The Middle East Remains a Mess, Netanyahu Settles The Score!

When tax payers are outvoted by those who either pay no taxes or receive most of the benefits and entitlements and the president wins by catering to these individual societal sectors it may make for  a winning strategy and ultimate victory at the polls but it is unhealthy.

A policy of divide and conquer is dangerous.  Pitting one class of citizens against another is not in keeping with the spirit of America. Politics of envy is beneath American exceptionalism.
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More on the Palestinian Mirage.

The U.N. is not creating viable nation states but simply validating bastardy. The Palestinians seek through fiat what they are unwilling to obtain through negotiation.  (See 1 below.)

Netanyahu  responds to U.N. vote and U.S failure in U.N. by moving forward with proposed settlements that will have a physical impact on establishing  two nation state as well as giving the State Department back of the hand notice of same. (See 1a below.)
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My way or the highway.  The Obama way!

Romney would be a damn fool to get involved since he lacks any standing within his party. (See 2 below.)
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Harvey Mansfield places his faith in American youth.  Not a sensible bet at this point it would seem. (See 3 below.)
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Cliff notes from Krauthammer.  (See 4 below.)
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Big spenders can be challenged. All it takes is the desire,  a modicum of brains and a desire to deliver what America needs - fiscal sanity and a restructured tax code. (See 5 below.)
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Yes, The Middle East is a mess. But what's new?  This time the Middle East  mess finds America's influence diminished as it holds Obama hostage while  trying to pivot to Asia.  (See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1)The Palestine Mirage

A futile U.N. gesture that violates the 1993 Oslo Accords.

It was no accident that Mahmoud Abbas chose November 29 to seek a United Nations General Assembly vote recognizing Palestine as a state, albeit as a non-member "observer" state at the U.N. November 29 is the 65th anniversary of the General Assembly's Resolution 181, which partitioned British-Mandated Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states

The Jews accepted the Resolution; Arabs unanimously rejected it. It passed by a vote of 33-13 with 10 abstentions. Had the Arab world voted for the plan, a Palestinian state would be as old as Israel is today, and within larger borders than the 1949 Armistice lines that the Palestinian President now claims for his new, notional, "state."

Yet if Mr. Abbas intended to acknowledge the Arab error in rejecting the creation of a Jewish homeland, it wasn't apparent Thursday. While he referred to Resolution 181 as "the birth certificate for Israel," he also spoke of the "unprecedented historical injustice inflicted on the Palestinian people since Al-Nakba [the catastrophe] of 1948." That would not have happened had the Arabs not sought to murder Israel in its crib by invading it.

Nor did Mr. Abbas help his cause by accusing Israel of "ethnic cleansing," "an apartheid system of colonial occupation," "the plague of racism," and more. That kind of talk may work with the usual suspects at Turtle Bay who gave Mr. Abbas a standing ovation. But Israelis who spent recent days in bomb shelters while Iranian-built missiles were fired at them from Gaza probably weren't cheering. Theirs is the say that matters if a Palestinian state is ever to come into being.

Those Israelis won't be reassured by the lopsided 138-9 margin of Thursday's vote, with 41 abstentions. In effect, the General Assembly voted to violate the 1993 Oslo Accords, which are the legal basis for Mr. Abbas's Palestinian Authority and require negotiations with Israel to create a state. When the world next asks Jerusalem to take "risks for peace," Israelis will know that countries such as France (which voted for the resolution) and Germany (which abstained) will not have their backs.

It will be interesting to see if the Palestinians now use their new U.N. status to harass Israelis in venues such as the International Criminal Court. Such tactics are aimed at making everyday life increasingly unbearable for Israelis, ostensibly to force their hand on accepting a Palestinian state. Our guess is that it will have the opposite effect.

As for the Obama Administration, it opposed the U.N. resolution but failed to get allies such as France and Germany to do so as well—further testimony to U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice's dubious diplomatic skills.

A brighter spot is the U.S. Senate, where Wyoming Republican John Barrasso has introduced an amendment that would cut U.S. funding for the Palestinian Authority by 50%, among other measures. Somebody needs to send Mr. Abbas the message that there's a price to be paid for flouting his agreements with Israel and ignoring the pleas of the Administration.

When the U.N. voted in 1947 for partition, the Jews of Palestine demonstrated that they were ready to create a functional state. On Thursday, the U.N. voted for a "Palestine" that has become a byword for political dysfunction, ideological extremism, and a preference for symbolism over pragmatism. The tragedy of Thursday's vote is that it will only encourage Palestinians to remain in their make-believe world.

1a) US 'shocked' by new settlement plan

New York Times says Israel gave United States only few hours’ notice of decision to pursue development that could prevent creation of viable, contiguous Palestinian state. 'This is one of the most sensitive areas of territory,' says former Ambassador Kurtzer

The Israeli approval of 3,000 new housing units in east Jerusalem and the West Bank came as a shock to the US administration, the New York Times reported Saturday.

The Americans were particularly angry at the decision to pursue “preliminary zoning and planning preparations” for a development on the segment connecting the town of Ma'aleh Adumim to Jerusalem (known as area E1) that would separate Ramallah and Bethlehem from Jerusalem and could prevent the creation of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state.

According to the NY Times, the timing of the two actions seemed aimed at punishing the Palestinians for their United Nations bid, which resulted in Palestine being upgraded to the status of a non-member state.

The Obama administration rushed to condemn the action, and senior officials expressed their frustration over the fact that the construction decision came after Israeli officials had suggested that they would only employ harsh retaliatory measures if the Palestinians used their new status to turn to the International Criminal Court in The Hague

According to the American newspaper, Israel gave the United States only a few hours’ notice of the plan, and President Barack Obama did not call Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“This is not just another few houses in Jerusalem or another hilltop in the West Bank,” said former American ambassador to Israel and Egypt Dan Kurtzer. “This is one of the most sensitive areas of territory, and I would hope the United States will lay down the law.”

“A number of important countries are telling us that they think it’s wrong to do settlements, and these are our best friends,” noted a senior Israeli government official, who according to the NY Times spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of being fired.

“After they say this directly or indirectly, the immediate response is to build more settlements, even in one of the most controversial areas. E1? How does that make sense? What is the message the government is sending its best friends?”

While Israel has frequently announced settlement expansions at delicate political moments, the NY Times said, the E1 move came as a shock to many after a week in which both Israelis and Palestinians toned down their talk about day-after responses to the United Nations vote.

According to the report, the Palestinians are already advancing less contentious moves: the Palestinian Authority has begun changing its name to “Palestine” on official documents, contracts and websites, and several nations are considering raising the level of diplomatic relations, giving Palestinian envoys the title of ambassador.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------2)Noonan: The Drawn-Out Crisis: It's the Obama Way

The president seems to prefer frustration to good-faith negotiation.

The president's inviting Mitt Romney for lunch is a small thing but a brilliant move. It makes Mr. Obama look big, gracious. It implies the weakened, battered former GOP nominee is the leader of the Republican Party—and if the other party has to have a leader, the weakened, battered one is the one you want.

Mr. Romney is not the leader of the party; he left no footprints in the sand. There is no such thing as Romneyism, no movement of which he's the standard-bearer. Nor is he a Washington figure with followers. Party leaders already view him as a kind of accident, the best of a bad 2012 lot, a hiccup. The bottom-line attitude of Republican political pros: Look, this is a man who's lived a good life and would have been a heck of a lot better than Obama, and I backed him. But to be a successful Republican president now requires a kind of political genius, and he didn't have it and wasn't going to develop it. His flaws as a candidate would have been his flaws as president. We dodged a bullet.

Republicans may be the stupid party, but they're not the sentimental one. Democrats often like their losers. Republicans like winners, and they find reasons to be moved by them after they've won.

To the extent the GOP has an elected face, it is that of Speaker John Boehner. And he is precisely the man with whom Mr. Obama should be having friendly lunches. In fact, the meal with Mitt just may be a clever attempt to obscure the fact that the president isn't really meeting with those with whom he's supposed to be thrashing out the fiscal cliff.

Enlarge Image

Martin Kozlowski

At a news conference Thursday, Mr. Boehner looked frustrated. In fact, he looked exactly the way he looked at the end of the debt-ceiling crisis in the summer of 2011—like someone who wanted a deal, was willing to gamble to get it, and failed. There has been "no substantive progress" toward an agreement, he said. In a meeting with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and in a Wednesday night phone call with the president, he saw no willingness to reform or cut entitlement spending. What about an increase in tax rates? "Revenues are on the table."

In fact the Democratic position on entitlements seems to have hardened.

In a way Mr. Boehner's press conference was the usual, but in a way it was sad, because it harkened back to the protracted, harum-scarum and unsatisfying fiscal negotiations of the recent past.

The election is over, a new era begins—and it looks just like the old one. A crisis is declared. Confusion, frustration, and a more embittered process follow. This is . . . the Obama Way. Nothing has changed, even after a yearlong campaign that must, at times, have looked to him like a near-death experience. He still doesn't want to forestall jittery, gloom-laden headlines and make an early deal with the other guy. He wants to beat the other guy.

It's not as if Mr. Boehner and the Republicans wouldn't deal. They've been weakened and they know it. A year ago they hoped winning the Senate and the presidency would break the stasis. They won neither. Mr. Obama not only was re-elected, it wasn't that close, it was a clean win. If the president was clear about anything throughout the campaign, it was that he wanted to raise taxes on those he calls the rich. So you might say that a majority of the American people just endorsed that move.You watch and wonder: Why does it always have to be cliffs with this president? Why is it always a high-stakes battle? Why doesn't he shrewdly re-enact Ronald Reagan, meeting, arguing and negotiating in good faith with Speaker Tip O'Neill, who respected very little of what the president stood for and yet, at the end of the day and with the country in mind, could shake hands and get it done? Why is there never a sense with Mr. Obama that he understands the other guys' real position?

No one would know this better than Mr. Boehner, who has risen to where he is in part because he's good at seeing the lay of the land and admitting what's there.

The president would only benefit from showing he has the command and capability to meet, argue, press and come to agreement. It would be heartening to the country to see this, and would impress the world. And the Republicans would like to get it done.

In narrow, purely political terms, they need two things quickly. One is that it now looks to everyone—even to them!—like the entire domestic agenda of the Republican Party is tax-cutting, and any party's agenda has to be bigger than that. The other is that when they try to protect people from higher tax rates they always look like Diamond Jim Brady enjoying the company of the wealthy and not noticing anybody else. Republicans need time to work through, within their party, their own larger economic stands.

So they're weakened, they want this particular crisis to end, and they badly need to win entitlement reforms that would, in the end, buttress the president's historical standing—and the president isn't working with them every day and making a deal?

***

Here's just one thing they should be discussing. Mr. Obama wants to raise tax rates on those earning $250,000 or more, as we know, on the assumption that they are "the rich." But if you are a man with a wife and two kids making that salary and living in Westfield, N.J., in no way do you experience yourself to be rich, because you're not. You pay federal payroll and income taxes, state income and sales taxes and local property taxes, and after the mortgage, food and commuting costs you don't have much to spare.

Tighten the squeeze on that couple, and they'll change how they live. They'll stop sending the struggling son to a neighborhood tutor, they'll stop going out to dinner once a week, they'll cut off the baby sitter, fire the guy who once a month does yard work, and hold back on new clothes. Also the guy will peruse employment ads in Florida and Texas, potentially removing from blue-state New Jersey his heartening, taxpaying presence.

It really is worth a discussion, isn't it? A closer look at the numbers? Shared thoughts on how Americans really live?

***

In an interview last year, shortly after the debt-ceiling debate, Mr. Boehner spoke of how much he'd wanted a deal. He wanted entitlement reforms, cuts in spending, was happy to increase revenues through tax reform. He thought our fiscal realities the great issue of his speakership, said he meant it when he told staffers if it resulted in the end of his speakership then so be it. He'd have walked out of Congress knowing "I did the right thing."

That's who Obama should be negotiating with—in good faith, and with his eye not on ideology but on the country.

Instead, it's going to be a long four weeks. Scratch that, it's going to be a long four years.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------3)The Crisis of American Self-Government

Harvey Mansfield, Harvard's 'pet dissenter,' on the 2012 election, the real cost of entitlements, and why he sees reason for hope.

By SOHRAB AHMARI

'We have now an American political party and a European one. Not all Americans who vote for the European party want to become Europeans. But it doesn't matter because that's what they're voting for. They're voting for dependency, for lack of ambition, and for insolvency."

Few have thought as hard, or as much, about how democracies can preserve individual liberty and national virtue as the eminent political scientist Harvey Mansfield. When it comes to assessing the state of the American experiment in self-government today, his diagnosis is grim, and he has never been one to mince words.

Mr. Mansfield sat for an interview on Thursday at the Harvard Faculty Club. This year marks his 50th as a teacher at the university. It isn't easy being the most visible conservative intellectual at an institution that has drifted ever further to the left for a half-century. "I live in a one-party state and very much more so a one-party university," says the 80-year-old professor with a sigh. "It's disgusting. I get along very well because everybody thinks the fact that I'm here means the things I say about Harvard can't be true. I am a kind of pet—a pet dissenter."

Partly his isolation on campus has to do with the nature of Mr. Mansfield's scholarship. At a time when his colleagues are obsessed with trendy quantitative methods and even trendier "identity studies," Mr. Mansfield holds steadfast to an older tradition that looks to the Western canon as the best guide to human affairs. For him, Greek philosophy and the works of thinkers such as Machiavelli and Tocqueville aren't historical curiosities; Mr. Mansfield sees writers grappling heroically with political and moral problems that are timeless and universally relevant.

"All modern social science deals with perceptions," he says, "but that is a misnomer because it neglects to distinguish between perceptions and misperceptions."

Enlarge Image

Zina Saunders

Consider voting. "You can count voters and votes," Mr. Mansfield says. "And political science does that a lot, and that's very useful because votes are in fact countable. One counts for one. But if we get serious about what it means to vote, we immediately go to the notion of an informed voter. And if you get serious about that, you go all the way to voting as a wise choice. That would be a true voter. The others are all lesser voters, or even not voting at all. They're just indicating a belief, or a whim, but not making a wise choice. That's probably because they're not wise."

By that measure, the electorate that granted Barack Obama a second term was unwise—the president achieved "a sneaky victory," Mr. Mansfield says. "The Democrats said nothing about their plans for the future. All they did was attack the other side. Obama's campaign consisted entirely of saying 'I'm on your side' to the American people, to those in the middle. No matter what comes next, this silence about the future is ominous."

At one level Mr. Obama's silence reveals the exhaustion of the progressive agenda, of which his presidency is the spiritual culmination, Mr. Mansfield says. That movement "depends on the idea that things will get better and better and progress will be made in the actualization of equality." It is telling, then, that during the 2012 campaign progressives were "confined to defending what they've already achieved or making small improvements—student loans, free condoms. The Democrats are the party of free condoms. That's typical for them."

But Democrats' refusal to address the future in positive terms, he adds, also reveals the party's intent to create "an entitlement or welfare state that takes issues off the bargaining table and renders them above politics." The end goal, Mr. Mansfield worries, is to sideline the American constitutional tradition in favor of "a practical constitution consisting of progressive measures the left has passed that cannot be revoked. And that is what would be fixed in our political system—not the Constitution."

It is a project begun at the turn of the previous century by "an alliance of experts and victims," Mr. Mansfield says. "Social scientists and political scientists were very much involved in the foundation of the progressive movement. What those experts did was find ways to improve the well-being of the poor, the incompetent, all those who have the right to vote but can't quite govern their own lives. And still to this day we see in the Democratic Party the alliance between Ph.D.s and victims."

The Obama campaign's dissection of the public into subsets of race, sex and class resentments is a case in point. "Victims come in different kinds," says Mr. Mansfield, "so they're treated differently. You push different buttons to get them to react."

The threat to self-government is clear. "The American founders wanted people to live under the Constitution," Mr. Mansfield says. "But the progressives want the Constitution to live under the American people."

Harvey Mansfield Jr. was born in 1932 in New Haven, Conn. His parents were staunch New Dealers, and while an undergraduate at Harvard Mr. Mansfield counted himself a liberal Democrat.

Next came a Fulbright year in London and a two-year stint in the Army. "I was never in combat," he says. "In fact I ended up in France for a year, pulling what in the Army they call 'good duty' at Orléans, which is in easy reach of Paris. So even though I was an enlisted man I lived the life of Riley."

A return to the academy and a Harvard doctorate were perhaps inevitable but Mr. Mansfield also underwent a decisive political transformation. "I broke with the liberals over the communist issue," he says. "My initiating forces were anticommunism and my perception that Democrats were soft on communism, to use a rather unpleasant phrase from the time—unpleasant but true." He also began to question the progressive project at home: "I saw the frailties of big government exposed, one after another. Everything they tried didn't work and in fact made us worse off by making us dependent on an engine that was getting weaker and weaker."

His first teaching post came in 1960 at the University of California, Berkeley. In California, he came to know the German-American philosopher Leo Strauss, who at the time was working at Stanford University. "Strauss was a factor in my becoming conservative," he says. "That was a whole change of outlook rather than a mere question of party allegiance."

Strauss had studied ancient Greek texts, which emphasized among other things that "within democracy there is good and bad, free and slave," and that "democracy can produce a slavish mind and a slavish country." The political task before every generation, Mr. Mansfield understood, is to "defend the good kind of democracy. And to do that you have to be aware of human differences and inequalities, especially intellectual inequalities."

American elites today prefer to dismiss the "unchangeable, undemocratic facts" about human inequality, he says. Progressives go further: "They think that the main use of liberty is to create more equality. They don't see that there is such a thing as too much equality. They don't see limits to democratic equalizing"—how, say, wealth redistribution can not only bankrupt the public fisc but corrupt the national soul.

"Americans take inequality for granted," Mr. Mansfield says. The American people frequently "protect inequalities by voting not to destroy or deprive the rich of their riches. They don't vote for all measures of equalization, for which they get condemned as suffering from false consciousness. But that's true consciousness because the American people want to make democracy work, and so do conservatives. Liberals on the other hand just want to make democracy more democratic."

Equality untempered by liberty invites disaster, he says. "There is a difference between making a form of government more like itself," Mr. Mansfield says, "and making it viable." Pushed to its extremes, democracy can lead to "mass rule by an ignorant, or uncaring, government."

Consider the entitlements crisis. "Entitlements are an attack on the common good," Mr. Mansfield says. "Entitlements say that 'I get mine no matter what the state of the country is when I get it.' So it's like a bond or an annuity. What the entitlement does is give the government version of a private security, which is better because the government provides a better guarantee than a private company can."

That is, until the government goes broke, as has occurred across Europe.

"The Republicans should want to recover the notion of the common good," Mr. Mansfield says. "One way to do that is to show that we can't afford the entitlements as they are—that we've always underestimated the cost. 'Cost' is just an economic word for the common good. And if Republicans can get entitlements to be understood no longer as irrevocable but as open to negotiation and to political dispute and to reform, then I think they can accomplish something."

The welfare state's size isn't what makes it so stifling, Mr. Mansfield says. "What makes government dangerous to the common good is guaranteed entitlements, so that you can never question what expenses have been or will be incurred." Less important at this moment are spending and tax rates. "I don't think you can detect the presence or absence of good government," he says, "simply by looking at the percentage of GDP that government uses up. That's not an irrelevant figure but it's not decisive. The decisive thing is whether it's possible to reform, whether reform is a political possibility."

Then there is the matter of conservative political practice. "Conservatives should be the party of judgment, not just of principles," he says. "Of course there are conservative principles—free markets, family values, a strong national defense—but those principles must be defended with the use of good judgment. Conservatives need to be intelligent, and they shouldn't use their principles as substitutes for intelligence. Principles need to be there so judgment can be distinguished from opportunism. But just because you give ground on principle doesn't mean you're an opportunist."

Nor should flexibility mean abandoning major components of the conservative agenda—including cultural values—in response to a momentary electoral defeat. "Democrats have their cultural argument, which is the attack on the rich and the uncaring," Mr. Mansfield says. "So Republicans need their cultural arguments to oppose the Democrats', to say that goodness or justice in our country is not merely the transfer of resources to the poor and vulnerable. We have to take measures to teach the poor and vulnerable to become a little more independent and to prize independence, and not just live for a government check. That means self-government within each self, and where are you going to get that except with morality, responsibility and religion?"

So is it still possible to pull back from the brink of America's Europeanization? Mr. Mansfield is optimistic. "The material for recovery is there," he says. "Ambition, for one thing. I teach at a university where all the students are ambitious. They all want to do something with their lives." That is in contrast to students he has met in Europe, where "it was depressing to see young people with small ambitions, very cultivated and intelligent people so stunted." He adds with a smile: "Our other main resource is the Constitution."

Mr. Ahmari is an assistant books editor at the Journal.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------4)Cliff-jumping with Barack
By CharlesKrauthammer

Why are Republicans playing the Democrats’ game that the “fiscal cliff” is all about taxation?

House Speaker John Boehner already made the preemptive concession of agreeing to raise revenue. But the insistence on doing so by eliminating deductions without raising marginal rates is now the subject of fierce Republican infighting.

Where is the other part of President Obama’s vaunted “balanced approach”? Where are the spending cuts, both discretionary and entitlement: Medicare, Medicaid and now Obamacare (the health-care trio) and Social Security?

Social Security is the easiest to solve. So you get a sense of the Democrats’ inclination to reform entitlements when Dick Durbin, the Senate Democrats’ No. 2, says Social Security is off the table because it “does not add a penny to our deficit.”

This is absurd. In 2012, Social Security adds$165 billion to the deficit. Democrats pretend that Social Security is covered through 2033 by its trust fund. Except that the trust fund is a fiction, a mere “bookkeeping” device, as the Office of Management and Budget itself has written. The trust fund’s IOUs “do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits.” Future benefits “will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures.”

And draining the Treasury, as 10,000 baby boomers retire every day. Yet that’s off the table. And on Wednesday, the president threw down the gauntlet by demanding tax hikes now — with spending cuts to come next year. Meaning, until after Republicans have fallen on their swords, given up the tax issue and forfeited their political leverage.

Ronald Reagan once fell for a “tax now, cut later” deal that he later deeply regretted. Dems got the tax; he never got the cuts. Obama’s audacious new gambit is not a serious proposal to solve our fiscal problems. It’s a raw partisan maneuver meant to neuter the Republicans by getting them to cave on their signature issue as the hold-the-line party on taxes.

The objective is to ignite exactly the kind of internecine warfare on taxes now going on among Republicans. And to bury Grover Norquist.

I am not now, nor have ever been, a Norquistian. I don’t believe the current level of taxation is divinely ordained. Nor do I believe in pledges of any kind. But Norquist is the only guy in town to consistently resist the tax-and-spend Democrats’ stampede for ever-higher taxes to fund ever more reckless spending.

The hunt for Norquist’s scalp is a key part of the larger partisan project to make the Republicans do a George H.W. Bush and renege on their heretofore firm stand on taxes. Bush never recovered.

Why are the Republicans playing along? Because it is assumed that Obama has the upper hand. Unless Republicans acquiesce and get the best deal they can right now, tax rates will rise across the board on Jan. 1, and the GOP will be left without any bargaining chips.

But what about Obama? If we all cliff-dive, he gets to preside over yet another recession. It will wreck his second term. Sure, Republicans will get blamed. But Obama is never running again. He cares about his legacy. You think he wants a second term with a double-dip recession, 9 percent unemployment and a totally gridlocked Congress? Republicans have to stop playing as if they have no cards.

Obama is claiming an electoral mandate to raise taxes on the top 2 percent. Perhaps, but remember those incessant campaign ads promising a return to the economic nirvana of the Clinton years? Well, George W. Bush cut rates across the board, not just for the top 2 percent. Going back to the Clinton rates means middle-class tax hikes that yield four times the revenue that you get from just the rich.

So give Obama the full Clinton. Let him live with that. And with what also lies on the other side of the cliff: 28 million Americans newly subject to the ruinous alternative minimum tax.

Republicans must stop acting like supplicants. If Obama so loves those Clinton rates, Republicans should say: Then go over the cliff and have them all.

And add: But if you want a grand bargain, then deal. If we give way on taxes, we want, in return, serious discretionary cuts, clearly spelled-out entitlement cuts and real tax reform.

Otherwise, strap on your parachute, Mr. President. We’ll ride down together.

-------------------------------------------------5)The Fiscal Cliff: How To Call The Big Spenders' Bluff

By Matt Kibbe

The fiscal cliff – and the hullabaloo surrounding it — is a curious phenomenon. It has been over 3 years since Harry Reid’s Senate passed a budget. The U.S. federal government is over $16 trillion in debt. And Uncle Sam is borrowing 1 out of every 3 dollars he spends.

If there is a “fiscal cliff,” our federal government drove off the edge of it about ten trillion dollars ago.

And yet we’re being told another recession looms unless we avoid automatic tax hikes and spending cuts scheduled for Jan. 1. So powerful insiders are negotiating a “bipartisan deal” behind closed doors to give us … tax hikes and spending cuts. What’s the difference?

In Washington, “shared sacrifice” means everyone must sacrifice except the government. History has shown that in these bipartisan “deficit-reduction deals,” the tax hikes are immediate while the spending cuts are promised – yet never materialize.

In the last such “deal” in 2011, taxpayers were cornered into raising the debt ceiling by $2 trillion while a so-called super committee was created to find $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years. If the super committee failed to agree on where the cuts would be made, across-the-board cuts would kick in.

These promised “cuts,” by the way, are not actual budget cuts but rather projected reductions in a constantly growing baseline of federal spending. Even so, the super committee failed. Now the automatic “cuts” are at hand.

This is no time to get cold feet.

Congress made a promise to the American people to produce those savings. Now, some members of Congress are concerned the sequester’s defense savings are too deep. But that’s not a good reason to “call the whole sequester off.” Rather, it’s a reason to come up with a new mix of defense and non-defense savings by Jan. 1. The overall level of savings is a promise to taxpayers that must be kept.

Fiscal conservatives must draw a line in the sand. The nation’s most senior military officer, Adm. Mike Mulligan, has identified our nation’s biggest threat as … our national debt. The only thing worse than cutting national defense is not cutting spending at all.

Spending reduction is just one aspect of this debate. Genuine tax and entitlement reforms are also imperative, if we’re to avoid another economically damaging downgrade in Uncle Sam’s credit. Taxpayers deserve better than hurried Washington insiders behind closed doors tweaking the minutiae of our tangled labyrinth of a tax code.

Raising marginal tax rates, as Democrats want to do, will slow economic growth and kill jobs. Instead, we should close the existing loopholes in the tax system that give special deals to connected Washington insiders and move towards a flatter, fairer tax code that treats all Americans equally.

Reforming the tax code and big entitlements can’t be done in a couple of weeks. With these kinds of programs, the details are everything. Only specific changes to the law can actually drive the numbers to produce genuine savings — not vague promises of future “reforms.” Such changes take time.

Congress should do as it did after the 2010 elections, and pass an extension of all current tax rates, not just those on people making less than a certain amount. This would afford all parties—and the American people—time to develop the fundamental tax and entitlement reforms we need.

This is why FreedomWorks has activated its grassroots members to call Congress with a two-part message. 1) Keep your promise on the sequester savings. 2) Pass a one-year extension of all current tax rates, so America has time to pass serious tax and entitlement reforms.

By the way, there is some good news hiding in all the dust of the “fiscal cliff” fracas. The coalition of committed fiscal conservatives in Congress has grown in the past two elections. Constitutional conservatives in the House held on to the historic gains of 2010, while the Senate just picked up three principled fiscal conservatives in Ted Cruz, Jeff Flake, and Deb Fischer to replace GOP establishment types Kay Bailey Hutchison, Jon Kyl, and Olympia Snowe.

This new generation of legislative entrepreneurs is re-populating Washington with innovative energy. Expect these principled leaders to put real specifics on the table, craft thoughtful budget solutions, and carve pathways to needed tax and entitlement reforms next year – all things Senate Democrats haven’t seen fit to do for the past 3 years.

Fiscal conservatives are once again at the table, but we won’t bargain with ourselves against an arbitrary deadline. Your move, Harry Reid.

Matt Kibbe is the president of FreedomWorks and author of the “Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government’s Stranglehold on America.”

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------6)Why the Middle East is a mess

By Frida Ghitis

Editor's note: Frida Ghitis is a world affairs columnist for The Miami Herald and World Politics Review. A former CNN producer and correspondent, she is the author of "The End of Revolution: A Changing World in the Age of Live Television." Follow her on Twitter:@FridaGColumns.

(CNN) -- Have you looked at the Middle East lately? It's a giant mess,with civil wars, massive popular protests, cross-border fighting, armed insurgencies, exploding car bombs and on and on. And that's just in the past few days.

The Middle East refuses to acknowledge that the United States has decided to pivot toward Asia. It refuses to step out of the spotlight.

What we see today is proof that long-standing notions about the region -- the old conspiracy theories, the oversimplifications -- were just not true. Claims that the world paid attention to the area only because it had oil or that the key to every single problem in the Middle East involved Israel have been proved wrong.

The Middle East still monopolizes the attention of diplomats, forces military experts urgently back to their drawing boards, keeps world leaders awake at night and would do so even if it did not hold a drop of oil or if the Arab-Israeli conflict did not exist.

Why?

The Middle East stands, as it has for centuries, at the center of historical currents and conflicting ideologies.

What goes on there reverberates across national borders and leaps over oceans. When (most of) you attend religious services on the weekend or when you take off your shoes before boarding an airplane, you do it because of an idea that was born in the Middle East.

The region is in crisis because it suffers from endemic corruption, poor governance, discrimination against women and serious economic problems.

Rival philosophies are battling for the future -- Shiites competing with Sunnis, advocates of democracy challenging dictators, Islamists trying to overpower pluralists and Christians concerned over their future. Those are just a few of the ingredients fueling the conflicts.

Democracy supporters may have become more muscular, but other determined fighters aspire to create profoundly anti-woman, anti-liberal and anti-American states. The implications of those beliefs will become evident as history unfolds.

For America, the full pivot will have to wait.

Consider the recent fighting in Gaza, dramatic developments in Egypt, slaughter in Syria, multiple bombings in Iraq, or the Palestinian bid at the United Nations.

On the front burner:

Egypt

The streets of Cairo are boiling with rage against President Mohamed Morsy, who stunned the country -- and the White House -- when he announced he was taking powers in what many view as a return to dictatorship. Protesters worry about a creeping power grab by the Muslim Brotherhood. One respected Arab observer compared Morsy to Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. Morsy insists his move is necessary and only temporary. Eventually we will find out who is right.

The answer will help set the future of democracy in the Arab world, where Egypt leads in ideological, political and cultural trends. That's why when Egyptians picked up the flame from a popular uprising in Tunisia two years ago, every dictator in the region trembled. Every Western capital had to review its strategic alliances.

Iran

The United States might want to focus on Asia, but it cannot stop worrying about Iran. Some will insist the concern is about oil, but the U.S. could still buy oil from a nuclear-armed Iran. Obama, and the world, fears Iran's nuclear program will trigger a nuclear arms race in the most politically unstable part of the planet.

On Wednesday, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization vowed that Iran will accelerate enriching uranium, despite harsh international sanctions. Separately, U.S. officials told CNN that Tehran is alreadyfinding ways to ship weapons to the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in Gaza, just days after the U.S. helped broker a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel.

Israelis and Palestinians

This conflict remains a neuralgic point in the region and a challenge to American influence. Hamas vows to destroy Israel, while the Palestinian Authority refuses to sit down for talks, laying the blame at Israel's feet. Defying Washington's wishes, the authority took its case to the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday, where an automatic majority of Arab, Muslim and Non-Aligned Movement countriesguaranteed a positive response to its upgraded status request.

The move unhelpfully delinks the process of gaining statehood from the need to reach a negotiated peace.

Syria

In Syria, some 40,000 men women and children have died in the country's civil war. The rebels are making gains in their very worthy cause of overthrowing the repressive regime of Bashar al-Assad. But the West, including the United States, worries about what might come after al-Assad's fall.

The opposition includes progressive advocates of democracy, but it also counts all manner of other ideologies, from mild Islamists to extremists who would like to see Syria as part of a supranational Islamic caliphate. Washington looks confused about what to do, but it cannot afford to ignore what is happening.

It would be nice if the American president could decide which regions will command his attention.

But this is the Middle East, and like it or not, it promises to remain at or near the top of the agenda.