Phyllis Schlafly writes in Townhall:

Obama’s nearly trillion-dollar stimulus law designates $128 billion for education, so it’s no surprise that tight strings are attached.Buried in the fine print is an ominous requirement to build a national electronic database of all children. Any state that receives federal education funds must “establish a longitudinal data system that includes the elements described in … the America COMPETES Act.”

That law, passed a couple of years ago, sets out the goal of longitudinal databasing of “student-level enrollment, demographic, and program participation information” for all students from preschool through postsecondary education…

Database collection on each student continues through college and into the workforce. States are required to enter “information regarding the extent to which students transition successfully from secondary school to postsecondary education.”

Creation of a database of this magnitude is the sort of thing that totalitarian governments do but should not be allowed by those who value freedom. It’s scary to think of Obama’s czars and political operatives such as Rahm Emanuel having access to all that personal information on American citizens.

Here in full is Melanie Phillips’s article in the Spectator (and please click on the link to Sultan Knish):

As predicted here repeatedly – Obama is attempting to throw Israel under the Islamist bus, and he’s getting American Jews to do his dirty work for him. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reportedly told the Israel lobbying group AIPAC on Sunday that efforts to stop Iran hinged on peace talks with the Palestinians. General James Jones, National Security Adviser to Obama, reportedly told a European foreign minister a week ago that unlike the Bush administration, Obama will be ‘forceful’ with Israel. Ha’aretz reports:

Jones is quoted in the telegram as saying that the United States, European Union and moderate Arab states must redefine ‘a satisfactory endgame solution.’ The U.S. national security adviser did not mention Israel as party to these consultations.

Of course not. If you are going to throw a country under the bus, you don’t invite it to discuss the manner of its destruction with the assassins who are co-ordinating the crime. As I said here months ago, the appointment of Jones and the elevation of his post of National Security Adviser at the expense of the Secretary of State was all part of the strategy to centralise power in the hands of those who want to do Israel harm.

Yesterday Vice-President Joe Biden and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry turned the thumbscrews tighter, telling Israel to stop building more settlements, dismantle existing outposts and allow Palestinians freedom of movement.

This is all not only evil but exceptionally stupid. The idea that a Palestine state will help build a coalition against Iran is demonstrably absurd. The Arab states are beside themselves with anxiety about Iran. They want it to be attacked and its nuclear programme stopped. They are desperately fearful that the Obama administration might have decided that it can live with a nuclear Iran.

The idea that if a Palestine state comes into being it will be easier to handle Iran is the opposite of the case: a Palestine state will be Iran, in the sense thatit will be run by Hamas as a proxy for the Islamic Republic. The idea that a Palestine state will not compromise Israel’s security is ludicrous.

It is of course, by any sane standard, quite fantastic that America is behaving as if it is Israel which is holding up a peace settlement when Israel has made concession after concession – giving up Sinai, giving up Gaza, offering all the territories to the Arabs in return for peace in 1967, offering more than 90 per cent of them ditto in 2000, ditto again to Mahmoud Abbas in the past year — only to be attacked in return by a Palestinian terrorist entity, backed in its continued aggression, let us not forget, by the countries of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, which has made no concessions at all and is not being pressured to do so.

It is not the aggressor here but the victim of aggression that America is now choosing to beat up. In any sane world, one might think the Americans would be piling the pressure on the Palestinians to renounce their genocidal ambitions against Israel, to stop teaching and training their children to hate and kill Jews, to adhere to the primary requirement in the Road Map that they must dismantle their infrastructure of violence as the first step in the peace process; one might think, indeed, that they would view Mahmoud Abbas’s repeated statements that the Palestinians will never accept Israel as a Jewish state to be the main impediment to peace.

But no. The repeated professions that America will never jeopardise Israel’s security are stomach churning when Obama is actually blaming Israel for measures it has taken to safeguard its security – the settlements were always first and foremost a security measure, and the travel restrictions are there solely to prevent more Israelis being murdered – and trying to force it to abandon them. Today comes further news that Obama will also try to force Israel to give up its nuclear weapons – which it only has as a last ditch insurance against the attempt to annihilate it to which several billion Arabs remain pledged.

Of course Obama doesn’t care that Hamas would run any Palestinian state. Of course he doesn’t care that Israel would be unable to defend itself against such a terrorist state. Because he regards Israel as at best totally expendable, and at worst as a running sore on the world’s body politic that has to be purged altogether (see this bleak assessment by Sultan Knish). His administration is proceeding on the entirely false analysis that a state of Palestine is the solution to the Middle East impasse and the route to peace in the region. What that state will look like or do is something to which at best the administration’s collective mind is shut and at worst makes it a potential cynical accomplice to the unconscionable. So Israel is to be forced out of the West Bank. Far from building a coalition against Iran, Obama is thus doing Iran’s work for it.

None of this, however, should come as the slightest surprise to anyone who paid any attention to Obama’s background, associations and friendships before he became President and to the cabal of Israel-bashers, appeasers and Jew-haters he appointed to his administration, with a few useful idiots thrown in for plausible deniability.

American Jews, meanwhile, are reacting as predicted – with a total absence of spine.  As IsraelMatzav reports, AIPAC was sending delegates to visit Congress to ‘convince’ Representatives and Senators to sign a petition calling for a two-state solution. Inspired! Almost eighty per cent of American Jews voted for Obama despite the clear and present danger he posed to Israel. They did so because their liberal self-image was and is more important to them than the Jewish state whose existence and security cannot be allowed to jeopardise their standing with America’s elite.

But the ordinary American people are a different matter. They do value and support Israel. They do understand that if Israel is thrown under that bus, the west is next. And it is they to whom Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu must now appeal, over the heads of the politicians and the media and certainly America’s Jews and everyone else. He must tell the American people the terrible truth, that America is now run by a man who is intent on sacrificing Israel for a reckless and amoral political strategy which will put America and the rest of the free world at risk.

This is shaping up to be the biggest crisis in relations between Israel and America since the foundation of Israel six decades ago. Those who hate Israel and the Jews will be gloating. This after all is precisely what they hoped Obama would do. To any decent person looking on aghast, this is where the moral sickness of the west reaches the critical care ward.

Behold a young hippy woman shall conceive, and shall bear a son, and his name shall be – okay, not Emanuel (‘God with us’), but Barack (‘Blessed’).  However, when Barack becomes President of the United States he will appoint Emanuel as White House chief of staff, and Emanuel will be the one who actually does the job. 

Rahm Emanuel, deeply experienced and full of passionate conviction, has accepted the post of Eminence Grise. He’ll be the wizard behind the curtain. 

Facts about him. He too, like the President Elect, is a politician from Chicago. (Yes, you are right to look nervous!)

He was, bewilderingly, a ballet dancer. But do not expect him to step lightly – he is nicknamed ‘Rahmbo’ for good reason. He’s a hard attacker.

Dare we hope that as he is Jewish and his father was a member of the Irgun, the passionately Zionist terrorist  group (which helped or hindered the birth of the State of Israel depending on your point of view), that he will counter the influence on the President of his good friend Rashid Khalidi, the PLO man? 

I’d say, don’t count on it. Emanuel is a man of the left. For such as he, leftism trumps everything, and in the world at large the left is now predominantly anti-Israel.

We can only wait and see.