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Jonathan David is a very dear Israeli friend. The number two man at Israel's largest and best private University - The IDC Herzilya. He was in Baltimore recently and was interviewed.
Dick,Enjoy my appearance on Canadian TV. You may like it. jd
http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/
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There are consequences when a president is weak. (See 1 below.)
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Is Gov. Walker and acceptable alternative to Gov. Christie? (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1) The price of presidential weakness
By Wesley Pruden
A president has to be a resolute officer of his administration. If he isn't he fails. When everybody gets his number the new reality makes everybody miserable. That goes double when other presidents, prime ministers and despots get it.
Barack Obama, resolute enough when he's designing health care schemes, shows only irresolution abroad. Weakness and irresolution is the face he turns to the rest of the world, in hopes that if he hires a good speechwriter and bows deeply enough to whatever kings and potentates cross his path, that's good enough.
But of course it isn't, and Mr. Obama is challenged now at every turn by friend and foe of the United States who need to see on what meat the man feeds, and of what stuff his promises and assurances are made. The mullahs in Tehran, who can't believe how easy it was to roll the president and his counterparts in Geneva, had no sooner signed the agreement to preserve the Iranian pursuit of the bomb at a bargain price than the mullahs began dreaming up new demands. If the mullahs could roll him once, they could roll him twice.
It's not just the Iranians measuring the president twice before cutting him once. China has drawn an unusual "Air Defense Zone" in the East China Sea meant to test the resolve of Japan, South Korea and above all the United States, to see who if anyone will try to do anything about it. The first Chinese aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, was dispatched to the area on a training mission, innocent enough but intended to show that Beijing is big enough to back up a threat. This is supposed to be a dispute between China and Japan over a few uninhabited islands in the East China Sea. It's true that all real estate is about location, location, location, but this dispute is useful in other ways.
The United States — presumably at the instructions of President Obama, but one never knows — dispatched two B-52 bombers, the terror of despots and troublemakers everywhere, to fly through the zone to see what would happen. Nothing did. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the United States has "no intention" of recognizing the "air defense zone," by notifying the Chinese when they cross the co-ordinates when they enter the zone, but the Chinese have no doubt noticed that President Obama's red lines eventually fade to green. The Chinese in Beijing read the newspapers.
Not far away, President Hamid Karzai is negotiating the terms of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, and an agreement to train Afghan's own army and to show the security forces how to keep what passes for peace in Islamic countries. Mr. Karzai desperately wants to forge such an agreement, but only on his terms, which change frequently. When Susan Rice, the White House negotiator, told Mr. Karzai that if there's no agreement soon the United States would withdraw all its troops and trainers in 2014. Mr. Karzai was so intimidated that he added the new conditions, including a demand that all prisoners at Guantanamo be freed.
Neither was he impressed by colleagues in the Afghan government. One of them told the New York Times that Mr. Karzai was only contemptuous of the American threat, and joked about the lack of American resolve. He asked Mr. Karzai what he wanted as the final outcome of the negotiations. "It is favorable if they surrender to us," he replied. "The United States has come and it will not go, brother. It does not go. Therefore, ask your demands and don't worry."
America's allies look at this, ponder the implications, and worry. No one worries more than the Saudis, one of the most reliable — if often infuriating — American friends in the Middle East. Like the Israelis, the Saudis can't understand President Obama's passionate romance with the Iranian regime.
They're think it spells trouble for everyone. "The Geneva negotiations," declared the influential Saudi newspaper Al Riyadh, "are just a prelude to a new chapter of convergence between the United States and Iran. A prominent Riyadh columnist likened Mr. Obama to Mother Teresa, "turning his right and left cheeks to his opponents in hopes of reconciliation."
Mother Teresa was something of a saint to her followers, and she was an inspiration to a lot of others. Nobody elected Barack Obama to sainthood. He just has to get over it.
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2)Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s action governor
MILWAUKEE
In 2011, thousands of government employees and others, enraged by Gov. Scott Walker’s determination to break the ruinously expensive and paralyzing grip that government workers’ unions had on Wisconsin, took over the capitol building in Madison. With chanting, screaming and singing supplemented by bullhorns, bagpipes and drum circles, their cacophony shook the building that the squalor of their occupation made malodorous. They spat on Republican legislators and urinated on Walker’s office door. They shouted, “This is what democracy looks like!”
When they and Democratic legislators failed to prevent passage of Act 10, they tried to defeat — with a scurrilous smear campaign that backfired — an elected state Supreme Court justice. They hoped that changing the court’s composition would get Walker’s reforms overturned. When this failed, they tried to capture the state Senate by recalling six Republican senators. When this failed,they tried to recall Walker. On the night that failed — he won with a larger margin than he had received when elected 19 months earlier — he resisted the temptation to proclaim, “This is what democracy looks like!”
Walker recounts these events in “Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge” (co-authored by Post columnist Marc Thiessen). Most books by incumbent politicians are not worth the paper they never should have been written on. If, however, enough voters read Walker’s nonfiction thriller, it will make him a — perhaps the — leading candidate for his party’s 2016 presidential nomination.
Act 10 required government workers to contribute 5.8 percent of their salaries to their pensions (hitherto, most paid nothing) and to pay 12.6 percent of their health-care premiums (up from 6 percent but still just half of what the average federal worker pays). Both percentages are well below the private-sector average. By limiting collective bargaining to base wages, Act 10 freed school districts to hire and fire teachers based on merit, and to save many millions of dollars by buying teachers’ health insurance in the competitive market rather than from an entity run by the teachers’ union. Restricting collective bargaining to wages ended the sort of absurd rules for overtime compensation that made a bus driver Madison’s highest paid public employee.
Act 10’s dynamite, however, was the provision ending the state’s compulsory collection of union dues — sometimes as high as $1,400 per year — that fund union contributions to Democrats. Barack Obama and his national labor allies made Wisconsin a battleground because they knew that when Indiana made paying union dues optional, 90 percent of state employees quit paying, and similar measures produced similar results in Washington, Colorado and Utah.
Walker has long experience in the furnace of resistance to the looting of public funds by the public’s employees. He was elected chief executive of heavily Democratic Milwaukee County after his predecessor collaborated with other officials in rewriting pension rules in a way that, if he had been reelected instead of resigning, would have given him a lump-sum payment of $2.3 million and $136,000 a year for life.
To fight the recall — during which opponents disrupted Walker’s appearance at a Special Olympics event and squeezed Super Glue into the locks of a school he was to visit — Walker raised more than $30 million, assembling a nationwide network of conservative donors that could come in handy if he is reelected next year. Having become the first U.S. governor to survive a recall election, he is today serene as America’s first governor to be, in effect, elected twice to a first term. When he seeks a second term, his opponent will probably be a wealthy rival who says her only promise is to not make promises. This is her attempt to cope with an awkward fact: She will either infuriate her party’s liberal base or alarm a majority of voters by promising either to preserve or repeal Act 10.
Walker is politely scathing — a neat trick — of Mitt Romney’s campaign, especially of Romney’s statement that “I’m not concerned about the very poor” because “we have a very ample safety net.” The imperative, Walker says, is to “help them escape the safety net.”
“Outside the Washington beltway,” he says pointedly, “big-government liberals are on the ropes.” No incumbent Republican governor has lost a general election since 2007. Since 2008, the number of Republican governors has increased from 21 to 30, just four short of the party’s all-time high reached in the 1920s. He thinks Republican governors are in tune with the nation. If reelected, he probably will test that theory.
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