Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit was finally released in exchange for 1027 Palestinian terrorists and captured cold blooded murderers.  One should be reminded that Schalit was kidnapped on Israeli soil.  Many have weighed in on whether the exchange was worth the price, but shouldn’t it be a  little demeaning to the Palestinians that one Israeli was deemed to be worth 1,027 of them?  As one friend noted,  maybe the Israelis thought one Israeli was worth 2,500 Palestinians and that this was a good deal. It speaks loudly about how Israel values the life of a single soldier and how the Palestinians value the acts of cold blooded killers.  I think the end story of this exchange is yet to be written.

The schmucks on Wall Street seem pointless.  In interviews they seem to be either as ill informed or as dumb as a sack of hammers or they are exploitive of those that are.  In their creative spirits to be the human microphone they should have focused more on having something to say than on figuring out how to say it.

In the absence of a clear message they have been hijacked by several extremist elements. Communists, Nazis, and blatant anti-Semites have used this forum to express their views.  Is it wise for Democratic leaders to be associated with these elements ?  Why are true liberals so hesitant to recognize and reject these elements. Do they think they will go away if ignored?  I heard one talking head accuse these extremists of being Tea Party plants.  What denial.

Cain’s 9.9.9. plan has been attacked by his Republican colleagues as much as by Democrats.  You would think he had proposed the 6.6.6 plan.  Arthur Laffer supports the idea.  While there are many details to struggle with, I like the idea of a consumption tax.  Among the wealthy income can vary more than consumption.  A consumption tax attracts revenue from a broader base and it is subject to less fluctuation in a recession.  The devil is in the details.

I wonder whether these endless debates is the best format to choose a candidate.  A debate performance is not necessarily  indicative of executive performance.   We want to know what their governing philosophy is an is their character sound enough to trust.  What we get is a game of gotchas and a hunt for any transgressions that makes them imperfect.  Anyone in a leadership position will have made mistakes, changed his views on something , or  otherwise stumbled.  The man who has never sinned is less respectable than the man who has only sinned once. (Tips to Nassim Taleb)

I have heard many who want forgiveness of student loans claim that the move would stimulate the economy.  This is common economic ignorance.  The loan you do not repay is a loss of the other party.  The dollar you do not pay is a dollar your creditor does not receive.  Likewise we never stimulate anything by taking a dollar from one citizen and giving to some else.  What these economic fools call stimulus is simply redistribution.

Rick Richman writes in Commentary, What Happened Before Nothing Happened?- 10/2/ 11

He responds to a common refrain that the Palestinians are frustrated from a lack of progress:

(1) In 2000, the Palestinians were offered a state by Israel, and turned it down; (2) in 2001, the Palestinians rejected the Clinton Parameters; (3) in 2002, the U.S. endorsed a Palestinian state if the Palestinians built a practicing democracy (today the putative state is ruled half by a terrorist group and half by a party that hasn’t held an election in nearly six years); (4) in 2003, the Palestinians accepted the Roadmap but have yet to complete any of its three phases; (5) in 2004, Israel adopted a plan to hand over Gaza to the Palestinians; (6) in 2005, Israel removed every settler and soldier from Gaza, which the Palestinians turned into Hamastan in one week; (7) in 2006, the Palestinians elected a terrorist group to control their legislature; (8) in 2007, the U.S. convened the Annapolis conference to “accelerate” the Roadmap; (9) in 2008, after a year of final status negotiations, the Palestinians rejected still another Israeli offer of a state; and (10) in 2009, Israel offered the Palestinians negotiations again, which they refused, and initiated an unprecedented construction moratorium, which they ignored.

HKO comments:

Terrorism works because it achieves the attention and recognition that the hard work of building a nation does not. If the Palestinians were truly focused on acquiring statehood rather than destroying one, they would have had a seat in the UN decades ago.

From Benjamin Netanyanu’s speech at the UN on 9/23/11 per the Weekly Standard.

These people say to me constantly: Just make a sweeping offer, and everything will work out. You know, there’s only one problem with that theory. We’ve tried it and it hasn’t worked. In 2000 Israel made a sweeping peace offer that met virtually all of the Palestinian demands. Arafat rejected it. The Palestinians then launched a terror attack that claimed a thousand Israeli lives.

Prime Minister Olmert afterwards made an even more sweeping offer, in 2008. President Abbas didn’t even respond to it.

But Israel did more than just make sweeping offers. We actually left territory. We withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 and from every square inch of Gaza in 2005. That didn’t calm the Islamic storm, the militant Islamic storm that threatens us. It only brought the storm closer and make it stronger.

Hezbollah and Hamas fired thousands of rockets against our cities from the very territories we vacated. See, when Israel left Lebanon and Gaza, the moderates didn’t defeat the radicals, the moderates were devoured by the radicals. And I regret to say that international troops like UNIFIL in Lebanon and UBAM (ph) in Gaza didn’t stop the radicals from attacking Israel.

We left Gaza hoping for peace.

We didn’t freeze the settlements in Gaza, we uprooted them. We did exactly what the theory says: Get out, go back to the 1967 borders, dismantle the settlements.

And I don’t think people remember how far we went to achieve this. We uprooted thousands of people from their homes. We pulled children out of — out of their schools and their kindergartens. We bulldozed synagogues. We even — we even moved loved ones from their graves. And then, having done all that, we gave the keys of Gaza to President Abbas.

Now the theory says it should all work out, and President Abbas and the Palestinian Authority now could build a peaceful state in Gaza. You can remember that the entire world applauded. They applauded our withdrawal as an act of great statesmanship. It was a bold act of peace.

But ladies and gentlemen, we didn’t get peace. We got war. We got Iran, which through its proxy Hamas promptly kicked out the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinian Authority collapsed in a day — in one day.

President Abbas just said on this podium that the Palestinians are armed only with their hopes and dreams. Yeah, hopes, dreams and 10,000 missiles and Grad rockets supplied by Iran, not to mention the river of lethal weapons now flowing into Gaza from the Sinai, from Libya, and from elsewhere.

Thousands of missiles have already rained down on our cities. So you might understand that, given all this,Israelis rightly ask: What’s to prevent this from happening again in the West Bank? See, most of our major cities in the south of the country are within a few dozen kilometers from Gaza. But in the center of the country, opposite the West Bank, our cities are a few hundred meters or at most a few kilometers away from the edge of the West Bank.

So I want to ask you. Would any of you — would any of you bring danger so close to your cities, to your families? Would you act so recklessly with the lives of your citizens?

The Syrian Al Kibar reactor after the Israeli attack

In September of 2007 the Israelis destroyed the Al Kibar nuclear plant in Syria that was under construction.  It got a little press at the time, but many people have dashed this action from their memory.

Clifford May writes about this action in National Review in Cheney Got it Right on Syrian Nukes, 9/22/11.

Excerpt:

In the end, after Bush decided not to act and diplomacy went nowhere, the Israelis took it upon themselves to destroy the reactor. The former advisers write: “Syria then spent months trying to sanitize the site and stonewall the IAEA — confirmation of its non-peaceful intentions. The Israeli attack in September 2007 was flawless, Syria and North Korea did not lash out, and a dire proliferation threat was eliminated for good. America and the world are safer for it.”

History will record that the CIA failed in this mission. Such failures have happened before and will happen again. That is to be expected, but this isn’t: After Bush’s decision not to take out the nuclear reactor, Woodward writes, the CIA officers responsible for providing the “low confidence” assessment “were pleased they had succeeded in avoiding the overreaching so evident in the Iraq WMD case. So they issued a very limited-circulation memorial coin. One side showed a map of Syria with a star at the site of the former reactor. On the other side the coin said, ‘No core/No war.’”

In other words, they considered it a victory that they had prevented Bush from acting. That is shameful. The CIA’s job is to provide the president with the intelligence he needs to make policy. The CIA’s job is not to substitute its policy preferences for those of the commander-in-chief — and then celebrate such power-grabs.

HKO Comments:

Foreign policy is difficult at best and often entails a choice of several bad alternatives.  After the intelligence failures preceding Iraq and the absence of WMD stockpiles we expected to find, our intelligence was understandably reluctant to risk a second bad call.

The problem in politics is that bad decisions are memorialized and actions that truly prevent disasters are often quiet and forgotten.  Fortunately in this case the reluctance to act on good but not infallible information was corrected by the Israelis.  Recall that they also did this when they destroyed the Osirik reactor  in Iraq in 1980.

Intelligence is fraught with fallibility, uncertainty and risk. Yet often the greatest risk is to take no risk until the information is infallible.

From Benjamin Netanyanu’s speech at the UN on 9/23/11 per the Weekly Standard.

Ladies and gentlemen, in Israel our hope for peace never wanes. Our scientists, doctors, innovators, apply their genius to improve the world of tomorrow. Our artists, our writers, enrich the heritage of humanity. Now, I know that this is not exactly the image of Israel that is often portrayed in this hall. After all, it was here in 1975 that the age-old yearning of my people to restore our national life in our ancient biblical homeland — it was then that this was braided — branded, rather — shamefully, as racism. And it was here in 1980, right here, that the historic peace agreement between Israel and Egypt wasn’t praised; it was denounced! And it’s here year after year that Israel is unjustly singled out for condemnation. It’s singled out for condemnation more often than all the nations of the world combined. Twenty-one out of the 27 General Assembly resolutions condemn Israel — the one true democracy in the Middle East.

Well, this is an unfortunate part of the U.N. institution. It’s the — the theater of the absurd. It doesn’t only cast Israel as the villain; it often casts real villains in leading roles: Gadhafi’s Libya chaired the U.N. Commission on Human Rights; Saddam’s Iraq headed the U.N. Committee on Disarmament.

You might say: That’s the past. Well, here’s what’s happening now — right now, today. Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon now presides over the U.N. Security Council. This means, in effect, that a terror organization presides over the body entrusted with guaranteeing the world’s security.

You couldn’t make this thing up.