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Feb. 8, 2013

Rabbi Berel Wein: Lofty ideals must be followed with grounded applications

Clifford D. May: Letter from the West Bank
Steve Rothaus: Judge OKs plan for gay man, lesbian couple to be on girl's birth certificate
Gloria Goodale: States consider drone bans: Overreaction or crucial for privacy rights?
Environmental Nutrition Editors: Don't buy the aloe vera juice hype
Michael Craig Miller, M.D.: Harvard Experts: Regular exercise pumps up memory, too
Erik Lacitis: Vanity plates: Some take too much license
The Kosher Gourmet by Susie Middleton: Broccoflower, Carrot and Leek Ragout with Thyme, Orange and Tapenade is a delightful and satisfying melange of veggies, herbs and aromatics
Feb. 6, 2013

Nara Schoenberg: The other in-law problem

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. : A see-no-jihadist for the CIA
Kristen Chick: Ahmadinejad visits Cairo: How sect tempers Islamist ties between Egypt, Iran
Roger Simon: Ed Koch's lucky corner
Heron Marquez Estrada: Robot-building sports on a roll
Patrick G. Dean, M.D.: Mayo Clinic Medical Edge: How to restore body's ability to secrete insulin
Sharon Palmer, R.D.: 3 prostate-protecting diet tips
The Kosher Gourmet by Emma Christensen 7 principles for to help you make the best soup ever in a slow cooker
Feb. 4, 2013

Jonathan Tobin: Can Jewish Groups Speak Out on Hagel?

David Wren: Findings of government study, released 3 days before Newtown shooting, at odds with gun-control crusaders
Kristen Chick: Tahrir becomes terrifying, tainted
Curtis Tate and Greg Gordon: US keeps building new highways while letting old ones crumble
David G. Savage: Supreme Court to hear case on arrests, DNA
Harvard Health Letters: Neck and shoulder pain? Know what it means and what to do
Andrea N. Giancoli, M.P.H., R.D.: Eat your way to preventing age-related muscle loss
The Kosher Gourmet by Diane Rossen Worthington Baked Pears in Red Wine and Port Wine Glaze: A festive winter dessert
Feb. 1, 2013

Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb: Redemption

Clifford D. May Home, bloody, home
Christa Case Bryant andNicholas Blanford Why despite Syria's allies warning of retaliation for Israeli airstrikes, the threats are likely hollow
Rick Armon, Ed Meyer and Phil Trexler Ex-police captain cleared by DNA test is freed after nearly 15 years
Harvard Health Letters: Could it by your thyroid?
Sharon Palmer, R.D.: When 'healthy food' isn't
Sue Zeidler: Coke ad racist? Arab-American groups want to yank Super Bowl ad (INCLUDES VIDEO)
The Kosher Gourmet by Nealey Dozier The secret of this soup is the garnish
January 30, 2013

Allan Chernoff: Celebrating 'Back from the Dead Day'

America isn't a religious country? Don't tell Superbowl fans!
Mark Clayton Cybercrime takedown!
Germany remembers Hitler rise to power
Israel salutes U. N. --- with the one finger salute
Sharon Palmer, R.D.: Get cookin' with heart-healthy fats
Ballot riles Guinness World Records
The Kosher Gourmet by Elizabeth Passarella Potato, Squash and Goat Cheese Gratin
January 28, 2013

Nancy Youssef: And Democracy for all? Two years on, Egypt remains in state of chaos

Fred Weir: Putin: West is fomenting jihadi 'blowback'
Meredith Cohn: Implantable pain disk may help those with cancer
Michael Craig Miller, M.D. : Ask the Harvard Experts: Are there drugs to help control binge eating?
David Ovalle Use of controversial 'brain mapping' technology stymied
Jane Stancill: Professor's logic class has 180,000 friends
David Clark Scott Lego Racism?
The Kosher Gourmet by Mario Batali The celebrated chef introduces us to PANZEROTTI PUGLIESI, cheese-stuffed pastry from Italy's south


Jewish World Review Oct.29, 2012/ 13 Mar-Cheshvan, 5773

When the 'kooks' and 'racists' turn out to be your ideological allies

By Jay Ambrose


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Erskine Bowles is not some right-wing, know-nothing extremist. He is in fact left of center, a former university president who served as White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton and as Democratic co-chair of President Barack Obama's bipartisan debt commission. It is in that latter position that he slammed Obama's irresponsible budgetary behavior while praising Paul Ryan to the skies.

Some Obama supporters try to pretend over and over again that it's mainly kooks -- many of them racists -- who have been sharply critical of Obama's handling of major issues. But knowledgeable, balanced sources like Bowles have repeatedly confirmed how Obama has run lickety-split from a potentially ruinous debt threat, doing more to flatten perfectly sound proposals from the other side than to come up with anything credible of his own.

The evidence in fact surrounds us that Obama is pushing us closer and closer to the tipping point on any number of crucial matters affecting our economy, our freedoms, rule of law and social cohesion. Give him another four years to do his sometimes amateurish, politically sneaky, ideologically overreaching thing, and our deliverance possibilities could be vastly reduced.

Let's start a brief review of some of these issues, with emphasis on the obese $16 trillion debt. Our president, who cheerfully overfed it with trillion-dollar deficits, then had the temerity to attack Republican challenger Mitt Romney in a debate for wanting to keep our defense strong. The defense budget is around 20 percent of the total budget, and that's including wars that cost little more during all the Bush years than Obama's stimulus measures. The core of the peril is entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that in their entirety are getting ever closer to two-thirds of the budget and could eventually pass that mark because of an aging population.

Well before he became the Republican vice presidential candidate, Rep. Ryan of Wisconsin put forth a well-considered restructuring plan to salvage Medicare. That proposal and his other budgetary ideas were denounced by Obama even though he was making his own Medicare cuts that would not save a single budgetary dollar. They were meant to help finance Obamacare, a brand-new entitlement worsening our financial burdens while also piling up 13,000 pages of new regulations, just for starters. This conglomeration comes on top of an already existing regulatory mishmash that inconveniences us, occasionally handcuffs our liberties, thwarts prosperity and sometimes even shoves us in fatal directions.

Here is another tipping-point issue summed up by the egregious excess of the U.S. code's 356,000 pages of laws and regulations that leave fewer and fewer aspects of our lives untouched. Obviously, some of these regulations are good and needed, but many are a terrible bother and worse. Reductions are needed, but what Obama is giving us instead is more, including some in Obamacare already scaring businesses out of hiring more people for fear of unaffordable costs.

Obama's regulatory enthusiasms hardly end there, as we see in the way the Environmental Protection Agency is slapping energy industries around. This bullying to no good end and conceivably disastrous ones is in no small measure the consequence of still another tipping point issue: radical environmentalism that is forever winning its way.

Most of us are pro-environment, of course, but at some point some parts of the environmental movement degenerated into a fanatical, theocratically minded religion that Obama seems to embrace. No single example is clearer than his nixing a vitally important Canadian-Texas oil pipeline as not safe when dozens of scientists had spent three years and filled eight volumes with details proving it was.

Actions of this sort could demolish the prospect of an economy-resuscitating energy boom that otherwise seems to be in the offing. That's hardly the end of the tipping-point story. There is also the risk to rule of law that comes from Obama's disregard of constitutional restraints and there are still other worries that could be lessened with a voter-induced turnover in management, starting at the top.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

Comment by clicking here.

Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado.


Previously:


10/24/12: The pettiness refuge
10/18/12: An interruption that tells a bigger tale
10/17/12: A recovery that wasn't
10/12/12: Big Bird squabble points to something real
10/11/12: The 'war' you don't hear about --- the one on average Americans
08/22/12: Obama leadership: Romney's returns trump road to recovery
08/15/12: Saving Medicare the Ryan way
08/01/12: Combatting free speech
07/25/12: Good and bad reactions to Colorado horror
07/18/12: Apology time for Obama
07/16/12: Free markets solve climate change threats
07/11/12: Humans and particles and those who would order them
07/06/12: Why we'll miss Andy Griffith
07/05/12: All will feel Affordable Care Act's bite
07/02/12: A social solution --- homes with dads
06/27/12: Being a 'nation of immigrants' is not an excuse
06/20/12: Barack Obama the autocrat
06/18/12: Bradbury's lessons for today
06/13/12: Should this leaking administration sink?
06/11/12: Simpson bashes back on reform
06/05/12: Legalize sugary drinks, ban dangerous drugs
06/04/12: Keep America from going Greek
06/01/12: Don't believe in Obama's fairy tales
05/30/12: Writing a book? Beats prison
05/23/12: Student loans fail students
05/21/12: Europeanizing America into crisis
05/16/12: Obama a bully, too
05/15/12: Walker recall vote could swing national pension policy
05/07/12: Bumbling, fumbling, benighted, old Washington near tipping point where freedom is done for
05/02/12: The Communists cannot be happy
04/30/12: There's no objective truth, least of all concerning behavior
04/25/12: Forgive the extremist?
04/23/12: Educational excellence is a game
04/18/12: Obama's interventions help a few by the most autocratic, complicated, ineffective means possible, yet hurt many more
04/16/12: Overregulation strikes again: The nanny state threatens to turn us into children
04/11/12: Obama is not bonkers
04/04/12: Will America vote against authoritarianism?
04/02/12: 'Tipping point' on federal restraint approaches
03/28/12: Obama truth from an open mike
03/21/12: The progressive campaign for voter fraud
03/19/12: Public pensions will get us if we don't watch out
03/14/12: Politics needs reporting, not speculation
03/12/12: Home of the free, the brave, the endangered
03/07/12: Obama used Limbaugh as scapegoat
03/05/12: Campaign substance lost in media melodrama
03/01/12: When Big Brother drowns
02/24/12: Obama goes gaseous on gas
02/22/12: Political tears for trust in personal empowerment --- except in the bedroom
02/17/12: Of cut-off ears and silenced mouths
02/15/12: Obama is a joke whose antics aren't funny
02/10/12: An energy boom looms, despite Obama
02/08/12: Obama's assault on faith
02/03/12: Can Romney get serious?
01/27/12: Obama is like an Italian ship captain
01/25/12: Newt Gingrich's first 100 days
01/20/12: Obama's Keystone pipeline lies
01/18/12: Critics worse than urinating Marines
01/13/12: Ron Paul is a cartoonish character
01/11/12: Newt Gingrich upset by Mitt Romney's brilliance
01/09/12: How about regulating presidents, too?
01/04/12: How America smothers itself
12/30/11: A tax break that helps break the nation
12/28/11: Watch out for the banana peel, Newt
12/21/11: A tale of two men
12/16/11: Strange happenings in Russia
12/14/11: Tim Tebow is a man of character
12/09/11: A populist, envy-mongering fraud divisively exacerbating resentment among different groups of Americans
12/07/11: Tax games threaten nation
12/05/11: Why Wal-Mart serves us better than Barney Frank
11/30/11: Not writing off Newt
11/28/11: Answers to the Iranian threat
11/23/11: Failure of the incumbency investment
11/18/11: Occupiers: Chop off their heads!
11/16/11: Obama asks jobless to sacrifice
11/09/11: Michael Moore's insufferable occupation
11/04/11: Political tipping point is coming
11/02/11: Idealogues versus 7 billion
10/28/11: Obama games on student loans
10/26/11: Wit and quick moves v. humanity and thoroughgoing honesty? It's no contest —- or at least shouldn't be
10/07/11: Baptists, bootleggers and Wall Street protesters
10/05/11: Federal law will get you even if you watch out
09/28/11: Leftist bugbears on the march
09/23/11: Still hope for coal to help us
09/21/11: Obama's Madoff ploy
09/19/11: U.S. can't afford to wait until it happens
09/14/11: Defending -- and strengthening -- gung ho collectivism
09/12/11: A pipeline to better times
09/08/11: Obama just keeps destroying jobs
09/06/11: Ultra-feminists thwarting justice
08/31/11: Corporations are people? Yes, Count the ways
08/26/11: What an earthquake tells us about debt
08/25/11: The tyranny of scientific consensus
08/23/11: Fracking hardly a public health threat
08/17/11: Why Obamacare won't control births
08/15/11: Balanced budget amendment unbalanced idea
08/10/11: Kerry's war on citizen speech
08/05/11: Upside to the compromise leaving the door open for obnoxious maneuvers
08/03/11: The people who may save America
07/29/11: On making deals, Obama is no LBJ
07/27/11: The threat behind the debt
07/23/11: Mean opposition to means-testing
07/20/11: Leftist babble makes debt crisis even worse
07/18/11: Time to raise demagoguery ceiling
07/13/11: Obama treating treaties badly
07/08/11: Is decline of U.S. exaggerated?
07/05/11: Not math deficiency, but demagoguery



© 2011, SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE

Insight (Our Columnists)

 Arnold Ahlert
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