By Salah Al Naimi
http://www.asharq-e.com/news.asp?section=1&id=32899
Gaza, Asharq Al-Awsat—Despite the optimistic tone of Fatah and Hamas
concerning their reconciliation efforts, the factions have failed to reached
an understanding on key issues, an informed Palestinian source told Asharq
Al-Awsat.
Moreover, further discussion of issues considered at the meeting of the PLO
leadership in Cairo in last week has been postponed as the parties could not
reach an agreement.
The sources noted that the Cairo meeting was originally intended as a
formality to endorse the consensus reached under the Cairo Agreement and the
Doha Declaration, but that members of Fatah decided to revisit many issues
that had already been discussed.
According to the source, this resulted in an argument over almost every
issue that was agreed upon, taking negotiations back to square one.
The source went on to say that there are several key issues which are
hindering the reconciliation process. Foremost among them is a disagreement
on the current election system. Fatah insists on using the proportional
representation system in all of the elections to the presidency, the
legislative council, and the Palestine National Council [parliament in
exile]. For its part, the Hamas Movement wants at least 25 percent of the
MPs be elected under the electoral constituencies system.
Another point of contention between the two Palestinian rival groups is the
issues of the legislative council deputies automatically becoming members of
the Palestine National Council. Fatah demands that the elected members of
the legislative council in the West Bank and Gaza Strip be automatically
considered members of the national council, while Hamas insists that
separate elections be held.
Another lingering issue is the fitness of the central elections committee to
oversee elections to the national council, in addition to a disagreement
over the designation of constituencies for Palestinians living abroad. There
were varying views on this point as some factions demand that the
Palestinians living abroad form one constituency, while others argue for
more than one constituency for this purpose. This is in addition to another
disagreement over the electability threshold, the sources noted.
In a related development, member of the PLO Executive Committee and member
of the Fatah Movement Central Committee Saeb Erekat strongly denied that
there is a connection between US President Barack Obama's expected visit to
the Palestinian Authority areas in March and interruption of the national
reconciliation efforts.
In statements to the Voice of Palestine Radio yesterday morning, Erekat said
that national reconciliation efforts will not be delayed until after
President Obama or Secretary of State John Kerry visits the region. Earlier,
sources close to Hamas accused Fatah of deliberately postponing the process
until Obama visits the Palestinian Authority areas and Israel.
Erekat added: "The United States may not want reconciliation, and this is
its own position, but President Abbas believes that reconciliation is a
higher interest and the first stage of our moves [towards statehood]."
Erekat pointed out that after Palestine was accepted at the United Nations,
"we say that today is different from yesterday, and Palestinian thinking
must reach new horizons to keep pace with this development." He added: "The
idea that Washington and Israel will impose conditions and a veto on the
reconciliation is shameful and we must renounce it."
Erekat explained: "Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas insisted on announcing
the formation of a government of technocrats under his leadership on the
same day in which he will issue a decree to hold elections within 90 days."
Erekat defended the Fatah's stand on holding early elections. He rejected an
argument by Hamas, which emphasizes that elections must be preceded by moves
to improve security before the elections.
In the same context, member of Hamas’s Political Bureau Khalil al-Hayyah
said that the issue of freedom of movement and political association in the
West Bank was an obstacle to the completion of the reconciliation process.
He emphasized that formation of the next government and setting a date for
elections are contingent on completing the reconciliation process, which
includes resolving this issue.
He also pointed out that agreement on the formation and term of the
government depends on agreement between the factions on the circumstances
and conditions for holding elections to the national council, the
legislative council, and the presidency.
For his part, president of the Independent Figures Grouping in the West Bank
Khalil Assaf held both the Fatah and Hamas movements responsible for the
failure of the Cairo meeting.
He told reporters from the Safa News Agency: "It is obvious that party and
personal interest was given preference over the national interest. And I
hold both parties responsible for this failure, albeit to different
degrees.”
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2)Why do societies give up?
By Victor Davis Hanson
Why do once-successful societies ossify and decline?
Hundreds of reasons have been adduced for the fall of Rome and the end of the Old Regime in 18th-century France. Reasons run from inflation and excessive spending to resource depletion and enemy invasion, as historians attempt to understand the sudden collapse of the Mycenaeans, the Aztecs and, apparently, the modern Greeks. In literature from Catullus to Edward Gibbon, wealth and leisure -- and who gets the most of both -- more often than poverty and exhaustion implode civilization
One recurring theme seems consistent in Athenian literature on the eve of the city's takeover by Macedon: social squabbling over slicing up a shrinking pie. Athenian speeches from that era make frequent reference to lawsuits over property and inheritance, evading taxes, and fudging eligibility for the dole. After the end of the Roman Republic, reactionary Latin literature -- from the likes of Juvenal, Petronius, Suetonius, Tacitus -- pointed to "bread and circuses," as well as excessive wealth, corruption and top-heavy government.
For Gibbon and later French scholars, "Byzantine" became a pejorative description of a top-heavy Greek bureaucracy that could not tax enough vanishing producers to sustain a growing number of bureaucrats. In antiquity, inflating the currency by turning out cheap bronze coins was often the favored way to pay off public debts, while the law became fluid to address popular demands rather than to protect time-honored justice.
After the end of World War II, most of today's powerhouses were either in ruins or still pre-industrial -- China, France,Germany, Japan, South Korea, Russia and Taiwan. Only the United States and Great Britain had sophisticated economies that survived the destruction of the war. Both were poised to resupply a devastated world with new ships, cars, machinery and communications.
In comparison to Frankfurt, the factories of 1945 Liverpool had survived mostly intact. Yet Britain missed out on the postwar German economic miracles, in part because after the deprivations of the war, the war-weary British turned to class warfare and nationalized their main industries, which soon became un-competitive.
The gradual decline of a society is often a self-induced process of trying to meet ever-expanding appetites, rather than a physical inability to produce past levels of food and fuel, or to maintain adequate defense. Americans have never had safer workplaces or more sophisticated medical care -- and never have so many been on disability.
King Xerxes' huge Persian force of 250,000 sailors and soldiers could not defeat a rather poor Greece in 480- 479 B.C.Yet a century and a half later, a much smaller invading force from the north under Philip II of Macedon overwhelmed the far more prosperous Greek descendants of the victors of Salamis.
For hundreds of years, the outmanned legions of the tiny and poor Roman Republic survived foreign invasions. Yet centuries later, tribal Goths, Visigoths, Vandals and Huns overran the huge Mediterranean-wide Roman Empire.
Given our unsustainable national debt -- nearly $17 trillion and climbing -- America is said to be in decline, although we face no devastating plague, nuclear holocaust, or shortage of oil or food.
Americans have never led such affluent material lives -- at least as measured by access to cell phones, big-screen TVs, cheap jet travel and fast food. Obesity rather than malnutrition is the greater threat to national health. Flash mobs go after electronics stores, not food markets. Americans spend more money on Botox, face lifts and tummy tucks than on the age-old scourges of polio, small pox and malaria.
If Martians looked at the small box houses, one-car families and primitive consumer goods of the 1950s, they would have thought the postwar United States, despite a balanced budget in 1956, was impoverished. In comparison, an indebted contemporary America would seem to aliens flush with cash, as consumers jostle for each new update to their iPhones.
By any historical marker, the future of Americans has never been brighter. The United States has it all: undreamed new finds of natural gas and oil, the world's pre-eminent food production, continual technological wizardly, strong demographic growth, a superb military and constitutional stability.
Yet we don't talk confidently about capitalizing and expanding on our natural and inherited wealth. Instead, Americans bicker over entitlement spoils as the nation continues to pile up trillion-dollar-plus deficits. Enforced equality rather than liberty is the new national creed. The medicine of cutting back on government goodies seems far worse than the disease of borrowing trillions from the unborn to pay for them.
In August 1945, Hiroshima was in shambles, while Detroit was among the most innovative and wealthiest cities in the world. Contemporary Hiroshima now resembles a prosperous Detroitof 1945; parts of Detroit look like they were bombed decades ago.
History has shown that a government's redistribution of shrinking wealth, in preference to a private sector's creation of new sources of it, can prove more destructive than even the most deadly enemy.
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3)
'Was the Iraq war worth it?' is a question unworthy of debate
So why are we still asking it?
by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
With the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq approaching, a predictable stream of commentary and events asking the familiar question of whether the war was 'worth it' is beginning to arise. This trend has so far included a planned debate at Goldsmiths, University of London featuring prominent pro and anti-war commentators like Mehdi Hasan and David Aaronovitch; a conference hosted by the anti-war activist group 'Stop the War Coalition'; and a few articles in the Huffington Post and the Sunday Sun.
The main justification invoked for debating whether the war was 'worth it' is so that we might learn 'lessons' for the future. With the Iraq War, however, it is clear that the same old talking points are going to be brought up: 'Saddam was a brutal dictator!'; 'Look how much better off the Kurds are!'; 'Iraq is a democracy today!'; 'The war has killed up to a million people!'; 'The war has only fostered more terrorism!'; 'There were no WMDs!'; 'It was all about oil!'. Is this familiar debate worth having at all? Not really.
First, the war came about in the very unique circumstances of the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with the idea that 'pre-emptive' military action - including full-scale invasions - against perceived rogue regimes was justified to stop them from allowing terrorists to acquire WMDs. Along with this doctrine came the notion that a war against Saddam would be a quick and easy job dealing with 'unfinished business' from the First Gulf War.
Further, it was believed that from the overthrow of the dictatorship would arise a self-sustaining Western-style democracy that would serve as an example to other countries in the region.
Yet the Middle East in particular has changed considerably since the invasion of Iraq, and it is quite clear that none of the above concepts guides Western policy towards the region today. There are no situations at the present time- and for the foreseeable future- analogous to Iraq as regards policy debate. Fretting that any involvement in a conflict is going to be 'another Iraq' is simply a cliché. This was especially so when it came to the Libyan civil war.
Further, there is nothing to be learnt from the talking points mentioned earlier that have been repeated ad nauseam, for they inevitably lead to cherry-picking narrative. Thus, the pro-war advocates who highlight Iraq's supposed status as a democracy ignore the fact that as of this year, the non-partisan think-tank Freedom House still classifies Iraq as 'Not Free', with scores for civil and political rights downgraded from last year and now equal to those of Iran. While they recognize elsewhere that democracy is not simply about holding free elections, they do not apply this standard to Iraq.
Similarly, in their idealization of the Kurds' situation, they overlook the authoritarian tendencies of the ruling parties in the autonomous Kurdish government that cracked down on protestors in 2011 and pre-emptively put a stop to further planned demonstrations, rather than addressing the demands for political and anti-corruption reform.
On the other hand, anti-war commentators tend to throw about greatly exaggerated death tolls of 650,000 (the Lancet survey) or over 1 million (Opinion Research Business Survey). In arguing that the war was nothing more than a project to secure Iraq's oil supplies and impose a neo-liberal economic model, they ignore the fact that the West was already buying oil from Iraq before 2003 and that even now, the oil industry and the economy more generally remain centralized and state-run enterprises.
In truth, the question of whether the war was 'worth it' is something for Iraqis (including me) to decide among themselves. As for Western observers, real lessons from Iraq are not to be learned by debating this old question.
Instead, what is needed is for researchers, analysts, and historians to write on the history of the decision-making in the build-up to the war, the invasion itself, and subsequent events in the post-Saddam environment, without ideological prejudice. That is, if one reads an account of, say, the aftermath of the invasion, it should not be apparent in any way if the writer in question was for or against the invasion. This does not mean that one cannot have a personal opinion on that matter, but it should not infringe upon one's work.
It is indeed possible to undertake such an enterprise. In this context I recommend the work of Joel Wing of Musings on Iraq, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, and the Iraq Body Count.
From objective accounts of the history of the lead-up to and the aftermath of the invasion, there are valuable discussions to be had:. How much of a role did the surge in Iraq really have? Why did no sharp decline in violence similarly accompany the troop surge in Afghanistan? Why was the reconstruction effort generally a failure? When rebuilding the security forces of a country, should the focus be on quality or quantity?
These are all questions worthy of debate, and questions which will continue to go unanswered while we concentrate instead on whether the war was 'worth it'.
Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum and a student at Brasenose College, Oxford University.
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4) Obama: The Audacity of Freedom
President Obama is a freer man than he has been at any point in his presidency. He is free from the need to save an economy close to collapse, from illusions that Republicans in Congress would work with him readily, from the threat of a rising tea party movement, and from the need to win re-election.
This sense of freedom gave his State of the Union address an energy, an ease and a specificity that were lacking in earlier speeches written with an eye toward immediate political needs. It was his most Democratic State of the Union, unapologetic in channeling the love Bill Clinton and Lyndon Johnson had for placing long lists of initiatives on the nation's agenda. Obama sees his second term not as a time of consolidation but as an occasion for decisively changing the direction of our politics.
Here was an Obama unafraid to lay out a compelling argument for the urgency of acting on global warming. He was undaunted in challenging the obsession with the federal budget -- and in scolding Congress for going from "one manufactured crisis to the next." By insisting that "we can't just cut our way to prosperity" and that "deficit reduction alone is not an economic plan," he brought to mind the great liberal economist John Maynard Keynes. He sought to add another big achievement to near universal health care coverage, announcing a new goal of making "high-quality preschool available to every single child in America."
And Obama made clear his determination to shift the center of gravity in the nation's political conversation away from anti-government conservatism, offering a vision that is the antithesis of the supply-side economics that has dominated conservative thought since the Reagan era.
If supply-siders claim that prosperity depends upon showering financial benefits on wealthy "job creators" at the economy's commanding heights, Obama argued that economic well-being emanates from the middle and bottom, with help from a government that "works on behalf of the many, and not just the few."
The "true engine of America's economic growth," he said, is a "rising, thriving middle class." He continued: "It is our unfinished task to restore the basic bargain that built this country, the idea that if you work hard and meet your responsibilities, you can get ahead, no matter where you come from, no matter what you look like or who you love." With that last phrase, he linked gay rights to an older liberalism's devotion to class solidarity and racial equality.
An Obama no longer worried about re-election was the worst nightmare of conservatives who feared he would veer far to the left if given the chance. In the GOP's response, Sen. Marco Rubio conjured that liberal bogeyman, declaring that the president's "solution to virtually every problem we face is for Washington to tax more, borrow more, and spend more."
But Rubio's rhetoric felt stale, disconnected from the Obama who spoke before him. Obama did speak for liberalism, yes, but it is a tempered liberalism. His preschool proposal, after all, is modeled in part on the success of a program in Oklahoma, one of the nation's reddest states. Most of the president's initiatives involve modest new spending and many, including his infrastructure and manufacturing plans, are built on partnerships with private industry.
Even the president's welcomed call to raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour and to index it to inflation was cautious by his own standards. In 2008, Obama had urged a $9.50 minimum wage, and it rightly ought to be set at $10 or above.
Moreover, the president's words were carefully calibrated to the issue in question. On immigration reform -- in deference to cross-party work in which Rubio himself is engaged -- Obama kept the rhetorical temperature low, praising "bipartisan groups in both chambers." But he invoked all of his rhetorical skills on the matter of gun safety, a more complex legislative sell. His gospel-preacher's variations on the phrase "they deserve a vote" will long echo in the House chamber.
No, the liberated Obama is not some new, leftist tribune. He's the moderately progressive Obama who started running for president before there was a financial crisis or a tea party. In his 2006 book "The Audacity of Hope," he proposed to end polarization by organizing a "broad majority of Americans" who would be "re-engaged in the project of national renewal" and would "see their own self-interest as inextricably linked to the interests of others." On Tuesday night, creating this majority was what he still had in mind.
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5)Our Real Problem Is Cultural Decay, Not Guns
There's a story told about a Paris chief of police who was called to a department store to stop a burglary in progress.
Upon his arrival, he reconnoitered the situation and ordered his men to surround the entrances of the building next door.
When questioned about his actions, he replied that he didn't have enough men to cover the department store's many entrances but he did have enough for the building next door.
Let's see whether there are similarities between his strategy and today's gun control strategy.
Last year, Chicago had 512 homicides; Detroit had 411; Philadelphia had 331; and Baltimore had 215.
Those cities are joined by other dangerous cities—such as St. Louis, Memphis, Tenn., Flint, Mich., and Camden, N.J. — and they also lead the nation in shootings, assaults, rapes and robberies.
Both the populations of those cities and their crime victims are predominantly black. Each year, more than 7,000 blacks are murdered.
Black Victims
Close to 100% of the time, the murderer is another black person.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims.
Though blacks are 13% of the nation's population, they account for more than 50% of homicide victims.
Nationally, the black homicide victimization rate is six times that of whites, and in some cities, it's 22 times that of whites.
Coupled with being most of the nation's homicide victims, blacks are also most of the victims of violent personal crimes, such as assault and robbery.
The magnitude of this tragedy can be seen in another light. According to a Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute study, between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 blacks were lynched at the hands of whites.
What percentage of murders, irrespective of race, are committed with what are being called assault weapons?
You'd be hard put to come up with an amount greater than 1 or 2%. In fact, according to FBI data from 2011, there were 323 murders committed with a rifle of any kind but 496 murders committed with a hammer or a club.
But people who want to weaken our Second Amendment guarantees employ a strategy like that of the Paris chief of police.
They can't do much about hammers, clubs, fists or pistols, but by exploiting public ignorance, they might have a bit of success getting an "assault weapon" ban that will have little impact on violent crime.
There are other measures these people employ in an attempt to end violence that border on lunacy. Massachusetts' Hyannis West Elementary recently warned a 5-year-old's parents that if their son made another gun from a Legos set, he'd be suspended.
Elementary-school children have been suspended or otherwise disciplined for drawing a picture of a gun or pointing a finger and saying, "Bang, bang."
I shudder to think about what would happen to kids in a schoolyard if they played, as I played nearly 70 years ago, "cops 'n' robbers" or "cowboys 'n' Indians."
Maybe today's politically correct educators would cut the kids a bit of slack if they said they were playing "cowboys 'n' Native Americans."
What explains a lot of what we see today, which politicians and their liberal allies would never condemn, is growing cultural deviancy.
Twenty-nine percent of white children, 53% of Hispanics and 73% of black children are born to unmarried women.
No Dad, Big Problem
The absence of a husband and father from the home is a strong contributing factor to poverty, school failure, crime, drug abuse, emotional disturbance and a host of other social problems.
By the way, the low marriage rate among blacks is relatively new.
Census data show that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults from 1890 to 1940. In 2009, the poverty rate among married whites was 3.2%; for blacks, it was 7%, and for Hispanics, it was 13.2%.
The higher poverty rates — 22% for whites, 35.6% for blacks and 37.9% for Hispanics — are among unmarried families.
Other forms of cultural deviancy are found in the kind of music accepted today that advocates killing and rape and other vile acts.
Punishment for criminal behavior is lax. Today's Americans accept behavior that our parents and grandparents never would have accepted.
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6)
Let the bleak times roll
One is a display of wretched excess, when giddy and rowdy participants give in to reckless and irresponsible behavior.
The other is a street festival in New Orleans.
There is, thankfully, less nudity in the House chamber for the president’s annual address, and (slightly) less inebriation. But what occurs beneath the Capitol Dome is as debauched as anything on Bourbon Street.
The State of the Union ritual is by now familiar to most Americans. President Obama leads the Democratic side of the chamber to a series of standing ovations for proposals that everybody knows won’t become law. Republicans show their seriousness of purpose by smirking or making stony faces — and by inviting as guests to the speech people such as rocker Ted Nugent, who has called the president a “piece of [excrement]” who should “suck on my machine gun.”
But this spectacle, unlike the one in Louisiana, is not all harmless fun. Obama made clear that he is not entertaining serious spending cuts or major entitlement reforms. Republicans, in their responses, repeated that they are not budging on taxes. The hard choices will have to wait for another day.
The standoff gives new meaning to Fat Tuesday: The nation’s finances are a mess, but — what the heck? — let’s have another round. No wonder a new Washington Post poll found that 56 percent of Americanshave a dim view of the country’s political system.
Early in his address, Obama pronounced himself “more than halfway towards the goal of $4 trillion in deficit reduction that economists say we need to stabilize our finances.” He blithely proclaimed that the rest of the job could be done by making “modest reforms” to Medicare and “getting rid of tax loopholes and deductions for the well-off.”
He didn’t mention that this would leave the country with a historically high debt level — and would be but a temporary fix before health-care costs explode in a decade. Departing from his prepared text, Obama challenged the idea that “deficit reduction is a big emergency, justifying making cuts in Social Security.”
The opposition, by contrast, was up to the usual antics for such evenings. Democrats across the chamber wore green ribbons to honor the victims of the Newtown, Conn., shootings, as did many Senate Republicans, but no member of the House Republican majority appeared to have joined in the remembrance.
Republicans glowered as Democrats applauded Obama for criticizing their efforts to protect military spending at the expense of other programs. They glared as Democrats applauded his call for equal treatment for all military personnel, “gay and straight.” Former vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan smiled dismissively and whispered to a neighbor as Obama spoke of the budget.
They declined to join a standing ovation even when Obama said that “the state of our union is stronger.” Up in the public gallery, Nugent, in jeans and cowboy boots, didn’t even rise with the rest of the chamber when House Speaker John Boehner said he had “the high honor and distinct privilege of introducing the president of the United States.”
Adding to the carnival atmosphere, spectators in the gallery offered shouts of encouragement; one woman was removed from the hall. The raucousness on the floor reached its peak when Obama called for a vote on gun-control measures in honor of the victims. Republican leaders squirmed, then stood awkwardly, as Democrats chanted, “They deserve a vote!”
Washington’s version of Mardi Gras had begun early in the day, at the Capitol South Metro station, where members of a nonpartisan balanced-budget group, Bankrupting America, offered beads to passersby willing to “show us your cuts.”
By that standard, few necklaces would be distributed. Democrats and Republicans alike would sooner bare their private parts than come clean about what government programs they would cut. Even Ryan, who is drafting a budget that could slash domestic discretionary spending by 40 percent over a decade, doesn’t like to be specific. And House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi says, “ It is almost a false argument to say we have a spending problem.”
Pelosi’s formulation is just as reckless as the Republicans’ mantra: “We don’t have a revenue problem; we have a spending problem.”
In reality, we eventually need both spending cuts and tax increases — and lots of them. But sacrifice will have to wait. In Washington, they’re still partying like there’s no tomorrow.
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7) OBAMA THE CHEAPSKATE
Exclusive: Joseph Farah asks, why not have feds raise minimum wage to $100 an hour?
You heard it in Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address.
He called for raising the minimum wage to $9 an hou
He explained, “We know our economy is stronger when we reward an honest day’s work with honest wages. But today, a full-time worker making the minimum wage earns $14,500 a year. Even with the tax relief we’ve put in place, a family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line. That’s wrong. That’s why, since the last time this Congress raised the minimum wage, 19 states have chosen to bump theirs even higher. …”
Some of you may support Obama’s idea. Some of you may oppose it.
My thought is that nobody in Washington – not Obama, not the Congress and not the Supreme Court – has any constitutional authority to insert itself between employers or potential employers and employees. If two consenting adults, as Obama believes, can do whatever they want to each other sexually, surely two consenting adults have the right to agree or not to agree to perform services for whatever wages they deem appropriate – without any interference from the federal government.
But that’s not what I want to talk about today.
Let’s forget the Constitution for a moment. After all, most of Washington ignores it every minute of every day.
Let’s look at this the way Obama’s own supporters – the people Rush Limbaugh accurately characterizes as “low-information voters” – might look at it.
Only $9 an hour?
What kind of a cheapskate is Obama?
Why only $9 an hour?
If indeed Obama wants every American to work for a “living wage,” why does he aim so low?
Obama’s proposal translates, for the benefit of the low-information-voter crowd, to a mere $360 a week at a full-time 40 hours. Does he consider that to be a living wage in his economy? Has he seen the price of gasoline lately? Has he been to a grocery store in the last four years? Even with 11,629 more Americans going on food stamps every day under his leadership, $360 a week doesn’t go very far.
If Obama truly believes raising the minimum wage is important to raising the standard of living in the U.S., why not raise it dramatically?
What would be wrong with raising it to $100 an hour?
That would bring the lowest-paid full-time employee in America to a salary of $4,000 a week, or $208,000 a year.
Just think of how that would raise the tax base. It would solve the deficit problem Obama has created in no time at all, right?
Well, no, of course it wouldn’t.
The reason it wouldn’t is because businesses would close all over the country. Hiring would cease. It would result in massive new unemployment. Surely anyone with half a brain, including most low-information-voters, would even understand that.
So rather than to inflict that massive new pain into an already flailing economy, Obama suggests injecting just a little more pain, to cause a little more unemployment, to make employers less likely to hire.
Does that make any sense?
Or does it make more sense to get government out of the way and allow employers to hire people willing to work for anything they deem an appropriate wage?
For instance, if I want to hire a full-time gardener for $300 a week, maybe even offering a homeless person a place to live on my property, and someone wanted that job, would it be wrong to allow him to accept it? That is what Obama believes. It would be bad.
Obama would rather that homeless person with no skills remains just where he or she is – no home, no job, no hope.
He acts like he cares, but he doesn’t care about people who are down and out or for those looking for their first break entering the workforce. He only cares about sounding compassionate. That $9 is not coming out of his pocket. He wants to mandate that it comes out of the pockets of the people who are actually providing jobs and opportunities for people in a very tough economy he himself has exacerbated.
So let’s not raise the minimum wage.
Let’s eliminate it.
And watch the magic of the free market at work.
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8)WHITE LIBERALS TELL BLACK LIES ABOUT CIVIL RIGHTS
Ann Coulter sets record straight about which party was segregationist in 1960s
In the hackiest of all hacky articles, Sam Tanenhaus, the man responsible for ruining The New York Times Book Review, has written a cover story in The New Republic, titled: “Original Sin: Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people.”
MSNBC has been howling this cliche for a decade – or, as MSNBC’s Chris Matthews said of Tanenhaus’ article, “
Being interviewed by a giddy Matthews – who has no black friends, employees or neighbors – Tanenhaus announced the startling fact that once, long ago, some Republicans supported civil rights!
“In the 1950s, as I say in the piece you read, Republicans looked pretty good on civil rights under Eisenhower. We had the Brown decision, the Central High in Little Rock, where he did the tough thing and sent the troops in, and we had the first modern civil rights act.”
It wasn’t a “tough” decision for Eisenhower to send troops to Little Rock in 1957.
In the presidential campaign the year before, the Republican platform had expressly endorsed the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The Democratic platform did not.
To the contrary, that year, 99 members of Congress signed the “Southern Manifesto” denouncing the court’s ruling in Brown. Two were Republicans. Ninety-seven were Democrats.
As president, Eisenhower pushed through the 1957 Civil Rights Act and the 1960 Civil Rights Act. He established the Civil Rights Commission. It was Eisenhower, not Truman, who fully desegregated the military.
Meanwhile, the Brown decision was being openly defied by the Democratic governor of Arkansas (and Bill Clinton pal), Orval Faubus, who refused to admit black students to Little Rock Central High School.
Liberals act as if Eisenhower’s sending federal troops to Little Rock was like Nixon going to China. No, it was like Nixon going to California.
Only someone who knows no history could proclaim, as Tanenhaus did, that the 1957 act “wasn’t great, it wasn’t what LBJ gave us, but it was something.”
If Eisenhower’s 1957 civil rights bill was weak, it was because of one man: Lyndon B. Johnson. As Robert Caro explains in his book, “Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” it was LBJ who stripped the bill of its enforcement provisions. Even after that, the bill was still opposed by 18 senators – all of them Democrats.
To the easily astounded Chris Matthews, Tanenhaus breathlessly remarked, “Not one Republican voted against that bill!” – as if the 1957 Civil Right Act was a Democratic idea and they were delighted to get any Republican support at all.
Imagine a modern German historian saying: “Remember – it wasn’t just Germans who opposed the Holocaust. The English and Americans did, too!” Such a historian would be beaten bloody, quite rightly so.
The 1957 bill was sent to Congress by Eisenhower, passed with the intervention of Vice President Richard Nixon and opposed exclusively by Democrats. Not “Southern Democrats,” not “conservative Democrats,” but Democrats, such as Wayne Morse of Oregon, Warren Magnuson of Washington, James Murray of Montana, Mike Mansfield of Montana and Joseph O’Mahoney of Wyoming.
With absolutely no evidence (because there is none), Tanenhaus then asserted that Republicans decided “they were not going to be pro-civil rights. … They were going to side with the Southern oppressors.” Cretin Matthews seconded this gibberish by saying Nixon was “playing the Southern Strategy electorally with Strom Thurmond and those boys.”
Who exactly does Matthews imagine he means by “Strom Thurmond and those boys”? Every single segregationist in the Senate was a Democrat. Only one of them ever became a Republican: Strom Thurmond.
The rest remained not only Democrats, but quite liberal Democrats. These included such liberal luminaries as Harry Byrd, Robert Byrd, Allen Ellender, Albert Gore Sr., J. William Fulbright, Walter F. George, Russell Long and Richard Russell.
Fulbright was Bill Clinton’s mentor. Gore was “Al Jazeera” Gore’s father. Sam Ervin headed Nixon’s impeachment committee. The segregationists who were in the Senate in the ’50s were rabid Joe McCarthy opponents. In the ’60s, they opposed the Vietnam War and supported LBJ’s Great Society programs. In the ’90s, they got 100 percent ratings from NARAL Pro-Choice America.
These “Southern oppressors” were liberal Democrats when they were racists and remained liberal Democrats after they finally stopped being racists (in public). If Republicans had a racist “Southern strategy,” it didn’t work on the racists.
Nor did Nixon – or Reagan – ever win over segregationist voters. Republicans only began sweeping the South after the segregationists died.
Even as late as 1980, when Reagan won a 44-state landslide, the old segregationists were still voting Democrat. Although Reagan handily won Southern states that had been voting Republican since the ’20s, he barely won – or lost – the Goldwater states.
According to numerous polls, Reagan swept Southern college students, while losing college students in the Northeast. Meanwhile, The Washington Post called the elderly “a bedrock of Carter’s southern base.”
As LBJ explained to fellow Democrats after doing a 180-flip on civil rights as president and pushing the 1964 Civil Rights Act (which resembled the 1957 Civil Rights Act he had gutted as a senator): “I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for two hundred years.” That’s according to a steward on Air Force One, who overhead him say it.
It’s one thing to rewrite history to say the Holocaust was when the Swedes killed the Jews. But it’s another to say that the Holocaust was when Jews killed the Germans.
That’s how liberals rewrite the history of civil rights in America. For the truth, get “Mugged.”
8a)Obama’s SOTU Lies, Twists, Turns, & Treason
By Tim Brown
Last night Barack Obama delivered the State of the Union address to the country. As with any and all Presidents who give such a speech, he affirmed the state of our union was strong. However, given polling data and the current climate in the United States, that seems to be anything but the truth. We are more divided now than we have been. However, it was the things that Obama said during the speech that I wish to address.
We are more than halfway towards the goal of $4 trillion in deficit reduction that economists say we need to stabilize our finances. Now we need to finish the job. And the question is: How? In 2011, Congress passed a law saying that if both parties couldn’t agree on a plan to reach our deficit goal, about a trillion dollars’ worth of budget cuts would automatically go into effect this year. These sudden, harsh, arbitrary cuts would jeopardize our military readiness, they’d devastate priorities like education and energy and medical research. They would certainly slow our recovery and cost us hundreds of thousands of jobs. And that’s why Democrats,
Republicans, business leaders, and economists have already said that these cuts — known here in Washington as “the sequester” — are a really bad idea.
Using the tired slogan of “not one dime,” as in people making less than $250,000 won’t see one dime of tax increase, Obama stated, “Tonight I’ll lay out additional proposals that are fully paid for and fully consistent with the budget framework both parties agreed to just 18 months ago. Let me repeat: Nothing I’m proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime. It is not a bigger government we need, but a smarter government that sets priorities and invests in broad-based growth.”
Yesterday, CBO Director Doug Emendorf was clear in telling the Senate Budget Committee that permanently elevated debt levels will be with us for at least the next decade.
The thing you have to keep your eye on in Obama’s statement is the little word “should.” After all, the Obama administration has yet to put a price tag on all his proposals the will actually be bigger and dumber government.
He then took on health care costs and Medicare:
On Medicare, I’m prepared to enact reforms that will achieve the same amount of health care savings by the beginning of the next decade as the reforms proposed by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission. Already, the Affordable Care Act is helping to slow the growth of health care costs. And — and the reforms I’m proposing go even further. We’ll reduce taxpayer subsidies to prescription drug companies and ask more from the wealthiest seniors.
Obama also proposed the same tired “roads and bridges” mantra that he did as he ran for President in 2008.
“Ask any CEO where they’d rather locate and hire, a country with deteriorating roads and bridges or one with high-speed rail and Internet, high-tech schools, self- healing power grids…Tonight, I propose a “Fix-It-First” program to put people to work as soon as possible on our most urgent repairs, like the nearly 70,000 structurally deficient bridges across the country.”
Apparently all that stimulus money didn’t exactly create “shovel ready” sustainable jobs. Instead, it seems it helped to shovel BS to the American people as evidenced here. It seems Obama is in line with House Democrat Steny Hoyer (MD) who believes that welfare stimulates the economy. Only in this case the welfare will probably be provided to the same kind of scams that they were before, which resulted in several bankruptcies and investigations, not to mention $825 billion put on the American tax payer’s debt bill.
Of course Obama couldn’t let the night go without touting the Federal government’s involvement in education.
“So let’s do what works and make sure none of our children start the race of life already behind. Let’s give our kids that chance.”
I agree. Let’s do what works and eliminate what doesn’t. For starters, let’s eliminate the Federal Department of Education, which is unconstitutional. That should save billions per year alone. Second, let’s get the State out of the education business and return that responsibility to parents. In my opinion, it is the homeschool movement that is the hope for this nation’s future, not the public education system.
Then there was the issue of legalization of illegals… sorry immigration reform:
“Real reform means strong border security, and we can build on the progress my administration’s already made, putting more boots on the southern border than at any time in our history and reducing illegal crossings to their lowest levels in 40 years. Real reform means establishing a responsible pathway to earned citizenship, a path that includes passing a background check, paying taxes and a meaningful penalty, learning English, and going to the back of the line behind the folks trying to come here legally. And real reform means fixing the legal immigration system to cut waiting periods and attract the highly skilled entrepreneurs and engineers that will help create jobs and grow our economy. In other words, we know what needs to be done. And as we speak, bipartisan groups in both chambers are working diligently to draft a bill, and I applaud their efforts.”
Obama, obviously not familiar with how economics in the real world actually works, proposed raising the minimum wage. He said, “Since the last time this Congress raised the minimum wage, 19 states have chosen to bump theirs even higher. Tonight, let’s declare that, in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full time should have to live in poverty — and raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour.”
As his administration and Democrats in general demonstrate, they have no idea about what a minimum wage job is for. It is not to sustain families. It is not to provide mass wealth or get people out of poverty. They are beginner jobs in which an employer and employee agree for what the time is worth to the individual providing the work. While I understand the idea behind the minimum wage was to keep people from taking advantage of others, it has gotten way out of hand and could be better handled between employer and employee. Besides, you can’t be providing increased wages when the government is sticking its hands in your pocket for more money. Inevitably, that increased wage will come back to haunt the individuals receiving it as cost of goods go up to compensate for the increased wages. Ultimately it will kill jobs. The minimum wage is a bad idea and raising it is an even worse idea.
One of the most glaring, hypocritical statements from Obama was whenever he stated, “As long as I’m commander-in-chief, we will do whatever we must to protect those who serve their country abroad, and we will maintain the best military the world has ever known.”
This comes from the mouth of a man that called the shooting at Ft. Hood by a radical jihadist “workplace violence” and referred to those killed in combat and the Bengahazi attack as “ bumps in the road.” It is a man that basically did nothing to save the lives of four Americans as they were murdered by Islamic radicals. This is a man sending young men to fight against radical Islamists in foreign wars, while his administration welcomes the Muslim Brotherhood into the White House and even supports the efforts of Al-Qaeda, while providing aid to foreign governments dominated by radical Islamists.
(a) Any person subject to this chapter who engages in unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy. Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the offense.
(b) Any person found guilty of sodomy shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.
Finally, a subject which I’ve written much about, gun control, came up.
One of those we lost was a young girl named Hadiya Pendleton. She was 15 years old. She loved Fig Newtons and lip gloss. She was a majorette. She was so good to her friends, they all thought they were her best friend. Just three weeks ago, she was here, in Washington, with her classmates, performing for her country at my inauguration. And a week later, she was shot and killed in a Chicago park after school, just a mile away from my house. Hadiya’s parents, Nate and Cleo, are in this chamber tonight, along with more than two dozen Americans whose lives have been torn apart by gun violence. They deserve a vote. They deserve a vote. They deserve a vote. Gabby Giffords deserves a vote. The families of Newtown deserve a vote. The families of Aurora deserve a vote. The families of Oak Creek, and Tucson, and Blacksburg, and the countless other communities ripped open by gun violence, they deserve a simple vote. They deserve — they deserve a simple vote.
There is no question that the story of Hadiya Pendleton is a tragic one. So are the other stories Obama mentioned like Gabby Giffords, the Aurora shooting and Newtown massacre and our hearts are indeed torn. However, this idea of deserving a vote against the Constitution and playing on people’s emotions is nothing short of treason. The Second Amendment is a part of our Constitution. It reflects the duty and responsibility we have to protect ourselves and ensure a free state for future generations. For an elected official, especially one who is in the highest office in the land to call for any kind of gun control is nothing short of treason as far as I’m concerned. What is worse is the wild applause that his statements garnered from other elected officials.
My fellow Americans, the state of our Union is anything but strong and that should be evidenced by the last election in which the country was divided. When men like Barack Obama are set on the destruction of not only the Union, but the enslavement to a corrupt and bloated Federal government that continues to trample upon the rights of the people, then we are teetering on the brink of destruction and must push back against it. Just remember, this same government was established to protect liberty, not trample upon it.
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