Yisrael Medad: Sunrise at Shiloh
Friday, 03 February 2012
Why so quiet?
I don't get it. Jews are never quiet. And yet, I've heard 'nary a peep around the innernut about the fact that Obama's Defense Secretary Leon Panetta just announced to the world - by way of David Ignatius at the Washington Post - that Israel is likely to strike Iran "in April, May or June."
.... President Obama and Panetta are said to have cautioned the Israelis that the United States opposes an attack...
.... U.S. officials see two possible ways to dissuade the Israelis from such an attack: Tehran could finally open serious negotiations for a formula to verifiably guarantee that its nuclear program will remain a civilian one; or the United States could step up its covert actions to degrade the program so much that Israelis would decide that military action wasn’t necessary....
Or, I suppose, if the U.S. really wanted to "dissuade the Israelis", Leon Panetta could simply broadcast their plans to Iran. Oops.
I wonder what the heck is going on, and whose side the U.S. is really on -- and I don't mean just the direction of the latest lip service to any "ironclad" commitments. I also wonder if the Israelis aren't feeding Panetta false information just to see what he does with it. That's what I would do - to see if he could be trusted - but then maybe I watch too many movies:)
Hopefully, this unnerving quiet is nothing more than widespread preparation for the Shabbat. That must be it; everyone's setting their tables and such....
But we are definitely talking about this on Sunday morning. Super Bowl or no Super Bowl.
Expectators Unexpectedly Ecstatic!
The unemployment rate has now declined for five straight months, partly because of unemployed workers giving up the hunt for a job but also because people are finding work.
The economy created jobs at the fastest pace in nine months in January and the unemployment rate unexpectedly dropped to a near three-year low, giving a boost to President Barack Obama as campaigning heats up ahead of November elections.
Nonfarm payrolls jumped 243,000, the Labor Department said on Friday, as factory jobs grew by the most in a year. The jobless rate fell to 8.3 percent - the lowest since February 2009 - from 8.5 percent in December.
The gain in employment was the largest since April and it far outstripped the 150,000 predicted in a Reuters poll of economists. It could lessen the likelihood of further action from the Federal Reserve to spur a stronger recovery.
Before you get too excited, though, check out these links from the Drudge Report:
Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge:
A month ago, we joked when we said that for Obama to get the unemployment rate to negative by election time, all he has to do is to crush the labor force participation rate to about 55%.
Looks like the good folks at the BLS heard us: it appears that the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million. No, that's not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month!
So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non institutional population increased by 242.3 million -- meaning, those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million.
Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30 year low of 63.7% as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation.
A broad measure of unemployment, which includes
people who want to work but have stopped looking
and those working only part time but who want more work,
slipped from 15.2 percent in December
to 15.1 percent in January."
(al Reuters)
See also: ... Record Surge In Part-Time Workers
Bush Years Quote of the Day
During the Bush years, conservatives all too often sided with the Republican Party rather than their own principles.
Danger Will Robinson . . . or Ann Coulter
Elect-Ability Quote of the Day
If conservatives can learn anything from Barack Obama,
it’s this:
Anyone is electable."
Yates Walker at The Daily Caller (with thanks to YS):
.... The list of potential political liabilities for Hillary and Barack could go on for days. Each had an ideology far to the left of mainstream America. Neither had an executive’s pedigree. Yet, somehow, electability wasn’t an issue for them.
It ain’t a mystery, folks.
The electability question is a liberal media con. It is posed only when discussing Republicans. And it is posed often. The purpose of the question is to cast doubt on conservative candidates and, ultimately, keep them out of office.
And, tragically, it works.
The electability meme ... has slithered into the minds of Republican voters, leading them to be unnaturally anxious when conservative candidates take strong stands. The result of this anxiety is manifest. We either lose (see: Bob Dole, John McCain, etc.) or elect callow, mealy-mouthed imps (see: the hordes of GOP congressmen who think compromise is a cardinal virtue). In short, the electability con has been a destructive, weakening force in the conservative movement for generations. And, as dupes, Republicans continually harm themselves....
.... It’s hard to root for weak candidates. Conservatives love America. And our country wasn’t founded and built by mealy-mouths and second-guessers. America was founded by ass-kickers, men and women who took hard stands, come hell or high water. That’s the type of candidate we want, the type they call “unelectable.”
If conservatives can learn anything from Barack Obama, it’s this: Anyone is electable.
"Typical White" people question Obama's biography
I've been pissed off ever since Obama called his grandmother a "typical white" person as he threw her under the bus. What does that mean, "typical white"? Can you imagine ANYone saying "typical black person"? I've never heard anything like it in my life.
So I was pissed off to begin with, and then I read the New York Times this morning: Rural Swath of Big State Tests Obama
.... Many voters talk of reading a stream of false and shadowy rumors purveyed by e-mail: Mr. Obama does not put his hand on his heart during the national anthem, he is a Muslim, he did not say hello to enlisted men in Afghanistan. Some disregard these rumors; some do not.
"False and shadowy RUMORS" ???
See also a "false and shadowy" rumor in the form of an ASSOCIATED PRESS photo, documentating Barry Soetoro's / Barack Obama's Indonesian citizenship and Muslim religion (as of 1968) at Texas Darlin. [English translation here.]
What's "shadowy" is that the AP never published the photo. And what's "false" is the New York Times. The Enemedia is delegitimizing and demonizing The Truth right in front of our eyes. It's unbelievable.
Typical White People Want Answers to their questions, simple questions like, What is Barack Obama's legal name? And... Is he a citizen of Indonesia?
Dear Reader, You'd better raise some hell with someone, somewhere, before he is crowned inaugurated.
Time is running out.
P.S., another "false and shadowy" rumor is that Obama met privately with an American agent for Hezbollah.
See "Jimmy Carter without the rabbits"
The Culture Chasm
I really should get out and about more. I must have fallen completely out of touch with popular culture, as I was shocked to read "Brad Pitt's Secret to Waking Up the Kids," when I came across it on the way to my email. These two excerpts should suffice as explanation.
In a recent interview with CBS This Morning, the Oscar-nominated actor ("Moneyball") revealed that he sometimes has to rely on a certain carbonated beverage to get his kids moving in the morning.
"Listen, I admit there's times like, 'We gotta get up. Get up! Here's your shoes. Here's your shoes. Drink this Coke. Drink this Coca-Cola. Drink it all. Right now! Drink it! Drink it! Drink it!' Just so we could get 'em up and going," Pitt confessed.
Pitt was speaking about his chaotic life with six children. The kids, three biological with Angelina Jolie and three adopted from overseas, travel with their mom and dad everywhere.
* * *
Pitt says that as the kids get older, they're becoming more aware that their parents aren't married. "We're getting a lot of pressure from the kids," Pitt says.
"It [marriage] means something to them. And they have questions when their friends' parents are married and why is that." Pitt has gone on record as saying that he and Jolie don't plan to marry until all couples can do so legally. Whether the kids will push the couple toward the altar ... remains to be seen.
Jolie - who is apparently "one of the most famous women on the planet" - has written and directed a movie called, "In The Land of Blood and Honey" (kind of like milk and honey, only different).
When lost, go to Wikipedia:
.... Journalist Christiane Amanpour, who covered the Bosnian War for CNN, introduced the film at the New York premiere on 5 December 2011, calling it "remarkable and courageous". The premiere after-party was held at The Standard hotel's rooftop in New York and was co-sponsored by the US foreign policy think tank Council on Foreign Relations (of which Angelina Jolie is a member)and women's rights organization Women for Women International. General Wesley Clark was also on hand at the premiere and called the film "incredible." Writing in the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen praised the movie, seeing it as an indictment of the hesitant American reaction to the atrocities committed by Serbs against Muslims in Bosnia as well as an endorsement of American-led foreign interventionism such as the military action in Libya....
Theirs is another world altogether, quite untethered from my own -- informative to visit, perhaps, but I sure wouldn't want to live there.
Thursday, 02 February 2012
What Liberal Intellectuals Are Reading, Studying and Concluding
THE OBAMA MEMOS
.... If there was a single unifying argument that defined Obamaism from his earliest days in politics to his Presidential campaign, it was the idea of post-partisanship. He was proposing himself as a transformative figure, the man who would spring the lock. In an essay published in The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan, a self-proclaimed conservative, reflected on Obama’s heady appeal: “Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us.”
.... In the past four decades, the two political parties have become more internally homogeneous and ideologically distant. In “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama wrote longingly about American politics in the mid-twentieth century, when both parties had liberal and conservative wings that allowed centrist coalitions to form. Today, almost all liberals are Democrats and almost all conservatives are Republicans. In Washington, the center has virtually vanished. According to the political scientists Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have devised a widely used system to measure the ideology of members of Congress,
when Obama took office there was no ideological overlap between the two parties. In the House, the most conservative Democrat, Bobby Bright, of Alabama, was farther to the left than the most liberal Republican, Joseph Cao, of Louisiana. The same was true in the Senate, where the most conservative Democrat, Ben Nelson, of Nebraska, was farther to the left than the most liberal Republican, Olympia Snowe, of Maine. According to Poole and Rosenthal’s data, both the House and the Senate are more polarized today than at any time since the eighteen-nineties.
It would be hard for any President to reverse this decades-long political trend... Congress is polarized largely because Americans live in communities of like-minded people who elect more ideological representatives. Obama’s rhetoric about a nation of common purpose and values no longer fits this country: there really is a red America and a blue America.
Polarization also has affected the two parties differently. The Republican Party has drifted much farther to the right than the Democratic Party has drifted to the left. Jacob Hacker, a professor at Yale, whose 2006 book, “Off Center,” documented this trend, told me, citing Poole and Rosenthal’s data on congressional voting records, that, since 1975, “Senate Republicans moved roughly twice as far to the right as Senate Democrats moved to the left” and “House Republicans moved roughly six times as far to the right as House Democrats moved to the left.” In other words, the story of the past few decades is asymmetric polarization.
Two well-known Washington political analysts, Thomas Mann, of the bipartisan Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agree. In a forthcoming book about Washington dysfunction, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” they write,
“One of our two major parties, the Republicans, has become an insurgent outlier —
— ideologically extreme,
contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime,
scornful of compromise,
unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science,
and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
ABC News goes out on a limb
I can't believe this is being reported by ABC, and with an intro from Obama's campaign for his "jobs bill"?! (Todah to Stef)
ABC News VIDEO:
U.S. Bridges, Roads Being Built by Chinese Firms
Uh-oh.
Update: BtB scooped ABC!
Well, kinda sorta. You decide:
In Manhattan, it's China that's "shovel ready
Lots of treasure in the BtB Archives (plus earlier site here - scroll down).
Tough Times Quote of the Day
Speaking to an intimate crowd of donors who paid more than $35,000 per couple to attend the fundraiser, Obama acknowledged that many Americans have gone through
"three years of really tough times."
Meanwhile, in Beverly Hills, the First Lady threatened that a second term for her husband would "impact our lives for decades to come."
There is some good news, however:
The New York Times Company reported on Thursday that its fourth-quarter profit declined 12.2 percent as rising subscription and digital advertising revenue at its largest newspapers could not offset the continued drop-off in print advertising....
.... For the full year, the company reported a net loss of $39.7 million compared with a profit of $107.7 million in 2010.
IRAN can produce FOUR BOMBS
IRAN has enough nuclear material for four bombs,
Israel's Director of Military Intelligence Major General Aviv Kochavi warned Thursday, in a rare appearance at the Herzliya Conference, according to YNet News.
but but BUT:
Israel's Vice Premier Moshe Ya'alon states that
"Any facility defended by a human being can be penetrated. Any facility in Iran can be hit, and I speak from experience as the IDF chief of staff," he remarked.
- all of Iran's nuclear facilities are 'within striking distance'
- November blast at Tehran weapons facility eliminated a system meant to manufacture missiles that could threaten the U.S.
Just last week US officials confessed they lacked the ability to destroy fortified nuclear facilities in Iran....
Obama has increased the National Debt by 44.5% ... so far
On January 20, 2009 - the day Mr. Obama took office - the national debt was $10.63 trillion, according to the Treasury Department. As of January 31st 2012, it was $15.36 trillion. That means the debt has increased approximately $4.73 trillion on Obama's watch. So far.
A week ago today, the debt ceiling was raised to $16.4 trillion -- pretty much under the radar, as Republicans are busy obsessing over who will be their nominee in the fall. House Republicans passed a “resolution of disapproval” to stop the increase, but in the words of the New York Times, "the Senate refused ... to take up that measure."
You may remember, the 2009 "stimulus" law set the debt limit at $12.1 trillion.
And, though you may not remember, back in 2006 then-Senator Barack Obama made a Great Speech on the floor of the Senate, urging Congress not to allow an increase in the debt limit - from $8.6 to $9 trillion:
The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure.
It is a sign that the U.S. Government can't pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies.
Over the past 5 years, our federal debt has increased by $3.5 trillion to $8.6 trillion. That is “trillion” with a “T.” That is money that we have borrowed from the Social Security trust fund, borrowed from China and Japan, borrowed from American taxpayers.And over the next 5 years, between now and 2011, the President’s budget will increase the debt by almost another $3.5 trillion.
Numbers that large are sometimes hard to understand. Some people may wonder why they matter. Here is why: This year, the Federal Government will spend $220 billion on interest. That is more money to pay interest on our national debt than we’ll spend on Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. That is more money to pay interest on our debt this year than we will spend on education, homeland security, transportation, and veterans benefits combined. It is more money in one year than we are likely to spend to rebuild the devastated gulf coast in a way that honors the best of America.
And the cost of our debt is one of the fastest growing expenses in the Federal budget. This rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy, robbing our cities and States of critical investments in infrastructure like bridges, ports, and levees; robbing our families and our children of critical investments in education and health care reform; robbing our seniors of the retirement and health security they have counted on....
One more flashback before we return to the present. This was on the campaign trail in Fargo North Dakota, 2008:
Make that two more flashbacks:
In an address to Congress in February 2009, a week after signing the economic stimulus law, Mr. Obama said he would “cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office.”
Okay, so he's a hypocrite, a liar and a compulsive big-spender of other people's money. But we knew that. What we didn't know is how hard the U.S. Treasury Department is trying ... to get Obama "past the election" without raising the debt ceiling again.
WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--A senior Treasury Department official said Wednesday she expects the federal debt ceiling won't have to be raised again ahead of November's presidential election.
"Our expectation is that we will get close to the end of the year with the current room under the debt ceiling," Assistant Secretary for Financial Markets Mary Miller told reporters. "We do know that should we fall short we can still use extraordinary measures...to get past the election."
Israel should get the Sinai back
I didn't post this when it first came out (Jan. 6), because I thought everyone understood the implications of the rise to power of Islamists in Egypt, and that "land for peace" doesn't work, at least not for long. What I hadn't focused on, though, was the role of the United States in all this -- both past and present.
The rise of the forces of jihadist Islam in Egypt places the US and other Western powers in an uncomfortable position. The US is the guarantor of Egypt's peace treaty with Israel. That treaty is based on the proposition of land for peace. Israel gave Egypt the Sinai in 1982 and in exchange it received a peace treaty with Egypt. Now that the Islamists are poised to take power, the treaty is effectively null and void.
The question naturally arises: Will the US act in accordance with its role as guarantor of the peace and demand that the new Egyptian government give Sinai back to Israel? Because if the Obama administration or whatever administration is in power when Egypt abrogates the treaty does not issue such a demand, and stand behind it, and if the EU does not support the demand, the entire concept of land-for-peace will be exposed as a hoax.
Indeed the land-for-peace formula will be exposed as a twofold fiction. First, it is based on the false proposition that the peace process is a two-way street. Israel gives land, the Arabs give peace. But the inevitable death of the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord under an Egyptian jihadist regime makes clear that the land-for-peace formula is a one-way street. Israeli land giveaways are permanent. Arab commitments to peace can be revoked at any time.
Then there are the supposedly iron-clad US and European security guarantees that accompany signed treaties. All the American and European promises to Israel - that they will stand by the Jewish state when it takes risks for peace - will be exposed as worthless lies. As we are already seeing today, no one will stand up for Israel's rights. No one will insist that the Egyptians honor their bargain.
As it has become more apparent that the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist parties will hold an absolute majority in Egypt's democratically elected parliament, Western governments and media outlets have insistently argued that these anti-Western, and anti-Jewish, movements have become moderate and pragmatic. Leading the charge to make the case has been the Obama administration. Its senior officials have eagerly embraced the Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood Yusuf Qaradawi is reportedly mediating negotiations between the US and the Taliban.
Qaradawi, an Egyptian who has been based in Qatar since 1961, when he was forced to flee Egypt due to his jihadist politics, made a triumphant return to his native land last February following the overthrow of president Hosni Mubarak. Speaking to a crowd of an estimated two million people in Cairo's Tahrir Square, Qaradawi led them in a chant calling for them to invade Jerusalem....
Wednesday, 01 February 2012
Rick Richman reviews Condi Rice book
In this month's issue of Commentary Magazine, our friend Rick Richman reviews Condi Rice's memoir, No Higher Honor.
At 766 pages, Condoleezza Rice’s memoir of her service as national-security adviser and secretary of state is not long as such memoirs go. Henry Kissinger’s ran 3,955 pages in three volumes; George Shultz’s book, covering six and a half years as secretary of state, ran 1,184 pages, with small print; Madeleine Albright’s memoir of her four years, in what was in retrospect a holiday from history, ran 548 pages. Rice covers a decade, starting in 1999 when she joined George W. Bush’s presidential campaign as foreign-affairs adviser.
She has written a straightforward chronological account, providing a great deal of detail but relatively little reflection on the lessons of her experience. The lessons she does draw and that one can draw about her tenure are worth noting, however, particularly on the issue that appears to have been the most important to her personally, to which she devoted most of her last two years as secretary of state and nine chapters (and parts of others) in this book: the Middle East peace process.
Read more :)
The Debt Star Cometh
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Figures on government spending and debt
(last six digits are eliminated).
| Total public debt subject to limit Jan. 30 | 15,313,699 |
| Statutory debt limit | 16,394,000 |
| Total public debt outstanding Jan. 30 | 15,356,140 |
| Operating balance Jan. 30 | 158,596 |
| Interest fiscal year 2012 through December | 62,662 |
| Interest same period 2011 | 56,780 |
| Deficit fiscal year 2012 through December | 321,735 |
| Deficit same period 2011 | 368,960 |
| Receipts fiscal year 2012 through December | 555,437 |
| Receipts same period 2011 | 531,797 |
| Outlays fiscal year 2012 through December | 877,173 |
| Outlays same period 2011 | 900,757 |
| Gold assets in January | 11,041 |
Foot-in-Mouth Quote of the Day
UPDATE via astute reader: Add this to he likes firing people, is also "unemployed," bet Rick Perry $10,000 in a debate... and "corporations are people."
Plus, he didn't make "much" in speaking fees... only $375,000.
=======================================================================
Mr. Inevitable fails:
“I’m not concerned about the very poor..."
There's HOPE for Change
Gallup released their annual state-by-state presidential approval numbers yesterday, and the results should have 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue very worried.
If President Obama carries only those states where he had a net positive approval rating in 2011 ... Obama would lose the 2012 election to the Republican nominee 323 electoral votes to 215.
You can get state-by-state info here.
Fewer Americans Own Their Homes
Jan. 31 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. homeownership rate fell in the fourth quarter as borrowers lost homes to foreclosure and tight lending standards stalled purchases.
The rate fell to 66 percent ... as low as it was in 1998, the Census Bureau said in a report today. It peaked at 69.2 percent in June 2004 and fell to a post-peak low of 65.9 percent in the second quarter of last year, according to the report.
You remember 1998. It was the year Bill Clinton was impeached, Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela, the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were bombed, and a permanent International Criminal Court (ICC) was created in The Hague by the UN General Assembly.
