Dagny has competition!
Below find picture of JOE 1V.
Visit emmadarvick.com to see what's going on in my oldest granddaughter's mind---though it is only a visual/artistic representation of her mind. She is a beautiful young and a very proficient off-beat artist with a style all her own.
Her art is of the stream of consciousness variety.
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Hypocrisy is Obama's key weapon because it helps to stoke the anger of those incapable of reasoning.
Like I have repeatedly said: you cannot borrow a book from the library without ID , you cannot get on a plane without ID, you cannot buy alcohol without ID if you do not look a certain age, you cannot even cash a check without ID. And recently I could not get an annual chest x'ray without ID.
Yet, when it comes to the most sacred right of a free society, the right to insure honest elections, Obama and his lap dog Attorney General argue voting does not require identification.
Hell, you can't even serve on a jury without ID.
This president and his Attorney General have distinguished themselves because they are 'identifiably' full of crap. (See 1 and 1a below.)
Ah, but Obama crap never ceases.
What has Israel done to Egypt except seek peace and Obama rewards the Muslim Brotherhood for their statements and actions and then we have Obama's statement about the military paying more for their medical costs. He knows he does not have their vote.
But it’s OK for Ms. Fluke to whine about having to pay for her contraceptives because he is seeking the feminine vote. (See 1b and 1c below.)
He canot help himself he is an inveterate liar. (See 1d below.)
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Michael Tanner revisits 'Obamascare' two years after passage and deems it is still a failure.
(See 2 below.)
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New Nazis in our midst? You decide. (See 3 below.)
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I have a dear friend, tennis nemesis and memo reader' extraordinaire' whose contempt for Obama transcends my own. He sent this to remind us all we now have ex parte government. (See 4 below.)
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Bernanke has tried stimulus programs, devaluing the dollar and he remains suspect the economy can sustain itself. Maybe he should give the economy a dose of Viagra!
What Bernanke cannot admit and say publicly is that as long as Obama is president any businessman in his right mind or event a left brained one should be circumspect and hesitant about making big capital bets. After all, radical changes means uncertainty! (See 5 below.)
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Peter Beinart should teach Hillary a thing or two about being Secretary of State with principles.. (See 6 below.)
Glick summarizes the problems beneath the surface Toulouse reveals. (See 6a below)
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The tragic killing episode in Florida cannot be justified and though Zimmerman may be protected by Floridalaw, if he has a conscience it should haunt him all his remaining years. (See 7 below.)
Dick
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1)Ken Blackwell: Holder’s ‘All-Out War’ on Voter IDs Is Obama Re-election Tool
By Jim Meyers and Kathleen Walter
Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell tells Newsmax that the Obama administration has “launched an all-out war on voter ID laws” to bolster the president’s re-election chances.
The Republican activist also asserts that voter ID laws offer a “reasonable safeguard” to protect against voter fraud and ballot-box stuffing.
Blackwell, who was secretary of state in Ohio from 1999 to 2007, also has been mayor of Cincinnati, undersecretary in the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the George H.W. Bush administration, and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. He now is vice chairman of the Republican National Committee's Platform Committee and a senior fellow with the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU).
The ACRU has launched a new campaign called Protect Your Vote, an effort to protect states’ rights to require voters to present ID cards at the polling place.
In an exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV, Blackwell discusses the rationale behind the ACRU campaign.
“Protecting the integrity of the ballot box is essential to our democracy,” Blackwell says.
“Laws requiring voters to show identification at the polls are common-sense measures to prevent fraud and corruption and to ensure that each year’s election returns accurately reflect the will of the people.
“With the attack led by the Obama Justice Department on voter ID laws across this country, ACRU has decided to mount a counteroffensive to protect the integrity of ballot boxes all across our country.
“We basically want to make sure that people understand that [Attorney General] Eric Holder’s Department of Justice has launched an all-out war on voter ID laws and other measures to safeguard the electoral process.
“Although Holder’s actions are purportedly to prevent minorities from being disenfranchised, the reality is that these actions are nothing more than a crass political move with the purpose of ensuring that President Obama gets re-elected.”
Holder is trying to “short-circuit these legitimate measures to protect the integrity of our electoral process,” Blackwell says.
The Justice Department recently blocked a new photo ID law in Texas and halted South Carolina’s law in December. Asked whether Holder’s Justice Department has become an Obama re-election tool, Blackwell responds: “Absolutely.”
Holder already is under fire for his role in the Fast and Furious gunrunning operation — more than 100 members of Congress have signed a no-confidence resolution against the attorney general, demanded his resignation, or both.
Blackwell continues: “What more than 30 states have tried to do is put in place a common-sense measure of voter ID so that people are assured that voters are who they purport to be, and voter IDs are commonplace in our culture. You need [an ID] for a driver’s license, for boarding an airplane, receiving a passport, purchasing alcohol or checking out a library book. So to use it to safeguard the integrity of the voting process at the voting station is pretty noneventful.
“I just had the occasion of witnessing voting in Egypt at the end of January. I watched as Egyptians offered voter ID cards to say, I am who I purport to be.”
He adds: “At the end of the day, it is a false issue to say show me how many millions of votes have been fraudulently cast. If you owned a bank would you wait until your bank is robbed before you put in safeguards to protect the dollars in your bank? The answer is no.
“This is not a matter of saying there is voter fraud that’s run rampant, but we do have enough anecdotal evidence. We all know the horror stories of ACORN in 2008 and 2010. So there is enough evidence to suggest that we need to put things in place to protect this from going crazy.
“This is a reasonable safeguard to protect against voter fraud and ballot box stuffing when we have sufficient enough evidence that there are some people who would do just that if given the opportunity.”
Obama is visiting Ohio this week to defend his energy polices, while polls show people blame the president for high gasoline prices.
“The people of Ohio and the people across the country are right to blame the president for the rising gas prices at the pump, because we are an energy-rich country,” Blackwell says.
“There’s no reason why we should be dependent on gas or oil or any source of energy from any other country. People are very right to be angry at the rising gas prices because President Obama has actually short-circuited and discouraged the all-of-the-above approach that would have made us not only an energy sufficient country but an energy exporting country, producing jobs and more income in our country.”
© 2012 Newsmax. All rights reserved
1a) Can Americans Trust Government Again?
Jeff Madrick
Contrary to what we hear from Republicans, America did not lose its way in the past few years. It lost its way a generation ago when it abandoned its faith in government.
Conventional wisdom has it that come November the 2012 presidential election will be determined by the state of the economy. Actually, the real battle will be over a much older fundamental ideological issue in American politics: what role government should play in shaping our future. This special issue of The Nation is dedicated to bringing the debate about government front and center as the presidential race heats up.
Anti-government ideologues are on a tear, passionately advocating austerity and smaller government as the cure for the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Apparently following the dictum that you should never let a crisis go to waste, they are spinning the recession to promote their pet causes, such as destroying “Obamacare” and weakening public sector unions. As a result, the stakes this November are higher than in any election since Ronald Reagan unseated Jimmy Carter in 1980.
Human Interest Religion Social Issues Technology War
Although the modern anti-government movement goes back to the tax revolts of the 1970s, the latest wave started with the capture of the GOP by evangelicals, the Tea Party and Grover Norquist’s anti-taxers. In 2010 they helped elect a group of far-right-wing members of Congress dedicated to breaking government’s back. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum now propose budgets that would cut taxes sharply for the rich, decimate our most basic social programs and leave no room for significant investment in the future.
There are several strands in the anti-government movement. Among the GOP presidential candidates, Ron Paul (who persists despite having no chance of being nominated) is the classic libertarian who wants lower taxes and fewer military interventions, and who distrusts big business. At the other end of the spectrum, Romney boasts of America’s military might and declares that freeing Wall Street and corporate America from government shackles would reinvigorate the economy. Santorum carves out a faux-populist niche, pandering to the working class on social issues like abortion, gay marriage and contraception, which he presumes they care most about. But the candidates’ variegated views converge in a single imperative: to sharply cut the size of government by reducing or eliminating social programs for the middle class and the poor while lowering taxes for the rich.
Anti-government crusaders play on exaggerated fears about the deficit to justify their plans for deep cuts in America’s two basic entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare. They’re against using government to address the nation’s growing inadequacies in infrastructure, energy technologies and education. They regard record-high income inequality and long-term economic stagnation as acceptable byproducts of the free market. They say the broken jobs machine will fix itself if business and the well-off can get tax breaks. They would repeal the new, though inadequate, Dodd-Frank financial regulations intended to stop Wall Street recklessness. And they would jeopardize longstanding social guarantees, from affirmative action to women’s healthcare, through Congress and the courts.
Persuading Americans to believe in government again may be an uphill battle, however. Conservatives have successfully demonized it as “they the bureaucrats” rather than “we the people.” As a result, nearly half of those who receive Social Security deny that they benefit from any federal programs. States where citizens get the most federal dollars are the most conservative.
Republicans routinely cite record deficits as proof of government failure. In a supposed show of principle, they were willing to shut down the government last spring rather than extend debt limits. Many insist that government must deprive women of a right to choose and must allow prayer in school, even if many parents and schoolchildren do not practice a religion.
But the Democrats are not sufficiently different. Yes, President Obama and his Congressional colleagues have been stymied by Republican intransigence. But Americans can be forgiven if they do not believe that the Democrats have offered programs that would reduce their economic insecurity. According to pollster Stan Greenberg, until recently most Americans could not tell you what Obama’s economic program is. In the end, many citizens find his major domestic achievement, the Affordable Care Act, too confusing to appreciate; many worry that it will raise their Medicare payments.
Perhaps most damaging, a number of Democrats are deeply skeptical about big government, an attitude that traces back to the “third way” philosophy of the Clinton era. A contemporary version of the third way would use market incentives to encourage socially beneficial actions. An example of this, the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), offers financial incentives to attract mortgage lenders into doing what government might better do.
Obama’s leadership style reflects such ambivalence about government. Rather than following in the footsteps of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he seems to aspire to be a Clinton Democrat, skeptical of big government, or even a moderate Republican from the Nelson Rockefeller or George Romney era.
Yet, in his State of the Union address in January, Obama did engage with Americans on the value of government. Rather than addressing the deficit, usually among his top priorities, he championed federal spending to create jobs while rejecting Reagan’s simplistic individualism. “No one built this country on their own,” he said. “This nation is great because we built it together. This nation is great because we worked as a team”—“team” being the government. Obama’s 2013 budget also elevates jobs over deficits and makes government the spearhead of economic growth and income equality.
One can wish, however, that the president had attacked the failures of the anti-government ideology more aggressively. After a generation of conservative dominance, Americans today are more insecure than they were in Reagan’s time. They are now wrongly told that Social Security and Medicare are going bankrupt and can be saved only by severe cutbacks in benefits. Even Obama was willing to raise Medicare eligibility to age 67.
The Bush years of 2001–07 saw the slowest rate of job creation of any post–World War II expansion, followed by the Great Recession of 2008. Now, three years after the recession technically ended, the unemployment rate remains well above 8 percent, and youth unemployment is nearly 20 percent. The median wage of men who work full time is no higher today than it was in 1969. If all men are included, the median male wage is 16 percent lower than it was in 1969, according to the Hamilton Project at the centrist Brookings Institution. This is because fewer men can find full-time work than a generation ago. A typical family’s income is lower than it was in 1999, yet people today pay more for their healthcare and move into more expensive neighborhoods to find decent schools for their kids. Women’s wages have risen, but not at a historically rapid pace. With wages low, Americans have saved less and borrowed more, especially in the 2000s, than in any decade in post–World War II history.
As Occupy Wall Street has so effectively reminded us, inequality has soared. The top 1 percent increased its share of total income from about 9 percent in 1979 to 18 percent in 2011. The United States ranks sixteenth among the richest nations in the world in the proportion of those between 25 and 34 who have a college degree. The inequality of educational achievement between poor and well-off Americans has widened sharply.
Transportation infrastructure has become so degraded that the Society of Civil Engineers repeatedly gives it a grade of D. The US investment in green technologies is trivial. America’s trade deficit has soared to record levels as a proportion of GDP, and the nation increasingly depends on borrowing from China and other emerging markets to be able to pay for imports.
Major media outlets have contributed to the anti-government shift by tacitly endorsing the government-falls-short ideology (see Greg Marx on page 20). They broadly supported financial deregulation in the 1990s, for example, and lauded Alan Greenspan through the end of his reign. They were late to notice the dangers of the runaway subprime market and repeatedly told us how brilliant the Wall Street bonus babies were.
* * *
The great ideological shift started well before Reagan’s presidency. When Richard Nixon took office in 1969, a majority of Americans still admired the New Deal and generally, if less enthusiastically, supported Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. But in the 1970s the national temper was changing. Trust in Washington began slipping after the escalation of the Vietnam War. Johnson’s landmark civil rights legislation as well as his war on poverty, although approved by most Americans, angered conservatives. Watergate marked another sharp downturn in confidence.
During his second term, Nixon exploited the racism of Southern Democrats to attack Great Society programs; but he also supported legislation to establish strong regulatory bodies, including the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency, all of which would fall victim to cutbacks by the Reagan administration a decade later. He indexed Social Security benefits to inflation and supported healthcare reform.
In the early 1970s, Ronald Reagan suffered a major setback in his second term as the governor of California when he failed to get passed an amendment to the state Constitution that would have cut California’s income taxes permanently. Some pundits thought Reagan’s political career was over.
The main catalyst for change was probably the economic downturn of the 1970s. Inflation and interest rates started rising in 1973, spurred by OPEC’s hike in oil prices, poor crops worldwide and Nixon’s accelerated government spending to win re-election. A steep recession soon followed. Anti-government policy-makers repeatedly blamed federal spending for the inflation, and a neoliberal laissez-faire monetary policy, sparked by Milton Friedman’s theories, gained support even among traditional Democratic economists.
Dogged by punishing stagflation, Americans became confused, frustrated and angry. Just five years after Reagan lost his battle to cut income taxes in California, Proposition 13, which drastically slashed property taxes, was approved by an overwhelming majority of voters. In Washington a sweeping bill to cut federal income taxes by 30 percent, sponsored by Congressman Jack Kemp and Senator William Roth, drew strong Congressional support.
America had turned. Two years later Reagan, proclaiming government the problem not the solution, captured the presidency. It is not the people who are living too well, he told Carter in a televised debate; it is “government that is living too well.”
Restoring Americans’ trust in government won’t be easy. We can start by debunking the destructive myths propounded by anti-government policy-makers and economists. As economist Alan Blinder has pointed out, contrary to alarmist propaganda, the nation does not have to balance the budget in ten years or risk going bankrupt; the real damage will come fifteen years down the road, when rapidly soaring healthcare costs inflate Medicare and Medicaid outlays beyond the nation’s ability to pay. Bringing these costs under control should be a top priority on the left.
Once the economy is back on track, higher taxes can finance these and other social programs. Economist Peter Lindert has done comprehensive research in his book Growing Public to show conclusively that bigger government and higher taxes do not impede economic growth (see page 21). More aggressive fiscal stimulus now, including aid to the states that are cutting spending, could stimulate more growth. Economists including Cristina Romer and David Romer have recently produced new research showing that Keynesian stimulus does work to lift economies out of the mire and support rapid recovery. The bailout of Detroit automakers provides a lesson that the government can pick winners and should focus more of its subsidies on manufacturing. And does anyone any longer doubt that this country needs an aggressive infrastructure investment program?
But restoring faith in government will require still more of the nation than these measures. Government has failed too often; it can and must do its tasks more efficiently. New programs have to work. Civic engagement, which has significantly deteriorated, can be revived (see Sabeel Rahman, page 24). And to remove the stigma cast on government by its opponents, policy wonks and activists can also learn how to talk more effectively about the value of it (see Dianne Stewart, page 23).
People need to be fully informed of the failure of free market policies in one arena after another. Conservatives have been expert at deflecting attention from their failures. The press has to be prodded into fairly stating the pro-government side of the argument and into revealing the billionaires and corporate interests that are financing much of the conservative wave. The people should be told that under the anti-government umbrella, privately financed healthcare is tragically inefficient in America; that the unregulated financial markets drove the nation into deep and lasting recession; that for every billion dollars of GDP, the United States now creates fewer jobs than in the past; that monopoly power has grown in communications, drugs, healthcare and finance.
Americans turned against government in frustration and fear in the 1970s. But those same Americans from every corner can rediscover the value of government, throw off the blinders of the past generation and lead their policy-makers to a wiser path. This is the urgent mission of our times.
Jeff Madrick is editor of Challenge magazine and a senior fellow at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis.
1b)Egypt Designates Israel Its Top Enemy — Obama Restores Military Aid
Egypt Designates Israel Its Top Enemy — Obama Restores Military Aid
By Robert Spencer
Egypt’s parliament, which is dominated by two pro-Sharia Islamic supremacist groups, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists, voted unanimously last Monday to expel Israel’s ambassador to Egypt, and signaled that the Camp David Accords would soon be a thing of the past: Egypt, the parliamentarians declared, would “never” be Israel’s ally. In fact, Israel was Egypt’s “number one enemy.” And how did Barack Obama respond to this egregious trampling upon the agreement that has kept an uneasy peace between Israel and Egypt for thirty years? By announcing a resumption of military aid to Egypt.
From the beginning of the “Arab Spring,” I said repeatedly that it was not a democracy movement, as the Western press was claiming, but an Islamic supremacist takeover that would result in the creation of Sharia states that would be far more hostile to the U.S. and Israel than the Arab nationalist regimes they were supplanting. This assessment was greeted with the usual scorn: the Islamic supremacist media machine charged “Islamophobia,” on Fox Juan Williams said I was “fearmongering,” and the usual suspects made the usual ad hominem attacks. Yet everything that has happened since then has shown that the “Arab Spring” is indeed an Islamic supremacist winter, ushering in repressive Sharia regimes with the enthusiastic blessing of Barack Obama.
Yet even as Egypt’s Islamic supremacists rattle their sabers, their spokesmen, allies and useful idiots in the American mainstream media continue to peddle their soothing lies. TheIslamic supremacist and adolescent mudslinger Reza Aslan was at West Virginia University last week speaking about the developments in the Middle East, and heaping more steaming piles of what he calls analysis on the hapless marks in his audience. “Believe it or not,” Aslan said, and anyone with eyes in his head will opt for “not,” “the greatest single aspiration in the region at this moment is to achieve democracy.” Slyly implying that those who have cast doubts on this alleged wonderful flowering of democracy are motivated by racism, he continued: “It does not matter where you pray or what skin color you were born with; democracy is a fundamental right of life.” He also, according to the report on his talk in the campus paper, “aimed to debunk that the Arab Spring is an Islamic takeover. This myth is simply an American paradox due to the primary belief that we live in a secular country that easily separates church and state, he said.” Ah yes, of course. “There is not much difference between us and them,” Aslan said. “These groups now have the opportunity to come out of the mosque and to market ideas and see how they can come to life in reality.”
Yes, “there is not much difference between us and them.” After all, we all want to cover women in burqas and enslave them to their husbands, brutalize and terrorize non-Muslims, murder apostates from Islam, and extinguish the freedom of speech, don’t we? And apparently one way these Egyptian parliamentarians hope to “come to life in reality” is by crucifying people and amputating their limbs. Yet as always, it doesn’t matter how outstandingly wrong and deceptive politically correct spokesmen are. It doesn’t matter that none of their predictions ever come true, or that everything they said was nothing to be concerned about turns out to be a matter of major concern. There is never any accountability for them at all — that a clown like Reza Aslan gets invited to speak at any university at all, while those who are consistently correct are demonized and marginalized, is a measure of how debased and politicized American academia and the public square in general have become.
Aslan also complained in January that “pundits and politicians are already ringing the alarm bells. The common refrain you hear in the US: The Middle East is being overrun with religious radicals bent on oppressing women and destroying Israel. That is nonsense, of course. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that political Islam will be a force in the new, democratic Middle East. And that is a good thing.” His comment on Egypt’s designation of Israel as its “number one enemy” was not recorded, but Aslan is no stupider or more malevolent than many other mainstream media and government spokesmen who assured us that the “Arab Spring” would bring a new flowering of freedom to the Middle East and North Africa. And chief among these was Barack Obama himself.
Speaking about the Libyan revolution in March, Barack Obama hailed “the rights of peaceful assembly, free speech, and the ability of the Libyan people to determine their own destiny,” and also praised “the peaceful transition to democracy in both Tunisia and in Egypt.” Now, as Egypt rushes headlong toward becoming a Sharia state and going to war with Israel, Obama is giving his blessing to the anti-Israel, anti-America forces he is largely responsible for unleashing.
Obama’s abandonment of the undeniably repulsive Mubarak regime paved the way for the ascendancy of the forces now in control in Egypt. Mubarak and his predecessors Anwar Sadat and Gamel Abdel Nasser kept a lid on the Muslim Brotherhood and other forces of Islamic fanaticism for decades. Now that they are gone, it is unlikely that the peace that Sadat concluded with Israel back in the 1970s will long survive.
According to a new poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, 54% of Egyptians want to scrap the Camp David accords that have kept an uneasy peace with Israel since 1979—in yet another blow to the credibility of Obama and all the analysts and commentators who assured the American people that the Egyptian uprising heralded the dawn of a new, secular democracy there. A significant percentage of Egyptians manifest a deeply ingrained Islamic anti-Semitism that leads them to hate Israel—and the Camp David accords—for religious reasons that are embedded within Islam, not political ones that may be susceptible to negotiation, compromise, or even rational consideration.
The resumption of military aid shows that Barack Obama doesn’t seem to mind that hostility one bit. A state can designate Israel its number one enemy and still receive military aid from the United States – military aid that it is almost certain to use against our putative allies in the Middle East, the Israelis.
Obama’s hostility to Israel runs throughout his administration. If he is reelected, and Egypt goes to war with Israel, it is not even certain that the United States would fight on Israel’s side.
From the beginning of the “Arab Spring,” I said repeatedly that it was not a democracy movement, as the Western press was claiming, but an Islamic supremacist takeover that would result in the creation of Sharia states that would be far more hostile to the U.S. and Israel than the Arab nationalist regimes they were supplanting. This assessment was greeted with the usual scorn: the Islamic supremacist media machine charged “Islamophobia,” on Fox Juan Williams said I was “fearmongering,” and the usual suspects made the usual ad hominem attacks. Yet everything that has happened since then has shown that the “Arab Spring” is indeed an Islamic supremacist winter, ushering in repressive Sharia regimes with the enthusiastic blessing of Barack Obama.
Yet even as Egypt’s Islamic supremacists rattle their sabers, their spokesmen, allies and useful idiots in the American mainstream media continue to peddle their soothing lies. TheIslamic supremacist and adolescent mudslinger Reza Aslan was at West Virginia University last week speaking about the developments in the Middle East, and heaping more steaming piles of what he calls analysis on the hapless marks in his audience. “Believe it or not,” Aslan said, and anyone with eyes in his head will opt for “not,” “the greatest single aspiration in the region at this moment is to achieve democracy.” Slyly implying that those who have cast doubts on this alleged wonderful flowering of democracy are motivated by racism, he continued: “It does not matter where you pray or what skin color you were born with; democracy is a fundamental right of life.” He also, according to the report on his talk in the campus paper, “aimed to debunk that the Arab Spring is an Islamic takeover. This myth is simply an American paradox due to the primary belief that we live in a secular country that easily separates church and state, he said.” Ah yes, of course. “There is not much difference between us and them,” Aslan said. “These groups now have the opportunity to come out of the mosque and to market ideas and see how they can come to life in reality.”
Yes, “there is not much difference between us and them.” After all, we all want to cover women in burqas and enslave them to their husbands, brutalize and terrorize non-Muslims, murder apostates from Islam, and extinguish the freedom of speech, don’t we? And apparently one way these Egyptian parliamentarians hope to “come to life in reality” is by crucifying people and amputating their limbs. Yet as always, it doesn’t matter how outstandingly wrong and deceptive politically correct spokesmen are. It doesn’t matter that none of their predictions ever come true, or that everything they said was nothing to be concerned about turns out to be a matter of major concern. There is never any accountability for them at all — that a clown like Reza Aslan gets invited to speak at any university at all, while those who are consistently correct are demonized and marginalized, is a measure of how debased and politicized American academia and the public square in general have become.
Aslan also complained in January that “pundits and politicians are already ringing the alarm bells. The common refrain you hear in the US: The Middle East is being overrun with religious radicals bent on oppressing women and destroying Israel. That is nonsense, of course. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that political Islam will be a force in the new, democratic Middle East. And that is a good thing.” His comment on Egypt’s designation of Israel as its “number one enemy” was not recorded, but Aslan is no stupider or more malevolent than many other mainstream media and government spokesmen who assured us that the “Arab Spring” would bring a new flowering of freedom to the Middle East and North Africa. And chief among these was Barack Obama himself.
Speaking about the Libyan revolution in March, Barack Obama hailed “the rights of peaceful assembly, free speech, and the ability of the Libyan people to determine their own destiny,” and also praised “the peaceful transition to democracy in both Tunisia and in Egypt.” Now, as Egypt rushes headlong toward becoming a Sharia state and going to war with Israel, Obama is giving his blessing to the anti-Israel, anti-America forces he is largely responsible for unleashing.
Obama’s abandonment of the undeniably repulsive Mubarak regime paved the way for the ascendancy of the forces now in control in Egypt. Mubarak and his predecessors Anwar Sadat and Gamel Abdel Nasser kept a lid on the Muslim Brotherhood and other forces of Islamic fanaticism for decades. Now that they are gone, it is unlikely that the peace that Sadat concluded with Israel back in the 1970s will long survive.
According to a new poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, 54% of Egyptians want to scrap the Camp David accords that have kept an uneasy peace with Israel since 1979—in yet another blow to the credibility of Obama and all the analysts and commentators who assured the American people that the Egyptian uprising heralded the dawn of a new, secular democracy there. A significant percentage of Egyptians manifest a deeply ingrained Islamic anti-Semitism that leads them to hate Israel—and the Camp David accords—for religious reasons that are embedded within Islam, not political ones that may be susceptible to negotiation, compromise, or even rational consideration.
The resumption of military aid shows that Barack Obama doesn’t seem to mind that hostility one bit. A state can designate Israel its number one enemy and still receive military aid from the United States – military aid that it is almost certain to use against our putative allies in the Middle East, the Israelis.
Obama’s hostility to Israel runs throughout his administration. If he is reelected, and Egypt goes to war with Israel, it is not even certain that the United States would fight on Israel’s side.
1c)Obama’s reasoning for why the military should pay more for their health insurance.
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It’s still a failure.
By Michael Tanner
This week marks two years since of the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and if the Obama administration has chosen to all but ignore the second anniversary of Obamacare, the rest of us should pause and reflect on just what a monumental failure of policy the health-care-reform law has been.
What’s more, it has been a failure on its own terms. After all, when health-care reform was passed, we were promised that it would do three things: 1) provide health-insurance coverage for all Americans; 2) reduce insurance costs for individuals, businesses, and government; and 3) increase the quality of health care and the value received for each dollar of health-care spending. At the same time, the president and the law’s supporters in Congress promised that the legislation would not increase the federal-budget deficit or unduly burden the economy. And it would do all these things while letting those of us who were happy with our current health insurance keep it unchanged. Two years in, we can see that none of these things is true.
For example, we now know that, contrary to claims made when the bill passed, the law will not come close to achieving universal coverage. In fact, as time goes by, it looks as if the bill will cover fewer and fewer people than advertised. According to a report from the Congressional Budget Office released last week, Obamacare will leave 27 million Americans uninsured by 2022. This represents an increase of 2–4 million uninsured over previous reports. Moreover, it should be noted that, of the 23 million Americans who will gain coverage under Obamacare, 17 million will not be covered by real insurance, but will simply be dumped into the Medicaid system, with all its problems of access and quality. Thus, only about 20 million Americans will receive actual insurance coverage under Obamacare. That’s certainly an improvement over the status quo, but it’s also a far cry from universal coverage — and not much bang for the buck, given Obamacare’s ever-rising cost.
At the same time, the legislation is a major failure when it comes to controlling costs. While we were once told that health-care reform would “bend the cost curve down,” we now know that Obamacare will actually increase U.S. health-care spending. This should come as no surprise: If you are going to provide more benefits to more people, it is going to cost you more money. The law contained few efforts to actually contain health-care costs, and the CBO now reports that many of the programs it did contain, such as disease management and care coordination, will not actually reduce costs. As the CBO noted, “in nearly every program involving disease management and care coordination, spending was either unchanged or increased relative to the spending that would have occurred in the absence of the program, when the fees paid to the participating organization were considered.”
This failure to control costs means that the law will add significantly to the already-crushing burden of government spending, taxes, and debt. According to the CBO, Obamacare will cost $1.76 trillion by 2022. To be fair, some media outlets misreported this new estimate as a doubling of the law’s originally estimated cost of $940 billion. In reality, most of the increased cost estimate is the result, not of increased programmatic costs, but of an extra two years of implementation. Still, many observers warned at the time that the original $940 million estimate was misleading because it included only six years of actual expenditures, with the ten-year budget window. The new estimate is, therefore, a more accurate measure of how expensive this law will be. Yet even this estimate covers only eight years of implementation. And it leaves out more than $115 billion in important implementation costs, as well as costs of the so-called doc fix. It also double-counts Social Security taxes and Medicare savings. Some studies suggest a better estimate of Obamacare’s real ten-year cost could run as high as $2.7–3 trillion. And this does not even include the over $4.3 trillion in costs shifted to businesses, individuals, and state governments.
All this spending means that we will pay much more in debt and taxes. But we will also pay more in insurance premiums. Once upon a time, the president promised us that health-care reform would lower our insurance premiums by $2,500 per year. That claim has long since been abandoned. Insurance premiums are continuing to rise at record rates. And, while there are many factors driving premiums up, Obamacare itself is one of them. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, insurance premiums had been rising at roughly 5 percent per year pre-Obamacare. That jumped to 9 percent last year. And roughly half that four-percentage-point increase can be directly attributed to Obamacare. Even Jonathan Gruber of MIT, one of the architects of both Obamacare and Romneycare, now admits that many individuals will end up paying more for insurance than they would have without the reform — even after taking into account government subsidies — and that those increases will be substantial. According to Gruber, “after the application of tax subsidies, 59 percent of the individual market will experience an average premium increase of 31 percent.”
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Finally, if the past two years should have taught us anything, it is that we may not be able to keep our current insurance, even if we are happy with it. The CBO suggests that as many as 20 million workers could lose their employer-provided health insurance as a result of Obamacare. Instead, they will be dumped into government-run insurance exchanges. And, the recent dust-up over insurance coverage for contraceptives is a clear illustration of how the government will now be designing insurance plans for all of us. Regardless of how one feels about the contraceptive mandate itself, it is just the tip of the iceberg as government mandates tell employers what insurance they must provide, and tell us what insurance we must buy, even if that insurance is more expensive, contains benefits we don’t want, or violates our consciences.
Next week, Obamacare will slouch its way to the Supreme Court. How the justices decide will be based on questions of constitutional law. Their decision will set a crucial precedent in setting the boundaries between government power and individual rights. But regardless of whether the Court upholds Obamacare or strikes it down, in whole or in part, we should understand that, simply as a matter of health-care reform, Obamacare is a costly and dangerous failure.
— Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution.
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3) Sultan Knish
By Daniel Greenfield
The New Nazis
There was a time when Jewish children were hunted down and killed in France. Their killers believed themselves to be members of a superior group that was destined to rule the world and enslave or exterminate members of inferior groups. The cowardice and appeasement of the French authorities allowed them to operate freely, to kill Jews and launch attacks on other countries.
What was then is now again. The occupying army doesn't wear uniforms, it wears keffiyahs. It doesn't speak German, it speaks Arabic. It doesn't believe that it is superior for reasons of race as much as for reasons of religion. It does not view all others as Untermenschen, but as infidels. It looks forward not to a thousand year Reich, but to a thousand year Caliphate.
Mohammed Merah did not chase down a French-Jewish seven year old girl, put a gun to her head and pull the trigger because he came from an economically depressed area or any of the other media spin. He was only doing what Muslims had been doing to non-Muslims for over a thousand years. He didn't do what he did because he was "radicalized", he did it because he became a fully committed Muslim.
It won't end with taking down one man and it won't end with Jewish children. When your ideology believes that it is in a zero-sum struggle with the rest of the world and that membership means that you are a superior breed of human being because you worship the Fuhrer or Allah, then it won't stop. It won't ever stop. Not until the figurehead is toppled, the creed is humiliated and the supermen are shown to be cowards, neurotics, pedophiles, insecure men dressing up their weaknesses in power fantasies.
Between all the non-stop coverage, the expressions of grief, the political pandering, no one is stating the obvious. France has been occupied all over again. Once again the occupation has been carried out with the consent of the authorities who have decided that cowardice is the only way. Vichy France has become Vichy Europe, Vichy America, Vichy Australia, where the blatant appeasement is disguised as honor, treason is portrayed as responsible leadership and collaboration in the mass murder of your own people is never acknowledged as such.
It's not Neo-Nazis that are the threat to Jews today. It's the new Nazis and the old Nazis who were rounding up Jews into ghettos and murdering their children long before a thousand years before Hitler. The Neos are pathetically longing for the return of a genocidal state that isn't coming back, while the Muslims are actually working to bring back their genocidal state. They are doing it in Egypt, in Libya, in Pakistan and in England, France and Spain.
Muslims have hated Jews before the telephone, the telegraph, the steam engine, gunpowder, movable type and paper currency. And now surrounded by smartphones, credit cards and jet planes, they still hate them. That simple undeniable fact is denied by government, in every university and in every center of culture. And every one of those deniers has blood on his hands.
Not only the blood of the Jewish children murdered by Mohammed Merah. Not only the blood of Jews murdered by Muslims in France. But the blood of all those who have been killed by Muslim immigrants, no matter of what generation, in the name of Islam.
The names of Chamberlain, Petain and Quisling have become eternally infamous because they stand for appeasement and collaboration. But then what do we make of the names Blair, Sarkozy and Stoltenberg? What have the latter done differently from their predecessors? The left likes to pretend that its collaboration with Islam is moral, while the collaboration with Nazism was immoral. It's a distinction without a difference.
Does it really matter whether the men murdering children in the name of their Fuhrer call him Adolf or Mohammed? Does it matter whether they call themselves Hans or Mohammed? Does it matter whether their fantasies of superiority are based on bad science or bad religion? What matters is the end result. A foreign enemy controls your cities, murders at will and takes your future for his own.
The Tolouse Massacre did not come out of the blue, it follows decades of Muslim violence in France-- a Kristalnacht that has been going on year after year. It will not stop here. Not while there are five million Muslim in France, some of whom are bound to pick up the Koran and take it seriously. The "radical" clerics that Mohammed Merah listened to did not innovate a new religion, there has never been any basis to the teachings of the so-called radicals other than the Koran. The only book more popular in the Muslim world than Mein Kampf.
"O Muslims, O Servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him." That is what Muslims look forward to in their end times. Rocks and trees that tell them where the Jews are so that the fat faithful servants of Allah don't have to spend too much time and energy searching for their victims. Mohammed Merah did not have any trees or rocks to tell him where to find Jews to kill. But he had a compliant French state which tolerated a known Jihadist to the detriment of his victims.
The question, as always, after every act of Muslim terror is how many more must die? How many? Because the killing will continue. It has gone on for over a thousand years. It is not about to stop now. Muslim leaders who condemn these acts do it for tactical reasons, not moral ones. They don't believe it's wrong to kill rebellious non-Muslims... unless the act rebounds against Muslims.
The difference between the "radicals" and the "moderates" is that the radicals want to engage in genocide even while they are a minority, while the moderates want to wait until they are a majority. The radicals are satisfied with killing a few Hindus, Christians, Jews, here and there. The moderates want to wait and kill millions. Neither are our allies. Both are our murderers.
There is no peaceful way forward here. Carving up Czechoslovakia, Cyprus or Israel will not sate the blood lust of people whose egos are fed by hate, who treat every concession as proof of their own superiority, who love nothing so much as for others to fear them. There is no peace to be had with a creed that defines peace exclusively in terms of its own dominance over others.
Islam, like Nazism, is a disease of the soul, a twin sense of superiority and victimhood possessed by the angry corner dwellers of the world, who are certain that they would rule if only it wasn't for all the others holding them back. To understand a Nazi or a Muslim, you don't need to learn their creeds, just stare into the eyes of a wife beater, a pedophile or any bully and you will see that same smirk which easily transforms into outrage, the arrogant tone that turns unctuous when it is set back on its heels, the flickering eyes that are always looking at what they can't have.
You don't need to read the Koran to understand Mohammed Merah, you can just as easily understand the Koran by reading about what Mohammed Merah did. Nothing much has changed in all the centuries, except that Mohammed Merah didn't get to rape the girl he murdered, because the French state was still functional enough to keep him on the run. The day will however come when it won't be and then the peoples of the free world will learn what true Muslim terror really is, as the peoples of Africa and Asia, as the many other religions of the Middle East, including the Jews learned, in the day of the original Mohammed.
There is nothing extraordinary about what Mohammed Merah did. You may think that there is, but that is because you are a citizen of the free world and you have become used to that rare thing known as civilized behavior. But when your nations opened their borders to people who consider your infidel lands, the Dar Al-Harb, the House of the Sword, then civilization gets its throat cut, it gets chased down at a school, has a gun put to its head and the trigger gets pulled.
Killing children is not a shocking act in the Middle East, except when CNN points its cameras the right way. Parents routinely kill their own children for minor offenses that would hardly get an American child grounded. When they move to America or Canada, they kill their children there too and we considerately look away. If they do that to their children, why do you think they will have any more mercy on yours?
There is no point in holding Mohammed Merah accountable for what he did, just as there was no point in bringing Nazi leaders to trial for crimes against humanity. Mohammed recognizes no form of law other than the law of Islam, just as the Nazis recognized no other form of humanity than their own. There is no common moral or legal system that we share with Islam. Equality before the law, the cornerstone of our system, is so much noise in the windy corridors of the mosque. How can the Subhuman be equal to the Aryan, how can the Infidel be equal to the Muslim?
Mohammed Merah is a mad dog and should be treated as what he is. Accountability is for those who share our moral system. It is for our own leaders who continue perpetuating the macabre myth of a religion of peace, even while attending the funerals of tis victims. Accountability is for the Petains, the Chamberlains and the Quislings who have led us into this hole and keep waving in more Mohammeds to come and join the party.
The old Nazis marched in at the head of an army. The new Nazis bought a plane ticket. The old Nazis had to get by the French Armed Forces and the Royal Air Force. The new Nazis are welcomed in and anyone who says a word otherwise faces trials and jail sentences. The old Nazis deported Jews to camps. The new Nazis kill them right in the cities. And the killing will not stop until the Muslim occupation of Europe comes to an end.
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4)
5) Bernanke: Economy Lacks Strength
Bernanke said consumer demand remains weak relative to its level before the Great Recession. He noted that other contributors to economic growth — including borrowing and trade — have declined.
"Consumer spending has not ... recovered. It's still quite weak relative to where it was before the crisis," Bernanke said in the second of four lectures he is giving to George Washington University students this month. "We lack a source of demand to keep the economy growing."
His comments provided further insight into the reasoning behind the Fed's plan to hold short-term interest rates near zero through 2014. The central bank has stuck with that timetable despite three months of strong job growth and other signs of economic improvement.
Many economists believe that Fed officials will not make any changes in policy at their next meeting on April 25-26 and will only ease credit conditions if the economy slows further.
Applications for unemployment benefits fell last week to a four-year low, providing more support to the view that the job market is strengthening. From December through February, employers have added an average of 245,000 jobs per month, the best three months of hiring in two years.
But incomes are still barely keeping up with inflation and people are having to cope with a big jump in gas prices.
In his lecture Thursday, Bernanke covered the Fed's history from the end of World War II through the housing boom of the last decade. The boom followed by a collapse in housing that contributed to a financial crisis and deep recession.
Bernanke said he did not think the Fed's low interest rates in the early part of the decade contributed to the housing bubble. He did say he believes the central bank made mistakes in supervision and regulation that did play a role in banks making unsound mortgage loans.
"A lot of banks simply didn't have the capacity to thoroughly understand the risks that they were taking," Bernanke told the students. "I think the Fed and other bank supervisors didn't press hard enough on this and that turned out to be a serious problems.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------6)
Mohammed Merah did not chase down a French-Jewish seven year old girl, put a gun to her head and pull the trigger because he came from an economically depressed area or any of the other media spin. He was only doing what Muslims had been doing to non-Muslims for over a thousand years. He didn't do what he did because he was "radicalized", he did it because he became a fully committed Muslim.
It won't end with taking down one man and it won't end with Jewish children. When your ideology believes that it is in a zero-sum struggle with the rest of the world and that membership means that you are a superior breed of human being because you worship the Fuhrer or Allah, then it won't stop. It won't ever stop. Not until the figurehead is toppled, the creed is humiliated and the supermen are shown to be cowards, neurotics, pedophiles, insecure men dressing up their weaknesses in power fantasies.
Between all the non-stop coverage, the expressions of grief, the political pandering, no one is stating the obvious. France has been occupied all over again. Once again the occupation has been carried out with the consent of the authorities who have decided that cowardice is the only way. Vichy France has become Vichy Europe, Vichy America, Vichy Australia, where the blatant appeasement is disguised as honor, treason is portrayed as responsible leadership and collaboration in the mass murder of your own people is never acknowledged as such.
It's not Neo-Nazis that are the threat to Jews today. It's the new Nazis and the old Nazis who were rounding up Jews into ghettos and murdering their children long before a thousand years before Hitler. The Neos are pathetically longing for the return of a genocidal state that isn't coming back, while the Muslims are actually working to bring back their genocidal state. They are doing it in Egypt, in Libya, in Pakistan and in England, France and Spain.
Muslims have hated Jews before the telephone, the telegraph, the steam engine, gunpowder, movable type and paper currency. And now surrounded by smartphones, credit cards and jet planes, they still hate them. That simple undeniable fact is denied by government, in every university and in every center of culture. And every one of those deniers has blood on his hands.
Not only the blood of the Jewish children murdered by Mohammed Merah. Not only the blood of Jews murdered by Muslims in France. But the blood of all those who have been killed by Muslim immigrants, no matter of what generation, in the name of Islam.
The names of Chamberlain, Petain and Quisling have become eternally infamous because they stand for appeasement and collaboration. But then what do we make of the names Blair, Sarkozy and Stoltenberg? What have the latter done differently from their predecessors? The left likes to pretend that its collaboration with Islam is moral, while the collaboration with Nazism was immoral. It's a distinction without a difference.
Does it really matter whether the men murdering children in the name of their Fuhrer call him Adolf or Mohammed? Does it matter whether they call themselves Hans or Mohammed? Does it matter whether their fantasies of superiority are based on bad science or bad religion? What matters is the end result. A foreign enemy controls your cities, murders at will and takes your future for his own.
"O Muslims, O Servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him." That is what Muslims look forward to in their end times. Rocks and trees that tell them where the Jews are so that the fat faithful servants of Allah don't have to spend too much time and energy searching for their victims. Mohammed Merah did not have any trees or rocks to tell him where to find Jews to kill. But he had a compliant French state which tolerated a known Jihadist to the detriment of his victims.
The question, as always, after every act of Muslim terror is how many more must die? How many? Because the killing will continue. It has gone on for over a thousand years. It is not about to stop now. Muslim leaders who condemn these acts do it for tactical reasons, not moral ones. They don't believe it's wrong to kill rebellious non-Muslims... unless the act rebounds against Muslims.
The difference between the "radicals" and the "moderates" is that the radicals want to engage in genocide even while they are a minority, while the moderates want to wait until they are a majority. The radicals are satisfied with killing a few Hindus, Christians, Jews, here and there. The moderates want to wait and kill millions. Neither are our allies. Both are our murderers.
There is no peaceful way forward here. Carving up Czechoslovakia, Cyprus or Israel will not sate the blood lust of people whose egos are fed by hate, who treat every concession as proof of their own superiority, who love nothing so much as for others to fear them. There is no peace to be had with a creed that defines peace exclusively in terms of its own dominance over others.
Islam, like Nazism, is a disease of the soul, a twin sense of superiority and victimhood possessed by the angry corner dwellers of the world, who are certain that they would rule if only it wasn't for all the others holding them back. To understand a Nazi or a Muslim, you don't need to learn their creeds, just stare into the eyes of a wife beater, a pedophile or any bully and you will see that same smirk which easily transforms into outrage, the arrogant tone that turns unctuous when it is set back on its heels, the flickering eyes that are always looking at what they can't have.
You don't need to read the Koran to understand Mohammed Merah, you can just as easily understand the Koran by reading about what Mohammed Merah did. Nothing much has changed in all the centuries, except that Mohammed Merah didn't get to rape the girl he murdered, because the French state was still functional enough to keep him on the run. The day will however come when it won't be and then the peoples of the free world will learn what true Muslim terror really is, as the peoples of Africa and Asia, as the many other religions of the Middle East, including the Jews learned, in the day of the original Mohammed.
There is nothing extraordinary about what Mohammed Merah did. You may think that there is, but that is because you are a citizen of the free world and you have become used to that rare thing known as civilized behavior. But when your nations opened their borders to people who consider your infidel lands, the Dar Al-Harb, the House of the Sword, then civilization gets its throat cut, it gets chased down at a school, has a gun put to its head and the trigger gets pulled.
Killing children is not a shocking act in the Middle East, except when CNN points its cameras the right way. Parents routinely kill their own children for minor offenses that would hardly get an American child grounded. When they move to America or Canada, they kill their children there too and we considerately look away. If they do that to their children, why do you think they will have any more mercy on yours?
Mohammed Merah is a mad dog and should be treated as what he is. Accountability is for those who share our moral system. It is for our own leaders who continue perpetuating the macabre myth of a religion of peace, even while attending the funerals of tis victims. Accountability is for the Petains, the Chamberlains and the Quislings who have led us into this hole and keep waving in more Mohammeds to come and join the party.
The old Nazis marched in at the head of an army. The new Nazis bought a plane ticket. The old Nazis had to get by the French Armed Forces and the Royal Air Force. The new Nazis are welcomed in and anyone who says a word otherwise faces trials and jail sentences. The old Nazis deported Jews to camps. The new Nazis kill them right in the cities. And the killing will not stop until the Muslim occupation of Europe comes to an end.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4)
5) Bernanke: Economy Lacks Strength
There is still not enough spending and investment to sustain the economic recovery, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Thursday.
Bernanke said consumer demand remains weak relative to its level before the Great Recession. He noted that other contributors to economic growth — including borrowing and trade — have declined.
"Consumer spending has not ... recovered. It's still quite weak relative to where it was before the crisis," Bernanke said in the second of four lectures he is giving to George Washington University students this month. "We lack a source of demand to keep the economy growing."
His comments provided further insight into the reasoning behind the Fed's plan to hold short-term interest rates near zero through 2014. The central bank has stuck with that timetable despite three months of strong job growth and other signs of economic improvement.
Many economists believe that Fed officials will not make any changes in policy at their next meeting on April 25-26 and will only ease credit conditions if the economy slows further.
Applications for unemployment benefits fell last week to a four-year low, providing more support to the view that the job market is strengthening. From December through February, employers have added an average of 245,000 jobs per month, the best three months of hiring in two years.
But incomes are still barely keeping up with inflation and people are having to cope with a big jump in gas prices.
In his lecture Thursday, Bernanke covered the Fed's history from the end of World War II through the housing boom of the last decade. The boom followed by a collapse in housing that contributed to a financial crisis and deep recession.
Bernanke said he did not think the Fed's low interest rates in the early part of the decade contributed to the housing bubble. He did say he believes the central bank made mistakes in supervision and regulation that did play a role in banks making unsound mortgage loans.
"A lot of banks simply didn't have the capacity to thoroughly understand the risks that they were taking," Bernanke told the students. "I think the Fed and other bank supervisors didn't press hard enough on this and that turned out to be a serious problems.
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Peter Beinart's Peace-Making A Jerusalem Post Op-Ed Ending a war at any cost sounds noble, but it is cowardly. For if we cannot articulate that there are things worth fighting for - and yes, killing and dying for - then tragically, we are "miserable creatures who have no chance at being free." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
 'To save Israel, boycott the settlements,' Peter Beinart pleaded in this week's New York Times. Israel, he says, is dangerously creating one political entity between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, in which "millions of West Bank Palestinians are barred from citizenship and the right to vote in the state that controls their lives."Therefore, it is time to drop the phrase "West Bank." Or "Judea and Samaria." Rather, Beinart suggests, freedom and democracy-loving Jews should now call the West Bank "nondemocratic Israel." Perhaps, he muses, that name and the boycotts of West Bank settlements that he hopes will follow might save whatever hope remains for a two-state solution. Many Jews, including Zionists deeply committed to Israel, will resonate to portions of Beinart's argument. They will agree that the conflict has lingered far too long, and that it is, at certain times, brutal and ugly. They will acknowledge that Israel's presence in the West Bank is oppressive for the Palestinians and at times callouses Israel's soul. They will certainly share Beinart's wish that matters could be otherwise. But Beinart's op-ed is cavalier, and thus dangerous, on many levels. What, exactly, is he proposing with this boycott? If a rape crisis hotline serves people on both sides of the Green Line, must it be boycotted? What about Israeli-Palestinian coexistence organizations based in Haifa, but which do work in the settlements? Should Beinart's plea that contributions to West Bank charities not be tax-exempt apply to them, too?  Beinart argues that the boundary between Israel and the West Bank has become unconscionably blurred, but then ignores his own complaint in pretending that one could boycott the latter without punishing all of Israel. The whole plan is so half-baked that one knows, instantly, that it cannot be taken seriously. Why, then, even suggest it? Because of a psychology we need to understand. A similar line of reasoning leads Beinart to place most of the blame for our morass on the Israeli side. Though he acknowledges that the Palestinians haven't been much help, Beinart invariably spotlights Israel. "Many Israeli maps and textbooks no longer show the green line at all," he notes. That's true. But what about Hamas? And what about the maps distributed by the Palestinian authority? Surely, Beinart knows that they have always avoided showing the Green Line, suggesting that all of Israel will one day be theirs. Why does he never mention that? As Clinton might have said, "It's the psychology, stupid." That very same dangerous psychology also leads Beinart to a complete ignoring of history and of the future. Nowhere in this op-ed, or in his original New York Review article, for that matter, do we learn about how the occupation began. It's as if Israel woke up one morning, and for want of anything better to do, grabbed the West Bank. Or why no mention of the fact that Ehud Olmert, to cite but one example, was elected prime minister on a platform of getting out of the West Bank, after the Gaza fiasco had already begun to unfold, but was stymied by the Second Lebanon War, which he, of course, did not start? In Beinart-land, the past is a blank screen. All that matters is the unbearable heaviness of being in the present. The future is absent as well. Beinart cannot bear the occupation, but dares not imagine what might unfold if Israel retreated tomorrow. Just last week, the southern portion of Israel was immobilized by rocket-fire from Gaza, even with Iron Dome in place. What would Beinart have us do? Move back to the Green Line so that Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and the runways of Ben-Gurion Airport would also be in range? Would he have the entire country be paralyzed the next time?  Does Beinart believe that pulling back to the Green Line would end the armed resistance? Hezbollah and Hamas insist that it wouldn't. Does he not believe them? Does he understand their intentions better than they themselves do? We don't know, because he never even raises the subject of what the future might bring.The psychology precludes that. THE SEEMINGLY noble but tragic psychological logic of Beinart's worldview goes like this: Good Jews do not occupy people. Therefore, for this unbearable conflict to continue violates our most basic Jewish sensibilities. And since, deep down, we know that Israel's enemies are not going to compromise (and why should they, given that time and increasing numbers of Jews are on their side?), we must do whatever it takes to end it. Better that Israel should take the moral high road - even at great danger - so that we no longer feel shamed. The less they budge, the more we must. For the conflict must end at any cost. Beinart insists that he loves Israel, and I believe him. When we debated at the Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, I found him warm, likable and smart; his devotion to Israel was evident. But warmth and likability, lovely as they are, do not make for clearheaded policy. What Beinart and his movement owe those of us dubious about their proposals is an answer to these questions: Do you really believe that compromise on Israel's part now will end the conflict? Do Fatah agreements with Hamas mean nothing? If peace will not come even when Israel retreats, what do you propose that Israel should do once rockets are launched from the West Bank, too? And perhaps most damning: Is it possible that when people espouse your position they give the Palestinians ever less reason to compromise, thus making war more likely, not less? As the American Civil War raged, John Stuart Mill had this to say to Americans wearying of the conflict: "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral... feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. A man who has nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance at being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." Sadly, some battles cannot be ended, and when they cannot, even if they occasionally shame us, they must be fought. Neither personal safety nor even absolute moral comfort are ultimate values. Any Jew with even a smidgeon of Jewish sensibility wishes that this simmering war could end. But we ignore John Stuart Mill at our own peril. Ending a war at any cost sounds noble, but it is cowardly. For if we cannot articulate that there are things worth fighting for - and yes, killing and dying for - then tragically, we are "miserable creatures who have no chance at being free." It was precisely that condition that Zionism sought to end. Thinking Jews dare not knowingly embrace it now. 6a)Mohamad Merah, Man of the West By Caroline B. Glick
It is a testament to the weakened state of the US in the region that in his hour of distress, Abbas opted to turn to Hamas The massacre of Jewish children at Oztar HaTorah Jewish Day School in Toulouse presents us with an appalling encapsulation of the depraved nature of our times - although at first glance, the opposite seems to be the case. On the surface, the situation was cut and dry. A murderer drove up to a Jewish school and executed three children and a teacher. Led by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, all of France decried the massacre and announced its solidarity with the French Jewish community. World leaders condemned the crime. The killer died in a standoff with French security forces. Justice was served. Case closed. But dig a little deeper and it becomes clear that justice has not been served. Indeed, it hasn't even begun to be addressed. The killer Mohamed Merah was not a lone gunman. He wasn't even one of the lone jihadists we hear so much about. He had plenty of accomplices. And not all of them were Muslims. An analysis of the nature of his crime and the identity of his many accomplices must necessarily begin with a question. Why did Merah videotape his crime? Why did take the trouble of strapping a video camera to his neck and filming himself chasing eight-year-old Miriam Monsonego through the school courtyard and shooting her three times in the head? Why did he document his execution of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler and his two little boys, three-year-old Gavriel and six-year-old Aryeh? The first answer is because Merah took pride in killing Jewish children. Moreover, he was certain that millions of people would be heartened by his crime. By watching him shoot the life out of Jewish children, they would be inspired to repeat his actions elsewhere. And he was surely correct. Millions of people have watched the 2002 video of Daniel Pearl being decapitated. Similar decapitation videos of Western hostages in Iraq and elsewhere have also become runaway Internet sensations. Led by Youssef Fofana, the Muslim gang in France that kidnapped and tortured Ilan Halimi to death in 2006 also took pictures of their handiwork. Their photographs were clearly imitations of the photos that Pearl's killers took of him before they chopped his head off. The pride that jihadist murderers take in their crimes is not merely manifested in their camerawork. US Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan who massacred 13 US servicemen at Fort Hood showed obvious pride in his dedication to jihad. Hassan gave a presentation to his colleagues justifying jihad. He carried business cards in which he identified himself as an "SOA," a soldier of Allah. Similarly, Naveed Haq, the American Muslim who carried out the attack at the Seattle Jewish Federation building in 2006 murdering one woman and wounding another five bragged to his mother and friend about his crime in monitored telephone calls from jail. Haq boasted that he was "a jihadi" and that his victims deserved to die because they were "Israeli collaborators." The exhibitionism common to all the men's behavior makes it obvious that that their attacks were not the random actions of isolated crazy people or lone extremists. All of these killers were certain that they were part of a global movement that seeks the annihilation of the Jews, the subjugation of the Western world and the supremacy of jihadist Islam. And they were convinced that their actions served the interests of this movement and that they would be viewed as heroes by millions of their fellow Muslims for their killing of innocents. This situation is bad enough on its own. But what make it truly dangerous are the West's responses to it. Those responses together with the crimes themselves expose the depraved and perilous nature of our times. And they show that Merah's death can bring no closure to this story. There are five interrelated aspects to the West's response to these crimes and the jihadist reality they expose. The first aspect of the West's response is denial. Time after time, Merah and his ilk throughout the Western world show us who they are and what they want. And time after time, the Western elites, and even much of the Jewish leadership, turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to their cries of murder and calls for the destruction of Western civilization. In the case of Halimi's murder for instance, Paris police refused to view his abduction as a hate crime. Despite the fact that Fofanna and his followers called Halimi's family and recited Koranic verses while Ilan screamed out in agony in the background, the Paris police treated his disappearance as a garden variety kidnap for ransom case. Even after Ilan was found naked at a rail heading with burns on more than eighty percent of his body and died en route to the hospital, it took French authorities over a week to admit that he had been the victim of an anti-Semitic crime. On a lesser note, everyone from the media to Jewish communal leaders in the US abjectly refuse to recognize that mainstream Muslim groups like the Muslim Students Association are sympathetically inclined towards Hamas. Moreover, they refuse to recognize that sympathy for Hamas necessarily entails sympathy for Hamas's genocidal platform of annihilating the Jewish people in the name of jihad. As David Horowitz wrote in a recent article at Frontpage magazine, Jewish student leaders at places like University of North Carolina Chapel Hill prefer to attack messengers like himself, than accept the inconvenient truth that Muslim student leaders on campus with them support the annihilation of Israel. Ignoring and denying the openly expressed aims of jihadists like Merah is of course only part of the problem. The second aspect of the West's effective collusion with these killers is Western elites' justification of their crimes. After initially pinning the blame for the Toulouse massacre on Nazis, when French authorities finally acknowledged Merah's jihadist identity, they also provided his justification for murder. Speaking to reporters, French Interior Minister Claude Gueant gave us Merah's name and his excuse at the same time. Gueant told us that Merah was associated with al Qaeda and he was upset about what he referred to as Israel's "murder" of Palestinian children. It should be unnecessary to note the simple truth that Israel doesn't murder Palestinian children. Palestinians murder Israeli children. But then, if Merah got his news from the Western media there is a reasonable chance that he wouldn't know that. EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton was rightly condemned by Israeli political leaders this week for her equation of the actual massacre of Jewish children in Toulouse with the imaginary massacre of Palestinian children in Gaza. But she is not alone in this behavior. US President Barack Obama engaged in similarly outrageous libels when during his speech to the Muslim world in June 2009 he compared the Holocaust with Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. And the line separating these libels from actual incitement is often hard to find. French television, which Merah no doubt often watched is notorious for crossing it. It was France 2 that gave us this century's first anti-Semitic blood libel with its October 2000 tale of Muhamed al-Dura's alleged death at the hands of IDF soldiers. The France 2 story was exposed as a fraud by an appellate court in Paris in 2008. The appellate court overturned a lower court's libel ruling against Internet activist Philippe Karsenty who claimed on his personal website that the al Dura story was a hoax. The appellate court viewed France 2's unedited footage from the scene. That footage showed al Dura moving after the France 2 cameraman had declared him dead. The footage led the court to overturn the decision of the lower court that had found Karsenty guilty of libel. Apparently the same French establishment that now declares solidarity with France's Jews is unwilling to part with the al Dura hoax that incited the spilling of so much Jewish blood in the past decade. Last month France's Supreme Court overturned the appellate court's ruling and ordered it to retry the case. As far as the Supreme Court of France is concerned, the appellate court had no right to ask France 2 to provide evidence that its story was true. According to the Court, the unedited footage which proved the story was a blood libel should never have been admitted as evidence. The truth should never have been permitted to come to light. In addition to denying, justifying and inciting jihadist violence, Western elites and authorities also engage in facilitating it and, after the fact, excusing it. In the case of Merah, although details are still unclear, it has been reported that Merah underwent jihadist training by al Qaeda in Afghanistan and was apprehended by Afghan authorities. Despite his ties to al Qaeda, either US or French military authorities decided he should be sent back to France despite the danger he clearly constituted to French society. Moreover, according to media reports, French authorities knew that he was dangerous and yet failed to apprehend him. They had been informed that at least on one occasion, Merah sought to radicalize a 15-year-old Muslim boy. And yet, he was allowed to remain at large. As the mother of the teenager said, "All these people had to die before they finally arrest Mohammed Merah. What an enormous waste. The police knew this individual was dangerous and radicalized. I complained to the police twice about Mohammed Merah and tried to follow up several times." In the US, Hasan's colleagues and commanders knew of his sympathy for jihad and his connections to jihadist leader Anwar Awlaki in Yemen. And yet they promoted him to major and sent him to Ft. Hood. The West's complicity with these jihadist crimes doesn't end with their perpetration. After failing to acknowledge that Halimi was abducted by jihadists who murdered him because he was a Jew, French authorities conducted his murderers' trials behind closed doors. Hidden from public scrutiny, in their first trial, Halimi's killers were given pitifully lights sentences. Fofanna was rendered eligible for parole within 22 years. It was only the outcry of activists within the French Jewish community that caused French authorities to have a retrial. In Seattle, Haq's first trial for his attack on Seattle's Jewish Federation was declared a mistrial. Seattle's mayor and media went out of their way to present Haq as mentally ill. The prosecution failed to seek the death penalty and didn't bother to present the records of Haq's phone conversations bragging about his crimes until his second trial. Together the behavior of proud jihadist warriors of the West like Merah, Hassan, Haq and Fofanna, the depraved silence, indifference, and complicity of Western elites with their jihadist aims form the physical and moral landscape of our time. And it is because of this evil mix of perpetrators and enablers that Merah's death is not a victory of justice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 7)To Be Black in America... By Eugene RobinsonWASHINGTON -- For every black man in America, from the millionaire in the corner office to the mechanic in the local garage, the Trayvon Martin tragedy is personal. It could have been me or one of my sons. It could have been any of us. How many George Zimmermans are out there cruising the streets? How many guys with chips on their shoulders and itchy fingers on the triggers of loaded handguns? How many self-imagined guardians of the peace who say the words "black male" with a sneer? We don't yet know every detail of the incident between Martin and Zimmerman in Sanford, Fla., that ended with an unarmed 17-year-old high-school student being shot dead. But we know enough to conclude that this is an old, familiar story. We know from tapes of Zimmerman's 911 call that he initiated the encounter, having decided that Martin's presence in the neighborhood was suspicious. We know that when Zimmerman told the 911 operator that he was following Martin, the operator responded, "OK, we don't need you to do that." We know that Zimmerman kept following Martin anyway. "This guy looks like he is up to no good," Zimmerman said on the 911 tape. Please tell me, what would be the innocent way to walk down the street with an iced tea and some Skittles? Hint: For black men, that's a trick question. Some commentators have sought to liken Martin's killing to the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, an unspeakable crime that helped galvanize the civil rights movement. To make a facile comparison is a disservice to history -- and to the memory of both young men. It is ridiculous to imply that nothing has changed. When Till was killed in Mississippi at 14 -- accused of flirting with a white woman -- this was a different country. State-sanctioned terrorism and assassination were official policy throughout the South. Today, the laws and institutions that enforced Jim Crow repression have long since been dismantled. Mississippi, of all places, has more black elected officials than any other state. An African-American family lives in the White House. Black America was never a monolith but over the past five decades it has become much more diverse -- economically, socially, culturally. If you stood on a street corner and chose five black men at random, you might meet a doctor who lives in the high-priced suburbs, an immigrant from Ethiopia who drives a cab, a young aspiring filmmaker with flowing dreadlocks, an unemployed dropout trying to hustle his next meal, and a midlevel government worker struggling to put his kids through college. Those men would have nothing in common, really, except one thing: For each of them, walking down the wrong street at the wrong time could be a fatal mistake. I hear from people who contend that racism no longer exists in this country. I tell them I wish they were right. Does it matter than Zimmerman is himself a member of a minority group -- he is Hispanic -- or that his family says he has black friends? Not in the least. The issue isn't Zimmerman's race or ethnicity; it's the hair-trigger assumption he made that "black male" equals "up to no good." This is one thing that hasn't changed in all the eventful years since Emmett Till's mutilated body was laid to rest. It is instructive to note that Till grew up in Chicago and just happened to be in Mississippi visiting relatives. Young black men who were born and raised in the South knew where the red lines were drawn, understood the unwritten code of behavior that made the difference between survival and mortal danger. Till didn't. Today, young black men grow up in a society where racism is no longer deemed acceptable. Many live in integrated neighborhoods, attend integrated schools, have interracial relationships. They wonder why their parents prattle on so tediously about race, warning about this or that or the other, when their own youthful experience tells them that race doesn't matter. What could happen on the way home from the store with some Skittles and an iced tea? Whether Zimmerman can or should be prosecuted, given Florida's "stand your ground" law providing broad latitude to claim self-defense, is an important question. But the tragic and essential thing, for me, is the bull's-eye that black men wear throughout their lives -- and the vital imperative to never, ever, be caught on the wrong street at the wrong time. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ||||||||||
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