Category Archives: Political Commentary

What Do Israelis Know?

…that American Jews don’t?

Barack Hussein Obama received nearly eighty percent of the Jewish vote and still garners strong approval among America’s Jews. In contrast, only six percent of Jewish Israelis support Obama.

Even before the election, Israeli Jews, unlike their sycophantic American brethren, saw through Obama. Israelis were the least supportive population anywhere in the Western world of the inexperienced politician turned presidential candidate.

To support Obama, liberal Jews had to engage in a set of incredible mental gymnastics. They had to ignore his twenty-year relationship with the anti-Semitic minister Reverend Jeremiah Wright. They had to ignore his strong personal relationship with the virulent anti-Zionist Rashid Khalidi. They had to ignore his statement to the Iowa caucuses that no one has suffered more than the Palestinian people. They had to ignore his support of his Kenyan cousin and genocidal strongman Raila Odinga, an advocate of Sharia. They had to ignore Obama’s own Muslim heritage. They had to ignore that anti-Israel policy experts such as Samantha Power (who now has her own special seat on the National Security Council), Susan Rice, and General James Jones had the real inside track on advising Obama on the Middle East.

Part of the problem, of course, is that they aren’t liberal. They’re leftist. And they value their leftism above their heritage, and ignore the history of how the left ultimately treats Jews, from Hitler to Stalin. And as noted in comments, the more recent Jewish emigres from Russia know better — it’s the European Ashkenazim who have been here for generations, and remain steeped in their socialist past, that are the problem. Ever since Likud won in Israel, and it was no longer viewed as properly socialist, they (like Barack Obama) seem willing to throw the nation under the bus.

A House Of Repeal

I like this idea:

Perhaps what America needs is an authority whose sole job is to get rid of outdated, ill-conceived, or just plain bad laws.

This administration would certainly keep it busy.

I don’t know if this is the solution, but the system clearly is broken. The Founders would be appalled.

I still like my idea of a Sunset Amendment:

“All laws passed by the Congress shall remain in effect for no more than ten calendar years from the date of passage, at or prior to which time they must be repassed, or expire. All federal laws in existence at the time of passage of this amendment shall have staggered expiration dates, as a function of their age on the books, according to the formula, time-to-expire = 35 x (year-of-amendment-passage – 1787)/(year-of-amendment-passage – year-of-law-passage) + 5. Repassage of all existing laws will also have a lifetime of ten years.”

I’ve put some (but not a tremendous amount of) thought into this. The idea is to make the whole mess go away eventually, but you wouldn’t want to have a single date of expiration for all existing law–it would simply overwhelm the system. What I’m hoping for here is something that whelms the system only slightly, but enough to keep them so busy renewing important laws that they won’t have time to renew antiquated or bad ones, or to cause new mischief.

The formula has the earliest phaseouts (of the most recent laws) occur in five years, while the oldest laws (some of which, given their age, might have actually been good ones), can hang on as long as forty. The last sentence may be redundant, because it’s implied by the first sentence, but I want to make it clear that once law existing prior to amendment passage has been reauthorized, it has no special status among laws passed later–it is simply treated as any other newly-passed law.

There is a useful discussion of loopholes over comments at the old post.

Maybe The Ming Dynasty Had The Right Idea

Legend has it (whether true or not) that, after Zheng He’s voyages were shut down, it was made a capital offense to build a ship with more than four masts.*

If I were Norm Augustine, I would suggest that NASA be encouraged to innovate by being forbidden to develop a vehicle with more capability than the biggest existing Atlas V. This would finally force them to stop wasting money on the heavy-lift fetish, and get on with the business of developing a cost-effective (and scalable) in-space transportation infrastructure. If they really want to continue to indulge in this economically irrational behavior, let them do it with their own money, or find some crazy investor, instead of continuing to screw the taxpayers.

*It was not the size restriction of the ships that prevented the Chinese from being a naval power. The Portuguese and Spanish conquered the New World with much smaller ones.