 24, that the Six Power nuclear talks with Iran next month will be the last attempt to persuade Tehran to give up is nuclear weapon program by talks.
6b)A Festival of Lies
By Thomas Friedman
THE historian Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote a brutally clear-eyed piece in The National Review, looking back at America’s different approaches to Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and Afghanistan and how, sadly, none of them could be said to have worked yet.
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Thomas L. FriedmanReaders’ Comments
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“Let us review the various American policy options for the Middle East over the last few decades,” Hanson wrote. “Military assistance or punitive intervention without follow-up mostly failed. The verdict on far more costly nation-building is still out. Trying to help popular insurgents topple unpopular dictators does not guarantee anything better. Propping up dictators with military aid is both odious and counterproductive. Keeping clear of maniacal regimes leads to either nuclear acquisition or genocide — or 16 acres of rubble in Manhattan. What have we learned? Tribalism, oil, and Islamic fundamentalism are a bad mix that leaves Americans sick and tired of the Middle East — both when they get in it and when they try to stay out of it.”And that is why it’s time to rethink everything we’re doing out there. What the Middle East needs most from America today are modern schools and hard truths, and we haven’t found a way to offer either. Because Hanson is right: What ails the Middle East today truly is a toxic mix of tribalism, Shiite-Sunni sectarianism, fundamentalism and oil — oil that constantly tempts us to intervene or to prop up dictators.This cocktail erodes all the requirements of a forward-looking society — which are institutions that deliver decent government, consensual politics that provide for rotations in power, women’s rights and an ethic of pluralism that protects minorities and allows for modern education. The United Nations Arab Human Development Report published in 2002 by some brave Arab social scientists also said something similar: What ails the Arab world is a deficit of freedom, a deficit of modern education and a deficit of women’s empowerment.So helping to overcome those deficits should be what U.S. policy is about, yet we seem unable to sustain that. Look at Egypt: More than half of its women and a quarter of its men can’t read. The young Egyptians who drove the revolution are desperate for the educational tools and freedom to succeed in the modern world. Our response should have been to shift our aid money from military equipment to building science-and-technology high schools and community colleges across Egypt.Yet, instead, a year later, we’re in the crazy situation of paying $5 million in bail to an Egyptian junta to get U.S. democracy workers out of jail there, while likely certifying that this junta is liberalizing and merits another $1.3 billion in arms aid. We’re going to give $1.3 billion more in guns to a country whose only predators are illiteracy and poverty.In Afghanistan, I laugh out loud whenever I hear Obama administration officials explaining that we just need to train more Afghan soldiers to fight and then we can leave. Is there anything funnier? Afghan men need to be trained to fight? They defeated the British and the Soviets!The problem is that we turned a blind eye as President Hamid Karzai stole the election and operated a corrupt regime. Then President Obama declared that our policy was to surge U.S. troops to clear out the Taliban so “good” Afghan government could come in and take our place. There is no such government. Our problem is not that Afghans don’t know theway to fight. It is that not enough have the will to fight for the government they have. How many would fight for Karzai if we didn’t pay them?And so it goes. In Pakistan, we pay the Pakistani Army to be two-faced, otherwise it would be only one-faced and totally against us. In Bahrain, we looked the other way while ruling Sunni hard-liners crushed a Shiite-led movement for more power-sharing, and we silently watch our ally Israel build more settlements in the West Bank that we know are a disaster for its Jewish democracy.But we don’t tell Pakistan the truth because it has nukes. We don’t tell the Saudis the truth because we’re addicted to their oil. We don’t tell Bahrain the truth because we need its naval base. We don’t tell Egypt the truth because we’re afraid it will walk from Camp David. We don’t tell Israel the truth because it has votes. And we don’t tell Karzai the truth because Obama is afraid John McCain will call him a wimp.Sorry, but nothing good can be built on a soil so rich with lies on our side and so rich with sectarianism, tribalism and oil-fueled fundamentalism on their side. Don’t get me wrong. I believe change is possible and am ready to invest in it. But it has got to start with them wanting it. I’ll support anyone in that region who truly shares our values — and the agenda of the Arab Human Development Report — and is ready to fight for them. But I am fed up with supporting people just because they look less awful than the other guys and eventually turn out to be just as bad.Where people don’t share our values, we should insulate ourselves by reducing our dependence on oil. But we must stop wanting good government more than they do, looking the other way at bad behavior, telling ourselves that next year will be different, sticking with a bad war for fear of being called wimps and selling more tanks to people who can’t read.-----------------------------------------------------------7)Doing the math: The Iron Dome SystemBy Dr. Aaron Lerner
THE historian Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote a brutally clear-eyed piece in The National Review, looking back at America’s different approaches to Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and Afghanistan and how, sadly, none of them could be said to have worked yet.
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
Readers’ Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
“Let us review the various American policy options for the Middle East over the last few decades,” Hanson wrote. “Military assistance or punitive intervention without follow-up mostly failed. The verdict on far more costly nation-building is still out. Trying to help popular insurgents topple unpopular dictators does not guarantee anything better. Propping up dictators with military aid is both odious and counterproductive. Keeping clear of maniacal regimes leads to either nuclear acquisition or genocide — or 16 acres of rubble in Manhattan. What have we learned? Tribalism, oil, and Islamic fundamentalism are a bad mix that leaves Americans sick and tired of the Middle East — both when they get in it and when they try to stay out of it.”
And that is why it’s time to rethink everything we’re doing out there. What the Middle East needs most from America today are modern schools and hard truths, and we haven’t found a way to offer either. Because Hanson is right: What ails the Middle East today truly is a toxic mix of tribalism, Shiite-Sunni sectarianism, fundamentalism and oil — oil that constantly tempts us to intervene or to prop up dictators.
This cocktail erodes all the requirements of a forward-looking society — which are institutions that deliver decent government, consensual politics that provide for rotations in power, women’s rights and an ethic of pluralism that protects minorities and allows for modern education. The United Nations Arab Human Development Report published in 2002 by some brave Arab social scientists also said something similar: What ails the Arab world is a deficit of freedom, a deficit of modern education and a deficit of women’s empowerment.
So helping to overcome those deficits should be what U.S. policy is about, yet we seem unable to sustain that. Look at Egypt: More than half of its women and a quarter of its men can’t read. The young Egyptians who drove the revolution are desperate for the educational tools and freedom to succeed in the modern world. Our response should have been to shift our aid money from military equipment to building science-and-technology high schools and community colleges across Egypt.
Yet, instead, a year later, we’re in the crazy situation of paying $5 million in bail to an Egyptian junta to get U.S. democracy workers out of jail there, while likely certifying that this junta is liberalizing and merits another $1.3 billion in arms aid. We’re going to give $1.3 billion more in guns to a country whose only predators are illiteracy and poverty.
In Afghanistan, I laugh out loud whenever I hear Obama administration officials explaining that we just need to train more Afghan soldiers to fight and then we can leave. Is there anything funnier? Afghan men need to be trained to fight? They defeated the British and the Soviets!
The problem is that we turned a blind eye as President Hamid Karzai stole the election and operated a corrupt regime. Then President Obama declared that our policy was to surge U.S. troops to clear out the Taliban so “good” Afghan government could come in and take our place. There is no such government. Our problem is not that Afghans don’t know theway to fight. It is that not enough have the will to fight for the government they have. How many would fight for Karzai if we didn’t pay them?
And so it goes. In Pakistan, we pay the Pakistani Army to be two-faced, otherwise it would be only one-faced and totally against us. In Bahrain, we looked the other way while ruling Sunni hard-liners crushed a Shiite-led movement for more power-sharing, and we silently watch our ally Israel build more settlements in the West Bank that we know are a disaster for its Jewish democracy.
But we don’t tell Pakistan the truth because it has nukes. We don’t tell the Saudis the truth because we’re addicted to their oil. We don’t tell Bahrain the truth because we need its naval base. We don’t tell Egypt the truth because we’re afraid it will walk from Camp David. We don’t tell Israel the truth because it has votes. And we don’t tell Karzai the truth because Obama is afraid John McCain will call him a wimp.
Sorry, but nothing good can be built on a soil so rich with lies on our side and so rich with sectarianism, tribalism and oil-fueled fundamentalism on their side. Don’t get me wrong. I believe change is possible and am ready to invest in it. But it has got to start with them wanting it. I’ll support anyone in that region who truly shares our values — and the agenda of the Arab Human Development Report — and is ready to fight for them. But I am fed up with supporting people just because they look less awful than the other guys and eventually turn out to be just as bad.
Where people don’t share our values, we should insulate ourselves by reducing our dependence on oil. But we must stop wanting good government more than they do, looking the other way at bad behavior, telling ourselves that next year will be different, sticking with a bad war for fear of being called wimps and selling more tanks to people who can’t read.
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7)Doing the math: The Iron Dome System
By Dr. Aaron Lerner
Let's take Jamie Levin's figures at face value:
13 Iron Dome systems @ $50 million a unit = $650 million
$650 is a lot of money - but in perspective it is less than the cost of 4
F-35's - the "stealth" jets that are only of any value if the enemy isn't
equipped with gizmos to detect them (this when Russia already claims to
have come up with such a gizmo)
Some of the money for the systems comes from Uncle Sam and the $50 million a
unit price tag also doesn't take into account possible economies of scale in
production.
Intercepting a rocket cost $62,000 for the Tamir interceptor
At the high end around 25% of rockets launched require interception because
they are going to hit an urban area.
For every 10,000 rockets launched this means intercepting 2,500 rockets @
$62,000 a rocket = $155 million.
The above figures of course don't include the cost of the manpower, etc.,
for running the systems.
Now $155 million isn't chump change.
Last November the Manufacturers Association applied to the National Labor
Court for an injunction to halt a strike, claiming that a general strike
would cost the economy around NIS 330 million a day.
At today's exchange rate that comes to $88.5 million a day.
So once you have made the $650 million investment in the 13 Iron Dome
systems, handling 10,000 rocket launches costs costs less than the cost of a
two day general strike.
And that's assuming that when that such a large number of rockets is being
launched at us that we don't respond with firepower to prevent this volume
of launches.
So the narrative that the Arabs could engage us in a bank breaking war of
attrition because of the cost of the interceptors may not ring true.
That, of course, is not to say that we should accept the ever increasing
threat of the Arab rockets in Gaza.
Nor that the response of Israel to the rockets should be to take cover.
What it does say is that there is a logic for having the system as a
component in an overall strategy.
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7a)"Israel's economy will pay heavy price for Iron Dome
The Iron Dome system promises a sense of physical security, but without a
national conversation about economic priorities, its extraordinary cost will
have unintended consequences for Israeli economic security.
By Jamie Levin Haaretz
Since March 9, more than 300 rockets, mortars and missiles have been fired
into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, a response to the killing of
Zohair al-Qaisi, secretary-general of the Palestinian Popular Resistance
Committee, who the army said was planning a major terrorist attack on
Israel. But unlike during the decade of attacks that preceded these
hostilities, in which 8,000 rockets induced terror and resulted in 31
fatalities in southern Israel, a sense of euphoria has instead prevailed
among many Israelis. The reason? Seventy-eight percent of the rockets
threatening population centers were successfully intercepted by the new Iron
Dome air defense system, with no Israeli fatalities, according to a report
in this paper.
Over the past decade, successive Israeli leaders have struggled to find an
appropriate response to these attacks, but neither the unilateral Gaza
pullout in 2005, nor an outright three-week war in 2008-09 was effective in
halting rocket fire on southern Israel. Rather than toppling the Hamas
leadership in Gaza, the most immediate result of long-term closures and
regular Israeli military reprisals has been to create enormous suffering
among ordinary Palestinians.
Iron Dome has managed to do what the politicians could not: make the
residents of southern Israel feel more secure. Hence the widespread
celebration, particularly in the media, which has heralded the
missile-defense system variously as "the best show in town," a "star" and a
"hero."
Capitalizing on the success of the system, Defense Minister Ehud Barak has
begun talking about the urgent need to deploy a total of 13 Iron Dome
systems, including those already operational in Ashkelon, Ashdod and Be'er
Sheva. From the north to the south, Israelis living under the threat of
extended-range rockets from Gaza and Hezbollah rockets from southern Lebanon
will likely demand them.
But before Israelis become complacent in a newfound sense of safety that
missile defense promises to provide, they should consider that each Iron
Dome system costs $50,000,000 and each Tamir interceptor it employs has a
price tag of no less than $62,000. In contrast, each of the Qassam rockets
that the Iron Dome is meant to intercept cost no more than $1,000. It is
believed that there are tens of thousands of Qassam rockets in Gaza alone
and the capacity to produce more.
It is the cost differential between the Iron Dome and the rockets that it is
intended to defend against that creates the perfect conditions for an
economic war of attrition, in which Israel is forced to choose between
bankruptcy and security. Rafael's missile-defense system is seen as the
perfect response to occasional rocket attacks that do not justify full-scale
military reprisals. But while Iron Dome may stop the rockets from hitting
their targets, it won't keep them from being fired, and the economic costs
of intercepting such intermittent attacks (which have become an almost daily
occurrence ) will be tremendous. Israel's enemies can leverage this cost
difference to create an economic weapon.
Budgetary shortfalls have plagued the Iron Dome from the beginning, delaying
the system's development. The initial budget of NIS 800 million to develop,
test and field two batteries was insufficient, according to a report by Gili
Cohen in Haaretz. Neither the army nor the Defense Ministry was willing to
sacrifice other programs to make up the difference. Limited financial
resources (the United States has pledged only $205,000,000 to the program )
mean that Israel will be forced to weigh spending on missile defenses
against other expenditures - a scenario that economists refer to as the
guns-versus-butter dilemma.
Such trade-offs come in a troubling economic climate. Fully 20 percent of
Israelis currently live below the poverty line and the countrywide protests
this past summer, which targeted everything from the price of cottage cheese
to the lack of affordable housing, highlighted the growing inequality
between rich and poor. In the wake of these protests, the Trajtenberg
Committee recommended boosting social spending by NIS 5 to 6 billion per
year, part of which was to come out of the defense budget.
The confidence inspired by Iron Dome will surely temper the willingness to
cut into military expenditures. Instead of money coming from defense to fund
social welfare, the opposite will likely occur. Money for the Iron Dome will
likely come from programs intended to help the most vulnerable sectors of
society, which are less capable of defending their interests. Such cuts will
deepen the already troubling disparities between rich and poor, further
threatening social cohesion.
The Iron Dome system promises a sense of physical security, but without a
national conversation about economic priorities, its extraordinary cost will
have unintended consequences for Israeli economic security. These are the
realities that Israel can ill afford to ignore.
Jamie Levin is a research fellow at the Harry S Truman Institute for the
Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a PhD
candidate in political science at the University of Toronto.
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