Many of my memo readers have visited the museum on the various trip tours I have conducted.
I am proud to post this item recognizing our wonderful Director - Bill Eiland and my dear friend for over 20 years.
Dear Board: We thought you would be interested in the following press release, which went out to national and local media outlets this week. Bill deserves your congratulations on this major national award, which draws attention not only to his decades of service, but also to our museum in general.
Hillary Brown Director of Communications Georgia Museum of Art For Immediate Release: Georgia Museum of Art director receives national service award.
William Underwood Eiland, director of the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia, received the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) Award for Distinguished Service to Museums last week at AAM’s annual conference, in Baltimore. The award was instituted in 1981 and recognizes excellence and contributions to the museum profession for at least 20 years.
It is only given in years when there is a worthy nominee. Previous recipients include Charles F. Hummel, of Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library, and Bonnie Pitman, former director of the Dallas Museum of Art. Evaluations are based on individual contributions to institutions, the museum profession and the local, state, national or international museum community.
Eiland has been the director of the Georgia Museum of Art since 1992, a period of unprecedented growth for the museum. He has given his time for many years to such professional organizations as AAM (for which he serves as an accreditation site visitor), the Southeastern Museums Conference, the Georgia Association of Museums and Galleries (GAMG), the Association of Art Museum Directors, the Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Advisory Panel for the National Endowment for the Arts and the International Council of Museums. Eiland is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has received several fellowships, including the Danforth Teaching Fellowship at the University of Virginia, a Museum Professionals Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Research Fellowship from the UGA Center for Humanities and Arts.
He has edited and contributed to more than 50 publications. Eiland previously earned a Lifetime Achievement Award from GAMG in 2007 and Museum Professional of the Year from the same organization in 2000. The Southeastern College Art Conference named him Outstanding Museum Professional in 1999.
Eiland was inducted into the Sigma Pi Kappa national honor society in spring 2010 and, in 2000, named a Distinguished Alum of Birmingham Southern College, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1970.
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PJTV.COM: "Trifecta -- Shock Poll for Liberals: People Want Less Government A recent Gallup poll shows that a majority of people think the federal government is too big and too powerful. Only eight percent believe the government needs more power. So why do President Obama and the Democrats keep pushing for more spending and increased government in your life? Stephen Green, Scott Ott and Bill Whittle discuss how conservatives can make the case that less government is better."
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Obama plunges. Less than half now believe he is trustworthy. Will it remain a permanent view? (See 1 below.)
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Does Hillary resent having been Obama's lap dog and was thrown under the bus? (See 2 below)
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Israeli intelligence sources deny Russia has shipped the air defense missiles have arrived. (See 3 below.)
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John Fund connects Obama to Chicago. (See 4 below.)
LTE to local paper:
"Obama's presidency has come full circle - all the way from empty speechifying and receiving an undeserved Nobel Peace Prize to allowing thousands to be slaughtered because he dithers when it comes to hard decisions and now base corruption.
Even when it came to protecting the lives of four Americans Obama chose denial while maintaining his continual campaign mode, attributing everything to a video that inflamed Muslims. What to do? Send Amb. Rice out to perpetuate this myth while Hillary threw herself under the Obama bus.
As for the recent IRS scandal and Obama's repeated confidence in the most corrupt Attorney General in years, Obama brings more shame to The Oval Office.
Why did it take years for Obama's incompetence to become blatantly evident? The answer is simple. The press and media chose him, then fawned over and protected him. Meanwhile, those who saw through him were attacked for being racially motivated. Now even his protectors are having to swallow hard defending him.
Obama claims to know nothing about everything. Even his whereabouts the evening Benghazi broke remain secreted.
After five years, Obama has little to show by way of positive accomplishments beyond 'The Affordable Healthcare Act' which is neither affordable nor wanted. America's influence is down around his ankles, the Federal Debt is higher than a kite and Obama continues to employ evasive Chicago tactics as a substitute for leadership.
The stench mounts and he plays golf. "
---Dick
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1)Obama Job Approval Tumbles in Wake of White House Scandals
By Melanie Batley
President Barack Obama's job approval rating has taken a huge hit in the wake of the scandals surrounding the White House, a new poll has found.
Fewer than half the registered voters surveyed now believe Obama is "honest and trustworthy," according to the poll conducted by Quinnipiac University. That figure had stood at 58 percent the last time the question was asked in September 2011. Now it is at 49 percent.
And it is the scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service that is hitting Obama hardest, the survey found. The voters, who were surveyed between Wednesday last week and Tuesday of this week, believe that controversy is more worrying than those surrounding the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, or the seizure of phone records from journalists.
According to the Connecticut university's survey, more people now view the president negatively than positively. Slightly under half -- 49 percent -- say they have a negative view of Obama, while 45 percent have a positive view.
Just one month ago, before news of the IRS controversy broke, the president's job approval rating was more positive than negative, at 48 to 45 percent.
When it comes to the individual controversies swirling around the Obama administration, 44 percent of voters see the IRS prying into conservative groups as the most important, while 24 percent say they are most concerned about the administration's handling of the terrorist attack in Benghazi, and 15 percent say the records seizure at news organizations is most important.
Many voters believe criticism of the administration's handling of the Benghazi attack as "just politics," the survey shows with 43 percent describing it that way
Meanwhile, more than three out of four voters -- 76 percent -- believe a special prosecutor should be appointed to investigate the IRS scandal. That figure includes 63 percent of Democrats, 88 percent of Republicans, and 78 percent of independent voters.
"There is overwhelming bipartisan support for a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS," said Peter Brown, assistant director of Quinnipiac's Polling Institute.
"Voters apparently don't like the idea of Attorney General Eric Holder investigating the matter himself, perhaps because they don't exactly think highly of him," Brown said. Holder got a negative 39 percent job approval rating, compared to 23 percent who approved of the way he is doing his job.
But the poll also shows that almost three-quarters of voters, or 73 percent, believe that dealing with the economy and unemployment is a higher priority than investigating these three issues. Only 22 percent disagree.
But those who were surveyed are also optimistic that the economy is finally improving.
"The fact that voters say, 34–25 percent, that the economy is getting better also may be a reason the president's job approval numbers have not dropped further," said Brown.
Other points from the poll include:
• Political parties and groups are generally held in disdain. Voters have an unfavorable view of both the main parties and the tea party. The Republican Party fares worse, with an unfavorable rating of 50 percent, compared to 35 percent who rate it favorably. The same is said of the Democrats by 47 percent who rate their party favorably, and 42 percent unfavorably; and the tea party by 38-28 percent.
• A minuscule 3 percent of voters surveyed says they trust the federal government to do the right thing all the time. Twelve percent says they trust the feds most of the time, 47 percent say some of the time, and 36 percent say hardly ever.
• A congressional election today would be evenly split, with 38 percent saying they would vote for a Republican to sit in the House of Representatives and the same number saying they would vote Democrat.
A total of 1,419 registered voters were polled for the survey, with a margin of error of 2.6 percentage points, Quinnipiac said
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2)The Betrayal of Hillary Clinton
By Peter Wilson
Hillary Clinton might have been a little touchy about Benghazi when she testified to Congress in January because Barack Obama had thrown her under the bus, abandoning her philosophy of "normalization" -- the policy of intentionally minimizing security around embassies and other diplomatic facilities.
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A report by the historian Arthur Herman on Fox News last October describes the situation before the attack:
Twice the man in charge of security for our diplomats in Libya, Greg Nordstrom, begged the State Department for more security in Benghazi after no less than 48 security "incidents" there, including two bombings.
Washington, however, said no. Hillary Clinton... had her minion Charlene Lamb... tell Nordstrom that State wanted "to normalize operations" in Libya and to "reduce security resources."
Clinton defended normalization in a speech on October 13, 2012, a month after the attack. "We will never prevent every act of violence or terrorism, or achieve perfect security," Clinton said. "Our people can't live in bunkers and do their jobs... Diplomacy, by its very nature, is often practiced in dangerous places."
I disagree with this assertion; a desk officer doing the job of issuing visas deserves a safe workplace. The diplomatic security debate however reflects a larger conflict between the Department of State and our military and intelligence communities. By placing their faith in diplomacy, Obama and Clinton elevate the job of the diplomat to include gathering intelligence and winning hearts and minds, tasks that are better suited to the CIA and the military.
In the days after Benghazi, Ambassador Stevens was characterized as a romantic who spoke Arabic and liked to mingle with the people without the insulation of security -- a kind of modern-day Lawrence of Arabia. Later, this narrative was challenged, notably by John McCain, who claimed that Stevens requested increased security.
Sentiments similar to Hillary's were expressed in a November 14, 2012 New York Times article titled, "Can American Diplomacy Ever Come Out of Its Bunker?" Foreign Correspondent Robert F. Worth presents a history of security measures at American embassies, which began a transformation under President Reagan after the April 1983 bombing of the Beirut embassy left 63 people dead. A few excerpts:
The death of an ambassador [in Libya] would not be seen as the occasional price of a noble but risky profession; someone had to be blamed...Lost in all this partisan wrangling was the fact that American diplomacy has already undergone vast changes in the past few decades and is now so heavily encumbered by fortresslike embassies, body armor and motorcades that it is almost unrecognizable...The mantra of "security" will only grow louder. As a result, some of the country's most distinguished former ambassadors are now asking anew what diplomacy can achieve at such a remove.
Guess who is now chanting "the mantra of 'security'"?
In the second presidential debate, Obama claimed, "nobody's more concerned about safety and security [of American diplomats] than I am."
In the October 2012 vice presidential debate, Joe Biden was sent out to tell a bald-faced lie: "We weren't told they wanted more security. We did not know they wanted more security there." The assumption is that, had they known, of course they would have increased security.
Biden attacked Paul Ryan with his overbearing style:
Number one, the --- this lecture on embassy security -- the congressman here cut embassy security in his budget by $300 million below what we asked for, number one. So much for the embassy security piece.
Barbara Boxer and others in Congress continued to blame Benghazi on Republican budget cutting: "I believe if we want to know what happened in Benghazi, it starts with the fact that there was not enough security. There was not enough security because the budget was cut."
At his press conference on May 16, 2013, Obama brought up the funding issue; he "called on Congress... to take action to bolster security at American Embassies... I'm calling on Congress to work with us and support and fully fund our budget request."
The Washington Post comments cluelessly: "we don't understand why Boxer would frame the security funding problem in such partisan terms." According to the Post, "while Boxer claims that Republicans 'cut' the budget, she is only comparing it to what the Obama administration proposed. The reality is that funding for embassy security has increased significantly in recent years."
The larger point is that in none of these examples does any Democrat bring up the philosophy of normalization. They've all become security hawks, which given that it involves spending money was not so painful.
Hillary Clinton's idealism before Benghazi has vanished, even though it is ideologically consistent with President Obama's foreign policy philosophy, set out in his 2009 speech at Cairo University:
I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect...Now, we also know that military power alone is not going to solve the problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan... I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible.
Obama rejects the hard power of military force, but his "new beginning" is not a classic soft power approach -- more like a "no power" approach. The goal of both soft power and hard power is to advance American interests abroad, and Obama's highest goal is "leading from behind" -- "diplomacy" and "international consensus" where the United States takes its place in the world among the nations, as an equal, or perhaps, given the sins of our fathers, as an inferior penitent. Speak softly, but don't carry any kind of stick, because only hoodlums carry sticks.
In the world, it means cutting our military budget and unilaterally dismantling our nuclear arsenal so that other nations will trust us and won't react aggressively in response to our aggressive stance. In Benghazi, it means, or used to mean, normalization.
A North Korean missile obliterating San Diego? Tragic, but that's the price for transforming the global power structure. Four deaths at the hands of "some guys out for a walk one night"? As Rep. Elijah Cummings succinctly put it in the recent Benghazi hearings, "death is part of life." In the words of the New York Times reporter cited above, "The occasional price of a noble but risky profession." Deplorable, but it's the cost of achieving the higher goal of friendly relations with the Muslim world.
We can denounce this philosophy as dangerously naïve, but naïveté is not an impeachable offense. Obama might have fared better had he stuck to his guns and defended Clinton's normalization policy. We know though, this isn't who he is. When Obama is threatened politically, betrayal and lies come naturally.
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3)Israeli intelligence denies first Russian S-300s arrive in Syria - contrary to Assad’s claim
Senior Israeli intelligence sources emphasized Thursday May 30 that Syria had still not received the first consignment of Russian S-300 anti-missile batteries – contrary to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s claim.
The Syrian ruler was responding to the quote from Israel’s National Security Adviser Yakov Amidror that the S-300 batteries have not been delivered yet and when they are, Israel will destroy them before they are operational.
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem has meanwhile pitched in to warn that another Israeli strike against Syria would elicit an immediate Syrian response. He spoke to the Hizballah TV station Al Mayadin Wednesday night. In answer to a question, he said the Syrian response would be proportional to the Israeli attack.
In Helsinki, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reacted harshly to the European Union’s decision – spearheaded by Britain and France – to lift its arms embargo on the Syrian rebels: He made it clear that this decision had untied Moscow’s hands for supplying Bashar Assad with weapons banned by international treaties.
“Every decision has two sides. If one side lifts its restrictions, then the other side may no longer feel compelled to keep its previously adopted obligations,” Shoigu said Wednesday.
A special interview with President Assad is scheduled for simultaneous broadcast Thursday night by Hizballah’s Al-Manar and Syrian state television channels.
Directly taunting Israel, Syrian president Bashar Assad said in an interview prerecorded for broadcast Thursday night, May 30, that the first batch of Russian S-300 anti-air missiles has arrived in Syria and a second consignment was on the way. The broadcast was scheduled to air simultaneously over Hizballah’s Al Manar and Syrian state television channels.
The Syrian ruler was responding to the quote from Israel’s National Security Adviser Yakov Amidror that the S-300 batteries have not been delivered yet and when they are, Israel will destroy them before they are operational.
Continuing in the same vein, Assad said that not only would the Syrian army react to any further Israeli attacks, he “would not stand in the way of Syrian groups that want to fight for the liberation of the Golan.”
Fresh Hizballah forces entered Syria early Thursday, May 30, hours after the United States called the presence of the Hizballah fighters from Lebanon in Syria “unacceptable” and “dangerous” and demanded their immediate withdrawal. Already fighting on three fronts – Damascus, Homs and al Qusayr - Military sources report that the new increment is assigned a fourth. Iran’s Lebanese proxies will be heading south to take on the rebel stronghold of Deraa, capital of the Huran, where thet will be fighting within 30 kilometers of Israel’s Golan border.
Lookout posts report the incoming Hizballah units organizing their equipment and getting set to move.
The threats traded by Russia, Syria, Hizballah with Israel have reached a new pitch of stridency.
Israel’s National Secuirty Adviser Yakov Amidror was quoted Wednesday night as warning that if the Russian S-300 anti-air missiles are delivered to Syria, Israel will strike them and prevent their deployment for operational use.
Israel’s National Secuirty Adviser Yakov Amidror was quoted Wednesday night as warning that if the Russian S-300 anti-air missiles are delivered to Syria, Israel will strike them and prevent their deployment for operational use.
Former Defense Minister Moshe Arens voiced his certainty that the Russians are aware Israel is capable of destroying the batteries.
Military sources add: Moscow has made a point of stressing that the S-300s for Syria will arrive accompanied by Russian officers and advisers, in the belief that Israel will think twice before tangling with Moscow by attacking the missiles still in their crates and risking harm to Russian personnel. This eventuality came up in the tough conversation Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi on May 14.
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem has meanwhile pitched in to warn that another Israeli strike against Syria would elicit an immediate Syrian response. He spoke to the Hizballah TV station Al Mayadin Wednesday night. In answer to a question, he said the Syrian response would be proportional to the Israeli attack.
In Helsinki, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reacted harshly to the European Union’s decision – spearheaded by Britain and France – to lift its arms embargo on the Syrian rebels: He made it clear that this decision had untied Moscow’s hands for supplying Bashar Assad with weapons banned by international treaties.
“Every decision has two sides. If one side lifts its restrictions, then the other side may no longer feel compelled to keep its previously adopted obligations,” Shoigu said Wednesday.
A special interview with President Assad is scheduled for simultaneous broadcast Thursday night by Hizballah’s Al-Manar and Syrian state television channels.
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The administration’s political tactics are straight out of the Daley playbook.
The scandals swirling around the Obama administration have many journalists scratching their heads as to how “hope and change” seem to have been supplanted by “arrogance and fear.” Perhaps it’s time they revisit one of their original premises about Barack Obama: that he wasn’t influenced by the Chicago Daley machine. You know: the machine that boosted his career and whose protégés — including Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, and his wife, Michelle — he brought to Washington with him.
The liberal take on the president was best summed up by Slate magazine’s Jacob Weisberg, who wrote last year that Obama “somehow passed through Chicago politics without ever developing any real connection to it.” It’s true that Obama initially kept some distance from the machine. But by the time he ran for the Senate in 2004, his main political Sherpas were Axelrod, who was then the chief consultant to Mayor Richard M. Daley, and Jarrett, the mayor’s former deputy chief of staff. As Scott Simon of NPR noted: “While calling for historic change globally, [Obama] has never professed to be a reformer locally.” The Daley machine, which evolved over 60 years from a patronage-rich army of worker bees into a corporate state in which political pull and public-employee unions dominate, has left its imprint on Obama. The machine’s core principle, laid out in an illuminating Chicago Independent Examiner primer on “the Chicago Way,” is that at all times elections are too important to be left to chance. John Kass, the muckraking columnist for the Chicago Tribune who for years has warned that Obama was bringing “the Chicago way” to Washington, sums up his city like this: “Once there were old bosses. Now there are new bosses. And shopkeepers still keep their mouths shut. Tavern owners still keep their mouths shut. Even billionaires keep their mouths shut.”
“We have a sick political culture, and that’s the environment Barack Obama came from,” Jay Stewart, the executive director of the Chicago Better Government Association, warned ABC News when Obama ran in 2008. He noted that Obama had “been noticeably silent on the issue of corruption here in his home state.”
Joel Kotkin, an urban expert who still considers himself a “Kennedy Democrat –– John F. Kennedy,” wrote at Forbes: “Most of us would put up with a bit of corruption and special dealing if the results were strong economic and employment growth. But the bare demographic and economic facts for both Chicago and Illinois reveal a stunning legacy of failure.” Since 2007, the Chicago region has lost more jobs than Detroit has, and more than twice as many as New York. The city’s murder rate is a national disgrace, and its teachers’ union is so powerful that a strike it called last year forced new mayor Rahm Emanuel to back down from his attempt to curb union power.
The Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch tags Chicago as the fifth most heavily taxed city in the country: Its sky-high effective sales tax of 9.75 percent makes the tax burden on a family earning $25,000 a year the fourth highest in the country. From 1991, two years after Richard M. Daley first took office as mayor, to 2011, the year Emanuel took the reins, the average debt per Chicagoan grew from $600 to $2,600, an increase of 433 percent. As Dick Simpson, a former reform Chicago alderman who now teaches at the University of Illinois, put it: “There’s a significant downside to authoritarian rule. The city could do much better.”
Conservatives in Chicago, an embattled breed, say the Obama scandals now coming to light — the IRS, the intimidation of journalists, the green-energy boondoggles such as Solyndra — could have been anticipated. “The 2008 Obama campaign perpetrated a fraud that he was a reformer,” says Chris Robling, a former journalist who has served as a Republican election commissioner. “All of the complaints — from the lack of transparency to HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s shaking down corporations to promote Obamacare — stem from the culture of the Daley Machine.” For decades, Robling says, Mayor Daley “encouraged” contributions to his favorite charities, with the implicit understanding that the “encourager” controlled the city’s inspectors and regulators. “That sounds an awful lot like what Sebelius was doing to prop up Obamacare,” Robling notes. “Obama’s ideology may come from Saul Alinsky’s acolytes, but his political tactics come straight from the Daley playbook.” Indeed, friends of Bill Daley, Mayor Daley’s brother, say that one reason Bill left his post as Obama’s White House chief of staff after only one year was that even he thought Team Obama was too much “all politics, all of the time” and not enough about governance.
Journalists used to know that presidents are in part a product of their past: where their careers were nurtured and where their politics were shaped. They understood this as a given when it came to Ronald Reagan and California; they basically grasped it about Bill Clinton’s Arkansas, and certainly nailed it on George W. Bush and Texas. But when it came to Barack Obama, all that went out the window. Speaking at the University of Southern California, at a post-2008 conference on the election, Mark Halperin, then of ABC News, said that the media’s treatment of Obama had been “the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war.” It was “extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage,” he concluded.
That media failure continued throughout Obama’s first term. Perhaps now, as Obama’s “Chicago Way” is coming into focus, the media will want to redeem itself. With Obama, it’s become all too clear: You can take the politician away from the machine, but you can’t take the machine out of the politician.
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