Obama's mission: Saving Gov. Patrick | |
| President Barack Obama raised $2.5 million for the Democratic National Committee Thursday night, but his trip to Boston had another, less publicized purpose - saving Deval Patrick. Few politicians are as close to Obama as the Massachusetts Democratic governor, or have deeper ties to the president and his core team of advisers. And almost no one faces a tougher re-election battle this year than Patrick, whose disapproval ratings would be considered near-terminal if not for the three-way race that he currently finds himself in. As a result, the White House is looking to every weapon in its arsenal to help Patrick win a second term. Patrick has been at the White House at least a half-dozen times in the past year, whether he’s lunching with senior adviser David Axelrod, dropping by the Oval Office for a chat or attending Obama’s first state dinner. The Massachusetts governor is the only Democrat besides Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and party-switching Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) to get the president to headline a personal fundraiser for him more than a year before the November election. Obama’s former campaign manager, David Plouffe, has been consulting for Patrick’s 2010 bid since last spring, and Axelrod also has lent his expertise. “We want to be as helpful as we can to him,” said Axelrod, who worked on the Massachusetts governor’s 2006 campaign. “The same things that attracted me to Barack Obama attracted me to Deval Patrick,” Axelrod said, “this sense of public service as a calling and not a business, and the sense that we have to break out of the old political paradigms of hyper-partisanship and special interest-dominance and bring about real change.” The intense White House interest in the Massachusetts election is more than just business—it’s personal. Patrick and Obama, both Harvard Law School graduates with Chicago roots, have a history together that dates back almost two decades. They first met in Chicago, at a time when Obama was a community organizer and Patrick, who grew up in a tough South Side neighborhood, was working in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department under President Bill Clinton. Years later, Patrick supported Obama in his Senate campaign. Obama returned the favor in 2006 when Patrick was running for governor, his first-ever bid for public office. In October, 2007, Patrick reached out to Obama and, against the advice of some political advisers, informed his friend he’d decided to endorse him over Hillary Clinton. The safe political play for Patrick—who’d been in office less than a year—would have been to let the contest unfold. But he decided to take the risk at a critical time for the then-Illinois senator’s struggling presidential campaign. Obama and his team flew to Boston the following week. “Not only did we do the endorsement, but we did a rally on Boston Common and there were 20,000 people there,” recalled John Walsh, Patrick’s 2006 campaign manager who is now chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. So it was hardly a surprise when more than 800 words of Obama’s speech Thursday were dedicated to gushing about the governor. As he did at a Patrick fundraiser last October, Obama reminded the donors just how close the two men are. “Deval stood up for me,” Obama explained, early in the Illinois Senate campaign when nobody knew his name. Later, Patrick came to his Senate office and told him he wanted to run for governor. “And I thought to myself, ‘Well, this guy is crazy. He’s not going to win. He’s never run for anything,’” Obama said. “But then I thought to myself, ‘Well, yes, but he supported me when I was doing this stupid thing running for the United States Senate, so – and I like him – so, what the heck.’” Politics isn’t the only thing they have in common. They share similar personal backgrounds, with each raised by a single mother and forced to come to terms with a strained relationship with a distant father. Both are married to attorneys and have two daughters. They are also trailblazing, post-civil rights era African-American politicians of roughly the same age who rode similar hope and change themes to victory--“Yes we can” for Obama in 2008; “Together we can” for Patrick in 2006. Their messages were close enough that in one much-publicized 2008 speech, Obama even borrowed nearly exact phrasing from a 2006 Patrick speech. It is precisely those thematic similarities—not to mention some shared political experiences—that have spawned theories that Patrick’s re-elect will be a bellwether for how Obama fares in 2012. “Deval Patrick is the canary in the coal mine for Barack Obama in 2012,” conservative Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr wrote in January. Mary Anne Marsh, a Democratic strategist in Massachusetts, believes that if Patrick loses, “many people would say, ‘This is the way to try to beat Barack Obama in 2012.’” The president himself invited comparisons Tuesday in his remarks at the Boston fundraiser. “The campaign Deval Patrick built is the same campaign for change that you and I built across this country,” Obama told the Democratic crowd. “I’ve come to tell you tonight that we have kept faith with those beliefs.” The notion of Patrick’s campaign as a dry run for 2012 is rooted in the idea that both politicians took office with ambitious first-term agendas and huge expectations based on the historic nature of their victories and Democratic control of the executive and legislative branches in Boston and Washington. Both found that the euphoria surrounding their victories began to fade with the daily grind of governance and difficulties in making the adjustment from campaigning to governing. Both men saw their poll numbers drop, particularly among key independent voters. The economic downturn only added to their challenges. Patrick, however, has had a much harder go of it than Obama. The president has been able to point to significant accomplishments—among them health care reform and the economic stimulus bill—enabled by the luxury of being able to run a deficit. He is still popular within the party and his poll ratings remain respectable. Patrick, meanwhile, stumbled through controversy during a rough first year and has been forced to make unpopular decisions to maintain a balanced budget in tough economic times. One of the issues he’s being hammered on this year is not making good on his campaign promise to lower property taxes. “As candidates they were both in tune with what people were worried about, with their concerns, what they were looking for, what they wanted. And that in large part helped them get elected because they not only understood that, they were able to communicate that and people really believed in them and trusted them,” said Marsh, the Democratic strategist. “And it seemed when they both got into office they went tone deaf, politically.” Those close to Patrick aren’t buying into the idea that his election offers any insight into 2012. “What happens in 2010 will say something about what happens in 2012, but the truth is that between 2010 and 2012 there’s probably three or four or more political lifetimes,” said Walsh, the state party chairman. “The overwhelming dynamic I see out there is this anxiety that voters have and it sort of combines in with an impatience at the pace of change.” Axelrod laughed when asked if Patrick’s reelection campaign is a referendum on the hope and change platform. “No, I think every election is unique and has its own qualities,” he said. “If you’re someone who’s committed to bringing needed change, that’s additionally burdensome.” He said he believes Patrick’s campaign, and ultimately Obama’s, will be affected more by timing and the economy. “I don’t view this as some sort of a canary in the coal mine sort of thing, but I view it as the effort of a very, very good man governing in difficult times,” he said. | |
 © 2010 Capitol News Company, LLC |
Former CBS News president Richard Salant (1961 - 64 and 1966 - 79) explained the major media's role: "Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have." ...and to this very day most Americans haven't noticed they're being brained washed! ~ N. Hooben
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Deval Patrick - The Canary In The Coal Mine
Source: Politico
Saturday, April 3, 2010
We Are A Nation Of Laws...aah, we used to be!
Cross-posted from: RBN
The Fed Admits To Breaking The Law
Now how long will it be before something is done about it?
April 1 (Bloomberg) — After months of litigation and political scrutiny, the Federal Reserve yesterday ended a policy of secrecy over its Bear Stearns Cos. bailout.
In a 4:30 p.m. announcement in a week of congressional recess and religious holidays, the central bank released details of securities bought to aid Bear Stearns’s takeover by JPMorgan Chase & Co. Bloomberg News sued the Fed for that information.
The problem is this: The Fed is not authorized to BUY anything other than those securities that have the full faith and credit of The United States.
In addition Ben Bernanke has repeatedly claimed that these deals would not cost anyone money. But the current value looks differently:
Assets in Maiden Lane II totaled $34.8 billion, according to the Fed, which set their current market value in its weekly balance sheet at $15.3 billion. That means Maiden Lane II assets are worth 44 cents on the dollar, or 44 percent of their face value, according to the Fed.
Maiden Lane III, which has $56 billion of assets at face value, is worth $22.1 billion, or 39 cents on the dollar, according to the Fed’s weekly balance sheet. A similar calculation for the Bear Stearns portfolio couldn’t be made because of outstanding derivatives trades.
In other words, they have lost more than half of their value.
This was and remains a blatantly unlawful activity.
The Fed has effectively usurped Article 1 Section 7 of The Constituion which reads in part:
All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.
The Fed effectively appropriated taxpayer funds without authorization of Congress. At the time these facilities were put in place neither TARP or any other Congressional authorization existed for them to do so, and to date no bill has been put through Congress authorizing the expenditure of taxpayer funds, either through putting them at risk or via outright expense, for this purpose.
Nor does it stop with a “mere” Constitutional violation – The Federal Reserve Act’s Sections 13 and 14 do not permit Fed asset purchases except, once again, for items carrying “full faith and credit” guarantees. Credit-default swaps and trash mortgages most certainly do not meet these qualifications.
I know I’ve harped on this for more than two years, but here we have a raw admission of exactly what was done – and there is simply no way to construe any of it in a light that conforms with either The Constitution or black-letter statutory law.
What’s worse is that Tim Geithner, head of the NY Fed at the time, was very much involved in this – that is, he in effect personally, along with Ben Bernanke, usurped the power of the United States House.
The Fed has spent two years trying to hide this from the public and Congress. It has fought off both Congressional demands for disclosure and multiple FOIA lawsuits, the latter of which has resulted in a series of adverse rulings (and, it appears, was ultimately going to force disclosure anyway.)
These actions are unacceptable but promising “never to do that again” is insufficient. In a Representative Republic where the rule of law is supposed to be paramount – that is, where we do not crown Kings and relegate everyone else to the status of knaves, unlawful actions such as this demand that strong and unmistakable sanction also be applied to all wrongdoers in addition to protection against future abuse.
In this case this means that both Geithner and Bernanke must go – for starters.
Amending The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 (as Chris Dodd has proposed to prevent future lending bailouts) is not sufficient in that The Fed did not lend in this case, it purchased, and by buying what we now know were trash loans it violated the black letter of existing law.
There is only one effective remedy for an institution that has proved that it will not abide the law: it must be stripped of all authority that has been in the past and can be in the future abused.
This means that The Fed, if we are to keep it at all, must be relegated to a body that only practices and provides monetary policy – nothing more or less – and that all monetary operations must be performed openly, transparently, and within those constraints.
We cannot have a republic where an unelected body is left free to violate The Constitution with wild abandon and those acts are then allowed to stand.
One final thought: If the individuals responsible for this blatant black-letter violation of the law do not face meaningful sanction for these acts, and neither does The Fed as an institution, can you fine folks over at The Executive, Judiciary and Legislative branches of our government please explain to us ordinary Americans why we should obey any of the laws of this land when you will not enforce the laws that already exist?
April 2, 2010
8 Comments to "The Fed Admits To Breaking The Law"
Hanging By A Thread...or is that, "tread"
They say this one became part of a movie scene...
The following story can be found here (To make a long story short, the bridge colapsed due to a landslide.)
The following story can be found here (To make a long story short, the bridge colapsed due to a landslide.)
And this one happened on the Crook 'O Lune Bridge
Friday, April 2, 2010
How much does Obama spend to create one job? If you said, "$286,000.00" you would be correct.
Morning Bell: Welcome to the Obama Dependency Economy
Posted By Conn Carroll On April 2, 2010 @ 9:49 am In Enterprise and Free Markets
Today the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor and Statistics released its monthly jobs report [1] showing that the nation’s unemployment is 9.7% for the third month in a row. While the jobs report does indicate that 162,000 net jobs were created in March, almost 50,000 of those jobs were temporary government Census jobs that do not reflect any real economic progress. In total, the U.S. economy has now lost a total of 3.8 million jobs since President Barack Obama signed his $862 billion stimulus plan. We are 8.1 million jobs short of the 138.6 million he promised the American people.
It is good to see the American economy finally recovering again. It demonstrates the resilience of the American entrepreneur in the face a punishing job killing agenda from Washington. And don’t fall for any White House claims that this belated recovery is due to the stimulus. As the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) admitted [2] last month, its analysis of the stimulus’ job creating record was simply “essentially repeating the same exercise” as the initial projections. In other words, the CBO numbers on the stimulus don’t take any actual new real world data into account. Working with actual data, Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center has found [3]: 1) no statistical correlation between unemployment and how the $862 billion was spent; 2) that Democratic districts received one-and-a-half times as many awards as Republican ones; and 3) an average cost of $286,000 was awarded per job created. $286,000 per job created. That is simply a bad investment.
And President Obama’s future agenda is full bad investments. His recently released budget [4] would raise taxes on all Americans by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade; borrow 42 cents for each dollar spent in 2010; and double the publicly held national debt to more than $18 trillion. This is simply unsustainable. As Thomas Edsall writes in The Atlantic: “Net annual interest on the debt will more than triple during the next ten years, according to the CBO, shooting from $207 billion in 2010, to $723 billion in 2020, more than doubling as a share of GDP, from 1.4 percent to 3.2 percent.” The cause of these exploding deficits is spending and that spending is making the American public more and more dependent on the federal government Edsall continues: “According to the Federal Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the share of total personal income in the United States that comes from government transfer programs – Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ benefits, unemployment compensation, etc. – has grown rapidly over the past six decades, from 5.9 cents of every dollar in 1950 … to 17.3 cents in 2009. In addition, according to BEA, another 9.8 cents of every dollar went, in 2009, to salaries for state, local and federal government employees, a figure that does not include costs of fringe benefits. In other words, more than a quarter of all personal income in the United States is paid for with tax dollars.”
Heritage’s own Index of Dependence on Government [5] shows a steep rise in American reliance on government: “The burgeoning of flagship entitlement programs and the shrinking number of taxpayers who have any financial stake in the government threaten to bankrupt the government–which has led to an increasing interest across the political spectrum in the growth of dependency-creating initiatives.” And one of the strongest dependency-creating special interests, government unions, reached a key tipping this year. As Heritage’s own James Sherk was the first to document [6], government union workers now out number those in the private sector. Edsall explains what this means for the American people: “The consequences of this shift are profound. A majority of the American labor movement is now directly dependent on tax dollars. In terms of political orientation, these workers can now be described as tax consumers as well as tax payers. For these workers, a tax increase may result in a slightly smaller paycheck but, more importantly, the hike means more money is available to pay for raises and new benefits.”
There is an alternative to the Obama dependency economy. We do not have to subject ourselves to chronically high unemployment and an ever-increasing government workforce. As bad as the media makes this recession seem, job losses were actually far worse in the 2001 recession [7]. The difference this time around is that the private sector has not created new jobs to replace the lost ones as fast as it did the last time around [7]. Reduced hiring is particularly acute among small businesses: they account for 36% of the net job losses in this recession compared to just 12% in 2001 [7].
What small businesses need to start hiring is less government intervention in the economy, not more. To promote entrepreneurship Congress could [7]: Freeze all proposed tax hikes and costly regulations until unemployment falls below 7 percent; Freeze spending and rescind unspent stimulus funds; Reform business regulations, such as repealing Section 404 of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act in order to reduce excessive auditing costs; Reform the tort system to lower costs and uncertainty facing businesses; Remove barriers to domestic energy production in Alaska and the Outer Continental Shelf; Repeal the job-killing Davis–Bacon Act; Pass pending free-trade agreements; and Reduce taxes on companies’ foreign earnings if they repatriate those earnings to the United States.
Quick Hits:
It is good to see the American economy finally recovering again. It demonstrates the resilience of the American entrepreneur in the face a punishing job killing agenda from Washington. And don’t fall for any White House claims that this belated recovery is due to the stimulus. As the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) admitted [2] last month, its analysis of the stimulus’ job creating record was simply “essentially repeating the same exercise” as the initial projections. In other words, the CBO numbers on the stimulus don’t take any actual new real world data into account. Working with actual data, Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center has found [3]: 1) no statistical correlation between unemployment and how the $862 billion was spent; 2) that Democratic districts received one-and-a-half times as many awards as Republican ones; and 3) an average cost of $286,000 was awarded per job created. $286,000 per job created. That is simply a bad investment.
And President Obama’s future agenda is full bad investments. His recently released budget [4] would raise taxes on all Americans by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade; borrow 42 cents for each dollar spent in 2010; and double the publicly held national debt to more than $18 trillion. This is simply unsustainable. As Thomas Edsall writes in The Atlantic: “Net annual interest on the debt will more than triple during the next ten years, according to the CBO, shooting from $207 billion in 2010, to $723 billion in 2020, more than doubling as a share of GDP, from 1.4 percent to 3.2 percent.” The cause of these exploding deficits is spending and that spending is making the American public more and more dependent on the federal government Edsall continues: “According to the Federal Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the share of total personal income in the United States that comes from government transfer programs – Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ benefits, unemployment compensation, etc. – has grown rapidly over the past six decades, from 5.9 cents of every dollar in 1950 … to 17.3 cents in 2009. In addition, according to BEA, another 9.8 cents of every dollar went, in 2009, to salaries for state, local and federal government employees, a figure that does not include costs of fringe benefits. In other words, more than a quarter of all personal income in the United States is paid for with tax dollars.”
Heritage’s own Index of Dependence on Government [5] shows a steep rise in American reliance on government: “The burgeoning of flagship entitlement programs and the shrinking number of taxpayers who have any financial stake in the government threaten to bankrupt the government–which has led to an increasing interest across the political spectrum in the growth of dependency-creating initiatives.” And one of the strongest dependency-creating special interests, government unions, reached a key tipping this year. As Heritage’s own James Sherk was the first to document [6], government union workers now out number those in the private sector. Edsall explains what this means for the American people: “The consequences of this shift are profound. A majority of the American labor movement is now directly dependent on tax dollars. In terms of political orientation, these workers can now be described as tax consumers as well as tax payers. For these workers, a tax increase may result in a slightly smaller paycheck but, more importantly, the hike means more money is available to pay for raises and new benefits.”
There is an alternative to the Obama dependency economy. We do not have to subject ourselves to chronically high unemployment and an ever-increasing government workforce. As bad as the media makes this recession seem, job losses were actually far worse in the 2001 recession [7]. The difference this time around is that the private sector has not created new jobs to replace the lost ones as fast as it did the last time around [7]. Reduced hiring is particularly acute among small businesses: they account for 36% of the net job losses in this recession compared to just 12% in 2001 [7].
What small businesses need to start hiring is less government intervention in the economy, not more. To promote entrepreneurship Congress could [7]: Freeze all proposed tax hikes and costly regulations until unemployment falls below 7 percent; Freeze spending and rescind unspent stimulus funds; Reform business regulations, such as repealing Section 404 of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act in order to reduce excessive auditing costs; Reform the tort system to lower costs and uncertainty facing businesses; Remove barriers to domestic energy production in Alaska and the Outer Continental Shelf; Repeal the job-killing Davis–Bacon Act; Pass pending free-trade agreements; and Reduce taxes on companies’ foreign earnings if they repatriate those earnings to the United States.
Quick Hits:
- Gallup’s Daily tracking finds that 20.3% of the U.S. workforce was underemployed [8]in March — a slight uptick from the relatively flat January and February numbers.
- Backed by the city’s private sector employers, the Los Angeles City Council defeated [9] Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s energy rate hike intended to pay for his leftist environmental agenda.
- Leftist environmental land use regulations [10] in Oregon’s Rogue River Valley are preventing pear farmers from expanding their fields and hiring more workers.
- The Obama administration finalized expensive new gas mileage standards [11] for new cars and trucks Thursday.
- Have a blessed Good Friday, Passover and Joyous Easter, from your friends and family at The Heritage Foundation
Thursday, April 1, 2010
What's this? "Obama administration is helping Hamas"
Well here we go again with the guy in the White House interfering with the internal affairs of another country. Since its inception, Israel has been our strongest and in reality, our only ally, in the middle east. And along comes this hoodlum from Chicago and overnight destroys a relationship that will be easy to mend when we toss him out with the garbage as he did with the Dalai Lama. And it's not just a singular effort by Obama that is destroying the friendship, it's all his cronies including the poor excuse for a Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. You recall when she visited the area while she lived in the White House how she buttered up to Yassar Arafat and kissing Soha Arafat (link to picture). As a lead in to the following story I've added this picture as proof positive who the real freinds are of this administration... Did you ever see such a happy re-union of old pals? He certainly didn't act this way with Netanyahu. ~ Norman E. Hooben
Why is President Barack Obama so obviously humiliating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?
Why is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton negating everything she said when she represented New York state and piling on the Jewish state?
They want Netanyahu out. Specifically, they want him to feel such pressure that he dumps his right-wing coalition partners and forms a new government with the center-left party Kadima, headed by former Prime Minister Tzipi Livni.
Livni, who thinks nothing of trading land for peace, no matter how flawed the peace might be, will then hold Netanyahu's government hostage and force it to bend to the will of Washington and sign a deal with the Palestinians that cedes them land in return for a handful of vague vapors and promises, none of which will be kept.
On March 3 Livni said, in a Knesset debate, that since Netanyahu took control "Israel has become a pariah country in the world."
She is trying to use Obama's and Clinton's rejection of Netanyahu's course to force her way into the government. And Obama and Clinton are intent on helping her do so by publicly humiliating Netanyahu.
Netanyahu insists that he'd be happy to negotiate a peace accord. But, as he told me last year, "I just don't have a peace partner with whom to negotiate."
The Palestinians are expert at playing "good cop/bad cop" with Israel. The good cop — the Palestinian Authority — wants to negotiate a peace deal and insists on signs of Israeli good faith in order to do so.
Meanwhile, the bad cop — Hamas — fires missiles at Israel from Gaza, land Israel ceded to the Palestinians in order to promote the peace process earlier in the decade.
Any peace deal with the Palestinian Authority will not be binding on Hamas, and the pattern of Gaza will likely play out again: First, Israel cedes land to the Palestinian Authority. Second, Hamas seizes the newly ceded land through elections or military action. Third, Hamas refuses to recognize the peace deal and uses the newly acquired territory as a base from which to launch further attacks against Israel.
Insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome each time.
When Hillary Clinton and President Obama explode in indignation against Israel for building apartments in East Jerusalem, they deliberately miss the point: There is no reason for Israel to catalyze peace negotiations when there is no single entity that is both committed to peace and speaks for the entire Palestinian people.
Without a peace partner, negotiations are either a trip to nowhere or a slippery slope to more Gaza-like concessions that do nothing but strengthen the enemies of Israel without providing any advancement to the cause of peace.
The merits of building in East Jerusalem or the need for a moratorium on all settlement construction are quite irrelevant as long as a substantial body of Palestinian opinion wants a war with Israel and the prevailing political authority in Gaza insists on the Jewish state's eradication.
So why are Obama and Clinton so intent on raising the profile of the construction issue and publicizing it?
One suspects an effort is afoot to link Israeli resistance to the peace process with the ongoing loss of American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, if not to the global terrorism of al-Qaida.
Gen. David Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee that "Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples [in the region] … Enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the area of responsibility." In other words, blame Israel.
And ultimately, the administration's agenda may be to explain its withdrawal of support for Israel by blaming its stubborn insistence on housing construction.
One can well see the Obama administration learning to live with an Iranian nuclear weapon, all the while blaming Israel for fomenting Iranian hostility by building housing.
Meanwhile, through American aid to Gaza, the Obama administration is helping Hamas to solidify its position in Gaza and lengthen its lease on political power — the very power it is using to torpedo the peace process.
__________________________________
The following from: Newsmax
Obama Wants Israel's Netanyahu Out
By: Dick Morris & Eileen McGann
Why is President Barack Obama so obviously humiliating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?
Why is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton negating everything she said when she represented New York state and piling on the Jewish state?
They want Netanyahu out. Specifically, they want him to feel such pressure that he dumps his right-wing coalition partners and forms a new government with the center-left party Kadima, headed by former Prime Minister Tzipi Livni.
Livni, who thinks nothing of trading land for peace, no matter how flawed the peace might be, will then hold Netanyahu's government hostage and force it to bend to the will of Washington and sign a deal with the Palestinians that cedes them land in return for a handful of vague vapors and promises, none of which will be kept.
On March 3 Livni said, in a Knesset debate, that since Netanyahu took control "Israel has become a pariah country in the world."
She is trying to use Obama's and Clinton's rejection of Netanyahu's course to force her way into the government. And Obama and Clinton are intent on helping her do so by publicly humiliating Netanyahu.
Netanyahu insists that he'd be happy to negotiate a peace accord. But, as he told me last year, "I just don't have a peace partner with whom to negotiate."
The Palestinians are expert at playing "good cop/bad cop" with Israel. The good cop — the Palestinian Authority — wants to negotiate a peace deal and insists on signs of Israeli good faith in order to do so.
Meanwhile, the bad cop — Hamas — fires missiles at Israel from Gaza, land Israel ceded to the Palestinians in order to promote the peace process earlier in the decade.
Any peace deal with the Palestinian Authority will not be binding on Hamas, and the pattern of Gaza will likely play out again: First, Israel cedes land to the Palestinian Authority. Second, Hamas seizes the newly ceded land through elections or military action. Third, Hamas refuses to recognize the peace deal and uses the newly acquired territory as a base from which to launch further attacks against Israel.
Insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome each time.
When Hillary Clinton and President Obama explode in indignation against Israel for building apartments in East Jerusalem, they deliberately miss the point: There is no reason for Israel to catalyze peace negotiations when there is no single entity that is both committed to peace and speaks for the entire Palestinian people.
Without a peace partner, negotiations are either a trip to nowhere or a slippery slope to more Gaza-like concessions that do nothing but strengthen the enemies of Israel without providing any advancement to the cause of peace.
The merits of building in East Jerusalem or the need for a moratorium on all settlement construction are quite irrelevant as long as a substantial body of Palestinian opinion wants a war with Israel and the prevailing political authority in Gaza insists on the Jewish state's eradication.
So why are Obama and Clinton so intent on raising the profile of the construction issue and publicizing it?
One suspects an effort is afoot to link Israeli resistance to the peace process with the ongoing loss of American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, if not to the global terrorism of al-Qaida.
Gen. David Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee that "Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples [in the region] … Enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the area of responsibility." In other words, blame Israel.
And ultimately, the administration's agenda may be to explain its withdrawal of support for Israel by blaming its stubborn insistence on housing construction.
One can well see the Obama administration learning to live with an Iranian nuclear weapon, all the while blaming Israel for fomenting Iranian hostility by building housing.
Meanwhile, through American aid to Gaza, the Obama administration is helping Hamas to solidify its position in Gaza and lengthen its lease on political power — the very power it is using to torpedo the peace process.
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April 2nd, 2010 at 2:58 pm
P.S. Down with the MISHPUCKA !!!!!!!!
The FED does whatever it wants to do without the consent of our prostitute suck-ups that pose as our representatives. Folks, only a small fraction of the people in this country have the capacity to understand that the FED took over the country in 1913 and put the nail in the coffin in 1933 under the treasonous FDR who signed over our country to the scum-sucking pedophile satanists. LOOK IT UP!!!
Board of Governors:
Ben S. Bernanke(Jew) – Chairman
Donald L. Kohn(Jew) – Vice Chairman
Kevin M. Warsh(Jew)
Elizabeth A. Duke(White European)
Daniel K. Tarullo(White European)
Federal Reserve District Banks:
Eric S. Rosengren(Jew) – President, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
William C. Dudley(White European) – President, Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Charles I. Plosser(Jew) – President, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
Sandra Pianalto(White European) – President, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland
Jeffrey M. Lacker(Jew) – President, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond
Dennis P. Lockhart(White European) – President, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta
Charles L. Evans(White European) – President, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
James B. Bullard(Jew) – President, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
Gary H. Stern(Jew) – President, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
Thomas M. Hoenig(Jew) – President, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City
Richard W. Fisher(Jew) – President, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
Janet L. Yellen(Jew) – President, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
Of the five(5) members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, three(3) are Jews. This is a numerical representation of 60%. Of the twelve(12) Federal Reserve District Bank presidents, eight(8) are Jews. This is a numerical representation of 67%. Jews are approximately 2% of the United States population. This means that Jews are over-represented on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors by a factor of 30 times, or 3,000 percent, and over-represented among the Federal Reserve District Bank presidents by a factor of 33.5 times, or 3,350 percent. This extreme numerical over-representation of Jews among the members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Federal Reserve District Bank presidents cannot be explained away as a coincidence or as the result of mere random chance. You must ask yourself how such an incredibly small and extremely unrepresentative minority ethnic group that only represents 2% of the American population could so completely dominate the U.S. Federal Reserve System.
For the past forty(40) years, every Chairman of the Federal Reserve System has been a Jew, except for a brief period of seventeen(17) months. Here are the Chairmen of the Federal Reserve System since 1970.
Arthur F. Burns(Jew)
term: February 1, 1970 – January 31, 1978
George W. Miller(White European)
term: March 8, 1978 – August 6, 1979
Paul A. Volcker(Jew)
term: August 6, 1979 – August 11, 1987
Alan C. Greenspan(Jew)
term: August 11, 1987 – January 31, 2006
Ben S. Bernanke(Jew)
term: February 1, 2006 – present
Jews are approximately 2% of the United States population. The probability that almost every Chairman of the Federal Reserve System since 1970 would be a Jew is infinitesimally small. This extreme numerical over-representation of Jews among the Chairmen of the Federal Reserve System cannot be explained away as a coincidence or as the result of mere random chance. You must ask yourself how such an incredibly small and extremely unrepresentative minority ethnic group that only represents 2% of the American population could so dominate the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve System.
The hired help in DC not only went out and begged for their jobs they knew that if hired the would be required to swear to support & defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. To do less should require INSTANT DISMISSEL.
“How about someone find out which laws were broken,”…”
I for one will be the one screaming to put them in prison from the capital building if someone that knows what they are doing can provide solid evidence that the constitution is being unlawfully broken by anyone in congress or the white house… etc. How about it y’all? I’m willing to help.