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Jennifer Rubin says it’s time for Israel’s supporters to be heard.
News reports indicate that the president will be meeting with heads of Jewish organizations at the White House today. One can imagine that Iran and the U.S. position on Israeli settlements will be on the agenda. We now have “a test,” as Moshe Arens wrote recently, of whether Israel’s self-proclaimed friends in the U.S. have the nerve to tell the president that his policies, if continued, will imperil the security of the Jewish state and do damage to the historic relationship between the U.S. and Israel.
It is tempting and natural for Jewish leaders, many of whom are Democrats and supported the president’s campaign, to pull their punches. Who wants a confrontation with the president? Really, might not the president’s policies “improve” with time? As Jonathan Tobin aptly detailed in his discussion of Alan Dershowitz’s defense of Obama’s Israel policy, the temptation to apologize and rationalize is great. But it is also foolhardy and dangerous. Israel faces an existential threat and U.S.-Israeli relations are at a crossroads. Muteness by American Jewish leaders, or even worse, encouragement of a U.S. policy that is more hostile toward Israel than any in recent memory, may have tragic consequences.
So the question remains: is there a Peter Bergson for the 21st Century? For those needing to freshen up their knowledge of history, this story summarizes how Bergson and a small group of American Jews made a difference at a time when world Jewry also faced an existential threat: …
The D.C. city council wants to be heard about vouchers. They think kids are more important than union leaders.
… The D.C. Council’s letter shows that support for these vouchers is real at the local level and that the opposition exists mainly at the level of the national Democratic Party. Mr. Durbin has suggested that he included the D.C. Council provision in deference to local control. “The government of Washington, D.C., should decide whether they want it in their school district,” he said in March. Well now we know where D.C. stands. We will now see if the national party stands for putting union power and money above the future of poor children.
Christopher Hitchens with a thought about Iran that’ll drive the Dems nuts.
… Which brings me to a question that I think deserves to be asked: Did the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the subsequent holding of competitive elections in which many rival Iraqi Shiite parties took part, have any germinal influence on the astonishing events in Iran? Certainly when I interviewed Sayeed Khomeini in Qum some years ago, where he spoke openly about “the liberation of Iraq,” he seemed to hope and believe that the example would spread. One swallow does not make a summer. But consider this: Many Iranians go as religious pilgrims to the holy sites of Najaf and Kerbala in southern Iraq. They have seen the way in which national and local elections have been held, more or less fairly and openly, with different Iraqi Shiite parties having to bid for votes (and with those parties aligned with Iran’s regime doing less and less well). They have seen an often turbulent Iraqi Parliament holding genuine debates that are reported with reasonable fairness in the Iraqi media. Meanwhile, an Iranian mullah caste that classifies its own people as children who are mere wards of the state puts on a “let’s pretend” election and even then tries to fix the outcome. Iranians by no means like to take their tune from Arabs—perhaps least of all from Iraqis—but watching something like the real thing next door may well have increased the appetite for the genuine article in Iran itself. …
David Warren doesn’t think Iran is over.
… The people still in the streets of Iran are … long past disputing the results of their Potemkin presidential election. They are, to paraphrase an old Czech saying from 1968, demanding a new government, while the government demands a new people.
It is almost impossible to find out what is happening on the ground there, in the absence of concerted western efforts to find out. I have seen encouraging accounts of full-dress Revolutionary Guards turning against plainclothed Basij thugs, rather than let them attack unarmed civilians. There are crowd-control issues emerging because the mullahs have arrested more prisoners than their jails can hold, and must therefore herd the new ones into such places as sports arenas — inside which, once there is a quorum, the chants of “death to Khamenei,” “death to the regime,” and “God is great” simply resume. I have also been seeing reports of demonstrators setting fires in various parts of Tehran — a serious matter in the middle of a big drought, with dust storms.
But of course I am not in Iran, and have no way to confirm these things. Nor, as a gravely responsible journalist, can I take the accounts at face value, even of purported eyewitnesses who may well be far too emotionally involved to describe, impartially, the scene before them.
All I or my reader can do is pray. So I suggest we pray very hard for Persia.
Mark Steyn wonders what future is portended for a country that can’t focus on the cap and trade power grab because of Michael Jackson’s death.
Two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville, that French bloke who toured Jacksonian America (Andrew, I mean), foresaw our descent into Jacksonian America (Michael, I mean), fretting that the citizens of a self-governing republic would decay into “an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.” But even the worst journeyman hack peddling a fin de la civilisation potboiler might find the juxtaposition of the rulers ramming through a massive power grab and tax hike while the oblivious proletariat is feasting on round-the-clock coverage of a self-mutilated misfit of dubious sexual predilections a bit too crude to be plausible. But apparently it works: bread and circus freaks.
At such moments, democracy in America (in Tocqueville’s phrase) seems alarmingly like the zombies in the late Mr. Jackson’s “Thriller” video: It can still stagger about with a certain mesmeric energy but it’s ever more the living dead. As is now traditional, our legislators had not read the bill they voted for. However, for once they had a decent excuse: A 300-page amendment to the original pithy 1,000-page bill was introduced at three in the morning on the day of passage and, alas, because Big Government has now effortlessly outpaced the nimble typing fingers of congressional stenographers, there was no actual physical copy of the bill in existence at the time the House voted for it.
Is that even legal? To pass a law that’s not in writing? Hey, relax. Someone probably tweeted the high points. It’ll be out there somewhere. The White House asked Ashton Kutcher to tweet National HIV Testing Day, so I’m sure they asked Lady Gaga or Perez Hilton to tweet National Unread Unwritten 1,000-Page Bill Day. No taxation without Twitterization!
If George III had put the tea clause 247 pages into a 300-page amendment to a 1,000-page bill, he might still have the colonies.
Debra Saunders notes the religious aspects of global warming belief.
… Faith. Mystery. Promises to engage in pious acts. Global warming is a religion. While Obama was in Italy preaching big cuts in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, he was losing some of his flock in Washington. The House may have passed the 1,200-page cap-and-trade bill largely unread, but Senate Democrats are combing the fine print and not liking what they see. As Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said of the bill, “We need to be a leader in the world but we don’t want to be a sucker.”
Republicans who oppose the legislation are positively gleeful. For some issues, it can be more fun being part of the opposition, as Democrats are discovering.
During the last administration, Senate Dems could slam President George W. Bush for not supporting the 1997 Kyoto global-warming treaty, secure in the knowledge that they would never have to vote yea or nay on a treaty that they knew could be poison for the coal industry and family checkbooks.
That’s why the Senate in 1997 voted 95-0 against any global-warming treaty that exempted developing nations like China. Now China wants none of the G8′s goal for it to halve its greenhouse gases — and the Dems are stuck with a leader who wants to save the planet.
When the GOP was in the White House, Democrats got to play scientific martyrs. James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, would go running to the New York Times or Washington Post with the lament that the Bushies were trying to muzzle his pro-global-warming science. No matter how many times he appeared on TV, the stories kept reporting on allegations that Bush was censoring science.
Now GOP senators have their own Hansen: Alan Carlin of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. …
The Economist reports on the growing dichotomy between Texas and California.
… It is easy to find evidence that California is in a funk. At the start of this month the once golden state started paying creditors, including those owed tax refunds, business suppliers and students expecting grants, in IOUs. California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, also said that the gap between projected outgoings and income for the current fiscal year has leapt to a horrible $26 billion. With no sign of a new budget to close this chasm, one credit agency has already downgraded California’s debt. As budgets are cut, universities will let in fewer students, prisoners will be released early and schemes to protect the vulnerable will be rolled back. …
… By contrast, Texas … has coped well with the recession, with an unemployment rate two points below the national average and one of the lowest rates of housing repossession. In part this is because Texan banks, hard hit in the last property bust, did not overexpand this time. But as our special report this week explains, Texas also clearly offers a different model, based on small government. It has no state capital-gains or income tax, and a business-friendly and immigrant-tolerant attitude. It is home to more Fortune 500 companies than any other state—64 compared with California’s 51 and New York’s 56. And as happens to fashionable places, some erstwhile weaknesses now seem strengths (flat, ugly countryside makes it easier for Dallas-Fort Worth to expand than mountain-and-sea-locked LA), while old conservative stereotypes are being questioned: two leading contenders to be Houston’s next mayor are a black man and a white lesbian. Texas also gets on better with Mexico than California does. …
Jennifer Rubin says it’s time for Israel’s supporters to be heard.
News reports indicate that the president will be meeting with heads of Jewish organizations at the White House today. One can imagine that Iran and the U.S. position on Israeli settlements will be on the agenda. We now have “a test,” as Moshe Arens wrote recently, of whether Israel’s self-proclaimed friends in the U.S. have the nerve to tell the president that his policies, if continued, will imperil the security of the Jewish state and do damage to the historic relationship between the U.S. and Israel.
It is tempting and natural for Jewish leaders, many of whom are Democrats and supported the president’s campaign, to pull their punches. Who wants a confrontation with the president? Really, might not the president’s policies “improve” with time? As Jonathan Tobin aptly detailed in his discussion of Alan Dershowitz’s defense of Obama’s Israel policy, the temptation to apologize and rationalize is great. But it is also foolhardy and dangerous. Israel faces an existential threat and U.S.-Israeli relations are at a crossroads. Muteness by American Jewish leaders, or even worse, encouragement of a U.S. policy that is more hostile toward Israel than any in recent memory, may have tragic consequences.
So the question remains: is there a Peter Bergson for the 21st Century? For those needing to freshen up their knowledge of history, this story summarizes how Bergson and a small group of American Jews made a difference at a time when world Jewry also faced an existential threat: …
The D.C. city council wants to be heard about vouchers. They think kids are more important than union leaders.
… The D.C. Council’s letter shows that support for these vouchers is real at the local level and that the opposition exists mainly at the level of the national Democratic Party. Mr. Durbin has suggested that he included the D.C. Council provision in deference to local control. “The government of Washington, D.C., should decide whether they want it in their school district,” he said in March. Well now we know where D.C. stands. We will now see if the national party stands for putting union power and money above the future of poor children.
Christopher Hitchens with a thought about Iran that’ll drive the Dems nuts.
… Which brings me to a question that I think deserves to be asked: Did the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the subsequent holding of competitive elections in which many rival Iraqi Shiite parties took part, have any germinal influence on the astonishing events in Iran? Certainly when I interviewed Sayeed Khomeini in Qum some years ago, where he spoke openly about “the liberation of Iraq,” he seemed to hope and believe that the example would spread. One swallow does not make a summer. But consider this: Many Iranians go as religious pilgrims to the holy sites of Najaf and Kerbala in southern Iraq. They have seen the way in which national and local elections have been held, more or less fairly and openly, with different Iraqi Shiite parties having to bid for votes (and with those parties aligned with Iran’s regime doing less and less well). They have seen an often turbulent Iraqi Parliament holding genuine debates that are reported with reasonable fairness in the Iraqi media. Meanwhile, an Iranian mullah caste that classifies its own people as children who are mere wards of the state puts on a “let’s pretend” election and even then tries to fix the outcome. Iranians by no means like to take their tune from Arabs—perhaps least of all from Iraqis—but watching something like the real thing next door may well have increased the appetite for the genuine article in Iran itself. …
David Warren doesn’t think Iran is over.
… The people still in the streets of Iran are … long past disputing the results of their Potemkin presidential election. They are, to paraphrase an old Czech saying from 1968, demanding a new government, while the government demands a new people.
It is almost impossible to find out what is happening on the ground there, in the absence of concerted western efforts to find out. I have seen encouraging accounts of full-dress Revolutionary Guards turning against plainclothed Basij thugs, rather than let them attack unarmed civilians. There are crowd-control issues emerging because the mullahs have arrested more prisoners than their jails can hold, and must therefore herd the new ones into such places as sports arenas — inside which, once there is a quorum, the chants of “death to Khamenei,” “death to the regime,” and “God is great” simply resume. I have also been seeing reports of demonstrators setting fires in various parts of Tehran — a serious matter in the middle of a big drought, with dust storms.
But of course I am not in Iran, and have no way to confirm these things. Nor, as a gravely responsible journalist, can I take the accounts at face value, even of purported eyewitnesses who may well be far too emotionally involved to describe, impartially, the scene before them.
All I or my reader can do is pray. So I suggest we pray very hard for Persia.
Mark Steyn wonders what future is portended for a country that can’t focus on the cap and trade power grab because of Michael Jackson’s death.
Two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville, that French bloke who toured Jacksonian America (Andrew, I mean), foresaw our descent into Jacksonian America (Michael, I mean), fretting that the citizens of a self-governing republic would decay into “an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.” But even the worst journeyman hack peddling a fin de la civilisation potboiler might find the juxtaposition of the rulers ramming through a massive power grab and tax hike while the oblivious proletariat is feasting on round-the-clock coverage of a self-mutilated misfit of dubious sexual predilections a bit too crude to be plausible. But apparently it works: bread and circus freaks.
At such moments, democracy in America (in Tocqueville’s phrase) seems alarmingly like the zombies in the late Mr. Jackson’s “Thriller” video: It can still stagger about with a certain mesmeric energy but it’s ever more the living dead. As is now traditional, our legislators had not read the bill they voted for. However, for once they had a decent excuse: A 300-page amendment to the original pithy 1,000-page bill was introduced at three in the morning on the day of passage and, alas, because Big Government has now effortlessly outpaced the nimble typing fingers of congressional stenographers, there was no actual physical copy of the bill in existence at the time the House voted for it.
Is that even legal? To pass a law that’s not in writing? Hey, relax. Someone probably tweeted the high points. It’ll be out there somewhere. The White House asked Ashton Kutcher to tweet National HIV Testing Day, so I’m sure they asked Lady Gaga or Perez Hilton to tweet National Unread Unwritten 1,000-Page Bill Day. No taxation without Twitterization!
If George III had put the tea clause 247 pages into a 300-page amendment to a 1,000-page bill, he might still have the colonies.
Debra Saunders notes the religious aspects of global warming belief.
… Faith. Mystery. Promises to engage in pious acts. Global warming is a religion. While Obama was in Italy preaching big cuts in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, he was losing some of his flock in Washington. The House may have passed the 1,200-page cap-and-trade bill largely unread, but Senate Democrats are combing the fine print and not liking what they see. As Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said of the bill, “We need to be a leader in the world but we don’t want to be a sucker.”
Republicans who oppose the legislation are positively gleeful. For some issues, it can be more fun being part of the opposition, as Democrats are discovering.
During the last administration, Senate Dems could slam President George W. Bush for not supporting the 1997 Kyoto global-warming treaty, secure in the knowledge that they would never have to vote yea or nay on a treaty that they knew could be poison for the coal industry and family checkbooks.
That’s why the Senate in 1997 voted 95-0 against any global-warming treaty that exempted developing nations like China. Now China wants none of the G8′s goal for it to halve its greenhouse gases — and the Dems are stuck with a leader who wants to save the planet.
When the GOP was in the White House, Democrats got to play scientific martyrs. James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, would go running to the New York Times or Washington Post with the lament that the Bushies were trying to muzzle his pro-global-warming science. No matter how many times he appeared on TV, the stories kept reporting on allegations that Bush was censoring science.
Now GOP senators have their own Hansen: Alan Carlin of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. …
The Economist reports on the growing dichotomy between Texas and California.
… It is easy to find evidence that California is in a funk. At the start of this month the once golden state started paying creditors, including those owed tax refunds, business suppliers and students expecting grants, in IOUs. California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, also said that the gap between projected outgoings and income for the current fiscal year has leapt to a horrible $26 billion. With no sign of a new budget to close this chasm, one credit agency has already downgraded California’s debt. As budgets are cut, universities will let in fewer students, prisoners will be released early and schemes to protect the vulnerable will be rolled back. …
… By contrast, Texas … has coped well with the recession, with an unemployment rate two points below the national average and one of the lowest rates of housing repossession. In part this is because Texan banks, hard hit in the last property bust, did not overexpand this time. But as our special report this week explains, Texas also clearly offers a different model, based on small government. It has no state capital-gains or income tax, and a business-friendly and immigrant-tolerant attitude. It is home to more Fortune 500 companies than any other state—64 compared with California’s 51 and New York’s 56. And as happens to fashionable places, some erstwhile weaknesses now seem strengths (flat, ugly countryside makes it easier for Dallas-Fort Worth to expand than mountain-and-sea-locked LA), while old conservative stereotypes are being questioned: two leading contenders to be Houston’s next mayor are a black man and a white lesbian. Texas also gets on better with Mexico than California does. …