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More commentary regarding what is going on in Virginia. (See 1 and 1a below.)
I remain a great believer in the rule of law. Therefore, I have misgivings about accusations pertaining to past behaviour, no matter despicable, to rule, as long as we have legal methods to determine facts etc. What one may have done under contemporaneous circumstances should not be allowed to rule unless there is evidence, clear factual evidence, such behaviour remains present.
We are all imperfect and to judge a person solely by what took place in the past leaves everyone open to false accusations, unproven allegations and political and/or contrived smears. Do we want to perpetuate Kavanaugh type justice?
In the case of Virginia's Governor the state and people can impeach on the basis of their current feelings and facts and should resort to this legal remedy before they drive him out of office on conduct pertaining to when he was younger and it was a different age, outrageous as his actions may have been.
It seems Virginia Democrats are pushing their governor to retire so they are free to tag Republicans as racists in the up coming election. The current governor beat his Republican opponent by accusing him of being a racist. Live by the "sheet" you may get tripped up by the "sheet." How sickening Virginia and politics, in general, has become, no "sheet."
What I believe is more pure hypocrisy are Democrats who fail to rebuke those Muslim Representatives in Congress who have consistently made anti-Semitic comments etc. and yet, they do nothing.
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Commentary about the intelligence communities' blunders. Intelligence estimates are difficult at best because the information, on which to base their estimates, is difficult to obtain, often designed to trick etc.
On the other hand, when any president castigates the community in public that is not wise for a variety of reasons. In the specific matter of Trump, he obviously was aware that many senior members of the intelligence community were in cahoots with a variety of nefarious sources and efforts to smear him and second, he has every right to ask how long must we remain fighting an unwinnable war.
We cannot end terrorism but perhaps we can come up with more effective and less costly methods, other than all out wars, to monitor terrorist behaviour and be on the ready to pre-empt. (See 2 below.)
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Lynn is a "DAWG" graduate and we are active supporters of GMOA, on whose board I serve. This is from UGA'a president, Jere Morehead. (See 3 below.)
Meanwhile GMOA receives statewide honor for efforts of our Board hair and one of our finest curators. (See 3a below.)
and:
Israel is also doing well, economically speaking. (See 3b and 3c below.)
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Dick
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1)
Planned Parenthood Is Fine with Infanticide, but a Racist Photo Is a Bridge Too Far? By Tyler O’Neil
In a matter of days, Planned Parenthood went from vociferously defending Gov. Ralph Northam (D-Va.) to demanding his resignation. Earlier this week, Northam defended infanticide — the killing of an infant who survives a late-term abortion. Planned Parenthood rushed to his defense. Yet mere hours after news of a racist photo broke, the abortion giant turned on one of its stalwart defenders.
“As the nation’s largest provider of reproductive health care, we have a responsibility to advocate for all patients, and to provide compassionate health care to all people who walk through our doors,” Dr. Leana Wen, Planned Parenthood’s president, wrote in a statement. “There is no place for Gov. Ralph Northam’s racist actions or language. He must step down as Governor.”
She concluded with a rousing statement that seems even better fitted to the news of Northam’s endorsement of infanticide. “The people of Virginia need to be able to trust that their leaders will fight for them, and support policies that protect their health, safety and value their communities. Gov. Northam’s actions have put that in doubt.”
On Wednesday, Northam described the process of a third-trimester abortion. “If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered,” the governor said. “The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and mother.”
In other words, babies who survive an attempted abortion are not considered alive. They would be “resuscitated” if the mother and family say so, and the doctor and the mother would decide whether or not to let the baby live. Under this logic, abortion doctors should give a baby born alive “palliative care” to keep the baby “comfortable” while he or she dies, withholding the life-saving care normally afforded a newborn. CONTINUE AT SITE
1a) Virginia Dems Attempt to Pass Bill Allowing Abortions Up to 40 Weeks
A Democratic lawmaker in the Virginia House of Delegates proposed a bill that would allow for abortions through the end of the third trimester of pregnancy.
During Democratic Delegate Kathy Tran's presentation of the bill on Tuesday, Majority Leader Todd Gilbert (R.) asked her about the full extent of the bill's leniency.
"How late in the third trimester could a physician perform an abortion if he indicated that it would impair the mental health of the woman?" Gilbert asked.
"Or physical health," Tran said.
"Okay," Gilbert replied. "I'm talking about the mental health."
"I mean, through the third trimester," Tran said. "The third trimester goes up to 40 weeks."
"Okay, but to the end of the third trimester?" Gilbert asked.
"Yup, I don't think we have a limit in the bill," Tran said.
"Where it's obvious that a woman is about to give birth, she has physical signs that she's about to give birth, would that still be a point at which she could request an abortion if she was so certified?" Gilbert asked. "She's dilating."
Tran replied that was a decision the woman and her doctor would have to make before choosing to have an abortion. Gilbert asked specifically if the measure would allow for abortion right before birth.
"My bill would allow that, yes," Tran said.
Nearly half of the Democratic caucus supported the bill, called the Repeal Act, but when put to a vote, it was defeated.Gov. Ralph Northam (D.) has also voiced support for similar pro-abortion bills in the Virginia Senate, none of which have passed.
"When we can’t change people’s minds, we change seats," Northam said last week at a pro-abortion rally inside the State Capitol building after two bills failed to leave the Virginia Senate Committee on Education and Health.
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2)
The intelligence community's history of blunders
Jeff Jacoby of Boston Globe
Testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last week, the nation’s top
intelligence officials provided a tour d’horizon of the global threats faced by the United
States. As Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats — who was joined by CIA Director
Gina Haspell, Defense Intelligence Agency director Robert Ashley, National Security
Agency director Paul Nakasone, and National Geospatial Agency director Robert Cardillo
— told it, the world looks rather different from the one President Trump tends to
describe.
According to the intelligence chiefs (most of whom Trump had appointed), Russia is
actively trying “to influence US policy, actions, and elections,” Iran is “not currently”
engaged in “nuclear weapons-development activities,” North Korea is “unlikely” to give
up its nuclear weapons, and that ISIS still has “thousands of fighters in Iraq and Syria.”
The testimony from Coats and his colleagues generated a flood of gleeful reports about
Trump being contradicted by the intelligence community. That in turn triggered
pushback from the president, who predictably took to Twitter to lash out. “Perhaps
Intelligence should go back to school,” Trump tweeted, calling Coats, et al., “extremely
passive and naïve.” He kept up the criticism on CBS’s Face the Nation yesterday, pointing
out that the intelligence services were wrong when they concluded, in the run-up to the
Iraq War, that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
“Guess what? Those intel people didn’t know what
the hell they were doing, and they got us tied up in
a war that we should have never been in,” Trump
said.
His public attacks were unprofessional, unseemly,
and unwise. But he has a point.
Of course it goes without saying that Trump’s slap at the intelligence community wasn’t grounded in
his own careful study of the data, deep consultation with experts, wide reading, or foreign policy
experience. He is responding to criticism from Coats and the others — highly respectful and indirect
criticism — the way he always responds to criticism: by lashing out, flinging insults, and leaving no
room for reasonable disagreement. Trump’s rebuke is emotional, not thoughtful.
Nor is this the first time he has mocked and disparaged the intelligence community. Early in his
presidency, erupting over reports that intelligence agencies had released the anti-Trump dossier
commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign and compiled by former British agent Christopher
Steele, Trump angrily asked if Americans were “living in Nazi Germany.” Last August, the president
revoked the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan, a vocal Trump opponent.
Trump’s latest blast at the intelligence chiefs is just another example of his standard operating
procedure: Whether right or wrong, always hit back hard.
And yet.
America’s intelligence community does have a history of getting big things wrong. Then-
CIA Director George Tenet’s confident 2003 assurance that a deadly threat was posed by
Saddam’s WMD stockpile — a “slam-dunk,” he famously called it — is only one such
blunder. And just as Tenet and his colleagues badly overestimated Iraq’s arsenal before
the second Iraq war, William Webster’s CIA badly underestimated Iraq’s nuclear-
weapons program before the first Iraq War in 1990-91.
Similarly, the intelligence agencies were taken by surprise when India went nuclear in
1998, just as they had been stunned when the Soviets went nuclear in 1949. They didn’t
expect Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. In January 1962, the CIA pronounced it “unlikely”
that the Soviets would attempt to build military bases in Cuba any time in the next 20
years. The intelligence agencies didn't foresee the Communist invasion of South Korea in
1950, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 — or, to return to Saddam, the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
In 2005, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission — formed to examine the grievously
flawed estimates of Iraqi WMDs — summarized its brutally devastating findings. “Across
the board,” the commission reported, “the intelligence community knows disturbingly
little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors.”
And then there was 9/11.
In 2004, when the George W. Bush administration was being slammed for not having
anticipated the terrorist attacks that triggered what came to be known as the War on
Terror, I began a column with the following short “quiz”:
1. Identify the following list of topics:
“The World Bank's mission creep”
“Getting debt relief right”
“Russia's unformed foreign policy”
“Japan, the reluctant reformer”
“With a friend like Fox”
“Caspian energy at the crossroads.”
No clue? Don't feel bad. You would have to be suffering from acute foreign-policy
wonkiness to recognize the table of contents from the September/ October 2001
issue of Foreign Affairs , the flagship publication of the Council of Foreign
Relations. Like the “curious incident” described in the Sherlock Holmes tale —
that the dog didn’t bark — the significance of these headlines is not in what they
say but in what they don’t say: The nation's leading journal of international
relations was paying no attention to the threat from Islamist terror even as
Islamist terrorists were planning the deadliest attack ever committed by foreign
enemies on US soil.
2. Which US senator admitted on 9/11, “We have always known this
could happen. . . . I regret to say — I served on the Intelligence
Committee up until last year. I can remember after the bombings of the
embassies, after TWA 800, we went through this flurry of activity,
talking about it — but not really doing the hard work of responding.”
That was John Kerry on “Larry King Live,” ruing his and his colleagues' pre-9/11
failure to give the threat from international terrorism the attention and “hard work
of responding” it deserved.
3. President Clinton's final national security policy paper,
submitted to Congress in December 2000, was 45,000 words long.
Yet which international menace was never mentioned?
Al Qaeda. The document referred to Osama bin Laden just four times, and its
discussion of terrorism spoke not of wiping out the killers in their nests but of
extraditing “fugitives” to make them “answer for their crimes.”
The US intelligence community, along with most of the foreign-policy establishment,
was blindsided by 9/11. In the parlance of the time, they failed to “connect the dots” — dots whose
significance was far more apparent in hindsight than in real time. That failure wasn’t because they needed
to “go back to school,” as Trump disrespectfully put it last week, but because intelligence-community
assessments are generally compilations of conventional wisdom, common-denominator judgments more
likely to encapsulate the safe conclusions that a large bureaucratic behemoth (there are 17 federal
intelligence agencies) can agree on than to take a risk by breaking away from received opinion.
I don’t know for a fact that Trump is right about Iran’s unreconstructed appetite for
nuclear weapons. I do know that when it comes to flushing out clandestine nuclear
activity by hostile regimes, US intelligence services have an almost unrelieved record
of failure.
Much of what the West knows about Iran’s nuclear ambitions has not been unearthed
by deep-cover agents operating inside the country. It has been supplied by defectors
and dissidents. The United States knew nothing about the Iranian nuclear facilities at
Arak and Natanz, for example, until Iranian exiles revealed their existence in 2002. It
was years before the United States discovered that Iran had constructed a secret
cataclysmic overthrow of the Shah by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which
transformed Iran from a loyal ally of the United States to an implacable enemy. It is
hard to imagine how intelligence experts could have missed the signals of an
impending transformation as sweeping as the Islamic revolution, but the CIA
managed to do so. In a long look back at the events of 1979, Muhammad Sahimi wrote
The Carter administration had not been prepared for the sudden surge of
revolutionary fever, nor understood the depth of dissatisfaction of the Iranian
people with the Shah's regime. A CIA analysis in August 1978 had reached the
conclusion that “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary
situation.”
The intelligence agencies were wrong about the stability of the Shah in the 1970s,
wrong about Iran’s nuclear facilities at the turn of the 21st century, wrong even more
the intel community’s insistence now that the regime in Tehran has shelved its work
on perfecting nuclear weapons? Trump’s public belittling of his intelligence chiefs is
an indication of his own dysfunction and unfitness.
All the same — when it comes to intelligence assessments, especially those that
downplay foreign threats, skepticism is warranted.
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3)Dear Alumni and Friends:
Last week, I was honored to deliver the 2019 State of the University Address,
celebrating our major achievements from the past five years and announcing new
initiatives to shape the next five. The speech and a short video are available on our
website.
Over the past five years, we have:
- Hired outstanding faculty members to reduce class sizes and grow the
- research enterprise;
- Pioneered an experiential learning requirement to give students more
- opportunities to connect coursework to the world around us;
- Created the Double Dawgs program to provide pathways for students to earn
- a bachelor’s and master’s degree in five years or less;
- Launched a campus-wide entrepreneurship program to help students turn
- their bright ideas into successful business and non-profit ventures;
- Elevated research expenditures by nearly 30 percent and expanded our
- economic impact on the state;
- Established more than 350 endowed need-based scholarships that will
- support thousands of students for generations to come; and
- Opened Delta Hall in Washington, D.C. and the new Science Learning Center,
- Business Learning Community, and Center for Molecular Medicine in Athens.
The list of accomplishments could be longer, and our successes would not be possible
without you. I appreciate your dedication and support. My goal is to maintain our
great momentum, and I announced during the speech that a process was underway
to develop a new strategic plan for the University.
I can say with confidence that the University of Georgia is one of the nation’s very
best universities. I share your deep love for this place, the birthplace of public higher
education in America, and I look forward to all that we will accomplish together in
the year ahead.
With warmest regards,
Jere W. Morehead
President
3a)
3b) Israel’s Economy Is Too
Strong to Argue About
Soaring indicators show how far the country
has come as a fateful election approaches.
When politicians face voters in troubled economic times, non-economic
issues tend to recede. When economic performance is strong, by contrast
serious underlying problems may not get the attention they deserve.
That seems to be happening in Israel, where surveys show that voters are
worried about their economic future. But with just two months to go before
the parliamentary election that will decide whether Benjamin Netanyahu
gets a record fifth term as the longest-serving prime minister in the
country’s 70-year history, the economy isn’t a big part of the political
debate.
Maybe that’s because Israelis are preoccupied by their many external
conflicts, with Palestinians, Hamas, Hezbollah and their proxies in the West
Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran.
But sheer economic vigor undoubtedly explains a lot. Israel’s gross
domestic product has been rising at an average annual rate of 3.69 percent
since 2000, inflation has been negligible at 1.57 percent, and
unemployment has fallen to half of its average for the period of 7.4 percent.
The nation of 8.4 million people — a little more than Switzerland and a little
less than Austria — has outperformed these European stalwarts since the
global economic research firm MSCI Inc. upgraded it to developed-market
status in 2009. Israel’s GDP growth of 69 percent since then is more than
17 times what Austria managed and almost three times what Switzerland
mustered, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Among the 36 developed economies that make up the Organisation for
Economic Development and Cooperation, Israel is poised to climb to
second-fastest growing in 2020 and will be No. 4 with Chile this year
sharing 3.6 percent growth, behind Slovakia (4 percent), Poland (3.8
percent) and Slovenia (3.5 percent).
That’s not to say that Israel is joining the list of 10 happiest countries, which
includes Switzerland, anytime soon. While 60 percent of Israelis said they
are satisfied or very satisfied in a recent Israel Democracy Institute survey,
a similar percentage said they are worried or very worried that they wouldn’t
be able to help support their children, and 65 percent said they are
concerned they aren’t saving money for the future.
Israel’s poverty rate of 17.7 percent is the second-highest in the OECD
(many among Israel’s fast-growing ultra-orthodox population refuse to work.)
There is persistent dissatisfaction with infrastructure, public spending,
hospital crowding and the so-called dual economy, where two-thirds of the
workforce get less than the national average wage.
For all the pessimism inside and outside the country, there is no question
that Israel is outperforming most of Europe and the OECD with accelerating growth that has taken it from 15th-fastest growing in 2015 to No. 9 in 2017 and 2018. Four years before quarterly unemployment
reached a record low of 3.6 percent in 2018, Israel’s jobless rate hovered
consistently below Austria’s. Last year, the favorable joblessness margin
Switzerland perennially enjoys over Israel narrowed to the smallest gap in
history.
Nothing gets the world’s attention more than a robust housing market. The
combination of high growth and low unemployment made Israeli
homeowners the biggest winners during the past decade, according to the
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Housing prices increased 88 percent, the
most of any country among the 25 ranked by the bank. No. 2 New Zealand
is an also-ran with a 10-year return of 51 percent. Switzerland is a laggard
at 39 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Economies rarely are secure without a strong currency, and the shekel
more than holds its own in foreign exchange, strengthening 8 percent
against the dollar during the past 10 years as the Swiss franc gained 16
percent and the Euro depreciated 12 percent, according to data compiled
by Bloomberg. The perception of Israel in a perpetual existential crisis is
belied by the shekel’s two-year implied volatility, a measure of economic
uncertainty in the eyes of global investors. At 6.4 percent, it’s hovering at
the lowest level since 2014, while the same measure for the euro continues
to climb much higher, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
3c) Market Forecast: A More Stable Israeli Currency
Two-year implied volatility of the shekel against the U.S. dollar
Source: Bloomberg
Investors took a big hit 10 years ago, when MSCI put Israel’s publicly
traded companies in the developed world. Overnight, one of the best-
performing emerging markets in the new century became untouchable for
global investors because of the changed classification. But even that
formidable obstacle is gone now that these same companies gained 7.8
percent during the past 12 months, making Israel the second-best
performer among 33 major economies as the global equity market was
losing 3.3 percent.
Israel can even be said to be as creditworthy as any major economy, i
ncluding the U.S. Prior to 2014, Israel paid a higher interest rate on its debt
- as much as 1.9 percentage points more in 2011 — than any benchmark
Treasury. The trend has been reversing since then, and today the yield on
benchmark 10-year Israel obligations is 0.55 percentage points less than
its U.S. counterpart.
Even in the heat of a fractious nation’s political campaign, the country’s
economic performance doesn’t provide much material to argue about.
(With assistance from Shin Pei)
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