At least I put any retractions up front unlike some media and newspapers who recant on back pages.
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According to the Obama Administration it is against the law to purge voting lists of criminals, illegal citizens etc. because doing so is offensive and hurts one's self-esteem. Of course, the fact that it erases the vote of a U.S. citizen, particularly one living in a critical state who might vote for Romney, is of no consequence.
One more law suit that will go against the Obama thugs when the Supreme Court gets it before them. Just unbelievable.
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Not sure Public Sector jobs have peaked because the public sector is always expanding but their outrageous pensions and other skulduggery is now under a microscope and should subside.
Andy Stern created a gravy train and, once again, union overreach has been arrested. Power corrupts yet, so many keep seeking it and then being destroyed by it.
Unions served a legitimate purpose but like all entities who drink from the chalice of power they lose sight of their roots and purpose and die on the sword of avarice.(See 1 below.)
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Maintaining and increasing the count of Illegal Palestinian refugees is simply another way to perpetuate UNWRA jobs and show Israel in a bad and false light.
Israel absorbed Jews who were made refugees by Arab wars. However, Palestinians who mostly fled, even though encouraged to remain by the Israelis, and been rejected by their own, use their refugee status to claim they are pawns. (See 2 below.)
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It is weekend approaching so time for levity!
Now for a little humor from my British girl friend: "On his 74th birthday, a man got a gift certificate from his wife.
The certificate paid for a visit to a medicine man living on a nearby reservation who was rumored to have a wonderful cure for erectile dysfunction.
After being persuaded, he drove to the reservation, handed his certificate to the medicine man and wondered what he was in for.
The old man handed a potion to him, and with a grip on his shoulder, warned,"This is a powerful medicine. You take only a teaspoonful and then say '1-2-3.' "
When you do, you will become more manly than you have ever been in your life and you can perform as long as you want."
The man was encouraged. As he walked away, he turned and asked, "How do I stop the medicine from working?"
"Your partner must say '1-2-3-4,'" he responded,
"but when she does, the medicine will not work again until the next full moon."
He was very eager to see if it worked so he went home, showered, shaved,
took a spoonful of the medicine and then invited his wife to join him in the bedroom.
When she came in, he took off his clothes and said, "1-2-3!" Immediately, he was the manliest of men.
His wife was excited and began throwing off her clothes and then she asked "What was the 1-2-3 for?"
And that, boys and girls, is why we should never end
our sentences with a preposition, because we
could end up with a dangling participle."
More bad humor: "
This just in: A Brit engineer started his own business in Afghanistan. Hes making land mines that look like prayer mats. Prophets are going thru the roof!
This just in: A Brit engineer started his own business in Afghanistan. Hes making land mines that look like prayer mats. Prophets are going thru the roof!
Another famous American converts to Islam ...
It was announced today that Buckwheat,
of Our Gang fame, has converted to
the Muslim faith and changed his name to
Kareem of Wheat.
Let?s just hope he doesn't become a cereal killer.
|
Lord I apologize.."
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This from a dear friend and fellow memo reader - a lawyer in her own right and a damn good one. This is from a fellow lawyer friend and supports my own claim about how PC'ism and government 'big brotherism' has just about wrecked everything they touch: " I recently received an email from a friend who is a labor lawyer, defending companies against charges by their applicants/employees. Here is a quote that depicts what is wrong with our economy today:
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1)Public Sector Unions Have Peaked
5)CBS News Poll analysis by the CBS News Polling Unit: Sarah Dutton, Jennifer De Pinto, Fred Backus and Anthony Salvanto.
“We have, as a society, created so many layers of laws everyone now uses the government as a sword or a shield. At my end of the practice , every type of malfeasance, nonfeasance or insubordination by employees is “Protected activity “ …..or a whistleblower….it has gotten to the point no company in its right mind wants employees, for fear there is a John Edwards waiting to tell the jury how outrageous a piece of discipline was.”
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Fail, fail fail. (See 3 below.)
Divider in chief. (See 3a below.)
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More validation of the point I hope I made in a previous memo discussing the divide over Netanyahu's view of how to negotiate with Iran and Obama's.
The gulf between them remains and has even widened now that Obama has accepted Kofi Annan's proposal to allow Russia and Iran to resolve the Syrian bloodletting. (See 4 below.
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Will The Supremes listen or are they above the people? (See 5 below.)
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DickFail, fail fail. (See 3 below.)
Divider in chief. (See 3a below.)
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More validation of the point I hope I made in a previous memo discussing the divide over Netanyahu's view of how to negotiate with Iran and Obama's.
The gulf between them remains and has even widened now that Obama has accepted Kofi Annan's proposal to allow Russia and Iran to resolve the Syrian bloodletting. (See 4 below.
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Will The Supremes listen or are they above the people? (See 5 below.)
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1)Public Sector Unions Have Peaked
Bill Frezza
Public sector unions have reached their high water mark. Let the cleanup begin as the red ink recedes.
Despite a last-minute smear campaign accusing Scott Walker of fathering an illegitimate love child, the governor’s recall election victory sends a clear message that should resonate around the nation: The fiscal cancer devouring state budgets has a cure, and he has found it. The costly defeat for the entrenched union interests that tried to oust Walker in retribution for challenging their power was marked by President Obama’s refusal to lend his weight to the campaign for fear of being stained by defeat. We’ll see how well this strategy of opportunistic detachment serves in the fall as Obama reaches out to unions for support.
This fight is not without precedent. Progressive patron saint Franklin Delano Roosevelt—who more than any other president set our country on a course away from the founding principles of limited government—knew that public sector unions would be the death of the social welfare state he worked so hard to create. Hence, he consistently opposed allowing government employees to unionize. Today, Greece sets the example of what happens when public sector unions gain the upper hand.
In 1959 Wisconsin became the first state to allow collective bargaining by government employees. The projected cost of supporting Baby Boomer union retirees now threatens to bankrupt the state, as it does many others. Scott Walker ran for office promising change. The fiscal medicine he is administering may be bitter, but it looks like it is starting to work. The state budget has been balanced. The unemployment rate has been dropping and is now below the national average. Property taxes are down. Fraudulent sick leave policies—which allowed employees to call in sick and then work the next shift for overtime pay—have been ended. The government has stopped forcibly collecting union dues from workers’ paychecks.
Best of all, the myth that union bosses represent their members’ interests has been exposed as a lie. Now that union dues are voluntary, tens of thousands of union members have stopped paying them. Membership in the Wisconsin chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union (AFSCME) has dropped by half. Membership in the state’s American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is down by over a third. Given unions’ influential role in most elections, the national implications of this trend are staggering.
Walker’s message is clear: The key to bringing balance back to public sector labor relations and balance state budgets is to break the iron triangle of closed-shop mandatory unionization, compulsory dues collection, and oversized campaign donations to politicians that promise to do the unions’ bidding. If other governors take his cue and take up the cause, that giant sucking sound you hear will be the air coming out of union bosses’ bloated political action budgets.
The work in Wisconsin is not complete. The controversial law exempted police and firefighters, a political concession to get the legislation passed. Federal courts have zeroed in on this anomaly, striking down certain sections of the law because they do not treat workers equally. This needs to be repaired— by rescinding the exemption for public safety workers. With the recall election behind him, Walker may be sufficiently emboldened to do just that.
The power of private sector unions was long ago broken by many heavily unionized companies going bankrupt. While this was painful for both workers and shareholders, the economy motored on as nimbler non-union competitors picked up the slack. This approach is problematic for the public sector because bankrupt state and local governments cannot be replaced by competitors waiting in the wings. Yes, citizens can always vote with their feet, emptying out cities like Detroit, leaving the blighted wreckage behind. But isn’t Walker’s targeted fiscal retrenchment less painful than scorched-earth abandonment?
Chicago machine candidate Barack Obama rode into office to the tune of Hail to the Chief, promising the unions that backed him the gift of card check elections, ending the secret ballot that shields employees from union intimidation. He may well ride into retirement to the tune of On Wisconsin as the era of closed shop unionism comes to an end.
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2)The Fake Palestine Refugees
by Daniel Pipes
National Review Online
National Review Online
The fetid, dark heart of the Arab war on Israel, I have long argued, lies not in disputes over Jerusalem, checkpoints, or "settlements." Rather, it concerns the so-called Palestine refugees.
So called because of the nearly 5 million official refugees served by UNRWA (short for the "United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East"), only about 1 percent are real refugees who fit the agency'sdefinition of "people whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict." The other 99 percent are descendants of those refugees, or what I call fake refugees.
Worse: those alive in 1948 are dying off and in about fifty years not a single real refugee will remain alive, whereas (extrapolating from an authoritative estimate in Refugee Survey Quarterly by Mike Dumper) their fake refugee descendants will number about 20 million. Unchecked, that population will grow like Topsy until the end of time.
This matters because the refugee status has harmful effects: It blights the lives of these millions of non-refugees by disenfranchising them while imposing an ugly, unrealistic irredentist dream on them; worse, the refugee status preserves them as a permanent dagger aimed at Israel's heart, threatening the Jewish state and disrupting the Middle East.
Solving the Arab-Israeli conflict, in short, requires ending the absurd and damaging farce of proliferating fake Palestine refugees and permanently settling them. 1948 happened; time to get real.
I am proud to report that, in part based on the work carried out by the Middle East Forum's Steven J. Rosen and myself over the past year, the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee on May 24 unanimously passed a limited but potentially momentous amendment to the $52.1 billion fiscal 2013 State Department and foreign operations appropriations bill.
The amendment, proposed by Mark Kirk (Republican of Illinois) requires the State Department to inform Congress about the use of the annual $240 million of direct American taxpayer funds donated to Palestine refugees via UNRWA. How many recipients, Kirk asks, meet the UNRWA definition cited above, making them real refugees? And how many do not, but are descendants of those refugees?
The Kirk amendment does not call for eliminating or even reducing benefits to fake refugees. Despite its limited nature, Kirk calls the reporting requirement a "watershed." Indeed, it inspired what a senior Senate GOP aide called "enormous opposition" from the Jordanian government and UNRWA itself, bringing on what Foreign Policy magazine's Josh Rogin called a raging battle.
Why the rage? Because, were the State Department compelled to differentiate real Palestine refugees from fake ones, the U.S. and other Western governments (who, together, cover over 80 percent of UNRWA's budget) could eventually decide to cut out the fakes and thereby undermine their claim to a "right of return" to Israel.
Sadly, the Obama administration has badly botched this issue. A letter from Deputy Secretary of State Thomas R. Nidesopposing an earlier version of the Kirk amendment demonstrates complete incoherence. On the one hand, Nides states that Kirk would, by forcing the U.S. government "to make a public judgment on the number and status of Palestinian refugees … prejudge and determine the outcome of this sensitive issue." On the other, Nides himself refers to "approximately five million [Palestine] refugees," thereby lumping together real and fake refugees – and prejudging exactly the issue he insists on leaving open. That 5-million refugee statement was no fluke; when asked about it, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell confirmed that "the U.S. government supports" the guiding principle to "recognize descendants of refugees as refugees."
Also, by predicting a "very strong negative reaction [to the amendment] from the Palestinians and our allies in the region, particularly Jordan," Nides invited Arabs to pressure the U.S. Senate, a shoddy maneuver unworthy of the State Department.
Through all of Israel's 64-year existence, one American president after another has resolved to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, yet every one of them ignored the ugliest aspect of this confrontation – the purposeful exploitation of a refugee issue to challenge the very existence of the Jewish state. Bravo to Senator Kirk and his staff for the wisdom and courage to begin the effort to address unpleasant realities, initiating a change that finally goes to the heart of the conflict.
Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. © 2012 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.
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3)Grifters on Parade
By J. R. Dunn
The nearly simultaneous exposure of the false claims of Elizabeth Warren to Cherokee ancestry and Obama's to Kenyan nationality is an example of two events that are not quite a pure coincidence. While each of these episodes is causally unrelated, what we're seeing is the same process working itself out in two distinct cases.
As all the world knows, an author's bio written in the early '90s stated that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. There is little or no possibility that it was printed without his knowledge. (One of the similarities between the two cases is that the institutions involved simply repeated what the principals said.) The bio made the Kenya claim because that's what Obama told its fabricators to put down. Furthermore, the claim was allowed to stand for over a decade, being edited out only in 2006.
So what are we to make of this? With anyone else, the case would be open and shut. But as we've come to learn regarding Obama, there are always layers beneath layers, going all the way down to the level of the fabled turtle that holds everything up. While Obama could have made the claim because it was true, it is just as likely that he did so because it was convenient at the time or served some purpose not obvious at first glance. The one undeniable axiom concerning Obama is that he lets no opportunity to help himself out slip past unexploited.
I have always been skeptical of the Kenya birth claim because there is no positive evidence for such an occurrence. All the evidence presented thus far has been circumstantial (when not simply fabricated), pointing in several directions and capable of being matched to a number of mutually exclusive hypotheses. As is often true in such cases, the simplest, most spectacular, and most unproveable theory of them all has seized public attention.
An unfortunate side-effect of the birth debate is that it has served to mask the bulk of the undeniable questions surrounding Obama's record, in particular his college records, which have faded almost to invisibility. In the light of the fake bio, they may well have been transformed into the most critical element of them all.
So we turn to Elizabeth Warren. In comparison to Obama, Warren's case is simplicity itself: she was claiming to be something she was not in order to ease her climb up the academic ladder. Warren asserted herself to be an American Indian, a Cherokee (as is usually the case with such assertions; few whites claim to be Sioux or Ute, and never Crow or Modoc), on grounds that have proven to be flimsy to illusory. Her case rests on a document that research by the Breibart sites has demonstrated to be nonexistent. At best, Warren can claim to be a laughably small proportion Indian (1/32 or even 1/64); at worst, she is exactly what she appears to be -- a member of the WASP tribe putting on the war paint to fool her fellow palefaces.
The reasons for this imposture are straightforward. The '90s were the peak of the political correctness craze, which was centered in American academia. At the time, you had to be something apart from white, male, and straight to get ahead in the academic world. The higher the identity tokens were stacked -- African, Arab, immigrant, gay, disabled, transsexual, and so on, ad infinitum -- the greater the benefits (there were a lot of jokes about this at the time). Warren, already female, decided to throw in the Indian card as well to trump the competition. The record shows that she played it for all it was worth, aiming war arrows at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and a number of professional associations, as well as reasserting the claim in print in her cousin's damnfool cookbook. And until only weeks ago, it worked out well for her. Warren achieved the highest academic positions, served as advisor to the president, and was a candidate for a powerful federal position, and now she has a shot at the U.S. Senate. All of this is based on a single untruth about her ethnic background. Clearly, Warren is something of a poster girl for affirmative action.
Warren may also have given us the key to the Obama records conundrum. Obama was making his way through the Ivies at roughly the same time as Warren, during the period when PC was becoming dominant. He dealt with exactly the same environment on exactly the same terms, as a privileged minority among many such, seeking any extra edge available to him. Obama was black -- at least in part -- which represents the hole card as regards diversity, trumping feminism, sexuality, and almost any brand of foreign origin. We know he played that to the hilt. But there were plenty of other blacks breaking into academia at the time. Obama faced a lot of competition, the same as Warren did from other females. But Obama, also like Warren, possessed another card. That is...if you didn't look too closely.
That was the Kenya connection. It's quite likely he didn't even have to make the claim explicitly. In the atmosphere of the time, educational institutions were desperate to pad the roster by any and every means in order to demonstrate their "diversity." All that Obama needed to do was simply mention that his father was a Kenyan political personality, and well-programmed academic functionaries would fill in the rest. From that point on, all that was required of young Obama was to silently agree. Everybody knew that Barack Obama was Kenyan. I mean, with a name like that?
What would status as a foreigner, an African in particular, buy him in the academic environment? Authenticity, over and above all. As an African, Obama embodied something that American blacks could not claim. He was a serious third-worlder, in the pure Frantz Fanon sense, within a milieu where third-world figures are automatically granted sainthood. And beyond that, it may very likely have resulted in financial rewards, in the form of grants or scholarships (his father, after all, was a beneficiary of such a program). Without opening the records, we will never know.
As time went by, he grew more casual about it, and began making the claim in things like an author's bio, secure in the assumption that nobody would question Harvard's imprimatur concerning his status.
Then, when the lie became inconvenient -- when Obama began thinking of the presidency -- the claim was either scrubbed or locked up behind academic privacy walls, all except for oddities like the bio in question. He could depend on the functionaries at Columbia and Harvard to say nothing, and if there were few odd bits and pieces floating around -- as, of course, there inevitably were -- it didn't matter. Because he had, after all, been born in Hawaii, and try as they might, nobody could prove differently.
He must have been awfully pleased at how neatly it all worked out.
I'll be the first to admit that this is no more than another hypothesis. But the parallels between the two cases -- academia, ethnicity, diversity, cheating, false claims -- are enticing and structurally impressive. If this isn't the explanation, I suspect it's very close.
I also suspect that Warren is finished. She has become a punchline, something no politician can afford. And Obama?
Claiming that you're a foreigner is not an impeachable offense, not even illegal, as such. But it is perfectly in line with the squalid personality and record of our hustler president. He has failed as a leader, he has failed as a statesman, and he is now failing as a fraud. It's really too bad he didn't choose to present himself as, say, a quarter Cherokee. Was it something about the cheekbones?
3a)Obama Has Always Been a Divider
By Thomas Sowell
Among the people who are disappointed with President Obama, none has more reason to be disappointed than those who thought he was going to be "a uniter, rather than a divider" and that he would "bring us all together."
It was a noble hope, but one with no factual foundation. Barack Obama had been a divider all his adult life, especially as a community organizer, and he had repeatedly sought out and allied himself with other dividers, the most blatant of whom was the man whose church he attend for 20 years, Jeremiah Wright.
Now, with his presidency on the line and the polls looking dicey, President Obama's re-election campaign has become more openly divisive than ever.
He has embraced the strident "Occupy Wall Street" movement, with its ridiculous claim of representing the 99 percent against the 1 percent. Obama's Department of Justice has been spreading the hysteria that states requiring photo identification for voting are trying to keep minorities from voting, and using the prevention of voter fraud as a pretext.
But anyone who doubts the existence of voter fraud should read John Fund's book "Stealing Elections" or J. Christian Adams's book, "Injustice," which deals specifically with the Obama Justice Department's overlooking voter fraud when those involved are black Democrats.
Not content with dividing classes and races, the Obama campaign is now seeking to divide the sexes by declaring that women are being paid less than men, as part of a "war on women" conducted by villains, from whom Obama and company will protect the women -- and, not incidentally, expect to receive their votes this November.
The old -- and repeatedly discredited -- game of citing women's incomes as some percentage of men's incomes is being played once again, as part of the "war on women" theme.
Since women average fewer hours of work per year, and fewer years of consecutive full-time employment than men, among other differences, comparisons of male and female annual earnings are comparisons of apples and oranges, as various female economists have pointed out. Read Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Hudson Institute or Professor Claudia Goldin of Harvard, for example.
When you compare women and men in the same occupations with the same skills, education, hours of work, and many other factors that go into determining pay, the differences in incomes shrink to the vanishing point -- and, in some cases, the women earn more than comparable men.
But why let mere facts spoil the emotional rhetoric or the political ploys to drum up hysteria and collect votes?
The farcical nature of these ploys came out after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi declared that Congress needed to pass the Fair Pay Act, because women average 23 percent lower incomes than men.
A reporter from The Daily Caller then pointed out that the women on Nancy Pelosi's own staff average 27 percent lower incomes than the men on her staff. Does that show that Pelosi herself is guilty of discrimination against women? Or does it show that such simple-minded statistics are grossly misleading?
The so-called Fair Pay Act has nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with election-year politics. No one in his right mind expects that bill to become law. It will be lucky to pass the Senate, and has no chance whatever of getting passed in the House of Representatives.
The whole point of this political exercise is to get Republicans on record voting against "fairness" for women, as part of the Democrats' campaign strategy to claim that there is a "war on women."
If you are looking for a real war on women, you might look at the practice of aborting girl babies after an ultrasound picture shows that they are girls. These abortions are the most basic kind of discrimination, and their consequences have already been demonstrated in countries like China and India, where sexually discriminatory abortions and female infanticide have produced an imbalance in the number of adult males and females.
A bill to outlaw sexually and racially discriminatory abortions has been opposed and defeated by House Democrats.
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4)
| Israel and the United States in Disagreement over Iran |
| By Shalom, Zaki No one who attended the May 29-30, 2012 INSS conference "Security Challenges of the 21st Century: Israel's Search for Opportunities in a Turbulent Region" could have failed to come away with the impression that Israel is nearing the point at which it will have to make a decision on the Iranian nuclear question. The statements made by the Prime Minister, the Defense Minister, and Deputy Prime Minister Ya’alon left no room for doubt that time is quickly running out. Their remarks offered a clear glimpse at the fundamental considerations that inform the Israeli government's perception of the current state of affairs. First, all the efforts made in recent years and especially over the last months to dissuade Iran from continuing to develop nuclear capabilities have failed to bear fruit. These efforts have included lengthy dialogues with Iran in a host of different settings and forums, economic sanctions, actions designed to isolate it internationally, and even extensive covert activities attributed to Israel and the United States. Israel welcomes the expansion of the sanctions that are scheduled to be imposed against Iran in the coming weeks, yet it does not pin great hopes on the ability of the sanctions to stop Iran’s nuclear activity. It seems that for Iran, the nuclear project is a supreme national interest, for which the regime of ayatollahs is prepared to pay a steep price. Second, there is little hope that the negotiations of recent weeks, in Istanbul and Baghdad, as well as those scheduled for Moscow, can cause a transformation. Iran can assume that an international forum that includes Russia and China will find it hard to take far-reaching decisions against it. Likewise, President Obama’s timeframe, influenced especially by the upcoming US elections, present the President with a set of serious constraints in terms of making far-reaching decisions on the Iranian nuclear issue. Given these circumstances, it is little wonder that under the guise of the talks, Iran continues its nuclear program, and according to Minister Ya’alon, “is laughing all the way to the bomb.” Iran’s attitude to the negotiations with the P5+1 does not indicate that Iran feels deterred in any way or senses any urgency. Rather, it projects complacency, self-confidence, and even disregard for anyone’s capacity to harm it. Third, Israel is fairly disappointed by the conduct of President Obama’s administration in the talks with Iran. From the Israeli perspective, there is a conspicuous gap between the resolute tone of the Obama administration’s statements on Iran and their translation into tough stances in the dialogue. Prime Minister Netanyahu stated explicitly that the threshold of demands presented to Iran in the recent talks is far from satisfactory to Israel: “Iran must stop all enrichment of nuclear material; it must remove all materials enriched to date from its territory; and it must dismantle its underground nuclear enrichment plant at Qom. Only a specific Iranian commitment during negotiations to meet all three demands and a clear confirmation that they have been executed can stop Iran's nuclear plan. This should be the goal of the negotiations. But I must say regretfully this is not what is asked of Iran today.” Fourth, the time that is elapsing presents Israel with serious dangers in terms of its ability to take military action against Iran. Defense Minister Barak and other speakers repeatedly stressed the risk that in the not-so-distant future Iran will have reached the zone of immunity and that will make it hard for Israel to take military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities, or perhaps prevent it from doing so altogether. Moreover, the circumstances and heavy pressures may lead Iran to show certain tactical flexibility to make their position more acceptable to the P-5+1. If this happens and an agreement is signed, Israel’s legitimacy to act against Iran will be severely impaired. The American administration is well aware of the considerations and constraints facing Israel with regard to making a decision on the Iranian issue. In an effort to allay Israel's concerns the administration has labored to keep Israel well informed regarding the dialogue with Iran. Ms. Michele Flournoy, former Undersecretary of Defense under President Obama, and other American representatives who participated in the INSS conference, expressed the administration’s positions, stressing the resolve of the United States to thwart a nuclear Iran, and in any case the futility of an Israeli military operation against Iran. Among the points made in this context were the following: President Obama has a reliable record in meeting his commitments. His declarations about preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons are unambiguous and not open to interpretation. The President has repeatedly said that the American policy on Iran is prevention, not containment. During his term in office, President Obama has strengthened strategic relations between the United States and Israel in an unprecedented manner, thereby manifesting his determination to safeguard Israel’s security. The demands currently made of Iran are not final; they are merely the first stage of demands in the dialogue. Later, further demands will be made of Iran, and those will presumably satisfy Israel’s concerns. An Israeli military operation will not solve the Iranian nuclear problem, though it may perhaps postpone it. Only the United States can come up with a complete solution to the problem. United States Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro also worked to allay Israeli concerns. In his closing remarks, he stressed (in Hebrew) that “we do not intend to continue talking just for the sake of talking. The window of opportunity is closing. The clock is ticking and Iran must change its ways.” Conclusion Against the backdrop of the dialogue between the P-5+1 and Iran in recent weeks, two major issues have emerged that display clear differences between Israel and the United States. First, Israel’s timetable vis-à-vis Iran differs vastly from America's. While Israel operates out of a sense that it has very little time left, the United States seems to be in no hurry because it has a much longer timeframe. Second, Israel is making very specific and concrete demands of Iran, much more far-reaching than those being made by the United States, at least for now. It seems that in the current circumstances, the bottom line is that Israel will find it hard to respond favorably to the suggestion/demand by President Obama’s administration to place its trust in America’s resolve to prevent a nuclear Iran and not act on its own. It seems that only a presentation of a tough American stance in the talks with Iran, accompanied by concrete steps against it, may perhaps persuade the Netanyahu government to respond positively to the administration’s demands on the Iranian issue. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
A new CBS News/New York Times poll reveals that nearly seven in ten Americans want the Supreme Court to overturn either all or President Obama's health care law or strike down just the individual mandate.
In the poll released on Thursday, 41 percent of those polled think Mr. Obama's health care law should be overturned completely by the Supreme Court, with another 27 percent of respondents saying they want the court to keep the law but overturn the mandate.
Nearly one-quarter - twenty-four percent - of respondents want the entire law upheld. The margin of error is three percentage points.
The percentage that wants to see the entire law abolished is up slightly since April, when 37 percent said they wanted the court to overturn the full law, 29 percent said only the mandate should be overturned and 23 percent wanted the whole law upheld.
As the Supreme Court decision on the health care law is expected this month, the new poll shows that Republicans are much more likely to want the entire law overturned than Democrats, with 67 percent wanting the law to be overturned compared to 20 percent of Democrats. While 42 percent of Democrats say they want the entire law to be upheld, 42 percent of Independent respondents say they want the Supreme Court to overturn the whole law. Tea Party supporters are especially likely to want the entire law to be overturned -- 70 percent support that.
While a plurality of Americans want the health care law to be overturned, a CBS News/ New York Times Poll conducted in March found some parts of the law are popular: 85 percent said insurance companies should cover people with pre-existing conditions and nearly seven in ten supported children under 26 staying on their parents' health plan. Still, the requirement that nearly all Americans obtain health insurance was less popular in that poll: 45 percent approved of that, while 51 percent disapproved.
Read the complete poll (PDF)
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