Ariel Sharon, Larger than life Ariel Sharon, who died Saturday at age 85, after being suspended comatose, between life and death for the past eight years, was the final Israeli prime minister from the generation that fought in the 1948 War of Independence. And as with others of his generation, the growth and development of […]
https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/367985/print
Obamacare’s Cornhusker Nemesis by John Miller
It’s not easy to pile up more than 20,000 sheets of paper — the number of pages of regulations associated with Obamacare, according to some estimates. Yet it’s an effective prop for Ben Sasse, a Republican running for Senate in Nebraska. “This is a picture of what government can’t do well, wasn’t built to do, and inevitably fails at,” he says, gesturing toward the tower of paper. At full height, the pages stand more than nine feet tall. On the evening of December 17, in the First National Bank of Holdrege with its eight-foot ceiling, the top segment has to rest on a nearby table. “Government this big squashes freedom,” says Sasse. A man in the audience senses a more imminent threat: “I’m hoping that stack doesn’t fall on you!” It stays up during an hour-long town-hall meeting in part because a pipe runs through the middle of the pages like a spine, holding them together. Aides wheel the contraption around on a dolly and store it in the bowels of the campaign’s RV.
Sasse is betting that deep discontent with Obamacare will drive him into the Senate later this year. Nebraska is all but certain to elect a Republican to succeed retiring GOP senator Mike Johanns, so the state’s main election will take place on May 13, when Sasse squares off against banker Sid Dinsdale, former state treasurer Shane Osborn, and two other Republicans in this year’s first truly contested Senate primary. Between now and then, each candidate will position himself as a conservative and rail against Obamacare. With Sasse, however, Nebraska Republicans have an opportunity to do more: They can elect not merely a man who promises to vote for the repeal of President Obama’s signature policy achievement, but a senator who almost immediately would become one of the GOP’s most visible and articulate experts on the health-care law’s defects and the ways to replace it.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
NO SECOND GUESSING HERE
Lynne Stewart suggested that maintaining the blind sheikh’s “exchange value” was part of her job. “It could be very important that that person is still perceived as worth exchanging, perhaps, for someone else,” she suggested.
A year after Rahman was sentenced to life in prison, terrorists from his Muslim Brotherhood splinter organization, the Islamic Group, carried out the Luxor Massacre in Egypt. European tourists had their ears and noses cut off before being killed. The attack had been carried out to take hostages to exchange for Lynne Stewart’s client. A note calling for the release of Rahman was found in a disemboweled body.
When asked about the Luxor Massacre, Stewart accused Americans of being “two-faced about violence” adding that, “The basic desire of people to be free hasn’t changed. And I’m not sure that I want to second-guess what methods other people use.”
In the massacre that Lynne Stewart refused to second-guess; the methods included the murder of Shaunnah Turner, a 5-year-old girl.
rhttp://bit.ly/1cJUsj9
Secretary of State, John Kerry, is preoccupied with the attempt to establish a Palestinian state, as a means to advance peace and US interests. However, Congress – which is charged by the Constitution with supervising the Administration – has yet to conduct hearings on the impact of the proposed Palestinian state upon vital US interests. Congress cannot relinquish its constitutional responsibility to probe, independently, the critical implications of a Palestinian state upon the US economy, core values, homeland and national security, as well as upon the stability of pro-US Arab regimes, in particular, and the Middle East in general.
Independent Congressional scrutiny of this Palestinian state-driven policy is doubly-essential against the backdrop of the systematic US Middle East policy failures since 1947.
The US Administration Track Record
In 1948, the US State Department opposed the establishment of a Jewish state. Assuming that Israel would be an ally of the Communist Bloc, and expecting Israel to be devastated by the invading Arab armies, the Administration imposed a regional military embargo, while the British supplied arms to Jordan, Iraq and Egypt.
During the 1950s, the US Administration courted the Egyptian dictator, Nasser, in an attempt to remove him from Soviet influence, offering financial aid and pressuring Israel to “end the occupation of the Negev,” internationalize Western Jerusalem and evacuate the whole of Sinai. Instead, Nasser intensified his pro-USSR policy, subversion of pro-US Arab regimes and support of Palestinian terrorism.
During the 1970s and 1980s, until the invasion of Kuwait, the US Administration supported Saddam Hussein through an intelligence-sharing agreement, the transfer of sensitive dual-use US technologies and approval of five billion dollar loan guarantees.
In 1977, the Administration, initially, opposed the Begin-Sadat peace initiative, lobbied for an international conference, and finally jumped on the peace bandwagon.
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-fray-Sovereignty-Yes-but-look-before-you-leap-337716
Extending Jewish sovereignty over Judea-Samaria is imperative, but some proposals for this imperil Israel no less than the two-state folly.
No one has a job over there… They are shooting at each other. There are drugs. They burn cars. Enough is enough.
– a Swedish citizen, cited in The New York Times, February 26, 2011, on the impact of Muslim immigration.
Lebanonization refers to the [situation] within a single country so riven with religious and other disputes that the country becomes impossible to govern.
– A.M. Rosenthal, cited by William Safire in the New York Times, April 21, 1991.
Two apparently unrelated events occurred over the past week or so.
The one was the publication of the second issue of the political journal Sovereignty by Women in Green and the Forum for Sovereignty, which carried various proposals for alternatives to the two-state paradigm that has dominated – or rather tyrannized – the public debate on the Palestinian question for almost a quarter century.
The other was a visit to Israel by two Scandinavian journalists (one Danish, the other Swedish), who gave a hair-raising account of the influence the massive Muslim migration into their countries is having on their societies at virtually every level.
Despite these two events being seemingly entirely unconnected, they are in closely linked, and Israelis – particularly opponents of the two-state principle – will ignore this at their peril.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/368176/new-scandal-same-old-christie-andrew-c-mccarthy New Scandal, Same Old Christie It’s not the first time a top official has been fired for lying to the governor. After swiftly dismissing a top official in his administration, Chris Christie was characteristically caustic when pressed by the press for the lesson to be drawn from the scandal: “Don’t lie to the […]
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2014/01-02/fundamental-uncertainties-climate-change/
The World Meteorological Organisation of the United Nations took its first steps towards establishing the World Climate Program in the early 1970s. Among other things it held a conference in Stockholm to define the main scientific problems to be solved before reliable climate forecasting could be possible. The conference defined quite a number, but focused on just two. The first concerned an inability to simulate the amount and character of clouds in the atmosphere. Clouds are important because they govern the balance between solar heating and infrared cooling of the planet, and thereby are a control of Earth’s temperature. The second concerned an inability to forecast the behaviour of oceans. Oceans are important because they are the main reservoirs of heat in the climate system. They have internal, more-or-less random, fluctuations on all sorts of time-scales ranging from years through to centuries. These fluctuations cause changes in ocean surface temperature that in turn affect Earth’s overall climate.
The situation hasn’t changed much in the decades since. Many of the problems of simulating the behaviour of clouds and oceans are still there (along with lots of other problems of lesser moment) and for many of the same reasons. Perhaps the most significant is that climate models must do their calculations at each point of an imaginary grid of points spread evenly around the world at various heights in the atmosphere and depths in the ocean. The calculations are done every hour or so of model time as the model steps forward into its theoretical future. Problems arise because practical constraints on the size of computers ensure that the horizontal distance between model grid-points may be as much as a degree or two of latitude or longitude—that is to say, a distance of many tens of kilometres.
“Gates-gate: Is Obama the Only Problem with the A-stan War?”
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2745/Gates-gate-Is-Obama-the-Only-Problem-with-A-Stan-War.aspx
Excuse me while I defend President Obama.
This doesn’t happen often, if ever at all. But this Robert Gates story, whipping through Washington like wildfire, feels like smoke in our eyes.
It all started with an article by Bob Woodward in the Washington Post about the former secretary of defense’s new memoir, “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.” Gates, Woodward writes, had concluded “by early 2010 (that) the president ‘doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war (in Afghanistan) to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.’”
Getting out: my one, undoubtedly accidental, convergence with Obama. But I digress.
Woodward continues: “Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was ‘skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,’ Gates writes.”
A commander in chief sends Americans to war “convinced it would fail”? The ensuing dudgeon has never been higher among Obama’s critics, which, of course, should include me.
But there are a couple of points to take into account about this particular revelation from the Gates book via Woodward (the book’s release date is Jan. 14).
First, I found myself lingering over Woodward’s description of “the president’s own strategy.” To be sure, any war Obama fights as president belongs to him, but there is more to this story. Back in 2010, I recall reading a shocking insider account about how the military brass virtually imposed the Afghanistan “surge” strategy on Obama. The headline over this earlier Washington Post story was: “Military thwarted president seeking choice on Afghanistan.” The writer was again Bob Woodward. In fact, the earlier article, one of a three-part series, was adapted from Woodward’s 2010 book “Obama’s Wars.”
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2014/01-02/america-big-dumb-ox/
An interesting new review of American Betrayal from the January 2014 issue of the Australian journal Quadrant, edited by Keith Windshuttle, the leading general intellectual journal of ideas, literature, poetry and historical and political debate published in Australia.
“I have long known Robert Conquest’s three laws of politics, of which the third had always been something of a mystery. One and two I have seen for myself, but the third remained unclear:
1. Everyone is conservative about what they know best.
2. Any organisation not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
The mystery has now been more than cleared up, and if I have learned anything in reading American Betrayal by Diana West, it is that Conquest may not have gone far enough. My own rewrite of Rule Number 3 would be: assume any organisation with actual power will almost immediately be taken over by a cabal of its enemies. That may even have been what he meant but was too polite to say.
No book has ever frightened me as much as American Betrayal. The only thing wrong with reading it is that you find yourself so surrounded by impossible odds that it seems there is no way you can go that isn’t in the wrong direction. Trying to fix things is as bad as just leaving them alone. But because the story the book tells is so incredible, you realise just how unbelievable her thesis would be unless you had read the book yourself. I will therefore first bring to your attention a number of the reviews that were put up on the Amazon website. I’ll only say that none of them gives you anything like the flavour of what the book is actually like. So first read through these and then let us continue from there:
“This explosive book is a long-needed answer to court histories that continue to obscure key facts about our backstage war with Moscow. Must-reading for serious students of security issues and Cold War deceptions, both foreign and domestic.”—M. Stanton Evans, author of Blacklisted by History
“Enlightening. I give American Betrayal five stars only because it is not possible to give it six.”—John Dietrich, formerly of the Defense Intelligence Agency and author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=65617
The first long study on the Jews in Turkey was written by the late American scholar Stanford Shaw—born Stanley Shapiro, a well known Ottoman scholar, who eventually married a Turkish Muslim woman. Though clearly versed in the sources, he produced what was essentially a whitewash of the ‘wonderful’ Jewish life in modern Turkey. Shaw’s is more fantasy than truth.
The present book takes a much more sobering approach. This superb book , Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust, by Corry Guttstadt, gives the details of why Jewish life, unlike what the above-mentioned Stanford Shaw claims, was so precarious, even after, and especially so, after the secular Turkish Republic was founded. The author is thoroughly grounded in the Turkish sources, and has done research in fifty archives in eleven countries. She presents a very detailed analysis of how pre-Holocaust Turkey was so difficult for the Jews, how the Turkish government did almost nothing to help its Jewish citizens living in Nazi-occupied Europe, and how it used the precarious situation of the Jews in the world to pass extremely restrictive laws to impoverish its own Jewish citizens during World War II. The few examples where Turkish consuls in Europe helped Jews — so often touted by modern Turkish diplomats and public relations firms — were the exception, not the rule.
