In The Eyes of Liberals, Conservatives Remain Heartless and Will Always Be Despite Logic To The Contrary. FILM FLAM CONTINUES!

Two nice thoughts!
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David Pollock reviews ShibleyTalhami's book which offers"a skewed" look at Arab hearts and minds. (See 1 below.)
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Income inequality is an emotional issue which Democrats hope to use to deflect attention from Obama's overly costly and failing 'Affordable Health Care Act.' However, David Malpass suggests government is driving inequality. (See 2 below.)

Yesterday my candidate for The House Seat being vacated by Jack Kingston,spoke to a group of my friends at our monthly luncheon.

Bob Johnson is a doctor, a 26 year military veteran and a Conservative.  Most of the audience tended to be liberal and they asked some good penetrating questions which revealed where they were coming from. Bob demonstrated he too was intelligent, understood their concerns and proceeded to answer their inquiries in a forthright manner.

Most telling to me was the fact that everyone in the audience agrees something is rotten in Denmark but they will not grasp the fact that we cannot continue to spend as we are so something must give. That something is, of course, government spending on various entitlements etc.

If the government deficit pertained to  their own household budget they would move swiftly to trim expenditures because they would know upside income was not an available option.  However, because it is government they, somehow, believe deficits do not mean anything, can be covered by selling more bonds, devaluing our currency or raising taxes because the wealthy can afford to continue being the 'stuckee.'  They just cannot bring themselves to comprehend the act of reduce spending.

These are grown men, who have run successful businesses or professional enterprises but they cannot bring themselves to believe government's amoebic appetite  for spending  is the problem. Deep down, they seem to  believe Conservatives are heartless, are unrealistic and probably are solely interested in protecting wealth. Conservatives are takers and not expansive in their eyes whereas  Liberals and Progressives are caring and feeling.

Their questions were legitimate, were thoughtful, and though Bob's responses were equally thoughtful and , probably gave them some intellectual discomfort, on the emotional level I doubt he penetrated.

They think with their hearts and therein lies so much of the disconnect.  They just cannot bring themselves to believe government is too big, too distant, fails at virtually everything it attempts and spends in an unaccountable manner and, I repeat, they were all successful in their personal business endeavors.

When I got home, I listened to the news and lo and behold the new edifice being constructed that will  house our new consolidated intelligence cadre is over budget by an estimated billion dollars and its completion will be delayed. We all know government  budget estimates are always low balled in order to make them appear palatable and then cost overruns come later.

It stands to reason,  when you are spending someone else's money and have access to printing presses waste is a by-product and the bigger the size of government the waste multiplier simply grows.  I can comprehend this proposition and I can cite decades of facts to support my thesis. Why can't they?  Again it is not because they are not intelligent. It is simply because they view everything through a liberal prism and allow emotions to rule their minds. To admit a flaw in their reasoning would be devastating to their psyche and years of self-delusion.

So what do they do?  They project upon those who challenge them by characterizing them as being evil, being heartless, wanting to gut the poor and less fortunate.  This is the emotional  grease liberal's and progressive's use to get themselves off logic's hook and so it will continue to be until the day of reckoning arrives and s--- hits the fan.
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This was sent to me by a friend.  It is a thoughtful op ed but, in my opinion, it also fails to address the consequences of Iran  being  allowed to go nuclear just as Assad is being allowed to remain Syria's leader and al Qaeda is being allowed to continue to increase its dominance. Why?  Because Obama has no desire to challenge the inevitable and is a complete amateur.

I submit that Netanyahu's position probably defies logic not because he is wrong but because the confused and, at times, feckless West has allowed circumstances to devolve as they  have because of oil dependency.
As for Israeli settlements I am not willing to swallow the author's belief they are illegal. Yes, they are a poke in the eye but as long as Israel is unable to establish Jerusalem as its capital and governments refuse to locate their embassies there I see no reason why Israel should bend to the desires of the West's double standards.

When Western Governments come to court with clean hands then I will be more objective about Israel's actions. (See 3 below.)
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Well what is the ball score on these phony scandals?

Yesterday a bi-partisan Congressional committee concluded the four Americans killed at Benghazi could have been saved because Obama and Hillary knew it was not an attack based on some film.  So the' film flam' continues.

Then we are told  The Justice Department, using the FBI as their cover up tool, is not going to bring criminal charges in the IRS matter nor even conduct a thorough investigation.   Why?  Because it would mean seeking the truth and embarrassing Obama and heaven forbid Eric Holder would ever consider enforcing the law. What difference does it now make is Obama's official line of defense.

Grant's administration was considered one of the more corrupt but Obama has set the high water mark for lying, deception, disregard of the lives of Americans, indifference towards the military, contempt for our Constitution all in pursuit of winning campaigns.
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Dick
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1)The World through Arab Eyes

Arab Public Opinion and the Reshaping of the Middle East

by Shibley Telhami
New York: Basic Books, 2013. 240 pp. $27.99

Reviewed by David Pollock

A Skewed Look at Arab Hearts and Minds

Telhami offers in The World through Arab Eyes a valuable if unavoidably imperfect attempt at illuminating the hearts and minds of the Arab world as revealed through public opinion polling. His book contains useful broad generalizations, revealing new data and intriguing ambiguities. But it also suffers from occasional problems: methodological flaws, unsupported or questionable single-sourced assertions, and strained interpretations that go beyond the available evidence. Arab public opinion polling as well as the analysis and policy debate surrounding it needs to be taken with a proverbial shaker of salt, a seasoning the author does not always apply.

Egyptians window shop in Cairo. Arabs' popular dislike of the United States derives mostly from a rejection of its policies rather than its values—and, more surprisingly, this dislike actually has very little effect on Arab consumer preferences or behavior.

On the positive side, the book provides interesting and well-organized survey data on certain broad major topics. Moreover, the author acknowledges the evidence that Arab public opinion has turned inward, toward domestic issues such as political freedoms and social justice. He also makes due allowances for the significant differences among and within diverse Arab publics.

In addition, the book offers numerous specific nuggets of information. It is interesting and important, for instance, to see that on average the Arab citizens of Israel are four times more likely to empathize with Jewish Holocaust victims than are Arabs in the six other countries polled: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates. Or that those Arabs' popular dislike of the United States derives mostly from a rejection of its policies rather than its values—and, more surprisingly, that this dislike actually has very little effect on Arab consumer preferences or behavior. Another important data point: On a weighted average, two-thirds of those in the six Arab countries polled would accept a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; only one-quarter say the Arabs should keep fighting Israeli forever.

Equally surprising nuggets, but also plausible and useful, come from individual countries. In Saudi Arabia, the "most admired" foreign leader in 2011 was Saddam Hussein. In 2012 Egypt, two-thirds of those polled wanted Shari'a as the country's legal basis, but most (83 percent) preferred applying "the spirit of shari'ah but with adaptation to modern times"; just 17 percent opted to apply it literally, "including the penal code (hudud)."

One problem, however, is that other recent polls show dramatically different results for very similar questions. The latest Pew poll from Egypt, to cite but one case, shows that 88 percent of Muslims there favored the death penalty for apostasy.[1] This kind of discrepancy points to the problems in most contemporary Arab survey research—whether by Pew or Telhami.

The book suffers from scattered methodological omissions as well. The first is simply the failure to spell out several important procedural approaches. Were all these surveys true probability samples, or were some based on quota or even merely "convenience" samples? If the former, what precisely were the methods adopted in each case—multi-stage, stratified, geographic probability? Random walk? Household interview selection? Statistical/demographic weighting? If these were not all standard probability samples, how truly scientific or reliable are the resulting numbers? Regardless of sampling method, how much host government supervision, permission, or intimidation took place, which might have distorted the findings?

Some potentially revealing numbers are also missing from the narrative. For example, one poll cited produced the unlikely result, not replicated in others conducted by this reviewer, that Hugo Chavez was once the "most admired" foreign leader among Arabs. But did he get a rating of 60 percent, 20 percent, or some other percentage? It makes a big difference—and in this and other instances, there is no telling from the text.

A different deficiency is in the choice of the countries surveyed and in the decision to stick with purely urban samples, which thereby excludes half or more of a country's total population. Thus, the book's samples hardly encompass all the Arab eyes of its title, and they completely omit crucial current developments in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Tunisia. Even in Egypt and other countries that are included, many of the most salient internal political issues are absent. As a result, the book has little to tell us about the great contest between the Islamist and the civil-military segments of society now underway in Egypt or about the prospects for stability or instability in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, or Jordan.

Too often the book treats all six Arab countries polled as a unit, which obscures rather than illuminates the vital differences among them. The averaged responses are weighted by population. Since Egypt has many more people than the other five countries combined, the findings are really a distorted reflection of Egyptian public opinion rather than a meaningful average of anything.

Another methodological problem is the occasional use of loaded questions on key issues. Some examples: "What aspect of al-Qaeda do you admire the most, if any?" "How important is the Palestinian issue to you?"—instead of an open-ended question like "What issues are important to you?" Given the author's repeated and correct references to Arab aversion to international pressure, why ask: "There is international pressure on Iran to curtail its nuclear program. What is your opinion?" This preamble prejudices the findings by cuing the respondents in a particular direction.

Finally, the author largely neglects other readily available Arab polls that variously corroborate, qualify, or contradict the findings from his own fieldwork. Among the obvious candidates for inclusion would have been the Pew, Gallup, Charney, PIPA, Pechter, and many Palestinian and Israeli surveys on the topics in question. Given the particular constraints and vagaries of Arab polling, no single source can be credible. In certain important cases—as on Arab attitudes toward Iran or toward selected American values—the discrepancies among different pollsters are so significant that they demand detailed accounting and explanation.

In particular, other surveys taken in the two-and-a-half years since the beginning of the 2011 Arab uprisings strongly suggest that most Arabs are now very heavily focused on their own internal issues—and not on Americans, Israelis, Palestinians, or other Arabs. This is contrary to the book's overall leitmotif. Telhami interlaces the book with observations about Arab "dignity" and "the ever-present prism of pain," attempts to reassert the primacy of the Palestinian issue and resentment of U.S. policy therein. If there were actual empirical survey support for this, as opposed to mere anecdotes, fine. But the evidence is just not there—not in the polls, not in the public squares, and not in the actual policies of Arab governments, revolutionary or otherwise. In 2011, as Telhami notes in passing, the Palestinian conflict ranked eighth out of eleven possible named priorities in an Egyptian poll—and dead last in Tunisia. Yet the author is at pains to add that "there were other indications of [its] importance," without indicating what those are.

Even if he at times concedes that today's Arab politics and public opinion are "primarily" about domestic matters rather than foreign economic, social, and political affairs, Telhami spends little time considering the ramifications of this trend.

Telhami is among the most decent, thoughtful, knowledgeable, and balanced experts in this all-too-polarized intellectual arena. There is much to be learned from this book, despite its imperfections. Yet had the author considered the substantial and directly relevant work of others like him—including mounds of complementary but occasionally quite contrary polling data—the result would have been considerably more compelling. This narrow focus is a common and even an understandable academic failing but one that is relatively easily remedied. One keeps hoping that it will be—another time.

David Pollock is the Kaufman Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and director of its bilingual Arabic/English blog, Fikra Forum. A Harvard Ph.D. and former State Department official, he is the author of Slippery Polls: Uses and Abuses of Opinion Surveys from Arab States (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2008) andThe Arab Street: Public Opinion in the Arab World (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1993).

[1] Neha Sahgal and Brian J. Grim "Egypt's Restrictions on Religion Coincide with Lack of Religious Tolerance," Pew Rresearch Center, Washington, D.C., July 2, 2013.

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2)  

How Big Government Drives Inequality

Stifling economic growth and benefiting insiders with Washington access do not help the middle class.

By DAVID MALPASS

Inequality is the wedge issue that Democrats hope will carry them through the 2014 and 2016 elections, neutralizing the ObamaCare fiasco. The issue has popular appeal because median incomes (after inflation) have been falling throughout the recovery, while high-end incomes are increasing rapidly.

For progressives, this situation seems made to order: If you want a flatter income distribution, don't you need bigger government to get it? Yet experience shows the opposite: Washington's increased size and power has concentrated income and wealth in fewer hands. Making government bigger will exacerbate this problem—it is already too big, intrusive and expensive to allow a robust economy that benefits everyone.

President Ronald Reagan rejected class warfare, advocating sound money and lower tax rates to boost growth and living standards. His policies worked. The economy grew faster than 7% in real terms for five quarters in a row starting in the second quarter of 1983. Gross domestic product grew on average 4.6% per year in real terms during the 1983-88 expansion, while real median incomes grew 2.1%. His policies were such an economic success that appeals to class warfare gained relatively little political traction for 25 years.

Today, almost five years after the recession officially ended in June 2009, job growth from new business formation is running one-third below average, according to the Labor Department's Employment Dynamics report. Real GDP growth has averaged a weak 2.3% over the past three years, while real median incomes have fallen 0.6% per year. This disastrous economic result sets up a political confrontation between those who believe that a bigger government makes things better and those who believe that it concentrates power and income in fewer hands, undercutting the middle class.Since the Reagan years, growth policies have faded while the government has increased its control over the economy and national income. Top marginal federal income-tax rates have risen to nearly 44% today from 28% in 1988. The dollar has weakened while consumer prices have doubled in 25 years. Federal nondefense spending has nearly quadrupled to $2.8 trillion in 2013 from $750 billion in 1988, adding a huge burden on taxpayers as national debt grows.

Progressives may concede the weakness of the economic recovery. Yet they urge more government spending and higher taxes, claiming that their policies will achieve higher growth and a fairer distribution of income.

Conservatives need to champion economic growth as Reagan did, but they also need to make a more forceful connection between the government's centralization of power and income inequality.

Big government expansions in recent years have harmed individuals with modest incomes while exempting or benefiting people with higher incomes. These include the federal takeover of the mortgage industry, and the Federal Reserve's decisions to keep interest rates near zero and buy some $3 trillion in bonds. Both of these expansions channel credit to the government and the well-connected at the expense of savers and new businesses.

Middle-income earners used to be the primary beneficiary of the rise in the value of their houses. Housing gains now lift Washington, allowing the government to pay itself huge "dividends" from Fannie Mae, FNMA +0.32% Freddie Mac FMCC -0.33% and the Federal Reserve, which owns nearly $1.5 trillion in the government's housing-related bonds. The government promptly spends the windfalls, fueling a further accumulation of wealth and income for those with Washington access.

The financial industry is making billions in profits fueled by the government's provision of zero-rate loans for those with connections and collateral. Wall Street's upper crust is the epicenter for financing the contractors, lobbyists and lawyers that help the government spend money. Meanwhile, government grabs a huge share of the profits generated by small businesses. It piles on opaque regulations, complex tax rules and countless independent agencies, producing a system that works against small businesses and the middle class. The Affordable Care Act takes pains to exempt Congress, government, corporations and unions, but leaves the rest severely exposed, adding to inequality.

This week's congressional budget deal saw a narrow group of Washington's elite legislators and lobbyists working over the weekend to divvy up nearly $1.1 trillion in discretionary spending for 2014. Much of the spending and all of the lobbying and debt underwriting costs will benefit those with high incomes while the extra debt falls heavily on the middle class.

There is nothing wrong with an appropriate level of government services—it's necessary. But we are long past that level. Growing the government shrinks the rest of the economy and after-tax paychecks.

The next debt limit increase is approaching fast, probably in March. Fiscal conservatives are likely to argue along traditional lines for a few spending cuts or some votes to highlight the ObamaCare calamity. That leaves Democrats with the inequality argument to use as a bludgeon against Republicans.

The debt-limit debate should be a national referendum on the size of the federal government and the need for new controls on its growth and power. That will be a critical step in restoring income growth, but as currently written, the debt-limit law forces votes in favor of more debt.

I've advocated strengthening the debt limit by adding a declining debt-to-GDP ceiling that, when exceeded, triggers extra controls on spending and a hair shirt for Washington. Extra debt should trigger a slowdown in automatic entitlement growth, pay cuts for senior officials and reductions in their subsidized benefits until they resolve the spending crisis.

A new debt law offering spending restraint would boost confidence among investors and entrepreneurs. Most important, it would allow median incomes to begin rising again once Washington leaves private enterprise more room to breathe and grow.

Mr. Malpass is president of Encima Global LLC. He served as deputy assistant Treasury secretary in the Reagan administration and deputy assistant secretary of state in the George H.W. Bush administration.

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3)Time to Be A Statesman, Not a Partisan

Prime Minister Harper’s trip to Israel and the West Bank will not be just a simple filling out of hisresumé and staging a series of photo-ops geared to the 2015 election—although it will certainly be both of those things. The domestic Canadian politics of the visit have been made more urgent by the Liberals’ point that Justin Trudeau has already been to Israel and the curiously incurious Prime Minister has not, either before coming to office or in the eight years since. Beyond the “comms plans“ and optics, though, it is the substance that matters, as the visit falls in the middle of some of the most politically and strategically fraught negotiations of our times--the quest for a two state solution for Israel and Palestine and the curtailing of the Iranian nuclear program. Success or failure in each of these talks will have profound consequences, including for Canadians. The national interest requires the Prime Minister to be more statesman than partisan.

The alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program will likely be preoccupying PM Harper’s Israeli hosts. Jerusalem has gone to great lengths to warn that a nuclear weapon-equipped Iran would be a danger to Israel and could trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey seek means to deter Iran and defend themselves. Were all that to happen, Israel’s nuclear deterrent would lose some or all of its value and its own strategic situation would become near incalculably complex. Under pressure from Israel the US has sworn not just to “contain” Iran but to use force if necessary to prevent the Shia state from producing nuclear weapons. Despite the posturing in Jerusalem, the view is widely held that on its own Israel could only interrupt Iran’s nuclear program briefly not stop it and that American participation, even leadership, in attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be indispensable to any mission’s operational success. The American time frame for any such military action is considerably longer and more conditional than Tel Aviv’s because of Washington’s vastly greater technical capability and the president’s sharing of the public’s skepticism of preventive wars.

The unintended consequences of a military attack on Iran would probably include the destruction of the international consensus for imposing sanctions on Iran; redoubled determination on the part of Iranian hardliners to escape the confines of the Non-Proliferation Treaty; deepening Muslim hatred of the US (and Israel) for an attack on yet another Muslim country; opportunistic political profit-taking by Moscow and Beijing; disruption of oil and possibly financial markets at least temporarily and the concomitant impacts on European economies; and destruction of potentially thousands of lives.

Those are some of the consequences if the attack succeeds in crippling the Iranian nuclear program. A failed operation would be all that and worse, not least, the shredding of Israel’s political and military reputation. Further, Americans’ attitudes towards Israel could be undermined if the US public, already fed up with fighting in the Middle East, came to believe that Israel had dragged them into another war.

For all of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s outrage, real or feigned for bad cop effect, the temporary deal and the ongoing negotiations between Teheran and Security Council members on the Iranian nuclear program is vastly preferable to war.  The negotiations might lead Iran to accept limits on its nuclear program, pull Teheran out of its isolation and lead to more normal relations with a democracy-hungry Iranian people. The Iranians have not eternally been enemies of the US or of Israel. Times can change.

The Iranian and Palestinian issues are linked, at least indirectly. The Israeli government’s determination to keep building settlements is eroding support for Israel internationally at precisely the time it needs international legitimacy to attract support for action against Iran. In the words of former Israeli national security adviser Uzi Arad “the Prime Minister (Netanyahu) has been dealing with Iran as if there were no Palestine and Palestine as if there were no Iran” (quoted by Ari Shavit in “Does This Mean War?”Haaretz, 2012). But, for Israel, the road to Teheran runs through Washington because the decision-makers on Iran are the decision-makers on Palestine. In addition to its intrinsic merits, an agreement on a two-state solution would give Washington greater “cover” in the Middle East, and in the mid-West too, for military action if Teheran proved intransigent. Given these highly complex circumstances, Prime Minister Harper needs to take special care not to complicate Secretary Kerry’s efforts, and to contribute judiciously to them where he can.

The status quo in the West Bank will not endure eternally whatever some Israelis might wish and neither side will get all it wants in negotiations whatever some Palestinians might hope. Partly because there are people including cabinet ministers on both sides, not just among the Palestinians, who do not believe the other side has a right to exist, Mr. Harper ought to reiterate publically Canada’s long-standing support for a two state solution -- based on the pre-1967 lines and mutually agreed land swaps. To be taken seriously by Israelis, Mr. Harper will want to demonstrate publically as well as privately that he understands Israel’s need for security and its right to defend itself when threatened. To be taken seriously by others, he will need to accord greater importance than heretofore to the Palestinians’ desire for a state of their own. He should spend some of the political capital he has amassed from  unwavering  support of the Israeli government to urge Israel to cease building settlements, which are illegal under international law and render a two-state solution moot. Mr. Harper should program enough time in the West Bank to see for himself how difficult life there is.

On Iran, Mr. Harper should not endorse Prime Minister Netanyahu’s impatience with a diplomatic solution—even prominent Israeli national security specialists are divided on the necessity of military action -- and should manifest strong support for a negotiated outcome.  He needs to be more statesman than partisan. Too much is at stake for free-lancing and self-serving expressions of skepticism. He should make the point with the Israelis that progress on the Palestine question would strengthen Israel’s standing internationally and attract more support when Israel rings the alarm about Iran’s nuclear intentions.

Finally, Ottawa’s Global Markets Action Plan calls for harnessing all its diplomatic assets, including presumably its chief diplomatic asset,  “to support the pursuit of commercial success by Canadian companies and investors in key foreign markets”. Given all that we have at stake in our own relations with Washington, Mr. Harper will presumably connect the dots from political to economic diplomacy and take care not to alienate the US Secretary of State and President, the recommender and decider-in-chief respectively, of the Keystone pipeline project. The Middle East trip provides him an opportunity to lend a hand to the US administration on issues that matter to us as well as to President Obama and to do so prior to the President’s decision on the Keystone pipeline. That would be statesmanship.

Paul Heinbecker is a former Chief foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. He is currently with the Centre for International Governance Innovation and Laurier University in Waterloo.