Assad To Be Lashed With Obama Noodles!

Always getting your way can lead you into a trap of your own making. Will Obama be hit by a swinging door? Stay tuned. (See 1 below.)
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Bret Stephens concludes it might just be that Israeli's will never see peace.
(See 2 below.)
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More laws from Murphy! (See 3 below.)
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Worth repeating. I first posted in a previous memo. (See 4 below.)
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Someone apparently brought to Obama's attention his inconsistency so he is now going to get tough with Assad just as he has with all the other Middle East tyrants!

Look out Assad you are about to be lashed with wet diplomatic noodles.

Why is Obama appearing at AIPAC"s Annual Meeting? Is he trolling for Jewish campaign money and votes. You decide. (See 5 below.)
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Gingrich steps on this tongue and probably killed his otherwise unlikely chance at getting the Republican nomination. Newt is famous for spinning out of control. (See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1)Obama's $250,000 Question Left and right agree: His agenda requires him to break his tax pledge.
By WILLIAM MCGURN

Like this columnist Back in 2008, candidate Barack Obama turned even Joe the Plumber to his political advantage by playing percentages and pitting the majority of the country against the super-rich. Such was the simplicity of his message that even those attending an American university could grasp it. As one college student told this newspaper at the time, "Everyone knows Obama's only going to raise taxes on those making more than $250,000, and Joe the Plumber does not make more than $250,000."

Politically that was a winner. Now, however, the numbers are not adding up—or at least, not in a way that will pay for President Obama's ambitions for the federal government. And at least some of his allies on the progressive left are pointing it out.

In the New Republic, the Brookings Institution's William Galston zeroes in on the fuzzy math. "Unless Obama is prepared to tolerate huge deficits indefinitely," he writes, "or to emulate arch-conservatives and curb the budget deficit with spending cuts only, he will have to break his unsustainable tax pledge at some point. The only question is when."

More remarkable still, Mr. Galston was jumping off from an article in National Review by Reihan Salam, who made the same point about the mathematical impossibilities of Mr. Obama's present tax pledge. Mr. Salam, a policy adviser at the pro-market think tank Economics 21, observes that the revenues Mr. Obama needs to pay for his agenda fall in the rung just below the super-rich—that is, Americans earning between $100,000 and $200,000. The political problem is that this is a block that went Republican by 56% to 43% in 2010.

"The President's political advisers are keenly aware of the fact that Democrats need to improve their performance with these voters or face defeat in 2012," Mr. Salam writes. "This helps explain the profound irrationality of the Obama administration's approach to key public-policy questions." By irrationality, he means what Mr. Galston means: the split between what the president needs to do economically to fund his programs and what he did politically to get himself elected.

Mr. Galston, of course, is no Art Laffer, though his original piece was full of interesting figures illustrating that the U.S. tax regime is more progressive than the most popular clichés would have it. Mr. Galston cheerfully supports raising taxes on those with incomes between $100,000 and $250,000 to support progressive policies and help tame the deficit. He is simply honest enough to know that Mr. Obama cannot get the top 2% of income earners to pay for everything he has promised to do.

Inside the Beltway, one of the most hallowed chestnuts is that so polarized have our politics become, we can no longer agree on basic facts. Mr. Galston and Mr. Salam and their respective allies disprove that. Both agree on the revenue problem, though their policy conclusions veer off in sharply opposite ways.

Both would probably also agree that in the last two elections, the American people have zeroed in on one part of the message without perhaps accepting the full consequences of their position. In 2008, Americans went resoundingly for Mr. Obama, who promised that no one but the super-rich would have to worry about paying more for anything. Then in 2010, a tea party backlash helped elect Republicans who promised to reduce the size and reach of government.

So here's the question for 2012: If we the people don't want the higher taxes that are needed to support not only ObamaCare but a growing federal government, are we willing to support the real cuts that go along with that choice? And if we decide we don't want these programs touched, will we accept the higher taxes that go along with keeping them, including for people making a lot less than $250,000?

This is the heart of the argument shaping up between Mr. Obama and Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee. Manifestly Mr. Obama believes that as much as Americans say they want smaller government, the moment they find one of their favorite programs (e.g., Medicare) up for consideration, they balk.

Mr. Ryan and Republicans make the opposite bet: The president's spending has made Americans more willing to face up to these choices, especially if the alternative is higher taxes on more people.

The argument over taxes and spending, of course, is never fully won. The good news here is Messrs. Galston and Salam have met across the ideological spectrum to offer a good starting point. For those of us who believe that America is best served by a debate that forces citizens to make a clear choice—and that Mr. Ryan has the better part of the argument—we say, "Bring it on."
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2)Israel Will Never Have Peace This weekend's border-crossing demonstrators believe, like Hamas, that the Jewish State has no right to any territory from the river to the sea.
By BRET STEPHENS

No doubt it is true, as the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported on Sunday, that among the Palestinian protesters seeking to force their way into Israel there were some with humbler aims than reclaiming "historic Palestine."

"We've crossed the border in order to stay with our families, away from all the killing in Syria," the paper reported one of the infiltrators as saying. "We ask the powers that be in Israel to help us stay and not send us back."

No doubt it is also true, as White House spokesman Jay Carney noted yesterday, that the attempted breach was an effort by Damascus "to distract attention from the legitimate expression of protest by the Syrian people." The border between Israel and Syria has been quiet for 37 years; it's no accident, comrades, that the embattled regime of Bashar Assad, perhaps advised by Iran, would choose this particular moment to shift violent energies toward a more opportune target.

But here's something about which there should also be no doubt: People don't scamper over barbed wire, walk through mine fields and march toward the barrels of enemy soldiers if they aren't fearless. And if they aren't profoundly convinced of the rightness of what they are doing.

For many years it has been the conventional wisdom of Arab-Israeli peace processors that the conflict was, at heart, territorial, and that it could be resolved if only Israel and its neighbors could agree on a proper border. For many years, too, it has been conventional wisdom that if only the conflict could be resolved, other distempers of the Muslim world—from dictatorship to terrorism—would find their own resolution.

If the Arab Spring has done nothing else, it has at least disposed of the latter proposition. From Tehran to Tunis to Tahrir Square, Muslims are rising against their rulers for reasons quite apart from anything happening in Gaza, the West Bank or the Golan Heights. This isn't to say they've abandoned their emotional commitments to Palestinians, or their ideological ones against Israel. It's simply to say that they have their own problems.

But just as the West has consistently misunderstood the Muslim problem, so too has it failed to grasp the Palestinian one. And what it has failed to grasp above all is the centrality of Palestinian refugees to the conflict.

The fiction that is typically offered about the refugees by devotees of the peace process is that Palestinian leaders see them as a bargaining chip in their negotiations with Israel, perhaps in exchange for the re-division of Jerusalem. But listen in on the internal dialogue of Palestinians and you will hear that the "right of return" is an inviolable, inalienable and individual right of every refugee. In other words, a right that can never (and never safely) be bargained away by Palestinian leaders for the sake of a settlement with Israel.

In this belief the Palestinians are sustained by many things.

One is the mythology of 1948, which is long on tales of what Jews did to Arabs but short on what Arabs did to Jews—or to themselves. Another is the text of U.N. resolution 194, written in 1948, which plainly states that "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date." A third is UNRWA, the U.N. agency that has perpetuated the Palestinian refugee problem for generations when most other refugees have been successfully repatriated. A fourth is their ill treatment at the hands of their Arab hosts, which has caused them to yearn for the fantasy of a homeland—orchards and all—that modern-day Israel succeeds in looking very much like. A fifth is the incessant drone of Palestinian propaganda whose idea of Palestinian statehood traces the map of Israel itself.

Other things could be mentioned. But the roots of the problem are beside the point. The real point is that a grievance that has been nursed for 63 years and that can move people to acts like those witnessed on Sunday is never going to allow a political accommodation with Israel and would never be satisfied by one anyway.

No wonder Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas's prime minister, can say he would be prepared to accept the 1967 borders—but that establishing those borders will never mean an end to the conflict. The same goes for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who praised Sunday's slain protesters as martyrs who "died for the Palestinian people's rights and freedom." This from the "moderate" who is supposed to acquaint his people with the reality and purpose of a two-state solution.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due in the U.S. soon to deliver what is being billed as a major policy address. What should he say? I would counsel the same wisdom that sailors of yore used to tattoo to their knuckles as a reminder of what not to forget on the yardarms of tall ships in stormy seas. Eight easy letters:

H-O-L-D F-A-S-T.
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3)Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well..

He, who laughs last, thinks slowest.

A day without sunshine is like, well . Night.

Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don’t..

If the shoe fits, get another one just like it.

The things that come to those that wait, may be the things left by those, who got there first.

Flashlight: A case for holding dead batteries.

The shin bone is a device for finding furniture in the dark.

When you go into court, you are putting yourself in the hands of twelve people, who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty.

Mother nature is a bitch.
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4)Subject: Netanyahu at his best

Even those who aren't particularly sympathetic to Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, could get a good measure of satisfaction from this interview with British Television during the retaliation against Hamas' shelling of Israel.

The interviewer asked him: "How come so many more Palestinians have been killed in this conflict than Israelis?" (A nasty question if there ever was one!)

Netanyahu: "Are you sure that you want to start asking in that direction?"

Interviewer: (Falling into the trap) Why not?

Netanyahu: "Because in World War II more Germans were killed than British and Americans combined, but there is no doubt in anyone's mind that the war was caused by Germany's aggression. And in response to the German blitz on London, the British wiped out the entire city of Dresden, burning to death more German civilians than the number of people killed in Hiroshima. Moreover, I could remind you that in 1944, when the R.A.F. tried to bomb the Gestapo Headquarters in Copenhagen, some of the bombs missed their target and fell on a Danish children's hospital, killing 83 little children. Perhaps you have another question?"

Apparently, Benjamin Netanyahu gave another interview and was asked about Israel's occupation of Arab lands. His response was, "It's our land". The reporter (CNN or the like) was stunned - read below "It's our land...." It's important information since we don't get fair and accurate reporting from the media and facts tend to get lost in the jumble of daily events.

"Crash Course on the Arab-Israeli Conflict."

Here are overlooked facts in the current & past Middle East situation. These were compiled by a Christian university professor:


BRIEF FACTS ON THE ISRAELI CONFLICT TODAY... (It takes just 1.5 minutes to read!)

It makes sense and it's not slanted. Jew and non-Jew -- it doesn't matter.


1. Nationhood and Jerusalem: Israel became a nation in 1312 BC, two thousand (2000) years before the rise of Islam.

2. Arab refugees in Israel began identifying themselves as part of a Palestinian people in 1967, two decades after the establishment of the modern State of Israel.

3. Since the Jewish conquest in 1272 BC, the Jews have had dominion over the land for one thousand (1000) years with a continuous presence in the land for the past 3,300 years.

4. The only Arab dominion since the conquest in 635 lasted no more than 22 years.

5. For over 3,300 years, Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital. Jerusalem has never been the capital of any Arab or Muslim entity. Even when the Jordanians occupied Jerusalem, they never sought to make it their capital, and Arab leaders
did not come to visit.

6. Jerusalem is mentioned over 700 times in Tanach, the Jewish Holy Scriptures. Jerusalem is not mentioned once in the Koran.

7. King David founded the city of Jerusalem. Mohammed never came to Jerusalem.

8. Jews pray facing Jerusalem. Muslims pray with their backs toward Jerusalem.

9. Arab and Jewish Refugees: in 1948 the Arab refugees were encouraged to leave Israel by Arab leaders promising to purge the land of Jews. Sixty-eight percent left (many in fear of retaliation by their own brethren, the Arabs), without ever seeing an Israeli soldier. The ones who stayed were afforded the same peace, civility, and citizenship rights as everyone else.




10. The Jewish refugees were forced to flee from Arab lands due to Arab brutality, persecution and pogroms.

11. The number of Arab refugees who left Israel in 1948 is estimated to be around 630,000. The number of Jewish refugees from Arab lands is estimated to be the same.

12. Arab refugees were INTENTIONALLY not absorbed or integrated into the Arab lands to which they fled, despite the vast Arab territory. Out of the 100,000,000 refugees since World War II, theirs is the only refugee group in the world that has never been absorbed or integrated into their own people's lands. Jewish refugees were completely absorbed into Israel, a country no larger than the state of New Jersey.

13. The Arab-Israeli Conflict: the Arabs are represented by eight separate nations, not including the Palestinians. There is only one Jewish nation. The Arab nations initiated all five wars and lost. Israel defended itself each time and won.

14. The PLO's Charter still calls for the destruction of the State of Israel. Israel has given the Palestinians most of the West Bank land, autonomy under the
Palestinian Authority, and has supplied them.

15. Under Jordanian rule, Jewish holy sites were desecrated and the Jews were denied access to places of worship. Under Israeli rule, all Muslim and Christian sites have been preserved and made accessible to people of all faiths.

16. The UN Record on Israel and the Arabs: of the 175 Security Council resolutions passed before 1990, 97 were directed against Israel.

17. Of the 690 General Assembly resolutions voted on before 1990, 429 were directed against Israel.

18. The UN was silent while 58 Jerusalem
synagogues were destroyed by the Jordanians.

19. The UN was silent while the Jordanians systematically desecrated the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives.

20. The UN was silent while the Jordanians enforced an apartheid-like policy of preventing Jews from visiting the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.

These are incredible times. We have to ask what our role should be. What will we tell our grandchildren about what we did when there was a turning point in
Jewish destiny, an opportunity to make a difference?
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5)Obama to get tough with Assad. Syrian-Israeli flare-up expected

US Ambassador Robert Ford recalled before warming his seat.

Washington sources report President Barack Obama has finally resolved to stamp down hard on Syrian President Bashar Assad in person as the man responsible for the inhuman Syrian crackdown on protest against his regime and the massacre of hundreds of dissenters. Before his much-awaited speech on US relations with Middle East Muslim nations Thursday, May 19, Obama is preparing to impose sanctions on the Syrian president. The White House is working on the final text of the announcement but has already decided to recall the newly-appointed US Ambassador to Damascus Robert Ford for consultations.

An American ambassador was last recalled from Damascus in 2005. It took five years for Obama to appoint Robert Ford to the post in late 2010.

The administration has also decided to authorize the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna to report to the UN Security Council that Syria was building a plutonium reactor for military purposes at Deir A-Zour, which it was bombed by Israeli in September 2007. Damascus has refused to cooperate with the nuclear watchdog in making the site available for inspection. The IAEA is therefore urged to seek the same Security Council for Syria as those imposed on Iran for its nuclear activities.

Barack Obama was finally convinced Assad must be stopped without delay by the horrifying discovery of hastily-dug mass graves near the protest center of Daraa in southern Syria. The civilian death toll from Assad's savage three-month crackdown on dissent is now well past 1,000.

It is taken into account, military sources report that tough American measures targeting Assad will bring forth heightened Syrian-Israeli border tensions, potentially in the form of a limited Syrian military strike into Israel or Lebanon or both. Indeed his cousin Rami Makhlouf threatened that instability in Syria would cause instability in Israel.

The expectation of trouble to come was strengthened by the information reaching Washington that Syrian military intelligence and Ahmed Jibril's PFL-General Command had organized the forcible crossing of the Israeli border on the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) Day, Sunday, May 15, of thousands of Palestinians streaming out of the camps in which they are held near Damascus. The operation was also synchronized with the Lebanese Hizballah.

According to this information, Syria and the PFL-GC are planning another mass incursion in the same format for June 5, the 44th anniversary of the 1967 War, when Syria lost part of the Golan after attacking Israel.

In advance of the event, the Israeli Defense Forces and Lebanese army have reinforced the units guarding their borders and are on a high state of preparedness.

The IDF's engineering corps has embarked on a crash operation for building a proper defense system with physical obstacles along the 220-kilometer Israeli-Syrian border in place of the fragile fence that crowds of Palestinians trampled on May 15.

Washington's impatience with Syria was evident in the harsh tone of the White House rebuke of Syria as "inciting protests on the Golan Heights" and therefore responsible for the clash and loss of life which resulted: "The Jewish state has the right to prevent unauthorized crossing at its borders," said White House spokesman Jay Carney Monday.

The White House's allusion to Israel's borders in the Golan context was deliberate, Washington sources report. It signposted Barack Obama's intention to emphasize the importance the US attaches to Israeli border security as a matter of policy when he meets Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu at the White House Friday, May 20 and again when Obama addresses the conference of the US-Israeli lobby AIPAC Sunday, May 22.

According to sources, the US President has no intention of outlining a Middle East peace plan for dictating to Israel in his address to the Muslim world Thursday, May 19.

This suggestion which is the subject of heated debate in Israel did not originate with US administration sources but political opposition elements at home which have an interest in pushing the Netanyahu government to the wall.
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6)Newt Gingrich: 'I Am Reaching Out to Paul Ryan' on Medicare Plan
Arlette Saenz reports:

Looking for reconciliation with the Republican Party’s other “ideas man,” Newt Gingrich said he is planning to reach out to Rep. Paul Ryan after attacking his Medicare plan on a morning talk show this Sunday.

“I am reaching out to Paul Ryan. My hope is to find a way to work with the House Republicans,” Gingrich said on a conference call with bloggers according to the Daily Caller. “I used language that was too strong — although the underlying principle, I think, was right.”

Gingrich’s attempt to mend his Medicare flub comes as prominent GOP leaders reacting with unusual ferocity, even questioning his ability to run a disciplined presidential campaign.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, whose support will be instrumental in winning the South Carolina primary, slammed Gingrich in an interview with CNN today.

“What he said was absolutely unfortunate,” Haley told CNN in a phone interview. “Here you’ve got Representative Ryan trying to bring common sense to this world of insanity, and Newt absolutely cut him off at the knees.”

“When you have a conservative fighting for real change, the last thing we need is a presidential candidate cutting him off at the knees,” Haley said.

House GOP members have joined the chorus criticizing Gingrich’s labeling of the plan as “radical.”

House Budget Committee Chairman Ryan, who developed the plan criticized by Gingrich, said “With allies like that who needs the left?

“Hardly is that social engineering and radical,” Ryan said on the Laura Ingraham radio show Monday.

“What’s radical is kicking the can down the road, not doing anything to fix this problem and watching the whole system implode on itself.”

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., called Gingrich’s comments a “tremendous misspeak,” which could jeopardize his presidential run.

“There's no question there was a misspeak here," Cantor told Chicago radio station WLS Tuesday morning. "Just to sit here while all but three House Republicans voted for the Ryan budget, to somehow portray that as a radical step, I believe, is a tremendous misspeak."

"Many have said now he's finished," Cantor later said. "I probably would reserve judgment on that. Perhaps he can come out and say he misspoke and get back on board with what we're trying to do."

Gingrich is in the middle of a 17 city tour through Iowa. Tonight, he will address the Minnesota Family Council’s Annual Dinner along with Rep. Michele Bachmann.
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