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Making Certain Government Can’t Do Its Job

Burnishing Bush

Two weeks ago Laurence Silberman wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “The Dangerous Lie That ‘Bush Lied'” to say how “shocking” he found former Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier’s having twice asserted on Fox News that President George W. Bush “lied us into war in Iraq”.

Silberman is a senior federal judge on the D.C. Court of Appeals and served as co-chair of the commission assigned in 2004-05 to evaluate the “intelligence community’s determination that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD”. He warrants that it was intelligence that Bush relied on as his “primary casus belli” and reliance on what proved to be “dead wrong” does not make Bush a liar.

There are weaknesses in his certitude. He cites the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) and its “90% level of confidence” that “Saddam had weapons of mass destruction” as the leading determinant in Bush’s decision. But that’s not what the NIE said. “Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons” was the conclusion of the sixteen intelligence services, which then said only that “We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs”. Silberman doesn’t make that clear. His “Saddam had weapons of mass destruction” leaves the reader to assume nuclear weapons, especially use of the word “destruction”, which one doesn’t commonly associate with chemical and biological weapons.

So that led us to wonder how close to accurate were Judge Silberman’s other assertions to absolve the 43rd president.

He reminds us that “Saddam had also attempted to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush” in Kuwait in 1993, “But President George W. Bush based his decision to go to war on information about Saddam’s WMD”. Implicit is that the younger Bush was not motivated by revenge. But the judge doesn’t get to erase what Bush had said. In a September 2002 campaign speech six months before the invasion, Bush cited a number of reasons why Saddam was so dangerous to the U.S., among them, “After all, this is the guy who tried to kill my dad”. He would refer to the assassination attempt again that month in an address at the United Nations General Assembly, urging adoption of a resolution demanding that Saddam surrender his WMD. We could also cite Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, whose perspective on the cause of war as the first proconsul in Iraq before Paul Bremer’s disastrous reign was more immediate than than that of Judge Silberman sitting in D.C. a year or two later. Garner said of George W. Bush that “he had a burr in his saddle on Iraq because they made an assassination attempt on his father”.

Silberman wants us to believe that Bush based the decision to attack Iraq in 2003 solely on the intelligence handed to him. But longer memories recall Richard Clarke saying that, on the night after 9/11 two years earlier, Bush had demanded “Iraq, Saddam, find out if there is a connection”. The origin of the 9/11 attacks was al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but there was an eagerness to go after Iraq from the start and the intelligence that Silberman says Bush relied on came later and was made to order — raw intelligence free of analysis “cherry-picked” and “stove-piped” straight to the top were the terms of choice at the time.

In leaked minutes of a meeting at 10 Downing Street, Richard Deerlove — “MI6”, Britain’s chief of intelligence — fresh from a trip to Washington where he learned of U.S. manipulation of intelligence first hand, reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair that “The intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy”.

As another proof that lies took us to war, the AP reporter could have cited Bush’s use of United Nations resolution 1441 as justification for going to war. The following article from 2007 by guest writer Al Robdell makes clear that the conditions of 1441 had already been met by Saddam Hussein, yet Bush went on to create his own reality for our consumption in his search for exculpation:
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          Not just a lie, a “Big Lie”

See the President of the United States of America rewrite history in front of your very eyes when he was asked this Wednesday whether there was any choice other than going to war with Iraq:

It’s important to document the actual history of those days, when there was a choice to be made, since this version, repeated often enough without a single objection soon becomes the new reality.

Here are the President’s words, which he has spoken numerous times before almost verbatim, from the White House Transcript:

Q: So there was no choice — so there was no choice between the course we took and leaving Saddam Hussein in power? Nothing else that might have worked?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, we tried other things. As you might remember back then, we tried the diplomatic route: 1441 was a unanimous vote in the Security Council that said disclose, disarm or face serious consequences. So the choice was his to make. And he made — he made a choice that has subsequently left — subsequently caused him to lose his life under a system that he wouldn’t have given his own citizens. We tried diplomacy. As a matter of fact, not only did I try diplomacy; other Presidents tried diplomacy.

Let me paraphrase his statement:

The United Nations, the nations of the world, speaking in unity, gave Saddam Hussein an ultimatum to disclose his Weapons of Mass Destruction and to disarm (destroy his illegal weapons, (specifically defined as WMD along with certain long range missiles.) He then adds that this was encompassed in Resolution 1441 which stated that if he refused, he would face “serious consequences” which is diplomatic language for war.

This statement is so clear and reasonable, if only it were true. This was not an off the cuff answer. This is the story that is being repeated to the public. It could be taken from this description of Joseph Goebbels’ “Big Lie,” that if you you repeat something consistently over a long enough period, even though false, it becomes a new reality.

Now comes the easy part, dissecting this sham for what it is: Yes, Saddam did refuse to disclose his WMD. But in this case his excuse is pretty compelling: he didn’t possess any to disclose. My source? How about President Bush from the same news conference, spoken about one minute before he said Saddam was attacked for not disclosing WMD:

I obviously thought he had weapons, he didn’t have weapons; the world thought he had weapons. It was a surprise to me that he didn’t have the weapons of mass destruction everybody thought he had…

O.K. He couldn’t “disclose” what he didn’t possess; now what about the “destroy” part of the ultimatum?

It turns out that there was only one type of weapon that Iraq possessed that was marginally illegal based on the outside limit of its range. Weeks before the invasion these missiles were being destroyed as fast as possible as indicated in this reportfrom the New York Times of March 8, 2003, twelve days before we attacked:

The assessment from the weapons inspectors took account of Iraq’s cooperation since Nov. 27, when inspections in Iraq resumed for the first time since 1998, after the Security Council passed a unanimous resolution. In addition to casting severe doubt on the reported Iraqi attempt to buy uranium in Niger, Dr. ElBaradei said that ”there is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import aluminum tubes for use in centrifuge enrichment” of uranium into weapons-grade material. For months, American officials have cited Iraq’s importation of these tubes as evidence that Mr. Hussein’s scientists have been seeking to develop a nuclear capability.

Mr. Blix reiterated that the destruction of 34 Al Samoud 2 missiles in the past week “constitutes a substantial measure of disarmament indeed, the first since the middle of the 1990’s. We are not watching the breaking of toothpicks.“

Disarm?: far from refusing, Iraq was acceding to the demand, as reported by the U.N. Chief Inspector.

So what else is wrong with President Bush’s summarization of why we attacked Iraq? I’m talking about proximate causes here, not underlying motivations which is another more complex subject. He mentions U.N Resolution 1441 as containing the ultimatum and threat of war. Here’s how one newspaper saw it:

It should be remembered that U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, adopted in November 2002 regarding Iraq, was also unanimous but not definitive. The consensus was an additional resolution would be needed to authorize action against the Baghdad regime. But when Washington tried to get such a resolution, it failed to even muster a majority of the Security Council, with three veto-yielding members (China, Russia and France) opposed.

This wasn’t from the New York Times or the Washington Post. It was from the July 26, 2006 edition of The Washington Times, considered the Fox News of the print media.

There’s more, so much more that refutes the content and implications of the President’s statement, such as the acknowledgment by his Press Secretary as the war was approaching that even acceding to the 1441 demands would no longer be sufficient,

Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said today that President Bush was hopeful that war could be averted, but that to escape military action, Iraq must disarm and Mr. Hussein must be deposed.

That combination of events, he said, looked highly unlikely.

Pressed on the point, Mr. Fleischer said both would be necessary conditions because disarmament was the United Nations’ goal and changing Iraq’s government was the president’s.

The statement puts the United States on a different track from the United Nations, whose resolutions have been concerned with the immediate and unconditional disarmament, not with a change of government in Baghdad. that Saddam must give up power.

the above report from a New York Times article concluded with, “All pretense of Iraq being attacked based on the will of the international community was abandoned.”

There are those who are convinced that everything that President Bush has said about this war is a lie, most importantly his underlying motivation for it in the first place. While some may refute this, and many do, how does one justify his blatant rewriting of the events leading up to this war.

We could not have possibly attacked Iraq because Saddam refused to “Disclose and Disarm.” He was disarming and he had nothing to disclose. This is irrefutable fact– from the President’s own words, that of his press secretary, and the most extreme right wing newspaper in the country.
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A few days ago there was a highly recommended sketch by a noted humorist that showed a video of a fictional White House reporter challenging the President at a news conference. While most of us were enjoying the satire, I almost believed it was real. And I was somewhat peeved that I was tricked into buying into it.

Perhaps I was made numb by the routine bizarre fiction coming from the highest office in the land. What I find more incredible than the satiric video is that among the assembly of White House correspondents who listened to President Bush say these words, not a single one stood up and challenged him.

Not a single one of these “respected” journalists was willing to state the facts that refute his statement, to incur the wrath of this one man, who willfully and purposefully perpetrated an illegal act of war; and now has the effrontery to attempt to rewrite history, by erasing his crime with this “big lie.”

                           Al Rodbell writes on a wide range of topics
                                       on his personal website, AlRodbell.com

The Talks with Iran, What Are the Odds?

Congress’s resolve to influence any accord with Iran is born of deep skepticism over the negotiations so far. They have watched
the Obama administration and its five partners acquiesce to a succession of extensions in which Iran has yielded little.

With a final agreement nowhere in sight, negotiators had in November 2013 settled for a six-month “interim agreement” so that talks could continue. It gave Iran immediate rollbacks of some sanctions already in place and released an estimated $6 to $7 billion in frozen assets in return for only pledges that Iran would cut back its steady march to what appears to all as nuclear weapons capability.

The Joint Plan of Action, as it is more formally called, required Iran over six months from January 20 to July 20 of last year to cease installing new centrifuges, to halt most work on a heavy-water reactor meant to extract plutonium and to dilute its stockpile of uranium that had been enriched to the 20% level capable of arming a nuclear bomb. All of these cutbacks were quickly reversible if talks had collapsed, leaving the partners with nothing, whereas Iran had received tangible benefits. And by freeing Iran to continue uranium enrichment to a lower level, the agreement gave away what had always been on the list to take away. Nowhere in the talks are restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missile program considered. The Obama administration agreed not to bring it up despite no country lacking an atomic warhead ever having been interested in developing ICBMs. Iranian President Hasan Rouhani tweeted “In #Geneva agreement world powers surrendered to Iranian nation’s will”.

The six months passed and talks were extended another four months to late November last year with the interim rules still in place. That date came and went with little progress and another extension of the status quo was agreed to, this one to the end of June this year — unless, of course, more time is needed.

That explains why ten Democrats have joined all Republicans in the Senate to press for a tougher set of sanctions, which in their view is the only way to bring Iran to heel and end its stalling while, many assume, it secretly advances weapon development in undiscovered locations. The view in Congress is that Obama’s policy is no more than hope that Iran will change and that he is willing to yield all the way to the next president to avoid the question of war. What the “president wants is to escape the ‘binary choice’ between accepting the unacceptable and launching a preemptive strike”, writes Reuel Marc Gerecht at The Weekly Standard.

progress?

Fears that the Iranians would not live up to their pledges in the intermim agreement were unfounded, say inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who say they’ve been scrupulous about “blending down” bomb grade fuel. Last November, Obama said on ABC’s “The Week” that the interim deal “has definitely stopped Iran’s nuclear program from advancing” while the negotiations continued. Secretary of State John Kerry
said “the interim agreement wasn’t violated. Iran has held up its end of the bargain. And the sanctions regime has remained intact.”

poles apart

But interim rules and their good faith observance belie the minefield of intractable disagreements that lie ahead.

To begin with, the U.S. and negotiating partners Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China are focused on lengthening the “breakout” time — the amount of time Iran would need to produce enough fuel for a single bomb. They want to assure that if there were an accord and Iran chose to break it, at least a year would be needed.

That translates to converting the heavy-water reactor at Arak to a light-water facility incapable of producing plutonium. It means, according to a former U.N. weapons inspector, that 15,000 centrifuges currently whirring at enrichment plants at Natanz and Fordow would have to be destroyed so as to leave behind only 4,000 first generation machines — enough to produce fuel for civilian use but not a bomb.

Try telling that to the Iranians, who say they will need 50,000 centrifuges for planned civilian reactors. They want the explicit right to make as much nuclear fuel as desired for peaceful purposes. The Ayatollah Khamenei, who holds the ultimate authority, has
publicly spoken of a desire for a tenfold increase in enrichment capacity in years to come for the country’s power sector — an unacceptable centrifuge population because Iran would have a “breakout time” of just weeks to produce weapons-grade fuel.

The allied nations demand a comprehensive inspection system to minimize the possibility of Iran building a nuclear weapon at undiscovered sites — or of their buying one from an outlaw nation like North Korea. A letter to Obama from Senators Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Lindsay Graham (R-SC) last summer said that for the Senate to sign off, inspection rights would have to last “at least 20 years” and would
guarantee “access to any and all facilities, persons or documentation”, the last two stipulations derived from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which Iran is a signatory, and standard practices of the IAEA. But Iranian officials have made it clear that the Islamic Republic will allow neither inspections of undeclared sites nor the freedom of inspectors to go anywhere, anytime.

A serious sticking point is that Iran is adamant that sanctions are to be lifted immediately and permanently as a condition of any final agreement. That won’t fly with Obama, who will only suspend step by step as Iran complies with the terms of the deal. In that, he has the full support of Congress.

a matter of trust

The Iranian demand is based on distrust that the United States will honor its agreement. The clerics think we are trying to overthrow their regime. They are mindful of Qaddafi, who gave up his nuclear ambitions and was rewarded with death and the destruction of his regime. And they see past Obama that hard-liners in Congress ultimately must approve the revocation of sanctions.

Underlying all is an abiding hatred of America, “the Great Satan”, that goes back to the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, a democratically elected prime minster, by Britain’s MI5 and the CIA; followed by support of the brutally repressive Shah; and by America’s siding with Iraq in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War.

The U.S. is of course equally distrustful of Iran. In 2009 we discovered Iran had secretly tunneled into a mountain outside the city of Qum to build an underground centrifuge facility, now known of as Fordow, so deep that only America’s largest bunker-busting bomb has a chance of reaching it.

Files and diagrams were found on a smuggled laptop a decade ago that provided evidence of weapons design, yet Iran continues to deny it seeks to develop a nuclear bomb.

For six years international nuclear weapons inspectors have demanded that Iran — in accordance with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty — turn over experiments suspected to be attempts to solve the difficult science of detonating a bomb.

Despite Obama and Kerry assurances of compliance, Iran is known to be selling more than the monthly quota of a million barrels of oil allowed by the interim agreement’s sanctions relief.

And the former number two at the IAEA is convinced that Iran has illicitly imported enough carbon fiber to manufacture 5,000 advanced IR-2 centrifuges. Iran will not reveal its whereabouts or purpose.

For these reasons, even with a formal accord there will always be the suspicion that Iran will operate a parallel, covert track to develop highly enriched uranium for what is referred to as a “sneakout”. Our once-classified 2007 National Intelligence Estimate concluded as much. Thus we go on searching with spy satellites for tunnel entrances, of which intelligence services think there are hundreds, perhaps thousands. That hunt explains why one of our drones crashed in Iran several years ago.

many cooks

Even if by some alchemy the negotiators come to agreement, hurdles remain. Obama will need to persuade a contentious Congress to revoke the sanctions. President Hassan Rouhani and his foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, seem less interested than the hardliners in Tehran in the pride of joining the nuclear club and have worked to strike a deal, but they must win the approval of the Ayatollah Khamenei and the parallel clerical revolutionary government that has final authority. They also have to cope with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which runs the military side of the nuclear program and has no interest in giving it up. “Everyone is using the constraints they face back home as a reason to avoid compromise. And the fact of the matter is that there are many generals in Iran and many members of Congress in Washington who would like to see this whole effort collapse.” That was the outlook of an unnamed White House official quoted in The New York Times. In November, The Wall Street Journal said U.S. and European officials saw signs that hard-line politicians and security officials in Tehran were seeking to undermine Messrs. Rouhani and Zarif.

Given the seemingly insurmountable complications, it is hard to imagine a breakthrough. The Iranian rial has plunged some 60% relative to the dollar creating inflation at home at the same time as oil prices have been cut in half. Add the tougher sanctions that may replace failed talks and the multiple hardships could persuade the Ayatollah to relent out of the specter of public uprisings and fear for his regime’s survival. It is doubtful that the threat of attack by the U.S. deters the Iranians, though, given Obama’s clear signal of wanting to avoid war at all costs. The Iranians also have seen the U.S. stand idly by for years while North Korea tests its nuclear devices.

But Israel can’t tolerate a nuclear weaponed Iran that has repeatedly threatened its existence, so it may fall to the Israelis after all to add the finishing touches to the chaos that is the Middle East. If that happens, will a Congress that even shies from a resolution to authorize force against ISIS vote to join in?

Would-Be 9/11 Hijacker Says Saudi Royals Funded al Qaeda

He is believed to have been the intended 20th hijacker
Zacarias Moussaoui
in the 9/11 attacks had he not been arrested weeks before. He has now testified from his federal “supermax” prison in Colorado that members of the Saudi royal family were contributors to al Qaeda in the 1990s. Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, also says that in Afghanistan he once discussed with a member of the Saudi embassy in Washington how the American president’s aircraft, Air Force One, might be brought down with a Stinger missile. He said he was supposed to return to Washington with the embassy official to scout for shoot down locations, but his arrest intervened.

deep cover

In September we reported in this story, “Bush Removed Section from Congressional Probe to Protect Saudis“, that the George W Bush administration had removed 28 pages from a joint Congressional investigation of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Moussaoui’s testimony, if true, suggests that what is in those classified pages may prove to be far more incendiary than previously imagined. In response to his allegations, the Saudi embassy here called him a “deranged criminal…whose words have no credibility”. However, there has long been speculation about Saudi funding of al Qaeda. Moussaoui’s testimony moves those claims into the royal family itself.

asked to testify

The case was originally brought in 2002 and has dragged on so long, fought strenuously by the Saudis who have claimed sovereign immunity, that The New York Times likens it to Jarndyce v. Jarndyce of Charles Dicken’s “Bleak House”.

Asking to testify, Moussaoui had sent a letter to the presiding judge in a lawsuit brought against Saudi Arabia by relatives of those killed in the attacks. Proof enough that he was not prompted to do so is that “lengthy negotiations with Justice Department officials and the federal Bureau of Prisons” preceded his being allowed to come forward, as well as President Obama continuing to quash release of the 28 pages so as to avoid any contretemps with the Saudis.

Justice Department lawyers came away with 100 pages of testimony in which Moussaoui says he had acted as a messenger for Osama bin Laden. That had caused him to come in direct contact with various members of the Saudi royal family. Most notable among them, he says, was Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who just became king of Saudi Arabia. The purpose was to raise money, first for militants fighting the Russians in Afghanistan and then for what they became: al Qaeda.

Bin Laden had Moussaoui develop a database of donors to al Qaeda. Moussaoui says his list included the Saudi intelligence chief, Saudi clerics who promoted an extreme brand of Islam called Salafism, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, long the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. and a close friend of the Bush family. According to journalist Craig Unger’s book, “House of Bush, House of Saud”, business deals were made over decades that gave the U.S. “lucrative oil deals” in exchange for American military protection of Saudi Arabia. Prince Bandar “was so close to George H. W. Bush, that he was considered almost a member of the family”.

dropped stitches

What followed Moussaoui’s arrest in the U.S. became sensational. He was detained in Minneapolis on immigration charges weeks before 9/11. A flight school there alerted the FBI in August 2001 that a student wanted to learn only how to steer an airliner, not how to take off or land. Agents urged superiors in Washington to obtain a warrant to search Moussaoui’s belongings, arguing that he appeared to be an Islamic extremist. The warrant was refused. He was later found to have the telephone number in Germany of a ringleader of the terrorist cell that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.

The FBI’s arrest of Moussaoui on Aug. 17, 2001, was relayed by the FBI-CIA counter-terror center to the highest levels of the CIA, including Director George Tenet, the 9/11 Commission reported, but “the news had no evident effect of warning”. Had Moussaoui’s name been run through British intelligence files, the CIA would have discovered he had undergone training with Al Qaeda.

Despite urgings for seven months by chief White House counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke in 2001, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice delayed convening what is called a “principals meeting” between the heads of State, Defense, the FBI and the CIA. The only Bush administration pre-9/11 meeting on counter-terrorism was therefore not held until until Sept. 4, 2001. Moussaoui was not mentioned.

of sound mind

At the time of his trial, his defense lawyers had Moussaoui diagnosed as mentally ill, but he was deemed competent enough to stand trial. In the recent testimony “my impression was that he was of completely sound mind — focused and thoughtful”, according to Sean Carter, a lawyer for the plaintiffs in the deposition.

The The New York Times gave full-length treatment to the new revelations in these four full-length stories, the first a front page lede. The Wall Street Journal ran only 132 words and in it gave equal weight to the Saudi disclaimer that “his own lawyers presented evidence that he was mentally incompetent”.

There seems to be general agreement that the 28 pages should be declassified, and again we’ll refer to our original story for the fuller account of the document, the Bush administration facilitating the departure of bin Laden family members immediately after 9/11, and the Obama administration still sitting on an incriminating document that “absolutely shocked” two members of Congress whose committee was allowed to read it.

Both the Bush and Obama administrations run interference for the Saudi regime that has funded a virulent form of Islam throughout the Muslim
Obama with King Salman
world and we now hear has reportedly funded al Qaeda from the highest levels of the royal family. That has metastasized into ISIS which, while Sunni like the Saudis, poses a serious threat to the kingdom by considering itself the new Islamic Caliphate, which by definition means overtaking Islam’s two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, both in Saudi Arabia.

Yet the Saudis do nothing for the coalition; its F-16s sit on the tarmac while they complain, as we previously said, that the U.S. isn’t doing enough. So what explains America’s deference? Obama even broke off a state visit to India to go running to the funeral of King Abdullah and greet the new King Salman. We all know the answer and so does Deadline Poet Calvin Trillin at The Nation:

        “So why did we remain steadfastly loyal
        To this repressive, autocratic royal
        Whose nation’s where jihadist teachers thrive?
        Two hints: It’s black. Without it, cars can’t drive.”

Obama Hands ISIS a Propaganda Plum

The Middle Class Takes Center Stage

The “income-redistribution themes” put forth in President Obama’s budget are “amusingly detached from the reality of the largest GOP majority in Congress since 1949”, said The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page, missing the point. Others were quicker to realize that Obama of course knows that none of what he put forth would survive in that Congress. The kinder, gentler America he portrays — expanded child day care, paid sick leave, middle-class tax cuts, free community college — is designed to cast Republicans as curmudgeons for begrudging all such goodies and to put them on the defensive in the run-up to the 2016 elections.

That strategy will become more apparent when Republicans counter with a budget that will seem harsh in comparison. The President’s 10-year budget accepts an annual deficit of 2.5% of gross domestic product rising to 4% further out. But the Republican budget is expected to hammer the deficit down to zero over the ten years, which means cutting social programs, trimming the Social Security and Medicare benefits that Obama’s plans leave untouched, and casting themselves as the party of grim austerity compared to what Mitt Romney called the Democrats’ “free stuff”. “It is going to be a very difficult challenge for conservatives to make the argument that they have better solutions, because these things sound so appealing” is the warning of Lanhee Chen, Romney’s top economic adviser in 2012. Add also that Obama would pay for his “latest giveaway”, as The Weekly Standard put it, with crowd-pleasing taxes on big financial institutions, multinational corporations and the wealthy.

There are several in the Republican Party who realize that the failing middle class must be resuscitated, so some programs could find common ground. Marco Rubio has for some time spoken of increasing the child tax credit and replacing the earned-income tax credit with a more generalized benefit (see our “New Republican Thinking Would Overhaul Safety Net“). Rand Paul wants tax breaks to spur investment in low-income communities. And there is agreement that the nation’s infrastructure has been neglected too long.

But Obama wants to pay for infrastructure rehabilitation with a 14% tax levied on accumulated profits held offshore by American corporations, and a 19% tax on each year’s foreign profits hereafter. It’s illogical why a tax on profits earned in other countries should pay for infrastructure improvements in this country, but Obama unabashedly reaches into whatever pockets he can find to support his plans.

Many Republicans are in favor of infrastructure spending and the jobs it would bring, but not if it means taxing business (or raising taxes on anyone), but they have no answer to where the money will come from. John Boehner on “60 Minutes” said “we believe that through tax reform we can find the funds to fund a long-term highway bill”. That makes repair of highways and bridges depend on tax reform that never happens. And how would that yield more money anyway, if the only tax reform that Republicans will accept must not raise taxes nor, therefore, revenue?

The coming budget takes effect October and will be the first to feel the full effect of the draconian spending cuts of the “sequester” after a two-year lessening of those constraints, and both sides want to explore relief from its “meat axe” approach out of fear that it will halt the economic recovery in its tracks. But Republicans want to lift only defense spending caps whereas Obama insists that defense increases be matched dollar-for-dollar with help for other discretionary items.

In every one of these differences sensible people can see opportunity for compromise but instead are met with the stalemate of entrenched positions. Failure to deal with reality has turned the budget exercise into an annual charade which results in Congress financing the government with “continuing resolutions” rather than considered programs and allocations.

For their part, Democrats will not consider — to the point of avoiding the subject altogether — any modifications to Social Security or Medicare despite their being unsustainable at present rates. There was no mention of entitlements in Obama’s State of the Union, nor any proposed modifications in his budget, nor any movement toward dealing with Social Security going negative in 2017. Beginning that year, what it pays out will exceed what it takes in and the difference must be paid out of general tax revenues.

So-called entitlements — expenses made mandatory by law (until the law is changed) — will put the squeeze on all other spending. Obama’s own budget shows discretionary spending (which includes defense) falling between 2015 and 2025 from 6.5% of GDP to 5.1%, the lowest level since 1962 (the first year in which such data were reported). Non-defense discretionary spending dwindles from 3.1% of GDP to a mere 2.2%. By 2025 Medicaid spending will be $567 billion compared to $301 billion in 2014, mostly due to Obamacare. By not dealing with elephantine entitlements, Obama undercuts the very proposals he is making. Columnist William Galston of The Wall Street Journal calls it “a slow-motion reordering of the nation’s priorities”.

Republicans speak continuously of “growth” but without specifics of how to achieve that growth other than to cut taxes still further, reduce regulations that are never particularized, and leave it to the free market to perform its miracles. Obama is pursuing “the wrong priorities…instead of helping to grow the economy and helping to grow opportunities for middle-class families” was House Speaker John Boehner’s reaction to the President’s budget. Presidential candidate in waiting Jeb Bush is already citing the catechism of “growth above all” — a goal of 4% a year but only “broad outlines” of how to get there. Any tax increase “destroys jobs”. Increasing the capital gains tax “could harm business expansion and job creation“. Never mind any evidence to back that up.

Spend a few moments with this table from The Economist and you will see that 70% of all capital gains go to a mere 1% of the population.
To pretend that the 1% is busily using the money to create jobs (rather than just trading securities amongst themselves) — or even to say that our economy is so feeble that it depends so heavily on just 1% to create jobs — is to reveal the lie that raising the capital gains tax would destroy jobs.

And lies there are aplenty in this never-ending failure to come to agreement and move the country forward. Just as many fortify their opinions from reading the editorial and op-ed pages of The New York Times, so do others solidify theirs from
The Wall Street Journal, so it matters what they say.

Obama’s budget is greeted effusively in a Times editorial, but about taxing non-repatriated funds held abroad by multinationals, neither “tax” nor “foreign profits” are mentioned; they are called “greater contributions from corporate America”. The added taxes on “those atop the wealth ladder” would also be “contributions”. He does indeed deal with the problems of Social Security, says the Times, by his budget’s assuming passage of immigration reform, “essential to the financial health of the Social Security system”.

The Times choice of words amounts only to shading whereas honesty is cast aside in The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial writers’ reaction to the President’s idealistic plans for a middle-class rescue. The wide divide in incomes in America have long been an Obama meme yet readers are told that, “The President has suddenly discovered that middle-class incomes have plunged on his watch” and it is Obama’s “policies that have done so much to reduce middle-class incomes”.

How’s that again? Obama caused incomes to drop? Are they maybe talking not about income but the added cost of health insurance for those who do not qualify for subsidies? Rather, it turns out they are referring to this chart
accompanying their editorial. They want their readers to believe that the plunge in incomes caused by the economic crash — which occurred in September of 2008, before Obama was president, before he was even elected — and the Great Recession that resulted, were somehow his doing.

That brings to mind the other standard agitprop, that Obama has added more to the national debt than all other presidents combined. When Sean Hannity of Fox News recited that a while back, the program’s liberal foil Juan Williams objected that Hannity was blaming the President for the fallout from the 2008 crash; government revenues had plunged due to job losses in the millions. Hannity’s response was, “Oh, c’mon. That again, Juan?”

Senate on Climate Change? Yes, But Humans Not to Blame

As part of the vote on the Keystone XL pipeline, Democrats forced Senate members to state their beliefs for the record on climate change. Senators were first asked to vote on the amendment “It is the sense of the Senate that climate change is real and not a hoax” put forth by Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, who has lectured the Senate weekly 84 times on the subject.

The vote was 98-to-1 in agreement, “a historic shift for many of my Republican colleagues”, says Whitehouse. You are probably assuming that the lone vote against was from Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe, famous for saying that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”. But it wasn’t. The lone vote was from Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi. Inhofe voted “aye”, saying the true “hoax” is that climate change is the result of human activity.

A second vote on “climate change is real (and) human activity contributes to climate change” failed 59-40 to overcome a filibuster. That says a full 40% of the Senate doesn’t think humans have had anything to do with the changing climate.

When “significantly” was added (“…human activity significantly contributes…”) in a third vote, nine of the 59 fell away. Only 50 thought the human impact significant.

america disagrees

The votes against human contribution to climate change came from Republicans. No surprise there, as even the climate change issue is bafflingly politicized. But to illustrate just how behind the curve are the folks we send to the Senate, out came a poll at the same time that said half of American Republicans support government action to curb global warming and would vote for a candidate who campaigned on fighting climate change. The poll was conducted by a research organization for the New York Times, Stanford University and environmental group, Resources for the Future.

It will be interesting to see whether candidates for the 2016 Republican nomination take note of these findings. In the run-up to the 2012 election, all save Jon Huntsman denied the science and opposed any remedial action.

Who’s Foreign Policy Is It Anyway?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thinks the tide has
turned and that the new Republican-controlled Congress now runs the country, so he plans to bypass President Obama and the White House and go directly to a joint session of Congress in March to urge its members to subvert the negotiations with Iran by the United States and five other nations.

He comes at the invitation of House Speaker John Boehner, who evidently thinks Congress should remove foreign policy from the President’s portfolio. Obama “expects us to stand idly by and do nothing while he cuts a bad deal with Iran…Two words: ‘Hell no!’…We’re going to do no such thing,” was Boehner’s response to criticism of what the White House gently called his “departure from protocol”.

The invitation was issued right after the President’s State of the Union speech in which he made a bid for greater cooperation between the government branches.”I did not consult with the White House”, admitted Boehner, because “the Congress can make this decision on its own”. Except that Boehner decided for the whole Congress on his own. On “60 Minutes” he said he gave Obama “a heads-up that morning” and referred to Israel as “our longest ally”, which would come as a surprise to a number of other nations.

Netanyahu is all too eager to brandish his influence on U.S. policy because his pitch will be delivered just weeks before the Israeli elections, which has Boehner and the Israel-fawning

Congress choosing sides in another country’s politics.

At issue is legislation that would impose deeper sanctions on Iran if they fail to come to heel in the latest round of negotiations. To justify the Netanyahu intervention, Republicans cite U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron’s lobbying certain members of Congress not to pass that legislation on his recent visit, but Cameron going to bat for the President with a few phone calls fell well short of appearing before the entire Congress to enlist action against the President.

Netanyahu has chosen to go yet another round against Obama, working behind his back to persuade Congress to subvert White House policy. “Bibi”, as he is called, has repeatedly ignored White House calls to end the West Bank settlement expansions that are the principal cause of collapsed peace proposals between Israel and the Palestinians; has brusquely told the Obama administration “not to ever second guess me again” during the Gaza war — while pocketing an extra $225 million from the U.S. for replenishment of Israel’s “iron dome” defense missiles (the House voted 395-8 for that); rudely lectured Obama before the cameras in the Oval Office in 2011 for assuming that a return to Israel’s 1967 borders is fundamental to the two-state solution; and pulled the same end-run during that visit, going before an adoring Congress that applauded him 56 times and gave him a standing ovation. Conservative pundit Pat Buchanan refers to Capitol Hill as “Israeli occupied territory.”

wedge issue

Republicans and a number of Democrats, the latter led by Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, find the Obama administration weak in allowing the talks to drag on inconclusively, and argue that sanctions are what brought Iran to the table. “The more I hear from the administration and its quotes, the more it sounds like talking points that come straight out of Tehran,”
said Menendez, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who has for years been crafting sanctions in an alliance with Israel greater than that with a president from his own party.

The next course of sanctions on their menu would take effect if an agreement is not reached by the end-of-June deadline. They say that Obama would be able to apply to Congress for monthly waivers on specific items as a way to slow their taking effect. It is not surprising that Obama does not want to be on the end of Menendez’ leash.

The Obama administration and other negotiants foresee that the talks may need to be extended yet again — a third time — and therefore caution that newly-imposed sanctions, or even merely voted-on sanctions, a violation of the interim agreement under which the talks are continuing, would be enough to end the process. Menendez finds it “counter-intuitive to understand that somehow Iran will walk away because of some sanctions that would never take place if they strike a deal”. Intuition isn’t needed; the Iranians have
said they would. Possibly a bluff, but our negotiating partners — the U.K., France, Germany, Russia and China — say with one voice to Congress to not sabotage the talks.

The President has said he would exercise his veto. The question is whether Congress, whose members — Republican and Democrat alike — regularly pander to Jewish voters and the Israel lobby (the Senate voted an unprecedented 100-to-0 on a set of sanctions in 2012), might succeed in overriding the veto.

It is plainly obvious that the Obama administration will opt for extended talks whenever there is the faintest hope of resolution. Ending or allowing Congress to disrupt the talks with added sanctions would lead to a stalemate in which Iran will continue on its path of developing nuclear weapons. All of our past bluster about not allowing that to happen will come to the fore. Israel will feel the “existential” need to attack. Speaking alongside Cameron, Obama said, “If in fact our view is that we have to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, then we have to recognize the possibility that should diplomacy fail we have to look at other options to achieve that goal”. The deputy national security adviser Benjamin Rhodes had once
put it more bluntly: “It just stands to reason if you close the diplomatic option, you’re left with a difficult choice of waiting to see if sanctions cause Iran to capitulate, which we don’t think will happen, or considering military action.”