He attached a note and said he wanted to make my day! He did!(See below.)
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Where's the Syrian Flotilla? (See 1 below.)
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My friend, Chris Neslon, is president of St John's College - Annapolis Campus. He sent me his Convocation address in respopnse to an article I e mailed him aboout the value ofa classical education.
This is what Chris said: "I thought that you might enjoy my opening Convocation Address to the St. John’s College Community, laying out what we expect of our students in their years with us. I hope you enjoy
Low interest rates more a threat according to Peter Schiff than the "Fiscal Cliff." (See 2 below.)
Three myths laid at the feet of the election cycle. (See 2a below.)
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Biden arose from the banished today and said: "Osama is dead, General Motors is alive. I would explain but it is too hot!"
I would add: " and they are betting on your stupidity, how does it feel to be out of work and drink this Kool Aid!"
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Hell, Jerusalem it is just a dot on the map! (See 3 below.)
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Let's assume political conventions are a good bit of propaganda - and let's assume this video falls into that class as well.
With that said, after listening to the Republican and Democrat Conventions, I challenge you to listen to this. Just more propaganda for the Petri dish!
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Dick
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1)Where Is the Flotilla for Syria?
Assad's war has claimed four times as many victims in 20 months as have been killed in the Israel-Palestine conflict in the last 20 years.
By RON PROSOR
Last month, a group of Scandinavians pulled up anchor from a Swedish port and set off toward the Middle East under the pretense of delivering humanitarian aid. The Nordic fog may have clouded their choice of destination. The moral compass of these self-proclaimed human-rights activists steered them to the Gaza Strip, not Syria.
The fleets of flotillas, ferries, yachts, sailboats, canoes and catamarans and that have set sail for Gaza in recent years rival the size of the Spanish Armada. Yet one might argue that humanitarian flotillas are needed just a bit more urgently in Syria, where more civilians have been murdered by the Assad regime than those killed during Japan's 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11 combined.
The conflict in Syria has also claimed roughly four times as many victims in the past 20 months as were killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past 20 years. The residents of Gaza continue to enjoy more international assistance than virtually any other population on the planet, but almost no aid is reaching the two million people displaced within Syria—roughly 10% of the country's population.
The flotilla crowd has different priorities. They prefer to work around the clock to protest Israel's legitimate defense against the terrorists who target its citizens and fire thousands of rockets into its cities. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised: It's much easier to face news cameras in Tel Aviv than bullets in Damascus.
Indeed, Israel is the luxury destination of choice for this type of "human-rights activist." In Israel, these weekend revolutionaries are free from the dangers of arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and execution that abound in the totalitarian states that make up the rest of the region. Instead of trying to dig into the dark abyss of abuses in neighboring states, they prefer to lounge in the comfort of Israel's democratic institutions, civil society and independent media, which offer a wealth of easily accessible information that they use to attack Israel.
Indeed, Israel is the luxury destination of choice for this type of "human-rights activist." In Israel, these weekend revolutionaries are free from the dangers of arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and execution that abound in the totalitarian states that make up the rest of the region. Instead of trying to dig into the dark abyss of abuses in neighboring states, they prefer to lounge in the comfort of Israel's democratic institutions, civil society and independent media, which offer a wealth of easily accessible information that they use to attack Israel.
The burden of democracy is always heavy, and Israel is proud to carry it. With more reporters and human-rights activists per capita than anywhere else on the planet, we understand deeply the invaluable role of civil society, even though its institutions can sometimes be used and abused by those with the most radical of agendas.
Today much of the international human-rights arena resembles a masquerade ball, where the most extreme views can be easily masked beneath the empty utterance of words like "democracy" and "human rights." Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung, the leader of the Scandinavian ship to Gaza, was recently suspended from the Swiss World Peace Academy for a series of anti-Semitic rants. He recommended that all university students read "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the infamous piece of 19th-century propaganda used in Nazi classrooms.
Far from criticizing the tyrants of the Middle East, the flotilla crowd often joins hands with them. Just this May, the British activist group Viva Palestina enjoyed the hospitality of Bashar Assad, making a pit stop in Syria on its way to trying to enter Gaza. Around the same time that Assad's thugs were gearing up for their massacre of children in Houla, members of Viva Palestina were proudly tweeting their whereabouts and posting photos on Facebook of themselves next to the regime's representatives.
Instead of dancing with dictators and tangoing with tyrants, what if the flotilla crowd actually set sail in the direction where aid is so desperately needed?
—Mr. Prosor is Israel's ambassador to the United Nations.
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2)Peter Schiff: Low Interest Rates Threaten Economy More Than ‘Fiscal Cliff’
Low interest rates are threatening the U.S. economy more than the sharp fiscal adjustment poised to strike at the end of the year is, said author and financial commentator Peter Schiff.
At the end of the year, the Bush-era tax cuts and other tax breaks and benefits expire at the same time automatic cuts to public spending kick in, a combination known as a fiscal cliff that could send the economy sliding into recession next year if left unchecked by Congress.
Lawmakers have been unwilling to address tax and spending issues in an election year but will likely convene after November’s elections and come to an agreement to steer the country away from the edge of the fiscal cliff, even if such an accord involves temporary measures.
The real threat to the economy, however, lies in low interest rates, Schiff noted.
Yields on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note are currently hovering below 2 percent, as investors at home and abroad line up to invest in America.
Sooner or later, those investors are going to demand more for their money, especially considering the rate the country’s debts keep piling up.
Once they do, expect the government to yank money normally bound elsewhere in the economy to service hefty interest on even heftier debt burdens.
“The current national debt is about $16 trillion. This is just the funded portion — the unfunded liabilities of the Treasury, such as Social Security and Medicare, and off-budget items, such as guaranteed mortgages and student loans, loom much larger. Our recent era of unprecedented fiscal irresponsibility means we are throwing an additional $1 trillion or more on the pile every year,” Schiff wrote in a Washington Times commentary.
“The only reason this staggering debt load hasn’t crushed us already is that the Treasury has been able to service it through historically low interest rates (now below 2 percent). These easy terms keep debt-service payments to a relatively manageable $300 billion per year,” Schiff added.
The European debt crisis and China’s cooling growth rates have sent investors scrambling to U.S. Treasurys in search of safe harbor, but that won’t last.
“On the current trajectory, the national debt likely will hit $20 trillion in a few years. If, by that time, interest rates were to return to 5 percent (a low rate by postwar standards) interest payments on the debt could run around $1 trillion per year,” Schiff wrote.
“Such a sum would represent almost 40 percent of total current federal revenues and likely would constitute the single largest line item in the federal budget. A balance sheet so constructed would create an immediate fiscal crisis in the United States.”
Meanwhile, the economy would slow and crimp tax revenues, exacerbating the government’s dilemma as it seeks to finance public spending and rising debt burdens with less income.
“By foolishly borrowing so heavily when interest rates are low, our government is driving us toward this cliff with its eyes firmly glued to the rearview mirror,” Schiff said.
“Most economists downplay debt-servicing concerns with assertions that we have entered a new era of permanently low interest rates. This is a dangerously naive idea.”
The European Central Bank (ECB) is reportedly close to announcing plans to buy sovereign bonds from countries like Spain and Italy to lower borrowing costs there and ease the debt crisis.
Such a move, if it came it pass, could entice investors out of the safe haven of U.S. Treasurys and toward higher-yielding asset classes, including European debt and stocks worldwide, which could pressure U.S. Treasury prices downward, setting the stage for higher interest rates down the road as the U.S. government seeks to entice investors back.
ECB President Mario Draghi said recently he would be comfortable buying government debt with three years to maturity, which could spark demand for risk.
“There are expectations in the market that the ECB will announce something,” said Luca Jellinek, head of European interest-rate strategy at Credit Agricole Corporate & Investment Bank in London, according to Bloomberg.
“That perhaps underpins risk sentiment and weakens demand for high-grade government bonds.
2a)3 Huge Economic Misconceptions From Election Season
We're down to nine weeks until the presidential election. That means we're heading into a period of what will no doubt be a breathless display of rhetoric and nonsense winning out over facts and reason. Here are three that always get me.
1. Lower taxes lead to faster economic growthIt makes a lot of sense: Take money out of the hands of the most productive members of the private sector and give it to some bumbling bureaucrats, and growth will slow, and vice versa. It makes so much sense that few take the effort to look at the historical facts to see how the argument holds up (the most dangerous form of certainty).
Here's the scorecard:
Sources: Tax Policy Center, Federal Reserve.
Do you see the trend? I hope not. Because it doesn't exist.
Since the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, America has had every combination of taxes and growth you can think of. High taxes and blistering booms, low taxes and crushing depressions, and everything in between.
Why is this?
First, there's a difference between the top statutory tax rate and the top effective tax rate. Statutory is the rate that's advertised; effective is the rate people actually pay. Because of deductions, write-offs, loopholes, and high marginal barriers, the difference between the two can be huge. Since 1979, the top statutory tax rate has been as high as 70% and as low as 28%, but the average effective income tax rate for the top percentile of households has hovered between and 18% and 24% -- much less variance. A spike in effective tax rates would almost certainly thump the economy, but we simply haven't seen that despite big changes in statutory rates.
More importantly, taxes are just one piece of this enormously complicated thing we call the economy. Other factors like education, population growth, and the ideas of entrepreneurs play a much larger role in economic growth than taxes alone. It's not that taxes don't matter, but that other things matter so much more. Take an economy of 300 million people, 27 million businesses, and 6.7 billion other people on the planet in hot pursuit, and very rarely can you say, "Do X andY will happen." It's just a lot more complicated than that.
2. We eventually need to pay off the national debtLet's just get this out there: We will never, ever pay off the national debt. And frankly, that's fine.
A popular way to put U.S. debt in perspective is to compare it to household finances. This makes the numbers more comprehensible, but it turns the comparison into apples and oranges.
Households have a fairly short window of money-making potential (40-50 years), and pass away 10-20 years after that. All debts have to be repaid by that time for creditors to get their money back.
Countries are different. Their lifespans are indefinite, and they can remain indebted indefinitely. The same is true for corporations. General Electric and Ford have likely been indebted for over a century, and they'll never become debt-free. Nor should they, and nor should our country. Rather than being paid off for good, debt that comes due is replaced with new debt, and on and on. What matters for organizations with indefinite lifespans is not the raw amount of debt, but the cost of carrying that debt.
Yes, sometimes the cost of carrying debt becomes excessively expensive. When interest rates rise, our nation's $16 trillion debt surely will. How will we deal with it then? Ideally the same way we did after World War II: We grew out of it.
As a percentage of GDP, debt after the second world war was more than a third higher than it is today. But it was never much of a problem. For the following three decades, debt to GDP fell consistently and like a rock before settling at just 31% in 1981, three-quarters lower than it was at the end of the war.
Interestingly though, from 1945 to 1980, there were only eight years when the government actually ran a surplus, and most were irrelevantly small. Think about that: The debt burden fell dramatically even as we ran deficits almost 80% of the time.
How? Because those deficits were small and the economy grew like a weed.
As long as nominal GDP growth is higher than the annual deficit, a government can run in the red forever while actually lowering its debt load. This isn't intuitive because it doesn't apply to households, but that's the point: Governments aren't households.
3. It matters who wins the presidencyCan we all admit one thing? Evidence that if one party wins, the economy will tank, or if another party wins, it will boom, is mindlessly weak. Just as with taxes, we have had every combination of political party and economic growth you can think of. Democrat and high growth, Democrat and deep recession. Republican and high growth, Republican and deep recession.
There is very little a U.S. president can do to the economy unilaterally. If a single person does have inordinate sway over the economy, it's the president of the Federal Reserve, not the president of the United States.
Almost without exception, politicians get too much credit for the economy when things are good, and are burdened with too much blame when it slows. In their world, a successful economy reflects their decisions, and a poor one reflects the decisions of the person they're running against. In the real world, the economy is built on the decisions of businesses and consumers, most of whom go about their day making personal choices while blissfully unaware of what's happening in Washington.
This is not a declaration that the Oval Office has no impact on the economy -- surely it can have. But its impact is way out of proportion with the amount of blame and credit we often give it. The 1990s boom probably would have happened with a Republican president, the 2000s probably would have been just as miserable with a Democratic president, and the budget deficit would have been massive over the last four years even with a Republican president. For the vast majority of Americans, the most important business stories of the next decade will have nothing to do with who wins the next election. You reject that at your own peril.
Bank lobbyist (of all people) Andrew Lowenthal made a good point a few years ago: "Every election I've ever been involved with has been 'the most important election in history.' At some point, it's not. It's just the path of history."
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3)Editorial of The New York Sun | September 4, 2012
3)Editorial of The New York Sun | September 4, 2012
It is difficult to imagine a benign explanation for the decision of the Democratic Party to delete from its platform language supporting the recognition of Jerusalem as capital of Israel. “Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel,” the Democratic platform declared four years ago. “The parties have agreed that Jerusalem is a matter for final status negotiations. It should remain an undivided city accessible to people of all faiths.” This year the platform declares that President Obama and the Democratic Party “maintain an unshakable commitment to Israel's security.” It speaks of the president having boosted security assistance to Israel, but it doesn’t say anything about Jerusalem one way or another. The name of Jerusalem does not appear in the platform.
We first read about this in a brief bulletin of the Weekly Standard, and, while we haven’t done a double-blind study, our soundings suggest it has caught the national Jewish leadership flatfooted. It is going to be illuminating to see what explanation emerges. No less an authority than the Congress of the United States has established that, as a matter of law, the “Statement of the Policy of the United States” that “Jerusalem should remain an undivided city in which the rights of every ethnic and religious group are protected” and that “Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of Israel.” It has also stated as a matter of law that the American embassy in Israel should be moved to Jerusalem.
The law was passed back in 1995. The State Department has fought tooth and nail to block not only the move of the Embassy to Jerusalem but any action that might signal recognition of Israel’s just claims. Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama have all invoked waivers to avoid implementing the law. All the more reason, though, to include Jerusalem language in the party platforms. The Republican Party did so, this year, saying: “We support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state with secure, defensible borders; and we envision two democratic states – Israel with Jerusalem as its capital and Palestine – living in peace and security.”
The GOP platform in 2008, incidentally, was even blunter than the platform this year. Said it: “We support Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel and moving the American embassy to that undivided capital of Israel.” So it is possible to say that both parties have softened their line a bit. But the Democratic platform this year is a complete abandonment of the Jerusalem question. It is a symptom of a party that wants to have it both ways — posturing as the stronger of the two parties in respect of the Jewish state even while retreating in its statement of the broad framework.
A spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as trying to put the best face on the party’s abandonment of its Jerusalem plank, but Governor Romney was right as rain to issue a statement marking the retreat. “It is unfortunate that the entire Democratic Party has embraced President Obama’s shameful refusal to acknowledge that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital,” the Wall Street Journal quoted Mr. Romney as saying in a statement. Your editors have been covering what we call the “Battle of Jerusalem” for more than 20 years now, and if, in decades to come, Jerusalem is lost, this is going to be seen by historians as a significant moment. Let us hope it does not come to that.
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