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Bibi returns the favor! At Least He Can Read!
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My cousin, who lives in Israel, is head of the American Jewish Committee in Israel, which had a lot to do with the making of this documentary.
Spielberg and Streep on Auschwitz
From Jim Pion
This film is for our children, grandchildren and future generations never to forget. May no one ever say it never happened or existed .
Auschwitz, a brand new 15-minute documentary on the history of the Nazi death camp, produced by Steven Spielberg and narrated by Meryl Streep,will be permanently installed at the Auschwitz Memorial. The documentary had its premiere yesterday, in the presence of 300 Holocaust survivors. #PastIsPresent #Auschwitz70 - with USC Shoah Foundation
https://www.facebook.com/
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Ed Klein reveals Obama warned and knew of Hillary's use of private e mails.
He also has written about the bad blood between the two and how Obama and his radical crowd. who have taken over the Democrat Party. fear a Hillary presidency that will undo Obama's legacy.
The long knives are out! (See 1 below.)
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Liberals listen up - The desire to feel good and be self-congratulatory can be destructive as well! (See 2 below.)
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Explaining Bibi's victory! (See 3 and 3a below.)
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I know Tom Price. Good man and good doctor.
That said , Republicans need to come together and stick it to Obama regarding future spending and programs etc. (See 4 below.)
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I know Tom Price. Good man and good doctor.
That said , Republicans need to come together and stick it to Obama regarding future spending and programs etc. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)
Edward Klein: Obama Knew, Cautioned Hillary About Private Email Use
President Barack Obama definitely knew that Hillary Clinton was using a private email account as secretary of state — and he cautioned her not to, veteran political journalist Edward Klein told Newsmax TV.
"According to State Department, White House, and Clinton sources — three separate sources — the president of the United States was … aware she was using a private server, a private email," Klein said Tuesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show."
"And either he or his people told her and warned her not to."
"According to State Department, White House, and Clinton sources — three separate sources — the president of the United States was … aware she was using a private server, a private email," Klein said Tuesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show."
"And either he or his people told her and warned her not to."
The White House has said Obama emailed Clinton during her time in the State Department, but was unaware she used the personal account exclusively as well as a private server. Klein disagrees.
"That is a lie. This is not true that he was kind of vaguely aware," Klein said. "They said you've got to be using the government server and she didn't."
Klein called Clinton's apparent skipping of a separation agreement, requiring her to return all government documents when she left the State Department, a "classic Clinton avoidance.""She knew what she was doing when she used the server to begin with, which meant that nobody could get it," he said.
"And … when she was asked or knew she was supposed to sign a separation agreement, she didn't because that separation agreement requires you to then turn over all your emails to the State Department."
Last week, Klein said the Obama administration "is up to its eyebrows in efforts to stop" Clinton from running for the White House — including six investigations launched by longtime presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett involving Clinton's years as Secretary of State.
"This administration, the Obama administration, will do virtually anything to prevent Hillary from becoming president," Klein told economist and Newsmax columnist Larry Kudlow on his WABC radio show.
"It's their view that if she does become president — like her husband, Bill — she will govern from the left of center and not be a true liberal," Klein said, "and will, therefore, compromise with Republicans like Bill did when he was in office, and will undo a lot of the Obama legacy.
"They are determined to stop her — and of course, it's not going to be easy," he said.
Klein, editor of The New York Times Magazine from 1977 to 1987, has written several books critical of Bill and Hillary Clinton and President Obama. His latest is "Blood Feud: The Obamas vs. The Clintons," published by Regnery.
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2)Ruinous 'Compassion'
By Thomas Sowell
It is fascinating to see brilliant people belatedly discover the obvious -- and to see an even larger number of brilliant people never discover the obvious.
A recent story in a San Francisco newspaper says that some restaurants and grocery stores in Oakland's Chinatown have closed after the city's minimum wage was raised. Other small businesses there are not sure they are going to survive, since many depend on a thin profit margin and a high volume of sales.
At an angry meeting between local small business owners and city officials, the local organization that had campaigned for the higher minimum wage was absent. They were probably some place congratulating themselves on having passed a humane "living wage" law. The group most affected was also absent -- inexperienced and unskilled young people, who need a job to get some experience, even more than they need the money.
It is not a breakthrough on the frontiers of knowledge that minimum wage laws reduce employment opportunities for the young and the unskilled of any age. It has been happening around the world, for generation after generation, and in the most diverse countries.
It is not just the young who are affected when minimum wage rates are set according to the fashionable notions of third parties, with little or no regard for whether everyone is productive enough to be worth paying the minimum wage they set.
You can check this out for yourself. Go to your local public library and pick up a copy of the distinguished British magazine "The Economist."
Whether it is the current issue or a back issue doesn't matter. Spain, Greece and South Africa will be easy to locate in the table near the back, which lists data for various countries. Just look down the unemployment column for countries with unemployment rates around 25 percent. Spain, Greece and South Africa are always there, whether or not there is a recession. Why? Because they have very generous minimum wage laws.
While you are there, you can look up the unemployment rate for Switzerland, which has no minimum wage law at all. Over the years, I have never seen the unemployment rate in Switzerland reach as high as 4 percent. Back in 2003, "The Economist" magazine reported: "Switzerland's unemployment neared a five-year high of 3.9% in February."
In the United States, back in what liberals think of as the bad old days before there was a federal minimum wage law, the annual unemployment rate during Calvin Coolidge's last four years as president ranged from a high of 4.2 percent to a low of 1.8 percent.
Low-income minorities are often hardest hit by the unemployment that follows in the wake of minimum wage laws. The last year when the black unemployment rate was lower than the white unemployment rate was 1930, the last year before there was a federal minimum wage law.
The following year, the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 was passed, requiring minimum wages in the construction industry. This was in response to complaints that construction companies with non-union black construction workers were able to underbid construction companies with unionized white workers (whose unions would not admit blacks).
Looking back over my own life, I realize now how lucky I was when I left home in 1948, at the age of 17, to become self-supporting. The unemployment rate for 16- and 17-year-old blacks at that time was under 10 percent. Inflation had made the minimum wage law, passed ten years earlier, irrelevant.
But it was only a matter of time before liberal compassion led to repeated increases in the minimum wage, to keep up with inflation. The annual unemployment rate for black teenagers has never been less than 20 percent in the past 50 years, and has ranged as high as over 50 percent.
You can check these numbers in a table of official government statistics on page 42 of Professor Walter Williams' book "Race and Economics."
Incidentally, the black-white gap in unemployment rates for 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds was virtually non-existent back in 1948. But the black teenage unemployment rate has been more than double that for white teenagers for every year since 1971.
This is just one of many policies that allow liberals to go around feeling good about themselves, while leaving havoc in their wake.
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COMMENTARY
Why Did Bibi Win? Realism, Not Racism.
Why Did Bibi Win? Realism, Not Racism.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
Within moments of the announcement of the exit polls, some of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s critics were claiming his likely win in today’s Knesset election was the result of a crude, racist appeal to voters. The justification for this charge was a speech made by Netanyahu and released only on social media because of restrictions on campaign appeals in the media, telling the country that left-wing groups funded by foreign money were busing Arab voters to the polls in order to elect a left-wing government led by his Zionist Union rival Isaac Herzog. Netanyahu’s opponents interpreted this as an appeal to racism. The statement was unfortunate because it made it seem as if the prime minister viewed Arab voters as somehow illegitimate. But the voters likely saw it in a different light. The prospect of a left-wing government that depended on the Joint Arab List was always unlikely. But a critical mass of voters viewed the prospect with alarm not because they’re racists but because a government that relied on the votes of anti-Zionists that favor Israel’s dissolution was something they considered a danger to the future of their country.
Despite the expectation that dissatisfaction Netanyahu would lead to the end of his career, Netanyahu appears to have survived and will likely surpass David Ben Gurion as the country’s longest serving prime minister. Only a few days ago this was considered unlikely because the polls showed Herzog’s Labor-led party with a solid four-seat lead. But just as Netanyahu’s numbers were depressed in 2009 and 2013 because of the widespread belief that he couldn’t lose, the belief that he was finished had the opposite effect. A significant number of voters who might have gone for other right-wing parties such as Naphtali Bennet’s Jewish Home, went back to Likud in the final days in order to prevent a victory for the left.
But what those venturing opinions about the election must understand is that despite the hopes of the Israeli left and its foreign supporters (including one particular fan in the White House), the basic political alignment of the country remained unchanged. The center-right and religious parties retained a clear majority over the parties of the left. Likud’s natural allies outnumber those of the left. The only way for Herzog to become prime minister was to assemble an unlikely coalition of the left, secular and ultra-Orthodox parties. Even then, he might still need the support from the anti-Zionist Arab list composed of Communists, Islamists and radical Arab nationalists.
Contrary to the implications of Netanyahu’s statement, the increased turnout of Arab voters is a good thing for the country. Israeli Arabs should be invested in their country and take advantage of its democratic system. But the small gains by the Joint Arab List — which seems to have won 13 seats over the 11 won by the elements of its coalition, previously — won’t make much of a difference because the new Knesset members will remain in the minority. It is also a near certainty that the three factions will split once the dust settles from the election.
Even some of Israel’s friends in the United States may be asking themselves how is it possible for the Jewish state’s voters to give a majority to parties that are unlikely to agree to a two-state solution with the Palestinians. The answer is that unlike most Americans, Israel’s voters have been paying attention to the history of the conflict over the past 20 years and know that Herzog was no more likely to create a Palestinian state than Netanyahu. Nor is it fair to brand Netanyahu, who did not denigrate the right of Arabs to vote, a racist. There is no comparison between the efforts of minorities to vote in Western democracies or the United States and the desire of the Arab parties to destroy Israel. That’s because the Palestinian leadership, split between Hamas and Fatah, has consistently refused peace offers that would have given them independence. Most Israelis would like a two-state solution to happen but they know that under the current circumstances any withdrawal from the West Bank might duplicate the disastrous retreat from Gaza in 2005. Though Western journalists mocked Netanyahu’s comments about wanting to prevent a “Hamasistan” in the West Bank, the voters in Israel largely agreed.
That doesn’t make them racist or extreme. It means they are, like most Americans, realists. They may not like Netanyahu but today’s results demonstrates that there is little support for a government that would make the sort of concessions to the Palestinians that President Obama would like. They rightly believe that even if Israel did make more concessions it would only lead to more violence, not peace. Israel’s foreign critics and friends need to understand that in the end, it was those convictions have, for all intents and purposes, re-elected Netanyahu.
3a)
Netanyahu gambles his career and scores breathtaking victory
When it comes to elections, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu is the political equivalent of a scrambling quarterback. During the three-month election campaign that ended Tuesday night, the prime minister fell 20 yards behind the line of scrimmage before evading a savage blitz, escaped a catastrophic sack, then, at the last moment, turned upfield, crossed the line of scrimmage and galloped ahead for a huge gain.
Although Netanyahu’s Likud Party only won about half the number of seats needed to secure a majority in Israel’s parliament, it did so much better than anyone (including Bibi) expected that he seems to have triumphed in the goal he had set for himself last December when he broke up the government he had formed in 2013 and called new elections.
He did that because he wanted to strengthen his own hand and rid himself of two hostile coalition partners at the same time. This was a risky strategy, and it looked for quite a while like a disastrous one.
Throughout the final weeks, polling suggested Likud had fallen behind the center-left opposition, the Zionist Union.
If Likud had come in second Tuesday night, the ZU might have been given the first crack at forming a new government — and though it would have had profound difficulties assembling that new government, it’s possible the ZU might have succeeded.
But had it failed, Bibi would then have been left with the horrid task of slapping together some kind of nightmarish contraption coalition to secure the 61 seats necessary for a majority. He would have been weak and his government would have been on the verge of collapse from the moment it was assembled.
Something else — something entirely unexpected — happened. Bibi’s Likud was expected to secure 20 to 22 seats in the Knesset on Tuesday night. That’s what all the polls showed. Instead, it appears Likud won 29, maybe 30 seats.
Not only was that shockingly good for Likud, it was a far stronger showing than in the last election, because in 2013, the party had merged with another called Yisrael Beytenu.
In 2013, Likud and Yisrael Beytenu together won about 23 percent of the vote. Tuesday night, Likud alone won 24 percent (or so the results seemed to suggest at press time).
Take it still further: Yisrael Beytenu evidently won six seats last night. So, if you unofficially reassemble the 2013 merger and unite its total with Likud’s, their overall number is 36 to 37 seats — a nearly 15 percent gain in two years.
Bibi’s path to forming a new government is clear and should be relatively easy, especially compared to last time.
He gambled his entire career and he won, just as he did with the speech in front of Congress earlier this month.
The three-month election process was heart-stopping and melodramatic, like an old “Batman” episode from the 1960s without the camp — including the startling role played by Special Guest Villain Barack Obama doing everything in his power to take down the man he seems to have chosen as his Enemy No. 1.
The president (or his team) shipped close campaign aides to Israel to help Bibi’s opponents, and one State Department-funded group helped coordinate the line of attack.
The strategists going after him figured out that the key to the election was to stimulate what might be called “Bibi exhaustion” in the electorate. Their approach was to remind centrist voters of Bibi’s failure to do anything about the nation’s spiraling cost-of-living crisis, which had helped bring hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets in mass protests in 2011.
It worked. A bit. The Zionist Union won something like 24 seats, an improvement for its core Labor Party from 15 seats just two years ago. But the thing is, Israel’s left doesn’t have any answers to the nation’s pressing problems either — and is seen as too ready to capitulate on hard-core defense and security issues.
So, in the final days of the election, trapped in his own backfield, the Zionist Union coming hard upon him as Obama and his minions cheered from the skyboxes, Bibi eluded its grasp and made his move. Love him or hate him, you have to admit that Bibi pulled off a pretty spectacular piece of footwork in the most exciting election finish I can remember.
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4)- The GOP’s Budget Test
The Republican Congress is starting to debate its budget outline for fiscal 2016, and it’s not too soon to call it a test of whether this gang can shoot straight. The budget sets a broad policy direction that ought to unify Republicans, if they can overcome their parochial passions.
4)- The GOP’s Budget Test
If Republicans can’t agree on a spending outline, they’re cooked.
The Republican Congress is starting to debate its budget outline for fiscal 2016, and it’s not too soon to call it a test of whether this gang can shoot straight. The budget sets a broad policy direction that ought to unify Republicans, if they can overcome their parochial passions.
On Tuesday new House Budget Chairman Tom Price rolled out his fiscal blueprint for the coming year, and in the tradition of previous chairman Paul Ryan (now heading Ways and Means) the document continues to develop the most important reform plan in a generation. Mr. Price would cut spending by $5.5 trillion relative to the status quo over the next decade, reducing federal spending to 18.2% of the economy by 2024. The share today is 20.3% and is headed toward 22.3% in a decade on present trend.
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The main obstacles to getting 218 votes are tea party free agents who want government to shrink faster, and defense hawks and some appropriators who want to break the spending caps that are enforced by the sequester passed in 2011. Both groups should understand that without the budget passing they have no chance of getting anything close to what they want.
The irony of tea party opposition is that the outline includes far-reaching reform that would balance the federal budget within eight years. Mr. Price’s budget would slow the annual growth of federal spending to a manageable 3.3% on average from the current 5.1%. That’s no small achievement given the accumulating obligations for ObamaCare and baby boom retirees.
Mr. Price does this with targeted policy changes to the real drivers of the federal debt—the open-ended entitlement state. Mr. Price retains Mr. Ryan’s “premium support” reform, which would gradually modernize Medicare by introducing more competition among insurers and more individual choice of health plans.
The budget also calls for repealing ObamaCare, and it makes a valuable contribution on Medicaid, which as a share of GDP has increased 240% since 1980 and is due to rise another 75% over the next 10 years. Republicans have long supported changes that would devolve the program to states with federal block grants, but this budget emphasizes deregulating Medicaid to give Governors more flexibility to innovate.
The document ranges across the federal government (consolidating the 92 antipoverty programs, for example), and the Congressional Budget Office estimates the plan would increase real GDP per capita by 1.5% in 2025. The best method to reduce the deficit is faster economic growth.
Normally this would be a layup despite back-bench grousing, but dissent is also coming from members of the GOP’s national-security wing. Their alarm is sincere, and the sequester’s indiscriminate, ever-tighter reductions have harmed national defense. But the damage to date is also overstated: Congress uses an annual “overseas contingency operations fund” to circumvent the caps and give the military more resources to prosecute the likes of Islamic State.
Mr. Price’s plan adheres to the defense cap of $523 billion, but he adds another $90 billion in the contingency fund to bring overall defense spending for 2016 to $613 billion, higher than President Obama’s budget request. Over 10 years the House plan would exceed Mr. Obama’s budget by $151 billion and the current fiscal path by $387 billion.
We agree that defense spending should increase to meet the world’s growing disorder, but Mr. Obama will also insist on at least $1 in additional domestic discretionary spending (education, roads and the like) for every $1 of defense above the caps. Lifting the caps (and most of the rest in the budget) requires separate legislation that must be negotiated with the White House, and the caps are the best leverage Republicans have to extract reform concessions.
It makes no sense to unilaterally abandon the GOP’s single largest fiscal achievement since 2010 before negotiations. Especially since Mr. Obama isn’t going to use the military for much in his last two years no matter how much Congress spends. Better to pass the budget, giving instructions to the spending committees, and use those bills and others to give the Pentagon more flexibility to allocate priorities under the cap. Then see what Mr. Obama might trade for more spending.
As important, failing to pass a budget would also deprive Republicans of the procedural tool known as reconciliation. This allows the GOP to pass a final budget with a simple majority in the House and Senate, and thus it will be crucial to putting larger reforms of ObamaCare or taxes on Mr. Obama’s desk. A vote against the budget is in that sense a vote for the ObamaCare status quo.
The House and Senate will have to reconcile their separate outlines into a single bill that does not require Mr. Obama’s signature. The budget is thus a chance to offer the public a serious reform agenda that is an alternative to the high-tax, slow-growth entitlement state of Mr. Obama and Hillary Clinton. It is also a particular test of whether Republicans can operate as a functioning majority.
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