.jpg)
.jpg)
===
There is no honesty because there is no integrity. Can't have one without the other. Clinton's lack either. (See 1 below.)
===
Can you explain Obama's Iran strategy and then have any faith it will be effective considering his past actions? (See 2 below.)
===
More propaganda from The Guardian. When will they stop lying about Israel?
I have been there and seen with my own eyes. (See 3 below.)
===
Will Democrats eventually pay at the polls for burning bridges?
Our son had a long private breakfast with Sen. Casey (D Pa.) and emphasized the moral importance that Casey attend and he is. Prior to that he was wavering. (See 4 below.)
===
Obama told Israel, " he has their back" and now turns his back on Israel and he says he will not hear Netanyahu's speech.
Meanwhile, Elie Wiesel is no weasel. (See 5 below.)
The Iran deal's "Sunset Clause" can be likened to a nuclear flash!
Just heard Netanyahu's address and now off to Louisville.
He laid out the case now what will the world do? Act like Chamberlain has spoken or Churchill?
===
Dick
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)
The Honesty Gap
By Thomas SowellThere may be some poetic justice in the recent revelation that Hillary Clinton, who has made big noises about a "pay gap" between women and men, paid the women on her Senate staff just 72 percent of what she paid the men. The Obama White House staff likewise has a pay gap between women and men, as of course does the economy as a whole.
Does this mean that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both discriminate against women, that they are themselves part of the nefarious "war on women" that so many on the left loudly denounce? The poetic justice in the recent "pay gap" revelations is that the fundamental fraud in the statistics that are thrown around comes back to bite those who are promoting that fraud for political purposes.
What makes such statistics fraudulent is that they are comparing apples and oranges.
Innumerable studies, going back for decades, have shown that women do not average as many hours of work per year as men, do not have as many consecutive years of full-time employment as men, do not work in the same mix of occupations as men and do not specialize in the same mix of subjects in college as men.
Back in 1996, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that young male physicians earned 41 percent higher incomes than young female physicians. But the same study showed that young male physicians worked over 500 hours a year more than young female physicians.
When the study took into account differences in hours of work, in the fields in which male and female doctors specialized and other differences in their job characteristics, "no earnings difference was evident." In other words, when you compare apples to apples, you don't get the "gender gap" in pay that you get when you compare apples to oranges.
This is not peculiar to the medical profession. Nor was this a new revelation, even back in 1996. Many studies done by many scholars over the years -- including female scholars -- show the same thing, again and again.
A breakdown of statistics in an old monograph of mine -- "Affirmative Action in Academia" -- showed the pay differential between women and men evaporating, or even reversing, as you compared individuals with truly comparable characteristics. This was back in 1975, forty years ago!
There might have been some excuse for believing that income differences between women and men were proof of discrimination back in the 1960s. But there is no excuse for continuing to use misleading statistics in the 21st century, when their flaws have been exposed repeatedly and long ago.
Many kinds of high-level and high-pressure careers require working 50 or 60 hours a week regularly, and women with children -- or expecting to have children -- seldom choose those kinds of careers.
Nor is there any reason why they should, if they don't want to. Raising a child is not an incidental activity that you can do in your spare time, like collecting stamps or bowling.
If you trace the actual history of women in high-level careers, you will find that it bears no resemblance to the radical feminist fable, in which advances began with the "women's liberation" movement in the 1960s and new anti-discrimination laws.
In reality, women were far better represented in professional occupations in the first three decades of the 20th century than in the middle of that century. Women received a larger share of the postgraduate degrees necessary for such careers in the earlier era than in the 1950s and 1960s.
The proportion of women among the high achievers listed in "Who's Who in America" in 1902 was more than double the proportion listed in 1958. The decline of women in high-level careers occurred when women's age of marriage and child-bearing declined during the mid-century "baby boom" years.
The later rise of women began when the age of marriage and child-bearing rose again. In 1972 women again received as high a proportion of doctoral degrees as they had back in 1932.
The truth is not nearly as politically useful as scare statistics. The "gender gap" is not nearly as big as the honesty gap.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In an interview with Reuters intended as a rebuttal to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress tomorrow, President Obama claims that his critics are not only wrong about his negotiating strategy with Iran, but that they lack one of their own other than to declare war. The attempt to depict his critics as warmongers is a classic Obama straw man. Opponents of his policy do have an alternative: returning to the policy of pressure and sanctions that the president discarded in 2013 which offered the only way, short of the use of force, to force Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions. But the real fallacy here is not so much the typical administration smears of critics. It is the fact that the president has an Iran strategy at all. Having made concession after concession to Iran in the last two years, there is little reason to believe that the current negotiations will stop Iran. To the contrary, the president appears set on a path that ensures that, sooner or later, Iran will get its bomb.
Let’s examine the president’s claims.
Both the president and Secretary of State John Kerry have insisted that agreeing to let Iran keep its nuclear program—something that he specifically promised he would never do in his 2012 foreign-policy debate with Mitt Romney—was unavoidable. They claim that Western pressure would never have forced Iran to surrender its nukes. More than that, they assert that their concessions have enticed Iran to agree to strictures that have halted Tehran’s progress toward a bomb.
The answer to the first claim is that we don’t know if that would have worked because Obama never tried it. By abandoning sanctions just at the moment when Iran seemed to be feeling the pressure—and prior to an oil price collapse that would have made them even less capable of resisting foreign pressure—the president ensured that the Islamist regime never had to face a worst-case scenario. Instead of waiting for them to fold, he did, and the result was a nuclear deal that undid years of diplomacy aimed at building an international consensus against Iran’s right to enrich uranium.
The president and Kerry are now boasting that their interim deal hasn’t been violated by Iran and that it has stopped their progress in its tracks. But given the poor intelligence that the U.S. has about Iran and the regime’s lack of cooperation with inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, this is purely a matter of conjecture and faith on the part of the president and his apologists. But even if we were to believe, in spite of Iran’s long record of cheating on nuclear issues, that somehow the interim deal was succeeding, even the president concedes that allowing them to keep their nuclear infrastructure means that Iran could always go back on its promises, re-activate the stockpile of nuclear fuel still in its possession, and “break out” to a bomb in short order.
The length of a “break out” is a key point in the president’s defense of his strategy. He told Reuters that as long as long as this period was at least a year, the U.S. would be able to detect it in time to re-impose sanctions or use force to stop them from obtaining a bomb. But this is another argument based more on faith than facts and which, even in the unlikely event it is vindicated, still makes Iran stronger and puts U.S. allies in the region as well as the West in peril.
The prediction of a year is an optimistic conjecture embraced by the president because it sounds better than the few months some others think is a more sensible estimate. The lack of credible inspections of Iran’s military research makes any predictions about the length of a breakout a guess, and not even an educated one. U.S. intelligence in Iran is negligible. Even the IAEA concedes that Iran may have extensive nuclear facilities that the West knows nothing about.
But let’s say it is a year. Given the poor state of U.S. intelligence on Iran, why would anyone believe Obama’s promise that he’ll know what’s going on in their secret facilities? This is the same president who assured us that his intelligence told him that ISIS was merely a “jayvee” terror team not worth worrying about. And even if a U.S. president did learn the truth about their plans, would Obama or a similarly weak-willed successor be ready and willing to believe the intelligence that showed a cherished diplomatic strategy had failed and be ready to re-impose sanctions, let alone order the use of force?
Obama’s commitment to the negotiations isn’t purely one of belief that it is the only way to stop Iran’s nuclear dreams. It’s a path to his dream of a new détente with Iran that will erase decades of enmity and create a new era of cooperation with that tyrannical, anti-Semitic, and terror-sponsoring regime. Why should we believe that he is ready to give up his hopes if he has already proven himself to be unconvinced by Iran’s past deceptions and prevarications? Why should any American president, even one more sensible about Iran than Obama, think that once sanctions are dismantled, our Western allies who are eager to do business with the regime would be willing to give up their profits to redeem a promise made by Obama?
Moreover, by reportedly agreeing to a sunset clause, the president has already legitimized Iran’s nuclear dreams and rendered it almost certain that the ten-year period now being mooted for the agreement will be shortened one way or the other.
The president’s critics can’t be sure that their strategy of a return to sanctions and tough pressure on Iran aimed at bringing the regime to its knees will succeed. But, despite the president’s claims, he never tried it before he prematurely abandoned pressure for appeasement. But we can be almost certain that a strategy that aims at entente with Iran is guaranteed to fail miserably. Indeed, it is not so much a recipe for failure as it is one for a completely different approach to Iran that is ready to acquiesce to their demands.
That is a position that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu does well to protest tomorrow in his speech to Congress. So should Democrats and Republicans who take their pledges to stop Iran more seriously than the president.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)
The Guardian Electrifies Israeli Security Barrier
By SimonPlosker
It appears that Israel isn’t the only state preventing terror through the construction of a physical barrier. The Guardian reports that Kenya is to build a wall on the Somali border to keep out al-Shabaab terrorists.
The report also makes comparisons with Israel’s security barrier:
Kenya is going to build a wall. Not just any wall, but a “separation barrier”, to employ the euphemism coined by Israel to describe the towering, snaking structure that now separates it from Palestine’s West Bank.
Not a huge surprise that The Guardian has unilaterally given a non-existent Palestinian state ownership over the West Bank. However, the report also contains a glaring factual error:
Most famous, however, is Israel’s separation barrier – nearly 500 miles long, it alternates between rows of barbed wire and electrified fencing and eight-metre high concrete walls.
“Electrified fencing” implies that anyone who touches the structure will be electrocuted, perhaps even fatally. The reality, however, is that the barrier is electronic, meaning that anyone who touches or interferes with it will trigger an alert to a central monitor that can send IDF forces to investigate.
Israel’s security barrier is a non-lethal means of preventing terrorism.
A request for a correction has been sent to The Guardian, which has so far failed to respond.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4)Fattah will not attend Netanyahu speech
ByJonathanTamari
WASHINGTON –Rep. Chaka Fattah will not attend Tuesday’s speech from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Congress, the Philadelphia Democrat said Monday.
“I would never participate in any activity to disparage the President of the United States, therefore I will not be present tomorrow,” Fattah said in a statement. “I will be in Israel a week from tomorrow, to continue my leadership in strengthening the United States and Israel’s cooperation and partnership in science and technology.”
Fattah is the only official from the Philadelphia region to so far say he will not attend the speech, which has turned divisive. More than two dozen Democrats have said they will not attend, according to the New York Times.
Many Democrats see the event as a political jab at President Obama, since Netanyahu is coming at the behest of House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio), without a clearance from the White House – a breach of longstanding protocol when it comes to foreign leaders.
To these Democrats, the circumstances of the speech have forced them to decide between backing their president and backing Israel – which usually enjoys overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress.
"I am deeply troubled by the politicization of America's vital relationship with Israel, and the disregard for longstanding diplomatic protocol displayed by House Republican leadership. This is an affront to our president, to members of Congress, and a betrayal of the long-held American principle that when it comes to national security, politics ends at the water's edge,” Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.) said in a statement.
But he will still attend.
“When America's and Israel's security is on the line, and we're dealing with a situation as dire and complex as Iranian nuclear negotiations, I will listen to all sides, and will not miss an opportunity to hear from the prime minister of one of America's closest and most important allies,” Booker said.
The speech comes as the United States and several international partners negotiate with Iran over a deal aimed at preventing Tehran from building a nuclear weapon. Netanyahu fears that the negotiations will fail to stop a nuclear Iran.
In a speech Monday to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Netanyahu said his address to Congress “is not intended to show any disrespect to President Obama or the esteemed office that he holds. I have great respect for both.” But he argues that he has to speak out because a deal could "threaten the survival of Israel."
Other Democrats have made less of the concerns over protocol.
Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.) said in a release that “the bond between our two countries has been and always will be unbreakable. Israel’s security and that of the United States are inextricably linked.” He said he will attend.
Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.), the top Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, will attend the speech. He is scheduled to speak to AIPAC's conference Monday night.
Rep. Brendan Boyle (D., Pa.) and Ryan Costello (R., Pa.), both freshmen new to foreign affairs questions, wrote a joint op-ed set to run in the Inquirer Tuesday that explains their reasons for attending the speech.
“Shortly after today, the media firestorm over the speech will fade,” the two wrote. “But the consequences of what we do about a nuclear Iran will last far longer.”
Republicans have cheered Netanyahu’s visit and speech to Congress.
“Israel is one of America’s greatest allies in the world, and it is on the front lines of the battle against terrorism and radical Islam,” Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) said in a news release. “I eagerly look forward to hearing Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech before Congress tomorrow. We should pay close attention to the perspective of the only true democracy in the Middle East.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5)Wiesel on Iran: ‘When Evil Begins Its Work Don’t Give It Another Chance’
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel will be in the House chamber to hear Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday.
But first, Wiesel stopped Monday at the Dirksen Senate office building — accompanied by his wife, coming straight from the airport — for a heart-to-heart with Israel supporters and a bank of TV cameras to remind America that “silence is not an option.”
Code Pink interrupted the meeting in the Senate hearing room, brandishing signs criticizing AIPAC and one that read “parking for Palestinians only.” Many of those who showed up to hear Wiesel bore lanyards from the AIPAC megaconference at D.C.’s convention center.
The crowd chanted “get out” at Code Pink, and organizer Rabbi Shmuley Boteach lectured the protesters after they grabbed hold of a mic. They were led out by Capitol Police before 86-year-old Wiesel arrived.
Boteach called Wiesel “the living face of the six million murdered in the Holocaust.”
“The privilege of hearing Elie Wiesel on any occasion is historic,” the rabbi explained, but Wiesel coming to Washington to support the Jewish state on the eve of Netanyahu’s address made it an especially “historic discussion.”
“I learned to rely not on the promises of our friends but the threats of our enemies,” Wiesel said. “When our enemies make threats, take them seriously.”
“…If they say so and they repeatedly say so we should take them seriously.”
Wiesel implored members of Congress in a February ad to attend Netanyahu’s address.
“It is important for him to speak, it’s important for the American people to listen to him,” he told Monday’s audience. “When the prime minister of Israel speaks it’s not a political event; it must be viewed in historic terms.”
Wiesel said that to feel OK about a deal with Iran, “I need proof that whatever I read about Iran is not so.”
“When evil begins its work don’t give it another chance,” he said.
Boteach noted that the professor would have the chance to assess a grade to Netanyahu’s speech. “I’m giving him an ‘A,’” Wiesel preemptively replied.
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) was supposed to be at the event, but withdrew after Boteach ran a New York Times ad this past weekend calling out National Security Advisor Susan Rice’s “blind spot” on genocide, from Rwanda to the current administration negotiations with Iran.
“Since 1998, I have taken advantage of every opportunity to urge the toughest sanctions on Iran, including nearly twenty presentations at AIPAC policy conferences,” Sherman said in a statement. “I cannot appear at a forum which was advertised using an unwarranted incendiary personal attack. I will be working with Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, and others, to create appropriate forums to focus on the danger posed by Iran.”
At the event, Boteach said if the ad was “construed as a personal attack that was not our intent.”
“I personally want to offer an apology to anyone who was offended, including Ms. Rice herself,” he said.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was there, telling Wiesel “you are truly an American hero, a Jewish hero and a hero of the world.”
The senator met with Netanyahu earlier in the day and described the Israeli leader as “Churchillian.”
“This is not about powering the lights,” he said, referring to Iran’s claim that it wants nuclear power for peaceful energy purposes
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment