Lloyd Marcus Get It!

Marriage bliss in New Hampshire. (See 1 below.)
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Lloyd Marcus is a black American and he gets it.

This was sent to me by a friend, fellow memo reader and extreme Liberal. Frankly, I do not know why. (See 2 below.)

The Washington Post, The Constitution and slavery. If reading The Constitution on the floor of The House creates such angst amongst progressives maybe we should just burn it along with the flag. (See 2a and 2b below.)
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Does Iran have short cuts it can take in achieving nuclear weapons? (See 3 below.)

Sec. Clinton presses forward with sanctions as the best solution. (See 3a below.)
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Fred Barnes identifies his own exceptional Republicans. (See 4 below.)
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More on cloud computing. (See 5 below.)
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Israel targets Hamas' command centers built by Iran after rocketing continues. (See 6 below.)
Dick
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1)I just got off the phone with friend living in northern New Hampshire near the Canadian border.

He said that since early this morning the snow has been nearly waist high and is still falling.


The temperature is dropping way below zero and the north wind is increasing to near gale force. His wife has done nothing but look through the kitchen window and just stare.


He says that if it gets much worse,
he may have to let her in
_____________________________________________________________________________________2)A BLACK MAN, THE PROGRESSIVE'S PERFECT TROJAN HORSE
By Lloyd Marcus


As millions of my fellow Americans, I am outraged, devastated and extremely angry by the democrat's unbelievable arrogance and disdain for We The People. Despite our screaming "no" from the rooftops, they forced Obamacare down our throats. Please forgive me for using the following crude saying, but it is very appropriate to describe what has happened. "Don't urinate on me and tell me it's raining." Democrats say their mission is to give all Americans health care. The democrats are lying. Signing Obamacare into law against our will and the Constitution is tyranny and step one of their hideous goal of having as many Americans as possible dependent on government, thus controlling our lives and fulfilling Obama's promise to fundamentally transform America ..

I keep asking myself. How did our government move so far from the normal procedures of getting things done? Could a white president have so successfully pulled off shredding the Constitution to further his agenda? I think not.

Ironically, proving America is completely the opposite of the evil racist country they relentlessly accuse her of being, progressives used America 's goodness, guilt and sense of fair play against her.. In their quest to destroy America as we know it, progressives borrowed a brilliant scheme from Greek mythology. They offered America a modern day Trojan Horse, a beautifully crafted golden shiny new black man as a presidential candidate. Democrat Joe Biden lauded Obama as the first clean and articulate African American candidate. Democrat Harry Reid said Obama only uses a black dialect when he wants.

White America relished the opportunity to vote for a black man naively believing they would never suffer the pain of being called racist again. Black Americans viewed casting their vote for Obama as the ultimate Affirmative Action for America 's sins of the past.

Then there were the entitlement loser voters who said, "I'm votin' for the black dude who promises to take from those rich SOBs and give to me."

Just as the deceived Trojans dragged the beautifully crafted Trojan Horse into Troy as a symbol of their victory, deceived Americans embraced the progressive's young, handsome, articulate and so called moderate black presidential candidate as a symbol of their liberation from accusation of being a racist nation. Also like the Trojan Horse, Obama was filled with the enemy hiding inside.

Sunday, March 21, 2010, a secret door opened in Obama, the shiny golden black man. A raging army of democrats charged out. Without mercy, they began their vicious bloody slaughter of every value, freedom and institution we Americans hold dear; launching the end of America as we know it.

Wielding swords of votes reeking with the putrid odor of back door deals, the democrats landed a severe death blow to America and individual rights by passing Obamacare.

The mainstream liberal media has been relentlessly badgering the Tea Party movement with accusations of racism. Because I am a black tea party patriot, I am bombarded with interviewers asking me the same veiled question. "Why are you siding with these white racists against America 's first African American president?" I defend my fellow patriots who are white stating, "These patriots do not give a hoot about Obama's skin color. They simply love their country and oppose his radical agenda. Obama's race is not an issue."

Recently, I have come to believe that perhaps I am wrong about Obama's race not being an issue. In reality, Obama's presidency has everything to do with racism, but not from the Tea Party movement. Progressives and Obama have exploited his race from the rookie senator's virtually unchallenged presidential campaign to his unprecedented bullying of America into Obamacare. Obama's race trumped all normal media scrutiny of him as a presidential candidate and most recently even the Constitution of the United States .. Obamacare forces all Americans to purchase health care which is clearly unconstitutional.

No white president could get away with boldly and arrogantly thwarting the will of the American people and ignoring laws. President Clinton tried universal health care. Bush tried social security reform. The American people said "no" to both president's proposals and it was the end of it. So how can Obama get away with giving the American people the finger? The answer. He is black.

The mainstream liberal media continues to portray all who oppose Obama in any way as racist. Despite a list of failed policies, overreaches into the private sector, violations of the Constitution and planned destructive legislation too numerous to mention in this article, many Americans are still fearful of criticizing our first black president. Incredible.

My fellow Americans, you must not continue to allow yourselves to be "played" and intimidated by Obama's race or the historical context of his presidency. If we are to save America , the greatest nation on the planet, Obama's progressive agenda must be stopped.

Lloyd Marcus (black) Unhyphenated American, Singer/Songwriter, Entertainer, Author, Artist & Tea Party Patriot

2a)The Constitution Did Not Condone Slavery
By Ken Blackwell and Bob Morrison

"There's nothing new under the sun," said President Harry Truman, " there's only history we haven't learned yet." The history we haven't learned yet was on display on page one of the Washington Post. Post writers Philip Rucker and David Farenthold reported on the reading of the Constitution by newly sworn in Members of the 112th Congress.


Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) led the novel exercise and defended the decision not to read those portions of the Constitution that have been superseded by amendment. After all, it makes little sense to explain in detail how the president and vice president are to be chosen as the top two finishers in the Electoral College when the Twelfth Amendment changed all of that. (A good thing, too. Imagine how well George W. Bush and Al Gore would have gotten along for the first four years of the new century.)


The Rucker-Farenthold article was nowhere labeled analysis, but who expects anything but front-page editorials these days, anyway? They waded right in to a two-hundred-twenty-two-year-old controversy when they flatly stated that the original Constitution "condoned" slavery.


Abraham Lincoln did not agree. He revered the Constitution and said that the fact that it nowhere mentioned the words "slavery," "slave," "African," or "Negro" was a silent but powerful admission that the Founders were ashamed of the existence of slavery among them. They hid it away, Lincoln said, as "an afflicted man hides a wen or tumor."


Abolitionist editor and orator Frederick Douglass also did not agree. He emphasized eloquently that not one word would have to be changed in the Constitution if only the states would follow George Washington's example and voluntarily give up slavery.


Lincoln and Douglass were right. James Madison explained why there was no mention of slavery in the Constitution. The framers were unwilling to admit in the federal charter that there could be property in men.


The idea that our Constitution "condoned" slavery and was therefore an immoral document unworthy of being viewed with reverence is a stock liberal claim. It is false.


Most of the Founders wanted to abolish the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Jefferson had denounced that "execrable traffic" in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence.


But South Carolina and Georgia delegates would not go along, and, significantly, some in New England recognized the powerful influence of merchants whose ships included slavers.


But they were able to get into the original Constitution a provision which allowed Congress to ban the Slave Trade in twenty years. How odd for all those Washington liberals who today tout compromise to attack as immoral and vile this most important of compromises. Would most of the Founders have so desperately wanted to ban the Slave Trade if they thought it a good thing? If they condoned it?


When, as president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson urged Congress to act before January 1, 1808 to ban the Slave Trade, he denounced it in the strongest language ever used by any president prior to Lincoln. He called it a violation of the "human rights of unoffending Africans." The great work of William Wilberforce in abolishing the Slave Trade in the British Empire would have been fruitless unless Jefferson had acted simultaneously in America.


Then, there's the Post's ritual repeating of the falsehood that the Founders viewed black people as "three-fifths of a person." That is a wholly tendentious misreading of the Three-Fifths Clause. Don Fehrenbacher is a leading authority on this. In his penetrating study, The Slaveholding Republic, he writes, "[The] fraction 'three-fifths' had no racial meaning. It did not represent a perception of blacks as three-fifths human[.]" It was a compromise on methods of levying taxes and apportioning representation in Congress.


Further, the Three-Fifths Compromise reduced the power in Congress of slaveholding states while giving an electoral bonus to any state that voluntarily emancipated its slaves. When seven of the original thirteen states abolished slavery, they were allowed to count free black people in the census for purposes of representation in Congress.


It is especially galling to have liberals attack Republican members on these matters. They forget that it was Republicans who gave us the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments -- those great guarantees of civil rights. Every vote cast against those amendments was cast by a Democrat. It was Republicans who passed the first anti-lynching bill in the House -- in 1922. Those bills were routinely killed by Senate Democrats until 1957.


The Democratic Party did much to overcome its legacy. Starting in 1948, with Mayor Hubert Humphrey's powerful call for civil rights at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, right up to Lyndon Johnson signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act first offered by President Kennedy, the Democrats deserve credit.


But in all that time, they were competing with a Republican Party whose civil rights credentials were solid and understood. Without Sen. Everett Dirksen's solid phalanx of Republicans, the Democrats' filibuster against the Civil Rights Act could not have been broken.


Let's rejoice that we have come this far. Let's not use the reading of the Constitution as an occasion for scoring cheap -- and false -- political points. Let's proceed as Lincoln proceeded: with malice toward none.


Ken Blackwell and Bob Morrison are senior fellows with the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C.


2b)Progressives and the 'Bad Stuff' in the Constitution
By David R. Stokes

It is hard to actually believe that something as prototypically American as a public reading of the U.S. Constitution by people recently sworn to uphold it could be at all controversial. For that matter, it is even harder to believe that such an exercise should become the subject for ridicule by the very people -- the press -- whose free speech the founders went out of their way to protect. That the venerable document remains the oldest written Constitution in use by any nation on the planet is but one testament to its significance and enduring relevance.


But to hear the media buzz in the aftermath of the reading of by members of the House of Representatives from both political parties, it is clear that some on the left simply don't get it. And stepping forward as the spokesperson for the mockers is Rachel Maddow, host of her own weeknight show on MSNBC.


Seizing on the fact that the reading this past Thursday left out the parts of the Constitution that were later repudiated and revised, Maddow insisted that these parts should have been left in to highlight that there are flaws in the supreme law of our land, what she called "dumb and evil stuff." She seems to miss the point that the Constitution itself includes provisions for fixing errors.


Maddow reminded her listeners the other night that "the Constitution is not the ten commandments," though one wonders how seriously Rachel actually takes Mosaic Law. She is a bright and articulate broadcaster, well-educated -- that process even including a doctorate from Oxford University (Rhodes scholar) -- but in the case of the Constitution, her liberal bias generates more heat than her intellect can handle. She argues that when it comes to the Constitution of the United States:


You can handle that truth in one of two ways. You could acknowledge that the Constitution has had really crazy stuff in it from time to time, use that as a teaching moment. The Constitution is a living document that has changed over time in ways both bad and good as the country as gotten older. Or you can be a Constitutional fundamentalist and ignore the fact that there has been bad stuff in it over time.


This is the debate equivalent of "heads, I win -- tails, you lose."


The idea that the Constitution has changed over the years "in ways both good and bad" is itself flawed. As evidence of the "bad," Maddow predictably cites the 18th Amendment, the one enforcing Prohibition. Sadly, and with apparent obliviousness, Maddow tasked Ted Williams, the Andy Warhol Man-of-the-Hour-with-the-Golden-Voice, to read it on her show as part of his current media tour. Never mind that the image of a man whose life has been hitherto destroyed by alcohol and other substances, most of which remain "prohibited," thankfully, reading words about a well-meaning effort to assuage the scourge of substance abuse was awkward, to say the least.


The salient point is that the 18th amendment, which had wide political support in the first decades of the 20th century, was eventually repealed. Yet Maddow puts it front and center as proof that the Constitution can't be taken all that seriously.


Really?


The Prohibition movement was driven in this country largely by the political movement known as Progressivism. In fact, it was one of its most prominent and unifying ideas, closely related to the burgeoning women's suffrage movement. Arguably, a case can be made that the first impact women made on the American political landscape while en route to the right to vote was in the battle against booze. The history of the Prohibition movement cannot be told without recounting the role of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).


So it is ironic that the part of the Constitution Rachel Maddow & Co. use to "prove" its fallibility and irrelevance today was actually crucial to the thinking of a very liberal movement it its time. In fact, feminists today owe a debt of gratitude to the brave women who sought, via a war on liquor, to change their world.


And if Prohibition seems now in hindsight to be absurd and unworkable (as it indeed turned out to be), it should be considered that the current "Progressive" wars on things such as smoking and obesity as part of the national health-care discussion are not all that far removed from the mindset that brought us Prohibition. The 18th Amendment was repealed, but it is still referred to by many as a "noble experiment." And its failure highlights the flaws of all big-government efforts to micromanage personal lives.


The presence of an 18th Amendment in the Constitution is not evidence of "bad stuff." Rather, it is evidence of what can happen when the people decide to deliberate about an idea over decades, only to find that all their best hopes and efforts don't turn out to be practical. And the 21st Amendment to the Constitution, the one repealing the 18th, is evidence that our system works very well.


But the Rachel Maddows of the world have no patience for process. Their talk of a "living Constitution" does not involve the idea of lengthy national debate and structured deliberation. Quite to the contrary, were Prohibition the law of the land today, they would ignore the remedy of a new constitutional amendment and opt instead for various legal maneuvers, thus rendering the wording in the Constitution itself moot.


In other words, in pursuit of a living Constitution, what these liberals really seek is its effective death as a document to be taken seriously.


David R. Stokes is a minister, author, columnist, and broadcaster. His new book, The Shooting Salvationist (foreword by Bob Schieffer), will be released by Random House in July of 2011.
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3)Iran could take a short cut to a nuclear bomb before 2015

Dagan, when he retired as Mossad chief last week, estimated that difficulties had held back Iran's race for a nuclear bomb until early 2014 or 2015. He did not mention the Stuxnet virus invading its systems or the untimely deaths of its nuclear scientists. He did refer to arguments in Iran's ruling elite which had delayed the attainment of its goal, indicating that without those disputes Tehran would have acquired a nuclear capability by now - or very soon.

But most strikingly, Dagan omitted mention of the short cuts available to Iran, as noted here by debkafile's military, intelligence and Iranian sources:

1. Not all Iran's concealed nuclear facilities have been discovered by Western intelligence – not even Mossad. Given Iran's record of concealment, it would be foolish, for instance, to ignore the possibility of a secret plant enriching uranium at full speed somewhere underground out of range of the UN nuclear watchdog's cameras recording every centrifuge spinning at Natanz. They may still be undetected by spy satellites and unbeknownst even to the defectors and double agents willing to collaborate with the West.

A single secret facility of this kind would invalidate the current Western estimate of Iran's stock of low-grade enriched uranium as standing at 3,000 kilos. The real amount could be 20 times or even 100 times as much, enough for three or four bombs.

2. The same applies to the "malfunctions" undoubtedly holding up the program. No competent agency would risk guaranteeing that every last Iranian facility has been crippled or exposed to cyber invasion. The publicity surrounding Stuxnet and the deaths or defections of Iranian nuclear scientists has conveyed the impression of a nation on the point of collapse, whose every nook and cranny is wide open to the long arm of Western and Israeli spy agencies.

But who knows what really goes on in the top-secret laboratories of Shahid Beheshti University in northern Tehran, which employed the two nuclear scientists targeted for attack last month? It is there that much of the research is conducted from Iran's nuclear and missile programs. But there is no certainty that a parallel research institution is not operating in some other dark place.

3. Iran has been known in the past to have established or transferred sensitive nuclear facilities outside the country to remove them from the sight of alien intelligence agencies and safeguard them against sabotage, like the audacious attack of Oct. 12, 2010 against a hidden Shehab-3 missile store at the Revolutionary Guards Imam Ali base in northwest Iran. The consequences of this attack were as destructive as the Stuxnet invasion.

It will be recalled that only when the Israeli Air Force struck the North Korean-built plutonium reactor at A-Zur in northern Syria in Sept. 2007 was this vital external link in Iran's nuclear program revealed.

Tehran, Pyongyang and Damascus resumed their nuclear collaboration in early 2009, sources disclose. Three or four secret military research centers are going up in Syria at this moment, which is why Damascus denies International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors access to suspect nuclear sites.

Western intelligence, including the Mossad, knows very little about Iran's nuclear partnership with North Korea. An Iranian military nuclear mission has been discovered based permanently in Pyongyang. It was substantially expanded in recent weeks raising the suspicion in the US and Israel that a joint nuclear test is planned to take place at the North Korean testing site in the course of this year.

If North Korea performed this service for Iran, Dagan's 2015 estimate would no longer apply.

4. All the deadlines predicted for Iran's nuclear programs are therefore problematic.
Early on in the last decade, in 2000, Western and Israeli intelligence anticipated Iran would have a nuclear bomb or warhead by 2007. That year, the timeline was pushed back to 2009 and then again to 2011. The gap has widened now to 2015. However, there is no guarantee from any quarter that the latest estimate is any more credible than the old ones and that Tehran is not capable of throwing it awry by one stealthy ruse or another – this time not for another delay but by jumping the gun.

3a)Clinton dismisses outgoing Mossad chief's assessment about Iran nuclear program
Visiting the Gulf region, the U.S. Secretary of State urges increased pressure on Iran.
By Reuters

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dismissed on Sunday Israeli assessments of delays in the Iranian nuclear program and called for more work on sanctions to bring Tehran to heel.

Clinton, on a tour of Gulf Arab countries to shore up support for pressure on Iran, arrived in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. She will also visit Dubai, Oman and Qatar on the five-day trip.


Global powers are preparing for another round of talks with Iran this month over its nuclear program.

Clinton said a recent assessment by the retiring chief of Israel's Mossad intelligence service that Iran would not be able to build an atomic bomb until at least 2015 should not undercut international determination to keep the pressure on Iran through sanctions and other means to come clean about its atomic work.

"The timeline is not so important as the international effort to try to ensure that whatever the timeline, Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons," Clinton told reporters on her plane as it arrived in Abu Dhabi.

"I don't know that it gives much comfort to somebody who is in the Gulf, or who is in a country that Iran has vowed to destroy, that it's a one-year or a three-year timeframe."

Clinton did not dispute the views of Mossad's retiring director Meir Dagan, whose comments published on Friday were interpreted as evidence of new Israeli confidence in U.S.-led sanctions and covert action designed to discourage or delay Tehran's uranium enrichment program.

Dagan's views echo cautions expressed both in Jerusalem and Washington about possible use of force against Iran, which denies seeking nuclear arms and has vowed to retaliate against Israel and U.S. interests for any such attack.

"I think we should keep the attention where it belong," Clinton said, adding that she was confident existing sanctions on Iran "have had a very significant impact."

U.S. underscores Gulf security

Western intelligence agencies say Iran could make a bomb by the middle of the decade, should it choose to enrich uranium to higher levels and master weaponization techniques.

Clinton's Gulf visit, her second in two months, is aimed at underscoring U.S. security commitments to its allies in the oil-rich region, who are among those who feel most threatened by Iran's nuclear plans.

The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council - the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia - along with Germany are due to hold a second round of talks with Iran in Istanbul later this month after a first set of negotiations in December produced little progress.

Secret U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks described some Gulf leaders such as Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah as privately urging Washington to take an even tougher, military approach towards Tehran.

But U.S. officials have also voiced concern over the enforcement of sanctions by some of Iran's neighbors, who have deep trade and economic ties with the Islamic Republic.

Clinton said her message to Gulf leaders was that sanctions were working and enforcement must be improved.

"We do keep the pressure on all the time because the Iranians are always looking for a way out of the sanctions," she said. "We expect all our partners to share that concern, as these countries certainly do. "

"We don't want anyone to be misled by anyone's intelligence analysis," she said.

Clinton is expected to discuss other regional issues, ranging from security in Yemen, where al Qaeda's regional wing is increasingly viewed as a global threat, to the new government in Iraq and faltering U.S. attempts to bring Israel and the Palestinians back to the bargaining table.
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4)Knowledge Is Power
Paul Ryan and Bob Corker are unusual members of Congress. They know a lot.
By FRED BARNES

Paul Ryan was 28 when he arrived in the House of Representatives in 1999 as a Republican freshman from Wisconsin. Eager for advice, he sought the counsel of dozens of veteran House members on how to be an effective congressman. The most consequential advice came from an unexpected source, Democrat Barney Frank of Massachusetts. It was guidance for a committed conservative from one of Washington’s leading liberals.

And it was quite simple: Be a specialist, not a generalist. As they talked over breakfast in the members’ dining room, Frank went into considerable detail. “Pick two or three issues and really focus on them rather than being a yard wide and an inch deep,” Ryan says Frank told him. Do your homework. Concentrate on committee work. Study. If you do, you’ll be in the room when bills are written.

Ryan has followed that advice rigorously. His motto is, “Inquire, inquire, inquire, read, read, read.” He has made himself an expert on the budget, taxes, and health care. Ryan knows more about the federal budget than anyone else on Capitol Hill and talks about it more fluently. Because of this, he was a shoo-in for chairman of the House Budget Committee last week, elevated over colleagues with more seniority. He will draft the House version of the 2012 budget, a document the Democrat-controlled Senate and the White House will have to take as seriously as the budget proposal of the executive branch, which the Obama administration is set to release early next month.

There’s an old Washington adage that Ryan personifies almost perfectly: Knowledge is power. He’s become enormously influential because he knows so much more than his colleagues on a few issues. And they happen to be the most critical issues in 2011—spending, the deficit, the national debt, taxes, Obama’s health care plan, the size and reach of government.

In the Senate, Bob Corker, the only new Republican elected in 2006, figured out on his own that knowledge creates leverage in Congress. By 2008, he was a major player on the auto industry rescue and reform of financial market regulations, though he wound up voting against both of them. Over the past year, he started from scratch to learn about America’s decaying missile force and grabbed a significant role in passage of the arms control treaty with Russia last month. And in his bid to cut government spending and reduce debt, he’s found an ally outside the Senate—Ryan.

Even with the addition of Corker and Ryan, the roll call of members of Congress, past and present, whose mastery of complex issues brought power and prominence is remarkably short. Republican Jon Kyl of Arizona is Senate minority whip in good measure because he knows more about more subjects, understands them more thoroughly, and discusses them more and with more clarity than any other senator.

Like Ryan today, a young congressman from Michigan, David Stockman, emerged as an authority on the budget and spending in the late 1970s and was appointed White House budget director by President Reagan. For four decades until his death in 1971, Democratic senator Richard Russell of Georgia gained power from knowledge of issues, especially military defense.

Corker and Ryan, while both self-made congressional powerhouses, are quite different in their approach to legislative politics. Corker, 58, is primarily an inside dealmaker who, according to Nina Easton of Fortune, “has built his professional and political career on negotiating with people who don’t always share his views.” Ryan, now 40, is the Republican party’s premier public thinker on domestic policy. He’s also happy, as a legislator, to work with Democrats.

Corker is short and intense. Ryan is tall and easygoing. Corker likes to negotiate in private, as he did for 30 days last winter with Democratic senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut on regulating Wall Street. He excels at the inside game. Ryan usually plays an outside game, crusading for his Roadmap for America’s Future, a comprehensive plan for shrinking government and reviving private initiative.

Ryan is a voracious reader of books and articles. In Washington, he lives in his office in the Longworth House Office Building, sleeping on a rollaway bed. He normally spends one to two hours a night reading. He handed out copies of the free market classic Economics in One -Lesson by Henry Hazlitt to Republican freshmen. “Most of them have already read The Road to Serfdom,” Ryan says.

“I hate to say it,” Corker says, “but I don’t read many books.” He’s disciplined himself to read four newspapers—the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post—on his Kindle “every single morning and doing that first. That, plus boring white papers.” He had six of them with him when he flew back to Washington last week.

But for Corker and Ryan an important tool in gaining knowledge is talking to experts. As a member of Congress, Ryan says, “you can call any expert in the country and absorb their knowledge. That’s the fun part of the job.” Corker says “the most pleasant surprise [to being a senator] is you have such an opportunity to have access to information. There’s almost no one who won’t take your call. You can delve and delve and delve.”

Both are averse to alienating congressional Democrats with personal attacks. But Corker has bruised some Republican egos with his rapid ascent. “People respect Corker’s ability, but he needs to know his place,” a senior senator told me. Corker believes he does. It’s engaging in negotiations over big issues.

When Bob Corker, successful as a real estate developer, then as mayor of Chattanooga, arrived in Washington, he found that the fallout from a controversial campaign ad had preceded him. The TV spot featured a white woman who said she had met Harold Ford Jr., Corker’s Democratic opponent, at “the Playboy party.” Its tag line: “Harold, call me.”

Since Ford is African American, the ad was denounced as racist. It had been aired without Corker’s consent by the Republican National Committee and probably did more damage than good to his campaign. In any event, the controversy faded as Corker delved into Senate business.

After five weeks as a senator, Corker had an epiphany. “The whole five weeks were pretty miserable,” he says. He was going to “26, 27, 28 meetings a day, accomplishing nothing. This isn’t what I came here to do.” He needed a “timeout,” Corker says.

Corker decided to go back to his habits as a CEO and mayor. “You focus on a few things that you really drive home. You do this in the mayor’s office. This is what a CEO does, focuses on three or four things and really makes a difference. .  .  . Somehow or other, we’ve ended up being in the middle of things of interest and import.”

Last February 10, Corker got a call from Dodd, whose talks with Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the banking committee, had ended without a compromise on the sweeping expansion of financial regulations. Dodd wanted to negotiate with Corker, though he was a junior member of the committee.

Their daily talks progressed so well the White House and Senate Democrats feared Dodd was conceding too much. When Dodd and Corker went to Central America on a congressional trip—the financial bill wasn’t on their agenda—the alarm grew to the point that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was dispatched to join the trip and make sure Dodd and Corker didn’t come to an agreement.

On March 10, Dodd informed Corker their talks were over. The White House, figuring Republican votes weren’t needed, pulled the plug. Dodd fell in line. The bill took “a very big veer to the left,” Corker says. He and all but three Republicans voted against it.

There’s an epilogue—two really. Last May, two days after the Washington Post reported on White House efforts to spurn a compromise with Republicans, Obama invited himself to the weekly Senate Republican policy lunch and lectured the group on the need for bipartisanship. Corker was furious. “I just want to know when you get up in the morning and come over here for a lunch meeting like this, how do you reconcile that duplicity?” he said, according to accounts of the meeting.

The president bristled and pushed back from the lectern as Corker spoke. Obama’s answer was long but not responsive. He shook hands with senators as he left. “Your actions and your words don’t line up,” Corker told him, according to accounts. (Corker and the president have talked amicably several times since.)

At the financial overhaul hearings, Corker advanced the novel idea of skipping opening statements by senators. “You’d have Chuck Schumer show up” to deliver an opening speech, Corker cites as an example. “He wouldn’t stay to listen to the witnesses.” Dodd called the no-statement idea “the Corker rule” and embraced it for one hearing. But Dodd has retired, and the rule is likely to be retired too.

Corker’s first serious media notice came during the hearings on bailing out the auto companies. He has a vested interest in the auto industry, having played a part (as mayor and senator) in lobbying Volkswagen to build a plant in Chattanooga. “The most moving and meaningful thing that’s happened to me in my public life was the phone call from Volkswagen” in July 2008 informing him the Chattanooga site had been picked. “I couldn’t even talk,” Corker says. “I was overcome. I told them I’d call them back.”

Following the testimony by auto company CEOs from Detroit in November 2008, Corker made a strenuous effort to learn all he could about the auto industry and its financial woes. He opposed a bailout of General Motors. But, as he put it later, “I determined that if taxpayer monies were going to be used, it would be worth pursuing an approach where the automakers could return to profitability and the American people could be made whole to the greatest extent possible.”

He spent the Thanksgiving holiday with his family in New York, devoting several days to consultations with bond traders, analysts, and experts on the auto business. He talked to company officials and later, once Obama took office, he became friends with the president’s auto czar, Steve Rattner.

From all this, Corker produced a series of recommendations that the White House referred to as the “Corker criteria”—a planned bankruptcy, opening union contracts, turning union health and welfare funds into equity. To sell its plan to keep auto companies in Detroit alive, “the administration had no choice but to make those things happen.” Without them, he says, GM wouldn’t have survived.

Corker dominated the second hearing with auto CEOs, getting Dodd to grant him extra time for his questions. This annoyed other senators. “I was so junior in seniority I was sitting in the cameraman’s lap” at the far edge of the dais.

In December 2009, Corker was summoned by Kyl for a chat in the Senate dining room about missile modernization, which had been neglected for years. “I needed his help,” Kyl told me. “He’s a serious guy when he digs into an issue.”

He visited research facilities at Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and Y-12 in Tennessee. He consulted military, CIA, and defense intelligence officials. He discovered, Corker says, that “we’re the only nuclear country in the world that’s not modernizing,” and some of the missile technology is ancient.
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5)A Cloudy Future
By Andrew Thomas

I've always considered my wife a little paranoid about her privacy. Although she has never done anything illegal or immoral, she sometimes acts as though the world is out to get her. To avoid leaving an electronic trail, she pays for everything in cash as much as possible and has, until recently, refrained from conducting any online financial transactions.


I, on the other hand, have been somewhat cavalier about protecting my privacy, believing there is safety in numbers. After all, out of some three hundred million folks in this country, what are the odds that I would be a target for something nefarious? Cyberspace is just too vast and ubiquitous. At least that's how I have perceived it up until now.


Then I read Friday's Wall Street Journal. Inside was a full five page "Special Advertising Section" sponsored by a consortium of companies, including Microsoft. Two articles were featured, "15 Ways the Cloud Will Change Our Lives" and "Creativity in the Cloud." I am always skeptical of any advertising that tries to tell me how wonderful life will be once I use their product, but I become very concerned when they tell me that I will have no choice in the matter. "The Cloud" is such a product that activates my spider sense.
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Don't misunderstand my concerns. I'm not a technophobe. Technological advancements are greatly improving our lives every day. But can we trust the people who control the technology? Any technological breakthrough that is intended for the betterment of mankind can also be subverted for evil purposes. I have been distrustful of Bill Gates ever since he proclaimed his desire to de-populate the world using vaccines.


Now Microsoft and other companies such as EMC and CA Technologies are touting "The Cloud" as a breakthrough that will change our lives forever (whether we like it or not). Desktop computers are obsolete. Internal data storage will no longer be needed, as all of your personal information will be accessed through a sea of hundreds of thousands of remote servers using a handheld i-pad or i-phone. Data can be instantly assembled from multiple sources to develop a research project or a profile of you as an individual. How could anything go wrong?


The Journal ad quotes John Hagel, co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, Deloitte's Silicon Valley-based research center:


The need for guidance will spawn new companies that leverage the insights from the many footprints we leave online. Now, for example, shopping sites might offer suggestions of movies or videos based on previous purchases. The next level will be companies that make those suggestions based on not just your activity on one specific site, but across a range of places -- what you watch on web TV, on YouTube, and other sites....



If a company can capture all my online activity, as it occurs in real time, it can have an integrated view of me as an individual and suggest things I didn't even know I wanted to look at.


Although the ad focuses on many potential improvements to our lifestyles and well-being, there are a few disturbing ideas as well. One of the articles mentions an experimental Cloud technology showcased at a recent trade show which promoted the concept of installing cameras in your bathroom mirror, "alerting doctors" of potential illnesses.


Here's a crazy thought: What if our beneficent government wanted to gain control of "The Cloud" to more easily identify potential enemies of the state? How farfetched is it to believe that the federal government won't eventually command this technology? FCC chairman Julius Genachowski has already exerted regulatory influence over the internet with the implementation of "net neutrality" regulations. This is just the first step, the "camel's nose under the tent", toward the goal of complete internet control.


Orwell knew the propensity for governments to desire the enslavement of their people, but he couldn't possibly imagine the technology that might so easily achieve it. Will the concept of "government transparency" be twisted into a scenario in which a ruling class lives in the "clouds" over a completely transparent citizenry?


Or am I just catching my wife's paranoia?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------6)Israel targets new Iran-built Hamas command centers in Gaza

Israeli air strikes in Gaza early Monday, Jan. 10, described officially as aimed at "terrorist targets" and "smuggling tunnels" were in fact systematic missions to start destroying the new Hamas underground command centers which Iranian Revolutionary Guards engineers are building across the enclave.

Enhancement of Hamas's military capabilities against Israel is seen as Iran's punishment for the attacks on its nuclear scientists and installations, while serving its broader effort to control the Gaza Strip as its Mediterranean outpost.

Sunday, Jan. 9, the heads of Hamas's military wing Ezz e-Din Al-Qassam tried to persuade Iran's Palestinian proxy, Jihad Islami leader Amin al Hindi, to rein in his group's missile and mortar attacks on Israeli towns and villages and its rocket strikes against Israeli border patrols. They argued that these attacks caused no real harm, depleted the resources needed for a major showdown with Israel and provoked the IDF into prematurely launching another round of the Cast Lead campaign of 2008-2009. This campaign had already begun, they said, with the Israel Air Force's precision bombing of the new Hamas facilities going up for the next Palestinian war on Israel; Israel should not be driven to devastating attacks before the facilities were in place.

Sources report IRGC engineers who stole into Gaza in recent weeks have been working around the clock to lay a network of command centers across the territory according to detailed plans . In highest demand in Gaza today are not the missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv but the concrete smuggled in mainly from Egypt.

The "terror targets" the IAF struck Monday in Gaza City and Khan Younis were those very command centers.

To tempt Jihad Islami leaders into keeping their powder dry for now, Hamas offered them cabinet portfolios, hoping to buy them off with ceremonial departments, sumptuous offices, fancy cars and "budgets." However, Al Hindi, who takes his orders from Tehran, refused to play. He told Hamas: We don't want money; we want to step up our war on Israel.

According to Iranian sources, Tehran is aiming to launch a war of attrition from the Gaza Strip by using the Palestinian Hamas and Jihad Islami to constantly batter the border fence and the Israeli populations in its vicinity and so elevate the level of confrontation with the IDF.

Since Jihad Islami takes its orders directly from Tehran, Hamas - which also depends on Iranian directives, funding and military aid received through Damascus – cannot afford to force its will on the Jihad Islami and risk an open breach with Tehran.

Hamas-Gaza's only recourse is to persuade Khaled Meshaal, head of its Damascus wing, to press Tehran to rein in Jihad Islami and so save the unfinished command centers from destruction. Hamas seems to think that in Tehran one hand doesn't know what the other is doing. In fact, according to our sources, Iran is acting deliberately to stir up confusion among the Palestinan organizations in the Gaza Strip while also maintaining military tensions around the border fence and southwestern Israel at a high pitch.

While its air force takes advantage of the confusion Iran is generating in Gaza to wipe out the new military command centers, Israel's military planners are fully aware that this is a short-term strategy which carries a high price. Their reprisals for attacks are predicted by Iran and serve its strategic objectives in the Gaza Strip. Iran can rebuild Hamas's destroyed command centers but is determined to allow no letup in Palestinian violence from the Gaza Strip. Israeli strategists are therefore expected to chart different and novel modes of operation for stemming the attacks now fully orchestrated from Tehran.

So far, Iran is doing better in the Gaza Strip than in Lebanon. There, it calls the shots for a single radical group, the Hizballah, whereas in Gaza it holds the two dominant radical Palestinian movements in the palm of its hand.
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