But have no fear the press and media still will build her up as the greatest Sec of State ever.
Meanwhile another slap down for Obama.(See 1 below.)
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Conservatives prepared to haggle over Hagel. (See 2 below.)
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Boehner may have been in DC quite a while but when it comes to understanding Obama he remains naive. (See 3 below.)
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Even some Obama supporters are beginning to say ouch! (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1Bolstered by 16 Russian warships, Assad nixes dialogue with “Western puppets”
)With a buildup of 16 Russian warships carrying thousands of marines on the Syrian coast “to deter the West from deploying ground forces in Syria,” Syrian Bashar Assad could afford to brazen it out in his first public speech in seven months. Speaking at the Damascus opera house, Sunday, Jan. 6, Assad said Syria no longer takes dictation from anyone and called on Syrian citizens to defend the country against “a war fought by only a handful of Syrians and many foreigners.”
He rejected dialogue with the opposition which he referred to as “puppets fabricated by the West.”
Both Washington and Moscow may be encouraging the rush to Syria of al Qaeda and other radical Islamist fighters so as to put them in harm’s way on the Syrian battlefield instead of their staying home to make trouble in Asian, European and other Middle East countries.
On this point, Assad remarked: “The West tried to get rid of these terrorists by drawing them into conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places, but were unsuccessful. Now they are sending them to Syria. “
The Syrian ruler went on to maintain that it would not be too hard to get rid of them, if “all citizens are mobilized against these outside forces.” It was important, too, he said, to fight the terrorists’ ideas, before they permeated Syrian society. He vowed to fight terror “so long as a single terrorist remains in the country" and to combat the rebels fighting to overthrow his regime, whom he called “terrorists” and “criminals” who "harbor al Qaeda’s extremist ideology."
Assad’s emphasis on this point indicates he counts on his war against Islamist terrorism as a long-term insurance policy for bolstering his regime’s survival.
In Moscow, a senior military spokesman announced that Russian vessels, including battleships and landing craft carrying marines and military vehicles, would remain in Syrian waters until Easter. He said quite candidly that the presence of Russian marines near Syrian waters “will deter the West from deploying ground forces in Syria." The Russian flotilla and marines are intended to be the counterweight to the six NATO Patriot missile interceptors, the US, Germany and Holland have installed on the Turkish-Syrian border. Russia along with Iran is providing Assad with a strong military shield, which is supplemented by Chinese diplomatic support.
The Syrian ruler’s speech Sunday was therefore far more upbeat than his last address in June. Then, he defended himself against pressing international demands to step down by vowing to “live and die in Syria.” In this speech, he makes no mention of resigning or throwing in the towel. In contrast to current predictions of his downfall, to be found in Western and Israeli media, Assad felt secure enough to set out his blueprint for ending the Syrian conflict.
The first stage of a political solution would require that “the regional powers stop funding and arming the opposition” – a reference to Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Western powers.
He then invited “those who have not betrayed Syria” to a conference of reconciliation, followed by a referendum on a new constitution, the formation of a government and an amnesty.
He rejected the Syrian opposition movement as “puppets fabricated by the West,” and said that Syria wanted to negotiate with the "master not the servants."
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2) GOPers to defend Israel from one of their own
By Matea Gold
Conservatives prepare to fight likely nomination of Hagel as defense secretary
With former Sen. Chuck Hagel's nomination as defense secretary imminent, conservatives denounced his views on Israel and Iran as out of step with mainstream foreign policy.
An administration official said Sunday that Hagel — a decorated Vietnam veteran, a Republican and a former two-term senator from Nebraska — would be nominated Monday to succeed Leon E. Panetta. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House planning.
The nomination is likely to set up a bruising confirmation fight. Critics on all sides already have been complaining about Hagel, with Republicans leading the charge.
Speaking on CNN's "State of the Union" earlier Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., predicted that Hagel would be "the most antagonistic secretary of defense toward the state of Israel in our nation's history," and called it an "in-your-face nomination."
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., while promising Hagel would get a "fair hearing," said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that he would get "tough questions" in a confirmation hearing.
Hagel is viewed with suspicion by many in his party for calling on Israel to negotiate with Palestinians and for his opposition to some sanctions against Iran. Since his possible nomination was floated late last year, he has come under fierce attack by conservatives.
He also has been criticized on the left for a remark he made in 1998 that a Clinton administration ambassadorial nominee was "openly, aggressively gay." Hagel recently apologized for that comment and pledged support for lesbian and gay military families.
Hagel, an Army veteran with two Purple Hearts, said in a recent interview with the history magazine Vietnam: "I'm not a pacifist. I believe in using force, but only after a very careful decision-making process. ... I will do everything I can to avoid needless, senseless war."
In the Senate, Hagel voted to give the George W. Bush administration authority to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, but later he harshly criticized the conduct of both wars, irritating fellow Republicans and making him popular with Democrats critical of those wars.
Critics have focused on his calls for direct negotiations with Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that the U.S. and Israel refuse to deal with directly, and his votes against some Iran sanctions.
And Hagel rankled many with comments he made in a 2006 interview with author and former State Department Mideast peace negotiator Aaron David Miller. "The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here," Hagel said, but "I'm a United States senator. I'm not an Israeli senator."
Graham said: "Quite frankly, Chuck Hagel is out of the mainstream of thinking, I believe, on most issues regarding foreign policy. . . . This an in-your-face nomination by the president to all of us who are supportive of Israel."
Miller, who had interviewed Hagel for a book he was writing on the Mideast peace negotiations, wrote recently that attempts to use his comment about the "Jewish lobby" to paint Hagel as anti-Semitic were "shameful and scurrilous." He noted that in the same interview, Hagel emphasized "shared values and the importance of Israeli security."
Backers say Hagel showed his support for Israel by voting repeatedly to provide it with military aid and by calling for a comprehensive peace deal with the Palestinians that should not include any compromise regarding Israel's Jewish identity and that would leave Israel "free to live in peace and security."
They note that he also supported three major Iran sanctions bills: the Iran Missile Proliferation Sanctions Act of 1998, the Iran Nonproliferation Act of 2000 and the Iran Freedom Support Act of 2006
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3)The Education of John Boehner
Leverage for the next clash: GOP willingness to let the spending sequester take effect.
By STEPHEN MOORE
What stunned House Speaker John Boehner more than anything else during his prolonged closed-door budget negotiations with Barack Obama was this revelation: "At one point several weeks ago," Mr. Boehner says, "the president said to me, 'We don't have a spending problem.' "
I am talking to Mr. Boehner in his office on the second floor of the Capitol, 72 hours after the historic House vote to take America off the so-called fiscal cliff by making permanent the Bush tax cuts on most Americans, but also to raise taxes on high earners. In the interim, Mr. Boehner had been elected to serve his second term as speaker of the House. Throughout our hourlong conversation, as is his custom, he takes long drags on one cigarette after another.
Mr. Boehner looks battle weary from five weeks of grappling with the White House. He's frustrated that the final deal failed to make progress toward his primary goal of "making a down payment on solving the debt crisis and setting a path to get real entitlement reform." At one point he grimly says: "I need this job like I need a hole in the head."
The president's insistence that Washington doesn't have a spending problem, Mr. Boehner says, is predicated on the belief that massive federal deficits stem from what Mr. Obama called "a health-care problem." Mr. Boehner says that after he recovered from his astonishment—"They blame all of the fiscal woes on our health-care system"—he replied: "Clearly we have a health-care problem, which is about to get worse with ObamaCare. But, Mr. President, we have a very serious spending problem." He repeated this message so often, he says, that toward the end of the negotiations, the president became irritated and said: "I'm getting tired of hearing you say that."
With the two sides so far from agreeing even on the nature of the country's fiscal challenge, making progress on how to address it was difficult. Mr. Boehner became so agitated with the lack of progress that he cursed at Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. "Those days after Christmas," he explains, "I was in Ohio, and Harry's on the Senate floor calling me a dictator and all kinds of nasty things. You know, I don't lose my temper. I never do. But I was shocked at what Harry was saying about me. I came back to town. Saw Harry at the White House. And that was when that was said," he says, referring to a pointed "go [blank] yourself" addressed to Mr. Reid.
Mr. Boehner confirms that at one critical juncture he asked Mr. Obama, after conceding on $800 billion in new taxes, "What am I getting?" and the president replied: "You don't get anything for it. I'm taking that anyway."
Why has the president been such an immovable force when it comes to cutting spending? "Two reasons," Mr. Boehner says. "He's so ideological himself, and he's unwilling to take on the left wing of his own party." That reluctance explains why Mr. Obama originally agreed with the Boehner proposal to raise the retirement age for Medicare, the speaker says, but then "pulled back. He admitted in meetings that he couldn't sell things to his own members. But he didn't even want to try."
Mr. Boehner is frustrated that Republicans were portrayed by the press as dogmatic and unyielding in these talks. "I'm the guy who put revenues on the table the day after the election," he says. "And I'm the guy who put the [income] threshold at a million dollars. Then we agreed to let the rates go up, on dividends, capital gains as a way of trying to move them into a deal. . . . But we could never get him to step up," Mr. Boehner says with a shrug. Negotiations with the White House ended in stalemate when "it became painfully obvious that the president won't cut spending."
Once the talks broke down, the eventual scaled-back deal with no spending cuts was brokered by Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, with Mr. Boehner on the sidelines. He says that after the tax package passed the Senate, the House Republican caucus debated two alternatives. One was to amend the Senate bill by attaching spending cuts, and the other was to vote up or down on the Senate bill.
"We were already off the cliff," he says of the rushed Jan. 1 vote, and he feared that a no vote would do "serious damage to the economy." He denies twisting arms to win passage. Even though a majority of Republicans voted no, and he took flak from conservative groups as a sellout, "in the end, most of our members wanted this to pass, but they didn't want to vote for it."
In hindsight, what does he think was his biggest strategic mistake? "What I should have done the day after the election was to come out and say: The House has done its work. The House passed a bill that replaced the sequester with real spending cuts. The House passed a plan extending all of the current tax rates. We passed a budget. We call upon the Senate to do their work."
The left has been crowing that it walked away with the crown jewels and forced Republicans to cave on their "no new taxes" principle. Mr. Boehner sees things differently: "The law of the land was that all of the rates were going up January 1, period. So the question was, were we going to cut taxes by $3.7 trillion."
He's no cheerleader for the final deal—he derides the special-interest corporate-tax provisions as containing "an awful lot of garbage" and grouses about "extending unemployment without further reforms"—but he defends it as the best bad outcome that could have been expected: "Who would have ever guessed that we could make 99% of the Bush tax cuts permanent? When we had a Republican House and Senate and a Republican in the White House, we couldn't get that. And so, not bad."
Where does the fiscal debate go from here? The speaker is adamant on two points: First, Republicans won't be agreeing to any more tax increases during the next two years. "The tax issue is resolved," he says, and it will be discussed only in the context of a broader debate about tax reform—specifically, lower rates. He dismisses the president's declaration that any future budget cuts will have to be "balanced" with more tax hikes.
Second, Mr. Boehner says he won't engage in any more closed-door budget negotiations with the White House, which are "futile." He adds: "Sure, I will meet with the president if he wants to," but House Republicans will from now on proceed with establishing a budget for the year following what is known as "regular order," and they will insist that Harry Reid and Senate Democrats pass a budget—something they haven't done in nearly four years—before proceeding.
The real showdown will be on the debt ceiling and the spending sequester in March. I ask Mr. Boehner if he will take the debt-ceiling talks to the brink—risking a government shutdown and debt downgrade from the credit agencies—given that it didn't work in 2011 and President Obama has said he won't bargain on the matter.
The debt bill is "one point of leverage," Mr. Boehner says, but he also hedges, noting that it is "not the ultimate leverage." He says that Republicans won't back down from the so-called Boehner rule: that every dollar of raising the debt ceiling will require one dollar of spending cuts over the next 10 years. Rather than forcing a deal, the insistence may result in a series of monthly debt-ceiling increases.
The Republicans' stronger card, Mr. Boehner believes, will be the automatic spending sequester trigger that trims all discretionary programs—defense and domestic. It now appears that the president made a severe political miscalculation when he came up with the sequester idea in 2011.
As Mr. Boehner tells the story: Mr. Obama was sure Republicans would call for ending the sequester—the other "cliff"—because it included deep defense cuts. But Republicans never raised the issue. "It wasn't until literally last week that the White House brought up replacing the sequester," Mr. Boehner says. "They said, 'We can't have the sequester.' They were always counting on us to bring this to the table."
Mr. Boehner says he has significant Republican support, including GOP defense hawks, on his side for letting the sequester do its work. "I got that in my back pocket," the speaker says. He is counting on the president's liberal base putting pressure on him when cherished domestic programs face the sequester's sharp knife. Republican willingness to support the sequester, Mr. Boehner says, is "as much leverage as we're going to get."
That leverage, he reasons, is what will force Democrats to the table on entitlements. "Think of it this way. We already have an agreement [capping] discretionary spending for 10 years. And we're already in our second year of it. This whole discussion on the budget over the next several months is going to be about these entitlements."
Given the bruising of the past several weeks, Mr. Boehner is surprisingly optimistic about getting a deal done on corporate and personal income-tax reform. "The president understands the need for tax reform," he says. "The president admitted . . . in the first meeting that we needed to do tax reform, and he was for a tax reform process that would lower rates."
Mr. Boehner sees Republicans with two goals: lowering tax rates and closing loopholes, as happened in 1986, and equalizing tax rates between small businesses and large corporations. His optimism that Democrats will agree to that framework seems Pollyannish since they are now advocating closing loopholes to raise revenues—without lowering rates.
The driving passion for Mr. Boehner in these fiscal debates is his conviction that trillion-dollar deficits are sapping the country of its energy and prosperity. When I ask him when the impact of this debt will start to be felt, he says: "It's already here today. It's killing our economy. It's causing investors to sit on their cash. They're afraid to invest. It's a wet blanket on top of our economy."
He sees debt as almost a moral failing, noting that when he grew up in a "little middle-class, blue-collar neighborhood" outside of Cincinnati, "nobody had debt. It was unheard of. I just don't do debt."
Mr. Boehner says that the only way to build long-term economic growth is to reduce the nation's debt through entitlement and tax reform. But can such a deal be achieved with a president who doesn't even think that Washington has a spending problem? "He believes in the power of government," Mr. Boehner answers. "I believe in the power of the American people. It is really that simple." And really that difficult.
Mr. Moore is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
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4)Obama supporters shocked, angry at new tax increases
By Joesph Curl
Sometimes, watching a Democrat learn something is wonderful, like seeing the family dog finally sit and stay at your command.
With President Obama back in office and his life-saving “fiscal cliff” bill jammed through Congress, the new year has brought a surprising turn of events for his sycophantic supporters.
“What happened that my Social Security withholding’s in my paycheck just went up?” a poster wrote on the liberal site DemocraticUnderground.com. “My paycheck just went down by an amount that I don’t feel comfortable with. I guarantee this decrease is gonna’ hurt me more than the increase in income taxes will hurt those making over 400 grand. What happened?”
Shocker. Democrats who supported the president’s re-election just had NO idea that his steadfast pledge to raise taxes meant that he was really going to raise taxes. They thought he planned to just hit those filthy “1 percenters,” you know, the ones who earned fortunes through their inventiveness and hard work. They thought the free ride would continue forever.
So this week, as taxes went up for millions of Americans — which Republicans predicted throughout the campaign would happen — it was fun to watch the agoggery of the left.
“I know to expect between $93 and $94 less in my paycheck on the 15th,” wrote the ironically named “RomneyLies.”
“My boyfriend has had a lot of expenses and is feeling squeezed right now, and having his paycheck shrink really didn’t help,” wrote “DemocratToTheEnd.”
“BlueIndyBlue” added: “Many of my friends didn’t realize it, either. Our payroll department didn’t do a good job of explaining the coming changes.”
So let’s explain something to our ill-informed Democratic friends. In 2009, Mr. Obama enacted a “holiday” on the payroll tax deduction from employees’ paychecks, dropping the rate from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent. But like the holidays, the drop ended, and like New Year‘s, the revelers woke up the next morning with a massive hangover and a pounding head.
“Bake,” who may have been trolling the site, jumped into the thread posted Friday. “My paycheck just went down. So did my wife’s. This hurts us. But everybody says it’s a good thing, so I guess we just suck it up and get used to it. I call it a tax increase on the middle class. I wonder what they call it. Somebody on this thread called it a ‘premium.’ Nope. It’s a tax, and it just went up.”
Some in the thread argued that the new tax — or the end of the “holiday,” which makes it a new tax — wouldn’t really amount to much. One calculated it would cost about $86 a month for most people. “Honeycombe8,” though, said that amount is nothing to sneeze at.
“$86 a month is a lot. That would pay for … Groceries for a week, as someone said. More than what I pay for parking every month, after my employer’s contribution to that. A new computer after a year. A new quality pair of shoes … every month. Months of my copay for my hormones. A new thick coat (on sale or at discount place). It would pay for what I spend on my dogs every month … food, vitamins, treats.”
The Twittersphere was even funnier.
“Really, how am I ever supposed to pay off my student loans if my already small paycheck keeps getting smaller? Help a sister out, Obama,” wrote “Meet Virginia.” “Nancy Thongkham” was much more furious. “F***ing Obama! F*** you! This taking out more taxes s*** better f***ing help me out!! Very upset to see my paycheck less today!”
“_Alex™” sounded bummed. “Obama I did not vote for you so you can take away alot of money from my checks.” Christian Dixon seemed crestfallen. “I’m starting to regret voting for Obama.” But “Dave” got his dander up over the tax hike: “Obama is the biggest f***ing liar in the world. Why the f*** did I vote for him”?
Of course, dozens of posters on DemocraticUnderground sought to blame it all (as usual) on President George W. Bush. “Your taxes went up because the leaders need to dig us out of this criminal deficit hole we are in which has been caused because taxes were too low during the Bush years. Everyone has to help by spreading the wealth around a little. Power to the correct people!” posted “Orinoco.”
But in fact, it was Mr. Obama who enacted the “holiday,” and, to be clear, the tax cut that he pushed throughout the campaign — remember? 98 percent of Americans will get a cut under his plan? — was really the extension of the Bush tax suts. Thus, it was Mr. Obama who raised taxes on millions of Americans, not Mr. Bush.
How many Americans? The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington put the total at 77.1 percent of all wage earners. In fact, “More than 80 percent of households with incomes between $50,000 and $200,000 would pay higher taxes. Among the households facing higher taxes, the average increase would be $1,635, the policy center said,” according to a Bloomberg News article. Hilariously, the tax burden will rise more for someone making $30,000 a year (1.7 percent) than it does for someone earning $500,000 annually (1.3 percent).
A whole new wave of Obama supporters still don’t even know: They’ll get their first 2013 paychecks on the 15th of the month. So when you’re shooting the breeze in the lunchroom with your grumbling co-workers on the 16th, just ask them, “Who’d you vote for in November?” When they say Mr. Obama, just tell them: “Well, you got what you voted for. You did know he was going to raise taxes, right?”
The looks on their faces will be priceless.
*bull; Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at jcurl@washingtontimes.com.
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