John Bolton Unveils Foreign Policy Test for Candidates

Jazz Shaw -  Hotair

The timing for this probably couldn’t be better. It’s not that we don’t have plenty of domestic issues requiring attention, but we’ve reached a moment in the campaign where the focus of the nation is drawn to terrorism and affairs across the ocean. With that in mind, former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton is rolling out a new campaign to ensure that all of the 2016 candidates understand what’s at stake and push them to articulate their positions. But rather than leaving it up to the typical, vague talking points which campaigns love to roll out, Bolton is getting down to specifics. (Washington Post)

“You don’t make strategy by throwing a bunch of pick-up sticks on the table and seeing what emerges,” he said in an interview. “Tactics flow deductively from a real strategy. It’s not enough in my view for my candidates to deliver stump speeches written by their expert staffs. It’s not enough to download 50 ‘tough’ talking points and an ‘act natural’ algorithm.” 

Bolton, one of the few national Republican figures to pass on a 2016 bid, is kicking off a six-figure ad campaign, starting online to introduce a “Bolton Test” to the 2016 race — even though he really doesn’t want the debate to be about him. “I’m a policy wonk, not a PR person, but I acknowledge in a PR battle here,” he said. “My op-ed average is one a week. I’ve got appearances on Fox News God knows how many times per month. What I’m interested in is less affecting the candidates than affecting the discussion.”

Hopefully we’ll be seeing all of the candidates weighing in on “The Bolton Test.” This is one of the more concise sets of questions on foreign policy you’re going to run across and is fairly typical of Bolton’s style. Here’s a sample:

What is America’s proper place in the world? 

Do the candidates see a strong U.S. international presence as important to international peace and security? Or do they see American power as the cause of tension and conflict? Obama believes that America should apologize for its past foreign policies. 

What are the primary threats and opportunities America faces abroad? 

President Obama’s weakness encourages our enemies. We face threats from aggressive Russian and Chinese behavior, weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism. Candidates need to do more than answer questions with memorized talking points. They need the intellect and character to detect, analyze, and respond to threats and opportunities. 

How should America respond to those threats and opportunities?

Blaming Obama’s failures isn’t enough. We must restore the confidence of our allies while showing we are ready to protect our interests. How do the presidential candidates propose to do this? Unclear answers are not enough. For example, do the candidates understand the urgent need to restore our national missile defense system? After the Iran deal and years of ignoring North Korea’s nuclear threat, we are not prepared.

Nothing hyperbolic and completely lacking in inflammatory rhetoric. It’s a Just the Facts, Ma’am approach. And that’s pretty typical of Bolton. Last winter, when he was still mulling over the idea of running for president himself, the Ambassador gave us an interview where he expressed many of these same concerns. He’s a very focused guy, but he’s still got an interesting sense of humor. When he’s evaluating the current crop of candidates I have to wonder if he’ll be checking to see how many of them went to Yale Law. During our interview he dropped in the following gem:

“Everybody at Yale Law School thinks that they can become president and should become president if only the peasants would agree.”– John Bolton

Not too much to pick from in the current crop. Carson went to Yale, but it was the medical school. George Pataki studied History there but he went on to Columbia for his J.D. On the Democrat side, of course, Hillary Clinton went to Yale during the same era as Bolton, though they were not friends. (He talks about that in the interview.) Clearly both she, her husband and Bolton all had thoughts of moving into the Oval Office so… who knows? Perhaps there’s something to his theory.

The Stench of Freddie Mac Is Back -- An $18 Billion Spree Of Crony Capitalist Thievery

Shared by Col Mike walker, USMC (retired)

The Stench of Freddie Mac Is Back -- An $18 Billion Spree Of Crony Capitalist Thievery

 

By David Stockman, Former White House OMB Director and Congressman

 

Washington’s capacity to foster crony capitalist larceny and corruption never ceases to amaze. But according to the Bloomberg story below, Wall Street’s shameless thievery from US taxpayers is about to get a whole new definition.

 

To wit, Freddie Mac is handing three private equity billionaires deeply subsidized debt financing in order to undertake $18 billion in rental apartment deals. According to no less an authority than Morgan Stanley, the subsidy embedded in this cheap financing amounts to 150 basis points or roughly $150 million per year on the loan amounts in play.

 

Yet this largesse will serve no discernible public purpose whatsoever. Indeed, over the 10-year term of these loans the bonanza will amount to billions, but it will not generate a single new unit of housing. Nor will it provide a single dollar of incremental rent relief to any low or moderate income tenant.

 

That’s because the purpose of these giant loans is not to fund new construction of rental housing—– for which there is currently an arguable shortage. And it’s not even to incentivize owners to convert existing apartment buildings to so-called “affordable” housing.

 

Instead, its sole effect will be to put the taxpayers in the business of highly leveraged Wall Street deal making. That is, it will fund what amounts to apartment company LBOs being undertaken by the largest players in the private equity world including Barry Sternlicht's Starwood Capital Group, Steve Schwarzman's Blackstone Group and John Grayken’s Lone Star Fund.

 

Each of these cats are billionaires many times over and their remit most definitely does not include bolstering the social safety net. What they are doing is buying giant apartment companies in high priced takeover deals. These LBOs will shower sellers and speculators with windfall gains, and Wall Street dealers and themselves with prodigious fees now and the prospect of pocketing double, triple or quadruple their modest cash equity investments not too far down the road.

 

Freddie Mac, of course, is the one and same crony capitalist monstrosity that helped push the US financial system to the brink in 2008. If Washington had any common sense and gumption at all, it would have taken it out back and shot it years ago.

 

But the K-Street lobbies kept it alive during the dark days after the crash and have now invented a new mission to purportedly facilitate affordable rental housing. But that’s a crock, and the true purpose could not be more blatantly obvious than in the three deals described in the Bloomberg article.

Thus, Freddie Mac will loan the Lone Star Fund $5 billion to finance an LBO of Home Properties. Folks, the latter is a rental housing REIT that is publicly traded, more than adequately financed and in no need of help from the nation’s taxpayers whatsoever. In fact, it already has about $2.4 billion of plain old market debt.

 

But it can be well and truly said that the punters and hedge funds which own the stock have made out like bandits. Its share price has tripled since the March 2009 bottom, but more importantly, was up by 35% just in the 18-months prior to the June 2015 LBO announcement.

 

Did Home Properties earnings take-off in the last year or so, thereby warranting the stock price surge shown above?

 

No they didn’t. 

 

During the 12-months ended in June 2015, Home Properties earned $177 million or 4% less than the $185 million of net income it posted two years earlier for the June 2013 LTM.

 

So here is what was accomplished by putting US taxpayers in harms’ way in this instance.

 

A rental housing REIT with more than 100 communities and 40,000 apartment units, and which currently is comprised of about 30% “affordable” units under Freddie Mac’s elastic definitions, has been shuffled from public to private ownership.

 

The transaction was accomplished at the bubble era price of 25X net income—–a vastly inflated valuation which had been reached in June and which reflected the fact that the fast money boys had earlier piled on for the rumored takeover ride.

Yet without Freddie Mac’s funding of the takeout at this absurdly inflated price, the arbs and speculators who sold their stock into the recently completed deal would not have had a snowball’s chance of retaining their winnings.

 

That’s some public policy accomplishment, and its all there is.

 

Its proud new billionaire owner won’t be required to add a single additional unit of so-called “affordable” housing, and that term doesn’t mean much anyway. Freddie Mac’s definition includes about 60% of US households!

 

Well, there is one aspect which has changed, and not in a good way. What was a public REIT with $4.4 billion of equity market cap and $2.4 billion of debt has become a private LBO with $5 billion of debt and a deal fee tab in the order of $300 million.

 

As to the latter, it was some kind of Wall Street feast. Yet all of the deal commotion implied by this listing amounted to dead weight cost to society. This pointless LBO deal never would have happened on the free market:

 

BofA Merrill Lynch acted as financial advisor to Home Properties. BofA Merrill Lynch and Houlihan Lokey provided fairness opinions to the Home Properties Board of Directors in connection with the transaction. Goldman, Sachs & Co. acted as exclusive financial advisor to Lone Star. Hogan Lovells US LLP acted as legal advisor to Home Properties. Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP acted as corporate legal advisor, Hunton & Williams LLP acted as real estate legal advisor, and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP acted as tax legal advisors to Lone Star Funds. Sidley Austin LLP acted as legal advisor to BofA Merrill Lynch, and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP acted as legal advisor to Goldman, Sachs & Co.

 

In other words, the fools in Washington have descended so far down the rabbit hole of “help for housing” that they have managed to double the debt on these 40,000 rental units in order to cash out public equity investors who had no claim whatsoever to taxpayer support. Oh, yes, and to pay enormous fees to the deal banker, Goldman Sachs, which by all rights should be paying back taxpayers for its 2008 bailout, not scalping them yet again.

 

But when it comes to lunacy in the rabbit hole nothing comes close to another deal mentioned in the article—— the $5.3 billion LBO of Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village by Blackstone. It appears that Freddie Mac will provide $2.5 billion of the takeover financing, meaning the annual subsidy will be in the order of $40 million.

 

Let’s be clear about “Stuy Town” as its called. It has absolutely nothing to do with poor people or any plausible notion of a social safety net. It is a monster housing complex on the lower east side of New York which encompasses 80 acres, 11,000 apartment units and upwards of 35,000 middle class inhabitants—–a good sized city in most of America.

 

It also happens to be ground zero for one of the more spectacular housing debt crashes last time around. It had been a $5.4 billion leveraged buyout in 2006 by Tishman Speyer and a BlackRock fund. The deal predicate was that this legendary rent-controlled complex originally built by MetLife for returning servicemen after WWII would slowly return to free market pricing as grandfathered tenants passed away or moved on.

 

But the Greenspan credit bubble expired before the rent-protected tenants did or before mysteriously failing heating, plumbing and electrical services could induce enough of the remaining rent-protected tenants to move along on their own two feet in order to make the pro forma financials work.

 

Not surprisingly, the deal blew sky high during the financial crisis and resulted in billions of losses for the mortgage lenders. For the past five years it has been operated by a consortium of creditors whose foolish investments in this fiasco deserved no quarter whatsoever from the nation’s hard-pressed taxpayers.

 

Indeed, as time passed the creditors consortium had become desperate to find a mullet stupid enough to buy them out at a premium to their written down loan values, but the going was exceedingly tough. After all, the giant complex was still financially radioactive after upwards of $3.5 billion of losses from the 2006 LBO.

Moreover, additional headwinds arose from the fact that Stuy Town is a perennial object of local politicians demagogueing on behalf of “affordable” housing.

Then again that’s why we have oily politicians like Senator Chuck Schumer. As a real estate industry publication described it:

 

Their proposal was almost the exact opposite of Tishman Speyer's 2006 bid: They would take on little debt and keep the apartments as rentals, eyeing steady returns instead of swift profits. And they deemed it essential to win over the city, tenants and local politicians -- perhaps in part to New York's senior senator, Chuck Schumer.

 

At a tenant meeting at Stuy Town last week, Schumer said the Tishman Speyer saga had taught him the need for "outside leverage." "And I found a way," he added. "I realized that to get such a huge mortgage, you need the backing of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

 

So here is what’s going to happen. The busted lenders to the 2006 deal are going to make a killing by getting $5.3 billion for positions which are not remotely worth that.

 

At the same time, Blackstone will get subsidized financing from Freddie Mac, $225 million worth of benefits from New York City through an additional loan and uncollected taxes and the rights to sell the complex’s 700,000 square feet of air rights, which could be worth hundreds of millions.

 

Why all this largesse?

 

At the end of the day it will mean that a mere 500 units out of the 11,000 will be reserved for families making no more than $62,000 per year, and another 4,500 for families making up to $128,000 per year.

 

That’s right. The taxpayers of America are being dragged into a $5 billion LBO on the very site where an identical one blew up less than seven years ago—–purportedly to help families that are in the top 10% of income earners in the nation.

 

Needless to say, there is a simple alternative. Abolish Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and all the rest of the Washington’s crony capitalist machinery and turn housing finance over to the free market where it belongs.

 

If there are citizens in need who can pass a means test and can’t work owing to age or genuine disability give them cash to fund their own shelter choices. And if they are able bodied and willing to work, top up their wages with earned income tax credits or similar cash transfers.

 

But let’s stop being stupid. Blackstone is not the United Way.

SHELL-SHOCKED BY PC WORLD

SHELL-SHOCKED BY PC WORLD, UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESIDENT STEPS DOWN

Paul Mirengoff, Powerline

University of Missouri president Tim Wolfe resigned yesterday after the school’s football team threatened to go on strike. The threatened strike was in support of student protests over alleged “systematic oppression” of blacks at the school.

As at Yale, I have seen no reports of violence directed at any African-American at the University of Missouri. The “systematic oppression” appears to consist of a few incidents of racial slurs directed at a couple of black students (as I understand it, the main offender who was identified, a drunken student, was removed from campus pending formal disciplinary action).

Approximately 35,000 students attend the University’s Columbia campus. How can the University guarantee that no student will ever utter a racial slur?

Rich Lowry argues that the black students are really complaining about not being sufficiently coddled. I haven’t been on campus, but Lowry’s claim finds support in complaints like this one from the Student Association: “In the months [following the Michael Brown shooting], our students were left stranded, forced to face an increase in tension and inequality with no systemic support.”

Why the shooting of a thug who attacked a police officer required the University of Missouri to provide “systemic support” to students is unclear. What was the University supposed to do, postpone exams?

The Student Association also declared:

The academic careers of our students are suffering. The mental health of our campus is under constant attack. Our students are being ignored. We have asked the University to create spaces of healing and it failed to do so.

Translation: coddle us. Oh, and President Wolfe, give us a handwritten apology that acknowledges your “white privilege.”

Concluding that it was no privilege to preside over the infantile, Wolfe resigned.

He never stood a chance in the deranged environment of the politically correct modern university. Unlike so many college presidents, Wolfe made his bones in the real world.

According to his Wikipedia page, Wolfe began his career as a sales rep for IBM in 1980. He worked his way up the industry ladder, becoming president of Novell Americas in 2007. It’s unlikely that anyone demanded coddling from Wolfe during his corporate career.

Wolfe was named president of the University of Missouri in 2011. I imagine that he saw his mission more as maintaining the financial viability of the institution than as promoting “the mental health of [the] campus,” which he probably assumed was okay. Little did he know.

With his resignation, Wolfe can enjoy a return to the sane world, the football players can get on with the business of losing football games (the team is 1-5 in SEC play), and the University can find a spineless career administration who will hire minority counselors to provide “systemic support” to the fragile and the hysterical.

However, the mental health of the campus seems beyond repair.

Carson, West Point and the Media

Carson, West Point and the Media

Col Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

All,

Ben Carson averred he had been offered a free ride to West Point when looking to go to college.

He was a teenager and exceptionally qualified student, one that the “best of the best” colleges and universities would seek out.

He had also joined JROTC in high school, making it inevitable that someone talked to him about going to West Point. 

He also wanted to be a doctor and ROTC and West Point at that time did NOT allow cadets to graduate and go directly to medical school so Dr. Carson never seriously pursued entry into West Point.

Given his age and low interest (he admitted a number of times over the last decade or so that he never formally applied), it is completely believable that he never mastered the specific application process.

He simply recalled that he was told he was a shoe-in, a lock, it was a done deal, if he applied. Given his background and resume that is absolutely correct. 

The Marine Corps, in which I served as an officer, has no academy but the Officer Selection Officers who recruit Marine officers would have crawled naked over broken glass to get Ben Carson to sign up.

Carson may not have total recall but he accurately presented reality.

So what about the journalists who wrote the story? 

They are professional investigators yet they got the facts wrong. They, like teenaged Carson, also miscommunicated the complex admission process to West Point and committed other errors.

So who is being either dishonest, incompetent or both?

It is not Carson. In looking closely at the retelling of a brief event from his late teenage years, everything Dr. Carson says rings true.

How about the professional investigators? 

They blew this story and were clearly either dishonest, incompetent or both.

What does it mean?

Over the decades, news reporters have gone from purveyors of the facts to advocates. They start with a preconceived answer and then cherry pick, ignore, and twist the facts to fit their narrative even when it is patently false.

That is what happened here.

Semper Fi,

Mike

TIPTOEING (Past the Graveyard of Formerly Free Speech)

THOUGHTS FROM THE AMMO LINE
Scott Johnson, Powerline

Ammo Grrrll goes TIPTOEING (Past the Graveyard of Formerly Free Speech):

Way back in my misguided leftist days in San Francisco, I knew two families with wildly-varying child-raising philosophies. One couple had a lively little boy who ran barefoot in damp, chilly, meeting halls that exhibited the same standards of hygiene as many radicals did personally. He ate hot dogs, chips and candy, some picked up off dirty floors. He was bright and energetic and never sick.

Another couple had a little girl who was a hothouse flower. She was fed organic baby food and kept far far from other ragamuffin children and any adult with even a sniffle. As anyone who knows anything about immunity would guess, she was sick most of the time.
My mother was a clean freak of the first order, but her sister (of blessed memory) bordered on the insane on the subject. She boiled her children’s Monopoly pieces and tried to put the board in the oven to sterilize it. (That didn’t work out.) Her kids (my cousins) couldn’t play in a sandbox. Every letter we ever got from them mentioned one or more of the kids being down with the flu.

When I was a young mother, I tried to chart a kind of middle course. I had learned by that time from observing others’ experiences, that it was a yuge mistake to tiptoe around when the baby was napping, whispering to everyone, “Shhhh…the baby’s asleep.” Consequently, our son learned to sleep through piledrivers on the street outside his bedroom and knock-down/drag-out (or more accurately, drag queen) fights coming from the apartment above us. That flat was occupied by two large, high-strung gay men. I gathered from the shrieking, this was not a monogamous couple, yet at least one person was not on board with that, or as the saying goes, “comfortable” with it. They may have been gay, but they still fought like men. It often sounded like a saloon fight choreographed by John Wayne.

A couple weeks ago, I opined on the horrendous damage to our language and our freedom by the cossetted SJWs and Pajama Boys who are allowed to have speakers disinvited, CEOs fired, and entire subjects closed because they feel “unsafe.” Everyone around them is forced to respond to “microaggressions,” a meaningless synonym for “nothing.”

The damage to our Republic by caving to this utter nonsense is hard to calculate. But what about the damage to the shrinking little violets themselves? I am totally serious. What happens to those around whom people are forced to tiptoe?

I know for a fact that if you always tiptoe around an infant, she will never sleep through a night and will startle at the drop of a pin. She will be anxious and fearful.

Life, my dear friends and readers, is very, very tough. Nobody escapes unscathed. I am not talking here about the extraordinary courage necessary to storm the beaches of Normandy, go house to house in Fallujah, or raise a flag at Iwo Jima. I am talking about ordinary life. If you can’t stand to have a speaker on campus with whom you disagree – for a speech you aren’t even going to attend! – you are going to fold like a cheap card table at the first sign of any real trouble. How are you going to survive a layoff? Where will you find the strength to take chemo? How are you going to deal with the sudden death of a spouse, the incomparable pain of the loss of a child, the very real possibility of some day ending up with a serious disability?

We pamper our children at their peril. It’s tantamount to denying them vaccinations to shield them from all adversity, challenges, and differences of opinion.

Not even to mention the peril to a legal system wherein the standard for a tort has traditionally been something that would be offensive to someone “not unusually sensitive” when EVERYONE is “unusually sensitive” and must be catered to.

Do you feel safe with the real JV team captained by Obama, Kerry and a blind-folded foreign policy? BH

Obama just fell for a classic Russian ruse

By John Bolton

, NY Post

Recent Russian efforts to magnify its Middle East influence have been accompanied by a seeming surge in Kremlin “reasonableness.” In fact, Russian calls for new Syrian elections and sharing intelligence with Western powers are nothing more than exercises in “maskirovka,” Russia’s classic technique for disguising its real objectives.

Gullible Westerners, following a long-established pattern, are falling for the ruse.

And a ruse it is. Russia’s goals haven’t changed, only its propaganda.

For example, by offering to attack ISIS targets if Washington and the Free Syrian Army share intelligence regarding those targets, Moscow is trying to blunt criticism that its strikes so far have targeted the FSA itself. 

Russia needs no help finding ISIS, and knows full well America won’t help Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, even indirectly. Instead, Putin’s aim is to envelop the United States in a web of cooperation that further legitimizes Russia’s dramatically enhanced Middle East presence.

Russia’s support for new Syrian elections is the brashest ploy of all. Drawing the FSA (let alone ISIS, which will presumably sneer at the idea) into protracted negotiations over election rules can only lessen the opposition’s will. In the highly unlikely event elections were actually held, who doubts that Assad’s henchmen would deliver his votes with even more predictability and efficiency than America’s urban political machines?

Putin’s offers of “cooperation” are aimed at weakening Western resistance to Russia’s rising influence in the region and more broadly. Russia’s increasing confidence is also reflected in its worldwide interest in critical undersea communications cables, implicitly threatening their destruction in time of war.

Europe’s continuing Middle East refugee crisis is agitating governments to stop the nearly endless tide inundating them. Although purportedly from Syria, displaced by four years of grinding civil conflict, many of the refugees come from elsewhere, as far away as Afghanistan or as close as Kosovo. Verifying the refugees’ citizenship has overwhelmed Europe’s capacities — and they’re still coming. Most are young men; if they’re allowed to remain, their families will follow in due course.

Solving the refugee problem is the carrot Russia has soothingly offered through its Syrian intervention. But Moscow has more in mind, namely getting relief from the sanctions imposed because of its adventurism in Ukraine.

Recent (and very convenient) media reports that Russian special-operations forces currently deployed in Ukraine are being sent to Syria does two things. First, it announces that Russia has no immediate intention to increase tensions in Ukraine, providing another argument to reduce or eliminate sanctions. Second, it shows Russian commitment to “resolve” the Syria question.

Putin is also signaling to Arab leaders, especially Saudi Arabia, that Russia is a dependable ally, perhaps not so strong as the United States militarily, but at least more constant. By assembling a Shiite coalition including Assad, Iran, its puppet regime in Baghdad and Hezbollah, the Kremlin is showing that, while America dithers, it can act with firmness and resolve.

Plus, regional chaos has already helped provoke a dramatic spike in violence by Palestinians against Israel. And like Winnie the Pooh drawn to honey, Secretary of State John Kerry has diverted to the Israel-Palestinian dispute rather than repelling Russia’s incursions into America’s Middle East dominance. 

However weak Putin’s economic hand or precarious his domestic political position, he has the momentum and a full range of options. His alliance could easily reach an unholy modus vivendi with ISIS, allowing both Iran and ISIS, despite their widely varying (indeed, conflicting) motives, to pursue their respective objectives against the Arabian Peninsula’s oil-producing monarchies. Or, Putin could offer the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs a respite from ISIS and Iranian threats in pursuit of their common objective of higher global oil prices. 

Putin’s domestic vulnerabilities could, of course, be exploited by adversaries who understood his strategy and had both the determination and the capacity to protect their own vital interests. History, confirmed by several recent utterly childlike comments, tells us that President Obama neither understands what Putin is seeking, nor is inclined to counter it.

Not only in Syria but throughout the Middle East, Putin will remain unchecked by America for the next 15 months. As grim as the situation is now, it will be worse in January 2017.

John Bolton, now at the American Enterprise Institute, was US ambassador to the United Nations from August 2005 to December 2006. 

The State Department Clown Car Makes Things Worse in The Middle East

The State Department Clown Car Makes Things Worse in The Middle East
John Hinderaker, Powerline

Palestinians have launched at least 28 attacks on Israeli Jews over the past week, leaving seven dead and more than 70 wounded. These attacks, mostly using knives while a few involved guns or motor vehicles, have been encouraged by Islamic preachers on the West Bank and by Mahmoud Abbas.

This violence, while of great concern to Israelis, pales in comparison with the human catastrophes in Syria and elsewhere in the region. But as always, Israel and its tormentors occupy a disproportionate share of the world’s attention, including–unfortunately–that of the U.S. State Department.

Initially, John Kerry sparked outrage by suggesting that the Palestinian attacks were caused by Jews building homes in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem:

“There’s been a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years,” Kerry said during a question-and-answer session, “and there’s an increase in the violence because there’s this frustration that’s growing.”

That makes perfect sense–the natural reaction to Jews moving into their ancestral homeland is to try to kill them, evidently.

Yesterday, State Department spokesman John Kirby made matters worse during his press briefing by maintaining an exquisite neutrality as between would-be murderers and their victims. The colloquy is too long to reproduce here, but it is helpful to read the whole thing to get a full understanding of the tone. I will reproduce some highlights, and comment on them:

QUESTION: Let’s start with the Middle East and some comments that Secretary Kerry made yesterday and also that the White House just made. … There’s been quite a bit of, I don’t know, uproar maybe is the right word about his comments about settlements contributing to – massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years being responsible for the current upsurge in violence. Recognizing that the settlement issue is one that is of serious concern to the Palestinians, is it the Administration’s view that settlement activity is, in fact, to blame for or is responsible for the current surge in attacks that we’re all seeing? 

MR KIRBY: I think the Secretary was very consistent yesterday and has been over time in not trying to affix blame for the recent violence too particularly, and he was unequivocal yesterday, as you saw, in condemning the terrorist attacks against Israelis. What he has talked about is the challenges that are posed on both sides by this absence of progress towards a two-state solution. So – and he’s also highlighted our concern that current trends on the ground, including this violence, as well as ongoing settlement activity are imperiling the viability of eventually getting to a two-state solution. 

QUESTION: So it is not, then, the Administration’s view that a massive increase in settlement activity in the last years is directly responsible? 

MR KIRBY: I think the Secretary well understands that there’s a lot of nuance and context behind the violence that’s occurring recently. And as I said, he was careful not to affix blame in either direction on this in terms of past practices. What he did talk about – and you might have seen it if you saw him at Harvard last night – is that he understands there’s disenfranchisement, there’s disgruntlement, there is – there’s frustration on both sides that has led to this.

So, when dozens of murderous attacks are launched, it is important not to place blame on either the perpetrators or the victims.

Now and then, the fog does lift and the administration’s position is clear. That was true with regard to an incident in Dimona, where an Israeli stabbed several Arabs in retaliation against the many attacks that had been carried out against Jews:

QUESTION: All right, this will be very brief. I understand that you have decided now how to qualify the stabbing attack on the Palestinians in Dimona?

MR KIRBY: Yes, we’ve had a chance to look at that attack more deeply, and I think you’re going to ask me what – do we consider it an act of terrorism. And we do.

QUESTION: You do consider it an act of terrorism. Okay, so that would suggest then that you believe that this is – that both sides are, in fact, committing these —
MR KIRBY: Well, I would say certainly individuals on both sides of this divide are – have proven capable of and in our view guilty of acts of terror.

There are terrorists on both sides, so neutrality is appropriate.

Kirby also ventured the opinion that the Israelis have been guilty of using excessive force. It wasn’t clear what he had in mind here; shooting terrorists who were in the midst of stabbing Israelis, apparently:

QUESTION: [I]n response to Michael’s question, you said you’d seen reports of what many would consider to be excessive use of force. And I presume that you were talking about from the Israeli side. Is that correct?
MR KIRBY: Yes. 

QUESTION: You said what many would consider. So is the Administration among those who would consider what the Israeli actions have been to be excessive? 

MR KIRBY: I think, again, without qualifying each and every one of them, we’ve certainly seen some reports of security activity that could indicate the potential excessive use of force. And again, we don’t want to see that anywhere. We don’t want to see that here in our own country. So yeah, we’re concerned about that. 

QUESTION: So the – so you have raised this issue with Israelis? You’ve said that — 

MR KIRBY: We – we’re always concerned about credible reports of excessive use of force against civilians [Ed.: I.e., terrorists armed with knives], and we routinely raise our concerns about that. 

QUESTION: Okay. Now, that’s just a little bit different than what you said before. So you believe that these are credible reports of excessive use of force by the Israeli security forces on Palestinian citizens?
MR KIRBY: We’ve seen reports. We’re always concerned about those kinds of reports.

The Arabs have frequently used rumors of changes in the administration of Temple Mount as a pretext for violence, and apparently are doing so again. The Obama administration gave them aid and comfort:

QUESTION: All right. And then the visit to Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif by Israelis, is that – does the Administration consider that to be visits to there – does the Administration consider that to be incitement? 

MR KIRBY: I’m not going to be able to characterize every single act with terminology. What the Secretary has said and stands by is that we want to see the status quo restored, the status quo arrangement there on Haram al-Sharif and the Temple Mount, and for both sides to take actions to de-escalate the tensions. … 

QUESTION: Is it the Administration’s position that the status quo at the Temple Mount has been broken? 

MR KIRBY: Well, certainly, the status quo has not been observed, which has led to a lot of the violence.

The topic was revisited later, and Kirby reinforced his point:

QUESTION: So I just have two extremely brief ones, so we can move on after that. You said in answer to my question on the status quo whether – at the Temple Mount whether it’s been broken or not, you said that it has not been observed and that is what has led to – I think. I’ll go back and look at the transcript, but I think you said it had not been – it was not – has not been observed and that is what has led to a great deal of the violence. That certainly sounds like you’re affixing some kind of blame to Israel if this is, in fact, what the Administration believes has led to the violence – the visits by – visit by Israelis to —
MR KIRBY: Well, it’s not about believing it, Matt. I mean, you just looked at what’s been happening in that – on Haram al-Sharif and the Temple Mount recently. I mean, just if we’re looking at this in acute – through an acute lens, I mean, the activity there, the status quo not being observed, has led to violence. There’s – that’s indisputable. That’s not a belief; that’s a fact.

It is not a fact, however, and shortly thereafter Kirby took to Twitter to recant:

Emphasis added. The result of the State Department’s oafish diplomacy was to enrage our ally Israel:

Jerusalem reacted furiously Thursday to State Department spokesman John Kirby’s statement that Jerusalem was not maintaining the status quo on the Temple Mount and accused it of using disproportionate force to stop the wave of stabbing attacks. 

“The comments by the US State Department spokesman are so crazy, deceitful and baseless, that I expect President [Barack] Obama and US Secretary of State [John] Kerry to distance themselves from them, and to clarify the US position today,” said Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan.

John Kerry’s State Department is a clown show, and Kerry drives the clown car.

Socialists Can’t Add.

Socialists Can’t Add

Col. Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

All,

People send me these beautiful presentations about wealth inequality (pie charts, tables, bar graphs, broken-line graphs and all in vivid colors) and almost all of it is nonsense. 

Outside of the obvious fact that rich people are much richer than I am (about which I really do not care), the rest is all smoke and mirrors.

Here is reality in three numbers:

The combined wealth of all U.S. billionaires: $2.2 trillion (that is a “T”).

Projected Federal expenditures for 2015: $3.8 trillion

Total value of U.S. wealth: $188 trillion

The richest of the rich don’t own everything – only a small fraction of our national wealth (about 1.2%).

The billionaires’ total wealth would only run the U.S. Government for about seven (7) months. After that, we would be right back in the same mess of unsustainable government overspending.

So how does $2.2 trillion become infinitely huge while a debt of over $18 trillion (a number about eight times as large) become insignificant nothingness?

Because Far Left numbers are not about facts or reason or logic – they are about faith and socialist religious doctrine.

These people BELIEVE it so and nothing else matters.

Good grief.

Socialist math sucks!

Mike