===
Where is he now when we need him?
"Socialism only works in two places:
Heaven where they don't need it and hell where they already have it."
-Ronald
Reagan
Reagan
'Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too
strong.
strong.
- Ronald
Reagan
Reagan
'I have wondered at times about what
the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them
through the U.S. Congress.
-Ronald
Reagan
Reagan
'Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short
phrases:
phrases:
If it moves, tax it.
If it keeps moving, regulate it.
And if it stops moving, subsidize it.'
- Ronald
Reagan
Reagan
'If we ever forget that we're one nation under GOD, then we will be a nation gone under.'
-Ronald
Reagan
===Reagan
SIRC SHERRIFF FORUM
FEBRUARY 25, 2016
PARTICIPANTS
SHERIFF ROY HARRIS
JOHN WILCHER RETIRED COLONEL SHERIFF OF CC
KEN WILLIAMS FORMER DEPUTY SHERIFF AND BUSINESS LEADER
===
Can Democracies survive? If so, what must they do to adjust to a fast changing world? (See 1 below.)And
Why do terrorists attack democracies? (See 1a below.)
Finally:
Assessing Iran's Threat To America. (See 1b below.)
===
I have the greatest respect for Thomas Sowell but I am disappointed in his presidential selection. (See 2 below.)
However, when Sowell writes about the lure of Socialism I am in complete agreement. (See 2a below.)
===
Rumor is Obama will not attend Scalia's funeral. Is Obama unable to remove himself from looking in the mirror? They will pay their respects Friday. (See 3 below.)
===
Several days ago I posted my own comments and they were very much in line with these. (See 4 and 4a below.)
===
Democrat hypocrisy abounds and resurrects! (See 5 below.)
And
Obama now regrets his own hypocrisy by conveniently being hypocritical again. (See 5a below.)
===
Trump takes a neutral position vis a vis the Palestinian and Israeli situation unlike the other Republican candidates. I do not react as others have because I do not believe what he has done is set in stone at this point. (See 6 below.)
Meanwhile, unlike Trump, Merkel hangs tough regarding Iran and Israel (See 6a below.)
===
Dick
=======================================================================
1)Is There a Future for Democracy?
By Steven Beller
The world is changing faster than ever, and it is unclear whether modern democracy will be able to keep up with the changes. To quote A.J.P. Taylor, ‘nothing is inevitable, until it happens’, and predicting democracy’s future is no exception.
In a world where the IT revolution is having profound effects on the economy, society and politics, positive and negative, where inequality in the developed world is on the rise, but where millions in the developing world are rising out of poverty, where Islamic fundamentalism appears on the rise in the Islamic world, but where in other regions there is also an increase in a non-ideological, secular approach, and where over half the world’s population is urban, it is hard to say what opportunities democracy will have, what threats there are to it, and whether its response will be effective. Will the connection between freedom and equality hold, or will it be broken – or will their relationship change under the pressure of new circumstance? Will democracy as we know it – a hybrid of government by elected officials, a free market economy and the rule of law – nevertheless survive in recognizable form?
The Arab Spring – In some parts the prospects for democracy have never been brighter, but in others there have rarely been so many problems and doubts about its effectiveness, especially in dealing with inequality, economic distress, and global issues. The focus of democratic interest has recently been on the Arab Spring. The lessons for democracy are so far mixed, its prospects here ambivalent. On the one hand, the initial revolutions in North Africa benefited greatly from new communications technology, which made it almost impossible to stop information getting out and being shared, allowing for greater co-ordination by the revolutionaries. On the other hand, technology has done little to solve old problems of political organization and economic disorder. It has not enabled the initial revolutionaries, often young, quite secular professionals, to achieve political power, once more established, less progressive, elements in society came into play, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. As in 1848, the idealistic optimism of the revolutions’ beginnings has had to face social and economic realities that militate against Western democratic values.
To some commentators, it must look as though the move to 1849, the year of reaction, has already repeated itself. The rule of a fairly pragmatic Islamist, President Morsi, in Egypt was not in itself cause for democratic despair, if he had followed the model, for instance, of the moderate Islamist government of Turkey. Instead, the army’s intervention in Egypt has been justified on the grounds that Morsi was pushing the Islamist agenda too far, in an anti-democratic manner. The fact that Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also seems to be overstepping the bounds of the status quo with Turkey’s secular establishment also suggests the problems in keeping the tension between Islamist politics and modern democracy under control. The catastrophe in Syria should concentrate minds on the need for practical and moderate policies, but history is littered with examples of people not learning the obvious lessons. One of them appears to be Morsi; Erdoğan might be another. Certainly, the post-revolutionary governments of the Arab Spring seem so far, with the possible exception of Tunisia, incapable of producing effective governance. The potential extension of Iranian Islamic fundamentalism’s influence in Iraq, Lebanon, the Gulf and Palestine, through Hezbollah and Hamas, also should not be discounted as an anti-democratic factor. Having democracy’s supporters side with Saudi Arabia, an absolute theocratic monarchy, is frankly a peculiar outcome, but perhaps the most practical.
Prospects in South America and Africa – South America has been lately a success story for democracy. The right-wing dictatorships that so recently dominated the continent have gone. Chile, Brazil and Uruguay have confidently returned to the democratic community, and the recent Brazilian riots do not appear to change this trajectory. There are several countries, led by the late Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, which have promoted ‘Bolivarian’ democracy, putting the popular element in modern democracy ahead of its more liberal and market oriented aspects. Argentina has also pursued an independent course that veers from the modern democratic model, especially regarding financial rules. On the other hand, these countries maintain democratic forms and will probably come to resemble the other modern democracies on the continent. Then there is Cuba, a souvenir of the Cold War, still exerting a sentimental (anti-American) influence over many Central and South Americans. Yet it is likely that the Cuban regime will liberalize in the not-too-distant future and join most of the rest of the Caribbean and Central American states as functioning democracies; one hopes that includes Haiti at last. Mexico, once only formally a democratic republic, has made great advances in democratization and, despite its drug-cartel problems, is set to be a major player in pan-American politics. Assuming economic growth continues to be adequate, the prospects for democracy in Central and South America appear good.
Sub-Saharan Africa offers a better prospect for democratic progress than it has for some time, but it is still halting. Ghana, Benin, South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and Namibia counted as ‘flawed democracies’ in the Democracy Index of 2011, and a more generous definition of modern democracy would include more states, such as Nigeria, Liberia, Tanzania and Senegal, perhaps Kenya, too, after the recent election there. Much of the continent is still struggling to achieve sustainable democratic norms along with general economic prosperity. For every Ghana, there is a Zimbabwe, or Democratic Republic of Congo – and even a state regarded as democratic in 2011, such as Mali, can quickly fall back to more discouraging forms of governance. Relatively prosperous countries such as South Africa are often the objects of Western investor skepticism, but South Africa continues to be democratic; Ghanaian success also suggests a democratic way forward. On the transnational level, the African Union has also proved quite active and responsible in its responses to the continent’s many crises. Post-colonial legacies are waning as an obstacle to co-operation and more free-market economic policies, so sub-Saharan Africa could become a more positive area for modern democracy.
Asia – the crux of democracy – The future of democracy will likely be decided in Asia. If India can continue to flourish as a democracy, this will be a vital support for the democratic cause. It might well spread its democratic influence further afield, to Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and a newly receptive Burma, although nothing would be more helpful for India than peace with Pakistan, and for that country to solidify its democratic credentials and defuse the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. Most south-east Asian states, even Malaysia, seem well on the way to being prosperous and influential democracies. Singapore has been so successful as to be a model for a sort of economically neoliberal authoritarianism, but it has shown democratizing tendencies of late and could without much difficulty join those other major democracies in the region: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand.
The big question is what will happen in China, with its 1.4 billion people. It is, formally, a ‘people’s republic’ but this still means a state ruled absolutely by a dirigiste oligarchy, the Communist Party. China’s recent economic success has prompted many Chinese and others to see it as a superior, more efficient model for generating economic growth and hence well being – at the expense of personal freedom. The actual net effect of China’s prosperity could well be that the new middle classes will demand more power for civil society outside the party apparatus, much as happened in nineteenth-century central Europe. Or perhaps the politics already practiced within the party will simply externalize itself and form a competitive political party system out of the body of the party itself – as party leaders appeal increasingly to the interests and approval of the public at large. China will, I think, soon enough, within a generation, become a form of modern democracy, and at that point an already fairly pragmatic leadership will be more persuadable as a partner in global multilateral governance.
Russia seems to be going the other way, back to older soviet or even tsarist forms. If the West resumes economic growth, however, Russian geopolitical power and the prestige of its neo-authoritarian style should diminish and the other side of Russia – the wish to be part of the free West – will reassert itself, akin to Ukraine’s effort to strengthen contacts with the EU. Once Russia liberalizes, its remaining allies in eastern Europe and Eurasia will perforce do so also. It is a matter of when – if the West resumes growth and stays on its democratic course.
European democracy in the balance – That is a bigger ‘if’ than it should be. The current economic doldrums in Europe have been unnecessarily exacerbated by bad policy decisions, such as the insistence, led by Germany but echoed by Britain and others, on austerity, and the unwelcome return of narrow-minded interpretations of national interests. The economic travails have produced, among other things, the current Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán. Democratically elected by a massive landslide in 2010, his Fidesz party has used its absolute control of Hungary’s political system to compromise many of the liberal-democratic features of the Hungarian state. A democratically elected party is pursuing deeply antidemocratic measures in the heart of Europe. The crisis caused by Jörg Haider in Austria in 2000 is child’s play compared to Orbán’s policies in Hungary. If the European Union’s other members cannot counter Orbán’s power grab, then many of the assumptions of Europe being a community of democracies will be upended. Meanwhile, Germany’s government appears to think that outrageous levels of unemployment in southern European countries, which also have anti-democratic traditions, are quite acceptable in pursuit of economic virtue. No wonder Europe has lost the optimistic energy it possessed during the enlargement of 2004.
The current German-led policy of austerity being followed to solve Europe’s fiscal and economic crisis has the potential to break the Union in the longer term, because of the resentments it inevitably causes. It is unwise for future European solidarity, and even antidemocratic in its doctrinaire refusal to compromise, insisting on the necessity of such massive economic pain. A better policy would be to realize that economics is not a zero-sum game, and that combining greater mutual dependence with more generous financial help from the European Central Bank and deficit spending would produce greater economic growth and more financial confidence (as the American recovery has shown). Keynesian economics is much better suited to democracy than the current rigid neoliberal policies, not only because it avoids unnecessary hardship in the populace, but it also allows for more positive government action. The German, and even more inexcusably the British, governments’ rejection of Keynesianism is tragic.
– The economic crisis has also undermined Europe’s pluralist embrace of diversity. It has exacerbated the very nationalism and xenophobia that partly caused it (through inadequately co-ordinated transnational responses to the financial collapse). Right-wing media corporations, their billionaire owners and their political allies have, moreover, stoked and then exploited fear of immigrants, especially Islamophobia against the many Muslim immigrants now in such countries as France, Germany and the Netherlands. This in turn was partly a reaction to another major threat to democracy, the Islamist terrorism of al-Qaeda and its affiliated jihadists, post-9/11. This growth in Islamophobia has also had a large impact in America. It might even be said that the threat of terrorism in the West is not as much of a potential long-term threat to democratic values as the Islamophobic paranoia that it has evoked as a response, especially in the rush to curtail civil liberties in favour of security and order.
There has been a justified counter-reaction to the curtailing of many individual rights when it comes to terrorism, and the expansion of the surveillance and control apparatus of the state. The Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp remains a dagger at the heart of civil liberties and the rule of law, and it is unnerving to think that the Internet is full of snoops. The ability of drones to ‘take out’ terrorist suspects from thousands of feet in the sky, controlled by someone thousands of miles away is also repugnant to our sense of fair play and personal freedom. Yet the libertarian paranoia created by the realization that one cannot evade the state any more is itself misguided. New technology has made the world smaller and increased the reach of the law and government, regardless of our ideological reluctance. There is no public space in Britain not under video surveillance; in the United States, the open frontier of the Wild West has effectively disappeared, as surveillance and communication technology has progressed and we are ever more dependent on the Internet – which, as the recent irresponsible revelations by Edward Snowden have shown (are we surprised?), is monitored, at varying degrees, by the intelligence services of our governments.
Physical freedom can no longer exist without democracy’s institutional defenses of legal freedoms, and controls on government. It is often not even government that is the threat – it is private snooping, by the newspapers of News Corporation, for instance, that recently posed threats to privacy; the only defense against such intrusions is the state, even when they potentially come from the state itself. That, ironically, is the conclusion to be drawn from the Snowden affair – the surveillance that he revealed was not only hard to prevent in our current wired world; it was also justifiable, even, perhaps, necessary. The key point is that the government agencies are under a tight legal regimen, reinforced and expanded by the Obama administration, which has so far prevented – as far as we know – any major abuse by government agents and agencies. We have available legal and political measures by which we can control the new threats to our democratic liberties. As citizens of a democracy, we just need to be vigilant in demanding their enforcement, and make sure that the people we entrust with these powers understand and act on their responsibilities to that democracy.
Democracy and the new media – New technology is already having far-reaching effects on another vital aspect of democracy: freedom of speech and the free media. In many respects information technology and the Internet have enabled an explosion of free speech and have been instrumental in democratization. The liberating effect of citizens being able to participate in discussions and co-ordinate action not only on a national but also transnational and global level is incalculable. The Internet has been a boon for our ‘monitory democracy’, where NGOs and almost spontaneously formed pressure groups can keep a critical eye on power. Yet there is also a danger in this flood of information: the lack of gate-keepers means that we no longer have an institutional adjudication of what is true or just politicized slur. Before, ‘newspapersof- record’ or broadcast news could be relied on to tell us something close to objective truth. We could obtain well-founded opinion from the ‘op-ed’ pages of newspapers. The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph had their respective ideological preferences, but both were within the same, respectable political universe. In the chaotic, open world of today’s Web, there is not the same reliability, yet the dependable organs of public opinion, the major newspapers and broadcast stations, are being increasingly undermined by this same virtual world, when they are not being suborned by their corporate paymasters. If we lose these anchors of the public forum, as is quite possible given market trends, the danger is that ‘public opinion’ will be open to manipulation of rumor and hearsay because of too much information, rather than too little.
Yet it is also possible that the Internet will become more reliable and less open to abuse, either due to cannier consumers, self-regulation or regulation by democratically elected governments, domestically and transnationally. The Internet is not independent of private or public institutions – just as with the world financial system, it would not exist without innumerable technical conventions and rules, and there are already signs of how access can be controlled and supervised, if necessary. The trick is to make sure such control, domestic and global, is democratic and liberal, not that of an authoritarian power such as China, or – Edward Snowden and Julian Assange’s wish for asylum notwithstanding – enemies of the free media such as Venezuela and Ecuador.
A positive prognosis – The long-term prognosis for democracy is actually a positive one, if we, the people, have the political will and savvy to ensure that our elected representatives and civil servants continue to pursue the common good rather than that of special interests or themselves. The economic crisis has tested transnational and national governance in Europe, and many in the political class and even the electorate have failed (witness the bizarre Italian election in February 2013). Yet Europe is still standing, and despite the execrable levels of unemployment around the Mediterranean, violent resistance or protest against governments or Europe has been remarkably mild. Those affected appear to have decided that accepting the social bargain of democracy – on a national and European level – is still the one most likely to produce the most common (and individual) good, in the long run. That patience is not infinite, but so far it has held – it needs to be rewarded with jobs and prosperity. There has to be a remedy for Europe’s nationally articulated inequalities, as well as for the domestic increase in inequality that European states share with most other Western democracies, most notably the United States. In Europe, national special interests must not be put before the transnational solidarity that will benefit the common good.
On a domestic and global level, it bears repeating, democracies need to reassert control over money and capital, whether this means capping bankers’ bonuses, transaction taxes, or cracking down on tax havens and tax loopholes. Financial and fiscal discipline should be enforced for long-term economic benefit, but with consideration of social justice and equity. The public good ultimately comes before the rights of creditors. Bankers and the financial sector should be the servants of the public, not their masters – otherwise democracy succumbs to plutocracy.
Much of the story outside of Europe and the West is one of continuing improvement in the standard of living and the booming of the middle class, which means democracy will likely expand. In the West, economic recovery will most likely confirm or restore the faith of the voters in their democratic systems. The survival of democracy is, however, not a given. We cannot rely solely on objective protections to save our democracy from ourselves, especially in societies with vast economic and social inequalities. We need to ensure that there is a place for the democratic popular will – our will – to assert itself where appropriate, in defending the people, and their democracies, from the threats that they face in a rapidly changing world, both internationally and domestically. The answer to the threat to democracies from without, especially financial and economic forces beyond national control, would be the provision of some sort of international level of democratic control; and the answer to the threat from within, especially vast inequalities in income and hence in power, would be a greater assertion of each society’s control over its collective human and capital resources. Both, as we have seen, are possible. It just takes the political will of the people to make sure they occur.
By Celestine Bohlen
When terrorists attacked the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo last January, the prevailing view in Europe was that their target was freedom of speech, “a key component of our free democratic culture,” as Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said then.
On Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush had a similar explanation for why the United States had been singled out. “America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world,” he said in a speech to the nation.
These attacks have been attributed to Islamist extremists, but other attackers have targeted their own societies in more solitary wars: Anders Behring Breivik, obsessed with a hatred for multiculturalism, went on a murderous rampage in Norway in July 2011.
Democracies are not the only target of terrorist groups. Suicide bombings occur with deadly regularity in the Middle East and elsewhere, often in societies that lag far behind the democratic ideal, claiming the overwhelming majority of terrorism’s recent victims.
And yet the repeated attacks in Western countries continue to raise questions about the terrorists’ goals. Are democracies targeted because their social and political freedoms are antithetical to the jihadists’ vision of a rigid theocracy? If killers targeted Charlie Hebdo for its caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, why did a fellow terrorist, two days later, target a Jewish grocery store?
Islamist leaders have never hidden their disdain for democracy. Osama bin Laden, in a message to Iraqis in 2003, called it “this deviant and misleading practice.” The late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, considered the founder of the so-called Islamic State, also known as ISIS, challenged the 2005 Iraqi elections on theocratic grounds. “The legislator who must be obeyed in a democracy is a man, and not God,” he said. “That is the very essence of heresy and polytheism and error as it contradicts the basis of faith and monotheism.”
Yet most experts today would argue that Bin Laden attacked the United States in 2001 because of its military presence in the Middle East, not because of its freedoms. “If Bush says we hate freedom, let him tell us why we didn’t attack Sweden, for example,” the Al Qaeda chief said in a video broadcast on Al Jazeera in 2004.
As Islamist terrorism has evolved since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, the thinking about the terrorists’ motives has also shifted. The recent arrival on the scene of ISIS or Daesh, its Arabic name, has redefined the debate once again, as about 20,000 foreign fighters — including hundreds from Europe — join the war to establish an Islamic caliphate in the Middle East.
The fear in France and elsewhere in Europe is that Western recruits will return to wage a campaign of terror in the countries where they grew up, raising again the question of why Western democracies continue to be targeted, and if they — precisely because of the freedoms built into their systems — are more vulnerable to attack.
Gilles Kepel, a professor at France’s Institute of Political Studies, has argued that ISIS, in contrast to Al Qaeda, is playing a deeper and wider game by deliberately stoking tensions “at the heart of Europe in order to destroy it by unleashing a civil war between its Muslim and non-Muslim citizens and residents.”
Mr. Kepel, in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde last January, cited a strategy elaborated in 2004 by Abu Musab al-Suri, a Syrian ideologue, who called for individual acts of terror in Western societies designed to incite Islamophobia. He argued that this, in turn, would alienate more local Muslims, making them potential recruits for jihad.
The advent of social media, and a full-out war waged by ISIS in Iraq and Syria, has allowed this strategy to be put into action, according to Mr. Kepel. “The entire world became a battlefield for Daesh,” he said in the interview.
“‘Blasphemous’ cartoonists, Muslim ‘apostates,’ the police, Jews are all choice targets,” he said. “Daesh has identified precisely cultural, religious and political divisions, and has set their objective to turn them into fault lines.”
Other Islamist strategists have elaborated the theory of a “leaderless jihad,” which does not try to organize terrorist actions, but rather inspires them from afar, avoiding huge bills and risky command structures.
Jessica Stern, co-author with J.M. Berger of “ISIS: The State of Terror,” said the movement’s message was strikingly simple. “Everyone must come join the jihad, but if you can’t come, then stay home and carry out attacks there,” she said. The eventual goal is polarization and chaos — an “apocalyptic narrative” favored by Mr. Zarqawi.
“Social media has certainly made it much easier to encourage individual cells,” said Ms. Stern, a lecturer on terrorism at Harvard. “It is very effective because it makes it hard for law enforcement to know what is going on.”
Democracy, in that sense, may be more the setting than the target — opening a debate about whether democracies are more vulnerable because they allow more room for free speech and greater protection of human rights. Experts note, for instance, that autocratic societies like China have experienced fewer terrorist attacks than, say, India.
Others argue that repression only fosters terrorism. “The more you fight any expression of dissent under the banner of ‘counterterrorism,’ the more you foster the very same terrorist threat,” Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor at the Institute for Political Studies, wrote recently. He cited the case of Algeria, where an Islamic party’s victory at the polls in 1992 was suppressed by a military coup, leading to a decade-long war with marginalized jihadists that cost the lives of some 150,000 Algerians, mostly civilians.
As they set out to recreate a caliphate, ISIS leaders have reportedly instituted elements of a functioning state in places like Raqqa in Syria.
But ISIS rule is enforced by fear, rather than free consent. “If you believe the right way to regulate society should be determined by the word handed down by a 7th century prophet, that rules out having a vote on it,” said Patrick Cockburn, an Irish journalist and author of “The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution.”
ISIS’s military victories against the Iraqi Army and aggressive U.S.-led airstrikes have made it into something that Al Qaeda never was: a winning cause. An anonymous author, identified as a former official in a NATO country with wide experience in the Middle East, wrote recently in The New York Review of Books that the movement’s achievement has been to create a monopoly on jihad, luring fighters from all over the world.
“The only change is that there was suddenly a territory available to attract and house them,” the author wrote. “If the movement had not seized Raqqa and Mosul, many of these might well have simply continued to live out their lives with varying degrees of strain — as Normandy dairy farmers or council employees in Cardiff.”
“We are left again with tautology: ISIS exists because it can exist,” the author wrote. “They are there because they’re there.”
By IHO Staff
Iran represents by far the most significant security challenge to the United States, its allies, and its interests in the greater Middle East. Its open hostility to the United States and Israel, sponsorship of terrorist groups like Hezbollah, and historic and avowed threats to the commons well illustrate the problem it could pose given the right capabilities.
Today, Iran’s provocations are mostly a concern for the region and American allies, friends, and assets there. Iran relies heavily on irregular (to include political) warfare against others in the region and fields more missiles than any of its neighbors. The twin development of its ballistic missiles and nuclear capability also means that it poses a long-term threat to the security of the U.S. homeland.
According to the IISS Military Balance, among the key weapons in Iran’s inventory are 12-plus MRBMs, 18-plus SRBMs, 1,663 main battle tanks, 21 tactical submarines, six corvettes, 13 amphibious landing ships, and 334 combat-capable aircraft in its air force. There are a total of 523,000 personnel in the armed forces, including 125,000 the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and 130,000 in the Iranian Army.
With regard to these capabilities, IISS states that “[t]he Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is a capable organization well-versed in a variety of different operations.” While Iran’s armed forces “suffer from a generally outdated arsenal, exacerbated by the imposition of a UN weapons Embargo in June 2010,” their “innovative and cost-effective tactics and techniques (particularly the use of asymmetric warfare) mean that Iran is able to present a challenge to most potential adversaries, especially its weaker neighbors.” IISS also mentions that Iran’s “inability to offer effective deterrence to an advanced force such as the United States may be a motivation for Iran’s pursuit of dual-use nuclear programs.” This Index assesses the overall threat from Iran, considering the range of contingencies, as “aggressive” and “aspirational.”
===================================================================================
2) Sowell makes his presidential endorsement
2a)
Many people of mature years are amazed at how many young people have voted for Senator Bernie Sanders, and are enthusiastic about the socialism he preaches.
3) Obama Won't Attend Scalia Funeral
President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama will not attend the funeral of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Saturday, The Hill reports.
The Obamas do plan to pay their respects Friday when Scalia's body will lie in repose in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court building, but the funeral on Saturday at Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception will be attended by Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, according to White House press secretary Josh Earnest.
Earnest did not give a reason the Obama's would not be attending the funeral for the Reagan appointee who died Saturday at the age of 79
Scalia was one of the court's most conservative members, and his unexpected death set off an instant public battle between the left and right, with Democrats insisting Obama should name his own choice to replace Scalia and Republicans vowing not to confirm an Obama appointment with only 11 months left in his term.
Republicans say the next president, who they hope will be a member of their own party, should have the chance to make the nomination. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is hoping to be sitting in the Oval Office himself on January 20, but has said he will filibuster any Obama nominee while he still has his current job.
The president says he intends to send a nominee to the Senate and urged Republicans to act on it.
The last member of the high court to die was Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 2005. At that time, Politico notes, then-President George W. Bush attended the funeral and also gave a eulogy.
News that Obama would not attend the funeral was just as divisive as the argument over Scalia's replacement, with people on Twitter noting which funerals Obama has attended while in office – and which he hasn't.
========================================================================4) Republicans Are Campaigning to Lose
2) Sowell makes his presidential endorsement
Among the other Republican candidates, Dr. Ben Carson is a monumental figure in his field, and he is clearly revered even by people who would not vote for him. But votes are how elections are decided.
The governors among the Republican candidates can at least be judged by how their track record stands up in running a governmental organization. So can Senator Ted Cruz, who was attorney general in Texas. But Senator Marco Rubio has no comparable experience -- and his inexperience has shown up in his abortive attempt to join Democrats in promoting amnesty.
If the Republicans are to avoid having Donald Trump lead them -- and the country -- to disaster, they are going to have to have the majority of non-Trump supporters get behind some given candidate.
Senator Ted Cruz has been criticized in this column before, and will undoubtedly be criticized here again. But we can only make our choices among those actually available, and Senator Cruz is the one who comes to mind when depth and steadfastness come to mind.
As someone who once clerked for a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he will know how important choosing Justice Scalia's replacement will be. And he has the intellect to understand much more.
2a)
The Lure of Socialism
By Thomas SowellMany people of mature years are amazed at how many young people have voted for Senator Bernie Sanders, and are enthusiastic about the socialism he preaches.
Many of those older people have lived long enough to have seen socialism fail, time and again, in countries around the world. Venezuela, with all its rich oil resources, is currently on the verge of economic collapse, after its heady fling with socialism.
But, most of the young have missed all that, and their dumbed-down education is far more likely to present the inspiring rhetoric of socialism than to present its dismal track record.
Socialism is in fact a wonderful vision -- a world of the imagination far better than any place anywhere in the real world, at any time over the thousands of years of recorded history. Even many conservatives would probably prefer to live in such a world, if they thought it was possible.
Who would not want to live in a world where college was free, along with many other things, and where government protected us from the shocks of life and guaranteed our happiness? It would be Disneyland for adults!
Free college of course has an appeal to the young, especially those who have never studied economics. But college cannot possibly be free. It would not be free even if there was no such thing as money.
Consider the costs of just one professor teaching just one course. He or she has probably spent more than 20 years being educated, from kindergarten to the Ph.D., before ending up standing in front of a class and trying to convey some of the knowledge picked up in all those years. That means being fed, clothed and housed all those years, along with other expenses.
All the people who grew the food, manufactured the clothing and built the housing used by this one professor, for at least two decades, had to be compensated for their efforts, or those efforts would not continue. And of course someone has to produce food, clothing and shelter for all the students in this one course, as well as books, computers and other requirements or amenities.
Add up all these costs -- and multiply by a hundred or so -- and you have a rough idea of what going to college costs. Whether these costs are paid by using money in a capitalist economy or by some other mechanism in a feudal economy, a socialist economy, or whatever, there are heavy costs to pay.
Moreover, under any economic system, those costs are either going to be paid or there are not going to be any colleges. Money is just an artificial device for getting real things done.
Those young people who understand this, whether clearly or vaguely, are not likely to be deterred from wanting socialism. Because what they really want is for somebody else to pay for their decision to go to college.
A market economy is one in which whoever makes a decision is the one who pays for that decision. It forces people to be sure that what they want to do is really worth what it is going to cost.
Even the existing subsidies of college have led many people to go to college who have very little interest in, or benefit from, going to college, except for enjoying the social scene while postponing adult responsibilities for a few years.
Whether judging by test results, by number of hours per week devoted to studying or by on-campus interviews, it is clear that today's college students learn a lot less than college students once did. If college becomes "free," even more people can attend college without bothering to become educated and without acquiring re any economically meaningful skills.
More fundamentally, making all sorts of other things "free" means more of those things being wasted as well. Even worse, it means putting more and more of the decisions that shape our lives into the hands of politicians and bureaucrats who control the purse strings.
Obamacare has given us a foretaste of what that means in reality, despite how wonderful it may sound in political rhetoric.
Worst of all, government giveaways polarize society into segments, each trying to get what it wants at somebody else's expense, creating mutual bitterness that can tear a society apart. Some seem to blithely assume that "the rich" can be taxed to pay for what they want -- as if "the rich" don't see what is coming and take their wealth elsewhere.
============================================================================3) Obama Won't Attend Scalia Funeral
President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama will not attend the funeral of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Saturday, The Hill reports.
The Obamas do plan to pay their respects Friday when Scalia's body will lie in repose in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court building, but the funeral on Saturday at Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception will be attended by Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, according to White House press secretary Josh Earnest.
Earnest did not give a reason the Obama's would not be attending the funeral for the Reagan appointee who died Saturday at the age of 79
Scalia was one of the court's most conservative members, and his unexpected death set off an instant public battle between the left and right, with Democrats insisting Obama should name his own choice to replace Scalia and Republicans vowing not to confirm an Obama appointment with only 11 months left in his term.
Republicans say the next president, who they hope will be a member of their own party, should have the chance to make the nomination. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is hoping to be sitting in the Oval Office himself on January 20, but has said he will filibuster any Obama nominee while he still has his current job.
The president says he intends to send a nominee to the Senate and urged Republicans to act on it.
The last member of the high court to die was Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 2005. At that time, Politico notes, then-President George W. Bush attended the funeral and also gave a eulogy.
News that Obama would not attend the funeral was just as divisive as the argument over Scalia's replacement, with people on Twitter noting which funerals Obama has attended while in office – and which he hasn't.
========================================================================4) Republicans Are Campaigning to Lose
The candidate brawls and party disunity are setting up Clinton or Sanders for a win in November.
By Fred Barnes
The split between an aggrieved GOP base—the betrayed—and the party’s leaders dominates the Republican presidential race. It has turned televised debates into brawls. And it threatens to prevent Republicans from winning the presidency that otherwise might be theirs.
If the turbulence continues—and there’s no end in sight—the Republican nominee will lead a badly divided and weakened party in the general election in November. The Democratic candidate won’t be a powerhouse. That’s a certainty. But either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders will have the benefit of a united Democratic Party, a significant advantage in a close election.
The New Hampshire exit poll, by the way, asked Democrats if they feel betrayed by their politicians. Only 15% said yes, a mere fringe of discontent.
Anyone who watched the two debates last week could see the difference. The Republican candidates—four of the six anyway—got caught up in personal attacks. They were testy and offended. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders, while hardly chummy, spent considerable time echoing each other. “There is no question Secretary Clinton and I are friends,” Mr. Sanders said before noting a partial disagreement over Libya. No Republican uttered such words.
Some viewers may have been stirred by the angry clashes between Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and by Donald Trump’s wild charges against President George W. Bush. I winced. The candidates appeared to be anything but presidential. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders, for all their harping on left-wing themes, came closer to the presidential standard, at least for a night.
The split between party leaders and a substantial number of party voters emerged after Republicans won the House in the 2010 midterm election, and swelled when they added the Senate in 2014. Their legislative gains were minimal. The Republican base, egged on by conservative talk radio, accused congressional leaders of knuckling under to President Obama. Thus the notion of betrayal.
The discord and anger were practically an invitation to Mr. Trump to enter the race. A unified Republican Party would have provided him neither the political space in which to run nor issues to exploit. And Mr. Trump would most likely have decided not to run, as he had in earlier presidential years.
The moment he announced, Mr. Trump made opposition to immigration his calling card. It was a shrewd choice. More than any other issue, immigration alienates the conservative base from the Republican establishment in Washington. The real-estate tycoon turned reality TV star went on to create a constituency that includes working-class Republicans, renegade Democrats, and moderates.
Mr. Trump’s crude style has had a huge impact. He insults rivals, tosses out slurs, trashes Republican icons, and interrupts constantly during debates whenever he is mentioned, alluded to, or just feels like it. When he’s talking, he waves off anyone who dares to break in.
Absent Mr. Trump, would other candidates have acted like students at his school of bad behavior? I don’t think so. I’ve watched debates in presidential races going back to 1980 and never seen anything like Mr. Trump’s antics. Chris Christie’s near-destruction of Marco Rubio in the Feb. 2 debate was made possible by Mr. Trump’s example. So was the row in last week’s debate when Mr. Rubio said Mr. Cruz had lied repeatedly and Mr. Cruz said the accusation was “knowingly false.” This occurred as they both talked at the same time, barroom style.
The more bruising the fights, the more difficult it will be to produce Republican unity. The New Hampshire exit poll was not encouraging. Republican voters were asked if they would be “satisfied if Cruz wins the nomination?” The result: 38% said yes, 59% no. Mr. Rubio did slightly better: 41% yes, 57% no. Mr. Trump beat both of them: 51% yes, 46% no.
Democrats were asked a similar question. Satisfied if Mrs. Clinton is the nominee? Sixty percent said yes, 37% no. If Mr. Sanders wins? Seventy-nine percent said they’d be satisfied, 20% said they wouldn’t.
Given the relative harmony of the Democratic debates, these numbers weren’t surprising. Last week’s debate was filled with comments like “I completely agree with Senator Sanders” and “nothing that Secretary Clinton said do I disagree with.” Mrs. Clinton said she was “in vigorous agreement” with Mr. Sanders’s zeal for taxing the rich. “Let me concur,” Mr. Sanders said, with Mrs. Clinton’s stand on women’s rights.
Mr. Sanders didn’t bring up Mrs. Clinton’s email scandal, the Clinton Foundation, or her fees for speeches to Wall Street firms. He must have figured Democrats didn’t want to hear about her personal troubles, and raising them might backfire.
There was a sharp exchange or two but nothing that might jeopardize party unity or an upbeat national convention. This happens when candidates are operating off the same playbook—in their case, the progressive agenda.
Having capitalized on the GOP split, Mr. Trump shows no interest in bringing the party together. Unity is not his strong suit. His put-downs of every Republican except Ronald Reagan continue nonstop. Like Mr. Cruz, he’s antiestablishment. But he treats Mr. Cruz no better than the other candidates. Two days ago, he said Mr. Cruz is “the biggest liar” he’s ever met and “unstable.”
The Donald is not a team player, yet he has the best shot at the moment of winning the nomination. What happens then? The Republican rift will not be healed and disunity will reign. It’s highly likely that a sizable chunk of the Republican establishment will decline to back Mr. Trump in a repeat of 1964 when liberal and moderate Republicans refused to support Barry Goldwater.
The gap separating Republicans back then was greater than today’s split. But by the time the party recovered, the Great Society agenda of President Lyndon Johnson had been enacted. We still feel its effects a half-century later with more Americans dependent on government than ever.
In 2016 the prospect of a Republican triumph is fading. Republicans would rather quarrel angrily than win. Should this allow Mrs. Clinton to slip into the White House, we have a pretty good idea what will happen. President Obama’s legacy of ever-bigger government will be preserved, Mrs. Clinton will add to it, and America will suffer the consequences.
Mr. Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard, is a Fox News commentator.
5)Flashback to 1992: When Democrats Halted a Republican President’s Judicial Nominees
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5)Flashback to 1992: When Democrats Halted a Republican President’s Judicial Nominees
President George H.W. Bush and his challenger, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, square off in the first presidential debate of 1992. Democrats stopped the judicial nomination process to leave seats open in hopes of a Clinton victory. (Photo: Dennis Brack/Newscom]
If Senate Democrats get their way, Republicans won’t follow their example. That is, Senate Republicans in 2016 won’t act as Democrats did when they blocked court confirmations in 1992.
Twenty-four years ago looked a lot like the inverse of today. On the eve of a presidential election, there was a Republican in the White House and a Democrat majority in the Senate.
Now those roles are reversed—and so is the Democrat perspective on judicial nominees.
Rather than confirming President George H.W. Bush’s picks for federal judgeships, The New York Times from Sept. 1, 1992, reports, Senate Democrats delayed nominees “to preserve the vacancies for [Arkansas] Gov. Bill Clinton to fill if he is elected president.”
In an era before widespread use of the Internet, “none of the senators urging a shutdown” for Bush nominees would go on the record or register his opinion publicly with The New York Times.
But Neil Lewis reported that Senate Democrats wanted to leave approximately 50 judgeships open for “presumably more liberal nominees.”
According to Senate roll call votes from 1992, only one Bush judicial nominee received a vote after The New York Times published that story.
Edward Carnes, nominated by Bush in January 1992 and later filibustered by Democrats, won confirmation to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit on a vote of 62-36 on Sept. 9, 1992. He was the final nominee confirmed under Bush.
Another Bush nominee at the time was John G. Roberts, now chief justice of the Supreme Court. In 1992, the Senate opted not to vote on Roberts’ nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Without Senate action, his nomination was left to expire.
The New York Times reports that in the House, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., led a congressional congregation to complain to then-Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell, D-Maine.
“We told him it was very unsettling, even incredible, that the Senate should continue to consider these people as if it were business as usual,” Conyers told the newspaper.
In the minority today, Senate Democrats have shifted their opinion at news that Republicans intend to leave vacant the seat of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative who died Saturday.
Senate Democrats, led by Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., have accused Republicans of dereliction of their constitutional duty to advise and consent on judicial nominees.
In an op-ed Monday in The Washington Post, Reid criticized Senate Republicans for engaging in “partisan sabotage” after Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., announced he wouldn’t move an Obama nominee to the court.
Reid predicted that Republicans would be “remembered as the most nakedly partisan, obstructionist, and irresponsible majority in history.”
Edward Whelan, president of the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, told The Daily Signal that Democrats have done “the same thing Republicans are doing now.”
A Supreme Court clerk for Scalia in the 1990s, Whelan said he sees this back-and-forth as par for the course.
“The confirmation process is inherently political,” he said. “Especially when you’re talking about transformational seats, it’s all the more intense.”
5a)
WH: Obama 'regrets' filibustering Justice Alito's confirmation
President Obama regrets joining the Senate Democrats' failed effort to block the nomination of now-Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito from coming to a vote in 2006, a White House spokesman said Wednesday. "As the president alluded to yesterday, he regrets the vote he made because… Democrats should have been in a position in which they were making a public case," said White House spokesman Josh Earnest.
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6) Trump Says He’ll Be “Neutral” on Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Republican front-runner Donald Trump rejected one of his party’s most central foreign policy positions Wednesday evening, opting to stay “neutral” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In an hour-long town hall on MSNBC devoted solely to the New York billionaire, Trump fielded a question from an audience member and a follow-up by anchor Joe Scarborough by saying he didn’t “want to get into” which party is at fault.
“Let me be sort of a neutral guy. Let’s see,” he said. “I don’t want to say whose fault it is. I don’t think it helps.”
Trump couched his comments in the logic that preserving the element of surprise and unpredictability in where he stands is a key part of his deal making process. He called peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine “the toughest deal in the world right now to make,” and said it’s possible that it is “not makable.”
“It is a very, very tough agreement to make. I was with a very prominent Israeli the other day. He says it’s impossible because the other side has been trained from the time they’re children to hate Jewish people,” he said. “But I will give it one hell of a shot. That I will tell you.”
Trump’s noncommittal attitude is a significant departure from the unwavering support for Israel voiced by the Republican Party and by his G.O.P. rivals in particular. Marco Rubio hasblasted President Obama’s Israel policy and vowed to “make restoring the U.S.-Israel relationship a top priority.” Ted Cruz says that on the first day of his administration, he would “recognize Jerusalem as the eternal, undivided capital of Israel.” In an op-ed for Fox News in December, Jeb Bush wrote, “Given the deep historic, cultural, and emotional ties that bind the United States and Israel, as well as our shared interests in fighting the growing terrorist threat and combatting Iranian aggression, the U.S.-Israel relationship should be stronger than ever.”
Support for Israel, a New Jersey-sized democracy squeezed between sometimes hostile Arab nations that dwarf it in comparison, has become a key element of the Republican platform in part because conservative voters back it so adamantly. More than two-thirds of Republicans feel the U.S. should support Israel even when its stances diverge with American interests, a Bloomberg poll found last spring. Republicans felt more sympathy for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than they did for their own commander-in-chief, 67 percent to 16 percent.
For any other Republican candidate, taking a neutral position on Israel—a stance that could push away voters, donors, and support of the party establishment—would be political suicide. But Trump is not like most candidates. The success of his campaign does not rely on either donors or party support, but on defying them at every turn. He has blamed George W, Bushfor the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and declared that his health care policy would “take care of everybody”, despite just about every influential conservative bigwig rallying against him. And yet he keeps on rising. For whatever reason—some cocktail of star power, success, a say-what’s-on-your-mind mentality mixed with a surprising level of brashness and bashing—a shocking number of Republican voters have decided to place their support for Trump above traditional party policies. So will going against another one of the G.O.P.’s central tenets matter for him going forward? It hasn’t so far.
6a)
Merkel: Germany won't normalize ties with Iran unless it recognizes Israel
By Raphael Ahren
BERLIN — Germany will not normalize its relations with Iran unless or until it recognizes Israel, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday.
Merkel was answering a question from The Times of Israel at a joint press conference alongside visiting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Asked about the apparent rush by Germany to rebuild relations with the regime in Tehran, Merkel answered: “We made very clear — the federal government, all parties that make up the coalition — that there cannot exist normal, friendly relations with Iran as long as Iran doesn’t recognize Israel’s right to exist.”
She said that this had been made plain to Iran at every relevant opportunity: “In all conversations [with Iranian counterparts], my ministers, and I myself if applicable, have made this clear.”
She said that while Germany and Iran were indeed now in contact with each other, the ties could not be described as friendship given Iran’s hostility to Israel. “There is difference between friendship and talking to each other,” she declared.
Merkel also said that the current climate in the Middle East does not allow for major steps toward the creation of a Palestinian state, calling instead for small steps to safeguard a future two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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