Obama'sLeanings Come As No Surprise!

Just a little more corruption. This time only the wife of a high placed Democrat Congressman, John Conyers, from Michigan. (See 1 below.)
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De-ja vu all over again> (See 2 below.)
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The Obama squeeze is on as he looks for another pinata? He found one in Netanyahu over Jerusalem.

It is one thing to tell a sovereign nation you do not recognize their Capital but to tell them they cannot build homes for their citizens in their own capital is really something else. Especially when these demands come from a so called friend Aftyer meeting with Obama, Netanyahu has every right to ask who needs enemies. (See 3, 3a and 3b below.)
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Obama and Jimmy have a lot in common when it comes to Israel - they are both petulant, vindictive and two faced. Obama may win the battle but eventually he will lose the war he might cause because he has chosen to place himself on the wrong side of history but then his Arabist leanings come as no surprise.

Obama to Netanyahu - don't diss the messiah!(See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)Conyers's wife pleads guilty

Monica Conyers pleads guilty Friday to federal bribery charges
Monica Conyers, the chairwoman of the Detroit City Council and wife of House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), pleaded guilty Friday to federal bribery charges, the latest blow to a city still reeling from the collapse of the U.S. auto industry and the jailing of its former mayor.

Monica Conyers pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery in connection with a city sludge-hauling scandal. As a member of the Detroit City Council in 2007, Conyers cast the deciding vote in favor of awarding a $1.2 billion contract to Synagro Technologies Inc.

Monica Conyers’s attorney said Friday that she would be sentenced to between 30 and 37 months in federal prison.

John Conyers, who did not attend his wife’s court session, declined to say anything to Capitol Hill reporters about his wife’s guilty plea, but his office later released a statement on the case.

“This has been a trying time for the Conyers family and, with hope and prayer, they will make it through this as a family,” the statement said. “Public officials must expect to be held to the highest ethical and legal standards. With this in mind, Mr. Conyers wants to work towards helping his family and city recover from this serious matter.”

Terrence Berg, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, whose office has conducted a two-year investigation of the Detroit City Council, said no other council member will be charged in the Synagro case, and added “that the evidence offered no suggestion that United States Representative John Conyers, Ms. Conyers’ husband, had any knowledge or role in Ms. Conyers’ illegal conduct, nor did the congressman attempt to influence this investigation in any way.”

Monica Conyers initially opposed the Synagro contract with the city but later reversed her position and cast the critical vote approving it. Her reversal caused uproar inside the city council, and federal investigators soon began looking into allegations of payoffs surrounding her vote.

According to Monica Conyers’s plea agreement with the Justice Department, “During the summer and winter of 2007, both before and after her vote, defendant received cash payments … from an individual sent by Rayford Jackson, a paid consultant for Synagro.”

Jackson pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery 10 days ago, leading to heavy speculation in Detroit political circles that Monica Conyers would soon accept a plea deal of her own.

Jackson’s payments to Monica Conyers totaled at least $6,000, according to news reports.

Monica Conyers, 44, was elected to the city council in January 2005, and in September 2008, she was named the council’s interim president.

Her tenure has been marred by controversy and complaints about her personal behavior. Last year, in a dispute during official council proceedings, Conyers called then-council President Ken Cockrel “Shrek.”

Earlier this year, Councilman Kwame Kenyatta accused Conyers of making fun of his poor hearing and lack of a college degree in a confrontation outside his office. Kenyatta also said Conyers had started rumors about him having cancer.

Monica Conyers also came under fire after the city’s pension board said she owed the city $5,600 in unpaid travel advances from last year.

With her guilty plea today, Monica Conyers joins former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick in the ranks of now disgraced Motor City politicians.

Following a long, winding investigation that convulsed city politics, Kilpatrick, son of Rep. Carolyn Kilpatrick (D-Mich.), pleaded guilty last year to obstruction of justice charges, resigned from office and served more than three months in jail.

The House ethics committee announced on Wednesday that Carolyn Kilpatrick would be among the five lawmakers that it would investigate as part of its probe into who paid for Caribbean trips in 2007 and 2008.

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2)Roosevelt Redux?
By Jon N. Hall

Democrats unreservedly revere Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and they've beatified him into secular sainthood. Republicans honor FDR for his leadership during World War II. Roosevelt is unique: No other American president has served more than two terms. And unless the Constitution is amended, no other president ever will.


Question: How would we remember Roosevelt had he not served a third term?


Rather differently. Without a third term, FDR would be remembered as the president who presided over the Great Depression, period. Though FDR inherited it, the Depression lasted throughout his first two terms and beyond, more than twice as long as it did under Hoover. And every mistake Hoover made, FDR repeated, and in spades. As Andrew B. Wilson in The Wall Street Journal explains:


Far from a free-market idealist, Hoover was an ardent believer in government intervention to support incomes and employment. This is critical to understanding the origins of the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt didn't reverse course upon moving into the White House in 1933; he went further down the path that Hoover had blazed over the previous four years. That was the path to disaster. [...] the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations -- in disregarding market signals at every turn -- were jointly responsible for turning a panic into the worst depression of modern times. As late as 1938, after almost a decade of governmental "pump priming," almost one out of five workers remained unemployed.


Although there is some debate about the exact numbers, the unemployment rates throughout FDR's first two terms were indisputably abysmal. Bill Beach of the Heritage Foundation concludes: "It was still the worst unemployment our nation has seen. It didn't get better until the war was on." (Larger sizes of the following chart can be found here.)







Despite the pain of millions of Americans during his first two terms, it is precisely this part of FDR's tenure that generations of Democrats have held up as his triumph. That's because the first two terms were when FDR and his compliant Congress expanded government. It doesn't matter that Americans were hungry, nor even that the New Deal prolonged the Depression. No, what matters to Democrats is that we have a bright shiny new set of agencies, bureaus, and entitlements.


FDR's record would have been further tarnished had someone else been president when America finally recovered. And we can be fairly confident that the Depression would have ended on Willkie's watch. Why? Because any change would have been an improvement: FDR & Co. were doing everything wrong.


"Everything wrong" is the assessment recently given Pres. Obama by editor Mort Zuckerman: "[H]e's trying to boil the ocean, trying to do too much. This is not leadership." Obama fancies himself a transformative president in the mold of FDR. And the two do indeed have some things in common. Here are a few:


Like with FDR, unemployment is not at the top of Obama's agenda. In "How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America," the cover story for the March issue of the Atlantic, Don Peck writes:


The unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October, and there are good reasons to believe that by 2011, 2012, even 2014, it will have declined only a little. Late last year, the average duration of unemployment surpassed six months, the first time that has happened since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that number. As of this writing, for every open job in the U.S., six people are actively looking for work.


FDR never balanced the budget, and he ran the highest deficits in history. And this came after a full decade of back-to-back surpluses. With trillion-dollar deficits for as far as the eye can see, no one sees a balanced budget under Obama.


FDR flouted the Constitution, suffering several setbacks from the Supreme Court. And just as we predicted, the states are resisting Obamacare on constitutional grounds. On March 17, Idaho Gov. C. L. "Butch" Otter signed a measure requiring his attorney general to sue the federal government over the constitutionality of Obamacare's individual mandate. John Miller of the Associated Press reports:


There's similar legislation pending in 37 other states, a point Otter stressed when asked if the bill he signed can succeed, given constitutional law experts are already saying federal laws would supersede those of states in a U.S. District Court fight.


"The ivory tower folks will tell you, 'No, they're not going anywhere,'" he told reporters. "But I'll tell you what, you get 36 states, that's a critical mass. That's a constitutional mass."


Perhaps the states will save America from the federal government. Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli has promised a challenge to Obamacare. (Is contempt for the Constitution a trait of transformative presidents?)


FDR came to power in 1933, the same year as Hitler. But while Hitler immediately set out to trash the Treaty of Versailles, put troops in the Rhineland, build up a massive war machine, and invade his neighbors, FDR busied himself with his domestic agenda. Likewise, Obama busies himself with his domestic agenda (Obamacare, cap-and-trade, amnesty for illegal aliens, etc.) while Iran inches ever closer to having nukes.


FDR desperately needed a third term to salvage his legacy. FDR began to redeem himself on the day that would live in infamy. Without his wartime performance to burnish it, FDR's record would be an abject failure: No other president has presided over two full terms of economic depression.


But hey, we mustn't let anything stand in the way of "fundamentally transforming America."


Jon N. Hall is a programmer/analyst from Kansas City.
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3)Israel risks Obama presidential condemnation over Jerusalem


US president Barack Obama kept on turning the screw on Israeli minister Binyamin Netanyahu Wednesday, March 24, after their harsh conversation in the White House Tuesday: Netanyahu was told bluntly to issue before leaving Washington for home a White House-dictated public pledge to eschew further construction in East Jerusalem, or else face a US presidential notice condemning Israel and holding its government responsible for the failure to restart indirect Israel-Palestinian talks.

Washington sources add Netanyahu's public renunciation of Jerusalem construction was required to include also the large Jewish suburbs of the city and remain in force for the duration of negotiations. He must also pledge further concessions to the Palestinians.

As part of the ultimatum, the US president warned the Israeli prime minister that he also intended formulating in detail for the first time the settlement the US government sought for solving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

A high-ranking US official categorized the current crisis in US-Israeli relations as the most acute in 54 years, ever since 1956 when President Dwight Eisenhower gave David Ben-Gurion an ultimatum to pull Israeli forces out of Sinai - certainly more serious than the impasse over the Madrid conference between the first President Bush and Yitzhak Shamir in 1992.

A US presidential notice condemning Israel and predetermining the shape of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement would be tantamount to a US diktat and put the lid on negotiations, direct or indirect, because Israel would be dragged to the table in handcuffs to face an Arab partner who would accept nothing less than the terms Washington imposed in advance on Israel.

Such a notice would put a clamp on the close dialogue which has historically characterized US-Israeli ties to the detriment of Israel's international standing.
In the shadow of Obama's threat, Netanyahu and defense minister Ehud Barak spent their last hours in the US capital working on a statement that might satisfy him. These negotiations are led by Barak working out of the Israel embassy and the president's special adviser Dennis Ross from the National Security Council's office at the White House.

3a) Hillary adds fuel to fire
By Yoram Ettinger


Establishment of Palestinian state would promote rather than curb terror.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton exposed worrisome aspects of President Obama's policy toward Jerusalem in particular and toward Israel in general, during her March 22, 2010 AIPAC speech. Clinton ignores the Texas colloquialism: "The first thing to do, if you find yourself in a deep hole, is stop digging." The former senator and aspiring presidential candidate is, apparently, determined to learn from mistakes by repeating – rather than avoiding – them.


For instance, while Prime Minister Netanyahu declares that construction shall persist throughout Jerusalem, Secretary Clinton reiterates President Obama’s policy, which leads to the repartitioning of Jerusalem, in contrast with the position of most Americans and most members of the House and Senate: "New construction in Jerusalem… undermines that mutual trust and endangers the proximity talks…It exposes daylight between Israel and the US…(and) undermines America's unique ability to play a role in the peace process…"



Clinton has become the spearhead of the psychological war against Netanyahu that aims to perpetuate the 10-month construction freeze in Judea and Samaria, to expand the freeze to Jerusalem and to roll the Jewish State back to the pre-1967 lines on all fronts. Hillary Clinton believes that the feeble Israeli response to Vice President Biden's rebuke of construction in eastern Jerusalem – Israel's line in the sand – vindicates the use of psychological pressure and begs its intensification.


Clinton's AIPAC speech revealed that President Obama insists that Jerusalem – the core of Jewish aspirations – and "the claim of return" by the 1948 Arab refugees – the core of the threat to the survival of the Jewish State – are negotiable. She condemns Jewish construction in the Jewish capital and cautions against "unilateral statements and actions that undermine the process or prejudice the outcome of talks." Pressuring Israel to repartition Jerusalem, Clinton defines legal Jewish construction as an obstacle to peace, while condoning Arab construction and attempting to stop the demolition of illegal Arab construction.


Clinton ignores Jerusalem's unique role in shaping Jewish history during the last 3,000 years. Thus, she applies the immoral moral-equivalence to the Jewish State and to the Palestinian Authority, which underlines Obama's policy: "The US recognizes that Jerusalem is a deeply, profoundly important issue for Israelis and Palestinians, for Jews, Muslims and Christians."


Death sentence to Hashemite regime
Inadvertently, Clinton radicalizes Arab expectations, demands and terrorism. Why would Arabs be less extreme than Clinton when it comes to Jerusalem?! Why would Arabs demonstrate flexibility, while Clinton represents their demands aggressively and ably?! Why would Arabs consider any compromise when Clinton accepts their position and attempts to prejudge the outcome (e.g. opposing Jewish construction and supporting Arab construction)?! Why would Arabs refrain from terrorism, when sweeping concessions by Israel to the PLO/PA – the role model of hate education, violation of commitments, hijacking, murder of US diplomats and international terrorism – prove that terrorists can get away with - and be rewarded for - murder?!


The secretary of state recycles Obama's worldview – which leads him to focus on the Palestinian issue and to exert psychological pressure on the Jewish State – that the resolution of the Palestinian issue would supposedly be the panacea to Middle East turbulence and the Arab-Israeli conflict. She overlooks the possibility – which is based on PLO’s track record – that the establishment of a Palestinian State would constitute fuel – and not water – to the fire of terrorism in the Middle East and beyond.


For example, the proposed Palestinian State would constitute a death sentence to the pro-US Hashemite regime, would generate tailwind to pro-Saddam Iraqis, would provide a logistic and operational base to terrorist organizations, which threaten pro-US Persian Gulf regimes, would accord a strategic foothold to Iran, Russia, China, North Korea and other rivals and enemies of the US, etc. Clinton fails to realize that Arab countries consider the PLO a lethal subversive organization. Therefore, Arabs shower the PLO and the PA with much rhetoric, but refrain from sharing with the PLO their military and financial potential.



Clinton is certain that the Arab-Israeli conflict is over territory, in defiance of the last 100 years, which prove that the conflict is over the existence – and not over the size – of the Jewish state. Therefore, she has embraced the Land-for-Peace formula, which has been employed since Oslo, in spite of the fact that it has produced unprecedented hate-education and terrorism, has distanced us from peace and has brought us closer to war. Erroneous assumptions lead toward erroneous – and even bloody – policy, as has been the case since Oslo 1993.



Toward the end of her AIPAC speech, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed much respect toward the coming Passover holiday and to the voyage to the Promised Land. These were events which defined the American ethos since the 17th century. These were critical events, which define the Jewish ethos, underlining the centrality of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, the Cradle of Jewish History. These events highlight the gap between Obama's policy on one hand and the American and the Jewish ethos on the other hand.

3b)Israel pledges to launch proximity talks
By HILARY LEILA KRIEGER AND HERB KEINON



PM and staff work to provide Obama with commitments he can take to Arabs.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his staff worked furiously with US officials on Wednesday to put together a document outlining Israeli commitments and obligations to launch proximity talks with the Palestinians, after two hours of meetings between Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama failed to resolve disagreements between the two countries.

The Israeli effort seemed aimed at garnering goodwill from the Americans after a White House meeting that appeared to do little to dissipate recent tensions between the two allies.

Talks with US Middle East envoy George Mitchell were added to the schedule in the afternoon, following deliberations Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Ambassador Michael Oren and top aides held at the Israeli Embassy in Washington earlier in the day.

The Israeli team was working on a document to provide to the White House before Netanyahu’s planned departure on Wednesday night, later than originally expected, according to diplomatic officials in Jerusalem.

The document was “so far-reaching” that the prime minister and Barak needed to consult with the other five members of the inner cabinet known as the “septet,” according to one official, who noted that phone consultation with the ministers was expected before the document would be finalized.

The document is believed to consist of a series of Israeli commitments to the US outlining confidence-building measures toward the Palestinians and a willingness to deal with the core issues – settlements, Jerusalem, refugees and security – during the proximity talks. The assumption is that the US will then take this document to the Palestinians, and to the Arab League, which is meeting in Tripoli, Libya, this weekend, and say that this was what Israel has agreed upon in writing.

“The prime minister is making every effort to leave Washington on a positive note and bring an immediate renewal of peace talks with Palestinians to fruition,” an Israel official stressed.

Aside from a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office describing Netanyahu’s private conversation with Obama on Tuesday night as being held “in a good atmosphere,” few positive words were offered on the meeting.

American officials only went so far as to say there was an “honest and straightforward discussion” that was “frank, candid and open.”

“The president asked the prime minister to take steps to build confidence for proximity talks so that progress can be made toward comprehensive Middle East peace,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said. “There are areas of agreement, there are areas of disagreement, and that conversation is ongoing.”

Gibbs, along with several other US and Israeli officials, declined to discuss the specific content of the meeting or what disagreements he referred to.

The only details Gibbs offered concerned the time frame of the meeting, noting that Obama and Netanyahu had met privately for an hour and a half in the Oval Office, after which the prime minister and his aides spoke on their own in the Roosevelt Room. Netanyahu then asked that Obama return, according to Gibbs, and the two men talked again for another 35 minutes, concluding right before 9 p.m.

He also said that the two leaders’ staffs continued the conversation until nearly 1 a.m. before picking up again on Wednesday.

The meeting was held amid a total media blackout, with no press conference, photos or even a joint statement issued afterward.

Such treatment is highly unusual for a head of government, especially from a close ally, and gave rise to widespread speculation that the president did not want to reward Netanyahu with a photo of the two together.

The last time they met, when Netanyahu came to Washington in November to address the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America, the meeting was shrouded in similar secrecy. But on that occasion, aides on both sides were at pains to stress that it was positive encounter.

This time, not only were such characterizations lacking, but the tension surrounding the meeting and suspicions that it went badly were intensified by reports published right before the meeting that the Jerusalem Municipality gave final approval to a request to build 20 apartments for Jews in the Shepherd Hotel compound in east Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.

The recent US-Israeli row was sparked when an Interior Ministry panel approved 1,600 housing units in east Jerusalem during a visit by Vice President Joe Biden, a move Washington would like to see reversed.

US officials declined to specify whether that incident came up during the conversation with the prime minister, but State Department spokesman Mark Toner said that American is “seeking clarification” on the issue.

He also said, “We’ve made our position on Jerusalem clear on many occasions. We believe this is a final-status issue and that both sides should refrain from acts that could undermine trust or prejudge the outcome of negotiations.”

In response to the waves this announcement stirred up, Netanyahu’s spokesman Nir Hefetz issued a statement saying that there were no restrictions on Jews or Arabs buying properties throughout Jerusalem.

Regarding the specific project in Sheikh Jarrah, Hefetz said that the final approvals for the project were received a number of months ago, in 2009. “Reports as if a new decision on this issue was taken close to the prime minister’s visit to Washington are incorrect,” he said.


When asked about the Israeli explanation, specifically the charts on the layers of bureaucracy involved in any zoning decision, Toner replied, “To parse out their explanations is something they need to do, not us.” But he said that in the Shepherd Hotel decision was “all part of the ongoing discussion.”

Toner said that discussion would continue over the next week as lower-level officials hold contacts in the region, including talks with Palestinians planned by the US consul-general in Jerusalem and Mitchell deputy David Hale.

He added that Mitchell was expected to return to the region after Pessah
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4) Obama and Netanyahu: pointless poison
By Jackson Diehl


So it’s now been two weeks since President Obama chose to seize on a poorly-timed Israeli announcement about new Jewish housing in Jerusalem to launch another public confrontation with the government of Binyamin Netanyahu. The results, so far, are these:

Obama’s demand, through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that Israel reverse its decision on the new neighborhood and freeze all other new construction in Jerusalem has been publicly rejected by Netanyahu. And the administration, for the second time in a year, has backed down. “Ultimately,” said State spokesman P.J. Crowley at his briefing Tuesday, “the future of Jerusalem can only be resolved through the direct negotiations [between Israel and the Palestinians] that we hope will get started as quickly as possible.” That, word for word, has been the Israeli position all along.

Meanwhile, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has adopted Obama’s original demand as his own: He’s saying he won’t begin even the indirect, “proximity” talks he previously agreed to until Israel accepts the Clinton terms on Jerusalem. How could he do otherwise? The Palestinian leader cannot be less pro-Palestinian than the White House. But Abbas cannot climb down from his position so easily -- which means that, for the second time in a year, the Middle East peace process has been stalled by a U.S.-engineered deadlock. U.S. and Israeli negotiators worked until 3 a.m. Wednesday in an attempt to come up with a formula that would allow the talks to go forward. They met again Wednesday morning. So far, no luck.

Finally, Obama has added more poison to a U.S.-Israeli relationship that already was at its lowest point in two decades. Tuesday night the White House refused to allow non-official photographers record the president’s meeting with Netanyahu; no statement was issued afterward. Netanyahu is being treated as if he were an unsavory Third World dictator, needed for strategic reasons but conspicuously held at arms length. That is something the rest of the world will be quick to notice and respond to. Just like the Palestinians, European governments cannot be more friendly to an Israeli leader than the United States. Would Britain have expelled a senior Israeli diplomat Tuesday because of a flap over forged passports if there were no daylight between Obama and Netanyahu? Maybe not.

The White House’s explanations for Obama’s behavior keep shifting. At first spokesmen insisted that the president had to respond to the “insult” of the settlement announcement during a visit to Jerusalem by Vice President Biden -- even though the administration knew that, far from being a calculated snub, the decision by a local council had taken Netanyahu himself by surprise.

Next the administration argued that the scrap was a needed wake-up call for Netanyahu’s right-wing government, which, it was said, had been put on notice that its failure to move toward a settlement with Palestinians was endangering U.S. interests in the region. But -- assuming for the moment that the administration’s premise is correct -- Obama chose to challenge Netanyahu on a point that is not material to the creation of a Palestinian state. As the Israeli leader has pointed out, previous U.S. administrations and the Palestinians themselves have already accepted that Jewish neighborhoods in and around Jerusalem will be annexed to Israel in exchange for territory elsewhere.

U.S. pressure on Netanyahu will be needed if the peace process ever reaches the point where the genuinely contentious issues, like Palestinian refugees or the exact territorial tradeoffs, are on the table. But instead of waiting for that moment and pushing Netanyahu on a point where he might be vulnerable to domestic challenge, Obama picked a fight over something that virtually all Israelis agree on, and before serious discussions have even begun. As the veteran Middle East analyst Robert Malley put it to The Post’s Glenn Kessler, “U.S. pressure can work, but it needs to be at the right time, on the right issue and in the right political context. The administration is ready for a fight, but it realized the issue, timing and context were wrong.”

A new administration can be excused for making such a mistake in the treacherous and complex theater of Middle East diplomacy. That’s why Obama was given a pass by many when he made exactly the same mistake last year. The second time around, the president doesn’t look naive. He appears ideological -- and vindictive.
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