The nation's health needs can be left to the market to solve given the opportunity and, if the government will back off, costs will decline, service will improve and those uninsured will be assisted in having basic policies to provide for their health needs as well. Gingrich made some rational proposals earlier as have others.
If 'The Supremes' rule 'Obamascare' is legit Rube Gooldberg's drawing will look good by comparison (See 1 below.)
---
I just completed a conference call with Rep. Long who sits on a committee dealing with the terrorist threat to our nation. Dan Senor was his guest. The topic related exclusively to Iran , Israel and the Middle East.
It is evident the window for Israel is narrowing , Obama asks Israel to trust him and Netanyahu knows America is war weary. I see no way out for Israel considering the fact they are surrounded by countries possessing over 150,000 missiles, the various nations confronting Israel are in turmoil and Egypt is likely to be taken over by The Muslim Brotherhood and thus no longer a nation to be trusted.
It is obvious, no one really knows the outcome but Senor pointed out an Iran capable of even producing a nuclear bomb, even if they do not, creates a threat which has significant implications for the region and puts America in a very difficult and radically changed position.
Long and Senor would not speculate on Obama's actions but did keep repeating the threat Iran poses to Israel, to America and world peace.
One questioner wanted to know their take on a change from within. Not likely. Rep. Long and Senor agreed Obama's failure to act when Iraqis protested was a missed opportunity. No question, sanctions are causing pain and confusion but neither can one predict how long they will take to bring Iran to its knees,, if ever. Meanwhile Iran continues to be given a 'Pass Go' card by this Administration vis a vis its nuclear development program.
Rep Long is due credit for providing such opportunities.
---
Can't take college entry exams without an ID now.
You cannot enter any House or Senate building in D.C. without presenting ID nor the White House but no big deal when it comes to voting for the inhabitants of these edifices. What tripe is perpetrated by those who claim it is all racially motivated. What say you confused Liberals?
Are you the same twerps seeking 'Leo' Zimmerman's lynching! (See 2 below.)
---
A recent op ed piece by Juan Williams, cited some chilling figures. According to the Justice Department figures for 2005 (the latest available) almost one half of the nation's murder victims were black and the majority of them were between 17 and 29. Blacks represent 13% of the population but were more than 4 times the number of homicide victims. Ninety-three percent of these were victims of black on black attacks.
Less than half of black students graduate from high school and according to The U.S. Department of Education's Civil Rights Office, for the school year 2006 - 2007, reported 22% of all black and Hispanic K-12 students were suspended at least once compared with 5% for whites.
Also 22% of blacks live below poverty levels and 72% of black babies are born to unwed mothers. Unemployed blacks number t 13% or 5 points above the national average.
These statistic raise some interesting questions.
1) Tax payers have spent untold billions helping blacks overcome the ravages of slavery and segregation is more money a solution? The government could have set up trust funds for black citizens and probably achieved better results rather than do it piece meal through demeaning subsidies which helped destroy their family structure.
2) It is obvious government is good at keeping statistics for their failed policies.
3) Liberals could argue the statistics might be higher had the government not engaged in racial preferences - Affirmative Action - but that is conjecture.
4) Far too many blacks seem indifferent about taking time to finish school and getting an education yet they seem to have plenty of available time to engage in attacking each other. Has minimum wage increases helped black employment? Granted you cannot buy a $300 pair of Nike shoes even on the current minimum wage scale so maybe it is a matter of changing priorities.
5) It is a fact, which even former Sen. Moynihan discussed, that the break up of the traditional family will create undesired consequences. Certainly it has produced a lot of fatherless babies who will assuredly have a tougher life and a less successful one.
6) Obama now wants us to place our freedoms and faith in another government program called 'Obamascare." Based on the failures of The Energy Department, The Department of Education, The Social Security Administration , The Bureau of Indian Affairs and some other disparate and assorted Federal Agencies you would think government solutions are a true waste of money and an affront to tax payer intellect..
7) The one thing government has proven adept at is destruction - we have the finest military in the world - but now Obama wants to disassemble the Pentagon and starve it so he can feed and employ the masses.
8) Finally, I pose the 'Leo' Zimmerman situation should be viewed against these government statistics ,Florida Law and the facts, as we are slowly coming to learn. Hanging poor old ' Z'in the press, media and by the likes of America's shakedown clowns, The Sharptons and Jacksons, may produce revenue and raise passions but might also be a bit questionable.
If I have overstated anything please take me to task. (See 3 below.)
---
Long live Livni's demise. (See 4 below.)
---
June will prove a very important month - "The Supremes" will sing out their decision and voters in Wisconsin have a shot at sanity. (See 5 below.)
---
It is always back to The Classics for reasoning! That is why the education St John's College provides is so significant to our Republic. (See 6 below.)
---
Risk averse Mitt and how not to win. (See 7 below.)
---
Cliff May and Iranian talks. (See 8 below.)
---
John Fund on Alinsky. (Am hoping to get John to speak at next year's SIRC President's Dinner. Should know next week.) (See 9 below.)
-
Dick
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)Insurers and the Supremes
The industry's role comes with risks—namely congressional underfunding—but stop calling it insurance.
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
Insurers were never the enemy of ObamaCare that it suited President Obama to pretend. That much is clear from their stance in this week's Supreme Court case.
In a brief filed by America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry's main trade group, along with the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, insurers conspicuously fail to take issue with the individual mandate or any feature of ObamaCare. Their sole concern is a question that will animate Wednesday morning's oral argument—"severability," or whether the individual mandate can be struck down without invalidating the rest of the law.
Insurers choose their words carefully, but in effect they note that ObamaCare doubles down on the policies that have already made the industry's product an unaffordable, overpriced luxury for millions of Americans. Without a mandate to force customers to buy it anyway, the new law will just provide a powerful new incentive for Americans to skip coverage unless and until struck by one of those "pre-existing conditions" the law requires insurers to pay for.
"The result would be a 'marketwide adverse-selection death spiral' that would thwart rather than advance Congress's goal of expanding affordable health care," insist the insurers. Thus, if the court rules against the mandate, it should throw out the law's other requirements too.
This argument sounds reasonable but should leave you cold given the role insurers have shown themselves willing to accept under ObamaCare.
The individual mandate, remember, is partly a disguised tax, singling out the young, healthy or otherwise uninclined to buy insurance so the money can be used to subsidize someone else. But the mandate-tax is only one of several taxes enacted to support ObamaCare. If struck down, not only could it be replaced by a different tax. It could be replaced with a funding mechanism that would actually lessen the cost of ObamaCare. Example: Any source of funding that wouldn't incentivize today's voluntarily uninsured to run to the doctor for every hangnail in order to recoup the cost of insurance the government is forcing them to buy.
What's more, the penalties under the law already are so weak that many will likely prefer to pay a fine than buy insurance. Insurers have already accepted that budgetary handouts will be needed to keep this system afloat. Add the metaphysical certitude that future congressional funding will prove inadequate in the face of the incentives ObamaCare will spawn, and insurers have fully committed themselves to a lifetime of lobbying for appropriations to sustain an unsustainable system.
If this sounds familiar, it should: Medicare and Social Security operate on the same principle. Both have turned into Ponzi schemes, scheduled to pay out trillions more in benefits than they receive in funding. Which brings us to the overarching reason the insurers' "death spiral" complaint leaves us powerfully unmoved.
To invoke the classic insurance death spiral is, frankly, a bit odd in a law that completes the metamorphosis of health insurance into something else, certainly not insurance. With ObamaCare, the industry takes another fateful step in surrendering to regulators the job of designing coverage, assessing risk, setting rates and deterring inefficient behavior. Why the Affordable Care Act (as the law is widely known) even keeps insurers around is a bit of a mystery. But keep them it does, collecting a rake-off for administering a system of national health care masquerading as insurance regulation.
This is the role the industry has accepted, and it comes with risks—namely congressional underfunding—but stop calling it insurance.
Insurance is an investment contract: You pay today in return for a promise to be paid later. In any actuarial sense, however, Washington's jig was up a long time ago. The problem is not that the ObamaCare statute can't work without the mandate. The problem is that it can't work without the Chinese or someone lending us trillions of dollars indefinitely so the federal government can keep spending money it doesn't have.
The Constitution may permit far-reaching schemes of insurance regulation; it may even permit an individual mandate. It may permit the government completely to take over health care. But it certainly does not permit insurance fraud. That's what the mandate is: It forces the young and healthy to pony up once again for another of Washington's actuarially unsound welfare promises.
In fairness to Mr. Obama, his motives at least are intelligible. The Democratic Party has made it semi-clear that it sees the "progressive" health-care project still at the stage of taking a wrecking ball to the existing system.
We'll leave aside the political ethics of such salami tactics, which voters have long tolerated. ObamaCare, for the purposes of the Supreme Court, must be assumed to be an end in itself. On its own terms, ObamaCare is a scheme that cannot work and was not designed to work. The justices would not be committing an inconvenience if they forced Congress to start over.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)College Tests Get New ID Standards
By WILL JAMES
The organizations behind the SAT and ACT college-entrance exams said Tuesday they are imposing stricter security measures for test-takers nationwide in response to a cheating scandal that erupted in New York.
In one of the most significant changes, students registering for college-admissions tests that take place in the 2012-13 school year will have to upload or mail photos of themselves that will be printed on tickets.
The tickets will then be checked against a photo identification on the day the test is given.
The College Board and ACT also have eliminated a standby option for taking exams. All students must sign up ahead of time and can't switch locations or tests.
"We believe these new enhancements will effectively eliminate the issue of test-taker impersonation," College Board spokeswoman Kathleen Fineout Steinberg said. The College Board owns the SAT.
The tighter controls come after the arrest late last year of 20 students from Long Island. Prosecutors alleged that 15 high-schoolers paid five college students between $500 and $3,600 per test to take the SAT or ACT for them between 2008 and 2011.
The accused impersonators allegedly presented fake identifications with their photos but the names of the students who were supposed to be taking the tests. Some of the students have pleaded guilty, but because they are juveniles, officials declined to reveal more details.
Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice, whose office is prosecuting the cases, worked with the College Board and ACT to craft the new rules.
"At the core of this case is that we have kids who think that cheating pays," Ms. Rice said at a Tuesday news conference with College Board officials.
"We have to disabuse 16-, 17- and 18-year-olds from thinking that cheating pays. If we don't, shame on us," she added.
Louis Freeh, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, also helped design the new security measures.
In addition to the new identification requirements, students will need to sign an updated certification statement acknowledging that impersonation could result in criminal charges.
All high schools, as opposed to just some, also will now receive their students' test scores, allowing for a "back-end check," Ms. Rice said.
Officials at ETS, which is the nonprofit organization that administers the SAT, along with high school and college administrators, will have access to a new database containing test-takers' photos and identification information.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)Subject: The Last Six Seconds
> One can hardly conceive of the enormous grief held quietly within General
> Kelly as he spoke.
>
> On Nov 13, 2010, Lt. General John Kelly, USMC, gave a speech to the Semper
> Fi Society of St. Louis , MO. This was four days after his son, Lt. Robert
> Kelly, USMC, was killed by an IED while on his 3rd Combat tour. During his
> speech, General Kelly spoke about the dedication and valor of our young men
> and women who step forward each and every day to protect us.
>
> During the speech, he never mentioned the loss of his own son. He closed the
> speech with the moving account of the last six seconds in the lives of two
> young Marines who died with rifles blazing to protect their brother Marines.
>
>
> "I will leave you with a story about the kind of people they are, about the
> quality of the steel in their backs, about the kind of dedication they bring
> to our country while they serve in uniform and forever after as veterans.
> Two years ago when I was the Commander of all U. S. and Iraqi forces, in
> fact, the 22 ND of April 2008, two Marine infantry battalions, 1/9 "The
> Walking Dead," and 2/8 were switching out in Ramadi. One battalion in the
> closing days of their deployment going home very soon, the other just
> starting its seven-month combat tour. Two Marines, Corporal Jonathan Yale
> and Lance Corporal Jordan Haerter, 22 and 20 years old respectively, one
> from each battalion, were assuming the watch together at the entrance gate
> of an outpost that contained a makeshift barracks housing 50 Marines. The
> same broken down ramshackle building was also home to 100 Iraqi police, also
> my men and our allies in the fight against the terrorists in Ramadi, a city
> until recently the most dangerous city on earth and owned by Al Qaeda.
>
> Yale was a dirt poor mixed-race kid from Virginia with a wife and daughter,
> and a mother and sister who lived with him and whom he supported as well. He
> did this on a yearly salary of less than $23,000.
>
> Haerter, on the other hand, was a middle class white kid from Long Island .
> They were from two completely different worlds. Had they not joined the
> Marines they would never have met each other, or understood that multiple
> America 's exist simultaneously depending on one's race, education level,
> economic status, and where you might have been born. But they were Marines,
> combat Marines, forged in the same crucible of Marine training, and because
> of this bond they were brothers as close, or closer, than if they were born
> of the same woman.
>
> The mission orders they received from the sergeant squad leader I am sure
> went something like, "Okay you two clowns, stand this post and let no
> unauthorized personnel or vehicles pass. You clear?"
>
> I am also sure Yale and Haerter then rolled their eyes and said in unison
> something like, "Yes Sergeant," with just enough attitude that made the
> point without saying the words, "No kidding `sweetheart', we know what we're
> doing." They then relieved two other Marines on watch and took up their post
> at the entry control point of Joint Security Station Nasser, in the Sophia
> section of Ramadi, Al Anbar, Iraq .
>
> A few minutes later a large blue truck turned down the alley way - perhaps
> 60-70 yards in length, and sped its way through the serpentine of concrete
> jersey walls. The truck stopped just short of where the two were posted and
> detonated, killing them both catastrophically. Twenty-four brick masonry
> houses were damaged or destroyed. A mosque 100 yards away collapsed. The
> truck's engine came to rest two hundred yards away knocking most of a house
> down before it stopped. Our explosive experts reckoned the blast was made of
> 2,000 pounds of explosives. Two died, and because these two young
> infantrymen didn't have it in their DNA to run from danger, they saved 150
> of their Iraqi and American brothers-in-arms.
>
> When I read the situation report about the incident a few hours after it
> happened I called the regimental commander for details as something about
> this struck me as different. Marines dying or being seriously wounded is
> commonplace in combat. We expect Marines regardless of rank or MOS to stand
> their ground and do their duty, and even die in the process, if that is what
> the mission takes. But this just seemed different. The regimental commander
> had just returned from the site and he agreed, but reported that there were
> no American witnesses to the event - just Iraqi police. I figured if there
> was any chance of finding out what actually happened and then to decorate
> the two Marines to acknowledge their bravery, I'd have to do it as a combat
> award that requires two eye-witnesses and we figured the bureaucrats back in
> Washington would never buy Iraqi statements. If it had any chance at all, it
> had to come under the signature of a general officer.
>
> I traveled to Ramadi the next day and spoke individually to a half-dozen
> Iraqi police all of whom told the same story. The blue truck turned down
> into the alley and immediately sped up as it made its way through the
> serpentine. They all said, "We knew immediately what was going on as soon as
> the two Marines began firing." The Iraqi police then related that some of
> them also fired, and then to a man, ran for safety just prior to the
> explosion. All survived. Many were injured, some seriously. One of the
> Iraqis elaborated and with tears welling up said, "They'd run like any
> normal man would to save his life." "What he didn't know until then," he
> said, "And what he learned that very instant, was that Marines are not
> normal." Choking past the emotion he said, "Sir, in the name of God no sane
> man would have stood there and done what they did." "No sane man." "They
> saved us all."
>
> What we didn't know at the time, and only learned a couple of days later
> after I wrote a summary and submitted both Yale and Haerter for posthumous
> Navy Crosses, was that one of our security cameras, damaged initially in the
> blast, recorded some of the suicide attack. It happened exactly as the
> Iraqis had described it. It took exactly six seconds from when the truck
> entered the alley until it detonated.
>
> You can watch the last six seconds of their young lives. Putting myself in
> their heads I supposed it took about a second for the two Marines to
> separately come to the same conclusion about what was going on once the
> truck came into their view at the far end of the alley. Exactly no time to
> talk it over, or call the sergeant to ask what they should do. Only enough
> time to take half an instant and think about what the sergeant told them to
> do only a few minutes before, "Let no unauthorized personnel or vehicles
> pass." The two Marines had about five seconds left to live.
>
> It took maybe another two seconds for them to present their weapons, take
> aim, and open up. By this time the truck was half-way through the barriers
> and gaining speed the whole time. Here, the recording shows a number of
> Iraqi police, some of whom had fired their AKs, now scattering like the
> normal and rational men they were - some running right past the Marines.
> They had three seconds left to live.
>
> For about two seconds more, the recording shows the Marines' weapons firing
> non-stop the truck's windshield exploding into shards of glass as their
> rounds take it apart and tore in to the body of the ( I deleted) who is
> trying to get past them to kill their brothers - American and Iraqi-bedded
> down in the barracks totally unaware of the fact that their lives at that
> moment depended entirely on two Marines standing their ground.
>
> If they had been aware, they would have known they were safe because two
> Marines stood between them and a crazed suicide bomber. The recording shows
> the truck careening to a stop immediately in front of the two Marines. In
> all of the instantaneous violence Yale and Haerter never hesitated. By all
> reports and by the recording, they never stepped back. They never even
> started to step aside. They never even shifted their weight. With their feet
> spread shoulder width apart, they leaned into the danger, firing as fast as
> they could work their weapons. They had only one second left to live.
>
> The truck explodes. The camera goes blank. Two young men go to their God.
> Six seconds. Not enough time to think about their families, their country,
> their flag, or about their lives or their deaths, but more than enough time
> for two very brave young men to do their duty into eternity. That is the
> kind of people who are on watch all over the world tonight - for you.
>
> We Marines believe that God gave America the greatest gift he could bestow
> to man while he lived on this earth - freedom. We also believe he gave us
> another gift nearly as precious - our soldiers, sailors, airmen, U S Customs
> and Border Patrol, Coast Guardsmen, and Marines - to safeguard that gift and
> guarantee no force on this earth can ever steal it away.
>
> It has been my distinct honor to have been with you here today. Rest assured
> our America , this experiment in democracy started over two centuries ago,
> will forever remain the "land of the free and home of the brave" so long as
> we never run out of tough young Americans who are willing to look beyond
> their own self-interest and comfortable lives, and go into the darkest and
> most dangerous places on earth to hunt down, and kill, those who would do us
> harm.
>
> God Bless America , and SEMPER FIDELIS !"
> Kelly as he spoke.
>
> On Nov 13, 2010, Lt. General John Kelly, USMC, gave a speech to the Semper
> Fi Society of St. Louis , MO. This was four days after his son, Lt. Robert
> Kelly, USMC, was killed by an IED while on his 3rd Combat tour. During his
> speech, General Kelly spoke about the dedication and valor of our young men
> and women who step forward each and every day to protect us.
>
> During the speech, he never mentioned the loss of his own son. He closed the
> speech with the moving account of the last six seconds in the lives of two
> young Marines who died with rifles blazing to protect their brother Marines.
>
>
> "I will leave you with a story about the kind of people they are, about the
> quality of the steel in their backs, about the kind of dedication they bring
> to our country while they serve in uniform and forever after as veterans.
> Two years ago when I was the Commander of all U. S. and Iraqi forces, in
> fact, the 22 ND of April 2008, two Marine infantry battalions, 1/9 "The
> Walking Dead," and 2/8 were switching out in Ramadi. One battalion in the
> closing days of their deployment going home very soon, the other just
> starting its seven-month combat tour. Two Marines, Corporal Jonathan Yale
> and Lance Corporal Jordan Haerter, 22 and 20 years old respectively, one
> from each battalion, were assuming the watch together at the entrance gate
> of an outpost that contained a makeshift barracks housing 50 Marines. The
> same broken down ramshackle building was also home to 100 Iraqi police, also
> my men and our allies in the fight against the terrorists in Ramadi, a city
> until recently the most dangerous city on earth and owned by Al Qaeda.
>
> Yale was a dirt poor mixed-race kid from Virginia with a wife and daughter,
> and a mother and sister who lived with him and whom he supported as well. He
> did this on a yearly salary of less than $23,000.
>
> Haerter, on the other hand, was a middle class white kid from Long Island .
> They were from two completely different worlds. Had they not joined the
> Marines they would never have met each other, or understood that multiple
> America 's exist simultaneously depending on one's race, education level,
> economic status, and where you might have been born. But they were Marines,
> combat Marines, forged in the same crucible of Marine training, and because
> of this bond they were brothers as close, or closer, than if they were born
> of the same woman.
>
> The mission orders they received from the sergeant squad leader I am sure
> went something like, "Okay you two clowns, stand this post and let no
> unauthorized personnel or vehicles pass. You clear?"
>
> I am also sure Yale and Haerter then rolled their eyes and said in unison
> something like, "Yes Sergeant," with just enough attitude that made the
> point without saying the words, "No kidding `sweetheart', we know what we're
> doing." They then relieved two other Marines on watch and took up their post
> at the entry control point of Joint Security Station Nasser, in the Sophia
> section of Ramadi, Al Anbar, Iraq .
>
> A few minutes later a large blue truck turned down the alley way - perhaps
> 60-70 yards in length, and sped its way through the serpentine of concrete
> jersey walls. The truck stopped just short of where the two were posted and
> detonated, killing them both catastrophically. Twenty-four brick masonry
> houses were damaged or destroyed. A mosque 100 yards away collapsed. The
> truck's engine came to rest two hundred yards away knocking most of a house
> down before it stopped. Our explosive experts reckoned the blast was made of
> 2,000 pounds of explosives. Two died, and because these two young
> infantrymen didn't have it in their DNA to run from danger, they saved 150
> of their Iraqi and American brothers-in-arms.
>
> When I read the situation report about the incident a few hours after it
> happened I called the regimental commander for details as something about
> this struck me as different. Marines dying or being seriously wounded is
> commonplace in combat. We expect Marines regardless of rank or MOS to stand
> their ground and do their duty, and even die in the process, if that is what
> the mission takes. But this just seemed different. The regimental commander
> had just returned from the site and he agreed, but reported that there were
> no American witnesses to the event - just Iraqi police. I figured if there
> was any chance of finding out what actually happened and then to decorate
> the two Marines to acknowledge their bravery, I'd have to do it as a combat
> award that requires two eye-witnesses and we figured the bureaucrats back in
> Washington would never buy Iraqi statements. If it had any chance at all, it
> had to come under the signature of a general officer.
>
> I traveled to Ramadi the next day and spoke individually to a half-dozen
> Iraqi police all of whom told the same story. The blue truck turned down
> into the alley and immediately sped up as it made its way through the
> serpentine. They all said, "We knew immediately what was going on as soon as
> the two Marines began firing." The Iraqi police then related that some of
> them also fired, and then to a man, ran for safety just prior to the
> explosion. All survived. Many were injured, some seriously. One of the
> Iraqis elaborated and with tears welling up said, "They'd run like any
> normal man would to save his life." "What he didn't know until then," he
> said, "And what he learned that very instant, was that Marines are not
> normal." Choking past the emotion he said, "Sir, in the name of God no sane
> man would have stood there and done what they did." "No sane man." "They
> saved us all."
>
> What we didn't know at the time, and only learned a couple of days later
> after I wrote a summary and submitted both Yale and Haerter for posthumous
> Navy Crosses, was that one of our security cameras, damaged initially in the
> blast, recorded some of the suicide attack. It happened exactly as the
> Iraqis had described it. It took exactly six seconds from when the truck
> entered the alley until it detonated.
>
> You can watch the last six seconds of their young lives. Putting myself in
> their heads I supposed it took about a second for the two Marines to
> separately come to the same conclusion about what was going on once the
> truck came into their view at the far end of the alley. Exactly no time to
> talk it over, or call the sergeant to ask what they should do. Only enough
> time to take half an instant and think about what the sergeant told them to
> do only a few minutes before, "Let no unauthorized personnel or vehicles
> pass." The two Marines had about five seconds left to live.
>
> It took maybe another two seconds for them to present their weapons, take
> aim, and open up. By this time the truck was half-way through the barriers
> and gaining speed the whole time. Here, the recording shows a number of
> Iraqi police, some of whom had fired their AKs, now scattering like the
> normal and rational men they were - some running right past the Marines.
> They had three seconds left to live.
>
> For about two seconds more, the recording shows the Marines' weapons firing
> non-stop the truck's windshield exploding into shards of glass as their
> rounds take it apart and tore in to the body of the ( I deleted) who is
> trying to get past them to kill their brothers - American and Iraqi-bedded
> down in the barracks totally unaware of the fact that their lives at that
> moment depended entirely on two Marines standing their ground.
>
> If they had been aware, they would have known they were safe because two
> Marines stood between them and a crazed suicide bomber. The recording shows
> the truck careening to a stop immediately in front of the two Marines. In
> all of the instantaneous violence Yale and Haerter never hesitated. By all
> reports and by the recording, they never stepped back. They never even
> started to step aside. They never even shifted their weight. With their feet
> spread shoulder width apart, they leaned into the danger, firing as fast as
> they could work their weapons. They had only one second left to live.
>
> The truck explodes. The camera goes blank. Two young men go to their God.
> Six seconds. Not enough time to think about their families, their country,
> their flag, or about their lives or their deaths, but more than enough time
> for two very brave young men to do their duty into eternity. That is the
> kind of people who are on watch all over the world tonight - for you.
>
> We Marines believe that God gave America the greatest gift he could bestow
> to man while he lived on this earth - freedom. We also believe he gave us
> another gift nearly as precious - our soldiers, sailors, airmen, U S Customs
> and Border Patrol, Coast Guardsmen, and Marines - to safeguard that gift and
> guarantee no force on this earth can ever steal it away.
>
> It has been my distinct honor to have been with you here today. Rest assured
> our America , this experiment in democracy started over two centuries ago,
> will forever remain the "land of the free and home of the brave" so long as
> we never run out of tough young Americans who are willing to look beyond
> their own self-interest and comfortable lives, and go into the darkest and
> most dangerous places on earth to hunt down, and kill, those who would do us
> harm.
>
> God Bless America , and SEMPER FIDELIS !"
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Speaking to supporters at party headquarters in Petah Tikva, Mofaz said, “This evening, Kadima has won.” He added, directing his comments to Livni, “Tzipi, your place is with us.”
Noting that Kadima was the largest party in parliament, he vowed to lead it back to government, and to heal Israel’s social rifts.
“We come out of this evening united,” Mofaz said to a cheering but unruly audience. “Three years of Netanyahu have diverted us from doing the right thing, but together we will return Israel to the right path,” he added.
Mofaz also told supporters that there is no military security without social security, and that Israel is a country of equal opportunity for everyone.
Livni told reporters just after 1 AM that she had called Mofaz to congratulate him on his victory and to wish him success.
Asked whether she would stay in Kadima, Livni responded, “I’m not answering any questions. Friends, it has been a long couple of months and a long day today. I am going to sleep.”
Associates of Livni said after midnight that she would take a few days to consider her future after the humiliating defeat. She had earlier issued a statement thanking her supporters, and defending what she called her “principled” approach to politics — which saw her pass up the chance to become prime minister four years ago, when she spurned a deal with Shas. Some colleagues said privately they could not envisage her serving as Mofaz’s deputy.
Mofaz’s media adviser, Lior Horev, said that while victory was sweet, “the real battle begins tomorrow — to oust (prime minister) Benjamin Netanyahu.” He said he saw “no reason” why Mofaz and Livni could not work together.
MK Avi Douan, a Mofaz loyalist, said he also hoped Livni would stay in Kadima. He ruled out the notion of a Mofaz-led party now contemplating joining Netanyahu’s coalition. “That’s not in the program,” he said.
Born in Iran, Mofaz, 63, became the IDF’s chief of staff in 1998. Four years later, then-prime minister Sharon appointed him defense minister. From May 2006 until April 2009, under Ehud Olmert, he served as deputy prime minister and transportation and road safety.
The leadership rivals — both former Likud politicians — fought a bitter and personal campaign, in which Livni depicted Mofaz as an empty populist, and Mofaz portrayed Livni as ineffectual and aloof. Their in-fighting has been a factor in Kadima’s relentless decline in popularity since the 2009 elections; it may hold the most seats in the current Knesset, but polls suggest it would do well to come in third or fourth were general elections held today.
Tellingly, Education Minister Gideon Saar, from the ruling Likud party, was one of the first to congratulate Mofaz on the victory. Likud leaders have watched the race with a certain wry amusement, seeing a party, whose leaders broke away from the Likud under Ariel Sharon, tearing itself apart. The Likud, under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is polling at close to 40 seats in recent surveys, prompting speculation that Netanyahu might call early general elections later this year. Netanyahu, it is widely believed, is no admirer of Livni’s, and the feeling is mutual.
“If Livni doesn’t win, she’s going home. She’s not going to stay on as Mofaz’s number two,” Professor Shmuel Sandler, a specialist on electoral politics from Bar-Ilan University, had predicted earlier this week. “She could quit politics, and wait on the sidelines until they call her back, or she could form a new party. But I don’t think she has the inner strength to do that,” Sandler added.
In the last Kadima primaries in 2008, Livni won over Mofaz by a razor-thin majority of 231 votes. Livni noted Tuesday morning that the vote was a re-run of the 2008 party leadership contest and sounded bitter about being forced into another such race. She said Mofaz constantly highlighted his democratic credentials, but that the vote was only being held because he had refused to come to terms with the democratic vote four years ago in which he failed to oust her.
Mofaz promised “a new path forward” for Kadima after Tuesday. His wife Orit told Israel Radio the contest had “descended into inappropriate areas” — an apparent reference to Livni’s criticisms of Mofaz’s ostensible populist tendencies.
Kadima’s 28 MKs were more or less evenly split between the two candidates, leaving wide open the future of the party that former Sharon founded in 2005. Livni had repeatedly ducked questions ahead of Tuesday’s vote about what she would do if Mofaz took over the party’s leadership.
One hour before the polls closed at 22:00 p.m., only 38.2 percent of Kadima members had cast their vote. Some 95,000 Kadima party members were eligible to vote in nearly 200 polling stations in 104 localities.
Mofaz’s victory may well spell the end of Livni’s political career. Just a few years ago, she was poised to become Israel’s second woman prime minister.
In 2006, she became prime minister Ehud Olmert’s foreign minister — presiding over intense negotiations with the Palestinians — and stayed in the position until the general elections in 2009. In the meantime, she had taken over the leadership of Kadima from Olmert, but failed to build a stable government after his 2008 resignation over corruption charges.
Kadima’s coalition partners had tried to use the shakeup in the party at the time to achieve new concessions. “If Livni wants a government, she needs to comply with our demands,” Shas chairman Eli Yishai announced.
But Livni preferred new elections over paying what she considered too heavy a price for the premiership. “When it became clear that everyone and every party was exploiting the opportunity to make demands that were economically and diplomatically illegitimate, I decided to call off [talks] and go to elections,” she said.
But her hope that the public would reward her for such integrity, and leave her better able to build a coalition after the elections, went unrealized.
Kadima remained the strongest party after the vote in 2009, with its 28 seats, but the margin between it and the second-place party, the revived Likud, had narrowed immensely. The Likud won 27 seats and it had a wider choice of natural coalition partners, putting it in the driving seat as coalition talks began.
Livni entered the opposition and let Netanyahu form a government without Kadima, a principled step for which some outside observers praised her, although others argued that she and Netanyahu had deprived Israel of a more consensual unity government that could have marginalized special interest parties and formulated compromise policies on matters of land and religion. In her party, many never forgave her for, again, passing up the chance to govern.
After Tuesday’s drastic defeat to Mofaz, she may have lost that chance for good.
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5)Watch Wisconsin
By Bruce Walker
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By Bruce Walker
Republican Governor Scott Walker, Lieutenant Governor Kleefisch and two Republican state senators will face a recall vote in Wisconsin and the date of that election, with the likely date of the recall vote being June 5. A fifth Republican, Senator Pam Galloway, who was also going to face a recall election, has resigned from the state senate. This leaves the Senate tied 16-16, so the recall vote in June will determine which party controls the Wisconsin Senate.
So is the left winning there? Wisconsin is a left-leaning state, the sort whose general support Democrats need if they are going to rule America. If Democrats fail in these recall elections, then the left will have suffered a strategic loss which may unravel its long dominance of American politics.
The putative reasons for this recall election are three changes enacted by Wisconsin Republicans when they took over state government last January: (1) public employee union bosses cannot bargain for benefits in contracts any more, (2) union dues for public workers are no longer automatically deducted from paychecks, and (3) Wisconsin now has a statutory photo ID requirement for voting.
The first reform has worked, and the second reform has also worked. Public employees now get to keep more of their paycheck -- in some cases, this means an extra $1,000 a year -- and union bureaucracies have been trimmed, as this Washington Examiner article nicely explains. Implementation of the photo ID law has been enjoined by Judge Flanagan, who before issuing his ruling neglected to tell the parties that he had already signed a petition to recall Governor Walker, which made him, by the limpest ethical standards, unqualified to hear the case.
Flanagan is only part of the seamy abuse of judges to fight Wisconsin reforms. I noted last April that the left's blatant (and failed) attempt to defeat Judge Prosser in his re-election last spring was based solely on using the state bench to thwart laws passed by the people's representatives. The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law.
Now it appears that twenty-nine sitting Wisconsin state judges, 12% of the judges in the state, have also signed petitions to recall Walker and other Republicans. The New York Post reports the pathetic excuse given by Judge Warpinski when confronted with signing the recall petition: "I wasn't advocating for any political party. I was advocating for the recall process, which I thought was completely separate and apart." The judge, of course, is lying.
We also recently learned that twenty-five journalists covering state news also signed recall petitions. Gannett Media Group has also announced that twenty-five of these "journalists" violated the ethical standards and will be disciplined.
The efforts to stop Walker's reforms include: (1) Democrat state senators fleeing to Chicago, that Mecca of Good Government, to deny their chamber a quorum, (2) mobs of angry state employees trying to bully legislators, (3) trying to defeat Judge Prosser to get a more favorable judge on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, (4) trying to recall enough Republican state senators to give back control to Democrats, (5) litigating the new labor law as "unconstitutional" and failing, and now, (6) trying to recall the governor, lieutenant governor, and three Republican state senators.
The left has pulled out all the plugs to thwart Governor Walker. In the recall election for six Republican state senators last August, the left spent about $30 million, much of it from outside the state. But money for this sort of campaign is drying up. The Wisconsin Education Association Council, which discharged forty percent of its staff when dues reduction became voluntary, spent $500,000 in the August 2011 recall elections.
The left is expending more than just money. It is frittering away credibility and the power of intimidation. When the state judiciary appears blatantly ideological and hostile to any change proposed by Republicans, then it will be not David Prosser who may be facing tough elections in the future. At a time when local news media need to win as large an audience as possible to survive, clear bias will lose their bosses revenue.
Most of all, if the left throws every single weapon it can at Wisconsin Republicans and yet cannot prevent a conservative agenda from becoming law, then the left must know that it is vulnerable everywhere to conservatives who do not back down. If this last desperate effort of the power-mongers of leftism fails, then their whip may become a wet noodle, and the whole corrupt syndicate of leftism may completely unravel. Watch Wisconsin.
6)Can We Learn Something from the Classics about Vetting Obama?
By Monte Kuligowski
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By Monte Kuligowski
After my last piece on why it's reasonable to authenticate Obama's elusive birth certificate, I received an e-mail from a reader. His name is Bill Meisler, and he is fluent in ancient Greek. Recently, Bill was reading the speeches of Demosthenes.
Bill relayed the following:
In the scholarly notes to the Speech Against Meidias the commentator wrote that before an Athenian could hold any magistracy of the city, he had to undergo what was called a dokimasia, a formal public inquiry into whether the man who wished to hold the magistracy possessed all the necessary criteria needed to prove his Athenian citizenship and thereby be allowed the privilege of holding office. The dokimasia was open to the public and was presided over by the appropriate authorities in the presence of the boule, the democratic council representing the entire citizenry. Witnesses and unequivocal documentation were required, and any citizen could challenge the proceedings of the inquiry.
Though it may seem a little odd to us at first glance, the dokimasia was held after the election. In the book Aspects of Athenian Democracy, by Robert J. Bonner, it's noted that:
... [t]hese disqualifications and restrictions [to holding office] were matters of record or observation[.] But there were other disqualifications that could be discovered only by a judicial investigation involving the production of witnesses. Obviously it would be economical of time and effort to defer this inquiry until after the election[.] This examination was known as the dokimasia.
In contemporary America, the examination of candidates is thought to be done by the free press prior to the election. But when serious vetting of the winning candidate has not occurred, we have a predicament: judges have ruled that citizens have no standing to enforce eligibility requirements because of the election.
In such a system, the incalculable power of the unified media to create impressions and manufacture public opinion means that election results may be engineered and shielded from substance and sound judgment.
Unfortunately, with regard to the matter of Barack Obama, as David Kupelian puts it, instead "of vetting him as was their solemn duty, the media lifted him high overhead and giddily raced across the finish line[.]" Excluding those who did independent research, voters knew little on Election Day about the actual substance of the candidate chosen by the JournoLists to "make history."
Many voters, if not most, went to the polls not even knowing the Obama's middle name, or the fact that he attended elementary school in Islamic Indonesia using a completely different name. Was Barry Soetoro adopted by his Muslim stepfather, Lolo Soetoro? No one knows for sure because the press refused to ask questions, let alone demand answers.
Very few knew what Saul Alinsky-type community organizers were really all about. Many viewed a "community organizer" as a sort of idolized Boy Scout who helps neighborhoods by doing good deeds. Few knew that as a community organizer, Obama was creating political "power bases" for "redistributive justice." Most voters did not know of Obama's revolutionary dreams and of his commensurate connections to ACORN, the New Party, and Project Vote. (It was not for nothing that the Communist Party backed Obama.) Mr. Obama's core identity in hard-left Marxist radicalism was ignored or downplayed by the press.
At the pinnacle of the public's concern over Obama's shocking twenty-year church membership under the tutelage of his America-loathing "spiritual advisor," one "journalist" actually declared his early 2008 interview of Obama a "Reverend Wright-free zone."
On the contrary, the historic Republican candidate got no "free zones." Sarah Palin experienced one of the most vicious concerted media attacks in American political history. When John McCain selected Palin as his running mate, she was an admired governor with a remarkable 83% approval rating. After the liberal media were finished with Palin, only 39% of Alaskans were found to hold a positive opinion of the once-widely respected hockey mom.
John McCain was subjected to a Senate Resolution in 2008 to clear up questions relating to his status as a "natural born citizen" under the Constitution. The traditional definition of natural born citizen as one having an unbroken chain of natural allegiance to the United States was implicitly applied to McCain. Since the traditional definition didn't apply to Obama, the question as to whether Obama needed U.S. citizen parents to qualify was completely ignored.
The discussion between Charlie Rose and former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw just a few days prior to the 2008 presidential election says it all:
Rose: I don't know what Barack Obama's worldview is.Brokaw: No, I don't either.Rose: And do we know anything about the people who are advising him?Brokaw: You know that's an interesting question. ... I don't know what books he's read.Rose: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?Brokaw: There's a lot about him we don't know.
Many Americans now know they were hoodwinked by the image of Obama as presented by his campaign and the media (forgive the redundancy). In addition to the known betrayal, the sense that we have been deceived with regard to Obama's natal history remains. Mr. Obama's staunch secrecy in locking down the ordinary records of his past (passport, education, hospital, medical, vital, etc.) has only increased anger and distrust.
The recent findings of Sheriff Joe Arpaio's investigative team have led to the alarming pronouncement that probable cause exists to believe that Obama's belated birth certificate and Selective Service registration are both awkward forgeries.
Should Arpaio's findings be ignored without a hearing? Do we have any options?
Well, at this point, the solution is to have an American dokimasia to settle the matter once and for all. Robert Bonner informs us that during the examination in ancient Athens, the elected official "was required to prove, by witnesses, his citizen descent for three generations, his performance of his duties to his parents and of all military services, the payment of his taxes, the possession of a family tomb, and adherence to the cults of Apollo Patrous and Zeus of the Household."
Bonner continues, "anyone was free to show cause in a court of law why the official-elect should not be confirmed in his office." It's apparent from the examinations of the clients of Lysias that "the loyalty of the prospective officials to democracy was likely to be called in question."
The perfect venue for our Obama dokimasia is the House of Congress. Let's learn once again from the ancient Greeks and have open hearings, complete with witnesses and document production via the congressional power of the subpoena.
The principles our founders incorporated into our Constitution from Athenian democracy should continue in perpetuity. We may not require proof of citizen descent for three generations, but one generation should not be too much to ask. We may not require a generational family mausoleum, but adherence to the cult of American liberty with the traditional values of our founding -- God-given rights independent of government; limited, enumerated central power; etc. -- via fidelity to our Constitution should also be revived as a normative requirement.
The Athenian model of complete transparency is a refreshing idea in context of the exhausted secrecy of Barack Hussein Obama II.
From the classics we can learn that transparency at the most fundamental level equates to trust at all other levels.
7)How Mitt Can Win
By James V Capua
Romney might win or might lose adhering to his current approach, but one thing is sure: he would a win bigger, for him and the nation, with a different one.
With apologies to everyone who thinks the Etch-a-Sketch simile captures the right's problem with Mitt Romney, I'd suggest that a much better explanation is to be found in an interview-based analysis by the always sensible Stephen Hayes. Hayes reveals Romney as essentially "risk-averse," the result of being beat up in past campaigns for being too specific. Romney's consequent 2012 approach, according to Hayes, "goes a long way to explain why some conservatives have been reluctant to embrace his candidacy. They want a list. They want it to be long, they want it to be detailed, and they want a candidate who is not only willing to provide one but eager to campaign on it[.] ... That's not Mitt Romney. It never will be."
Anybody who has spent any time watching Romney in public situations that he does not control -- like serious interviews and audience/heckler give-and-take on the campaign trail -- will have noted a certain hesitation accompanied by a fleeting, deer-in-the-headlights "get me out of here" look, and sometimes a nervous laugh as the candidate formulates a response. Sometimes these responses have been quite effective, but regardless, the gun-shy Romney will never be called a happy warrior. Having convinced himself that he can't be what he regards as too specific, Romney has erroneously determined that the only alternative is a half-crouching defensive posture, especially with the example of opponents who seem to delight in stepping into messes of their own making constantly before him. The result: for many, Romney's tentative demeanor, based on an arguably false dichotomy, suggests not excessive caution, but rather lack of conviction. Romney might win or might lose adhering to his current approach, but one thing is sure: he would a win bigger, for him and the nation, with a different one.
There are good reasons beyond Romney's skittishness to accept the validity of his conviction that he should avoid specific "plans." Probably the best one is that the candidate who harps on "my 103- point plan" more times than not is peddling a fantasy, since in politics as much as in war, plans rarely survive the first shot or first legislative committee session. Presidential candidates' detailed "plans" more than anything else debase the political currency because they are functionally meaningless. They do, however, reveal the candidate's underlying assumptions and beliefs. So if Romney is afraid of "lists" and specifics, and if plans are phony anyway, why not just skip to the assumptions and beliefs and find compelling -- and yes, relatively safe -- ways to campaign on them? Properly presented, a campaign aimed at revealing a set of carefully identified and framed assumptions and animating beliefs can provide the substance conservatives demand and help extend the candidate's appeal beyond the conservative base at the same time.
What do I mean? One example might be a thoughtfully opportunistic response to what will likely be some nasty Occupy shenanigans this summer. While condemning rape, aggressive mass public defecation, and whatever other enormities are committed, Romney can admit that it is bad for all of us when a large proportion of our friends and neighbors feel like forgotten suckers. In response to the Occupiers' real or pretended grievances, he can acknowledge that what had been articles of faith, like the value of homeownership and the wisdom of sacrificing to attain it, have been upended by events and by policy. He can, in response, advocate for a vision of equality and community consistent withAmerican values, and identify the genuine threats to equal opportunity and economic growth presented by this administration's crony capitalism, intrusive regulation, unprecedented executive overreach, and disregard of the rule of law.
He can deplore the fraudulent K-12 and baccalaureate "educations" perpetrated by Obama's allies in teacher unions and the higher education establishment, which have condemned so many ill-prepared Occupiers to unemployability, and the consensus pricing and promiscuous predatory higher education lending, abetted by federal policy, that drowns these same Occupiers indebt. He can embrace a broad-based vision for a renewal of American education that includes equal status to and equal support for preparation for skilled and technical careers as to conventional four-year colleges. No lists, no plans, just "what I believe and how I think it can help me address the problems that concern you."
Likewise, Romney can grasp the opportunity presented by Obama, Axelrod, Plouffe & Co.'s inevitable class envy attacks on him as an occasion to condemn the sclerotic legacy society that is emerging in place of what had been a unique American model of broadly shared values and social and income mobility, as noted in a revealing American Spectator piece by F.H. Buckley. He can, with little risk, identify the ways in which progressive social policy has abetted this shift. He can call hypocrisy hypocrisy and lies lies, and nary a list is needed to lay out a "severely conservative" general framework for Romney administration policy. By so doing, Romney would augment the thin gruel of his current "I have been in business and know how to fix things" platform and begin to establish the outlines of a Romney mandate that will be a lot more useful than his resume should he actually manage to beat Obama.
And one more thing: Mitt, if you find yourself campaigning in Tennessee, avoid the temptation to recite the lyrics of the Disney Ballad of Davy Crockett again. Did the same genius who dropped the Etch-a-Sketches on you suggested that lead balloon? If you must mention Crockett, you could most safely note how you will follow his injunction: "First be sure you're right, then go ahead"? If you want to be a bit more adventurous, you might note Crockett's opposition while in Congress to lawmakers' use of public funds for acts of charity, or his principled opposition to his fellow Democrat President Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy. Being risk-averse does not have to mean being John McCain II.
8)The Diplomats' Dilemma
By Clifford D. May
New negotiations begin next month in Geneva. Americans are war-weary. But despots need to know that their enemies are prepared for more than talk
The dictionary defines diplomacy as the “art and practice of conducting negotiations,” but one incisive wag said diplomacy is really “the art of saying ‘nice doggie’ till you can find a rock.” So who has the stones required to stop Iran’s rulers from acquiring the nuclear weapons they need, not for deterrence as their apologists claim, but to escalate their war against Israel, America, and the West?
The United States does, but President Obama is not eager to utilize them. That’s understandable: Americans are war-weary. But if Iran’s rulers do acquire nuclear weapons on Obama’s watch, and if that leads to a 21st century that becomes bloodier than the 20th was, history will not judge him kindly.It is possible that Israelis will do the job others don’t want to do. Obama, in his AIPAC remarks, at least recognized the legitimacy of their concerns, acknowledging that “no Israeli government can tolerate a nuclear weapon in the hands of a regime that denies the Holocaust, threatens to wipe Israel off the map, and sponsors terrorist groups committed to Israel’s destruction.”
Israelis would like nothing better than to resolve this conflict diplomatically. But Iran’s rulers refuse even to talk with the leaders of the tiny Jewish state. Their intransigence is seldom noted, much less criticized, by those most enthusiastic about the possibility of a diplomatic solution.Between diplomacy and warfare lie economic sanctions. Israeli leaders have long been strongly supportive of the increasingly tough measures produced by the U.S. Congress on a bipartisan basis and signed by Obama. Europeans, too, have imposed stiff sanctions.
But sanctions — and diplomacy and warfare, too, actually — are means, not ends. No one with a lick of sense backs sanctions because they are confident sanctions will work — with “work” defined as causing Iran’s rulers to decide to forgo the most effective weapon ever invented (by infidels, of course) to project power.
So what’s the point? For one, sanctions, and the continuing debate they provoke, serve to remind the “international community” of the threat Iran’s theocrats pose. Second, it’s always useful to weaken one’s enemies, and sanctions — in particular the new sanctions targeting Iran’s central bank and expelling Iran from the SWIFT international electronic banking system — have been enfeebling Iran’s oil-based economy. Finally, should more kinetic measures be used to stop Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, it will be vital for sanctions to be in place — and remain in place — during whatever diplomatic palaver may follow.
Opponents of sanctions and more forceful measures don’t get this. They argue that diplomacy can still succeed — despite decades of failed outreach to Iran’s rulers by both Americans and Europeans. They further argue that sanctions are an impediment to diplomacy. Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, wrote recently that “the United States cannot hope to bargain with a country whose economy it is trying to disrupt and destroy.” The Iranians, she added, “cannot be nudged into a constructive negotiating process by measures that exacerbate their vulnerability.”
She has it exactly backwards, as anyone who has ever been involved in any negotiation should recognize. If we want Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to stop doing what they are doing — e.g., building nuclear weapons, supporting terrorists, threatening their neighbors, oppressing their own people — we have to do more than “nudge” them. We have to offer them something of great value.
What would Maloney have us put on the table other than an end to sanctions and no use of force — or no further use of force? What else does she imagine they would accept in exchange for giving up the chance to possess the weapons they see as key to achieving the goals of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, which include dominance of the Middle East in the short run, and “a world without America” eventually, with the extermination of Israeli men, women, and children somewhere along the way?
When conducted between reasonable, peace-loving people, the “art and practice of conducting negotiations” can lead to compromise and the resolution of conflicts. But when dealing with despots, people who respect only power and see even mercy as weakness, there are no talking cures. Iran’s rulers see the U.S. as materialistic, decadent, weak-willed, and just plain tired of carrying the burdens of leadership. They are convinced Obama will accept what he has called “unacceptable,” that, in the end, he will allow the world’s worst dictators — and the leading sponsors of terrorism — to arm themselves with the world’s worst weapons.
A new round of diplomacy is scheduled to begin next month in Geneva. For there to be any small chance of success, Iran’s rulers will need to feel pressured and vulnerable — they will need to take seriously the possibility that Americans and Israelis have rocks and are prepared to use them.
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9)Still the Alinsky Playbook
By John Fund
Forty years after his death, Saul Alinsky — the father of the community-organizing model that inspired both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — is more politically relevant than ever.
Leading conservatives attempt to tie the Obama administration to Alinsky’s radicalism, with Newt Gingrich declaring that Obama draws his “understanding of America” from “Saul Alinsky, radical left-wingers, and people who don’t like the classical America.” For their part, liberals have scrambled to minimize Obama’s affinity for Alinsky and to sand over Alinsky’s sharp edges. A blogger at Britain’s Guardian newspaper claims that Alinsky was merely “what passes for a left-wing radical in American politics, agitating for better living conditions for the poor.” (Liberals have also largely ignored the fact that the subtitle of Hillary Clinton’s honors thesis at Wellesley was “An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.”)
Somewhere between Gingrich’s exaggerations and the Left’s whitewash of Alinsky is an explanation of why so many followers of Barack Obama — along with the president himself — draw inspiration from a long-dead radical.
Born in 1909, Alinsky was a left-wing activist with a streak of ruthless political realism. After studying criminology at the University of Chicago, he went into union organizing, and found it too tame. His “approach to social justice,” in the words of the Washington Post, would come to rely instead on “generating conflict to mobilize the dispossessed.” His first big conflict came in 1939, when he helped lead workers in cleaning up the Back of the Yards, the festering slum area of the Chicago meatpacking district. That led to a major grant from department-store heir Marshall Field III, whose generosity enabled Alinsky to found the Industrial Areas Foundation, the nonprofit at which he invented “community organizing.”
This new approach was distinctive. He deployed pickets to the homes of slumlords and used megaphones to hurl insults at them; he dumped trash on the front step of a local alderman to demand better garbage collection; he flooded stockholder meetings with raucous protesters, a tactic Occupy Wall Street is emulating; and he tied up bank lines with people who exchanged loads of pennies for $100 bills and vice versa.
He boasted that knowledge of his tactics often led to preemptive surrender by local officials or businesses. He was able to abandon plans to flood a department store with protesters who would order merchandise to be delivered that they had no intention of paying for; he also never had protesters occupy every bathroom stall for hours at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. In both cases, the mere threat of such action won important concessions from his targets.
Alinsky himself disdained the chaotic tactics of 1960s student radicals. He eschewed violence in favor of planting radical seeds. While students were rioting at the 1968 Democratic convention, former left-wing radical David Horowitz recalls, “Alinsky’s organizers were insinuating themselves into [Lyndon] Johnson’s War on Poverty program and directing federal funds into their own organizations and causes.”
His most enduring influence may have been to inspire the National Education Association to become a political powerhouse. Sam Lambert, the executive secretary of the NEA in 1967, when it hired Alinsky as a political trainer, boasted that it would “become a political power second to no other special interest.” The NEA delivered on that promise. Between 1963 and 1993, the number of teachers belonging to unions grew to 3.1 million, up from only 963,720.
Alinsky didn’t live to see that, or a number of other fruits of his labors. But just before his death in 1972, he synthesized the lessons he had learned into a book called “Rules for Radicals,” in which he urged radicals to make common cause with anyone to further their ends. The book was even dedicated, presumably tongue in cheek, to Lucifer, “the very first radical,” who “rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom.”
Alinsky argued for moral relativism in fighting the establishment: “In war the end justifies almost any means. . . . The practical revolutionary will understand [that] in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind.”
Where did Alinsky get this amorality? Clues can be found in a Playboy magazine interview he gave in 1972, just before his death. In the closest thing to a memoir Alinsky left, he told how he decided to do his (never-completed) doctoral dissertation in the 1930s on the Al Capone mob, and to do it as “an inside job.” He caught the eye of Big Ed Stash, the mob’s top executioner, and convinced him he could be trusted as a sort of mob mascot who would interpret its methods to the outside world. “He introduced me to Frank Nitti, known as the Enforcer, Capone’s number-two man,” Alinsky told Playboy. “Nitti took me under his wing. I called him the Professor and I became his student. Nitti’s boys took me everywhere.”
Alinsky recalled that he “learned a hell of a lot about the uses and abuses of power from the mob,” and that he applied that knowledge “later on, when I was organizing.” The Playboy interviewer asked, “Didn’t you have any compunction about consorting with — if not actually assisting — murderers?” Alinsky replied: “None at all, since there was nothing I could do to stop them from murdering. . . . I was a nonparticipating observer in their professional activities, although I joined their social life of food, drink, and women. Boy, I sure participated in that side of things — it was heaven.”
Unlike the mob members he hung out with, Alinsky never coveted great wealth. “He was essentially a thrill-seeker who admitted he was easily bored and always had to stir things up,” says Lee Stranahan, who was a blogger for the Huffington Post until last year, when his research into Alinsky-inspired groups soured him on the Left. “His followers are even more ideological and relentless than he was.”
Alinsky’s tactics of intimidation are a case in point. His most oft-quoted rule is “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. . . . One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.”
Obama’s White House has honed that tactic to perfection. In 2009, then– communications director Anita Dunn sneered that Fox News “really is not a news network at this point.” President Obama himself has, in the spirit of Alinsky, gone out of his way to lambaste “fat-cat bankers” and greedy health insurers.
“[The administration has] shown they’ll go after anybody or any organization that they think is standing in their way,” Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said in a February speech. “You know the drill. Expose these folks to public view, release the liberal thugs on them, and then hope the public pressure or the unwanted attention scares them from supporting similar causes down the road.”
What exactly are the connections between Obama and Saul Alinsky’s thought? In 1985, the 24-year-old Obama answered a want ad from the Calumet Community Religious Conference, run by Alinsky’s Chicago disciples. Obama was profoundly influenced by his years as a community organizer in Chicago, even if he ultimately rejected Alinsky’s disdain for electoral politics and, like Hillary Clinton, chose to work within the system. “Obama embraced many of Alinsky’s tactics and recently said his years as an organizer gave him the best education of his life,” wrote Peter Slevin of the Washington Post in 2007. That same year, The New Republic’s Ryan Lizza found Obama still “at home talking Alinskian jargon about ‘agitation’” and fondly recalling organizing workshops where he had learned Alinsky concepts such as “being predisposed to other people’s power.”
In 1992, after Obama returned to Chicago from Harvard Law School, he ran a voter-registration drive for Project Vote, an ACORN affiliate set up by Alinsky acolytes. The purportedly non-partisan effort registered 135,000 new voters and was integral to the election of Carol Moseley Braun to the Senate. Obama then moonlighted as a top trainer for ACORN.
Obama even became ACORN’s attorney in 1995, when he sued on its behalf to implement the “Motor Voter” law — a loose system of postcard voter registration that has proven to be a bonanza for vote fraudsters — in Illinois. Later, while on the board of the liberal Woods Fund, Obama saw to it that the group gave substantial grants to ACORN.
His 2008 presidential campaign quietly hired ACORN affiliates to handle get-out-the-vote efforts in Ohio and Pennsylvania, improperly concealing their activities in Federal Election Commission reports as being for “staging and lighting.” Obviously, Team Obama was eager to distance itself from ACORN’s reckless record in voter-registration-fraud scandals. Indeed, since then ACORN has gone into bankruptcy following the surfacing of undercover videos showing its employees offering advice on setting up a whorehouse for underage illegal aliens.
Obama’s 2008 campaign showcased many Alinsky methods. “Obama learned his lesson well,” David Alinsky, the son of Saul Alinsky, wrote in the Boston Globe in 2008. “The Democratic National Convention had all the elements of the perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky style. Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board.”
In her new book on Obama, New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor lifted a bit of the curtain on his past. She told the Texas Book Festival: “The Obamas often don’t mingle freely — they often just stand behind the rope and reach out to shake hands — but he sees Jerry Kellman, his old community-organizing boss, and he is so happy to see him he reaches across and pulls him in. And Obama says, ‘I’m still organizing.’ It was a stunning moment and when [Kellman] told me the story, it had echoes of what Valerie Jarrett had told me once: ‘The senator still thinks of himself as a community organizer.’ . . . I think that plays into what will happen in the 2012 race.”
You can expect that the Obama 2012 campaign and allied groups will be filled with people deeply steeped in Rules for Radicals. That is good reason for conservatives to spend time studying Saul Alinsky. It also explains why liberals are so anxious to sugarcoat Alinsky and soft-pedal his influence on Team Obama.
— Mr. Fund, a writer based in New York, is the author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy. This article appears in the February 20, 2012, issue of National Review.
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