An idiot surrounded by idiots.
In The Price of Politics Bob Woodward writes about a CEO who says at the Obama White House “we talk to people we wouldn’t hire.”
In The Price of Politics Bob Woodward writes about a CEO who says at the Obama White House “we talk to people we wouldn’t hire.”
Andrew Stiles reported at National Review:
Larry Summers, former head of the National Economic Council, thought having Jarrett represent the White House was a mistake. Business leaders “felt patronized and offended by Valerie,” Summers told Woodward, largely due to her tendency to insist that she spoke for the president, and an approach to problem-solving that involved little more than scheduling multiple lunch meetings. One CEO complained to Alter that “when we go to the White House, we talk to people we wouldn’t hire.” Alter himself has likened Jarrett’s role in the White House to “the CEO putting his sister in charge of marketing.”
Reagan warned us about Obama without mentioning his name: Check out this video on YouTube:
YouTube - Videos from this emailJust another day at the amoral U.N. (See 1 below.)
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Obama rated 5th best president(See 2 below.)
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Kim Strassel points out the conundrum Republicans find themselves in regarding the health care issue. On the one hand they understandably do not wish to get in the way of the collapse of Obamacare which will impact Democrat election prospects. On the other hand, they do not want to be seen as standing idly by and being painted as obstructionists.
Tom Price is a good man, a doctor and rational politician from Georgia who understands health care and who has a plan that is workable and can, at least, serve as a platform for a positive approach towards helping improve the nation's healthcare delivery system which, all agree, needs addressing. (See 3 below.)
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Saudi Prince reminds us that , in his opinion, Obama is being played for the fool he is by Iran.
Of course the Saudis and Israel have their own vested interested in seeing Iran constrained but history supports their concerns. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)“Bash Israel Day” Results in Nine Anti-Israel Resolutions Passed in the General Assembly While Ruthless Dictators Like Assad Get a Free Pass, Says Ros-Lehtinen
“We already have existing law that prevents the U.S. from contributing funds to any UN entity that accepts a non-existent state of Palestine to its membership, like UNESCO has, though the Administration continues to seek ways to undermine this law and Congress’ intent.”
(WASHINGTON, D.C.) – U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Chairman of the Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee, made the following statement on the nine anti-Israel resolutions that were passed last Thursday, November 14, 2013, at the United Nations General Assembly. Statement by Ros-Lehtinen:
“Assad is responsible for the deaths of over 110,000 people and has even used chemical weapons on thousands of Syrians, so it’s inexplicable that one of the first orders of business was to ignore this mass murder and instead adopt nine anti-Israel resolutions. These Israel bashing resolutions are brought forth by the cowards at the UN who fear the world ‘s attention will turn to the current state of affairs in their own countries and that one day they may have to answer for their crimes against humanity. They hate Israel for what she represents: a free, democratic and vibrant society in a region that has seen nothing but turmoil, repression and regression.
"By admitting Cuba, China, Russia, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia all on the Human Rights Council and by passing these nine anti-Israel resolutions, it appears that hypocrisy remains high on the UN’s agenda for this year's session as it was last year, when we also saw nine anti-Israel resolutions passed in one day and where Iran was selected to chair a UN conference on disarmament.
"The Administration must take a stand and work to end the immoral, corrupt and biased agenda at the UN, and the only way we can do that is by withholding the millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer dollars we spend each year on the UN.
"We already have existing law that prevents the U.S. from contributing funds to any UN entity that accepts a non-existent state of Palestine to its membership, like UNESCO has, though the Administration continues to seek ways to undermine this law and Congress’ intent. I will keep on fighting this waste of taxpayer money and continue to push for fundamental reforms at the UN. The U.S. must stand with our ally Israel and impose consequences on the UN for its support of the Palestinian statehood scheme.”
NOTE: Ros-Lehtinen is the author of H.R. 3155, the United Nations Transparency, Accountability, and Reform Act of 2013. The bill changes the funding mechanism from an assessed contributions method to a voluntary basis and gives the UN two years after the bill’s enactment date to phase in this reform before the U.S. is required to withhold funds.
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2)Texas A&M Study Rates Obama 5th Best President
OBAMA RATED 5TH BEST PRESIDENT IN OUR HISTORY--
From a total of 44 US Presidents: Obama is rated as the 5th best
President ever!
The news release said,"...after only 5 years in office, Americans
have rated President Obama the 5th best President ever."
The details according to TEXAS A&M:
1. Reagan & Lincoln tied for first,
2. Twenty three presidents tied for second,
3. Seventeen other presidents tied for third,
4. Jimmy Carter came in fourth, and
5. Obama came in fifth!
This appears to be totally reasonable . . . . . .
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3)'
The GOP's Health-Reform Opportunity
Now is the time for Republicans to sell the public on innovative, pro-market health-care reforms.
By Kim Strassel
You can't fight something with nothing," muses Tom Price, the Republican for Georgia's Sixth District. That adage, which the surgeon-turned-congressman is now repeating to any colleague who will listen, is gaining steam within the broader GOP.
As the ObamaCare disaster dominates the public debate, Republicans are engaged in an animated discussion behind the scenes about their next move. Health reformers like Dr. Price, Reps. Phil Roe and Steve Scalise, and in the Senate Tom Coburn and Mike Lee, are pushing colleagues to go on offense and start selling the public on innovative, pro-market health reforms.
They've been met with reluctance, and some of it understandable. The ObamaCaremeltdown has been a political gift for Republicans, many of whom don't currently want to risk getting in the way of the law's collapse. Putting out a GOP "alternative," they say, would simply allow Democrats to refocus headlines by attacking a Republican plan.
Some worry conservative proposals don't offer enough political cover on touchy issues, like the number of Americans insured, or pre-existing conditions. Others are opposed to any big bill, given the public backlash to ObamaCare's size and complexity. Yet others fret that too many of their own members still aren't able to competently discuss health care.
These are risks, yes, though in politics everything is relative. And as the reformers are rightly pointing out, there is a greater risk to the GOP right now of doing nothing.
doctor Getty Images
The biggest of these risks is put succinctly by Sen. Coburn, who warns: "The failure of ObamaCare will not guarantee the success of free-market health reform." The president's law is destroying the private market, and the left will seek to capitalize on that. "If Republicans don't present a clear alternative the American people can understand and support we run the risk of single-payer becoming the default fix," says Mr. Coburn.
Tactical GOP silence also does nothing to combat Mr. Obama's favorite talking point. Republicans, he insists, just "want to drag us back into a broken system." As unhappy as America is with ObamaCare, that line hits home. While the U.S. health system before 2010 was the best in the world, it was still too inefficient, too regulated and too costly for too many people. Consumers don't want that back, either, and Republicans suffer if their party is tagged with that position.
Republicans have hopefully learned, too, that political nature abhors a vacuum. The party's failure this summer to delineate an ObamaCare strategy opened the way for louder voices to demand what became an ill-fated shutdown. If leadership isn't going to drive this agenda, it risks even more divisions with outside groups and with a grass roots that is hungry for some aspirational leadership. It risks once again reacting to events, rather than shaping them.
Finally, the party could throw away a huge opportunity. Democrats have owned the health issue for decades, but their ideas have now been exposed as abject failures. They are about to head home for Thanksgiving recess to be shellacked by angry constituents. Rarely has there been a moment where the public has been better educated on the health-care issue and more open to pro-market alternatives.
The GOP also has built up a surprisingly rich body of those policy reforms. This has been a longtime in the making—not to mention hard and unrecognized work for many of the trailblazers. The process has been aided by an influx of doctors to the GOP caucus, who have used their experience to craft original health reforms on everything from medical malpractice to high-risk pools, as well as thinkers like Paul Ryan, who has directed his budget expertise to policy reforms for health entitlements.
Those reforms have accumulated in a number of bills: the Coburn-Ryan proposal of 2009; a bill by Mr. Price; a Roe-Scalise plan endorsed by the Republican Study Committee; and more. No one of these proposals is perfect, but the GOP doesn't need one, big bill. They have an impressive framework of ideas that can be promoted and explained as a modern and dynamic health system—one that not just overthrows ObamaCare, but eclipses the system that preceded it.
Policy aside, Republicans might use this unique moment to redefine the broad concept of health care: Patient-centered, patient-driven, patient-owned (even when workers change jobs); a deep well of competitive choices that ensures access by all; fairness in tax treatment; ease of use; and a more streamlined and limited safety net.
Talking about these concepts, and the policies that underlie them does not get in the way of the ObamaCare collapse. Quite the opposite: It provides a contrast that could hasten the law's end.
The GOP's long reticence to address health care provided Mr. Obama with the moment to pass his law. The GOP is now faced with another such moment, only this time the party is far better positioned to show policy boldness. If it only will.
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4)Iran Is Playing Obama, Says Savvy Saudi Prince
It is quite something for a Saudi royal to state baldly that his country is part of a tacit alliance with Israel, but Saudi leaders, like Israel’s leaders, are frantic with worry that an overeager Obama will accede to Iran’s desire to become a threshold state, one whose nuclear program is so advanced that it would only need several weeks to assemble a deliverable weapon. Alwaleed, like Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, believes that Iran, in its ongoing negotiations with the world’s major powers, will pocket whatever sanctions relief it gets without committing to ending its nuclear program. “Why are they offering relief?” he asked. “Keep the pressure on. Sanctions are what brought about the negotiations to begin with! Why not keep the pressure up?”
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4)Iran Is Playing Obama, Says Savvy Saudi Prince
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Saudi royal who seems to own most everything there is to own -- a chunk of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, a piece of Twitter, all of Paris’s George V Hotel, the Savoy in London, and a Boeing 747 for his personal use -- was sitting in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Chicago the other evening (he and Bill Gates own most of Four Seasons Holdings), offering up the view -- the view of an experienced negotiator from the Middle East -- that U.S. President Barack Obama is outmatched by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
“There’s no confidence in the Obama administration doing the right thing with Iran,” he told me, with a directness that would make Benjamin Netanyahu blush. “We’re really concerned -- Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Middle East countries -- about this.”
It is quite something for a Saudi royal to state baldly that his country is part of a tacit alliance with Israel, but Saudi leaders, like Israel’s leaders, are frantic with worry that an overeager Obama will accede to Iran’s desire to become a threshold state, one whose nuclear program is so advanced that it would only need several weeks to assemble a deliverable weapon. Alwaleed, like Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, believes that Iran, in its ongoing negotiations with the world’s major powers, will pocket whatever sanctions relief it gets without committing to ending its nuclear program. “Why are they offering relief?” he asked. “Keep the pressure on. Sanctions are what brought about the negotiations to begin with! Why not keep the pressure up?”
Obama, Alwaleed says, is a man who is in desperate political straits and needs a victory -- any victory -- to right his presidency. “Obama is in so much of a rush to have a deal with Iran,” he said. “He wants anything. He’s so wounded. It’s very scary. Look, the 2014 elections are going to begin. Within two months they’re going to start campaigning. Thirty-nine members of his own party in the House have already moved away from him on Obamacare. That’s scary for him.”
Alwaleed believes a stronger president would have the willpower to say no to a flawed deal with Iran. Like the Israelis, the Saudis believe a flawed deal is one in which Iran isn’t forced to put its nuclear program in reverse, by shuttering facilities and mothballing centrifuges. (Alwaleed is not a Saudi government official, but he often floats trial balloons on behalf of the members of his family who rule his country, and they consider him free to make impolitic statements they believe but cannot publicly endorse).
“This has been going on for 30 years plus, since the Iranian revolution in 1979,” he continued. “And his people bragged about the first call between President Obama and President Rouhani. But what does a call mean? It’s nothing.” He went on to condemn Obama for folding when confronted with proof that Syria, Iran’s proxy, used chemical weapons against civilians. Obama had previously warned Syria not to cross the red line he drew on the deployment of chemical weapons.
“When he put that red line out, and the red line was crossed, he blinks,” he said, going on to suggest that Obama is mistaken to believe that Syria will, in fact, ship out all of its chemical weapons, as it has agreed to do. “You think the chemicals are going to come out, one hundred percent? Come on. Even if he lets them go, the same people who produced them before will produce them again.” When Obama “blinked,” Alwaleed suggested, the Arabs came to the conclusion that he would not stand up to Iran, either.
Alwaleed suggested that it may ultimately be the Iranian leadership itself that saves the day, by rejecting a compromise offer it sees as unacceptably tough -- but one that Iran’s Israeli and Arab adversaries see as unacceptably accommodating. “You and I both know that the real power is with Khamenei” -- Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader -- “and not President Rouhani. There are two theories, one that that Rouhani sincerely wants to negotiate but he can’t give up this program, and the second theory, which is -- come on, give me a break, they don’t want to do this. Either way, Khamenei is the real ruler.” He went on, “We just saw Khamenei issue an announcement saying to his own negotiators that before they go and talk they shouldn’t cross his own red lines.”
If the negotiations don’t succeed -- and clearly, Alwaleed sees no chance of success -- then what? Anti-proliferation by force? I asked him if he thought the Arab states would actually back an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, if this terrible option should come to pass.
“Publicly, they would be against it,” he said. “Privately, they would love it.”
What about at the level of the so-called Arab street?
“The Sunnis will love it,” he said, referring to the dominant branch of Islam, to which most Arab Muslims adhere. “The Sunni Muslim is very much anti-Shiite, and very much anti-, anti-, anti-Iran,” he said.
You’re sure they loathe Iran more than they loathe Israel?
“Look, Iran is a huge threat, historically speaking," he said. "The Persian empire was always against the Muslim Arab empire, especially against the Sunnis. The threat is from Persia, not from Israel. This was a great empire ruling the whole neighborhood. I’ll tell you something -- they are in Bahrain, they are in Iraq, they are in Syria, they are with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas, which is Sunni, in Gaza. They are intruding into these areas. King Abdullah of Jordan had a good statement on this -- he said that a Shiite crescent begins from Iran, through Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and goes down to Palestine, to Hamas.”
Alwaleed, who spent much of our time together criticizing Obama, also reserved some criticism for Saudi Arabia’s Jewish ally. He said that if Netanyahu would make advances in the peace process with Palestinians, he would help marginalize Iran. “If you want to weaken Iran’s position in the Arab world, you should have peace with the Palestinians. This would help move Iran away from this issue. This is the heart of it. Hezbollah will not go away, but they will be weakened.”
This last piece of analysis made good sense to me. As for the rest of his analysis? It is easy to write-off Saudi fears of Iranian regional domination as part of an internecine Muslim struggle that is ultimately immaterial to the core national security interests of the U.S. On the other hand, countries that have had long and bitter experience with Iran might have something to teach American negotiators as they strive for a deal.
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