My friend and arch political rival, Howard Morrison, brought Jolene Byrne by our home this afternoon to chat.
She is running for President of The Chatham County School Board (a non political position) because state law limits the current president's term to two. Were that not the case Jolene would not be running.
Howard and I, though on the opposite fence politically,see eye to eye on many issues. He particularly knows of my keen interest in providing our kids a solid education. We may differ on how to achieve this worthy goal but we both agree America cannot withstand another generation of poorly educated children.
Jolene articulated why she is running (she currently is a teacher) and why she believes she is the person for the job. I told her that Howard did her a disservice in believing what I have to say has much impact but to the extent that it does I strongly urge , when you vote, you vote for Jolene Byrne.
She is FIRM, BUT soft spoken, lovely in appearance and in her quiet way has a passion for teaching and explained why she can help bring about constructive changes by working with those currently on the board. I was convinced she can.
Joe Buck has been a good leader and, as I recently wrote, it is a shame he cannot succeed himself but Ms. Byrne, in my humble opinion, is capable of growing in the job and being a worthy successor. So when you go to vote please give consideration to her candidacy.
I will be happy to go into more detail if you wish to question why I am supporting her along with Howard and many others who want to continue the improvement of our grade and high school system of education.
Much has been said about what Obama should do to hurt the Russian economy. The plan is simple:
1) ban the use of coal,
2) mandate that Russia goes on Obamacare,
3) don't allow any drilling on Russian public land,
4) have the EPA pass rulings on Russian business,
5) re-define the full time Russian work week to 30 hrs,
6) raise the Russian minimum wage,
7) mandate overtime pay for gov’t employees.
8) Demand the Russian Government pay free Welfare benefits to un-qualified Citizens and Illegal immigrants.
These measures would bring the Russia economy to its knees; it has been working in the U. S. since 2009.
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How foreign is our policy Sowell asks?(See 1 below.)
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Interesting that this very 'humanitarian' Noble Peace Prize winning administration could not pardon a now deathly ill Jonathan Pollard prior to this week but are proposing using him as a bargaining chip.
===
I only wrote about this dangerous virus a few days ago and now it has moved to the northeast.
Thank you Vassar and your mindless elite students and faculty for validating my comments.
Even greater thanks to Stella Paul, my friend, for publishing this article. (See 3 below.)
===
Has it came to pass?, Has the mighty Obama deck begun to fold?
Will 2014 mark a retribution year? (See 4 below.)
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Ryan presents a balanced budget.
Democrats shudder at the thought! (See 5 below.)
===
Dick
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1) How Foreign is Our Policy?
By Thomas Sowell
Many people are lamenting the bad consequences of Barack Obama's foreign policy, and some are questioning his competence.
There is much to lament, and much to fear. Multiple setbacks to American interests have been brought on by Obama's policies in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Crimea and -- above all -- in what seems almost certain to become a nuclear Iran in the very near future.
The president's public warning to Syria of dire consequences if the Assad regime there crossed a "red line" he had drawn seemed to epitomize an amateurish bluff that was exposed as a bluff when Syria crossed that red line without suffering any consequences. Drawing red lines in disappearing ink makes an international mockery of not only this president's credibility, but also the credibility of future American presidents' commitments.
When some future President of the United States issues a solemn warning internationally, and means it, there may be less likelihood that the warning will be taken seriously. That invites the kind of miscalculation that has led to wars.
Many who are disappointed with what seem to be multiple fiascoes in President Obama's foreign policy question his competence and blame his inexperience.Such critics may be right, but it is by no means certain that they are.
Like those who are disappointed with Barack Obama's domestic policies, critics of his foreign policy may be ignoring the fact that you cannot know whether someone is failing or succeeding without knowing what he is trying to do.
Whether ObamaCare, for example, is a success or a failure, depends on whether you think the president's goal is to improve the medical treatment of Americans or to leave as his permanent legacy a system of income redistribution, through ObamaCare, and tight government control of the medical profession.
Much, if not most, of the disappointment with Barack Obama comes from expectations based on his words, rather than on an examination of what he has done over his lifetime before reaching the White House.
His words were glowing. He is a master of rhetoric, image and postures. He was so convincing that many failed to connect the dots of his past life that pointed in the opposite direction from his words. "Community organizers," for example, are not uniters but dividers -- and former community organizer Obama has polarized this country, despite his rhetoric about uniting us.
Many were so mesmerized by both the man himself and the euphoria surrounding the idea of "the first black president" that they failed to notice that there were any dots, much less any need to connect them.
One dot alone -- the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose church the Obamas attended for 20 years -- would have been enough to sink any other presidential bid by anyone who was not in line to become "the first black president."
The painful irony is that Jeremiah Wright was just one in a series of Obama's mentors hostile to America, resentful of successful Americans, and convinced that America had too much power internationally, and needed to be brought down a peg.
Anti-Americanism was the rule, not the exception, among Obama's mentors over the years, beginning in his childhood. When the young Obama and his mother lived in Indonesia, her Indonesian husband wanted her to accompany him to social gatherings with American businessmen -- and was puzzled when she refused.
He reminded her that these were her own people. According to Barack Obama's own eyewitness account, her voice rose "almost to a shout" when she replied:
"They are not my people."
Most of Barack Obama's foreign policy decisions since becoming president are consistent with this mindset. He has acted repeatedly as a citizen of the world, even though he was elected to be President of the United States.
Virtually every major move of the Obama administration has reduced the power, security and influence of America and its allies. Cutbacks in military spending, while our adversaries have increased their military buildups, ensure that these changes to our detriment will continue, even after Barack Obama has left the White House.
Is that failure or success?
1a) The Dissing of the President
The world is treating Obama like another failed American leader.
By Bret Stephens
I've never liked the word diss—not as a verb, much less as a noun. But watching the Obama administration get the diss treatment the world over, week-in, week-out, I'm beginning to see its uses.
Diss: On Sunday, Bloomberg reported that Hasan Rouhani named Hamid Aboutalebi to serve as the ambassador to the United Nations. Mr. Rouhani is the Iranian president the West keeps insisting is a "moderate," mounting evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Mr. Aboutalebi was one of the students who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979.
Here's the kicker: The State Department—the very institution whose diplomats were held hostage and brutalized for 444 days—will have to approve his visa to come to New York. Considering how desperate John Kerry is not to spoil the nuclear mood music with Tehran, the department probably will.
Diss: On Friday, Vladimir Putin called President Obama to discuss a resolution to the crisis in Ukraine. The Russian president "drew Barack Obama's attention to continued rampage of extremists who are committing acts of intimidation towards peaceful residents," according to the Kremlin, which, as in Soviet days, no longer bothers distinguishing diplomatic communiqués from crass propaganda.
Mr. Kerry was immediately dispatched to Paris to meet with Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart. Mr. Lavrov—who knows a one-for-me, one-for-you, one-for-me deal when he sees it—is hinting that Russia will graciously not invade Ukraine provided Washington and Moscow shove "constitutional reforms" favorable to the Kremlin down Kiev's throat. And regarding the invasion that brought the crisis about: "Mr. Kerry on Sunday didn't mention Crimea during his remarks," reports The Wall Street Journal, "giving the impression that the U.S. has largely given up reversing the region's absorption into Russia."
Diss: "If your image is feebleness, it doesn't pay in the world," Moshe Ya'alon, Israel's defense minister, said last month at Tel Aviv University. "At some stage, the United States entered into negotiations with them [the Iranians], and unhappily, when it comes to negotiating at a Persian bazaar, the Iranians were better."
The administration later demanded an apology from Mr. Ya'alon, which he dutifully delivered. But this isn't the first time he's dissed the administration. In January, he called Mr. Kerry"obsessive and messianic," adding that "the only thing that can save us is if Kerry wins the Nobel Prize and leaves us alone."
Diss: "It seems to me that some kind of joker wrote the U.S. president's order :-)". That was what Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin tweeted after learning last month that the Obama administration had sanctioned him for his role in the invasion of Ukraine.
Gotta love the ":-)".
Diss: In March, Iranian Gen. Masoud Jazayeri offered his view of Mr. Obama's threat to use military force against Iran if negotiations fail. "The low-IQ U.S. President and his country's Secretary of State John Kerry speak of the effectiveness of 'the U.S. options on the table' on Iran while this phrase is mocked at and has become a joke among the Iranian nation, especially the children."
Diss: In late December, Mr. Obama warned Congress that he would veto legislation to impose new sanctions on Iran if the Islamic Republic violated its nuclear commitments. It was essential, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said, to do nothing that "will undermine our efforts to achieve a peaceful resolution."
A few weeks later, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif laid a wreath at the tomb of Imad Mughniyeh, mastermind of the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, the 1985 hijacking of TWA 847 and countless other acts of international terrorism. Apparently Mr. Zarif didn't much fear undermining efforts to achieve a peaceful resolution.
Diss: In December, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, under fire for a corruption scandal, unleashed a media campaign to impugn U.S. Ambassador Francis Ricciardone as a member of a dark conspiracy to destabilize the government in Ankara. This is the same Mr. Erdogan whose regime Mr. Ricciardone praised for "great development in democratic structure." It's also the same Mr. Erdogan about whom Mr. Obama once said he had formed "bonds of trust."
Diss: "Rather than challenging the Syrian and Iranian governments, some of our Western partners have refused to take much-needed action against them," warned Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the U.K. late last year. "The foreign policy choices being made in some Western capitals risk the stability of the region and, potentially, the security of the whole Arab world. This means the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has no choice but to become more assertive in international affairs."
This would have been a diss were it whispered in the corridor of a foreign chancellery. The ambassador published it as an op-ed in the New York Times. NY
All this in just the past four months. And all so reminiscent of the contempt the world showed for Jimmy Carter in the waning days of his failed presidency. The trouble for us is that the current presidency has more than 1,000 days to go.
I was wrong about diss. It's a fine word. It means diss-respect. And connotes diss-may. And diss-honor. And diss-aster.
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2) Kerry’s “Last Chance” Diplomacy Implodes
May 7, 2002 turned out to be a grand day for Jew-haters, because things only got better from there. Threatening, harassing, intimidating and assaulting Jews is now a venerable tradition on California’s public campuses, protected by taxpayer-funded administrators and enshrined by public indifference.
Let’s flash forward to San Francisco State University today. Mohammad Hammad, president of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUP) has recently enjoyed organizing campus art projects that read “My heroes have always killed colonizers,” posing on social media sites with a knife that he claims “makes me want to stab an Israeli soldier,” and vowing to use his GUPS presidency “to radicalize half of our population and bring them back with me as fighters.”
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President Obama's 2015 Budget Proposal:
Senate Democrats' 2015 Budget Proposal:
2) Kerry’s “Last Chance” Diplomacy Implodes
Jonathan S. Tobin
Secretary of State John Kerry is back in Israel today attempting to breath life into the peace talks that he initiated last year. With the Palestinians refusing to accept the framework for further talks the secretary tried to broker, and the Israelis seeing little purpose in releasing more Palestinian terrorist murderers to bribe Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas if the PA won’t keep negotiating, the whole scheme is on the brink of collapse. Thus, Kerry is working furiously to try and come up with a way to entice the Israelis to give Abbas what he wants in terms of either more prisoner releases or a settlement freeze.
The latest idea on the table, which has now been publicly confirmed by U.S. officials speaking off the record, is for the U.S. to hand convicted spy Jonathan Pollard to the Israelis in exchange for the last batch of terrorists already scheduled for release from Israeli jails as well as a further group to be let go after that. Presumably this latest batch of terrorist prisoners would be enough to bribe Abbas to keep talking even though he has already signaled that he isn’t that interested in the discussions, especially if they require him to agree to measures that herald an end to the conflict with Israel. As I wrote last week, the idea of trading Pollard for murderers is a bad deal for Israel. If Prime Minister Netanyahu is to keep making concessions to Abbas then he should expect something of substance in return from the Palestinians that would bring peace closer. Doing so for the sake of Pollard makes no sense for anyone.
But the real problem here isn’t the unbalanced nature of such a deal that is not likely to be carried out anyway. Rather, it is the sense of hysteria that has been invested in the latest iteration of the Middle East peace process. Having decided to try to succeed where all of his predecessors have failed, Kerry did so by claiming that it was the region’s last chance for peace even though there was no reason to believe the conflict was in danger of re-igniting or there were reasonable prospects for success. But now that he appears to be failing, his frequent predictions of doom have become self-fulfilling prophecies.
The secretary invested time, energy, and the prestige of the United States on a negotiation that few thought had a chance because he was convinced there was no alternative and that a failure to advance a peace process that has been stuck in neutral ever since the Palestinians rejected the third Israeli offer of independence and statehood would lead to disaster. But as Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl aptly noted today, prior to the start of Kerry’s talks, “Israel and the Palestinian territories” were “an island of tranquility in a blood-drenched Middle East.” If the Palestinians preferred meaningless symbolic victories at the United Nations to statehood, such folly was rooted in Abbas’s belief that his people were not ready to give up their century-long war to destroy Israel.
Though Netanyahu has reluctantly agreed to a framework that is based on the 1967 lines, the Palestinians are still not ready to give up their “right of return” for the 1948 refugees and their descendants or to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state, thereby signaling an end to the conflict. But by raising the stakes in the conflict and repeatedly warning the Israelis that they would suffer violence in the form of a third intifada and increased boycott efforts if they did not agree to peace, Kerry has raised the stakes for the Palestinians. In a foolish repeat of earlier mistakes made by the Obama administration, the Palestinian leadership is being put in a position of having to match Kerry’s warnings with provocative actions of their own. And since a resolution of these disputes is beyond Abbas’s power or will to achieve, the collapse of Kerry’s diplomacy may spiral out of control.
Continually crying that this is the “last chance” for peace is not only inaccurate—diplomats have been saying the same thing for decades and have always been wrong, since peace will come the day the Palestinians give up their illusions about re-writing history and not one day sooner—it is also the sort of sentiment that rationalizes the actions of extremists who don’t want peace on any terms.
It is true that many Israelis worry about the long-term consequences of the current impasse which leaves the West Bank in limbo while Hamas-ruled Gaza functions as the independent Palestinian state in all but name. But as Diehl says, the alternative to Kerry’s apocalyptic warnings was an embrace of the reality of a conflict that couldn’t be solved but might be managed. Measures aimed at giving the Palestinians a bigger stake in an improved economy and better governance wouldn’t have cut the Gordian knot of Middle East peace but would have provided Abbas and his Fatah Party a reason to keep a lid on the territories as well as more of an incentive to think about preparing the way for eventual peace. Instead, Kerry has brought Abbas to the brink where he feels he has no alternative but to give the back of his hand to a negotiation that he never wanted to be part of in the first place. If violence in the form of a third intifada (perhaps funded in part by Iran via aid to Islamic Jihad or Hamas) follows, then it should be remembered that it was Kerry who set a potentially tragic series of events in motion.
What the secretary is learning is that as bad as a situation seems, it can only be made worse by hubris and naïveté, qualities Kerry possesses in abundance. Whether or not he manages to bribe either the Israelis or the Palestinians to keep talking in the coming days, the most important point to be gleaned from this chapter is that stoking fear in order to build support for peace isn’t merely counter-productive. It’s a recipe for disaster.
2a) Fatah spokesman:
We "blackmailed" Israel
to release the prisoners
PA's threat to have Israel prosecuted
at the International Criminal Court is
"a weapon... an important card...
We've been waving it around for two years"
Senior PA leader Nabil Shaath:
"Due to the prisoners we haven't stopped negotiations"
by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik
The Palestinian Authority's only reason for agreeing to and continuing the peace negotiations with Israel is to bring about the release of prisoners, Fatah's spokesman Ahmad Assaf has indicated. Stating that the PA "blackmailed" Israel to release the prisoners, Assaf explained that by virtue of the PA's membership in the UN, the PA is able to threaten Israel with taking it to the International Criminal Court. Assaf maintains that to prevent the PA from doing so, Israel agreed to release 104 prisoners, most of them serving life sentences for murder.
Senior PA leader Nabil Shaath explained already in November and again in December 2013, that the reason the PA has not "stopped negotiations," is because the PA wants to first fulfill its goal of having all the prisoners Israel arrested before the Oslo Accords released.
Israel agreed to release the 104 terrorists from prison because it was the Palestinian Authority's precondition for starting negotiations at all. But Fatah's spokesman calling the release of the prisoners "blackmail," together with Shaath's statement that they are just waiting for the prisoners to be released before they stop the negotiations, indicates that for the PA, the current round of peace talks may have been a charade.
Israel has already released 78 of the prisoners, and has not yet announced if it will release the remaining 26.
Fatah's spokesman further elaborated that the threat to go to the International Court is "a weapon that's in our pocket... an important card... We've been waving it around for two years now":
Fatah spokesman Ahmad Assaf:
"Our membership in the UN is also a weapon. And that's an important card. It's a weapon that's in our pocket. I didn't use it on day one. I didn't say, as soon as I got membership in the UN, that I want to go to the International Criminal Court - no. We've been waving it around for two years now: We've obtained the release of the prisoners, we blackmailed [Israel], that is, in quotation marks, and we've taken important positions because we have a card that we're waving around."
[Official PA TV, March 19, 2014]
Nabil Shaath, Fatah MP and Central Committee member and Commissioner of International Relations stated in November 2013 that "due to the prisoners (of whom only half have been released) [parentheses in source], we haven't stopped negotiations and haven't petitioned the UN." [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nov. 30, 2013]
He reiterated this again a second time, the official PA daily reported:
"Shaath emphasized that the leadership did not move forward on joining international organizations [until now] for one reason - which is ensuring the release of the remaining veteran prisoners who were arrested by Israel before the Oslo Accords, and that the leadership is awaiting their release."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Dec. 2, 2013]
Click to see more statements by PA and Fatah leaders expressing their view on the peace talks.
The following are longer excerpts of the reports on Nabil Shaath's statements:
"[Political] party and national leaders agreed about the need to build on the UN recognition of Palestine as a non-member state of the organization, which was obtained a year ago, as well as to move forward in this field in order to obtain all national rights.
Fatah Central Committee member Nabil Shaath said that [the day] the State of Palestine obtained recognition as a non-member state of the UN was without doubt a day that led to a great development in the world's view of our people's rights, after this [Palestinian] people decided to declare its statehood in the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital. Likewise, he noted that there is much to gain from this recognition, from which we will strive to benefit soon, by joining all international agreements and institutions that require no more than a request to join, and this will be translated shortly into a request to join 35 international conventions, the first of which is the Rome Convention.
Shaath emphasized that the leadership did not move forward on joining international organizations [until now] for one reason - which is ensuring the release of the remaining veteran prisoners who were arrested by Israel before the Oslo Accords, and that the leadership is awaiting their release."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Dec. 2, 2013]
Headline: "Calls to petition international UN organizations to prosecute Israel"
"In a statement made to an Arab-Israeli radio station on Wednesday [Nov. 27, 2013] chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said that if it were up to him the Palestinians would not wait for the conclusion of the nine months [of negotiations with Israel] to petition international institutions, including the International Criminal Court... Fatah Central Committee member Dr. Nabil Shaath explained in a statement published yesterday [Nov. 29, 2013] by the [Israeli] Maariv newspaper, that 'due to the prisoners (of whom only half have been released) [parentheses in source], we haven't stopped negotiations and haven't petitioned the UN.'"
"In a statement made to an Arab-Israeli radio station on Wednesday [Nov. 27, 2013] chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said that if it were up to him the Palestinians would not wait for the conclusion of the nine months [of negotiations with Israel] to petition international institutions, including the International Criminal Court... Fatah Central Committee member Dr. Nabil Shaath explained in a statement published yesterday [Nov. 29, 2013] by the [Israeli] Maariv newspaper, that 'due to the prisoners (of whom only half have been released) [parentheses in source], we haven't stopped negotiations and haven't petitioned the UN.'"
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nov. 30, 2013]
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3) California's Brownshirt Anti-Semitism Comes to Vassar
California is the lifestyle incubator of the nation. And now the trendy anti-Semitic thuggery that debuted at California’s public universities has metastasized across America, all the way to the elite halls of Vassar.
Before we discuss the fashionable pogrom that just took place on the Vassar campus where Jackie Kennedy once strolled in pearls, let’s look back at May 7, 2002. On that day, Professor Laurie Zoloth, Director of the Jewish Studies program at San Francisco State University, attended a “Peace in the Middle East” campus rally, organized by Hillel students, where they sang songs and prayed for peace in Israel. Wrote Professor Zoloth:
“As soon as the community supporters left, the 50 students who remained praying in a minyan for the traditional afternoon prayers, or chatting, or cleaning up after the rally, talking -- were surrounded by a large, angry crowd of Palestinians and their supporters. But they were not calling for peace. They screamed at us to ‘go back to Russia’ and they screamed that they would kill us all, and other terrible things. They surrounded the praying students, and the elderly women who are our elder college participants, who survived the Shoah, who helped shape the Bay Area peace movement, only to watch as a threatening crowd shoved the Hillel students against the wall of the plaza.“As the counter demonstrators poured into the plaza, screaming at the Jews to ‘Get out or we will kill you’ and ‘Hitler did not finish the job,’ I turned to the police and to every administrator I could find and asked them to remove the counter demonstrators from the Plaza, to maintain the separation of 100 feet that we had been promised. The police told me that they had been told not to arrest anyone, and that if they did, "it would start a riot." I told them that it already was a riot.”
Eventually, the terrified Jewish students gathered under the flag of Israel and were led by armed police guard back to the Hillel House. “This was neither free speech nor discourse, but raw, physical assault,” wrote Professor Zoloth, who noted with sadness, “Not one administrator came to stand with us.”
May 7, 2002 turned out to be a grand day for Jew-haters, because things only got better from there. Threatening, harassing, intimidating and assaulting Jews is now a venerable tradition on California’s public campuses, protected by taxpayer-funded administrators and enshrined by public indifference.
Upon being informed of these threats by a Jewish group called AMCHA Initiative, SFSU President Leslie Wong took decisive action by yawning, shrugging and sticking his fingers in his ears. After the police intervened, Mohammad Hammad disappeared from campus, presumably with his weapons collection intact. But the radical student group that elected him president still has free reign.
AMCHA Initiative, led by the politely relentless Tammi Rossman-Benjamin,documents the anti-Semitic tsunami on University of California’s campuses. At UC Berkeley, a Jewish girl holding an “Israel Wants Peace” sign was ramroddedwith a shopping cart by the head of Students for Justice in Palestine. At UC Irvine, eleven Muslim students disrupted the speech of the Israeli Ambassador with such ferocity they were convicted of disturbing the peace. And on and on and on.
The regal disinterest of UC’s Board of Regents has allowed the cancer to spread. If these characters can get away with it in California, they can pull it off in Michigan, Boston, and Brooklyn, too. As Caroline Glick explains, anti-Israel student activists at the University of Michigan recently hurled death threats at Jewish student council members and called them “dirty Jew” and “kike.” Michigan university administrators aggressively intervened -- on behalf of the anti-Semites.
Last February, Brooklyn College campus police forcibly removed four Jewish students who were peacefully monitoring an anti-Israel event. Brooklyn College administrators then lied about the Jewish students, claiming they were disruptive. Karen Gould, the college president, was forced to apologize to the students after a video exonerated them.
And at Northeastern University in Boston, a pressure campaign finally goaded administrators into suspending Students for Justice in Palestine’s campus affiliation for a year, after a series of vicious provocations. Students defaced a menorah on campus, disrupted Jewish events, and frightened Jews by placing mock eviction notices on their dormitory rooms.
Now it’s Vassar’s turn. Long gone are the days chronicled in Mary McCarthy’s famous novel, “The Group,” in which aristocratic young women clad in sweater sets gained a little academic polish while searching for husbands. Now Vassar is all about multiculturalism, with one notable exception: It’s edgy, it’s cool, it’s hip to hate Israel. Thirty-nine Vassar faculty members (including, tragically, Joshua Schreier, Director of Jewish Studies) signed a libelous letter supporting an academic boycott of Israel, in which they accused the Jewish state of cartoonish evils. As on the other campuses, the road to physically intimidating Jews was paved with academic corruption.
A planned trip to Israel with Earth Sciences Professor Jill Schneiderman and Greek and Roman Studies Professor Rachel Friedman has set off a firestorm of anti-Semitic fury. In late February, Students for Justice in Palestine activists physically intimidated students going into Professor Friedman’s class to discuss the upcoming trip. According to William Jacobson’s invaluable reporting at theLegal Insurrection blog, Professor Friedman was “shocked” and “in 17 years at Vassar never experienced anything like this.”
Vassar’s administration then convened a campus-wide forum to discuss “the ethics of the travel trip.” On March 3rd, 200 people gathered for an “open conversation” which quickly degenerated into what Schneiderman described as a “very toxic atmosphere” in which “rage against Israel was the theme.” “I was knocked off-center by a belligerent academic community dedicated to vilifying anyone who dares set foot in Israel,” wrote Schneiderman on her blog. Friedman said that Jewish students who spoke in defense of Israel were heckled, drowned out with finger-snapping noises and loudly laughed at.
So far, Vassar president Catharine Bond Hill has refused to comment. But Vassar’s national reputation has taken a serious hit, and a newly formed group of parents and alumni called Fairness to Israel may continue to press the issue.
The anti-Semitism weaponized at California universities has now infected campuses around the country. The academic community bears the blame for its studied indifference to this ugliness and its outright enthusiasm for tormenting Jewish students and faculty.
But the Jewish community must also acknowledge its failure to effectively combat this dangerous trend. Mainstream Jewish institutions have been AWOL from the battle. Now that Abe Foxman is finally retiring from the Anti-Defamation League, it’s time to replace him with someone who knows how to start winning.
I nominate Dr. Charles Jacobs of Americans for Peace and Tolerance. Jacobs led the fight against Northeastern and helped create the new film, The J Street Challenge, that’s taking the battle to the campus. It’s a war and Charles Jacobs is ready to wage it.
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4)-- Obama's Top-and-Bottom Coalition Shows Signs of Strain
America's two major political parties are inevitably coalitions, forced by the winner-take-all Electoral College and the need of candidates in single-member congressional districts to amass 50 percent of the vote, or nearly that, to win election.
In a nation of America's cultural variety, that means holding together groups that have different priorities and conflicting positions on issues.
So coalitions don't last forever, and change composition over time. John Kennedy's Democratic coalition united white Southerners and northern Catholics. Half a century later, Republican Mitt Romney carried white Southerners and white Catholics by wide margins.
Barack Obama's Democratic Party is a top-and-bottom coalition, with affluent gentry liberals and blacks, single women, recent Hispanic immigrants and young voters -- all groups of little political heft in Kennedy's day.
Now in the sixth year of the Obama presidency, with his job approval stuck below 50 percent, there are signs of strain. And choices made earlier, when Democrats held congressional super majorities, are starting to prove troublesome.
One choice was to not bring forward immigration legislation that would provide a path to legalization for immigrants in the country unlawfully. This was a top priority for the Hispanic Caucus, but Obama and Democratic congressional leaders chose not to advance an issue that would cost them the support of some Democrats and require Republican votes.
During the 2012 campaign, this caused Obama few problems, except for some pointed questions in a Univision interview. But the president's job approval among Hispanics plummeted 23 points in 2013, according to Gallup -- more than any other demographic group.
And it may be plummeting even more. Hispanics are more likely than average to lack health insurance, and Obamacare was supposed to help. But, with a Spanish language website non-functional for two months, few uninsured Hispanics seem to have signed up, and the latest Pew Research Center poll shows Obamacare approval among Hispanics down to 47 percent.
One issue the Obama Democrats put ahead of immigration was global warming. In June 2009, Nancy Pelosi's House passed a cap-and-trade bill. That had political costs -- it was a career-ender for many Blue Dog Democrats -- and the issue never reached the Senate floor even when there were 60 Democrats there.
But it was a top priority for green gentry liberals. Green in their concern for the environment -- and green in terms of money. This year, San Francisco hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer pledged to spend $100 million to elect candidates opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline.
Upwards of 60 percent of voters favor a permit for Keystone XL. Canada is a safe source of energy, and pipelines are the safest way to transport oil. But Obama has held up the approval process for five years -- longer than it took America to get from Pearl Harbor to the surrender of Germany and Japan. Money talks.
Some analysts have argued that opposing Keystone XL will appeal to young voters, the Millennial generation that voted 66 and 60 percent for Obama in 2008 and 2012. But Pew reports that Millennials are less likely than their elders to describe themselves as environmentalists; only 32 percent do so.
Speaking of Millennials, it is hard to see what they have gotten from the Obama Democrats. The 2009 stimulus package, Princeton political scientist Julian Zelizer points out, sent money to states to protect jobs of public employee union members rather than create new jobs for young people.
The public employee unions, after all, give lots of money to Democrats. The Millennials, the chumps, just give them votes -- or did.
Millennials also came out on the short end of Obamacare, which was designed to have under-30s with negative net worth subsidize premiums for peak-net-worth elders aged 50 to 64. Evidently, Obamacare's architects were focused on whom they could pay off rather than whom they were gouging.
Democrats have also been split on charter schools, with New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and teacher unions trying to shut them down while New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo cheers on the low-income parents rallying for them.
Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have a mixed record on the issue. State Democrats face internal fights between teacher unions and parents.
National Democrats meanwhile are flailing on Obamacare. Senate Democrats, in panic over adverse polls, are thinking of legislating fixes, while the administration keeps rewriting the law.
It's still true that Republicans are having a hard time assembling a majority coalition. But the Democrats' majority coalition seems to be breaking down.
5) Paul Ryan Introduces Balanced Budget, Democrats React Predictably
By Guy Benson
There was some debate over whether House Republicans would offer any spending blueprint for fiscal year 2015, as some argued it would only hand Democrats ammunition ahead of the midterm elections. In light of the Ryan-Murray compromise spending caps that last for two years, why bother advancing a detailed budget? Those questions have been put to rest, as House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has introduced his FY '15 road map. It has zero chance of becoming law, but its very existence makes clear that Ryan and his colleagues take their responsibilities -- and the law -- seriously. The GOP proposal offers a number of object lessons in political priorities, especially when contrasted with Democrats' alternatives, or lack thereof. A quick primer:
The Republican "Path to Prosperity:"
(1) Balances within ten years. The nonpartisan CBO has determined that deficit reduction would spur economic growth. Spending levels for the next two years comply with the bipartisan agreement forged in December.
(2) Reduces federal spending by $5.1 trillion over that budget window by slowing the rate of spending growth. On the current trajectory, Uncle Sam is set to spend nearly $48 trillion over the coming decade, at an average annual growth rate of 5.2 percent. The Republican plan would spend $42.6 trillion over the same time horizon, scaling back the rate of spending growth to 3.5 percent. Last month, CBO projected that current policy would add $7.3 trillion to the national debt by 2024.
(3) Secures the safety net by strengthening work requirements for able-bodied adults receiving welfare and food stamps.
(4) Affords flexibility to states by block-granting Medicaid (this budget repeals Obamacare, including its Medicaid expansion), and requires Congress and the president to fashion a plan to save Social Security -- which is generally viewed as the easier major entitlement fix.
(5) Saves Medicare for future seniors, employing the bipartisan premium support system featured in previous iterations of this budget. Less affluent and sicker future seniors would receive more assistance than richer and healthier future seniors. Current seniors -- and anyone who was at least 55 years old in 2013 -- would see no changes. Yes, that "cushion" has effectively been sliced down from ten years to nine. The debt clock keeps ticking, and unless we corral our spending on our own terms, Americans will soon enough experience the very unpleasant business of actual austerity. The government's own bookkeepers have concluded that absent reform, Medicare will be insolvent within the next dozen years.
(6) Simplifies the tax code and broadens the tax base by reducing income brackets to just two: 25 percent and ten percent. The plan repeals the Alternative Minimum Tax (which every year must be "patched" to avoid impacting the middle class), and lowers the corporate tax rate to 25 percent. In exchange for a simpler system and lower rates, a number of deductions and loopholes would be closed. Though this plan doesn't mirror Dave Camp's reform proposal, it's a safe bet that some of the specifics would be shared.
More details, including spending on the military and veterans, is available HERE. Ryan offers this graphic to hammer home the urgency of reform:
President Obama's 2015 Budget Proposal:
(1) Never balances. Ever.
(2) Increases spending, ballooning the national debt by $8.3 trillion over the budget window -- $1 trillion beyond than the unsustainable current trajectory. Under Obama's plan, the red ink on the above chart would be steeper, sooner.
(3) Raises taxes by an additional $1.8 trillion (and again, never balances).
(4) Makes no attempt at reforming the gathering tidal wave of unfunded promises that Obama has admitted in the past are driving a long-term debt crisis.
Senate Democrats' 2015 Budget Proposal:
(1) Does not exist.
Additional notes: Senate Democrats have failed to even attempt a budget in four of the last five years. Harry Reid doesn't care for the House Republican Budget, which he linked to -- surprise! -- the Koch Brothers:
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