Even Handedness Towards Those Who Bite! Why?

Israel's former consul general in New York does not see Israel being able to bridge the divide between themselves and the Palestinians for the foreseeable. He points out, Israel has basically been forced to negotiate with itself because they are always being leaned upon to make concessions. In his desire to change GW's strategy, and be seen by the Palestinians,the Arab world and Liberals as more even handed, Obama mistakenly suggests Israel give away the store before negotiations begin. This has proven unhelpful and re-inforced the Palestinians more demanding and obdurate position.

I concede I am biased but I have never understood why even handedness is the appropriate strategy between Israel and the Palestinians. Israelis have always been prepared to live in peace with their neighbors. Then why are their neighbors, seen as - peace loving , peace seeking Arabs,surrounded by sea of totalitarian states etc.

Elevating the status of the Palestinians distorts the negotiation process and instills a sense of falseness which ultimately boomerangs. (See 1 and 1a below.)

Obama also blew a domestic opportunity according to this analyst. (See 2 below.)


Rethinking our Iran strategy pre-supposes we even have one. (See 3 below.)

At least one of Obama's team members is willing to flirt with the truth. (See 4
below.)

Coincidences keep mounting of questionable behaviour. (See 5 below.)

Dick



1) Can Israel Make Peace with the Palestinians?
By Richard Baehr

Ambassador Alon Pinkas served as Israel's Consul General in New York from 2000 to 2004, capping a two decade career in Israel's foreign ministry, including work for prime ministers from both Labor and Likud governments. I had the privilege of interviewing Ambassador Pinkas when he visited Chicago this week.


As opinion polls in Israel suggest that Israelis believe President Obama is not a friend of Israel (4% of Israelis in a recent survey consider him to be pro-Israel), Ambassador Pinkas and other Israelis are visiting various American cities to emphasize the strength and importance of the US Israeli relationship.


Pinkas sees a sharp difference in tone between Obama and his two predecessors- Bill Clinton and George Bush, but does not believe that Obama is hostile to Israel. Israelis were spoiled a bit by what they perceived as an emotional tie between both Bill Clinton and Israel and George Bush and Israel, a connection that seems missing with Obama. Obama has made it clear that he thinks that the perception that the US stands with Israel in the conflict with the Palestinians was a major reason that the peace process was unsuccessful in recent decades. Obama's conclusion, expressed in a meeting with a group of Jewish leaders two months back, is that peace is more likely to be realized if the US President is perceived by both sides as engaged, but not in either side's corner. This approach by Obama runs counter to long held US policy that Israel is more likely to make concessions, if it feels a secure link with the United States. It has also been generally understood policy that if the US is perceived as pressuring Israel, the Arabs and the Palestinians will become more intransigent, waiting for the US to deliver Israel's concessions to them, offering nothing in return.


Pinkas believes that Israelis are nervous about Obama in part because he has been so openly critical of Israel from the outset of his administration. It could be argued that only Honduras has received more public criticism from this Administration. Israelis do not see the advertised even handedness in the President's actions so far. The insistent public demands on Israel -- for a total freeze of settlement activity beyond the green line, have not been matched by similar cajoling or public pressure on the Palestinians or other Arab nations to make gestures towards Israel. In fact, several Arab nations and the Palestinian Authority have now made public statements that if Israel refuses to commit to a total settlement freeze (including natural growth of settlements) that they are unwilling to offer any gestures or even to meet with Israelis to negotiate. Put simply, why would the Palestinians and the Arab states be more pro-Israel than President Obama? If Obama demands a total settlement freeze as a first step, why should they reciprocate with gestures or negotiations before this occurs?


Ambassador Pinkas is very skeptical about the likelihood of a breakthrough in future talks between the Israelis and Palestinians for two major reasons. Pinkas says the history of the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians since the commencement of the Oslo process has clarified that there is not now, and there has not been despite a decade and a half of trying, an intersection between the maximum that Israel is able to offer to end the conflict, and the minimum the Palestinians demand. Pinkas calls the gap unbridgeable, at least for now.

He says the history of the negotiations, has been one where Israel, to some extent, negotiates with itself, continually enhancing its offer, with the Palestinians always holding back for more concessions. The Palestinians always rejected Israel's offers as insufficient. Pinkas says Israel made a substantial offer at Camp David in the summer of 2000, enhanced over the next few months as the second intifada began, and broadened again at Taba. The discussions in 2007 and 2008 between Mahmoud Abbas and Ehud Olmert suggests that Obama's claim that the peace process was not pursued during the prior Administration, is not correct. Serious discussions took place during the last two years of the Bush administration, but as with those during the Clinton years, they proved in the end to be unproductive.


Israel had already left Gaza by 2007, and Olmert offered to Abbas well over 90% of the West Bank, with a land exchange of pre-67 Israeli territory to compensate the Palestinians for three settlement blocks that would be incorporated into Israel. Israel also offered a connector between Gaza and the West Bank, a capitol for the Palestinians in the Jerusalem area, and political sovereignty over neighborhoods in the Old City without any formal political subdivision of the Old City. Pinkas says the recent discussions failed in part, because the best that could be accomplished was a shelf agreement, representing the terms for a final peace agreement, were the Palestinians in a position to complete such a deal. The reality is that PA President Abbas has no political control over Gaza, now run by Hamas after their bloody coup against the PA in the summer of 2007. And Hamas has never shown any willingness to accept Israel as a permanent state in the region (a requirement one would think for a two state solution). Hamas, at best, has offered a defined truce period, in which it would not fire rockets, mortars or missiles at Israel. This split among the Palestinians is Pinkas' second argument for why no peace agreement is likely. Significantly Abbas adopted the same posture as Palestinian negotiators in prior discussions, booking each Israeli offer, and asking for more.


The Israelis have also made some demands in negotiations, in addition to offering concessions -- that the Palestinian state be demilitarized, that Israel be allowed to overfly a Palestinian state, that for a defined period of time, Israel would maintain a small military presence in the Jordan Valley, and that few if any of the people classified as Palestinian refugees by the United Nations (in reality, less than 5% of the so-called refugees ever lived within the boundaries of pre-67 Israel, the rest have all been born outside of Israel) could return to Israel. The legal right of return would not have to be relinquished, but with the exception of a few family reunification admits, Palestinians would return, if they chose, only to the new Palestinian state. Israel sought at Camp David, and has demanded since, that any peace agreement on final status issues- Jerusalem, borders, refugees, had to mean an end to Palestinian claims- in other words, the deal was final, not a stage to further negotiations. Pinkas described the negotiations as similar to those leading to a divorce between the two parties- a separation agreement. At the outset of the Oslo process, Pinkas says there were Israelis who believed that a marriage, a new Benelux could be created. Such hopes have now been dashed, though among the Palestinians, there is now growing clamor for a single multinational state, which given higher Arab birth rates, would over time lead to a larger Arab than Jewish population in the single state, and political control.


Ambassador Pinkas is also not sanguine about multinational action against Iran and its near complete nuclear program. Russia and China have not shown any willingness to agree to stepped-up international sanctions at the United Nations. While Rahm Emanuel talked at the annual AIPAC Policy Conference about the linkage between an Israeli settlement freeze and the US garnering support for a new sanctions regime against Iran, the two issues do not appear to be linked. China and Russia are reluctant to agree to stepped-up sanctions for many reasons, but none of them involve whether additional bedrooms are added to Jewish homes close to the green line or near the Old City.


The Iranians responded coldly to President Obama's early outreach and offer to negotiate at the highest levels, like a hard return of a weak second serve in a tennis match. Now the Iranians seem willing to run out the clock until their nuclear program is operational, agreeing to multi party talks, which Pinkas believes will likely be unproductive. Such talks occurred between European nations and Iran for several years, to no avail. Since US military action, or even the threat of such action, is not taken seriously by Iran, if new (crippling?) sanctions are not coming, and new negotiations resemble those of the prior years, this would seem to suggest there may be only one option left to prevent Iran completing its nuclear weapons program. Pinkas says he sees some signs that some people in the Obama administration may have already accepted that Iran will succeed in becoming a nuclear power, so the new policy that is being developed concerns how to deal with that reality.


A corollary to the Administration's Iran strategy has been an attempt to woo Syria away from the Iranian orbit. Pinkas is not convinced that Syria sees much to gain from shifting its strategic alignment, even if it occurred with an Israeli return of the Golan as a goodie to juice the deal. The Syrian regime has lived off is anti-Israel rhetoric and posture for 60 years. Would the Assad family retain its power if it could no longer rely on deflecting domestic opposition with its anti-Israel campaign? Ambassador Pinkas say it is unclear whether Iran or Syria has more impact on Hezbollah activities in Lebanon, though Iran is clearly the financial provider. Given Syrian interests in Lebanon, the alignment with Iran may offer more to Syria in that country.


Pinkas says both President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu made some early mistakes in how they calibrated the US-Israel relationship. Netanyahu may not have realized that the November, 2008 election really did constitute the start of a significant change in many domestic and international approaches by the United States. President Obama may not have understood the reality of the coalition that Prime Minister Netanyahu assembled in order to take office, and how much room that allowed him to meet American demands on settlements. Pinkas was unwilling to accept my suggestion that the early and then constant pressure on Israel may have been specifically orchestrated by Rahm Emanuel as a means to bring down the Netanyahu government, calculating that a wide divide between Israel and its closest ally, would worry Israelis, and lead to a collapse of Netanyahu's coalition, and the ascension in new Israeli elections of a more compliant (to US demands) Israeli leader.


While Pinkas believes that the US Israel relationship remains strong, he clearly sees no reason for optimism on any major international front concerning Israel: negotiations with the Palestinians, the Syrian track, or stopping the Iranian nuclear program. On each of these issues, the Obama administration seems to still believe in its transformational ability to make progress. Time will tell on each count, but the history of the modern state of Israel suggests many more disappointments than achievements in its relationship with its Arab neighbors and the Palestinians.


Richard Baehr is chief political correspondent of American Thinker.

1a) Forget normalization - Saudi Arabia steps up boycott of Israel
By MICHAEL FREUND


Despite efforts by Washington in recent years to bring about a normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab world, Saudi Arabia has been steadily intensifying its enforcement of the Arab League boycott of Israel.

A review of US Commerce Department data conducted found that the number of boycott-related and restrictive trade-practice requests received by American companies from Saudi Arabia has increased in each of the past two years, rising from 42 in 2006 to 65 in 2007 to 74 in 2008, signifying a jump of more than 76 percent.

The bulk of these requests were related to the companies' or products' relationship to Israel. Typically, Saudi officials ask foreign suppliers to affirm that any goods exported to the desert kingdom are not manufactured in Israel and do not contain any Israeli-made components.

US law bars American companies from complying with such demands, and requires them to report any boycott-related requests to the federal government.

The Commerce Department figures reflect only those requests that have been officially reported to the US government. Figures for 2009 were not yet available.

A US Treasury Department official confirmed that there was ample evidence that the Saudis continued to enforce the boycott. According to the official, statistics compiled by a number of US government departments and federal agencies all "indicate that American companies continue to receive boycott requests from Saudi Arabia."

Citing figures collected by the Internal Revenue Service, the official said that of the cases that were reported to the IRS, "55% of the boycott requests from Saudi Arabia led to boycott agreements."

Two months ago, the Treasury Department published a list of eight Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, that it says continue to boycott Israel. The list appeared in the Federal Register, the official journal of the US government.

Washington has been attempting to get Riyadh to improve relations with the Jewish state, without success.

On July 31, after talks with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal rejected Washington's efforts, telling reporters, "Incrementalism and a step-by-step approach has not and, we believe, will not lead to peace."

Saudi Arabia's ongoing enforcement of the boycott also appears to violate repeated promises that it gave to Washington in recent years to drop the trade embargo.

In November 2005, the desert kingdom pledged to abandon the boycott after Washington conditioned Saudi Arabia's entry into the World Trade Organization on such a move. A month later, on December 11, Saudi Arabia was granted WTO membership.

The WTO, which aims to promote free trade, prohibits members from engaging in discriminatory practices such as boycotts or embargoes.

The Saudi boycott of Israeli-made goods is part of the decades-old Arab League effort to isolate and weaken the Jewish state.

The league established an Office for the Boycott of Israel in Damascus in 1951, aimed at overseeing implementation of the economic and trade embargo.

In recent years, enforcement of the boycott has waxed and waned. Some Arab League members, such as Egypt and Jordan, ceased applying it after signing peace treaties with Israel, while others, such as Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia do not enforce it. Other Arab states, such as Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, continue to bar entry of goods made in Israel and those containing Israeli-made components.


2) SHERMAN FREDERICK: Obama blows chance to lead

Speech divided rather than united. When, exactly, did the bloom come off the rose?

For a good many, I'll bet it was 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 9, just after President Barack Obama delivered another "sounds good, less filling" speech before a joint session of Congress.

After nine months, Americans have begun to make up their minds about this president, and the growing conclusion is this: On the menu of competency, this leader of the free world is one taco short of a full combination plate. He's undisciplined, snooty and less gifted than initially thought, making him ill-prepared to grasp greatness, even when history offers it.

Time and again, in a pinch, this president has shown himself a pedestrian thinker unable to move himself, much less anyone else, beyond partisan politics. Because of that (and I'm sorry to say it) his presidency is likely to fall short at time when America could use a healthy dose of excellence.

His speech on health care "reform" last week before Congress illustrated the point perfectly.

That topic has devolved into a public brawl. Blame that on mean-ol' Republicans or wild-eyed governors from Alaska or "evil-mongers" from the rest home, if you like. But we can all agree that hardly any constructive conversations on health care have taken place in this country in the past 30 days. And that goes on the heads of leaders from both parties.

Now, enter the president. He steps up to deliver a "major" speech on the topic. People anxiously hope the president will recoup his legendary oratory skills to pull the debate out of the woods, onto a path of civil discourse and maybe, just maybe, to common ground. Citizens stand on tip-toe to hear their young leader cut through the rancor and lead the way.

And he makes things worse.

Instead of inspiration and consensus, he bared his ideological fangs and called his way the "moral imperative" highway to "real" (translation: "radical") change. He couldn't have been more holier-than-thou as he slipped into his trademark snotty tone to dismiss critics and further ignite partisanship. Instead of elevating the debate, he widened the divide, which I suspect now dooms a health care "reform" bill from passing Congress with any kind of bipartisan support.

Call it "Obama Fatigue" if you're searching to sugarcoat it and blame others. But this problem goes more to the leader than to the followers. You can bet that after this empty performance, many people now wonder whether our new president is up to the task of ever constructively leading our nation.

Look, if I may be so bold, Mr. President: A nation cannot live on eloquence alone. Speeches without substance wear thin quickly. And as was most painfully clear from your performance last week, the mere repetition of rhetoric, no matter how elegantly delivered, doesn't make the message any less partisan and divisive.

President Obama should have begun his address by highlighting the virtues of the American health care system -- the best in the world -- and then proceeded to outline incremental and understandable ways to make it better. Instead, all we got was a condescending, bravado-laden lecture.

As a result, health care "reform" is in deeper trouble than before and I'm afraid Democrats have come to the conclusion that their only option now is to slam home "Obamacare" over the heads of Blue Dog Democrats and Republicans, not to mention the objections of the American people.

If that happens, the president will have failed. And we'll all lose.


Sherman Frederick (sfrederick@reviewjournal.com) is publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and president of Stephens Media.

3) Rethinking our Iran strategy: The Islamic Republic's revolution may be at a crossroads. It's a possible opening for the U.S.
By Robin Wright and Robert Litwak



Three decades of assumptions about Iran -- including the premises behind Washington's recent outreach to Tehran -- have been transformed by its stunning uprising. It's time for a policy rethink.

The Obama administration's offer to engage was the right idea. But the theocracy's brutal crackdown on the opposition since the June 12 presidential election, followed by the purge of senior politicians in show trials and an alarming increase in general executions, marks a turning point for Iran's revolution. U.S. policy now needs a broader approach. Recent history offers relevant guidelines.

The three most important revolutions of the 20th century -- for their political innovation and impact -- happened in the Soviet Union, China and Iran. At the peak of revolutionary paranoia, the Soviet Union and China witnessed turmoil similar to what is happening today in Iran. Soon afterward, however, Moscow and Beijing altered course. Both began the move from defiant revolutionary regime to a normal state willing to work within the international order and mended relations with the United States.

The shift in both the Soviet Union and China was partly tied to the maturation of revolutions, as Crane Brinton outlined in "The Anatomy of Revolution," which leads to the final stage of "convalescence" that plays out over years, even decades. The Islamic Republic is on the same trajectory. Its current uprising pits those trying to transform Iran into a normal state against unrelenting revolutionaries. The men and women now on trial have made the transition, in varying degrees, in their political thinking.

In their civil disobedience since June, millions of Iranians also have indicated that they're ready for normalcy. The U.S. should now factor them into policy.

The pattern of revolutions suggests, however, that a catalyst is required to trigger the critical transition. The spark has traditionally been one of three factors: a geo-strategic challenge, economic necessity or political exigency. In other words, a revolution needing to convert an enemy into an ally to survive.

In the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin launched show trials of Communist Party officials from 1936 to 1938, when vast numbers were dispatched to gulags or executed. Yet pressure from the Nazi threat combined with the costs of war spawned a U.S.-Soviet alliance and Stalin's meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Stalin was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev, who started de-Stalinization. The revolution's later undoing began after Mikhail Gorbachev concluded that the Soviet system of political control was no longer viable in the information-based global economy and that basic changes were essential to survive.

In the 1960s, China had all the trappings of a rogue state. It defied the international order. It detonated an atomic bomb in 1964. And in 1966, it launched the Cultural Revolution, a period of chaotic political and social upheaval when Mao Tse-tung ruthlessly purged alleged "bourgeois liberals" in the Communist Party. Yet in 1969, the collapse of the Sino-Soviet alliance followed by troop buildups along their mutual border led Mao to consider the realpolitik of normalizing relations with Washington. Henry Kissinger's secret 1971 trip led to President Nixon's historic visit in 1972.

Neither Stalin nor Mao became America's friends. But those encounters -- under conditions of strategic need -- did pave the way for meaningful engagement.

Iran's three most specific overtures to the U.S. fit the same pattern. In 1986, at a desperate juncture in its war with Iraq, Tehran was willing to deal secretly with both the United States and Israel to acquire weaponry, namely TOW anti-tank missiles. Even after this arms-for-hostages swap was revealed, the regime still sent a secret emissary to the White House to probe further potential.

In the early 1990s, Iran offered the most lucrative petroleum deal in its history to Conoco, to develop offshore oil and gas fields to help pay for postwar reconstruction and modernization demanded by a war-weary population.

In 2001, after the U.S. toppled Afghanistan's Taliban, Iran cooperated with Washington in crafting a new government. After the U.S. invasion toppled Iraq's Saddam Hussein in 2003, Tehran put out feelers, prodded partly by the Swiss, about resolving differences with Washington. Flanked by U.S. troops on key borders, Tehran wanted to ensure it was not next.



Three U.S. administrations did not exploit opportunities when Iran needed to play and reached out. The challenge now is to create a confluence of factors that will make Tehran again feel that a real deal with Washington is in its interest. Then engagement has a real shot.

Under the current circumstances, it doesn't.

Diplomacy centered primarily on Iran's nuclear program is unlikely to work. The regime as well as many protesters view pressure to end uranium enrichment -- a process to provide fuel for peaceful nuclear energy that can be subverted to develop a nuclear weapon -- as a challenge to Iran's sovereignty and a denial of its economic development. Under the current circumstances, the regime is more likely to engage in a process -- largely to get the world off its back -- that would not produce enduring substance or real resolution.

And if that diplomatic tactic doesn't work, simply slapping on more international sanctions (given stonewalling by Russia and China on anything tough) also seems unlikely to alone squeeze Iran into cooperation.

Yet a military strike is also likely to backfire, instead rallying Persian nationalism around the regime, just as Saddam Hussein's 1980 invasion mobilized support for the revolution at a time it was running out of steam.

The Obama administration would be well-advised to step back and recalculate what conditions would lead Iran to feel that the benefits of beginning the transition to a normal state outweigh the costs of sticking to the revolutionary zealotry increasingly rejected by its own people.

Robin Wright, author of "Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East," has covered Iran since 1973. Robert Litwak is the former director for nonproliferation at the National Security Council. Both are at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.


4) Adviser: High unemployment for years
By: Eamon Javers


The president’s chief economic adviser warned Friday that the nation’s unemployment rate could stay “unacceptably high” for years to come — a situation that would seriously complicate Barack Obama’s ability to convince Americans that he’s beating back the recession.

“The level of unemployment is unacceptably high,” National Economic Council Director Larry Summers said Friday. “And will, by all forecasts, remain unacceptably high for a number of years.”

Summers’ comments came in a briefing with reporters ahead of Obama’s speech in New York City on Monday, marking the one-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, an event widely regarded as having created a panic that caused the global economic meltdown.

Even with his gloomy forecast for unemployment, Summers said the economy is getting better and made the case that Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package and other fiscal rescue steps headed off even more economic pain.

“We are making a clear transition from rescue as a priority of public policy to sustained recovery,” Summers said. “We have moved back from the brink of financial catastrophe.”

“Today, the question is, when will the recession phase end?” Summers said. He said the forecast is “for economic growth at a significant rate during the second half of 2009.”

But as is usually the case in economic recovery, job creation continues to lag. The national unemployment rate is at 9.7 percent, a 26-year high, and Obama has repeatedly said he ultimately expects it to hit double-digits before beginning to fall again.

The economy lost 216,000 jobs in the month of August, which was fewer than the July number of 276,000. Overall, 6.9 million jobs have been lost in the recession, which economists call the worst since the Great Depression.

With his remarks about sustained high unemployment, Summers touched on one of the most sensitive issues in the economy, closely watched by average Americans as a key reading of the nation’s economic health.

Unemployment is probably the single most important statistic for Democrats eyeing the mid-term Congressional elections next fall. If the unemployment rate begins to decline, the White House may have an easier time convincing voters that its enormous stimulus spending and massive federal intervention into the economy were effective. But if all the White House’s enormous efforts are unable to move the needle on unemployment, a so-called “jobless recovery” could seriously hamper the president’s party in the mid-terms.

White House spokesman Matthew Vogel said, "The President and the economic team are committed to tackling unemployment and are focused every single day on getting Americans back to work. Many economic indicators have turned positive, but employment is a lagging indicator and obviously the toughest nut to crack. We are confident that we are headed in the right direction, but that there's no room for complacency even as we see a return to growth later this year."

At the briefing, Summers walked a fine line between taking credit for the economic turnaround and declaring premature victory over the crisis.

“These problems were not made in a week or a month or a year,” Summers said. “They are not going to be fixed in a week or a month or a year.”

And he used the opportunity to make a pitch for the passage of financial regulatory reform – a key theme of Obama’s address Monday at Federal Hall near Wall Street. The administration’s proposals to change the rules of the road on Wall Street have been languishing on Capitol Hill. “We believe that this is the year, after what has happened, to overhaul financial regulation,” Summers said.

Earlier in the week, the White House said its research indicated the $787-billion economic stimulus bill passed earlier this year had saved or created 1 million jobs so far. That’s on pace, officials said, to hit the president’s goal of saving or creating 3.5 million jobs by the time the program ends in 2010.


And on Friday, the White House put out a raft of statistics to emphasize its point that the economy is responding to the forceful efforts of the Obama team.

The so-called Wall Street “fear index” is down by 58 percent since Inauguration Day; the S&P 500 is up 30 percent; and the LIBOR-OIS spread, which is widely seen as a measure of stress in the credit markets, is down 87 percent.

Looking back to global economic history, Summers said, “I’m not aware of any case in which so profound a crisis was addressed so forcefully and quickly.”

Summers also offered his thoughts on the TARP corporate bailout program, which has turned a profit on the amounts of money that have been repaid by large banks so far. But he said it wouldn’t be “reasonable” to expect that the entire program could turn a profit, because much of the money has been spent on inherently money losing efforts.

5.)A Scandal of Epic Proportions....

This could be a scandal of epic proportions and one that makes Nixon's Watergate or Clinton's Monica Lewinsky affair pale by comparison. It pertains to why certain Chrysler dealerships were closed.

Roll the clock back to the weeks just before Chrysler declared bankruptcy Chrysler, like GM, was in dire financial straights and the federal government graciously offered to "buy the company," keep them out of bankruptcy and "save jobs." Chrysler was, in the words of Obama and his administration, "Too big to fail," same story with GM.

The feds organized their "Automotive Task Force" to fix Chrysler and GM. Obama, in an act that is probably unconstitutional, appointed Steve Rattner to be the White House's official Car Czar- literally, that's what his titlewas. Rattner was the liaison between Obama, Chrysler, and GM.

Initially, the national media reported Chrysler had made this list of dealerships. That is not true. The Washington Examiner , Newsmax, Fox New and a host of other news agencies discovered the list of dealerships was put together by the "Automotive Task Force" headed by no one other then Mr. Steve Rattner.

The plot thickens. There was neither rhyme nor reason why certain dealerships were closed? Actually there's a very interesting pattern as to who was closed. Again, on May 27, 2009, The Washington Examiner and Newsmax exposed the connection. Amazingly, of the 789 dealerships closed by the federal government 788 had donated money, exclusively, to Republican political causes, while contributing nothing to Democratic political causes. The only "Democrat" dealership on the list was found to have donated $7,700 to Hillary's campaign, and a bit over $2,000 to John Edwards. This same dealership, reportedly, also gave $200.00 to Obama's campaign. Does that seem a little odd to you?

Steve Rattner, who put the list together, happens to be married to Mauree White. Maureen happens to be the former national finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee. As such, she would have access to campaign donation records from everyone in the nation, Republican or Democrat. But of course, this is just a wacky coincidence.

Then comes another really wacky coincidence. On that list of dealerships being closed, a weird thing happened in Arkansas, North Louisiana, and Southern Missouri. It seems Bill Clinton's former White House Chief of Staff, Mack McClarty, owns a chain of dealership in that region, partnered with a fellow by the name of Robert Johnson. Johnson happens to be the founder of Black Entertainment Television and was a huge Obama supporter and financier. These guys own a half dozen Chrysler operations under the company title of RLJ-McClarty-Landers. Interestingly, none of their dealerships were ordered closed - not one- while all their competing Chrysler/Dodge and Jeep dealership were! Eight dealerships located near the dealerships owned by McClarty and Johnson were ordered shut. Thus, by pure luck, these two major Obama supporters now have a virtual monopoly on Chrysler sales in their zone. Look in The Washington Examiner. The story's there, and it's in a dozen or so other web-based news organizations.

Furthermore, if you thought Chrysler was owned by Fiat, you are mistaken. Under the federal court ruling, 65% of Chrysler is now owned by the federal government and the United Auto Worker's union- Fiat owns 20%. The other 15% is till privately owned and presumably will be traded on the stock market. Obama smiles and says he doesn't want to run the auto industry.

It would appear the president has the power to destroy private businesses and eliminate upwards of 100,000 jobs, just because they don't agree with his political agenda. There are voices in Washington demanding an explanation, but the "Automotive Task Force" has released no information to the public or any of the senators demanding answers. Keep your ear to the ground for more on this story.



Car Czar No More

Move the clock forward as this story was going to press. Obama's Car Czar, Steve Rattner, resigned on July 13 and was promptly replaced by former steel workers union boss Ron Bloom. According to CBS News, Rattner left "to return to private life and spend time with his family." Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said, "I hope that he takes another opportunity to bring his unique skills to government service in the future."

Rattner is under investigation for a multi-million dollar pay-to-play investment bank scandal in New York. Did that have anything to do with his resignation? According to several news sources , there are rumors Ratner is being investigated for what could be pay-to-play scandal involving the closing of Chrysler and GM dealerships. Like CBS reported, Ratner wants to spend more quality time with his family. Obama has thirty-two personally appointed "czars" who answer to no one but him, all of whom are acting without any Constitutional authority. Do they all have "unique skills," as Tim Geithner likes to say?