Month: July 2012

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Same topic read BooMan’s fp story – Romney Sounds Medicated.

WOW! I wonder what Romney really thinks to know about Afro-American culture or the Mexican-Americans who do the fruit picking and agricultural labor. Oops, he is part Mexican too. What about a cleaning lady or a housewife, they must be of an inferior race …

Great accomplishment of the Jewish nation, just look at the West Bank and Gaza

GDANSK, Poland–Mitt Romney ended his trip to Israel on a controversial note, angering Palestinian officials by suggesting Israelis have been more economically successful because of their culture.

“As you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality,” Romney told a group of Jewish donors at a Jerusalem fundraiser that netted more than $1 million for his campaign.

“Culture makes all the difference,” Romney told supporters. And as I come here, and
I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation.”

Romney’s comments didn’t sit well with key Palestinian leaders, including Saeb Erekat, a senior aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who told the Associated Press that Romney’s comment was a “racist statement.”

“This man doesn’t realize that the Palestinian economy cannot reach its potential because there is an Israeli occupation,” Erekat told AP. “It seems to me this man (Romney) lacks information, knowledge, vision and understanding of this region and its people… He also lacks knowledge about the Israelis themselves. I have not heard any Israeli official speak about cultural superiority.”

Ultra-orthodox Haredim are poor and many rely heavily on welfare

Romney, Bain & Co, and Experience In the Israeli War Room

Orit Gadiesh was part of Romney’s gubernatorial transition team. She joined Bain & Company (the precursor company to Bain Capital) in 1977, at the tender age of 26. Before that, she was the assistant to Ezer Weizman, the Israeli Minister of Defense and later President. During fighting in the early 1970’s, Ms. Gadiesh worked in the war room, a bunker where Gen. Moshe Dayan was in charge. She is the daughter of Israeli Brigadier General Falk Gadiesh.

From my earlier diary – Romney Can’t Help It – His Faith and Social Darwinism

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

I do think that differences in cultural values can help explain differences in the relative wealth of nations, but it’s not something to be discussed casually. And, as a political topic, it’s radioactive. If you’re running for office, you’re running to represent all your constituents, and if some of them are from Ecuador or Mexico or Palestine, they’re not going to like being told that their cultures are inferior. That’s what Mitt Ronmey did at a fundraiser in Israel. Of course, the Palestinians are outraged that Romney would overestimate their annual income by a factor of ten, blame their culture for their economic hardship, and assert that their misery is the result of providence. Even many Israelis were offended by Romney’s basic argument.

Talking Points Memo received a transcription of Romney’s remarks from his campaign. Reading it made me wonder if Romney is taking some kind of powerful medication because his words are almost nonsensical.

GOVERNOR ROMNEY: I was thinking this morning as I prepared to come into this room of a discussion I had across the country in the United States about my perceptions about differences between countries. And as you come here and you see the GDP per capita for instance in Israel which is about 21,000 dollars and you compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority which is more like 10,000 dollars per capita you notice a dramatic, stark difference in economic vitality.

And that is also between other countries that are near or next to each other. Chile and Ecuador, Mexico and the United States. I noted that part of my interest when I used to be in the world of business is I would travel to different countries was to understand why there were such enormous disparities in the economic success of various countries.

I read a number of books on the topic. One, that is widely acclaimed, is by someone named Jared Diamond called ‘Guns, Germs and Steel,’ which basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth. And you look at Israel and you say you have a hard time suggesting that all of the natural resources on the land could account for all the accomplishment of the people here. And likewise other nations that are next door to each other have very similar, in some cases, geographic elements.

But then there was a book written by a former Harvard professor named ‘The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.’ And in this book Dr. Landes describes differences that have existed—particularly among the great civilizations that grew and why they grew and why they became great and those that declined and why they declined. And after about 500 pages of this lifelong analysis—this had been his study for his entire life—and he’s in his early 70s at this point, he says this, he says, if you could learn anything from the economic history of the world it’s this: culture makes all the difference. Culture makes all the difference.

And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things. One, I recognize the hand of providence in selecting this place.

I’m told in a Sunday school class I attended— I think my son Tagg was teaching the class. He’s not here. I look around to see. Of course he’s not here. He was in London. He taught a class in which he was describing the concern on the part of some of the Jews that left Egypt to come to the promised land, that in the promised land was down the River Nile, that would provide the essential water they had enjoyed in Egypt. They came here recognizing that they must be relied upon, themselves and the arm of God to provide rain from the sky. And this therefore represented a sign of faith and a show of faith to come here. That this is a people that has long recognized the purpose in this place and in their lives that is greater than themselves and their own particular interests, but a purpose of accomplishment and caring and building and serving.

There’s also something very unusual about the people of this place. And Dan Senor— And Dan, I saw him this morning, I don’t know where he is, he’s probably out twisting someone’s arm—There’s Dan Senor, co-author of ‘Start-up Nation,’ described— If you haven’t read the book, you really should— Described why it is Israel is the leading nation for start-ups in the world. And why businesses one after the other tend to start up in this place. And he goes through some of the cultural elements that have led Israel to become a nation that has begun so many businesses and so many enterprises and that is becomes so successful.”

I can kind of follow along with what he’s saying, but it’s a whole lot of bullshit. There’s nothing particularly important about what he had to say, except that it revealed a lot about how he thinks. And it is one more demonstration that Romney has a gift for insulting people unintentionally.

Jennifer Rubin is a real piece of work. Let’s take a look at part of her Washington Post piece on Mitt Romney’s visit to Israel.

Without specifically criticizing President Obama in his speech in Jerusalem, Mitt Romney delivered a blow to the Obama campaign’s frantic efforts to defend the president’s hostile stance toward the Jewish state simply by saying: “It is a deeply moving experience to be in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel.” The Obama administration can’t even say that much, a sign of how reflectively protective of the Palestinians’ sensibilities is this president. Of course, Jerusalem is the capital. It was declared so in 1948. The Knesset is there. The disposition of its borders is a matter for final status negotiation, but only an uninformed or virulently insensitive administration would be unable to distinguish the two.

Okay. First we have the idea that the Obama administration is hostile to Israel based on their refusal to call Jerusalem the capital of Israel. Let’s deal with some facts. In 2002, Congress passed a bill that would allow American citizens who were born in Jerusalem to put the word ‘Israel’ on their passport. This was in response to State Department policy that neither Jordan nor Israel be listed on such passports. George W. Bush signed the bill but he issued a signing statement declaring that the language on Jerusalem was unconstitutional.

Section 214(d) sought to override this instruction by allowing citizens born in Jerusalem to have “Israel” recorded on their passports if they wish. In signing the Foreign Relations Authorization Act into law, President George W. Bush stated his belief that §214 “impermissibly interferes with the President’s constitutional authority to conduct the Nation’s foreign affairs and to supervise the unitary executive branch.”

The case wound up at the Supreme Court, which ruled that the bill is constitutional and remanded it back to the lower courts to reconsider the merits of the case. But the point is that President Bush refused to obey part of a law that he signed because it instructed the State Department to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Was this evidence that George W. Bush was hostile to Israel?

Ms. Rubin says that of course Jerusalem is the capital of Israel because it was declared the capital in 1948. But, by whom was it declared the capital? Because the United Nations certainly did not declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel in 1948, or at any other time. The United Nations officially considers Jerusalem to be a corpus separatum, or entity unto itself.

Considering that no U.S. government has ever legally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, hasn’t our whole political establishment been “uninformed or virulently insensitive” to Israel for over 60 years now?

But if it’s rhetorical support Ms. Rubin wants, she should remember 2008, when Obama said the following:

“Let me be clear,” Obama said, “Israel’s security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable. The Palestinians need a state that is contiguous and cohesive and that allows them to prosper. But any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized and defensible borders. Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided,” he added, in efforts to secure the Jewish vote.

So, in essence, when it comes to talking about Jerusalem, Romney is not much different from Obama who is not much different from the lesser Bush. The entirely of Ms. Rubin’s column is a calumnious lie.

Physicist Richard Muller doesn’t express moral outrage in his column in Saturday’s NY Times, but he does something that is, I think, at least as important:  he  demolishes the arguments of so-called “climate skeptics” who don’t believe human activity is the cause of global warming.

“Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.“

For this column, and for his willingness to allow the truth of his findings to change his mind, Muller is the latest recipient of the Dionne Award, named for Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne and given at the whim of this blog to a “habitually even-tempered and fair-minded commentator for excellence in expressing moral outrage”.

Unfortuantely, as Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum points out, “Climate skeptics are skeptics because they don’t like the idea of global warming, not because there’s truly any evidence that it doesn’t exist. It’s politically inconvenient, economically inconvenient, and personally inconvenient, so they don’t want to hear about it.”  Thus, it’s unlikely that climate skeptics (including powerful interests like ExxonMobil and much of today’s Republican Party) will be influenced by Muller’s conversion.

Their self-interested stubbornness is a different issue for a different day.  Today it’s enough to celebrate Muller’s research and his willingness to act like a true scientist—one who follows the scientific method where it leads, regardless of any blows it may strike against his prior hypotheses.

h/t: Kevin Drum

Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/

(One in an occasional series of posts on removing cars from their privileged place in American society.)

This past weekend marked the first anniversary of Boston’s “Hubway” biking system.  Hubway has exceeded expectations with over 7,000 members who’ve taken over 350,000 trips.  Monthly usage has climbed every month this year (starting in March—New England winters, even mild ones, make for poor biking conditions) and now exceeds 2,000 trips per day.

Hubway is expanding to nearby Brookline, Cambridge and Somerville later this year.  It’s also expanding from downtown outward to more residential Boston neighborhoods like Allston, Charlestown, Dorchester and Roxbury.

Here’s how it works:

“The bike rental system is built on separate municipal contracts and a regional agreement among the four communities and the operator, Alta Bicycle Share. Each has assembled its own start-up financing through grants, sponsorships, and tax dollars; a typical station with a full complement of bikes costs $50,000.

Membership fees ($85 for a year, $5 for a day), corporate and nonprofit sponsorship, and advertising offset operating costs, including maintenance and Hubway’s tending of stations to keep them from being too full or too empty for too long.“

Members pick up a bike at one Hubway station and return it to another one near their destination.  There are financial incentives to keep the trips short (i.e., under 30 minutes).

The biggest political issue in any city is land because, almost by definition, cities are places where there are lots of people competing for control and use of a small piece of land.  In Boston, that’s meant carving out space to store the Hubway bicycles when they’re not in use, and making room for them on the city’s streets—primarily by painting bike lane markers on scores of the city’s busiest streets.  Support for bicycling has also been institutionalized for the past five years in the city’s Transportation Department through the “Boston Bikes” office.

Hubway has had, so far at least, a minimal impact on automobile drivers.  The minor inconvenience of staying out of marked bike lanes is probably more than offset by the decrease in the number of cars on downtown streets.  What Hubway has done is to make bicycling a much easier and more attractive option:  no need to buy a bicycle, no need to park and store it, no need to worry about it being stolen.

Dethroning the automobile isn’t always about big, dramatic changes.  It’s also about the steady accumulation of small changes that make alternative modes of transportation more attractive, one commuter/traveler at a time.

Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently made news by suggesting that the right to own a hand-held rocket launcher might be constitutionally protected. He based his reasoning on the word “bear.” The right to keep and “bear” arms means, for Scalia, that you have the right to any weapon that you can carry. So, no cannons, but stinger missiles and rocket propelled grenades are okay. You have to wonder about a guy who goes about settling legal questions this way. He also believes that the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision was wrongly decided. That case established a married couple’s constitutional right to buy and use contraception because there is an inherent right to marital privacy in the Constitution. Justice Scalia disagrees, and he thinks the voters of the several states should decide whether or not you and your spouse should be able to buy a condom, the Pill, or any other family planning device. Yet, he is totally outraged that the government can give you a tax penalty for failing to buy health insurance.

Scalia is nuts, but he’s squarely in the mainstream of contemporary Republican thinking.

Near the end of a long article in the Washington Post about the resistance people have in Oklahoma to buying car insurance or being told what to do by the government, we encounter an anonymous man who has no health insurance and doesn’t like the insurance mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act:

On a recent morning at the center, patients waited in avo­cado-green chairs to pick up medicine or see a doctor. John, 37, who would not give his last name, said he could not afford health insurance for himself, his wife and his five children on his $38,000 salary as an apartment manager. He said he resents the idea that the government could compel him to do something he may not be able to afford.

“I don’t think the government should have the right to force people to do anything unless it’s following a criminal law or something,” he said.

This man has a large family. It’s larger than can be accounted for by the Kaiser Foundation health care subsidy calculator, which only will allow me to enter a maximum family size of four. Since he has a family size of seven, I can’t get a precise measure of what this man stands to get under ObamaCare, but it will be more generous than what I report here.

A 37 year-old man with a family of four and an annual income of $38,000 is making 162% of the poverty rate. A typical health care plan for such a family would cost $11,384, so it’s easy to see why this man cannot afford a policy. Under the new law, the maximum percentage of income a person/family has to pay for the premium if eligible for a subsidy is 4.56%. What this means is that the government will give this man $9,650 a year to insure himself and his whole family. He is obligated to pay $1,734.

Let’s break this down. Right now, he has no health insurance and it will cost him over eleven thousand dollars to buy a policy for his family. Under the new law, he can cover his whole family for $1,734 or he can pay a tax penalty of $695 and keep his entire family uninsured. So, essentially, the true cost of getting insured is $1,139. The true cost of remaining uninsured is $695 and all the untold risk that entails.

And, again, because his family size is seven and not four, I am underestimating the benefit he will receive.

Now, I hate the mandate because it attempts to compel people to buy private for-profit health insurance, and I don’t think we should use insurance as the way to pay for health care. But this guy is probably totally unaware of the real choice he is facing. He is being offered a chance to avoid the risk of foreclosure on his house and total bankruptcy if any of his seven family members become seriously ill for a price tag of less than $1,800 a year when a normal policy currently costs in excess of $11,000 and would constitute more than a quarter of his annual income.

On top of that, his annual out-of-pocket expenses will be capped at $4,167 (based on a family of four) while he currently has no cap on that whatsoever.

He is being offered an incredible deal. But he’s been indoctrinated into believing that his liberty is being threatened. I hope John reads this, because he needs to know what President Obama did for his family, and he needs to take advantage of it.

Mitt Romney really should show more common sense than to travel to Israel and declare that Jerusalem is their capital and that he will move our embassy there whenever the Israelis feel it would be a good time to do so. It’s an unnecessarily provocative move that isn’t likely to win him many Jewish votes. And it’s just one more example of Romney making promises that really amount to an abdication of responsibility.

He’ll let his generals decide his foreign policy. He’ll consult his lawyers before he confronts Iran. He’ll let Israel attack Iran without any conditions. He’ll let Israel decide when to move our embassy to Jerusalem.

It’s a pattern of behavior at this point. And I think most Jewish-Americans are familiar enough with the controversy over Jerusalem’s status that they’ll see Romney’s behavior as naked pandering that demonstrates a reckless disregard for protocol.

It isn’t really much different from going to Taiwan and declaring that it isn’t part of China. The only difference is that China has more power to strike back than the Arab World. The final status of Jerusalem is supposed to be decided as part of a comprehensive peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, brokered by the regional powers and the international community. It is not supposed to be decided on the back of candidate Romney’s cocktail napkin.

There are ways to talk about the Israelis’ claim on Jerusalem without challenging sixty years of US foreign policy while you are standing on foreign soil. But Romney either doesn’t know how to do diplomacy or he’s just under the misimpression that a large number of Jewish retirees in Florida are going to be so impressed with his pro-Israel stance that they’ll vote for him.

My guess is that he’ll lose at least one of those votes with these antics for every vote he gains.

In the meantime, most disinterested observers just think he’s being an ass and showing weakness. If he’s president, it seems everyone will be driving the jet-ski but Romney.

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Pollard activists to use McCain to pressure Romney

(JPost) – Activists for Pollard’s freedom will hoist posters of McCain – who opposed clemency until recently – wherever Romney goes in Israel.

 « click for story “What about Manning?”

Mitt Romney, like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, will be presented with a letter calling for clemency for Pollard signed by Knesset faction heads representing 109 MKs across the political spectrum from Meretz to the National Union.

In his only public comments about Pollard so far, Romney told the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in December that he was “open to examining” the case. While one Jewish leader said afterward that he was confident that Romney would see the justice in Pollard’s case once he studied it, another Jewish leader present at the meeting said he was disappointed Romney did not call for Pollard’s release.

Will the Israeli State be willing to release Vanunu who has served his sentence?

• Romney, Pollard and Israel: The Next Big Gaffe?
• U.S. sees Israel, tight Mideast ally, as spying threat

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

Dick Cheney was willing to go on the record that picking Sarah Palin as a running mate was a mistake.

“That one,” Cheney said, “I don’t think was well handled.”

“The test to get on that small list has to be, ‘Is this person capable of being president of the United States?’”

Cheney believes Sarah Palin failed that test.

“I like Governor Palin. I’ve met her. I know her. She – attractive candidate. But based on her background, she’d only been governor for, what, two years. I don’t think she passed that test…of being ready to take over. And I think that was a mistake.”

Frankly, Sarah Palin could be governor for 20 years and she still wouldn’t be ready to take over. My only problem with Cheney’s remarks is that he also flubbed the vetting of vice-presidential candidates when he gave up and picked himself. His advice to the president was so universally disastrous that Bush no longer listened to him at all in his second term. For four years, Dick Cheney was the most powerful vice-president in history. He was also the worst vice-president in history. When it comes to picking a running mate, Cheney should just shut his face.