His anti-semitism czar blasts Israel first!!!

The State Department vs. the Israeli Ambassador

24 Dec 2009 02:25 pm

You can't make this stuff up. The new State Department anti-Semtism czar (you didn't know such a thing existed?), Hannah Rosenthal, publicly criticized the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Michael Oren, for criticizing J Street, the left-leaning Jewish lobbying group:

Remarks by Israel's ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, against the liberal Jewish lobby J Street were "most unfortunate" according to Hannah Rosenthal, head of the U.S. administration's Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism.

Talk about sticking your nose in places where it doesn't belong. The Obama Administration official charged with monitoring worldwide anti-Semitism makes her first target... the Israeli ambassador to the United States? I'll be taking bets now on how long Hannah Rosenthal lasts in the job.

http://jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/12/the_state_department_vs_the_is.php

Obma worst first year ever of any president

The President Is No B+
In fact, he's got the worst ratings of any president at the end of his first year.



By KARL ROVE

Barack Obama has won a place in history with the worst ratings of any president at the end of his first year: 49% approve and 46% disapprove of his job performance in the latest USA Today/Gallup Poll.

There are many factors that explain it, including weakness abroad, an unprecedented spending binge at home, and making a perfectly awful health-care plan his signature domestic initiative. But something else is happening.

Mr. Obama has not governed as the centrist, deficit-fighting, bipartisan consensus builder he promised to be. And his promise to embody a new kind of politics—free of finger-pointing, pettiness and spin—was a mirage. He has cheapened his office with needless attacks on his predecessor.

Consider Mr. Obama's comment in his interview this past Sunday on CBS's "60 Minutes" that the Bush administration made a mistake in speaking in "a triumphant sense about war."

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Rove
Associated Press
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Rove

This was a slap at every president who rallied the nation in dark moments, including Franklin D. Roosevelt ("With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph"); Woodrow Wilson ("Right is more precious than peace and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts"); and John F. Kennedy ("Any hostile move anywhere in the world against the safety and freedom of peoples to whom we are committed . . . will be met by whatever action is needed").

This kind of attack gives Mr. Obama's words a slippery quality. For example, he voted for the bank rescue plan in September 2008 and praised it during the campaign. Yet on Dec. 8 at the Brookings Institution, Mr. Obama called it "flawed" and blamed "the last administration" for launching it "hastily."

Really? Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and New York Fed President Timothy Geithner designed it. If it was "flawed," why did Mr. Obama later nominate Mr. Bernanke to a second term as Fed chairman and make Mr. Geithner his Treasury secretary?

Mr. Obama also claimed at Brookings that he prevented "a second Great Depression" by confronting the financial crisis "largely without the help" of Republicans. Yet his own Treasury secretary suggests otherwise. In a Dec. 9 letter, Mr. Geithner admitted that since taking office, the Obama administration had "committed about $7 billion to banks, much of which went to small institutions." That compares to $240 billion the Bush administration lent banks. Does Mr. Obama really believe his additional $7 billion forestalled "the potential collapse of our financial system"?
About Karl Rove

Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. At the White House he oversaw the Offices of Strategic Initiatives, Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Intergovernmental Affairs and was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, coordinating the White House policy-making process.

Before Karl became known as "The Architect" of President Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, he was president of Karl Rove + Company, an Austin-based public affairs firm that worked for Republican candidates, nonpartisan causes, and nonprofit groups. His clients included over 75 Republican U.S. Senate, Congressional and gubernatorial candidates in 24 states, as well as the Moderate Party of Sweden.

Karl writes a weekly op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, is a Newsweek columnist and is the author of the forthcoming book "Courage and Consequence" (Threshold Editions).

Email the author atKarl@Rove.comor visit him on the web atRove.com. Or, you can send a Tweet to @karlrove.

Mr. Obama continued distorting the record in his "60 Minutes" interview Sunday when he blamed bankers for the financial crisis. They "caused the problem," he insisted before complaining, "I haven't seen a lot of shame on their part" and pledging to put "a regulatory system in place that prevents them from putting us in this kind of pickle again."

But as a freshman senator, Mr. Obama supported a threatened 2005 filibuster of a bill regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He doesn't show "a lot of shame" that he and other Fannie and Freddie defenders blocked "a regulatory system" that might have kept America from getting in such a bad pickle in the first place.

The president's rhetorical tricks don't end there. Mr. Obama also claimed his $787 billion stimulus package "helped us [stem] the panic and get the economy growing again." But 1.5 million more people are unemployed than he said there would be if nothing were done.

And as of yesterday, only $244 billion of the stimulus had been spent. Why was $787 billion needed when less than a third of that figure supposedly got the job done?

Mr. Obama also alleged on "60 Minutes" that health-care reform "will actually bring down the deficit" (which people clearly know it will not). He said his reform reduces "costs and premiums for American families and businesses" (though they will be higher than they would otherwise be). And he claimed 30 million more people will get coverage through "an exchange that allows individuals and small businesses" to purchase insurance (though 15 million of them are covered by being dumped into Medicaid and don't get private insurance).

Mr. Obama may actually believe it when he says, "I think that's a pretty darned good outcome" and congratulates himself that he could succeed where "seven presidents have tried . . . [and] seven presidents have failed."

But voters seem to have a different definition of success. And they are tiring of the president's blame shifting and distortions.

Mr. Obama may believe, as he told Oprah Winfrey in a recent interview, that he deserves a "solid B+" for his first year in office, but the American people beg to differ. A presidency that started with so much promise is receiving unprecedentedly low grades from the country that elected him. He's earned them.

Mr. Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, is the author of the forthcoming book "Courage and Consequence" (Threshold Editions).

Idiotic timetable for Afganistan

Afghans and Pakistanis Concerned Over U.S. Plan


By SABRINA TAVERNISE and CARLOTTA GALL
Published: December 2, 2009


Many in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, argued that the short timetable diminished any incentive for Pakistan to cut ties to Taliban militants who were its allies in the past, and whom Pakistan might want to use to shape a friendly government in Afghanistan after the American withdrawal.

Obma care falling in polls WSJ

*
* DECEMBER 11, 2009

ObamaCare Keeps Falling in the Polls


By JOHN FUND


Opponents of ObamaCare will be aided by polls showing that it is even less popular than HillaryCare was a year into the Clinton presidency. Back in December 1993, Gallup found that 47% of voters backed HillaryCare, with 32% opposed. Today, an average of health-care surveys at Pollster.com shows support for ObamaCare at 38.8%, with 51.4% against...

That legislation only passed 220 to 215. There will be new pressures on members for a second vote. Louisiana Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao, the lone Republican to vote for the bill, may not be able to support it again without strong limits on funding abortions—and several Democrats might feel compelled to join him.

Meanwhile, the new Quinnipiac poll reports that 63% of Americans believe covering the uninsured will increase their own costs, and that includes 44% of Democrats. Voters by 48% to 46% believe extending coverage to the uninsured would decrease the quality of their own care—including a majority of independents and 26% of Democrats. A full 74% of people don't believe the president's claim that health reform won't add to the deficit, including 53% of Democrats.

There is also the issue of jobs. The unemployment rate is 10% and a new study by the National Federation of Independent Business estimates that mandating that employers provide health care will cost 1.6 million jobs by 2013.

These are all potent issues if TV ads and grass-roots activism can be directed into the districts of House Democrats vulnerable to defeat in 2010. Fourteen Blue Dog Democrats who voted to pass health-care reform last month represent districts rated as leaning Republican by the Cook Political Report. Another nine Democrats hail from districts that are only slightly Democratic. Pressure will be put on the 39 Democrats who voted no the first time to switch their vote, but they will be hard to budge. There are enough votes among the three groups to make it agonizingly difficult to pass health care a second time.

Speaker Pelosi has told her members that health-care reform is so important she is willing to lose 20 seats next year if that is what it takes to get it. Polls showing Republicans leading in the generic vote for Congress make some Democrats worry that she is seriously lowballing the risk. She may not mind if some members lose their seats, especially if they are moderates who are possible future votes against her in a leadership contest. The Blue Dogs who are the subject of her political science experiment may decide they'd rather not be her guinea pigs.
—Mr. Fund is a columnist for WSJ.com

Obma weakening us vis a vis Soviet nuks too

The Disarmament President
Obama's boffo Oslo speech versus the real nuclear world.

WSJ Dec 11
Let's take those in order. The U.S. looks likely to agree to cut the number of permitted delivery vehicles, such as missiles, long-range bombers and submarines, by half, to 800 or less. This is to Russia's advantage, which as of last spring had 814—and not all of them in working condition. Many of America's 1,198 nuclear delivery vehicles—from B-2 bombers to ICBMs—are being fitted with conventional weapons. The ceilings in a new Start would likely make no distinction between bomb types. If the goal is to move away from nukes, why limit the military's capacity to deploy conventional weapons?

As for verification, with fewer allowable warheads, Ronald Reagan's "trust but verify" maxim applies more than ever. Yet Russia wants to reduce oversight, and it specifically told the U.S. that continuous monitoring at the Votkinsk Machine Building Plant would end once Start expired. The Russians are building new RS-24 mobile nuclear missiles at Votkinsk. According to one Russian general, the RS-24 will by 2016 constitute four-fifths of its ICBM forces. Without monitoring, the U.S. won't know for sure how many of these missiles the Russians make and where they are deployed.

While Russia invests in new warheads and missiles, the Obama Administration has yet to lay out its own plans for updating the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Even staunch proponents of arms control concede that to be able to reduce the quantity of U.S. arms, we have to improve the quality. The Senate should ask why the White House isn't.

The Russians also refused to discuss their huge advantage in tactical weapons, and the Administration said OK. After the July "framework agreement," Russia signalled that U.S. plans to deploy missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic stood in the way of a final deal. Mr. Obama obliged, informing the Poles and Czechs of his reduced defenses late on the day before the sixth round of Start talks in Geneva. The announcement pleased the Russians, though it still hasn't got Washington a deal. Stay tuned for more concessions as U.S. negotiators try to get it before the year's end.

Meanwhile, the world's rogues continue to pursue nuclear weapons, and Mr. Obama said yesterday that "it is incumbent upon all of us to insist that nations like Iran and North Korea do not game the system." He added that "we must develop alternatives to violence that are tough enough to change behavior." But all the President has to show for a year of courting these regimes is their refusal even to consider giving up either their weapons (North Korea) or their growing capacity to make them (Iran).

The French, for one, see this danger plainly and want the U.S. to press harder on Tehran. But on these hard cases, the Administration can't muster the same sense of urgency it is bringing to the cause of an unnecessary arms control pact with Russia. Mr. Obama is right that he still has to earn that Nobel.

He is not the one to fight this war

December 3, 2009 4:00 AM

The War for 21st-Century Freedom
The Islamists are fighting for control of the world. We need a president who knows it.

By Barbara Lerner
Are you worried — like so many Americans after the Fort Hood massacre — about the growing threat of Islamist subversion and terror here at home? Worried, beyond that, about what we’re doing — or not doing — militarily in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq? Worried about the growing reach and power of Islamist movements in Europe and South America, as well as Asia, the Middle East, and Turkey? Worried about the military alliances Islamist governments are forging with their secular mirror images: socialist-god governments in places like North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela?

Then focus like a laser on Iran, now, because Islamists will score major victories in all those places and more if we fail to prevent the ruling mullahs from openly, triumphantly making Iran the world’s first Islamist nuclear power. The danger isn’t only Iran’s own catastrophic recklessness, once she gets the bomb, or the fact that all her Arab neighbors will respond by scrambling to go nuclear too. It’s also that Islamists everywhere — joined by growing masses of previously undecided Muslims — will see Iran’s success in achieving nuclear status the way Iran’s mullahs see it: as a historic defeat for the West, blasting open the gate to a 21st-century world where Islam rules and Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists are subservient or worse. Islamist ranks will swell, everywhere, as confidence grows that the Islamist side is the winning side, and victory is near.






THE WAR WE MUST WIN
Most Americans can scarcely imagine an Islamist-ruled world. Most Muslims can, and they respond in one of three ways. Moderate Muslims wholeheartedly reject the Islamist vision and the support for jihad that is inseparable from it; Muslim extremists embrace it, many with growing fervor; and a third group sits on the fence, waiting and watching. Constant politically correct reassurances that only a minority of the world’s Muslims support violence against us are based on the fantasy that only “Islamist extremists” do that; “moderate Islamists” don’t. In fact, there is no such thing as a “moderate Islamist.” All Islamists are extremists. It’s an extreme creed. Moderate Muslims do exist, millions of them, many bravely fighting against the rising Islamist tide, but they aren’t “moderate Islamists.” Moderate Muslims are anti-Islamist Muslims, who oppose the imposition of Sharia and all the oppressive baggage that comes with it. They are on our side — freedom’s side — and we should be on theirs. Instead, we mostly ignore them and fail to heed their warnings, reaching out to “moderate Islamists” instead, welcoming them into our critical institutions — as our military, aided by the FBI, welcomed Major Hasan.

When it comes to Islamists abroad, poll data make it clear that they are the overwhelming majority in the Middle East. Iran and Turkey were the two great Middle Eastern exceptions, as Islamism swamped competing ideologies in all the Arab lands. Iran may still be, if popular majorities in that once great nation were allowed free choice, but they are governed by an Islamist regime more despotic than any Persian shah, ancient or modern. Turkey, once the freest, most proudly westernized and progressive country of them all, is on the verge of the same sorry fate. If you doubt that, look again at the new Turkey, governed by an Islamist party since 2002, a Turkey that is right now preparing to embrace Iran.

Focus like a laser on Iran now, because we have only months — not years — to prevent Iran from blasting through that history-making gate. Don’t waste precious time on the pretense that negotiations and/or sanctions can save us. As John Bolton, Michael Ledeen, Rich Lowry, Andrew McCarthy, and a few other brave souls keep pointing out, we have been negotiating with Islamist Iran for 30 years now, offering the mullahs one sweet deal after another, and getting blow after blow in return. Even if — mirabile dictu — Iran signed an agreement promising to forgo nuclear weapons forever, it would be worth no more than the 1938 Munich agreement. Iran’s mullahs are fanatics, like Hitler, not rational criminals we can make a deal with, as we did with the Soviets. MAD — mutual assured destruction — worked, because the Russians weren’t mad.

As for sanctions, if there ever was a chance they could have worked, even in their most robust form — a complete blockade of Iran’s ports by America and the few allies who might have joined us — that chance is long gone…
WHY WE AREN’T FIGHTING TO WIN
That’s what we need to do, now — deliver a crushing blow to Iran’s Islamists — to begin to turn the tide in the war for the survival of freedom in the world. Religious freedom, after all, is inseparable from freedom itself, the freedom we enjoy because our fathers defended it with America’s full might, twice in the century just past. Tragically, the odds that we will rise to freedom’s defense again in the next few critical months are almost nil. Some in our military and Defense Department are struggling, against the odds, to speed up the delivery of Massive Ordinance Penetrators (MOPs) capable of destroying Iran’s deeply buried nuclear facilities, but they can’t supply our most critical lack.

Eight years after the bloody attack of September 11, 2001, we still don’t have a commander-in-chief willing to order pilots with MOPs into action. Eight years after 9/11, we still don’t have a president willing to face the scope of this war. Our military is the most formidable on the planet still, but we are forcing it to fight piecemeal wars, tied up in peacetime restraints, with murky goals. Eight years after 9/11, we still don’t have the president we need: a president who will rally the country behind our cause — freedom’s cause — and order our fighting men and women to do everything we must do for the victory we must have.


THE PRESIDENT WE NEED
Discouraged? Don’t be. All is not lost, because those who love freedom have two great trump cards: the fundamental honesty and good sense of the American people, and the back-against-the wall courage of the Israeli people.

Let’s deal with the Israelis first, and face the facts. Israel is a small country; her six million cannot do what our 300 million can and must do. They cannot give Iran’s evil government the overwhelming death blow it merits. But they can forestall total disaster by doing enough damage to Iran’s nuclear sites to buy us a little time, and the odds that they will do just that in the next few months are at least 50-50. They have no choice, if they are to survive. Iran has made it clear to anyone who listens that she will use her nuclear weapons to wipe out Israel first, before she uses them against us, most likely in the form of a terrorist attack. If Israel does act to save herself — along with the home and heritage of the Judeo-Christian world — it will give us a second chance to do what we must do to save ourselves and what is left of the free world. That is what we must concentrate on now: how to rally the American people behind a new leader who will fight for America, and for the survival of religious freedom in the world.

Obama care will hurt seniors

Medicare Part D 'Reforms' Will Harm Seniors
An ObamaCare change will cost taxpayers a bundle and lead to poorer drug coverage...By TOM SCULLY
There is a little-noticed provision buried deep in both the House and Senate health-care reform bills that is intended to save billions of dollars—but instead will hurt millions of seniors, impose new costs on taxpayers, and charge employers millions in new taxes.

As part of the Medicare Modernization Act in 2003, Congress created a new drug benefit—called Medicare Part D—for retirees at a cost of about $1,900 per recipient per year. Many private employers already provided drug coverage for their retirees, and the administration and Congress did not want to tempt employers into dropping their coverage. Actuaries calculated that if the government provided a subsidy of at least $800, employers would not stop covering retirees.

The legislation created a $600 tax-free benefit (the equivalent of $800 cash for employers), and it worked. Employers continued to cover about seven million retirees who might have otherwise been dumped into Medicare Part D.

It was a good arrangement for all involved. An $800 subsidy is cheaper than the $1,900 cost of providing drug coverage. And millions of seniors got to keep a drug benefit they were comfortable with and that in many cases was better than the benefit offered by the government.

But now that subsidy is coming in to be clipped. This fall congressional staff, looking for a new revenue source to pay for health reform, proposed eliminating the tax deductibility of the subsidy to employers. The supposed savings were estimated by congressional staff to be as much as $5 billion over the next decade.

It sounds smart—except that nobody asked how many employers will drop retiree drug coverage. Clearly, many will. The result is that, instead of saving money, the proposed revenue raiser will force Medicare Part D costs to skyrocket as employers drop retirees into the program.

Horrible commander- in- chief

* DECEMBER 2, 2009

Critics From Across the Spectrum Rip Plan
Some of Obama's Most Loyal Backers Denounce Escalation Despite Quick-Drawdown
*
By PETER WALLSTEN

WASHINGTON—A barrage of instant criticism blasting President Barack Obama's new Afghanistan strategy from across the political spectrum signaled the challenges ahead in selling the plan to a skeptical public and Congress.



Many Republicans, while supporting the troop increase, were quick to charge that the timetable for withdrawal would embolden U.S. adversaries. Arizona Sen. John McCain warned that Mr. Obama risked telling the enemy "that you're coming and you're leaving."


The plan appears designed to minimize political fallout—calling for a progress assessment a month after the November 2010 congressional elections and initiating the troop exit the following year as Mr. Obama begins ramping up his own re-election campaign.

But the difficulties ahead for Mr. Obama were evident as many in his own party, including some embroiled in tough campaigns for next year, were quick to express displeasure.

Martha Coakley, front-runner in the special election to succeed the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, said in an interview that imposing a strict timetable wasn't enough to win her backing. "If you asked me to vote today, my vote would be no," said Ms. Coakley, whose Democratic primary election is next week.


Strategists in both parties said they expected Mr. Obama to easily win votes in Congress for his plan. Support from Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and other military officers will make it difficult for Republicans and many Democrats to attempt to block it.

But the president faces a bigger challenge in persuading the American people to give the strategy time to work. Continuing public skepticism could cloud next year's elections and further erode Mr. Obama's standing with voters, making it harder for the White House to press its domestic agenda.

Obamacare will raise costs

ObamaCare at Any Cost
A bill that raises prices but lowers costs, and other miracles.


We have now reached the stage of the health-care debate when all that matters is getting a bill passed, so all news is good news, more subsidies mean lower deficits, and more expensive insurance is really cheaper insurance. The nonpolitical mind reels.

Consider how Washington received the Congressional Budget Office's study Monday of how Harry Reid's Senate bill will affect insurance costs, which by any rational measure ought to have been a disaster for the bill. CBO found that premiums in the individual market will rise by 10% to 13% more than if Congress did nothing. Family policies under the status quo are projected to cost $13,100 on average, but under ObamaCare will jump to $15,200.

Finance Chairman Max Baucus chimed in from the Senate floor that "Health-care reform is fundamentally about lowering health-care costs. Lowering costs is what health-care reform is designed to do, lowering costs; and it will achieve this objective."

Except it won't. CBO says it expects employer-sponsored insurance costs to remain roughly in line with the status quo, yet even this is a failure by Mr. Baucus's and the White House's own standards. Meanwhile, fixing the individual market—which is expensive and unstable largely because it does not enjoy the favorable tax treatment given to job-based coverage—was supposed to be the whole purpose of "reform."

Instead, CBO is confirming that new coverage mandates will drive premiums higher. But Democrats are declaring victory, claiming that these higher insurance prices don't count because they will be offset by new government subsidies. About 57% of the people who buy insurance through the bill's new "exchanges" that will supplant today's individual market will qualify for subsidies that cover about two-thirds of the total premium.

So the bill will increase costs but it will then disguise those costs by transferring them to taxpayers from individuals. Higher costs can be conjured away because they're suddenly on the government balance sheet. The Reid bill's $371.9 billion in new health taxes are also apparently not a new cost because they can be passed along to consumers, or perhaps will be hidden in lost wages.

This is the paleoliberal school of brute-force wealth redistribution, and a very long way from the repeated White House claims that reform is all about "bending the cost curve." The only thing being bent here is the budget truth.

Moreover, CBO is almost certainly underestimating the cost increases. Based on its county-by-county actuarial data, the insurer WellPoint has calculated that Mr. Baucus's bill would cause some premiums to triple in the individual market. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association came to similar conclusions.

One reason is community rating, which forces insurers to charge nearly uniform rates regardless of customer health status or habits. CBO doesn't think this will have much of an effect, but costs inevitably rise when insurers aren't allowed to price based on risk. This is why today some 35 states impose no limits on premium variation and six allow wide differences among consumers.

The White House decided to shoot messengers like WellPoint to avoid rebutting their message. But Amanda Kowalski of MIT, William Congdon of the Brookings Institution and Mark Showalter of Brigham Young have found similar results. In a 2008 paper in the peer-reviewed Forum for Health Economics and Policy, these economists found that state community rating laws raise premiums in the individual market by 20.9% to 33.1% for families and 10.2% to 17.1% for singles. In New Jersey, which also requires insurers to accept all comers (so-called guaranteed issue), premiums increased by as much as 227%.

The political tragedy is that there are plenty of reform alternatives that really would reduce the cost of insurance. According to CBO, the relatively modest House GOP bill would actually reduce premiums by 5% to 8% in the individual market in 2016, and by 7% to 10% for small businesses. The GOP reforms would also do so without imposing huge new taxes.

But Democrats don't care because their bill isn't really about "lowering costs." It's about putting Washington in charge of health insurance, at any cost.

Obama is wrong on how to make jobs

* NOVEMBER 30, 2009

White House, Business Leaders Split on How to Create Jobs



By NEIL KING JR. and GARY FIELDS

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration and U.S. business leaders will meet at the White House this week to ponder ways to boost employment. Their ideas, though, don't overlap much.

Businesses of all sizes are brimming with proposals they say would spur economic growth. The most commonly voiced are tax cuts and boosting access to credit.
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The White House, for its part, wants to discuss job growth in the clean-tech sector and shifting some stimulus spending to infrastructure projects. Obama aides are also eyeing a limited range of incentives for small businesses to create jobs.

A 10.2% jobless rate, the worst since 1982, is emerging as the administration's biggest domestic challenge, a threat to the weak economic recovery and Democrats' hold on Congress. But many of the nostrums floated by business would increase spending or reduce tax receipts, unpalatable moves for the White House as the nation's huge deficit becomes a political liability.

Another point of contention: A number of chief executives say the government should clear up uncertainty over health care, energy prices and financial regulations. "Companies large and small are saying, 'I am not going to do anything until these things -- health care, climate legislation -- go away or are resolved,' " said Dan DiMicco, chief executive of steelmaker Nucor Corp.



Across the spectrum, business owners say tax cuts would be the best fuel for job growth. "The first thing they should do is lower the corporate tax rate," said Michael Klayko, chief executive of network supplier Brocade Communications Systems Inc., one of the few companies, even in Silicon Valley, that continues to hire.

Mr. Klayko said big tech companies and other multinationals would jump at the chance to bring billions of dollars in overseas earnings back to the U.S., if the Obama administration offered a tax holiday on repatriation similar to a move the Bush administration made in its second term.

Bill Rys, tax counsel at the National Federation of Independent Business, said his trade group is pushing for a payroll tax holiday.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is pitching an even longer list of tax breaks, including a reduction of the corporate capital-gains tax and a permanent elimination of the estate tax.

Write to Neil King Jr. at neil.king@wsj.com and Gary Fields at gary.fields@wsj.com

Conservative and liberal lawmakers Wednesday sharply criticized President Obama's plan to start a U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in July 2011.

Washington (CNN) -- Conservative and liberal lawmakers Wednesday sharply criticized President Obama's plan to start a U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in July 2011.

Most Republicans backed the president's decision to send more troops. They claimed, however, he was playing politics by setting an "arbitrary" withdrawal deadline while insisting that any transfer of responsibility to the Afghan government ultimately will be based on conditions in that country.

They also argued he inadvertently strengthened the hand of Taliban and al Qaeda extremists by allowing them to know when a U.S. departure from the war-torn country would begin.

"I disagree with the president's decision to personally relay to our enemies when they can regroup and when they can retake Afghan territory," said Rep. Connie Mack, R-Florida and a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

"I simply cannot understand and cannot agree with this approach," Mack said, adding that Obama's decision "emboldens our enemies [and] allows them to prepare and plan."

Announcing a firm date for starting an American withdrawal while also saying such a withdrawal depends on conditions in Afghanistan "are two incompatible statements," said Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Senate Armed Services Committee's ranking Republican.

"You either have a winning strategy ... and then once it's succeeded, then we withdraw or, as the president said, we will have a date [for] beginning withdrawal in July 2011. Which is it? It's got to be one or the other. It's got to be the appropriate conditions, or it's got to be an arbitrary date. You can't have both."

"The president always has the freedom to adjust his decisions," Gates said, adding that Obama has made "a clear statement of his strong intent."

Disastorour foreign policy on all fronts from Richard baehr

The Obama foreign policy disaster plays out on all fronts. The Administration came to office pressuring Israel for a complete settlement freeze, including natural growth,and including Jerusalem. To use one of the Obama team's favorite words, these were unprecedented demands. Israelis across the political spectrum rejected the demands. The US asked the Palestinians and our Arab allies to make a few face saving gestures towards Israel so that the Administration would appear to be balanced- making demands on both sides. The Palestinians and the Arabs gave nothing. But the Administration continued to pressure Israel. In response, Netanayahu got his Cabinet to approve a ten month freeze on new construction in the West Bank, but not including Jerusalem. No other Israeli government had ever made such a concession. Knowing Obama's original demands for a total freeze, Bibi's concessions were naturally unacceptable to the PA and the Arab states. If Obama demands X, why should the Arabs accept less than X? Of course, the Obama team never conducted any of this diplomatic pressuring, diplomatically, in other words, quietly. Instead a collection of Administration figures, from Clinton to Emanuel. made public demands on Israel. After Bibi's concessions, the Administration made a few statements, in essence, confirming prior policy on what a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians would entail (territorial exchanges). The PA's new policy is that without a complete settlement freeze, they will not resume talks. Of course, the whole idea that final status talks could occur, when the PA does not even control Gaza, is ridiculous. The PA has instead embarked on a new policy- legal war- through pushing the Goldstone Report, and getting its collaborationist partners in Europe ,led by Sweden, to enshrine a Palestinian state in the pre 67 borders, with Jerusalem as it capitol. The lesson for Israel of course is that no good deed gets rewarded. Rather concessions and the appearance of weakness , inspire further assaults. Bibi made a conscious decision to try to salvage the US Israel relationship, which has been badly damaged by the Obama team's incompetence and hostility. Turning over strategic policy to political hacks like Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, is no way to run a foreign policy. But Obama knows nothing but politics. . And when it comes to Israel , his politics have never been friendly , despite all the liberal Jews who covered for him during the campaign. The President believes the US has been too friendly to Israel, and needs to be more even handed, more like Europe. And Europeans and Arab have seen in this new American attitude, an opening to step us their pressure on Israel even more. All in all, a disaster has occurred, and Israel's international standing is at a new low.
The EU's new gambit: http://tinyurl.com/yjg3d9v
Europe's blind spot: http://tinyurl.com/ykamg4j
Barry Rubin on The Obama team's huge mistakes: http://tinyurl.com/yhb2zwb
Caroline Glick on Bibi's bad week: http://tinyurl.com/yfp4bqa
The United Nations passed the partition resolution in 1947 which within six months led to the creation of the state of Israel. Now the UN meets to mourn that decision and celebrate Palestinian suffering. http://tinyurl.com/yjoyz5o
Daniel Greenfield, AKA Sultan Knish, on the dead end search for peace: http://tinyurl.com/yaowdue
Alan Dershowitz challenges the Goldstone Report. 20% of Democrats in the US House abstained, or voted against directing the Administration to vigorously challenge the report's conclusions and any actions against Israel based on the report . http://tinyurl.com/yhzbclc

3. On Iran, the story is the same. China and Russia will not go along with new sanctions. Iran sticks its finger in Obama' eye and announces it will start ten new enrichment sites and withdraw from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. But Barack Obama has not given up on engaging.
Nyet from Russia and China: http://tinyurl.com/yb94lqk
Is Ahmadinejad a loon, a religious armageddon seeking zealot, or a calculating politician. Read this and then decide: http://tinyurl.com/yckwt4q

nation angry over defecits

By KARL ROVE

After engineering an unprecedented spending surge for nearly a year, President Barack Obama now wants to signal that he takes deficits seriously. So this week the White House announced that it is considering creating a commission to figure how to fix the budget mess.

Eureka!

Well, almost. What seems to concern the president is not the problem runaway spending poses for taxpayers and the economy. Rather, what bothers him is the political problem it poses for Democrats.

Last year, Mr. Obama made fiscal restraint a constant theme of his presidential campaign. "Washington will have to tighten its belt and put off spending," he said back then, while pledging to "go through the federal budget, line by line, ending programs that we don't need." Voters found this fiscal conservatism reassuring.

However, since taking office Mr. Obama pushed through a $787 billion stimulus, a $33 billion expansion of the child health program known as S-chip, a $410 billion omnibus appropriations spending bill, and an $80 billion car company bailout. He also pushed a $821 billion cap-and-trade bill through the House and is now urging Congress to pass a nearly $1 trillion health-care bill.

An honest appraisal of the nation's finances would recommend dropping both of these last two priorities. But the administration has long planned to run up the federal credit card. In February, Mr. Obama's budget plan for the next decade projected that revenues would equal about 18% of GDP while spending would jump to 24% of GDP, up from its post World War II average of 21%. Annual deficits of about 6% of GDP were projected for years to come.

When Mr. Obama was sworn into office the federal deficit for this year stood at $422 billion. At the end of October, it stood at $1.42 trillion. The total national debt also soared to $7.5 trillion at the end of last month, up from $6.3 trillion shortly after Inauguration Day.

This spending has been matched by a decline in the president's poll numbers. This week, Gallup found that his job approval rating slipped below 50%. Last March, Americans approved of Mr. Obama's handling of the deficit by a 52% to 43% margin in the ABC News/Washington Post poll. By October, his standing had flipped in the same poll, with 45% approving and 51% disapproving.

Anger over deficits was picked up in a late October NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, which asked voters if they'd rather boost "the economy even though it may mean larger budget deficits" or keep the "budget deficit down, even though it may mean it will take longer for the economy to recover." Only 31% chose boosting the economy; 62% wanted to keep the deficit down.

These numbers suggest trouble for Democrats. In 1994, a wave of budget concerns (among other factors) handed Republicans control of Congress. Just before Election Day that year, 33% of voters approved and 59% disapproved of President Bill Clinton's handling of the deficit.

Today the latest Quinnipiac Poll tells us that only 19% of voters believe that Mr. Obama's health-care reform won't add to the deficit. The rest of us have reason to be skeptical. The bill includes all sorts of budget gimmicks, two of which illustrate that there is no fiscal restraint in it. One calls for steep cuts in Medicare and the other imposes a 40% excise tax on private, gold-plated health plans. It's just not plausible that this Congress will actually cut Medicare or tax health plans the unions have spent decades creating.

The administration says it is now instructing agencies to either freeze spending or propose 5% cuts in their budgets for next year. This won't add up to much unless agencies use the budgets they had before the stimulus inflated their spending as their baseline in calculating their cuts.

For example, if the Education Department uses its current stimulus-inflated budget of $141 billion instead of the $60 billion budget it had before Mr. Obama moved into the White House, freezing its budget will do nothing to fix the fiscal mess the president has created.

Ominously for Democrats, concerns over spending have recently helped to flip the Gallup generic ballot to now favor Republicans by four points (48% to 44%). Last year, Democrats held a 12-point generic ballot advantage. The change has been driven by independents, who now favor Republicans by 22 points. By comparison, in the run-up to the 1994 congressional elections, Republicans first eclipsed Democrats in March of that year, when they gained a one-point advantage, before falling behind Democrats until the fall.

Mr. Obama's spending choices are dragging congressional Democrats into ugly electoral territory where many are likely to meet a brutal fate next fall.
—Mr. Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, is the author of the forthcoming book "Courage and Consequence" (Threshold Editions).

Obama weakens anti-terrorism efforts

Major Hasan and Holy War
A domestic Islamic threat is real, and the FBI is unprepared to fight it.

By REUEL MARC GERECHT WSJ Nov 23

For those of us who have tracked Islamic militancy in Europe, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's actions are not extraordinary. Since Muslim militants first tried to blow a French high-speed train off its rails in 1995, European intelligence and internal-security services have increasingly monitored European Muslim radicals. Whether it's anti-Muslim bigotry, the large numbers of immigrant and native-born Muslims in Europe, an appreciation of how hard it is to become European, or just an understanding of how dangerous Islamic radicalism is, most Europeans are far less circumspect and politically correct when discussing their Muslim compatriots than are Americans.

A concern for not giving offense to Muslims would never prevent the French internal-security service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), which deploys a large number of Muslim officers, from aggressively trying to pre-empt terrorism. As Maj. Hasan's case shows, this is not true in the United States. The American military and especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation were in great part inattentive because they were too sensitive.

Moreover, President Barack Obama's determined effort not to mention Islam in terrorist discussions—which means that we must not suggest that Maj. Hasan's murderous actions flowed from his faith—will weaken American counterterrorism. Worse, the president's position is an enormous wasted opportunity to advance an all-critical Muslim debate about the nature and legitimacy of jihad.

European counterterrorist officers know well that jihadists can appear, self-generated or tutored by extremist groups, inside Muslim families where parents and siblings lead peaceful lives. Security officials live in fear of the quiet believer who quickly radicalizes, or the secular down-and-out European who enthusiastically converts to a militant creed. Both cases allow little time and often few leads to neutralize a possible lethal explosion of the faith.

It shouldn't require the U.S. to have a French-style, internal-security service to neutralize the likes of Maj. Hasan. He combines all of the factors—especially his public ruminations about American villainy in the Middle East and his overriding sense of Muslim fraternity—that should have had him under surveillance by counterintelligence units. Add the outrageous fact that he was in email correspondence with Anwar al-Awlaqi, a pro-al Qaeda imam well-known to American intelligence, and it is hard not to conclude that the FBI is still incapable of counterterrorism against an Islamic target.

For the FBI, religion remains a much too sensitive subject, much more so than the threatening ideologies of yesteryear. Imagine if Maj. Hasan had been an officer during the Cold War, regularly expressing his sympathy for the Soviet Union and American criminality against the working man. Imagine him writing to a KGB front organization espousing socialist solidarity. The major would have been surrounded by counterintelligence officers.


Powerfully intertwined in all of this is liberal America's reluctance to discuss Islam, Islamic militancy, jihadism, or anything that might be construed as invidious to Muslims. The Obama administration obviously doesn't want to get tagged with an Islamist terrorist strike in the U.S.—the first since 9/11. The Muslim-sensitive 9/11 Commission Report, which unambiguously named the enemy as "Islamist terrorism," now seems distinctly passé.

Thoughtful men should certainly not want to see a U.S. president propel a "clash of civilizations" with devout Muslims. However, clash-avoidance shouldn't lead us into a philosophical cul-de-sac. The stakes are so enormous—jihadists would if they could let loose a weapon of mass destruction in a Western city—that we should not prevaricate out of politeness, or deceive ourselves into believing that a debate between Muslims and non-Muslims can only be counterproductive.




The brilliant Iranian revolutionary-turned dissident, Abd al-Karim Soroush, whose ideas contributed to the pro-democracy tumult we've witnessed in Iran since the June 12 election, has forcefully argued for Muslims to critique themselves unsparingly, to happily import and use the West's rational relentlessness to strengthen the faith. An elemental part of Mr. Soroush's critique is that Muslims are capable of thinking on their own. They can take the heat.


But Westerners could certainly benefit from Mr. Obama underscoring something else he touched on in his Cairo speech: Muslims should stop blaming non-Muslims for their crippling problems. He could ask, as some Muslims have, why is it that Islam has produced so many jihadists? Why is it that Maj. Hasan's rampage has produced so little questioning among Muslim clerics about why a man, one in a long line of Muslim militants, so easily takes God's name to slaughter his fellow citizens?


As it stands now, however, Iranian youth who once so eagerly welcomed Mr. Obama's election by shouting his name in Persian—U ba ma! ("He is with us!")—are now writing the president's likely legacy among Muslims who yearn for a better modernity. Disappointed to see how determined Mr. Obama has remained to engage the regime they despise, they now forlornly chant U ba unhast ("He is with them.").

For Muslims who are on the front lines of Islam's bloody reformation, as well as for American counterterrorist officers who must find holy warriors in our midst, Mr. Obama has come down on the wrong side of history.

Mr. Gerecht, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

His making Washington worse

By FRED BARNES WSJ Nov 26



Mr. Obama also decried the prominent role played by lobbyists. "Lobbyists aren't just a part of the system in Washington, they're part of the problem," Mr. Obama said in a May 2008 campaign speech.

I was reminded of this last statement by a recent headline on the front page of USA Today. It read: "Health care fight swells lobbying. Number of organizations hiring firms doubles in '09." The article suggested that what Mr. Obama had promised to fix had only gotten worse.


Indeed that's the case. Washington is more partisan than ever, and more polarized. Even on a purely procedural vote to begin Senate debate on health-care reform this past Saturday, every Democrat voted one way (yes), every Republican the other (no)...


First, Mr. Obama misread the meaning of the 2008 election. It wasn't a mandate for a liberal revolution. His victory was a personal one, not an ideological triumph of liberalism. Yet Mr. Obama, his aides and Democratic leaders in Congress have treated it as a mandate to radically change policy directions in this country. They are pushing forward one liberal initiative after another. As a result, Mr. Obama's approval rating has dropped along with the popularity of his agenda.

Mr. Obama should have known better. The evidence that America remains a center-right country was right there in the national exit poll on Election Day. When asked about their political beliefs, 34% identified themselves as conservative, 22% as liberal, and a whopping 44% as moderate.

As Mr. Obama has unveiled his policies, the country has tilted more to the right. A Gallup Poll on Oct. 21 found the country to be 40% conservative, 36% moderate, and 20% liberal.

Nearly every Obama policy has thrilled either the president's base in the Democratic Party or a liberal interest group but practically no one else. Nearly every policy is unpopular with a majority or large plurality of Americans. The $787 billion economic stimulus was enacted in February with strong public support. But it has long since lost favor.

It should have been no surprise the public gave a thumbs down to Mr. Obama policies. The decision to close the prison in Guantanamo, the takeover of General Motors and Chrysler, the bailout of banks and financial institutions (begun under President George W. Bush), the trillion-dollar deficits, cap and trade, the surge in the size and scope of the federal government—these were out of sync with the country's right-of-center majority.

Mr. Obama argued in his Feb. 24 address to Congress that health-care reform, billions in new education spending, and cap and trade to reduce carbon emissions were necessary to revive the economy. This was a clever attempt to exploit the recession to pass unrelated liberal policies. It was too clever. It didn't work.

Second, Mr. Obama misread his own ability to sway the public. He is a glib, cool, likeable speaker whose sentences have subjects and verbs. During the campaign, he gave dazzling speeches about hope and change that excited voters.
But campaign speeches don't have to be specific, and candidates aren't accountable. Presidential speeches are different. The object is to persuade voters to back a certain policy, and it turns out Mr. Obama is not good at this. He failed to stop the steady decline in support for any of his policies, most notably health care.

The president spent much of the summer and early fall touting his health-care initiative. He spoke at town halls, appeared on five Sunday talk shows the same day (Sept. 20), turned up on "The Late Show with David Letterman" and on "60 Minutes." All the while, support for ObamaCare fell. His address to Congress on health care on Sept. 9 is now remembered only for Republican Rep. Joe Wilson's shouted accusation, "You lie!"

Third, Mr. Obama misread Republicans. They felt weak and vulnerable after losing two straight congressional elections and watching John McCain's presidential bid fall flat. They were afraid to criticize the newly elected president. If he had offered them minimal concessions, many of them would have jumped aboard his policies. If that had happened, the president could have boasted of achieving bipartisan compromise on the stimulus and other policies. He let the chance slip away.

By March, tea parties had begun cropping up across the country to protest spending in Washington. Over the summer, independents moved away from Mr. Obama when they learned of the soaring cost of his policies. By late summer, Republicans emerged as a full-blown opposition with growing public backing.

The point in all this is Mr. Obama could have given a little and gained a lot. To change Washington, he would have had to corral congressional Democrats, who weren't interested in bipartisanship or compromise. He would have had to disappoint his base and, at times, anger liberal interest groups. Mr. Obama wasn't willing to go that route.

In Washington it's business as usual, except for one thing. The bigger the role of government, the more lobbyists flock to town. By pushing for his policies, the president effectively put up a welcome sign to lobbyists. Despite promising to keep them out of his administration, he has even hired a few. So nothing has changed, except maybe that Washington is now more acrimonious than it has been.

Mr. Barnes is executive editor of the Weekly Standard and a commentator on Fox News Channel.

Continues to drop in polls

By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Published: November 23, 2009

WASHINGTON — President Obama returned from his trip to Asia facing some unsettling news: two new public-opinion polls showing that his approval rating has dipped below 50 percent for the first time. To many of his critics, who chafed as Mr. Obama enjoyed broad support among Americans even though many were critical of his handling of specific issues like the economy, this erosion is a tipping-point, the end of Mr. Obama’s perceived near-invulnerability.

The latest on President Obama, his administration and other news from Washington and around the nation.

For a number of reasons, the slide is not a surprise. Coming less than a year into his presidency, not to mention almost a full year before the 2010 Congressional elections, though, the long-term political significance of the slide is anything but clear.

Still, there is cause for the White House to be concerned, and for Republicans to sense an opportunity. The poll numbers worry Democratic strategists who are preparing for the already tough mid-term elections. They are well aware of the significance of presidential approval ratings in predicting the outcome — and particularly of what happens when a president’s approval rating is below 50 percent in the two months before a mid-term election.

Mr. Obama’s decline a year into his term comes as he struggles through a decidedly sour climate. The unemployment rate has jumped above 10 percent and shows no sign of abating. At this point, even if Mr. Obama cannot be blamed for causing the economic decline, Americans are growing impatient with him to fix it.

His main legislative initiative — the health care bill — is the subject of a messy fight in Congress, displaying Washington in the very bitter partisan light that Mr. Obama promised to end. It has provided Republicans with a platform to stir concerns that Mr. Obama is using the health care overhaul to expand the role of government beyond the comfort level of many Americans; polls suggest that these arguments have helped sow significant doubts.

Joe Klein of Time explains

Over the past few weeks, Barack Obama has been criticized for the following: He didn't go to Berlin for the 20th anniversary of the Wall's coming down. He didn't make a forceful enough statement on the 30th anniversary of the U.S. diplomats' being taken hostage in Iran. He didn't show sufficient mournfulness, at first, when the Fort Hood shootings took place, and he was namby-pamby about the possibility that the shootings were an act of jihad. He has spent too little time focusing on unemployment. He bowed too deeply before the Japanese Emperor. He allowed the Chinese to block the broadcast of his Shanghai town-hall meeting. He allowed the Chinese President to bar questions at their joint press conference (a moment memorably satirized by Saturday Night Live). He didn't come back with any diplomatic victories from Asia. He allowed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 plotters to be tried in the U.S. criminal-justice system rather than by the military. He has dithered too long on Afghanistan. He has devoted too much attention to — and given congressional Democrats too much control over — health care reform, an issue that is peripheral to a majority of Americans.

And all this has led to a dangerous slippage in the polls, it is said, a sense that his presidential authority is ebbing.

Dangerous incompentence in Foreign Policy

But his popularity overseas was going to remake the world…and was going to lead to the defanging of Iran, etc. The only time that Iran looked hesitant and paused its nuclear program was when America showed some resoluteness and adherence to a principled approach towards supporting our allies and opposing our foes. Not happenin’ these days.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/wehner/182091#more-182091
The Unmasking of Barack Obama

Peter Wehner - 11.30.2009 - 11:17 AM

The overseas reviews for President Obama’s foreign policy are starting to pour in — and they’re not favorable. Bob Ainsworth, the British defense secretary, has blamed Obama for the decline in British public support for the war in Afghanistan. According to the Telegraph:

Mr. Ainsworth took the unprecedented step of publicly criticizing the U.S. President and his delays in sending more troops to bolster the mission against the Taliban. A “period of hiatus” in Washington — and a lack of clear direction — had made it harder for ministers to persuade the British public to go on backing the Afghan mission in the face of a rising death toll, he said. Senior British Government sources have become increasingly frustrated with Mr. Obama’s “dithering” on Afghanistan, the Daily Telegraph disclosed earlier this month, with several former British defense chiefs echoing the concerns.

The President is “Obama the Impotent,” according to Steven Hill of the Guardian. The Economist calls Obama the “Pacific (and pussyfooting) president.” The Financial Times refers to “relations between the U.S. and Europe, which started the year of talks as allies, near breakdown.” The German magazine Der Spiegel accuses the president of being “dishonest with Europe” on the subject of climate change. Another withering piece in Der Spiegel, titled “Obama’s Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage,” lists the instances in which Obama is being rolled. The Jerusalem Post puts it this way: “Everybody is saying no to the American president these days. And it’s not just that they’re saying no, it’s also the way they’re saying no.” “He talks too much,” a Saudi academic who had once been smitten with Barack Obama tells the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami. The Saudi “has wearied of Mr. Obama and now does not bother with the Obama oratory,” according to Ajami. But “he is hardly alone, this academic. In the endless chatter of this region, and in the commentaries offered by the press, the theme is one of disappointment. In the Arab-Islamic world, Barack Obama has come down to earth.”

Indeed he has — and only Obama and his increasingly clueless administration seem unaware of this.

On almost every front, progress is nonexistent. In many instances, things are getting worse rather than better. The enormous goodwill that Obama’s election was met with hasn’t been leveraged into anything useful and tangible. Rather, our allies are now questioning America’s will, while our adversaries are becoming increasingly emboldened. The United States looks weak and uncertain. It’s “amateur hour at the White House,” according to Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former official in the Carter administration. “Not only are things not getting fixed, they may be getting more broken,” according to Michael Hirsh at Newsweek. When even such strong Obama supporters as Gelb and Hirsh reach these conclusions, you know things must be unraveling.

It’s no mystery as to why. President Obama’s approach to international relations is simplistic and misguided. It is premised on the belief that American concessions to our adversaries will beget goodwill and concessions in return; that American self-abasement is justified; that the American decline is inevitable (and in some respects welcome); and that diplomacy and multilateralism are ends rather than means to an end.

Right now the overwhelming issue on the public’s mind is the economy, where Obama is also having serious problems. But national-security issues matter a great deal, and they remain the unique responsibility of the president. With every passing month, Barack Obama looks more and more like his Democratic predecessor Jimmy Carter: irresolute, unsteady, and overmatched. The president and members of his own party will find out soon enough, though, that Obama the Impotent isn’t what they had in mind when they elected him. We are witnessing the unmasking, and perhaps the unmaking, of Barack Obama.

Evan the ARABS HAVE GIVEN UP ON HIM

The Arabs Have Stopped Applauding Obama (my note-do they just hold him in contempt?)
A foreign policy of penance has won America no friends.
By FOUAD AJAMI

'He talks too much," a Saudi academic in Jeddah, who had once been smitten with Barack Obama, recently observed to me of America's 44th president. He has wearied of Mr. Obama and now does not bother with the Obama oratory.

He is hardly alone, this academic. In the endless chatter of this region, and in the commentaries offered by the press, the theme is one of disappointment. In the Arab-Islamic world, Barack Obama has come down to earth.

He has not made the world anew, history did not bend to his will, the Indians and Pakistanis have been told that the matter of Kashmir is theirs to resolve, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the same intractable clash of two irreconcilable nationalisms, and the theocrats in Iran have not "unclenched their fist," nor have they abandoned their nuclear quest.

There is little Mr. Obama can do about this disenchantment. He can't journey to Turkey to tell its Islamist leaders and political class that a decade of anti-American scapegoating is all forgiven and was the product of American policies—he has already done that. He can't journey to Cairo to tell the fabled "Arab street" that the Iraq war was a wasted war of choice, and that America earned the malice that came its way from Arab lands—he has already done that as well. He can't tell Muslims that America is not at war with Islam—he, like his predecessor, has said that time and again.

It was the norm for American liberalism during the Bush years to brandish the Pew Global Attitudes survey that told of America's decline in the eyes of foreign nations. Foreigners were saying what the liberals wanted said.

Now those surveys of 2009 bring findings from the world of Islam that confirm that the animus toward America has not been radically changed by the ascendancy of Mr. Obama. In the Palestinian territories, 15% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 82% have an unfavorable view. The Obama speech in Ankara didn't seem to help in Turkey, where the favorables are 14% and those unreconciled, 69%. In Egypt, a country that's reaped nearly 40 years of American aid, things stayed roughly the same: 27% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 70% do not. In Pakistan, a place of great consequence for American power, our standing has deteriorated: The unfavorables rose from 63% in 2008 to 68% this year.



Mr. Obama's election has not drained the swamps of anti-Americanism. That anti-Americanism is endemic to this region, an alibi and a scapegoat for nations, and their rulers, unwilling to break out of the grip of political autocracy and economic failure. It predated the presidency of George W. Bush and rages on during the Obama presidency.

We had once taken to the foreign world that quintessential American difference—the belief in liberty, a needed innocence to play off against the settled and complacent ways of older nations. The Obama approach is different.

Steeped in an overarching idea of American guilt, Mr. Obama and his lieutenants offered nothing less than a doctrine, and a policy, of American penance. No one told Mr. Obama that the Islamic world, where American power is engaged and so dangerously exposed, it is considered bad form, nay a great moral lapse, to speak ill of one's own tribe when in the midst, and in the lands, of others.

The crowd may have applauded the cavalier way the new steward of American power referred to his predecessor, but in the privacy of their own language they doubtless wondered about his character and his fidelity. "My brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the stranger," goes one of the Arab world's most honored maxims. The stranger who came into their midst and spoke badly of his own was destined to become an object of suspicion.

Mr. Obama could not make up his mind: He was at one with "the people" and with the rulers who held them in subjugation. The people of Iran who took to the streets this past summer were betrayed by this hapless diplomacy—Mr. Obama was out to "engage" the terrible rulers that millions of Iranians were determined to be rid of.

On Nov. 4, on the 30th anniversary of the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran, the embattled reformers, again in the streets, posed an embarrassing dilemma for American diplomacy: "Obama, Obama, you are either with us or with them," they chanted. By not responding to these cries and continuing to "engage" Tehran's murderous regime, his choice was made clear. It wasn't one of American diplomacy's finest moments.



Mr. Obama has himself to blame for the disarray of his foreign policy. American arms had won a decent outcome in Iraq, but Mr. Obama would not claim it—it was his predecessor's war. Vigilance had kept the American homeland safe from terrorist attacks for seven long years under his predecessors, but he could never grant Bush policies the honor and credit they deserved. He had declared Afghanistan a war of necessity, but he seems to have his eye on the road out even as he is set to announce a troop increase in an address to be delivered tomorrow.

He was quick to assert, in the course of his exuberant campaign for president last year, that his diplomacy in South Asia would start with the standoff in Kashmir. In truth India had no interest in an international adjudication of Kashmir. What was settled during the partition in 1947 was there to stay. In recent days, Mr. Obama walked away from earlier ambitions. "Obviously, there are historic conflicts between India and Pakistan," he said. "It's not the place of the United States to try to, from the outside, resolve those conflicts."

Nor was he swayed by the fate of so many "peace plans" that have been floated over so many decades to resolve the fight between Arab and Jew over the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. Where George W. Bush offered the Palestinians the gift of clarity—statehood but only after the renunciation of terror and the break with maximalism—Mr. Obama signaled a return to the dead ways of the past: a peace process where America itself is broker and arbiter.

The Obama diplomacy had made a settlement freeze its starting point, when this was precisely the wrong place to begin. Israel has given up settlements before at the altar of peace—recall the historical accommodation with Egypt a quarter century ago. The right course would have set the question of settlements aside as it took up the broader challenge of radicalism in the region—the menace and swagger of Iran, the arsenal of Hamas and Hezbollah, the refusal of the Arab order of power to embrace in broad daylight the cause of peace with Israel.

The laws of gravity, the weight of history and of precedent, have caught up with the Obama presidency. We are beyond stirring speeches. The novelty of the Obama approach, and the Obama persona, has worn off. There is a whole American diplomatic tradition to draw upon—engagements made, wisdom acquired in the course of decades, and, yes, accounts to be settled with rogues and tyrannies. They might yet help this administration find its way out of a labyrinth of its own making.

Mr. Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author of "The Foreigner's Gift" (Free Press, 2007).

Complete failutre on Iran

500,000 Iranian Centrifuges (Gee... a Nobel Peace Prize winner who has enabled Iran-imagine that!)
Tehran ups the ante again as diplomacy goes nowhere.

Mohamed ElBaradei caps his contentious and ultimately failed 12-year stint as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency today, having spent many years enabling Iran's nuclear bids only to condemn them in his final days in office. Mr. ElBaradei combined his rebuke of Iran with his familiar calls for more negotiation, but we'll take his belated realism about Iran as his tacit admission that Dick Cheney and John Bolton have been right all along. Let's hope the education of the Obama Administration doesn't take as long.

As if to underscore the point, yesterday the Iranian government ordered up 10 additional uranium enrichment plants on the scale of its already operational facility in Natanz, which has a planned capacity of 54,000 centrifuges. That could mean an eventual total of more than 500,000 centrifuges, or enough to enrich about 160 bombs worth of uranium each year. Whether it can ever do that is an open question, but it does give a sense of the scale of the regime's ambitions.

The decision is also a reminder of how unchastened Iran has been by President Obama's revelation in September that Iran had been building a secret 3,000 centrifuge facility near the city of Qom. The IAEA's governing board finally got around on Friday to rebuking Iran for that deception, a vote the Administration trumpeted because both Russia and China voted with the United States. But perhaps only within the Obama Administration can a symbolic gesture by the IAEA be considered a diplomatic triumph.



"Time is running out for Iran to address the international community's growing concerns about its nuclear program," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said yesterday, but the West has said this many times before. Earlier this year, Mr. Obama said Iran had a deadline of September.

The regime scoffed at Mr. Obama after he delivered a conciliating message for the Persian New Year in March, scoffed again after he mildly criticized its post-election crackdown and killing spree in June (following days of silence), and scoffed a third time by rejecting the West's offer last month to enrich Iran's uranium for it. Yet the Administration insists the enrichment deal is still Iran's for the taking. "A few years ago [the West] said we had to completely stop all our nuclear activities," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last month. "Now look where we are today."

Those are the words of a man who believes he has Mr. Obama's number. And until the President, his advisers and the Europeans realize that only punitive sanctions or military strikes will force it to reconsider its nuclear ambitions, an emboldened Islamic Republic will continue to march confidently toward a bomb over the wreckage of Mohamed ElBaradei's—and Barack Obama's—best intentions.

Tied in with acorn

By CHARLIE SAVAGE
Published: November 27, 2009
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has concluded that the Obama administration can lawfully pay the community group Acorn for services provided under contracts signed before Congress banned the government from providing money to the group.
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The department’s conclusion, laid out in a recently disclosed five-page memorandum from David Barron, the acting assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, adds a new wrinkle to a sharp political debate over the antipoverty group’s activities and recent efforts to distance the government from it.
Since 1994, Acorn, which stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has received about $53 million in federal aid, much of it grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development for providing various services related to affordable housing.
But the group has become a prime target for conservative critics, and on Oct. 1, President Obama signed into law a spending bill that included a provision that said no taxpayer money — including money authorized by previous legislation — could be “provided to” the group or its affiliates.
A Housing and Urban Development Department lawyer asked the Justice Department whether the new law meant that pre-existing contracts with Acorn should be broken. And in a memorandum signed Oct. 23 and posted online this week, Mr. Barron said the government should continue to make payments to Acorn as required by such contracts.
The new law “should not be read as directing or authorizing HUD to breach a pre-existing binding contractual obligation to make payments to Acorn or its affiliates, subsidiaries or allied organizations where doing so would give rise to contractual liability,” Mr. Barron wrote.
The deputy director of national operations for Acorn, Brian Kettenring, praised Mr. Barron’s decision.
“We are pleased that commitments will be honored relative to Acorn’s work to help keep America’s working families facing foreclosure in their homes,” Mr. Kettenring said.
Mr. Barron said he had based his conclusion on the statute’s phrase “provided to.” This phrase, he said, has no clearly defined meaning in the realm of government spending — unlike words like “obligate” and “expend.”
Citing dictionary and thesaurus entries, he said “provided to” could be interpreted as meaning only instances in which an official was making “discretionary choices” about whether to give the group money, rather than instances in which the transfer of money to Acorn was required to satisfy contractual obligations.
Since there are two possible ways to construe the term “provided to,” Mr. Barron wrote, it makes sense to pick the interpretation that allows the government to avoid breaching contracts.
Moreover, he argued, requiring the government to cancel contracts with a specifically named entity — “including even in cases where performance has already been completed but payment has not been rendered” — would raise constitutional concerns best avoided by interpreting the law differently.
The Constitution prohibits “bills of attainder” — legislation intended to punish specific people or groups. Acorn has filed a lawsuit arguing that the statute banning the government from providing it money amounts to a bill of attainder.
Founded in Arkansas in 1970, Acorn describes itself as the nation’s largest grass-roots community organizing group. It provides financial services to poor and middle-income families, conducts voter registration drives, and advocates for higher minimum wages and more affordable housing.
Conservatives have long complained about Acorn’s voter drives in poor neighborhoods, citing instances in which workers fraudulently registered imaginary voters like Mickey Mouse. Acorn has argued that it is the real victim of such incidents, which its employees have often brought to the attention of the authorities.
Criticism of Acorn escalated in September, when two conservative activists released videos they had recorded using secret cameras of Acorn workers in several cities. The activists had posed as a pimp and a prostitute seeking financial advice. Instead of raising objections, the Acorn employees counseled the couple on how to hide their illicit activities and avoid paying taxes.
Conservatives seized on the videos to criticize the group further, highlighting that the Obama campaign had paid an Acorn affiliate for get-out-the-vote efforts. Congress then enacted the ban on providing money to it.
Acorn has fired several of the employees depicted in the videos.

Radical judicial appointments

NOVEMBER 19, 2009.The White House Butler
A judge twice rejected by voters is nominated by President Obama..ArticleComments (.As consolation prizes go, Louis Butler can't complain. After being twice rejected by Wisconsin voters for a place on the state Supreme Court, the former judge has instead been nominated by President Obama to a lifetime seat on the federal district court. If he is confirmed, Wisconsin voters will have years to contend with the decisions of a judge they made clear they would rather live without.

But after serving four years, voters had seen enough of his brand of judicial philosophy, making him the first sitting justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in four decades to lose a retention election last year.

In Ferdon v. Wisconsin Partners, he drew the rage of doctors and others when he dismantled the state's limit on noneconomic damages in medical malpractices cases—the kind of tort reform that had been serving the state well. Business groups were likewise floored by his decision in Thomas v. Mallet, which allowed "collective liability" in lead paint cases—making any company a potential target, regardless of whether they made the paint in question. His nickname as a public defender was "Loophole Louis," a name that stuck when, as a judge, he was considered to be soft on crime.


State court judges like Mr. Butler are likely to be an important source of nominees for President Obama. Because Democrats have been out of office since the Clinton Administration, many of the liberal judges on the federal district courts are older, an incentive for the White House to comb state courts for new judges—especially for the federal appeals courts.

Mr. Butler's nomination also shows the return to prominence of judicial ratings by the American Bar Association, which traditionally gives extra weight to "judicial experience." The ABA, which was ousted by the Bush Administration in part because of the ABA's notorious liberal bias, is now back in favor in the Obama White House. Mr. Butler served on the ABA's Standing Committee on Judicial Independence, a group that like Justice at Stake critiques how that independence is supposedly compromised by the need to raise money for judicial elections.

Mr. Butler's nomination shows the dominance of liberal ideology in Mr. Obama's judicial selections, and especially a contempt for Wisconsin voters.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A20

Obamamnomics borrowing leads to ruin

OPINIONNOVEMBER 19, 2009, 11:26 P.M. ET.Why No One Expects a Strong Recovery
When you repeal sound economic policies you repeal their results..By JEB HENSARLING AND PAUL RYAN
"You can't find a single deep recession that has been followed by a moderate recovery."

That may no longer hold. Since the current recession has lasted a record seven quarters—and has been marked by a near-record average GDP decline of 1.8% per quarter—we should be witnessing the start of a powerful and sustained recovery. Yet forecasts of a 2% recovery in growth are only one-fourth as strong as postwar experience suggests. Meanwhile, unemployment sits at a generational high of 10.2%.

Why all the pessimism? The source appears to be a growing fear that the federal government is retreating from the free-market economic principles of the last half-century, and in particular the strong growth policies that began under Ronald Reagan. A review of the economic policies instituted by President Barack Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress lends credibility to this concern.

Exhibit A is the economic stimulus package signed into law by President Barack Obama in February. Even among previous stimulus efforts, the 2009 stimulus stands out for its ineffective targeting and sheer size. With interest, it is $1.1 trillion, double the size of Roosevelt's New Deal spending as a percentage of GDP.


Martin Kozlowski
.Virtually none of the stimulus spending was directed towards encouraging broad-based private investment, and thus failed to encourage true economic growth. An analysis by economists John F. Cogan, John B. Taylor and Volker Wieland, published on this page on Sept. 17, suggests that while the stimulus succeeded in temporarily and marginally increasing disposable personal income, it left personal consumption spending virtually unchanged.

Meanwhile, $112 billion of its $300 billion tax relief was in the form of payments to people who paid no income taxes. These payments, akin to a one-time welfare check, do not change the incentives to save and invest, and do not effectively promote broad-based economic growth.

Exhibit B is tax policy going forward. It is a near certainty that Democratic-controlled Congress will allow most of the tax cuts of 2001-2003 to expire on Dec. 31, 2010. Marginal income tax rates, capital gains rates, dividend rates and death-tax rates will increase—significantly. Hardest hit by these increases will be small businesses that file under the individual income tax code as sub-chapter S corporations, partnerships and proprietorships. Yet these are the very people whose investment and hiring decisions either drive or starve recoveries.

Exhibit C is the administration's intervention in the GM and Chrysler reorganizations. Upsetting decades of accepted bankruptcy law, the administration leveraged TARP funds to place unsecured and lower priority creditors like the United Auto Workers union in front of secured and higher priority creditors. This intervention has arguably had the effect of stifling investment as wary investors watched political considerations trump the rule of law.

As Warren Buffett said at the time, "We don't want to say to somebody who lends and gets a secured position that the secured position doesn't mean anything." Gary Parr, deputy chair of the mergers and acquisitions firm Lazard Freres & Co., stated the problem more directly. "I can't imagine the markets will function properly if you are always wondering if the government is going to step in and change the game," he was quoted in The Atlantic Online in September.

Health care, the administration's signature issue, is Exhibit D. Disregarding its impact on quality and access, its plan will surely cost well over $1 trillion over the next decade. The House-passed version includes an 8% "pay or play" payroll tax and a half-trillion dollar surtax on incomes over $500,000, much of which will strike small business. Both taxes will tend to depress investment and the creation of new jobs.

And looming down the road is the proposed cap-and-tax legislation, which will cost taxpayers $800 billion.
Beyond instilling tremendous political uncertainty into economic decision-making, these policies ensure that deficits will shatter all previous records. In the Office of Management and Budget's 2009 Mid-Session Review, the administration projects a decade of deficits averaging 3.3 times the postwar norm of 1.8%. Yet its projections assume that interest rates will be less than half the postwar norm for interest rates, and that economic growth will be almost 10% higher than the high-growth 1980s. Never in the postwar era have such high deficits, low interest rates and high growth rates occurred simultaneously.

If one substitutes the Blue Chip Economic Forecast's interest-rate forecast for that of the administration, deficits will increase by an additional $1.2 trillion over the administration's projected deficits. If the next decade's interest rates climb to match those of the 1980s, then the deficit would increase another $5.3 trillion. If higher interest rates then slow economic growth, the impact on the deficit would be much worse.

Anyone who believes the Democratic Party's recently expressed concern over the deficit should look at the relentless growth of spending on its watch. Total nondefense spending set an all-time record this year—20.2% of GDP—double federal spending as a percentage of GDP during the height of the New Deal in 1934. Even without this year's stimulus bill and last year's bailout of the financial system, nondefense discretionary spending authority still grew by 10.1% in fiscal year 2009 and is projected to rise by another 12% in fiscal year 2010. Forty-three cents of every dollar of this spending is borrowed money.

Given the magnitude of federal borrowing, there is good reason to expect higher interest rates and strong inflationary pressures in the future.

It is hardly surprising that many investors are reaching the conclusion that this administration and Congress favor policies that virtually guarantee the economy will not return to the climate of low interest rates, benign inflation and strong growth that we knew from 1982-2007. These investors understand a simple truth that current Washington policy makers fail to grasp: When you repeal the Reagan economic program, you repeal its results.
Messrs. Hensarling and Ryan are Republican representatives from Texas and Wisconsin, respectively.

Obmamanomics will lead to a poorer America WSJ nOV 24

Government Deficits and Private Growth
Future living standards will take a hit as federal borrowing balloons and bank lending to business shrinks .By GEORGE MELLOAN
For anyone who wondered if last winter's federal seizure of the financial services industry would have adverse economic consequences, an answer is now available. The credit market has been tilted to favor a single borrower with a huge appetite for money, Washington. Private borrowers, particularly small businesses, have been sent to the end of the queue.

David Gothard
.Banking has been captured by the nanny state, which means that its potential for contributing to economic growth and job creation has been sharply curtailed, even as its potential contribution to government growth has been expanded.

Washington hasn't been able to milk the taxpayers sufficiently to finance its massive deficit. The Chinese are getting skittish as well. So tapping bank deposits is yet another avenue to a big pot of cash. As for the bankers, they've been awarded an easy life.

... In its August report to Secretary Timothy Geithner, the committee said: "This year's double-digit-as-a-percent-of-GDP budget shortfall [the federal deficit] is unsustainable. Moreover, there is little support for a marked shrinking in the deficit in the year ahead, as revenue trends likely will remain sluggish amid high unemployment and lingering capital losses and public spending will remain elevated as a share of the economy. Various policy efforts under discussion by the Administration and Congress also probably would add to the deficit and public debt on a net basis."
Needless to say, the Obama administration and Congress aren't heeding such warnings. More big spending programs on health care and green energy are getting teed up.


James Hamilton of the University of California at San Diego wrote in his "econbrowser" blog on March 29 that, "the new Fed balance sheet represents a fundamental transformation of the role of the central bank." He noted that for many years the Fed had pumped money into the economy with no attempt to direct which borrowers would receive credit. The whole idea behind the Fed's open market operations is to make the process of creating new money completely separate from the decision of who receives any fiscal transfers.


"The philosophy behind the pullulating new Fed facilities is precisely the opposite of that traditional concept. The whole purpose of these facilities is to redirect capital to specific perceived priorities."

Yes, things have changed in a year. Feeding the government and starving free enterprise looks like a prescription for long-term economic stagnation. It's not unlike what we witnessed in the depression of the 1930s.

Mr. Melloan, a former columnist and deputy editor of the Journal editorial page, is author of "The Great Money Binge: Spending Our Way to Socialism," published last week by Simon & Schuster.

Obama making same tragic mistakes as Carter in Foreign Policy

The Carter Ricochet Effect Jimmy Carter's presidency offers a lesson in how the purest intentions can lead to the most disastrous results.By BRET STEPHENS .An idealistic president takes office promising an era of American moral renewal at home and abroad. The effort includes a focus on diplomacy and peace-making, an aversion to the use of force, the selling out of old allies. The result is that within a couple of years the U.S. is more suspected, detested and enfeebled than ever.

No, we're not talking about Barack Obama. But since the current administration took office offering roughly the same prescriptions as Jimmy Carter did, it's worth recalling how that worked out.
How it worked out became inescapably apparent 30 years ago this month. On Nov. 20, 1979, Sunni religious fanatics led by a dark-eyed charismatic Saudi named Juhayman bin Seif al Uteybi seized Mecca's Grand Mosque, Islam's holiest site. After a two week siege distinguished mainly by its incompetence, Saudi forces were able to recapture the mosque at a cost of several hundred lives.

By any objective account—the very best of which was offered by Wall Street Journal reporter Yaroslav Trofimov in his 2007 book "The Siege of Mecca"—the battle at the Grand Mosque was a purely Sunni affair pitting a fundamentalist Islamic regime against ultra-fundamentalist renegades. Yet throughout the Muslim world, the Carter administration was viewed as the main culprit. U.S. diplomatic missions in Bangladesh, India, Turkey and Libya were assaulted; in Pakistan, the embassy was burned to the ground. How could that happen to a country whose president was so intent on making his policies as inoffensive as possible?

.
.The answer was, precisely, that Mr. Carter had set out to make America as inoffensive as possible. Two weeks before Juhayman seized the Grand Mosque, Iranian radicals seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 66 Americans hostage. They did so after Mr. Carter had refused to bail out the Shah, as the Eisenhower administration had in 1953, and after Andrew Young, Mr. Carter's U.N. ambassador, had described the Ayatollah Khomeini as "somewhat of a saint."

They also did so after Mr. Carter had scored his one diplomatic coup by brokering a peace deal between Egypt and Israel. Today, the consensus view of the Obama administration is that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would ease tensions throughout the region. But worthy though it was in its own right, peace between Egypt and Israel was also a fillip for Sunni and Shiite radicals alike from Tehran to Damascus to Beirut to Gaza. Whatever else the Middle East has been since the signing of the Camp David Accords, it has not been a more peaceful place.

Nor has it been any less inclined to hate the U.S., no matter whether the president is a peace-loving Democrat or a war-mongering Republican. "Everywhere, there was the same explanation," Mr. Trofimov writes in his account of the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad. "American institutions, declared a student leader in Lahore, had to be burned down because 'the Holy Kaaba had been occupied by Americans and the Jews.'"

On the other hand, among Muslims inclined to favor the U.S., the Carter administration's instincts for knee-jerk conciliation and panicky withdrawals only had the effect of alienating them from their ostensible protector. Coming as it did so soon after Khomeini's rise to power and the revolutionary fervors which it unleashed, the siege of Mecca carried the real risk of undermining pro-American regimes throughout the region. Yet American embassies were repeatedly instructed not to use their Marines to defend against intruders, as well as to pull their personnel from the country.

"The move didn't go unnoticed among Muslim radicals," notes Mr. Trofimov. "A chain of events unleashed by the takeover in Mecca had put America on the run from the lands of Islam. America's foes drew a conclusion that Osama bin Laden would often repeat: when hit hard, America flees, 'dragging its tail in failure, defeat, and ruin, caring for nothing.'" It is no accident, too, that the Soviet Union chose to invade Afghanistan the following month, as it observed a vacillating president who would not defend what previously were thought to be inviolable U.S. strategic interests.

Today, President Obama likes to bemoan the "mess" he inherited overseas, the finger pointed squarely at President Bush. But the real mess he inherited comes straight out of 1979, the serial debacles of which define American challenges in the Middle East just as surely as the triumphs of 1989 define our opportunities in Europe. True, the furies that were unleashed that year in Mecca, Tehran and elsewhere in the Muslim world were not of America's making. But absence of guilt is no excuse for innocence of policy.

Pretty soon, Mr. Obama will have his own Meccas and Tehrans to deal with, perhaps in Jerusalem and Cairo. He would do well to cast a backward glance at the tenure of his fellow Nobel peace laureate, as an object lesson in how even the purest of motives can lead to the most disastrous results.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

Lying about OBamacare rationing nov 24

Liberals and Mammography
Rationing? What rationing?.ArticleComments (132)more in Opinion ».EmailPrinter
Text .The flap over breast cancer screening has provided a fascinating insight into the political future of ObamaCare. Specifically, the political left supports such medical rationing even as it disavows that any such thing is happening.

No sooner had the Health and Human Services Department's U.S. Preventative Services Task Force recommended against mammography for women under 50 than Secretary Kathleen Sebelius rushed to say don't worry. The decision had "caused a great deal of confusion and worry among women," she said, promising that no policies would change. New Jersey's Frank Pallone vowed to hold hearings, and Senator Dick Durbin leveled the gravest charge Democrats can make: The task force was "appointed by President Bush."

The political duck-and-cover was also on display in that vanguard of ObamaCare known as the New York Times, which ran at least four much-ado-about-nothing items even as it endorsed the reduced screening. On the same day as an editorial and op-ed, a front-page "news analysis" lectured that what the public really needs is "a transformational shift in thinking" about the "evidence-based" medical future that the mammogram decision portends. Yes, and no doubt the Times will tell us what "evidence" to follow.

Even more revealing was Princeton's Uwe Reinhardt, a leading liberal health-care economist, writing on the New York Times Economix blog. Mr. Reinhardt sees the task force's handiwork as an exemplar of "rational decision-making" that had nothing to do with cost analysis, even as he claimed that rationing based on cost is inevitable.

You have to admire Mr. Reinhardt's partisan dexterity. He knows that no government task force is ever going to justify a treatment denial with an overt claim to costs. Instead, the task force found a sneaky way to use clinical data to take costs into account without admitting it. It cites all sorts of harm associated with the problem of "overdiagnosis"—i.e., too many costly procedures. This is a reference to mammograms that lead to further tests and treatments that in hindsight are unnecessary.

The HHS task force concludes that this harm outweighs the benefits of saving lives through early detection, yet this makes little sense unless financial costs are a priority. For instance, the panel cites patient anxiety from false positives, yet the literature also shows overwhelmingly that women would rather risk a scare than allow a cancer to progress—especially considering that about 75% of all breast cancers develop in women who do not have special risk factors.

In any event, the distinction between cost effectiveness and clinical effectiveness will be moot if ObamaCare passes. The House bill gives the HHS task force the mandate to review "the benefits, effectiveness, appropriateness, and costs of clinical preventive services" in making its de facto insurance coverage rulings. As Mr. Reinhardt notes, "at some point soon the rising cost of American health care actually will force Americans to bring monetary costs into the analysis as well."

What's really going on here is that the left knows its designs will require political rationing of care, but it doesn't want the public to figure this out until ObamaCare passes. Then it will begin the campaign to instruct the rest of us that we must follow the guidance of Princeton professors about what medical care we can receive. Americans will simply have to accept that the price of government-run health care in the name of redistributive justice is that patients and their doctors must bow to the superior wisdom of HHS task forces.

Just don't admit it until after the White House signing ceremony.