The Curse of Surgery: So, "I'm getting circumcised tomorrow."
My friend told me that he had that done when he was a few days old.
I asked him "Does it hurt?"
He said, " Well I couldn't walk for about a year."
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Democrats remain hell bent on warning Israel that one day Trump will be gone and it will have to contend with them.
What is more disconcerting is that America has to deal with Democrats now.(See 2 and 2a below.)
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Pompeo is the right man for the job considering the fact that Trump is going to try an rectify mistakes of the past in order to"Make America Great Again."
Personally, I do not believe Trump can "Make America Great Again." Only Americans can do this. I am going to attempt a preview of "Homo Deus" which I read while I was away.
However, I do believe Trump can make America more respected and I believe, in that regard, he is doing a good job. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) Some will agree, some not so much
A few days ago Jack Minzey sent what was to be the final chapter in the long line of books and treatises which he had written. Jack passed away last Sunday, 8 April 2018. Professionally, Jack was head of the Department of Education at Eastern Michigan University as well as a prolific author of numerous books, most of which were on the topic of Education and the Government role therein. This is the last of his works:
Civil War
How do civil wars happen?
Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can't settle the question through elections because they don't even agree that elections are how you decide who's in charge. That's the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.
The Mueller investigation is about removing President Trump from office and overturning the results of an election. We all know that. But it's not the first time they've done this. The first time a Republican president was elected this century, they said he didn't really win. The Supreme Court gave him the election. There's a pattern here.
What do sure odds of the Democrats rejecting the next Republican president really mean? It means they don't accept the results of any election that they don't win. It means they don't believe that transfers of power in this country are determined by elections.
That's a civil war.
There's no shooting. At least not unless you count the attempt to kill a bunch of Republicans at a charity baseball game practice. But the Democrats have rejected our system of government.
This isn't dissent. It's not disagreement. You can hate the other party. You can think they're the worst thing that ever happened to the country. But then you work harder to win the next election. When you consistently reject the results of elections that you don't win, what you want is a dictatorship.
Your very own dictatorship.
The only legitimate exercise of power in this country, according to Democrats, is its own. Whenever Republicans exercise power, it's inherently illegitimate. The Democrats lost Congress. They lost the White House. So what did they do? They began trying to run the country through Federal judges and bureaucrats. Every time that a Federal judge issues an order saying that the President of the United States can't scratch his own back without his say so, that's the civil war.
Our system of government is based on the constitution, but that's not the system that runs this country. The Democrat's system is that any part of government that it runs gets total and unlimited power over the country.
If the Democrats are in the White House, then the president can do anything. And I mean anything. He can have his own amnesty for illegal aliens. He can fine you for not having health insurance. His power is unlimited. He's a dictator.
But when Republicans get into the White House, suddenly the President can't do anything. He isn't even allowed to undo the illegal alien amnesty that his predecessor illegally invented. A Democrat in the White House has 'discretion' to completely decide every aspect of immigration policy. A Republican doesn't even have the 'discretion' to reverse him. That's how the game is played That's how our country is run. Sad but true, although the left hasn't yet won that particular fight.
When a Democrat is in the White House, states aren't even allowed to enforce immigration law. But when a Republican is in the White House, states can create their own immigration laws. Under Obama, a state wasn't allowed to go to the bathroom without asking permission. But under Trump, Jerry Brown can go around saying that California is an independent republic and sign treaties with other countries.
The Constitution has something to say about that.
Whether it's Federal or State, Executive, Legislative or Judiciary, the left moves power around to run the country. If it controls an institution, then that institution is suddenly the supreme power in the land. This is what I call a moving dictatorship.
Donald Trump has caused the Shadow Government to come out of hiding: Professional government is a guild. Like medieval guilds. You can't serve in if you're not a member. If you haven't been indoctrinated into its arcane rituals. If you aren't in the club. And Trump isn't in the club. He brought in a bunch of people who aren't in the club with him.
Now we're seeing what the pros do when amateurs try to walk in on them. They spy on them, they investigate them and they send them to jail. They use the tools of power to bring them down.
That's not a free country.
It's not a free country when FBI agents who support Hillary take out an 'insurance policy' against Trump winning the election. It's not a free country when Obama officials engage in massive unmasking of the opposition. It's not a free country when the media responds to the other guy winning by trying to ban the conservative media that supported him from social media. It's not a free country when all of the above collude together to overturn an election because the guy who wasn't supposed to win did.
Have no doubt, we're in a civil war between conservative volunteer government and a leftist Democrat Professional Progressive Left Wing Government.
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2) Heeding Democratic Warnings
Every day Israel is subjected to a torrent of warnings from Democrats.
“You will pay a price for your support of President Donald Trump,” we are told.
“He won’t be president forever, and when he’s gone, watch out!”
The basic notion, repeated over and over again is clear enough. If Israel doesn’t want to be punished by the next Democratic White House – which we are warned will make us long for Barack Obama – then we’d better stop talking about the fact that Trump is the best ally and friend Israel has ever had in the White House.
These warnings are not baseless. The data are unmistakable. Republicans are more supportive of Israel than they ever have been. Democrats are abandoning Israel in droves. In January, Pew reported that liberal Democrats side with the Palestinians over Israel by a margin of nearly two to one. Conservative Republicans support Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of more than 16 to 1.
The yawning gap in support plays out in multiple ways. This week, 70 House Democrats sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanding that Israel not destroy illegal Palestinian construction in the south Hebron hills.
Last week, no serving Democratic lawmakers attended the opening of the US Embassy in Jerusalem.
Democrats also boycotted the Israeli Embassy in Washington’s party celebrating the move.
How is Israel supposed to deal with this wide and growing gap in partisan support? Before taking a stab at the answer, we first must understand what is causing the Democrats to turn against the Jewish state.
There are two primary causes for the current trend.
The first has to do with President Trump.
Never in US history has a president been demonized and delegitimized by his political opponents as Trump has been by Democrats. Since the day he was elected, Democrats have sought to overturn the election results.
Every policy Trump enacts is subjected to immediate delegitimization. Democrats attack every position Trump adopts as morally defective, somehow treacherous and utterly illegitimate.
Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem and move the US Embassy to Israel’s capital is case in point. In 1995, Democrats and Republicans joined together to overwhelmingly pass the Jerusalem Embassy Act mandating the transfer of the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. It passed the Senate 93-5.
Every year since lopsided majorities in both houses have voted in favor of resolutions enjoining successive administrations to follow the law and move the embassy. In the past four presidential elections, the Democrats’ party platform has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and supported moving the embassy to Jerusalem.
Given this background, the obvious move for Democrats would have been to applaud Trump for finally doing what none of his predecessors did.
Given this background, dozens of Democratic lawmakers could have been expected to come to Jerusalem for the embassy opening last week and still more could have been expected to put in an appearance at the Israeli Embassy’s bash in Washington.
Instead, with some notable if constrained exceptions, Trump’s move was met with stony silence by the vast majority of Democrats. And several powerful lawmakers, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and prominent senators Dianne Feinstein, Dick Durbin, Chris Murphy and Bernie Sanders condemned the move.
The only possible explanation for their abrupt abandonment of a policy they had dutifully followed for 23 years is Trump. They revile him and reject him to such a degree that they prefer to abandon long-held positions than admit that he did exactly what they have wanted the president to do for the past 23 years.
The second cause of the Democrats’ abandonment of Israel is the rise of identity politics within the party.
For the past decade or so, a struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party has been going on between moderate Democrats, in the Bill Clinton mold and the far Left. The Clinton Democrats ascribe to traditional liberal democratic values and views of America and its role in world affairs. They believe that the protection of liberty and civil rights are the beating heart of American identity and that America has an indispensable and uniquely moral role to play as a superpower in world affairs.
Opposing them are lawmakers and activists from the far Left who believe identity politics should govern the party’s positions and policies. Identity politics reject the notion that people should be judged by their achievements and character.
Instead its subscribers assert that people should be judged, pushed ahead or kept back, supported or opposed based on their membership in various ethnic, racial, gender and sexual identity groups.
Perhaps the best encapsulation of identity politics was given this week by a New York Times editor on the paper’s twitter feed. In a post reporting the results of the gubernatorial primaries in Georgia, the editor wrote, “History in Georgia: Stacey Abrams became the first black woman to be a major party’s nominee for governor after winning her Democratic primary.”
The paper applauded Abrams for being born a certain race and a certain gender. It told us nothing about her qualifications for office. It told us nothing about her past achievements or plans for governing if elected. All the Times thinks we need to know is that Abrams is black and a woman. This is why she should be governor.
Unfortunately for Israel and its supporters, the same forces who determined that black women should be supported determined that Israeli Jews and their American supporters should be opposed and the Palestinians, including Hamas, should be supported.
This position is unmovable. Identity politics imposes a pecking order of victimhood that is impervious to reason and closed to argument.
People are judged only by their placement on the ladder of victimhood. During Obama’s presidency, the dispute between the two warring factions was swept under the rug as everyone joined together in supporting him.
But even as he was supported by moderate and radical Democrats alike, Obama advanced policies and positions that empowered the radicals at the expense of the moderates.
Obama’s hostility towards Israel, his repeated intimations that Israel is a colonialist outpost while the Palestinians are the indigenous people of the land of Israel were part and parcel of his across-the-board effort to enable the radical Left to take over the party. Obama’s efforts laid the groundwork for socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly strong challenge to Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton in the party’s presidential primaries. It also set the stage for the rise of radical leaders like Congressman Keith Ellison and Sen. Elizabeth Warren in the post-Obama Democratic party. Feinstein, who supported a bipartisan Senate resolution just last year calling for the implementation of the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, is now facing a far-Left primary challenger.
To fend off the challenge, she is embracing identity politics.
Her outspoken condemnation of the embassy move no doubt is an expression of her political pivot to the far Left.
When the causes of the Democrats’ alienation from Israel are properly understood, it becomes self-evident that Israel did nothing to precipitate the current situation. It is equally clear that Israel is powerless to reverse the current trends. Only the Democrats can do that.
And so we return to the question: What can Israel do to minimize the partisan divide over support for the Jewish state in America? Democrats advise Israel to do two things. First, they say, the government, and the public more generally, should keep Trump at arm’s length. We should stop supporting him and applauding and thanking him for his support for Israel.
Second, they say, the government should maintain faith with Obama’s pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel policies. Among other things, this means that Israel should permanently deny Jews the right to exercise their property rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. Israel should also prop up Hamas and the PLO.
If Israel does these things, the Democrats say, then a future Democratic president will be more likely to develop a constructive relationship with Jerusalem than he or she otherwise would be.
There are two problems with this advice. First, it involves abandoning the proverbial bird in the hand for a bird that not only flew out of the tree but is swiftly vanishing over the horizon. If present trends in the Democratic party continue, there is little chance that a future Democratic president will be supportive of Israel. The party’s rank and file would revolt.
The second problem with the advice that Democrats are providing is that if Israel listens to them, it will be at even greater risk of being harmed by a hostile administration in the future. Given the ascendancy of the radical Left in the party, and its intractable, impermeable hatred of Israel, Israel needs to secure as many of its long-term strategic interests as it can with the friendly Trump administration lest those interests are imperiled by a hostile Democratic White House in the future.
Among other things, this means securing Israel’s long-term strategic interests in Judea and Samaria by applying Israeli law to Area C.
It means diminishing Israel’s strategic dependence on the US by vastly diminishing with the short term goal of eliminating US military assistance to Israel. That aid should be replaced with US-Israeli joint projects to jointly develop weapons systems and advance other common strategic goals.
Securing Israel’s long-term strategic interests means vastly diminishing Hezbollah’s capacity to wage war against Israel from Lebanon.
And it means destabilizing with the goal of overthrowing the Iranian regime.
The Democrats who are saying that by supporting Trump, Israel is turning itself into a partisan issue, are themselves responsible for turning support for the Jewish state into a partisan issue. By denying that Israel has a right and a legitimate interest in standing with a president that is supportive of and takes concerted steps to advance the US-Israel alliance, they are saying Israel has no right to be supported by its supporters.
The Democrats are right that Israel has a vested interest in preserving and expanding bipartisan support. But contrary to their position, there is only one way for Israel to achieve this goal, and happily, the government’s policies indicate that this is the path that Israel is following today.
Israel must support its supporters and oppose its opponents, without regard to their political affiliation. Israelis support Trump because Trump supports Israel not because he is a Republican. By the same token, Israelis support Senate Minority leader Charles Schumer not because he is a Democrat, but because he supports Israel.
Democrats are right that Trump won’t be president forever. Israel needs to heed their warnings not by distancing itself from the administration, but by working with the Trump administration to secure its long-term strategic interests and goals.
Democratic and Republican supporters of Israel will certainly support our efforts.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
2a)Whites have fled the Democratic Party. Here’s how the nation got there.
2a)Whites have fled the Democratic Party. Here’s how the nation got there.
By Joshua N. Zingher
Joshua N. Zingher is an assistant professor of political science at Old Dominion University whose research focuses on mass political behavior, elections and representation.
With the 2018 midterms months away and the 2020 presidential election cycle approaching rapidly, Democrats are considering how to improve their poor showings in 2014 and 2016. The party has been debating — sometimes heatedly — how to do this. Which voters should they target? How should Democrats target them?
But here’s what’s clear: White voters have been fleeing the Democratic Party, and that’s a big reason Democrats are looking to rebound from back-to-back losses.
Over decades, whites have steadily abandoned the Democratic Party
Whites have slowly but consistently moved away from the Democratic Party. These recent losses are on top of Democrats’ losses among Southern whites during the 1960s and 1970s after Democrats’ support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Bill Clinton won 49 percent of the white two-party vote in 1996. Al Gore won 43 percent in 2000. John F. Kerry won 41 percent in 2004. Barack Obama won a slightly larger share in 2008, but then dropped to only 39 percent in his 2012 reelection bid. Hillary Clinton got the same percentage as Obama.
Obama was able to mask the Democratic Party’s weakness among whites by prompting record-high turnout among African Americans, as well as strong turnout from other Democratic-leaning minority groups. Hillary Clinton was unable to generate the same level of enthusiasm from racial and ethnic minorities.
Here’s how I did my research
My new research helps explain how Democrats got to this point. I utilized survey data from the American National Election Study that spanned 1972 to 2012 and the General Social Survey that spanned 1983 to 2014 to see how the predictors of white vote choice had changed. I found that white voters’ shift toward the Republican Party has been driven by two factors.
The first factor is that growing elite polarization has caused the electorate to “sort” along ideological lines.
On the elite level, Republicans are conservatives and Democrats are liberals. The parties are clearly divided ideologically, and there is no overlap between the two. This is quite different from previous eras, when Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans looked quite different from the rest of their parties.
Voters have an easier time deciding which party best matches their own position when the party positions are highly polarized. As a result, liberals have increasingly become Democrats, and conservatives have become Republicans.
This sorting process has hurt the Democratic Party among whites (especially in the South and Midwest), as there were historically more conservative white Democrats than liberal white Republicans. For Democrats, the increase in support among formerly Republican white liberals has not made up for the loss of white conservatives.
The second factor is that demographic changes have decreased the ratio of whites to nonwhites in the electorate. The electorate was 29 percent nonwhite in 2016. This is up from 11 percent in 1976 and 19 percent in 2000.
This is politically important because the average white voter is more economically conservative and more socially liberal on issues such as abortion, gay rights and so on than the average nonwhite voter. (This varies by education level, as I’ll discuss below.)
As the ratio of nonwhites to whites has increased, an increasing proportion of whites are now “right of center” on economic issues and “left of center” on social issues. The growth of the nonwhite population has pulled the overall median away from the median white citizen’s position — on both social and economic issues.
Taking advantage of these demographic changes, the Democratic Party has courted and won more votes from ethnic and racial minority groups. However, at the same time, in response to these demographic changes, more whites have shifted rightward on economic issues.
I built an index that combines individuals’ positions on a number of survey items and reduces their answers to one summary measure of economic liberalism. I found that 58 percent of whites were to the right of the median in 1972 — but that had become 65 percent in 2016.
With Democratic optimism on the rise for a "blue wave" in 2018, here's their strategy for winning more state and national seats than Republicans. (Joyce Koh/The Washington Post)
As most whites shift rightward, they perceive the Democratic Party to be shifting leftward
I used the American National Election Study data to show that many whites view the Democratic Party as moving further away from their own positions. This is true both when whites are asked to assess the positions of the parties generally and on a variety of specific issues such as government-sponsored health care and the government’s role in providing employment.
My research suggests this combination of political “sorting” and changing white perceptions of the Democratic Party has resulted in an almost eight-point swing in white vote choice. That lines up well with actual vote returns. White votes were split between the two parties about 50-50 in the 1970s — but in elections since 2000, that has become closer to 60-40 in favor of the Republican Party. Democrats might be gaining more votes from Latinos, Asians and other emerging demographic groups, but they are losing whites as a result.
Furthermore, the demographics of the white voters who are likely to support Democrats are different from the white voters who supported the Democratic Party in previous decades.
Most notably, while the Democratic Party is winning a lower percentage of whites overall, a greater proportion of college-educated whites are voting for Democrats. Attitudes on social issues in particular have become stronger predictors of voting behavior in recent elections; economic attitudes have become more important, too, but were already quite a strong predictor to start with.
The Democratic Party is increasingly a coalition of professional-class whites and members of ethnic and racial minority groups. Overall, the Democratic Party has made inroads among socially liberal whites while losing social and economic conservatives.
These changes have altered the Democratic Party’s prospects in presidential elections. While Democrats might be winning more college-educated whites, members of that group often live in states that are already heavily tilted toward Democrats. Whites without college degrees make up a large proportion of voters in many critical swing states in the Upper Midwest — the very states Trump was able to flip from blue to red in 2016.
Thus the Democratic Party is not simply winning a lower proportion of white voters; the whites who are getting more likely to vote for Democrats are less helpful in carrying the electoral college.
The decrease in white support for the Democratic Party is one of the most important trends in U.S. politics. This shift in white voting behavior is the result of changes of the parties’ positions and the country’s demographics.
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3) Mike Pompeo just gave the Iran speech Kerry should have given
3) Mike Pompeo just gave the Iran speech Kerry should have given
by Jonathan Schanzer
New York Post
New York Post
In his first major speech as secretary of state — a searing 20-minute stemwinder — Mike Pompeo on Monday laid out the new US strategy toward Iran, following President Trump's decision to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear agreement.
Pompeo unveiled Washington's plan to deploy intense economic warfare against the Islamic Republic until it halts a wide range of nuclear and non-nuclear activity. But the speech was more than just that; it was the one Pompeo's predecessor, John Kerry, should have delivered in 2013.
Kerry, of course, was the nation's top diplomat when America announced its interim deal with Iran that year. To reward the mullahs merely for coming to the table, he said the United States would pay hundreds of billions of dollars in blackmail to the Islamic Republic — the world's most prolific state sponsor of terrorism — in exchange for a temporary and reversible halt to its nuclear activity.
Fast forward two years, and Kerry bound America to a more permanent arrangement, offering more than $150 billion in blackmail, while recklessly agreeing to limits on Iran that would expire within a decade. Worse, Kerry failed to address issues like missiles, terrorism and other malign activity that Iran carries out to destabilize the Middle East. We were told it was the best deal we could get.
Pompeo on Monday put an end to all that. He declared that his goal was to return to "the global consensus" before the deal.
No longer will the United States tolerate Iran's rogue behavior, which he detailed. This includes Iran's quest for the bomb, but also the support Iran has been providing to terrorist groups in Yemen (the Houthis), Syria and Iraq (Shi'ite militias and Hezbollah) and the Gaza Strip (Hamas).
Pompeo vowed to "crush" these proxies and declared that Iran would never get a nuclear bomb. "Not now, not ever."
The new secretary announced that the US Treasury would unleash "the strongest sanctions in history," unless the regime in Tehran yields. If it doesn't, Pompeo warned, the regime will "be battling to keep its economy alive."
Good for him. Fact is, this is the only kind of language — and policy —that could get Iran to change course.
In short, the objective is what it should've been in 2013 —to put Iran's leaders to a fundamental choice: Face a withering campaign of sanctions, led by the United States and increasingly adopted by its allies, or engage in constructive diplomacy that ultimately puts the Islamic Republic on a path toward peaceful coexistence with the United States, the broader Middle East and the rest of the world.
And this is not based on a vague notion of peace. Pompeo delineated a dozen areas where the Iranians need to fall in line. In exchange, he said, the Trump administration would agree to the "re-establishment of full diplomatic and commercial relations."
Critics will rightly point out that the Iranians, reeling from Trump's decision, are not likely to rush to the negotiating table. To save face, they need to find some negotiating leverage. And that leverage traditionally comes from malign activities, such as nuclear advances, missile tests or destabilizing the Middle East.
But the Iranians are now racing against the clock. Their currency, the rial, has been in a free-fall since the president announced his withdrawal from the deal. Inflation is through the roof.
True, the Iranian economy was already tanking, thanks to mismanagement by the regime, and this has sparked public protests in recent months.
But Trump's sanctions have accelerated the decline, and it's now safe to say that whatever economic improvement the 2015 nuclear deal may have yielded has effectively vanished. In this way, even before sanctions are fully implemented, the new policy is already making an impact.
Critics also point out that we can't do this alone. The Europeans, in particular, are still stinging from Trump's withdrawal from the deal. The Chinese and Russians are also not pleased, given the time and effort they invested in it. All are now considering plans to work around US restrictions on trade with Iran. And Pompeo offered little to indicate that they will acquiesce.
But never underestimate the fear that can be sown by American sanctions. Ours is still the most important economy in the world. And as long as it is, the United States is right to use that as leverage to get a meaningful deal with Iran.
Pompeo made it clear that this is America's strategy. It's the strategy we always should have pursued.
Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism-finance analyst at the Treasury, is senior vice president at Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
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