NJB Article and Source Repository

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Murder and the Settlement Distraction. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Murder and the Settlement Distraction. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, November 13, 2013.

The Democrats’ Worst Nightmare. By Robert W. Merry.

The Democrats’ Worst Nightmare. By Robert W. Merry. The National Interest, November 13, 2013.

The Middle East After a U.S. - Iran Deal. By George Friedman.

The Middle East After a U.S. - Iran Deal. By George Friedman. Real Clear World, November 12, 2013.

Bill Clinton Chases the ACA Unicorn. By Walter Russell Mead.

Bill Clinton Chases the ACA Unicorn. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, November 13, 2013.

Bill Clinton Is Wrong. This Is How Obamacare Works. By Jonathan Cohn. The New Republic, November 12, 2013.

ObamaCare and the End of Civilization. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, November 13, 2013.

Regime Sells Obamacare to Millennials with Promise of Sex Without Consequences. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, November 13, 2013.

Bill Clinton: Obama Should Honor His Keep Your Plan Promise. Video. GOPICYMI, November 12, 2013. YouTube.

Mead:

Bill Clinton is making waves with his comments that President Obama should honor his “like it, keep it” promise, even if it means changing the Affordable Care Act. Clinton isn’t only the one saying this: Democrats nervous about the future of the law have been increasingly taking this line over the last week. But Clinton is the most prominent person, besides, arguably, Obama himself, to say it, and Jonathan Cohn has a thoughtful piece at the New Republic about the problem with this position. In brief, Cohn argues that you can’t actually reverse the insurance cancellations without also crippling the law itself. There’s no world in which the ACA could do what it has set out to do—expand access to relatively comprehensive insurance—without disrupting plans people already have.

This is because insurance is a risk-sharing enterprise, and you can’t expand access to high risk people without raising prices on some other sub-set of the population. Forcing young men to have maternity care in their health insurance, for example, helps subsidize that care for women. And you can’t do that unless you eliminate plans that don’t help subsidize that care. More:

Is that a worthwhile tradeoff for reform? Obviously that’s a matter of opinion. The fact that some people—even a small, relatively affluent group—are giving up something they had makes their plight more sympathetic. They are right to say Obama could have made clear his promise might not apply to them. And there’s a principled argument about whether people should be responsible for services they’re unlikely to use presently, whether it’s fifty-something year olds paying for maternity care or twenty-something year olds paying for cardiac stress tests.

But the principle of broad-risk sharing—of the healthy subsidizing the sick, of the young subsidizing the old, and everybody paying for services like pediatrics and maternity care—is one built into the insurance most Americans already have.

Read the whole thing; Cohn is right that Clinton and Obama can’t eliminate the disruption to pre-existing plans without also rolling back the other beneficial effects of the law. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way to balance the tradeoffs here, as a truly consumer-directed health care reform would do, but it does mean that as long as the ACA is law, Clinton is asking the near impossible.

But all this ignores the essential problem that is making the rollout such a headache for the administration: this law would never become law if Obama hadn’t made the promises he did. Clinton may misunderstand what’s possible at this point, but he is reacting to more than just the number of people affected. The law has never been popular, and the twin discoveries that the people who pushed it can’t organize a website to make it work and that politically important promises about the law turned out to be wrong will deepen its unpopularity now. It’s almost 100 percent certain that if both the public and the Democrats in Congress had understood the fine print as well as they do now, the ACA would never have passed Congress. Obama could never “have made clear his promise might not apply to [some people]” because if he had been totally transparent and upfront about how the law would work and what it would do, he could never have gotten it passed.

Cohn wants Clinton to stand up and argue that the cancellations are just the expected process of a good law working itself out. But Bill Clinton’s political instincts point him to a different course. Clinton understands what a deep political hole the law is in, even if he doesn’t have a workable fix.

The 2014 election is still a long way away, but many in the MSM seem at this point to be underestimating the danger that the ACA fiasco poses to Democrats in the midterm. It isn’t just that specific ‘promises’ have been broken or that the early rollout has been a fiasco. It is that the differences between the law-as-experienced and the law-as-described are deal-breakers. Without the false impressions about how the law would work, the law would not have been passed. This is the danger that Democrats must address, and it has the potential to be extremely damaging.

Proposals to allow people to keep their plans probably seems like a much needed lifeboat for distressed Democrats. We should expect to see more and more people take the Clinton line as the public becomes aware that the law they’re getting isn’t anything like the law that was pitched to them.

If voters have made some unpleasant discoveries about Obamacare, Democrats are about to have an unpleasant epiphany of their own. Passing Obamacare, Democrats are discovering, wasn’t the end of the national conversation about health care. We are now beginning a conversation about how to fix what is wrong with Obamacare, and in many ways this conversation will make it more difficult, not less, for Democrats to steer health policy in the directions they prefer.

In Aleppo I Only Survive by Looking Syrian. By Francesca Borri.

In Aleppo I only survive by looking Syrian. By Francesca Borri. The Guardian, November 12, 2013.

Borri:

In this war, to be a foreign reporter is to be hunted by Islamists and the regime. My helmet is a veil, my hijab a flak jacket.

Since the rise of the Islamist resistance, parts of Syria have become off-limits to journalists – 30 of us are now missing. Today my helmet is a veil, and my flak jacket a hijab. Because the only way to sneak into Aleppo is by looking like a Syrian.

Locals here don't refer any more to “liberated areas,” but to east and west Aleppo – they don’t show you pictures of their children, or of siblings killed by the regime, but simply the pictures of beautiful Aleppo before the war. Because nobody is fighting the regime anymore; rebels now fight against each other. And for many of them, the priority is not ousting Bashar al-Assad’s regime, but enforcing sharia law.

Aleppo is nothing but hunger and Islam. Dozens of threadbare children, disfigured by leishmaniasis, walk barefoot in the steps of mothers, covered in black from head to toe – all bowl in hand, seeking a mosque for bread, their skin yellowed by typhus. In the narrowest alleys, to dodge mortar fire, boys are on the right with their toy Kalashnikovs, while the left is for girls, already veiled. Jihadi fathers push with their beards, djellabas and suicide belts. In July, Mohammad Kattaa was executed for misusing the name of the prophet. He was 15.

And so there are only Syrians now to tell us what’s happening. They work for the major media, and contribute to articles written from New York, Paris and Rome. They are the famous citizen journalists, glorified by those who probably would never trust a citizen dentist.

And the outcomes are cases similar to that of Elizabeth O’Bagy, the analyst mentioned by John Kerry during the days of the chemical attack. In fact, she had just published through the Wall Street Journal a piece that essentially made you believe that the rebels were all good guys: that hardliners, here, are but a handful – because the problem for the US is that Assad might be replaced by al-Qaida. A few days later, while Human Rights Watch uncovered evidence of rebels responsible for war crimes against the minorities, it was revealed that O’Bagy was on the payroll of a Syrian lobby group whose goal was to pressure the Obama administration towards intervention. In the Twitter and YouTube era, when many newspapers save on correspondents on the ground by raking up somebody who will summarise for them what's going on in his own backyard, it’s on the O’Bagys that we then base foreign policy, base our wars: on the accounts of a recent graduate, born in 1987.

It’s not that the war has become more dangerous. Early on we were with the rebels, and the rebels were those who were fighting for freedom: and we journalists were those who witnessed for the world the crimes of Assad. But we suddenly realised (especially my generation) what a war means when you are not embedded. Today we are also here to witness the crimes of the rebels: and both the rebels and the regime hunt us. This war isn’t more dangerous; it’s only truer: a war where nobody is innocent, where nobody is immune; a war where nobody is welcome – we have all run away.

Do we as journalists have any responsibility? Our role is to question. So why are we targeted? Perhaps because many of us were here only for money, only for the single article – here for an award, or a contract, so that for Syrians we became just a matter of business.

Or perhaps because when Abdullah Yassin, the activist who made possible the work of many of us, was killed, and killed for protecting us, for bringing to the police two kidnappers, none of us left a flower on his tomb? Or perhaps it is because we have reported only the blood, because it was easier, because it was cheaper – and so we delivered to the world a misleading portrait of this country – that now generates unsteady and mixed-up policies? Perhaps because we all jumped here, in the aftermath of the gas attack, just to vanish in disappointment when Obama opted not to strike?

Why, if we are around or not, today do Syrians see no difference? Perhaps because we are but the mirror and expression of the international community, and its cynicism on Syria.

A few evenings ago I was on Twitter, when a jet swooped overhead. In a heartbeat, a flurry of followers – many of them, I am afraid, waiting for my last Tweet from under the rubble. And my reaction in that moment was only: Go to hell. And I turned everything off.

Francesca Borri

Looking at the Pew Study Through the Wrong End of the Telescope. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Looking at the Pew Study Through the Wrong End of the Telescope. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, November 12, 2013.

Requiem for a Movement. By Daniel Gordis. Jewish Review of Books, November 11, 2013. Also here.

New Analysis of Pew Data: Children of Intermarriage Increasingly Identify as Jews. By Theodore Sasson. Tablet, November 11, 2013.

Conservative Judaism: Not dead yet. By Rabbi David Wolpe. Haaretz, November 20, 2013. Also here.

Misreading the apocalypse: Orthodoxy won’t save American Jewish life. By Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie. Haaretz, November 25, 2013. Also here.

Loving Us to Death: How America’s Embrace Is Imperiling American Jewry. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, October 24, 2013.

Why Bother Being Jewish? By Caroline Glick. NJBR, October 8, 2013.

American Jews: Laughing But Shrinking. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, October 1, 2013. With related articles.

To Fight Assimilation, Stop Dumbing Down Judaism. By Evelyn Gordon.

To Fight Assimilation, Stop Dumbing Down Judaism. By Evelyn Gordon. Commentary, November 12, 2013.

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Israel Has No Alternative to U.S. Alliance. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Israel Has No Alternative to U.S. Alliance. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, November 12, 2013.

Superpower Outage. By Martin Kramer. Commentary, November 13, 2013.

Tobin:

China and Israel may not have much in common, but that hasn’t stopped the Jewish state from working hard to better ties with the world’s most populous nation. The growing connections between the two countries are largely economic, but the fact that two highly placed figures from Israel’s political and military realms spoke recently at China’s military academy was enough to gain the notice of the New York Times’s Sinosphere blog. The piece, which spoke of the visit to Beijing by Dore Gold, a former ambassador to the United Nations and a confidant of Prime Minister Netanyahu and retired general Uzi Dayan, spoke of how the Jewish state is working assiduously to deepen its relationship with China. Given Israel’s relative diplomatic isolation, there’s nothing terribly surprising about it reaching out in this direction. But put into the context of the last two weeks, any discussion of Israel’s efforts to make friends with a potential rival of the United States must be seen as part of an effort to lessen its dependence on its sole superpower ally.

Indeed, the Times didn’t shy away from such a discussion in the piece as it weighed, not unfairly, the advantages of better relations with China for Israel as well as the complications of trying to work closely with a nation that is also doing business with Iran. At a time when the United States seems to have distanced itself again from Israel on both the talks with the Palestinians and the Iranian nuclear threat, the frustration level in Jerusalem with the Obama administration is very high. This has led not only to ruminations about whether the U.S.-Israel alliance is doomed, as was the conceit of a recent feature in Tablet magazine, but to suggestions from some Israeli pundits, like the Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick, that maybe “it is time to reassess Israel’s strategic assumptions and for the country to begin the process of exploring “new opportunities” that will enable it to survive without U.S. help if not to completely replace the old alliance.

But while the notion of playing China or Russia off of the United States may seem tempting to Israelis who are sick of being played for chumps by the Obama administration, any thoughts about “alternatives” to the U.S. alliance are fantasies, not serious policy options. It’s not just that neither of those countries should be considered reliable friends of Israel. It’s that any effort to pretend that there is another option outside of the U.S. alliance is as much of a danger to the future of this relationship as the ill-considered actions of President Obama or Secretary of State Kerry.

As for the fissures in the existing alliance, they are serious but should not be mistaken for a fundamental split. Israelis are right to be infuriated about Kerry’s tantrum last week because of his anger about the failure of the peace negotiations he foolishly initiated as well as the U.S. attempt to rush to complete an unsatisfactory nuclear agreement with Iran. Like the spats with Israel that President Obama fomented during the course of his first term, these disputes illustrate the distorted mindset of this administration as well as its willingness to create daylight between the positions of the two allies. But, as both Obama and Kerry understand, there are clear limits as to how far they can go in taking shots at Israel.

Even a reelected Obama who seemingly has little to fear from disgruntled supporters of Israel realizes that picking fights with the Jewish state is a no-win proposition for him. As he showed during the last two years with his election-year charm offensive and the rhetorical lengths to which he went during his trip to Israel last spring, the president is aware of the fact that the roots of the alliance are deep and it can’t be uprooted easily.

The long-term problems that the Tablet piece noted are not to be dismissed. There’s no question that the trends explored by the Pew Report about the decline of the Jewish community and the impact of an increasingly assimilated American Jewry will mean a smaller base of pro-Israel Jews. But that and the growth of anti-Israel opinion, while troubling, should not be mistaken for a fundamental threat to the future of ties between the two countries. Support for Zionism is baked into the political DNA of America and won’t be erased by either Jewish demographics or left-wing activism. The point about the Walt-Mearsheimer “Israel Lobby” myth is that the wall-to-wall bipartisan coalition in support of Israel in Congress and throughout the American political system is wide and so deep as to encompass the vast majority of Americans. As Israeli leaders should have realized a long time ago, the core of that support is not Jewish activism or money but the deeply-held sentiments of American Christians.

Leaders like Obama, who are not in love with Israel, can shake it up. But even he is incapable of altering its foundations, as the growth of U.S.-Israel security cooperation on his watch has proved. It’s hard right now to see past the seeming betrayal on Iran, but pessimists should remember that the intransigent Islamist regime—like the Palestinians—may ultimately push the administration back into Israel’s arms.

But even if one were inclined to despair about the future of U.S. support, neither China nor Russia provides anything like an alternative. Both can be useful at times to Israel and Jerusalem is right to explore how far it might go in those directions, especially when it comes to economic ties at a time when Europe seems to be abandoning the Jewish state. Yet it must be understood not only are these countries not likely to be good or reliable friends of Israel, but flirting too much with them also carries with it the possibility of worsening the far more essential ties with the United States.

There is still only one superpower in the world and neither China nor Russia looks to be catching up with the U.S. in the near future. But if the history of the rest of this century will be read through the prism of China’s drive to attain the status of a global power and Russia’s efforts to reconstitute the old Tsarist and Soviet empires, then there is no question that a small democracy like Israel must place itself firmly on the side of the U.S. in these rivalries. The ties between the U.S. and Israel are based on shared values, not realpolitik. Forgetting that would be an unforgivable error on the part of any Israeli leader and that is a mistake that a savvy operator like Prime Minister Netanyahu is not likely to make.

That’s not just because both are tyrannies that cannot be trusted to deal fairly with Israel, let alone try to protect it against its foes. But also because Israel’s long-term safety must be seen as linked to the ability of the United States to maintain its status as the leader of the free world. Even at times of great tension with Washington, Israelis must never forget that it is not just that they have no viable alternatives to the U.S. but that American power remains the best hope of freedom for all nations.

Those advocating alternatives to the U.S. for Israel are engaging in magical thinking that will do more harm than good. The fix for the gaps that have been created by the administration’s ill-advised moves on the peace process and Iran is to be found in efforts to restrain the president’s folly in the U.S., not searches for new allies to take America’s place.

Brit Hume: ObamaCare Challenges Will Only Get Worse.

Brit Hume: ObamaCare challenges will only get worse. Interviewed by Megyn Kelly. The Kelly File. Fox News, November 12, 2013. YouTube.

Politics in America Getting Ever More Bitter. By Bill O’Reilly and Charles Krauthammer.

Politics in America getting ever more bitter. By Bill O’Reilly and Charles Krauthammer. Video. The O’Reilly Factor. Fox News, November 12, 2013. YouTube. YouTube.

Nuclear Negotiations with Iran Fall Apart. Ralph Peters Interviewed by Bill O’Reilly.

Nuclear negotiations fall apart. Ralph Peters interviewed by Bill O’Reilly. Video. The O’Reilly Factor. Fox News, November 12, 2013. YouTube.

Archive of Posts About America 3.0. By Lexington Green (co-author Michael J. Lotus).

Archive of Posts About America 3.0. By Lexington Green (co-author Michael J. Lotus). Chicago Boyz.

America 3.0 YouTube Channel. Audio and video discussions.

The transformation of the USA – here comes America 3.0. By Michael J. Lotus. FoxNews.com, October 25, 2013.

Lotus:

The recent political deadlock and government shutdown, and the disastrous rollout of ObamaCare, show that something is seriously wrong in Washington, D.C.

What’s going on?

America is going through a transformation, on a scale that few people now realize. The last such fundamental change was from the rural and agrarian society of the Founding era (America 1.0) to the urban and industrial society which is now coming to an end (America 2.0).

That transition was disruptive and painful, but ultimately led to a better America.

We are now making a similar transition to a post-industrial, networked, decentralized, immensely productive America, with a more individualistic, voluntarist, anti-bureaucratic culture (America 3.0).

Today’s political regime is like legacy software, built for an earlier world.

Institutions of the 20th Century welfare state that once looked permanent are crumbling. The old operating system has been kludged so many times it won’t work much longer. It has to be replaced.

The time-worn liberal-progressive wisdom is simple: See a problem, create a government program to fix it.

ObamaCare proves this approach no longer works.

Social Security lasted many years before it was structurally doomed to insolvency.

Medicare experienced cost overruns from the beginning, but was initially self-sustaining. Yet it now faces $22 trillion in future unfunded liabilities.

Unlike Social Security and Medicare, which were viable when they began, ObamaCare failed before it even got started.

ObamaCare had 82 legally specified start dates, but missed half of them. Waivers have been granted to four million Americans, according to an arbitrary, opaque and politicized process.

The employer mandate has been delayed for a year, in violation of the express language of the law.

Congress got a taxpayer funded bailout of their ObamaCare premiums.

Despite Mr. Obama’s assurances, the Congressional Budget Office found that 14.5 million Americans will lose their insurance plans.

The failed rollout is only the tip of a vast iceberg of failure.

Further, ObamaCare primarily benefits insiders, like insurance companies, who are equipped to play the Washington game.

ObamaCare is simply beyond the scope of anything the Federal government can accomplish. Health care takes up over 17% of US GDP, about $2.8 trillion annually. Attempting to centrally govern a complex economy of this size and complexity was always hopeless.

Unfortunately, while liberal-progressive thought is trapped in the 20th Century, there has been an egregious dearth of creative alternatives from the other side of the political divide.

The Republican party is engaged in a civil war between an institutional wing that shuns controversy, and insurgents who fiercely oppose ObamaCare.

But mere opposition is not enough.

Viable alternative, and a vision of a transformed public sector, and a transformed America are sorely needed.

True reform will embrace the existing trends in our society and in technology, facilitating competition and broad consumer choice.

Health care decisions belong in the hands of citizens, even when they receive government assistance For example, the law should promote health savings accounts that roll over from year to year.

Means-tested subsidies on a sliding scale should be provided to purchase qualified health insurance plans attached to HSAs.

Preexisting conditions would be covered by high risk pools in states, backstopped by block granted Federal funds.

Radically decentralizing decision-making will lead to competitive cost savings and innovation, rather than rationing care to cut costs.

The government shutdown, and the failures of ObamaCare, are dramatic symptoms of an old systems reaching its end.

But this is a time of transition, not decline. It is up to us to begin building the free and prosperous America which will be ours, if we do the work to make it happen.

The New Style in Fairy Tales. By John Gray.

The New Style in Fairy Tales. By John Gray. The New Republic, November 25, 2013. Review of David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. By Malcolm Gladwell. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2013. 305pp.

College Grads’ Bad Habits Driving Unemployment. By Walter Russell Mead.

College Grads’ Bad Habits Driving Unemployment. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, November 12, 2013.

The Real Reason New College Grads Can’t Get Hired. By Martha C. White. Time, November 10, 2013.

Chris Christie’s Tea-Party Problem. By Richard Cohen.

Chris Christie’s Tea-Party Problem. By Richard Cohen. Real Clear Politics, November 12, 2013. Also at the Washington Post.

Conservative Republicans Recoil at the Notion That Christie Is the Party’s Savior. By Jonathan Martin. New York Times, November 10, 2013.

Who’s Still Afraid of Interracial Marriage. By Jelani Cobb. The New Yorker, November 13, 2013.

More Dumb Stuff Richard Cohen Says. By Elon James White. The Root, November 12, 2013.

Merle Haggard: Are the Good Times Really Over? Video. ALLEN0955, August 26, 2008. YouTube. Song is from 1983.

Cohen:

Iowa not only is a serious obstacle for Christie and other Republican moderates, it also suggests something more ominous: the Dixiecrats of old. Officially the States’ Rights Democratic Party, they were breakaway Democrats whose primary issue was racial segregation. In its cause, they ran their own presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond, and almost cost Harry Truman the 1948 election. They didn’t care. Their objective was not to win — although that would have been nice — but to retain institutional, legal racism. They saw a way of life under attack and they feared its loss.

Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.

As with the Dixiecrats, the fight is not over a particular program — although Obamacare comes close — but about a tectonic shift of attitudes. I thank Dennis J. Goldford, professor of politics and international relations at Drake University in Des Moines, for leading me to a live performance on YouTube of Merle Haggard singing “Are the Good Times Really Over.” This chestnut, a lament for a lost America, has been viewed well more than 2 million times. It could be the tea party’s anthem.

For all his positions and religious beliefs, Christie is too Joisey for the tea party — too brash, as well. He would be wise to steer clear of Iowa lest he lose or, worse, follow Romney and take on the deeply conservative coloration of the state’s GOP. That might make him (barely) acceptable to Republican Iowans but anathema to the rest of us.

Hillary’s Nightmare? A Democratic Party That Realizes Its Soul Lies With Elizabeth Warren. By Noam Scheiber.

Hillary’s Nightmare? A Democratic Party That Realizes Its Soul Lies With Elizabeth Warren. By Noam Scheiber. The New Republic, November 10, 2013. From the November 25, 2013 issue. Also here.

Why Elizabeth Warren should scare Hillary Clinton. By Ryan Cillizza. Washington Post, November 11, 2013. Also here.

Elizabeth Warren’s Full DNC Speech. Video. The New York Times, September 5, 2012. YouTube.

Miley Cyrus to Wreak Havoc in the Holy Land. By Lauren Izso.

Report: Miley Cyrus to wreak havoc in the Holy Land. By Lauren Izso. Jerusalem Post, November 10, 2013.

Miley Cyrus and the State of American Culture. NJBR, August 27, 2013. With VMA video.

Izso:

Attention lovers of controversy: Miley Cyrus has said she will perform in Israel next summer, Channel 2 has reported.

Apparently still in the discussion stages, the television station that broke the story says Cyrus’s “people” are in advanced planning stages for the show. They say the performance will be on a smaller scale than Rihanna’s October performance, but there is no doubt it will stir some controversy.

The twerking queen, who actually coined the term, now officially in the Oxford English Dictionary, has been transforming her image in recent months.

Leading up to the release of her latest album, Bangerz, Cyrus has quite aggressively transformed her squeaky-clean Hannah Montana image to a non-pants-wearing-midriff-bearing tongue-sticker-outer, and everyone has something to say about it.

In an October interview with the website Hunger TV, Cyrus spoke of how she is the authority on what her audience wants to see, and that too often creative decisions are made by people who are out of touch.

Jewish and out of touch, to be more specific.

“It’s always weird when things are targeted for young people yet they’re driven by people that are like 40 years too old,” she said. “It can’t be like this 70-year-old Jewish man that doesn’t leave his desk all day, telling me what the clubs want to hear.”

Sorry to break it to you Hannah Montana, but you’ll be seeing a lot of them if you come to Israel next summer.

Miley Cyrus: We Can’t Stop. Video. MileyCyrusVEVO, June 19, 2013. YouTube. Director’s Cut.

Robin Thicke: Blurred Lines. Video. RobinThickeVEVO, March 20, 2013. YouTube. Unrated Version at VEVO and YouTube.

No Room for Dissent in Putin’s Russia. By Robert Amsterdam.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova at her trial.

No Room for Dissent in Putin’s Russia. By Robert Amsterdam. Real Clear World, November 11, 2013. Also at RobertAmsterdam.com.

What has happened to Pussy Riot’s Nadya? By Frida Ghitis. CNN, November 13, 2013.

Amsterdam:

The arrest, trial and continued imprisonment in Russia of the female punk rock band Pussy Riot has captured the attention of international media over the past year, but the story seems in recent days to have taken a dramatic turn.

Although it seemed as if not much more could happen to Nadia Tolokonnikova after she and her bandmates were convicted on charges of hooliganism last year, the Russian government’s repression has been extended. Almost three weeks ago, Tolokonnikova “disappeared” into the penal system – in transit, it is believed, to the ИК-50 prison colony in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, deep in gulag archipelago – with no information provided to her family or legal team until she eventually resurfaced.

Her unexplained transfer to some of the worst prison conditions imaginable, thousands of miles away from her family, was prompted by a 9-day hunger strike and publication of an open letter in which she blew the whistle on inhumane prison conditions, including 17-hour work days, beatings and attempted suicides by desperate inmates.

It is difficult to say whether or not the continued arbitrary punishment of this young 23-year-old mother comes down from the top, or rather is the whim of a cowardly prison administrator, but what is certain is that Russia is a very dangerous place for whistleblowers — a system in which the rights of the individual are totally unprotected from the discretionary power of the state.

Whatever hopes may have remained that Putin would release political prisoners before the Sochi Winter Olympic Games are rapidly fading. Even while the world’s eyes are on Russia, it is evidently not a season of forgiveness judging by the Kremlin’s determination to punish the Greenpeace “Arctic 30” with charges of piracy and now, additionally, hooliganism.

. . . .

Russia’s partners in the West — and indeed foreign investors looking to sink millions into Sochi advertising — need to come to terms with the fact that Russia is not improving, not modernizing and is far off the democratic path under the current leadership. With state control over the media, a rubberstamp Duma and a politicized judiciary, for the time being Putinism is here to stay, and the more external enemies the leadership is able to manufacture, the more comfortable they shall become to commit to the social, moral and economic decay of the nation.

Supporters of Pussy Riot are hoping and praying that they will be released at the end of their two-year sentence, if not before — but there always remains the threat of more trials and more bogus verdicts. The only true salvation, however, lies in the challenging task of transforming some of the fundamental notions held by many in Russian society. To achieve progress, the Russian people must unburden themselves from a difficult history, and divorce God and patriotism from the state.

Obama Turns on Israel. By Daniel Pipes.

Obama Turns on Israel. By Daniel Pipes. National Review Online, November 8, 2013.

Would You Rather Win with Chris Christie or Lose with Ted Cruz? By Bernard Goldberg.

Honest: Would You Rather Win with Chris Christie or Lose with Ted Cruz? By Bernard Goldberg. BernardGoldberg.com, November 10, 2013.

Goldberg:

Those sophisticates at Time magazine made a funny. They put Chris Christie on their cover with the headline, “The Elephant in the Room.” Get it? Elephant. Christie. Time magazine did a junior high fat joke right there on its cover. Time’s executive editor Michael Duffy explained the cheap shot this way: “Well, he’s obviously a big guy. He’s obviously a big Republican. But he’s also done a really huge thing here this week.”

The “huge thing” wasn’t only winning re-election as New Jersey’s governor, but doing it by appealing to a broad range of voters in a very blue state – not just to his conservative base.

But, hey, no harm no foul. Time isn’t even a newsmagazine anymore. It became a liberal journal of opinion a long time ago. So you can just hear those wild and crazy journalists at Time sitting around the conference room table giggling about how they’d get away with their fat joke because, well, in the world of politics, the word “elephant” isn’t a synonym with “fatso.”

But do you think the gang at Time would ever say Barack Obama is a “dark horse.” In the world of politics “dark” doesn’t mean “black,” right?

Time’s cover doesn’t necessarily mean that Chris Christie is the GOP frontrunner for 2016. It’s way too early for that. But it does help make him the flavor of the month. He was also on all the Sunday TV talk shows this week. You don’t get to do that unless you’re the flavor of the month, or at least of the week.

Besides, he’s a favorite of liberal journalists, not only because he’s got a big mouth which makes for some interesting quotes, but also because he’s not the most conservative Republican out there. For the same reasons they despise Ted Cruz, they adore Chris Christie. For now.

But if he becomes a serious threat to one of their all-time favs, Hillary Clinton, the so-called mainstream media will turn on Christie with a vengeance. They hated Goldwater and Reagan while they were alive, painting them as crazy right-wing ideologues. When they were dead, they became good conservatives – to contrast them with every other conservative who was still breathing.

It’s a good bet Christie will run. And if he does, he’s charismatic enough to cause the Democrats some sleepless nights. But Christie’s greatest strength is also his greatest weakness.

Christie can win in a deep blue state like New Jersey because he’s not a hard right Tea Party type. That means he can win the support of women and minorities – crucial to winning a nationwide election. But the hard right sees him as the latest incarnation of John McCain and Mitt Romney – two moderates who lost.

Chris Christie can attract moderates and independents that would give him a shot in swing states that Republicans must win to take the White House. He could win Florida and Ohio and North Carolina and Colorado and New Hampshire, and maybe even Iowa and New Mexico. But he might not be able to win his party’s nomination because it’s conservatives who make up the majority of primary voters, and they – at least as of now – don’t want a Chris Christie. They want a Ted Cruz or a Rand Paul or some other candidate who can’t win a national election despite what they think.

What the hard right needs to understand is that if they really want change, first they have to win elections. I know it sounds obvious, but it’s one of those obvious facts the Tea Party never seemed able to grasp. They picked a bad candidate in Nevada a few years back when a good candidate might have defeated Harry Reid. And they picked a candidate in Delaware who had to go on TV and tell everyone that she’s not a witch. She also lost. And there have been other Tea Party favorites who appealed to the hard right base, but because that’s never enough, they also lost.

The Tea Party folks are very proud of the fact that they stand on principle. Bulletin: so do less hardline Republicans. But the hard right calls everyone to the left of Ted Cruz a RINO, a Republican in name only. The Tea Party won’t like this, but the real RINOs are the Tea Party people. They’ve been very clear that their allegiance is to pure conservatism, not to the Republican Party. Yes, my right wing friends, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and the others on the far right are the real RINOs.

Because I want Republicans to win, let me offer two pieces of advice. The first to Chris Christie:

Don’t pick a fight with your own base, the conservatives who at the moment don’t really like you. As Ross Douthat puts in his New York Times column: “As a would-be nominee, you have to woo base voters, not run against them, and make them feel respected even when they disagree with you. This doesn’t mean muzzling yourself, or pandering to every right-wing interest group. But it means persuading conservatives that you like them, that you understand them and that as president you’re going to be (mostly) on their side.”

In other words, fight the temptation to go along with liberal journalists who believe the GOP is a party of right-wing morons. Don’t get drawn in by their phony admiration for you.

The second piece of advice is for the Tea Party and other purists on the right. If it looks like Chris Christie can win, jump on his bandwagon. Give him your support. And do you best to be passionate about it. If you don’t, you’ll have up to eight years of Mrs. Clinton. No matter how you feel about Christie, he’s a lot better than another liberal Democrat, right?

The answer to that last question is obviously yes. But true believers sometimes don’t think rationally. I’m cautiously optimistic that Chris Christie could win in 2016 (although cautiously hopeful may come closer to my real feelings). But I’m pessimistic about his chances of winning the support of his own party. Fundamentalists – political, religious or any other kind – don’t like to bend. Sometimes I think they’d rather lose than compromise. Rush Limbaugh, after all, can barely get the word “compromise” out of his mouth without gagging. To him, compromise is caving in. He’s a lot like Barrack Obama in that respect.

And so the real elephants in the room are those purist conservatives who will have to decide how badly they want to win. It’s still early, but I fear too many of them would rather lose with Ted Cruz than win with Chris Christie.

Bernie Goldberg to O’Reilly: Tea Partiers Are the Real RINOs in the GOP. By Josh Feldman. Mediaite, November 11, 2013.

Bernie on the Tea Party and Chris Christie. Video. GoldbergCommentary, November 11, 2013. YouTube.

The Republican Donor Class Doesn’t Understand What We’re Up Against. By Rush Limbaugh.

The Republican Donor Class Doesn’t Understand What We’re Up Against. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, November 11, 2013.

Rush:

We need some brawlers. We need some people who are not afraid to do battle with the Democrats to save the country. You know, that’s what it comes down to. In addition to everything else going on, the Republican donor class, the consultant class, the Republican establishment, they don’t think there’s any emergency.

Obamacare’s not an emergency, just the latest Democrat legislation.

There is no debt crisis.

It’s not any big deal.

The country isn’t threatened. Our way of life’s not being upset. There’s nothing upset here. Everything’s fine. “It’s just the Democrats are in power, and that’s what we gotta fix. We’ve gotta put ourselves back in power so that we’re in charge of it money and not them,” but they don’t think there’s a crisis. They’re not concerned that their kids or grandkids are gonna have nothing when they grow up. They're not concerned about the jobs and the economy and any of that.

It doesn’t appear. They don’t think there’s a crisis. That really is the dividing line between the Tea Party and the establishment. The Tea Party thinks if something isn’t done, the country as founded will not exist. Those guys don’t think that. The Republican establishment thinks that’s hooey. The donor class says, “What do you mean, the country’s not gonna exist as founded? What the hell are you talking about?” That’s kook talk, they think. They just don’t believe it, and that is the dividing line.

There are couple others, too, but that is the big line of demarcation, of difference. No, they don’t see what’s happening. They don’t think it’s a harbinger that the country is under assault and they don’t see the Democrats as trying to “re-found” the country, if you will. They don’t see the Democrats as anything other than the current officeholders. They don’t think that there’s any crisis. They really don’t.

Plus, donors are like anybody. They want to be close to power. They want cronyism, not ideology. They want crony. They want to get close to power so that a Republican president will do nice things for their business, in pay off or donations like it’s happening with Obama. They’re not ideologues. And they think with the Tea Party out there the Republicans are never gonna win anything and they’re never gonna be close to power, so their problem is the Tea Party.

The way the donors and the establishment look at it, the Tea Party is what’s gonna prevent them from ever regaining power, not the Democrats. It’s the Tea Party – and if you don’t understand that, nothing will make sense about any of this.