An elderly man suffered a massive heart attack. The family drove wildly to get him to the emergency room. After what seemed like a very long wait the ER doctor appeared wearing his scrubs and a long face.
Sadly, he said, "I'm afraid Grandpa is brain-dead but his heart is still beating."
"Oh, Dear God," cried his wife, her hands clasped against her cheeks with shock. "We've never had a Democrat in the family before!"
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
GOP pick up seats and pop for 2012
WASHINGTON – Republican-leaning states will pick up a half dozen House seats thanks to the 2010 census, which found the nation's population growing more slowly than in past decades but still shifting to the South and West.
The Census Bureau announced Tuesday that the nation's population on April 1 was 308,745,538, up from 281.4 million a decade ago. The growth rate for the past decade was 9.7 percent, a slower pace than the 13.2 percent population increase from 1990 to 2000.
Only one state, Michigan, lost population during the past decade. Nevada, with a 35 percent increase, was the fastest-growing state.
The new numbers are a boon for Republicans, with Texas leading the way among GOP-leaning states that will gain House seats at the Rust Belt's expense. Following each once-a-decade census, the nation must reapportion the House's 435 districts to make them roughly equal in population, with each state getting at least one seat.
That triggers an often contentious and partisan process in many states, which will draw new congressional district lines that can help or hurt either party.
Texas will gain four new House seats, and Florida will gain two. Gaining one each are Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah and Washington.
The Census Bureau announced Tuesday that the nation's population on April 1 was 308,745,538, up from 281.4 million a decade ago. The growth rate for the past decade was 9.7 percent, a slower pace than the 13.2 percent population increase from 1990 to 2000.
Only one state, Michigan, lost population during the past decade. Nevada, with a 35 percent increase, was the fastest-growing state.
The new numbers are a boon for Republicans, with Texas leading the way among GOP-leaning states that will gain House seats at the Rust Belt's expense. Following each once-a-decade census, the nation must reapportion the House's 435 districts to make them roughly equal in population, with each state getting at least one seat.
That triggers an often contentious and partisan process in many states, which will draw new congressional district lines that can help or hurt either party.
Texas will gain four new House seats, and Florida will gain two. Gaining one each are Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah and Washington.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Obama's obsession with settlements proven and dumb
the mainstream media has been completely silent about one significant revelation from the Wikileaks release- that the Administrations' approach to linkage in the Middle East has had it completely backwards- dealing with the Iranian nuclear program, and their aggressive interference in many areas in the region, was on the minds of all area leaders. That should have been the focus of U.S policy. Instead the Obama team chose to make Israeli West Bank settlements the issue arguing the following:
1. Israel needs to completely halt all "settlement construction" beyond the green line.
2. With that step, the Palestinians and Israelis will meet for fruitful negotiations, and solve all their problems
3. The Arab states will then back the U.S in getting tougher sanctions against Iran.
4. Iran will abandon its nuclear weapons program.
Of course, as for #2, there has been almost no progress in 63 years, but hey, time is not really a factor when we are discussing the Iranian nuclear program, is it? As for sanctions, do they appear to have done the job (#4)? My conclusion is that the two year obsession with settlements reflects something more than a "strategy" for dealing with Iran. Put quite simply, the Obama administration has an obsession with settlements.
http://tinyurl.com/387ppda
Barry Rubin on the same subject: http://tinyurl.com/35d2mfv
1. Israel needs to completely halt all "settlement construction" beyond the green line.
2. With that step, the Palestinians and Israelis will meet for fruitful negotiations, and solve all their problems
3. The Arab states will then back the U.S in getting tougher sanctions against Iran.
4. Iran will abandon its nuclear weapons program.
Of course, as for #2, there has been almost no progress in 63 years, but hey, time is not really a factor when we are discussing the Iranian nuclear program, is it? As for sanctions, do they appear to have done the job (#4)? My conclusion is that the two year obsession with settlements reflects something more than a "strategy" for dealing with Iran. Put quite simply, the Obama administration has an obsession with settlements.
http://tinyurl.com/387ppda
Barry Rubin on the same subject: http://tinyurl.com/35d2mfv
Thursday, December 9, 2010
T Party pro Israel
Tea party
The myth of the anti-Israel Tea Party
Jennifer Rubin, who recently moved from Commentary magazine to take a blogging seat at the Washington Post, writes that the idea that the Tea Party is anti-Israel is a myth:
The emergence of the Tea Party, a grassroots movement on the right dedicated to fiscal discipline, set up a potential conflict in the Republican Party between hawks and neo-isolationists. As things have panned out, however, the neo-isolationists have largely been routed. This is nowhere more in evidence than with regard to support for Israel.
In conversations with multiple Republican leaders and their advisors, I've detected not a whiff of neo-isolationism, nor, frankly, anything but robust support for Israel (coupled with criticism of the Obama administration's sometimes harsh public rhetoric about the Jewish state). A senior Senate aide tells me: "This is a freshmen class of Republicans whose pro-Israel credentials are beyond dispute by anyone except fierce partisan Democrats and liberal journalists with anti-GOP blinders. In fact, these new Republicans would make the Maccabees proud."
...The executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Matt Brooks, told me this morning that it is "wishful thinking" by the left that the Tea Party is anti-Israel. He argues, "Survey after survey shows that grassroots Republicans are more pro-Israel than grassroots Democrats by a consistent margin of almost 2:1. The trouble going forward for Israel in the body politic comes from the progressive left, not the from the right." He adds that "it is clear to anyone who follows politics that Ron Paul is way outside of the mainstream of the GOP."
The myth of the anti-Israel Tea Party
Jennifer Rubin, who recently moved from Commentary magazine to take a blogging seat at the Washington Post, writes that the idea that the Tea Party is anti-Israel is a myth:
The emergence of the Tea Party, a grassroots movement on the right dedicated to fiscal discipline, set up a potential conflict in the Republican Party between hawks and neo-isolationists. As things have panned out, however, the neo-isolationists have largely been routed. This is nowhere more in evidence than with regard to support for Israel.
In conversations with multiple Republican leaders and their advisors, I've detected not a whiff of neo-isolationism, nor, frankly, anything but robust support for Israel (coupled with criticism of the Obama administration's sometimes harsh public rhetoric about the Jewish state). A senior Senate aide tells me: "This is a freshmen class of Republicans whose pro-Israel credentials are beyond dispute by anyone except fierce partisan Democrats and liberal journalists with anti-GOP blinders. In fact, these new Republicans would make the Maccabees proud."
...The executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Matt Brooks, told me this morning that it is "wishful thinking" by the left that the Tea Party is anti-Israel. He argues, "Survey after survey shows that grassroots Republicans are more pro-Israel than grassroots Democrats by a consistent margin of almost 2:1. The trouble going forward for Israel in the body politic comes from the progressive left, not the from the right." He adds that "it is clear to anyone who follows politics that Ron Paul is way outside of the mainstream of the GOP."
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
pc fear of Islamiphobia destroying America
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Barry Rubin: How terrorists and their supporters infiltrate the US Government and influence policySunday, December 5, 2010 8:48 AM
From: "Ed Lasky"Add sender to Contacts
To: edlasky@att.net
There is a very important — one might even say life-and-death — distinction that should be made in considering U.S. counterterrorism policy. Certainly, U.S. forces have had many successes in stopping intended terrorist attacks against the United States. Yet there have also been a number of failures. How to distinguish what made the difference?
The successes in the post-September 11 era have come when the techniques of police and military work or intelligence-gathering were used against full-time terrorists. Indeed, an observer could sum up the handling of terrorism in the United States in the almost-decade since September 11 by saying there have been no major attacks, and the policy has been successful.
When it comes to organizations planning attacks, this approach works very well. But when the threat involves individuals or small groups being radicalized and perhaps joining or supporting terrorist groups, the record is much worse.
The weakness is in analysis, profiling, decision-making, and understanding the nature of the enemy ideology. As a result, there have been a number of smaller attacks, including some not counted at all by a government that wants to keep its batting average high, and some near-misses that were averted due more to luck than to skill.
In addition, a huge amount of money has been wasted and effort misdirected, as many are coming to see regarding the current methods of airport security.
In understanding these vital issues one can read no better work than Patrick Poole’s 10 Failures of the U.S. Government on the Domestic Islamist Threat. (Patrick Poole is a frequent PJM contributor.)
He provides ten case studies, each of which is hair-raising, and none of which, arguably, has led to major corrective action. At the root of each one is a failure or refusal to comprehend revolutionary Islamism or the bureaucratic fear of taking on the enemy. Moreover, some cases show how the other side has even gained political influence in America.
Consider Abdulrahman Alamoudi, the Muslim leader who most frequently visited the Clinton White House. Poole rightly describes Alamoudi as:
The most prominent Islamic activist leader in America at the time, he had infiltrated the highest levels of political power. … [He was asked] by the Defense Department to establish the military’s Muslim chaplain corps, and appointed by the State Department to serve as a civilian ambassador, taking six taxpayer-funded trips to the Middle East. … Just days after the 9/11 attacks, he appeared with President Bush and other Muslim leaders at a press conference at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. despite his public comments a year earlier at a rally just steps from the White House identifying himself as a supporter of the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist organizations.
In July 2005 the Treasury Department revealed that Alamoudi had been one of al-Qaeda’s top fundraisers ….
Go back and reread the last two paragraphs. Shouldn’t this experience have created great skepticism about proclaiming Muslim leaders to be moderate without critically examining their record? Instead, the opposite has happened.
Then there was Ali Mohamed, a man who trained American soldiers on Arab culture and infiltrated the U.S. Army’s training program for intelligence officers in the Middle East. Simultaneously, he was teaching Islamist militants in the United States — including the cell that carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — how to shoot and blow things up. Later, he became al-Qaeda’s chief military expert.
How might the Army have known to distrust this man? Well, he had been expelled from the Egyptian army because of his terrorist sympathies, and Egypt warned the United States about him.
We’ve heard a lot lately about al-Qaeda’s new star, Anwar al-Awlaki, who has been behind many of the recent terrorist attacks on America. But did you know, as Poole writes:
Despite being subject to a FBI investigation initiated in 1999, and having been interviewed by the FBI at least four times after 9/11 for his contacts with two of the hijackers, Al-Awlaki was leading prayers for congressional Muslim staffers inside the U.S. Capitol. … Al-Awlaki was also feted at a luncheon inside the still-smoldering Pentagon following the 9/11 attacks …
Poole also writes of:
… Anwar Hajjaj, a local Islamic cleric who still leads prayers for the Congressional Muslim Staff Association. Hajjaj headed the Taibah International Aid Association, which was designated a global terrorist organization by the Treasury Department in May 2004.
And about lobbyist Faisal Gill, appointed to a senior post in the Department of Homeland Security:
… a former aide to al-Qaeda fundraiser Abdurahman Alamoudi … [Gill] had omitted his previous employment as director of government relations for Alamoudi’s American Muslim Council on the Standard Form 86 required for Gill’s security clearance. Gill had been at the forefront of AMC’s political efforts to end the use of secret evidence in terrorism deportation proceedings. In his position in the Homeland Security Intelligence division, he had access to a wide range of top-secret information, including vulnerabilities of national critical infrastructure.
Gill was investigated and cleared at the time, despite the fact that he had lied.
Hesham Islam has been an especially powerful figure: the senior advisor for international affairs for Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England and the Pentagon’s point-man for Muslim outreach. When one officer wrote a good study of revolutionary Islamist ideology, Islam campaigned to get him fired. Other officials told me that Islam tried to push them out also.
Islam’s autobiography on a Defense Department site contained clear contradictions and omissions, while his own academic work was rather shockingly radical. His father had worked for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, while Islam claimed that he had survived a ship sinking that apparently never happened.
This study doesn’t include many other cases, most notably that of Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood terrorist, where the Army’s negligence was responsible for the tragedy. At the time, I called Hasan the first terrorist to give an academic lecture with Power Point — to an Army audience — explaining his intention to commit a terrorist attack. Since then, things haven’t improved, including the Army’s report that didn’t even dare to talk about jihad.
Let’s be clear. There should be no witch-hunt of Muslims. This is about applying the same kind of scrutiny to Muslims that anyone else gets. The truth: bureaucrats are afraid to follow clear leads and point out obvious problems, lest their careers be injured by accusations of Islamophobia.
During the 1930s, it was regarded as impolite to look into whether there were Soviet agents in the U.S. government. Despite the lies and exaggerations of certain people later, there was a very serious Communist infiltration that damaged U.S. interests.
There is clearly a parallel effort — no matter how uncoordinated and individual in nature — today. Read Poole’s study, and then demand better media coverage and government response to this problem.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition, Viking-Penguin), the paperback edition of The Truth about Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan), and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). The website of the GLORIA Center is at http://www.gloria-center.org and of his blog, Rubin Reports, at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.
Barry Rubin: How terrorists and their supporters infiltrate the US Government and influence policySunday, December 5, 2010 8:48 AM
From: "Ed Lasky"
To: edlasky@att.net
There is a very important — one might even say life-and-death — distinction that should be made in considering U.S. counterterrorism policy. Certainly, U.S. forces have had many successes in stopping intended terrorist attacks against the United States. Yet there have also been a number of failures. How to distinguish what made the difference?
The successes in the post-September 11 era have come when the techniques of police and military work or intelligence-gathering were used against full-time terrorists. Indeed, an observer could sum up the handling of terrorism in the United States in the almost-decade since September 11 by saying there have been no major attacks, and the policy has been successful.
When it comes to organizations planning attacks, this approach works very well. But when the threat involves individuals or small groups being radicalized and perhaps joining or supporting terrorist groups, the record is much worse.
The weakness is in analysis, profiling, decision-making, and understanding the nature of the enemy ideology. As a result, there have been a number of smaller attacks, including some not counted at all by a government that wants to keep its batting average high, and some near-misses that were averted due more to luck than to skill.
In addition, a huge amount of money has been wasted and effort misdirected, as many are coming to see regarding the current methods of airport security.
In understanding these vital issues one can read no better work than Patrick Poole’s 10 Failures of the U.S. Government on the Domestic Islamist Threat. (Patrick Poole is a frequent PJM contributor.)
He provides ten case studies, each of which is hair-raising, and none of which, arguably, has led to major corrective action. At the root of each one is a failure or refusal to comprehend revolutionary Islamism or the bureaucratic fear of taking on the enemy. Moreover, some cases show how the other side has even gained political influence in America.
Consider Abdulrahman Alamoudi, the Muslim leader who most frequently visited the Clinton White House. Poole rightly describes Alamoudi as:
The most prominent Islamic activist leader in America at the time, he had infiltrated the highest levels of political power. … [He was asked] by the Defense Department to establish the military’s Muslim chaplain corps, and appointed by the State Department to serve as a civilian ambassador, taking six taxpayer-funded trips to the Middle East. … Just days after the 9/11 attacks, he appeared with President Bush and other Muslim leaders at a press conference at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. despite his public comments a year earlier at a rally just steps from the White House identifying himself as a supporter of the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist organizations.
In July 2005 the Treasury Department revealed that Alamoudi had been one of al-Qaeda’s top fundraisers ….
Go back and reread the last two paragraphs. Shouldn’t this experience have created great skepticism about proclaiming Muslim leaders to be moderate without critically examining their record? Instead, the opposite has happened.
Then there was Ali Mohamed, a man who trained American soldiers on Arab culture and infiltrated the U.S. Army’s training program for intelligence officers in the Middle East. Simultaneously, he was teaching Islamist militants in the United States — including the cell that carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — how to shoot and blow things up. Later, he became al-Qaeda’s chief military expert.
How might the Army have known to distrust this man? Well, he had been expelled from the Egyptian army because of his terrorist sympathies, and Egypt warned the United States about him.
We’ve heard a lot lately about al-Qaeda’s new star, Anwar al-Awlaki, who has been behind many of the recent terrorist attacks on America. But did you know, as Poole writes:
Despite being subject to a FBI investigation initiated in 1999, and having been interviewed by the FBI at least four times after 9/11 for his contacts with two of the hijackers, Al-Awlaki was leading prayers for congressional Muslim staffers inside the U.S. Capitol. … Al-Awlaki was also feted at a luncheon inside the still-smoldering Pentagon following the 9/11 attacks …
Poole also writes of:
… Anwar Hajjaj, a local Islamic cleric who still leads prayers for the Congressional Muslim Staff Association. Hajjaj headed the Taibah International Aid Association, which was designated a global terrorist organization by the Treasury Department in May 2004.
And about lobbyist Faisal Gill, appointed to a senior post in the Department of Homeland Security:
… a former aide to al-Qaeda fundraiser Abdurahman Alamoudi … [Gill] had omitted his previous employment as director of government relations for Alamoudi’s American Muslim Council on the Standard Form 86 required for Gill’s security clearance. Gill had been at the forefront of AMC’s political efforts to end the use of secret evidence in terrorism deportation proceedings. In his position in the Homeland Security Intelligence division, he had access to a wide range of top-secret information, including vulnerabilities of national critical infrastructure.
Gill was investigated and cleared at the time, despite the fact that he had lied.
Hesham Islam has been an especially powerful figure: the senior advisor for international affairs for Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England and the Pentagon’s point-man for Muslim outreach. When one officer wrote a good study of revolutionary Islamist ideology, Islam campaigned to get him fired. Other officials told me that Islam tried to push them out also.
Islam’s autobiography on a Defense Department site contained clear contradictions and omissions, while his own academic work was rather shockingly radical. His father had worked for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, while Islam claimed that he had survived a ship sinking that apparently never happened.
This study doesn’t include many other cases, most notably that of Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood terrorist, where the Army’s negligence was responsible for the tragedy. At the time, I called Hasan the first terrorist to give an academic lecture with Power Point — to an Army audience — explaining his intention to commit a terrorist attack. Since then, things haven’t improved, including the Army’s report that didn’t even dare to talk about jihad.
Let’s be clear. There should be no witch-hunt of Muslims. This is about applying the same kind of scrutiny to Muslims that anyone else gets. The truth: bureaucrats are afraid to follow clear leads and point out obvious problems, lest their careers be injured by accusations of Islamophobia.
During the 1930s, it was regarded as impolite to look into whether there were Soviet agents in the U.S. government. Despite the lies and exaggerations of certain people later, there was a very serious Communist infiltration that damaged U.S. interests.
There is clearly a parallel effort — no matter how uncoordinated and individual in nature — today. Read Poole’s study, and then demand better media coverage and government response to this problem.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition, Viking-Penguin), the paperback edition of The Truth about Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan), and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). The website of the GLORIA Center is at http://www.gloria-center.org and of his blog, Rubin Reports, at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
stimulus waste
Why the Spending Stimulus Failed
New economic research shows why lower tax rates do far more to spur growth.
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By MICHAEL J. BOSKIN
President Obama and congressional leaders meeting yesterday confronted calls for four key fiscal decisions: short-run fiscal stimulus, medium-term fiscal consolidation, and long-run tax and entitlement reform. Mr. Obama wants more spending, especially on infrastructure, and higher tax rates on income, capital gains and dividends (by allowing the lower Bush rates to expire). The intellectual and political left argues that the failed $814 billion stimulus in 2009 wasn't big enough, and that spending control any time soon will derail the economy.
But economic theory, history and statistical studies reveal that more taxes and spending are more likely to harm than help the economy. Those who demand spending control and oppose tax hikes hold the intellectual high ground.
Writing during the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes argued that "sticky" wages and prices would not fall to clear the market when demand declines, so high unemployment would persist. Government spending produced a "multiplier" to output and income; as each dollar is spent, the recipient spends most of it, and so on. Ditto tax cuts and transfers, but the multiplier is assumed smaller.
OpinionJournal.com Columnist John Fund on the tax debate within the Democratic caucus, and on the fight for key committee chairmanships in the House.
Macroeconomics since Keynes has incorporated the effects of longer time horizons, expectations about future incomes and policies, and incentives (including marginal tax rates) on economic decisions.
Temporary small tax rebates, as in 2008 and 2009, result in only a few cents per dollar in spending. The bulk (according to economists such as Franco Modigliani and Milton Friedman) or all (according to Robert Barro of Harvard) is saved, as people spread any increased consumption over many years or anticipate future taxes necessary to finance the debt. Empirical studies (such as those by my colleague Robert Hall and Rick Mishkin of Columbia) conclude that most consumption is based on longer-term considerations.
In a dynamic economy, many parts are moving simultaneously and it is difficult to disentangle cause and effect. Taxes may be cut and spending increased at the same time and those may coincide with natural business cycle dynamics and monetary policy shifts.
Using powerful statistical methods to separate these effects in U.S. data, Andrew Mountford of the University of London and Harald Uhlig of the University of Chicago conclude that the small initial spending multiplier turns negative by the start of the second year. In a new cross-national time series study, Ethan Ilzetzki of the London School of Economics and Enrique Mendoza and Carlos Vegh of the University of Maryland conclude that in open economies with flexible exchange rates, "a fiscal expansion leads to no significant output gains."
My colleagues John Cogan and John Taylor, with Volker Wieland and Tobias Cwik, demonstrate that government purchases have a GDP impact far smaller in New Keynesian than Old Keynesian models and quickly crowd out the private sector. They estimate the effect of the February 2009 stimulus at a puny 0.2% of GDP by now.
By contrast, the last two major tax cuts—President Reagan's in 1981-83 and President George W. Bush's in 2003—boosted growth. They lowered marginal tax rates and were longer lasting, both keys to success. In a survey of fiscal policy changes in the OECD over the past four decades, Harvard's Albert Alesina and Silvia Ardagna conclude that tax cuts have been far more likely to increase growth than has more spending.
Former Obama adviser Christina Romer and David Romer of the University of California, Berkeley, estimate a tax-cut multiplier of 3.0, meaning $1 of lower taxes raises short-run output by $3. Messrs. Mountford and Uhlig show that substantial tax cuts had a far larger impact on output and employment than spending increases, with a multiplier up to 5.0.
View Full Image
Associated Press
Conversely, a tax increase is very damaging. Mr. Barro and Bain Capital's Charles Redlick estimate large negative effects of increased marginal tax rates on GDP. The best stimulus now is to stop the impending tax hikes. Mr. Alesina and Ms. Ardagna also conclude that spending cuts are more likely to reduce deficits and debt-to-GDP ratios, and less likely to cause recessions, than are tax increases.
These empirical studies leave many leading economists dubious about the ability of government spending to boost the economy in the short run. Worse, the large long-term costs of debt-financed spending are ignored in most studies of short-run fiscal stimulus and even more so in the political debate.
Mr. Uhlig estimates that a dollar of deficit-financed spending costs the economy a present value of $3.40. The spending would have to be remarkably productive, both in its own right and in generating jobs and income, for it to be worth even half that future cost. The University of Maryland's Carmen Reinhart, Harvard's Ken Rogoff and the International Monetary Fund all conclude that the high government debt-to-GDP ratios we are approaching damage growth severely.
The complexity of a dynamic market economy is not easily captured even by sophisticated modeling (an idea stressed by Friedrich Hayek and Robert Solow). But based on the best economic evidence, we should reject increased spending and increased taxes.
If anything, we should lower marginal effective corporate and personal tax rates further (for example, along the lines suggested by the bipartisan deficit commission's Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson). We should quickly enact an enforceable gradual phase-down of the spending explosion of recent years. That's what the president and congressional leaders should initiate. Then let the equally vital task of long-run tax and entitlement reform proceed.
Mr. Boskin is a professor of economics at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush.
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New economic research shows why lower tax rates do far more to spur growth.
Article
Video
Comments (325)
MORE IN OPINION »
EmailPrint
Save This
↓ More
+ More
Text
By MICHAEL J. BOSKIN
President Obama and congressional leaders meeting yesterday confronted calls for four key fiscal decisions: short-run fiscal stimulus, medium-term fiscal consolidation, and long-run tax and entitlement reform. Mr. Obama wants more spending, especially on infrastructure, and higher tax rates on income, capital gains and dividends (by allowing the lower Bush rates to expire). The intellectual and political left argues that the failed $814 billion stimulus in 2009 wasn't big enough, and that spending control any time soon will derail the economy.
But economic theory, history and statistical studies reveal that more taxes and spending are more likely to harm than help the economy. Those who demand spending control and oppose tax hikes hold the intellectual high ground.
Writing during the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes argued that "sticky" wages and prices would not fall to clear the market when demand declines, so high unemployment would persist. Government spending produced a "multiplier" to output and income; as each dollar is spent, the recipient spends most of it, and so on. Ditto tax cuts and transfers, but the multiplier is assumed smaller.
OpinionJournal.com Columnist John Fund on the tax debate within the Democratic caucus, and on the fight for key committee chairmanships in the House.
Macroeconomics since Keynes has incorporated the effects of longer time horizons, expectations about future incomes and policies, and incentives (including marginal tax rates) on economic decisions.
Temporary small tax rebates, as in 2008 and 2009, result in only a few cents per dollar in spending. The bulk (according to economists such as Franco Modigliani and Milton Friedman) or all (according to Robert Barro of Harvard) is saved, as people spread any increased consumption over many years or anticipate future taxes necessary to finance the debt. Empirical studies (such as those by my colleague Robert Hall and Rick Mishkin of Columbia) conclude that most consumption is based on longer-term considerations.
In a dynamic economy, many parts are moving simultaneously and it is difficult to disentangle cause and effect. Taxes may be cut and spending increased at the same time and those may coincide with natural business cycle dynamics and monetary policy shifts.
Using powerful statistical methods to separate these effects in U.S. data, Andrew Mountford of the University of London and Harald Uhlig of the University of Chicago conclude that the small initial spending multiplier turns negative by the start of the second year. In a new cross-national time series study, Ethan Ilzetzki of the London School of Economics and Enrique Mendoza and Carlos Vegh of the University of Maryland conclude that in open economies with flexible exchange rates, "a fiscal expansion leads to no significant output gains."
My colleagues John Cogan and John Taylor, with Volker Wieland and Tobias Cwik, demonstrate that government purchases have a GDP impact far smaller in New Keynesian than Old Keynesian models and quickly crowd out the private sector. They estimate the effect of the February 2009 stimulus at a puny 0.2% of GDP by now.
By contrast, the last two major tax cuts—President Reagan's in 1981-83 and President George W. Bush's in 2003—boosted growth. They lowered marginal tax rates and were longer lasting, both keys to success. In a survey of fiscal policy changes in the OECD over the past four decades, Harvard's Albert Alesina and Silvia Ardagna conclude that tax cuts have been far more likely to increase growth than has more spending.
Former Obama adviser Christina Romer and David Romer of the University of California, Berkeley, estimate a tax-cut multiplier of 3.0, meaning $1 of lower taxes raises short-run output by $3. Messrs. Mountford and Uhlig show that substantial tax cuts had a far larger impact on output and employment than spending increases, with a multiplier up to 5.0.
View Full Image
Associated Press
Conversely, a tax increase is very damaging. Mr. Barro and Bain Capital's Charles Redlick estimate large negative effects of increased marginal tax rates on GDP. The best stimulus now is to stop the impending tax hikes. Mr. Alesina and Ms. Ardagna also conclude that spending cuts are more likely to reduce deficits and debt-to-GDP ratios, and less likely to cause recessions, than are tax increases.
These empirical studies leave many leading economists dubious about the ability of government spending to boost the economy in the short run. Worse, the large long-term costs of debt-financed spending are ignored in most studies of short-run fiscal stimulus and even more so in the political debate.
Mr. Uhlig estimates that a dollar of deficit-financed spending costs the economy a present value of $3.40. The spending would have to be remarkably productive, both in its own right and in generating jobs and income, for it to be worth even half that future cost. The University of Maryland's Carmen Reinhart, Harvard's Ken Rogoff and the International Monetary Fund all conclude that the high government debt-to-GDP ratios we are approaching damage growth severely.
The complexity of a dynamic market economy is not easily captured even by sophisticated modeling (an idea stressed by Friedrich Hayek and Robert Solow). But based on the best economic evidence, we should reject increased spending and increased taxes.
If anything, we should lower marginal effective corporate and personal tax rates further (for example, along the lines suggested by the bipartisan deficit commission's Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson). We should quickly enact an enforceable gradual phase-down of the spending explosion of recent years. That's what the president and congressional leaders should initiate. Then let the equally vital task of long-run tax and entitlement reform proceed.
Mr. Boskin is a professor of economics at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush.
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Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Kerry is an enemy of Israel
1/29/wikileaked_john_kerry_calls_for_israel_to_cede_golan_heights_and_east_jerusalem
He has been characterized as Syria’s best friend in the Senate. He chairs the senate Foreign Relations Committee. Shocked by what he saw in Gaza (The luxury mall? The brutalization of Christians? The teaching of anti-Semitism? The indoctrination of children? I don’t think that is what he meant).
The hits keep coming, courtesy of Wikileaks:
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WikiLeaked: John Kerry calls for Israel to cede Golan Heights and East Jerusalem
Posted By Josh Rogin http://www.foreignpolicy.com/images/091022_meta_block.gifMonday, November 29, 2010 - 12:44 PM http://www.foreignpolicy.com/images/091022_meta_block.gifhttp://www.foreignpolicy.com/images/091022_more_icon.gifShare
On a February trip to the Middle East, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry (D-MA) told Qatari leaders that the Golan Heights should be returned to Syria, that a Palestinian capital should be established in East Jerusalem as part of the Arab-Israeli peace process, and that he was "shocked" by what he saw on a visit to Gaza.
Kerry discussed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in a visit to Qatar during separate meetings with Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani and the Emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa, as revealed by the disclosure of diplomatic cables by the website WikiLeaks.
The emir told Kerry to focus on Syria as the path toward resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Kerry agreed with the emir that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a man who wants change but pointed out that his arming of Hezbollah and interference in Lebanese politics were unhelpful. Kerry said that Assad "needs to make a bolder move and take risks" for peace, and that he should be "more statesman-like." Kerry also agreed with the emir that the Golan Heights should be given back to Syria at some point.
"The Chairman added that Netanyahu also needs to compromise and work the return of the Golan Heights into a formula for peace," the diplomatic cable reported.
He has been characterized as Syria’s best friend in the Senate. He chairs the senate Foreign Relations Committee. Shocked by what he saw in Gaza (The luxury mall? The brutalization of Christians? The teaching of anti-Semitism? The indoctrination of children? I don’t think that is what he meant).
The hits keep coming, courtesy of Wikileaks:
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WikiLeaked: John Kerry calls for Israel to cede Golan Heights and East Jerusalem
Posted By Josh Rogin http://www.foreignpolicy.com/images/091022_meta_block.gifMonday, November 29, 2010 - 12:44 PM http://www.foreignpolicy.com/images/091022_meta_block.gifhttp://www.foreignpolicy.com/images/091022_more_icon.gifShare
On a February trip to the Middle East, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry (D-MA) told Qatari leaders that the Golan Heights should be returned to Syria, that a Palestinian capital should be established in East Jerusalem as part of the Arab-Israeli peace process, and that he was "shocked" by what he saw on a visit to Gaza.
Kerry discussed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in a visit to Qatar during separate meetings with Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani and the Emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa, as revealed by the disclosure of diplomatic cables by the website WikiLeaks.
The emir told Kerry to focus on Syria as the path toward resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Kerry agreed with the emir that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a man who wants change but pointed out that his arming of Hezbollah and interference in Lebanese politics were unhelpful. Kerry said that Assad "needs to make a bolder move and take risks" for peace, and that he should be "more statesman-like." Kerry also agreed with the emir that the Golan Heights should be given back to Syria at some point.
"The Chairman added that Netanyahu also needs to compromise and work the return of the Golan Heights into a formula for peace," the diplomatic cable reported.
Desperate Obama wants Aipac to lobby for START
Jonathan S. Tobin - 12.01.2010 - 7:26 AM
The call by Democratic senators Chuck Schumer and Carl Levin for AIPAC to back passage of the stalled START treaty with Russia speaks volumes about the growing desperation of both the White House and its Senate allies.
The administration is reportedly going all-out to push Jewish groups to lobby for the treaty, but it is unlikely that AIPAC will succumb to the pressure. The group has been scrupulous about sticking to its agenda of working only on behalf of Israel-related issues, a policy that keeps it strictly neutral on arms control measures like START. Nevertheless, Schumer and Levin claim that friends of Israel are obligated to back a measure that is key to Obama’s “reset” of relations with Russia because it is the price the United States must pay to keep the Medvedev/Putin regime on board with the effort to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear capacity.
That’s an argument that the liberal-leaning Anti-Defamation League as well as Obama’s cheering section at the National Jewish Democratic Council and J Street have accepted, though the latter group seems to be backing it more out of a knee-jerk reaction to any appeasement measure rather than concern about Iranian nukes. But this selling point is based on a false assumption about both Russia’s intentions and its interests.
While the need to build an anti-Iranian coalition is something all friends of Israel care about, it is far from clear that Obama’s impulse to sacrifice America’s own defense interests in the cause of making the authoritarian regime in Moscow more comfortable is something that will tangibly impact the ability of the international community to confront Tehran. The Russians have exacted a high price from Obama for their half-hearted support for tepid sanctions on Iran that are clearly inadequate to the task, even though it is obviously just as much in their interest to stop Tehran as it is in the rest of the international community’s.
Moreover, once we strip away the talk about this treaty’s being essential to Iran policy, it is easy to see that its passage has more to do with Obama’s fetish about arms control agreements than anything else, and it is on the merits of that issue alone that this issue should be decided.
As for Jewish groups that might be tempted to wade in on START, they also need to understand that the push to pass the treaty before the end of the year in Congress’s lame duck session smacks of the sort of partisanship that groups like AIPAC and the ADL ought to avoid. While Jewish Democrats are fond of castigating the GOP for attempting to win votes by comparing its record on Israel to that of the Democrats, what’s going on here is a far more blatant instance of Jewish groups carrying the water for one side of the political aisle. The Senate ought to wait until January, when newly elected members are seated and will have a chance to consider this treaty. And Jewish and pro-Israel organizations should stay out of a fight that has everything to do with the Obama administration’s foreign policy obsessions and little to do with the defense of Israel.
The call by Democratic senators Chuck Schumer and Carl Levin for AIPAC to back passage of the stalled START treaty with Russia speaks volumes about the growing desperation of both the White House and its Senate allies.
The administration is reportedly going all-out to push Jewish groups to lobby for the treaty, but it is unlikely that AIPAC will succumb to the pressure. The group has been scrupulous about sticking to its agenda of working only on behalf of Israel-related issues, a policy that keeps it strictly neutral on arms control measures like START. Nevertheless, Schumer and Levin claim that friends of Israel are obligated to back a measure that is key to Obama’s “reset” of relations with Russia because it is the price the United States must pay to keep the Medvedev/Putin regime on board with the effort to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear capacity.
That’s an argument that the liberal-leaning Anti-Defamation League as well as Obama’s cheering section at the National Jewish Democratic Council and J Street have accepted, though the latter group seems to be backing it more out of a knee-jerk reaction to any appeasement measure rather than concern about Iranian nukes. But this selling point is based on a false assumption about both Russia’s intentions and its interests.
While the need to build an anti-Iranian coalition is something all friends of Israel care about, it is far from clear that Obama’s impulse to sacrifice America’s own defense interests in the cause of making the authoritarian regime in Moscow more comfortable is something that will tangibly impact the ability of the international community to confront Tehran. The Russians have exacted a high price from Obama for their half-hearted support for tepid sanctions on Iran that are clearly inadequate to the task, even though it is obviously just as much in their interest to stop Tehran as it is in the rest of the international community’s.
Moreover, once we strip away the talk about this treaty’s being essential to Iran policy, it is easy to see that its passage has more to do with Obama’s fetish about arms control agreements than anything else, and it is on the merits of that issue alone that this issue should be decided.
As for Jewish groups that might be tempted to wade in on START, they also need to understand that the push to pass the treaty before the end of the year in Congress’s lame duck session smacks of the sort of partisanship that groups like AIPAC and the ADL ought to avoid. While Jewish Democrats are fond of castigating the GOP for attempting to win votes by comparing its record on Israel to that of the Democrats, what’s going on here is a far more blatant instance of Jewish groups carrying the water for one side of the political aisle. The Senate ought to wait until January, when newly elected members are seated and will have a chance to consider this treaty. And Jewish and pro-Israel organizations should stay out of a fight that has everything to do with the Obama administration’s foreign policy obsessions and little to do with the defense of Israel.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Scott Johnson on powerline.blog
The Obama administration has a message for the world. The message is something along these lines: The United States is very bad, but Barack Obama is very good. He seeks to redeem America from its evil.
Eye on the UN has compiled the disgusting video below of the United States abasing itself before some of the most reprehensible regimes in the world. I believe this is what goes under the name of "smart diplomacy" in the Obama administration.
The video depicts in condensed form the three-hour appearance of the United States in the dock at the UN Human Rights Council to present its first-ever universal periodic review report and receive recommendations for improvement from council members. Eye on the UN's Anne Bayefsky explained at the time that 56 countries lined up for the opportunity to have at the U.S. representatives, many standing in line overnight for the opporunity to be near the top of the list. Making it to the head of the line were Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, Iran, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and North Korea.
Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner made an appearance to play his designated role demeaning the United States on behalf of the Obama administration. Posner replied "thanks to very many of the delegations for thoughtful comments and suggestions" shortly after Cuba said the U.S. blockade of Cuba was a "crime of genocide," Iran "condemned and expressed its deep concern over the situation of human rights" in the United States, and North Korea said it was "concerned by systematic widespread violations committed by the United States at home and abroad."
Carl in Jerusalem aptly comments: "The key foreign policy goal of the Obama administration is to destroy the notion that America is an exceptional nation, and to cut it down to the same size as brutal dictatorships around the world. Trying to cut down America's most feisty ally by forcing it into a situation where it will have to fight for its very existence is part of the same 'strategy.'"
The Obama administration has a message for the world. The message is something along these lines: The United States is very bad, but Barack Obama is very good. He seeks to redeem America from its evil.
Eye on the UN has compiled the disgusting video below of the United States abasing itself before some of the most reprehensible regimes in the world. I believe this is what goes under the name of "smart diplomacy" in the Obama administration.
The video depicts in condensed form the three-hour appearance of the United States in the dock at the UN Human Rights Council to present its first-ever universal periodic review report and receive recommendations for improvement from council members. Eye on the UN's Anne Bayefsky explained at the time that 56 countries lined up for the opportunity to have at the U.S. representatives, many standing in line overnight for the opporunity to be near the top of the list. Making it to the head of the line were Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, Iran, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and North Korea.
Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner made an appearance to play his designated role demeaning the United States on behalf of the Obama administration. Posner replied "thanks to very many of the delegations for thoughtful comments and suggestions" shortly after Cuba said the U.S. blockade of Cuba was a "crime of genocide," Iran "condemned and expressed its deep concern over the situation of human rights" in the United States, and North Korea said it was "concerned by systematic widespread violations committed by the United States at home and abroad."
Carl in Jerusalem aptly comments: "The key foreign policy goal of the Obama administration is to destroy the notion that America is an exceptional nation, and to cut it down to the same size as brutal dictatorships around the world. Trying to cut down America's most feisty ally by forcing it into a situation where it will have to fight for its very existence is part of the same 'strategy.'"
Friday, November 19, 2010
New Congress Most pro israel ever-because it has more republicans
New members of Congress have expressed their support for a strong U.S.-Israel alliance.
Article photo 2
The House’s current makeup is 240 Republicans and 190 Democrats, with five races (all involving Democratic incumbents) still undecided as of this writing.
112th Congress Expected to be Most
Pro-Israel Ever
SHARE STORY email | PRINT ARTICLE PRINT THIS ARTICLE
Despite the many changes brought about by the 2010 midterm elections, the incoming 112th Congress is expected to be the most pro-Israel Congress ever. Many of Israel’s strongest supporters were reelected.
Sixteen new senators have been elected to the 112th Congress. Republicans have picked up a net gain of six seats in the upper chamber. The newly-elected Senate consists of 51 Democrats, 47 Republicans and 2 Independents who caucus with the Democrats (Sens. Joe Lieberman and Bernie Sanders).
AIPAC lay leaders and staff have established relationships with every new senator, and have received position papers on U.S. Middle East policy from all of the freshmen-to-be. In those papers, the new members of Congress express their support for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship. Many also emphasize the danger of Iran’s nuclear program and other issues important to U.S. policy in the region.
Article photo 2
The House’s current makeup is 240 Republicans and 190 Democrats, with five races (all involving Democratic incumbents) still undecided as of this writing.
112th Congress Expected to be Most
Pro-Israel Ever
SHARE STORY email | PRINT ARTICLE PRINT THIS ARTICLE
Despite the many changes brought about by the 2010 midterm elections, the incoming 112th Congress is expected to be the most pro-Israel Congress ever. Many of Israel’s strongest supporters were reelected.
Sixteen new senators have been elected to the 112th Congress. Republicans have picked up a net gain of six seats in the upper chamber. The newly-elected Senate consists of 51 Democrats, 47 Republicans and 2 Independents who caucus with the Democrats (Sens. Joe Lieberman and Bernie Sanders).
AIPAC lay leaders and staff have established relationships with every new senator, and have received position papers on U.S. Middle East policy from all of the freshmen-to-be. In those papers, the new members of Congress express their support for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship. Many also emphasize the danger of Iran’s nuclear program and other issues important to U.S. policy in the region.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Obama honors Israel's enemies
Many in the Jewish community were up in arms when Mary Robinson, the Irish diplomat with a long record of hostility to Israel, , was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Obama. An argument can be made that one of the other recipients of that medal, Bishop Desmond Tutu, has been and continues to be an even more blatant Israel hater. What does it say about the President of the United States, when both are among the designees in the same year? Bishop Tutu, demonstrating his inner Jimmy Carter, is among those now advocating boycotts, sanctions and divestment from Israel
http://tinyurl.com/26ams5c Richard Baehr
http://tinyurl.com/26ams5c Richard Baehr
Sunday, November 14, 2010
why are terrorists at Capital Hill Prayer sessions?
An Al Qaeda leader, the head of a designated terror organization and a confessed jihadist-in-training are among a "Who's Who" of controversial figures who have participated in weekly prayer sessions on Capitol Hill since the 2001 terror attacks, an investigation by FoxNews.com reveals.
The Congressional Muslim Staff Association (CMSA) has held weekly Friday Jummah prayers for more than a decade, and guest preachers are often invited to lead the service. The group held prayers informally for about eight years before gaining official status in 2006 under the sponsorship of Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., one of two Muslims currently serving in Congress. The second Muslim congressman, Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., joined as co-sponsor after he was elected in 2008.
Among those who FoxNews.com determined have attended the prayer services during the Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama administrations are:
— Anwar al-Awlaki, the notorious Al Qaeda cleric believed to be hiding in Yemen and the lone American on the U.S. government’s capture or kill list, who conducted a prayer service on Capitol Hill shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
— Randall “Ismail” Royer, a former communications associate for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who confessed in 2004 to receiving jihadist training in Pakistan. He is serving a 20-year prison term.
— Anwar Hajjaj, former president of Taibah International Aid Association, which was designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and U.N. in 2004.
— Esam Omeish, the former president of the Muslim American Society, who was forced to resign from the Virginia Commission on Immigration in 2007 after calling for "the jihad way," among other remarks.
— Salam Al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who was forced to step down from a national terrorism committee post in 1999 for pro-terrorist comments.
— Nihad Awad, CAIR executive director, who attended a Hamas meeting in Philadelphia in 1993 that was wiretapped by the FBI.
— Johari Abdul Malik, Dar al-Hijrah imam, who made statements in support of convicted and suspected terrorists who attended his mosque.
— Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim scholar banned from the U.S. for six years beginning in 2004 for his alleged ties and donations to terror groups. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lifted Ramadan's ban in January.
— Abdulaziz Othman Al-Twaijri, the head of a division of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, considered a foreign agent by the U.S.
It is unclear who else has attended these services, because there appears to be no public record of those CMSA has invited to Capitol Hill. The group’s website, included in the official congressional staff associations directory, displays an error message. And out of the more than 25 people associated with CMSA whom FoxNews.com contacted for this article — members, participants, guests, listed officers, congressional sponsors and Muslim advocacy groups — only one person was willing to speak.
“The U.S. Capitol ought to be one of the most transparent and public bodies, yet they get some public criticism about who they’re bringing in and they pull down their website," said Patrick Poole, an anti-terrorism consultant to law enforcement and the U.S. military who has written about CMSA for the conservative blog Pajamas Media.
"That’s not behavior conducive to people drawing public salaries and working in the halls of Congress,” Poole said.
But a portrait of the Jummah prayer meetings can be gleaned through video footage, news reports, court records and social media posts. And what emerges is a "Who’s Who" of controversial characters cycling through the doors of the Capitol on the invite of CMSA.
“There is a pattern of seriously bad actors not just being involved with, but leading this organization,” Poole said.
“There really needs to be some kind of investigation into who else CMSA is or has been bringing onto the Hill.”
The most notorious of the lot is al-Awlaki, who is seen leading the prayer service on Capitol Hill in video footage included in "MUHAMMAD: Life of a Prophet," a documentary that aired on PBS in 2002.
In the footage, Jameel Johnson, Rep. Gregory Meeks’ former chief of staff and founder and former president of CMSA, is seen sitting next to Randall “Ismail” Royer, a former communications associate for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) who is now serving a 20-year sentence after pleading guilty in 2004 to helping jihadists from Virginia gain access to a terrorist training camp in Pakistan. That camp was run by Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was designated a terrorist organization by the United States in December 2001. One year before Royer was filmed attending the Awlaki prayer service, he attended jihad training camps in Pakistan, documents show.
Nihad Awad, executive director of CAIR, can also be seen at the Awlaki prayer session. Awad has spoken out in support of Hamas and attended a 1993 Hamas meeting in Philadelphia that was wiretapped by the FBI, according to public record and court documents from the Holy Land Foundation trial. CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial.
Last year, the FBI severed ties with CAIR due to evidence of the group’s ties to networks supporting Hamas, which the State Department has designated as a terrorist group, according to documents obtained by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, a watchdog group.
"The FBI has had to limit its formal contact with CAIR field offices until certain issues are addressed by CAIR's national headquarters," FBI spokesman John Miller told FoxNews.com last year. "CAIR's leadership is aware of this. Beyond that, we have no further comment."
Awad's assistant, Asma Gheyoub, told FoxNews.com that she had passed along FoxNews.com's request for comment and that Awad would be in contact. But Awad has not responded.
Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s national communications director, also appears to have attended the Awlaki prayer service.
When asked by FoxNews.com if he had attended the service on Capitol Hill, Hooper said:
“Do you realize that the prayer services are open to the public, staffers, we have no say in who offers the prayer — or are you just trying to smear Muslims?”
When asked who chooses who offers the prayer, Hooper said, “You’d have to ask the staffers.”
When asked if he is in the video of the service or had attended any service on Capitol Hill led by Awlaki, Hooper said, “I don’t even remember. I don’t have a real big interest in furthering Fox News' anti-Muslim agenda, but thanks for calling.”
Sources told FoxNews.com that CMSA is comprised mostly of young Hill staffers who, for the most part, do not play a role in bringing in speakers; they say organizations like CAIR have a heavy hand in selecting and bringing in outside guests.
Ibrahim Ramey, human and civil rights director at Muslim American Society Freedom, a national Muslim advocacy group with a branch in Washington, told FoxNews.com that CMSA would never support anyone advocating violence against the U.S. Ramey said he's attended numerous CMSA functions and counts some of its members as friends.
"I do know that Sheikh Awlaki has declared war on America and American civilian targets and that he would not be welcome to participate in any CMSA program on Capitol Hill," Ramey said.
"He has made very clear statements about killing innocents, but he had been up until years ago, he had been a fairly respected member of the Northern Virginia Muslim community, where he would be now would not be compatible with the work we're doing at CMSA."
But video shot by Roll Call in April 2010 shows another set of controversial figures, including Anwar Hajjaj, who led the prayer.
To see Roll Call's video click here.
Hajjaj, tax filings show, was president of Taibah International Aid Association, which was designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2004 for its ties to a network funneling money to Hamas.
Hajjaj and Usama bin Laden’s nephew, Abdullah bin Laden, co-founded World Assembly of Muslim Youth, which the FBI has deemed a “suspected terrorist organization” since 1996, according to a complaint filed in New York federal court on behalf of the families of Sept. 11 victims. The judge refused to dismiss the charges against the World Assembly in September, saying the charges against it were "sufficient to demonstrate that they are knowingly and intentionally providing material support to Al Qaeda."
Hajjaj’s involvement with CMSA dates back at least to 2006, according to reports.
And there are others.
Esam Omeish, former president of the Muslim American Society, has led CMSA prayer services on Capitol Hill. He's called for "the jihad way," supported suicide bombers and advocated for the impeachment of President George W. Bush, according to reports and video.
According to State Department documents, “In 2007, he had to resign from the Virginia Commission on Immigration due to comments he made regarding “Israel’s war machine” during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict. He is also accused of supporting suicide attacks and violence in achieving a Palestinian state.”
Another controversial figure is Salam Al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who spoke at a CMSA forum aired on CSPAN in August of this year. In 1999, Marayati was forced to step down from a national terrorism committee post after some inflammatory statements he'd made became public.
In a 2003 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Marayati said his organization's members were angry at "the FBI's policy of targeting people because of their race and religion."
"That's what they've been doing since the attacks, and we don't know of any case that has resulted in the arrest, indictment or prosecution of a terrorist," he said.
In 2006, at a fundraising dinner for Sami Al-Arian, who pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiring to provide services to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a designated terror group, Marayati said:
"So if we have this case where we are being dictated upon, not only on terminology, but dictated upon on who speaks for us, and our organizations, our charities, are shut down one by one. Therefore, brothers and sisters, there is a storm that is coming. That storm is going to be worse than Japanese internment."
In an interview in 2000, former FBI counterterrorism chief Steven Pomerantz said, “Mr. Marayati has justified and defended the activities of terrorist organizations such as Hamas, which, among other violent activities, has been involved in the murder of American citizens. He has also categorized the Hezbollah terrorist attack, which killed 241 U.S. Marines, as 'a military operation.'"
But Ramey denied that anyone would knowingly bring supporters of violence onto the Hill, calling the work of CMSA and violent jihadists mutually exclusive.
"I'm sure that there is no support for anything that is illegal or violent vis-a-vis the United States," he said.
"We repudiate those things — we believe social change is necessary but something we would want to accomplish legally, with above-board efforts."
The CMSA Twitter feed identifies other guests on Capitol Hill:
— Johari Abdul Malik, the imam of Dar al-Hijrah, the Falls Church, Va., mosque where Awlaki was once imam, has made statements in support of members of his mosque convicted on terror-related charges, according to reports and documents. Among them is Omar Abu Ali, who was convicted in 2005 of providing support to Al Qaeda and plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush.
Malik, who is on a State Department junket in Afghanistan, told FoxNews.com via e-mail that he was heading abroad and wouldn’t be able to comment until mid November.
— Tariq Ramadan, who was banned from the U.S. for six years for his alleged donations to Hamas, a group since classified by the U.S. Treasury Department as a terrorist organization. In April, CMSA’s Twitter account announced the group as “Honorary Hosts for a Capitol Hill welcome reception this afternoon for Professor Tariq Ramadan! He’s beginning his U.S. speaking tour.”
— Abdulaziz Othman Al-Twaijri, the head of the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, a division of the Organization of Islamic Conference, attended a CMSA briefing in May at the Capitol Visitor Center.
“The Organization of the Islamic Conference — he’s a foreign agent,” Poole said. “That’s like having the Iranian government come in and speak on Capitol Hill.”
The Capitol Hill chaplain, the Rev. Daniel Coughlin, said there are numerous staff organizations on the Hill — the Black Caucus and the Golf Association, for example — but only a few official religious ones. And they, like the non-religious staff associations, are overseen by the Committee on House Administration.
There are also other ad hoc prayer groups that meet in an unofficial capacity.
"It's more than prayers," Coughlin said. "Each different religious group has different sessions, maybe they have speakers or a social."
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/11/11/congressional-muslim-prayer-group-terror-ties/
The Congressional Muslim Staff Association (CMSA) has held weekly Friday Jummah prayers for more than a decade, and guest preachers are often invited to lead the service. The group held prayers informally for about eight years before gaining official status in 2006 under the sponsorship of Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., one of two Muslims currently serving in Congress. The second Muslim congressman, Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., joined as co-sponsor after he was elected in 2008.
Among those who FoxNews.com determined have attended the prayer services during the Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama administrations are:
— Anwar al-Awlaki, the notorious Al Qaeda cleric believed to be hiding in Yemen and the lone American on the U.S. government’s capture or kill list, who conducted a prayer service on Capitol Hill shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
— Randall “Ismail” Royer, a former communications associate for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who confessed in 2004 to receiving jihadist training in Pakistan. He is serving a 20-year prison term.
— Anwar Hajjaj, former president of Taibah International Aid Association, which was designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and U.N. in 2004.
— Esam Omeish, the former president of the Muslim American Society, who was forced to resign from the Virginia Commission on Immigration in 2007 after calling for "the jihad way," among other remarks.
— Salam Al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who was forced to step down from a national terrorism committee post in 1999 for pro-terrorist comments.
— Nihad Awad, CAIR executive director, who attended a Hamas meeting in Philadelphia in 1993 that was wiretapped by the FBI.
— Johari Abdul Malik, Dar al-Hijrah imam, who made statements in support of convicted and suspected terrorists who attended his mosque.
— Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim scholar banned from the U.S. for six years beginning in 2004 for his alleged ties and donations to terror groups. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lifted Ramadan's ban in January.
— Abdulaziz Othman Al-Twaijri, the head of a division of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, considered a foreign agent by the U.S.
It is unclear who else has attended these services, because there appears to be no public record of those CMSA has invited to Capitol Hill. The group’s website, included in the official congressional staff associations directory, displays an error message. And out of the more than 25 people associated with CMSA whom FoxNews.com contacted for this article — members, participants, guests, listed officers, congressional sponsors and Muslim advocacy groups — only one person was willing to speak.
“The U.S. Capitol ought to be one of the most transparent and public bodies, yet they get some public criticism about who they’re bringing in and they pull down their website," said Patrick Poole, an anti-terrorism consultant to law enforcement and the U.S. military who has written about CMSA for the conservative blog Pajamas Media.
"That’s not behavior conducive to people drawing public salaries and working in the halls of Congress,” Poole said.
But a portrait of the Jummah prayer meetings can be gleaned through video footage, news reports, court records and social media posts. And what emerges is a "Who’s Who" of controversial characters cycling through the doors of the Capitol on the invite of CMSA.
“There is a pattern of seriously bad actors not just being involved with, but leading this organization,” Poole said.
“There really needs to be some kind of investigation into who else CMSA is or has been bringing onto the Hill.”
The most notorious of the lot is al-Awlaki, who is seen leading the prayer service on Capitol Hill in video footage included in "MUHAMMAD: Life of a Prophet," a documentary that aired on PBS in 2002.
In the footage, Jameel Johnson, Rep. Gregory Meeks’ former chief of staff and founder and former president of CMSA, is seen sitting next to Randall “Ismail” Royer, a former communications associate for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) who is now serving a 20-year sentence after pleading guilty in 2004 to helping jihadists from Virginia gain access to a terrorist training camp in Pakistan. That camp was run by Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was designated a terrorist organization by the United States in December 2001. One year before Royer was filmed attending the Awlaki prayer service, he attended jihad training camps in Pakistan, documents show.
Nihad Awad, executive director of CAIR, can also be seen at the Awlaki prayer session. Awad has spoken out in support of Hamas and attended a 1993 Hamas meeting in Philadelphia that was wiretapped by the FBI, according to public record and court documents from the Holy Land Foundation trial. CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial.
Last year, the FBI severed ties with CAIR due to evidence of the group’s ties to networks supporting Hamas, which the State Department has designated as a terrorist group, according to documents obtained by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, a watchdog group.
"The FBI has had to limit its formal contact with CAIR field offices until certain issues are addressed by CAIR's national headquarters," FBI spokesman John Miller told FoxNews.com last year. "CAIR's leadership is aware of this. Beyond that, we have no further comment."
Awad's assistant, Asma Gheyoub, told FoxNews.com that she had passed along FoxNews.com's request for comment and that Awad would be in contact. But Awad has not responded.
Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s national communications director, also appears to have attended the Awlaki prayer service.
When asked by FoxNews.com if he had attended the service on Capitol Hill, Hooper said:
“Do you realize that the prayer services are open to the public, staffers, we have no say in who offers the prayer — or are you just trying to smear Muslims?”
When asked who chooses who offers the prayer, Hooper said, “You’d have to ask the staffers.”
When asked if he is in the video of the service or had attended any service on Capitol Hill led by Awlaki, Hooper said, “I don’t even remember. I don’t have a real big interest in furthering Fox News' anti-Muslim agenda, but thanks for calling.”
Sources told FoxNews.com that CMSA is comprised mostly of young Hill staffers who, for the most part, do not play a role in bringing in speakers; they say organizations like CAIR have a heavy hand in selecting and bringing in outside guests.
Ibrahim Ramey, human and civil rights director at Muslim American Society Freedom, a national Muslim advocacy group with a branch in Washington, told FoxNews.com that CMSA would never support anyone advocating violence against the U.S. Ramey said he's attended numerous CMSA functions and counts some of its members as friends.
"I do know that Sheikh Awlaki has declared war on America and American civilian targets and that he would not be welcome to participate in any CMSA program on Capitol Hill," Ramey said.
"He has made very clear statements about killing innocents, but he had been up until years ago, he had been a fairly respected member of the Northern Virginia Muslim community, where he would be now would not be compatible with the work we're doing at CMSA."
But video shot by Roll Call in April 2010 shows another set of controversial figures, including Anwar Hajjaj, who led the prayer.
To see Roll Call's video click here.
Hajjaj, tax filings show, was president of Taibah International Aid Association, which was designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2004 for its ties to a network funneling money to Hamas.
Hajjaj and Usama bin Laden’s nephew, Abdullah bin Laden, co-founded World Assembly of Muslim Youth, which the FBI has deemed a “suspected terrorist organization” since 1996, according to a complaint filed in New York federal court on behalf of the families of Sept. 11 victims. The judge refused to dismiss the charges against the World Assembly in September, saying the charges against it were "sufficient to demonstrate that they are knowingly and intentionally providing material support to Al Qaeda."
Hajjaj’s involvement with CMSA dates back at least to 2006, according to reports.
And there are others.
Esam Omeish, former president of the Muslim American Society, has led CMSA prayer services on Capitol Hill. He's called for "the jihad way," supported suicide bombers and advocated for the impeachment of President George W. Bush, according to reports and video.
According to State Department documents, “In 2007, he had to resign from the Virginia Commission on Immigration due to comments he made regarding “Israel’s war machine” during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict. He is also accused of supporting suicide attacks and violence in achieving a Palestinian state.”
Another controversial figure is Salam Al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who spoke at a CMSA forum aired on CSPAN in August of this year. In 1999, Marayati was forced to step down from a national terrorism committee post after some inflammatory statements he'd made became public.
In a 2003 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Marayati said his organization's members were angry at "the FBI's policy of targeting people because of their race and religion."
"That's what they've been doing since the attacks, and we don't know of any case that has resulted in the arrest, indictment or prosecution of a terrorist," he said.
In 2006, at a fundraising dinner for Sami Al-Arian, who pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiring to provide services to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a designated terror group, Marayati said:
"So if we have this case where we are being dictated upon, not only on terminology, but dictated upon on who speaks for us, and our organizations, our charities, are shut down one by one. Therefore, brothers and sisters, there is a storm that is coming. That storm is going to be worse than Japanese internment."
In an interview in 2000, former FBI counterterrorism chief Steven Pomerantz said, “Mr. Marayati has justified and defended the activities of terrorist organizations such as Hamas, which, among other violent activities, has been involved in the murder of American citizens. He has also categorized the Hezbollah terrorist attack, which killed 241 U.S. Marines, as 'a military operation.'"
But Ramey denied that anyone would knowingly bring supporters of violence onto the Hill, calling the work of CMSA and violent jihadists mutually exclusive.
"I'm sure that there is no support for anything that is illegal or violent vis-a-vis the United States," he said.
"We repudiate those things — we believe social change is necessary but something we would want to accomplish legally, with above-board efforts."
The CMSA Twitter feed identifies other guests on Capitol Hill:
— Johari Abdul Malik, the imam of Dar al-Hijrah, the Falls Church, Va., mosque where Awlaki was once imam, has made statements in support of members of his mosque convicted on terror-related charges, according to reports and documents. Among them is Omar Abu Ali, who was convicted in 2005 of providing support to Al Qaeda and plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush.
Malik, who is on a State Department junket in Afghanistan, told FoxNews.com via e-mail that he was heading abroad and wouldn’t be able to comment until mid November.
— Tariq Ramadan, who was banned from the U.S. for six years for his alleged donations to Hamas, a group since classified by the U.S. Treasury Department as a terrorist organization. In April, CMSA’s Twitter account announced the group as “Honorary Hosts for a Capitol Hill welcome reception this afternoon for Professor Tariq Ramadan! He’s beginning his U.S. speaking tour.”
— Abdulaziz Othman Al-Twaijri, the head of the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, a division of the Organization of Islamic Conference, attended a CMSA briefing in May at the Capitol Visitor Center.
“The Organization of the Islamic Conference — he’s a foreign agent,” Poole said. “That’s like having the Iranian government come in and speak on Capitol Hill.”
The Capitol Hill chaplain, the Rev. Daniel Coughlin, said there are numerous staff organizations on the Hill — the Black Caucus and the Golf Association, for example — but only a few official religious ones. And they, like the non-religious staff associations, are overseen by the Committee on House Administration.
There are also other ad hoc prayer groups that meet in an unofficial capacity.
"It's more than prayers," Coughlin said. "Each different religious group has different sessions, maybe they have speakers or a social."
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/11/11/congressional-muslim-prayer-group-terror-ties/
SC Please help save America
AND THE TRUTH SHALL SET US FREE !
Finally ! The Supreme Court is listening !!! Hooray !
Our New Dictator May Be In Deep Trouble...
Chief Justice John Roberts, U.S. Supreme Court.
According to sources who watch the inner workings of the federal government,
a smack down of Barack Obama by the U.S. Supreme Court may be inevitable.
Ever since Obama assumed the office of President, critics have hammered him on a number of Constitutional issues.
Critics have complained that much, if not all of Obama's major initiatives run headlong into Constitutional roadblocks on the power of the federal government.
Obama certainly did not help himself in the eyes of the Court when he used the venue of the State of the Union address early in the year to publicly flog the Court over its ruling that the First Amendment grants the right to various organizations to run political ads during the time of an election.
The tongue-lashing clearly did not sit well with the Court, as demonstrated by Justice Sam Alito, true, ‘when Obama told a flat-out lie concerning the Court's ruling.
As it has turned out, this was a watershed moment in the relationship between the executive and the judicial branches of the federal government. Obama publicly declared war on the court, even as he blatantly continued to propose legislation that flies in the face of every known Constitutional principle upon which this nation has stood for over 200 years.
Obama has even identified Chief Justice John Roberts as his number one enemy, that is, apart from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, and so on.
And it is no accident that the one swing-vote on the court, Justice Anthony Kennedy, stated recently that he has no intention of retiring until 'Obama is gone.'
Apparently, the Court has had enough.
The Roberts Court has signaled, in a very subtle manner, of course, that it intends to address the issues about which Obama critics have been screaming to high heaven.
A ruling against Obama on any one of these important issues could potentially cripple the Administration.
Such a thing would be long overdue.
First, there is Obama Care, which violates the Constitutional principle barring the federal government from forcing citizens to purchase something.
And no, this is not the same thing as states requiring drivers to purchase car insurance, as some of the intellectually-impaired claim.
The Constitution limits FEDERAL government, not state governments, from such things, and further, not everyone has to drive, and thus, a citizen could opt not to purchase car insurance by simply deciding not to drive a vehicle.
In the Obama Care world, however, no citizen can 'opt out.'
Second, sources state that the Roberts court has quietly accepted information concerning discrepancies in Obama's history that raise serious questions about his eligibility for the office of President.
The charge goes far beyond the birth certificate issue. This information involves possible fraudulent use of a Social Security number in Connecticut , while Obama was a high school student in Hawaii .
And that is only the tip of the iceberg.
Third, several cases involving possible criminal activity, conflicts of interest, and pay-for-play cronyism could potentially land many Administration officials, if not Obama himself, in hot water with the Court.
Frankly, in the years this writer has observed politics, nothing comes close to comparing with the rampant corruption of this Administration, not even during the Nixon years.
Nixon and the Watergate conspirators look like choirboys compared to the jokers that populate this Administration.
In addition, the Court will eventually be forced to rule on the dreadful decision of the Obama DOJ suing the state of Arizona .
That, too, could send the Obama doctrine of open borders to an early grave, given that the Administration refuses to enforce federal law on illegal aliens.
And finally, the biggie that could potentially send the entire house of cards tumbling in a free-fall is the latest revelation concerning the Obama-Holder Department of Justice and its refusal to pursue the New Black Panther Party.
The group was caught on tape committing felonies by attempting to intimidate Caucasian voters into staying away from the polls.
A whistle-blower who resigned from the DOJ is now charging Holder with the deliberate refusal to pursue cases against Blacks, particularly those who are involved in radical hate-groups, such as the New Black Panthers, who have been caught on tape calling for the murder of white people and their babies.
This one is a biggie that could send the entire Administration crumbling--that is, if the Justices have the guts to draw a line in the sand at the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Finally ! The Supreme Court is listening !!! Hooray !
Our New Dictator May Be In Deep Trouble...
Chief Justice John Roberts, U.S. Supreme Court.
According to sources who watch the inner workings of the federal government,
a smack down of Barack Obama by the U.S. Supreme Court may be inevitable.
Ever since Obama assumed the office of President, critics have hammered him on a number of Constitutional issues.
Critics have complained that much, if not all of Obama's major initiatives run headlong into Constitutional roadblocks on the power of the federal government.
Obama certainly did not help himself in the eyes of the Court when he used the venue of the State of the Union address early in the year to publicly flog the Court over its ruling that the First Amendment grants the right to various organizations to run political ads during the time of an election.
The tongue-lashing clearly did not sit well with the Court, as demonstrated by Justice Sam Alito, true, ‘when Obama told a flat-out lie concerning the Court's ruling.
As it has turned out, this was a watershed moment in the relationship between the executive and the judicial branches of the federal government. Obama publicly declared war on the court, even as he blatantly continued to propose legislation that flies in the face of every known Constitutional principle upon which this nation has stood for over 200 years.
Obama has even identified Chief Justice John Roberts as his number one enemy, that is, apart from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, and so on.
And it is no accident that the one swing-vote on the court, Justice Anthony Kennedy, stated recently that he has no intention of retiring until 'Obama is gone.'
Apparently, the Court has had enough.
The Roberts Court has signaled, in a very subtle manner, of course, that it intends to address the issues about which Obama critics have been screaming to high heaven.
A ruling against Obama on any one of these important issues could potentially cripple the Administration.
Such a thing would be long overdue.
First, there is Obama Care, which violates the Constitutional principle barring the federal government from forcing citizens to purchase something.
And no, this is not the same thing as states requiring drivers to purchase car insurance, as some of the intellectually-impaired claim.
The Constitution limits FEDERAL government, not state governments, from such things, and further, not everyone has to drive, and thus, a citizen could opt not to purchase car insurance by simply deciding not to drive a vehicle.
In the Obama Care world, however, no citizen can 'opt out.'
Second, sources state that the Roberts court has quietly accepted information concerning discrepancies in Obama's history that raise serious questions about his eligibility for the office of President.
The charge goes far beyond the birth certificate issue. This information involves possible fraudulent use of a Social Security number in Connecticut , while Obama was a high school student in Hawaii .
And that is only the tip of the iceberg.
Third, several cases involving possible criminal activity, conflicts of interest, and pay-for-play cronyism could potentially land many Administration officials, if not Obama himself, in hot water with the Court.
Frankly, in the years this writer has observed politics, nothing comes close to comparing with the rampant corruption of this Administration, not even during the Nixon years.
Nixon and the Watergate conspirators look like choirboys compared to the jokers that populate this Administration.
In addition, the Court will eventually be forced to rule on the dreadful decision of the Obama DOJ suing the state of Arizona .
That, too, could send the Obama doctrine of open borders to an early grave, given that the Administration refuses to enforce federal law on illegal aliens.
And finally, the biggie that could potentially send the entire house of cards tumbling in a free-fall is the latest revelation concerning the Obama-Holder Department of Justice and its refusal to pursue the New Black Panther Party.
The group was caught on tape committing felonies by attempting to intimidate Caucasian voters into staying away from the polls.
A whistle-blower who resigned from the DOJ is now charging Holder with the deliberate refusal to pursue cases against Blacks, particularly those who are involved in radical hate-groups, such as the New Black Panthers, who have been caught on tape calling for the murder of white people and their babies.
This one is a biggie that could send the entire Administration crumbling--that is, if the Justices have the guts to draw a line in the sand at the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Commen sense died-
Obituary printed in the London Times - Interesting and sadly rather true.
Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape.
He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:
- Knowing when to come in out of the rain;
- Why the early bird gets the worm;
- Life isn't always fair;
- and maybe it was my fault.
Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don't spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).
His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.
Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children. It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.
Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims. Common Sense took a beating when you couldn't defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault.
Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement. Common Sense was preceded in death, by his parents, Truth and Trust, by his wife, Discretion, by his daughter, Responsibility, and by his son, Reason.
He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers; I Know My Rights, I Want It Now, Someone Else Is To Blame, and I'm A Victim.
Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone. If you still remember him, pass this on. If not, join the majority and do nothing.
Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape.
He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:
- Knowing when to come in out of the rain;
- Why the early bird gets the worm;
- Life isn't always fair;
- and maybe it was my fault.
Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don't spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).
His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.
Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children. It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.
Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims. Common Sense took a beating when you couldn't defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault.
Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement. Common Sense was preceded in death, by his parents, Truth and Trust, by his wife, Discretion, by his daughter, Responsibility, and by his son, Reason.
He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers; I Know My Rights, I Want It Now, Someone Else Is To Blame, and I'm A Victim.
Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone. If you still remember him, pass this on. If not, join the majority and do nothing.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Repub win will help fight Iran
The Hill blog
The World from The Hill: GOP majority would increase pressure on Iran policy
By Bridget Johnson - 10/31/10 05:00 PM ET
Republicans see a majority in the next Congress as an opportunity to put heat on the administration to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
They'll be joined by Democrats who have been vocal this Congress about the threat, expressing fears of a nuclear Iran and reminding the White House that the clock is ticking on reining in the country’s nuclear ambitions.
Republican Study Committee Chairman Rep. Tom Price (Ga.) told The Hill that, with an expected GOP majority in the House next Congress, it will be time to pull together as a conference and get like-minded Democrats on board an effort to push even tougher sanctions against Iran.
“The question that the American people are asking is, ‘Are we in a better position vis-à-vis Iran than we were two years ago?’” Price said. “I don't think anyone can say we are.”
Price said the "conversation has to occur with the leaders on the other side as well as the president."
"Are you serious about what you say? If so, then we need to see greater action from a sanctions standpoint," Price said.
Iran has brushed off recent sanctions, boasting that the measures have not had an adverse impact on the country. Price said this reflects the perception of a lack of resolve on the part of the administration to really get tough on Iran.
A Democratic congressional aide told The Hill a bipartisan effort is definitely expected, with more members taking it upon themselves to write to individual companies and ask them to curtail or eliminate certain business dealings with Iran.
For example, a bipartisan group of legislators wrote to the chairman of Spain's largest oil company, Repsol, in July, following up on news reports that the firm was pulling out of a deal to develop a gas field in Iran. “We hope such reports are true, and we encourage you to follow through by completely, expeditiously, and verifiably ceasing to do business in and with Iran,” the letter said.
Demonstrating that the effort has been truly crossing the aisle, Republicans signing the letter were Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Fla.), who is expected to take the gavel at the Foreign Affairs Committee if Republicans regain control of the House, Thad McCotter (Mich.), Dan Burton (Ind.), Elton Gallegly (Calif.), Bob Inglis (S.C.), Ed Royce (Calif.). Don Manzullo (Ill.), and Jeff Fortenberry (La.). Democrats were House Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade Chairman Brad Sherman (Calif.), Gary Ackerman (N.Y.), Eliot Engel (N.Y.), Ted Deutch (Fla.), Ron Klein (Fla.), Joe Baca (Calif.) and Gerry Connolly (Va.).
Ros-Lehtinen and Sherman were behind much of the legislation dealing with Iran this Congress, again attracting bipartisan co-sponsors.
And in an unusual pairing last spring, Reps. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) and Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) led a letter to Obama -- with 363 House signatures -- urging the president to take “punishing measures” against Iran and to "fulfill your June 2008 pledge that you would do 'everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.'"
The aide said that among Democrats there is “a group of members who are willing to do more and push the administration to do more.”
Price has “no doubt” that the GOP will be allying with a number of Democrats on Iran, which he called “front and center” on the party’s national security agenda as outlined in the “Pledge to America.”
Iran began loading fuel into its Russian-built Bushehr nuclear reactor on Tuesday. The Islamic Republic has long claimed that its nuclear ambitions are confined to energy purposes, but is under a watchful and worried world eye that doubts the intentions of the saber-rattling regime are peaceful.
On Friday, Iran said it would be ready for nuclear talks after Nov. 10 with Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the U.S. But like clockwork, Tehran retreated on this Sunday when an aide to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran would sit down and talk with the P5+1 -- except the nuclear issue would not be up for discussion.
On state-run TV Saturday night, Ahmadinejad reiterated that the West has "no option but negotiating with Iran," but said they should only come to the table as friends of the Islamic Republic. "(We ask) on the basis of what framework are you going to negotiate? Is it based on justice and respect? But they do not dare announce it yet," Ahmadinejad said.
Price said he’s "not certain what tea leaves the administration is reading" that leads the White House to believe that more attempts at negotiations will bear fruit.
“We don't have to see the moves of the chess pieces,” he said of the closed-door diplomatic overtures in Obama’s term. "We do have to see that we're being victorious in the policy. ... The results so far have been ineffective.”
Many lawmakers see Iran's hot-and-cold approach to talks as buying time to continue its nuclear ambitions unabated. In addition, the rhetoric coming out Tehran is largely unchanged in the past two years, with Ahmadinejad even recently launching his sharpest attacks yet against Washington.
“They have such nerve to threaten us and say all options are on the table. May the undertaker bury you, your table and your body, which has soiled the world," Ahmadinejad said earlier this month. Shortly before, Obama had called Ahmadinejad’s 9/11 conspiracy theories at the United Nations “inexcusable,” “offensive” and “hateful.”
And though jobs and the economy will be foremost on voters' minds Tuesday, "and rightly so," Price said national security and Iran rank high when voters "drill down to the next level of issues."
"Without a doubt, the American people are very, very concerned about what they see as a lack of resolve on the part of the administration," he said.
and from the Jerusalem Post\
Reps urge Obama to oppose Palestinian state declaration
By HILARY LEILA KRIEGER
10/31/2010 01:57
Rep. Tom Price of Georgia writes letter to Obama on behalf of the 115-member Republican Study Committee.
Talkbacks (9)
WASHINGTON – The chairman of a major Republican congressional caucus is urging US President Barack Obama to oppose any UN effort to recognize a unilaterally declared Palestinian state.
Rep. Tom Price of Georgia wrote Obama on behalf of the 115-member Republican Study Committee on Thursday, asking the president to push back against reports suggesting that Palestinians are considering appealing to the UN rather than negotiating with Israel.
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“Any support for such a measure would create a serious barrier to peace between Israel and the Palestinians,” the letter stated.
Price also pressed Obama to back Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s call for the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
Negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians have ground to a halt after Israel refused to extend a freeze on settlements that ended in September and the Palestinians have refused to negotiate without a freeze in place. Netanyahu suggested that he would reinstate a freeze if Palestinians recognized the Jewish nature of the State of Israel.
Both Israelis and Palestinians are now watching the US elections before making major moves, and both Democrats and Republicans are seizing on issues connected to Israel to attract Jewish voters.
On Friday, two Jewish Democratic representatives blasted Republican Eric Cantor of Virginia, who is in line to be majority leader should Republicans capture the House on November 2, for suggesting that Israel aid could be separated from the general foreign aid budget and be considered part of defense spending.
Cantor made the suggestion in response to concerns in the pro- Israel community that aid to Israel would be cut by a Republican- dominated Congress whose members have made budgettrimming a priority and have raised questions about the size of foreign aid.
“It would absolutely isolate aid to Israel,” New York Democratic Rep. Steve Israel warned on a conference call arranged by the National Jewish Democratic Council. “Now you would have a bigger and more precise target to go after.”
He was joined on the call by Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who attacked the Republican leadership for disrespecting the Holocaust by continuing to support Richard Iott in Ohio despite his participation in World War II reenactments where he took the part of a Nazi soldier.
Wasserman Schultz criticized “the shocking indifference that the Republicans have to trivialization of the Holocaust.”
In one race in which Israel issues have featured prominently, however, a new poll by J Street found that the focus on the Jewish state had not significantly moved voters.
Incumbent Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, who has received $70,000 from J Street, is trying to fend off Republican Joel Pollak, who has spent around a half million dollars on his campaign.
He has attacked her positions on Israel, particularly the support she has received from J Street, a self-described “pro-Israel, propeace” lobby.
Though he has a slim chance of defeating Schakowsky on election day, the J Street poll showed that Jewish voters were still backing her by 65 percent to 23%.
When asked whether the criticism leveled against Schakowsky on her Israel record affected their support for the candidates, 36% of the 400 Jewish registered voters interviewed said it made them more likely to support Schakowsky, and only 21% said they were more likely to back Pollak as a result.
The World from The Hill: GOP majority would increase pressure on Iran policy
By Bridget Johnson - 10/31/10 05:00 PM ET
Republicans see a majority in the next Congress as an opportunity to put heat on the administration to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
They'll be joined by Democrats who have been vocal this Congress about the threat, expressing fears of a nuclear Iran and reminding the White House that the clock is ticking on reining in the country’s nuclear ambitions.
Republican Study Committee Chairman Rep. Tom Price (Ga.) told The Hill that, with an expected GOP majority in the House next Congress, it will be time to pull together as a conference and get like-minded Democrats on board an effort to push even tougher sanctions against Iran.
“The question that the American people are asking is, ‘Are we in a better position vis-à-vis Iran than we were two years ago?’” Price said. “I don't think anyone can say we are.”
Price said the "conversation has to occur with the leaders on the other side as well as the president."
"Are you serious about what you say? If so, then we need to see greater action from a sanctions standpoint," Price said.
Iran has brushed off recent sanctions, boasting that the measures have not had an adverse impact on the country. Price said this reflects the perception of a lack of resolve on the part of the administration to really get tough on Iran.
A Democratic congressional aide told The Hill a bipartisan effort is definitely expected, with more members taking it upon themselves to write to individual companies and ask them to curtail or eliminate certain business dealings with Iran.
For example, a bipartisan group of legislators wrote to the chairman of Spain's largest oil company, Repsol, in July, following up on news reports that the firm was pulling out of a deal to develop a gas field in Iran. “We hope such reports are true, and we encourage you to follow through by completely, expeditiously, and verifiably ceasing to do business in and with Iran,” the letter said.
Demonstrating that the effort has been truly crossing the aisle, Republicans signing the letter were Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Fla.), who is expected to take the gavel at the Foreign Affairs Committee if Republicans regain control of the House, Thad McCotter (Mich.), Dan Burton (Ind.), Elton Gallegly (Calif.), Bob Inglis (S.C.), Ed Royce (Calif.). Don Manzullo (Ill.), and Jeff Fortenberry (La.). Democrats were House Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade Chairman Brad Sherman (Calif.), Gary Ackerman (N.Y.), Eliot Engel (N.Y.), Ted Deutch (Fla.), Ron Klein (Fla.), Joe Baca (Calif.) and Gerry Connolly (Va.).
Ros-Lehtinen and Sherman were behind much of the legislation dealing with Iran this Congress, again attracting bipartisan co-sponsors.
And in an unusual pairing last spring, Reps. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) and Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) led a letter to Obama -- with 363 House signatures -- urging the president to take “punishing measures” against Iran and to "fulfill your June 2008 pledge that you would do 'everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.'"
The aide said that among Democrats there is “a group of members who are willing to do more and push the administration to do more.”
Price has “no doubt” that the GOP will be allying with a number of Democrats on Iran, which he called “front and center” on the party’s national security agenda as outlined in the “Pledge to America.”
Iran began loading fuel into its Russian-built Bushehr nuclear reactor on Tuesday. The Islamic Republic has long claimed that its nuclear ambitions are confined to energy purposes, but is under a watchful and worried world eye that doubts the intentions of the saber-rattling regime are peaceful.
On Friday, Iran said it would be ready for nuclear talks after Nov. 10 with Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the U.S. But like clockwork, Tehran retreated on this Sunday when an aide to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran would sit down and talk with the P5+1 -- except the nuclear issue would not be up for discussion.
On state-run TV Saturday night, Ahmadinejad reiterated that the West has "no option but negotiating with Iran," but said they should only come to the table as friends of the Islamic Republic. "(We ask) on the basis of what framework are you going to negotiate? Is it based on justice and respect? But they do not dare announce it yet," Ahmadinejad said.
Price said he’s "not certain what tea leaves the administration is reading" that leads the White House to believe that more attempts at negotiations will bear fruit.
“We don't have to see the moves of the chess pieces,” he said of the closed-door diplomatic overtures in Obama’s term. "We do have to see that we're being victorious in the policy. ... The results so far have been ineffective.”
Many lawmakers see Iran's hot-and-cold approach to talks as buying time to continue its nuclear ambitions unabated. In addition, the rhetoric coming out Tehran is largely unchanged in the past two years, with Ahmadinejad even recently launching his sharpest attacks yet against Washington.
“They have such nerve to threaten us and say all options are on the table. May the undertaker bury you, your table and your body, which has soiled the world," Ahmadinejad said earlier this month. Shortly before, Obama had called Ahmadinejad’s 9/11 conspiracy theories at the United Nations “inexcusable,” “offensive” and “hateful.”
And though jobs and the economy will be foremost on voters' minds Tuesday, "and rightly so," Price said national security and Iran rank high when voters "drill down to the next level of issues."
"Without a doubt, the American people are very, very concerned about what they see as a lack of resolve on the part of the administration," he said.
and from the Jerusalem Post\
Reps urge Obama to oppose Palestinian state declaration
By HILARY LEILA KRIEGER
10/31/2010 01:57
Rep. Tom Price of Georgia writes letter to Obama on behalf of the 115-member Republican Study Committee.
Talkbacks (9)
WASHINGTON – The chairman of a major Republican congressional caucus is urging US President Barack Obama to oppose any UN effort to recognize a unilaterally declared Palestinian state.
Rep. Tom Price of Georgia wrote Obama on behalf of the 115-member Republican Study Committee on Thursday, asking the president to push back against reports suggesting that Palestinians are considering appealing to the UN rather than negotiating with Israel.
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“Any support for such a measure would create a serious barrier to peace between Israel and the Palestinians,” the letter stated.
Price also pressed Obama to back Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s call for the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
Negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians have ground to a halt after Israel refused to extend a freeze on settlements that ended in September and the Palestinians have refused to negotiate without a freeze in place. Netanyahu suggested that he would reinstate a freeze if Palestinians recognized the Jewish nature of the State of Israel.
Both Israelis and Palestinians are now watching the US elections before making major moves, and both Democrats and Republicans are seizing on issues connected to Israel to attract Jewish voters.
On Friday, two Jewish Democratic representatives blasted Republican Eric Cantor of Virginia, who is in line to be majority leader should Republicans capture the House on November 2, for suggesting that Israel aid could be separated from the general foreign aid budget and be considered part of defense spending.
Cantor made the suggestion in response to concerns in the pro- Israel community that aid to Israel would be cut by a Republican- dominated Congress whose members have made budgettrimming a priority and have raised questions about the size of foreign aid.
“It would absolutely isolate aid to Israel,” New York Democratic Rep. Steve Israel warned on a conference call arranged by the National Jewish Democratic Council. “Now you would have a bigger and more precise target to go after.”
He was joined on the call by Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who attacked the Republican leadership for disrespecting the Holocaust by continuing to support Richard Iott in Ohio despite his participation in World War II reenactments where he took the part of a Nazi soldier.
Wasserman Schultz criticized “the shocking indifference that the Republicans have to trivialization of the Holocaust.”
In one race in which Israel issues have featured prominently, however, a new poll by J Street found that the focus on the Jewish state had not significantly moved voters.
Incumbent Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, who has received $70,000 from J Street, is trying to fend off Republican Joel Pollak, who has spent around a half million dollars on his campaign.
He has attacked her positions on Israel, particularly the support she has received from J Street, a self-described “pro-Israel, propeace” lobby.
Though he has a slim chance of defeating Schakowsky on election day, the J Street poll showed that Jewish voters were still backing her by 65 percent to 23%.
When asked whether the criticism leveled against Schakowsky on her Israel record affected their support for the candidates, 36% of the 400 Jewish registered voters interviewed said it made them more likely to support Schakowsky, and only 21% said they were more likely to back Pollak as a result.
Time To Kick The One-Party Habit
Time To Kick The One-Party Habit
More Articles By Uri KaufmanUri Kaufman
Posted Oct 27 2010
For Jewish-Americans, the December date that lives in infamy is December 17. For on that day in 1862, Major-General Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order 11.
The order, which covered Grant's military district in portions of Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky, declared that "Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the [Military District] within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order."
Those who dared to return would be "arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners."
The order was countermanded by Abraham Lincoln before anyone was expelled. But it became an issue when Grant ran for president in 1868. How to justify the wholesale expulsion of an entire people? Grant asserted that he was furious over illegal smuggling of Southern cotton to the North and that "the order was issued and sent without any reflection and without thinking of the Jews as a set or race to themselves, but simply as persons who had ... violated an order."
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This rather curious defense was apparently enough for America's tiny Jewish community. In 1868, a majority of them cast their ballot for the Republican candidate for president - General Ulysses S. Grant.
Time has softened the hard choices facing Jewish Americans. It would be somewhat more difficult today for a candidate to win nomination after advocating a mass expulsion. But the Jewish practice of voting for candidates who work against Jewish interests lives on.
A politician could play out his career in a thousand arenas where working against his supporters is suicide and only one where it isn't. But that one applies when he works against Jewish Americans. In the 19th and early 20th centuries this phenomenon worked to the benefit of Republicans like Grant. Since that time it has worked to the benefit of Democrats.
One of the first to benefit from this trend was Franklin Roosevelt. He and Harry Truman never drew less than 75 percent of the Jewish vote and sometimes gained as much as 90 percent of it.
How did Franklin Roosevelt repay the Jewish community? By obstructing the issuance of visas to Jewish refugees seeking to flee Europe. In June 1940, Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long ordered American consuls "to put every obstacle in the way [to] postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of visas" in order to "delay and effectively stop" all such immigration.
Roosevelt knew, however, how to grant entry to refugees when he wanted to. In August 1940 he exploited a loophole in America's immigration law for British children, declaring them "visitors" who intended to return home.
The story of Roosevelt and the Jews grew even darker during the war. I am prepared to concede that any reasonable cost-benefit analysis argued against bombing the rail lines to Auschwitz. The Germans would have repaired them quickly and hundreds of hard-to-train flight crews would have been lost - flight crews that were needed to win the war. What I cannot concede, indeed what I cannot understand, is why Roosevelt didn't simply announce to the world what was going on in Auschwitz. Eli Wiesel once said something that I recall hearing from many others when I was growing up: Roosevelt knew what was going on the camps, but the Jews didn't. Why didn't he go on the BBC or Voice of America - which everyone in Europe listened to - and warn them not to get on the trains? For that matter, why didn't he warn the Germans that those involved in the killing would be brought to justice after the war?
A simple announcement like that would have cost the allies nothing and would have saved countless lives. Why didn't he do it? This is one of those questions that have no answer.
* * * * *
Harry Truman has often been portrayed as a great friend of Israel because of his recognition of the Jewish state. In truth, this was an empty gesture that had little influence on events. What had far greater influence was the arms embargo he imposed against Israel. It was precisely because of that embargo that the Soviets tilted in favor of Israel and allowed Czechoslovakia to sell weapons to Jerusalem. The Czech arms deal was the decisive event outside the field of battle and it would have happened whether Truman had recognized Israel or not.
During the fighting that followed Israel's declaration of independence, Israeli troops had Egyptian soldiers surrounded in the Negev. Truman demanded that Israel free the Egyptians without getting a peace treaty in return. The Israeli army also held a large chunk of the Sinai Peninsula as well as two villages in Lebanon. Truman likewise demanded that Israel withdraw immediately and unconditionally from both.
At the same time, Syria held three small pieces of Israeli territory. David Ben-Gurion asked that the Truman administration work with similar dispatch to bring about a Syrian withdrawal. If Israel was being forced to hand over Arab land in the Sinai and Lebanon, it seemed only fair that Syria be forced to hand over Israeli land near the Kineret. The Truman administration refused. It never pressured Syria, choosing instead to broker an agreement to have that territory, and other territory in Israel, left demilitarized.
In other words, the Truman administration took the position that the Syrian army did not have to withdraw from Israeli territory unless the Israeli army withdrew from an equal amount of Israeli territory. This outrageous double standard bedevils the region to this day because Syria now takes the position that in return for peace Israel must withdraw not only from the Golan Heights but from the demilitarized zone as well.
It's true that Truman's successor, Dwight Eisenhower, displayed similar hostility toward Israel following the '56 Sinai War. But Eisenhower didn't get 75 percent of the Jewish vote as Truman had.
In the 1960s a Jewish American could feel good voting for the Democrats. John Kennedy was the first American president to sell arms to Jerusalem. Yes, they were defensive arms only, and Kennedy's Mideast record was troubling in several areas. But Kennedy did choose as his vice president Lyndon Johnson, who had been one of Israel's staunchest defenders in the Senate. And when Johnson succeeded Kennedy as president, he maintained that close relationship; indeed, a plausible argument can be made that LBJ was the best friend Israel's ever had in the Oval Office.
The Jewish people will forever owe a debt of gratitude to Johnson, as they do his successor, Richard Nixon, who came through for Israel when it mattered in 1973.
* * * * *
But in 1976 Democratic voters (not just Jews) should have been made to wear dunce caps and sit in the corner, having nominated for president Jimmy Carter instead of Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson and sending him to the White House.
In fairness, it should be said that even if Scoop Jackson had been elected, the Camp David Peace Treaty probably would have turned out the same: full withdrawal from Sinai in return for full peace, and agreeing to disagree on Jerusalem.
That doesn't change the fact that Jimmy Carter treated Israel with nothing but unbending hostility. In his diary, Carter blamed Israel for every impasse, saw a Jewish lobbyist hiding behind every bush, and wrote that Sadat deserved the Nobel Peace Prize while Begin did not. The Israelis were particularly enraged by Carter's insistence that a letter be included in the Camp David Accords stating that East Jerusalem was occupied territory that would have to be returned.
"Why," Moshe Dayan asked in his memoirs, "was the Jewish Quarter in the Old City regarded as 'conquered territory,' held by us in contravention of international law? Simply because the Jordanian Arab Legion conquered it in 1948, destroyed its synagogues, killed or took captive the Jewish civilians who lived there? What was there holy about the military conquest by the Jordanian Army in 1948, and profane about our victory in the 1967 war - a war which also started with Jordan's attack on Israel?"
None of that seemed to have fazed America's Jewish community. At a particularly low point, the United Jewish Appeal honored Lillian Carter, Jimmy Carter's mother, as its Outstanding Humanitarian of the Year. She declared, "I've never been around so many Jews before" - and got a standing ovation. Incredibly, Carter received a plurality of the Jewish vote when he ran against Ronald Reagan in 1980, garnering 45 percent to Reagan's 39 percent. (Third party candidate John Anderson picked up the rest of the Jewsih vote.)
How fortunate that the American people could see what American Jews could not. The 1980s were a particularly difficult time for Israel. Those years witnessed the destruction of Saddam's nuclear reactor, the First Lebanon War, the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, Israel's economic collapse in 1985, the arrest of Jonathan Pollard, the leak by Mordecai Vanunu of Israel's nuclear capability, and the First Intifada. I shudder to think what might have happened if even one of those events had occurred on Jimmy Carter's watch. Ronald Reagan never wavered in his support.
As Moshe Dayan tells it in his memoir, there was only man in the Carter administration even more hostile to Israel than Carter himself. "What I resented most," he writes, "was the part played by Vice President Mondale . I was disgusted." In 1984, when Reagan was reelected to a second term with 59 percent of the general vote, Jews gave 67 percent of their votes to his Democratic challenger - Walter Mondale.
In more recent times, no one talked with greater emotion about Israel than Bill Clinton. He bid "shalom" to his chaver Yitzhak Rabin and never tired of quoting his pastor, whose dying words were "Don't forget Israel." I saw him tell the pastor story in New York City. There wasn't a dry eye in the house.
One can only wonder, then, what Clinton was thinking in 1993 when Hizbullah started a border war with Israel. At a time during which Hizbullah had murdered more Americans than any other terror group - this was before 9/11 - Clinton decided to pressure his chaver Rabin into a cease-fire agreement after just ten days. He did the same thing in 1996 to Prime Minister Shimon Peres after just seventeen days. Hizbullah concluded that Washington would always come to the rescue. Not surprisingly, after each such rescue it went right back to shooting at Israel.
When Hizbullah attacked Israel in 2006, kidnapping Regev and Goldwasser and killing eight other soldiers, the group told Lebanon's prime minister not to worry. The infidel Jews would bomb for a few days and then they'd be forced to stop.
What Hizbullah failed to take into account was that this time there was a Republican in the White House. George W. Bush reasoned that if other countries had the right to fight back, then Israel should enjoy that right as well. With no American pressure to speak of, the war lasted 34 days. It was the only war in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict that Jerusalem started on its own terms and ended on its own terms. When the guns fell silent, there was rubble piled high in Beirut and a new set of rules on the ground. The border between Israel and Lebanon has been almost totally quiet ever since.
The contrast between Clinton and Bush was just as stark with respect to the Palestinians. When Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Palestinians on Purim in 1994, the Clinton administration sprang into action. Despite the fact that Goldstein acted alone, the administration allowed the Security Council to condemn Israel and even set up an international observer force in Hebron to help protect Palestinians.
When Palestinians attacked Israelis in an organized fashion with claims of responsibility, the response from Clinton was of a different kind altogether. After Benjamin Netanyahu, in his first go-round as prime minister, opened the door to the Kotel Tunnels, Yasir Arafat started a mini-war that left dozens dead. Clinton blamed the episode on a startled Netanyahu and demanded concessions from Israel.
The same thing happened after Netanyahu announced new building in Har Homa. Arafat responded by emptying out Palestinian jails, a café in Tel Aviv was bombed - and the Clinton administration blamed Netanyahu. In September 2000, after the trumped up "provocation" of Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount, Arafat almost certainly figured he was back in the driver's seat. The next day he started the al-Aksa Intifada.
George W. Bush, derided by the vast majority of American Jews, stood up for Israel's right to defend itself, granting Jerusalem the leeway it needed to win the war against Arafat's suicide bombers. (Try to imagine the outcry if Israel had entered Jenin on Clinton's watch.) Israel even hurried to finish up Operation Cast Lead in January 2009 on the last day of Bush's administration. It had good reason to do so. A Democrat was about to assume office.
* * * * *
All of which brings us to Barack Obama. In December 2008 Israel offered the Palestinians the two-state solution once again, including an unprecedented offer to absorb thousands of refugees. The Palestinians said no, made no concessions and offered no counter-terms.
Obama assumed office a month later. The Great Man determined that the real problem was - what else? - the settlements! He then took a position that was even more anti-Israel than the Palestinians had taken. Until then, the Palestinians accepted the idea that Israel could build in the three settlement blocs. Obama demanded that Israel freeze building everywhere, even in East Jerusalem. The peace process has been in a ditch ever since.
A personal note: I am embarrassed to admit it now, but I was a Democrat myself for almost twenty years. I once hosted an event for a Democratic candidate that raised $25,000. It was Bill Clinton and his treatment of Israel that cured me once and for all. I am now a Republican. And I have all the zeal of the converted.
In a democracy, you get the government you deserve. The Jewish people have long deserved better. This Tuesday, we have an opportunity to stand with those who have stood with us. We owe ourselves nothing less.
Uri Kaufman is the author of "Low Level Victory," scheduled for release early next year.
More Articles By Uri KaufmanUri Kaufman
Posted Oct 27 2010
For Jewish-Americans, the December date that lives in infamy is December 17. For on that day in 1862, Major-General Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order 11.
The order, which covered Grant's military district in portions of Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky, declared that "Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the [Military District] within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order."
Those who dared to return would be "arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners."
The order was countermanded by Abraham Lincoln before anyone was expelled. But it became an issue when Grant ran for president in 1868. How to justify the wholesale expulsion of an entire people? Grant asserted that he was furious over illegal smuggling of Southern cotton to the North and that "the order was issued and sent without any reflection and without thinking of the Jews as a set or race to themselves, but simply as persons who had ... violated an order."
Advertisement
This rather curious defense was apparently enough for America's tiny Jewish community. In 1868, a majority of them cast their ballot for the Republican candidate for president - General Ulysses S. Grant.
Time has softened the hard choices facing Jewish Americans. It would be somewhat more difficult today for a candidate to win nomination after advocating a mass expulsion. But the Jewish practice of voting for candidates who work against Jewish interests lives on.
A politician could play out his career in a thousand arenas where working against his supporters is suicide and only one where it isn't. But that one applies when he works against Jewish Americans. In the 19th and early 20th centuries this phenomenon worked to the benefit of Republicans like Grant. Since that time it has worked to the benefit of Democrats.
One of the first to benefit from this trend was Franklin Roosevelt. He and Harry Truman never drew less than 75 percent of the Jewish vote and sometimes gained as much as 90 percent of it.
How did Franklin Roosevelt repay the Jewish community? By obstructing the issuance of visas to Jewish refugees seeking to flee Europe. In June 1940, Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long ordered American consuls "to put every obstacle in the way [to] postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of visas" in order to "delay and effectively stop" all such immigration.
Roosevelt knew, however, how to grant entry to refugees when he wanted to. In August 1940 he exploited a loophole in America's immigration law for British children, declaring them "visitors" who intended to return home.
The story of Roosevelt and the Jews grew even darker during the war. I am prepared to concede that any reasonable cost-benefit analysis argued against bombing the rail lines to Auschwitz. The Germans would have repaired them quickly and hundreds of hard-to-train flight crews would have been lost - flight crews that were needed to win the war. What I cannot concede, indeed what I cannot understand, is why Roosevelt didn't simply announce to the world what was going on in Auschwitz. Eli Wiesel once said something that I recall hearing from many others when I was growing up: Roosevelt knew what was going on the camps, but the Jews didn't. Why didn't he go on the BBC or Voice of America - which everyone in Europe listened to - and warn them not to get on the trains? For that matter, why didn't he warn the Germans that those involved in the killing would be brought to justice after the war?
A simple announcement like that would have cost the allies nothing and would have saved countless lives. Why didn't he do it? This is one of those questions that have no answer.
* * * * *
Harry Truman has often been portrayed as a great friend of Israel because of his recognition of the Jewish state. In truth, this was an empty gesture that had little influence on events. What had far greater influence was the arms embargo he imposed against Israel. It was precisely because of that embargo that the Soviets tilted in favor of Israel and allowed Czechoslovakia to sell weapons to Jerusalem. The Czech arms deal was the decisive event outside the field of battle and it would have happened whether Truman had recognized Israel or not.
During the fighting that followed Israel's declaration of independence, Israeli troops had Egyptian soldiers surrounded in the Negev. Truman demanded that Israel free the Egyptians without getting a peace treaty in return. The Israeli army also held a large chunk of the Sinai Peninsula as well as two villages in Lebanon. Truman likewise demanded that Israel withdraw immediately and unconditionally from both.
At the same time, Syria held three small pieces of Israeli territory. David Ben-Gurion asked that the Truman administration work with similar dispatch to bring about a Syrian withdrawal. If Israel was being forced to hand over Arab land in the Sinai and Lebanon, it seemed only fair that Syria be forced to hand over Israeli land near the Kineret. The Truman administration refused. It never pressured Syria, choosing instead to broker an agreement to have that territory, and other territory in Israel, left demilitarized.
In other words, the Truman administration took the position that the Syrian army did not have to withdraw from Israeli territory unless the Israeli army withdrew from an equal amount of Israeli territory. This outrageous double standard bedevils the region to this day because Syria now takes the position that in return for peace Israel must withdraw not only from the Golan Heights but from the demilitarized zone as well.
It's true that Truman's successor, Dwight Eisenhower, displayed similar hostility toward Israel following the '56 Sinai War. But Eisenhower didn't get 75 percent of the Jewish vote as Truman had.
In the 1960s a Jewish American could feel good voting for the Democrats. John Kennedy was the first American president to sell arms to Jerusalem. Yes, they were defensive arms only, and Kennedy's Mideast record was troubling in several areas. But Kennedy did choose as his vice president Lyndon Johnson, who had been one of Israel's staunchest defenders in the Senate. And when Johnson succeeded Kennedy as president, he maintained that close relationship; indeed, a plausible argument can be made that LBJ was the best friend Israel's ever had in the Oval Office.
The Jewish people will forever owe a debt of gratitude to Johnson, as they do his successor, Richard Nixon, who came through for Israel when it mattered in 1973.
* * * * *
But in 1976 Democratic voters (not just Jews) should have been made to wear dunce caps and sit in the corner, having nominated for president Jimmy Carter instead of Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson and sending him to the White House.
In fairness, it should be said that even if Scoop Jackson had been elected, the Camp David Peace Treaty probably would have turned out the same: full withdrawal from Sinai in return for full peace, and agreeing to disagree on Jerusalem.
That doesn't change the fact that Jimmy Carter treated Israel with nothing but unbending hostility. In his diary, Carter blamed Israel for every impasse, saw a Jewish lobbyist hiding behind every bush, and wrote that Sadat deserved the Nobel Peace Prize while Begin did not. The Israelis were particularly enraged by Carter's insistence that a letter be included in the Camp David Accords stating that East Jerusalem was occupied territory that would have to be returned.
"Why," Moshe Dayan asked in his memoirs, "was the Jewish Quarter in the Old City regarded as 'conquered territory,' held by us in contravention of international law? Simply because the Jordanian Arab Legion conquered it in 1948, destroyed its synagogues, killed or took captive the Jewish civilians who lived there? What was there holy about the military conquest by the Jordanian Army in 1948, and profane about our victory in the 1967 war - a war which also started with Jordan's attack on Israel?"
None of that seemed to have fazed America's Jewish community. At a particularly low point, the United Jewish Appeal honored Lillian Carter, Jimmy Carter's mother, as its Outstanding Humanitarian of the Year. She declared, "I've never been around so many Jews before" - and got a standing ovation. Incredibly, Carter received a plurality of the Jewish vote when he ran against Ronald Reagan in 1980, garnering 45 percent to Reagan's 39 percent. (Third party candidate John Anderson picked up the rest of the Jewsih vote.)
How fortunate that the American people could see what American Jews could not. The 1980s were a particularly difficult time for Israel. Those years witnessed the destruction of Saddam's nuclear reactor, the First Lebanon War, the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, Israel's economic collapse in 1985, the arrest of Jonathan Pollard, the leak by Mordecai Vanunu of Israel's nuclear capability, and the First Intifada. I shudder to think what might have happened if even one of those events had occurred on Jimmy Carter's watch. Ronald Reagan never wavered in his support.
As Moshe Dayan tells it in his memoir, there was only man in the Carter administration even more hostile to Israel than Carter himself. "What I resented most," he writes, "was the part played by Vice President Mondale . I was disgusted." In 1984, when Reagan was reelected to a second term with 59 percent of the general vote, Jews gave 67 percent of their votes to his Democratic challenger - Walter Mondale.
In more recent times, no one talked with greater emotion about Israel than Bill Clinton. He bid "shalom" to his chaver Yitzhak Rabin and never tired of quoting his pastor, whose dying words were "Don't forget Israel." I saw him tell the pastor story in New York City. There wasn't a dry eye in the house.
One can only wonder, then, what Clinton was thinking in 1993 when Hizbullah started a border war with Israel. At a time during which Hizbullah had murdered more Americans than any other terror group - this was before 9/11 - Clinton decided to pressure his chaver Rabin into a cease-fire agreement after just ten days. He did the same thing in 1996 to Prime Minister Shimon Peres after just seventeen days. Hizbullah concluded that Washington would always come to the rescue. Not surprisingly, after each such rescue it went right back to shooting at Israel.
When Hizbullah attacked Israel in 2006, kidnapping Regev and Goldwasser and killing eight other soldiers, the group told Lebanon's prime minister not to worry. The infidel Jews would bomb for a few days and then they'd be forced to stop.
What Hizbullah failed to take into account was that this time there was a Republican in the White House. George W. Bush reasoned that if other countries had the right to fight back, then Israel should enjoy that right as well. With no American pressure to speak of, the war lasted 34 days. It was the only war in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict that Jerusalem started on its own terms and ended on its own terms. When the guns fell silent, there was rubble piled high in Beirut and a new set of rules on the ground. The border between Israel and Lebanon has been almost totally quiet ever since.
The contrast between Clinton and Bush was just as stark with respect to the Palestinians. When Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Palestinians on Purim in 1994, the Clinton administration sprang into action. Despite the fact that Goldstein acted alone, the administration allowed the Security Council to condemn Israel and even set up an international observer force in Hebron to help protect Palestinians.
When Palestinians attacked Israelis in an organized fashion with claims of responsibility, the response from Clinton was of a different kind altogether. After Benjamin Netanyahu, in his first go-round as prime minister, opened the door to the Kotel Tunnels, Yasir Arafat started a mini-war that left dozens dead. Clinton blamed the episode on a startled Netanyahu and demanded concessions from Israel.
The same thing happened after Netanyahu announced new building in Har Homa. Arafat responded by emptying out Palestinian jails, a café in Tel Aviv was bombed - and the Clinton administration blamed Netanyahu. In September 2000, after the trumped up "provocation" of Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount, Arafat almost certainly figured he was back in the driver's seat. The next day he started the al-Aksa Intifada.
George W. Bush, derided by the vast majority of American Jews, stood up for Israel's right to defend itself, granting Jerusalem the leeway it needed to win the war against Arafat's suicide bombers. (Try to imagine the outcry if Israel had entered Jenin on Clinton's watch.) Israel even hurried to finish up Operation Cast Lead in January 2009 on the last day of Bush's administration. It had good reason to do so. A Democrat was about to assume office.
* * * * *
All of which brings us to Barack Obama. In December 2008 Israel offered the Palestinians the two-state solution once again, including an unprecedented offer to absorb thousands of refugees. The Palestinians said no, made no concessions and offered no counter-terms.
Obama assumed office a month later. The Great Man determined that the real problem was - what else? - the settlements! He then took a position that was even more anti-Israel than the Palestinians had taken. Until then, the Palestinians accepted the idea that Israel could build in the three settlement blocs. Obama demanded that Israel freeze building everywhere, even in East Jerusalem. The peace process has been in a ditch ever since.
A personal note: I am embarrassed to admit it now, but I was a Democrat myself for almost twenty years. I once hosted an event for a Democratic candidate that raised $25,000. It was Bill Clinton and his treatment of Israel that cured me once and for all. I am now a Republican. And I have all the zeal of the converted.
In a democracy, you get the government you deserve. The Jewish people have long deserved better. This Tuesday, we have an opportunity to stand with those who have stood with us. We owe ourselves nothing less.
Uri Kaufman is the author of "Low Level Victory," scheduled for release early next year.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
eye off the ball
Yesterday it was disclosed that for a few months, the guy in charge of the nuclear footballl during Clinton administration lost the codes and never informed the president or Joint chiefs.
Eye off the ball-Don't be distracted from the real issue/taking our eye off the ball.
The real issue-
bombs are headed for synagogues in Chicago and our US President
1. sends reps to a Moslem Brotherhood influenced conference in Chicago
see http://israelgreatest.blogspot.com/p/obama-and-israel.html
"At the end of September 2010, Chicago will become a destination point for the international community’s top Islamic representation which includes the entire top leadership of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) together with the top leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood in America. HYPERLINK “http://www.oicun.org/9/20100727101615770.html” http://www.oicun.org/9/20100727101615770.html In a post 11 September 2001 world, the red flag warning should be most clear that the Muslim Brotherhood is a high level national security concern for both Israel and the United States. The leadership of the OIC, Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Brotherhood are meeting at the American Islamic College in Chicago on the 28 to 30th of September 2010.
The notable who’s who in attendance list includes the full panoply of OIC leadership, the Obama Administration’s OIC liaisons Sada Cumber from the Bush Administration, and Rashad Hussain from the current administration, Dalia Mogahed and Farah Pandith from State Department, as well as Siraj Wahhaj, Ahmed Rehab of CAIR, etc."
Instead he should have sent the FBI to arrest everyone.
2. His State department has been lying about what it actually says in the UN and what it pretends it says when it communicates with US Jews
"In fact, it’s worse. The U.S. State Department has now adopted a practice honed by Israel’s Arab negotiating partners – saying different things to different audiences. The State Department is distributing for American consumption speeches that it claims were delivered in Israel’s defense at the recent session of the U.N. Human Rights Council. But the remarks American diplomats actually delivered to the U.N. audience, which President Obama so desperately seeks to impress, were strikingly different."
3. Is afraid to use "Islamic" terrorism language.
"from a Congressional candidate running vs a Farakhan backed Muslim Democrat in Indy.
“Our elite intelligence agencies have broken a global plot by radical Muslim terrorists to kill Jews and other Americans through transporting mail bombs in commercial carriers and attempting to blow up the Washington, D.C. metro/subway system. The men and women of our intelligence agencies have performed flawlessly; they have saved the lives of thousands of Americans.
We must call on President Obama and the Democratic administration to untie the hands of the intelligence community and allow them to re-use words such as “Radical Muslims,” “War on Terror,” “Muslim Jihadists,” “Radical Islamic Terrorists” and not use the meaningless phrase preferred by the administration, “man- made disaster.” By being explicit, the enemy can be swiftly identified and American lives will be saved here in America and abroad.
As your Congressman, I vow to be strong on national security, defend and protect our nation from its enemies and support our ally, the only democracy in the Middle East, The State of Israel.
Respectfully Submitted,
Dr. Marvin Scott, Candidate for United States Congress
Indianapolis, CD 7"
These 3 are just a tip of the iceberg of the nightmare and it will get much much worse once Obama gets spanked with huge Democratic losses Tuesday night and turns his wrath on Israel during his final 2 years in office. .
For details of how this should play out and how pro Israel forces can protect ourselves from him see http://israelgreatest.blogspot.com/p/obama-and-israel.html
Eye off the ball-Don't be distracted from the real issue/taking our eye off the ball.
The real issue-
bombs are headed for synagogues in Chicago and our US President
1. sends reps to a Moslem Brotherhood influenced conference in Chicago
see http://israelgreatest.blogspot.com/p/obama-and-israel.html
"At the end of September 2010, Chicago will become a destination point for the international community’s top Islamic representation which includes the entire top leadership of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) together with the top leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood in America. HYPERLINK “http://www.oicun.org/9/20100727101615770.html” http://www.oicun.org/9/20100727101615770.html In a post 11 September 2001 world, the red flag warning should be most clear that the Muslim Brotherhood is a high level national security concern for both Israel and the United States. The leadership of the OIC, Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Brotherhood are meeting at the American Islamic College in Chicago on the 28 to 30th of September 2010.
The notable who’s who in attendance list includes the full panoply of OIC leadership, the Obama Administration’s OIC liaisons Sada Cumber from the Bush Administration, and Rashad Hussain from the current administration, Dalia Mogahed and Farah Pandith from State Department, as well as Siraj Wahhaj, Ahmed Rehab of CAIR, etc."
Instead he should have sent the FBI to arrest everyone.
2. His State department has been lying about what it actually says in the UN and what it pretends it says when it communicates with US Jews
"In fact, it’s worse. The U.S. State Department has now adopted a practice honed by Israel’s Arab negotiating partners – saying different things to different audiences. The State Department is distributing for American consumption speeches that it claims were delivered in Israel’s defense at the recent session of the U.N. Human Rights Council. But the remarks American diplomats actually delivered to the U.N. audience, which President Obama so desperately seeks to impress, were strikingly different."
3. Is afraid to use "Islamic" terrorism language.
"from a Congressional candidate running vs a Farakhan backed Muslim Democrat in Indy.
“Our elite intelligence agencies have broken a global plot by radical Muslim terrorists to kill Jews and other Americans through transporting mail bombs in commercial carriers and attempting to blow up the Washington, D.C. metro/subway system. The men and women of our intelligence agencies have performed flawlessly; they have saved the lives of thousands of Americans.
We must call on President Obama and the Democratic administration to untie the hands of the intelligence community and allow them to re-use words such as “Radical Muslims,” “War on Terror,” “Muslim Jihadists,” “Radical Islamic Terrorists” and not use the meaningless phrase preferred by the administration, “man- made disaster.” By being explicit, the enemy can be swiftly identified and American lives will be saved here in America and abroad.
As your Congressman, I vow to be strong on national security, defend and protect our nation from its enemies and support our ally, the only democracy in the Middle East, The State of Israel.
Respectfully Submitted,
Dr. Marvin Scott, Candidate for United States Congress
Indianapolis, CD 7"
These 3 are just a tip of the iceberg of the nightmare and it will get much much worse once Obama gets spanked with huge Democratic losses Tuesday night and turns his wrath on Israel during his final 2 years in office. .
For details of how this should play out and how pro Israel forces can protect ourselves from him see http://israelgreatest.blogspot.com/p/obama-and-israel.html
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Obama blame Barney Frank for the previous disaster, not Bush
•It was Barney Frank who, as chairman of the Banking Committee in 2007, continued to push for home ownership even for people who couldn’t afford it. He prevented oversight and regulation, allowing people to rush into mortgages they never should’ve gotten.
•It was Barney Frank did absolutely nothing to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This ended in disaster, causing caused misery beyond description.
•It was Barney Frank who, as Chairman of the powerful Financial Services Committee, was in charge of overseeing Wall Street.
•It was Barney Frank who wrote the infamous $700 billion Wall Street Bailout bill.
•It was also Barney Frank who wrote the “regulations” that went easy on his Wall Street pals.
•It was Barney Frank did absolutely nothing to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This ended in disaster, causing caused misery beyond description.
•It was Barney Frank who, as Chairman of the powerful Financial Services Committee, was in charge of overseeing Wall Street.
•It was Barney Frank who wrote the infamous $700 billion Wall Street Bailout bill.
•It was also Barney Frank who wrote the “regulations” that went easy on his Wall Street pals.
Jewish religion is not liberalism
Liberalism Is Not Our Religion
102
ShareTuesday, October 26, 2010
Aryeh Rubin
Special To The Jewish Week
I believe in equality for all. I support civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, universal health care, feeding the poor, social justice, separation of church and state, access to education, diversity, the arts, animal rights (I have not eaten meat or poultry in 33 years), and more. I marched against the war in Vietnam, protested the bombing in Cambodia, and advocated for affirmative action.
In terms of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I met with the Palestinian leadership, including Yasir Arafat, as part of my peace activism. I believed, up to a point, in Oslo, and maintain that while a failure, it was not a mistake. I am hopeful that the two sides will keep talking until there is a deal.
Still, I have not elevated liberalism to the status of religion. I do not blindly follow the liberal agenda and my convictions take a backseat to my commitment to the well-being of Israel and the Jewish people. Unfortunately, this is not the case for the majority of U.S. Jews, who have substituted liberalism for Judaism and whose actions are often governed by misguided priorities. In lieu of traditional Jewish belief or value systems, many American Jews have adopted what is essentially a theology of universalism and tikkun olam, or social justice. In doing so, much of American Jewry has essentially become de-Judaicized.
When the lives of my family, my friends, and my people are in jeopardy because we are Jewish, when there are very real threats to the continued existence of the State of Israel and by extension the Jewish people, when our enemies have declared that their intention is to annihilate us and are acquiring tools to this end with the world standing by, then my pro-humanist beliefs give way to my commitment to the sanctity and security of Israel and the Jewish people.
American Jewry’s loyalty to the liberal political dogma is disturbing when things are going well for the Jews. But when things are not going well, this behavior is self-destructive and helps our enemies.
The future of Israel is at stake. Not only is Israel threatened by the soon-to-be nuclear Iran and its satellites, but its right to exist is being questioned by a virulent, global delegitimization campaign that is being led and energized by the academic left and supported by the elements of the liberal wing. In not speaking out, many Jews are, in effect, endangering Israel and abdicating their responsibility as Jews.
Many American Jews have become distanced from Judaism’s larger core values and are uncomfortable making moral judgements concerning the distinction between good and evil, which is an inherent part of our heritage. In addition, many are uncomfortable with the notion of the exceptionalism of Israel, and even with the exceptionalism of the U.S.
Historically, the vulnerability of diaspora Jews led many to make a habit of ingratiating themselves to their non-Jewish hosts. For some Jews, this knee-jerk accommodation, while no longer a survival technique, seems to have become integrated into the genetic code — hence, the quintessential galut (diaspora) Jew. History has shown us over and over again that this approach is ultimately unsuccessful. Witness the tragic outcomes of previous golden ages of Jewry in Spain, France, and Germany. We must not allow these genes to express themselves; we must show strength and become proactive.
When our ancestors were permitted to exit the ghetto, they gravitated towards those expressing universalist ideas, which were most often part of the ideology of the left. It was from the universalists that they experienced the first indications of tolerance. It’s therefore not surprising that they proceeded to derive intellectual sustenance and a modicum of physical security from the left, hence our historic loyalty. But today it is the American right that has evolved to the point where it is much more philo-Semitic and more pro-Israel than the left. The hawks and the evangelicals among them are the most fervent supporters of the State of Israel. From the perspective of our own survival, we must gravitate to, and work with, those who wish us well and support our standing in the world.
Despite the pacifist attitude espoused by many children of Holocaust survivors, despite the anti-war rhetoric spouted by many of the Jewish baby boomers, and despite what for many of us is an innate opposition to war, ultimately it is only the strength of Israel that earns us the respect of our enemies. It is not our intellect, not our Nobel prizes, not our supposed financial acumen. As the Italian-Jewish intellectual Alain Elkann noted, the only antidote to Auschwitz is Israel — and its military might. As such, Israel is fighting not only for itself, but for all Jews. I would argue that by extension, it is fighting for the well-being of the Western world and its values.
Liberal Jews should be making the case for Israel as a bastion of liberal values. Israel is the only country in the Middle East with a free press. It is the only true democracy in the Middle East, with equal rights for women and, in practice, a refuge for gay Arab men from neighboring countries. In Israel there are no honor killings, no stonings, no capital punishment, no cutting off of the hands of thieves.
Throughout our history there have been Jews who have opted out, and this is an acceptable reality. What is not acceptable is that today, entire legions of Jews, in the name of liberalism, are in effect working against the survival of the Jewish people, whether out of ignorance, different priorities, or a lack of understanding of the global perspective.
Confronted with both old and new enemies seeking to destroy us, and vilified by anti-Zionism — anti-Semitism in new clothes — the majority of American Jewry needs to look in the mirror, re-examine its convictions and make a shift.
Abiding by one’s political philosophy, values and convictions is a noble way of living — but not when they are coming to chop your head off. At that point, and I believe we are there now, one’s moral and political compass needs to revert to survival mode.
Aryeh Rubin is the managing director of The Maot Group, an investment boutique in Miami, and president of the Targum Shlishi Foundation.
102
ShareTuesday, October 26, 2010
Aryeh Rubin
Special To The Jewish Week
I believe in equality for all. I support civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, universal health care, feeding the poor, social justice, separation of church and state, access to education, diversity, the arts, animal rights (I have not eaten meat or poultry in 33 years), and more. I marched against the war in Vietnam, protested the bombing in Cambodia, and advocated for affirmative action.
In terms of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I met with the Palestinian leadership, including Yasir Arafat, as part of my peace activism. I believed, up to a point, in Oslo, and maintain that while a failure, it was not a mistake. I am hopeful that the two sides will keep talking until there is a deal.
Still, I have not elevated liberalism to the status of religion. I do not blindly follow the liberal agenda and my convictions take a backseat to my commitment to the well-being of Israel and the Jewish people. Unfortunately, this is not the case for the majority of U.S. Jews, who have substituted liberalism for Judaism and whose actions are often governed by misguided priorities. In lieu of traditional Jewish belief or value systems, many American Jews have adopted what is essentially a theology of universalism and tikkun olam, or social justice. In doing so, much of American Jewry has essentially become de-Judaicized.
When the lives of my family, my friends, and my people are in jeopardy because we are Jewish, when there are very real threats to the continued existence of the State of Israel and by extension the Jewish people, when our enemies have declared that their intention is to annihilate us and are acquiring tools to this end with the world standing by, then my pro-humanist beliefs give way to my commitment to the sanctity and security of Israel and the Jewish people.
American Jewry’s loyalty to the liberal political dogma is disturbing when things are going well for the Jews. But when things are not going well, this behavior is self-destructive and helps our enemies.
The future of Israel is at stake. Not only is Israel threatened by the soon-to-be nuclear Iran and its satellites, but its right to exist is being questioned by a virulent, global delegitimization campaign that is being led and energized by the academic left and supported by the elements of the liberal wing. In not speaking out, many Jews are, in effect, endangering Israel and abdicating their responsibility as Jews.
Many American Jews have become distanced from Judaism’s larger core values and are uncomfortable making moral judgements concerning the distinction between good and evil, which is an inherent part of our heritage. In addition, many are uncomfortable with the notion of the exceptionalism of Israel, and even with the exceptionalism of the U.S.
Historically, the vulnerability of diaspora Jews led many to make a habit of ingratiating themselves to their non-Jewish hosts. For some Jews, this knee-jerk accommodation, while no longer a survival technique, seems to have become integrated into the genetic code — hence, the quintessential galut (diaspora) Jew. History has shown us over and over again that this approach is ultimately unsuccessful. Witness the tragic outcomes of previous golden ages of Jewry in Spain, France, and Germany. We must not allow these genes to express themselves; we must show strength and become proactive.
When our ancestors were permitted to exit the ghetto, they gravitated towards those expressing universalist ideas, which were most often part of the ideology of the left. It was from the universalists that they experienced the first indications of tolerance. It’s therefore not surprising that they proceeded to derive intellectual sustenance and a modicum of physical security from the left, hence our historic loyalty. But today it is the American right that has evolved to the point where it is much more philo-Semitic and more pro-Israel than the left. The hawks and the evangelicals among them are the most fervent supporters of the State of Israel. From the perspective of our own survival, we must gravitate to, and work with, those who wish us well and support our standing in the world.
Despite the pacifist attitude espoused by many children of Holocaust survivors, despite the anti-war rhetoric spouted by many of the Jewish baby boomers, and despite what for many of us is an innate opposition to war, ultimately it is only the strength of Israel that earns us the respect of our enemies. It is not our intellect, not our Nobel prizes, not our supposed financial acumen. As the Italian-Jewish intellectual Alain Elkann noted, the only antidote to Auschwitz is Israel — and its military might. As such, Israel is fighting not only for itself, but for all Jews. I would argue that by extension, it is fighting for the well-being of the Western world and its values.
Liberal Jews should be making the case for Israel as a bastion of liberal values. Israel is the only country in the Middle East with a free press. It is the only true democracy in the Middle East, with equal rights for women and, in practice, a refuge for gay Arab men from neighboring countries. In Israel there are no honor killings, no stonings, no capital punishment, no cutting off of the hands of thieves.
Throughout our history there have been Jews who have opted out, and this is an acceptable reality. What is not acceptable is that today, entire legions of Jews, in the name of liberalism, are in effect working against the survival of the Jewish people, whether out of ignorance, different priorities, or a lack of understanding of the global perspective.
Confronted with both old and new enemies seeking to destroy us, and vilified by anti-Zionism — anti-Semitism in new clothes — the majority of American Jewry needs to look in the mirror, re-examine its convictions and make a shift.
Abiding by one’s political philosophy, values and convictions is a noble way of living — but not when they are coming to chop your head off. At that point, and I believe we are there now, one’s moral and political compass needs to revert to survival mode.
Aryeh Rubin is the managing director of The Maot Group, an investment boutique in Miami, and president of the Targum Shlishi Foundation.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Israel Pac endorses Pollak over Schakowky Ill-9
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
TO PROTECT OUR HERITAGE PAC ENDORSES JOEL POLLAK FOR ILLINOIS 9TH DISTRICT CONGRESSIONAL SEAT.
joel
On Sunday, October 17th, To Protect Our Heritage (TPOH) PAC, along with thirty co-sponsoring organizations, held a Candidates' Forum, giving 900 guests the opportunity to listen to Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-9th) and her opponent Joel Pollak answer in-depth questions about their stances and proposed Congressional actions involving Israel, its neighbors and the U.S. relationship. To Protect Our Heritage, the Midwest's oldest and largest bi-partisan, pro-Israel PAC, recognizes and welcomes that both candidates define themselves as strongly pro-Israel.
The PAC has endorsed and contributed to Rep. Schakowsky in the past because of her excellent voting record on Israel-related issues. We appreciate Rep. Schakowsky's stance, stated at the Forum, that an undivided city of Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of the Jewish State of Israel and that our country should promptly move our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. We also appreciate her statement that Mohammad Abbas should immediately recognize Israel as a Jewish state in return for a two-month continuation of Israel's moratorium on additional building of homes in the West Bank, as offered by Benjamin Netanyahu.
However, following the forum, the TPOH candidate selection committee conferred and chose to endorse Joel Pollak for the 9th District U.S. Congressional seat because his responses to the questions showed him to be an articulate and unwavering LEADER for the U.S.-Israel relationship. While we appreciate Rep. Schakowsky's history of affirmative votes on legislation introduced by others, we are convinced that Joel Pollak will be a stronger advocate for the critical relationship between our country and Israel. In seeking out ways to strengthen the ties and protect Israel, he will be helping both nations.
In response to the question "What two pieces of Israel-related legislation will you propose if you are in the House of Representatives next February?" Pollak advocated (1) ceasing U.S. funding of the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose leadership has included many of the world's most sadistic tyrants and whose primary function and accomplishment for years has been to condemn Israel - while ignoring real human rights violations throughout the rest of the world, and (2) making a clear statement to Iran that the U.S. considers Israel an ally like NATO allies and thus "a strike against Israel would be a strike against the U.S." Although Rep. Schakowsky mentioned reaffirming the U.S. commitment to Israel, she offered no specifics. We note that in her twelve years in Congress she has not authored any legislation on Israel.
Problematic are Rep. Schakowsky's strong ties with individuals and groups such as J Street, whose members came as a group to cheer her at the forum. J Street has labeled itself as pro-Israel; however, its underlying mission has been revealed to be the weakening of bi-partisan Congressional support for Israel by, among other tactics, drawing away Democratic support for that relationship. J Street leadership has come out not only against AIPAC (American Public Affairs Committee) on various congressional initiatives but has ridiculed and attacked some of Israel's strongest defenders, such as Elie Wiesel, Alan Dershowitz, and Joe Lieberman. Israel's Ambassador Michael Oren characterized J Street as "a unique problem in that it not only opposes one policy of one Israeli government, it opposes all policies of all Israeli governments...This is not a matter of settlements here [or] there. We understand there are differences of opinion, but when it comes to the survival of the Jewish state, there should be no differences of opinion." J Street has recently been exposed as deceiving the public by presenting its funders as pro-Israel, when in fact they include major contributions from a mysterious Hong Kong donor and George Soros, whose antipathy towards Israel is well documented. Rep. Schakowsky, by her staunch support of J Street since its inception - and she has been a main if not the main beneficiary of J Street fundraising efforts - likely unwittingly threatens to make Israel a partisan issue between the two political parties.
The answers to the question "Why is Israel important to the U.S?" highlighted the core difference between the candidates. Rep. Schakowsky listed Israel's important technological and medical achievements which benefit the U.S. On the other hand, Pollak underscored the deeper philosophical and cultural connection between the two nations. He noted that America and Israel represent the values of opportunity, liberty, and respect for the individual human being. Moreover he stated, "America and Israel were founded on the same idea that oppressed and persecuted people could build something new through nothing more than hard work and faith... A world that is not safe for Israel and the idea of Israel is not safe for the United States and the idea of the United States."
Joel Pollak, who brilliantly articulates his pro-Israel message whether his audience is in a synagogue, church or mosque, understands the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship and is unafraid to declare a clear and compelling case for that relationship. Therefore, To Protect Our Heritage PAC, whose sole mission is strengthening the bonds between Israel and the U.S., endorses Joel Pollak. By serving as a leader on the issue, Joel Pollak will strengthen both nations.
NOTE: The endorsement is by To Protect Our Heritage PAC and not event co-sponsors, most of whom do not endorse or contribute to political candidates.
[L
TO PROTECT OUR HERITAGE PAC ENDORSES JOEL POLLAK FOR ILLINOIS 9TH DISTRICT CONGRESSIONAL SEAT.
joel
On Sunday, October 17th, To Protect Our Heritage (TPOH) PAC, along with thirty co-sponsoring organizations, held a Candidates' Forum, giving 900 guests the opportunity to listen to Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-9th) and her opponent Joel Pollak answer in-depth questions about their stances and proposed Congressional actions involving Israel, its neighbors and the U.S. relationship. To Protect Our Heritage, the Midwest's oldest and largest bi-partisan, pro-Israel PAC, recognizes and welcomes that both candidates define themselves as strongly pro-Israel.
The PAC has endorsed and contributed to Rep. Schakowsky in the past because of her excellent voting record on Israel-related issues. We appreciate Rep. Schakowsky's stance, stated at the Forum, that an undivided city of Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of the Jewish State of Israel and that our country should promptly move our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. We also appreciate her statement that Mohammad Abbas should immediately recognize Israel as a Jewish state in return for a two-month continuation of Israel's moratorium on additional building of homes in the West Bank, as offered by Benjamin Netanyahu.
However, following the forum, the TPOH candidate selection committee conferred and chose to endorse Joel Pollak for the 9th District U.S. Congressional seat because his responses to the questions showed him to be an articulate and unwavering LEADER for the U.S.-Israel relationship. While we appreciate Rep. Schakowsky's history of affirmative votes on legislation introduced by others, we are convinced that Joel Pollak will be a stronger advocate for the critical relationship between our country and Israel. In seeking out ways to strengthen the ties and protect Israel, he will be helping both nations.
In response to the question "What two pieces of Israel-related legislation will you propose if you are in the House of Representatives next February?" Pollak advocated (1) ceasing U.S. funding of the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose leadership has included many of the world's most sadistic tyrants and whose primary function and accomplishment for years has been to condemn Israel - while ignoring real human rights violations throughout the rest of the world, and (2) making a clear statement to Iran that the U.S. considers Israel an ally like NATO allies and thus "a strike against Israel would be a strike against the U.S." Although Rep. Schakowsky mentioned reaffirming the U.S. commitment to Israel, she offered no specifics. We note that in her twelve years in Congress she has not authored any legislation on Israel.
Problematic are Rep. Schakowsky's strong ties with individuals and groups such as J Street, whose members came as a group to cheer her at the forum. J Street has labeled itself as pro-Israel; however, its underlying mission has been revealed to be the weakening of bi-partisan Congressional support for Israel by, among other tactics, drawing away Democratic support for that relationship. J Street leadership has come out not only against AIPAC (American Public Affairs Committee) on various congressional initiatives but has ridiculed and attacked some of Israel's strongest defenders, such as Elie Wiesel, Alan Dershowitz, and Joe Lieberman. Israel's Ambassador Michael Oren characterized J Street as "a unique problem in that it not only opposes one policy of one Israeli government, it opposes all policies of all Israeli governments...This is not a matter of settlements here [or] there. We understand there are differences of opinion, but when it comes to the survival of the Jewish state, there should be no differences of opinion." J Street has recently been exposed as deceiving the public by presenting its funders as pro-Israel, when in fact they include major contributions from a mysterious Hong Kong donor and George Soros, whose antipathy towards Israel is well documented. Rep. Schakowsky, by her staunch support of J Street since its inception - and she has been a main if not the main beneficiary of J Street fundraising efforts - likely unwittingly threatens to make Israel a partisan issue between the two political parties.
The answers to the question "Why is Israel important to the U.S?" highlighted the core difference between the candidates. Rep. Schakowsky listed Israel's important technological and medical achievements which benefit the U.S. On the other hand, Pollak underscored the deeper philosophical and cultural connection between the two nations. He noted that America and Israel represent the values of opportunity, liberty, and respect for the individual human being. Moreover he stated, "America and Israel were founded on the same idea that oppressed and persecuted people could build something new through nothing more than hard work and faith... A world that is not safe for Israel and the idea of Israel is not safe for the United States and the idea of the United States."
Joel Pollak, who brilliantly articulates his pro-Israel message whether his audience is in a synagogue, church or mosque, understands the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship and is unafraid to declare a clear and compelling case for that relationship. Therefore, To Protect Our Heritage PAC, whose sole mission is strengthening the bonds between Israel and the U.S., endorses Joel Pollak. By serving as a leader on the issue, Joel Pollak will strengthen both nations.
NOTE: The endorsement is by To Protect Our Heritage PAC and not event co-sponsors, most of whom do not endorse or contribute to political candidates.
[L
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Dems becoming the anti-Israel party?
Congress: The pattern of weak Democratic support began just a week after Inauguration Day 2009, right after the Israel-Hamas war, when 60 House Democrats (including such left-wingers as Dennis Kucinich, Barbara Lee, and Maxine Waters) and not a single Republican wrote the secretary of state to "respectfully request that the State Department release emergency funds to [the anti-Israel organization] UNRWA for reconstruction and humanitarian assistance" in Gaza.
In the same spirit, 54 House Democrats and not a single Republican signed a letter to Barack Obama a year later, in January 2010, asking him to "advocate for immediate improvements for Gaza in the following areas" and then listed ten ways to help Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization.
In dramatic contrast, 78 House Republicans wrote a "Dear Prime Minister Netanyahu" letter a few months later to express their "steadfast support" for him and Israel. The signatories were not just Republicans but members of the House Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus.
So, count 54 Democrats for Hamas and 78 Republicans for Israel.
In the aftermath of the March 2010 crisis when Joe Biden went to Jerusalem, 333 members of the House of Representatives signed a letter to the secretary of state reaffirming the U.S.-Israel alliance. The 102 members who did not sign included 94 Democrats (including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi) and 8 Republicans, a 12-to-1 ratio. Seventy-six senators signed a similar letter; the 24 who did not sign included 20 Democrats and 4 Republicans, a 5-to-1 ratio.
Voters: Public opinion explains these differences on Capitol Hill.
An April 2009 poll by Zogby International asked about U.S. policy: Ten percent of Obama voters and 60 percent of voters for Republican John McCain wanted the president to support Israel. Get tough with Israel? Eighty percent of Obama voters said yes and 73 percent of McCain voters said no. Conversely, 67 percent of Obama voters said yes and 79 percent of McCain voters said no to Washington engaging with Hamas. And 61 percent of Obama voters endorsed a Palestinian "right of return," while only 21 percent of McCain voters concurred.
Almost a year later, the same pollster asked American adults how best to deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict and found "a strong divide" on this question. Seventy-three percent of Democrats wanted the president to end the historic bond with Israel but treat Arabs and Israelis alike; only 24 percent of Republicans endorsed this shift.
Gallup on "Sympathy for Israelis vs. Palestinians in Mideast Situation, by Party ID."
A survey this month asked if a likely voter is "more likely or less likely to vote for a candidate whom you perceive as pro-Israel." Thirty-nine percent of Democrats and 69 percent of Republicans prefer the pro-Israel candidate. Turned around, 33 percent of Democrats and 14 percent of Republicans would be less likely to support a candidate because he is pro-Israel. Democrats are somewhat evenly split on Israel but Republicans favor it by a 5-to-1 ratio.
A consensus exists that the two parties are growing further apart over time. Pro-Israel, conservative Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe finds that "the old political consensus that brought Republicans and Democrats together in support of the Middle East's only flourishing democracy is breaking down." Anti-Israel, left-wing James Zogby of the Arab American Institute agrees, writing that "traditional U.S. policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not have bipartisan backing." Thanks to changes in the Democratic party, Israel has become a partisan issue in American politics, an unwelcome development for it.
In late March 2010, during a nadir of U.S.-Israel relations, Janine Zacharia wrote in the Washington Post that some Israelis expect their prime minister to "search for ways to buy time until the midterm U.S. elections [of November 2010] in hopes that Obama would lose support and that more pro-Israel Republicans would be elected." That an Israeli leader is thought to stall for fewer Congressional Democrats confirms the changes outlined here. It also provides guidance for voters.
Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
In the same spirit, 54 House Democrats and not a single Republican signed a letter to Barack Obama a year later, in January 2010, asking him to "advocate for immediate improvements for Gaza in the following areas" and then listed ten ways to help Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization.
In dramatic contrast, 78 House Republicans wrote a "Dear Prime Minister Netanyahu" letter a few months later to express their "steadfast support" for him and Israel. The signatories were not just Republicans but members of the House Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus.
So, count 54 Democrats for Hamas and 78 Republicans for Israel.
In the aftermath of the March 2010 crisis when Joe Biden went to Jerusalem, 333 members of the House of Representatives signed a letter to the secretary of state reaffirming the U.S.-Israel alliance. The 102 members who did not sign included 94 Democrats (including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi) and 8 Republicans, a 12-to-1 ratio. Seventy-six senators signed a similar letter; the 24 who did not sign included 20 Democrats and 4 Republicans, a 5-to-1 ratio.
Voters: Public opinion explains these differences on Capitol Hill.
An April 2009 poll by Zogby International asked about U.S. policy: Ten percent of Obama voters and 60 percent of voters for Republican John McCain wanted the president to support Israel. Get tough with Israel? Eighty percent of Obama voters said yes and 73 percent of McCain voters said no. Conversely, 67 percent of Obama voters said yes and 79 percent of McCain voters said no to Washington engaging with Hamas. And 61 percent of Obama voters endorsed a Palestinian "right of return," while only 21 percent of McCain voters concurred.
Almost a year later, the same pollster asked American adults how best to deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict and found "a strong divide" on this question. Seventy-three percent of Democrats wanted the president to end the historic bond with Israel but treat Arabs and Israelis alike; only 24 percent of Republicans endorsed this shift.
Gallup on "Sympathy for Israelis vs. Palestinians in Mideast Situation, by Party ID."
A survey this month asked if a likely voter is "more likely or less likely to vote for a candidate whom you perceive as pro-Israel." Thirty-nine percent of Democrats and 69 percent of Republicans prefer the pro-Israel candidate. Turned around, 33 percent of Democrats and 14 percent of Republicans would be less likely to support a candidate because he is pro-Israel. Democrats are somewhat evenly split on Israel but Republicans favor it by a 5-to-1 ratio.
A consensus exists that the two parties are growing further apart over time. Pro-Israel, conservative Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe finds that "the old political consensus that brought Republicans and Democrats together in support of the Middle East's only flourishing democracy is breaking down." Anti-Israel, left-wing James Zogby of the Arab American Institute agrees, writing that "traditional U.S. policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not have bipartisan backing." Thanks to changes in the Democratic party, Israel has become a partisan issue in American politics, an unwelcome development for it.
In late March 2010, during a nadir of U.S.-Israel relations, Janine Zacharia wrote in the Washington Post that some Israelis expect their prime minister to "search for ways to buy time until the midterm U.S. elections [of November 2010] in hopes that Obama would lose support and that more pro-Israel Republicans would be elected." That an Israeli leader is thought to stall for fewer Congressional Democrats confirms the changes outlined here. It also provides guidance for voters.
Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
Shame on Jan Schakowski Illinois 9 Congresswoman
Jan Schakowsky: First You Lose, then you Misquote
Richard Baehr
Several hundred people turned out last night to hear Illinois 9th district Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky discuss Israel with her Republican challenger, Joel Pollak. By the end of the night a few things were clear:
1. Pollak is much brighter and more conversant with the issues, and able to speak about them without reading from prepared notes. It is embarrassing that a multi-term Congresswoman has to write out a script for a 5 minute opening and closing statement, or have one written for her.
2. Schakowsky did not want to talk about Helen Thomas, a nasty anti-Semite and Israel-hating journalist, whom Schakowsky chose to honor at a big campaign fundraising event this year. Joel Pollak had Alan Dershowitz at his fundraiser, a liberal Democrat and defender of Israel.
3. Schakowsky was warmly cheered by the dozens of J- Street members who attended the Forum last night. Though J-Street has bashed Israel over Gaza, facilitated meetings in Congress with Richard Goldstone, fought Congressional sanctions against Iran, and basically done everything possible to make life difficult for Israel, in the process damaging U.S.-Israel relations, Schakowsky and J-Street have had a two way love affair from the group's inception. She has received more money from their PAC than any other candidate for federal office this year. J-Street , and it s chief funder, Israel-hating George Soros, have tried to weaken AIPAC by picking off many on the left.
In essence, if you work with J-Street, your goal is to make support for Israel less bi-partisan. So why does Schakowsky stick with this noxious group? My guess is for two reasons: the first is that they have Barack Obama's back as he publicly chastises Israel over settlements. Other Presidents may have opposed settlement construction, but none have been as public on the subject, or as persistent about them as Obama. Obama has invited J-Street into his small group meetings with Jewish leadership. One flack for the Democrats, Steve Sheffey, has argued that Pollak has made Israel a partisan issue. That is pretty funny, coming as it does, as he applauds Schakowsky for her record on Israel, a record that includes assisting J-Street in its designs to weaken AIPAC.
4. Schakowsky kept repeating that she had a 100% voting record on Israel. But that record reflects setting the bar lower each election cycle on what it means to be pro-Israel. Voting for foreign aid is hardly at this point a test of pro-Israel credentials. Almost all Congressmen support it every year, except when one party or the other (most recently the Democrats) includes it in an omnibus bill they know is unacceptable to the other Party for the sole purpose of getting a no vote on the record for members of the minority party. That is cynicism writ large, but really just par for the course for the Democrats. When one member has done more than any other member of Congress to promote a group hostile to Israel, , and honors an anti-Semite and Israel hater, her so called perfect record on Israel is a joke.
5. The forum last night was to be on the sole topic of Israel. Pollak observed the rules. Schakowsky could not help herself, straying into her real agenda -- and the one she really cares about -- liberal domestic spending programs. Of course, Schakowsky introduced the subject with the magic words: Tikkun Olam )"repairing the world" in Hebrew -- in other words, "good works"). Tikkun Olam are the same buzz words used by the Jews who sponsor flotillas to break the Gaza embargo, and by the Rabbis who lead the fast for Gaza. Tikkun Olam does not man running up 3 trillion dollars in deficits in two years for spending program that accomplished almost nothing, and now become debts that we will leave for future generations. Anyone in attendance last night could tell that Schakowsky was far more engaged and passionate in her few minutes talking about her liberal spending agenda, than in all the rest of her pretty flat toned responses on Israel.
6. Since Pollak battered Schakowsky on substance, Jan's team was left to create a misquote, an attempt to take viral a statement never made by Joel Pollak in the Forum. Whether the misquote was created by Schakowsky herself , or by Steve Sheffey is unclear. This is from Sheffey's debate puff piece posted on Schakowsky's website after the debate:
"Pollak also said that "President Obama has made it okay to hate Israel" and he criticized Obama's speech in Cairo. In response, Jan pointed out that the opposite is true. Jan said that President Obama deserves praise for being the first President to tell the Arab world, on Arab soil, that the bond between the U.S. and Israel is "unbreakable."
In a Facebook response, Pollak provided the actual comment he made:
"Jan Schakowsky is circulating a desperate fundraising email--sent from her BlackBerry after last night's candidate forum on Israel--in which she tells her supporters that I said: "President Obama has made it ok to hate Israel."
What I said -- as video of the forum will confirm -- was the following:
"President Obama's policy has made it acceptable to hate Israel openly in polite society. Helen Thomas was fired for making hateful statements about Jews, but she had vilified Israel for years, and felt comfortable expressing her views in this political climate. The Obama policy has also encouraged the world to scapegoat Israel and Jews -- not just in the Middle East, but closer to home, where Manuel Zelaya of Honduras blamed Israel and Jews when he was ousted from power."
Schakowsky -- as usual -- doesn't want to tell her supporters what I was referring to, because she held a fundraiser with Helen Thomas earlier this year, and traveled to Honduras last November to support Zelaya's attempt to return to power.
The hard truth for Schakowsky supporters is that their candidate refuses to criticize anything that President Obama has done -- and is doing -- with regard to Israel.
By singling Israel out, President Obama encouraged those opposed to or skeptical of Israel's very existence to believe that the world would soon be united against it. That has encouraged those who, like Thomas, previously kept hateful opinions to themselves.
And by wedding herself so closely and uncritically to President Obama's policy, Schakowsky has lost the trust of the pro-Israel community, in our district and across the nation."
There are many reasons why voters in the 9th district are turning to the challenger. For anyone attending the forum last night, and for whom support for a strong U.S Israel relationship is paramount, the choice was pretty clear. Schakowsky is a firm backer of Barack Obama's policies on Israel, Joel Pollak believes those policies, have been ineffective, and worse, endangered and isolated Israel. Iran proceeds merrily along to becoming a nuclear power after two years of failed engagement, and delayed sanctions and for Jan Schakowsky, all is well.
Richard Baehr
Several hundred people turned out last night to hear Illinois 9th district Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky discuss Israel with her Republican challenger, Joel Pollak. By the end of the night a few things were clear:
1. Pollak is much brighter and more conversant with the issues, and able to speak about them without reading from prepared notes. It is embarrassing that a multi-term Congresswoman has to write out a script for a 5 minute opening and closing statement, or have one written for her.
2. Schakowsky did not want to talk about Helen Thomas, a nasty anti-Semite and Israel-hating journalist, whom Schakowsky chose to honor at a big campaign fundraising event this year. Joel Pollak had Alan Dershowitz at his fundraiser, a liberal Democrat and defender of Israel.
3. Schakowsky was warmly cheered by the dozens of J- Street members who attended the Forum last night. Though J-Street has bashed Israel over Gaza, facilitated meetings in Congress with Richard Goldstone, fought Congressional sanctions against Iran, and basically done everything possible to make life difficult for Israel, in the process damaging U.S.-Israel relations, Schakowsky and J-Street have had a two way love affair from the group's inception. She has received more money from their PAC than any other candidate for federal office this year. J-Street , and it s chief funder, Israel-hating George Soros, have tried to weaken AIPAC by picking off many on the left.
In essence, if you work with J-Street, your goal is to make support for Israel less bi-partisan. So why does Schakowsky stick with this noxious group? My guess is for two reasons: the first is that they have Barack Obama's back as he publicly chastises Israel over settlements. Other Presidents may have opposed settlement construction, but none have been as public on the subject, or as persistent about them as Obama. Obama has invited J-Street into his small group meetings with Jewish leadership. One flack for the Democrats, Steve Sheffey, has argued that Pollak has made Israel a partisan issue. That is pretty funny, coming as it does, as he applauds Schakowsky for her record on Israel, a record that includes assisting J-Street in its designs to weaken AIPAC.
4. Schakowsky kept repeating that she had a 100% voting record on Israel. But that record reflects setting the bar lower each election cycle on what it means to be pro-Israel. Voting for foreign aid is hardly at this point a test of pro-Israel credentials. Almost all Congressmen support it every year, except when one party or the other (most recently the Democrats) includes it in an omnibus bill they know is unacceptable to the other Party for the sole purpose of getting a no vote on the record for members of the minority party. That is cynicism writ large, but really just par for the course for the Democrats. When one member has done more than any other member of Congress to promote a group hostile to Israel, , and honors an anti-Semite and Israel hater, her so called perfect record on Israel is a joke.
5. The forum last night was to be on the sole topic of Israel. Pollak observed the rules. Schakowsky could not help herself, straying into her real agenda -- and the one she really cares about -- liberal domestic spending programs. Of course, Schakowsky introduced the subject with the magic words: Tikkun Olam )"repairing the world" in Hebrew -- in other words, "good works"). Tikkun Olam are the same buzz words used by the Jews who sponsor flotillas to break the Gaza embargo, and by the Rabbis who lead the fast for Gaza. Tikkun Olam does not man running up 3 trillion dollars in deficits in two years for spending program that accomplished almost nothing, and now become debts that we will leave for future generations. Anyone in attendance last night could tell that Schakowsky was far more engaged and passionate in her few minutes talking about her liberal spending agenda, than in all the rest of her pretty flat toned responses on Israel.
6. Since Pollak battered Schakowsky on substance, Jan's team was left to create a misquote, an attempt to take viral a statement never made by Joel Pollak in the Forum. Whether the misquote was created by Schakowsky herself , or by Steve Sheffey is unclear. This is from Sheffey's debate puff piece posted on Schakowsky's website after the debate:
"Pollak also said that "President Obama has made it okay to hate Israel" and he criticized Obama's speech in Cairo. In response, Jan pointed out that the opposite is true. Jan said that President Obama deserves praise for being the first President to tell the Arab world, on Arab soil, that the bond between the U.S. and Israel is "unbreakable."
In a Facebook response, Pollak provided the actual comment he made:
"Jan Schakowsky is circulating a desperate fundraising email--sent from her BlackBerry after last night's candidate forum on Israel--in which she tells her supporters that I said: "President Obama has made it ok to hate Israel."
What I said -- as video of the forum will confirm -- was the following:
"President Obama's policy has made it acceptable to hate Israel openly in polite society. Helen Thomas was fired for making hateful statements about Jews, but she had vilified Israel for years, and felt comfortable expressing her views in this political climate. The Obama policy has also encouraged the world to scapegoat Israel and Jews -- not just in the Middle East, but closer to home, where Manuel Zelaya of Honduras blamed Israel and Jews when he was ousted from power."
Schakowsky -- as usual -- doesn't want to tell her supporters what I was referring to, because she held a fundraiser with Helen Thomas earlier this year, and traveled to Honduras last November to support Zelaya's attempt to return to power.
The hard truth for Schakowsky supporters is that their candidate refuses to criticize anything that President Obama has done -- and is doing -- with regard to Israel.
By singling Israel out, President Obama encouraged those opposed to or skeptical of Israel's very existence to believe that the world would soon be united against it. That has encouraged those who, like Thomas, previously kept hateful opinions to themselves.
And by wedding herself so closely and uncritically to President Obama's policy, Schakowsky has lost the trust of the pro-Israel community, in our district and across the nation."
There are many reasons why voters in the 9th district are turning to the challenger. For anyone attending the forum last night, and for whom support for a strong U.S Israel relationship is paramount, the choice was pretty clear. Schakowsky is a firm backer of Barack Obama's policies on Israel, Joel Pollak believes those policies, have been ineffective, and worse, endangered and isolated Israel. Iran proceeds merrily along to becoming a nuclear power after two years of failed engagement, and delayed sanctions and for Jan Schakowsky, all is well.
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