Stroke victim John Fetterman continues to be the clearest thinker about a two-state solution for Israel

 

Fetterman: Calling For Palestinian State, Two-State Solution "An Absolute Betrayal" Of Israel And Jews Worldwide

While you were preparing to celebrate Christmas, America's first Muslim president abstained at the UN Security Counsel, effectively condemning Israeli settlements

From the story "Obama faces widespread backlash after abstaining from UN Israel vote" here:

On Friday, the Security Council voted 14-0 on a resolution condemning Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory as a “flagrant violation” of international law that have “"no legal validity." It demands a halt to "all Israeli settlement activities," saying this "is essential for salvaging the two-state solution."

The United States has veto power in the Security Council and has used it for similar resolutions in the past. The Obama administration’s decision to abstain represents a break from the longstanding U.S. policy of shielding Israel from U.N. reproaches.

If #NeverTrump Bill Kristol endorsed General Mattis for a 3rd party run in April, I'm against him as Trump's pick for Defense

Bill Kristol, here:

Jim Mattis happens to be a social liberal. He's more liberal than I am. He's very concerned about the debt. He's a strong national security hawk. Why wouldn't someone like him... 

Mattis is also a conventional liberal in that he subscribes to a two-state solution for Israel, just like George Bush and John Kerry.

Hey Rush! Bibi was just kidding about that about-face on a two-state solution!

Quoted here in The New York Times:

Mr. Netanyahu said he had not intended to reverse his endorsement in a 2009 speech at Bar-Ilan University of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but only to say that it was impossible right now. He cited the Palestinian leadership’s refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and its pact with the militant Islamist Hamas movement, as well as the rise of Islamic terrorism across the region.

“I haven’t changed my policy,” Mr. Netanyahu said in an interview with MSNBC, his first since his resounding victory on Tuesday, which handed him a fourth term. “What has changed is the reality.”

“I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution, but for that, circumstances have to change,” he said. “I was talking about what is achievable and what is not achievable. To make it achievable, then you have to have real negotiations with people who are committed to peace.”

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The "peace process" is very useful also to Israeli liberals. Even they can make a career of it.

Hey Rush! The only people who really believe in a two-state solution are liberals like George W. Bush, right?

From today's Rush Limbaugh show, here:

So you terrorize Israel with bombs from Gaza and bombs from Hamas and bombs from Hezbollah, and then while the peace process is going on you then demand the right of return.  And both of those stratagems are designed to effectively bring about the end of the Jewish state.  The people who believe in this two-state solution, like our caller here from the last hour, the only people who really believe in it are Western liberals such as American liberals, Western European socialist liberals.

Dateline Washington, December 2008, here:

US President George W. Bush summed up eight years of his administration's affairs in the Middle East on Friday, and said he still believed that "the day will come when the map of the Middle East shows a peaceful, secure Israel beside a peaceful and democratic Palestine. I was the first American President to call for a Palestinian state, and building support for the two-state solution has been one of the highest priorities of my Presidency."

Rep. Amash Is A Fake Conservative

Rep. Amash is getting increasingly bold in his use of code words which show that he is a fake conservative. I think he's triangulating in this way in order to get ready for a Senate run.

He stresses "independence" to distance himself from the Republican brand discredited among the young and to find support among people who thus vote Democrat by default.

He stresses "moderation" to distance himself from conservative social issues which are increasingly viewed as extreme, rebranding them as "federal" issues to escape criticism from the Christian right.

The past has nothing to teach us, especially "positions that were popular in the 1990s". Will he soon repudiate the Two State Solution? I'm sure that will please voters in Dearborn.

"Individual liberty" is code for moral license, which includes same sex marriage and legalized drugs, flying under the banner of states' rights.

And perhaps most importantly, what better way to get some street cred with Democrats and liberals than to play the race card against Sen. John McCain? A wise man might have let the senator simply self-destruct. But an ambitious, grasping man, on the other hand, sees an opportunity in piling on. Who is the has-been Sen. McCain to the lowly Rep. Amash, anyway? Wouldn't Justin Amash be happier in the Democrat Party where race is at the center of politics? That's where libertarianism comes from, after all. Success to libertarians is defeating Republicans, and taking over the Republican Party and not the Democrat Party from which they came. When's the last time a libertarian defeated a Democrat, anyhow? But in 2012 libertarians gloried in defeating a number of Republicans.

If Republicans were smart they'd wise up and realize they have a little fifth column problem. But they won't. They're the stupid party, after all.

Gov. Mitt Romney Is Exposing The Liberalism Of Presidents Reagan And Bush

Gov. Mitt Romney is forcing us to consider seriously how Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush got carried away by liberal impulses and got us into troubles.

I think Romney was not a fan of Ronald Reagan in the 1990s because he realized Reagan's program was fiscally irresponsible, cutting taxes while increasing military spending to defeat Soviet Communism. The result was the largest increase in the US public debt since WWII. As a business man who can read a spread sheet, Mitt Romney can recognize fiscal insanity when he sees it.

Now a leaked video of a private fundraiser Romney addressed in Florida in May is being attacked by the left in recent hours. It shows Mitt Romney not too happy with the liberal consensus which uses the tax code as a form of welfare, primarily through the mechanism of tax credits combined with statutory tax rates which nullify income tax liability. This was not a bug in the law. It was a feature intended all along. Romney is signaling that he's not entirely on board with this form of liberalism.

The idea of getting people off welfare was an ingenious one under Reagan, effectively rebating their Social Security contributions when they went to work, instead of collecting a check directly from the federal government while unemployed. But it was fundamentally a compromise with liberalism, and the Earned Income Tax Credit later took on a life of its own, being notably expanded under Bill Clinton and under George W. Bush. Combined with the Child Tax Credit, the two credits represent transfer payments far in excess of the cost of the mortgage interest deduction, the drumbeat against which gets louder by the day. To take away the mortgage interest deduction would yield the government about $80 billion a year in new revenue. But eliminating the two tax credits would end a direct federal government expenditure in excess of $110 billion a year.

If you want to know in what world liberals like Nancy Pelosi under a liberal president like Barack Obama would find it thinkable to consent to a deliberate underfunding of Social Security, liberalism's signature program, by rolling back payroll taxes to help the working poor during the Great Recession, look to Ronald Reagan, who did basically the same thing for poor people through the EITC way back in the 1980s. In making Social Security contributions rebateable to the working poor, Reagan was nothing if not a liberal trendsetter.

Another innovation and accommodation with liberalism by Ronald Reagan was EMTALA, part of the tax reform of 1986, which made it the law that emergency rooms had to provide services regardless of ability to pay. That unfunded mandate costs approximately only $50 billion a year today. I say "only" because lying about the severity of that problem became the heart of the healthcare debate which gave us ObamaCare. The Heritage Foundation may have authored the idea of the individual healthcare mandate in 1989, but once again it was Ronald Reagan who paved the way and provided the cover for accommodating what eventually became ObamaCare's liberal tyranny.

Romney's remarks also question George Bush's two-state solution to peace in Israel, which is nothing but another unrealistic aspiration of liberalism which thinks you can put a chicken and a hungry snake in the same pen and enjoy a quiet Sunday afternoon. To this Romney wisely prefers the unsteady truce of the status quo. In doing so his realism is shining through.

Mitt Romney's looking better all the time, and conservatives should reconsider whether voting for him is such a bad idea after all.