Israel Perspectives: Feeling ‘Right’ at Home: Shattering the Post-Election Myths
Array wrong on issues involving health care, family planning, housing, justice, government checks on corporate power, labor rights, human rights, civil justice, and, of course, on all issues of war and peace. His campaign website, like most good little DCCC shills’ websites, avoids discussing issues. If every Democrat took the kind of stand Gretchen takes on her website, the Democrats would sweep Congress: I am committed to bringing about a resolution in Iraq and to bringing our soldiers home. I will support legislation such as HR 55, the Homeward Bound bill - which sets a time line for return and mechanisms that would help fund Iraq’s recovery.And on issue after issue, that’s what you get. If she wins the primary, next November IN-09 voters will have a clear choice between a right-wing rubber-stamp Republican and a proud progressive true blue Democrat. Like Gretchen, he faces all the toughest issues head on– and comes up on the correct side each time. But I also understand that just because I do not believe in same sex marriage, does not mean that people should be denied civil rights.Like Gretchen, he’s amazing on all the issues, from We support our troops by bringing them home as quickly as possible to Congress had no trouble voting for their own cost of living wage, but then forget about those that are struggling just to survive. There appear to be 4 Democrats vying for the opportunity to challenge him: Kevin Boyd, a progressive pastor who looks GREAT on the issues, Tom Hayhurst, whose slick website smells DCCC all the way (no positions on issues), and 2 guys with no websites Thomas Schrader and Edward Smith. The 3 Democrats fighting it out in the primary are Rick Cornstuble, a retired school teacher and a moderate, Dave Sanders, a biodefense researcher and national security policy expert, also a moderate, and Darin Kinser, who has no website.The 5th CD is the home of one of the worst jackasses in Congress, Republican loon and wild extremist Dan Burton. The Democrats who want to take him on are Katherine Carr, a middle class retiree with a solid analysis of what Bush and the rubber-stamp Congress have done to screw things up in our country, Mike Clements, a handsome young fella with no issues on his DCCC-smelling website, and a couple of guys with no websites, Tom Williams and Mike Brown. Anyone who’s keeping score– we like Barry Welsh too.Labels: Baron Hill, Barry Welsh, DCCC, Gretchen Clearwater, Indiana, Pence
The three percentage point decline since Fox’s previous poll of 3/14-15/06 is just shy of statistical significance, but combined with the evidence from Time and the somewhat older poll from Greenberg, it seems the decline in approval did continue through the end of March.That said, the new data are continuing to bend my local regression model up from the linear decline (the green line in the figure). This suggests that while approval has continued down, it has been doing so at a slower rate than we saw in February and the first half of March.The decline in Fox’s approval poll was concentrated among independents, who fell from 36% approval in the 3/14-15/06 poll to 30% approval in the 4/4-5/06 poll.
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AG Sharpston has delivered her Opinion in the two cases brought by the Commission against Portugal, alleging failure to correctly implement Articles 2, 4 and 5 (read in conjunction with Article 1) of Council Directive 92/100 of 19 November 1992 on rental and lending rights and on certain rights relating to copyright in the field of intellectual property.She advised the ECJ to rule as follows:* In conferring rights on the producers of videograms, Portugal failed to grant exclusive rental rights to producers of the first fixation of a film. This infringed Art.2 of the Directive.* The Portuguese legislation was insufficiently precise concerning who was obliged to pay the rental remuneration. It was ambiguous whether it the film producer or videogram producer was liable.Sharpston killed the video star?* Portugal excluded public, school or university libraries, all museums, all public archives, all public foundations and all private non-profit making institutions from paying the rental remuneration. This exclusion was too wide. Although Art.5(3) of the Directive allowed Member States to exempt ‘certain’ bodies from the obligation to pay the right, as an exemption, it had to be construed strictly. ‘Certain’ in this context meant some but not all, and an exemption from a liability which exempts all who would otherwise be liable is not an exemption but an annulment of the underlying obligation.* Art.5 was validly implemented. Portugal’s argument that public lending did not have an effect on the internal market was rejected. * The fact that authors had already received remuneration from the sale of their work did not remove the justification for their further remuneration through the public lending right. The AG also rapped the Commission over the knuckles, saying: I would like to conclude with a comment on the style of the Commissionlink
After addressing the cases in which the plaintiffs were either not sick enough or too sick, the Article then highlights some of the other problems these plaintiffs have faced when attempting to assert ADA claims–problems which occurred either at the initial stage of the litigation or after the plaintiffs had achieved some success at the lower court. However, this Article demonstrates that people with these illnesses face an uphill battle when attempting to apply for relief under the ADA, and that the current interpretation and application of the ADA severely restrict the number of individuals who achieve success under the Act. Unless, and until, either Congress acts to limit the courts’ conservative interpretation of the ADA, or the courts change the pro-employer interpretation of the ADA, the once-closed doors to which President Bush referred when signing the ADA into law will remain closed and secured with a very strong lock.
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We donât yet know the shape of the new governing coalition, but itâs not too early to draw some conclusions about the people, parties, and ideas that won and lost.First, the resultsWith all votes counted, the new Knesset looks like this:Kadima29seatsLabor19seatsShas12seatsLikud12seatsYisrael Beitenu11seatsNational Union / National Religious Party 9seatsGil (Senior Citizens) 7seatsUnited Torah Judaism 6seatsMeretz 5seatsUnited Arab List 4seatsBalad 3seatsHadash 3seatsNineteen parties participated in the election and failed to reach the required 2 percent threshold for Knesset entry; about 200,000 votes (the equivalent of around seven Knesset seats!) were thrown away â either because people voted for a party that failed to reach the threshold, because they deliberately stuck a blank piece of paper in the voting envelope instead of a partyâs slip, or else because they accidentally included slips for two or more different parties in their envelope.Only 63.2 percent of the electorate voted; For now at least, the taboo against recruiting Arab parties into Israeli governing coalitions will remain unbroken.On the other hand, predictions of declining support for Kadima turned out to be somewhat correct: while the party was a clear winner, with ten more Knesset seats than its nearest rival, it âlostâ around five seats between most of the late pre-election polls and the final results, and around eight seats compared to polls taken a couple of weeks before the election. On the other hand, the Center-Left as a whole held its own: while the polls taken around 10 March showed Kadima-Labor-Meretz receiving around 60 Knesset seats, these three parties plus the Pensioners (who didnât even show up on the radar a couple of weeks ago) gained 60 seats in the election itself.Winners and losersTwelve parties will be represented in the new Knesset, and the largest party received less than 25 percent of the vote. If we classify the Pensioners as Left and Shas as Right, we have 60 MKâs on the Left (not counting the Arab parties) and 50 on the Right â a small victory for the Left-Center, and for âdisengagementâ.But if we classify explicitly pro-âdisengagementâ parties as Left, anti-âdisengagementâ parties as Right, and parties that are willing to go along with âdisengagementâ in return for government support for their social programs as âOtherâ, we have a Left of Kadima, Labor, and Meretz with 53 MKâs, a Right of Yisrael Beitenu, Likud, and NU/NRP with only 32 MKâs, and an âOtherâ of Shas, Pensioners, and UTJ with 25 MKâs. Gil, the pensionersâ party, won enough seats â and has sufficiently specific demands, even if their initial version of these demands is a bit inflated â to make it a desirable coalition partner for Kadima.When initial results showed Meretz winning only four Knesset seats, it appeared that Yossi Beilin, whose first campaign as Meretz leader had clearly flopped, would quickly be dismissed from his position as party chief. itâs frustrating enough sitting on the Opposition benches when your party loves you, but it must be truly awful when everyone in the party youâre supposed to be leading knows that you caused their fall from power to insignificance.Ultimately, the Likud â and perhaps even Kid Brother himself â will, I hope, realize a very basic truth about Bibi: Heâs not very good at politics. In the mean time, the Israeli electorate sent some fairly clear messages to the political establishment:While the voters might have been more excited by a reassuring, charismatic leader â Ariel Sharon, for example, had he remained healthy â none of the remaining party leaders had any noticeable positive effect on their partiesâ electoral success. (The only exception to this was Avigdor Lieberman, who appealed to Former-Soviet-Union immigrants who like strong leaders but donât like Stalinesque moustaches.) I would like to be able to say that the trend towards idea-based rather than personality-based voting represents a growing maturity in the Israeli electorateâs thinking, but I suspect that the true message is simply that our current party leaders are a rather unattractive bunch.The voters strongly repudiated Netanyahuâs brand of reduced-benefit capitalism in favor of stronger social benefits.The voters strongly rejected the âGreater Israelâ idea (in its applied form), but did not send a very clear message as to precisely how and when they want Israel to reduce its presence in the West Bank.
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Nearly 40% of those eligible to vote, representative of nearly every segment of the population, chose not to, having either lost faith in the legitimacy / effectiveness of the current political system, parties and elected officials, or they just don’t care anymore.* There were 3 non-Arab parties whose platform included some type of end the occupation concept that earned seats in the 17th Knesset (Kadima, Labor, Meretz), who, in total, earned 53 seats - well short of a 61 seat majority needed to form a coalition.Of the remaining seats that went to non right-wing parties, 7 seats went to the Pensioners party (a party that currently has no platform on anything except for taking care of the elderly), 18 seats went to the ultra-Orthodox Shas and UTJ parties who also do not have an official platform when it comes to the issue of borders (and neither of those parties would constitute Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria as an occupation), and lastly, 10 seats were split between the 3 Arab parties whose voters and leaders (more here - halfway into the post) fail to accept Israel as a Jewish State.So, in short, these election results do not show any indication that a majority of (Jewish) Israelis are clamoring for an End to the Occupation.Myth The surprisingly peaceful withdrawal from Gaza demonstrated that the majority of Israelis support territorial withdrawal and the dismantling of settlements in pursuit of disengagement from the Palestinians.FactHow can this be considered a proof? What of the tens of thousands who involved themselves in acts of non-violent civil disobedience?Consider the following: * Ariel Sharon (Likud) was elected by a landslide in the 2003 elections on a platform that directly contrasted Amram Mitzna’s (Labor) Disengagement plan.The true mandate that Ariel Sharon and the Likud received in the aftermath of the 2003 elections (where nearly 1 in every 3 voters voted Likud) was to eliminate the terror threat posed by the Palestinians against the Jewish State - and in that, his expulsion plan completely failed to represent the will of the people.* The only referendum held on the matter of the expulsion plan - which took place within Ariel Sharon’s Likud party - suffered a resounding defeat: 60% opposed, 40% in favor.* Ariel Sharon was only able to garner a majority within his cabinet for the expulsion by firing those ministers who opposed the expulsion plan and replacing them with those who were willing to betray their ideological convictions in return for cushy ministerial positions (and a BMW, of course).The same tactic was used by Sharon to build support within the Knesset for the expulsion plan.At no point did the majority of (Jewish) Israelis ever give their support to Ariel Sharon’s expulsion plan.Myth Ehud Olmert…
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Array wrong on issues involving health care, family planning, housing, justice, government checks on corporate power, labor rights, human rights, civil justice, and, of course, on all issues of war and peace. His campaign website, like most good little DCCC shills’ websites, avoids discussing issues. If every Democrat took the kind of stand Gretchen takes on her website, the Democrats would sweep Congress: I am committed to bringing about a resolution in Iraq and to bringing our soldiers home. I will support legislation such as HR 55, the Homeward Bound bill - which sets a time line for return and mechanisms that would help fund Iraq’s recovery.And on issue after issue, that’s what you get. If she wins the primary, next November IN-09 voters will have a clear choice between a right-wing rubber-stamp Republican and a proud progressive true blue Democrat. Like Gretchen, he faces all the toughest issues head on– and comes up on the correct side each time. But I also understand that just because I do not believe in same sex marriage, does not mean that people should be denied civil rights.Like Gretchen, he’s amazing on all the issues, from We support our troops by bringing them home as quickly as possible to Congress had no trouble voting for their own cost of living wage, but then forget about those that are struggling just to survive. There appear to be 4 Democrats vying for the opportunity to challenge him: Kevin Boyd, a progressive pastor who looks GREAT on the issues, Tom Hayhurst, whose slick website smells DCCC all the way (no positions on issues), and 2 guys with no websites Thomas Schrader and Edward Smith. The 3 Democrats fighting it out in the primary are Rick Cornstuble, a retired school teacher and a moderate, Dave Sanders, a biodefense researcher and national security policy expert, also a moderate, and Darin Kinser, who has no website.The 5th CD is the home of one of the worst jackasses in Congress, Republican loon and wild extremist Dan Burton. The Democrats who want to take him on are Katherine Carr, a middle class retiree with a solid analysis of what Bush and the rubber-stamp Congress have done to screw things up in our country, Mike Clements, a handsome young fella with no issues on his DCCC-smelling website, and a couple of guys with no websites, Tom Williams and Mike Brown. Anyone who’s keeping score– we like Barry Welsh too.Labels: Baron Hill, Barry Welsh, DCCC, Gretchen Clearwater, Indiana, Pence
The three percentage point decline since Fox’s previous poll of 3/14-15/06 is just shy of statistical significance, but combined with the evidence from Time and the somewhat older poll from Greenberg, it seems the decline in approval did continue through the end of March.That said, the new data are continuing to bend my local regression model up from the linear decline (the green line in the figure). This suggests that while approval has continued down, it has been doing so at a slower rate than we saw in February and the first half of March.The decline in Fox’s approval poll was concentrated among independents, who fell from 36% approval in the 3/14-15/06 poll to 30% approval in the 4/4-5/06 poll.
link
AG Sharpston has delivered her Opinion in the two cases brought by the Commission against Portugal, alleging failure to correctly implement Articles 2, 4 and 5 (read in conjunction with Article 1) of Council Directive 92/100 of 19 November 1992 on rental and lending rights and on certain rights relating to copyright in the field of intellectual property.She advised the ECJ to rule as follows:* In conferring rights on the producers of videograms, Portugal failed to grant exclusive rental rights to producers of the first fixation of a film. This infringed Art.2 of the Directive.* The Portuguese legislation was insufficiently precise concerning who was obliged to pay the rental remuneration. It was ambiguous whether it the film producer or videogram producer was liable.Sharpston killed the video star?* Portugal excluded public, school or university libraries, all museums, all public archives, all public foundations and all private non-profit making institutions from paying the rental remuneration. This exclusion was too wide. Although Art.5(3) of the Directive allowed Member States to exempt ‘certain’ bodies from the obligation to pay the right, as an exemption, it had to be construed strictly. ‘Certain’ in this context meant some but not all, and an exemption from a liability which exempts all who would otherwise be liable is not an exemption but an annulment of the underlying obligation.* Art.5 was validly implemented. Portugal’s argument that public lending did not have an effect on the internal market was rejected. * The fact that authors had already received remuneration from the sale of their work did not remove the justification for their further remuneration through the public lending right. The AG also rapped the Commission over the knuckles, saying: I would like to conclude with a comment on the style of the Commissionlink
After addressing the cases in which the plaintiffs were either not sick enough or too sick, the Article then highlights some of the other problems these plaintiffs have faced when attempting to assert ADA claims–problems which occurred either at the initial stage of the litigation or after the plaintiffs had achieved some success at the lower court. However, this Article demonstrates that people with these illnesses face an uphill battle when attempting to apply for relief under the ADA, and that the current interpretation and application of the ADA severely restrict the number of individuals who achieve success under the Act. Unless, and until, either Congress acts to limit the courts’ conservative interpretation of the ADA, or the courts change the pro-employer interpretation of the ADA, the once-closed doors to which President Bush referred when signing the ADA into law will remain closed and secured with a very strong lock.
link
We donât yet know the shape of the new governing coalition, but itâs not too early to draw some conclusions about the people, parties, and ideas that won and lost.First, the resultsWith all votes counted, the new Knesset looks like this:Kadima29seatsLabor19seatsShas12seatsLikud12seatsYisrael Beitenu11seatsNational Union / National Religious Party 9seatsGil (Senior Citizens) 7seatsUnited Torah Judaism 6seatsMeretz 5seatsUnited Arab List 4seatsBalad 3seatsHadash 3seatsNineteen parties participated in the election and failed to reach the required 2 percent threshold for Knesset entry; about 200,000 votes (the equivalent of around seven Knesset seats!) were thrown away â either because people voted for a party that failed to reach the threshold, because they deliberately stuck a blank piece of paper in the voting envelope instead of a partyâs slip, or else because they accidentally included slips for two or more different parties in their envelope.Only 63.2 percent of the electorate voted; For now at least, the taboo against recruiting Arab parties into Israeli governing coalitions will remain unbroken.On the other hand, predictions of declining support for Kadima turned out to be somewhat correct: while the party was a clear winner, with ten more Knesset seats than its nearest rival, it âlostâ around five seats between most of the late pre-election polls and the final results, and around eight seats compared to polls taken a couple of weeks before the election. On the other hand, the Center-Left as a whole held its own: while the polls taken around 10 March showed Kadima-Labor-Meretz receiving around 60 Knesset seats, these three parties plus the Pensioners (who didnât even show up on the radar a couple of weeks ago) gained 60 seats in the election itself.Winners and losersTwelve parties will be represented in the new Knesset, and the largest party received less than 25 percent of the vote. If we classify the Pensioners as Left and Shas as Right, we have 60 MKâs on the Left (not counting the Arab parties) and 50 on the Right â a small victory for the Left-Center, and for âdisengagementâ.But if we classify explicitly pro-âdisengagementâ parties as Left, anti-âdisengagementâ parties as Right, and parties that are willing to go along with âdisengagementâ in return for government support for their social programs as âOtherâ, we have a Left of Kadima, Labor, and Meretz with 53 MKâs, a Right of Yisrael Beitenu, Likud, and NU/NRP with only 32 MKâs, and an âOtherâ of Shas, Pensioners, and UTJ with 25 MKâs. Gil, the pensionersâ party, won enough seats â and has sufficiently specific demands, even if their initial version of these demands is a bit inflated â to make it a desirable coalition partner for Kadima.When initial results showed Meretz winning only four Knesset seats, it appeared that Yossi Beilin, whose first campaign as Meretz leader had clearly flopped, would quickly be dismissed from his position as party chief. itâs frustrating enough sitting on the Opposition benches when your party loves you, but it must be truly awful when everyone in the party youâre supposed to be leading knows that you caused their fall from power to insignificance.Ultimately, the Likud â and perhaps even Kid Brother himself â will, I hope, realize a very basic truth about Bibi: Heâs not very good at politics. In the mean time, the Israeli electorate sent some fairly clear messages to the political establishment:While the voters might have been more excited by a reassuring, charismatic leader â Ariel Sharon, for example, had he remained healthy â none of the remaining party leaders had any noticeable positive effect on their partiesâ electoral success. (The only exception to this was Avigdor Lieberman, who appealed to Former-Soviet-Union immigrants who like strong leaders but donât like Stalinesque moustaches.) I would like to be able to say that the trend towards idea-based rather than personality-based voting represents a growing maturity in the Israeli electorateâs thinking, but I suspect that the true message is simply that our current party leaders are a rather unattractive bunch.The voters strongly repudiated Netanyahuâs brand of reduced-benefit capitalism in favor of stronger social benefits.The voters strongly rejected the âGreater Israelâ idea (in its applied form), but did not send a very clear message as to precisely how and when they want Israel to reduce its presence in the West Bank.
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Nearly 40% of those eligible to vote, representative of nearly every segment of the population, chose not to, having either lost faith in the legitimacy / effectiveness of the current political system, parties and elected officials, or they just don’t care anymore.* There were 3 non-Arab parties whose platform included some type of end the occupation concept that earned seats in the 17th Knesset (Kadima, Labor, Meretz), who, in total, earned 53 seats - well short of a 61 seat majority needed to form a coalition.Of the remaining seats that went to non right-wing parties, 7 seats went to the Pensioners party (a party that currently has no platform on anything except for taking care of the elderly), 18 seats went to the ultra-Orthodox Shas and UTJ parties who also do not have an official platform when it comes to the issue of borders (and neither of those parties would constitute Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria as an occupation), and lastly, 10 seats were split between the 3 Arab parties whose voters and leaders (more here - halfway into the post) fail to accept Israel as a Jewish State.So, in short, these election results do not show any indication that a majority of (Jewish) Israelis are clamoring for an End to the Occupation.Myth The surprisingly peaceful withdrawal from Gaza demonstrated that the majority of Israelis support territorial withdrawal and the dismantling of settlements in pursuit of disengagement from the Palestinians.FactHow can this be considered a proof? What of the tens of thousands who involved themselves in acts of non-violent civil disobedience?Consider the following: * Ariel Sharon (Likud) was elected by a landslide in the 2003 elections on a platform that directly contrasted Amram Mitzna’s (Labor) Disengagement plan.The true mandate that Ariel Sharon and the Likud received in the aftermath of the 2003 elections (where nearly 1 in every 3 voters voted Likud) was to eliminate the terror threat posed by the Palestinians against the Jewish State - and in that, his expulsion plan completely failed to represent the will of the people.* The only referendum held on the matter of the expulsion plan - which took place within Ariel Sharon’s Likud party - suffered a resounding defeat: 60% opposed, 40% in favor.* Ariel Sharon was only able to garner a majority within his cabinet for the expulsion by firing those ministers who opposed the expulsion plan and replacing them with those who were willing to betray their ideological convictions in return for cushy ministerial positions (and a BMW, of course).The same tactic was used by Sharon to build support within the Knesset for the expulsion plan.At no point did the majority of (Jewish) Israelis ever give their support to Ariel Sharon’s expulsion plan.Myth Ehud Olmert…
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