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1.) Poll confirms most of world stupider, morally inferior to America — A new poll confirms that Americans see the world much clearer than the rest of the world. Jessica Stanton reports for TheDC:
“Israel continues to remain one of the world’s most negatively-viewed countries, according to the BBC’s annual Country Ratings Poll. The majority in 17 out of 22 countries rank Israel negatively — a slight increase from 2011. This trend is particularly on the rise in Europe, and in Muslim and Asian countries. Around 24,090 people worldwide participated in the 2012 poll. With 50 percent of respondents rating the country negatively, the Jewish state is on par with North Korea and only behind Iran (55 percent) and Pakistan (51 percent). Only the majority in the U.S., Nigeria and Kenya ranked Israel positively.”
If you think the government of Israel is comparable to the governments of North Korea and Iran, you are either utterly ignorant or a total idiot. Those are the only options. Israel remarkably upholds high standards of openness and liberalism while under great and constant threat from its neighbors. That Americans continue to stand by the embattled Jewish state is a great testament to our great nation.
2.) Matt Labash is a non-Latino man with a GOP Latino plan — TheDC’s Matt Labash wants to help with the GOP’s soul searching after Tuesday’s disastrous election, providing several important questions for the GOP to consider. Among them:
“Do we need to make more Republican Latinos? We have clearly not attracted enough of them to the party. Obama won a whopping three-quarters of Latino voters. Solution: if we can’t attract more Latinos, we need to make our own. I will lead by example. From here on, I’m only making babies with Latina women, then reading our children Friedrich von Hayeks’s ‘Road to Serfdom’ as their bedtime stories. We will all move to San Antonio, and lobby to get the voting age lowered to six, so that Texas doesn’t go blue within two election cycles. We will build a firewall of sorts. Or as we Latinos say, a ‘fuego wall.'”
Clearly Labash has been working on this plan for some time — you don’t, after all, come up with such a flawless, visionary and fully implementable strategy like this on the fly. It makes one think: Could Labash be planning to run for chairman of the Republican National Committee to save the GOP? Developing …
3.) Obama vs. Iran — One former adviser to President Obama says the Iranians should understand that President Obama means what he says. TheDC’s Jamie Weinstein reports:
“A former Middle East adviser to President Barack Obama said Thursday that he is ‘absolutely’ convinced that President Obama would use military force against Iran to forestall its nuclear program if diplomacy failed. ‘The president thought about it very carefully, the debate was between prevention and containment, he made a very conscious decision for prevention,’ Dennis Ross said to a question asked by The Daily Caller at a post-election foreign policy forum hosted at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. ‘And I think once he made that decision, he also understood that has implications. If diplomacy fails, it leads you down the path towards the use of force. Do I think he would act on it? I think that absolutely he would act on it.'”
There is good reason to be skeptical that President Obama will actually follow through with his pledges to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons capability. But let us hope Ross is right and that President Obama is serious about preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power.
4.) Tea party? What tea party? — Speaker of the House John Boehner tells Diane Sawyer who is boss in his caucus. TheDC’s Alexis Levinson reports:
“There is no tea party caucus independent of the Republican caucus in the House, Speaker John Boehner said Thursday in an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer. Asked about the tea party, and whether they were “going to be by your side for this, ‘Boehner suggested that there was no major differentiation between tea party Republicans in the House and the Republican caucus as a whole.’ … ‘But do they come back changed by this election?’ Sawyer asked. ‘Well, listen, I think this has been the most misreported story of my two years’ tenure,’ Boehner replied. ‘We don’t have a tea party caucus to speak of in the House. All of us who were elected in 2010 were supported by the tea party.’ … Officially, there is a Tea Party Caucus, started by Rep. Michele Bachmann. It has 55 members. But Boehner is evidently not referring to that group specifically.”
This raises an important question: Did Boehner give Diane Sawyer the interview due to her (potentially) drunken performance anchoring Tuesday night’s election? The speaker, after all, is known to have a fondness for a drink or two himself.
5.) “The Lizard King” quote of the day — From “The Lizard King: The Shocking Inside Account of Obama’s True Intergalactic Ambitions By An Anonymous White House Staffer,” edited and introduced by Daily Caller writers Jamie Weinstein and Will Rahn:
“When Obama decided to run for president, Axelrod brought me along. When Hillary Clinton dropped out of the presidential primary in June 2008, the media reported it was because she knew she couldn’t win the nomination. But that’s bogus. Bill had already secured the super delegates necessary for her to win if she took the race to the convention. She dropped out because of what I found on her. It turns out that Chelsea is not her and Bill’s daughter at all—but the product of a night of passion between Hillary and the late. PLO chairman Yasser Arafat during a trip Hillary took to Beirut in 1979, shortly after Bill became governor of Arkansas.”
It is unquestionably the funniest book of the year — and your TheDC Morning facilitator isn’t just saying that because he co-wrote it. BUY … IT … NOW.
6.) Tweet of Yesterday — Jose Canseco: It’s national positive attitude day. We are all winners
VIDEO: Sen. Schumer says he’s “very heartened” by Boehner’s new “tone” after Obama win