Hillary is Getting Her Sanctions, Chomsky The Clown

Howard Fineman
David Corn
Mona Charen

"Grassroots activists are reasserting the virtues of limited government, personal responsibility, and public accountability. Our best hope is that tea party principles will prevail. Those are the very principles that can save us from Europe's fate." - Mona Charen

"Recent elections have demonstrated popular frustration with Washington: Republican and Democratic incumbents have been booted. And the politerati are closely watching Tuesday's primaries to assess the intensity of the throw-the-bums-out fever sweeping the nation. " - David Corn

"Two years later the president is tentatively unveiling the strategy he and fellow Democrats will pursue in this fall's election season, and it has a heavy dose of ... looking backward. It's going to be as much about history as hope, and more about attacking Republicans than promoting his own vision. The goal is to give pause to independent voters eager to punish Obama for their economic insecurity by voting for GOP candidates. The message: we can't return power to the very people who gave us the catastrophic Great Recession to begin with." - Howard Fineman

I had to go to the hospital today, sorry that the blog is late.

The essays above hover around the mood of the country, trying to predict the results of the primaries taking place today. Mona is a tea party supporter, and her essay is based in fear. Fear that Obama's policies are all wrong because what he has done is contrary to what she would do in a similar situation. Fear is always understandable, but in order to banish that fear a person has to be able to look at themselves in the mirror, look at the fear face-to-face and acknowledge it, before it will dissipate. It requires trust, and as long as someone who is not conservative is in charge, that trust will not develop and the fear is generated in a self perpetuating loop. Welcome to the politics of fear... Of course, a similar situation occurred on the left when Nixon and George Bush was in power, I remember friends walking around and reacting to the day's news events, muttering "what an asshole!"...  David is a liberal trying to assess the Independent mind, be the judge whether he is successful or not, while Howard is predicting what the White House and Democratic strategy will be towards these elections. It's somewhat unsettling, so read it and weep...


Brazil, Turkey, and Iran, as expected announced an agreement over how to handle the nuclear fuel and storage for Iran's nuclear program, with turkey coming out a solid winner. The US is pissy that this happened without their input or consent, and takes a negative view over the deal made. The UN nuclear oversight committee is unhappy because they still can't get unrestricted access to Iran's nuclear facilities or able to talk to their scientists. In response, Hillary Clinton announced that the UN Security Committee had produced a final draft of the sanctions she wanted brought against Iran, and that Russia and China is on board. What probably convinced China is the Iranian declaration that they would continue to produce refined nuclear fuel at 20% enrichment, although only 8% is need to fuel an electricity producing reactor. The fact that Iran keeps trying to dictate terms instead of working with the rest of the world may have reminded China too much of their own behavior, and they certainly don't want to look too long in that mirror.

Foreign policy wonks are frustrated these days. During his first year in office, Obama didn't articulate a definite policy, so they were left to conjecture. He is more of a pragmatist, so he seemed to be reacting and trying different approaches, like the push - pull - make nice approaches he has tried with Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai.

Similar approaches have been tried to get Iran to engage with us, but they prefer to keep us as enemies. If we became friends, then half of the reason that an Islamic Republic was formed, railing against the Great Satan USA, would be lost, and then the government would be forced to take a long look into the mirror, and neith Ahmadinejad or Khameini are handsome men... So Obama hasn't articulate any specific set of ideas that can be called the Obama Doctrine, unless you consider the carrot before using the stick as viable.

a bozo no-no...

If you want to see what a nation would be like if more right wing extremists took over and ran it, look no farther than Israel. Yesterday they refused to let Noam Chomsky cross the border into Israel: "Front-page coverage and heated morning radio discussions asked how Professor Chomsky, an 81-year-old professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, could pose a risk to Israel and how a country that frequently asserts its status as a robust democracy could keep out people whose views it found offensive.


Professor Chomsky, who is Jewish and spent time living on a kibbutz in Israel in the 1950s, is an outspoken critic both of American and Israeli policy. He has objected to Israel’s foundation as a Jewish state, but he has supported a two-state solution and has not condemned Israel’s existence in the terms of the country’s sharpest critics."

"They mark the end of Israel as a law-abiding and freedom-loving state, or at least place a large question mark over this notion.” - Boaz Okun

Of course, Professor Chomsky is a famous lefty who lived for awhile on a kibbutz in Israel during the 1950's. He was invited to speak at a Palestinian school and had no plans to speak to any Jewish ones, so they government decided not to let him in. the rationale is this: “This is a decision of principle between the democratic ideal — and we all want freedom of speech and movement — and the need to protect our existence,” said Otniel Schneller, of the centrist Kadima party, on Israel Radio. “Let’s say he came to lecture at Birzeit. What would he say? That Israel kills Arabs, that Israel is an apartheid state?”


In another three months, Mr. Schneller went on, some Israeli would be standing over her son’s grave, the victim of incitement “in the name of free speech.” People like Professor Chomsky, he added, do not have to be granted permission to enter." Remember this when we are having our own debates over immigration policy...

This incident was further mremarked upon because just last month there was the Great Clown Denial. You can't make this stuff up. Ivan Prado, a famous spanish clown: "... spent six hours at Ben-Gurion airport in Tel Aviv being questioned before being sent back to Madrid. He had planned to run a clown festival modeled after one in Spain in the West Bank city of Ramallah but was accused of having ties with Palestinian terrorist groups by the Israelis." I know that some children are terrified by clowns and never grow out of it, but to keep one out of the country to for fear of harming the kids, or for fear that he may turn many fellow countrymen into clowns is irrational behavior at best... Or maybe Netanyahu was afraid of the humiliation involved from being told his bad behavior was a Bozo No-No... Clowns and critical philosophers evidently need not apply. I've always wanted to go and pray in Bethlehem and Jerusalem. What happens after banning clowns? Go after bloggers because we're one step down on the scale of importance?