Category Archives: Politics – international

An errand taken by a fool

Posted on by
Reply

Jonathan Tobin writes about Why Did Kerry Lie About Israeli Blame? Why do any of the lying swindlers in the Obama administration lie about everything? Here are the issues as set out by Tobin:

Kerry knows very well that the negotiations were doomed once the Palestinians refused to sign on to the framework for future talks he suggested even though it centered them on the 1967 lines that they demand as the basis for borders. Why? Because Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas wouldn’t say the two little words —“Jewish state”—that would make it clear he intended to end the conflict. Since the talks began last year after Abbas insisted on the release of terrorist murderers in order to get them back to the table, the Palestinians haven’t budged an inch on a single issue.

Thus, to blame the collapse on the decision to build apartments in Gilo—a 40-year-old Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem that would not change hands even in the event a peace treaty were ever signed and where Israel has never promised to stop building—is, to put it mildly, a mendacious effort to shift blame away from the side that seized the first pretext to flee talks onto the one that has made concessions in order to get the Palestinians to sit at the table. But why would Kerry utter such a blatant falsehood about the process he has championed?

The answer is simple. Kerry doesn’t want to blame the Palestinians for walking out because to do so would be a tacit admission that his critics were right when they suggested last year that he was embarking on a fool’s errand.

Meanwhile the Palestinians remain the second most prosperous people in the Middle East, supported to the nines by the UN, while places like Egypt, Libya and Syria fall to bits. A few more fool’s errands he and his President can run if that is their wont.

UPDATE: This is from the Republican Jewish Coalition in the American Congress:

After almost nine months of negotiations, during which Israel took concrete steps to advance the process, including the release of 78 prisoners – many of them terrorists – it is outrageous for Secretary Kerry to blame the Jewish state for the apparent failure of the diplomatic process undertaken at his insistence.

The simple fact is that while Israel has supported the peace talks, the Palestinians have consistently undercut them. Most recently, Israel has pledged to continue talks past Kerry’s original deadline and the Palestinian side has refused to do the same.

Secretary Kerry’s testimony today is a troubling consequence of the Obama administration’s assumption that increasing the pressure on Israel will bring the Palestinians back to a process they have repeatedly rejected.

Even here the statement pretends to see goodwill and genuine good intentions in Obama and Kerry. Only a complete moron would think that the side that has no pressure on it to concede a thing will concede a thing. Everyone knows there is no intention to reach an agreement, and this is an intention that is as firmly held by Obama and Kerry as it is by Abbas. The only intention is to weaken Israel. And let me finally ask, where is the Democrat Jewish Coalition? You don’t really have to ask, do you?

FURTHER UPDATE: And now there’s this, Israel ‘Deeply Disappointed’ by Kerry’s Remarks on Peace Talks.

In an unusually pointed rebuke of its ally, the United States, Israel said on Wednesday that it was “deeply disappointed” by Secretary of State John Kerry’s remarks a day earlier that appeared to lay primary blame on Israel for the crisis in the American-brokered Middle East peace talks.

The Israeli-Palestinian dispute that has brought the talks to the brink of collapse appeared to be developing into an open row between Israel and the United States, even as Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were said to be planning a third meeting here this week with American mediators to try to resolve the crisis.

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, Mr. Kerry said that both the Israeli and Palestinian sides bore responsibility for “unhelpful” actions, but that the precipitating event of the impasse was Israel’s announcement of 700 new housing units for Jewish settlement in an area of Jerusalem across the 1967 lines, in territory the Palestinians claim for a future state.

“Poof, that was sort of the moment,” Mr. Kerry said. “We find ourselves where we are.”

In what is being referred to here as “the poof speech,” Mr. Kerry laid out the chain of events that led to the verge of a breakdown.

Clearly stung by Mr. Kerry’s version and his focus on the settlement issue, Israel countered on Wednesday that it was the Palestinians who had “violated their fundamental commitments” by applying last week to join 15 international conventions and treaties.

Mr. Kerry’s remarks “will both hurt the negotiations and harden Palestinian positions,” said an official in the office of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The thing here is that Israel has basically said that Kerry is incompetent at his job and has washed its hands of the whole “peace process”. This is quite a stand to have taken and suggests Israel is looking at other options than having to depend on the United States.

The Venezuelan experiment – proving what everyone already knew

Posted on by
Reply

The Venezuelan experience is an example endlessly repeated about how the politics of resentment, the natural home for the socialist ethos, leads to ruin for everyone within such communities, aside from its political leaders or their friends. And so Venezuela, which is an example in so many different ways, but here we are looking only at price control:

Two years before his death, Hugo Chavez tried to repeal the law of supply and demand. . . . Chavez despised the law because he believed it robbed the poor and unjustly profited producers. . . .

In its place, he persuaded the Venezuelan legislature to enact the 2011 Law on Fair Costs and Prices, a price-setting mechanism to ensure greater social justice. A newly created National Superintendency of Fair Costs and Prices was empowered to establish fair prices at both the wholesale and retail levels. More than 500,000 price edicts have been issued. Companies that violate these price controls are subject to fines, seizures and expropriation.

And the results. This is from The Guardian who may report but being good leftists probably don’t really understand what’s gone wrong:

“Battling food shortages, the Venezuelan government is rolling out a new ID system that is either a grocery loyalty card with extra muscle or the most dramatic step yet towards rationing in Venezuela, depending on who is describing it. . . .

Registration begins at more than 100 government-run supermarkets across the country on Tuesday and working-class shoppers – who sometimes endure hours-long queues at the stores to buy cut-price groceries – are welcoming the plan.

“The rich people have things all hoarded away, and they pull the strings,” said Juan Rodriguez, who waited two hours to enter the government-run Abastos Bicentenario supermarket near downtown Caracas on Monday, then waited three hours more to check out….

Patrons will register with their fingerprints, and the new ID card will be linked to a computer system that monitors purchases. The food minister, Félix Osorio, said it will sound an alarm when it detects suspicious purchasing patterns, barring people from buying the same goods every day.

Re The Guardian story, what is most revealing of all is its last para:

Defenders of Venezuela’s socialist government say price controls imposed by the late President Hugo Chávez help poor people lead more dignified lives, and the United Nations has recognised Venezuela’s success in eradicating hunger.

Do you think the idiot who wrote this story and ended it this way has learned a thing. He lives somewhere else but in spite of the evidence he has reported still thinks what Chavez did helped the poor. With morons like this around, the next Venezuela is just around the corner.

The hits just keep on coming

Posted on by
Reply

This is a modest blogsite which I do mostly for my own interest as a kind of intellectual diary but is not really done for others. I make no effort to let others know that I even do this which is why the explosion of hits this morning has taken my hit count to five times its previous max. This required a bit of investigation, and it has pleased me to the end of the earth that the reference came from Mark Steyn, bless him. The post was on Johnny, Get Your Gun-Free Zone, a reference to Dalton Trumbo’s eerie Johnny Got his Gun which I read in my bad old student days, and this is what Mark said on his link:

Yesterday the Supreme Court struck down key elements of US campaign-finance law. As a practical matter, I’m not a fan of “money in politics”, because, at least on the Republican side, with the “smart money” the money may be smart but the fellows who give it and spend it aren’t. However, in a country with a corrupt prosecutocracy and the most politicized judiciary in the developed world, a byzantine campaign-finance regime policed by a corrupt Justice Department is far worse than the problem it purports to solve. After a recent piece of mine, this Aussie blogger wrote that “a more self-conscious society would be embarrassed by what he is revealing“:

Although quite a bit of his post is about his own efforts in dealing with Michael Mann and the hockey stick, this story he tells about Dinesh D’Souza is incredible:

‘Take Dinesh D’Souza, one of those “political enemies” who’s managed to attract the attention of the feds. For a campaign finance “violation” of $15,000, he has already been handcuffed and perp-walked, bailed for half-a-million, lost his passport and freedom of movement, and requires permission from a judge even to travel from New York to Boston. This is disgraceful. Yet D’Souza now faces the choice between confessing to something or having his life ruined. This is a disgusting, capricious system of which Americans should be entirely ashamed.’

Even if “shame” were the right word for the emotion they should be feeling, they’re not ashamed because it is not how they see it themselves.

No liberals other than Alan Dershowitz have a thing to say about the D’Souza outrage. And nor do many conservatives. Because this “is not how they see themselves”. But civilized societies do not do this over a $15,000 political-donation overspend. This system is evil.

It was, indeed, the absence of any further comment by anyone else anywhere that made me lose my bearings about this whole issue. How could this be happening to someone as prominent and important as Dinesh D’Souza without anyone but Mark Steyn saying a word. The reality is that no one is now safe.

Balanced budget amendment

Posted on by
Reply

It is good to see that at least someone notices the problems with deficits and public spending even if economists are not amongst them. It appears that some kind of critical mass may have taken place in the United States over whether enough states have passed a balanced budget amendment that must lead to a constitutional convention which will determine whether or not the federal government of the United States must by constitutional law maintain a balanced budget. The article is titled, Balanced budget convention gains steam as congressman calls for official evaluation and this is how it begins:

Rep. Duncan Hunter on Tuesday asked Congress to evaluate whether enough states have officially called for a constitutional convention to propose a balanced budget amendment — marking the next step toward what could be an historic gathering.

Mr. Hunter, California Republican, said Congress should take stock of where things stand after Michigan last week approved an official call for a balanced budget amendment convention. According to some analysts, Michigan’s move makes it the 34th state to request a convention.

For something as unconventional as the notion of a balanced budget amendment to have passed at different times and in different states through 34 different legislatures shows there is an understanding of the problems that runaway federal spending has caused. The disasters that have befallen one economy after another due to the insane levels of public spending after the GFC are due almost in their entirety to the spending that followed the financial crisis and not to the crisis itself. But you almost have to be a non-economist even to notice. Economists still think that C+I+G provides them with some form of understanding about what to do in recessions, with no lessons learned from the past five years.

And since we will be having a vote on amending the constitution at our own next election, I cannot see why we shouldn’t include one on a balanced budget as well.

The voting class and the working class

Posted on by
Reply

Watching Q&A last night, and especially the discussion on stopping the boats, reminded me of a post I put up in 2012. I repeat it here.

Ann Coulter does the numbers and it is now a demographic battle in the US about who comes and who votes. It wasn’t the young after all who had voted to subvert the America of individual effort and personal responsibility. Ann tells a quite disturbing story:

On closer examination, it turns out that young voters, aged 18-29, overwhelmingly supported Romney. But only the white ones. . . .

What the youth vote shows is not that young people are nitwits who deserve lives of misery and joblessness, as I had previously believed, but that America is hitting the tipping point on our immigration policy.

The youth vote is a snapshot of elections to come if nothing is done to reverse the deluge of unskilled immigrants pouring into the country as a result of Ted Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act. Eighty-five percent of legal immigrants since 1968 have come from the Third World. A majority of them are in need of government assistance.

Whites are 76 percent of the electorate over the age of 30 and only 58 percent of the electorate under 30. Obama won the “youth vote” because it is the knife’s edge of a demographic shift, not because he offered the kids free tuition and contraception.

There is even this, which does seem to show there is a way out, as difficult as it may be:

Nearly 20 percent of black males under 30 voted for Romney, more than three times what McCain got.

It is working and paying taxes that may be the divide that matters. As she points out, it is immigration policy that is in the middle. And it will be the big issue of the future as the US does or does not submerge itself under a flood of migrants from places where no one can even conceivably be employed in a high tech, English speaking nation as the US for the time being now is. This is how she concludes:

Romney got a larger percentage of the white vote than Reagan did in 1980. That’s just not enough anymore.

Ironically, Romney was the first Republican presidential candidate in a long time not conspiring with the elites to make America a dumping ground for the world’s welfare cases. Conservatives who denounced Romney as a ‘RINO’ were the ones doing the bidding of the real establishment: business, which wants cheap labor and couldn’t care less if America ceases to be the land of opportunity that everyone wanted to immigrate to in the first place.

The parties of the left are actively ruining their countries for political advantage. Many of these people will never pay more in taxes than they take in welfare. But they’re not being brought here to work. They are being brought here to vote.

You’ve been warned

Posted on by
Reply

If you happen to be the kind of person who thinks the global warming is a modern form of the madness of crowds, then the world must indeed look like an insane asylum. The article is titled, Global warming dials up our risks, UN Report says. This, remember, is not science fiction:

If the world doesn’t cut pollution of heat-trapping gases, the already noticeable harms of global warming could spiral “out of control,” the head of a United Nations scientific panel warned Monday.

And he’s not alone. The Obama White House says it is taking this new report as a call for action, with Secretary of State John Kerry saying “the costs of inaction are catastrophic.”

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that issued the 32-volume, 2,610-page report here early Monday, told The Associated Press: “it is a call for action.” Without reductions in emissions, he said, impacts from warming “could get out of control.”

One of the study’s authors, Maarten van Aalst, a top official at the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said, “If we don’t reduce greenhouse gases soon, risks will get out of hand. And the risks have already risen.”

Twenty-first century disasters such as killer heat waves in Europe, wildfires in the United States, droughts in Australia and deadly flooding in Mozambique, Thailand and Pakistan highlight how vulnerable humanity is to extreme weather, according to the report from the Nobel Prize-winning group of scientists. The dangers are going to worsen as the climate changes even more, the report’s authors said.

“We’re now in an era where climate change isn’t some kind of future hypothetical,” said the overall lead author of the report, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science in California. “We live in an area where impacts from climate change are already widespread and consequential.”

Nobody is immune.

Obama and the creation of a socialist state

Posted on by
Reply

This was a comment on my Delusional Liar post on Obama. I thought I knew about Alinski but if that is a direct quote from somewhere it is a truly explosive find. Even if not a direct quote, it is a quite nice summation of what is going on even if it has happened only opportunistically.

Obama is not delusional at all. He knows exactly what he’s doing. I’d like to single out the first and fifth of these rules but Obama really has them ALL covered.

How to create a social state by Saul Alinsky:

There are eight levels of control that must be obtained before you are able to create a social state. The first is the most important.

1) Healthcare – Control healthcare and you control the people

2) Poverty – Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.

3) Debt – Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.

4) Gun Control – Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a police state.

5) Welfare – Take control of every aspect of their lives (Food, Housing, and Income)

6) Education – Take control of what people read and listen to – take control of what children learn in school.

7) Religion – Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools

8) Class Warfare – Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor.

Delusional liar

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s a story of the kind you can read every day on the right side of the blog world, Bob Kerrey Calls Obama a Delusional Liar; Renders Himself MSM Nonperson

Ho hum. Obama is a liar. Wrote about it myself just the other day. He is also off with the fairies, completely lacking in a sense of reality. I’ve also written about just this myself. But in this case the person making the accusation actually tried to run for President as a Democrat and is a former Democrat US Senator. But even so, you have to come to the right side blogs to find out. From the article:

Imagine if a former Republican presidential candidate and U.S. senator had called a current Republican president a delusional liar whose programs are wasteful. Would the mainstream media not be all over the story? Such a person would be interviewed at length by Wolf Blitzer on CNN as well as made the rounds of the morning talk shows and the Sunday news programs as well. The media buzz would be red hot on this topic for days extending into weeks.

Well, there is such a person but because he is a Democrat saying these things about President Obama, we can expect him to become an MSM nonperson. Such seems to already be the fate of former presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey. It is no surprise that his extended criticisms of Obama appeared in in a Daily Mail article in Britain, not in America where the shunning seems to have already begun.

It’s the American media that is the black hole for information about Obama. Nothing emerges. What might go in never comes out. But as for Kerrey’s views, which you can only read here or on like-minded blogs, this is what he had to say:

Obama isn’t the first president to make that kind of miscalculation – Kerrey calls it ‘self-delusion’ – while in office.

He joked that geneticists will one day soon ‘find a base pair’ of genes that predisposes people to deception.

And he predicted, half-seriously, that ‘they’ll find another base pair which say that politicians have 25 per cent more capacity for – you call it lying, I call it self-delusion.’

But however much a delusional liar Obama may be, a media that actually did its job would hound a president into less time on the golf course and more effort to get his policies right. It is the far left American media that is at the heart of the problem for which no solution comes to mind, nor can there be until some politician on the right takes up this issue in a seriously determined way.

UPDATE: The horror of Obama in the White House who cannot be removed before January 2017 is beginning to dawn on more and more people. It’s an insanity really. The same dim bulbs who could not wait to see the last of George Bush and who voted for Obama a second time are driving the US and the West into receivership and worse. Same goes for all those fools who chose to stay home because the Republicans nominated someone not exactly to their taste. So here is yet another story of the train wreck coming, this one titled Chickens come home to roost for Obama:

Obama’s sixth year in the White House is shaping up as his worst, and that’s saying something. He’s been in the Oval Office so long that it is obscene to blame his problems on George W. Bush, the weather or racism. Obama owns the world he made, or more accurately, the world he tried to remake.

Nothing important has worked as promised, and there is every reason to believe the worst is yet to come. The president’s casual remark the other day that he worries about “a nuclear weapon ­going off in Manhattan” inadvertently reflected the fear millions of Americans have about his leadership. Not necessarily about a bomb, but about where he is taking the country.

We are racing downhill and he is stepping on the gas. Will he stop before the nation crashes?

Stories of this kind have a global warming sense to me, some kind of thrilling to the horrors to come. Only unlike global warming, this is a genuine tragedy and is happening in real time.

A special kind of stupid

Posted on by
Reply

All this makes perfect sense but he leaves out the role of the media. Nevertheless:

Maybe you were not that excited that 2012 gave you a choice between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. I sympathize — I liked Rick Perry. But how is President Romney vs. President Obama a hard choice? How is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vs. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid a hard choice? How is Speaker of the House John Boehner vs. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi a hard choice?

It isn’t.

Even if you think that Romney is a squishy RINO Massachusetts technocrat with a secret crush on Obamacare, you have to be on the wrong side of the border between ideologically hardcore and ideologically blinded to conclude that spending four years fighting against the very worst imaginable tendencies of a Romney administration would have been anything other than wine and roses compared with spending four years fighting against the very worst tendencies of an Obama administration, especially when the president is in the position of never having to face another election.

You can tell yourself a just-so story about how the guy you liked who couldn’t beat Romney in the GOP primary would have beaten the mom jeans off of Obama in the general, and maybe you’re right, but it didn’t happen that way. (And maybe you don’t like that the so-called establishment supported Romney. Guess what? You can support candidates, too!) Likewise, if all the senators that conservatives admire weren’t already running for president, one of them might make a majority leader that you’d prefer to McConnell. And Paul Ryan probably would be a more inspiring speaker than Boehner is. Fine, fine, and fine. But that isn’t where we were, and it isn’t where we are.

The question wasn’t “Mitt Romney — yes or no?” It was: “Mitt Romney — compared with what?”

Well, compared with what you have right now today. There are idiots aplenty in every electorate in the world, but it takes a special kind of stupid to vote for Obama twice or not to vote him out when you get the chance. If you are a conservative and sat out the last election then you are as bad as the lowest of the low information voters and then some.