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Tevi Troy, who worked in W’s White House writes in The Tablet about the Koch Test. No, it’s not about Anthony Weiner, but about Ed Koch who appears in these pages often. Koch is a former mayor of New York who famously refused to back Jimmy Carter for a second term. Guess who might get his “Carter Treatment” this coming election?
Ed Koch had a piece on the political website Real Clear Politics recently that should worry President Barack Obama. Koch, who backed Obama in the 2008 election, wrote that “If President Obama does not change his position [on Israel], I cannot vote for his reelection.”
One might think that the vote of one octogenarian and often cranky former New York City mayor may not be a big deal, but Koch has a long and eventful history of involvement with presidential campaigns. He almost perfectly captures the views of a certain type of older—often but not always Jewish—Democrat who is nonetheless skeptical of his party on national security issues. While Koch usually backs his party’s candidate, he also seems to have an uncanny ability to back a Republican—tacitly or explicitly—when the Democrats are going to lose.
In 1980, during his first term as mayor, Koch tortured Jimmy Carter over Carter’s position on Israel. At one point, Carter’s people reached out to Koch and asked him not to say anything about a particular administration action until the president had had a chance to explain himself. Koch obliged and went down to the White House for a meeting with Carter. Unsatisfied with the explanation Carter gave, Koch then continued criticizing the administration, infuriating Carter. …
More in this vein from Roger Simon.
Rahm Emanuel’s idolatrous and predictable oped in the Washington Post — Obama’s commitment to Israel — would not be worth commenting on were it not that the perpetual love affair between Americans Jews and the Democratic Party… for the first time ever… perhaps, maybe, perhaps… is approaching a break up.
As Alana Goodman aptly put it at Commentary’s Contentions blog: “You know Democrats are getting panicky about President Obama’s alienating the pro-Israel community when they drag out Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to defend the president’s statements.”
Goodman goes on to eviscerate the mayor’s argument:
“Emanuel, unsurprisingly, misses the major point here. The problem with Obama’s speech was that he called for the 1967 borders as the starting point for negotiations, without reaffirming that Israel would absorb the Israeli-majority settlement blocs across the green line. He also didn’t reject the Palestinian right of return. In other words, he implied that the U.S. would take the Palestinian negotiating position on the issue, putting our ally Israel at a significant disadvantage.”
I would say deliberately misses the point, rather than “unsurprisingly,” but no matter. …
Writing before Friday’s dismal jobs report, Nile Gardiner suggests the president is in big trouble next year.
On a recent visit to London I was struck by how much faith many British politicians, journalists and political advisers have in Barack Obama being re-elected in 2012. In the aftermath of the hugely successful Special Forces operation that took out Osama Bin Laden and a modest spike in the polls for the president, the conventional wisdom among political elites in Britain is overwhelmingly that Obama will win another four years in the Oval Office. Add to this a widespread perception of continuing disarray in the Republican race, as well as a State Visit to London that had the chattering classes worshipping at the feet of the US president, and you can easily see why Obama’s prospects look a lot rosier from across the Atlantic.
But back in the United States, the reality looks a lot different. Many political leaders in Britain fail to understand the degree to which the American people are deeply unhappy with their president’s poor handling of the economy. Nor have they grasped the epic scale of the defeat suffered by the president in the November mid-terms, and the emphatic rejection by a clear majority of Americans of the Big Government Obama agenda. …
Dorothy Rabinowitz writes about the Republican who can win.
… The Republican who wins the presidency will have to have more than a command of the reasons the Obama administration must go. He will have to have a vision of this nation, and its place in the world, that voters recognize, that speaks to a sense of America they can see and take pride in. He can look at the film of the crowds, mostly of young people, who gathered at the White House to wave the flag of the United States when bin Laden was captured and killed. Faces of blacks, whites, Asians—of every ethnic group.
At Louisiana State University not long after that, a student who planned to burn an American flag had to be rushed from the campus for his safety, much to his shock. Students by the hundreds had descended on him in rage, waving their own banners and roaring “USA! USA!” at the top of their lungs. It was a shout that spoke for more than they could say.
After all the years of instruction, all the textbooks on U.S. rapacity and greed, all the college lectures on the evil and injustice the U.S. had supposedly visited on the world, something inside these young rose up to tell them they were Americans. That something lies in the hearts of Americans across the land and it is those hearts to which the candidate will have to speak.
Two years ago an Air France jet fell into the Atlantic on its way to Brazil. Last month the flight data recorder was recovered from two and a half mile deep water. Der Spiegel reports on what has been learned.
… The crash of the A330 had made millions of airline passengers uneasy. How, many wondered, was it possible for a passenger jet to simply be lost as it traversed the ocean? It was reminiscent of ships disappearing without a trace on the high seas in bygone centuries. Would the data recorders finally solve the mystery?
It was only much later, after hours of radio silence and well after the plane was scheduled to have completed its crossing of the Atlantic, that planes were dispatched to search for the missing Airbus.
Even experienced accident investigators were caught completely off guard by the calamity. “This is a mysterious crash,” said Peter Goelz, former head of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in Washington. He said it was in the same category as air disasters such as that on the island of Tenerife in 1977, with 583 deaths, the deadliest in the history of air travel.
On Wednesday of this week, families of the victims — from 32 countries — are set to gather in Paris and Rio de Janeiro to mark the second anniversary of the crash. The meeting is taking place at a time when the veil that has covered the accident in mystery may slowly be lifting. The four-page BEA report provides answers to several of the most pressing questions the crash left behind — and raises just as many additional issues.
The drama began at 2:10 a.m. and 5 seconds GMT: Without warning, the autopilot and the auto-thrust disengaged. The report is silent as to why. But crash investigators have an explanation: The three speed gauges on the outside of the aircraft, known as pitot sensors, had become iced up. …
… But why were all the crew’s efforts in the cockpit in vain? Did the plane no longer react to the cockpit commands as it fell? Or did the horizontal stabilizer, which was still almost fully deflected at 13 degrees, continue to force the nose of the plane up?
Airbus vehemently denies that the plane’s automatic controls could have worked against the pilots’ commands. Were the suspicions proven true, however, then the software would have to be replaced in over a thousand A330s and in its sister model, the A340. The costs would run into hundreds of millions of euros.
In any case, flight engineer Hüttig, who also advises the victims’ families regarding technical issues, is concerned about the description of the horizontal stabilizer as being at 13 degrees. That is consistent with behavior he observed in an Air France A330 simulator in Paris a few months ago, when he replicated the situation together with other pilots. “The phenomenon is startlingly similar,” he says. …
WHO warns; Killer cellphones! USA Today op-ed says don’t believe it.
… This is the same WHO that inflamed and accelerated the swine flu scare in 2009, quickly elevating it to pandemic status and authorizing the production of millions of doses of vaccine that ultimately had to be discarded.
What has changed since last week is not the actual risk associated with cellphones, but simply our perception, which is linked to society’s reasonable fear of cancer. But so far the science doesn’t back up these new concerns.
More than two dozen studies done in Europe, the United States and New Zealand have not established a definitive link between cellphones and brain cancer. Of course the results are limited because they rely on survey data, which is the weakest kind of science. One study showed a possible association between heavy cellphone use and cancer, but the study was severely limited because it questioned people who already had brain cancer and asked them to try to recall how frequently they had used their cellphones. …