Sunday, September 2, 2012

Israel -Trust Obama At Your Peril!


Interesting commentary on the effect 'Entitlements' have had on American Culture and Character!  You decide. (See 1 below.)

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From Roman columns to sand sculpture.  (See 2 below.)

In my opinion the forthcoming week is going to be full of conflict and contrast.

First, we have a host of various speakers who are basically angry and may set the tone for the rest of the Convention. Then we have Clinton who has to be conflicted and, reports suggest, is playing his cards close to his chest after multiple speech revisions.

Then comes, what I believe, is a worried president whose jaunty step is a little less so.  I am told internal polling results are disconcerting.

I have no way of knowing but I suspect next week's convention will not be as smooth and seamless as the one run by the RNC. TIME WILL TELL.  YOU DECIDE.
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Down that well traveled yellow brick road in search of black votes! Will it be just another futile attempt to bring reality to those whose heads remain in the sand?(See 3 below.)
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Another Obama ruse of support? Clint was right. Obama's foreign policy message to allies has consistently been gfy!

Has Netanyahu caved? (See 4 and 4a below.)
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Dick

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1) American Character Is at Stake

By NICHOLAS EBERSTADT


The American republic has endured for well over two centuries, but over the past 50 years, the apparatus of American governance has undergone a radical transformation. In some basic respects—its scale, its preoccupations, even many of its purposes—the U.S. government today would be scarcely recognizable to Franklin D. Roosevelt, much less to Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson.
Since 1960, entitlement programs have come to dominate the federal budget. Worse, says Nicholas Eberstadt in a conversation with WSJ's Gary Rosen, they have undermined our national character.

Are Entitlements Corrupting Us? No

What is monumentally new about the American state today is the vast empire of entitlement payments that it protects, manages and finances. Within living memory, the federal government has become an entitlements machine. As a day-to-day operation, it devotes more attention and resources to the public transfer of money, goods and services to individual citizens than to any other objective, spending more than for all other ends combined.

The growth of entitlement payments over the past half-century has been breathtaking. In 1960, U.S. government transfers to individuals totaled about $24 billion in current dollars, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. By 2010 that total was almost 100 times as large. Even after adjusting for inflation and population growth, entitlement transfers to individuals have grown 727% over the past half-century, rising at an average rate of about 4% a year.
In 2010 alone, government at all levels oversaw a transfer of over $2.2 trillion in money, goods and services. The burden of these entitlements came to slightly more than $7,200 for every person in America. Scaled against a notional family of four, the average entitlements burden for that year alone approached $29,000.
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Bloomberg News
Our national character 'may be sacrificed long before the credibility of the U.S. economy,' says Nicholas Eberstadt

A half-century of unfettered expansion of entitlement outlays has completely inverted the priorities, structure and functions of federal administration as these were understood by all previous generations. Until 1960 the accepted task of the federal government, in keeping with its constitutional charge, was governing. The overwhelming share of federal expenditures was allocated to some limited public services and infrastructure investments and to defending the republic against enemies foreign and domestic.

In 1960, entitlement payments accounted for well under a third of the federal government's total outlays—about the same fraction as in 1940, when the Great Depression was still shaping American life. But over subsequent decades, entitlements as a percentage of total federal spending soared. By 2010 they accounted for just about two-thirds of all federal spending, with all other responsibilities of the federal government making up barely one-third. In a very real sense, entitlements have turned American governance upside-down.

Government data on public transfers can be used to divide entitlement spending into six baskets: income maintenance, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance and all the others. Broadly speaking, the first two baskets concern entitlements based on poverty or income status; the second two, entitlements attendant on aging or old-age status; and the next, entitlements based on employment status. These entitlements account for about 90% of total government transfers to individuals, and the first four categories comprise about five-sixths of all such spending. These four bear closest consideration.

Poverty- or income-related entitlements—transfers of money, goods or services, including health-care services—accounted for over $650 billion in government outlays in 2010. Between 1960 and 2010, inflation-adjusted transfers for these objectives increased by over 30-fold, or by over 7% a year. Significantly, however, income and benefit transfers associated with traditional safety-net programs comprised only about a third of entitlements granted on income status, with two-thirds of those allocations absorbed by the health-care guarantees offered through the Medicaid program.

For their part, entitlements for older Americans—Medicare, Social Security and other pension payments—worked out to even more by 2010, about $1.2 trillion. In real terms, these transfers multiplied by a factor of about 12 over that period—or an average growth of more than 5% a year. But in purely arithmetic terms, the most astonishing growth of entitlements has been for health-care guarantees based on claims of age (Medicare) or income (Medicaid). Until the mid-1960s, no such entitlements existed; by 2010, these two programs were absorbing more than $900 billion annually.

In current political discourse, it is common to think of the Democrats as the party of entitlements, but long-term trends seem to tell a somewhat different tale. From a purely statistical standpoint, the growth of entitlement spending over the past half-century has been distinctly greater under Republican administrations than Democratic ones. Between 1960 and 2010, the growth of entitlement spending was exponential, but in any given year, it was on the whole roughly 8% higher if the president happened to be a Republican rather than a Democrat.

This is in keeping with the basic facts of the time: Notwithstanding the criticisms of "big government" that emanated from their Oval Offices from time to time, the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George W. Bush presided over especially lavish expansions of the American entitlement state. Irrespective of the reputations and the rhetoric of the Democratic and Republican parties today, the empirical correspondence between Republican presidencies and turbocharged entitlement expenditures should underscore the unsettling truth that both political parties have, on the whole, been working together in an often unspoken consensus to fuel the explosion of entitlement spending.

From the founding of our nation until quite recently, the U.S. and its citizens were regarded, at home and abroad, as exceptional in a number of deep and important respects. One of these was their fierce and principled independence, which informed not only the design of the political experiment that is the U.S. Constitution but also their approach to everyday affairs.

The proud self-reliance that struck Alexis de Tocqueville in his visit to the U.S. in the early 1830s extended to personal finances. The American "individualism" about which he wrote did not exclude social cooperation—the young nation was a hotbed of civic associations and voluntary organizations. But in an environment bursting with opportunity, American men and women viewed themselves as accountable for their own situation through their own achievements—a novel outlook at that time, markedly different from the prevailing attitudes of the Old World (or at least the Continent).

The Saturday Essay


The corollaries of this American ethos were, on the one hand, an affinity for personal enterprise and industry and, on the other, a horror of dependency and contempt for anything that smacked of a mendicant mentality. Although many Americans in earlier times were poor, even people in fairly desperate circumstances were known to refuse help or handouts as an affront to their dignity and independence. People who subsisted on public resources were known as "paupers," and provision for them was a local undertaking. Neither beneficiaries nor recipients held the condition of pauperism in high regard.

Overcoming America's historic cultural resistance to government entitlements has been a long and formidable endeavor. But as we know today, this resistance did not ultimately prove an insurmountable obstacle to establishing mass public entitlements and normalizing the entitlement lifestyle. The U.S. is now on the verge of a symbolic threshold: the point at which more than half of all American households receive and accept transfer benefits from the government. From cradle to grave, a treasure chest of government-supplied benefits is there for the taking for every American citizen—and exercising one's legal rights to these many blandishments is now part of the American way of life.

As Americans opt to reward themselves ever more lavishly with entitlement benefits, the question of how to pay for these government transfers inescapably comes to the fore. Citizens have become ever more broad-minded about the propriety of tapping new sources of finance for supporting their appetite for more entitlements. The taker mentality has thus ineluctably gravitated toward taking from a pool of citizens who can offer no resistance to such schemes: the unborn descendants of today's entitlement-seeking population.

More From Review


Among policy makers in Washington today, it is very close to received wisdom that America's national hunger for entitlement benefits has placed the country on a financially untenable trajectory, with the federal budget generating ultimately unbearable expenditures and levels of public debt. The bipartisan 2010 Bowles/Simpson Commission put this view plainly: "Our nation is on an unsustainable fiscal path."

The prospect of careening along an unsustainable economic road is deeply disturbing. But another possibility is even more frightening—namely, that the present course may in fact be sustainable for far longer than most people today might imagine.

The U.S. is a very wealthy society. If it so chooses, it has vast resources to squander. And internationally, the dollar is still the world's reserve currency; there remains great scope for financial abuse of that privilege.

Such devices might well postpone the day of fiscal judgment: not so the day of reckoning for American character, which may be sacrificed long before the credibility of the U.S. economy. Some would argue that it is an asset already wasting away before our very eyes.
—Mr. Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. Excerpted from "A Nation of Takers: America's Entitlement Epidemic," forthcoming from the Templeton Press.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2) Rains wash away Mount Obama in Charlotte, N.CBy Stephen DinanA torrential downpour that struck Charlotte Saturday afternoon damaged the Mount Rushmore-style sand sculpture bust of President Obama — an ominous beginning to what many fear is a plagued convention.
Workers were trying Saturday afternoon to reform the base of the sculpture, built from sand brought in from Myrtle Beach, S.C., pounding and smoothing out the sand that had washed off the facade of the waist-up rendering of the chief executive.
The sand sculpture was protected from above, and Mr. Obama's face didn't see too much damage. But the storm was so strong that its heavy winds blew the rain sideways, pelting the president's right side and leaving the sand pockmarked and completely erasing his right elbow.
Democrats' choice of Charlotte has drawn criticism from unions who don't like North Carolina's labor laws, and the state seems to be tilting away from Democrats politically.
The large Rushmore-style sculpture drew comparisons to Mr. Obama's 2008 convention in Denver, when he accepted his party's nomination on a stage that looked like a Greek temple.
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3)The Black Vote in 2012
By Bruce Walker


Republicans are making  another pitch to win black votes in 2012.  Are we going down the same fruitless path for black voters who may be utterly locked into voting Democrat, especially when the Democrat is black?
Political pundits love to put people into convenient classes, but much like the "Hispanic vote" or the "women's vote," the characterizations are far too broad.  Within the Hispanic vote, for example, are people whose ethnic connections are from Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and a number of other nations.  Lumping these together as the "Hispanic vote" makes about as much sense as speaking of the "European vote."
Women are just like men: they do not vote as part of some tightly knit group, but as Americans who work or stay at home raising kids or live on Social Security or are on welfare.  They are the most passionate opponents of abortion and its most passionate advocates.  Feminists once tried to lump all women into their collective, but that failed wildly.
Although there is a "gender gap" -- which breaks down on closer examination as a gap between married women and single women, women who work and women on welfare -- it is hard to imagine anything sillier than lumping "women" in America into a group.  But that is what has happened in political punditry.  There is a group of women who, often because they are unwed mothers (and for other reasons, like affirmative action), perceive their interests to be with Democrats, but that is about it.
The black vote, likewise, has been irrationally thrown together as if it were a single mind, a single soul, a single voter.  In fact, black Americans are disproportionately religious; they sign up for the military in greater percentages than white Americans, and many, like Star Parker, are more utterly opposed to morally destructive welfare programs than are white Americans.
What is also obvious is that black Americans who are most inclined to hear the message of Republican conservatism live in the South.  In 2010, 35 black Republicans ran for House seats, and 20 of those 33 came from the 11 states of the Old Confederacy.  Two of those 20 won -- Alan West of Florida and Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republicans in the House.  All three black Republicans running for the Senate were from the South.  The highest-ranking black Republican in Congress -- indeed, the highest-ranking black in Congress -- has been J.C. Watts of Oklahoma, which is a conservative border state.
Those black Republicans -- more than that, black conservatives -- like Congressmen Scott and Alan, or Artur Davis, Condi Rice, and Herman Cain -- all came out of the South.  For almost a century, the Republican Party was the only political party in the South which accepted blacks.  Perhaps just as importantly, deep Christian faith is sincere and serious among blacks in the South.  Indeed, that demographic group may be the most religious in America.
The relative conservatism of blacks in the South may be a key to the 2012 election.  Republicans like Cain, Davis, Scott, West, and Rice can speak to blacks in the South in a language very different from the atheistic Marxism which infests not only Obama, but nearly all the Chicago mafia around him.  This emphatically includes those black Americans who advise Obama.  Valerie Jarrett grew up in Chicago, just like Michelle Obama.  Jeremiah Wright grew up in Philadelphia, another big northern city, and his church is in Chicago. 
Black Republicans like Davis, Scott, West, Cain, and Rice have shown that their acquiescence in 2008, while history was being made, will not be their attitude today.  In this election, for the first time in a long time, the black vote in the South really counts.  Virginia, Florida, and North Carolina, the swing states today, gave a higher percentage of their vote to McCain than he got nationally.  Every Republican presidential candidate since 1976 has done better in Virginia, Florida, and North Carolina than he did nationally. 
Obama must persuade these religiously serious and patriotic blacks in the South not only to support him, but also to be enthused enough to show up at the polls and vote for him.  Yet in reality, this Chicago child, who grew up in Hawaii and went to Ivy League schools, has almost nothing in common with Southern blacks, except for race.  When Obama spoke condescendingly about bitter people clinging to their guns and religion, he could just as easily have been referring to millions of black families in the South. 
What, exactly, do these Americans have in common with a president who conspicuously ignores God in his public pronouncements, who wants long power in Washington (which means far away from them), and who has done nothing to help these black voters -- often the first to feel the full lash of unemployment -- out of their troubles?  Obama, to these good Americans, might as well be from Mars.  If Republicans can persuade Southern blacks of that, then Republicans will win the election.
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4)Slashed US military input shortens Israel’s notice of Iranian missile launch
 Iran nuclear 
US and Israeli defense chiefs far apart.
US and Israeli defense chiefs far apart.


Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are silent in the face of the avalanche of bad news coming in from official Washington.
The Patriot anti-missile systems scheduled for what was to have been the biggest joint US-Israel anti-missile drill in October will remain packed in tarpaulin because they come without crews; even one – much less two - Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense warships may not be dispatched to Israeli waters; and the number of US servicemen sent over for the annual exercise is to be cut by more than two-thirds to 1,500.

This downgrade of US participation in an annual war exercise with Israel is more than striking. It adds up to the dismemberment by the Obama administration of the entire intricate strategy US and Israel have built over years for the deterrence - and interception if need be - of any Iranian/Hizballah/Syrian missile assault on Israel.

The inferences are cruel: The US defense or second-strike elements - which had been slotted into place by the military strategists of the two armies - will not be there. Their absence slashes the time available for Israel’s alarm-and-interception systems to spring into action - the moment the engines of Iranian ballistic missiles heading its way are fired - right down from the originally estimated 14 minutes' notice.
It also means that Barak’s estimate of 500 dead in the worst case of a war with Iran must go by the board.
Netanyahu and Barak have clearly been rendered speechless by the high-powered US military, diplomatic and personal onslaught on Israel and its government. Even the smooth-tongued Tzahi Hanegbi, just returned to the Likud fold, found no easy way of whitewashing the debacle. “Defense relations with the US are deeper than ever before,” he said unconvincingly in a radio interview Sunday morning, Sept. 2.
Hanegbi is in Netanyahu’s confidence. His words may signify the prime minister’s decision to bow under the onrush of Hurricane Obama. There is of course another way: He could demand a retraction from the White House of the damaging comments by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey denigrating Israel’s military ability to seriously damage Iran’s nuclear program and his statement: “I don’t want to be complicit if they (Israel) choose to do it.”

This was a devastating detraction by America’s top soldier, who a week ago boasted he spoke regularly to Israel’s Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, not only of Israel’s military deterrent ability but of the morality of its acting to preempt or delay a nuclear Iran.
(Collins dictionary: complicit: The fact of being an accomplice especially in a criminal act.”)
Yet US commander-in-chief, President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta have chosen to let Dempsey’s words stand. The unavoidable inference is that they are complicit with Dempsey’s sentiments.
For a similarly brutal assault, the late prime minister, Mehahem Begin, reproved US Ambassador Samuel Lewis by retorting, “We are not a banana republic!” He sent his cabinet secretary Arieh Naor to recite his words in Hebrew and English to make sure they were fully understood in Washington.

By failing to follow his example, Netanyahu and Barak are bowing their heads before the Obama administration, a grave strategic error at the very moment when Israel needs to put its foot down, and one which augurs ill for the efficacy of their handling of the Iranian peril rising up just around the corner.


4a)
Wall Street Journal: Why Israel Does Not Trust Obama
Since coming to office, Obama Administration policy toward Israel has
alternated between animus and incompetence.

The U.S. is harder on its ally than on Iran's nuclear program. .
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Barack Obama is fond of insisting that he "has Israel's back." Maybe he
should mention that to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

In remarks to journalists in London quoted by the Guardian, General Martin
Dempsey warned that any Israeli attack on Iran would "clearly delay but
probably not destroy Iran's nuclear programs." He also said economic
sanctions on Iran were having an effect and needed more time to work, but
that the good they were doing "could be undone if [Iran] was attacked
prematurely."

And to underscore the firmness of his opposition to an Israeli strike, the
Chairman added that "I don't want to be complicit if they choose to do it."
We don't know what exactly Gen. Dempsey thinks American non-complicity might
entail in the event of a strike. Should the Administration refuse to
resupply Israel with jets and bombs, or condemn an Israeli strike at the
U.N.? Nor do we know if the General was conducting freelance diplomacy or
sending a signal from an Administration that feels the same way but doesn't
want to say so during a political season.

Whatever the case, the remarks were counterproductive and oddly timed, with
this week's report by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran's
nuclear programs haven't been slowed in the least by U.S. or international
sanctions. In fact, they are accelerating.

Iran has now installed 2,140 centrifuges at its underground Fordo facility
near the city of Qom. Its stockpile of uranium enriched to 20%—or 87% of the
enrichment needed to reach bomb-grade levels—has grown from effectively zero
to some 200 kilograms in a year. Only 50 more kilograms of 20% uranium are
needed to produce a bomb, and that's saying nothing of Iran's additional
large stockpiles of reactor-grade uranium that can also be enriched to
higher levels of purity.

Administration officials have also repeatedly told the media that they
aren't entirely sure if Iran really intends to build a bomb. We'll grant
that ultimate intentions are usually unknowable, especially in closed
societies such as Iran's.

Yet as the IAEA noted, "the Agency has become increasingly concerned about
the possible existence in Iran of undisclosed nuclear related activities
related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile." These
activities, by the way, "continued after 2003," according to the report.
This puts paid for the umpteenth time the 2007 National Intelligence
Estimate that misleadingly claimed the contrary.

No wonder the Israelis are upset—at the U.S. Administration. It's one thing
to hear from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that he wants to wipe you off the map: At
least it has the ring of honesty. It's quite another to hear from President
Obama that he has your back, even as his Administration tries to sell to the
public a make-believe world in which Iran's nuclear intentions are
potentially peaceful, sanctions are working and diplomacy hasn't failed
after three and half years.

The irony for the Administration is that its head-in-the-sand performance is
why many Israeli decision-makers believe they had better strike sooner than
later. Not only is there waning confidence that Mr. Obama is prepared to
take military action on his own, but there's also a fear that a re-elected
President Obama will take a much harsher line on an Israeli attack than he
would before the first Tuesday in November.

If Gen. Dempsey or Administration officials really wanted to avert an
Israeli strike, they would seek to reassure Jerusalem that the U.S. is under
no illusions about the mullahs' nuclear goals—or about their proximity to
achieving them. They're doing the opposite.

Since coming to office, Obama Administration policy toward Israel has
alternated between animus and incompetence. We don't know what motivated
Gen. Dempsey's outburst, but a President who really had Israel's back would
publicly contradict it.
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