The Palestinian Lesson That Needs To Be Learned

Fouad Ajami writes in the Wall Street Journal  on June 1, 2011 a very insightful article on the lesson that was learned and the one that should be learned by the Palestinians.  I think it is well worth the time reading and would love to hear what you think.   It is reprinted from  the UCI (Unity Coalition on Israel) site.

Here is the article:

The U.N. Can't Deliver a Palestinian State


Fouad Ajami - The Wall Street Journal, June 1st, 2011



It had been quite a scramble, the prelude to the vote on Nov. 29, 1947, on the question of the partition of Palestine. The United Nations itself was only two years old and had just 56 member states; the Cold War was gathering force, and no one was exactly sure how the two pre-eminent powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, would vote. The Arab and Muslim states were of course unalterably opposed, for partition was a warrant for a Jewish state.

In the end, the vote broke for partition, the U.S. backed the resolution, and two days later the Soviet Union followed suit. It was a close call: 10 states had abstained, 13 had voted against, 33 were in favor, only two votes over the required two-thirds majority.

Now, some six decades later, the Palestinians are calling for a vote in the next session of the General Assembly, in September, to ratify a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. In part, this is an appropriation by the Palestinians of the narrative of Zionism. The vote in 1947 was viewed as Israel's basic title to independence and statehood. The Palestinians and the Arab powers had rejected partition and chosen the path of war. Their choice was to prove calamitous.

By the time the guns had fallen silent, the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, had held its ground against the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. Its forces stood on the shores of the Red Sea in the south, and at the foot of the Golan Heights in the north. Palestinian society had collapsed under the pressure of war. The elites had made their way to neighboring lands. Rural communities had been left atomized and leaderless. The cities had fought, and fallen, alone.

Palestine had become a great Arab shame. Few Arabs were willing to tell the story truthfully, to face its harsh verdict. Henceforth the Palestinians would live on a vague idea of restoration and return. No leader had the courage to tell the refugees who had left Acre and Jaffa and Haifa that they could not recover the homes and orchards of their imagination.

Some had taken the keys to their houses with them to Syria and Lebanon and across the river to Jordan. They were no more likely to find political satisfaction than the Jews who had been banished from Baghdad and Beirut and Cairo, and Casablanca and Fez, but the idea of return, enshrined into a “right of return,” would persist. (Wadi Abu Jamil, the Jewish quarter of the Beirut of my boyhood, is now a Hezbollah stronghold, and no narrative exalts or recalls that old presence.)

History hadn't stood still. The world was remade. In 1947-48, when the Zionists had secured their statehood, empires were coming apart, borders were fluid, the international system of states as we know it quite new. India and Pakistan had emerged as independent, hostile states out of the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, and Israel had secured its place in the order of nations a year later. Many of the Arab states were still in their infancy.

But the world is a vastly different place today. The odds might favor the Palestinians in the General Assembly, but any victory would be hollow.

The Palestinians have misread what transpired at the General Assembly in 1947. True, the cause of Jewish statehood had been served by the vote on partition, but the Zionist project had already prevailed on the ground. Jewish statehood was a fait accompli perhaps a decade before that vote. All the ingredients had been secured by Labor Zionism. There was a military formation powerful enough to defeat the Arab armies, there were political institutions in place, and there were gifted leaders, David Ben-Gurion pre-eminent among them, who knew what can be had in the world of nations.

The vote at the General Assembly was of immense help, but it wasn't the decisive factor in the founding of the Jewish state. The hard work had been done in the three decades between the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the vote on partition. Realism had guided the Zionist project. We will take a state even if it is the size of a tablecloth, said Chaim Weizmann, one of the founding fathers of the Zionist endeavor.

Sadly, the Palestinian national movement has known a different kind of leadership, unique in its mix of maximalism and sense of entitlement, in its refusal to accept what can and can't be had in the world of

nations. Leadership is often about luck, the kind of individuals a people's history brings forth. It was the distinct misfortune of the Palestinians that when it truly mattered, and for nearly four decades, they were led by a juggler, Yasser Arafat, a man fated to waste his people's chances.

Arafat was neither a Ben-Gurion leading his people to statehood, nor an Anwar Sadat accepting the logic of peace and compromise. He had been an enemy of Israel, but Israel had reached an accord with him in 1993, made room for him, and for a regime of his choice in Gaza. He had warred against the United States, but American diplomacy had fallen under his spell, and the years of the Clinton presidency were devoted to the delusion that the man could summon the courage to accept a practical peace.

But Arafat would do nothing of the kind. Until his death in 2004, he refrained from telling the Palestinians the harsh truths they needed to hear about the urgency of practicality and compromise. Instead, he held out the illusion that the Palestinians can have it all, from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean. His real constituents were in the refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria and Jordan, and among the Palestinians in Kuwait. So he peddled the dream that history's verdict could be overturned, that the “right of return” was theirs.

There was hope that the Arafat legacy would go with him to the grave.The new Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas had been a lieutenant of Arafat's, but there were hints of a break with the Arafat legacy. The alliance between Fatah and Hamas that Mr. Abbas has opted for put these hopes to rest. And the illusion that the U.N. can break the stalemate in the Holy Land is vintage Arafat. It was Arafat who turned up at the General Assembly in 1974 with a holster on his hip, and who proclaimed that he had come bearing a freedom fighter's gun and an olive branch, and that it was up to the U.N. not to let the olive branch fall from his hand.

For the Palestinians there can be no escape from negotiations with Israel. The other Arabs shall not redeem Palestinian rights. They have their own burdens to bear. In this Arab Spring, this season of popular uprisings, little has been said in Tunis and Cairo and Damascus and Sanaa about Palestine.

The General Assembly may, in September, vote to ratify a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. But true Palestinian statehood requires convincing a decisive Israeli majority that statehood is a herald for normalcy in that contested land, for Arabs and Jews alike.



Mr. Ajami is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is co-chair of the Hoover Working Group on Islamism and the International Order

Can You Trust Your Government With Your Vital Information?

One of the most intimidating experience of my life was years ago when I was "asked" to come down to the local IRS office to explain some of my office expenses.  The results were OK (I had received bad advice from an accountant) and the examiner was civil but I still remember the sweaty palms and sleepless nights preceding the exam.  It makes a colonoscopy seem pleasant!

However, one can only imagine how it would feel to think that you were going to get a refund and find out that the return had been stolen.  This is occurring to taxpayers more and more each year and the increase is not single digits.  From 2008 to 2010 the increase was nearly 500%, that is five times more than two years prior.  This is not some petty criminal activity but I have to assume that there has to be an organized crime attack on the IRS. What is happening? One can only guess as the IRS prosecuted very few of these criminals so it seems that the pain and discomfort it causes the taxpayer is inconsequential.  This is your friendly, warm and feeling government at work. Wrong!

The crime against the taxpayer is compounded when the real victim has to prove who they are and that the IRS really owes them the refund. I can imagine the poor slob sitting at  the metal desk in the windowless room  with the bare bulb suspended above him being questioned by the IRS agents. Both agents ( a man and a woman) assuming that the taxpayer must have done something wrong to lose his refund. It is obvious to them that he must be wrong as the IRS would never do anything wrong.  Hey, that could be a movie!

Unfortunately more and more people are being subjected to this problem and I doubt that the trend line will decrease for two reasons.  The first is that the IRS has the money (that's why Willie Sutton robbed banks) and secondly, they don't prosecute those who they catch.  So how long will it be before the government takes action?  I hope soon for if this trend continues no refund will be safe.

So, if the government cannot keep your refund out of unscrupulous hands, how are they going to keep your medical records out of the same enterprising criminals? How would you like to find out that someone had stolen your medical information and had had an operation to, say, remove an organ. You go in sometime afterward with the same complaint and they refuse you because, that operation had already been done.   How would you prove it?  And how many layers of bureaucracy would you have to go through. And how agreeable and helpful would those government workers be?  Probably as helpful as your local IRS agent is.

We are in trouble. The government cannot keep refunds out of bad guys hands and we want to let the government control 15% of the economy with Obama Care. We must be nuts.

The article that follows contains more information on this major issue that has not been seen anywhere but here and in an AP posting.

AP NewsBreak: Taxpayer identity theft is soaring

AP NewsBreak: IRS grappling with soaring taxpayer identity theft; sharply up from 2008 to 2010

Larry Margasak, Associated Press, On Wednesday June 1, 2011, 4:02 pm EDT

 

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Imagine filing your tax return and learning that someone else got your refund. With your name and Social Security number, no less.

The IRS is grappling with a nearly five-fold increase in taxpayer identity theft between 2008 and 2010, a Government Accountability Office official plans to tell a House hearing Thursday. There were 248,357 incidents in 2010, compared to 51,702 in 2008.

The GAO findings, obtained by The Associated Press, don't begin to describe the pain for a first-time victim, who must wait for a refund while the IRS sorts out which return is real and which is a fraud.

Many identity thieves don't get prosecuted, according James White, director of strategic issues for the GAO..

"IRS officials told us that IRS pursues criminal investigations of suspected identity thieves in only a small number of cases," White says in testimony prepared for a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee.

He said that in the 2010 fiscal year, the IRS criminal investigations division initiated just over 4,700 investigations of all types -- far less than the identity theft cases alone.

"We want to know why this problem is apparently getting much worse," said Rep. Todd Platts, R-Pa., chairman of the subcommittee. "By bringing these issues to the public as quickly as possible, the committee hopes to give citizens the necessary information so they can protect themselves from such identity theft."

IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, in his prepared statement, defended the criminal investigation record. He said his criminal division concentrates on schemes of national scope and added that 95 percent of those prosecuted for refund-related identity theft go to prison.

Tax identity thieves typically submit returns for refunds early in the filing season. The legitimate taxpayer usually files later, and only then learns from the IRS that two returns were filed using the same Social Security number.

Some thieves steal a name and Social Security number to obtain a job. The employer will report the thief's wage information to the IRS, as would the legitimate taxpayer's employer. The victim then would receive an unwelcome IRS notice that he or she failed to report everything that was earned. The victim would then need to work with the tax agency to sort things out.

Shulman said the IRS can significantly increase its protection after someone has been victimized the first time.

One victim, LaVonda

She had to make rounds of calls to the IRS and other government agencies, sometimes repeating the same information. She spoke on the phone with an IRS employee she described as "the most rude and discourteous person I have ever spoken with in my life."

She was told her refund would take 16 weeks to six months.

She closed her bank accounts and opened new ones. She ordered new checks. She placed a 90-day alert on her credit reports. She often has to show her IRS identity theft affidavit.

"You may not be able to know how stressful this has been," she said in her statement. "I can't sleep. I wonder what the person will do next as far as trying to get credit cards or anything in my name."

Tax form 14039, the IRS Identity Theft Affidavit, allows the agency to mark an account to identify future questionable activity. A task force of the IRS and other agencies established a website, STOPFRAUD.gov, which tells taxpayers what to do if they suspect identity fraud.

The main IRS website includes "Ten Things the IRS Wants You to Know About Identity Theft."

If the IRS receives multiple tax returns for the same individuals, the taxpayer usually must substantiate identity with a federal or state-issued identification such as a driver's license or passport -- together with a copy of a police report or the IRS affidavit.

This past January, the IRS developed a pilot program designed to lessen delays for victims who deserve a refund.

Victims are issued an "identity protection personal identification number," which the IRS will use to process future returns. A new PIN will be issued each year the taxpayer's account has been marked for potential fraud.

Budget Woes and The Decline of the United States

Today, Walter E. Williams writes in Townhall about the budget and he questions whether the United States in in decline and "do we deserve our fate?"  Although Mr. Williams does not say so, I believe that the best days of this country are over unless we can control  the money we are spending every minute of every day. The string of budget shortfalls is not a result of an economy in free-fall, it is a result of a government that cannot control what money it spends.  

 My pessimism is based upon the reception the Ryan budget has been given. Is it perfect, hardly. Would I make different choices, surely.  However, everyone from the President to Representative Boehner have either been 100% against it or very cool to it.  If Republicans cannot gather the gumption to fight against this runaway train, who will?  Definitely  not the Democrats.

I am not in the inner circles of either party, but I can read between the lines. No one wants to cut the gravy train that nearly a majority of people in this country are on!  It would mean the death of that party in the next election. Anyone whose "goose" was cooked, would vote against those who made the changes.  However, the only way to prevent a complete collapse of the government in the future is to drastically reduce programs, to cut benefits, and to restrict usage of those programs which are left.  It would be an absolute blood bath. No politician who wanted to get re-elected would ever vote to do that.

We have seen how the disgruntled acted in New Jersey and Wisconsin  when their benefits were cut. We have seen recall and impeachment petitions launched for those who made the proposals. What would happen if they cut Medicare, Medicaid and welfare to the bone?  I think you call it revolution!

So if the politicians don't have the guts to make the changes and the people would revolt if it was done, I can see no way out of this crisis. You may call it pessimistic, but without drastic cuts, we, as a country, are in deep trouble and our children will be the ones who pay.

I certainly do not want to leave our country with this inheritance and wonder if there is anyone else out there that thinks the same as I.  Are you listening America?  I sure do hope so.

Here is Mr. Williams article:

Walter E. Williams  

Do We Deserve Our Fate?

The latest Social Security Trustees Report tells us that the program will be insolvent by the year 2037. The combined unfunded liability of Social Security and Medicare has reached nearly $107 trillion in today's dollars. That is about seven times the size of the U.S. economy and 10 times the size of the national debt. Those entitlement programs, along with others, account for nearly 60 percent of federal spending. They are what Congress calls non-discretionary spending. About half of discretionary spending is for national defense. Each year, non-discretionary spending consumes a higher and higher percentage of the federal budget.

The language Congress uses to describe their spending is corrupt beyond redemption. Think about the term entitlement. If one American is entitled to something he didn't earn, where in the world does Congress get the money? It's not Santa or the Tooth Fairy. The only way Congress can give one American a dollar is to first take it from another American. Therefore, an entitlement is a congressionally given right for one American to live at the expense of another. In other words, Congress forcibly uses one American to serve the purposes of another American. As such, it differs in degree, but not kind, from that uglier part of our history where black people were forcibly used to serve the purposes of their slave masters.

What about the terms discretionary versus non-discretionary congressional spending? Non-discretionary refers to uncontrollable things like sunsets and sunrises, low tides and high tides and laws of thermodynamics. By contrast, all congressional spending is discretionary and controllable. For political expedience, Congress has written laws to shield certain spending from annual budget scrutiny by calling it non-discretionary.

The level of congressional spending is unsustainable, but how willing are Americans to do anything about it? A courageous member of Congress, Paul Ryan, R-Wis., chairman of the House Budget Committee, has put forth a budget plan that would trim the deficit by $4.4 trillion over 10 years by reforming Medicare and Medicaid, making defense cuts and imposing hard spending caps on domestic spending.

Ryan's plan was immediately attacked as trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. In the wake of this attack, even some of his Republican backers, including House Speaker John Boehner, have become lukewarm in support.

The president and his supporters call for tax increases as a means to cover the deficit, but higher tax revenues cannot eliminate the deficit. Controlling for inflation, federal tax revenue today is 23 times greater than it was in 1960, but congressional spending is 42 times greater. During the last half-century, except for five years, the nation has faced a federal budget deficit. It's just simple math. If tax revenues soar, but congressional spending soars more, budget deficits cannot be avoided.

One chief causal factor for the decline of these former great nations is what has been described as "bread and circuses," where government spends money for the shallow and immediate wants of the population, and civic virtue all but disappears. For the past half-century, our nation has been doing precisely what brought down other great nations. We might have now reached the point of no return. If so, do we deserve it?

Walter E. Williams

Dr. Williams serves on the faculty of George Mason University as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and is the author of More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well. 

Is it Medicare or Mediscare?

The upcoming debate over the budget has many components with Medicare only being part of the issue. However,  it is a major part of the problem.  Whether the solution is the Ryan Plan or something else, we must start the discussion. Sitting on the sidelines and playing ostrich is NOT the answer. 

The following article from Israel Commentary discusses the political back and forth that is currently part of the discussion. To demagogue the issue is not the way solve the problem.  So in light of this blog's goal to have an open conversation, we are open to your suggestions.  Please post them and we will forward to our congressmen/women.

Here is the article:

Israel Commentary

How to determine the winner of the Obamacare/Medicare debate?

Redacted from the article, “Beyond Mediscare”

By Yuval Levin

The Weekly Standard, May 30, 2011

Do House Republicans want to kill the elderly? If you listen to the left these days, you’d certainly think so. Last week, a liberal advocacy group called “The Agenda Project”—which claims to advance “rational, effective ideas in the public debate”—released an ad showing a look-alike of House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan pushing an old woman in a wheelchair off a cliff. “Is America beautiful without Medicare?” the ad inquires of viewers. “Ask Paul Ryan and his friends in Congress.”

Nor is it only rabid interest groups that have succumbed to such appeals. Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health and human services said, more or less, the same thing earlier this month. When asked about the House Republican budget’s approach to Medicare, Sebelius said that, under the plan, “If you run out of the government voucher and then you run out of your own money, you’re left to scrape together charity care, go without care, die sooner. There really aren’t a lot of options.”

The president himself has come pretty close to this view. The Republican budget, Obama said in a speech at George Washington University last month says  “instead of guaranteed health care, you will get a voucher. And  if that voucher isn’t worth enough to buy the insurance that’s available in the open marketplace, well, tough luck—you’re on your own. Put simply, it ends Medicare as we know it.”

Clearly, the GOP Medicare reform has struck a nerve. Democrats seem unwilling to speak about it honestly. Maybe they know that the facts do not support their case.

Let’s start with “Medicare as we know it.” According to the Congressional Budget Office and Medicare’s trustees, the program has a long-term unfunded liability of more than $30 trillion. It’s about a decade from insolvency. The trustees’ latest annual report, released on May 13, notes that the Medicare trust fund is projected to run out of money five years sooner than was projected last year. Its current trajectory would swallow up the federal budget. Taxes could not be raised high or fast enough to keep up with its growth without crushing the economy.

The Democrats cannot deny the figures, but their solution is to let the crisis come. President Obama’s budget offered nothing beyond Obamacare as a solution. In an extraordinary letter affixed to the recent trustees’ report, Medicare’s chief actuary noted that Obamacare’s approach to the program—price controls determined by a board of experts and devoid of market-based reforms that could help health care providers improve their efficiency—would actually exacerbate Medicare’s troubles.

The Republican budget offers precisely such market-based reforms. It proposes not just to reduce the growth rate of Medicare spending, but to introduce consumer pressures into the system that would create financial incentives for providers to work more efficiently and reduce the growth of the health care costs that are at the heart of the problem.

Currently Medicare recipients play no part in determining who gets paid and how much, and have no sense of what their health care costs. Providers have no financial incentive to deliver better care at lower prices. And price controls that would reduce what Medicare pays per service (the Obamacare solution) would only create an incentive for providers to supply a greater volume of services to make up the difference. That is exactly what price controls have done in the past—drive efficiency down and costs up.

The House Republican proposal would change Medicare’s counterproductive design. It would leave today’s seniors and those now 55 or older in the current system, since they have planned their retirements around it. But everyone younger than that would join a redesigned Medicare when they retire.

Rather than pay all providers a set fee directly, seniors would use the money (in the form of a premium support payment that would start at current Medicare rates and grow with inflation) to choose insurance plans from a menu of guaranteed private coverage options. Poor seniors and those in the worst health would get significantly greater support, while the wealthiest would receive less.

And seniors would be buying guaranteed insurance with limits on out of pocket costs, not paying directly for care. Sebelius’s notion that they would simply “run out” of money if they got sick is nothing more than fear-mongering.

For politicians, it is also a choice between reforming a program that seniors are comfortable with and leaving it alone despite its fatal problems. Republicans have chosen to deal with that difficulty by leaving current seniors with all the benefits they are accustomed to in the current program and reforming it for the next generation.

Democrats have chosen to deal with it by pretending there is no problem, falsely insisting that any reform will harm today’s seniors, and leaving a colossal disaster for the next generation. Republicans, in other words, have chosen a policy solution that carries political risk while the Democrats have opted for political advantage

Jim Tressell Resigns

For those of you who are not football fans or who are not aware of the extreme University of Michigan-Ohio State rivalry, the resignation of the Ohio State coach is a big deal. No one wishes bad luck to the other team (well maybe just a bit!!) but to lose a very strong competitor as Jim Tressel is a sad day. However, it appears as if there were some program violations and for that he has to pay the price.

Ohio State will always be a rival for the Wolverines but one can only wonder how it will effect the team this coming season.  For Michigan fans, I am sure the answer will be "a lot." 

Here is the AP posting:

Jim Tressel resigns as Ohio State's football coach

 

AP – FILE - In a March 30, 2011, file photo, Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel pauses before answering …

By RUSTY MILLER, AP Sports Writer Rusty Miller, Ap Sports Writer – 39 mins ago

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Jim Tressel, who guided Ohio State to its first national title in 34 years, resigned Monday amid NCAA violations and mounting revelations that sullied the image of one of the country's top football programs.
"After meeting with university officials, we agreed that it is in the best interest of Ohio State that I resign as head football coach," Tressel said in a statement released by the university. "The appreciation that (wife) Ellen and I have for the Buckeye Nation is immeasurable."
Luke Fickell will be the coach for the 2011 season. He already had been selected to be the interim head coach while Tressel served a five-game suspension.
Ohio State spokesman Jim Lynch said he was unaware of any buyout or severance package. He added that Tressel had returned from vacation Sunday night and met with athletic director Gene Smith, who then met with staff. Tressel typed his resignation and submitted it to Smith, he said.
Tressel's downfall came with public and media pressure mounting on Ohio State, its board of trustees, President E. Gordon Gee and Smith.
"We look forward to refocusing the football program on doing what we do best — representing this extraordinary university and its values on the field, in the classroom, and in life," Smith said in a statement. "We look forward to supporting Luke Fickell in his role as our football coach. We have full confidence in his ability to lead our football program."
Tressel and Ohio State were to go before the NCAA's infractions committee Aug. 12 to answer questions about the player violations and why Tressel did not report them. For more than nine months, he denied knowledge of improper benefits to players until confronted by investigators with emails that showed he had known since April 2010.

Critical View of Obama As Our Foreign Affairs Manager

Today in a posting on Israel Commentary,  Walter Russell Mead  writes a very provocative and thoughtful evaluation of President Obama's foreign affairs failures over the past couple weeks.  Although the commentary is a bit over the top in parts, I found his evaluation of the process and the results spot on. Obama has been able to single handedly upset the Palestinians and Israelis and get nothing for it. As it is said, "you need to break some eggs to make an omelet" however, he broke the eggs and then threw them out the window.

Let me know what you think of this article, I am interested.
Here it is:

The least competent manager of our diplomatic portfolio in a long time.

By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and Editor-at-Large of The American Interest magazine

The Dreamer Goes Down For The Count
I had never thought there were many similarities between the pleasure-loving Charles II of England and the more upright Barack Obama until this week. Listening to his speeches on the Middle East at the State Department, US-Israel relations at the AIPAC annual meeting and most recently his address to the British Parliament the comparison becomes irresistible.
“Here lies our sovereign king,” wrote the Earl of Rochester about King Charles: Whose word no man relies on. Who never said a foolish thing Or ever did a wise one.”
This seems to capture President Obama’s Middle East problems in a nutshell. The President’s descriptions of the situation are comprehensive and urbane. He correctly identifies the forces at work. He develops interesting policy ideas and approaches that address important political and moral elements of the complex problems we face. He crafts approaches that might, with good will and deft management, bridge the gaps between the sides. He reads thoughtful speeches full of sensible reflections.
But the last few weeks have cast him as the least competent manager of America’s Middle East diplomatic portfolio in a very long time. He has infuriated and frustrated long term friends, but made no headway in reconciling enemies. He has strained our ties with the established regimes without winning new friends on the Arab Street . He has committed our forces in the strategically irrelevant backwater of Libya not, as he originally told us, for “days, not weeks” but for months not days.
Where he has failed so dramatically is in the arena he himself has so frequently identified as vital: the search for peace between Palestinians and Israelis. His record of grotesque, humiliating and total diplomatic failure in his dealings with Prime Minister Netanyahu has few parallels in American history. Three times he has gone up against Netanyahu; three times he has ingloriously failed. This last defeat — Netanyahu’s deadly, devastating speech to Congress in which he eviscerated President Obama’s foreign policy to prolonged and repeated standing ovations by members of both parties — may have been the single most stunning and effective public rebuke to an American President a foreign leader has ever delivered.
Netanyahu beat Obama like a red-headed stepchild; he played him like a fiddle; he pounded him like a big brass drum. The Prime Minister of Israel danced rings around his arrogant, professorial opponent. It was like watching the Harlem Globetrotters go up against the junior squad from Miss Porter’s School; like watching Harvard play Texas A&M, like watching Bambi meet Godzilla — or Bill Clinton run against Bob Dole.
The Prime Minister mopped the floor with our guy. Obama made his ’67 speech; Bibi ripped him to shreds. Obama goes to AIPAC, nervous, off-balance, backing and filling. Then Bibi drops the C-Bomb, demonstrating to the whole world that the Prime Minister of Israel has substantially more support in both the House and the Senate than the President of the United States .
President Obama’s new Middle East policy, intended to liquidate the wreckage resulting from his old policy and get the President somehow on to firmer ground, lies in ruins even before it could be launched. He had dropped the George Mitchell approach, refused to lay out his own set of parameters for settling the conflict, and accepted some important Israeli red lines — but for some reason he chose not to follow through with the logic of these decisions and offer Netanyahu a reset button.
As so often in the past, but catastrophically this time, he found the “sour spot”: the position that angers everyone and pleases none. He moved close enough to the Israelis to infuriate the Palestinians while keeping the Israelis at too great a distance to earn their trust. One can argue (correctly in my view) that US policy must at some level distance itself from the agendas of both parties to help bring peace.
But that has to be done carefully, and to make it work one first needs to win their trust. Obama lost the trust of the Israelis early in the administration and never earned it back; he lost the Palestinians when he was unable to deliver Israeli concessions he led them to expect.
The President is now wandering across Europe seeking to mend fences with allies ( Britain, France, Poland ) he had earlier neglected and/or offended; at home, his authority and credibility have been holed below the waterline.
Everyone who followed the events of the last week knows that the President has lost control of the American-Israeli relationship and that he has no near-term prospects of rescuing the peace process. The Israelis, the Palestinians and the US Congress have all rejected his leadership.
Peace processes are generally good things even if they seldom bring peace; one hopes the President can find a way to re-launch American diplomacy on this issue but for now he seems to have reached a dead end — and to have allowd
Internationally, this matters a great deal; domestically it matters even more. The President has significantly less capacity to act than he did a week ago. The Bin Laden dividend, already cruelly diminished by what The Daily Caller said was the administration’s “victory lap in a clown car” is now history. The GOP, in trouble recently as voters recoil from what many see as Republican extremism on issues like Medicare and public unions, will be able to use the national security card in new and potent ways.
As the stunning and overwhelming response to Prime Minister Netanyahu in Congress showed, Israel matters in American politics like almost no other country on earth. Well beyond the American Jewish and the Protestant fundamentalist communities, the people and the story of Israel stir some of the deepest and most mysterious reaches of the American soul. The idea of Jewish and Israeli exceptionalism is profoundly tied to the idea of American exceptionalism. The belief that God favors and protects Israel is connected to the idea that God favors and protects America .
It means more. The existence of Israel means that the God of the Bible is still watching out for the well-being of the human race. For many American Christians who are nothing like fundamentalists, the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land and their creation of a successful, democratic state after two thousand years of oppression and exile is a clear sign that the religion of the Bible can be trusted.
Being pro-Israel matters in American mass politics because the public mind believes at a deep level that to be pro-Israel is to be pro-America and pro-faith. Substantial numbers of voters believe that politicians who don’t ‘get’ Israel also don’t ‘get’ America and don’t ‘get’ God. Obama’s political isolation on this issue, and the haste with which liberal Democrats like Nancy Pelosi left the embattled President to take the heat alone, testify to the pervasive sense in American politics that Israel is an American value. Said the Minority Leader to the Prime Minister: “I think it’s clear that both sides of the Capitol believe you advance the cause of peace.”
President Obama probably understands this intellectually; he understands many things intellectually. But what he can’t seem to do is to incorporate that knowledge into a politically sustainable line of policy. The deep American sense of connection to and, yes, love of Israel limits the flexibility of any administration. Again, the President seems to know that with his head. But he clearly had no idea what he was up against when Bibi Netanyahu came to town.
As a result, he’s taking another ride in the clown car, and this time it isn’t a victory lap. I hope I’m wrong, but I think the next intifada got a lot closer this week. (Hashem forbid!)

Happy Memorial Day 2011

I want to wish all readers of Conservative Musings, a very Happy Memorial Day. 

However, before you go out and cook up those burgers and dogs, please take a second and think about the Serviceman and women who are away from home defending our freedom. They may be in Afghanistan, Iraq, Germany, Korea, or even somewhere here in the good ole USA.  Wherever they are, we need to thank them for their commitment to us and the United States.

If you have someone in the Service, as I do, you should give them a call and let them know that you are thinking about them.  I am sure your soldier, sailor, airman or marine will thank you.

Have a safe and happy Memorial Day.

Conservative Tom

My Social Security Plan

Earlier today, I said I would propose my Social Security Plan. So here we go.  But first I want to talk about the problems with the program.  There are a number of reasons that Social Security is unaffordable. First, when the program first started there were many workers (42) supporting one retiree. No problem to fund the dollars for that one person. However, over time the number of retirees has grown significantly and the number of workers supporting each worker has decreased to the area of 3.3 workers supporting one retiree. The impact of the Baby Boom generation is where the program meets its largest challenge.

This large group of upcoming retirees are going to be supported by a significantly smaller group of workers. Regardless of the amount of money that is taken from each workers check, the numbers just do not work out. Over time the 3.3 workers supporting one retiree will decrease to 1 or less. Can the system be viable then?

Secondly, while Social Security was initially meant to be a supplementary retirement program, it has expanded far beyond its original intent. Over the years we have seen the benefits expanded to persons not originally intended to be covered such as dependent children, mentally challenged children and immigrants.

I know a lady who had a son born prematurely. The child, unfortunately, has learning as well as developmental problems. He receives Social Security even though he has never earned a dollar as an employee. Is that right?

Another friend of mine started receiving Social Security at age 62, because their son is under the age of 18, that child gets a monthly benefit. Does that make any sense.  Oh, yes, my friend also gets his retirement plan and has continued to work. Wow, what a country!

The third reason the Social Security is failing it that it turned from a self-funded, self-administered program to one where the politicians could borrow the assets to fund other programs. Money was taken out and IOUs were given in return. The amount of money earned from these IOUs by the administration of Social Security has not kept up with the growing benefit outlay due to increasing participants. This causes the shortage which is estimated to bankrupt the program in less than ten years.

Lastly, government programs always expand over time as politicians try to prove to their constituents they are doing their job. Therefore, the initial cost estimates are always significantly low. This has been true for Medicare, Medicaid and the prescription drug plan "D" as well it will be for Obamacare.

So for these and many other reasons, Social Security is in trouble. I guess the question has to be asked, if we could not afford the program in the beginning as Greenspan indicated in his comments on Meet the Press, should we continue it? If the answer is yes, how do we modify it to make it viable? Do we drastically cut present or future benefits? Do we drastically increase the amount each worker pays into the system? Or is there a combination of things that we should do.

I do not think it is feasible, even in a dictatorship, to completely remove the benefits of Social Security from those who contributed.I do believe that it would cause such poverty and dislocation that no government could remain after taking such an action. So the only rationale way is to preserve the program as a much smaller version.

My suggestion in the case of Social Security as well as a number of other programs, we need to take a very hard and and uncompassionate look at everything involved with it. This will not be easy and it will take something missing in Washington, political guts. It will take tough decisions that will be politically very unpopular. If you think that the Ryan proposal is radical, you don't want to see mine.

I would return Social Security to the type of program it was originally imagined. A supplementary retirement program that is not expected to be your entire plan for your later years. It would limit benefits to the participant only and only to the amount that he/she had paid in based on a fair rate of return, say 5-7%. It would be a retirement program and NOTHING else. It would cut off millions who receive benefits that they had never paid for.

If you die early, your descendants do not lose what you had paid in. Children whose parents died before collecting, would receive the same stream  of money due their parent until the age of 18 and then the remaining balance would be transferred to their individual Social Security account(s) to be used when they reach retirement age.

I would also allow participants to opt out for a portion of their benefit, say 50%. They would sign an agreement with the government that says in effect, "I waive 50% of my Social Security Benefits and have NO recourse against the government now or in the future should this action leave me with less benefits than had I stayed in the program. I agree to contract with a financial planner for the next X years to help me prepare to fund my retirement."

Their outside investments would have to be in guaranteed accounts say Certificates of Deposit, annuities or guaranteed interest accounts.  No speculation would be allowed with these dollars.

 I would require all workers to be part of the Social Security program for a very simple reason. Life. Things always change and as soon as we think that we have it all figured out, life comes up and bites us. Everyone needs some sort of safety net and this program would be your safety net.



Age of retirement  for Social Security would be moved up from 67 to 75. No early Social Security would be allowed.  If you want to retire earlier, save for it.

The percentage that each employee pays in and for which each employer matches would be maxed out at $250,000, adjusted for inflation.

All employees, including all Federal government employees, Congressmen/women, Congressional employees, Armed Forces, State employees and union members would be required to be part of the plan. If you earn money in the United States, its territories or protectorates, you would be part of the plan. Absolutely no exceptions would be allowed.

Those who have done well and feel they do not need Social Security benefit at retirement age can opt out. You are not required to take it.  The same goes for Medicare and the Part D prescription drug program.

Yes, this is a slimmed down version of the program we know today. But the bloated behemoth we now have cannot make it and things must change and they must change dramatically.

I have used Social Security as an example, however, the other entitlements must also be treated with the same lack of deference. Things must change or we will be writing our country's economic demise.

The thing we must learn from the experience we have had with benefits, the government cannot provide them. They may have been well intentioned in the beginning, however, over time they grow until they become unmanageable and in the end cripple the country.

What other suggestions, comments or (I am sure there will be none) criticisms do you have. Please post them. Once I get a list of them, I plan to submit them to our Congressmen/women.

Thanks for your input.

Greenspan--We Could Never Afford Entitlements

I was watching Meet the Press on April 17, 2011 and one of the guests on the panel was Dr. Greenspan, the former head of the Federal Reserve.  David Gregory asked a question of Dr. Greenspan the answer to which I have not been heard anywhere else.  I purposely have waited to see if anyone would comment on this obvious slip.  Since no one has responded, I am today.

They were discussing Social Security and other entitlements and Greenspan  said  "I don't think we could afford it in the first place." Wow, what a revealing moment!  Did he really say that regardless of the good Social Security has done over the past 70 plus years, that it was in the end  never affordable?  I believe the answer is yes. If so, I doubt that he will ever be asked to respond to a question like that again!

If we could not afford Social Security then I am sure we could not afford Medicare, Medicaid, and Part D prescriptions.  So what do now?  Do we just abandon the programs and let the damage fall where ever it might?  Do we continue the programs until we are forced to make drastic changes? Or do we start now to do things to change and modify the programs such as the Ryan proposal.

I would like to hear what you think.  In a later posting today, I will make my proposals but I want to hear from you.

The text of the interplay between Dr. Greenspan and David Gregory is below, for those who want to read the entire exchange. 

Let me know what you think.




MR. GREGORY: Dr. Greenspan, final point on this. This budget debate that we're talking about, what's realistic in an election framework? Being serious about Medicare or entitlements? Tax reform? What do you think is possible?
DR. GREENSPAN: You're, you're asking me a political question, not an economic question.
MR. GREGORY: Right. I like to put you on the spot like that.
DR. GREENSPAN: Yeah, well...(unintelligible). But look...
MR. GREGORY: You're up to it.
DR. GREENSPAN: ...as I watch what's going on, we have to remember that over the next 10 years or so we're going to find that the baby boom generation, highly skilled, highly educated, is going to fade from the scene. It's going to be replaced by a generation who are now in school and creating grades which don't make us look very good in the international spectrum. This means that we are probably dealing with an economy which isn't growing fast enough or creating much real resources to fund the entitlement programs that we have already made. I don't, I don't, I don't consider these--the issue of cutting back spending as essentially something which is new. I don't think we could afford it in the first place. We're really canceling something which didn't exist.