Israel to Give Part of Mt. Zion?

Israel to Give Part of Mt. Zion?
by Hillel Fendel
Arutz-7 Israel International News

Ten-year-long negotiations between Israel and the Vatican appear to be drawing to a close, with concerns rising that Israel will cede control of the building housing King David’s Tomb in Jerusalem. The Bilateral Permanent Working Commission – a team of negotiators representing Israel and the Vatican – released an upbeat press release at the end of last week, speaking of "meaningful progress," "great cordiality," and a mutual commitment to reaching a final agreement "as soon as possible.”Tellingly, a plenary meeting has been announced for this Thursday, April 30, at the Foreign Ministry. The meeting will be chaired by the two states’ deputy foreign ministers, Danny Ayalon and Monsignor Pietro Parolin. It is widely believed that the agreement will be signed then.

Church Demands Parts of Mt. Zion
The two states have been negotiating a treaty since March 1999 on matters having to do with Church-owned or Church-claimed property in Israel. Among the most significant issue under negotiations is the Vatican’s demand for the Last Supper room, located on the second floor of the ancient Mt. Zion building that also houses the tombs of Kings David, Solomon, and Hezekiah. In addition, the Vatican is claiming areas around Lake Kinneret, as well as in Caesaria and Jerusalem.Hints and implications in the Vatican and Catholic press have long indicated that the negotiations are expected to end successfully, from the Catholic vantage point, in time for Pope Benedict’s visit to Israel two weeks from now.“This is a shame and a disgrace of unequalled proportions,” said Daisy J. Stern, M.D., who has been leading an information campaign on the topic. “Giving away these important areas has no Halakhic [Jewish lega validity, of course, but signing it away will definitely make it very difficult to ever reclaim them.”

Mt. Zion - International Center for Catholics?
At present, since shortly after the Six-Day War in 1967, the Diaspora Yeshiva has run the Mt. Zion compound, on which it is located, and warns of the catastrophic implications for Israel and the Jewish People if the deal goes through. The director of the yeshiva explained that if the Catholic Church receives control of the area, just a few hundred yards from the Temple Mount and adjacent to the Old City walls, it will turn it into "the international center for Catholics all around the world, and if the pope just gives the word, Christians will be flocking over here en masse." "This is an enormous issue that is being pushed through without any public debate whatsoever," he said.

Vatican Signs Agreement with Arab League
Dr. Stern notes that though there had been reports that an agreement might be signed last week, “nothing happened – except that while they [the Vatican representative were talking with Israel, they signed an agreement with the Arab League. This is very worrisome. There are no details on the agreement with the Arab League, except that it aims to promote ‘peace, security and stability.’ Who knows what that really means? Are they dividing up the spoils of the future Vatican agreement with Israel – or perhaps they are preparing for the next Arab war with Israel? We don’t know.”“This new agreement with the Arab League renders the Vatican, most gravely, an interested party in the Israeli-Arab dispute,” said Prof. Hillel Weiss of Bar Ilan University, who has been closely following the issue. Of further concern is the fact that Israel is investing some 6 million shekels in improvements and renovations to various sites in preparation for the Papal visit. Work at the Last Supper room has been underway for some time.Blueprint of an AgreementA Foreign Ministry official confirmed in 2005 that a “blueprint of a possible agreement with the Vatican has been received.” The proposed contract, as Arutz-7 reported at the time, read as follows:"The State of Israel hands over to the Holy See the use of the Cenacle [the room of the event known as the Last Supper, above King David's tomb - ed, of the access path to it, and of the spaces adjacent to it... It is the Holy See's intention to inform the Bishops - and through them the world's Priests - that the Catholic Church has been given the use of the Cenacle, inviting them to visit the Holy Place together with their faithful... The Holy See hands over this use of the Cenacle to the Custody of the Holy Land [which acts on behalf of the Holy ... [whic will keep the Cenacle open from 6 AM to 8 AM for the celebration of the Holy Mass... Official liturgical celebrations of non-Catholic Churches can take place only upon prior written permission by the Custody of the Holy Land."The proposed agreement also stipulated that the Holy See will preserve the historic character of the site and keep it open to pilgrims and tourists, and that Israel will provide for the safety of the site. The Foreign Ministry official said at the time that “Israel is not prepared to relinquish its jurisdiction over this area.” The world will find out later this week whether this position is still valid.Rabbi Mordechai Goldstein, who founded and still runs the Diaspora Yeshiva, officially known as Yeshiva Toras Yisrael, told Arutz-7 in the past that "according to their bible, the Land is to return to the Christians, and 144,000 Jews are to return to Mt. Zion. Their plan is for them to take control of the site, and then to announce that they are holding a mass reenactment of the Last Supper, with [all types of religious ritual, and to invite millions of Christians to come to Jerusalem and celebrate." Rabbi Goldstein said that this means much tourism money for Israel, and that someone in the Israeli government is apparently very interested in making this happen.

The King David's Tomb complex, some 100,000 square feet, is "certainly one of the holiest spots in the Land of Israel," a yeshiva source said. "David, Solomon and others kings of Judea are said to be buried here. We've already given away the Temple Mount and the Machpelah Cave, except for here and there when we're allowed in; now they want to give Mt. Zion away as well? For thousands of years, this area was almost always totally closed off to Jews. G-d gave it back to us in 1948, but parts of it were still in range and sight of Jordanian snipers and were not in full use. After 1967, Rabbi Goldstein founded the Diaspora Yeshiva here - and it became an island of holiness, the first yeshiva for baalei teshuvah [newly religiou in Israel; we were there day and night learning Torah. Rabbi Goldstein was almost prophetic in establishing this yeshiva at that time at that spot; destiny from above intertwined him with Mt. Zion."

Dr. Stern and others are attempting to organize a public protest, beginning with an email and fax campaign to Deputy Foreign Minister Ayalon, who will represent Israel at the Thursday meeting. The Director-General of the Foreign Ministry can be emailed at mankal@mfa.gov.il, and the fax number is 02-5303704 (from abroad, replace leading 0 with 972). Comment on this story

Author Pulls “Smart Guns” Bill from Committee Schedule

Senate Bill 697 was scheduled to be heard on Tuesday, April 28 in the Senate Public Safety Committee. Yesterday, SB697 was pulled from the committee schedule at the request of the sponsor, State Senator Mark DeSaulnier (D-7). SB697 would prohibit the sale of handguns other than "owner-authorized (or ‘smart’) handguns" -- that is, handguns with a permanent, programmable biometric feature that renders the firearm useless unless activated by the authorized user. No proven, viable handgun of this type has ever been developed. The bill would require the California Attorney General to report to the Governor and Legislature on the availability of owner-authorized handguns; once the Attorney General finds that these guns are available, only “owner-authorized” handguns could be approved for sale in California .While this development is a solid step towards defeating SB697, the bill still poses a threat.

Democrats Under Ethics Cloud Benefit From Distracted Public

Allegations of ethics violations by a handful of Democrats in recent months reached something of a crescendo this week as two prominent members of Congress were accused of corruption.
California Rep. Jane Harman denied allegations that she offered to help seek reduced charges for two pro-Israel lobbyists suspected of espionage in exchange for help from a pro-Israel donor, also suspected Israeli agent, in lobbying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to give Harman a key chairmanship.

Rep. Jane Harman awaits President
Obama's address to a joint session
of Congress. Feb. 24, 2009 (AP)

And California Sen. Dianne Feinstein denied that she devised legislation that helped her husband get a federal contract to sell foreclosed properties at compensation rates higher than the industry norms.

But the latest cases, which involve Democrats, did not make the same splash that corruption allegations did a few years ago, when Republicans were on the receiving end of the finger-pointing.

Some Republican analysts attribute the difference to timing.

Democrats have benefited from an "Obama media cycle," said Republican strategist Ron Bonjean, who served as an aide to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.

Reporters are struggling to keep up with the Obama administration and all the crises it's grappling with, Bonjean told FOXNews.com.

In addition, he said, the media and the public have become more desensitized to allegations of corruption against lawmakers after the ones against Republicans.

GOP consultant Joe Gaylord, who served as an aide to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, told FOXNews.com he believes GOP values and principles played a role in garnering more attention to ethics accusations against Republican lawmakers.

"Republicans who have generally used the ethics process become much more susceptible to the hypocrisy charges because they set a high standard for how people should behave," he said. "Then when a Republican doesn't behave properly, it becomes a bigger story."

A succession of reports and scandals against congressional Republicans ranging from pay-to-play schemes to salacious affairs began more than four years ago when then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was questioned about his overseas travel and ties to lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who was under federal investigation. Ohio Rep. Bob Ney also got entangled in the Abramoff scandal, and ended up in jail.

Another Republican, Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, resigned his California seat in 2005 after pleading guilty to accepting $2.4 million in bribes and underreporting his income for 2004.
In 2006, Florida Rep. Mark Foley resigned when it was learned that he had exchanged raunchy e-mails with a teenage boy who was a former congressional page. In 2007, Idaho Sen. Larry Craig was arrested and pleaded guilty to an undercover sex sting in a men's bathroom at a Minneapolis airport. All five lawmakers are gone from office now.

The cumulative effect of these incidents created a perception that Republicans were ethically challenged. Even before Craig's "wide stance," Democrats were able to seize on the allegations and regain control of Capitol Hill in 2006, in part by repeating the mantra that they would wipe away the "culture of corruption" in Congress.

But in recent months, Democrats have fallen victim to similar allegations of corruption. While denying wrongdoing on Tuesday, Harman called for a federal investigation into why her conversations were being recorded and why they were leaked to the media.
The Office of Congressional Ethics, created by a House resolution on March , 11, 2008, also won't take up the Harman investigation, according to Roll Call, because the OCE rules prevent it from looking at any cases that arose before its creation.

Feinstein defended herself Wednesday by pointing out that her legislation to route $25 billion in taxpayer money to a government agency that reportedly awarded her husband's real estate firm a lucrative contract never was enacted into law.

Another Democrat, Pennsylvania Rep. Jack Murtha, is facing a federal probe for purportedly steering defense appropriations to clients of KSA Consulting, which employed his brother Robert, and the PMA Group, founded by Paul Magliocchetti, a former senior staffer on the Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Defense.

New York Rep. Charlie Rangel is being investigated by the House Ethics Committee in at least four areas, including his reported failure to properly report income taxes on a Caribbean villa in the Dominican Republic; use of four, rent-controlled apartments in Harlem; questions about an offshore firm asking Rangel for special tax exemptions; and whether Rangel improperly used House stationery to solicit donations for a school of public affairs named after him at City College of New York.

Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said the main difference between the current Democratic scandals and the ones that routed the Republicans is that now "it's not one big scandal easily understood."

She explained that many of ethics accusations against Republicans a few year ago were linked to Abramoff. "It was one issue," she said. "Now we're looking at lots of different little issues."
But she warned that the allgegations against Democrats could add up to a death by a thousand cuts.

"The Democrats have something to worry about here," she said. "There will be a critical mass when it will look like Democrats have a huge ethical problem. And the Democrats who have not been taking the problems very seriously ignore them at their peril."

Bonjean when it comes to rallying voter outrage "timing is everything." Right now, the focus of anti-tax tea partiers and others critical of Washington is on government spending, bank bailouts, legal rights for terror suspects and Bush administration-era interrogation techniques.

"There's only so much oxygen in the room for what it is that's going to get covered and what becomes important," added Gaylord. "And in this age, when there is a crisis a minute ... it moves the individual activities of congressmen and congresswomen, no matter how corrupt it might be, down on the scale of importance.

"The Obama administration, with everything it is changing, is providing cover for Democratic corruption," he said.

An Alarming video every Westerner should see

The plan was described by Abdallah Al-Nafisi in a speech that aired on Al-Jazeera television Feb. 2, according to MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, an independent nonprofit that provides translations and analysis of media reports.

Anyone (like Barack Obama) entertaining ideas of western democracies establishing friendly relations with the radicals of the Islamic world should watch this video.While watching the inflammatory rhetoric of the speaker, remember that this is not a Jihadists from Iran but a professor from Kuwait - a country with every reason to be grateful to the USA for liberating it from the tyranny of Saddam Husseins invasion.

CNN Coverage of the Tax Day Tea Party in Chicago

Tea Party Anti-Tax Protest, Sacramento, CA Capitol

Tea Party Anti-Tax Protest, Sacramento, CA Capitol

Neil Cavuto from Fox News

Drought aid offered to California

The money is part of the $1 billion announced by the Bureau of Reclamation for water projects intended to create jobs across the West.
Associated Press
12:11 PM PDT, April 15, 2009

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar pledged $260 million in federal stimulus money today to help California address its water shortages and aging infrastructure.The money is part of the $1 billion announced by the Bureau of Reclamation for water projects intended to create jobs across the West.

"In the midst of one of the deepest economic crises in our history, Californians have been saddled with a drought that is putting tens of thousands of people out of work and devastating entire communities," Salazar said in a statement. "President Obama's economic recovery plan will not only create jobs on basic water infrastructure projects, but it will help address both the short- and long-term water supply challenges the Golden State is facing."California's share will fund a host of projects, including new groundwater wells, rock barriers intended to improve water quality in the delta, fish screens at Red Bluff Diversion dam and at the Contra Costa canal.An additional $135 million will be available for grants for water reuse and recycling projects.
Salazar was expected to discuss the funding at a news conference at Mather Air Force Base in the Sacramento suburb of Rancho Cordova after completing an aerial tour of the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta.Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger accompanied the secretary on the helicopter tour today, nearly two months after he declared a California state emergency because of the drought. That order directed state agencies to provide assistance to drought-affected communities and businesses, and called for a statewide conservation campaign.The delta sits at the confluence of two of California's largest rivers. It's the hub of the state's water supply, channeling fresh water from Northern California to massive pumps that send the water to 25 million people and millions of acres of farmland.Three years of dry years combined with federal restrictions on pumping designed to protect a threatened fish from getting sucked into the pumps has led to water cutbacks across the state.The state has said it will deliver only 20 percent of the water typically allocated for cities and farms this year. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has said it will not deliver any water this spring to farms south of the delta.Such low delivery estimates prompted farmers to leave large swaths of land unplanted this season, and residents in cities stretching from the Northern California city of Redding to San Diego have been told to scale back their water use.Southern California's regional water wholesaler voted Tuesday to tighten deliveries and raise fees for its 26 member agencies, which supply all or some of the water used by 19 million Southern Californians.An estimated 2,500 people, many of them farmworkers, are in the midst of a four-day march across California's agricultural heartland to protest the lack of available water.From Sacramento, Salazar was scheduled to travel to San Francisco to announce earthquake monitoring funding from the U.S. Geological Survey. The following day he'll lead a public hearing in San Francisco about offshore drilling and alternative energy development.

Afghans Throw Stones at Women Protesting Rape in Marriage Law

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

KABUL — A group of some 1,000 Afghans swarmed a demonstration of 300 women protesting against a new conservative marriage law on Wednesday. The women were pelted with small stones as police struggled to keep the two groups apart.

The law, passed last month, says a husband can demand sex with his wife every four days unless she is ill or would be harmed by intercourse — a clause that critics say legalizes marital rape. It also regulates when and for what reasons a wife may leave her home alone.
Women's rights activists scheduled a protest Wednesday attended by mostly young women. But the group was swamped by counter-protesters — both men and women — who shouted down the women's chants.

Some picked up gravel and stones and threw them at the women, while others shouted "Death to the slaves of the Christians!" Female police held hands around the group to create a protective barrier.

The government of President Hamid Karzai has said the Shiite family law is being reviewed by the Justice Department and will not be implemented in its current form. Governments and rights groups around the world have condemned the legislation, and President Barack Obama has labeled it "abhorrent."

Though the law would apply only to the country's Shiites — 10 to 20 percent of Afghanistan's 30 million people — it has sparked an uproar by activists who say it marks a return to Taliban-style oppression. The Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996-2001, required women to wear all-covering burqas and banned them from leaving home without a male relative.
Shiite backers of the law say that foreigners are meddling in private Afghan affairs, and Wednesday's demonstrations brought some of the emotions surrounding the debate over the law to the surface.

"You are a dog! You are not a Shiite woman!" one man shouted to a young woman in a headscarf holding aloft a banner that said "We don't want Taliban law." The woman did not shout back at the man, but told him: "This is my land and my people."

Women protesting the law said many of their supporters had been blocked by men who refused to let them join the protest. Those who did make it shouted repeatedly that they were defending human rights by defending women's rights and that the law does not reflect the views of the Fourteen-year-old Masuma Hasani said her whole family had come out to protest the law — both her parents and her younger sister who she held by the arm.

"I am concerned about my future with this law," she said. "We want our rights. We don't want women to just be used."

As the back-and-forth continued, another demonstration of Shiite women who said they support the law began.

"We don't want foreigners interfering in our lives. They are the enemy of Afghanistan," said 24-year-old Mariam Sajadi.

Sajadi is engaged, and said she plans to ask her husband's permission to leave the house as put forth in the law. She said other controversial articles — such as one giving the husband the right to demand sex from his wife every fourth day — have been misinterpreted by Westerners who are anti-Islam.

Commentary: Why your taxes could double

Editor's Note: David M. Walker served as comptroller general of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office from 1998 to 2008. He is now president and CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

(CNN) -- Even under the best of economic circumstances, tax season is a tense time for American households. The number of hours we collectively spend working on our returns is probably a lot more than government agencies claim.

The burden in financial terms is even greater: A recent independent survey found that the average American's total federal, state and local tax bill roughly equals his or her entire earnings from January 1 up until right before tax day.

Now imagine that tax bill doubling over time.

In recent years, the federal government has spent more money than it takes in at an increasing rate. Total federal debt almost doubled during President George W. Bush's administration and, as much as we needed some stimulus spending to boost the economy, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office now estimates total debt levels could almost double again over the next eight years based on the budget recently outlined by President Obama.

Regardless of what politicians tell you, any additional accumulations of debt are, absent dramatic reductions in the size and role of government, basically deferred tax increases. Remember the old saw? "You can pay me now or you can pay me later, with interest."

To help put things in perspective, the Peterson Foundation calculated the federal government accumulated $56.4 trillion in total liabilities and unfunded promises for Medicare and Social Security as of September 30, 2008. The numbers used to calculate this figure come directly from the audited financial statements of the U.S. government.

If $56.4 trillion in financial commitments is too big a number to digest, think of it as $483,000 per American household, or $184,000 for every man, woman and child in the country.
Even broken down, the numbers can be tough to swallow. Yes, you've paid your taxes, but you still bear a significant share of the government's own financial burden.

To help this news go down with a smile, the Peterson Foundation is supporting a campaign designed to help Americans understand what Washington is doing to us, rather than for us.
Meet Owen & Payne (www.owenandpayne.com), partners in a fictional accounting firm that specializes in helping Americans fill out the "new" Form 483000, which spells out how our elected officials are putting our nation into more and more debt and how that bill eventually will have to be paid: By doubling your taxes. The campaign is all in fun, but the intent is very serious.
Unless we begin to get our fiscal house in order, there's simply no other way to handle our ever-mounting debt burdens except by doubling taxes over time. Otherwise, our growing commitments for Medicare and Social Security benefits will gradually squeeze out spending on other vital programs such as education, research and development, and infrastructure.
Personal savings, while experiencing an uptick lately because of the recession, have been too low for too long. As a result, when our government has to borrow money, it must increasingly turn to lenders overseas.

Effectively addressing these issues will require tough choices and comprehensive reforms, including budget controls, changes to our entitlement programs, reductions in health care costs, other spending cuts, and yes, tax increases. But as the old saw goes, paying now, or paying soon, won't be as painful as paying later.

So as you file your tax returns this year, bear in mind that no matter how much you're paying now, you'll pay much more in the future because of Washington's failure to get its finances in order. If you don't like the idea, then get informed and get involved. And by listening rather than punishing, help encourage our elected officials to speak the truth about our financial condition, even if it means reforming entitlements, cutting spending, and yes, raising taxes.

The Lady Is Preoccupied

By Thomas Cheplick on 3.27.09 @ 6:07AM

Thomas Cheplick is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist.

Ah, the gripes and groans emitting from Washington conservatives over Sarah Palin's decision not to attend any events, can be heard all the way up here in New England "Where is she?" I can hear my fellow D.C. comrades cry. "Doesn't she care about us?" is another loud moan. "Why, why, why has she forsaken this, that, and every event we've asked her to show up at?" others righteously inquire. And then there is this new, almost vengeful, attack on her refusal to 'show up': "I can't believe one of her closest advisors is Greta van Susteren's husband -- a known 'anti-gun', 'anti-nearly everything conservative' trial lawyer."

My friends, we need to calm down. Six days before the Conservative Political Action Convention (CPAC) began, for instance, our Lady of the North was on a small aircraft en-route with the Reverend Franklin Graham to the edge of western Alaska -- the literal edge, perhaps, of the Western World. Up the Yukon River, she landed on a frozen tundra in the ice-cold, far-flung Russian Mission region of her rugged state (where, with binoculars, you can see Russia from your house). Now why -- you may ask -- was she there palling around with the good Reverend, instead of preparing to attend the Woodstock of Conservatism, CPAC? Because there is a huge food and fuel crisis in Western, aka "Bush" Alaska, and with the Reverend, she was energetically delivering food stuffs to cash-strapped Russian Mission residents unable to purchase food.
As Rev. Graham said at the time: "Battling winter storms, we quickly began airlifting tons of food to more than a dozen remote villages along the Yukon, Kuskokwim and Nushagak rivers. The Governor pulled out all the stops and worked swiftly to assist." And also: "What a blessing it was to work with government officials who serve their people with true Christian compassion."
To be pointed: Governor Palin is incredibly preoccupied right now and we probably will not see her till mid-year.

Alaska, presently, is in the midst of an intense, rapid 90-day legislative session that began in January and is set to expire in mid-April. A little after that will we probably see more of Governor Palin, I reliably hear. Indeed, she will have lots more free time to take more than once the 14-plus hour plane ride from Juneau-to-Washington.

But at the moment she is simply plain loaded with work.

Not only has she had to put forward a massive and extremely complex plan to the state legislature this session detailing the construction of a $4 billion gasoline bullet line to alleviate fuel shortages in Anchorage (the main population center), but she has to put together proposals on constructing a huge hydroelectric dam in Alaska, and also on merging Alaska's main power utilities into a single corporation. This is work, my friends, serious work.

And it is compounded by the fact that Alaska is now slowly receiving the stimulus monies, and there is intense discussion in the State House over how to use them.

"The stimulus money is a major issue," explains Gregg Erickson, editor-at-large of the well-respected Alaska Budget Report. "There is great jostling in the legislature over the transportation money in the stimulus package. Alaska has a huge capital budget unlike any other state so there are great arguments over capital or 'shovel-ready' projects to fund."

For the record, we must keep in mind, too, that Governor Palin was not against accepting stimulus monies.

"She never suggested she would reject all of the stimulus money," notes Bill McAllister, her press secretary. "That was a straw man erected by a few Democrats. She specifically said she favored infrastructure projects that would stimulate the economy and create or retain private sector jobs. She said she would be concerned if taking certain funds committed the state to programs that ultimately it could not sustain under its own fiscal regime."

And all this work is nicely topped off some more by the fact that Alaska now has a crippling $1 billion state budget deficit brought on by the drop in oil prices. Her state's budget fluctuates significantly year-to-year because the state has no personal income tax, no sales tax, and derives most of its revenue from royalties on oil production. Alaska did setup a "rainy day fund" that contains over $6 billion, but the main question over how much to take out of this "rainy day fund" to shore up the state budget for this year has stirred intense and passionate debate.
"We will have to tap our reserves to fill the shortfall this year, and one just as large that’s projected for the next fiscal year," said McAllister. She's got to find a double-solution there too that can pass through the notoriously cankerous state legislature, and also that does not cause too many ruffed feathers in Alaska's fractured state Republican Party.

The Lady of the North probably will not be seen bouncing around America for a few more months, at which she can then get to work addressing the van Susteren question, answer if she bears any ill will against Michael Steele for firing from the Republican National Committee her PAC treasurer, and also why she recently appointed Judge Morgan Christen, a former member of Planned Parenthood, to Alaska's Supreme Court.

This woman's work, it seems, is never done.

http://spectator.org/archives/2009/03/27/the-lady-is-preoccupied

Watchdogs in Name Only

March 30, 2009 - 22:32 ET

By Bernard Goldberg
After Barack Obama won the election he realized that the economy was worse than he thought…so he had to lay off seventeen journalists. (Rim shot…thanks, I’ll be here all week. Try the veal.)
The reason that even liberals get that joke is because, like most humor that works, it has an air of believability about it.

How much of an air? Well, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press asked registered voters a simple question: “Who do most reporters want to see win?”

Seventy percent answered “Barack Obama.” Seventy percent! (90% of Republicans said the media was in the tank for Obama and so did a remarkable 62% of Democrats and Independents!) Just 9% said they thought the media favored McCain (and we can only hope they don’t let those people have sharp objects). The rest said “neither” or “don’t know.”
But here’s the real bad news: The mainstream media doesn’t care about those poll numbers. They’re riding high at the moment. They refuse to see the damage they are doing to themselves and to the nation.

Why the Corruption of the Media Matters
Back in 1972 I was a young producer for CBS News covering George McGovern’s presidential campaign. Pat Caddell, now a popular political analyst, was a young man just out of Harvard who was doing polling for the candidate. McGovern lost the election, of course, (he carried just one state, Massachusetts) and Nixon won a second term.

I ran into Caddell at a political conference in Florida nine days after the 2008 election and asked for his thoughts about the mainstream media. They were more biased than ever, he said, before launching into a bit of history to put the current mess into perspective.

“There is one institution in America which has no checks and balances,” he told me. “And that is the press. And there was a reason for that. It wasn’t that the Founding Fathers loved the press. It was because the press was supposed to protect the country. That’s why Jefferson said, ‘I would much rather have newspapers without a government than a government without newspapers.’ But when [the media] leaves the ramparts and becomes a partisan outrider for one party or the other or one candidate or the other— essentially [deciding] who should be president and who should not be president, what truth people should know and what truth they should not know, then what they become, what they constitute, is a threat to democracy.”
“Why,” he asked me, “should the American people support the First Amendment if the press isn’t going to do its job for them.”

And that’s when this whole “media bias” thing starts to get really scary.

Caddell worries that someday a demagogue is going to come along, somebody who makes Huey Long look like a shut-in. Somebody, Caddell told me, “who gets up at the start of his campaign and says, ‘I want you to see the press. They are the enemy of the American people. They will do everything they can to stop me because they want to stop you.’ And the American people will believe it. What if this is the most dangerous man that ever came along? Nobody will care what the press says.”

And that, my friends, is why the corruption of the media matters. The press has constitutional protections for one main reason: to keep watch over a powerful government. The fundamental job of journalists is to look out for us - the American people! If nobody cares what the press says, journalists will be watchdogs in name only. They may bark from time to time, but nobody will listen. And their weakness will make it easy for a corrupt government to get away with murder. That is the danger we all face when the mainstream media goes on their “noble mission” to make history.

The Tipping Point
The grim reaper is knocking on the mainstream media’s door. Many newspapers are on the brink of financial collapse and network newscasts don’t have nearly the ratings of years gone by. But still, they remain gloriously oblivious. They have reached a tipping point but refuse to believe it. The corrosion that is eating away at their credibility has been happening slowly. It’s like acid rain; one day you look around and all the trees are dead. Nobody pays attention until it’s too late.

And when they become so irrelevant that no one listens to them anymore, they undoubtedly will lash out at their critics for poisoning the well. They will remain arrogant and clueless and blame the media bashers for damaging their standing with the public. But their demise won’t come from the outside. It will be an inside job, the result of one too many self-inflicted wounds.
When that day comes it will be very bad indeed for the mainstream media. But it will be an even worse day for America. Let’s just pray that their demise doesn’t also lead to ours.
********************
Bernard Goldberg is a New York Times best-selling author. His titles include Bias, Arrogance, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America: (And Al Franken is #37), and Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right. His latest best-seller A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media is on sale now. To learn more, go to www.bernardgoldberg.com/

The Myth of 90 Percent: Only a Small Fraction of Guns in Mexico Come From U.S.

While 90 percent of the guns traced to the U.S. actually originated in the United States, the percent traced to the U.S. is only about 17 percent of the total number of guns reaching Mexico.

EXCLUSIVE: You've heard this shocking "fact" before -- on TV and radio, in newspapers, on the Internet and from the highest politicians in the land: 90 percent of the weapons used to commit crimes in Mexico come from the United States.

-- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it to reporters on a flight to Mexico City.
-- CBS newsman Bob Schieffer referred to it while interviewing President Obama.
-- California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said at a Senate hearing: "It is unacceptable to have 90 percent of the guns that are picked up in Mexico and used to shoot judges, police officers and mayors ... come from the United States."

-- William Hoover, assistant director for field operations at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, testified in the House of Representatives that "there is more than enough evidence to indicate that over 90 percent of the firearms that have either been recovered in, or interdicted in transport to Mexico, originated from various sources within the United States."

There's just one problem with the 90 percent "statistic" and it's a big one:
It's just not true. In fact, it's not even close. By all accounts, it's probably around 17 percent.
What's true, an ATF spokeswoman told FOXNews.com, in a clarification of the statistic used by her own agency's assistant director, "is that over 90 percent of the traced firearms originate from the U.S."

But a large percentage of the guns recovered in Mexico do not get sent back to the U.S. for tracing, because it is obvious from their markings that they do not come from the U.S.
"Not every weapon seized in Mexico has a serial number on it that would make it traceable, and the U.S. effort to trace weapons really only extends to weapons that have been in the U.S. market," Matt Allen, special agent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told FOX News.

A Look at the Numbers
In 2007-2008, according to ATF Special Agent William Newell, Mexico submitted 11,000 guns to the ATF for tracing. Close to 6,000 were successfully traced -- and of those, 90 percent -- 5,114 to be exact, according to testimony in Congress by William Hoover -- were found to have come from the U.S.

But in those same two years, according to the Mexican government, 29,000 guns were recovered at crime scenes. In other words, 68 percent of the guns that were recovered were never submitted for tracing. And when you weed out the roughly 6,000 guns that could not be traced from the remaining 32 percent, it means 83 percent of the guns found at crime scenes in Mexico could not be traced to the U.S.

So, if not from the U.S., where do they come from? There are a variety of sources:
-- The Black Market. Mexico is a virtual arms bazaar, with fragmentation grenades from South Korea, AK-47s from China, and shoulder-fired rocket launchers from Spain, Israel and former Soviet bloc manufacturers.

-- Russian crime organizations. Interpol says Russian Mafia groups such as Poldolskaya and Moscow-based Solntsevskaya are actively trafficking drugs and arms in Mexico.

- South America. During the late 1990s, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) established a clandestine arms smuggling and drug trafficking partnership with the Tijuana cartel, according to the Federal Research Division report from the Library of Congress.

-- Asia. According to a 2006 Amnesty International Report, China has provided arms to countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Chinese assault weapons and Korean explosives have been recovered in Mexico.

-- The Mexican Army. More than 150,000 soldiers deserted in the last six years, according to Mexican Congressman Robert Badillo. Many took their weapons with them, including the standard issue M-16 assault rifle made in Belgium.

-- Guatemala. U.S. intelligence agencies say traffickers move immigrants, stolen cars, guns and drugs, including most of America's cocaine, along the porous Mexican-Guatemalan border. On March 27, La Hora, a Guatemalan newspaper, reported that police seized 500 grenades and a load of AK-47s on the border. Police say the cache was transported by a Mexican drug cartel operating out of Ixcan, a border town.

'These Don't Come From El Paso'
Ed Head, a firearms instructor in Arizona who spent 24 years with the U.S. Border Patrol, recently displayed an array of weapons considered "assault rifles" that are similar to those recovered in Mexico, but are unavailable for sale in the U.S.

"These kinds of guns -- the auto versions of these guns -- they are not coming from El Paso," he said. "They are coming from other sources. They are brought in from Guatemala. They are brought in from places like China. They are being diverted from the military. But you don't get these guns from the U.S."

Some guns, he said, "are legitimately shipped to the government of Mexico, by Colt, for example, in the United States. They are approved by the U.S. government for use by the Mexican military service. The guns end up in Mexico that way -- the fully auto versions -- they are not smuggled in across the river."

Many of the fully automatic weapons that have been seized in Mexico cannot be found in the U.S., but they are not uncommon in the Third World.

The Mexican government said it has seized 2,239 grenades in the last two years -- but those grenades and the rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) are unavailable in U.S. gun shops. The ones used in an attack on the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey in October and a TV station in January were made in South Korea. Almost 70 similar grenades were seized in February in the bottom of a truck entering Mexico from Guatemala.

"Most of these weapons are being smuggled from Central American countries or by sea, eluding U.S. and Mexican monitors who are focused on the smuggling of semi-automatic and conventional weapons purchased from dealers in the U.S. border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California," according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.

Boatloads of Weapons
So why would the Mexican drug cartels, which last year grossed between $17 billion and $38 billion, bother buying single-shot rifles, and force thousands of unknown "straw" buyers in the U.S. through a government background check, when they can buy boatloads of fully automatic M-16s and assault rifles from China, Israel or South Africa?

Alberto Islas, a security consultant who advises the Mexican government, says the drug cartels are using the Guatemalan border to move black market weapons. Some are left over from the Central American wars the United States helped fight; others, like the grenades and launchers, are South Korean, Israeli and Spanish. Some were legally supplied to the Mexican government; others were sold by corrupt military officers or officials.

The exaggeration of United States "responsibility" for the lawlessness in Mexico extends even beyond the "90-percent" falsehood -- and some Second Amendment activists believe it's designed to promote more restrictive gun-control laws in the U.S.

In a remarkable claim, Auturo Sarukhan, the Mexican ambassador to the U.S., said Mexico seizes 2,000 guns a day from the United States -- 730,000 a year. That's a far cry from the official statistic from the Mexican attorney general's office, which says Mexico seized 29,000 weapons in all of 2007 and 2008.

Chris Cox, spokesman for the National Rifle Association, blames the media and anti-gun politicians in the U.S. for misrepresenting where Mexican weapons come from.
"Reporter after politician after news anchor just disregards the truth on this," Cox said. "The numbers are intentionally used to weaken the Second Amendment."

"The predominant source of guns in Mexico is Central and South America. You also have Russian, Chinese and Israeli guns. It's estimated that over 100,000 soldiers deserted the army to work for the drug cartels, and that ignores all the police. How many of them took their weapons with them?"

But Tom Diaz, senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center, called the "90 percent" issue a red herring and said that it should not detract from the effort to stop gun trafficking into Mexico.
"Let's do what we can with what we know," he said. "We know that one hell of a lot of firearms come from the United States because our gun market is wide open."