carnage and culture

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Today's Tune: Drive-By Truckers - Made Up English Oceans

Drive-By Truckers Produce Their Best Album in Years

By Howard Wolfson

http://www.thedailybeast.com/

March 9, 2014

From loss to politics and even middle age, the remaining members of this alt-country rock band are belting out spectacular songs on ‘English Oceans,’ one of the best albums of 2014 so far.

All the tell tale signs were there: Members divorced one another and left the band. Writer’s block afflicted one of the two remaining songwriters. Solo albums were launched. The longest silence of the group’s career followed.

After nine albums and 18 years, the Drive-By Truckers would have been excused for succumbing to the drama, the road, their age, and packing it in. Instead, they have returned with English Oceans, one of the best albums of their career and the best album of 2014 so far.

“You know, we had to make a decision. Are we going to keep doing this? Is this worth it?” says band co-founder Patterson Hood, who spoke to The Daily Beastthis week at a hotel bar in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “Is it just getting ridiculous? Has it become a soap opera for too long, or are we going to fix this shit and go out and do it?”

“A band is tough,” Hood continues. “I mean, there is a reason why it’s a dying art. There’s less and less bands now, or at least that go at it like this.”

By “like this” he means full-out, myth-making on the road Southern rock; short stories about men and women who struggle against history’s grasp to make a living and find love. Hood and his longtime musical partner Mike Cooley have sung about George Wallace and Bear Bryant and the “duality of the Southern thing”—of “being fiercely proud of the good parts of my heritage and mortified and ashamed of the bad parts,” as Hood put it in an essay he wrote for The Bitter Southerner.

They have made some of the best albums of the last two decades, and Hood says the decision to remain a band was made with that in mind. “If we’re going to make another record, we need to make—we’re better off not making another record unless we can just make one-of-the-best-records-we’ve-ever-made-records.”

And they have.

After all the drama and the departures, the deep friendship between Hood and Cooley remains the band’s core and driving force. “This will be our 29th year as partners,” Hood says. “At the end of the day I want to hear what Cooley does to whatever song I write. I love what he does to my songs.”

Cooley is more of an equal songwriting partner on this record than on recent efforts, and, in fact, some of his songs are some of the album’s strongest.

The album is bookended by two of the most top-notch songs in the Truckers’ long catalogue: “Shit Shots Count” is a cracking “Exile on Main Street” like rave-up, all snarling guitars and punchy horns. Cooley sings, “If the table’s tilted, just pay the man who levels the floor,” which is a pretty decent summary of how the characters in the Truckers’ world get by.

The last song, “Grand Canyon,” is a beautiful homage to the Truckers’ longtime tour mate, Craig Lieske, who suffered a fatal heart attack after opening for the band in Athens. This past week at City Winery in New York City, Hood sang the song like a man possessed, eyes closed, head titled back in tribute to a lost friend and their time on the road. “If the recently departed make the sunsets to say farewell to the ones they leave behind there were Technicolor hues to see our sadness through as the sun over Athens said goodbye.

“You always have those friends that you kind of deep down know you’re going to lose, and we end up losing a lot of them. If you live long enough, you lose most of them,” Hood laments. “Lieske was not one of those guys. He was probably the last one on the road crew that I would expect to just die. So it was just such a shock.”

English Oceans is also an album written by men beginning to confront impending middle age. (Hood will turn 50 this year, while Cooley is 47.) Cooley’s “Primer Coat” is about creaking knees and children growing up and marrying out: “Mama’s planning the wedding, daddy’s planning on crying. She’s slipping out of her apron strings. You best leave him be. He’s staring through his own taillights and gathering speed.”

Politics also continues to be a focus on the new album. Hood talked up the chances of Democrats Jason Carter and Michelle Nunn to be elected statewide this November in his state of Georgia, and brags that Carter had put one of the Truckers’ songs on his grandfather Jimmy Carter’s iPod. “I’ll do anything I can to try to help them,” he says.

Two of the album’s songs—“Made up English Oceans” and “The Part of Him”—are about a Lee Atwater-type political operative who “did what he had to do to get southern boys to vote.” That kind of manipulation is a theme throughout the Truckers’ catalogue: “I can make them believe anything. The whole notion is so cynical and ugly and true, but it’s true,” Hood says.

Despite this cynicism, Hood says he is hopeful about the future. “As a culture and a country, we are hitting a tipping point. There’s no shortage of racist assholes and there always will be, but they’re getting less and less empowered, and the people they’ve been trying to oppress are getting more and more empowered.”

Hood is similarly optimistic about the band and the album: “We worked really hard and went through so much. I feel like we got it right this time.”

http://www.thenationalva.com/events/detail/drive-by-truckers

The Left Versus Minorities

By Thomas Sowell

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/

March 11, 2014

De Blasio slapped with suit over charter schools

A charter schools network is challenging Mayor de Blasio's (inset) decision to cancel the siting of three schools.

Photo: Riyad Hasan

If anyone wanted to pick a time and place where the political left's avowed concern for minorities was definitively exposed as a fraud, it would be now -- and the place would be New York City, where far left Mayor Bill de Blasio has launched an attack on charter schools, cutting their funding, among other things.

These schools have given thousands of low income minority children their only shot at a decent education, which often means their only shot at a decent life. Last year 82 percent of the students at a charter school called Success Academy passed city-wide mathematics exams, compared to 30 percent of the students in the city as a whole.

Why would anybody who has any concern at all about minority young people -- or even common decency -- want to destroy what progress has already been made?

One big reason, of course, is the teachers' union, one of Mayor de Blasio's biggest supporters. But it may be more than that. For many of the true believers on the left, their ideology overrides any concern about the actual fate of flesh-and-blood human beings.

Something similar happened on the west coast last year. The American Indian Model Schools in Oakland have been ranked among the top schools in the nation, based on their students' test scores. This is, again, a special achievement for minority students who need all the help they can get.

But, last spring, the California State Board of Education announced plans to shut this school down!

Why? The excuse given was that there had been suspicious financial dealings by the former -- repeat, former -- head of the institution. If this was the real reason, then all they had to do was indict the former head and let a court decide if he was guilty or innocent.

There was no reason to make anyone else suffer, much less the students. But the education establishment's decision was to refuse to let the school open last fall. Fortunately a court stopped this hasty shut-down.

These are not just isolated local incidents. The Obama administration has cut spending for charter schools in the District of Columbia and its Justice Department has intervened to try to stop the state of Louisiana from expanding its charter schools.

Why such hostility to schools that have succeeded in educating minority students, where so many others have failed?

Some of the opposition to charter schools has been sheer crass politics. The teachers' unions see charter schools as a threat to their members' jobs, and politicians respond to the money and the votes that teachers' unions can provide.

The net result is that public schools are often run as if their main function is to provide jobs to teachers. Whether the children get a decent education is secondary, at best.

In various parts of the country, educators who have succeeded in raising the educational level of minority children to the national average -- or above -- have faced hostility, harassment or have even been driven out of their schools.

Not all charter schools are successful, of course, but the ones that are completely undermine the excuses for failure in the public school system as a whole. That is why teachers' unions hate them, as a threat not only to their members' jobs but a threat to the whole range of frauds and fetishes in the educational system.

The autonomy of charter schools is also a threat to the powers that be, who want to impose their own vision on the schools, regardless of what the parents want. Attorney General Eric Holder wants to impose his own notion of racial balance in the schools, while many black parents want their children to learn, regardless of whether they are seated next to a white child or a black child. There have been all-black schools whose students met or exceeded national norms in education, whether in Louisiana, California or other places around the country. But Eric Holder, like Bill de Blasio, put his ideology above the education -- and the future life -- of minority students.

Charter schools take power from politicians and bureaucrats, letting parents decide where their children will go to school. That is obviously offensive to those on the left, who think that our betters should be making our decisions for us.

Monday, March 10, 2014

Reset to Nowhere

By Rich Lowry

http://nypost.com/

March 10, 2014

The “reset” with Russia had a brief, unhappy life. It began with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presenting her Russian counterpart with a mistranslated reset button reading “overcharged.” It ended with current Secretary of State John Kerry denying knowledge of the late, unlamented policy on “Meet the Press”: “Well, I don’t know what you mean by the reset.”

Memories are short in Foggy Bottom. And understandably. Who wouldn’t try to forget a geopolitical initiative that has been exposed as willful naiveté and strategic obtuseness from the beginning?

George Kennan wrote the famous “Long Telegram” at the outset of the Cold War. President Obama would have needed only “A Very Brief Telegram” at the outset of his administration: “Bush’s fault.”

This was a perverse misreading of history. Of all President George W. Bush’s failings, not giving the Russians a chance wasn’t one of them. He notoriously looked into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s eyes at the beginning of his presidency and saw sweetness and light. By the end, his illusions were shattered by the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008.

President Obama picked up like this Russian act of aggression had been perpetrated long ago by the Grand Duke of Muscovy, instead of by the very regime he was resetting with.

In a 2009 visit to Moscow, the springtime of reset, Obama professed his belief “that Americans and Russians have a common interest in the development of rule of law, the strengthening of democracy and the protection of human rights.” He was 0 for 3.

It didn’t take a student of Russian history, or of international relations or even of the model UN, to know that this would end in ashes.

At one level, the Obama administration was guilty of the human impulse of wanting to see the world as you would like it to be rather than as it is.

At another, the president isn’t particularly interested in international relations. It was appropriate that one of his statements on the crisis came at an elementary school while announcing his latest budget, which reduces the US Army to pre-World War II levels. Because we all know that we’ll never face an unexpected, unpredictable international crisis again.

This gets to the deeper ambition. The president thought Putin would help him manage an American stand-down from global leadership. Putin was happy to do so — on his own terms.

Whereas Obama has the left’s traditional discomfort with American power, Putin has no such guilty conscience. Whereas Obama believes we’ve entered a paradisiacal new period in history when everyone can be constrained by international norms, Putin has no such delusions.

Consider the New START treaty. According to nuclear expert Keith Payne, it didn’t require any cuts of deployed warheads or strategic launchers by Russia, which was already under the agreement’s limits, only by the United States.

Still, the administration treats the treaty as a signal triumph of US diplomacy. You can imagine Russian national-security analysts arguing over whether this is more pathetic or hilarious.

The attitudes behind the reset linger. John Kerry’s plaintive observation that the invasion of Crimea is “a 19th-century act in the 21st century” carries the quaint assumption that raw power politics and nationalist pride are things we left behind two centuries ago.

In a similar vein, President Obama said last week that Ukraine’s stability and success are “in Russia’s interest.” Not if you are Vladimir Putin and stung by the humiliation of the Russian empire’s diminishment after the end of the Cold War and informed by Catherine the Great’s belief that the only way to secure Russia borders is to extend them.

Obama declares that Russia is on the wrong side of history. That may be a clinching argument in a debate over gay marriage at Wesleyan University, but won’t carry much weight with Putin. He thinks he can make history move with lies, thuggery and iron.

It’s now Obama’s challenge to prove him wrong.

Molon Labe: Connecticut’s Terrifying Start Of Gun Confiscation

Rachel Alexander

http://townhall.com/

March 10, 2014

The latest gun control law in Connecticut has crossed a very frightening line. A standoff has been created between the government and tens of thousands of gun owners now considered felons. It marks the beginning of an Orwellian new phase. Gun owners saw it coming, as evidenced by their recent adoption in recent years of the defiant expression “molon labe.” The phrase originated from Spartan General-King Leonidas, who reportedly responded with “Come and get them!” to Persian Emperor Xerxes’ demand that the Spartans surrender their weapons at the Battle of Thermopylae. The Spartans fought valiantly, but were ultimately defeated. With the prequel to the Hollywood bestselling movie 300 just released last week, Americans are now even more aware of the phrase.

Until now, gun control laws hadn’t mandated the confiscation of weapons; generally, banned guns were grandfathered in under previous laws so their current owners could continue to legally own them. The Connecticut law changes all that. Passed last year in response to the Sandy Hook shooting, SB 1160 bans so-called “assault weapons” - certain rifles, more recently known as AR-15s, that have been singled out based on purely cosmetic criteria - and magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

The firearms have been banned based on how “scary” they look, not their actual usage in crimes. According to a study from the BATF that came out a few years ago, none of the top 10 guns used in crimes in the U.S. were so-called assault weapons; they were all pistols or revolvers. In fact, the #5 gun used in crimes was a shotgun, which Vice President Joe Biden advised Americans last year to use for self-defense.

The only way to legally retain one of these newly banned firearms or magazines in Connecticut now is to register it - but most gun owners do not want their name on a government list. They are well aware that a list of gun owners can someday be used by the government for confiscation. If gun owners didn’t register their firearms or magazines prior to the December 31, 2013 deadline mandated by the legislation, their firearms will be subject to confiscation and the owners considered guilty of a felony.

So far, it appears that the vast majority of gun owners affected by the legislation did not register their guns prior to the December 31 deadline, making between 50,000 and 350,000 gun owners felons. This is frightening, considering the law doesn’t just make the violation a misdemeanor, it makes it a felony, which could result in a prison sentence. Fewer than 50,000 gun owners registered their firearms by the deadline to comply with the law.

Gun owners who sent in their applications for registration after the deadline have reported already receiving letters by the government instructing them to get rid of their guns. The Hartford Courant notes that the government has records of gun owners who went through background checks in order to purchase AR-15s. The government could potentially go after any of those gun owners who failed to register their guns.

There is shock that gun owners are showing defiance. "I honestly thought from my own standpoint that the vast majority would register," said Sen. Tony Guglielmo, R-Stafford, the ranking GOP senator on the legislature's public safety committee. "If you pass laws that people have no respect for and they don't follow them, then you have a real problem."

On January 30, Federal District Court judge Alfred V. Covello upheld the law in Shew v. Malloy. While he admitted that it placed a substantial burden on the Second Amendment, he claimed that it “substantially related to the important governmental interest of public safety and crime control.” It is astonishing that a judge would use that as justification, considering even Congress sunsetted the federal assault weapons ban due to a lack of evidence showing it was effective.

Many judges come up with rulings based on their personal political views, or are pressured into a certain decision by outside special interests. Judicial activism is nothing new. Judicial activists have successfully forced a tortured, restricted interpretation of the Second Amendment over the years, in order to diminish its validity. Covello’s disappointing decision is currently being appealed, backed by the powerful NRA.

Trying to prosecute 50,000 to 350,000 gun owners would be insanity. The liberal activist politicians who passed the foolish legislation in response to an emotional response to the Sandy Hook Shooting do not represent the will of the people who elected them, who want the Constitution upheld. In many ways, the Second Amendment is our most important right, because without it, we cannot protect any of our other rights. There is a reason why it is the Second Amendment, not the 30th Amendment.

Requiring gun owners to register their firearms puts them on a fast track with sex offenders, who are required to register with the government so they can be monitored for the rest of their lives. If gun owners fail to register for tracking, they are then treated like criminals, just like sex offenders. This is bizarre, considering lawful gun owners are merely patriotic Americans concerned about protecting their cherished rights. AR-15s aren’t guns used in crimes, but are popular guns for self-defense and target shooting.

Connecticut Carry, a leading gun rights organization in the state, is daring the government to come after gun owners. The stage is being set for massive civil disobedience unless the law is changed. Many prosecutors and law enforcement officers are not going to uphold a law this heavy-handed; nevertheless, this ill-conceived legislation, pushed through by gun-control activists, is going to pit many law-abiding law enforcement officers against thousands of patriotic, American freedom-loving gun owners. It is terrifying that here in America, innocent gun owners would be put in the same category as sex offenders, turning them into felons. Connecticut governor Dannel Malloy (D), who signed SB 1160, seems to have become another King Xerxes. This time around, will the Spartans in Connecticut prevail?

Saturday, March 08, 2014

Yogi Berra and Carmen had the love story to remember with the Yankees

The best thing to happen to the Yankees legend was Carmen. He knew it. We all did. She was at his side from the time they married in January of 1949.

By Mike Lupica

http://www.nydailynews.com/

March 7, 2014

Yogi Berra and his wife Carmen wave to the crowd during Yogi Berra Day at Yankee Stadium in July 1999. (AP)

The glamorous couple, because one of them was a legendary Yankee and the other was one of the most famous movie stars ever, was Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. But that was not the great and lasting Yankees love story. The great Yankee love story was Yogi and Carmen Berra.

Yogi Berra is a great Yankee, too. Don’t worry about that, and one of the great winners in baseball history, a sweet and kind and good man who has always been so much more than the character with the funny lines and the funny television commercials. That has always been the thing with No. 8.

As much ballplayer as he was, he has always been a much better man.

And through it all, there was this great beauty, the former Carmen Short, at his side, from the time she married Yogi in January of 1949. She became a mother and a grandmother and the First Lady of the Yankees for such a long time, even through all the years when Yogi was estranged from The Stadium and his team because of the way he was fired once as manager by the late George Steinbrenner.

PHOTOS: CARMEN BERRA DEAD AT 85: HER LIFE IN PHOTOS

Always at Yogi’s side there was Carmen — pretty and smart and funny, a partner to him in all ways.

We were sitting in his living room one time in Montclair, N.J., and Carmen had walked out of the room. Yogi and I got back to talking about baseball and the Yankees and finally I asked him what he thought his greatest accomplishment was and he smiled, and nodded toward the door his wife had just walked through.

“Getting her to marry me,” he said. “Who’d have thought?”

They finally moved out of that lovely home and moved into an assisted living facility. Yogi will be 89 in May. Carmen had a stroke recently and died Thursday night at the age of 85. It was just six weeks ago that the two of them had made it to their 65th anniversary.

The books have been written and the movies have been made about Joe and Marilyn. We have always known so much about their romance and their short marriage and how he made sure there were flowers left at her grave until the day he died. He was Joe D., the Yankee Clipper, the man who had hit in 56 straight games and played in 10 World Series and saw his Yankee teams win nine of those. Marilyn Monroe was — is — one of the famous movie sex symbols of all time.

There have been other marriages between sports and show business since. Never one that seemed as iconic as that. But the marriage to talk about and the Yankees love story to talk about is the one between Yogi and Carmen.

If you were lucky enough to know her, to know the two of them, you understood it all the moment you walked through the front door of their home. You saw the way he always looked at her and she looked at him. Better than anyone, she saw all the good in her husband, the intelligence; understood why people always have said that they just wanted to go through life standing next to Lawrence Peter Berra, because good things always seemed to happen to him.

The best thing to happen to him was Carmen. He knew it. We all did. You would talk to her in all those years when he stayed away from the team, and she would always say the same thing, “Who would ever want to be mean to Yogi?”

Carmen knew about all the famous lines credited to her husband, ones that helped create a whole Yogi industry, made him one of the most well-known characters in baseball history. She knew about him saying that it sure gets late early around here; and about the day that John Lindsay’s wife, Mary, told Yogi how cool he looked in a seersucker suit on a hot New York City Day and how Yogi responded, “You don’t look so hot yourself, Mrs. Lindsay.”

One day at the house in Jersey, Carmen said, “But you know who my husband really is? He’s an example of how you can come from where he came from and still have this kind of life in America. That’s who Yogi Berra is.”

Dale Berra and I were at a charity softball game one summer, and talking about how his dad had thrown out the first pitch at the same game once and been treated like some kind of rock star, even as an old man.

“A star who married a star,” Dale said.

He was talking about his mom, whom Yogi met when she was waitressing in the 1940s at Biggie’s restaurant in St. Louis. Yogi wanted to know if she was married and she laughed and said no. They started dating. He was 23 when they married, right before the Yankees season that began with five World Series titles in a row. She was 19. This was a romance that lasted all the way until this week at the Crane’s Mill Assisted Living Facility in West Caldwell, N.J.

She was there through the glory years of the 1950s with the New York Yankees, as DiMaggio gave way to Mantle in center field at the old Stadium. She was there when her husband got fired for losing Game 7 of the World Series to the Cardinals in 1964 and there when Yogi was with the Mets in 1973, and all the way back to Game 7 again, when it wasn’t over till it was over.

Always, she was there when you would visit them in Jersey, all her life and laughter and style and love of her husband filling the room, and Yogi’s wonderful American life. This was the love story to remember with the Yankees, today more than ever. The way the world has always loved Yogi, that is the way he loved Carmen.

Today's Tune: The Pierces - Kathy's Song

Surviving Obama

By CAROLINE B. GLICK
http://www.jpost.com/
March 6, 2014

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office of the White House, in Washington, D.C.on March 5, 2012. UPI/Martin H. Simon/Pool

Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg minced few words in discussing the interview that US President Barack Obama gave him on the eve of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s latest visit to Washington.

Speaking with journalist Charlie Rose, Goldberg equated Obama’s threat to stop supporting Israel in international forums to the talk of a mafia don. Obama told Goldberg that if Israel doesn’t cut a deal with the Palestinians soon, “our ability to manage the international fallout is going to be limited.” He added, “And that has consequences.”

That statement, Goldberg noted, was a “veiled threat” and “almost up there with, ‘Nice little Jewish state you’ve got there. Hate to see something happen to it.’” Goldberg saw the interview as Obama’s way of showing that he is beginning to abandon the pretense of supporting Israel, now that he no longer faces reelection. In Goldberg’s words, “It’s not that the gloves are coming off. It’s more that the mask of diplomatic language is coming off a little bit.”

Goldberg added that due to the fact that Obama “doesn’t have to run again for anything,” he doesn’t need to pretend feelings for Israel that he doesn’t have, by among other things, going to the AIPAC annual policy conference.

And indeed, Obama has achieved a comfort level with implementing anti-Israel policies. His threat to step aside and let Israel-haters have their way in places like the United Nations or in certain quarters of Europe is of a piece with several steps the he is already reportedly undertaking to harm Israel in various ways.

Before he was reelected in 2012, Obama felt it necessary to align his policies on Iran to the preferences of the US public. And as a consequence, although he voiced harsh criticism of congressional sanctions bills against Iran, he grudgingly signed them into law. (He then proceeded to use the sanctions he opposed but signed as proof that he supported Israel in speeches before Jewish audiences.) Now that he no longer has to concern himself with the wishes of the American public and its representatives in Congress, Obama has dropped the mask of opposition to Iran and forged ahead with a diplomatic process that all but ensures Iran will acquire nuclear weapons.

The same is apparently the case with joint US-Israeli missile defense programs. On Wednesday, it was reported that the administration has slashed funding of those programs by two-thirds for the 2015 fiscal year. Obama touted his previous willingness to fully fund those programs – manifested in his decision not to veto congressional appropriations, despite his stated desire to slash funding – as proof of his administration’s “unprecedented” security cooperation with Israel.

Then there are the low-level bureaucratic sanctions that Obama began enacting against Israel last year. These involve State Department activities that are not subject to easy congressional oversight.

For instance, last week it was reported that last year the State Department drastically decreased the number of Israeli tourist visa applications it approved. The rise in rejection rates has prevented Israel from participating in the visa waiver program.

Foreign Ministry officials told reporters they believe this is a deliberate, premeditated policy.

And this week we learned that last year the State Department rejected hundreds of visa requests from members of Israel’s security services.

Although White House spokesman Jay Carney was quick to claim that Israel’s interception of the Iranian missile ship en route to Gaza on Wednesday morning was the result of US-Israeli intelligence cooperation, the fact is that the US continues to undermine Israel’s covert operations in Iran. Earlier this week, CBS reported that the Obama administration has demanded that Israel stop its reported covert campaign to kill Iranian nuclear scientists in order to delay or block Iran’s nuclear progress.

Obama’s new willingness to threaten Israel and to take the actions he feels it is safe to take to downgrade Israel’s relations with the US will likely only grow after November’s midterm elections.

After the congressional elections, Obama will feel entirely free to attack the US’s closest ally in the Middle East.

So what can Israel do? How can Israel safeguard its interests at a time when the US president publicly trashes and threatens those interests and privately undermines them? Israel already did the most important thing in this regard when voters reelected Netanyahu to lead the government last year. During his trip to the US this week, Netanyahu made clear that he understands the challenge and is competent to handle it.

Since Netanyahu returned to the premiership in January 2009, he has implemented a policy of waiting Obama out. Over the past five years, the prime minister has only directly challenged Obama when he had no choice. And that has been the right course. Little good comes to Israel from open fights with the White House. Such fights should only be engaged when the consequences of having a fight are less bad than the consequences of not fighting.

In his speech at the AIPAC Conference on Tuesday, Netanyahu rebutted every position Obama has staked out on the Palestinians and Iran without ever mentioning Obama’s name. By doing so he energized Israel’s supporters while denying Obama the ability to claim that Netanyahu is unsupportive of his policies.

In other words, he humored the White House while staking out an independent Israeli policy for which he secured the support of Israel’s American backers.

But Netanyahu’s skill in maneuvering around Obama is not enough for Israel to safely weather his presidency. Israel needs an overall strategy for securing its interests.

Such a multi-pronged strategy begins with Iran.

Israel needs to directly attack Iran’s nuclear installations – by covert action as well as through overt military strikes, as required.

According to CBS, after Obama’s diplomatic capitulation to Iran became public, Netanyahu ordered Israel’s intelligence services to concentrate their efforts in Iran on exposing the fraudulence of Iran’s purported commitment to freezing its nuclear progress. But while this is important, exposing Iran’s duplicity is not nearly as important as incapacitating Iran’s nuclear sites.

With Obama now joining Secretary of State John Kerry in openly threatening to passively support a European trade war against Israel, it is imperative that Israel develop every economic opportunity it has to expand its markets. As Netanyahu made clear in his speech to AIPAC, Israel’s technological prowess has already made it a magnet for global investors. But these opportunities should be maximized through further economic liberalization.

In a conversation with Haaretz earlier this week, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz noted that “President Obama has been the president most hostile to the nation of Israel in modern times.”

In a conversation with this writer on Tuesday, Cruz placed the blame for Obama’s success in implementing his anti-Israel policies on the Senate Democrats, led by Majority LeaderHenry Reid.

In his words, “The challenge we are facing is that the number one protector of Obama’s foreign policy has been Harry Reidand the Senate Democrats.”

On the sidelines of the AIPAC conference, Cruz blasted the hypocrisy of Senate Democrats. “At the same time they block the Kirk-Menendez sanctions [bill against Iran] and blame Israel for the impasse in peace negotiations, they proclaim their support for Israel,” he said.

And Cruz is certainly correct.

There can be no doubt that Israel’s strongest supporters today are in the Republican Party.

But it is important to remember that most Democrats also support Israel. They are simply unable politically to withstand the pressures that Obama has brought to bear to force them to stand with him against Israel.

In his speech to AIPAC, Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, who chairs the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee confessed that he was forced to stand down on Iran sanctions due to partisan pressure.

In his words, “When it comes to Iran, I have stood with you and have stood against so many in my own party.”

Menendez’s admission that he couldn’t withstand the pressures that Obama and Reid brought to bear against him indicates that among some Democrats, support for Israel remains strong, but that under Obama, Israel’s Democrat supporters are weak.

While deeply problematic, this is a problem with a limited shelf-life.

If Obama views the midterm elections as the final restraint on his ability to act against the will of the American public, his fellow Democrats likely view the elections as the last time Obama will serve as the head of their party during an election cycle. In the 2016 elections, the Democrat presidential nominee will set the tone for the party, not Obama. Moreover, as the full economic impacts of Obamacare, Obama’s signature domestic policy, become known after the midterm elections, Obama will be even more severely weakened. Consequently, his ability to pressure his Democrat colleagues to toe his line will be diminished.

Finally, given Obama’s obsessive focus on demanding that Israel surrender its land to the Palestinians, it is imperative that Israel develop a strategy for waiting Obama out on this issue.

Obama told Goldberg that Israel must surrender to the Palestinians forthwith, because it has no other option. In his words, “I have not yet heard… a persuasive vision of how Israel survives as a democracy and a Jewish state at peace with its neighbors in the absence of a peace deal with the Palestinians and a two-state solution.

As I explain in my book The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, which was released on Tuesday, Israel has a viable alternative.

It involves applying Israeli law to all of Judea and Samaria and integrating the Palestinians into Israeli society.

Israel would not be endangered demographically or democratically if it adopted this approach, and it would certainly be better off militarily.

Netanyahu has stated his support for establishing a Palestinian state. But he has made clear that he will only agree to a peace deal that protects Israel’s vital interests. While maintaining faith with that position, it would be prudent for him to discuss publicly and at length the fact while a negotiated peace is his preference, there is a fine alternative to a Palestinian terror state in Israel’s strategic and historic heartland.

If the Palestinians are uninterested in negotiating a viable agreement with Israel, then Israel will feel free to adopt an alternative course of applying its laws to Judea and Samaria.

At a minimum, such a move by Netanyahu would discredit and end Obama’s demographic threats, which are based on falsified Palestinian census data. It would place pressure on the Palestinians to show their hand – either embracing peace in a genuine manner, or demonstrating the basic falsity of their protestations of peaceful intentions. Either way, Israel would be better off.

Obama’s newfound courage to begin abandoning his pretense of supporting Israel presents Israel with a new challenge. But it is far from insurmountable. With the proper mix of policies, Israel can absorb Obama’s blows and even to blunt them, as Obama becomes an independent, unrestrained, and weak lame duck president.

The IRS’s behavior taxes credulity

By George F. Will, Published: March 7, 2014

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

Former IRS Director Lois Lerner Testifies To A House Oversight Committee On IRS Targeting Scandal

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

What’s been said of confession — that it is good for one’s soul but bad for one’s reputation — can also be true of testifying to Congress, so Lois Lerner has chosen to stay silent. Hers, however, is an eloquent silence.

The most intrusive and potentially most punitive federal agency has been politicized; the IRS has become an appendage of Barack Obama’s party. Furthermore, congruent with exhortations from some congressional Democrats, it is intensifying its efforts to suffocate groups critical of progressives, by delaying what once was the swift, routine granting of tax-exempt status.

So, the IRS, far from repenting of its abusive behavior, is trying to codify the abuses. It hopes to nullify with new rules the existing legal right of 501(c)(4) groups, many of which are conservative, to participate in politics. The proposed rules have drawn more than 140,000 comments, most of them complaints, some from liberals wary of IRS attempts to broadly define “candidate-related political activity” and to narrow the permissible amount of this.

Lerner is, so far, the face of this use of government to punish political adversaries. She knows what her IRS unit did and how it intersects with the law, and for a second time she has exercised her constitutional right to remain silent rather than risk self-incrimination. The public has a right to make reasonable inferences from her behavior.

And from Obama’s. After calling the IRS behavior “outrageous,” he now says there is not a “smidgen” of evidence of anything to be outraged about. He knows this even though the supposed investigation of the IRS behavior has not been completed, or perhaps even begun. The person he chose to investigate his administration is an administration employee and a generous donor to his campaigns.

Obama breezily says there was nothing more sinister than “boneheaded decisions” by wayward and anonymous IRS underlings. Certainly boneheadedness explains much about this administration. Still, does he consider it interesting that the consequences of IRS boneheadedness were not randomly distributed but thwarted conservatives?

The rules that Obama says befuddled the IRS boneheads — to his benefit — read today exactly as they have read since 1959. For half a century they did not prevent the IRS from processing applications for tax-exempt status in less than three months. Some conservative group should offer $10,000 to anyone who can identify aliberal group that had the experience scores of conservative groups have had — an application delayed more than three years and receipt of an IRS questionnaire containing at least 60 questions.

Speaking of questions: Can anyone identify a Democratic Senate candidate whose tax records were leaked, as Christine O’Donnell’s were when she was the Republican candidate in Delaware in 2010? Is it a coincidence that in January 2011, after Catherine Engelbrecht requested tax-exempt status for two conservative groups she founded in Texas — King Street Patriotsand True the Vote — the Engelbrecht family business was notified of its first IRS audit? Does James Comey wonder why (this was before he became FBI director), five months after Engelbrecht’s tax-exemption request, FBI agents appeared seeking information about attendees at the King Street Patriots meetings? Were five subsequent FBI contacts “checking in” for “updates” on the group’s activities really necessary? Why did the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives show a sudden intrusive interest in the Engelbrechts’ business, which has nothing to do with alcohol or tobacco or firearms or explosives?

The idea that politicians should write laws restricting people critical of them is as perverse as the idea that the sprawling, opaque IRS bureaucracy should be assigned to construe and apply such laws. It is bad enough that there is the misbegotten Federal Election Commission to do what the First Amendment forbids — government regulation of the quantity, content and timing of political speech.

This column has previously noted that in 1996 a Republican Senate candidate called the FEC to dispute campaign finance charges made by Democrats. The head of the FEC’s enforcement division told the Republican: “Promise me you will never run for office again, and we will drop this case.” So spoke Lois Lerner.

There almost certainly are people, above her and beyond the IRS, who initiated or approved the IRS’s punitive targeting of conservative groups and who hope Lerner’s history of aggressive partisanship will cause investigators to conclude that she is as high as responsibility for the targeting rises. Those people should hire criminal defense attorneys.