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Dagny and Blake bond!
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Offense is the best defense. (See 1 below.)
Netanyahu interview. (See 1a below.)
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Bye, bye Western Civilization? (See 2 below.)
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While Obama prepares to cave regarding Iran, Iran's Revolutionary Guards prepare to destroy Israel. (See 3 below.)
Now with cars, then missiles, then bombs? (See 3a below.)
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Tevi once worked in The White House. (See 4 below.)
My friend and The SIRC 's President Dinner speaker, John Podhoretz, writes about Obama's Repudiation. (See 4a below.)
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Chicken salad versus chicken shit! (See 5 below.)
And then: Click here: Kevin McCarthy | Facebook
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Dick
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1)
Israel in ‘Huge’ Lobbying Effort Ahead of Deadline for Iranian Nuke Deal
Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister, Yuval Steinitz on Sunday told Israel Radio that the Jewish state is engaged in what he termed a “huge” lobbying effort ahead of a Nov. 24th deadline for a deal on Iran’s nuclear program, suspected by Israel and western powers as being a covert weaponization project.
The head of Iran’s Majlis (Parliament) Nuclear Committee said Sunday that the United States has sent Tehran an eight-page document, summing up the American position towards the Nov. 24th target date for formulating a nuclear deal, Israel’s Walla News site said.
“Excessive demands by the United States are leading to a deadlock in the talks,” committee chief Ibrahim Carhana told an Iranian news agency, adding that, “After a year of negotiations, we returned to the starting point – and even below zero.”
However, as part of the media effort, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that “Iran is not your ally. Iran is not your friend. Iran is your enemy. It’s not your partner.
“Iran is committed to the destruction of Israel, just as the P5+1, the United States and the world powers are negotiating with Iran a nuclear agreement, the Ayatollah Khamenei, the ruler of Iran, calls for the annihilation of Israel. He just did that four days ago. He specified nine ways and reasons by which Israel should be destroyed. He’s participated in rallies and chants of ‘Death to America,’ ‘Death to Israel,’” Netanyahu stressed.
“This is not a friend, neither in the battle against ISIS nor in the effort, the great effort that should be made to deprive him [of] the capacity to make nuclear weapons. Don’t fall for Iran’s ruse. They are not your friend,” the PM cautioned.
“Look at what ISIS is doing now with assault rifles and pick-up trucks. Just imagine what Iran would do if it had nuclear weapons. So both our enemies are fighting one another and when they are, weaken both – don’t strengthen either one.”
Iran nuke talking points graphic. Image: Twitter
According to Carhana, the document was transferred to Iran in the last round of talks held last week in Muscat, Oman. He did not reveal the full proposal, but said that the United States offered Iran a 30-year plan of action, including a decade-long track to gradually remove sanctions.
Iran would not be allowed to run more than 4,500 new-generation centrifuges, as part of the American proposal, and will be required to allow international inspectors unrestricted access to all its nuclear facilities, and all military installations in the country.
The Arak heavy water reactor will remain closed until its reactor is rebuilt as a “light water” system, that is, one that cannot be used by the military nuclear industry.
This week, one more round of talks are set to be held in Vienna, in an attempt to bridge the gaps between the parties, which include the P5+1 nations.
Last week, US President Barack Obama warned that the parties may not be able to reach an agreement by the deadline, with the Russian Foreign Ministry releasing a similar warning.
In a New York Times op-ed published in October, Steinitz wrote that Iran “has softened its inflammatory anti-Western rhetoric and shown some flexibility on less important issues, but we must not be duped by these gestures.”
“President [Barack] Obama must stand by his declaration that no deal with Iran is better than a bad deal,” wrote Steinitz.
1a)
1a)
| PM Netanyahu Interviewed on CBS's "Face the Nation": imagine what Iran would do if it had nuclear weapons |
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was interviewed this afternoon (Sunday, 16 November 2014) on the CBS program "Face the Nation" and made the following remarks: "Iran is not your ally. Iran is not your friend. Iran is your enemy. It's not your partner. Iran is committed to the destruction of Israel, just as the P5+1, the United States and the world powers are negotiating with Iran a nuclear agreement, the Ayatollah Khamenei, the ruler of Iran, calls for the annihilation of Israel. He just did that four days ago. He specified nine ways and reasons by which Israel should be destroyed. He's participated in rallies and chants of 'Death to America', 'Death to Israel'. This is not a friend, neither in the battle against ISIS nor in the effort, the great effort that should be made to deprive him [of] the capacity to make nuclear weapons. Don't fall for Iran's ruse. They are not your friend." Prime Minister Netanyahu added: "Basically the Middle East is awash with militant Islamists, the militant Islamists led by al-Qaeda and ISIS on the Sunni side, the militant Islamists led by Iran and Hezbollah on the Shiite side. We want both of them to lose. The last thing we want is to have any one of them get weapons of mass destruction. Look at what ISIS is doing now with assault rifles and pick-up trucks. Just imagine what Iran would do if it had nuclear weapons. So both our enemies are fighting one another and when they are, weaken both – don't strengthen either one." |
2) Smug Filled Rooms
As the story broke bit by bit over the internet -- one angry citizen’s (Rich Weinstein) research established that MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, a major architect and salesman for ObamaCare, boasted in 6 separate videos that he lied and that voters were “too stupid” to catch on -- we got to see inside what Professor Charles Lipson smartly coined “the smug filled rooms” of the Capitol.
Many observed the only “stupid” people were the Democrats who -- without a single Republican vote -- twisted parliamentary procedure to pass this into law, accepting California’s constitutional genius Nancy Pelosi’s admonition, “we have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it.”
The revelations could not have come at a worse time for the administration.
For one thing, the Supreme Court just granted certiorari in the King case. That case tests whether the clear language of the ObamaCare subsidies for those who sign up under state-run plans was improperly extended by IRS to signers on the federal website, a bit of administration legerdemain to keep ObamaCare viable after 37 states refused to set up state insurance exchanges.
You see, Gruber’s arrogance revealed that the scheme was not only contrary to the clear language of the statute, but as well to the intent of its authors. He has gravely undercut the administration’s argument to look beyond the language to sustain their expansion of it. While countless Democrats -- including especially Nancy Pelosi -- who credited and relied on Gruber’s work now act as if they never heard of him, they can’t so easily dispose of him and his role in the creation of Obamacare .
James Taranto spotted this dilemma:
In March, a group of left-leaning “economics scholars,” including Gruber himself, filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case of King v. Sebelius, then under consideration by the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. (Last week the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of the case, now styled King v. Burwell.) The March brief appealed to Gruber’s authority:
‘Economist and MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber has developed a sophisticated economic model that allows for a robust prediction of outcomes in the health care system, depending on various policy changes. The Gruber Microsimulation Model (“GMSIM”) utilizes two primary sets of data: (1) Fixed information on individuals, derived from 2011 Current Population Survey data and updated to 2013 and later years; and (2) varying information on policy parameters, which inform the changes in price and eligibility of various forms of insurance. . . . The GMSIM has been cited as one of the leading options for modeling health insurance reforms such as the ACA [the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act].’
A three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit sided with the administration in King. On the same day, a panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled for the plaintiffs in Halbig v. Burwell, another case raising the same legal question -- to wit, whether the Internal Revenue Service exceeded its statutory authority in making tax subsidies available to purchasers of medical insurance policies on the federally run exchange.
The plaintiffs rest their argument on the plain language of the statute, which limits subsidies to taxpayers “enrolled in [policies] through an Exchange established by the State.” The administration’s defenders, including Gruber, have argued that the plain-language interpretation is counter to congressional intent and that the limitation is a mere “typo.” That claim is nonsensical, as we observed Monday. Even if it was a drafting error, it was far more serious than a mere typo.
But as we noted in July, Gruber himself had asserted on multiple occasions that it was Congress’s intention to limit the subsidies to state-established exchanges. In that view, Congress’s intent was to make it so attractive to set up an exchange that no state would refuse.
Last week, the day before Election Day, 18 Democratic state attorneys general, led by Virginia’s Mark Herring, filed a brief with the D.C. Circuit, arguing that the full court should reverse the panel’s decision in Halbig. According to them, Gruber is no authority at all:
‘The best that Appellants and their amici come up with are YouTube videos of Professor Jonathan Gruber, a private citizen at non-governmental meetings in January 2012, years after the ACA was enacted. But Appellants fail to demonstrate that Professor Gruber’s message was disseminated to the State officials responsible for determining whether to build their own Exchange. In any event, Gruber later corrected himself, calling his earlier statements a mistake.’
Back in July, Gruber rather hilariously characterized his earlier comments as a “speak-o.” Presto, change-o, typo, speak-o!
The Democratic state attorneys, who distanced themselves from Gruber in their brief, are not alone. As each new video appears more administration backers claim they never heard of him, he’s “a private citizen” and such.
But you cannot pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars, cite him in your speeches and on your websites and in your briefs as an authority and then credibly pretend you don't know him .
Gruber was retained by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2009 on a $297,600 contract to provide “technical assistance in evaluating options for national healthcare reform.” Gruber also confirmed to the Washington Post that he was paid another $95,000 before that, for a total of nearly $400,000.
Around this time, his analysis was not only featured on Pelosi’s House speaker website in 2009, but cited by the White House several times. Though he often was billed as an analyst in media interviews where he touted the merits of the plan, critics complained his financial ties to the administration weren’t disclosed.
Gruber also spent a good deal of time testifying on the Hill and in meetings at the White House -- 19 visits from 2009 to June of this year, according to publicly available logs
Apart from his work in Washington, he went on to bag similar contracts for health care work at the state level after that, working six-figure deals with multiple states.
“He talks himself about being in the Oval Office, on loan to Congress, particularly the Senate Budget Committee,” Rich Weinstein, who helped dig up the Gruber tapes, told FoxNews.com
This pack of lies -- Gruber’s and his supporters’ -- seriously undercut faith in government and the administration. As Professor Lipson concludes:
The Gruber videos are devastating because they say flatly that the deception was premeditated and was used self-consciously to pass the law. The professor goes further and says the law would have been defeated if its central provisions had been known to voters.
Assuming Gruber's message is true, it means the Obama administration deliberately evaded our democratic process to pass its signature legislation. Its justification, which Gruber makes explicit, is not only that "we know what's best for you," but also that "you are too dense to know that yourself."
This arrogant, condescending approach extends far beyond Obamacare. It is an essential feature of progressive politics for the past century. From the outset, progressive politics yoked expert advice to expansive state action, especially redistributive policies to help the poor.
It says, "We are experts who want to help you, the great unwashed. You are too stupid and uneducated to know how to know what's best for you. Since we do know, and since we have your best interests at heart, we will handle those complex choices for you."
It's an intellectual's version of noblesse oblige.
We do need experts, of course. We need them to design satellites and sewer systems, plan interstate highways, set safety standards for food and skyscrapers, and defend our country.
But as a democracy, we need voters and their elected representatives to make the basic choices about what to do and which trade-offs to make. It is voters and their representatives who should decide whether to buy a new sewer system, wage a war, build a new highway or send rockets into outer space. Those choices ought to be made after vigorous public debate, not in the smug-filled rooms of the Progressive Policy Institute or MIT Faculty Club.
If that weren’t enough to cause the purveyors of ObamaCare indigestion, there’s this: the cost of coverage under the Act will substantially increase this year. As Tom Maguire notes of the administration’s suggestion we use the Thanksgiving break to shop around to get the best new deals on health insurance: “If you like your health plan you can reminisce about it.”
And there’s more, as they say on the late night TV gadget ads
Penalties will rise under the individual mandate and the employer mandate will take effect.
After being delayed for a year, large businesses (100 or more employees in 2015, 50 or more in 2016) will be required to offer affordable (and subsidized) health plans to at least 70 percent of their full time employees or face a $2,000-$3,000 penalty per employee.
This mandate will lead to fewer full time employees being hired.
You’d think after covering for the ObamaCare architects during the legislative process, pillorying its critics and sitting on the Gruber revelatory videos the press would slink off somewhere in shame.
Instead, they continue for the most part to sit on the story or downplay it, reporting if they do at all that Gruber had also worked on Romneycare. So what? That made Gruber’s persistent and arrogant lies about ObamaCare okay?
And now they -- NBC’s Chuck Todd, NPR’s Alisa, Chang, Peter Foster (Washington editor of the UK Telegraph) and Jeremy Peters (Washington bureau of the NYT) -- are off on a new angle: contending as a matter of fact that the Republicans who swept the midterms -- in large part because voters were not as stupid as the press and knew Obamacare stunk -- have “an obligation to govern”.
In other words, to prove they are worthy, they must give the losers what they want. Actually, as Jay Cost reminds us in debunking past years’ meme -- that the Democrats had achieved a permanent majority -- that’s not how our republic was designed.
“The rules of the game” at present favor a Republican Congress and Senate and a Democratic White House, and to govern without opposition you must win all three. The Democrats didn’t, and their dreams of a radically egalitarian government is in any event at odds with both the constitutional scheme and the facts on the ground. That is likely to remain the state of the union especially now that sunlight has entered the smug filled rooms which for so long have closeted academics at the government till and their johns in the Democratic Party.
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2) A Suicidal Collapse of Western Civilization?
My background is basically European -- and more specifically, Western European. I have lived and worked in many of those countries, and I know most of the major cities intimately -- from Stockholm in the north, Newcastle, London, Paris, The Hague, Munich, Vienna, to Rome and Erice, Sicily in the south. I have also spent several months in Moscow and in Jerusalem as a guest of academic institutions.
Economic Suicide
The ongoing economic suicide of Europe is based on a faulty understanding of the climate issue by most Western politicians and on their extreme policy response, based on emotion rather than logic and science. The major European economies have reacted irrationally to contrived, unjustified fear of imagined global-warming disasters
Perhaps I should explain that the climate has not been warming for the past 18 years -- and even if it had been warming, it would be no disaster. The EU wants to cut emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, a natural plant-fertilizer, by 40% within 15 years -- by 2030. This insane drive to replace energy sources from fossil fuels that release plant-friendly CO2 into the atmosphere has led to greatly increased costs of energy. As is well understood, such actions not only hurt economic growth, but they increase poverty levels and therefore threaten the social fabric of these nations.
There are some exceptions. of course: France and Belgium rely heavily on nuclear energy; Austria and Norway rely heavily on hydro. Poland has actively resisted the general trend to demonize CO2, but the UK and Germany, which has been the power-house of European economic growth, are severely threatened by their insistence on installing wind and solar energy. The latter is especially inappropriate to the Continent and to Great Britain.
The pity of it all is that these economic sacrifices in Western Europe will hardly affect the level of atmospheric CO2 -- which is controlled globally by huge emissions from China -- and soon also from India.
Unfortunately, during the past few years, and even during the White House administration of George W. Bush, the United States has tended to move in the same direction -- and energy costs have gone up markedly.
The regulatory burdens created by the EPA’s “War on Coal,” by holding up permits for pipelines and for exploration-production of fuels on Federal lands, etc, are imposing real costs on US households, which are the equivalent of a large energy tax -- except that none of these increased costs flow into the US Treasury.
Cultural, plus even more dangerous Demographic Suicide,
But it is cultural suicide, which adds to economic suicide and spells doom for the future of Western Europe. I have in mind here the heavy immigration from Islamic nations -- with most immigrants unwilling to adjust to the prevailing culture of the host country.
Examples are rampant. In Great Britain, the dangerous immigration has come mostly from Pakistan and Bangladesh, Islamic successors to the British rule over India; Hindu immigrants present no special problem. In Southern Europe, the Low Countries, and most of Scandinavia, much of the immigration has been from Somalia and North Africa. France has experienced massive immigration from North Africa and other African French-speaking former colonies.
In many of these nations now, these immigrant communities have formed enclaves that the native inhabitants can no longer enter safely; even the police have great difficulty controlling law and order in these enclaves. Examples exist in cities like Birmingham, Amsterdam, Malmo (Sweden), Paris and Marseille. Germany seems slightly better off, with immigrants from Turkey making some effort to become good Germans. Of course, the aim of many in these enclaves is to take over the host country -- using available democratic means -- and institute Sharia (Islamic law).
It is clear that these immigrants are taking advantage of the democratic nature of the host nations and their willingness to grant asylum status and lavish economic subsidies to any who declare themselves as refugees. A prime example is Sweden, where multi-culturalism runs wild and is supported by the government-subsidized and beholden media. So far, no real revolt yet -- except for some grumbling from the indigenous population (whom the compliant media denounce as “racists.”)
Least affected have been the Slavic nations, which were formerly under Soviet domination. Perhaps because of their delayed economic development, they have not been as attractive a destination for immigrants. Ironically, these East-Europeans may yet save Western civilization.
The United States faces a rather special situation. There is much immigration, mostly illegal, from south of the border. But these Latino immigrants are not Islamic; they share similar cultural values with native-born Americans -- and most are making an effort to adapt to the prevailing culture. The main danger is one of national security. With porous borders, potential terrorists can easily slip into the United States and create mayhem.
A peculiar problem exists in Israel, which has experienced illegal Islamic (!) immigration, mainly from Sudan and Eritrea. We are told that some southern suburbs of Tel Aviv now resemble a Third-World nation. Efforts are underway to deport these illegal immigrants; but standing in the way is Israel’s Supreme Court, a group of unelected liberal lawyers, who personally oppose the Parliament-passed law of deportation -- certainly an anomalous situation by US standards.
Russia has experienced problems of its own, mainly from Islamic provinces in the Caucasus. The suppression of the Chechen revolt has caused a violent reaction, leading to major terror acts, even in Moscow.
Exacerbating the Islamic “conquest“ of Western Europe is the fact that the indigenous people -- from Swedes to Spaniards -- are not reproducing themselves. Whatever the cause may be, the number of children per family is well below the replacement level of 2.11; in some countries it is as low as 1.30. The statistics are frightening -- as seen in records of births, welfare rolls, and school attendance. By mid-century, parts of Europe will have a Moslem majority -- and even before then it will be too late to rectify the situation.
What of the future?
With ongoing internal battles within Islamic groups, it is not easy to predict the future. In Syria, some 200,000 have been killed and millions have been turned into refugees. The rise of the “Islamic State” in the last few months promises a brutal suppression of any who hold even a slightly different Islamic view. Their announced goal is to set up a theocratic Caliphate in any lands that have ever been under Islamic rule -- including most of the Balkans, Andalus-Spain, and of course Israel.
At the battle of Tours in 732, Charles Martell stopped the advance into France of Moslem armies from the Iberian peninsula. In 1571, in the great naval battle of Lepanto, off Greece, a Spanish-Italian fleet defeated the Turks. In their farthest advance into Central Europe, a Turkish army besieged Vienna in 1683. Christian forces, under the command of King John Sobieski of Poland, defeated the invaders decisively and saved Western civilization.
Americans have twice saved Europe in the 20th century and may soon be forced to defend Europe again against a new threat. The first assault on Western European civilization came from Nazi Germany and its allies; it took a bloody World-War-II (1939-1945) to defeat them. Certainly, without US intervention, Western Europe, and even Britain, might now be part of a German-ruled dictatorship, a sort of involuntary European Union. It is doubtful also whether the Soviet Union could have withstood Hitler’s onslaught without the active material assistance of the United States.
The second threat to Europe came from the post-1945 Soviet Union; it was dominated by the specter of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. The “Warsaw Pact” encompassed even a large part of Germany. This “Cold-War” threat was neutralized thanks to the steadfastness of the United States -- but also by the internal economic problems brought about by the planned economy of the Soviet empire.
The new threat of course is Islamo-Fascism and its aim to introduce Sharia -- in at least those parts of Europe that had been Muslim lands in the past, but aiming really at all of Europe -- and eventually the rest of the world. This new threat uses a method of warfare that is different from the past and more insidious. Terrorism has come into its own, partly based on large Islamic populations in Western Europe.
Coupled with this external threat is the internal one from Islamic fanatics, many of them born in Europe -- and even from converts. We have seen this happen in Spain, and more recently in Britain. Their methods have been crude and their weapons have been primitive; but with nuclear proliferation and with the possibility of chemical and biological warfare, these threats have to be taken very seriously.
Fighting these threats takes resources for surveillance, intelligence, sundry military expenditures, and weapons, both offensive and defensive. Resilience requires above all a strong economy. And one cannot have a strong economy without adequate energy resources – which gets us back to the issue of climate fears.
The problem now is that while the threat of terrorism is growing, so is the suicidal drive to limit the use of energy and thereby also economic growth. This internal threat is particularly strong in Europe and has been called, quite properly, eco-Bolshevism. It would have all the earmarks of the failed Soviet system, with government involvement in every facet of the economy and with energy restrictions reducing economic growth.
There is no question that the policies being discussed now in Europe and in the United States would be extremely costly, would force industrial cutbacks and of course massive job losses. All of these exacerbate social tension in nations that have a large number of immigrants, who traditionally have the highest unemployment levels.
Will the US step up again and save Europe? Doubtful
One may ask: Is there any way to stop this steamroller? There’s probably little hope that such an initiative can come from Europe; it may have to come from the United States. Somehow we would have to convince European leaders that their policies, based on global-warming fears, are mistaken. That job may prove to be very difficult -- unless there is a drastic change in current US policy. But it is something that has to be done if we want Europe to survive economically, as an ally against the threat of Islamo-Fascism.
I don’t believe that the US is prepared to save Europe; just listen to our Secretary of State: Speaking in Boston on Oct 9, John Kerry pronounced that climate change, if left unaddressed, will result in the end of times: “Life as you know it on Earth ends,” Kerry said. Last February, Kerry claimed that climate change was the world’s “most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” Not nuclear bombs in the hands of the terrorist-sponsoring regime of Iran -- or in the hands of ISIS or al Qaeda; not Ebola or some fearsome epidemic of a lethal disease. According to Kerry, climate change is the real number-one national-security threat.
US media, academia, and other opinion-makers are chiming in. In her latest work of science-fiction, Harvard’s Naomi Oreskes, co-author of the mendacious Merchants of Doubt, imagines a future world devastated by climate change. She generously gives the West another 80 years -- well beyond her own life span, of course. But she totally ignores the dangers of rising Islamo-Fascism and of demography. Just listen:
The year is 2393, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Clear warnings of climate catastrophe went ignored for decades, leading to soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread drought and -- finally -- the disaster now known as the Great Collapse of 2093, when the disintegration of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet led to mass migration and a complete reshuffling of the global order. Writing from the Second People's Republic of China on the 300th anniversary of the Great Collapse, a senior scholar presents a gripping and deeply disturbing account of how the children of the Enlightenment -- the political and economic elites of the so-called advanced industrial societies -- failed to act, and so brought about the collapse of Western civilization.
So don’t look to the US to come to the rescue of a doomed Western Europe. It is unlikely that our children or grandchildren will be fortunate enough to experience the charms of great cities like London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Rome – or what’s left of them.
So don’t look to the US to come to the rescue of a doomed Western Europe. It is unlikely that our children or grandchildren will be fortunate enough to experience the charms of great cities like London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Rome – or what’s left of them.
S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project. His specialty is atmospheric and space physics. An expert in remote sensing and satellites, he served as the founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service and, more recently, as vice chair of the US National Advisory Committee on Oceans & Atmosphere. He is a senior fellow of the Heartland Institute and the Independent Institute. He co-authored the NY Times best-seller Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 years. In 2007, he founded and has since chaired the NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change), which has released several scientific reports [See www.NIPCCreport.org]. For recent writings, see http://www.americanthinker.com/s_fred_singer/ and also Google Scholar
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3) Iran’s Revolutionary Guard showcases ballistic capabilities to “attack and
destroy” Israel
Observers say move is tactic by more conservative elements in the Iranian
leadership to undermine ongoing nuclear negotiations
Ali M. Pedram Asharq Al-Awsat
London, Asharq Al-Awsat—Iranian websites close to the country’s Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps have run special feature reports and interviews
relating to Iran’s capability to “attack and destroy” Israel using ballistic
missiles, the semi-state-run Fars and Tasnim news agencies reported on
Saturday.
A special feature report published by Fars on three missiles—named
Israel-hitter—stated the missiles could be launched quickly from Iranian
territory to reach targets in Israel, and explained the extensive
infrastructure that has been built underground to house them.
A Tehran-based analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Asharq
Al-Awsat that publishing such “provocative” reports just two weeks before
the November 24 deadline for reaching a comprehensive agreement with Western
powers on Iran’s nuclear program was an intentional move by more
conservative elements in the Iranian leadership, and designed to derail
President’s Hassan Rouhani’s reconciliatory foreign policy approach to close
the nuclear dossier.
More conservative elements within the Iranian political establishment are
under immense pressure to accept the framework of extending the current
nuclear interim deal, which would see some sanctions on Iran remaining and
the Islamic Republic observing ongoing restrictions on its uranium
enrichment program.
One of the main reasons for the current stalemate in negotiations between
Iran, the US and the EU over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program relate
to grave concerns the Western powers have regarding Iran’s posing an
“existential threat” to Israel should it develop the capacity to produce
nuclear weapons.
The rhetoric coming out of Tehran in recent years—most notably, the
controversial comments made by Iran’s former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
in 2005, in which he reportedly said Israel “should be wiped from the face
of the earth”—have caused concern in the international community and given
the Israeli leadership grounds for pushing for an entire dismantling of Iran’s
nuclear capabilities.
Both the West and Israel fear Iran’s ballistic and nuclear capabilities
could be used in tandem to later produce such weapons. Iran’s new government
has, however, distanced itself from Ahmadinejad’s fiery rhetoric against
Israel and reiterated many times that it is banned from producing nuclear
bombs, not only due to its international obligations under the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, but also due to religiously binding fatwas issued
by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei prohibiting the production of such
weapons.
Observers say the publication of the information regarding the missiles, and
the anti-Israel rhetoric, are moves designed to divert attention from Iran’s
nuclear program, which currently is and in future proposed to fall under the
scrutiny of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Others have said they believe the information is designed to carry a message
that any possible threat from Iran against Israel will come via conventional
and ballistic missiles, and not necessarily as a result of the nuclear
program, which is under the stringent scrutiny of the IAEA.
In a recent interview, Ali Abkar Velayati, special adviser on foreign policy
to Khamenei, reiterated comments from Khaled Mishal, the leader of the
Palestinian militant group, Hamas, that “Iran has been providing the
Palestinian fighters with [everything from] bullets to missiles to [aid in
their] fight with Israel.”
Velayati, who is generally known as a moderate conservative politician, said
Iran’s current support for Shi’ite communities across the Arab world would
not have been possible without the ballistic détente Iran had managed to
secure.
Moshen Reza’i, the former commander of the Revolutionary Guard and current
secretary of the Expediency Council, said recently it was Iran’s ballistic
capabilities that had caused the P5+1—the five permanent members of the UN
Security Council plus Germany—“to retreat from their previous policies
against Iran” and begin making conciliations.
In another example of the conservative rhetoric being stepped up from
Tehran, Yahya Rahim Safavi, another former Revolutionary Guard commander—and
a current military adviser to Khamenei—described Khamenei in comments on
Saturday as the “commander of Islamic lands,” with the aim of resisting and
fighting the US and Israel.
3a)
Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, is making himself a household name, and not in a good way. A series of videos have emerged in recent days showing Mr. Gruber—an architect of the Affordable Care Act—telling college audiences that major parts of the law were designed purposely to mask its true cost to individual Americans.
As Mr. Gruber put it, speaking last year at a conference at the University of Pennsylvania: “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”
Mr. Gruber says in one video that his real aim was to reduce the tax break available to those who get employer-sponsored insurance, about 170 million Americans. He lamented that it would be hard to persuade Congress to reduce people’s tax breaks: “You just can’t get through. It’s politically impossible.” True enough—the excise tax does the job instead. It is a stealthy way to reduce the tax preference for health care without taking it away from employers.
Mr. Gruber also noted that the real impact of the tax would fall on individual Americans: “We just tax the insurance companies, they pass on higher prices that offsets the tax break we get, it ends up being the same thing. It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.” In another video that surfaced on Friday, he explained that the only way to get rid of the tax preference for employer-sponsored insurance was “by mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people, when we all know it’s a tax on people who hold those insurance plans.”
Our study bears this out. While the tax is designed to be paid by companies, employees or consumers will see significant increases in costs. These cost increases will be passed on in several ways. Large employers who are subject to the excise tax in 2018 will pay an average of more than $2,700 per employee a year from 2018 to 2024. As Mr. Gruber admits, and basic economics confirms, this cost will be passed on to consumers or to employees in higher prices and lower compensation.
Employers, being rational actors, will not want to pay these taxes and will reduce their health-care benefits to limit their potential exposure to the tax. Doing this will cause employees to be hit by the excise tax in at least two other ways. If employers increase taxable wages to compensate for reducing the value of their plans, then employees will be paying more in taxes for the same compensation levels, and more after-tax out-of-pocket expenses for their health care.
From 2018 to 2024, the excise tax could cost 12.1 million employees an average $1,050 in higher payroll and income taxes a year, if employers increase their taxable wages as they reduce the cost of health-care benefits. Alternatively, if employers only reduce the value of their offerings without increasing wages and salaries, these employees could see up to a $6,150 reduction in their health-care benefits and little or no increase in pay.
Mr. Gruber also implicitly acknowledged that calling the excise tax a “Cadillac” tax is misleading, as the tax’s reach will expand. “Over time it’s gonna apply to more and more health-insurance plans,” he said, elaborating in a separate speech that the “tax that starts out hitting only 8% of the insurance plans essentially amounts over the next 20 years [to] essentially getting rid of the exclusion for employer-sponsored plans.”
This means that eventually the excise tax will affect an increasing number of workers who don’t have top-flight health insurance. By 2031 the cost of the average family health-care plan is expected to hit the excise-tax threshold. The tax’s creeping reach is reminiscent of the Alternative Minimum Tax, which was originally designed to hit only the wealthiest taxpayers but now nails the middle class.
The contention was ridiculous on its face. You cannot hear people who deliberately choose not to speak. Even so, Obama suggested that, had those non-voters voted, they would have done so in support of him and his party:
The voters to whom Obama was referring obliquely are between the ages of 18 and 29. That demographic group’s voting pattern since 2008 shows the error in the president’s analysis.
And in 2014? Under-30s voted 53 to 43 for the Democrats. So consider this pattern: Overall, from 2008 to 2014, the Obama-Democrat share of the youth vote fell by 20 percent.
That is why these numbers suggest something very different from what the president thinks. They suggest that young people were wildly enthusiastic about Barack Obama in 2008, considerably less enthusiastic about him in 2012, and not enthusiastic at all about the Democratic Party he leads in 2014. The president described their failure to turn out thus: “When they look at Washington, they say nothing’s working and it’s not making a difference and there’s just a constant slew of bad news coming over the TV screen.” Not really. They lost their enthusiasm because of him.
That is even more apparent once you note that in several states, there was a substantial difference between the behavior of voters ages 25 to 29 and voters ages 18 to 24. In North Carolina, 25- to 29-year-olds voted for Democrat Kay Hagan by a margin of 59 to 34—while 18- to 24-year-olds only went 47 to 44 for Hagan. In Kentucky, the split was even more stark: The younger cohort favored Republican Mitch McConnell 53 to 42, while the slightly older group went for his Democratic challenger 52 to 43.
The Democrats running for the Senate knew this. It is why they did not want him to campaign for them, and why one of them steadfastly refused even to acknowledge having voted for Obama despite the fact that she had been a delegate at the 2012 Democratic convention. Behaving in this fashion actually ran counter to the conventional wisdom about the highly polarized American electorate that followed Obama’s reelection. According to this new wisdom, campaigns should no longer be dedicated to winning undecided voters, who are supposedly very few in number, but to turning out persuadable voters.
The term persuadable describes a person who is probably generally sympathetic to a candidate but doesn’t feel any drive to go out and vote for him. Getting these “persuadables” to the polls in 2012 was the key to Obama’s reelection triumph. For the first time, pollsters report, the Obama campaign was able to drag people to the ballot box who said they basically preferred Obama but measured their own eagerness to vote at 2 or 3 on a scale of 10. (It had been an axiom for decades that no matter whom voters claimed to support, only those who scored themselves at 4 or above would actually turn out.) The key persuadable constituency in 2012 was voters between the ages of 18 and 29. So despite Obama’s low approval rating, one might have thought he would have remained valuable on the campaign trail as a lure to the persuadable voters who had pulled him across the finish line. That is clearly what he believes. But those campaigns were not run by stupid people. They were run by professionals desperate to win—professionals who probably admire Barack Obama. They kept their distance because they had to. They knew the persuadables weren’t going to be persuaded this time. He had lost them.
Making the election a national referendum on the president hadn’t worked in 2012, and many of the wisest and most intellectually serious people on the right were concerned that it wasn’t going to work this time either—that the Republican candidates needed to set a positive and coherent agenda because, without one, they would not inspire enough people. But those campaigns weren’t run by stupid people either. They saw what the Democratic campaigns saw.
So why did the anti-Obama focus fail in 2012 but win in 2014? The president wants to believe it’s because he’s being blamed for Washington’s dysfunction. But consider just a partial list of horribles the American people have had to face since 2012.
ObamaCare went live in October 2013, and the billion-dollar website that was supposed to guide people through their choices died. Americans learned that the Veteran’s Administration had been falsifying data to hide its dreadful record of failed care. Border states were flooded with tens of thousands of children who had been led to believe that they (and eventually their parents) would be legalized after their horrific journeys. The Internal Revenue Service acknowledged that it had targeted groups hostile to the president, then denied it, and then claimed the emails detailing the actual events had somehow vanished. Americans were given contradictory and confusing details about how authorities were going to prevent the spread of Ebola inside the United States. After we were told the war on jihadist terror was basically a thing of the past, there came the rise of ISIS. The president erased his own “red line” when it came to Syria’s use of chemical weapons. Vladimir Putin took a bite out of a neighboring country and is getting ready to take another. That is quite a record to take to the electorate.
No one believes that the Republican Party is popular. And yet, on Election Day, Republicans won eight new Senate seats (with a ninth on the way). The party will have its largest majority in the House of Representatives since 1946. Republicans reside in 31 of the nation’s 50 governor’s mansions, by far the highest number in modern times. In 24 states, the GOP holds the governorship and both houses of the state legislature; Democrats are in the same position in only six states. Republicans will now control 67 of the nation’s 98 state legislative chambers, up from 59. And all this despite the fact that no one believes that the Republican Party is popular.
The New York Times reported on election night that the president did not feel “repudiated.” At his press conference, Obama said the Republicans had had a “good night.” They had indeed, but only because he had been repudiated.
Daniel Greenfield's article: The Price of Restraint is Death |  |
Yesterday afternoon a young woman stood by the side of a road holding up a sign. It read “Gush Etzion”. Those two words summon up spittle-flecked rants about Zionist settlements from the anti-Israel left.
 But for Dalia, it was just home. And then it wasn’t.Dalia caught a ride to a bus stop on the way home from her job as a children’s occupational therapist. Her next stop was a shift at Yad Sarah, a volunteer organization for the elderly and disabled. But before that could happen, a Muslim attacker did what songs, cartoons and posters distributed by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas encouraging “Car Jihad” had been telling him to do. He ran her over with a Mazda van. With the 26-year-old woman on the ground, the courageous Islamic Jihadist stabbed her as she lay dying. Then shouting Allahu Akbar, he began slashing at an unarmed man who had stopped to help. When the unarmed man fighting him off with his bare hands proved too much for the knife-wielding Jihadist, the killer fled, was wounded and taken into custody. Dalia’s father, a volunteer with Magen David Adom, Israel’s Red Cross, heard that there had been an attack. He did what countless Israeli fathers and mothers began doing right after they heard the news. He called his daughter. There was no answer. Despite being only in her twenties, Dalia knew what was coming. This wasn’t her killer’s first act of terrorism and it wasn’t her first time as a victim of Islamic terrorism. When she was seventeen years old, Dalia was attacked by a knife-wielding terrorist in the same place. But the terrorist didn’t have a van and there were armed men at the scene. “I stood on February 28, 2006 at Gush Etzion Junction when a terrorist came and began to stab those standing at a hitchhiking station,” she would later write. She described terrorists for whom prison life is “like a hotel”, who watch television, take courses and contact their lawyers. “Those who stab Jews have their rights and privileges. The injustice cries out to Heaven.” “Punish and expel those who threaten us," Dalia wrote, “no matter the cost to them. They must pay the price for their terror. That is the only way the terrorism will end.” As you read this, Dalia Lemkus will have already been buried. Her parents and her five brothers and sisters will have cried over her grave. Her killer will receive the best possible care in an Israeli hospital. The Palestinian Authority will use the foreign aid it receives from the United States and the European Union to pay him a salary for life. If he gets out, he will be entitled to everything from special housing to free medical care paid for by you, by me and by all of us.  Stabbing a young woman in the neck while she lay in the street made him a hero of Palestine. He has become a model of Muslim manhood, little boys in UNRWA schools will be taught about his great deed and encouraged to follow in his footsteps. And they will, just as he had followed the example of those great Muslim heroes who had murdered Jewish women and children in Hebron before he was born.The educational system staffed by Hamas supporters and paid for by foreign aid does its work well. Some countries turn out future doctors and scientists. The Palestinian Authority turns out heroes who can nerve themselves up to take on a 26-year-old Jewish woman as long as they have a few thousand pounds of van or at least a butcher knife on their side. Not to mention Allah and the Koran. Dalia’s killer may remain behind bars where Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch will complain that his smartphone isn’t fast enough, that his Coca Cola isn’t fizzy enough and that the clothes he shops for remotely with his family using the money that the Palestinian Authority pays to the families of its heroes don’t fit him correctly. But it’s also possible that he will be set free. He was before. Dalia’s killer had been in jail for terrorism before he was released. Releasing terrorists is how Israel demonstrates its goodwill toward terrorists. This year, Obama forced Israel to free over a hundred convicted terrorists as a “gesture” just to get the Palestinian Authority terrorists to discuss continuing talks with Israel. Israel was being pressured into releasing terrorists in exchange for an opportunity to negotiate resuming negotiations. And Israel freed most of the terrorists until the PLO broke the deal and went to the UN. Secretary of State John Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that it was Israel’s fault because it “didn’t release the Palestinian prisoners on the day they were supposed to be freed.” The next time that Obama and Kerry force Israel to release terrorists for the opportunity to negotiate the possibility of negotiating with terrorists, Dalia’s killer may be shouting “Allahu Akbar” all over again. And if Israel doesn’t release him on the day that Obama and the PLO want him released, it will be blamed for not wanting peace. What better way is there to achieve peace than by freeing terrorists? Dalia left her comments on talkbacks in which Israelis shout to be heard above the reassuring lies told by their media. Now she has been silenced. She will be buried in her native town of Tekoa where her body will rest unless the left and their Islamic partners succeed in forcing the expulsion of the thousand Jews of Tekoa, the living in the houses and the dead from the town cemetery.  The State Department, which rejects the existence of the living and dead Jews of Tekoa and wants them gone, responded to Dalia’s murder by urging both sides to show restraint.The AP’s Matt Lee asked State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki whether she meant that Israelis should show restraint by standing still and allowing themselves to be stabbed. “If you’re standing at a bus stop or something and someone runs a car into you or comes up and stabs you, I don’t know how to, I mean, those people aren’t, don’t need to exercise restraint, do they?” Psaki laughed and refused to address the question. But it’s a question that ought to be addressed. Israel is constantly ordered to show restraint. It is told that its response to Muslim terrorism is disproportionate. But when does proportionate restraint begin? Is it when a Muslim terrorist is running you over with a van and sinking his knife into your neck? Or is it only when the terrorist is down and you contemplate doing something about the men who sent him and will continue sending more like him? Israel is generously allowed to fight back once the knife is at its neck. But once it breaks free, then it’s told to show restraint. Taking out the terrorist networks that send out men like this would be disproportionate. Refusing to release the killer of Dalia would show that Israel doesn’t want peace. And no matter what Israel does, how much it sacrifices, how many young women it buries in its cemeteries after they have been run over, stabbed or blown up, no matter how many of their killers it releases, it is always guilty of not wanting peace badly enough. Critics of Israel like Jeffrey Goldberg insist that its situation is not “sustainable”. And that’s true. Struggling with an attacker who has a knife at your throat is not sustainable. Either he cuts your throat or you cut his throat. If every time you get enough breathing room to fight back, you try to negotiate with him, instead of doing to him what he’s trying to do to you, then eventually he will kill you.  Dalia survived her first attack. She didn’t survive her second attack. There are only so many second chances when someone wants to kill you. And if you are a non-Muslim in the Muslim world, then someone always wants to kill you.The price of restraint is death. Negotiating with your killers lets them trade up from a knife to a van, from a stone to a rocket, from an outpost in Lebanon to fortresses within range of your major cities. Dalia tried to warn Israelis. She tried to warn the world. Now her voice speaks from the grave. It is the voice of the dead. It is the voice of truth. “They must pay the price for their terror. That is the only way the terrorism will end.” |
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4) Another ObamaCare Deception
As Jonathan Gruber knows, the health-care law is a tax machine. The ‘Cadillac’ levy will hit the middle class.
By TEVI TROY
Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, is making himself a household name, and not in a good way. A series of videos have emerged in recent days showing Mr. Gruber—an architect of the Affordable Care Act—telling college audiences that major parts of the law were designed purposely to mask its true cost to individual Americans.
As Mr. Gruber put it, speaking last year at a conference at the University of Pennsylvania: “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”
One example cited by Mr. Gruber is the so-called Cadillac tax, as the ObamaCare excise tax on high-value employer health plans is known. The tax, which he helped devise and will take effect in 2018, imposes a 40% levy on individual health plans worth more than $10,200, and on family plans worth more than $27,500. As Mr. Gruber’s remarks were unearthed last week, economist Mark Wilson and I released a study of the excise tax that shows he is right about its deceptive design. The tax is likely to hit many people who don’t have high-end coverage.
Mr. Gruber says in one video that his real aim was to reduce the tax break available to those who get employer-sponsored insurance, about 170 million Americans. He lamented that it would be hard to persuade Congress to reduce people’s tax breaks: “You just can’t get through. It’s politically impossible.” True enough—the excise tax does the job instead. It is a stealthy way to reduce the tax preference for health care without taking it away from employers.
Mr. Gruber also noted that the real impact of the tax would fall on individual Americans: “We just tax the insurance companies, they pass on higher prices that offsets the tax break we get, it ends up being the same thing. It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.” In another video that surfaced on Friday, he explained that the only way to get rid of the tax preference for employer-sponsored insurance was “by mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people, when we all know it’s a tax on people who hold those insurance plans.”
Our study bears this out. While the tax is designed to be paid by companies, employees or consumers will see significant increases in costs. These cost increases will be passed on in several ways. Large employers who are subject to the excise tax in 2018 will pay an average of more than $2,700 per employee a year from 2018 to 2024. As Mr. Gruber admits, and basic economics confirms, this cost will be passed on to consumers or to employees in higher prices and lower compensation.
Employers, being rational actors, will not want to pay these taxes and will reduce their health-care benefits to limit their potential exposure to the tax. Doing this will cause employees to be hit by the excise tax in at least two other ways. If employers increase taxable wages to compensate for reducing the value of their plans, then employees will be paying more in taxes for the same compensation levels, and more after-tax out-of-pocket expenses for their health care.
From 2018 to 2024, the excise tax could cost 12.1 million employees an average $1,050 in higher payroll and income taxes a year, if employers increase their taxable wages as they reduce the cost of health-care benefits. Alternatively, if employers only reduce the value of their offerings without increasing wages and salaries, these employees could see up to a $6,150 reduction in their health-care benefits and little or no increase in pay.
Mr. Gruber also implicitly acknowledged that calling the excise tax a “Cadillac” tax is misleading, as the tax’s reach will expand. “Over time it’s gonna apply to more and more health-insurance plans,” he said, elaborating in a separate speech that the “tax that starts out hitting only 8% of the insurance plans essentially amounts over the next 20 years [to] essentially getting rid of the exclusion for employer-sponsored plans.”
This means that eventually the excise tax will affect an increasing number of workers who don’t have top-flight health insurance. By 2031 the cost of the average family health-care plan is expected to hit the excise-tax threshold. The tax’s creeping reach is reminiscent of the Alternative Minimum Tax, which was originally designed to hit only the wealthiest taxpayers but now nails the middle class.
The all-too-candid MIT economist is not likely to have a hard time paying for his own health care—Mr. Gruber reportedly received $400,000 for advising the Obama administration on the Affordable Care Act. But he is having a hard time explaining his unguarded comments about the law. His views may be obnoxious, but Mr. Gruber has performed a public service by finally telling the truth about ObamaCare and providing a glimpse of the mind-set of those who foisted it on the country. The American people are smart enough to see Mr. Gruber and the Affordable Care Act for what they are.
Mr. Troy is the president of the American Health Policy Institute and a former deputy secretary of Health and Human Services.
4a) The Repudiation of Barack Obama
Barack Obama began the press conference he held the day after his party was crushed in the 2014 midterm elections by implying that the results were of questionable legitimacy because turnout had been so low—by some accounts, the lowest since 1942. “To everyone who voted, I want you to know that I hear you,” he said. “To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too.”
The contention was ridiculous on its face. You cannot hear people who deliberately choose not to speak. Even so, Obama suggested that, had those non-voters voted, they would have done so in support of him and his party:
One of the things that I’m very proud of in 2008 and 2012, when I ran for office, was we got people involved who hadn’t been involved before. We got folks to vote who hadn’t voted before, particularly young people. And that was part of the promise. The excitement was, if you get involved, if you participate, if you embrace that sense of citizenship, then things change. And not just in abstract ways, in concrete ways. Somebody gets a job who didn’t have it before. Somebody gets health care who didn’t have it before. Or a student is able to go to college who couldn’t afford it before.
Obama believes that he and his party have done all these things—that they have helped someone get a job, get health care, go to college. If that were so, why on earth wouldn’t those very people go to the polls to reward the party that had done such wonderful things for them? Well, he explained, “sustaining that excitement, especially in midterm elections, has proven difficult—that sense of if you get involved, then you know, if you vote, then there’s going to be a big change out there.”
That is one way to look at it. The wrong way.
The voters to whom Obama was referring obliquely are between the ages of 18 and 29. That demographic group’s voting pattern since 2008 shows the error in the president’s analysis.
In 2008, Obama won under-30s by a margin of 2 to 1. That same cohort favored Democrats in 2010, but by a margin of 58 to 42—which is a drop of 11 percent. In his 2012 reelection, Obama brought the under-30 number up a little; they went for him 3 to 2. But that was still a 10 percent decline for him compared with 2008.
And in 2014? Under-30s voted 53 to 43 for the Democrats. So consider this pattern: Overall, from 2008 to 2014, the Obama-Democrat share of the youth vote fell by 20 percent.
Now, it is true that under-30s comprised 19 percent of the electorate in 2012 but only 13 percent in 2014. So let us be insanely generous and assume that those missing voters would have broken 3 to 2 for the Democrats as they did for Obama in 2012. By my calculation, those extra votes still wouldn’t have added enough to change the outcome in any of the eight Senate races in which Republicans took control of Democratic seats on election night. (Even in North Carolina, the closest of the races, Republican Thom Tillis would have edged out Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan by about 18,000 votes.) In other words, give Obama his lost voters, and the 2014 wave would have broken in almost exactly the same way.
That is why these numbers suggest something very different from what the president thinks. They suggest that young people were wildly enthusiastic about Barack Obama in 2008, considerably less enthusiastic about him in 2012, and not enthusiastic at all about the Democratic Party he leads in 2014. The president described their failure to turn out thus: “When they look at Washington, they say nothing’s working and it’s not making a difference and there’s just a constant slew of bad news coming over the TV screen.” Not really. They lost their enthusiasm because of him.
That is even more apparent once you note that in several states, there was a substantial difference between the behavior of voters ages 25 to 29 and voters ages 18 to 24. In North Carolina, 25- to 29-year-olds voted for Democrat Kay Hagan by a margin of 59 to 34—while 18- to 24-year-olds only went 47 to 44 for Hagan. In Kentucky, the split was even more stark: The younger cohort favored Republican Mitch McConnell 53 to 42, while the slightly older group went for his Democratic challenger 52 to 43.
This older group went to the polls for the first time during Obama’s rock-star “hope and change” moment in 2008. The younger group came to political consciousness when Barack Obama was already serving as president. Perhaps for the 2008 voter, in these states, and in others, those who have participated only in Obama-era elections are considerably more likely to vote Republican than their older siblings. And again, due to gridlock, or disappointment, or because the GOP is very appealing to them. It, too, is because of him.
The Democrats running for the Senate knew this. It is why they did not want him to campaign for them, and why one of them steadfastly refused even to acknowledge having voted for Obama despite the fact that she had been a delegate at the 2012 Democratic convention. Behaving in this fashion actually ran counter to the conventional wisdom about the highly polarized American electorate that followed Obama’s reelection. According to this new wisdom, campaigns should no longer be dedicated to winning undecided voters, who are supposedly very few in number, but to turning out persuadable voters.
The term persuadable describes a person who is probably generally sympathetic to a candidate but doesn’t feel any drive to go out and vote for him. Getting these “persuadables” to the polls in 2012 was the key to Obama’s reelection triumph. For the first time, pollsters report, the Obama campaign was able to drag people to the ballot box who said they basically preferred Obama but measured their own eagerness to vote at 2 or 3 on a scale of 10. (It had been an axiom for decades that no matter whom voters claimed to support, only those who scored themselves at 4 or above would actually turn out.) The key persuadable constituency in 2012 was voters between the ages of 18 and 29. So despite Obama’s low approval rating, one might have thought he would have remained valuable on the campaign trail as a lure to the persuadable voters who had pulled him across the finish line. That is clearly what he believes. But those campaigns were not run by stupid people. They were run by professionals desperate to win—professionals who probably admire Barack Obama. They kept their distance because they had to. They knew the persuadables weren’t going to be persuaded this time. He had lost them.
The Republicans running against Democratic incumbents knew it, too. Every one of them highlighted the degree to which his Democratic rival was an Obama catspaw. As the Washington Post noted after the election, “Republicans had a simple plan: Don’t make mistakes, and make it all about Obama, Obama, Obama. Every new White House crisis would bring a new Republican ad. And every Democratic incumbent would be attacked relentlessly for voting with the president 97 or 98 or 99 percent of the time.”
Making the election a national referendum on the president hadn’t worked in 2012, and many of the wisest and most intellectually serious people on the right were concerned that it wasn’t going to work this time either—that the Republican candidates needed to set a positive and coherent agenda because, without one, they would not inspire enough people. But those campaigns weren’t run by stupid people either. They saw what the Democratic campaigns saw.
So why did the anti-Obama focus fail in 2012 but win in 2014? The president wants to believe it’s because he’s being blamed for Washington’s dysfunction. But consider just a partial list of horribles the American people have had to face since 2012.
ObamaCare went live in October 2013, and the billion-dollar website that was supposed to guide people through their choices died. Americans learned that the Veteran’s Administration had been falsifying data to hide its dreadful record of failed care. Border states were flooded with tens of thousands of children who had been led to believe that they (and eventually their parents) would be legalized after their horrific journeys. The Internal Revenue Service acknowledged that it had targeted groups hostile to the president, then denied it, and then claimed the emails detailing the actual events had somehow vanished. Americans were given contradictory and confusing details about how authorities were going to prevent the spread of Ebola inside the United States. After we were told the war on jihadist terror was basically a thing of the past, there came the rise of ISIS. The president erased his own “red line” when it came to Syria’s use of chemical weapons. Vladimir Putin took a bite out of a neighboring country and is getting ready to take another. That is quite a record to take to the electorate.
No one believes that the Republican Party is popular. And yet, on Election Day, Republicans won eight new Senate seats (with a ninth on the way). The party will have its largest majority in the House of Representatives since 1946. Republicans reside in 31 of the nation’s 50 governor’s mansions, by far the highest number in modern times. In 24 states, the GOP holds the governorship and both houses of the state legislature; Democrats are in the same position in only six states. Republicans will now control 67 of the nation’s 98 state legislative chambers, up from 59. And all this despite the fact that no one believes that the Republican Party is popular.
The New York Times reported on election night that the president did not feel “repudiated.” At his press conference, Obama said the Republicans had had a “good night.” They had indeed, but only because he had been repudiated.
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5)
5)
Chicken Salad
President George W. Bush's Speech after the capture of Saddam Hussein
"The success of yesterday's mission is a tribute to our men and women now serving in Iraq. The operation was based on the superb work of intelligence analysts who found the dictator's' footprints in a vast country. The operation was carried out with skill and precision by a brave fighting force. Our servicemen and women and our coalition allies have faced many dangers in the hunt for members of the fallen regime, and in their effort to bring hope and freedom to the Iraqi people. Their work continues, and so do the risks. Today, on behalf of the nation, I thank the members of our Armed Forces and I congratulate them !"
Chicken Shit
Barrack Hussein Obama's Speech after the killing of Osama bin Laden
"And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the Director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network. Then, last August, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and I authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice. Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan."
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