Obama Throws Allies "Under the Bus"

Is Russian 'Reset' Worth Kicking Allies To Curb?

By R. JAMES WOOLSEY AND REBECCAH HEINRICHS
Posted 07/05/2011 07:10 PM ET
 

The Obama administration continues to burn America's allies in its pursuit to please our foes. The most recently burned is the Czech Republic.

In 2009 the Obama administration pulled the rug out from under the Poles and the Czechs when it canceled the missile defense plan begun by the previous administration and failed to notify the countries' leaders until right before the public announcement.
President Obama assured the countries they would have roles in the new plan. Then earlier this month, Czech Defense Minister Alexander Vondra told the Associated Press that his country withdrew "in frustration" at a minor role in the Obama plan.
The previous plan would have placed radar in the Czech Republic, and 10 long-range interceptors in Poland. Both countries' leaders braved political heat, especially from Russia, for agreeing to host those defensive assets.
In 2008, Czech President Vaclav Klaus told the Washington Times that "having experienced decades of Soviet domination during the Cold War," Czechs are "extremely sensitive to any patronizing from that part of the world."
The assets would have defended much of Europe and the U.S. from Iranian long-range missiles. They also had the benefit of strengthening ties between America and the former Soviet satellite countries. This second benefit is, in part, what caused Russia to balk at the plan.

Russia's strong objection to the cooperative agreement prompted the Obama administration to cancel the plan in favor of an incremental and hopefully more agreeable (to the Russians) missile defense plan for Europe, although the administration contends the plan was scrapped for other reasons.

What has leaving the Czechs and Poles high and dry gotten anyone? Besides leaving two strong countries whose leaders have demonstrated the foresight and political courage to set their countries up for a future on the side of free and prosperous Western democracies in a state of abandonment and embarrassment, it has done nothing but embolden and temporarily appease Russia.

Last November at the NATO-Russia summit, the Obama administration was optimistic about coming to an agreement with the Russians on its new plan. Surely, to the disappointment of many of those optimistic Obama staffers, earlier this month the NATO-Russia Council failed to come to an agreement.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has even threatened to revive an arms race around 2020, when the last phase of the four-phase plan is supposed to be deployed. This phase would include a couple of dozen next generation SM-3 missiles to intercept Iranian long- range missiles.

Russian officials refuse to be convinced that this will not threaten its own nuclear arsenal even though Russia's offensive weapons could easily overwhelm the U.S. system. Even Russia's lead designer of ballistic missiles, Yuri Solomonov, has admitted that U.S. missile defense in Europe is not a threat to Russia's strategic nuclear forces.

In addition to Moscow's "this will threaten our arsenal" objection to the Obama missile defense plan, Russian officials are insisting that Iran doesn't pose a threat anyway. The U.S. intelligence community has assessed that the current Iranian missile fleet has the ability to reach targets in Europe and could have the ability to hit the U.S. homeland by 2015.
According to former secretary of the Russian Security Council, Andrei Kokoshin, Iran's existing intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) program makes "military strategic sense" only if these missiles are outfitted with warheads carrying weapons of mass destruction, primarily nuclear weapons.

"Underscoring this point, Tehran recently test-fired 14 long-range nuclear capable missiles," he said.
Combine this capability with the Iranian government's anti-Western sentiment and sponsorship of terrorism, and it makes one wonder that if this isn't a threat, what in the eyes of the Russians is?

Both Russian arguments beg crucial questions about the U.S.-Russian relationship.

One, although U.S. missile defense cannot neutralize Russian offensive weapons, why is Russia, no longer a Cold War enemy, so afraid it might?
Two, why are the Russians determined to maintain the ability to successfully nuke the U.S. and why is the administration still willing to accommodate this demand?
Last, why are Russian officials so certain that Iran, an international pariah and the world's leading sponsor of terrorism, poses no threat worth defending against when the Free World is convinced that it does?

U.S. diplomats should consider these questions, and one of their conclusions should be that the Obama administration's pursuit of "resetting" relations with Russia is futile and its methods in doing so are contrary to U.S. interests and come at the priceless cost of harming good relationships with true allies.
• Woolsey is chairman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former CIA director. Heinrichs is an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former manager of the Congressional Missile Defense Caucus.

Wisconsin Shool District - Benifits from "Barganing limits"

Collective bargaining limitations lead to school improvements in one Wisconsin district

Remember when Democratic senators in the Wisconsin state legislature said Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to limit collective bargaining for public teachers’ unions would be detrimental for students? When union protesters — among other cruder criticisms — enjoined politicians to “care about educators like they care about your child”? Looks like the law that caused such bitter controversy in the Badger State will benefit both students and teachers in at least one Wisconsin district. The Washington Examiner’s Byron York reports:

The Kaukauna School District, in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin near Appleton, has about 4,200 students and about 400 employees. It has struggled in recent times and this year faced a deficit of $400,000. But after the law went into effect, at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, school officials put in place new policies they estimate will turn that $400,000 deficit into a $1.5 million surplus. And it’s all because of the very provisions that union leaders predicted would be disastrous.
In the past, teachers and other staff at Kaukauna were required to pay 10 percent of the cost of their health insurance coverage and none of their pension costs. Now, they’ll pay 12.6 percent of the cost of their coverage (still well below rates in much of the private sector) and also contribute 5.8 percent of salary to their pensions. The changes will save the school board an estimated $1.2 million this year, according to board President Todd Arnoldussen.

These savings were only made possible by limits on collective bargaining, York explains. Before Walker’s bill became law, the school district was obligated, by its collective bargaining agreement, to purchase health insurance coverage from WEA Trust, a union-created company. WEA Trust predictably hiked its prices — but, as soon as the school district became free to shop around for cheaper coverage, even WEA Trust dropped what it was charging.
But wait, there’s more: With those savings, the school district plans to hire more teachers!
Limits on collective bargaining will also lead to smaller class sizes, a boon for students. That’s because, in the absence of the work rules in place under the unions, teachers will now pick up an extra class period a day, teaching six instead of five — and will be present at the school for a full 40 hours each week, rather than just 37.5. I’d venture to guess it’s easier for a teacher to teach just 26 students at a time than it is to teach 31, too.
The school district also plans to implement merit pay.
This bright news comes just as the National Education Association admitted, for the first time, that evidence of student learning should be considered in the evaluations of school teachers around the country — and as the union gave an early 2012 presidential election endorsement to President Barack Obama. Oh yeah … and as the union approved a dues increase.

That's Racist - Jonah Goldberg

The accusation becomes a punch line.

‘That’s racist.”

It’s a comedic catchphrase these days, popularized by an online clip from a 2005 TV show Wonder Showzen on MTV2. It’s not as iconic as Gary Coleman’s “What ’chu talkin’ ’bout, Willis?” or Fonzie’s “Ayyyyyy” or even Bart Simpson’s “Don’t have a cow, man.” But what it lacks in pedigree, it makes up for in ubiquity and social relevance.

“The segregated neighborhoods and swimming pools of Bradley’s grandparents have yielded to more subtle forms of discrimination. That’s reflected in how ‘that’s racist’ is being used — to shut down conversations or as a joke.”


But what’s the joke? We don’t find out until a 14-year-old-boy says it plainly: “I think I or other people just sort of do it as a way of mocking people who are overly sensitive about race issues.”

Bingo!

a wonderful yet utterly inconvenient truth for the ostentatiously liberal network:
     
     Young people just aren’t as uptight about race as their parents, never mind their grandparents, are. 


No, racism hasn’t vanished. And the legacy of racism has a long half-life.

But the simple fact is “that’s racist” is the sort of thing those darn kids today say to make fun of their aging Gen X and baby-boomer parents.

It’s also a common joke among conservatives, precisely because we’re used to being called racists for the weirdest things. If I write on Twitter something about how I don’t like “Obamacare,” some fellow right-winger will immediately respond with some variant of “that’s racist!”

And that’s the joke.

And the people who’ve spent the last few decades screaming “that’s racist,” not as a punch line but as a heinously unfair accusation or in an attempt to bully people, don’t seem to get that the joke is on them.

Obama’s Economists: Each Job ‘Saved or Created’ by the Stimulus Cost $278,000 (So Far)

Obama’s Economists: Each Job ‘Saved or Created’ by the Stimulus Cost $278,000 (So Far)

**Written by Doug Powers
As Jeffrey Anderson at the Weekly Standard pointed out, the White House releasing a fiscal report on the Friday before a long holiday weekend can only mean one thing: There’s not much good news in it for the White House, and, ergo, taxpayers.
Such is the case with the White House Council of Economic Advisors’ seventh quarterly report on the impact of the “stimulus”:

The council reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs — whether private or public — at a cost (to date) of $666 billion.

That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.

In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the “stimulus,” and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead.

Mind you these are Obama’s own economists, so the report is like an employee’s performance evaluation that was filled out by the employee. The absolute truth is probably much more bleak.

Over ten years, the CBO says the stimulus will raise the federal deficit $830 billion — $43 billion more than originally estimated.
Which brings us to President Obama’s weekly address:

Now, it would be nice if we could keep every tax break, but we can’t afford them. Because if we choose to keep those tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, or for hedge fund managers and corporate jet owners, or for oil and gas companies pulling in huge profits without our help — then we’ll have to make even deeper cuts somewhere else. We’ve got to say to a student, ‘You don’t get a college scholarship.’ We have to say to a medical researcher, ‘You can’t do that cancer research.’ We might have to tell seniors, ‘You have to pay more for Medicare.’

Or how about we say to the White House, “You don’t get to spend the remaining $164 billion earmarked for a ‘stimulus’ that is clearly a failure.”
To steal a line from a military recruiting campaign years ago, “it’s a great place to start” — but unfortunately the painfully obvious options never seem to be on the table.
**Written by Doug Powers

Politics vs Reality - Thomas Sowell

It is hard to understand politics if you are hung up on reality. 

Politicians leave reality to others. What matters in politics is what you can get the voters to believe, whether it bears any resemblance to reality or not.
Not only among politicians, but also among much of the media, and even among some of the public, the quest is not for truth about reality but for talking points that fit a vision or advance an agenda. Some seem to see it as a personal contest about who is best at fencing with words.

The current controversy over whether to deal with our massive national debt by cutting spending, or whether instead to raise tax rates on "the rich," is a classic example of talking points versus reality.

Most of those who favor simply raising tax rates on "the rich" -- or who say that we cannot afford to allow the Bush "tax cuts for the rich" to continue -- show not the slightest interest in the history of what has actually happened when tax rates were raised to high levels on "the rich," as compared to what has actually happened when there have been "tax cuts for the rich."
As far as such people are concerned, those questions have already been settled by their talking points. Why confuse the issue by digging into empirical evidence about what has actually happened when one policy or the other was followed?
The political battles about whether to have high tax rates on people in high income brackets or to instead have "tax cuts for the rich" have been fought out in at least four different administrations in the 20th century -- under Presidents Calvin Coolidge, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

The empirical facts are there, but they mean nothing if people don't look at them, and instead rely on talking points.
The first time this political battle was fought, during the Coolidge administration, the tax-cutters won. The data show that "the rich" supplied less tax revenue to the government when the top income tax rate was 73 percent in 1921 than they supplied after the income tax rate was reduced to 24 percent in 1925.

Because high tax rates can easily be avoided, both then and now, "the rich" were much less affected by high tax rates than was the economy and the people who were looking for jobs. After the Coolidge tax cuts, the increased economic activity led to unemployment rates that ranged from a high of 4.2 percent to a low of 1.8 percent.
But that is only a fact about reality -- and, for many, reality has no such appeal as talking points.

The same preference for talking points, and the same lack of interest in digging into the facts about realities, prevails today in discussions of whether to have a government-controlled medical system.

Since there are various countries, such as Canada and Britain, that have the kind of government-controlled medical systems that some Americans advocate, you might think that there would be great interest in the quality of medical care in these countries.
The data are readily available as to how many weeks or months people have to wait to see a primary care physician in such countries, and how many additional weeks or months they have to wait after they are referred to a surgeon or other specialist. There are data on how often their governments allow patients to receive the latest pharmaceutical drugs, as compared to how often Americans use such advanced medications.

But supporters of government medical care show virtually no interest in such realities. Their big talking point is that the life expectancy in the United States is not as long as in those other countries. End of discussion, as far as they are concerned.
They have no interest in the reality that medical care has much less effect on death rates from homicide, obesity, and narcotics addiction than it has on death rates from cancer or other conditions that doctors can do something about. Americans survive various cancers better than people anywhere else. Americans also get to see doctors much sooner for medical treatment in general.
Talking points trump reality in political discussions of many other issues, from gun control to rent control. Reality simply does not have the pizzazz of clever talking points.

Liberty and Loss - Mark Steyn

I’m afraid my Fourth of July column this year casts a bit of a damper on the fireworks.

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of Obama’s speech last week was one so obvious it was barely remarked upon. As spokesperson for the spendaholic class, the President essentially told the world: Nothing’s gonna change.

We’re gonna spend spend spend the republic into the abyss.                  BMBYAB

Does 4th of July Still Matter? TS

Does Constitution Still Matter?

By THOMAS SOWELL
Posted 07/01/2011 06:11 PM ET

The Fourth of July may be just a holiday for fireworks to some people. But it was a momentous day for the history of this country and the history of the world.
Not only did July 4, 1776, mark American independence from England, it marked a radically different kind of government from the governments that prevailed around the world at the time — and for thousands of years before.
The American Revolution was not simply a rebellion against the King of England, it was a rebellion against being ruled by kings in general. That is why the opening salvo of the Revolution was called "the shot heard round the world."
Autocratic rulers and their subjects heard that shot — and things that had not been questioned for millennia were now open to challenge. As the generations went by, more and more autocratic governments around the world proved unable to meet that challenge.
Some clever people today ask whether the U.S. has really been "exceptional." You couldn't be more exceptional in the 18th century than to create your fundamental document by opening with the momentous words, "We the people."
Those words were a slap in the face to those who thought themselves entitled to rule, and who regarded the people as human livestock, destined to be shepherded by their betters. To this day, elites who think that way — including many among the intelligentsia as well as political messiahs — find the Constitution a pain because it stands in the way of their imposing their will and presumptions on the rest of us.
More than 100 years ago, so-called "Progressives" began a campaign to undermine constitutional limits on government that stood in the way of self-anointed political crusaders imposing their grand schemes on the rest of us. That effort to discredit the Constitution continues, and the arguments haven't changed much.
Time magazine's July 4 cover story is a classic example of this arrogance. It asks of the Constitution: "Does it still matter?" A rambling essay by Managing Editor Richard Stengel is a toxic blend of the irrelevant and the erroneous.
The irrelevant points out in big letters that those who wrote the Constitution "did not know about" things in the world today, including airplanes, television, computers and DNA.
This may seem like a clever new gambit, but it rehashes arguments made long ago. In 1908, Woodrow Wilson said, "When the Constitution was framed there were no railways, there was no telegraph, there was no telephone."
In Mr. Stengel's rehash of this argument, he declares: "People on the right and left constantly ask what the framers would say about some event that is happening today."
Maybe that kind of talk goes on where he hangs out. But most people have enough common sense to know that a constitution does not exist to micromanage particular "events" or express opinions about the passing scene.
A constitution exists to create a framework for government — and our Constitution tries to keep the government inside that framework.
As for the erroneous, Mr. Stengel says, "If the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it certainly doesn't say so." Apparently he has not read the Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Perhaps Richard Stengel should follow the advice of another Stengel — Casey Stengel, who said on a number of occasions, "You could look it up." Does the Constitution matter? If it doesn't, then your Freedom doesn't matter.