Barry Rubin writes in the Jerusalem Post:

Read the whole thing. Here’s an extract:

We now have the perfect metaphor for the Middle East’s political situation. In Egypt, a little boy with cystic fibrosis badly needs a certain medicine. Unfortunately for him, that drug is only produced in Israel, and Egypt’s health ministry won’t let it be imported.

Unless one understands how this story typifies the region, it’s impossible to understand the Middle East.

Let’s remember that Egypt has been at peace with Israel for over 30 years, and that, nevertheless, its government still does much to boycott, not to mention demonize, the Jewish state. By constantly pursuing a hate-Israel campaign, it stokes an atmosphere of hatred and extremism which also gives ammunition to the Muslim Brotherhood that seeks to turn Egypt into a war-oriented, totalitarian Islamist state.

So tightly controlled is the Egyptian media, so extraordinary the Israelphobia, that the English-language Cairo paper Al-Ahram was considered courageous even to mention the sick boy’s family’s effort to obtain the Israeli-invented medicine.

Meanwhile, an Egyptian wrote recently: "Admission into [a] state-run hospital is likely to cost one his life." This came shortly after a scandal involving a top ruling-party politician who was discovered selling tainted transfusion blood.

Arab countries cannot develop medicines and hi-tech advances precisely because they are too busy using up the resources for battles against various fantasy enemies of Allah.

SOME YEARS ago, a US official told me about funds that had been offered Egyptian officials to implement a program dealing with Red Sea pollution. But the project involved cooperation with Israel. The official was told that anything helping Israel was unacceptable, no matter how much good it might do Egypt. …

The rest of the world, finding such talk incomprehensible, either thinks it’s meaningless jabber, or ignores it altogether. Surely the problem must stem from addressable grievances, fixable misunderstandings and emotional exaggeration? Unfortunately, this is all nonsense.

What’s the effective voice in the region? Not the "peace process" concept used in talking with the West, but the "resistance" concept, used in talking among themselves. 

 

 From Power Line:

Unfortunately, it may well be the case that [Paul]  Krugman won his award [this year, in Economics] due at least in part to his left-wing, anti-Bush commentary. Every year, we have occasion to note the leftist bias of the Nobel awards. The prizes seem to have become, in part, a method of rewarding Bush’s harshest critics, Al Gore and Jimmy Carter for example. If there’s a chemist out there who has written an anti-Bush op-ed, there may well be a Nobel Prize in his or her future.

The Nobel Prize is just another example of an institution whose veneration once crossed ideological lines, but that the left has long since captured. Other such institutions include the NAACP, the New York Times, Amnesty International, and (though it was never really venerated) the American Bar Association. The left’s "long march" through these institutions has deprived them of their credibility and their status as honest brokers.

In the case of the Nobel Prize, the money must be welcome. But as honors go, a Nobel Prize in anything relating to public policy is not much more meaningful than praise from the Daily Kos.

As the comments on many of our entries show, we come in for a fair amount of abuse. We take it all as a form of compliment. If we get under the skin of our enemies, we are doing well. 

Now, thanks to our reader, Kenn, my attention is drawn to this entry on the website of endiana, and a real compliment, following the important posting on McCain’s prophetic letter concerning Fannie Mae.  

I feel  honored to be placed in the company of Melanie Phillips and SARAH PALIN. 

Why did this article by Vladimir Bukovsky and Pavel Stroilov (in Front Page Magazine on October 10) not surprise me?

It is about a US delegation to the Soviet Union, of which one of the Soviet officials noted:

 

This time, the [US] delegation did not officially raise the issue of human rights during the negotiations. Biden said he did not want ‘to spoil the atmosphere with problems which are bound to cause distrust in our relations.’ However, during the breaks between the sessions the senators passed to us several letters concerning these or those ‘refuseniks’.

 

Unofficially, Biden and Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for ‘human rights’. They must prove to their voters that they are ‘effective in fulfilling their wishes’. In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.

 From Little Green Footballs:

Obama started building the base years before. For instance, ACORN noticed him when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project. He was a very good organizer. When he returned from law school, we asked him to help us with a lawsuit to challenge the state of Illinois’ refusal to abide by the National Voting Rights Act, also known as motor voter. Allied only with the state of Mississippi, Illinois had been refusing to allow mass-based voter registration according to the new law. Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5000 of them).

Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for STate Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends.

112

 By Glenn McCoy

www.townhall.com/funnies  

 Bush and Rice have capitulated to North Korea (see next below), but far worse is to come if Obama gets to control US defense – which seems all to likely.

This from Power Line:

We are now three weeks out from the presidential election, and so far as I am aware Barack Obama has not been asked a single question about the disarmament credo he sets forth in the video above:

I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems…

 

…I will not weaponize space…

…I will slow development of future combat systems…

…and I will institute an independent "Defense Priorities Board" to ensure the quadrennial defense review is not used to justify unnecessary spending…

…I will set a goal of a world without nuclear weapons…

…and to seek that goal, I will not develop nuclear weapons…

…I will seek a global ban on the production of fissile material…

…and I will negotiate with Russia to take our ICBMs off hair-trigger alert…

…and to achieve deep cuts in our nuclear arsenals…

Isn’t it time for someone who covers politics for a living to ask Obama a few serious questions about this credo? Or for John Mccain to note it?

 John Bolton writes in the Wall Street Journal:

North Korea has now achieved one of its most-prized objectives: removal from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. In exchange, the U.S. has received "promises" on verification that are vague and amount to an agreement to negotiate the critical points later.

In the Bush administration’s waning days, this is what passes for diplomatic "success." It is in fact the final crash and burn of a once-inspiring global effort to confront and reverse nuclear proliferation, thereby protecting America and its friends.

Delisting the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) as a terrorist sponsor represents a classic case of prizing the negotiation process over substance, where the benefits of "diplomatic progress" can be trumpeted in the media while the specifics of the actual agreement, and their manifest inadequacies, fade into the shadows.

In the weeks before being delisted, North Korea expelled international inspectors, first from its Yongbyon plutonium-reprocessing facility and then from the entire complex. It moved to reactivate Yongbyon and to conduct a possible second nuclear-weapons test, and prepared for an extensive salvo of antiship and other missile capabilities. All of this the Bush administration dismissed as North Korea’s typical negotiation style.

The irony is that the DPRK need not have gone to the trouble. President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice were apparently ready to cave in without the show of force, and indeed rushed to announce the terrorism delisting during a three-day weekend. Thus, while the North’s macho display was irrelevant, the conclusion Pyongyang will draw is that bluff and bluster worked.

So now Pyongyang has what it wants, and Washington has a vague, inadequate invitation to more verification palavering. In any complex negotiation, implementation is the real test, and nowhere is this more painfully evident than in arms-control agreements.

North Korea is the world’s most accomplished serial violator of international agreements, beginning with the Korean War Armistice Agreement it signed in 1953 and including every other significant subsequent DPRK commitment. Most pertinent here, these breaches include repeated promises to give up its nuclear capabilities, beginning with the 1992 Joint North-South Declaration and the ill-fated 1994 Agreed Framework….

Having bent the knee to North Korea, Secretary Rice appears primed to do the same with Iran, despite that regime’s egregious and extensive involvement in terrorism and the acceleration of its nuclear program. Watch for the opening of a U.S. diplomatic post in Tehran within days after our Nov. 4 election, and other concessions on the nuclear front. Hard as it is to believe, there may be worse yet to come.

 

From Power Line:

We’ve noted many times that John McCain was one of the prescient legislators who saw the dangers posed by the runaway Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae and tried to do something about the problem. Until now, though, I’d never seen this letter of May 5, 2006, signed by McCain and 19 other Senators, that couldn’t have been clearer about the dangers posed by the Democrats’ reckless treatment of Fannie and Freddy, and the need to take action to protect the taxpayers and the economy. It’s hard to see how any warning could be more spot-on. Click to enlarge:

Among the more prescient observations:

We are concerned that if effective regulatory reform legislation for the housing-finance government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) is not enacted this year, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole. …

Today, almost half of the home mortgages in the U.S. are guaranteed by these GSEs. They are mammoth financial institutions with almost $1.5 Trillion of debt outstanding between them. With the fiscal challenges facing us today (deficits, entitlements, pensions and flood insurance), Congress must ask itself who would pay this debt if Fannie or Freddy could not? …

It is vitally important that Congress take the necessary steps to ensure that these institutions benefit from strong and independent regulatory supervision, operate in a safe and sound manner, and are primarily focused on their statutory mission. More importantly, Congress must ensure that the American taxpayer is protected in the event either GSE should fail.

 Via Human Events. One thing I hadn’t realized is that McCain’s reform legislation was passed through the Senate Banking Committee, but was not able to gain majority support on the Senate floor. All twenty Senators who signed the letter calling attention to the urgency of reforming Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were Republicans. After May 2006, the Democrats continued to use Fannie and Freddy as their private slush funds until the inevitable collapse, which McCain had warned against so eloquently, occurred.

For some inexplicable reason, John McCain seems unable to claim the credit he deserves for being one of the few politicians in Washington who saw the present crisis coming and tried to do something about it. He is even more unable to vigorously and unambiguously put the blame where it belongs: on the Democratic Party. Which is one of the principal reasons why, as everyone expects, he will lose in November. 

 Investor’s Business Daily tells it straight:

Right now it looks like the U.S., which built the mightiest, most prosperous economy the world has ever known, is about to turn its back on the free-enterprise system that made it all possible.

It isn’t only that the most anti-capitalist politician ever nominated by a major party is favored to take the White House. It’s that he’ll also have a filibuster-proof Congress led by politicians who are almost as liberal.

Throw in a media establishment dedicated to the implementation of a liberal agenda, and the smothering of dissent wherever it arises, and it’s no wonder panic has set in.

What is that agenda? It starts with a tax system right out of Marx: A massive redistribution of income — from each according to his ability, to each according to his need — all in the name of "neighborliness," "patriotism," "fairness" and "justice."

It continues with a call for a new world order that turns its back on free trade, has no problem with government controlling the means of production, imposes global taxes to support continents where our interests are negligible, signs on to climate treaties that will sap billions more in U.S. productivity and wealth, and institutes an authoritarian health care system that will strip Americans’ freedoms and run up costs.

All the while, it ensures that nothing — absolutely nothing — will be done to secure a sufficient, terror-proof supply of our economic lifeblood — oil — a resource we’ll need much more of in the years ahead.

The businesses that create jobs and generate wealth are already discounting the future based on what they know about Obama’s plans to raise income, capital gains, dividend and payroll taxes, and his various other economy-crippling policies. Which helps explain why world stock markets have been so topsy-turvy.

But don’t take our word for it. One hundred economists, five Nobel winners among them, have signed a letter noting just that:

"The prospect of such tax-rate increases in 2010 is already a drag on the economy," they wrote, noting that the potential of higher taxes in the next year or two is reducing hiring and investment.

It was "misguided tax hikes and protectionism, enacted when the U.S. economy was weak in the early 1930s," the economists remind us, that "greatly increased the severity of the Great Depression."

We can’t afford to repeat these grave errors.

Yet much of the electorate is determined to vote for the candidate most likely to make them. If he wins, what we consider to be a crisis in today’s economy will be a routine affair in tomorrow’s.