Keeping My Fingers Crossed! Who Needs Facts?

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Is, is, is until it isn't.  (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Demwits do not need facts. Because they say it thus it must be so! (See 2 below.)
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Pendulums have a way of swinging back.  It is becoming increasingly evident the mood of  most Americans is one of concern over the fact that government is not working, Congress has abdicated its role and this president is out of control. (See 2 below.)

Issues that need addressing are either being ignored or fashioned in a more blatant and intemperate manner.

The 2016 election, as with all elections, can go either way.  The Demwit bench is light, the Repub's over weighted but at least offers some talent.  The campaign will sort out but in the current  heated atmosphere will the best emerge to get our nation back on track?  That is the critical question. I have no answer(s.)  Just keeping my fingers crossed and urge you do likewise. Stay tuned!
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Dick
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1)  Netanyahu: Sometimes the entire world is wrong

"Deal with Iran poses grave threats to Israel and the Middle East, to Europe and the world," PM Benjamin Netanyahu tells visiting Italian counterpart • PM: We were told North Korea nuclear deal would make the world safer. We all know how that turned out.

Shlomo Cesana, Israel Hayom Staff and Associated Press

At a meeting with visiting Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi in Jerusalem on Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the nuclear deal reached last week between world powers and Iran "poses grave threats to Israel and the Middle East, to Europe and the world."

Netanyahu noted the deal would "put Iran at the threshold of an entire nuclear arsenal within a decade, because at that time the deal permits Iran to build as many centrifuges as it wants and to enrich as much uranium as it wants, which means that Iran could break out in a decade or so to dozens of nuclear bombs in zero time. And almost immediately, starting from this year, as the deal passes, the deal will give Iran hundreds of billions of dollars to bankroll its aggression in the region and its terrorism around the world."

Netanyahu reiterated his view that the deal is a "historic mistake."

"Now, we're repeatedly told that no deal is better than a bad deal," Netanyahu said. "Well, this is a bad deal. Yet today we are told that the whole world supports this bad deal. Well, that's just not true. Israel and many Arab states oppose this deal. And, in any case, sometimes the entire world can be wrong.

"It was dead wrong on another nuclear deal -- the one with North Korea. We were told then by the international community, the scientific community, the arms control community that that deal would prevent North Korea from getting nuclear weapons and it would make the world safer. Well, we all know how that turned out."

Earlier on Tuesday, Netanyahu met with U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who was wrapping up a two-day visit to Israel. Neither commented on Iran in a brief appearance before news cameras and reporters. They shook hands and Netanyahu quickly steered Carter upstairs, to Carter's apparent surprise that Netanyahu was bypassing a chance to publicly attack the deal.

Later in the day, during remarks to U.S., French, Belgian, British, Jordanian and other international troops at an air base in Jordan, Carter mentioned that Netanyahu had been blunt behind closed doors.

"The prime minister made it quite clear that he disagreed with us with respect to the nuclear deal in Iran," Carter said. "But friends can disagree."

Carter has said his aim is to keep the U.S.-Israeli military relationship on track and to promise that the U.S. will offer more cooperation on joint defense projects like missile defense.

A Carter aide who attended the meeting in Jerusalem later told reporters that Netanyahu bluntly expressed his opposition to the Iran deal but did not get angry or upset with Carter. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss specifics of a closed meeting.

Netanyahu made the same arguments against the deal that he has expressed publicly numerous times since the agreement was announced earlier this month, the aide said, including his view that Iran will use money freed up by the removal of international economic sanctions to accelerate its support for proxies like the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah.

Carter countered with the U.S. view that Iran is likely to be compelled to use much of its windfall to fix a badly damaged economy.

The U.S. official said neither Carter nor Netanyahu raised the issue of potential U.S. compensation to Israel in the form of increased defense assistance to counter Iran-related threats.

Carter is in the midst of a week-long tour of the Middle East focused on reassuring allies about Iran and assessing progress in the coalition air campaign against the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq. He was the first Cabinet-level American official to meet with Netanyahu since the signing of the Iran
deal.

Carter was to fly to Jedda, Saudi Arabia on Wednesday to consult with Saudi leaders, who are also unsettled by the Iran deal, which they see as likely to increase Iranian power and influence in the Gulf region and beyond.


1a)

Obama's Half-Hearted Foreign Policy Has Allowed Jihadis to Run Wild.

By Lamont Colucci

 

If there is an epitaph written about the Obama foreign policy legacy, it would highlight the word vacuum. The latest transformation of the Obama Doctrine should be entitled the Grand Retreat – not quite a rout, but not quite a strategic withdrawal either. It is almost exhausting making a list of every location that America has either left or never bothered with. However, one can focus on the single issue of Islamic extremism to illustrate this disaster.

The stage for this was set by the last two-term Democratic administration under President Bill Clinton. In an effort to avoid the large footprint of traditional American foreign policy, the Clinton team dithered over Bosnia, then Kosovo. In desperation, groups in both places took aid from radical Islamists, who gained battle experience fighting the Serbs and are now reappearing in places like Syria and Iraq. In the former Yugoslavia, they were sometimes referred to as El Mudzahid. These Islamic extremist fighters fought on the Bosnian and Kosovar side, partially due to America coming late to the game to assist against the imperial ambitions of Serbia, a historically Russian client. The presence of Islamic extremism in the former Yugoslavia proved so horrible that Ambassador Richard Holbrooke would ultimately demand the fighters' ouster as part of the Dayton Accords.

The Obama mentality was illustrated in Libya, where American halfhearted intervention assisted in justifiably removing dictator Moammar Gadhafi, but lack of further involvement allowed parts of the country to fall under the sway of the Islamic State group. Naturally, the worst example is in Iraq and Syria, where initial timidity followed by a rump policy of limited intervention with farcical rules of engagement led to the assembling and metastasizing of the Islamic State group, whose current grip is expanding worldwide. This vacuum has now been fully repeated in Yemen, and elements of it are in play in Egypt. America is absent from the field, and the enemy has exploited it fully.

The newest wrinkle to this vacuum policy is in the Ukraine. We are witnessing the deployment of Chechen fighters against the Russians. Ukrainian sources indicated their presence near the city of Mariupol. This might seem merely disturbing from a general perspective, as it illustrates both the chaos and desperation of the Ukrainian government. It is made a bit more salient due to the Boston Marathon bombing enacted by Chechen jihadists.

However, a more poignant issue is whether or not the Chechens in the Ukraine have any link to Islamic extremism abroad. The evidence is sparse, but Occam's razor would indicate the answer to be yes. Isa Munayev, the Chechen leader of the Dzhokhar Dudayev battalion fighting in Ukraine, has connections with an Islamic State group fighter who goes by the moniker of Khalid. There is a larger amount of evidence that Muslim foreign fighters of Uzbek and Balkan origins have joined the fights as well.

The Chechen jihadi relationship is not confined to Eastern Europe. For instance, French authorities have questioned Chechen fighters for possible connections between Islamic extremists inside France and as a provider of weapons to extremists. Their organization, if one wants to call it that, is known as the “Brothers,” who are stateless Islamic jihadists with connections to the Islamic State group. Those in the Ukraine see the war there in terms of jihad; others simply want to hurt the Russians. The truth of this misses the larger question: Why is the United States not leading in the forefront to control events?

The United States cannot continuously choose the perceived lesser of two evils and call that a policy. The first problem with this non-strategy is we could be wrong. Were Gadhafi and Saddam Hussein worse than the Islamic State group? Probably not. Is the Islamic State group better than Iran? Maybe, though probably not. If this is now the benchmark of the Obama foreign policy, things are worse than they were even a year ago. We are beyond notions of a devil's bargain; we are simply choosing how close to the Ninth Circle of Hell we can live.

Tyrants like Gadhafi and Hussein had to go. They were inimical to liberal values and realist interests. The natural follow-up to the ouster of both would have been the United States leading the charge (as the Bush administration did in Iraq) of helping to establish order, rule of law and Islamic democratic values. Instead, we have the false narrative in the mainstream media that the devil's bargain is a viable and legitimate choice. This cannot be allowed to be the fate in the Ukraine, where the false choices are either supporting Islamic thugs or Putin's gangsters. Neither can this be the story in Iraq where the false choice is between the Iranian Revolutionary Guard terrorists or Islamic State group murderers. Nor again can this be the case in Syria, where the fallacious option is between the brutality of the Assad tyranny and the barbarism of the jihadists.

This can all be avoided with clear, unambiguous American leadership that is unabashedly aggressive. The number one job of any president is national security; an effective foreign policy is integral to this. The power vacuum created by the Obama administration is generating a military-diplomatic black hole that will be difficult to reverse

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1) The Fact-Free Left

By Thomas Sowell |

The outrage over another multiple murder of American military personnel on American soil by another Islamic extremist has been exacerbated by the fact that these military people had been ordered to be unarmed -- and therefore sitting ducks.

Millions of American civilians have also been forbidden to have guns, and are also sitting ducks -- for criminals, terrorists or psychos.

You might think that, before having laws or policies forcing fellow human beings to be defenseless targets, those who support such laws and policies would have some factual basis for believing that these gun restrictions save more lives, on net balance, than allowing more legal access to firearms. But you would be wrong.

Most gun control zealots show not the slightest interest in testing empirically their beliefs or assumptions. There have been careful factual studies by various scholars of what happens after gun control laws have been instituted, strengthened or reduced.

But those studies are seldom even mentioned by gun control activists. Somehow they just know that gun restrictions reduce gun crime, no matter how many studies show the opposite. How do they know? Because other like-minded people say so -- and say so repeatedly and loudly.

A few gun control advocates may cherry-pick examples of countries with stronger gun control laws than ours that have lower murder rates (such as England) -- and omit other countries with stronger gun control laws than ours that have far higher murder rates (such as Mexico, Russia and Brazil).

You don't test an assumption or belief by cherry-picking examples. Not if you are serious. And if you are not going to be serious about life and death, when are you going to be serious?

Unfortunately, gun control is just one of many issues on which the political left shows no real interest in testing their assumptions or beliefs. The left glorifies the 1960s as a turning point in American life. But they show no interest in testing whether things turned for the better or for the worse.

Homicide rates had been going down substantially, for decades on end -- among both blacks and whites -- until the 1960s. Plotted on a graph, there is a big U-shaped curve, showing the turnaround after the bright ideas of the left were applied to criminals in American courts of law in the 1960s.

This was not the only U-shaped curve, with its low, turnaround point in the 1960s. The same was true of the venereal disease gonorrhea, whose rate of infection went down in every year of the 1950s -- and then skyrocketed, beginning in the 1960s.

Teenage pregnancies had also been going down for years, until the late 1960s, when "sex education" was introduced in schools across the country. Then pregnancy rates rose nearly 50 percent over the next decade, among girls 15 to 19 years old -- exactly the opposite of what had been predicted by the left.

Another program that had the opposite effect from its advocates' claims was the "war on poverty" program created by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Contrary to what was said during the celebrations of its 50th anniversary last year, the loudly proclaimed purpose of the "war on poverty" was not simply to transfer money or other benefits to the poor. Both Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and their supporters in Congress and in the media, all clearly stated that the central purpose of the "war on poverty" was to reduce dependency on government.

Both poverty and dependency on government had already been declining for years before this massive program began. The proportion of people whose earnings put them below the poverty level -- without counting government benefits -- declined by about one third from 1950 to 1965.

This was yet another beneficial trend that reversed itself after another bright idea of the left was put into practice in the 1960s. After half a century and trillions of dollars, the only response of the left has been to change the criteria, so that now the "war on poverty" could be portrayed as a success because it proved that, if you transferred more resources from X to Y, then Y would now have more resources. Who could have doubted that?

Changing the goal after the fact is just one of the ways the left has portrayed its failures as successes.

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2) What Hath Obama Wrought?

By Richard Winchester

Just before the 2008 presidential election,  Barack Hussein Obama, who by then knew the election’s eventual outcome, told a campaign rally “[w]e’re five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America!”  Once he was inaugurated, Obama set out to keep that promise.

He still has about 18 months left to be POTUS, and there are indications that in his final days Obama will try to make even more fundamental changes to America.

Obama, however, has been president for six-and-one-half years, long enough to warrant at least a preliminary assessment of his impact on the country.  Hint:  it isn’t good.

Obama promised to be “a transformational president,” like Ronald Reagan and not Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton.  He’s been that, but for the worse.

Let’s first assess America’s national security and prestige abroad.  Begin with his cancellation of placing U.S. missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic, followed by major reductions of America’s nuclear arsenal, calamitous retreats in Iraq and Afghanistan, gutting the American military, purging potentially effective military officers, leading from behind in Libya, evaporating red lines in Syria, the Benghazi debacle, enabling Russian irredentism in the Crimea and Ukraine, caving to Iranian mullahs, inability or unwillingness to defeat ISIS, betrayal of Israel, and more, Obama’s record in the international arena can only be seen as a series of unmitigated disasters.  Florida senator and Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio put it succinctly when he noted that, under Obama, “our allies no longer trust us, our enemies no longer fear us.”  (Others have said essentially the same.)

Turning to domestic matters, perhaps the most general assessment of Obama’s record as POTUS is that he’s been the most dogged proponent of big government since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Lyndon Baines Johnson.  He dislikes the Constitution for its limits on government.  (I have no doubt this review of his domestic achievements will over-look some dastardly acts, but the following recitation should suffice to confirm the above assertions.)  The $800+ billion bailout bill, which was supposed to go to shovel-ready jobs, and was soon accompanied by government take-over of two of America’s big three automobile companies, along with billions of dollars wasted on crony capitalists, many of whom happened to be donors to the Democratic Party, went a long way to postponing economic recovery in the U.S.  Passage of the miss-labeled “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” in the spring of 2010 -- which had to be sold to a gullible public with presidential lies, and then enacted by congressional slight-of-hand -- means, at bottom, government take-over of one-seventh of the American economy.  (Don’t forget also the fiasco when the Obamians tried to implement Obamacare, as well as Obama’s repeated revisions of the original legislation, thereby violating the Constitution’s provision of separation of powers, and the two tortured Supreme Court rulings needed to validate Obamacare.)  A hallmark of the Obama administration has been a flood of regulations that have seriously crimped economic growth, and grievously weakened the American economy’s private sector -- if there still is such a thing.  (Is there any wonder that a smaller percentage of the adult populace is gainfully employed than at any time since the presidency of Jimmy Carter?)  Obama acts as if illegal aliens should swamp people here legally.  With the stroke of a pen, Obama undid the hard-won reforms of the welfare system in 1996; now the notion welfare state has an entirely new meaning in America.  Just one manifestation of Obama’s accomplishments in building a larger welfare state in the U.S. is that more Americans are receiving what used to be called food stamps than at any time in our history.  Nearly half the population receives some kind of government benefit.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that, “[t]he American Republic will endure until the Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”  Politicians learned how to bribe the public with money from the public treasury long before Obama.  But, since he was immaculated, Obama has taken bribery of the American people to new heights.

America’s acknowledged national debt stands at $18+ trillion, more than half of which has been amassed since January 20, 2009.  If government spending continues to exceed revenues at the rate it’s been doing since 2009, how long will it be before the national government’s credit rating is down-graded once again, and the U.S. becomes the new Greece or Puerto Rico?

Another facet of Obama’s legacy is the weaponization of government agencies, such as the IRS, the DOJ, and the Department of Homeland Security, against his critics.  Other presidents have used one or more federal agencies against opponents.  But, to my knowledge, no modern-era president before Obama tried to deny that a major news outlet -- the Fox News Channel -- is a legitimate news outlet.

As the first African American -- at least on his acknowledged father’s side -- to be twice elected POTUS, Obama was supposed to be a post-racial president.  Actually, Obama talks and acts like a black racist.   From the Beer Summit following his admittedly ignorant insult of the Cambridge, MA police force through the most recent incidence of white police-on-black violence -- notice, however, that he has been silent after the murder of Kathryn Steinle by an illegal alien who sought sanctuary in San Francisco -- Obama and other Obamians have gone out of their way to inflame racial passions.

The public’s perception of the state of American race relations has deteriorated since Obama became POTUS, a fact recognized by all races.  Large portions of the African American community believe white police officers prey on young black men, and some blacks engage in violence against whites.  Instances of “the Polar Bear Game” or “the Knock-out Game” have become more frequent since Obama became POTUS.  We may be witnessing the beginning of a race-based war on the police.  Sadly, in all-too-many cases, such as the bloody assault by black hooligans against a white man on Cincinnati’s Fountain Square this July 4th, cowardly city officials refuse to label the assault a hate crime.  Similarly, the mainstream media (MSM) consistently refuse to report fully on instances of black-on-white violence; in the rare instance of white-on-black violence, the MSM’s reportage is at full volume.

Obama’s impact on America’s politics constitutes a double whammy.  Elected as a post-partisan POTUS, he has been the most polarizing president in decades.  Bluntly put, American politics is more polarized than at any time since 1860.  Assessments of his job performance differ tremendously by party identification.  Although 80+% of Democrats rate his job performance favorably, only about 17% of Republicans agree.

Even worse, while Obama has been POTUS, grassroots Democrats have drifted far to the Left of where the typical Democrat was on most issues a generation or so ago.  This process probably began in the 1990s, but it has accelerated since 2009.  If you want an assessment of how Obama has affected Democrats’ frame-of-mind when it comes to politics, think Bernie Sanders.  He has also pushed many Republicans to the right. 

There’s more, but the above should illustrate why Barack Obama has been an unmitigated disaster as POTUS.

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