Bloodthirsty Liberal

The NY Times notices that Obama is side-stepping Congress.

And they applaud it:

One Saturday last fall, President Obama interrupted a White House strategy meeting to raise an issue not on the agenda. He declared, aides recalled, that the administration needed to more aggressively use executive power to govern in the face of Congressional obstructionism.

“We had been attempting to highlight the inability of Congress to do anything,” recalled William M. Daley, who was the White House chief of staff at the time. “The president expressed frustration, saying we have got to scour everything and push the envelope in finding things we can do on our own.”

For Mr. Obama, that meeting was a turning point. As a senator and presidential candidate, he had criticized George W. Bush for flouting the role of Congress. And during his first two years in the White House, when Democrats controlled Congress, Mr. Obama largely worked through the legislative process to achieve his domestic policy goals.

But increasingly in recent months, the administration has been seeking ways to act without Congress. Branding its unilateral efforts “We Can’t Wait,” a slogan that aides said Mr. Obama coined at that strategy meeting, the White House has rolled out dozens of new policies — on creating jobs for veterans, preventing drug shortages, raising fuel economy standards, curbing domestic violence and more.

If the Republicans win in November, they can do whatever they want. No need to follow any sort of pre-arranged, Constitutionally-based, protocol.

This highlights the cynicism of the Democrats:

The sharpest legal criticism, however, came in January after Mr. Obama bypassed the Senate confirmation process to install four officials using his recess appointment powers, even though House Republicans had been forcing the Senate to hold “pro forma” sessions through its winter break to block such appointments.

Mr. Obama declared the sessions a sham, saying the Senate was really in the midst of a lengthy recess. His appointments are facing a legal challenge, and some liberals and many conservatives have warned that he set a dangerous precedent.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate Democratic leader, who essentially invented the pro forma session tactic late in Mr. Bush’s presidency, has not objected, however. Senate aides said Mr. Reid had told the White House that he would not oppose such appointments based on a memorandum from his counsel, Serena Hoy. She concluded that the longer the tactic went unchallenged, the harder it would be for any president to make recess appointments — a significant shift in the historic balance of power between the branches.

All of this fits perfectly with the John Yoo video a few posts down, and backs up what BTL and I have been saying since early in the 2008 Presidential campaign cycle. I have concluded that the US deserves what we have elected and am at peace with it, but I wonder sometimes about the bitterness that people will experience as they understand that we really don’t have the rule of law any longer.

- Aggie

The transitions are a bit long, so wait through the black. She is extremely interesting. BTL, I tried to resize and couldn’t get it to work.

- Aggie

Seriously, folks, this is by design:

The Jewish Federation of North America is opposed to the Obama administration’s fiscal 2013 budget that would limit the value of tax deductions for charitable contribution, saying that it would threaten charitable giving. The Orthodox Union said proposed changes could reduce charitable donations by $4 billion annually.

William Daroff, vice president for public policy and director of the Washington office of The Jewish Federations of North America said in a statement Monday, “Despite the fact that the White House had recently indicated that its tax reform proposals would not ‘disincentivize’ large charitable gifts, today’s Budget release is disappointing for America’s charities and the millions we support, particularly during this time of economic distress.

“The Administration has once again proposed limiting the value of charitable contributions. Such a change in the I.S. tax code will result in America’s charities losing billions of dollars a year in private support that our country desperately needs. As in past year, we will work with members of Congress to defeat this misguided proposal.”

Obama doesn’t want charitable donations; he wants government to decide where money goes. No one really disputes that. It’s his job to “spread the wealth”, not the wealthy’s.

A few years ago, Thomas Frank wrote a book called What’s the Matter With Kansas? The gist of it was that people adopted conservative beliefs that were at odds with their self-interests. As he saw things.

I couldn’t imagine a more elitist premise if I tried. Conservatives—people in general—are quite able to adopt politics that agree with their world view without any help from liberal intellectuals, thank you very much.

Which is why I think Obama has to be defeatable. His policies are so at odds with American mainstream thinking that I have to believe we’ll overcome our fear of un-electing him (with the inevitable racial overtones) and vote for the Other Guy, whoever he or she may be (as long as s/he’s remotely credible). I believe… I think…

Or should I say “putting the crass in democracy”?

She has electrified the activists, but now, after her much ballyhooed entrance into electoral politics, US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren faces her first serious challenge: rallying enough state Democratic Party convention delegates to clear the primary field.

That test starts today as thousands of Democrats across Massachusetts begin the two-week process of choosing delegates to June’s state party endorsement convention.

…

Warren, a Harvard Law School professor whose public profile was forged in part during her battles in Washington as a consumer advocate, faces minimal opposition in her bid to win the party’s backing at the June convention and the nomination in the September Democratic primary.

The question is whether she has the muscle to sweep the caucuses and gain enough slates of delegates committed to her to block the two other candidates in the race – Marisa DeFranco of Middleton and James Coyne King of Dover – from the ballot.

I guess “minimal opposition” is still too much opposition, huh? Why not just—oh, I don’t know—get more votes? A radical suggestion, but who is more radical than Betty Warren? Anyway, most of the serious opposition dropped out after Warren sucked all the political oxygen (i.e. cash) out of the room.

Isn’t it a little—oh, I don’t know—icky for someone who’s never run for so much as dog-catcher before in her life to work so hard avoiding an election?

Who else would be so anti-democratic?

In his first race for office, seeking a state Senate seat on Chicago’s gritty South Side in 1996, Obama effectively used election rules to eliminate his Democratic competition.

As a community organizer, he had helped register thousands of voters. But when it came time to run for office, he employed Chicago rules to invalidate the voting petition signatures of three of his challengers.

The move denied each of them, including incumbent Alice Palmer, a longtime Chicago activist, a place on the ballot. It cleared the way for Obama to run unopposed on the Democratic ticket in a heavily Democrat district.

“That was Chicago politics,” said John Kass, a veteran Chicago Tribune columnist. “Knock out your opposition, challenge their petitions, destroy your enemy, right? It is how Barack Obama destroyed his enemies back in 1996 that conflicts with his message today. He may have gotten his start registering thousands of voters. But in that first race, he made sure voters had just one choice.”

I mean who else?

Do you remember the looting of the art museum in Baghdad at the beginning of the Iraq war? The Left was furious with Bush because supposedly many treasures were destroyed. It turned out to be a wildly exaggerated claim. This one seems to be true, but, since it happened on Obama’s watch, we won’t hear much about it. The article is in the British newspaper, The Guardian, and given how much they lie, it could be a fabrication. But it appears to be true.

Volunteers in white lab coats, surgical gloves and masks stood on the back of a pickup truck along the banks of the Nile in Cairo, rummaging through stacks of rare 200-year-old manuscripts that were little more than charcoal debris.

The volunteers, ranging from academic experts to appalled citizens, have spent the past two days trying to salvage what’s left of some 192,000 books, journals and writings, casualties of Egypt’s latest bout of violence.

The Institute of Egypt, a research centre set up by Napoleon Bonaparte during France’s invasion in the late 18th century, caught fire during clashes between protesters and Egypt’s military over the weekend. It was home to a treasure trove of writings, most notably the handwritten 24-volume Description de l’Egypte, which began during the 1798-1801 French occupation. It includes 20 years of observations by more than 150 French scholars and scientists, was one of the most comprehensive descriptions of Egypt’s monuments, its ancient civilisation and contemporary life at the time.

It is probably now burned beyond repair.

So we know why The Guardian published this: It was filled with European documents. It is still a tragedy and a reminder that mobs are not good. And youth mobs – I’m betting this was a youth mob because you need to be fairly young to riot, you need good knees for running, that kind of thing – are the worst.

- Aggie

The Egyptian military attacks protesters, sets tents on fire.

This is what you’d expect from Egypt. You can go to the link to read about it.

More interesting to me is what Natan Sharansky has to say about it all.

Sharanksy was a Soviet prisoner, a Jewish dissident, held for twelve years, I think. Ronald Reagan was able to free him. (Jonathan Pollard needs a Ronald Reagan). He moved to Israel and dropped the Russian first name – Anatoly – for the Hebrew name – Natan. He is a leader of freedom-loving people all over the world. At one time the liberals also loved him, but now they typically loathe him. George Bush claimed that Sharansky’s book, The Case for Democracy, inspired his policies. And Sharansky has hope for Egyptian democracy. So, although I am skeptical, I respect him deeply.

The results of the recent parliamentary elections in Egypt have fueled a new round of anxiety in the West over the direction of the Arab Spring. Hopes raised to a fever pitch by the events of January and February have suffered a crushing blow. Observing the victory of the Islamist parties last month, liberals’ miserable showing and the military’s determination to maintain an iron grip, some ask whether the end of Egyptian democracy is already in sight. Others are asking whether democracy, “our” Western heritage, is really for “them.”

These are the wrong questions, and the attitude behind them, if encapsulated in policy, will ensure the return of dictatorship or worse.

This same reflexive attitude long undergirded Western support for Egypt’s dictatorial rulers as the guarantors of “stability.” That support, in turn, helped lay the groundwork for the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, suffocating other, better political options. Are we now bent on repeating the same dreary cycle, lending our consent to repression in the name of a false stability?

Consider how unprepared Western governments and publics were for the events of the Arab Spring. They shouldn’t have been. At a 2007 democracy conference in Prague, Egyptians such as Saad Ibrahim, Iraqis such as Mithal al Alusi and other Arab democratic dissidents assured the participants, including President George W. Bush and other Western statesmen, that their region was ripe for popular revolt. What had happened in the Soviet Union, they said, was already happening in the Middle East: Ordinary people were losing their fear, daring to exercise their long-suppressed faculty to not only speak but also think freely. It was merely a matter of time before the actions of a few would multiply and become, in the end, irrepressible.

The Western officials gathered in Prague loved what they heard from these dissidents. But after they went home, nothing changed in their governments’ policies. The stability model continued to reign and, with it, the rationale that in Egypt there was no alternative but the Muslim Brotherhood or chaos.

The Arab Spring gave the lie to the stability model, which — as the Prague dissidents knew and as millions went on to demonstrate this year — was in fact a recipe for instability. In Cairo’s Tahrir Square the people spoke, and what did they demand? Not the destruction of Israel. Not the damnation of America. They demanded the right to live in a society where minds would no longer be controlled. Their demand was local, but their message was universal.

One Western response to the Egyptian revolution was to back elections. These are far from a bad thing, but they are not the main thing. Thus far, post-Mubarak elections in Egypt have sparked further turmoil, alarm, disillusionment and fatalism among Western observers beguiled by the dream of a democratic triumph. “It’s not the French Revolution,” moaned an Israeli columnist.

This is, inadvertently, an instructive point. For if the bloody aftermath of the French Revolution proves anything, it is that a gap exists between the moment people decide they will no longer live in a society ruled by fear and the moment a democratic society forms — a society that will protect not only “correct” thinking but also the thoughts one hates.

Nothing is instantaneous in politics. To think of elections as a panacea, let alone a sure road to real democracy, is to evince a failure of historical imagination. The proper role of the free world is not to encourage or to stop elections. Its role should be to formulate, and to stick by, a policy of incremental change based on creating the institutions that will lead ineluctably to pressure for more and more representative forms of government. The free world should place its bet on freedom — the hope and demand of Tahrir Square — and work toward a civil society defined by that value.

There’s more at the link. He is very brave and he is willing to wait it out, believing that somehow the underlying demand for freedom will prevail. I am a wimp. I think that the Islamists will turn it into a more repressive, terrorist state. I hope and pray that he’s correct.

- Aggie

We look at Obama’s response to the so-called Arab Spring, and say why? Obama looks at the rise of the Moslem Brotherhood and other Islamist movements across Araby, and says why not?

In a recent article, Egyptian Coptic liberal ‘Issam ‘Abdallah attacked the Obama administration for supporting the Islamist forces in the Middle East “deliberately and in an organized manner,” rather than giving its support to the secular democrats. He said that the administration had allowed the Islamist lobbies in the US, chiefly those of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and Iran, to gain enough clout over the years to influence US Middle East policy. These same lobbies, he said, were waging all-out war against the Arab liberals and anyone else who stood up for democracy and freedom in the Middle East.

Why Do the West and the US Support the Islamists instead of the Secular Democrats in the Middle East?

“The most tragic and dangerous means of oppression [being used] against the revolutions in the Arab world is not internationally forbidden arms or the Arab dictatorships, like [that of] Mubarak [in Egypt], Al-Qadhafi [in Libya], Bin ‘Ali [in Tunisia], Saleh [in Yemen], and Al-Assad [in Syria], but that being used by the Islamist lobby in the US – or, more precisely, ‘the Islamist lobbies,’ which are the most influential and powerful [lobbies] in Washington.

…

“We have come to understand, like [the rest of] the enlightened people in the world, that the Obama administration is resolved to support the new tyrannical forces, which have come to power by way of ‘formal democracy.’ The MB in Egypt, the Islamist Al-Nahda party in Tunisia, the Al-’Adala party in Morocco, and the transnational Islamist militias (Al-Qaeda) in Libya were supported by Washington deliberately and in an organized manner, at the expense of the liberal and secular forces in the region.”

A disputable assertion, I suppose, but the facts on the ground (and all the liberal reformers in the ground) would support it.

Thanks, Barry. Those women didn’t want equality anyway. And who needs peace between Egypt and Israel. The world is a much safer place today with Obama in the White House.

Islamists claimed a decisive victory on Wednesday as early election results put them on track to win a dominant majority in Egypt’s first Parliament since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, the most significant step yet in the religious movement’s rise since the start of the Arab Spring.

The party formed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s mainstream Islamist group, appeared to have taken about 40 percent of the vote, as expected. But a big surprise was the strong showing of ultraconservative Islamists, called Salafis, many of whom see most popular entertainment as sinful and reject women’s participation in voting or public life.

Analysts in the state-run news media said early returns indicated that Salafi groups could take as much as a quarter of the vote, giving the two groups of Islamists combined control of nearly 65 percent of the parliamentary seats.

I would like to remind our brain-dead liberal readers that you believed the nonsense from the White House and from the State Department: This is a Democracy movement! There is simply no learning curve in this country any more, and we will someday pay the price. Does anyone recall that the Bush administration was all overjoyed at the thought of voting in Gaza? How did that work out? Why couldn’t we see the trend?

That victory came at the expense of the liberal parties and youth activists who set off the revolution, affirming their fears that they would be unable to compete with Islamists who emerged from the Mubarak years organized and with an established following. Poorly organized and internally divided, the liberal parties could not compete with Islamists disciplined by decades as the sole opposition to Mr. Mubarak. “We were washed out,” said Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, one of the most politically active of the group.

Although this week’s voting took place in only a third of Egypt’s provinces, they included some of the nation’s most liberal precincts — like Cairo, Port Said and the Red Sea coast — suggesting that the Islamist wave is likely to grow stronger as the voting moves into more conservative rural areas in the coming months. (Alexandria, a conservative stronghold, also has voted.)

The Obama administration is going to refuse to discuss this, and the media will soon stop reporting, so let’s tell the truth while we can: The United States, as the most powerful nation on earth, has responsibilities. Peace and stability are good. Revolution and anarchy are bad. Rigid religious systems that oppress women and minorities are bad. The United States, but turning a blind eye to what was obviously happening in Egypt, supported bad outcomes. We could not possibly have been stupid enough to innocently believe that the Islamists wouldn’t take over the country. And that leads to the most basic question about the Obama administration: Is Obama merely incompetent or is he malevolent?

- Aggie

Why do I think America will be called upon to save the continent for a fourth time (the Huns, the Krauts, and the Russkies)? Only the red liquid seeping into the ground will be ink, not blood.

The European Commission has proposed perhaps the most radical shift in decision-making away from parliaments and toward unelected bodies in the history of the European Union.

Under proposals unveiled by the EU executive on Wednesday (23 November), while formal domestic lawmaking procedures are to remain in place, almost all fiscal policy decisions would be taken out of the hands of national assemblies and delivered up to European civil servants.

The far-reaching proposals instantly provoked accusations of a hollowing out of democracy in Europe – allegations that the commission has angrily dismissed, saying the moves are necessary if the euro is to survive.

…

“The EU is doing what it does best: creating new rules and layers of governance that undermine national sovereignty,” said MEP Jan Zahradil, the Czech chairman of the ECR.

The proposals “are fundamentally flawed by the complete absence of any democratic check or legitimacy,” said Green MEP Philippe Lamberts, the group’s economic policy spokesman.

“Simply giving far-reaching budgetary surveillance powers to EU technocrats, with no in-built democratic checks, would amount to a scaling back of the democratic process,” he said.

Let me see if I have this right. The EU exists to tether together the fates of European countries. This is done especially to keep German ambitions in check. Ergo, to save the continent from tyranny, it must be tyrannized.

Little help, Nigel?

Thanksgiving in Egypt

The number of people wounded in three days of clashes in Egypt has reached 1,700, a health ministry spokesman said Monday.

In addition, 20 people have died, including at least 10 on Sunday in confrontations between protesters and security forces in Cairo.

Doctors at Cairo’s Tahrir Square said injuries include gunshot wounds, excessive tear gas inhalations and beatings to the head.

“I have received many people suffering of convulsions,” said Tarek Salama, a medic in a makeshift hospital in Tahrir Square. “Lots of gunshot wounds from rubber and bird shots. And I have seen two cases who have been hit with actual live bullets.”

Tahrir Square — once a center of euphoria following the ouster of longtime President Hosni Mubarak in February — continues to be a major flashpoint for the unrest.

Will they even notice at the White House?

- Aggie