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Rick Richman comments on a post from Israeli blogger Arlene Kushner. Apparently Israel has seen enough of Obama to know that they want their deals in writing.
Israeli blogger Arlene Kushner writes that there are “rumors afloat about the specifics on U.S.-Israel negotiations with regard to a ‘temporary’ freeze on settlement building.” She cites an Israeli press report that “the U.S. wants a two year freeze because Obama figures that’s how long forging a peace deal will take,” while Netanyahu is offering three months (with the right to resume building if Arab states do not respond with normalization steps).
But the real sticking point may be something else that she notes in her post:
Both Netanyahu and Barak (who reportedly would accept a six-month freeze) want the deal in writing, since Obama claimed there was no deal with Bush that had to be honored because there was nothing that was an explicit written commitment. Obama is said to be balking at this as he doesn’t want to go on record as formally authorizing building in the settlements under any conditions.
This is what happens when you renege on established oral understandings on the grounds they are “unenforceable.” …
George Jonas in Canada’s National Post also comments on US-Israeli relations.
…”Think about that for a moment,” wrote Jeff Jacoby in theBoston Globe recently. “Six months after Barack Obama became the first black man to move into the previously all-white residential facility at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, he is fighting to prevent integration in Jerusalem.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to the Obamists’ chutzpah was unequivocal, though not as intemperate as mine would have been. He didn’t tell Obama and his officials to go fly a kite. He simply reminded everyone that with Israel being a free country, the residents of Jerusalem, regardless of ethnicity or religion, were free to purchase property wherever they liked. Just as Arabs could live in west Jerusalem if they chose, Jews could live in east Jerusalem. “This is the policy of an open city,” he said.
It’s not the policy of Obamaniac liberals, though. Their “two-state” solution is to turn the Jewish State into a multicultural caravanserai but make the Palestinian State judenrein. It’s not Zionism that is racist; it’s rampant liberalism, liberalism run amok. The United Nation’s infamous Zionism=racism doesn’t compute, but after the left’s — not only the American or European, but even theIsraeli left’s — display of visceral aversion to Jewish settlements in the Holy Land, liberalism=racism isn’t far off the mark.
Recently, America’s uber-liberal President had the temerity to advise Israel to engage in introspection. That’s a joke. Whatever Israel’s failings, there hasn’t been a more introspective country on Earth. Whatever Obama’s qualities, there hasn’t been a more cocksure occupant of the Whiter House. …
The Wall Street Journal editorial board tells us about a truly amazing occurrence.
We witnessed that rarest of things last week—a politician’s public humility. When France, along with Germany, reported an unexpected uptick in economic growth for the second quarter, French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde called the return to growth “very surprising.” Imagine that—a major global economy stops shrinking, without the benefit of trillion-dollar stimulus packages or major reforms, and a politician doesn’t rush to claim credit for the achievement.
Politicians don’t “grow” an economy like a vegetable garden, and the reasons behind economic growth in the global economy are at least as mysterious to our political class, if not more so, than they are to the rest of us. Ms. Lagarde, who spent decades in the private sector, is perhaps better placed than many politicians to appreciate this fact. A single quarter of 0.3% growth hardly means it’s off to the races for France or Germany, and the euro zone’s economy as a whole still shrank in the quarter, by 0.1% of GDP.
But at a time when politicians around the world are desperate for any sign of a turnaround, it’s refreshing to hear the minister responsible for France’s economy speak the truth about growth. It is the product of literally millions of decisions made by millions of people about what to produce, buy and sell. Politicians can influence all that decision making, especially by increasing or decreasing the incentives to produce, work and innovate. But they can’t control today’s multi-trillion-dollar economies, no matter how much they’d like to take credit for doing so when things start looking better. …
Richard A. Epstein takes another look at Gates-gate now that the police tapes have been released.
…Who, then, is likely to make a blunder–someone who follows the book, or someone who in righteous indignation falls back on his own deep-seated conviction that whites, police officers included, suffer from unconscious racial biases? Again the tapes go a long way to answering that question. It is no wonder that police officers, white and black, took offense at the president’s remarks. The color of the uniform matters more than the color of the skin.
In these circumstances, it was ungracious for Obama to damn Crowley by faint praise. Of course an “outstanding officer” like Sgt. Crowley with “a fine record of racial sensitivity” can have interactions with members of the African-American community that are “fraught with misunderstanding.” This Solomonic effort to split the baby is undercut by one simple fact: Crowley’s compliance with protocol in the face of Gates’ gratuitous confrontation. Gates is hardly covered with glory because his own abusive conduct may not be criminal. Common civility requires more.
There is a larger lesson to be learned. No national dialogue will improve race relations by treating a model officer like Crowley as if he were a rogue cop. The rate of racial progress in Cambridge makes these harsh denunciations hurtful. Gates could have contributed to improving relations by keeping his cool after the incident was over. Yet, no matter how one views the case, standard statistical protocols caution against sad generalizations about race relations from one unfortunate incident. Professor Gates and President Obama would have done a lot better if they had reined in their own harsh charges. Sometimes silence is golden.
Tom Maguire at Just One Minute blog has a lot of fun tracking the NY Times efforts to cover for the kid president.
… Well – Obama quite clearly talked about the hip replacement as a quality of life decision, not a “curative” treatment, said it was a tough call, said end-of-life care is a huge cost driver, and spoke in favor of a final legislative package that included “voluntary” guidelines established by government wise men to balance expense and efficacy. Denial is probably the best tactic for Obama’s supporters on this one.
However, the Times has now pointed themselves into a corner – their recent faux-careful examination of the “death panel” rumors that have dogged Obama completely failed to note Obama’s own contribution to the debate in April. The Times has decreed that the notion that Obama has ever hinted at support for anything like a death panel (or cost oriented trade-offs for end-of-life care) is “false”, despite their own past reporting to the contrary.
So what are they going to do when Obama starts talking about his grandmother and insisting that his only takeaway from that experience was that he is opposed to death panels or any sort of government advisory role in end-of-life care? Are you kidding? They are going to move on. Nothing in the latest Gay Stolberg story hints that Obama is re-spinning his grandmother’s tale with a new “lesson learned” or that the folks now accused of being “dishonest” can point to Obama’s own words as printed in the Times.
It’s Times-world – Obama can say whatever he wants and later say whatever else he wants, then denounce the people still grappling with the previous version.
Imagine my surprise.
Steve Chapman does a great job dispelling the myth that Americans don’t live as long as the unfortunate citizens of countries with socialized healthcare.
…It’s true that the United States spends more on health care than anyone else, and it’s true that we rank below a lot of other advanced countries in life expectancy. The juxtaposition of the two facts, however, doesn’t prove we are wasting our money or doing the wrong things.
It only proves that lots of things affect mortality besides medical treatment. Actor Heath Ledger didn’t die at age 28 because the American health-care system failed him.
One big reason our life expectancy lags is that Americans have an unusual tendency to perish in homicides or accidents. We are 12 times more likely than the Japanese to be murdered and nearly twice as likely to be killed in auto wrecks.
In their 2006 book, “The Business of Health,” economists Robert L. Ohsfeldt and John E. Schneider set out to determine where the U.S. would rank in life span among developed nations if homicides and accidents are factored out. Their answer? First place.
That discovery indicates our health-care system is doing a poor job of preventing shootouts and drunk driving but a good job of healing the sick. All those universal-care systems in Canada and Europe may sound like Health Heaven, but they fall short of our model when it comes to combating life-threatening diseases. …
Ross Douthat discusses seniors, Medicare, and Republican strategy.
…That’s why Republicans find themselves tiptoeing into an unfamiliar role — as champions of old-age entitlements. The Democrats are “sticking it to seniors with cuts to Medicare,” Mitch McConnell declared. They want to “cannibalize” the program to pay for reform, John Cornyn complained. It’s a “raid,” Sam Brownback warned, that could result in the elderly losing “necessary care.”
The controversy over “death panels” is just the most extreme manifestation of this debate. Obviously, the Democratic plans wouldn’t euthanize your grandmother. But they might limit the procedures that her Medicare will pay for. And conservative lawmakers are using this inconvenient truth to paint the Democrats as enemies of Grandma.
You can understand why Republicans, after decades of being demagogued for proposing even modest entitlement reforms, would relish the chance to turn the tables. But this is a perilous strategy for the right.
Medicare’s price tag, if trends continue, will make a mockery of the idea of limited government. For conservatives, no fiscal cause is more important than curbing this exponential growth. And by fighting health care reform with tactics ripped from Democratic playbooks, and enlisting anxious seniors as foot soldiers, conservatives are setting themselves up to win the battle and lose the longer war. …
The Economist walks us through Tristram Hunt’s new book, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels.
When the financial crisis took off last autumn, Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital”, originally published in 1867, whooshed up bestseller lists. The first book to describe the relentless, all-consuming and global nature of capitalism had suddenly gained new meaning. But Marx had never really gone away, whereas Friedrich Engels—the man who worked hand in glove with him for most of his life and made a huge contribution to “Das Kapital”—is almost forgotten. A new biography by a British historian, Tristram Hunt, makes a good case for giving him greater credit.
The two men became friends in Paris in 1844 when both were in their mid-20s, and remained extremely close until Marx died in 1883. Both were Rhinelanders (our picture shows Engels standing behind Marx in the press room of Rheinische Zeitung which they edited jointly) but came from very different backgrounds: Marx’s father was a Jewish lawyer turned Christian; Engels’s a prosperous Protestant cotton-mill owner. Marx studied law, then philosophy; Engels, the black sheep of his family, was sent to work in the family business at 17. While doing his military service in 1841 in Berlin, he was exposed to the ferment of ideas swirling around the Prussian capital. …