http://www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.co.il/2014/02/israel-cannot-lose.html Israelis know that the Jewish State cannot afford to lose a single war or conflict. In fact prevention of any loss of innocent life is paramount to Israelis. And a determined “refusal to give up” is almost a national character trait that can be seen in many other aspects of Israeli society. Israel is […]
“Five centuries ago, the expulsion happened partly because the Iberian rulers wanted the Jews’ assets. Now we see efforts to welcome back the Jews partly for the same reason.” — Michael Freund The Spanish government has approved a law that would allow descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from the country in 1492 to seek […]
The project on elections that I am doing with Family Security Matters is about to debut. This site will be the first to give you full information on every single candidate running for Senate and Congress – incumbents as well as their challengers in every single state.
Mostly it will be done alphabetically starting with Alabama, Alaska, Arizona and Arkansas. The mighty states of Texas and Illinois have their primaries in March and as soon as they are tallied and victors emerge, both those states will be fully featured.
On a personal level, although this is hard work, I am delighted to learn how many wonderful candidates and incumbents there are in both parties- how many are patriotic Americans, how many are veterans of wars that started after the draft was terminated, how many really care about the future of this country, and finally, although it is not one of the priority issues listed there are links in every case to their views on Israel, and, bless them, there are hundreds who have shown strong fidelity to the unbreakable and critical bonds between the United States and Israel.
I am not paid, nor do I expect to be paid for these services, but if you wish to contribute to this worthy project which is quite expensive to produce, please support Family Security Matters- my partners and friends and allies.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/about/
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-ignorance-and-hypocrisy-behind-oil-export-bans?f=puball
Help consumers, security, environment by eliminating prohibition on exporting US oil and gas
US oil and gas production was already declining, when the 1973 Arab oil embargo sent oil and gasoline prices skyrocketing and created block-long lines at gas stations. Increased domestic production could have eased the supply and price crunch, but the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill had resulted in congressional leasing and drilling moratoriums on federal offshore and onshore lands.
Though it voted 50-49 to build the Alaska pipeline, Congress refused to allow more drilling. Instead, it legislated a 55-mph speed limit, mileage standards for vehicles and a ban on exporting domestically produced crude oil. The speed limit was eventually lifted, but drilling bans expanded, the mileage rules tightened, the export ban remained, and the United States increasingly imported more oil at higher prices.
However, quietly and under the federal and environmentalist radar, America’s oil industry improved and expanded its horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (aka, fracking) technologies – on state and private lands, where DC regulators and pressure groups had little sway. The unprecedented boom that followed sent US oil, natural gas and natural gas liquids (propane) production sharply upward for the first time in decades. America’s oil output rose 30% just between 2011 and 2013, to 7.4 million barrels per day. The Green mantra that we were depleting petroleum supplies was smashed on the fractured rocks of reality.
Suddenly, the United States was importing less oil than at any time since 1995; millions of oil patch and related jobs were created; frack state royalty and tax revenues skyrocketed; natural gas prices plummeted; and the cheaper fuels and feed stocks fostered a US petrochemical and manufacturing renaissance. The fracking revolution also enabled companies to export more gasoline, kerosene, lubricants, solvents, asphalt and other finished products (since the government never banned refined product exports). Those exports have greatly improved the nation’s balance of trade and gross domestic product.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-faltering-american-foreign-policy
At President Obama’s State of The Union Address scant attention was given to foreign policy. He did note that “the war in Afghanistan is coming to an end;” but in reality the war continues. It just so happens the U.S. will be absent from it. Yet the truncated reporting on foreign policy is suggestive. Could it be there is little to report or is it more telling to suggest that there is little good news to report?
Wherever one turns on the global stage, conflict is occurring or is likely to emerge.
The North Koreans are about to engage in their fourth nuclear test. Although unannounced, Iranian scientists will be in attendance in order to learn how to miniaturize a nuclear device for transport on a missile.
International organizations claim that President Assad has destroyed only six percent of his poison gas arsenal in violation of his promise and assurances from Russia. Syria is entering its fourth year of conflict with about 120,000 people killed.
The war in Syria has spilled over into Lebanon and Jordan with Hezballah continuing to play an insidious role as a surrogate for Iranian ambitions in the region.
President Erdogan of Turkey, President Obama’s “closest ally,” is in a fragile political position as a result of a failing economy and a political scandal. His rhetoric has become anti-American and pro-Saudi.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/02/10/carney-on-report-of-iran-moving-warships-toward-u-s-is-that-just-a-fox-thing/?print=1
There is a Head of Intelligence in our government. There should now be a “Head of Stupidity”…..and Jay Carney could become the first appointment. rsk
The White House brushed off Iran’s claim that it’s moving warships toward America’s maritime borders.
“The Iranian Army’s naval fleets have already started their voyage towards the Atlantic Ocean via the waters near South Africa,” Commander of Iran’s Northern Navy Fleet Admiral Afshin Rezayee Haddad announced on Saturday, according to the semi-official Fars News Agency.
“Iran’s military fleet is approaching the United States’ maritime borders, and this move has a message,” Haddad added.
The news agency added that Iran’s has been vowing to send “a flotilla into the Atlantic” since 2011, but this claim takes on an added dimension with the concessions just granted to Tehran by the U.S. in nuclear talks.
The Fars report said the recent moves are a tit-for-tat, getting back at Washington for its beefed-up presence in the Persian Gulf.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/370791/against-reinterpreting-constitution-charles-c-w-cooke
TO UNDERSTAND “THE SUPREMES- BRETHREN AND SISTERN” PLEASE READ:
Just because we ignore its meaning doesn’t mean it changes.
In the pages of Commentary last Friday, Peter Wehner responded at length to my criticism of a National Affairs feature in which he had accused tea partiers of misunderstanding the nature of the American Constitution. Or rather, in the choice word of Wehner’s co-author Michael Gerson, Wehner “educated” me as to why I was wrong to challenge him.
Greatly thrilled as I am by all things didactic, I nevertheless have some queries for my tutors, with whom I must confess I still rather strongly disagree. For a start, I would respectfully remind Wehner of the question he set out in the first instance to address, which is whether the modern federal government can reasonably be said to tally with the Founders’ vision and with the Constitution that they produced, and which is not whether conservatives are electorally wise to attempt a resuscitation of that Constitution. In his reply, Wehner sticks largely to the latter inquiry, once again making a reasonable case that the conservative movement should accept that the priorities and desires of the American people have changed, delivering anew the vehement and wise warning that an overly aggressive program of constitutional repristination would be electoral folly, but ultimately doing little to establish that there is a strong connection between the positions he holds and the Founders’ Constitution. This, naturally, is a problem.
Last time around, I noted that the Constitution is not a mere suggestion booklet but instead a charter “of ultimate law — the provisions of which were fought over line by line,” and that, in consequence, it is incumbent upon us to hew closely to the text as it was written and, later, formally amended. I contended, too, that the Progressive amendments of the early 20th century dramatically changed the document’s scope and cannot therefore be used to link modern action with original intent. And I finished by arguing that one should be wary of anybody who approaches settled law by disparaging “abstract theories” and by referring vaguely to the “prescient mindset” of those who wrote the rules, lest they slide into living constitutionalism. “Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution,” Thomas Jefferson wrote. “Let us not make it a blank paper by construction.” Whether they mean to or not, my submission was that Wehner and Gerson’s line of argument will lead us inexorably to that very state, subordinating timeless meaning in favor of contemporary convenience and driving a fatal hole through the originalists’ cause.
Rather curiously, Wehner resolves to parry my complaint that he is making a strong case for living constitutionalism by . . . well, by making a strong case for living constitutionalism. “As for the charge of embracing a ‘living Constitution,’” he writes,
it is one thing, and I believe quite a problematic thing, for judges to invent and create and impose on the public invented rights. But in the representative democracy the founders created, they certainly believed that within certain parameters the will of the people, ratified in election after election and by Congress after Congress, needed to be taken into account. And Social Security has been ratified in dozens of staggered elections (presidential, Senate, and House) over the course of most of the 20th century and all of the 21st century.
This is a peculiar argument. For a start, I fail to see why it is better for an individual to have the rules of his government informally changed by a majority of his peers than to have them changed by a judge or nine. In both cases, a document’s legal meaning and practical effect is being substantially altered outside of the legitimate process for reform. Does the input mechanism really matter that much?
Wehner maintains that it does, recalling correctly that James Madison at first “opposed the creation of the First National Bank on constitutional grounds but, in revising his views” while president, “signed the act establishing” the second one. This is an accurate description of what did happen, certainly, but it is by no means a slam-dunk argument of what should have happened, nor does it serve as a contribution to the case that today’s sprawling, intrusive, illimitable government is the direct descendant of the charter-as-written. In fact, the example raises an important question: To wit, if Madison’s attitude toward the bank is to be our guiding principle in these matters, then why do we have a codified constitution at all? Why not instead declare parliament to be sovereign and determine to settle all questions by simple majority at the ballot box, as my country of birth has elected to do?
At the very least, I would like to know where the limiting principle lies. Wehner writes that,
the conduct of elections that tacitly or explicitly endorse existing policy, and people’s decisions with the passage of time to rearrange their own lives in light of the law, all amount to a public ratification.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303650204579374690004758598#printMode
Last month the Palestinian ambassador to the Czech Republic blew himself up as he tried to open an old booby-trapped embassy safe. When police arrived on the scene, they discovered a cache of unregistered weapons in violation of international law. Surprise.
Then the real shocker: After prevaricating for a couple of weeks, the Palestinian government apologized to the Czechs and promised, according to news accounts, “to take measures to prevent such incidents in the future.”
As far as I know, this is only the second time the Palestinians have officially apologized for anything, ever. The first time, in 1999, Yasser Arafat’s wife, Suha, accused Israel of poisoning Palestinian children. Hillary Clinton was there. Palestinian officialdom mumbled its regrets.
In other words, no apology for the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. No apology for the 1973 murder of Cleo Noel, the U.S. ambassador to Sudan, and his deputy, George Moore. No apology for the 1974 massacre of 25 Israelis, including 22 schoolchildren, in Ma’alot. No apology for the 1978 Coastal Road massacre, where 38 Israelis, including 13 children, were killed.
And so on and on—straight to the present. In December, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas posthumously bestowed the “Star of Honor” on Abu Jihad, the mastermind of the Coastal Road attack, as “the model of a true fighter and devoted leader.” Dalal Mughrabi, the Palestinian woman who led the attack itself, had a square named after her in 2011. In August, Mr. Abbas gave a hero’s welcome to Palestinian murderers released from Israeli jails as a goodwill gesture. And Yasser Arafat, who personally ordered the killing of Noel and Moore, is the Palestinian patron saint.
I mention all this as background to two related recent debates. Late last month Scarlett Johansson resigned her role as an Oxfam “Global Ambassador” after the antipoverty group condemned the actress for becoming a pitchwoman for the Israeli company SodaStream. Oxfam wants to boycott Israeli goods made—as SodaStream’s are—inside the West Bank; Ms. Johansson disagrees, citing “a fundamental difference of opinion in regards to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] movement.”
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304851104579363621009670740?mod=WSJ_article_EditorsPicks
BIRMINGHAM, Ala.—Ernest Maiden was dumbfounded to learn that he falls through the cracks of the health-care law because in a typical week he earns about $200 from the Happiness and Hair Beauty and Barber Salon.
Like millions of other Americans caught in a mismatch of state and federal rules, the 57-year-old hair stylist doesn’t make enough money to qualify for federal subsidies to buy health insurance. If he earned another $1,300 a year, the government would pay the full cost. Instead, coverage would cost about what he earns.
“It’s a Catch-22,” said Mr. Maiden, an uninsured diabetic. Without help, he said, he must “choose between paying the bills and buying medicine.”
Hair stylist Ernest Maiden doesn’t make enough money to qualify for federal subsidies to buy health insurance but also is ineligible for Medicaid. Bob Miller for The Wall Street Journal
The 2010 health law was meant to cover people in Mr. Maiden’s income bracket by expanding Medicaid to workers earning up to the federal poverty line—about $11,670 for a single person; more for families. People earning as much as four times the poverty line—$46,680 for a single person—can receive federal subsidies.
But the Supreme Court in 2012 struck down the law’s requirement that states expand their Medicaid coverage. Republican elected officials in 24 states, including Alabama, declined the expansion, triggering a coverage gap. Officials said an expansion would add burdensome costs and, in some cases, leave more people dependent on government.
The decision created a gap for Mr. Maiden and others at the lowest income levels who don’t qualify for Medicaid coverage under varying state rules. The upshot is that lower-income people in half the states get no help, while better-off workers elsewhere can buy insurance with taxpayer-funded subsidies.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303650204579375310934336066?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop ‘ObamaCare” is useful shorthand for the Affordable Care Act not least because the law increasingly means whatever President Obama says it does on any given day. His latest lawless rewrite arrived on Monday as the White House decided to delay the law’s employer mandate for another year and in some cases maybe forever. ObamaCare […]
