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Marty Peretz blogs on the administration missteps in Middle East peace efforts.
…The Times piece is by Mark Landler which means it is accurate. And accurate on a weighty topic: “U.S. Faces Risks and Advantages in Bid to Save Talks.”
Apparently everyone now regrets that the president and his siren, Hillary Clinton, made not building in the settlements the key to our entire Middle East policy. The basic objection to this is the crucial issue (or one of the really crucial issues) of where the territorial lines will be drawn. If Israeli settlers build here and not there will have no effect on the prospective borders. None. …
Here’s Malley’s wisdom on the matter: “The original sin was putting so much emphasis, an issue we couldn’t resolve…We’ve spent the whole year trying to undo the damage of that step.”
Jennifer Rubin notes that the attitudes of American Jews are changing.
The second AJC poll of the year has some interesting results…
A bare majority of American Jews (51 percent) approve of Obama’s overall performance, still higher than the nation as a whole, but not nearly the level of support (78 percent) he enjoyed on Election Day or for a good stretch of his term. American Jews’ specific views on Israel and Iran explain, in part, why they have become disenchanted with Obama:
American Jewish confidence in Obama’s approach to Iran has dropped with 43 percent approving of the administration’s handling of the Iran nuclear issue compared to 47 percent in March. Some 46 disapprove, up from 42 percent. Some 59 percent support and 35 percent oppose U.S. military action to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Some 70 percent support and some 26 oppose Israeli military action. …
These findings, in conjunction with the recent poll of all Americans that I discussed here, here and here, point to several important developments. In answer to the question of whether anything can wean Jews of their “sick addiction” to the Democratic Party, the answer seems to be “Obama.” At this rate, his level of support among Jews will roughly match the general population’s, an unheard of phenomenon for the past 75 years. …
Toby Harnden looks at criticism leveled at the administration by the mainstream. Harnden suggests Bob Schieffer’s question to Axelrod of “Is that the best you can do?” is likely to be the epitaph for the administration.
…So the White House and the hapless Democrats running for re-election on November 2nd must be in near despair over David Axelrod’s interview with Schieffer yesterday. In it, the host of CBS’s Face the Nation was incredulous at Axelrod’s focus not on the economy or jobs or health care or the Islamist threat or the wars America is engaged in but, er, the possibility that the US Chamber may be funding ads with foreign money. A charge, of course, which would be called racist if Republicans had levelled it against Obama.
You can watch the exchange here…
Did you get that last comment from Schieffer? “I guess I would put it this way. If the only charge Democrats can make three weeks into the election is that somehow this may or may not be foreign money coming into the campaign, is that the best you can do?” Ouch. …
Jennifer Rubin highlights some well-written criticism of David Axelrod’s attacks, and add her own excellent commentary.
Ed Gillespie is justifiably steamed at the White House. He writes:
“In their latest attempt to distract voters from their job-killing policies, President Obama, his White House and senior Democrats in Congress have added to their long list of bogeymen the outside groups that seek to help elect Republicans in November. They threaten congressional investigations, discuss private tax information and level baseless accusations of criminal activity against those who have been public in seeking to defeat Democratic candidates and their liberal agenda. Without a trace of irony, powerful Democratic officeholders lament that many who support these groups wish to remain anonymous. …”
And if that were not enough, Obama’s closest political hack, Tailgunner David Axelrod, insists that no proof of wrongdoing was needed, “that it was up to the chamber to prove it hadn’t done anything wrong.” In the West Wing, apparently, the American principle is that you’re guilty until proven innocent, and our highest elected and appointed officials are there to hurl the charges. …
Michael Barone puts together some pieces on the hypocrisy of the Chamber of Commerce accusations.
Glenn Reynolds nails this one: the Obama Democrats’ campaign riff against foreign donations to Democrats is bogus—and according to the New York Times, no less. This looks like a matter of projection, since it’s well documented that the 2008 Obama campaign did not put in place address verification software that would have routinely prevented most foreign donations. In effect they were encouraging donations by foreign nationals. …
And here’s our own Washington Examiner editorial from the time:
“Then there’s the question of whether foreign nationals are contributing to the Obama campaign. There is more than enough evidence to warrant a full-scale investigation by the Federal Election Commission, including the $32,332.19 that appears to have come from two brothers living in a Hamas-controlled Palestinian refugee camp in Rafah, GA (that’s Gaza, not Georgia). The brothers’ cash is part of a flood of illegal foreign contributions accepted by the Obama campaign.”
The Obama campaign was happy to encourage mass illegal donations from foreign nationals. Now it’s making baseless charges that its opposition is doing the same thing. Hope and change! …
Mark Halperin is still drinking the cool-aid, but does take exception with the Obami’s partisan attacks.
…But Obama has exacerbated his political problems not just by failing to enact policies that would have actually turned the economy around, but also by authorizing a series of tactical moves intended to demonize Republicans and distract from the problems at hand. He has wasted time lambasting his foes when he should have been putting forth his agenda in a clear, optimistic fashion, defending the benefits of his key decisions during the past two years (health care and the Troubled Asset Relief Program, for example) and explaining what he would do with a re-elected Democratic majority to spur growth.
Throughout the year, we have been treated to Obama-led attacks on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Congressman Joe Barton (for his odd apology to BP), John Boehner (for seeking the speakership — or was it something about an ant?) and Fox News (for everything). Suitable Democratic targets in some cases, perhaps, but not worth the time of a busy Commander in Chief. In the past few days, we have witnessed the spectacle of the President himself and his top advisers wading into allegations that Republicans are attempting to buy the election using foreign money laundered through the Chamber of Commerce, combining with Karl Rove and his wealthy backers to fund a flood of negative television commercials. Not only is this issue convoluted and far-fetched, but it also distracts from the issues voters care about, frustrating political insiders and alienating struggling citizens…
Jennifer Rubin also blogs on the senate race in West Virginia.
West Virginia’s Senate seat is slipping away from the Democrats. In a wave election year, the voters there may decide it is more important to keep their governor home and to send to Congress someone to block Obama’s agenda. So Democratic Gov. Joe Manchin is trying to run from and against the Obama agenda:
In an interview on Fox News, Manchin said he is open to repealing the new healthcare law — the signature accomplishment of Democrats during Obama’s time in the White House.
The governor also took to the airwaves to tout his independence, releasing a TV ad in which he’s shown shooting a hole through the cap-and-trade bill favored by Obama and House Democrats. …
So far, it is not working. Republican John Raese has a lead of 4.5 points in the RealClearPolitics.com poll. It’s not clear that running against Obama is a viable strategy for Democrats, but neither is running on his unpopular agenda. In short, that’s why so many Democrats will lose in three weeks.
John Podhoretz has the latest poll numbers.
Gallup just released its weekly “generic” poll, and for the second week in a row it is forecasting a colossal wipeout for Democrats — with likely voters voting Republican by a margin between 12 and 17 points. Rasmussen, widely and unfairly considered biased towards Republicans, has shown a markedly smaller Republican lead, but this week its likely-voter number has Republicans besting Democrats by 8 percent. Meanwhile, statewide and district-wide polls suggest that a minor surge by Democrats at the end of September seems either to have evaporated or was never all that real in the first place. …
An 8-to-15 point Republican margin in 2010, which seems increasingly possible, will represent a partisan and ideological turnaround of 15 to 24 percent. That is without precedent in the modern era. At the presidential level, Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980 was a landslide but still featured a shift away from Carter of 11 points among the electorate (Carter dropped from 51 percent in 1976 to 40 percent). …
…There’s no reason to think that independents and disaffected Democrats are going to become Republicans, the way the Perotistas did. But the goings-on after Barack Obama’s inauguration may have created a new swing-voting camp of anti-liberals, at least as far as Democratic party orthodoxy defines “liberal,” and how this new camp views the post-November political dynamic will define American politics for the next decade. …
Jay Nordlinger shares various thoughts, and includes an item that demonstrates the difference in character between W and Obama.
…I also have an item on Obama’s gracelessness — on his snippy, snotty remarks about conservatives, Republicans, and others not quite in love with him. Remember how he was supposed to have a “first-class temperament”? I say in my column that even third-class is pushing it. A reader writes,
I didn’t vote for George W. Bush either time . . . But one thing seems to draw little comment: He was subjected to the most intense and odious opprobrium in my lifetime, substantially worse than that flung at Nixon. There were the most vicious and vile accusations. And I cannot recall one instance where Bush lashed back or replied in kind. …
Here’s a stunning article from David Brooks on the ways government unions have destroyed state budgets.
…Over the past few decades, governments have become entwined in a series of arrangements that drain money from productive uses and direct it toward unproductive ones.
New Jersey can’t afford to build its tunnel, but benefits packages for the state’s employees are 41 percent more expensive than those offered by the average Fortune 500 company. These benefits costs are rising by 16 percent a year.
…States across the nation will be paralyzed for the rest of our lives because they face unfunded pension obligations that, if counted accurately, amount to $2 trillion — or $87,000 per plan participant.
All in all, governments can’t promote future prosperity because they are strangling on their own self-indulgence. …
Jonathan Tobin has a great follow-up to his original commentary on Chris Christie’s refusal to bury New Jersey in more debt.
…Brooks acknowledges that the tunnel is needed but rightly notes that the state’s inability to afford it stems from the fact that our states and municipalities are drowning in debt largely generated by the costs of paying government employees and their pensions (an issue that Jeff Jacoby explores at length in this month’s issue of COMMENTARY). It’s all well and good to say that big infrastructure projects are exactly the sort of thing government should be doing, but the liberal addiction to public-sector spending has made that impossible. And the public-sector unions that dominate the Democratic Party make sure this never changes.
One reader reacted to my earlier post on this subject by claiming that what Christie has done is to try and live without debt, a bad policy for any government, business, or family. In fact, what Christie is attempting to do is establish the principle that there must be a limit to debt. Unless our states free themselves from the massive debt that government unions have created, it will become increasingly difficult for government to afford the basic services they are supposed to provide, let alone money pits like the Hudson River Tunnel.
Brooks laments the fact that the left won’t make the hard choices about which government expenditures to prioritize. But the problem here isn’t about priorities but a liberal philosophy that wants no limits on government’s power to spend and therefore tax. Under these circumstances, commonsense conservatives like Christie have no choice but to simply draw a line in the sand and say “no” to the tunnel. …
In the New Scientist, Andy Coghlin reports on a new archaelogical finding. The science piece today is a stunner. Paleontologists have found a 500,000 year old partial skeleton of a pre-courser of both Neanderthals and modern humans. It is evident the remains are from a 45 year old man who was infirm suggesting his tribe took care of him. Pickerhead has long been amazed by the human capacity for caring and sharing that it repeatedly demonstrated by discoveries in anthropology and other social sciences. Colin Turnbull’s Mountain People describes the almost complete societal breakdown of the Ik people, 1,000 hunter-gatherers, who were forced by the government of Uganda to leave their ancestral land and take up farming. Yet, while in their degraded state, they would be very cautious when a kill had been made to find wood that would burn without smoke so the feast could be enjoyed without discovery. Because if another individual happened on the scene, the meal would be shared.
It is impossible to read history and not conclude human beings are steadily improving in one significant way; we keep finding better and better ways to help those, who for one reason or another, are unable to cope with life as it has presented itself. Our battles with the left are not over whether we should help, but over what would be the most constructive ways. People who love freedom believe market based economies provide the abundance to improve the collective wealth, and therefore improve the physical and mental well being of our fellows. Of course, you must have superior education to see this. And then it is hard to prove this would be the result. We have to teach the left it is not enough to wish something will happen, you also must understand the unintended consequences of coercion by the state.
He was too old to hunt, a hunchback probably needing a cane for support, and suffered terrible lower back pain. But a member of the human family who lived 500,000 years ago is the most elderly ancient human ever found. The individual of the species Homo heidelbergensis has been named “Elvis” after his pelvis and lower backbone were uncovered in Atapuerca, northern Spain. The hunter-gatherer was about 45 years old when he died.
…The fact that Elvis was so infirm suggests he was looked after by his contemporaries, which Bonmatí’s team say is good evidence that hunter-gatherers didn’t abandon the weak. He could not have been an active hunter, nor could he carry heavy loads. …
…A year ago, the same team reported evidence from Atapuerca that a 12-year-old child with skull malformations was cared for by the same group.
“We have evidence building up that these people were caring,” says Chris Stringer, an anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London. “This individual probably could move around, but couldn’t get his own food, so it implies a level of social support, and that he was valued by his contemporaries.”