And he paid good money to go to Saudi Arabia to
get an additional dose of radicalization from this beauty..
I miss him and Edith! One of the great TV sitcoms!
===
For the rest of the Holiday Season and in the spirit of same, I am going to refrain from criticizing Obama. On the other hand, should he do something praiseworthy I will make an appropriate congratulatory comment.
I will not make the same pledge regarding Hillarious. She deserves my constant attention and total focus.
For most of the time, Obama will be in Hawaii playing golf and more or less out of sight. As for Hillarious she does not play golf and though she may spend time playing Grandma, she makes few appearances because how often can we listen to her cackling. The FBI report should be out in the next two months and that is when I suspect the boom might be lowered on her coif. Also, next year, Obamacare funding could blow up in her face and impact her emphatic embrace of that policy.
I am leaving Monday for the last committee meeting of GMOA for the year and will be back late on Tuesday in time to watch the debate.
I will, however, continue to post cartoons and videos regardless of who is the object of derision. After all going fully neutral is not easy to do.
Meanwhile climate change seems to have gripped Savannah as our crime rate continues to rise. Our new police chief has embraced a new program to advise known gang leaders they will be held responsible for what happens in their territory. This is a program that has worked in other cities, about the size of ours. and Meg Heap, our terrific District Attorney, is fully supportive as well.
===
My learned friend and fellow memo reader sees the climate change claim as follows: "Climate change is the best liberal money grab since Obamacare. What a success the latter is. We have covered 89% of the population up from 85%. What an accomplishment! T--"
I believe climate change is another scare tactic employed to keep everyone stirred and at each other's throat for political purposes. When people are angry they are more susceptible of being manipulated because their objective reasoning is more likely to be replaced by illogical decisions based on angst .
===
While I am away I would expect The Fed to raise rates by a quarter of a percent. From a market standpoint it is already baked in but I suspect tax selling to continue right up until the last day because most investors and investment advisers have not had a good year and losses abound.
That said, there are always individual stocks that present good opportunities and I suspect A T & T, Intel, Corning and, from a much longer standpoint, Potash, provide future opportunities to make decent gains and all pay reasonable dividends.
===
Why are common sense solutions hard to reach? (See 1 below.)
And
Here is a technological potential solution to a serious problem: "
https://www.facebook.com/
===
Insight into what Americans think about Muslims according to this survey. (See 2 below.)
===
I will let this article speak for itself. (See 3 below.)
===
Dallas, apparently has solved a problem in a manner that avoids PC'ism! (See 4 below.)
===
Dick
========================================================================
1) A bipartisan consensus on fighting poverty
ByJennifer Rubin
When 15 experts, both liberal and conservative, agree on an agenda for fighting poverty, it is noteworthy. It is even more noteworthy when liberals accept the argument that conservatives have been advancing, namely:
===
Insight into what Americans think about Muslims according to this survey. (See 2 below.)
===
I will let this article speak for itself. (See 3 below.)
===
Dallas, apparently has solved a problem in a manner that avoids PC'ism! (See 4 below.)
===
Dick
========================================================================
1) A bipartisan consensus on fighting poverty
ByJennifer Rubin
When 15 experts, both liberal and conservative, agree on an agenda for fighting poverty, it is noteworthy. It is even more noteworthy when liberals accept the argument that conservatives have been advancing, namely:
Improving the family environment in which children are raised is vital to any serious effort to reduce poverty and expand opportunity. Twenty-five years of extensive and rigorous research has shown that children raised in stable, secure families have a better chance to flourish. Family structure is an important factor in reducing poverty, too: children raised in single-parent families are nearly five times as likely to be poor as those in married-couple families. . . . “Social policy faces an uphill battle,” says Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution, “as long as families continue to fragment and children are deprived of the resources of two parents.
That’s from the second chapter in a new report (p. 30), “Opportunity, Responsibility, and Security: A Consensus Plan for Reducing Poverty and Restoring the American Dream,” put out by the American Enterprise Institute/Brookings Institution Working Group on Poverty and Opportunity.
This represents a remarkable intellectual and policy shift for liberals, who for decades have scorned the notion that marriage matters and have feigned offense at the notion that we should tell young, unmarried women to delay childbirth.
AEI’s Robert Doar, a member of the working group, was instrumental in bringing the scholars together. In his office in Washington, I asked him what prompted such a turnaround from liberals. “The data is too strong,” he said simply. “People who care about this have also gotten frustrated.” One need only take a drive through blocks of blighted neighborhoods in Baltimore, as I did recently, to appreciate the magnitude of the policy failure and the lack of hope that still afflicts a substantial portion of our citizenry. Doar says the recent riots in Baltimore and focus on widespread joblessness and poverty there were “humbling” for many who devoted their lives to fighting poverty.
Family, it turns out, is a critical part of the explanation for persistent poverty. The report is chock full of alarming and persuasive evidence explaining the rise of single-parent households (an astounding 72 percent of all African American births) and the correlation between children raised in single-parent homes and the lack of economic success and social mobility. “By 2013, at nearly $107,000, the average married-couple family with children had nearly three times the income of the average single-mother family with children.” (p. 21) The report goes on to conclude, “Some of the measures of child development that have been linked with single-parent families are higher high school drop out rates, lower academic achievement, higher rates of teen pregnancy, more alcohol and drug use, higher rates of psycho-social problems (including suicide) and higher likelihood of not working and not being in school in late adolescence and early adulthood.” The effect of single-parent households reverberates generationally, as those children grow up with reduced economic opportunity. (In recent testimony before the House Budget Committee, Doar provided research findings that 4 out of 5 children raised in households with married parents made it out of the bottom quintile of income. An alarming 50 percent of children from single parents in the bottom quintile stayed there, while only 5 percent made it to the top quintile.)
The report, however, is very clear: Family structure is only part of the problem. “You need all three — family, work and education,” Doar says. The notion that a rising tide lifts all boats has been a mainstay on the right for decades. Certainly, the benefits of a growing economy cannot be understated. But decades of persistent poverty in bad times and good should convince reasonable minds that this is insufficient.
The AEI/Brookings report lays out a raft of policy suggestions in all three areas (family, work, education), ranging from promoting delayed, responsible childbearing to subsidizing work and increasing incentives to work (instead of remaining on government benefits) to school accountability and alternatives to four-year college.
This endeavor is neither easy nor cheap. The most effective programs, for example, in keeping teens in high school and encouraging delayed childbearing are “labor intensive,” Doar says. A popular approach to subsidizing work — expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit — requires both new resources (the report recommends increasing the maximum payment and expanding it to single adults with no children) as well as intensified efforts to eliminate fraud. If conservatives honestly want to attack the poverty problem, they will need to show willingness to pay for effective programs with concrete results.
As controversial as the emphasis on marriage may be, equally controversial is the effort to tie work to benefits. The report, for example, does not come out in favor of a work requirement for food stamps. Nevertheless, Doar thinks there is plenty of room for a middle ground between simply cutting checks and throwing people off benefits if they don’t get work in a defined time. These include work referral programs and workfare (whereby any beneficiary is offered some form of work before being taken off benefits). Even the simple requirement of coming in to see a case officer to discuss work prospects and job training can have a positive impact on recipients.
While the report diplomatically avoids mentioning it, conservatives can take credit for ending extension of long-term unemployment benefits, which liberals swore would increase suffering without leading to new employment. In fact, the unemployment rate has continued to drop since the federal government ceased subsidizing never-ending unemployment benefits, corroborating the importance of incentivizing work over government dependency.
The report is a remarkable achievement insofar as it provides political support and empirical data for an array of anti-poverty policies. Doar and his group will be sharing their report not only on Capitol Hill but also in state capitals. With House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) — an advocate of many of the approaches the AEI/Brookings report recommends — now on the job, the potential for bipartisan legislation is real. His challenge will be to get fiscal conservatives willing to spend money on programs if they can be shown to be effective and can, in many instances, be funded at the federal level but run by the states.
Unfortunately, the current president has shown very little interest in departing from decades of liberal dogma — even as the thinking of conscientious liberals has matured. Real progress and policy innovation will have to await a new president. If a new president — of either party — and Congress would be open to the findings, data and recommendations assembled by both liberals and conservatives, we could accomplish something tangible in the anti-poverty war. If so, the AEI/Brookings report deserves credit for helping to foster the most important social policy shift since welfare reform.
========================================================
2)What Americans really think about Muslims and Islam
The horrific terrorism in San Bernardino has revived fears of extremist jihadists operating on American soil. But the American public has been dealing with the issue of terrorism in the name of Islam since 9/11. If we weren’t in the middle of a polarized political season with an unprecedented number of GOP candidates competing to get attention, the discourse—and American public perceptions of Islam and Muslims—would not look all that different from the past few years.
In a poll I conducted between November 4 and 10, 2015—after a reported ISIS bomb brought down a Russian civilian airplane over Egypt but before the Paris and San Bernardino attacks—several trends are clear. Many of the attitudes expressed are outgrowths of the American experience over the past decade and a half.
First, Americans differentiate between the “Muslim people” and the “Muslim religion,” and they view Islam more unfavorably than they do Muslims. This may have many reasons, but at the core, it is probably easier for many Americans—with strong anti-discrimination norms—to express dislike of an abstract idea rather than to appear prejudiced toward people. Even Donald Trump prefaces his anti-Muslim or (anti-Hispanic) rhetoric with “I love Muslims.” It may also be partly a function of familiarity (as my seventh point below suggests).
The contrasting American attitudes on Islam and Muslims have been around for some time, though views of Islam in particular worsened in the months after 9/11. They never recovered, even during the early days of the Arab uprisings, which generated much sympathy among Americans.
Three weeks after 9/11, an ABC News poll found that Americans had a more favorable view of Islam than unfavorable, 47 percent to 39 percent. But a decade later, the picture changed dramatically. A poll I conducted in April 2011 showed that 61 percent of Americans expressed unfavorable views of Islam, while only 33 percent expressed favorable views. This was in the middle of expressed optimism about the Arab uprisings, when 70 percent of Americans, for example, expressed favorable views of Egyptians. At the time, Americans still seemed to differentiate between Islam and Muslims, with half saying they have positive views of Muslims.
My recent poll indicates nearly identical views of Islam in 2015 as in the optimistic days of 2011, with 61 percent of Americans also expressing unfavorable views. But views of the Muslim people slightly improved, with 53 percent expressing favorable views. This comes despite the pessimism about the region, the rise of ISIS, and the bombing that dominated the news even before the Paris and the San Bernardino attacks; After all, 70 percent of Americans identified ISIS as the biggest threat facing the United States a year ago, which is about the same percentage expressing this view in my most recent poll.
Second, views of both the Muslim people and the Muslim religion are divided across party lines. A large majority of Democrats, 67 percent, have favorable views of Muslims, compared to 41 percent and 43percent for Republicans and Independents respectively. And while a slight majority of Democrats, 51 percent, have a favorable view of the Muslim religion, in contrast, 73 percent of Republicans express unfavorable views of Islam.
Third, Republicans who express very unfavorable views of Muslims prefer Donald Trump for president (43 percent) in comparison to only 12 percent of Republicans who hold very favorable views of Muslims.
Fourth, Americans generally do not accept that there is a clash of civilizations, but the partisan divide on this issue is particularly large. Only 39 percent of Americans say Western and Islamic religious and social traditions are incompatible, while 57 percent say most people in the West and the Islamic world have similar needs and wants. These results are comparable to the results of a poll I conducted in April 2011, where the breakdown was 37 percent to 59 percent respectively. Party differences cannot be missed: While only 26 percent of Democrats say the two traditions are incompatible in the latest poll, 56 percent of Republicans say the same.
Fifth, demographically, younger people and those with higher education have slightly more favorable views of Islam and Muslims, and particularly reject a clash of civilization thesis. Sixty percent of people aged 18 to 24 have favorable views of Muslims in comparison to only 43 percent of those over 65; this also holds among Republicans, where 65 percent of those 18 to 24 have favorable views in comparison to 32% of those over 65.
Forty-nine percent of those with education below high school and 44 percent of those with a high school education hold positive views of Muslims, in comparison to 52 percent of those with some college education and 63 percent of those with college degrees and above.
Sixth, the views of two important American constituencies on Middle East policy, Evangelicals and American Jews, are particularly contrasting. Among those identifying themselves as Jewish Americans (5 percent of the sample), only 20 percent say that Islamic and Western religious and cultural tradition are incompatible. This contrasts with 55 percent of Evangelical Christians. While 43 percent of Jewish Americans have favorable views of Islam (which is slightly higher than the national total of 37 percent), only 18 percent of Evangelicals feel the same. And 55 percent of Jewish Americans express favorable views of Muslims, in contrast to only 38 percent of Evangelicals.
Seventh, majorities of those who know some Muslims—even if not well—have favorable of views of Muslims; this holds across the political spectrum. For example, only 22 percent of Republicans who know no Muslims have favorable views, compared with 51 percent of Republicans who know some Muslims but not well, and 59 percent of those who know some Muslims well.
But knowing some Muslims, even well, does not influence American views of Islam as much. While those who know Muslims have slightly improved views of Islam, still, majorities of Republicans and Independents retain an unfavorable view of the Muslim religion. And even Americans who say they know some Muslims very well are divided down the middle in their attitudes toward the Muslim religion.
Looking in the mirror
In the end, does it really matter how Americans view Muslims? Enormously—and not just because of policy implications, but also because it inevitably affects the way Muslims see themselves.
Our current debate is of course colored by the breathtaking exaggerations of an unusually intense political season. In the process, we forget that religion and ethnicity are often only small parts—sometimes mere afterthoughts—of how people see themselves. A New York lawyer, Anika Rahman, captured this complexity well in the days after 9/11 when she wrote in the New York Times:
“I am so used to thinking about myself as a New Yorker that it took me a few days to begin to see myself as a stranger might: a Muslim woman, an outsider, perhaps an enemy of the city. Before last week, I had thought of myself as a lawyer, a feminist, a wife, a sister, a friend, a woman on the street.”
It’s a reminder that identity is a relationship. People define themselves in part as a function of how others view them; we are what we have to defend. The worst thing that Americans can do is paint the wrong picture of Muslims—including their own fellow Americans.
2) Embedding U.S. special operations forces with the Syrian Kurds. At the end of October, U.S. relations with the Arab-Kurdish coalition got a further boost when President Obama ordered up to 50 special operators to northeastern Syria. These forces will almost certainly be deployed at the front lines of the war with the Islamic State, including in the upcoming battle for Raqqa, advising and supporting rebel troops engaged in direct combat. According to Secretary Carter, “What they are doing there is they are enabling local forces, a mixture of Kurds and Syrian Arabs who want to fight ISIL …. [T]his small, very elite group is intended to bring to bear all that the United States can bring to bear, in the way of intelligence, air power and so forth.” While small in size, the move marked a significant escalation for Obama, the first time he had agreed to position U.S. soldiers on the ground in Syria for an extended time. Moreover, Carter has repeatedly signaled that the U.S. will not hesitate to deploy furtherspecial operations forces to Syria as additional opportunities arise.
3) Expanding role for U.S. forces in Iraq. Several thousand U.S. forces have been in Iraq for much of the past year, advising and training the Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmerga. But their distance from the actual fight against ISIS appears to be growing shorter. Thus, in late October, a U.S. army commando was killed in a joint operation with Kurdish units to free prisoners held by the Islamic State — the first U.S. combat death in Iraq since 2011. In mid-November, credible reports emerged that U.S. special operations forces were near the front lines during the battle for Sinjar, directing air strikes on behalf of Kurdish troops engaged in the city’s liberation.
. Similar reports suggest that U.S. forces could well be engaged in a similar effort now with Iraqi Security Forces as they prepare to re-take the Sunni city of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province. U.S. commandos have worked especially closely with Iraq’s most capable units, the Counter-Terrorism Forces, which have a lead role in the effort to liberate Ramadi. Finally, from bases inside Iraq, U.S. forces have in recent months been supplementing air strikes against the Islamic State with increasing ground-based firepower, using highly precise rocket artillery systems.
4) Deploying a “Special Expeditionary Targeting Force.” Last week, Carter announced that the U.S. would be sending an elite task force of commandos to Iraq on a standing basis. Led by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the force’s mission would include an aggressive campaign of raids to capture/kill Islamic State leadership, gather intelligence, rescue hostages, and disrupt Islamic State operations. In Iraq, the force would conduct raids “at the invitation of the Iraqi government,” while in Syria it would be able to act unilaterally. According to Carter, “It puts everybody on notice in Syria. You don’t know at night who’s coming in the window. And that’s the sensation that we want all of ISIL’s leadership and followers to have.”
.
5) Intensifying the air war. In his testimony last week, Carter confirmed that — thanks to improved intelligence — airstrikes against the Islamic State targets increased significantly in November, to the highest level since the start of operations in August, 2014. The U.S. has also dramatically stepped up its attacks on the Islamic State’s sources of revenue, particularly oil. In what appeared to be a modification in the rules of engagement that followed immediately on the heels of the Paris attacks, U.S. aircraft for the first time targeted Islamic State tanker trucks, destroying nearly 400 that were preparing to carry Islamic State oil to market. Carter pledged “There’s more to come,” and has suggested publicly that the overly-restrictive rules of engagement for the air war should be loosened. Gen. Dunford claimed that the escalated targeting of Islamic State oil infrastructure, including wells and processing facilities, as well as other important economic targets, had recently disrupted a whopping 43 percent of the Islamic State’s revenue stream.
6) Increasing weapons shipments to anti-Assad rebels. This is a covert program run by the CIA rather than the Pentagon. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and Jordan are among Washington’s partners. The program funnels weapons to various non-Islamic State groups that have been fighting the Assad regime. The groups have been vetted by the CIA and supposedly do not include the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front or other hardline jihadist elements. Most are said to be associated with the Free Syrian Army, an umbrella organization founded by ex-Syrian military officers. The bulk of the weapons allegedly come from the stocks of America’s regional allies who also deliver them to the field after receiving U.S. approval.
7. By far and away the most important system delivered has been the U.S.-made BGM-71 TOW anti-tank missile. Since Russia began its air campaign in support of the Assad regime on Sept. 30, CIA-supported rebels claim that they have been receiving virtually unlimited supplies of TOWs. “Carte blanche,” is how one described it. The TOWs have been used with devastating effect to counter a major ground offensive that Assad’s forces launched in early October, backed by approximately 2,000 troops from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as well as thousands more from Lebanese Hezbollah and Iranian-backed militias made up of Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani Shiites. In the month of October alone, TOW firings were reportedly up 850 percent from the month before Russia’s intervention. Potentially hundreds of Syrian tanks, armored vehicles, and other battlefield vehicles have been destroyed.
While the sheer intensity of Russia’s aerial bombardment may be slowly but surely grinding the rebels down, the TOWs have played an outsized role in blunting the ground offensive’s success. By all accounts, the results of the Russian-led campaign have been disappointing so far, yielding relatively minor gains. A Syrian military source late last month acknowledged the dramatic increase in TOW use and the impact that the system was having on the battlefield. Assad himself allegedly complained of the increased weapon supplies to his enemies.
Importantly, both the Russians and Iranians have apparently suffered losses as a result of the TOWs. After a Russian jet was shot down by Turkey in late November, reports claimed that a TOW missile brought down a Russian rescue helicopter, killing a marine on board. The Iranians have had it even worse. At least 67 of their troops, many of them senior officers from the IRGC, were killed in the first two months of the latest offensive. While most may not have died at the hands of a TOW missile, some no doubt did — including, for example, the IRGC commanding general in southern Aleppo, Masoud Akbari, whose personal vehicle was allegedly taken out by a TOW in mid-November.
It’s almost certainly true that these recent shifts in strategy won’t be decisive. They remain inadequate to the task of putting the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate to flight before Obama leaves office — which of course should be his goal.
Nevertheless, they shouldn’t be dismissed as wholly insignificant either. They begin to address many of the concerns expressed by some of Obama’s critics. The need for an intensified air war. A greater focus on destroying the Islamic State’s sources of revenue, particularly oil. Putting U.S. advisors much closer to the front lines. A growing combat role for U.S. special forces, including unleashing JSOC’s hunter-killer teams. Increased support for Kurdish fighters, especially in Syria. And, perhaps, an escalating covert war to raise the costs of Russia’s intervention, bleed Syrian, Iranian, and Hezbollah forces, and build U.S. leverage in negotiations for a political settlement in Syria.
The question remains of how serious the administration will be in implementing these efforts — and then rapidly expanding them to accelerate the dismantling of the Islamic State’s caliphate in the shortest time possible. Carter and Dunford seem to understand the urgency of the situation. Though entirely eclipsed by the Paris attacks, the U.S.-enabled liberation of Sinjar by Kurdish forces last month was an important victory. But a far more significant test will be what now happens in Ramadi. After months of delay, Iraqi security forces have entirely surrounded the city. Backed by U.S. forces and air power, they now need to drive the Islamic State out in relatively short order, inflicting a major defeat on the group in Iraq’s Sunni heartland. And then we need to move quickly to tightening the noose on the caliphate’s capital in Syria, Raqqa, exploiting our enhanced relationship with the Arab-Kurdish coalition.
If, however, come January, Ramadi remains in the Islamic State’s hands and the threat to Raqqa has not appreciably increased, we will have some pretty strong indicators that the cynics are right — that whatever changes have been undertaken are largely for show, more about countering domestic critics than destroying a foreign enemy, a senseless incrementalism designed to buy time, not achieve victory.
As always, the biggest question mark remains President Obama himself. Is he at last prepared to assume fully the mantle of a wartime commander-in-chief? Is he even capable of doing so, temperamentally? Does he have it within him to convince the country and the rest of the world that defeating the Islamic State while securing U.S. interests in the Middle East against both Russian and Iranian challenges is his highest priority — one that he’s prepared to devote the remainder of his presidency to achieving? Will he use the full powers of his office to rally NATO to join the fight against the Islamic State? To mobilize forces from our Sunni allies in the region? To engage personally with Prime Minister Nouri al-Abadi in a sustained effort to implement a new, more inclusive governing agenda in Baghdad? To engineer a set of military facts on the ground against the Russian and Iranian coalition that leaves them no other option for exiting the Syrian morass than agreeing to a political solution that ditches Assad?
If past is prologue, there’s little grounds for optimism, I admit — unless, perhaps, the White House finally wakes up to the fact that a Paris-like attack in the Homeland would very likely end up destroying Obama’s legacy. It may be that primal political instinct to avoid a catastrophic ending to his presidency that at long last concentrates Obama’s mind, creating the kind of opening in the policy process that the serious national security professionals remaining in this administration, like Carter and Dunford, can effectively exploit. The stakes are high, both for America and the civilized world, so we should pray they succeed. The amount of damage that might yet be done in the twilight of a fading presidency, strategically adrift amid the crumbling ruins of an unraveling Middle East, is almost too terrifying to contemplate.
· John Hannah is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, focusing on U.S. strategy. During the presidency of George W. Bush, he served for eight years on the staff of Vice President Cheney, including as the vice president's national security advisor.
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4)The
City of Dallas, Texas passed an ordinance stating thatif a driver is pulled over
by law enforcement and is not able to provide proof of
insurance ,
the car is towed .To retrieve the car after being impounded,they must show proof of insuranceto have the car released.This has made it easy for the City
of Dallas to remove uninsured cars.Shortly after the "No Insurance" ordinance was passed,the Dallas impound lots
began to fill up and were full after only nine
days.Over
80%
of the impounded carswere driven by illegals .Now, not only must they provide proofof insurance to have their car released,they have to pay for the cost of the tow ,a
$350
fine , and
$20
for every day their
car is kept in the lot.Guess what?Accident
rates have gone down 47%and
Dallas' solution gets uninsured driversoff the road WITHOUTmaking them show proof of nationality.I wonder how the
US Justice Department will
get around this one .=================
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