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An old classic. (See 1 below.)
And:
Rashida Tlaib calls Trump an expletive during pitch to impeach.
Meanwhile, Pelosi sits on her hands: Pelosi downplays Rashida Tlaib's profanity-laced vow to impeach Trump, as Republicans fume.
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In a previous memo I mentioned Americans are an impatient lot etc.
I want to flesh out this thought and it's relevance to Trump and his policies.
Trump, unlike most presidents before him, has made a concerted effort to implement his campaign commitments. In doing so, he has willingly touched many third rail issues that needed correcting but never were for whatever reasons.
These policies were allowed to take root and have burrowed and will take patience and time to correct.
I do not believe Trump has done a good job of explaining this and calling upon Americans to exercise patience and allow the brew he has concocted to stew.
Some of what Trump has done can be erased quickly ,ie. strokes of a president's pen can eliminate red tape but even their effect takes time. Other policy changes, like tariff agreements, take longer and require months of sensitive negotiations etc.
Getting N Korea to renounce it's nuclear program will probably not succeed unless we are willing to do so by force.
Then there are matters involving the give and take of politics and now Democrats control The House, they want to make life miserable for Trump in order to defeat him in 2020 and undercut his efforts. There is a good chance his commitments will probably be successfully thwarted.
Why is this a likely probability? Several reasons:
a) Though Republicans control the Senate there are those, like Romney, who like McCain, Corker, Flake, are renegades and march to their own drum beat whereas, Democrats are more likely to march in lock step because they are unified in their pursuit of defeating Trump.
b) Also, there are those in the Republicans Party who are turned off by Trump and believe he threatens their own ability to be re-elected and thus, not likely to lay down for him.
c) Power to govern, retain and grow their ranks is far more important to Democrats than doing what is best for the nation and becomes their driving force. They know keeping the nation's archaic and ineffective immigration policies is dangerous but by avoiding solutions they keep the open wound festering. Not all blame can be attributed to Democrat resistance because Republicans have their own reasons for keeping this matter boiling.
It is called seeking political advantage at the cost of statesmanship. Shamefully, both parties come into court with unclean hands.
d) Historically, Republicans are terrible at framing issues and lack guts. Ask Newt Gingrich if you do not agree. Democrats know history is on their aside and if they hang tough Republicans will fray and scatter. Consequently, Schumer, Pelosi, Schiff, Waters and their ilk intend to thwart Trump at every turn believing his supporting ranks will thin over time and voters will become increasingly impatient because what Trump is about takes time and the mass media will continue stirring the anti-Trump pot.
e) Trump has at least several important aces in the hole - Democrats could overplay their hand, anger American voters who recoil at piling on and could nominate a radical that would be anathema to most Americans. Americans are generally fair minded and reject bullying
In my humble opinion, 2019 is going to be a grueling/contentious year followed by an equally disputatious one.
The enemy is us!
A dear friend and fellow memo reader is very discouraged.
"Americans are busy destroying themselves and the Country and they do not understand how Russia penetrated the USA and are manipulating us as PUPPETS !
Trump does not have leadership qualities to understand and organize such a fight against the Enemy (Russia and China).
No elections will repair this destruction.!
It takes a very special Leader to understand what is going on and getting organized to confront this terrible danger.
I do not see such a Leader emerging; not on the Republican side and not on the Democratic side. M--"
And
Another friend and fellow memo reader comments about Romney. (See 2 below.)
Caroline Glick publishes her last column because she is entering politics? (See 3 below.)
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Webb under consideration for Defense? (See 4 below.)
And:
Has dismantling begun? (See 4a below.)
Soaking has! Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez floats 70 percent tax on top earners to fund Green New Deal.
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Humor: A couple on a safari was going through Africa when a lion leaped out, attacking the husband.
As the lion was about to put the man's head in his mouth, the victim yelled to his wife, "Shoot! Shoot!"
The wife yelled back, "I can't, I'm out of space on the camera chip!"
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Dick
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1) The only cow in a small town in Poland stopped giving milk. The people did some research and found that they could buy a cow from Moscow for 2,000 rubles, or one from Minsk for 1,000 rubles. Being frugal,they bought the cow from Minsk. The cow was wonderful. It produced lots of milk all the time, and the people were amazed and very happy.
They decided to acquire a bull to mate with the cow and produce more cows like it. Then they would never have to worry about the milk supply again. They bought a bull and put it in the pasture with their beloved cow.
However, whenever the bull came close to the cow, the cow would move away. No matter what approach the bull tried, the cow would move away from the bull and he could not succeed in his quest.
The people were very upset and decided to ask the rabbi, who was very wise, what to do. They told the rabbi what was happening. "Whenever the bull approaches our cow, she moves away. If he approaches from the back, she moves forward. When he approaches her from the front, she backs off. An approach from the side and she just walks away to the other side.
" The rabbi thought about this for a minute and asked, "Did you buy this cow from Minsk?" The people were dumbfounded, since they had never mentioned where they had gotten the cow.
"You are truly a wise rabbi," they said. "How did you know we got the cow from Minsk?"
The rabbi answered sadly, "My wife is from Minsk."
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2)Even before being sworn in as the new Senator from Utah, Mitt Romney chose to make a scathing
attack on President Trump. This personal animus is contemptible. Ever since he left the governor’s
office in Massachusetts to seek higher office, his political career has been slouching.
During his presidential run in 2012, a few days before the election, his multi-million dollar computer-driven GOTV program, named Project ORCA, exploded. Instead of being idiot proof, it was idiotic.
As was his poor and wimpish performance in the 2nd presidential debate with Obama during which Mitt was
“Candied” by the moderator at Hofstra University. (Sorry to say that I was a member of his finance committee.)
During the 2016 presidential campaign season, Mitt saw fit to trash Trump at every turn. He obviously forgot that Trump endorsed him and made a big contribution to his 2012 debacle. After trump’s election in
2016, Mitt came sucking around to try and secure the job of Secretary of State and was interviewed by
Mr. Trump. No luck. Poor Mitt. He failed to understand that Mr. Trump is big on loyalty…very big, and
trashing the person you’re asking to hire you doesn’t add up to loyalty. In fact, it’s plain stupid.
Well, now he has a safe Senate seat but if he sits there and only bashes the president, he will prove
what a true cry baby he is. Playing the spoiler, doesn’t play well. Forget about 2020 Mitt,
or for that matter 2024 and 2028.
L----"
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3) Activating my beliefs
By Caroline B. Glick
Why the author-- a longtime JWR contributor -- is ending her weekly column
When I was 12 years old, my family took our first trip outside the United States.
We came to Israel on a two-week family tour. It was July 1982. The Lebanon War had just begun. In retrospect, it was the first step on what has become my lifelong Zionist journey.
I was moved by everything I saw. The IDF soldiers hitchhiking home for leave from the battlefields in Lebanon looked like movie stars. Ma’aleh Adumim, now a major city, was a clutch of mobile homes in the desert but the gleam in the eyes of the settlers showed the promise of what was to come.
The markets of Jerusalem, the beaches in Tel Aviv, the shells of Syrian tanks on the Golan Heights and the fish in the Sea of Galilee captivated my imagination.
The Western Wall awoke me to the immutable fact that the Nation of Israel, the Land of Israel and the Law of Israel are indivisible.
Hearing Hebrew, the language of prayer shouted out from every corner filled me with awe. And seeing the multiethnic society of Jews from every corner of the world shook me to my core. After two thousand years, in an act of will with no parallel in human history, Jews of all races, backgrounds, and cultures; Jews with unique, fervently kept traditions came home and began patching together a people forcibly separated for 50 generations.
During that first trip to Israel, I understood that the future of the Jewish people was being forged in Israel, not in the Diaspora, not even in my warm community on the south side of Chicago.
I loved America. But I wanted to move to Israel.
Nine years later, in 1991, two weeks after I finished college, I fulfilled my wish. I boarded an El Al flight to Tel Aviv with a one-way ticket in my hand. A week later, I took my first step towards the second stop on my Zionist journey: the Israel Defense Force. Two months after dropping down, I started basic training.
I served in the IDF for five and a half years, leaving as a captain. Most of my service was spent in negotiations sessions with the PLO. As the coordinator of negotiations on civil affairs with the Palestinians in the Defense Ministry, I was a core – if junior – member of the Israeli negotiating team during the Oslo peace process years.
In the IDF, as in all the stations I passed in my professional life, I viewed my work as a calling. I always believed that I had the ability to impact the country and the people for the better, and that it was my duty to try to do so.
For the past 18 years, as a writer in Israeli and international media, it has been my conviction that my job is to use my pen, my keyboard and my voice to shape and expand Israel’s maneuver room whether in relation to the international arena, to military questions, to legal affairs or to political issues.
The job of a commentator is to interpret reality. The media’s habit of simplifying issues by treating everything as an either-or proposition is disastrous for formulating policy. Israel’s options are rarely binary. On almost all issues, Israel has a full spectrum of options. Yet, due to media pressure, our leaders often miss them.
To advance its interests in the international arena, for instance, Israel doesn’t need to bow before foreign powers. It needs to show foreign powers that they want what Israel has to offer and that it is in their interest to work with Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the only prime minister Israel has had that fully understands and implements this basic truth.
The same is the case with the Palestinians. Israel has nothing to fear in its dealing with the Palestinians. The choice we were presented with for more than a generation – either peace with a Palestinian state or war without one – was a false and destructive conceit. It was based on a wide array of lies and delusions. I devoted hundreds of columns and my book, The Israeli Solution, to expose them.
So too, if we want to understand historic processes unfolding, we need to understand history. I saw it as my job as a columnist to explain the relevance of history to our current challenges and to expose the ignorance of much of what passes for historical wisdom in the popular discourse, whether in relation to German history, to Jewish history, to American history, or to Islamic history.
Over the past several years, I found myself returning over and over again to the study of basic issues of governance. This was no esoteric exploit.
Over the past several years, the term “rule of law” in Israel has been turned on its head. Rather than denote the dispassionate enforcement of duly promulgated laws, it has come to mean what President Reuven Rivlin once referred to as the tyranny of the “rule of law mafia,” that is, the rule of unchecked lawyers.
Israel’s Basic Law: Knesset defines the Knesset as the sovereign. That is because the public elects its members in national elections. Members of Knesset in turn, elect the government as the executive arm of the people’s will. That is how it works in democracies. The parliament legislates laws. The executive implements policies in accordance with the law and the mandate it receives from the public at the ballot box. The job of the judicial branch is to interpret laws.
Over the past several years, and with growing intensity in the past four years, the authority of the Knesset to promulgate laws has diminished. The combined forces of the attorney-general and the justices of the Supreme Court have seized not only the power to abrogate laws and interfere with the legislative process, but to dictate laws through legal opinions and judgments. The same goes for executive power. Not only have the justices and attorneys arrogated to themselves the power to cancel government decisions and policies, they have also asserted the power to dictate policies to the government.
Through these acts of the legal fraternity, the powers of Israel’s elected officials have been whittled down. This week we learned that Supreme Court president Esther Hayut has quietly empaneled a forum of 11 justices to determine the legality of Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People.
In Israel, Basic Laws are essentially the constitutional foundations of the state.
If Hayut goes through with adjudicating petitions against the law, even if the justices rule that the Basic Law is legal, by claiming the power to adjudicate a Basic Law, the justices will seize the power to undermine the foundations of the state.
The Law of Return, which is the anchor of Jewish peoplehood and the ingathering of exiles, has long been a red flag for post-Zionist radicals who reject Israel’s right to exist as a specifically Jewish state. There is every reason to believe that if the justices seize the power to undermine Basic Laws, they will not hesitate to go after the Law of Return.
Watching this dangerous trend of events, I have used my position as a columnist to warn the public about what is happening and to empower Israel’s politicians to fight for their powers. If Israel is to maintain its democracy, our elected officials must be empowered to challenge the legal fraternity and restore to the Knesset the sole power to legislate laws.
Given the gravity of the situation, the disputes over Israel’s borders, its energy policies, its immigration policies, its economic policies and its military policies become secondary concerns. The key question that hangs in the balance today is whether the Knesset will restore its power as the repository of the people’s will in accordance with law or will it become a mere debating society with the actual power to determine Israel’s future devolved entirely to bureaucrats ruled by a handful of unelected lawyers and judges? Because if the latter happens, the people will lose all ability to determine the outcome of every other aspect of national life.
Every once in a while, over the past year or two, I found myself wondering whether I should throw my hat into the ring and enter politics. Could I be effective in advancing the goal of restoring the powers of the Knesset from inside the Knesset or am I better off staying where I am? Since this was a purely hypothetical question, I left it open.
This brings me to my decision this week to move to a new stop on my Zionist journey.
This week I decided to respond positively to an offer from Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked and Education Minister Naftali Bennett to join their new party, the New Right (Hayamin Hehadash), and run on their Knesset slate.
True, there is more than one party that reflects my views in the Knesset, at least officially. But in recent years, the political leaders who have done the most to translate my positions into action have been Shaked and Bennett.
They share my concern for Israel’s future as a democracy. They dare to insist that to restore and strengthen Israeli democracy, the current power balance between bureaucrats on the one hand and elected officials on the other must be turned on its head. Whether they are discussing the vast expansion of the power of military lawyers over field commanders in the IDF, the necessity of enforcing the laws of Israel over its Arab citizens with the same alacrity as it is enforced over its Jewish citizens, or rejecting the notion that the Supreme Court has the power to overturn Basic Laws, Bennett and Shaked have consistently communicated and advanced positions I view as critical for the future of the country.
No less importantly for me as a proud Jew who never understood what I see as a largely artificial distinction between religious and secular Jews, their new party doesn’t seek to serve just one type of Israeli. It seeks to represent the full spectrum of the Israeli society that I saw and fell in love with, in all its rich diversity, in that pivotal first visit in the summer of 1982.
I am convinced that restoring Israel’s democratic institutions is the most urgent task we face today. And while I would have been happy to continue advocating for legal reform from my position in the media, when Bennett and Shaked asked me to join them in their efforts to advance this goal from the Knesset, I said yes with little hesitation.
The Zionist journey I began in 1982 has taken me places I could never have dreamed of. It is my deepest hope and my intention that on my next stop, I will have the privilege of advancing the Zionist enterprise I fell in love with so many years ago.
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4)
Trump Considers Dem as Mattis' Replacement
- by: AAN Staff
President Donald Trump is reportedly considering former Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) as outgoing Defense Secretary James Mattis' replacement. (The Daily Caller)
According to a report from The New York Times, Webb has been approached by representatives for both Vice President Mike Pence and acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney.
Representatives for Vice President Mike Pence and Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, have reached out to Mr. Webb, one of the three officials said. Separately, a senior Defense Department official confirmed that Mr. Webb’s name had been circulating at the White House. Those two and the third official all spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal discussions.
Webb’s vocal opposition to the Iraq war and former President Barack Obama’s Iran Deal — along with his belief that China should be dealt with aggressively — seem to align him with much of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy. He also fails to align with the more progressive Democrats on other key issues like climate change.
The Naval Academy graduate and Vietnam veteran also served as President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the Navy. While in Vietnam, he earned the Navy Cross, the Silver Star Medal, two Bronze Star Medals and two Purple Hearts.
Webb briefly entered the 2016 Democratic presidential primary but withdrew after the first debate where he admitted the enemy he was most proud of making was the Vietnamese soldier who wounded him, adding "but, he's not around right now to talk to."
4a)A Democrat already introduced bills to dismantle the electoral college, a move that would upset the careful balance established by the Founders.
The Daily Wire reports:
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) introduced two bills on Thursday, one to eliminate the electoral college and the other to prohibit presidents from pardoning themselves or their family members.A press release from Cohen’s office stated that the “senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, introduced two Constitutional Amendments today on the opening day of the new Congress. The first would eliminate the Electoral College and provide for the direct election of the President and Vice President of the United States. The second would limit the presidential pardon power by prohibiting presidents from pardoning themselves, members of their families, members of their administrations and their campaign staff.”“In two presidential elections since 2000, including the most recent one in which Hillary Clinton won 2.8 million more votes than her opponent, the winner of the popular vote did not win the election because of the distorting effect of the outdated Electoral College,” Cohen said. “Americans expect and deserve the winner of the popular vote to win office. More than a century ago, we amended our Constitution to provide for the direct election of U.S. Senators. It is past time to directly elect our President and Vice President.”“Presidents should not pardon themselves, their families, their administration or campaign staff,” Cohen continued. “This constitutional amendment would expressly prohibit this and any future president, from abusing the pardon power.”
These two bills would be ruled unconstitutional as they infringe on the President’s core powers of Article II. Democrats will not try to pass these as constitutional amendments, where these reforms could actually come in effect (although undesirable), because they know that the American people and the states would be against it.
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