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Will it ever dawn on Republicans to give Obama all the rope he seeks?
Why is Rubio lining up to pull 'Obamascare' chestnuts out of the fire? (See 1 below.)
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I continue to believe the market is making little headway and is somewhat overbought.
Fundamental picture has really not changed a great deal. Economy recovering gradually but not enough to truly dent the unemployment picture. Corporate earnings are decent but valuations of these earnings might be a bit frothy in view of the fact that I believe estimates will be revised downward for the fourth quarter.
Personal incomes remain under pressure, inflation is mute and The Fed seems inclined to keep the pedal on the floor. I suspect Yellin will be approved and fully appreciates the problems she is inheriting
Politically speaking, nothing has been resolved but the next fight over the budget and spending should be a bit tamer. I would not expect any major solutions will be hammered out but some give and take will occur and
appearance of comity is more in the cards.
Whether the administration can get the 'Obamascare' train back on track in the next several months is also problematical but no doubt they will continue to spin the debacle as best they can.
Meanwhile, it would appear our Middle East Policy remains in denial and this gives Iran unwarranted advantages to move forward on their nuclear development, all the while appearing like a purring cat in contrast to Netanyahu's more blatant and irritating calls calls for tougher sanctions etc.
The Saudis have been fairly clear about their view of Obama's actions.
Time will tell. Stay tuned.
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The public has come to think of politicians as rug dealers who sell something that just lies there but Democrats seem to be more delusional because they constantly lie to themselves. (See 2)
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Only our naive president believes al Qaeda is without a head and therefore, ineffective . (See 3 below.)
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A must read book for diplomats who believe they understand the Israeli soul! (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)No Delay, GOP - Let the Dems hang themselves.
By Larry Kudlow
One huge political question surrounds the catastrophic launch of Obamacare: Will the administration's double-talk, cancelled insurance contracts, terminated doctor-patient relationships, sticker shock from higher premiums and deductibility, and damage to job hiring and economic growth get the GOP off the shutdown hook for the 2014 midterm elections?
That is the question. Donald Rumsfeld would call it a known unknown. And right now nobody knows the answer.
But Christopher Ruddy, founder and CEO of Newsmax, makes an interesting point about this: “The key to stopping Obamacare is for its opponents to win in congressional elections in 2014. Delaying Obamacare only helps the Democrats who support this boondoggle.”
So far, with all the problems plaguing the Obamacare website, Senator Marco Rubio is leading the Republican charge to delay the March 31 enrollment deadline and tax penalty. And a lot of Republicans are lining up behind him. But is that the right tactic? On the Democratic side, Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and nine of her colleagues are urging the White House to push back the same deadline. But is that just to save their reelection hides next November?
Now, Obama recently appointed a new team to fix the website. And that team promptly predicted a successful fix by the end of November. So if that happens, it’s possible the whole Obamacare-disaster issue dies.
But according to highly respected health-industry expert Bob Laszewski, the chances of that are low. He says it will take at least a year to fix the “back end” problems -- the technical links between the website, the HHS, and most importantly the insurance companies, which are receiving massively error-laden information.
Laszewski says this is more important than the front-end disaster, where somebody in the Obama administration -- literally at the last minute in mid-September -- gave the order that the website require a detailed account-registration process before a user can shop for insurance.
Nobody knows why that decision was made. Perhaps it was to stop the media from seeing unsubsidized premium prices that undermine Obama’s promise for cheaper insurance. Or maybe the Obama folks wanted to block potential registrants from pricing-structure sticker shock. Either way, the decision to put registration ahead of shopping blew up the whole system.
And it may also have blown up Obama’s attempt to break the Republican party in half and carry a Democratic House in 2014.
And that’s Ruddy’s point: If Republicans hold the House and win the Senate next year, there’d be two houses to repeal Obamacare. But if the March 31 delay effort works, will voters forgive and forget a botched website launch?
Experts like Laszewski are now talking about the possibility of 16 million people getting pink slips for their current insurance. That’s no insurance. No doctor. Nothing. Already, over 1 million people have lost their insurance, with cancellation notices actually soaring above Obamacare enrollment rates.
Of course, President Obama said none of this would happen. Remember? But everything has changed. And unless the system gets fixed by January 1, a lot of folks are going to be very angry as they’re left out in the cold.
Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal calls the whole Obamacare effort a con job. By that he means a key Obama constituency, the young and healthy, are not going to buy overpriced insurance policies. They are the losers. And the winners are the older and sicker shoppers who allegedly are going to be subsidized by the young.
But the young are not stupid. They’d rather pay the minor tax penalty to stay out of this mess. And that means the system may go bankrupt because older and sicker customers will experience soaring premiums if the young and healthy don’t show up to subsidize their care.
And guess who’s going to do that subsidizing? We are. The taxpayers. And the whole cost structure of Obamacare will take another giant leap upwards -- above the CBO’s already tripled cost estimates.
The net economic effects of Obamacare also will become more apparent as large companies with heavy numbers of low-wage workers cut back on hiring, reduce hours worked, take on part-timers whenever possible, and send their workers into the Obama exchanges. But those workers won’t wind up in the exchanges. They’ll end up in Medicaid, which is already going bankrupt.
And who’s paying for that bailout? We are. The taxpayers.
The mainstream media have in large part turned against Obamacare, and all these factoids are going to be reported. So that raises the question regarding 2014: Do Republicans really want to bail out Obama by handing him a year’s delay? If all the flaws in Obamacare do pan out, they may well overshadow the shutdown negatives suffered by the GOP.
I think I am lining up on Chris Ruddy’s side. There’s an old political adage: If your opponent is determined to hang himself, for Heaven’s sake, don’t take away the rope.
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2)
During the Obama years, a potent mythology has taken root in Democratic circles. In this narrative, Democrats are victims, martyrs even, whereas Republicans are wily tricksters.
Last year, there was a hyped-up fable about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. President Barack Obama told "60 Minutes," "When I first came into office, the head of the Senate Republicans said, 'My No. 1 priority is making sure President Obama's a one-term president.'" Sen. Dianne Feinstein even told the San Francisco Chronicle's editorial board she heard McConnell speaking to that effect on the Senate's opening day.
One of those incidents could start with an IDF army patrol on the Golan running over an explosive device, the second patrol unit rushing to its aid coming under anti-tank fire, and the battalion commander leading the rescue being abducted along with two other soldiers. The terrorist organization staging this ambush, a transparent reference to Al Qaeda and its affiliates, would use the commotion to raid civilian settlements.
Hizballah would then pitch in with rockets against Galilee towns. In no time, the first ambush would have ignited a multi-front war situation.
1. The Syrian high command decided that the current state of the conflict is to their advantage and there was nothing to gain from rushing at this time into large-scale assaults which could be costly in casualties.
2. Hizballah units have withdrawn from the Golan border with Israel and either returned to home bases in Lebanon or massed round Damascus for the final battle to win the rebel-held outskirts, now under siege. So the Syrian army has lost its main fighting ally.
3. Two militias allied with al Qaeda’s Nusra Front stand in the path of the Syrian advance and stopped it in its tracks. Our military sources name them as The Islamic Muthanna Movement and the Harmayn Brigade.
4. Nusra itself has been able to seize land along the bank of the Yarmuk River not far from the Syrian-Jordanian-Israel border intersection, creating another obstacle.
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2)
Lies the Dems Tell Themselves
By Debra J. SaundersDuring the Obama years, a potent mythology has taken root in Democratic circles. In this narrative, Democrats are victims, martyrs even, whereas Republicans are wily tricksters.
Last year, there was a hyped-up fable about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. President Barack Obama told "60 Minutes," "When I first came into office, the head of the Senate Republicans said, 'My No. 1 priority is making sure President Obama's a one-term president.'" Sen. Dianne Feinstein even told the San Francisco Chronicle's editorial board she heard McConnell speaking to that effect on the Senate's opening day.
The thing is that the quote in question first appeared nearly two years later -- in an October 2010 interview with the National Journal's Major Garrett.
The latest iteration of Democrats-on-the-cross works like this: Obamacare hasn't delivered the big savings promised by the president -- $2,500 annually for the average family -- because Democrats ditched the single-payer model to mollify Republicans. In the Los Angeles Times, Harvard professor Jane Mansbridge writes, "The Democratic Party reluctantly adopted RomneyCare, a.k.a. Obamacare, to get Republican approval." What's more, House Republicans "coerced the Democrats into adopting a Republican health insurance reform plan."
A reader emails me, "The Republicans who hate Obama would not permit the creation of a decent single payer plan which would allow private insurance carriers to participate on a competitive uniform benefit program." Another insists, "We wanted single payer! The GOP did not -- that was the compromise, and it was one of many from this president."
Really? The Affordable Care Act did not win a single Republican vote on the House or Senate floor. If Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi abandoned single-payer to win GOP votes, they are the most incompetent negotiators in history.
Former Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, voted for the Obama stimulus package and a measure to end "don't ask, don't tell." In her book, "Fighting for Common Ground: How We Can Fix the Stalemate in Congress," Snowe recalls how 40 House Republicans voted with 249 Democrats to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program, only to watch Democrats unveil a stimulus package with no GOP input a week later.
There was little spirit of bipartisanship when Pelosi crowed: "Yes, we wrote the bill. Yes, we won the election."
When Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., rolled out his draft legislation in 2009, he didn't have a single Republican at his side. When the Senate Finance Committee voted on two Democratic public-option proposals -- to allow government plans to compete with private insurers -- Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, denounced the public option as "a Trojan horse for a single-payer system." Let it be noted that centrist Democrats joined Republicans to defeat both measures.
In "The Audacity of Hope," Obama laid out a plan for universal coverage that allowed private carriers, such as Blue Cross and Aetna, to compete with new state pools. Still, he didn't stick his neck out to push for Democrats' public-option proposals.
In a 2003 speech, Obama, a second-term state senator, called himself "a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program." PolitiFact, however, couldn't find a similar blank-check statement. The fact-checking organization observes that as Obama became a more well-known national figure, he spoke "favorably of single-payer in concept, but always (added) qualifiers."
Snowe voted for the Democrats' health bill to get it out of committee, but it never won her support on the floor. You see, Snowe foresaw Obamacare's big problem. As she wrote (my italics), "not one single member in Congress -- Republican or Democrat -- could answer whether the newly created health insurance planswould be affordable , yet we hurtled headlong toward a final vote on a monumental bill affecting every American."
In a savvier Republicans-ruined-Obamacare argument, Washington Post wonk-blogger Ezra Klein contends that the Democratic part of Obamacare -- Medicaid, which is single-payer -- works. But: "The part of Obamacare that's troubled is the part Democrats lifted from Republican policymakers. It's the part that tries to integrate private insurance companies with government systems in order to create a universal insurance system that's subsidized by the state but run by private companies."
Get it? If Obamacare fails, it's because Obamacare is a Republican plan.
Now, I won't deny that two decades ago, some conservative think tank swell came up with the term "individual mandate" -- which allowed other wonks to try to pin the tail on the elephant. But if liberals have to fish for a 1989 Heritage Foundation policy paper that had no Republican support in 2008, 2009 or 2012 to establish Republican paternity for the Affordable Care Act, that tells you one thing: They think Obamacare won't work.
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3)Al Qaeda’s thrust toward Golan: Israel, Saudis, Jordan share urgent need to stem the fast-multiplying peril
The defense squads of the Golan villages along the Israeli-Syrian border will be put through their paces by an exercise the IDF’s School for the Defense of Border Locales is conducting next week to build up their readiness and freshen their tactics against terrorist incursion
The IDF command is deeply concerned by developments of the last three weeks in the southern Syrian sectors facing the Israeli and Jordanian borders: The offensive the Syrian army launched Oct. 8 to clear rebel forces out of the areas adjacent to Golan - and draw a continuous line along those two borders - has been brought to a standstill.
That day too, in a lecture at Bar Ilan University, Israel’s Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz postulated several dire scenarios of terrorist incidents blowing up into full-scale wars.
One of those incidents could start with an IDF army patrol on the Golan running over an explosive device, the second patrol unit rushing to its aid coming under anti-tank fire, and the battalion commander leading the rescue being abducted along with two other soldiers. The terrorist organization staging this ambush, a transparent reference to Al Qaeda and its affiliates, would use the commotion to raid civilian settlements.
Hizballah would then pitch in with rockets against Galilee towns. In no time, the first ambush would have ignited a multi-front war situation.
Four elements contributed to the halt in the Syrian army’s advance into the border regions, according to military sources:
1. The Syrian high command decided that the current state of the conflict is to their advantage and there was nothing to gain from rushing at this time into large-scale assaults which could be costly in casualties.
2. Hizballah units have withdrawn from the Golan border with Israel and either returned to home bases in Lebanon or massed round Damascus for the final battle to win the rebel-held outskirts, now under siege. So the Syrian army has lost its main fighting ally.
3. Two militias allied with al Qaeda’s Nusra Front stand in the path of the Syrian advance and stopped it in its tracks. Our military sources name them as The Islamic Muthanna Movement and the Harmayn Brigade.
4. Nusra itself has been able to seize land along the bank of the Yarmuk River not far from the Syrian-Jordanian-Israel border intersection, creating another obstacle.
The alarm in the Israeli and Jordanian high commands over Al Qaeda’s looming encroachments is shared by Saudi Arabia, whose intelligence services now estimate that Al Qaeda and its multiple branches have massed some 6,000 fighting activists in Syria – 12 percent of them Saudi nationals.
Since more are pouring into the country all the time, intelligence experts in Riyadh calculate that the current number will double itself in the next six months. And that will not be the end: the 12,000 jihadists concentrated in Syria by next spring may have multiplied to 15-18,000 by the winter of 2014.
Most of them are streaming in from across the Muslim world including the Russian Caucasian.
Saudi Intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who is in charge of the Saudi effort in Syria, has warned that Riyadh cannot afford to have al Qaeda hanging massively over its front, back and side doors – in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Egyptian Sinai, and threatening to overrun Lebanon and Jordan. A jihadi victory in Syria would boost al Qaeda in Iraq on its northern border.
Israel is in the same position.
Most of them are streaming in from across the Muslim world including the Russian Caucasian.
Saudi Intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who is in charge of the Saudi effort in Syria, has warned that Riyadh cannot afford to have al Qaeda hanging massively over its front, back and side doors – in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Egyptian Sinai, and threatening to overrun Lebanon and Jordan. A jihadi victory in Syria would boost al Qaeda in Iraq on its northern border.
Israel is in the same position.
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4)A Must-Read Book for Brokers of Mideast Peace Talks
Last July, after numerous trips to the Middle East during his first weeks as secretary of state, John Kerry earnestly announced the renewal of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. In the ensuing months, Kerry has been reminded that good intentions, certainly in that part of world, are never enough.
Although the parties have met more than a dozen times since midsummer, they have exchanged acrimonious words in public while the talks seem to have been pushed to the sidelines of American diplomacy by Syria’s use of chemical weapons and by the opening of direct negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. In addition, Israel’s own internal contradictions have complicated the task, and I sometimes wonder whether Kerry and other well-meaning Americans have fully factored into their expectations the complexities of Israel’s domestic politics.
Progressive critics of Israel in the United States and Europe contend that lack of progress in the latest round of American-sponsored peace talks has little to do with regional events. They were doomed from the outset, these critics are convinced, because of Israel’s continued building in the West Bank, and stubborn Israeli opposition to a withdrawal to the Green Line, Israel’s pre-1967 borders.
Conservative supporters of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government will agree that this round of talks, like the many before it, are doomed, but not because of anything Israel has done beyond the Green Line. They maintain that the root problem is the Palestinian Authority’s refusal to recognize Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. This negation is part and parcel of persistent PA incitement of hatred of Israel through PA-run schools, PA-controlled media, and statements by PA political officials including PA President Mahmoud Abbas.
Underlying these clashing views on the obstacles to peace is a shared shortsightedness. The typical critic of the Netanyahu government, like the typical supporter, fails to see in Israel’s hold on the West Bank any hard political choices, puzzling moral dilemmas, or elusive religious ambiguities.
The same is often true of left-wing and right-wing Israelis. The left tends to regard Israel’s continuing control over the West Bank as nothing but an unjust occupation that is the antithesis of the Zionist dream of Jews creating in Israel a nation like all other nations. Meanwhile, the right views Israeli settlement of the biblical Judea and Samaria as nothing less than the fulfillment of the Zionist dream of redeeming the Jewish people by making the ancestral homeland bloom and prosper.
It is tempting to say that both sides can’t be correct. It would certainly make Middle East politics easier if there were one true and just Zionism.
But there are multiple Zionisms—or multiple dimensions of Zionism—with deep roots in Jewish tradition and the historical experience of the Jewish people. American diplomacy that ignores the tensions and divisions within Israel may enjoy short-term achievements but it will not produce stable, long-lasting results.
One is not likely to find a surer guide to the Zionisms that compete within Israel’s soul than Yossi Klein Halevi’s new book, “Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation.” A senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and a contributing editor of The New Republic, Halevi brings to “Like Dreamers” the gifts of a seasoned political journalist, master storyteller, and supple theologian. Taking on topics where rancor is the norm and empathy in short supply, he explores the hopes and fears of Israelis across the political and religious spectrum and writes about them with grace and insight.
Halevi grew up in Brooklyn and was drawn as boy to Israel by its dazzling victory in June 1967 in the Six-Day War. In May, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser moved Egyptian troops across the Sinai Peninsula toward Israel’s border; shut the Straits of Tiran, blocking Israel’s southern shipping route; expelled the U.N. buffer force from Sinai; and broadcast across the region its intention to destroy the Jewish state. To defend itself, Israel launched a preemptive air strike that destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground. In six days, Israel routed the Egyptians in the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula, seized control of the Golan Heights from Syria, and drove Jordanian forces back to the East Bank of the Jordan River. The Six-Day War seemed to make all dreams in Israel possible.
But when he immigrated to Israel in 1982 at age 29, Halevi found a country in which the national consensus about Zionism had unraveled, where utopian dreams clashed with utopian dreams. For 30 years, he has chronicled the “vehement schism between left and right” in Israel. In this book, he exposes the “utopian fantasists” of both the secular left and the religious right while showing how “each camp had expressed something essential about Jewish aspirations.”
“Like Dreamers” tells the story of the struggle between the “conflicting certainties” that arose in Israel after 1967 by relating the stories of seven men of the redoubtable 55th Paratroopers Reserve Brigade. They liberated Jerusalem during the Six-Day War and led the daring nighttime crossing of the Suez Canal in October 1973, which helped avert a military catastrophe for Israel after Egypt and Syria’s surprise attack.
Four of the paratroopers featured in Halevi’s book were sons of the secular kibbutz movement, which represented Israel’s great experiment in collective living in agriculture communities. One became a leading conceptual artist who built a greenhouse on his kibbutz “to teach young people ecological principles and kibbutz values. He also helped found the progressive peace movement in Israel and eventually broke with it because of his skepticism about the Palestinian readiness to make peace.”
Another helped jump-start Israel’s transition from a state-run economy to a free-market economy.
A third was sent to prison for 12 years for visiting Damascus to develop an underground movement that would work toward the creation of a single state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
And one became Israel’s leading poet-singer, a gentle and free-spirited bohemian, who fashioned for himself a highly unorthodox version of observant Judaism.
Three of the paratroopers Halevi profiles were religious Zionists; they believed that the rise of a free and democratic Jewish state in the land of Israel played a vital role in the religious redemption of the Jewish people. One founded Kfar Etzion, the first post-Six-Day War settlement, on the very spot where, in May 1948, Jordanian soldiers and local villagers burst through the perimeter of the original Kfar Etzion and executed the besieged kibbutz’s final eight defenders, who were waving the white flag of surrender. He went on to become a member of Knesset.
One became the settlement movement’s “great heretic,” condemning the turn to violence and fanaticism among the settlers, including religious teachings that could be seen as justifying the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
And one of the religious Zionists founded the Yesha Council, which represents the interests of all Israelis living in the West Bank, and became one of the settlement movement’s leading activists and publicists.
Halevi follows this remarkable assortment of reserve paratroopers through the turbulence of post-Six-Day War Israel: the national trauma of the Yom Kippur War; the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 aimed at driving out the PLO (the last war for Halevi’s paratroopers); the shock of the First Intifada in 1987; the high hopes and bitter disappointments of the 1993 Oslo agreements, including the rise in the mid-1990s of Palestinian suicide bombing attacks on Israeli civilians; the rejection at Camp David in July 2000 by Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s far-reaching proposal for the creation of a Palestinian state; and Arafat’s decision in September 2000, instead of putting forward a counterproposal, to launch the Second Intifada.
Halevi’s book ends in 2004, which marks the defeat of the Second Intifada and the emergence in Israel of a broad center committed to a two-state solution but skeptical that the Palestinians were prepared to build a state willing to live in peace with a Jewish state.
The great theme Halevi so adroitly explores—how Israelis can honor their political principles without deteriorating into political zealotry and how they can passionately pursue their political dreams in a country where others passionately pursue different political dreams—is one U.S. diplomats must take into account. To effectively promote a secure and lasting Middle East peace, Secretary Kerry and his team must understand the spirit of those from whom they seek painful concessions. They should start, if they haven’t already, by reading this book.
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