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The Arab spring has brought tremendous upheavals in the Middle East, and the exciting possibility of freedom for many oppressed nations. Instead of addressing these changes and advocating for peaceful transitions and democratic governing, the president falls back on the same boring liberal position. David Harsanyi writes on Obama’s speech today.
…According to a Bloomberg report, Obama will urge Israel to halt West Bank settlement expansion and return to the 1967 “borders.” (There were never any 1967 borders, but that’s another story.) If this is true, the president of the United States will be asking an ally — though he probably bristles at such a narrow-minded concept — to accept a Judenfrei West Bank, washed of all aggressive settlers, prosperity and progress. The president, if the report is true, will be asking the Jews to surrender the old city of Jerusalem and place it under new management. Hamas-Fatah management.
…History moves on. The Arab world refuses. On al-Nakba day (belated greetings!) last week — a day on which Arabs mourn not the loss of West Bank or Gaza but the existence of a Jewish state in any configuration — the Syrian regime encouraged a few thousand Palestinian “refugees” to bum rush the border to deflect attention away from the ongoing brutalization of its own people. What’s another 12 lives?…
Caroline Glick gives us a thorough rundown of today’s White House attack on Israel.
…the Netanyahu government and Congress are calling for a US aid cutoff to the Palestinian Authority. With Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization, now partnering with Fatah in governing the PA, it is illegal for the US government to continue to have anything to do with the PA. Both the Netanyahu government and senior members of the House and Senate are arguing forcefully that there is no way for Israel to make peace with the Palestinians now, and that the US must abandon its efforts to force the sides to sign an agreement.
The Israeli and congressional arguments are certainly compelling. But the signals emanating from the White House and its allied media indicate that Obama is ready to plough forward in spite of them. With the new international security credibility he earned by overseeing the successful assassination of Osama bin Laden, Obama apparently believes that he can withstand congressional pressure and make the case for demanding that Israel surrender Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to Hamas and its partners in Fatah. …
…Unlike his predecessors, Obama’s interest in the Palestinians is not opportunistic. He is a true believer. And because of his deep-seated commitment to the Palestinians, his policies are even more radically anti-Israel than the PLO-Fatah’s. It was Obama, not Abbas, who demanded that Jews be barred from building anything in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. It is the Obama administration, not the PLO-Fatah, that is leading the charge to embrace the Muslim Brotherhood.
…But Netanyahu doesn’t have to give in. He can stick to his guns and defend the country. He can continue on the correct path he has forged of repeating the truth about Hamas. He can warn about the growing threat of Egypt. He can describe the Iranian-supported butchery Assad is carrying out against his own people and note that a regime that murders its own will not make peace with the Jewish state. And he can point out the fact that as a capitalist, liberal democracy which protects the lives and property of its citizens, Israel is the only stable country in the region and the US’s only reliable regional ally. …
In Contentions, Jonathan Tobin hears that some small measure of common sense may have gained a foothold at the White House.
President Obama’s speech about the Middle East, scheduled for Thursday at the State Department, has been the subject of constant speculation fueled by leaks from administration sources. Most of the speculation is over whether he will take the opportunity to spell out his ideas for a revival of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, improbably linking it to the Arab Spring protests that have inflamed the region. There have been leaks intended to make us think he was sensibly dropping the idea of promoting some sort of U.S. dictat and others that made it appear as if he would squeeze Israel.
…While Obama pledged America’s undying support for Israel’s existence yesterday while hosting a “Jewish Heritage” day at the White House at which the Marine Band played klezmer music, the debate over whether or not to heighten pressure on the Jewish state illustrates the double game the administration is playing on the Middle East. With the Palestinian Authority having embraced an alliance with Hamas and making it clearer than ever that their goal of an independent state is merely a way station on the road to future conflict with Israel (as PA head Mahmoud Abbas’s op-ed article in yesterday’s New York Times illustrated), the notion that more U.S. pressure will pave the way to peace makes no sense.
What Obama seems most interested in is a statement that will buttress his attempts at outreach to the Arab world. But what the president fails to understand is that his attempt to link the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians to the Arab Spring won’t increase his influence in the region. Israel and the United States are both irrelevant to the protests. And nothing Barack Obama does will change that.
Switching gears, but staying with the general foolishness of this administration, Steve Chapman, in the Chicago Tribune, has more on the NLRB.
…If the NLRB succeeds, a federal official will command a private corporation it may not produce in one place and must produce in another. Never mind what makes business sense.
This is a radical departure for the agency. “It is highly unusual,” noted The New York Times, “for the federal government to seek to reverse a corporate decision as important as the location of a plant.”
Boeing adamantly denies moving production because of strikes or unions. But even if it was doing something so vicious as to protect itself against recurring labor disruptions, it ought to have that right.
William Gould, a Stanford University law professor who was appointed to head the NLRB by President Bill Clinton, has his doubts about this complaint. “It’s perfectly reasonable for a company to want to avoid strikes,” he told me. …
Jennifer Rubin reports more stalling from the union owned president, on free-trade agreements that would help the economy.
The White House, to the dismay of members of both parties in Congress, has been foot-dragging on submission of the South Korea, Colombia and Panama free-trade deals. Yesterday, as the Daily Caller reported, the president came up with a new excuse:
White House officials announced . . . .they won’t send three pending trade pacts to Congress until they get a new package of aid-funding approved by Capitol Hill. …
House Republican Policy Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.) was not pleased, issuing this statement:
The Obama Administration has found every possible excuse to delay implementation of these trade deals despite agreement that they would help boost economic growth and make America more competitive. .?.?. At a time when our economy could use all the help it can get, these agreements would expand U.S. exports and grow jobs and investments here in America. Inaction only results in the U.S. losing market share and exports to competitors. It is irresponsible for the White House to be throwing up yet another barrier to stall movement. If the president believes trade is an important part of getting our country’s economy moving again, his administration should reassure our trade partners and the American people that our nation will uphold its commitment to these agreements and not continue to find reason to delay or dismantle them.”
Matthew Boyle, in the Daily Caller, looks at government by the Democrats, for their political friends.
Of the 204 new ObamaCare waivers President Barack Obama’s administration approved in April, 38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district.
That’s in addition to the 27 new waivers for health care or drug companies and the 31 new union waivers Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services approved.
Pelosi’s district secured almost 20 percent of the latest issuance of waivers nationwide, and the companies that won them didn’t have much in common with companies throughout the rest of the country that have received Obamacare waivers. …
…Pelosi’s office did not respond to TheDC’s requests for comment either.
In Powerline, John Hinderaker posts on a study that the stimulus saved government jobs only. It figures that government would save itself, not the people it is supposed to serve.
Economists Timothy Conley and Bill Dupor have studied the effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the purported stimulus bill) with great rigor. Earlier this week, they reported their findings in a paper titled “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Public Sector Jobs Saved, Private Sector Jobs Forestalled.” The paper is dense and rather lengthy, and requires considerable study. Here, however, is the bottom line:
Our benchmark results suggest that the ARRA created/saved approximately 450 thousand state and local government jobs and destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs. State and local government jobs were saved because ARRA funds were largely used to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment. The majority of destroyed/forestalled jobs were in growth industries including health, education, professional and business services.
So the American people borrowed and spent close to a trillion dollars to destroy a net of more than one-half million jobs. Does President Obama understand this? I very much doubt it. When he expressed puzzlement at the idea that the stimulus money may not have been well-spent, and said that “spending equals stimulus,” he betrayed a shocking level of economic ignorance.
Andrew Malcolm looks at Obama’s poll numbers.
…Most obviously gasoline prices, which Americans always use as a key to how they feel about any White House administration. And a kind of general, pervasive unease and uncertainty that prompts pessimism and a hesitancy to spend or invest, reflected now in lowered estimates for this year’s economic growth.
The next big Washington fight will be over raising the national debt ceiling. Maybe you heard the thunk earlier Monday when the United States reached that limit. As a helpful reminder, Republican House Speaker John A. Boehner released a statement, including;
Americans understand we simply can’t keep spending money we don’t have. Spending-driven deficits, record debt, and the threat of tax hikes are smothering our economy with uncertainty and making it harder for small businesses to hire new workers.
Recent polls indicate Americans are unhappy about raising the limit without significant spending cuts, despite the dire credit warnings.
Frank Donatelli, in Politico, thinks that Obama will have to campaign against difficult economic statistics.
…Four represents gasoline prices rising to $4 and beyond. Energy prices affect all economic activity and threaten to put a crimp in our stilted recovery.
The administration’s policies of rationing scarcity are largely to blame. We are not drilling offshore for new oil. We are only now taking advantage of new oil and gas deposits in the U.S., and the Environmental Protection Agency is hardly leading the way. We are not exploiting our vast reserves of coal and natural gas.
…Ten represents $10 trillion of additional debt that we will accumulate by the end of a second Obama administration. This is a national crisis that the president has chosen to ignore.
…He believes the public is so insistent on maintaining entitlement programs that began in the 1930s and 1960s, and remain unchanged, that people will overlook this systematic looting of our children’s future. …