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	<title>Obama&#039;s Enemies List: A Growing List of Obama&#039;s Enemies &#187; Fairness Doctrine</title>
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		<title>The Fallacy of the Master Debater</title>
		<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/12/07/the-fallacy-of-the-master-debater/</link>
		<comments>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/12/07/the-fallacy-of-the-master-debater/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 07 Dec 2011 16:08:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ebliversidge</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Al Gore]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/12/07/the-fallacy-of-the-master-debater/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ Newt Gingrich: Master Debater. Such seems to be the impression driving the Gingrich boomlet in the Republican presidential contest -- as if, by virtue of his supposed debating ability, Gingrich will be the man most likely to defeat Barack Obama next fall. It's a myth, on multiple levels, as we shall see. Yet the power of the Gingrich surge does show, again, a lesson taught well by neo-Nazi David Duke when Duke was ascendant in Louisiana politics two decades ago: When considering a candidate for office, almost right up until they enter the polling booth and sometimes even in the booth itself, most voters rely more on what they see and hear themselves in real time than on facts, history, logic, or learned experience. If a speaker/debater "connects" with them, a lot of voters will actively siphon out all evidence against the speaker, in effect by adopting the "hear no evil" posture of one of the three infamous monkeys. Until powerfully disabused of what they consider a "first-hand" impression (first-hand because they "experienced" it by watching it on TV), many citizens will become the polling equivalent of jury nullifiers, becoming ever more obstinate in their positions. In this case, the position most dear to them is that they want to see somebody stick it to Barack Obama, face to face, and pummel him (politically speaking) into oblivion. With Duke's appeal to working-class white Democrats for nearly three solid years, what mattered was how well he parried the attacks from the hated media while making a case for low taxes and welfare reform -- and it didn't matter what they saw reported about his continuing Nazi or Klan ties because they didn't see it for themselves when he spoke on camera like a more approachable, blow-dried heir to Barry Goldwater. It was only in the last three weeks of his campaign for governor, when TV ads helped push through the message that a Duke governorship would cause businesses (and jobs) to flee Louisiana in droves, that all of the other accumulated evidence against Duke could finally be processed, and result in his landslide defeat. Something similar is happening with Gingrich and the image of the Master Debater. People see Gingrich handle himself well in eight-way debates (an easy task when no other candidate has even bothered criticizing you all year because you seemed so irrelevant), and they imagine that he's the one to take the fight to Obama. Suddenly it doesn't matter that he has always been not only anti-conservative on cap-and-trade, but has lied about what his position was. Suddenly it doesn't matter that he said the profiteers at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be criminally investigated even though he was one of the profiteers -- and that he, again, apparently has been prevaricating about what he did for Freddie. Suddenly it doesn't matter that he has always been wrong on a health-care mandate, wrong on ethanol for all the years he's been paid to be wrong on ethanol, wrong on entitlements and on Paul Ryan's budget, wrong on amnesty for illegal immigrants, wrong as wrong could be on ethical issues and behavior aplenty, wrong on the TARP bailouts, wrong on liberal candidate Dede Scozzafava, wrong in the past on the Fairness Doctrine, wrong on leadership, weak at actual negotiating (actually, " melting ") against Bill Clinton, weak at actually running a government, and about as personally trustworthy as Joe Isuzu : He's gonna pummel Obama, yesiree, and then all will be well! Perish the thought. First, Gingrich isn't all that good one on one. Clinton made mincemeat of him. Michele Bachmann rocked him on his heels with the mildest of assaults on amnesty. And his own former wife (number two) says he loses his cool when tweaked about personal things like his ample and undisciplined girth. Yeah, he's great on his feet -- until he implodes, at which time he drags everybody on his side down with him. But that's not the important part. The important thing is this: Even if Gingrich's debating invincibility weren't an utter myth, the notion that debates next fall will be tremendously important is a myth, and a much bigger one. The deal is this: General-election presidential debates rarely make a big difference. What makes a bigger difference is unpaid (establishment) media (Gingrich will get crushed), organization (Gingrich will get crushed), paid media (Obama's $800 million campaign will crush him), and the voters' sense of whether they would mind seeing and hearing the candidate on their TV screens for the next four years (not bloody likely, based on the Gingrich persona's long-established propensity to wear out its welcome and become grating after a few months). But let's consider this subject completely apart from Gingrich. The key question is, will strong debate performances make a decisive difference in next fall's campaign? Easy answer: No. Only one general-election presidential debate truly appeared to be decisive -- and, for that matter, only one primary-season debate had a similar effect, too. Both were won by Ronald Reagan, who was unique. In Nashua, N.H., in 1980, he waxed Poppy Bush and won a landslide because of it. Against Jimmy Carter that fall, he entered the lone debate one week before Election Day in a dead heat in the polls and ended up winning by a landslide. But that was Reagan. People liked him, in heartfelt ways, and had been liking him for 45 years. They couldn't help liking him. And they trusted, at a deep level, that he meant what he said, because he spent 25 years saying the same things -- rather than mandating-or-non-mandating, cap-and-trading or non-cap-trading, as political winds and personal financial payoffs shifted. But other than Reagan, nobody has ever swung large voting blocs -- not just in the Gallup polls, but in the voting booths -- on the strength of debate performances. Sure, John F. Kennedy arguably gained a small margin over Dick Nixon among those who watched their debate rather than listened on the radio, but all that accomplished was getting him close enough to lose if it weren't for his ability to steal the election in Illinois and Texas. Sure, G.W. Bush gained an ever-so-slight edge over Al Gore when he coolly let Gore come off as overbearing and mendacious in the last of their debates -- but again, only at the margins, and not enough to avoid a five-week Florida recounting nightmare. Bush v. Kerry? Nothing decisive. Obama v. McCain? Nothing decisive. Reagan v. Mondale? Some great lines, but Reagan led by landslide margins regardless. Clinton v. elder Bush? Well, Bush did look at his watch, but that election was decided by the timings (plural) of Ross Perot's entrances into and exits from the race. Clinton v. Dole? No difference. And while Gerald Ford certainly hurt himself by claiming Eastern Europe wasn't Soviet-dominated, he was trying to recover from a 32-point deficit anyway: The debate hardly told the tale. All of those other factors -- TV ads, grassroots organizing, wedge issues, the economy, and especially a candidate's long-term likeability -- make a much bigger difference in campaigns than do debate performances. Nobody is going to slay Obama face to face: He's too cool. He may be bested on points, but he won't show his distress. He may lose at the margins, but nobody -- especially nobody with a history of extravagant and self-defeating utterances, such as Gingrich -- will destroy him in a glorious duel. If he is to be beaten, the defeat will spring from the public's ultimate wisdom in overcoming an $800 million campaign, not from a manufactured gladiator ring. The key thing is, can a candidate against Obama, throughout the long course of a campaign, build and carry out the right narrative against him? Experience shows that Newt Gingrich cannot. The truth is that Bob Dole didn't so much lose the 1996 race to Bill Clinton -- an outcome almost unimaginable even 13 months earlier -- as that Newt Gingrich lost it. From behind the scenes ( in terms of public attention -- remember that only a tiny percentage of the public had even heard of Gingrich the day before the 1994 congressional elections) Newt Gingrich could help others in 435 House races frame a narrative against 40 years of Democratic rule; but once he was in charge of things, front and center, all he did was step all over his team's narrative again and again. Framed by the Gingrich image of Republican meanness, Dole never had a chance. And then Gingrich did it to Republicans yet again in 1998, so badly that he resigned in embarrassment. And, as was shown by his recent-year stumbles in dealing with Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Al Sharpton, Scozzafava, ethanol, cap and trade, and the Ryan budget, Gingrich has not matured one bit. A leopard can't change its spots. A grand wizard Kluxer under his sheets (à la David Duke) can't hide his wizardry. And no debate can help Newt alter his lizardry. ]]></description>
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		<title>Tech at Night: Obama and Holder vs AT&amp;T, CA tax corruption, Anonymous arrests are legion</title>
		<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/09/03/tech-at-night-obama-and-holder-vs-att-ca-tax-corruption-anonymous-arrests-are-legion/</link>
		<comments>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/09/03/tech-at-night-obama-and-holder-vs-att-ca-tax-corruption-anonymous-arrests-are-legion/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 03 Sep 2011 10:30:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>AlvarezDana</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eric Holder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fairness Doctrine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FCC]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[amazon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[competition]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dick durbin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fairness doctrine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[julius genachowski]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[news]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[press]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rick perry]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/09/03/tech-at-night-obama-and-holder-vs-att-ca-tax-corruption-anonymous-arrests-are-legion/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ This is one of those weeks when all the important stuff happens at once, and there&#8217;s much to cover. I&#8217;ll start with the big national story. As I previously covered, The Eric Holder/Barack Obama Justice Department is coming after AT&#038;T , using its own odd brand of economics to claim that the merger with T-Mobile would make the wireless market less competitive. When in fact, as history has shown with deals like Sprint/Nextel, prices are only going to come down as the market gets more competitive. But, nonsensical as it is, the Obama administration is pressing on with the same tired thinking that gave us zero net job creation last month, and downward revisions in prior months. So let&#8217;s sweep around and look at what&#8217;s going on, what others are saying both about the news and about the prognosis, beyond the Culture of Corruption aspect I already covered. First, let&#8217;s look at the FCC. I find the reactions interesting. The day after the announcement, I saw no reaction on the FCC mailing list from Chairman Julius Genachowski, but only from fellow Democrats Mignon Clyburn and (Free Press&#8217;s pet commissioner) Michael Copps. Copps, of course, is cheerleading . Also interesting beyond Genachowski&#8217;s silence was the statement by Clyburn . Is it just me or does Clyburn sound defensive, like she&#8217;s taking offense at the DoJ&#8217;s implication that the FCC wasn&#8217;t looking out for the public on this? Rick Perry&#8217;s reaction is good to hear . He&#8217;s all for the merger. Again, party lines aren&#8217;t always great predictors on tech issues, so I&#8217;m glad that a leading Republican Presidential candidate has made such a strong statement. At Forbes and at TLF , Larry Downes points out all tech firms should be concerned about Obama&#8217;s campaign promise to &#8220;reinvigorate&#8221; antitrust, and ought to take an interest in promoting smaller government. I mean, sure, it&#8217;s great news to see Obama slapping down the EPA due to Republican pressure on the heels of the FCC erasing the Fairness Doctrine. But this is still an administration that loves to expand its reach. The net growth of government has been positive under Obama, and that threatens innovation, growth, and jobs. And the President seems to be encouraging an activist Justice Department . Don&#8217;t be too discouraged, though. Mike Wendy says it&#8217;s not over yet , despite Clearwire and Sprint Nextel stocks surging in response to the massive favor Obama just did R. Gerard Salemme and Craig McCaw. And again, remember: the reason those stocks are rising is that the Obama/Holder DoJ is taking action to reduce competition in the 4G market, currently occupied nationally by just Verizon and Sprint/Clearwire. As for AT&#038;T itself, the consensus seems to be they&#8217;ve been caught flat footed , and didn&#8217;t see this coming but perhaps should have . In any case, they&#8217;re now floating offers to sell a minority stake in the firm , though I don&#8217;t see how that will appease anyone when the motivation behind this lawsuit is ideology, not facts or practical observation of the market. The number of seminar commenters even a nobody like me gets is amusing to watch, as they all come on and pretend to be Republicans as they push a big government, corporatist ideology. So you may have heard that California is trying to extend beyond its Constitutional authority and make an out-of-state firm Amazon pay taxes to California. California isn&#8217;t the only state to propose this, but it&#8217;s one of few pig headed enough to push so hard at it. Why? In state businesses are grumbling that Amazon, with its innovative inventory and Internet techniques, can sell for less. They claim that if only Amazon charged sales tax, they wouldn&#8217;t succeed so well. It&#8217;s nonsense, but it doesn&#8217;t take much to get tax-and-spend politicians to tax and spend, does it? Amazon responded to California&#8217;s plan by cutting all ties with California affiliates in the Amazon Associates program (I was one of them). As a result, California lost jobs and lost revenue, making a mockery of the delusional claims that this power grab would raise revenue. Amazon though also proposed a compromise: the firm would bring jobs to California above and beyond the affiliate program if the state would hold off on the tax long enough that Amazon could lobby for a national plan to pass the Congress. But, the state is siding with Wal-mart against Amazon . Now, I like Wal-mart, but I don&#8217;t like government taking sides to pick winners and losers. So even a member of the Board of Equalization (that&#8217;s the socialist name for California&#8217;s tax organization) likes the Amazon compromise. Now, I oppose the current talk in Washington pushed by Dick Durbin, as I believe it&#8217;s a first step toward a Canada-style Harmonized Sales Tax, including our equivalent of Canada&#8217;s Goods and Services Tax, a national sales tax. But if you wanted to tax revenue long term, Amazon&#8217;s plan is great. Once Amazon builds a distribution center here, then it becomes much easier on the long run to tax them. The Democrats&#8217; refusal to work with Amazon seems tor prove this plan is more about punishing Amazon than about &#8220;fairness.&#8221; It&#8217;s corrupt and it&#8217;s shameful. Some quick hits to finish: Wikileaks strikes again , but cowardly tries to pass the buck. The terrorist gang Anonymous continues to get rolled up in the UK. Ah, justice. Media neo-Marxists like Free Press are well-funded astroturf , and here I am fighting them without a penny of funding. This is just me, all volunteer, folks. ]]></description>
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		<title>Tech at Night: Schumer’s bad idea, Victory over Fairness Doctrine, Chinese attacks on our networks</title>
		<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/23/tech-at-night-schumer%e2%80%99s-bad-idea-victory-over-fairness-doctrine-chinese-attacks-on-our-networks/</link>
		<comments>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/23/tech-at-night-schumer%e2%80%99s-bad-idea-victory-over-fairness-doctrine-chinese-attacks-on-our-networks/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 23 Aug 2011 07:00:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>DixiePeters</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/23/tech-at-night-schumer%e2%80%99s-bad-idea-victory-over-fairness-doctrine-chinese-attacks-on-our-networks/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ What would be a Monday without Democrats wanting to expand government by passing new laws and regulations ? Some people aren&#8217;t careful with their things and/or their data, so Chuckie Schumer thinks there oughta be a law. I like CTIA&#8217;s response to that: CTIA understands that when consumers have their mobile devices lost or stolen, it is an unfortunate situation as they often contain a lot of personal information. We urge Congress to not impose unnecessary regulations on the wireless industry that would cause unintended consequences. To prevent your device from being lost or stolen, we recommend the following tips: Know and use the security features on your device (e.g. password locks). Use the personalization feature and put your name and a different phone number (and/or email address) so if someone finds your device, they can contact you to return it. Download an app that allows you to track and lock your wireless devices remotely. Keep a back-up of your contacts, calendar, etc somewhere else (e.g. computer). Never leave your device so that it can be easily picked up and don&#8217;t give your device to a person you don&#8217;t know. If you are a person who has a tendency to lose things, you may want to consider mobile device insurance. Make sure you know what the insurance plan does and does not cover. You can&#8217;t legislate good sense. Elections have consequences. We worked hard, we elected Republicans, House Republicans pressured the FCC, and the Fairness Doctrine is gone . Not just dormant, not lying in wait. It&#8217;s gone. The FCC has taken it off the books entirely. We win one big battle. Again, &#8220;the cloud&#8221; is not a substitute for controlling your own servers and your own data. As some Dearborn civil rights activists found out in their fight against anti-Christian bias driven by Islamic immigration into the area. YouTube is pulling their videos. Wikileaks, briber of betrayers, has been betrayed. One of their own turned on them and destroyed leaked data before it could be published. Ha ha! I hope they never learn, but I hope good people learn the value of backups! Once in a while, far too infrequently for the bias to be accidental, but sometimes online systems end up attacking the left. Facebook spam protection is hitting anti-fracking activists . Again, let&#8217;s give them a hearty Ha ha! The President is apparently clueless about his own administration and just how stifling of jobs and growth that his own policies are. Ridiculous. I think it&#8217;s laughable that Democrats say BART only &#8220;may have gone too far&#8221; when the San Francisco area transit system shut down communications in its stations to try to take control of the people within. That&#8217;s what terrorists do, folks. What if there had been a terrorist attack, then everyone inside would have been stuck. The Chinese are also trying to shut down select communications in America . And no, Chuck Schumer, the answer to that is not more regulations in America. The answer to that is getting your man in the White House to do his job and stand up for American interests abroad. For once in your life, man up, Mr. President, and hold the Chicoms accountable. ]]></description>
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		<title>FCC officially kills Fairness Doctrine — But it’s alive &amp; well in the hearts &amp; minds of libs</title>
		<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/22/fcc-officially-kills-fairness-doctrine-%e2%80%94-but-it%e2%80%99s-alive-well-in-the-hearts-minds-of-libs/</link>
		<comments>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/22/fcc-officially-kills-fairness-doctrine-%e2%80%94-but-it%e2%80%99s-alive-well-in-the-hearts-minds-of-libs/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 23 Aug 2011 03:00:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>kalpanaceo</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[ FCC officially kills Fairness Doctrine — But it&#8217;s alive &#038; well in the hearts &#038; minds of libs ]]></description>
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		<title>Tech at Night: FCC, Net Neutrality, Spectrum, Amazon</title>
		<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/07/14/tech-at-night-fcc-net-neutrality-spectrum-amazon/</link>
		<comments>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/07/14/tech-at-night-fcc-net-neutrality-spectrum-amazon/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 14 Jul 2011 12:30:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>concernedcoloradoan</dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/07/14/tech-at-night-fcc-net-neutrality-spectrum-amazon/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ Sorry if you&#8217;ve been missing Tech at Night this week. Monday I just ran out of time as I had to do a whole bunch of housekeeping*, and tonight I&#8217;m running late. So let&#8217;s go. In classic Tech at Night style, let&#8217;s talk about the FCC. They took forever to get the ball rolling on Net Neutrality, but it&#8217;s coming now and it&#8217;s a vehicle for censorship, says Seton Motley . As he says, &#8220;As every place we get our news and information continue their rapid migration to the Internet, Net Neutrality will lord larger and larger over the free market – and our free speech. Which is why we must rid ourselves of it as rapidly as possible.&#8221; More fuel for the FCC reform fire: Free State Foundation points out the FCC has known for years of its problems with the intercarrier compensation system, which is how money changes hands when phone calls are carried across different private phone networks. They knew in 2001. That&#8217;s a long time coming. Though if they do tackle it now, we need to watch out for the Universal Service Fund becoming an Internet Tax. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski says he&#8217;s &#8220;complied with the spirit&#8221; of the President&#8217;s executive order on pro-growth regulatory reform with a lot of talk. Noticeably missing from his statement is much action to reduce the burden of regulation on business. He&#8217;s eliminated 50 whole rules! 50! Ever read the FCC&#8217;s rules? 50&#8242;s a drop in the bucket. This isn&#8217;t serious. Congress must increase pressure, as with the Fairness Doctrine. The burden is simply too high , and I&#8217;ll probably be writing in-depth on this issue soon. Or as with actual cuts to the FCC&#8217;s planned budget , which the Obama administration is absolutely bawling about. The reaction is just hysterical, up to the point that it admits the FCC will have trouble handling &#8220;expanded responsibilities.&#8221; Hey, just who authorized the FCC to expand its own responsibilities anyway? Also, OMB claims that cutting the FCC&#8217;s budget won&#8217;t save money, claiming the FCC is funded by regulatory fees anyway. Erm, then why complain if the budgeted cash isn&#8217;t important? Moving on, The Amazon Tax fight is in bad shape, but is not over in California. Expect an in-depth overview of the situation soon at RedState. Amy Miller points out the dangers of a separate Secure Internet to the privacy of anyone who tries to use it. [Link fixed] Google is tracking your mouse movements if you&#8217;re signed up with Google+ or other services, which isn&#8217;t really going to help with Google&#8217;s regulatory problems . Not that I&#8217;m saying Google&#8217;s peculiar institutions of information gathering deserve a government smackdown, but you can&#8217;t keep building massive databases of people and not get a reputation of being that creep who peeps into everyone&#8217;s windows. You see this author, Jennifer 8 Lee, promoting the call for the People&#8217;s Democratic Socialist Revolution online , to crush the Kulaks and bring Social Justice for all? You know who she does online PR for? Yup, Wikileaks, says Wikipedia . Consider the source, and whether the source is with or against American safety, privacy, and prosperity. Guess what? the stimulus didn&#8217;t work for rural broadband, either . ARRA wrecked the economy and didn&#8217;t even work well in the things it tried to build up via spending. &#8220;Shovel-ready&#8221; indeed. Watch out though, they&#8217;re just going to say we need more money via Universal Service Fund reform, which in the mouth of a Democrat means Internet Tax. George Soros wins again. Because the former head of GLAAD put his group&#8217;s interests first and opposed government intervention against AT&#038;T and T-Mobile, the Soros establishment got Jarrett Barrios fired. And now the new head is following the Stalin, er, Soros line . War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. Lastly, the House gives us some mixed news. Auctioning the D block of former VHF TV spectrum will be a waste of time I think , as it failed before. But creating incentive auctions to encourage broadcasters to sell off their spectrum in order to free up more for America&#8217;s increasing need for wireless data, that&#8217;s great news. * I broke down and used up my Best Buy points on a big discounted television. A good 5&#8243; larger diagonal than my old, native 1080p instead of 720p resolution, fun stuff. In the process of installing it I cleaned up what I had hooked up to it: gave away the old PS2, threw away the VCR, re-ran all the cables. It&#8217;s all tidy now. Dust-free, too. ]]></description>
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		<title>Republicans on Uneasy Street</title>
		<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/07/13/republicans-on-uneasy-street/</link>
		<comments>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/07/13/republicans-on-uneasy-street/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 13 Jul 2011 15:08:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>AlvarezDana</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/07/13/republicans-on-uneasy-street/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ There is a sense of unease about the cast and storyline of the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. Something is off. Things have started too early. Or maybe they haven’t started yet. "No one" is running. Too many candidates are on or near the stage. Things just are not right. This discomfort is disappointing. Obama is vulnerable. He has governed poorly. Since his $800 billion stimulus, another 2 million Americans have lost their jobs. Inflation looms. His government takeover of health care has become less popular since Nancy Pelosi passed it and allowed Americans to read the 2,500 pages of small print. The 2010 Tea Party/Republican landslides should have signaled victory in 2012. Republicans gained 63 House members, six senators, six governorships, and 715 state legislators (taking into account the 25 party switchers from the Democratic side). Next: the presidency, for sure. And yet… Herein, four thoughts on why we seem adrift in what should be the dash to victory. First, the once grand post-FDR tradition of GOP nomination fights is largely behind us. The contest between the East Coast establishment and the conservative movement is no longer played out every four years. Wendell Willkie and Thomas Dewey won for the establishment in 1940, 1944, and 1948. War hero and moderate Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 stopped Robert Taft from being the man who won the party for the right. In 1960, Nixon was only sort of "us," but Rockefeller was certainly "them." Goldwater broke through as an unabashed conservative in 1964, but failed to win the presidency. Nixon again beat Rockefeller Republicanism in 1968. The establishment held off Reagan in 1976, but Reagan won in 1980 and George H. W. Bush won in 1988 as Patroclus wearing Reagan’s armor. In 2000, George W. Bush was the conservative alternative to "establishment friendly" John McCain. And in 2008, the conservative vote splintered among several candidates, with many social conservatives following the pied piper of Arkansas, Gov. Mike Huckabee, off the playing field and into irrelevancy long enough for McCain to win a nomination he could not have won in a two-way, right vs. establishment campaign. For almost half a century, the liberal establishment vs. conservative battle lines within the Republican Party, like the old Cold War face-off with the Soviet Union, provided clarity. We knew there were two teams. Conservatives knew what was expected of them. Now, every candidate is running as a Reagan Republican. The Rockefeller wing cannot win a primary in Delaware against a witch. Second, there are new faces and names in Republican leadership. Since 1952, when Ike ran with Nixon, through 2004, when George W. Bush won reelection, there was only one election -- 1964 -- when the Republican ticket did not include a Nixon, a Bush, or a Dole. The list of presidential and vice-presidential candidates reads like the Monty Python skit about Spam, Eggs, Bacon, and Spam -- 1952 and 1956: Ike and Nixon; 1960: Nixon and Lodge; 1968 and 1972: Nixon and Agnew; 1976: Ford and Dole; 1980 and 1984: Reagan and Bush; 1988 and 1992: Bush and Quayle; 1996: Dole and Kemp; 2000 and 2004: Bush and Cheney. In the days]]></description>
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		<title>Tech at Night: Amazon punishes CA, More on the FCC’s ideological lies, Marsha Blackburn: Tech Hero</title>
		<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/06/30/tech-at-night-amazon-punishes-ca-more-on-the-fcc%e2%80%99s-ideological-lies-marsha-blackburn-tech-hero/</link>
		<comments>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/06/30/tech-at-night-amazon-punishes-ca-more-on-the-fcc%e2%80%99s-ideological-lies-marsha-blackburn-tech-hero/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 30 Jun 2011 11:00:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>markboabaca</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fairness Doctrine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FCC]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nancy Pelosi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[4chan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[at&t]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[george-soros]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jerry brown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[opinion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[skype]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[spectrum]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wireless]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/06/30/tech-at-night-amazon-punishes-ca-more-on-the-fcc%e2%80%99s-ideological-lies-marsha-blackburn-tech-hero/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ Amazon&#8217;s not kidding one bit about punishing states that attempt to punish it. After Amazon sent a last ditch warning to Associates that all California Associates would be terminated in the event Governor Brown signed the budget with the Amazon Tax in it, the Governor went ahead and did it. So, every Amazon Associate in California just got terminated, including countless small businesses scraping by in a lousy economy (11% unemployment in CA, thanks to Brown, Obama, and the ARRA). I was one of them. I got the notice at 9:45pm. For the email&#8217;s contents, see below the fold. Democrats: Killing jobs since 1861. Contrast with Republicans who are embracing new technologies like Skype, shunned by the Nancy Pelosi era House. Amazon&#8217;s notice of termination: Hello, Unfortunately, Governor Brown has signed into law the bill that we emailed you about earlier today. As a result of this, contracts with all California residents participating in the Amazon Associates Program are terminated effective today, June 29, 2011. Those California residents will no longer receive advertising fees for sales referred to Amazon.com [ http://www.amazon.com/ ], Endless.com [ http://www.endless.com/ ], MYHABIT.COM [ http://www.myhabit.com/ ] or SmallParts.com [ http://www.smallparts.com/ ]. Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned before today will be processed and paid in full in accordance with the regular payment schedule. You are receiving this email because our records indicate that you are a resident of California. If you are not currently a resident of California, or if you are relocating to another state in the near future, you can manage the details of your Associates account here [ https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/network/your-account/payee-info.html ]. And if you relocate to another state in the near future please contact us [ https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/contact?subject=&#038;ie=UTF8 ] for reinstatement into the Amazon Associates Program. To avoid confusion, we would like to clarify that this development will only impact our ability to offer the Associates Program to California residents and will not affect your ability to purchase from Amazon.com [ http://www.amazon.com/ ], Endless.com [ http://www.endless.com/ ], MYHABIT.COM [ http://www.myhabit.com/ ] or SmallParts.com [ http://www.smallparts.com/ ]. We have enjoyed working with you and other California-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program and, if this situation is rectified, would very much welcome the opportunity to re-open our Associates Program to California residents. As mentioned before, we are continuing to work on alternative ways to help California residents monetize their websites and we will be sure to contact you when these become available. Regards, The Amazon Associates Team Unfortunately what hasn&#8217;t been entirely terminated is Lulzsec. The 4chan and Anonymous-associated group folded up as some members were arrested and others got scared. Others though are continuing their criminal activities: Some reportedly joined a gang called AntiSec while others have (re?)-joined Anonymous . Not that it matters: Investigations of Lulzsec crimes will continue, and arrests will surely continue as well. Frogmarch! Frogmarch! Frogmarch! It wouldn&#8217;t be Tech at Night without FCC news. You got my opinion on Monday of the FCC&#8217;s wireless competition report: it&#8217;s an ideological statement designed to further an agenda of greater regulation, despite all facts. If you&#8217;re like more though, here are a couple more options to read. First we&#8217;ve got Mike Wendy&#8217;s at Media Freedom . His conclusion: By not affirmatively finding that the market is effectively competitive (which the FCC had done until the last two reports), the pro-regulatory agency just adds to its tool chest, allowing it to better feint and manipulate its captures when needed down the road. And you know it will “find” a need. Also weighing in is AT&#038;T with a statement heavy on facts. Look, we all know that AT&#038;T has two very good reasons to promote the idea that the wireless market is competitive, but it&#8217;s simply lazy to dismiss the fact-heavy reports the firm puts out. Consider: 89.6% of Americans had 5 or more mobile voice providers available in 2010, up from 72.8% in 2009. Margins are shrinking. Revenue per voice minute is down. Price per text is down. Price per megabit of data is down. Sprint and Clearwire together have better spectrum than anyone else in the industry. Mobile broadband Internet is booming. Guess what? All these facts AT&#038;T cites are not AT&#038;T&#8217;s own research: they&#8217;re cited chapter and verse from the FCC&#8217;s own report . So anyone who dismisses AT&#038;T&#8217;s facts is calling the FCC&#8217;s own report a lie. Funny that conclusion we draw: FCC&#8217;s facts contradict FCC&#8217;s conclusion. Just more evidence that the report&#8217;s conclusion is ideological, not factual. Hopefully the Republican who joins Robert McDowell in the FCC will be as outspoken for an open Internet as he is . For all that the Obama-dominated FCC claims to be For the People™, it will be interesting to see whether the FCC maintains the cable blackout rule the NFL wants , effectively subsidizing the NFL with federal regulations. I say let the market decide and keep government out. Repeal the regulations entirely, and the Sports Broadcasting Act with it. Meanwhile, Astroturf continues at the FCC as the radical PIGs continue to spend George Soros&#8217;s money on an anti-freedom agenda of a government-run mass media. At least House Republicans are staying on top of the Fairness Doctrine , keeping the pressure on to ensure the Obama FCC keeps its word and repeals it. And one last FCC note: Democrats are worried about Net Neutrality defunding efforts . It&#8217;d be interesting to see what would happen in a House/Senate showdown over this. Then again, since when do Democrat-controlled Senates actually pass budgets? An inability to get work done seems to be going around, even, as The FCC&#8217;s months-long delay in actually publishing Net Neutrality regulations continues . Marsha Blackburn is so incredibly on top of tech issues . Certain names come up in Tech at Night over and over again. Most do because they&#8217;re critical Committee or Subcommittee chairmen. Marsha Blackburn? She&#8217;s on Energy and Commerce, but as a backbencher. And she&#8217;s louder on the FCC and tech issues than most anyone in the House. She&#8217;s such an asset in the House. Not to say the whole Committee isn&#8217;t doing some good work. Hearings continue on spectrum policy , which is so important as America&#8217;s wireless data use booms. Privacy hearings also continue . I&#8217;m hoping Republicans will see to it that market forces and innovation allow the industry to respond to the public&#8217;s needs on privacy. See, for example, the launch of Google+, a new competitor to challenge Facebook, long hated by privacy advocates. ]]></description>
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		<title>A Question of Ethics: A Common Lie in a Common Cause</title>
		<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/06/28/a-question-of-ethics-a-common-lie-in-a-common-cause/</link>
		<comments>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/06/28/a-question-of-ethics-a-common-lie-in-a-common-cause/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 28 Jun 2011 15:08:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>DixiePeters</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/06/28/a-question-of-ethics-a-common-lie-in-a-common-cause/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ "If Justice Thomas does not recuse himself and the Court rules [against Obamacare], I will be making the point that this is not a credible decision." -- Ex- Congressman Anthony Weiner in February of this year. Riddle me this, Batman. What do talk radio, a think tank, a Tea party supporter, the U.S. Supreme Court and a pair of billionaire brothers from Kansas have in common? It's Obamacare, stupid. To borrow from the Zen of James Carville (who summed up the sound and fury of the looming 1992 presidential campaign in one pithy and eventually famous phrase: "it's the economy, stupid"), there is a reason these five distinctly separate sets of people or institutions have recently and mysteriously come under a series of brutal attacks on their integrity. And what do the attackers have in common?]]></description>
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		<title>Tech at Night: A lot of tech legislation I hate, and a big win against the Fairness Doctrine</title>
		<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/06/09/tech-at-night-a-lot-of-tech-legislation-i-hate-and-a-big-win-against-the-fairness-doctrine/</link>
		<comments>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/06/09/tech-at-night-a-lot-of-tech-legislation-i-hate-and-a-big-win-against-the-fairness-doctrine/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 09 Jun 2011 12:30:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Linda</dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/06/09/tech-at-night-a-lot-of-tech-legislation-i-hate-and-a-big-win-against-the-fairness-doctrine/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ With fourteen articles to run through tonight, a near record, I don&#8217;t have time to waste. We&#8217;ll start with Joshua Trevino bringing us Bill Peacock on the Texas Amazon Tax . Texas SB 1 contains the tax Governor Perry already vetoed this session, and it needs defeated again. Says Peacock: &#8220;Gov. Perry was right to veto the Amazon tax bill, and he’d be right if he did it again. Staying focused on downsizing Texas government is the only way to keep Texas as the top job producing state in the nation.&#8221; In national bills that need stopped, patent reform still looms over our heads . This bill,t he America Invents Act, removes patent protection from the person who first invents a thing. Instead, patent protection goes to the person who first files papers with the government for the invention. Is it any wonder that patent mills like IBM, and lawyers groups like the ABA have fallen in love with it? Another bad bill by Patrick Leahy is PROTECT IP, which would create a national censorship blacklist of sites deemed to threaten copyright or trademark interests. It&#8217;s so bad that even the LA Times has come out against it , which is notable given that the MPAA is a major force behind the bill. However Senate Republicans have rolled over and let it advance. We&#8217;ve got to get the House to do better and defeat this. Senator Leahy isn&#8217;t stopping with the AIA or PROTECT IP, either. Now he&#8217;s continuing the terrible practice of targeting crime victims with laws seeking to punish the victims of breakins. So terrible. As I said Monday night, we need to put the perpetrators in jail, not hassle the victims. To keep the focus on the victims actually rewards the criminals by putting pressure on their enemies. I hate to say it but Senator Schumer may have the right idea . Now, Schumer may be targeting drugs with his plans to go after Bitcoin, but as I previously covered cyberterror groups like Lulzsec also use the currency to fund their operations. Remove some financial incentives to break the law, and only good can come of that. Now I&#8217;m not saying I necessarily approve of the specific plans Schumer has, but conceptually I much prefer going after the funding sources of crime than going after the victims. In other cybersecurity news, not surprisingly I disagree with Google. Google supports efforts by Democrats to expand the role of Government online to place laws and regulations on security outside the role of critical infrastructure. However I believe it&#8217;s only in critical infrastructure and civil defense that there&#8217;s a justification under the Constitution and in common sense for the government to have a role at all. And speaking of civil defense, I&#8217;m staying out on that limb and supporting efforts to hand out spectrum without auction . I mean, of the four names voting no on the bill (Olympia Snowe, Jim DeMint, Pat Toomey, and Marco Rubio), I have no problems with three of them. I respect them, but I disagree. Not all policy decisions are easy. Civil defense spectrum and the post-9/11 recommendations are one of them. the fringe of copyright are another . I favor copyright, and I&#8217;m not about to support eliminating it specifically for foreign works just because it inconveniences some ivory tower academics and performers. I&#8217;m all for broad-based, fair copyright reductions, but not special case giveaways. On the other hand, some issues are easy, and it&#8217;s nice to get a big win in them. So I&#8217;m celebrating a win by House Republicans Fred Upton and Greg Walden who have reached and agreement with the FCC to remove the Fairness Doctrine from the books. No more will it linger, threatening free speech. Elections have consequences. Quick hits to finish out the night: Attention continues on Free Press&#8217;s failure to cooperate with Marsha Blackburn&#8217;s investigation into the neo-Marxist front group&#8217;s funding. Free Press&#8217;s Derek Turner testified that &#8220;Absolutely, I&#8217;d be pleased to, yes,&#8221; when asked to submit the group&#8217;s funding sources. Meanwhile, the world waits. Greg Walden is warming up on AT&#038;T/T-Mobile and the Universal Service Fund . He&#8217;s smartly not showing his cards early, but I&#8217;m expecting he&#8217;ll be a strong ally going forward of those of us who favor small government online and off. Who&#8217;s responsible for blocking tethering apps on Android ? Verizon or Google? Either way, critics of Apple who have held up Google as promoting an open platform alternative have egg on their faces. Google&#8217;s embrace-and-extend of online standards continues with its new AuthorRank proposal for tracking authors of online works. I&#8217;m not saying it&#8217;s a bad idea, but we do need to watch for why Google wouldn&#8217;t go through open channels to propose new standards, instead of promoting them by corporate fiat. ]]></description>
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		<title>The Economics of Settlement</title>
		<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/06/08/the-economics-of-settlement/</link>
		<comments>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/06/08/the-economics-of-settlement/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 08 Jun 2011 15:10:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>AlvarezDana</dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[ The root cause of Middle Eastern turmoil, according to a broad consensus of the international media and the considered cerebrations of the deepest-thinking movie stars, is Israeli settlers in what are described as the "occupied territories" on the West Bank of the Jordan River. Even such celebrated and fervent supporters of Israel as Alan Dershowitz and Bernard-Henri Lévy put the settlers beyond the pale of their Zionist sympathies. Remove the settlers, according to these sage analyses of the scene, and the problems of the region become remediable at last. Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute adds to these political concerns a coming environmental catastrophe, also presumably aggravated by the Israeli settlers and their hydrophilic irrigation projects. He sees the Middle East as severely threatened by the growth of population and the exhaustion of water resources. The Institute explains: "Since one ton of grain represents 1,000 tons of water, [importing grain] becomes the most efficient way to import water. Last year, Iran imported 7 million tons of wheat, eclipsing Japan to become the world's leading wheat importer. This year, Egypt is also projected to move ahead of Japan. The water required to produce the grain and other foodstuffs imported into [the region] last year was roughly equal to the annual flow of the Nile River." Although these two concerns might seem unrelated, they converge in the history of Israel, created by several generations of settlers and constrained at every point by the dearth of water in a mostly desert land. In the mid-19th century, before the arrival of the first groups of Jewish settlers fleeing pogroms in Russia, Arabs living in what became the mandate territory of Palestine -- now Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza -- numbered between 200,000 and 300,000. Their population density and longevity resembled today's conditions in parched and depopulated Saharan Chad. Although Worldwatch might prefer to see the Middle East returned to these more earth-friendly, organic, and sustainable demographics, the fact that some 5.5 million Arabs now live in the former British Mandate, with a life expectancy of more than 70 years, is mainly attributable, for better or worse, to the work of those Jewish settlers. CHRONICLING THE ORIGINS of this Jewish feat in 1939, nine years before the creation of the modern state of Israel, was one of the little-known heroes of the 20th century, Walter Clay Lowdermilk. An American expert on land usage, he formulated and popularized the best techniques of soil reclamation and watershed management around the globe. Today the agricultural school at Technion bears the lapidary name of this American-born Christian, and the world-leading feats of Israeli water conservation attest in part to his influence. A Rhodes scholar at Oxford who earned his Berkeley doctorate in forestry, Lowdermilk focused his career on "reading the land" for its tales of human civilization. Married to a Christian missionary, he moved early in his career to northern China to find remedies for the great famine there in 1920 and 1921. Rejecting the prevailing view that the crisis was caused by climate change, Lowdermilk and his team identified the real problem as the huge load of silt borne down the Yellow River every year and deposited in the lowlands of the river, causing floods and depleting the up-country of soils. "In the presence of such tragic scenes," he wrote, "I resolved to devote my lifetime to [the] study of ways to conserve the lands on which mankind depends." Becoming assistant chief in charge of research for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service (now part of the Department of Agriculture), he embarked in 1938 on a global mission to determine how the experience of older civilizations could guide the U.S. in surmounting its own agricultural crises of the Dust Bowl and Southern erosion. This 25,000-mile peregrination ended in Palestine, where he confronted the question of how the "land of milk and honey" described in the Bible had become a wasteland. In ancient times, as he knew, Palestine was largely self-sufficient, with a population of millions. Replete with forests, teeming with sheep and goats, full of farms and wineries, the landscape evoked a European plenitude. By 1939, however, when Lowdermilk arrived in the area, it was largely an environmental disaster. As he recounted in his 1944 book, Palestine, Land of Promise , "when Jewish colonists first began their work in 1882...the soils were eroded off the uplands to bedrock over fully one half the hills; streams across the coastal plain were choked with erosional debris from the hills to form pestilential marshes infested with dreaded malaria; the fair cities and elaborate works of ancient times were left in doleful ruins." In the late 19th century around the current Tel Aviv, Lowdermilk was told, "no more than 100 miserable families lived in huts." Jericho, once luxuriantly shaded by balsams, was treeless. What amazed Lowdermilk, though -- and changed his life -- was not the 1,000 years of deterioration but the some 50 years of reclamation of both the highlands and the lowlands by relatively small groups of Jewish settlers. As one of many examples of valley reclamation, he tells the story of the settlement of Petah Tikva, established by Jews from Jerusalem in 1878, in defiance of warnings from physicians who saw the area outside what is now Tel Aviv as hopelessly infested with malarial mosquitoes. After initial failures and retreats, Petah Tikva became "the first settlement to conquer the deadly foe of malaria," by "planting Eucalyptus [locally known as ‘Jew trees'] in the swamps to absorb the moisture," draining other swamps, importing large quantities of quinine, and developing rich agriculture and citriculture. By the time of Lowdermilk's visit, Petah Tikva had become the largest of the Jewish rural settlements," supporting 20,000 people "where there were only 400 fever-ridden fellaheen sixty years ago." (Today it is at the center of Israel's high-tech industry.) In the gouged and gullied hills near Jerusalem, reclamation by settlers was epitomized by Kiriath Anavim. Founded in 1920 among thorn bushes, dwarfed trees, and a desolate rubble of rocks, the settlement by the time of Lowdermilk's trip boasted elaborate terraced lands, orchards, and vineyards, with plum, peach, and apricot trees, honey, and poultry, together with prosperous dairies producing milk for Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. In draining swamps, leaching saline soils, redeeming dunes into orchards and poultry farms, in planting millions of trees on rocky hills, in constructing elaborate water works and terraces on the hills, in digging 548 wells and supporting canals in little more than a decade and irrigating thousands of acres of land, establishing industries, hospitals, clinics, and schools, the 500,000 Jewish settlers who arrived before the creation of Israel massively expanded the very absorptive dimensions and capacity of the country. It was these advances that made possible the fivefold 20th-century surge of the Arab population by 1940. AS LOWDERMILK recounted in his book, in the 21 years between 1921 and 1942, the Jews increased the number of enterprises four-fold, the number of jobs more than ten-fold, and total invested capital from a few hundred thousand dollars to the equivalent of $70 million in 1942 dollars. Particularly significant in Lowdermilk's view were the purchases of large expanses of unused Arab land by Jewish settlers, many of whom had earned the necessary funds by their own hard work on the arid soils. On most occasions, the settlers bought only a small proportion of an individual Arab's holding and paid three or four times what similar plots sold for in Syria (and far more even than in Southern California). Thus the Jewish purchases provided capital for Arab farms, allowing a dramatic expansion of their production. "In cases where the land belongs to absentee owners and tenants are forced to move...I found that the Jewish purchasers had provided compensation to enable the tenants to lease other property." Lowdermilk reported that many Arab landowners had already begun to resist the agricultural advances and resented the success of the Jews, while the British in the area "are imbued with old colonial traditions and befriend feudal leaders." European diplomats often enjoyed going native by mimicking Arab grandees (who in turn were learning European ethnic prejudices and disdain for "men in trade"). Together they smeared these fully beneficial transactions with anti-Semitic slurs and caricatures. However, the results of the purchases were clear: "During the last 25 years (before 1939), Jews have acquired just six percent of Palestine's 6.5 million acres or 400 thousand acres, less than one quarter of which was previously cultivated by Arabs." These new opportunities in Palestine attracted hundreds of thousands of Arab immigrants from Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and the desert. With wages for Arab workers double or more the wages in Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, in 1936, a British Royal Commission could report: "The whole range of public services has steadily developed to the benefit of the [Arab] fellaheen...the revenue for those services having been largely provided by the Jews." Lowdermilk clinched his argument by a sophisticated comparison with conditions in Jordan. A country almost four times larger than Palestine (including Sinai), Jordan partakes of the same mountain fold of mesozoic limestone, the same rich river plains, the same Rift Valley and highlands, the same mineral resources, the same climate, and a several times larger population in ancient times. But at the time of Lowdermilk's visit, its agricultural output and per capita consumption of imports was one-fifth that of Palestine and its population density was one-tenth Palestine's. Without Jewish settlements, Jordan was suffering heavy emigration (mostly to America and Palestine) while Palestine attracted increasing flows of immigrants, mostly clustering around the Jewish settlements. With Jewish advances in food production and in medicine and public hygiene, Arab health statistics increasingly converged with those of the Jewish settlers. While the Arab birth rate actually dropped by 10 percent, the death rate fell by one-third and infant mortality dropped 37 percent. The net result was an Arab annual population growth rate of 16.2 percent, the highest in the world (exclusive of immigration). Lowdermilk summed it up: "Rural Palestine is becoming less and less like Trans Jordan, Syria and Iraq and more like Denmark, Holland, and parts of the United States [Southern California]." AGAINST ALL THESE heroics of advancement, however, a European-originated countercurrent was flowing. As widely reported by Lowdermilk and others on the scene, during the previous decade, "Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were very active in fomenting Arab discontents." A spearhead was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the most notable Palestinian leader, who became a fervent supporter of the Holocaust, soon enlisted in Hitler's cause, and spent the war at his headquarters in Berlin. "All Jewish immigration should be prohibited," the Mufti said, "since the country could not even absorb the Jews who were already there." They would have to be removed by a process "kindly or painful as the case might be." Lowdermilk pointed to a portentous precedent in Iraq. When the British relinquished their mandate, Iraqi leaders promised solemnly to protect the Assyrians -- the Christian minority in the country. "Instead, the Assyrian Christians were slaughtered by Arabs of the Mufti's ilk who did not wish to ‘assimilate or digest them.' " Lowdermilk predicted that "Arab rule in Palestine would...put an abrupt end to the reclamation work now being carried on so splendidly." Under Arab rule, Palestine has always been a somnolent desert land that could have sustained no authentic 20th-century Arab awakening. Palestine without Jews is not a nation but a naqba . Many people imagine that the new and larger influx of Jewish settlers after World War II perpetrated an injustice on the Arabs. What they did, in fact, was to continue the heroic and ingenious pattern of development depicted by Lowdermilk in 1939. With the Arab population growing apace with the Jewish population in most neighborhoods, and indeed faster in some, there could not possibly have been any significant displacement. The demographic numbers discredit as simply mythological or mendacious all the literature of Palestinian grievance and eviction from the likes of Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim Rashid Khalidi, and the other divas of the naqba narrative. By 1948, the Arab population in the Mandate area had grown to some 1.35 million, an increase of 60 percent since the 1930s, and up by a factor of seven since the arrival of the creative, far-seeing cohort of pioneering Jews from Russia in the 1880s. Mostly concentrated in neighborhoods abutting the Zionist settlements, this Arab population was the largest in the entire history of Palestine. Only the 1948 invasion by five Arab armies -- and a desperate and courageous Israeli self-defense -- drove out many of the Arabs, some 700,000. These Palestinian Arabs were evicted or urged to flee by Arab leaders in 1948 in a war that the Jews neither sought nor invited. But the creation of the State of Israel and its growing economy accelerated a renewed immigration into the area to today's level of some 5.5 million Arabs. The only real Palestinian naqba came not in 1948 at the hands of Zionists, but rather in 1949, at the hands of foreign aid bureaucrats in the form of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). In a desire to compensate the Palestinians for their alleged victimization by the creation of the State of Israel, the international bureaucracies perpetrated and created a genuine and permanent victimization among the 1.4 million refugees who live in UNRWA's 59 camps and the millions more who reside in the surrounding ghettoes. Financed by the U.S. and the European Union, as Michael S. Bernstam of Stanford's Hoover Institution explained in Commentary in December of 2010, UNRWA perpetuates the notion of a "right of return" to the land. Yet this land scarcely existed as an asset before the Jews reclaimed it and made it valuable and capable of supporting life. "This is not the right of return," writes Bernstam, "it is a claim of the right to retake ..." or more accurately to seize the land outright from its lawful owners. A typical harvest of misconceived foreign aid, this tragic error extends the Palestinian grievance beyond Gaza and the West Bank into countries such as Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon that also host Palestinian camps. The spurious ideology of Palestinian victimization by Israel blinds nearly all observers to the actual facts of economic life in the region. No one reading the current literature could have any idea that throughout most of the three roughly 20-year economic eras following 1948, the Palestinians continued to benefit heavily from Israeli enterprise and prospered mightily compared to Arabs in other countries in the region. During the era of Israeli "occupation" that ran from after the war of 1967 to 1993, for example, the number of Arabs in the territories tripled to some 3 million, with the creation of some 261 new towns, a tripling of Arab per capita incomes, and a rise in life expectancy from 52 to 73 years. Meanwhile, the number of Israeli settlers in this area stripped of Jews by Jordan rose only to 250,000. Again, far from effecting any displacement of Arabs, the Jewish settlements enabled a huge increase in both the number and wealth of the Palestinian Arabs. THE CAUSE OF the subsequent disaster was intervention from the West under the so-called Peace Process of the early 1990s. Foreign aid poured in at a rate of close to $4 billion per year, and the PLO under Yassir Arafat and his predatory gang of rabid anti-Semites was brought in from Tunisia to manage the bonanza. The result was a 40 percent decline in per capita income together with mounting terrorism and anti-Semitic animus. In this environment, Palestinian entrepreneurship collapsed amid much talk of the "humiliation" of Palestinians working for Jews. The test of a civilization is what it accomplishes in advancing the human cause -- what it creates rather than what it claims. From the outset early in the 20th century, Palestinian nationalism itself was an artiﬁcial construct characterized by hostility toward Jews, as well as toward capitalism. Palestinian political behavior was so obnoxious that their leaders were rejected by every Arab state in which they sought refuge, including the contiguous and predominantly Palestinian state of Jordan when it ruled the West Bank between 1948 and 1967. But after 1967, and under Israeli rule, the Palestinians proved that by focusing on enterprise complementing the Israeli economy they could become prosperous. The most revealing gauge of the impact of the Israeli economy on Arabs -- as opposed to the self-inﬂicted disruption of terrorism -- is the performance of the one-ﬁfth of Palestinian Arabs who live in Israel as citizens. A recent thicket of sociology was planted on the subject by UN economist Raja Khalidi in the Journal of Palestine Studies published by the University of California Press in Berkeley, California, and edited by Khalidi's brother Rashid. Rashid Khalidi became brieﬂy famous during Barack Obama's presidential campaign in 2008 for his "consistent reminders to me," as the presidential candidate said, "of my own blind spots and my own biases" relating to Palestinian suffering. In his article, Raja Khalidi's view "pits a discriminatory and hegemonic Jewish state (and economy) against an ethno-national minority unable to access its fair share of national resources." The "natural resources" denied to Arabs in Israel, according to Raja Khalidi, turn out to be resources of land. After they sold it to Jewish settlers, they suffered sellers' remorse. Apparently, they did not anticipate that the land could yield the region's most fertile farms or could give birth to skyscrapers and high-technology factories. Why didn't anyone tell them? Now they want it back, along with the skyscrapers and factories. Raja Khalidi's entire argument itself suffers from a huge gap -- namely, the absence of evidence that Arabs anywhere in the world outside of the United States have performed as well economically as have Arabs in Israel. The average Arab annual per capita income in Israel is $600 per month (i.e., an annual household income of $14,400 for a family of four). This compares with an average annual income of $9,400 for a family of four in sparsely populated Jordan, which roughly matches the average across the Arab world. Moreover, while Palestinians in the disputed territories have undergone a catastrophic 40 percent drop in income since the PLO's resurgence, the income gap between Israel's Palestinian Arab population and Jewish population has, in fact, been declining. Any income gap between the Jewish and Arab populations of Israel is clearly attributable to the prowess of Jewish entrepreneurs and other professionals, whose excellence produces similar gaps in every free country on earth with signiﬁcant numbers of Jews. Jews, for example, outearn other Caucasians in the United States by an even larger margin than they outearn Arabs in Israel. This probably reﬂects the fact that the United States, until recently, had a freer economy, by most standards, than Israel. The problem is Khalidi's own attitude, which echoes the view of Arab leader Musa Alami, meeting with David Ben-Gurion in 1934. When Ben-Gurion told him that Zionism "would bring a blessing to the Arabs of Palestine, and they have no good cause to oppose us," Alami retorted, "I would prefer that the country remain impoverished and barren for another hundred years, until we ourselves are able to develop it on our own." This sentiment continues today under Hamas. In 2005, when Israelis actually relinquished their advanced greenhouses and irrigation equipment in Gaza, the leaders of Hamas ordered many of these facilities destroyed. Some things never change. On April 9, 2011, the PLO's chief representative in the U.S., Maen Areikat, told the Jewish Forward : "Palestinians are not after improving their condition of living. Our real problem is ending the occupation" -- getting rid of those dastardly settlers! With Hamas now joining with the Palestinian Authority and with $4 billion in new foreign aid, including $900 million directly from the U.S. pouring into Gaza and the West Bank, the immediate prospects are grim. Nonetheless, Israel's current administration, under the business-savvy leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, is committed to the economics of collaboration and prosperity. As the abatement of violence permits, he is resolutely opening up new opportunities for Palestinian entrepreneurship and growth. The choice for the Palestinians is clear, as always, between the ascent of capitalism and freedom and the economics of dependency and national socialism. SO WHAT DOES THIS history have to do with the Worldwatch alarms about a rising threat of water exhaustion in the Middle East? A few simple statistics suggest that the Israeli "settlers" (and to the PLO all Israelis are settlers) once again are the solution rather than the problem in the region. Since the foundation of the State of Israel in a land that is half desert with no rain for six months of the year, the population has risen tenfold. While the amount of land under cultivation has nearly tripled, agricultural production has increased sixteenfold, producing some $800 million worth of Israeli farm exports last year. At the same time, industrial output has surged fiftyfold. Meanwhile, Israeli use of water has decreased by 10 percent. Israelis now purify and recycle some 95 percent of the nation's sewage, including imports of sewage from the West Bank and Gaza -- "They sell us sewage and we give them potable water," said one Israeli official. Israel is pioneering ever more efficient forms of drip irrigation and gains some 50 percent of its water from world-leading desalinization plants. With an array of new hydrological innovations, Israel provides the crucial answers to the acute water crisis that afflicts the Middle East and much of the rest of the world. Just as the Israeli settlers enabled the emergence of an economy in Palestine, so they offer the prospect of saving the entire region from water exhaustion and poverty after the oil boom ends. America's enemies in the Middle East well understand that no American military goals or resources in the Middle East are as remotely as important to the region as is Israel, with its ever-growing panoply of technical, economic, moral, and military assets. Israel cruised through the recent global slump with scarcely a down quarter, with nary a deficit or "stimulus plan" and with an ascendant shekel, while increasing its global supremacy, behind only the U.S., in an array of leading-edge technologies, from microchip design, network algorithms, medical instruments, and water recycling to missile defense, robotic warfare, and unmanned aerial vehicles. As the incomparable Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post reports, the latest economic data show Israel's economy growing 7.8 percent in the last quarter of 2010, with exports up 19.9 percent, accelerating to a 27.3 percent rise in the first quarter of 2011. So much for talk of boycotts. Meanwhile, contrary to all the floods of mendacious propaganda purveyed by an ever-gullible mainstream media, Netanyahu's bold economic and humanitarian policies in the West Bank and Gaza have succeeded in fostering a brisk economic revival in the territories, with a recovery rate of near 10 percent in Gaza alone. As George Will acerbically noted in a particularly brilliant column, "Turkey was claiming to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, a land with higher incomes and longevity than Turkey itself." Israel's unparalleled achievements in industry and intellect have fanned the familiar anti-Semitic frenzies among all the economically and morally failed societies of the socialist and Islamist Third World from Iran to Venezuela. They all imagine that by delegitimizing, demoralizing, defeating, and, ultimately, destroying Israel, they will take an enormous step toward bringing down the entire capitalist West. To most sophisticated Westerners, the jihadist focus on the annihilation of Israel may appear bizarre and counterproductive. But on the central importance of Israel, the jihadists have it right. Untethered from what had been the paramount American goal of deterring an attack on Israel and defending it against the common enemy, U.S. strategy has slid into total incoherence, drifting from a futile and deadly funambulism among the tribes of Afghanistan to propping up the Lebanese Army (i.e., Hezbollah) with sophisticated night-fighting gear to be used against no other target than Israel, and enhancing the Palestinian police forces with $100 million in new equipment and training assistance, all the while pretending to the overwhelmingly pro-Israel American electorate that it is, in fact, guaranteeing the military superiority of Israel. This feckless and reckless attempt at a "fairness doctrine" balancing act places the United States and the entire Middle East on a path that can only lead to a new war that such a Janus-faced policy, in which America arms both sides, will make at once more likely and more lethal. Acting on the facts of life and history would make peace a far more likely prospect than does the Obama administration's return to a "Peace Process" that chiefly focuses on uprooting Israeli settlers.  ]]></description>
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