Some Are Beginning to Get It!

Some in the press are beginning to get it!

Do Obama and Mitchell have plans for Israel? (See 1 below.)

It is time for the Senate to pass what The House already has but health care legislation has everything back listed. This sanction legislation is far more urgent than restricting our health care and could prevent a tragic war.(See 1a below.)

Obama really does hate Fox News and the story is revealed in this recent edition of (See 2 below.)

Weak tea, weak knee it is all the same. Stand for something and then if you lose it is meaningful. (See 3 below.)

This time it is the 'feel gooders' not the 'do gooders' who are restricting our freedom. More airport nonsense to give us a secure feeling when it amounts to very little.

Our airport security it is as much an employment act as anything else.

If you really want to have air travel security copy the Israeli model and employ highly trained security people. (See 4 below.)


If a Muslim walks into a Synagogue carrying a box and asks for the Imam - You Might be a terrorist!

Dick


1) Subject: GEORGE MITCHELL EMBRACES ARAB ''PEACE'' PLAN -- WOULD STRIP ISRAEL OF WESTERN WALL; PLUS LET MILLIONS OF REFUGEES RETURN



Honest Broker, Anyone?
Evelyn Gordon

Nothing in George Mitchell’s interview with PBS last week received more attention than the envoy’s implied threat to revoke American loan guarantees to Israel.


That’s a pity — because far more worrisome is the goal he set for the negotiations, as highlighted by Aluf Benn in today’s Haaretz.


“We think the way forward … is full implementation of the Arab peace initiative,” Mitchell declared. “That’s the comprehensive peace in the region that is the objective set forth by the president.”


The Arab initiative mandates a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines — every last inch of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. It also demands a solution to the refugee problem “in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194,” which Arabs interpret as allowing the refugees to “return” to Israel.


Later in the interview, Mitchell says this initiative requires “a negotiation and a discussion,” and that you can’t negotiate by telling “one side you have to agree in advance to what the other side wants.”


Yet by saying his goal is “full implementation” of this initiative, he’s effectively saying, “You can have your negotiation and discussion, but Washington has no intention of being an honest broker: it fully backs the Arab position on borders, Jerusalem, and even (to some extent) the refugees.”


This is the administration’s clearest statement yet that it’s abandoning the position held by every previous U.S. administration: that Israel needs “defensible borders” — which everyone agrees the 1967 lines are not.


Mitchell also thereby abandoned the position, held by every previous administration, that any deal must acknowledge Israel’s historic ties to the Temple Mount via some Israeli role there, even if only symbolic (see Bill Clinton’s idea of “sovereignty under the Mount”). The Arab initiative requires Israel to just get out.


And Mitchell effectively took Syria’s side on that border dispute: no Israeli government ever agreed to withdraw farther than the international border, whereas the Arab initiative mandates the 1967 lines — i.e., including the territory Syria illegally annexed pre-1967.
Even worse, the Arab initiative addresses none of Israel’s concerns, such as recognition as a Jewish state or security arrangements. That means Mitchell just announced support for all Arab demands without obtaining any parallel concession to Israel. Under those circumstances, why would the Arabs bother making any?


And his repeated demand that Israeli-Palestinian talks deal with borders first indicates that this was no slip of the tongue. After all, the only thing Israel has to give is territory; having once ceded that via an agreement on borders, it has nothing left to trade for, say, security arrangements — which, as a veteran Israeli negotiator told Benn, has actually proved one of the hardest issues to resolve in previous rounds of talks. Borders first, an Israeli minister summed up, is “a trap. We only give, we don’t get anything.”


George Bush’s Road Map viewed the Arab initiative as merely one of many “foundations” for talks. Mitchell’s adoption of its “full implementation” as a goal thus represents a deterioration in U.S. positions that ought to worry all Israel supporters .


1a)Time for Senate to Take Action on Critical Iran Legislation

Dodd-Shelby: Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act

As Iran continues to defy the international community in its quest for a nuclear weapons capability, it is vital the United States Senate takes action and passes critical Iran sanctions legislation. Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd (D-CT) and Ranking Member Richard Shelby (R-AL) have led the effort on the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act of 2009 (S. 2799). The legislation, which contains the major components of both the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA) and the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act (ISEA), seeks to reinforce American diplomacy by dramatically increasing economic pressure on Iran.

Prior to the holiday recess, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced his commitment to passing Iran sanctions legislation upon the Senate's return in January. Reid stated "This important piece of legislation...would impose new sanctions on Iran's refined petroleum sector and tighten existing US sanctions in an effort to create new pressure on the Iranian regime and help stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. I want everyone to know that I am committed to getting this legislation to the floor sometime after we return in January."

•The House, in an overwhelming bipartisan vote, passed similar legislation this past December. With final passage of the Dodd-Shelby legislation, Congress can provide strong congressional backing for the imposition of tough sanctions on Iran in order to persuade it to abandon its nuclear weapons quest. We are at a critical juncture in efforts to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapons capability.

•Iran has refused to hold serious negotiations with the United States and other world powers while continuing to enrich uranium in defiance of numerous U.N. Security Council resolutions. Iran now has enough low-enriched uranium that—if further enriched—could be used to fuel two nuclear weapons.

•Iran dismissed the end-of-the-year deadline set by the administration and its allies for Tehran to accept a deal offered by the United Nations to export the majority of its enriched uranium in exchange for nuclear fuel.

•As the United States works at the United Nations to pass additional Security Council sanctions, it is critical the administration takes immediate steps to ratchet up pressure on the regime.

•Iran’s leaders are clearly worried about the impact further sanctions will have on the country’s economy and its implications on the stability of its repressive and unpopular regime.

•This bill provides a comprehensive approach toward Iran sanctions in a number of key areas. For example, the bill authorizes state divestment efforts from companies investing in Iran’s energy sector and provides legal protection for asset managers divesting from these companies. It also seeks to prevent countries from transshipping sensitive technologies to Iran.

•The legislation also seeks to curtail Iran’s ability to import and produce refined petroleum (such as gasoline used in vehicles) by making clear the president’s authority to impose sanctions on companies providing refined petroleum to Iran, or helping Iran expand its own refining capacity. Shipping companies that transport the refined petroleum to Iran and their insurers are also targeted by the legislation.

•Curtailing Iran’s access to refined petroleum products—Tehran imports as much as 40 percent of its gasoline—could have a rapid and crippling effect on the Iranian economy, forcing the regime to confront a real choice: continue its illicit nuclear program and risk economic ruin or suspend the program and open the door to relief from sanctions.



2) Obama Hates Fox News

It's the summer of 2008 and Barack Obama is beginning to slip in the election polls.

He blames Fox News for his election worries.

He agrees to a secret meeting at New York's posh Waldorf Astoria hotel with the head of Fox News, Roger Ailes and other top honchos of their parent company News Corp.

The meeting goes into meltdown mode as a finger wagging Obama furiously vents his anger against Fox and their top conservative host Sean Hannity.

Have you heard about this?

Probably not, but Newsmax magazine, in a just-released special report "Obama Hates Fox News," reveals how Obama's war on Fox News all began, how it unfolded, and even predicts what will happen in the future.

Boycotting debates, kicking journalists off a campaign jet, planting questions from friendly media during presidential news conferences, freezing adversarial media out of interviews, singling out individual journalists to scold them publicly — they've all been part of Team Obama's efforts at manipulating and intimidating the media.

Newsmax magazine's special report "Obama Hates Fox News" takes an in-depth look at Obama's army of advisers, who seem to some critics part of an audacious end-run around congressional authority.

3)Gene Healy: Mass. election refutes weak tea conservatism
By: Gene Healy

If Republican Scott Brown wins the Massachusetts special election Tuesday, the Bay State will have its first GOP senator since the era when disco was king. And Brown will have the much-derided Tea Party legions to thank. They've turned out in force, hoping he'll provide the vote needed to strangle Obamacare.

That ought to give pause to the "reformist" conservatives insisting that Reagan-Goldwater conservatism is dead. Yet the reformists' unofficial leader, former Bush speechwriter David Frum, puts a different spin on what Massachusetts portends.

Brown is no "talk-radio conservative," Frum maintains: As a state senator, he "voted in favor of Mitt Romney's health plan" and supported greenhouse gas curbs. It would be "a travesty" if his victory empowered "anger, paranoia and extremism," which is how Frum characterizes rank-and-file "rejectionism."

But it isn't a desire for Romneyish RINOism that has Tea Partiers sleeping on couches and getting the vote out for Brown. They're Exhibit A in what Frum recently termed the "furious rejectionist frenzy" motivating the GOP base.

"It's the rank and file who are the problem here!" Frum exclaimed: It has hamstrung GOP leaders by preventing them from cutting deals with President Obama.

Right now, though, "rejectionist frenzy" looks like smart politics and smart policy. Even if Brown loses, the fact that he came so close deep in Blue State territory will have some Democrats looking for an excuse to switch their vote on a health care bill that passed by the slimmest of margins in the House.

Whatever Tuesday's result, this much is clear: The small-government movement has little to learn from Weak Tea Conservatives like Frum, whose desperate search for relevance blinds them to the facts on the ground.

Frum makes No. 33 in the U.K. Telegraph's latest list of America's "most influential" conservatives, because he's "at the forefront of the debate over what conservatism should be and how the Republican party can recover." But Frum's contribution to that debate has been marked by hilariously inept advice.

Frum's 2007 book "Comeback" is subtitled "Conservatism That Can Win Again." It can win, he says, by getting serious about global warming and mounting a federal campaign against obesity. In a new, post-Obama afterword, Frum suggests that McCain should have picked Susan Collins as his running mate to appeal to independents.

In "Comeback," Frum praises Romneycare, the model for Obama's health reform, reprimanding my colleague Mike Tanner for opposing an individual mandate to purchase health insurance. The mandate is "unquestionably constitutional," Frum wrote last month, and Republicans are silly to question it.

Frum insists that conservatives need to learn from their recent electoral drubbings; but it seems he hasn't learned a thing from the Iraq war, a key contributor to GOP losses in 2006 and 2008. "America still needs the neocons," he proclaims in a Dec. 8 Newsweek piece. Why? Because, among other things, they're "practical."

This, from a man who co-authored a book proclaiming it's "victory or Holocaust" in the war on terror, and that new Iraqs may be necessary in North Korea, Iran and Syria. The title? "An End to Evil." There's a "practical" goal.

Frum's message to the GOP is: Give up on small government and gird for endless war. Neocons once boasted that they were "liberals mugged by reality," but somewhere along the line they learned how to fight back.

Frum isn't wrong about everything. It's probably true, as he says, that Sarah Palin's "willful divisiveness" alienated independents by setting up a split between "real Americans and not so real Americans." But it's a little ripe to hear that from a man who famously labeled the great Robert Novak an "unpatriotic conservative" for opposing the Iraq war.

And when Frum's wrong, he's really wrong. "Reagan Republicanism offers solutions to the problems of 40 years before, not to those of the 21st century," he writes in "Comeback."

Funny enough, though, the problems of 2010 -- rooted in an overweening government that recognizes no limits on its capabilities -- look a lot like the problems of the late '70s. Self-styled "reformist" conservatives may not recognize that, but the voters are starting to.


Examiner Columnist Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of "The Cult of the Presidency."

4)The Body Scanner Scam: Why invading our physical privacy at airports won't make us safe..
(By EDWARD N. LUTTWAK


All males have a body cavity. Females have two body cavities. In prisons, these body cavities are habitually used to smuggle drugs and improvised weapons past body searches, including complete nudity strip searches.

Given the power of widely available explosives, the amount that can be carried inside a body cavity—let alone two—is sufficient to destroy ordinary pressurized airliners at normal flight altitudes. That makes "pat downs," or indeed any form of physical inspection that is remotely feasible in any airport of any normal country, entirely futile. That alone rules out scanners as a solution unless they are both very-high definition and pat downs are not allowed as an alternative.

Futility has not of course deterred the United States from creating and operating a vast Transportation Security Administration apparatus critically dependent on metal detectors. At enormous cost, and by inflicting enormous inconvenience, it almost guarantees the detection of any explosive device—so long as it is firmly attached to a nail clipper.

Reliance on metal detectors was dubious from the start not only because they cannot detect explosives as such, but because they cannot even detect knives if they are made out of ceramic. Some manufacturers of ceramic knives add metal to them specifically to allow detection. Others do not and their knives are just as lethal—certainly more so than the short box cutters used by the 9/11 terrorists.

The scanners that are now to be acquired would perpetuate futility at even greater cost. True, it is perfectly feasible to design very high definition scanners that could detect objects inside body cavities, and at least one manufacturer already claims that capability. But to use those scanners would throw out any pretense of preserving privacy. It also would mean subjecting every passenger to whatever level of radiation those machines will emit. Recent research has demonstrated that the cancer risks of radiation have been grossly underestimated, even for medical equipment operated by qualified radiologists and their trained technicians. It is therefore no good showing that in the manufacturer's tests the level of radiation is only moderately harmful, because once distributed at airports, those machines will not necessarily be perfectly calibrated, nor will they be operated correctly by experts.

All along the alternative—which costs much less, inflicts much less inconvenience and would have a much higher probability of intercepting terrorists before the fact—has been staring us in the face. To screen passengers as persons instead of their bodies and belongings has an overwhelming advantage: It can detect a would-be terrorist even if the specific technique he tries to employ is not previously known. To inspect all shoes after a shoe bomber almost succeeded, or to pat down passengers after the underwear bomber almost succeeded, provides no defense against the next techniques that could be tried at any time.

To screen passengers as persons would reduce costs and inconvenience very greatly, because entire categories of passengers could be waived through with a rapid examination of travel documents and a few random checks now and then. These include a variety of easily recognizable groups that not even the most ingenious terrorists could simulate: touring senior citizens traveling together (a category that contains a good portion of all American, European and East Asian tourist traffic), airline flying personnel who come to the security gate as a crew, families complete with children, and more. In each case, the critical procedure would be to ask the group's members to recognize each other as such.

Many individuals could also be included in the document examination plus random check category: frequent travelers who have multiyear travel records with airline alliances, whose travel history could instantly be determined by the TSA. Evidently some travel histories would require further probing, in effect returning those passengers to the general category of travelers. They are the ones whose bodies and belongings would be checked with whatever detectors or manual methods are at hand, but who would also be asked a specific set of nonarbitrary questions laid down by frequently changed protocols. The aim would be to identify innocent travelers as quickly as possible to send them on their way, while being ready to persist with further questions that might even end with the denial of boarding and a referral to police authorities.

With such a system that would discriminate only positively—only in favor of groups and categories of passengers, and never against them—we could have real security at a drastically lower cost in money and inconvenience.

Mr. Luttwak, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is author of the recently published "The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire" (Harvard).