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When I ask my liberal friends to explain the recent elections they respond that no one voted, the election reflected typical second term results and it was not a vote against Obama.
Obviously they either are too embarrassed to tell the truth or remain on another planet.
Democrats used to claim they were for the common man but Obama is against energy jobs, has no agenda to get workers re-employed considering his contempt for Capitalists and his policies continue raising costs and reducing productivity and competitiveness.
Yes, employment is up but when you look behind the statistics you find more people are working but not a full forty hours and they are not earning what they previously earned because they are engaged in more service than manufacturing and production jobs.
Figures do not lie but Obama does!
To paraphrase Obama - Republicans WON!
Consequently Democrats have lost a large number of seats not only in Congress but in states.
Now it is up to Republicans to rectify matters and, to do that, they need to get some opposition support and that means they should not go extreme. (See 1 below.)
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My friend Jonathan Schanzer tells it like it is. (See 2 below.)
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I was recently asked by a liberal friend what I thought about Netanyahu wanting to declare Israel a Jewish nation and I told him probably not a good idea because nothing Israel does will gain world acceptance but in a practical sense what's new. Well today the WSJ published a few LTE's that pretty much express my sentiments.
Furtermore, The Vatican is a Catholic state and that seems to be an accepted fact.(See 3 below.)
The same friend then stated he was warming to the idea of a single state solution and asked my thoughts.
Once again I reminded him a single state solution simply meant the West would be validating its lack of morality because it connoted the fact that terrorism paid. Furthermore,he was buying into the fact that suggests when the West becomes tired of watching Palestinians attack Israel, claiming they are being subjected to apartheid acts, it would be giving up and disregards history, renounces a U.N. resolution which was defied by the Arab/Muslim world and was willing to accept distorted facts and propaganda.
Nothing new about that. Chamberlain did and signaled to Hitler the West had lost its will and would look the other way, which it did and thus WW 2 and over 100 million were erased from the living!!
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Another liberal friend of mine too me to task for not reporting the recently released 'bi-partisan' report on Benghazi, since I had been willing to post so many items about the Benghazi episode.
I told him, when I returned from Baltimore, I would do so but my own view is that the report was more an act of frustration and desperation and signified a desire to sweep it under the rug rather than enlighten.
Senate Intelligence Committee report on Benghazi attack
This bipartisan report lays out more than a dozen findings regarding the Sept. 11, 2012, assault on the diplomatic compound in the Libyan city of Benghazi. Read more about the report
If there ever was a political weasel Schumer fills the bill. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1) Democrats Suffer Most Midterm Losses Ever Under Obama
By Greg Richter
The record previously was held by Harry Truman.
Truman's Democratic Party lost 74 seats in 1946 and 1950, while under Obama the Democrats have lost a total of 75 seats in 2010 and 2014. He could lose one more if Republican Martha McSally beats Democratic Rep. Ron Barber in Arizona in an election recount, Breitbart News reports. McSally is currently ahead by only 200 votes.
Most presidents have one bad midterm and one that isn't as bad, writes Roll Call's Stu Rothenberg.
George W. Bush actually gained seats in his first midterm, when the country was still reeling from the 9/11 attacks. And Bill Clinton gained seats in his second midterm after losing the House to Republicans four years earlier. But each suffered big losses in the other midterm during their presidencies.
Rothenberg said the partisanship of elections are partly to blame for Democratic losses, but so is Obama's failed leadership. Many in his base are believed to have stayed home because they didn't see Obama acting on things they care about, such as immigration reform.
Obama held off until after the elections to enact an executive order granting legal status to millions of illegal immigrants. And many, such as Landrieu, are believed to have gone down in defeat for having supported Obama's signature healthcare legislation, which has been losing popularity ever since its passage in 2010.
Breitbart notes that the GOP may face an uphill battle during the 2016 presidential election year. Republicans hold a 9-seat majority in the Senate, but 25 of their members face re-election in 2016.
Only 10 Democrats are up for re-election, and they are all from solidly blue states with strong fundraising ability.
Breitbart notes that the GOP may face an uphill battle during the 2016 presidential election year. Republicans hold a 9-seat majority in the Senate, but 25 of their members face re-election in 2016.
Only 10 Democrats are up for re-election, and they are all from solidly blue states with strong fundraising ability.
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Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, is vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He is on Twitter.
Israel’s most significant challenges will not go away, regardless of who holds office in Jerusalem. And elections are unlikely to change Israel’s security policies.
The top priority is — and will be for the foreseeable future — preventing Iran from becoming a threshold nuclear weapons power. To achieve this, Israel will also need to continue to sound the alarm about the potential for an ill-advised deal between Iran and the so-called P5-plus-1 countries (Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — plus Germany). This has been a source of tension between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama.
It will remain an issue of contention for the next two years no matter who is prime minister. Indeed, Obama appears committed to a deal, while the Israelis have voiced repeated concerns about a deal that doesn't dismantle Iran's nuclear program, and a wide range of other Iranian activities that will not be addressed in any nuclear deal, such as its ballistic missile program and support for the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah.
Nor is it likely that the elections will change the prospects for Palestinian-Israeli peace. The Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas appears to have decided to pursue the case for Palestinian statehood in international forums rather than through negotiations with Israel. Abbas’ support for the recent outbreak of violence in Jerusalem has also prompted much of the Israeli political spectrum to sour on further talks with him.
Finally, changes in the internal Israeli political dynamic will do nothing to change the other regional challenges that Israel faces. Neither a new prime minister nor the return of Netanyahu will stop the Turkish government from providing safe haven to terrorist groups like Hamas and the Islamic State. Nor would either outcome change the course of the civil war in Syria, which has spawned a spate of new jihadist groups.
Some might argue that a more moderate prime minister might help reset relations with Israel’s allies. These are the same people who argue that Netanyahu’s right-wing policies have been a contributing factor to Israel’s security challenges. But even if Netanyahu is unseated (which is extremely unlikely) it will soon become clear that Israel’s fight for survival looks roughly the same under any leadership. It’s a tough neighborhood.
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3) It Can’t Be a Big Surprise That Israel Is a Jewish State
The non-Jews who live and vote and serve in the armed forces in Israel right now don’t know they live in a Jewish state?
The juxtaposition of David Ellenson and Deborah Lipstadt’s “You Need a Law to Affirm Israel’s Jewish Identity?” (op-ed, Dec. 2) and the “Notable and Quotable” excerpts of Israeli U.N. Ambassador Ron Prosor ’s speech is revealing. While Mr. Ellenson and Ms. Lipstadt are worried that Israel’s proposed bill would “provide fodder for Israel’s critics,” Mr. Prosor reminds us of a lesson we apparently refuse to learn: that Israel’s actions, however laudable or conciliatory, never soften the criticism from its European friends or mitigate the hostility from its Muslim enemies. Anti-Semitism will not be appeased.
Furthermore, a declared state religion need not impede “complete equality of social and political rights [for] all its inhabitants.” In the U.K., for example, where the official state religion is the Church of England, there is no dilution of democracy, and all citizens enjoy “freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, [and] culture.”
Stanley Spatz
Hollywood, Fla.
It is the custom of Israel’s neighboring states to bare their own ethnic designations. Note the “Arab Republic of Egypt,” the “Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan” and the “Syrian Arab Republic.”
Michael P. Graff
New York
Has it occurred to those esteemed interlocutors that it might be just a bit more difficult to induce the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state—supposedly an absolute Israeli condition to a negotiated two-state solution—if Israel won’t recognize itself as a Jewish state?
Harvey E. Bines
Boston
David Ellenson and Deborah Lipstadt surely know what would become of a “binational” Israel. It would quickly be transformed into a Muslim state with Jews reduced to dhimmi status, or worse, in their own ancestral homeland. The Muslims have long denied the historicity of Jewish claims to the land. Negotiations have been fruitless because only Israel’s ceasing to exist will satisfy the Palestinians.
The Nation-State bill is an “in your face” response, assuring the Muslim world that Israel won’t commit suicide. True peace can come only when the Palestinians are willing to live beside the nation-state of the Jews.
Toby F. Block
Atlanta
The negative consequences Mr. Ellenson and Ms. Lipstadt write about are illusory, since the various proposals would have no real effect on anyone or anything. I oppose the proposals because they’re pointless, and Israel’s basic law should not be inflated with meaningless legislation.
Alan Stein
Natick, Mass.
I am utterly baffled. The non-Jews who live and vote and serve in the armed forces in Israel right now don’t know they live in a Jewish state? Like it’s some kind of secret one doesn’t discuss at parties? And the anti-Zionists, who charge Israel with genocide and harvesting organs from dead Palestinians during the recent Gaza conflict, need more fodder to promote their hatred of Israel?
Ari Weitzner
New York
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4)The Benghazi Report – An ongoing intelligence failure
BY STEPHEN F. HAYES AND THOMAS JOSCELYN:
After a long day on November 13, 2013, Speaker of the House John Boehner walked down the marble hallways of the Longworth House Office Building to the personal office of Representative Devin Nunes for a drink, a cigarette, and maybe a brief reprieve.
But Boehner’s visit was not a social call. He was there to see three CIA officers who had fought in Benghazi, Libya. Their identities were unknown to all but a small group of U.S. government officials with high-level security clearances, and the details of their harrowing stories were unknown to virtually everyone who was not a colleague or relative.
And the fact that the meeting was taking place at all was unknown to the man who, under different circumstances, might have been expected to host it. Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was not invited.
Rogers was sick of Benghazi. Some of his Republican colleagues had spun themselves into a frenzy of conspiracy theorizing, publicly making wild claims that had no basis in fact or hinting at dark conspiracies that had the president of the United States willfully and eagerly arming its enemies. Representative Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, long the Republican face of Benghazi investigations, accused Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of giving a “stand-down” order to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Representative Louie Gohmert claimed that Senator John McCain deserved some of the blame for Benghazi because McCain, like Barack Obama, had supported opposition forces in Libya. Normally responsible Republicans pretended that Hillary Clinton’s famous “what difference at this point does it make” line was not so much a tone-deaf question about how the attacks happened, which deserved the criticism it earned, but a declaration of indifference that the attacks happened, which was absurd. Rogers complained about these excesses regularly to his staff and colleagues.
This frustration, however, wasn’t the reason Boehner and Nunes cut him out of the meeting with CIA officers. They shared his frustration, as it happened.
Their concern was deeper. Rogers had long been reluctant to commit more time and resources to investigating Benghazi. At a meeting of intelligence committee Republicans in early 2013, just four months after the attacks, Rogers laid out his priorities for the new Congress. Not only was Benghazi not on that list, according to three sources in the meeting, he declared to the members that the issue was in the past and that they wouldn’t be devoting significant time and resources to investigating it. Whatever failures there had been in Benghazi, he explained, they had little to do with the intelligence community, and his intelligence committee would therefore have little to do with investigating them.
In the months that followed, more troubling details about the Benghazi story emerged in the media. Among the most damaging: Internal emails made clear that top Obama administration officials had misled the country about the administration’s role in the flawed “Benghazi talking points” that Susan Rice had used in her Sunday television appearances following the attacks, and that former acting CIA director Michael Morell had misled Congress about the same. Other reports made clear that intelligence officials on the ground in Benghazi had reported almost immediately that the assault was a terrorist attack involving jihadists with links to al Qaeda—information that was removed from the materials used to prepare administration officials for their public discussion of the attacks. A top White House adviser wrote an email suggesting that the administration affix blame for the attacks on a YouTube video.
The revelations even roused the establishment media from their Benghazi torpor and generated extraordinarily hostile questioning of White House press secretary Jay Carney by reporters who had trusted his claims of administration noninvolvement.
None of this convinced Rogers to make Benghazi a priority—a fact that frustrated many of the committee’s members. Boehner received a steady stream of visits and phone calls from House members who complained that Rogers wasn’t doing his job. In all, seven members of the intelligence committee took their concerns directly to the speaker or his top aides. Boehner’s presence at the secret meeting in Nunes’s office demonstrated that he shared those concerns long before he decided to impanel a select committee to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the Benghazi attacks. And what happened to the CIA officers as they attempted to share their story with congressional oversight committees suggests that those concerns were well founded.
As lawmakers headed home for Thanksgiving two weeks ago, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a report concluding that there were no intelligence failures related to the September 11, 2012, attacks in Benghazi and otherwise bolstering claims by the administration and its defenders that the controversy surrounding the attacks and their aftermath was rooted more in the imaginations of critics than in reality.
For many of those who had been following the story closely, the report was bizarre and troubling. Key events were left out. Important figures were never mentioned. Well-known controversies were elided. Congressional testimony on controversial issues was mischaracterized. The authoritative tone of the conclusions was undermined by the notable gaps in evidence presented to support them.
“If this was a high school paper, I would give it an F,” says John Tiegen, a former CIA officer who fought on the ground that night in Benghazi and lived through many of the events the report purports to describe. “There are so many mistakes it’s hard to know where to begin. How can an official government report get so many things wrong?”
4a) Sen. Graham: Benghazi Report ‘Full of Crap’
5)
The Two Faces of Chuck Schumer
Schumer’s message to the Democratic Left: I’m with you, until you start losing.
Let us count the times Sen. Chuck Schumer has blown himself up politically.
That was a short count, wasn’t it?
Whatever else might be said of him, Chuck Schumer is not in the habit of self-immolation. But progressives have been lining up to vilify New York’s senior senator as the Democratic Party’s village idiot for saying before Thanksgiving that ObamaCare was a political mistake. He even said that focusing on health care, the party’s magic mountain, was “the wrong problem.”
David Axelrod accused Sen. Schumer of being, ugh, a professional politician, whose “abiding principle” is how to win elections. That’s an understatement.
In 1974, Chuck Schumer stepped out of Harvard Law School and into the New York state legislature, never practicing a day of law. In 1998, the 24th year of his chosen career, Mr. Schumer entered the U.S. Senate.
Sen. Schumer’s chosen career is the bloodless business of political protection. In order, that includes a) him, b) his base of power and c) his party. Common to all three is winning, not losing, elections.
Does anyone seriously believe that before he gave that ObamaCare speech, Chuck Schumer had not already talked about the election with a lot of Democrats in the Senate and around the country?
And what does one imagine these professional Democrats were telling each other? Here’s a guess: They now realize that Barack Obama and the politics he represents—the politics of the progressive left—is undermining their party’s electoral future at every level of government.
Because Sen. Schumer supported ObamaCare and defended other Obama policies, his critics say he’s a hypocrite. Oh my. Maybe these people didn’t understand the terms of the prenuptial agreement at this level of politics: Chuck Schumer was on board for whatever ride, program or gimmick the Democratic left wanted, so long as members of the party family kept winning re-election. Now they are not.
What Chuck Schumer said is probably less than half of what was on his mind. How about “climate change?” Not the great and honorable cause called climate change but the political strategy for gaining power.
Had Barack Obama found some pretext to approve the Keystone XL pipeline before the election, Democratic candidates would have had a case to make to the blue-collar voters who have just deserted the party.
Instead, climate change just got Louisiana’s Sen. Mary Landrieu thrown under the bus by the White House. Instead, as Mr. Schumer surely noticed, Terry O’Sullivan, president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, has denounced the party. The union has 500,000 members.
Sen. Schumer knows exactly when the Democratic Party shifted from an organization able to cover many political bases to one willing to protect just its progressive base. It was 2006, when the left drove Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut out of the party with a primary defeat (he won anyway as an independent). Remember the giddy progressive dance after they engineered Sen. Lieberman’s primary defeat?
Chuck Schumer, who was running the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee then, might have accepted this as the cost of doing business with the party’s ascendant progressive coalition. It’s harder to accept when they start looking like losers.
With that speech, Chuck Schumer was sending an audible signal to state and local party bosses around the country and to peeved donors—aghast at the midterm results—that not everyone in Washington has lost his mind to the party’s Occupy-and-windmill wing.
Some think the senator’s pitch for a “middle-class” agenda was a stalking horse forHillary Clinton ’s campaign. You know, the famous Hillary shot-and-a-beer in an Indiana bar in 2008.
Maybe what the middle class wants is more than a drinking buddy.
Republican Larry Hogan just became Maryland’s governor after overcoming a 15-point deficit with an antitax campaign. The Baltimore Sun recently cataloged state Democrats adjusting to what we might call the Hogan Effect.
Baltimore’s Democratic mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, in her first term enacted a bottle tax, a taxi tax and a billboard tax. After the November election, she appointed a task force to find cuts in taxes and fees. She says she will veto a proposed tax on plastic bags, calling it a “backhanded tax” that’s unfair to businesses. As to the election results, she says, “I listened.”
Democratic state senator James Brochin : “I have consistently given the message in meetings that there is no reason why we need to be the party that raises taxes. I’m hoping they get it now.”
Maryland’s infamous fees on “polluted” rainwater runoff look to be a goner.
What are the odds that any Democrat of national prominence, including Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, would now adopt lower taxes as party policy? It’s less than zero, so long as the left’s grip on party policy holds. Call that the Elizabeth Warren Effect.
By default, the Republicans own what looks like one of the most populist, middle-class issues out there—get the government’s hands out of my family’s pockets.
