Thursday, June 30, 2011

Obama's Silver Tongue Has Become Tanished!

















"Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, while Democrats believe every day is April 15." --- Ronald Reagan
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A woman was sipping on a glass of wine, while sitting on the patio with
her husband, and she says, "I love you so much, I don't know how I could
ever live without you."

Her husband asks, "Is that you, or the wine talking?"

She replies, "It's me ............ talking to the wine."
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Rubio does not refer to our president as Mark Halperin did but Rubio thinks about Obama's presidency in much the same way.

In Democrat politics, we have gone from Weiner to 'schmuck' all in one month and the latter on the most liberal of all cable stations- MSNBC! (See 1 below.)
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Can Obama's foreign policy outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood be likened to that telephone TV ad - 'reach out and touch someone!' (See 2 below.)

Is The White House beginning to be concerned about the Jewish vote? They must have talked to Jimmy and followed his advice - turn your back on your ally and everything will work out just fine as it did in Iran.

Are Liberal Jews beginning to open their eyes? Probably some but I still believe at least 50% are going to cast their votes for Obama because they will find a convenient excuse not to vote for GW and Palin even though they are not running. (See 2a below. [Posting again.])
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Obama's new policy to protect our nation from terrorists is investigate and then prosecute members of The CIA. Maybe The Black Panthers should be enlisted by the CIA - they seem to be Teflon protected.

To further protect our nation from terrorists the Obama Administration, according to Dick Morris, has placed citizens of Israel visiting our country on their terrorist watch list. (See 3 and 3a below.)


Elliot Abrams, who is in Israel as I write, offers his thoughts regarding Obama and Israel. (See 3b below.)

Meanwhile, Obama is preparing to answer critics of his policies towards Israel because he is worried about losing the Jewish vote and money.

I suspect Obama will drive more Jews away because I doubt his defense will hold water. Why? Because Obama's spokespersons' defense will be seen as questionable in view of their own lack of objectivity and closeness to Obama. Methinks they will protest too much and be seen as overreaching. Why the need for such an effort? Simply because Obama has been found wanting and more are now focusing on his walk and paying less attention to his talk.

Obama's lack of believability with respect to Israel is further buttressed by his talk and walk routine on a host of other issues.Obama's silver tongue has become tarnished.(See 3c below.)
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If you cannot win legitimately then steal it and I would not put anything past Obama and his crowd. (See 4 below.)
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Does Obama use the shield of the U.N. as his weapon to bludgeon Israel? Has Obama replaced Congress by the U.N. You decide! Libya is his latest homage. (See 5 below.)
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One of the hardest things is to find reliable people who are competent in servicing various equipment. Dale Taylor fixes lamps and lighting fixtures and will pick up. His cell is 912 481 2937.
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Dick
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1)Rubio Blasts Obama: ‘Left-Wing Strong Man’
By Robert Costa



Earlier this month, Sen. Marco Rubio made an auspicious debut.

Unlike so many first turns in the upper chamber, Rubio’s stirring remarks, which celebrated American exceptionalism, caught fire. The Florida Republican’s words were cited by Senate colleagues and championed by conservatives. To no one’s surprise, the push to put Rubio on the 2012 ticket only increased, even though the charismatic freshman continues to swat away the chatter.

Look for the Rubio buzz to continue. In an interview with National Review Online, he says that he will take to the Senate floor for his second speech this week — and this time he will have President Obama in his crosshairs.

Rubio tells us that he will respond to Obama’s recent press conference, where the president reveled in class-warfare bluster. “Quite frankly, I am both disappointed for our country and shocked at some of the rhetoric,” he says. “It was rhetoric, I thought, that was more appropriate for some left-wing strong man than for the president of the United States.”

“Talking about corporate jets and oil companies,” Rubio says, missed the point. “Everybody here agrees that our tax code is broken,” he says, and he is open to discussing tax reform. “But don’t go around telling people that the reason you are not doing well is because some rich guy is in a corporate jet or some oil company is making too much money.”

Watching Obama brandish such talking points made Rubio wince. “Three years into his presidency, he is a failed president,” he says. “He just has not done a good job. Life in America today, by every measure, is worse than it was when he took over.”

“When does it start to get better?” Rubio asks. “When does the magic of this president start to happen?”
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2)Obama Reaches Out To Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood

The Obama administration is reaching out to the Muslim Brotherhood in a "limited" effort to build ties and promote democratic principles ahead of Egypt's upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says the U.S. isn't adopting a new policy. The administration simply wants to engage all Egyptian groups that espouse non-violence.

Clinton says hardline group must also respect minority rights and complete inclusion of women in the political sphere.

The Brotherhood favors a regime guided by Islamic Sharia law and was outlawed under former strongman Hosni Mubarak.

Israel is wary of any engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood because of the hostility of many of its members.


2a)White House worried about losing Jewish support

Democrats are very concerned that the administration's policy toward Israel will cost them money and votes in 2012. Ben Smith reports in Politico:

David Ainsman really began to get worried about President Barack Obama's standing with his fellow Jewish Democrats when a recent dinner with his wife and two other couples - all Obama voters in 2008 - nearly turned into a screaming match.

Ainsman, a prominent Democratic lawyer and Pittsburgh Jewish community leader, was trying to explain that Obama had just been offering Israel a bit of "tough love" in his May 19 speech on the Arab Spring. His friends disagreed - to say the least.

One said he had the sense that Obama "took the opportunity to throw Israel under the bus." Another, who swore he wasn't getting his information from the mutually despised Fox News, admitted he'd lost faith in the president.

If several dozen interviews with POLITICO are any indication, a similar conversation is taking place in Jewish communities across the country.

...Most of those interviewed were center-left American Jews and Obama supporters - and many of them Democratic donors. On some core issues involving Israel, they're well to the left of Netanyahu and many Americans... But they are also fearful for Israel at a moment of turmoil in a hostile region when the moderate Palestinian Authority is joining forces with the militantly anti-Israel Hamas.
READ MORE


A discussion at Politico's forum, The Arena, centered on whether Obama's Jewish support is slipping. RJC Executive Director Matt Brooks got into the debate:

While it is a fact that no modern Republican presidential candidate has yet matched the 39 percent of the Jewish vote that Ronald Reagan received in 1980, there has, however, been an unmistakable trend in Jewish voting, with Republicans gaining a larger share of the Jewish vote in presidential elections and doing well in the community in other races.

Looking just at presidential elections, the percentage of the Jewish vote that went to Republicans was: 1992 - 11 percent; 1996 - 16 percent; 2000 -19 percent; and 2004 - 24 percent. John McCain held on to 22 percent of the Jewish vote in 2008 but that drop off was small and understandable considering the tremendous political tsunami the GOP faced that year.

...Today, there is a significant sense of "buyer's remorse" in the Jewish community. We hear frequently from former Democrats who are horrified by Pres. Obama's policies toward Israel, alarmed at his health care policies, and dismayed at the economic policies that have kept Americans out of work and mired in a deep recession.

...Without question, that is why the Democrats are working at a feverish pace to try to engage in damage control and end the erosion of support that is taking place among Jewish voters.
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The Jewish vote reconsidered

In a multi-part series at Commentary, Jonathan Tobin takes a new look at how Jewish voters may respond to Pres. Obama's strained relations with Israel:

Every time anyone suggests Barack Obama's hostility to Israel will cost him some Jewish votes, the anger from both the Democratic Party establishment as well as outraged liberals is considerable. So it was little surprise Ben Smith's report yesterday in Politico generated considerable pushback from those invested in the continuation of the political status quo in the Jewish community. But, as I wrote yesterday, the problem for Democrats is not the once fashionable idea Jews were being seduced by the lure of conservative ideology, but the plain fact the leader of their party is someone who has a problem with Israel.

...Obama has picked fights with Israel almost from the first day of his administration. While he has not trashed the alliance altogether, something that would be too politically costly to even contemplate, the president has staked out new ground on settlements, borders and particularly Jerusalem that were different from those of his predecessors and which have tilted the diplomatic playing field against Israel. His ambush of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month may have backfired on him as the Israeli was able to make his defiance of the president's dictat on borders stand up to the cheers of Congress, but there was no mistaking Obama's hostility. The idea this can be explained or rationalized is wishful thinking on the part of Democrats. Those voters who consider a candidate's attitude toward Israel when they decide whom to vote for are bound to think less well of Barack Obama next year.
READ MORE OF PART ONE


Tobin continues with a look at who the pro-Israel, Jewish Democrat swing-voters are:

[A] majority of Jewish voters will probably stick with Barack Obama next year no matter how bad his relationship gets with Israel. But that does not mean a significant shift in the Jewish vote might not occur. Though many Jews either don't care about Israel or even actively identify with those who want more U.S. pressure on it, there are still a large number of liberal Democratic Jews who are passionate supporters of Israel. As their support for Obama in 2008 demonstrated, their standards for judging Democrats are far more lenient than those applied to Republicans. But it is simply untrue to claim this group is unaware of or unmoved by Obama's hostile actions, or the basic fact most Israelis view the president as an adversary of their country.

It is this group that may account for as much as 20 percent or more of the Jewish vote. That total is the difference between the nearly 80 percent Obama garnered in 2008 and the combined vote for Jimmy Carter and John Anderson in 1980 that came to nearly 60 percent, which represents the historic low point for the Democrats in terms of the Jewish vote. It is this group that could make up as much as a fifth or more of all Jewish voters who are in play in 2012.

Is that something for Democrats to worry about? You bet it is.
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3)Holder Orders Probe of CIA Al-Qaida Interrogations


The Justice Department inquiry into CIA interrogations of terrorist detainees has led to a full criminal investigation into the deaths of two people while they were in custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, Attorney General Eric Holder announced Thursday.

The attorney general said that he accepted the recommendation of a federal prosecutor, John Durham, who since August 2009 has conducted an inquiry into CIA interrogation practices during the Bush administration. Holder said Durham looked at the treatment of 101 detainees in U.S. custody since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and concluded that only these two deaths warranted criminal investigation. Holder said Durham found some of the 101 had never been held by the CIA.

Holder did not identify the two death cases. But former and current U.S. officials who requested anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation said Durham was looking at the deaths of Gul Rahman and Manadel al-Jamadi.

Rahman died in the early hours of Nov. 20, 2002, after being shackled to a cold cement wall in a secret CIA prison in northern Kabul, Afghanistan, known as the Salt Pit. He was suspected of links to the terrorist group al-Qaida. Rahman is the only detainee known to have died in a CIA-run prison.

Al-Jamadi died in 2003 at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The death has been known to the public for years and a military autopsy declared al-Jamadi's death a homicide.

This month, a former Abu Ghraib prison guard at the time of al-Jamadi's death, Lynndie England, was ordered to testify in a grand jury probe in Alexandria, Va. A subpoena signed by Durham for England's appearance says her testimony is needed in a probe of federal criminal laws involving war crimes, torture and other offenses. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the subpoena.

England, an Army reservist serving as a military policeman at Abu Ghraib, was among 11 soldiers found guilty of wrongdoing in the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003 and 2004. Photographs showed England holding a restraint around a man's neck, and giving a thumbs-up and pointing at the genitals of naked, hooded men, a cigarette dangling from her mouth.

England's attorney, Roy Hardy, told the AP that England testified along with former MPs Chip Frederick and Sabrina Harman before the grand jury earlier this month.

On his last day as CIA director, Leon Panetta emphasized the wide scope of Durham's preliminary review.

"After extensive examination of more than 100 instances in which CIA had contact or was alleged to have had contact with terrorist detainees," the prosecutor "has determined that no further law enforcement action is appropriate in all but two discrete cases," Panetta, who will be sworn in Friday as the new defense secretary, said in a statement.

Panetta added that "both cases were previously reviewed by career federal prosecutors who subsequently declined prosecution."

"I welcome the news that the broader inquiries are behind us," Panetta said. "We are now finally about to close this chapter of our agency's history."

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he welcomes the Justice Department's decision to end criminal investigations "against the vast majority of CIA interrogators."

The outlines of al-Jamadi's death have long been known.

A CIA officer at Abu Ghraib was sanctioned for not having a doctor examine al-Jamadi when he arrived at the prison badly injured from a struggle with Navy SEALs.

That officer, whom the AP is identifying only as Steve because he worked undercover, was a focus of the CIA's internal investigation. Steve ran the detainee exploitation cell at Abu Ghraib and had done similar work with the agency in Afghanistan. Steve later retired from the CIA. The AP also has identified another CIA officer with the agency's Special Activities Division connected to al-Jamadi's death. He remains undercover.

Rahman's identity was not known until revealed by an AP investigation.

Former CIA officials say Rahman was acting as a conduit between militant Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and al-Qaida. Hekmatyar's insurgent group is believed to be allied with al-Qaida. The former officials said the CIA had been tracking Rahman's cell phone at the time of his capture and were hoping the suspected militant would provide information about Hekmatyar's whereabouts.

But Rahman never cracked under questioning, refusing to help the CIA find Hekmatyar. Former CIA officials described him as one of the toughest detainees to pass through the CIA's network of secret prisons.

The young CIA officer running the prison at the time was never formally reprimanded in the case and remains working undercover for the agency.

The same day in August 2009 that the government made public a CIA inspector general's report that said the agency had used some "unauthorized, improvised, inhumane" tactics in terrorist interrogations, Holder directed Durham to look into claims of abuse during CIA interrogations. At the time, Durham was already investigating the destruction of CIA interrogation videos showing waterboarding of terrorist suspects. That part of Durham's investigation ended last November, when Durham cleared the CIA's former top clandestine officer and others of any charges for destroying the agency videotapes of waterboarding, which evokes the sensation of drowning.

AP Intelligence Writer Kimberly Dozier in Washington and AP writer Vicki Smith in Morgantown, W.Va., contributed to this report.



3a)OBAMA ADMIN LISTS ISRAEL AS TERROR SPONSOR
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN


The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) maintains a list of “specially designated countries” (SDCs) that “have shown a tendency to promote, produce or protect terrorist organizations or their members.” The folks from these nations get special scrutiny when they enter the U.S.

Here’s the list:

Afghanistan
West Bank
Algeria
Bahrain
Oman
Bangladesh
Pakistan
Philippines
Egypt
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Indonesia
Somalia
Iran
Sudan
Iraq
Syria
Israel
And so forth.

Israel? Yes Israel is one of the thirty-six SDCs that “promote, produce, or protect” terrorists, according to the Obama Administration. With splendid equality, they manage to list the world’s biggest victim alongside the globe’s leading perpetrators of terrorism. Israelis coming into America get the same high level of scrutiny that Iranians do!

This information, which comes to us courtesy of the wonderful website www.ruthfullyyours.com, is as shocking as it is credible.

That Obama has tried to maintain that there is a moral equilibrium between Israel and the aggressive Arabs that surround it is well known. But to list Israel as a promoter, protector, or producer of terrorism is quite extraordinary.

Doubtless some politically correct soul at ICE or in the State Department felt that the U.S. needed to show impartiality in making up its list and include non-Muslim countries. What better rebuttal to those who would claim that the ICE is profiling Muslims than to say that Israel is also on the list?

But Israel’s inclusion on the list, to say nothing of the indignity inflicted on its citizens as they seek to enter the United States, is an insult and must be corrected at once!



3b)Abrams on Obama: He sees Israel as a problem to solve
By HERB KEINON


In an interview with ‘The Jerusalem Post,’ the former top aide to George W. Bush explains his difficulties with the current president’s positions.


Elliott Abrams, one of former US president George Bush’s top Middle East advisers, is not known to mince words. So it was no surprise, really, when at a panel last week at the Presidential Conference in Jerusalem he said bluntly that “there is no great love” in President Barack Obama’s heart for Israel.

But as he was sitting on a panel with two strong Obama supporters, former congressman Robert Wexler and former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, this comment did not go unchallenged.

Wexler launched into a spirited and sarcastic rebuttal, presenting a checklist of actions Obama has taken that he said proved where the president’s heart was.

These steps included encouraging a security relationship between Israel and the US that is “unprecedented in terms of depth and profound engagement”; cancelling involvement in a Turkish military maneuver when the Turks disinvited Israel; sending the largest contingency of US military ever to dock at Haifa Port; ensuring that the OECD countries voted to let Israel into that prestigious club; lobbying the leaders of Britain, France and Germany not to support the PA’s statehood bid at the UN; overseeing the largest amount of military aid, $3 billion, ever approved for Israel; and pushing through an additional $205 million appropriation for Iron Dome development and purchase.

Sounds, Wexler said, like a whole lotta love to him.

Abrams didn’t really get to reply at the panel, but was able to do so in a later interview with The Jerusalem Post, in which he explained what he meant on this particular issue, and expanded on others.

“Bob was making a campaign speech,” he said of Wexler’s checklist. “I don’t want to be portrayed as saying the president hates Israel and is an enemy of Israel, because that is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that we had two consecutive presidents [Bush and Bill Clinton] who had a special consideration for Israel, who viewed Israel as a great ally. I think President Obama views Israel as a problem that needs to be solved.”

Abrams said that this was most evident at the United Nations.

Bush’s attitude, Abrams said, was that the UN “is against Israel, and that it is completely unfair and biased.” The upshot of that during his term was that “if something comes up, you veto it, and you’re done with it. You’ve then done a good deed.”

Indeed, he said, the Bush administration cast nine vetoes blocking anti-Israel resolutions in the Security Council over an eight-year span.

The Obama administration, by contrast, “is desperate to avoid vetoes,” he said.

“They don’t like to veto anything at any time. I believe they hoped initially to get through four years without a veto, and they got through two years without a veto.”

Earlier in the year, the US cast a veto against an anti-settlement resolution. But Abrams said that if you looked at US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice’s explanation of the veto, in which she, too, slammed settlement activity, “you see how unhappy she was” at casting it.

Abrams also suggested Wexler was being a bit disingenuous by giving Obama credit for this year’s $3b. military assistance package, saying that package had been negotiated during the Olmert-Bush years. “To give Obama or Netanyahu credit for that is wrong,” he said.

Regarding the security cooperation and Iron Dome assistance, Abrams – who did not contest that US-Israel security cooperation is now at its highest point ever – said there was no question that the president or the defense secretary could, if they wanted to, tone down the military-to-military relationship.

That the president had not interfered, Abrams said, was indeed to Obama’s credit.

And then Abrams added the “but”: Were the president to reduce the level of cooperation, or cancel exercises or high-level meetings between generals, that would become known, “and the rumblings, the unhappiness in the American Jewish community would become greater. So there is politics that would play here,” he said.

As to the additional Iron Dome funding, Abrams said, “First, it is a terrific thing that he did.” Second, he added, it is “very much in the interest of the US that he did it,” since a good, working Iron Dome system is beneficial to the US as well.

“After all, we have missile threats, too,” he said of the system that defends against short-range rockets and artillery shells.

“We are the only country with serious [military] bases all over the world,” he continued. “Missile defense is a very important thing for us – we are very good with long-range missile defense systems developed in the days of USSR, but Israel is at the forefront in the short-range missile defense – systems like Iron Dome.

This is very critical for a country with lots of bases in disputed locations. We have tens of thousands of troops in Korea within range of Korean missiles; we have troops in the Persian Gulf. The Iron Dome is great for the US.”

Abrams, who today is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Washington- based Council on Foreign Relations, had a hand in drafting the 2004 Bush letter to then-prime minister Ariel Sharon stating that the US believed the Palestine refugee problem should be settled in a Palestinian state, rather than Israel, and that it was unrealistic to expect that an Israeli-Palestinian agreement would mean a full and complete return to the 1949 armistice lines.

One of the sources of contention between the Netanyahu and Obama administrations since they took power in early 2009 was the status of that letter, with the prime minister wanting to pin Obama down to reaffirm it, and Obama unwilling to do so.

And this, at least for Abrams, signified a “huge” Obama mistake.

“I think the administration from the very beginning has taken the opinion that it was kind of a private letter from Bush to Sharon. But that’s wrong – it was very public, and was endorsed in overwhelming votes in both houses of Congress,” he said.

“Now we are asking Israel to take risks, we are always asking Israel to take risks, and it is reasonable to say, ‘What is the American position?’ If the American position is going to change every couple of years, then there is no American position, and there are no guarantees at all.”

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, according to Abrams, is very well within his rights to ask Obama how he views the letter.

If Obama’s answer is that the letter has no significance, that it “is just the private promise of a former president,” then Netanyahu could fairly ask why any future Obama promise would be any different, he said.

And the implications of that question are serious, not only for Israel, he went on; “I think it is very damaging to the US as an actor in international politics for a president to say, ‘Whatever my predecessor said, forget about it.’ Particularly, when it is formal, not private, and both houses of Congress endorsed it.”

Also disconcerting, Abrams said, was that certain comments Obama had made recently ran against the grain of the letter.

“First, I don’t think that the president has been as clear as he should have on the Palestinian refugee issue. I think he ought to say clearly that the Palestinian refugee problem will be addressed and solved in Palestine, as the Bush letter put it, rather than Israel. I don’t think there should be any pressure at all to take one single Palestinian.

There wasn’t in the Bush administration, and there shouldn’t be now. That is one big difference,” he said.

“The other big difference is this question of borders and swaps, because the position in the Bush letter was that you guys have to agree on a border, and that we are not going to dictate a border,” he continued.

“But one thing is pretty clear; it is not going to be the 1949 armistice line.”

ABRAMS SAID there was a significant difference between what appeared in the Bush letter and Obama’s comment that negotiations ought to start now on the basis of the 1967 lines, with mutually agreed swaps.

“When Obama says you need to agree on a border, and that it will be based on 1967 lines with agreed swaps, that undermines the Israeli negotiating position. By saying that, you are giving that border greater weight. You are not saying, ‘Hey, look, that was an armistice line from 1949 – it has no legitimacy, you guys have to negotiate a border.’ And then, when Obama added in the comment about mutually agreed swaps, my question is always, ‘Are you telling me Israel has to give up sovereign Green Line territory to keep the Kotel?’ That is ridiculous.”

Abrams said that while it was conceivable that Israel would agree to swaps, and that former prime minister Ehud Olmert had proposed one-to-one swaps for everything, “[it] is the sovereign right of Israel to make any deal it wants. But why should the US be weakening the Israeli negotiating position by even suggesting there have to be swaps for every deviation from the 1949 armistice line? It’s one thing to say there will be swaps for Ariel, another for the Kotel.”

He added that “Bush did Israel a favor by saying there would be no return to the 1949 lines, and I think you have to say that helped Israel, and didn’t help the Palestinians. I think the additional Obama formulation hurt Israel, and helped the Palestinians.”

He dismissed the notion that Sharon was “naïve” in putting so much faith in the Bush letter, and in fact used to wave it as “ideological compensation” for withdrawal from Gaza.

“I don’t think it was naïve. You have a very formal communication, it is not a law, not a treaty, but it was a carefully negotiated document endorsed by both houses of Congress. It was reasonable to expect – it was wrong – but it was reasonable to expect that another president would treat it pretty seriously, and this president has not treated it seriously.”

One element of the letter that Obama did incorporate in his speeches on the Middle East in May was that the US remained committed – as the letter stated – to Israel’s ability to “deter and defend itself, by itself, against any threat or possible combination of threats.”

Or, as Obama said at the annual AIPAC conference, “every state has the right to self-defense, and Israel must be able to defend itself – by itself – against any threat.”

What that line meant, Abrams explained, was that the US “is not going to say, ‘Don’t worry about taking security risks because we are behind you,’ because that is a meaningless guarantee.”

He said this line was important because it was a US commitment to “help Israel defend itself so it won’t get into a situation where it will need American troops or an American airlift.”

“Putting American munitions here, which we started doing in a big way under Bush, is a way of saying the same thing,” he said. “Why are we doing this? So that in an extreme situation there won’t be the need to airlift munitions here, so that Israel will be able to defend itself by itself.”

With the 2012 US presidential election now beginning to loom large, Abrams was asked whether Israel had what to fear from a second Obama term.

“The question is, to what degree is his pressure on Israel constrained by domestic politics and the need to be reelected?” Abrams replied. “If the answer is not at all, then you have nothing to fear. But if the answer is that it is probably constrained a good deal, and that in a second term he would be putting much more pressure on Israel – he would be allowing UN votes condemning Israel that he wouldn’t veto, he would be putting much more pressure on behalf of the Palestinians to get a deal that Israel may not like – then you have to worry about it.”

Abrams said he felt that domestic politics had constrained Obama until now.

“I think that the president, as I said, doesn’t get it fundamentally. There is something missing in his attitude toward Israel that Bush and Clinton had; some kind of fundamental sympathy with the plight of Israel in the world community.

He has an intellectual understanding of this, but he doesn’t seem to have an emotional understanding of this at the deepest level. He seems to view Israel, as I believe, as a problem for the US, one of our many problems around the world, rather than having an emotional attachment to it or viewing it fundamentally as a very valuable ally.”

Israel, Abrams implied, should not be intoxicated by the resounding reception Netanyahu received when he addressed Congress in May, because “fundamentally the foreign policy of the US is under the control of the president.”

Granted, Congress has power of the purse and can “wreck” the president’s foreign policy, but “normally the foreign policy is under the president. And if the president decides that he is going to force Israel into negotiations, and force it to make compromises in those negotiations, despite the views of its prime minister, then he can go pretty far.”•make compromises in those negotiations, despite the views of its prime minister, then he can go pretty far.”



3c)Obama campaign to go on the offensive against conservative critics of Israel stance
By Greg Sargent


Obama’s top presidential campaign advisers are putting together a plan to go on the offensive against critics of his stance on Israel, I’m told, and are assembling a team of high profile surrogates who are well respected in the Jewish community to battle criticism in the media and ensure that it doesn’t go unanswered.

Obama’s supporters say the plan is in effect an acknowledgment that conservative attacks on Obama’s Israel stance have made defections among Jewish voters and donors a possibility they must take seriously. Obama’s advisers see a need to push back even harder on the attacks than they did in 2008, in part because Obama now has a record on the issue to defend — a record that even Obama’s supporters concede has not been adequately explained.

A group of well-known figures in the Jewish community has been in discussions with senior Obama adviser David Axelrod about how to respond to the criticism, which is expected to intensify as the campaign heats up. Among them: Alan Solow, the former head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; former Congressmen Mel Levine and Robert Wexler; and executive Penny Pritzker.

“We will have highly credible spokespeople and surrogates speak out in a general manner in support of what this administration has done, and articulate it in a way that we think will resonate with voters who care about this issue,” Solow said in an interview. “We will meet with supporters who have expressed concerns or want to be briefed on these issues on a one-on-one basis.”

“We got close to 80 percent of the vote among Jewish Americans in 2008, but we had to aggressively bat down efforts to divide the community and to inflame,” David Axelrod told me. “Plainly we have to be at least as assiduous about it this time. If we’re passive in response it would be a mistake.”

Politico reported this week that many Jewish Dems and donors are privately expressing doubts about Obama’s Mideast policies. But the piece was largely anecdotal, and a recent Pew poll found that a plurality of Americans who identify themselves as sympathetic to Israel think his Mideast policies get the balance right between Israelis and Palestinians. And pundits have been predicting that Obama is perpetually on the verge of losing Jewish support since before the 2008 election.

But the difference now, Obama’s supporters say, is that conservatives are having some success in distorting his record. Obama supporters do in fact worry about the concerns conservatives have succeeded in sowing among Jewish Democrats, and they expect conservatives to invest substantial resources in continuing that effort.

“I can’t deny that people express to me concerns about the president’s policies,” Solow said. “But when I run through the record with them, they are by and large convinced that the president’s policies are correct.”

The effort to make this point, I’m told, will also be proactive, with surrogates publishing op ed pieces that represent the White House’s point of view. And it will include a renewed effort to highlight other aspects of Obama’s record that have gone under-discussed, like increased military cooperation between Israel and the United States.

Two of the primary conservative arguments against Obama are that he called for Israel to return to 1967 lines and that he has not publicly stated with enough clarity that Israel will not be expected to negotiate with a government that includes a Hamas that has not recognized Israel’s right to exist.

The first point is false, though reasonable people can debate whether Obama was right to go public with a call for talks around 1967 lines with swaps or whether his timing was sound. Pushed on whether there’s anything to the second point, Axelrod flatly denied it.

“The president does not believe that any country can be asked to negotiate with a terrorist organization that is sworn to its destruction and unwilling to abandon that goal or embrace a peaceful settlement of the conflict,” he said. “He could not have been clearer about that.”
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4)Is Another Ballot Heist Coming?
By Tom Rowan

The integrity of American elections ought to be above reproach. Unfortunately, recent history suggests that when candidates are desperate, serious hanky-panky is not out of the question.

The 2000 Florida Presidential election was severely marred by Al Gore's botched election robbery. The massive vote fraud in Palm Beach County stands as immutable proof of the extent that crooked Democrats will go to steal an election. After botching the robbery in "ballot box boiler rooms," the Democrats resorted to stall tactics, the courts, and endless recounts to steal the election for Gore. The only mistake the voter frauds made is that they did not destroy enough valid votes.

Only in Palm Beach

Robert Cook emailed me during and after the 2000 Florida recounts. I remember that Robert lived in Georgia at the time and he and I were certain of voter fraud in Florida and that the media were actively covering it up. Robert ran the election numbers and sent them to me. At the time I forwarded the information to every single member of the Florida House and Senate in a push for fraud-proof electronic voting. What Robert mathematically deduced was that Florida was the victim of a massive vote fraud scheme in Palm Beach County. Robert recounted his analysis and sent it to Michael Reagan. This short report is required reading for anyone who really wants to understand what actually happened in the 2000 Florida Presidential election.

The analysis leaves exactly zero room for the possibility for anything other than massive vote fraud. As Newsmax.com's Carl Limbacher reported: "Robert is a nuclear engineer with a track record for analyzing and correcting trends, errors and mistakes in heavy construction projects (ships, power plants, nuclear reactors, military and aerospace vehicles, etc.) for more than twenty years, put forth a compelling case that the 19,120 presidential race ballots at issue in Palm Beach County were 'destroyed by deliberate double-punching ballots with a "second punch" for Al Gore or Pat Buchanan.'" The results are shockingly clear evidence of vote fraud:

•Only Palm Beach County, Florida voters seem incapable of understanding and using this style of ballot (butterfly ballot -- chosen by local Democrats).
•Only in Palm Beach, FL were 15,000 ballots "invalidated" (for double-punched ballots) in the 1996 Presidential election. (Past history of vote fraud in 1996.)
•Only in Palm Beach (and in only the most heavily Democratic precincts) were 19,120 ballots rejected in 2000 for double-punching.
•Only in Palm Beach did this "double-punch" error happen only in the Gore-Bush-Buchanan selections for President.
•Only in Palm Beach has the news media complained about "massive" ballot confusion.
•Only in Palm Beach did Gore gain 750 votes in a recount.
•Only in Palm Beach County that more than 20% of the registered Republicans "forgot" to vote for their party's presidential candidate.
•Only in Palm Beach did Bush receive less than 65% of the registered Republican voters.
•Only in Palm Beach did Buchanan get less than half of the votes he received before in 1996.
Cook provides the probable means by which a Democrat conspirator could have disenfranchised thousands of voters and destroyed their "punch ballot cards":

Stamping 45,000 ballots with a tool (or other device) through the Gore slot gives: Every Gore vote = still a valid Gore vote. (No change in the total, no change in the recount.) Every Bush, Buchanan, Workers Party, and Libertarian Party ballot IS IMMEDIATELY INVALID. They will be thrown out because they have two votes. They NEVER were counted in the first place = no change in the recount. The double-punch occurs ONLY in the presidential race, and no position on the ballot is disturbed. All other races are correctly counted. EVERY ballot that had no vote (a "protest vote" against both major candidates) becomes a Gore vote. All other races on the ballot are not disturbed, and are correctly counted.

In this way, stacks of ballots cards (valid votes) were destroyed in a matter a few fevered post election moments. This simple vote fraud technique explains all the ridiculously improbable statistical outliers of that election. There simply is no other plausible mathematical explanation.

As the 2012 election looms, concerned voters should recall the nationwide voter registration frauds of ACORN, Al Franken's brazenly stolen Minnesota Senate election, and George Soros' SOS Project which seeks to install crony Secretaries of State to "oversee" how close elections are "decided." The massive vote fraud in Florida in 2000 ought to concern every voter in every state. If the Democrat party so brazenly tried to steal Florida's 2000 election, chances are very good that they will try to steal other "close" elections in 2012.

Recall too that the groundwork is already being laid for vote fraud in 2012. Donna Brazile is already complaining about nonexistent "voter disenfranchisement" (just as the Democrats did in 2000). Editorials are being written and lawsuits are being filed in an attempt to thwart any meaningful measures to eliminate vote fraud. Whomever the GOP nominates for president, he or she will face Obama's vicious nonstop smear machine, the usual network media bias, and a massive George Soros-funded effort to steal this election. With Obama's poll numbers as bad as they are and with his reelection prospects as bleak as any President's in living memory, a massive and nationwide voter fraud campaign is already underway. And, if past elections are any indication, this vote fraud campaign will be successful to varying degrees. The degree to which the 2012 Democrat vote fraud campaign will be successful depends on whether voters who care enough to show up to vote care enough that their votes are being stolen and complain about it. And if they care that they are the voters who are actually being "disenfranchised."

Of my most bitter memories of the 2000 Florida recount (and attempted election theft) was that our military votes were being challenged at our local courthouse by Gore lawyers dressed in pinstriped suits with thick New Jersey accents. This was simultaneously happening all across Florida. Gore's "election" lawyers were dressed like (and talked like) the typical Hollywood typecast depiction of a sleazy mobster. Another laughable and lighter moment was when Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley offered to "help" us Floridians "count" our votes. That would be like asking Al Gore for a weather report.
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5)Unmasking the ‘international community’
By Caroline B. Glick

Given the utter depravity of the UN and the international system it oversees, what can explain the international Left's kneejerk obeisance to it?

For many years, the Left in Israel and throughout the world has upheld the so-called "international community" as the arbiter of all things. From Israel's right to exist to climate change, from American world leadership to genetically modified crops, the Left has maintained that the "international community," is the only body qualified to judge the truth, lawfulness, goodness and justice of all things.

Most of those who uphold this view see the United Nations as the embodiment of the "international community." US President Barack Obama has repeatedly made clear that his chief litmus test for the viability or desirability of a foreign policy is the support in garners in UN institutions.

Obama is so averse to acting against the will of the UN that he is trying to strong arm Israel into making suicidal concessions to the Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority. Obama claims that if Israel agrees to accept indefensible borders, then he will be able to convince the Palestinians not to ask the UN to endorse Palestinian sovereignty in September. Since the success of the Palestinian initiative is entirely dependent on the US Security Council veto, by acting as he is, Obama is showing that he prefers sacrificing Israel's future viability as a nation state to standing up to the "will of the international community" as embodied by the UN.

Furthermore, in a bid to maintain faith with the UN Security Council resolution permitting the use of force in Libya to protect civilians, Obama has refused to articulate a clear goal for the US military involvement in Libya. The fact that the Security Council resolution essentially dooms NATO's military intervention in Libya to strategic incoherence stalemate that can lead to the break-up of Libya is unimportant to the US President. The only thing that is important is that the US abides by the limitations dictated by the UN Security Council resolution.

As to Libya, Obama's decision to send US forces to Libya without Congressional permission makes clear that from his perspective, the UN Security Council, rather than the US Congress is the source of authority for US military action. To the extent that the US Congress calls for the US President to act in a manner that is contrary to the UN Security Council, as far as Obama is concerned, it is the duty of the President to disregard Congress and obey the Security Council.

Given the totemic stature of the UN in the minds of the American President and the international Left, it is worth considering its nature.

A glance at UN affairs in recent days is revealing. Last week UN members elected Qatar President of the UN General Assembly and Iran one of the body's Vice Presidents. Both countries' representatives will use their platform to advance their regimes' anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-Western agendas.

As Prof. Anne Bayefsky noted in the Weekly Standard last week, their first order of business will be leading the Durban III conference that will take place in New York on the sidelines of September's General Assembly meeting. The first Durban conference was of course the infamously racist and anti-Jewish UN conference in Durban, South Africa in September 2001. At Durban Israel was singled out as the only racist, xenophobic country in the world and Jewish people were denied their right to national rights and self-determination.



The conference ended three days before the jihadist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001.

In addition to their anti-Jewish conference, the Qatari and Iranian leaders of the General Assembly will reliably advance a General Assembly resolution embracing Palestinian statehood and condemning Jewish statehood.

Perhaps anticipating its new leadership role in the "international community," last weekend Iran hosted its first "World Without Terrorism Conference." Speaking at the conference, Iran's supreme dictator Ali Khamenei called Israel and the US the greatest terrorists in the world. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the US was behind the Sept. 11 attacks and the Holocaust and has used both to force the Palestinians to submit to invading Jews.

Aside from the fact that the leaders from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan -- who owe their power and freedom to the sacrifices of the US military -- participated in the conference, the most notable aspect of the event is that it took place under the UN flag. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon sent greetings to the conferees through his special envoy.

According to Iran's Fars news agency, "In a written message…read by UN Envoy to Teheran Mohammad Rafi Al-Din Shah [Ban] Ki-Moon [commended] the Islamic Republic of Iran for holding this very important conference."

According to Fars, Ban added that the UN had "approved a large number of resolutions against terrorism in recent years and holding conferences like the Teheran conference can be considerably helpful in implementing these resolutions."

When journalists inquired about the veracity of the Iranian news report, the UN Secretary General's office defended its position. Ban's spokesman Farhan Haq sniffed, "If we're reaching out and trying to make sure that people fight terrorism, we need to go as far as possible to make sure that everyone does it."

So as far as the UN's highest official is concerned, when it comes to terrorism there is no qualitative difference between Iran on the one hand and the US and Israel on the other. Here it is worth noting that among the other invitees, Iran's "counter-terror" conference prominently featured Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir. Al-Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court on genocide charges for the genocide he has perpetrated in Darfur.

The new General Assembly Vice President is not merely the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism. It is also a nuclear proliferator. This no doubt is why Iran's UN representative expressed glee when earlier this month his nation's fellow nuclear proliferator North Korea was appointed the head of the UN's Conference on Disarmament. This would be the same North Korea that has conducted two illicit nuclear tests; constructed an illicit nuclear reactor in Syria; openly cooperated with Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile program; attacked and sank a South Korean naval ship last year, and threatens nuclear war any time anyone criticizes its aggressive behavior.

What these representative examples of what passes for business as usual at the UN show is that the international institution considered the repository of the will of the "international community" is wholly and completely corrupt. It is morally bankrupt. It is controlled by the most repressive regimes in the world and it uses its US and Western funded institutions to attack Israel, the US, the West and forces of liberty and liberalism throughout the world.

Given the utter depravity of the UN and the international system it oversees, what can explain the international Left's kneejerk obeisance to it? From San Francisco to Chicago to Boston; from Stockholm, to Paris to London, members of the international Left claim they support the victims of tyranny. They claim they stand for liberal values of freedom and tolerance and human rights. But like the UN, the truth about the international Left shows that its members are the opposite of what they claim to be.

Here too, a few examples from the past week suffice to tell the tale of liberal intolerance and violence. On Sunday US Congresswoman and Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann appeared on ABC News' This Week with George Stephanopolous. Towards the end of her interview, Stephanopolous informed Bachmann that she can expect the media to begin attacking her family, and specifically the 23 foster children that she and her husband cared for.

As he put it, "I know you want to shield them [the foster children] but are they prepared and are you prepared for the loss of privacy that comes with the president [sic.] campaign? And is that something you are concerned about for them?"

Stephanopolous's menacing warning was notable for what it says about the nature of the leftist-dominated media. In a recent interview First Lady Michelle Obama thanked the media for protecting her family from scrutiny. Yet Stephanopoulis had no compunction about threatening Bachmann's family with a journalistic lynch mob.

And this makes sense.

As fellow leftists, the Obamas get a free ride. But as a conservative Republican, and as a non-leftist woman, Bachmann - like the Sarah Palin -- has no right to expect tolerance for her family's privacy from the enlightened, feminist, liberal media.

Then there was the mob assault on Israeli historian Benny Morris outside the London School of Economics two weeks ago. As Morris described it at the National Interest, on his way to give a lecture at the university, "a small mob…of some dozen Muslims, Arabs and their supporters, both men and women, surrounded me and, walking alongside me for several hundred yards as I advanced towards the building where the lecture was to take place, raucously harangued and bated me with cries of "fascist," "racist," "England should never have allowed you in," "you shouldn't be allowed to speak."

He added, "To me, it felt like Brownshirts in a street scene in 1920s Berlin."

No less appalling than the behavior of the mob was the behavior of the professor at LSE who hosted Morris's lecture. As Morris described it, in his "brief introductory remarks," the professor "failed completely to note the harassment and intimidation (of which he had been made fully aware) …, or to criticize [Morris's attackers] in any way."

In New York last weekend when conservative television and radio host Glenn Beck went to New York's Bryant Park to watch a movie with his family, they were accosted by the people around them who professed hatred for "Republicans."

The extraordinary intolerance of the Left for Israel is on full display among the participants in the so-called flotilla. The purpose of the "flotilla" is to break international law by providing aid and comfort to Hamas-controlled Gaza and weaken with the intention of ending Israel's lawful maritime blockade of Gaza's Hamas-controlled coastline.

As Ehud Rosen exposed Thursday in a report for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, this year's flotilla is organized by Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood with the active participation of leftist anti-Israel groups.

In their public statements, participants in the Hamas flotilla profess bottomless tolerance for Hamas and its genocidal agenda. And they profess no tolerance whatsoever for Israel or its right to exist.

In their behavior, participants in the flotilla from the Obama-aligned Code Pink group and sister organizations ape the behavior of UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon in celebrating Iran's provocative conference on terrorism, overseeing North Korea's ascension to the head of the UN's Conference on Disarmament' and Qatar's and Iran's leadership of the General Assembly.

While emptily mouthing slogans of tolerance, all these adherents to the rule of the "international community" embrace the agenda of the most violent, intolerant, totalitarian forces in the world. Not only do they embrace them, they serve them.

It doesn't take much to tear off their flimsy mask of sweetness and light. Pity so few can be bothered to do it.

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Obama and His Pathetic Blame Gaming Nonsense!










Obama reminded us again in his press conference "he' is the president of the United States and 'we' must act responsible. By that, Obama means 'we' must pay more taxes because 'he' has no intention of cutting spending. It's all about Congress not doing its job while he has been doing his.

President Obama says he is "amused" when people say he needs to get more involved in the debt crisis talks currently being led by Vice President Joe Biden.

"If you know you have to do something, just do it. And I have to say, I am very amused when I start hearing comments about 'well the President needs to show more leadership on this.' Let me tell you something: Right after we finished dealing with the government shutdown, averting a government shutdown, I called the leaders here together. I said we have to get this done," President Obama said at a press conference this afternoon.

Obama told Congress it is up to them and "they need to do their job."

"Now's the time to go ahead and make the tough choices, that's why they're called leaders," he said.

Obama continued by telling us he has been busy killing bin Laden, bringing the troops home from Afghanistan blah, blah, blah, blah but he did not mention he has also been busy throwing our friends and allies under the bus etc, all the while finding time for golf.

Obama seems to forget Rep. Ryan laid out a program. What was Obama's response? He sneered. Obama likes to pick fights with those who do not agree with him. He thinks that is leadership. He snipes, he jokes and he lies. That is what he believes is leadership.

Obama lectures us as if he knows what is going on and we are too dumb to understand. Obama expects us to swallow his snide explanations and that he is doing something about our problems but he is so full of himself and so engaged in blame gaming others he loses all credibility as if he ever had any.

Sure glad Obama does not hold more frequent press conferences because it is just more long winded answers and blame crap from our narcissistic president.

Where's the leadership we need? Well it ain't to be found in The White House! (See 1,1a, 1b and 1c below.)
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When you cannot reason with terrorists turn on your government and blame them as if that will produce results you seek.

When you are dealing with a leader who succumbs to pressure it will not produce anything but more concessions which terror groups simply use as they add to their demands. But then liberals and blind pacifiers never learn and leaders who cave into their demands are also fools.

Political leadership is convincing people to come around to your viewpoint and that takes skills , the courage of your convictions, and the willingness to bide time and endure the pain. Reagan understood this and even GW did as well but he lacked Reagan's speechifying talents.

The press attacked Reagan and portrayed him as a buffoon but laughed it off because he knew he was right and was comfortable in his own skin. Netanyahu might have a more difficult situation but he seems a bit more thin skinned and less humorous.(See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1)Obama: Republican Leaders Must Bend on Taxes
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR


President Obama said Wednesday that he believed Republicans would concede to tax increases as part of a deficit reduction package in time to avoid a default on the nation’s debt, and voiced exasperation at the lack of progress in negotiations between the administration and Congressional leaders.

“Call me naïve,” he told reporters at a midday news conference in the East Room of the White House. “But my expectation is that leaders are going to lead.”

He accused the Republicans, who last week dropped out of negotiations on the budget, of avoiding tough decisions and said they were playing a dangerous game that could significantly affect the nation’s struggling economy and capital markets and slow down private efforts to create jobs.

Mr. Obama repeatedly mocked tax breaks that he said were for “millionaires and billionaires, oil companies and corporate jet owners,” saying that voters would not look kindly on Republican lawmakers who defended such breaks at the cost of cuts in popular programs like health care, education and food safety.

But he did not explicitly say that he would reject a deal that did not eliminate such breaks, saying that he believed his adversaries would eventually agree to what Democrats have called a “balanced approach” that included trillions of dollars in spending cuts along with tax increases.

“If you are a wealthy C.E.O. or hedge fund manager in America right now, your taxes are lower than they have ever been. They are lower than they have been since the 1950s. And they can afford it,” Mr. Obama said. “You can still ride on your corporate jet. You’re just going to have to pay a little more.”

The speaker of the House, John A. Boehner, issued a blistering response, accusing the president of ignoring “legislative and economic reality” and of being AWOL in the debate over efforts to reduce national spending.

“His administration has been burying our kids and grandkids in new debt and offered no plan to rein in spending,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement.

The speaker reiterated his opposition to tax increases and said Mr. Obama was “sorely mistaken” if he believed that tax increase would pass in the House. He vowed that House Republicans would block anything that includes increased taxes.

“The longer the president denies these realities, the more difficult he makes this process,” Mr. Boehner said. “If the president embraces a measure that meets these tests, he has my word that the House will act on it. Anything less cannot pass the House.”

Questions about the looming debt deadline dominated the early part of the news conference, the first in several months for the president. But Mr. Obama was also asked about a series of other domestic and foreign policy issues.

On the American intervention in Libya, Mr. Obama defended his administration’s actions against Congressional critics who say the military activities there violate the War Powers Act, which requires Congress to give its formal approval.

“We have engaged in a limited operation to help a lot of people against one of the worst tyrants in the world,” Mr. Obama said, deflecting a question about whether he believes the War Powers Act is constitutional. “This suddenly becomes the cause célèbre for some folks in Congress? C’mon.”

On the issue of same-sex marriage, Mr. Obama declined to say whether he had changed his mind about his personal opposition. But he said New York’s decision to legalize same sex marriage was a “good thing.”

“That’s exactly how things should work,” he said, noting that different communities will come to different conclusions on the issue. “I think we are moving in a direction of greater equality, and I think that’s a good thing.”

Mr. Obama said his administration had done more than all of his predecessors combined to advance the rights of gay men and lesbians in America. Mr. Obama is scheduled to host a gay pride event at the White House on Wednesday afternoon.

But his remarks are likely to disappoint gay activists, who were hoping that Mr. Obama would say that his personal opposition to gay marriage had ended. In the past, the president has said his position is “evolving.”

On the economy, Mr. Obama sounded dire warnings about the consequences of delaying a resolution on the debt negotiations, and expressed exasperation with Republicans in Congress, saying they needed to “do their job” instead of blaming him for a lack of leadership.

In a remarkable display of frustration, Mr. Obama said he was “amused” by Republican comments that he had not offered a clear direction in the effort to cut the budget and increase the nation’s debt ceiling.

“They are in one week, they are out one week,” the president said, in a week that the House is out of session. “You need to be here. I’ve been here. I’ve been doing Afghanistan and Bin Laden and the Greek crisis. You stay here. Let’s get it done. All right, I think you know my feelings about that.”

Mr. Obama compared the lack of resolution in the debt talks to his daughters’ ability to get their homework done a day early.

“They’re not waiting til the night before. They are not pulling all-nighters,” Mr. Obama said. “They need to do their job. They need to go ahead and make the tough choices.”

Mr. Obama also mocked Republicans in Congress who have questioned whether the Aug. 2 deadline set by the Treasury Department for a default on the debt has been hyped for political reasons. He said the people making those claims would force the government to pick and choose who they would pay and who they would leave hanging.

“This is not a situation where Congress is going to say we won’t buy this car or we won’t take the vacation. They took the vacation. They bought the car. And now they are saying, maybe we don’t have to pay,” Mr. Obama said. “If the United States government, for the first time, cannot pay its bills, if it defaults, then the consequences for the U.S. economy will be significant and unpredictable. And that is not a good thing.”

In his opening statement, Mr. Obama said his administration was making efforts to spur job creation, but challenged Congress to pass bills that would help private companies add to their payrolls. He cited bills that would make it easier to get patents on inventions, expand loans to private businesses for hiring and pass long-delayed trade deals.
“I urge Congress to act on these ideas right now,” he said.

On the debt talks, Mr. Obama said he was open to extending payroll tax cuts and other tax breaks that would help spur economic growth in the short term. “I think that it makes perfect sense for us to take a look at can we extend the payroll tax cut another year?” the president told reporters. “What we need to do is to restore business confidence and the confidence of the American people that we are on track.”

The president declined to comment on a controversial decision by the National Labor Relations Board to go to court to contest a decision by Boeing to build a nonunion plant in South Carolina. The decision by the independent agency has been criticized by Republicans as an infringement on right-to-work states and on the right of corporate managers to decide where to do business. The case is before a judge in Seattle.

But the president acknowledged the political sensitivities of the issue at a time when people are clamoring for the kinds of jobs that the Boeing plant would create. “If they are choosing to relocate here in the U.S., that’s a good thing,” Mr. Obama said. “What defies common sense is the notion that we would be shutting down a plant or laying off workers because labor and management can’t come to an agreement.”

Asked about concern in the military that the policy on how to handle terrorist suspects captured abroad was unclear, Mr. Obama said that his “top priority” was “to make sure that we are apprehending those who would attack the United States, and that we are getting all the intelligence that we can.”

But he said that “frankly, there are going to be different dispositions of the case depending on the situation.”

Pressed a second time on his personal views of same-sex marriage, Mr. Obama declined to elaborate, saying, “I’m not going to make news on that today” and telling the reporter who asked, Laura Meckler of The Wall Street Journal, “Good try, though.”

Later, Mr. Obama added: “I’ll keep on giving you the same answer until I give you a different one. And that won’t be today.”

1a)ObamaCare Doesn't Add Up
A new CBO report finds that the costs of Medicare and Medicaid will drive federal spending to all-time highs in coming decades.
By STEPHEN MOORE

Remember the much ballyhooed ObamaCare promise to "bend the health care cost curve down"?

Well, a new Congressional Budget Office report on the long-term trend in the federal budget finds that the costs of Medicare and Medicaid will drive federal spending and debt to all-time highs in coming decades. In one scenario, federal health-care spending doubles over the next 25 years, to 11% of GDP in 2035 from 5.6% this year. In another scenario, the debt eclipses 100% of GDP by 2021 and 190% of GDP by 2035. That's higher than where Greece is right now, and we see what the bond vigilantes are doing there.

What is conspicuously missing from this report is the magical windfall from the new health law. CBO reports that it is "using the same growth rates that would have been applied in the absence of the legislation." Now they tell us. Hence, Medicare alone is projected to nearly double over the next 25 years, from 3.7% of GDP to almost 7% by 2035.

CBO warns that ObamaCare's purported payment cuts to doctors and hospitals and the hoped-for reductions in the growth of the insurance subsidies would be "difficult to sustain over a long period." Let us translate all this mumbo jumbo: The ObamaCare cost savings are mostly bunk.

None of these scary trends is inevitable, and there is still time to get health-care costs contained. But now even CBO seems to agree that ObamaCare bends our health-care bills up, not down, in the long run.


1b)Obama picks fight with GOP over tax cuts for the rich
By Greg Sargent

The primary goal of President Obama’s presser, which just wrapped up, was obvious: He was clearly out to pick a major public fight with Republicans over tax cuts for the rich. Obama mounted a surprisingly aggressive moral case for ending high end tax cuts, casting it as a test of our society’s priorities, and argued — crucially — that anyone who fails to support ending them is fundamentally unserious about the deficit.

He also went out of his way to highlight GOP opposition to raising revenues by ending a perk for corporate jet owners. This proposal would raise only $3 billion, which means it’s trivial in the larger scheme of things, and Obama’s mention of it seemed deliberately designed to provoke howls of outrage and cries of “class warfare” from Republicans — with the obvious goal of maneuvering Republicans into the role of arch defenders of the interests of the wealthy.

Obama is picking this fight in order to reframe the deficit and debt ceiling debate as a battle not over government spending — losing turf for Dems — but over who has the most balanced priorities and who is really working in the interests of the whole country.

Here’s the key quote, which mentions the corporate jet tax break no less than three times:

If we choose to keep those tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, if we keep the tax break for corporate jet owners, if we choose to keep tax breaks for oil and gas companies that are making hundreds of billions of dollars, then that means we’ve got to cut some kids off from getting a college scholarship. That means we have to stop funding certain grants for medical research. That means that food safety may be compromised. That means that Medicare has to bear a greater part of the burden. These are the choices we have to make...
The Republicans say they want to reduce the deficit. Every single observer who’s not an elected official or politican says we can’t reduce our deficit in the scale and scope we need to without having a balanced approach that looks at everything. Democrats have to accept some painful spending cuts that hurt some of our consituencies that we may not like. And we’ve shown a willingness to do that for the greater good...
If you are a wealthy CEO or hedge fund manager in America right now, your taxes are lower than they’ve ver been. They’re lower than they’ve been since the 1950s. And you can afford it. You’ll still be able to ride on your corporate jet. You’ll just have to pay a little more...My believe is that the Republican leadership in Congress will hopefully sooner rather than later come to the conclusion that they need to make the right decisions for the country, that everybody else has been willing to move off their maximalist position. They need to do the same. My expectation is that they’ll do the responsible thing.
In another key moment, Obama seemed to draw a line against cost-shifting to seniors to solve the Medicare problem. He said:

We’re gonna have to look at entitlements. And that’s always difficult politically. But I’ve been willing to say we need to see where we can reduce the cost of health care spending and Medicare and Medicaid in the out years. Not by shifting costs on to seniors, as some have proposed, but rather by actually reducing those costs.
While there’s good reason for skepticism that the final deal won’t contain some kind of cost shifting, it was good to hear Obama lay down that marker in those terms.

More broadly, Obama stopped just short of saying he would not accept a final deficit deal without a high end tax hike. But his presser made it clear that he will will relitigate this fight and make it central to the campaign. And while we should keep in mind that Obama did ultimately cut a deal on the high-end tax cuts last time around, those who are hoping he will continue to make a strong moral argument in favor of ending them should be pleased by what they heard.

1c)Obamanomics is shovel-ready
The failure of Keynesian economics is no laughing matter, Mr. President
By Dr. Milton R. Wolf


In 1932, President Hoover received a letter from a man in Illinois that read simply, “Vote for Roosevelt and make it unanimous.” Based on its recent floundering, it seems even the White House recognizes that Obamanomics has been a disaster. It’s nearly unanimous now.

When President Reagan entered office, America faced a deep recession with double-digit unemployment and inflation, plus dishearteningly long gas lines. Rather than wasting time blaming his predecessor, the Gipper went right to work unveiling Reaganomics - an embrace of the free market - which included four simple principles: (1) lower tax burden, (2) lower government spending, (3) lower regulatory burden, and (4) a strong dollar monetary policy.

The top income tax rate was reduced from a stifling 70 percent to a low of 28 percent. Total federal spending was reduced from 23.5 percent of gross domestic product to 21.2 percent. Deregulation ended disastrous price controls and curtailed the government’s micromanaging of private businesses. Disciplined money supply strengthened the dollar.

As Peter Ferrara, policy adviser to Reagan, has described, the results were beyond spectacular. Reaganomics unleashed an explosive growth of wealth and prosperity, the largest in the history of humankind. Some 20 million jobs were created. Unemployment dropped to 5.3 percent. The gross domestic product growth rate hit a high of 6.8 percent, and the total economy grew by nearly a third. Inflation dropped to 3.2 percent. Even the oil shortage was solved almost overnight.

Barack Obama is no Ronald Reagan.

President Obama entered office peddling the false hope that government can “spread the wealth.” This is as foolish as bucketing water from one end of a swimming pool to the other. At best you achieve nothing; in reality, the spilled water along the way leaves everybody worse off.

Obamanomics favors top-down compulsory cooperation over voluntary. It is the anti-Reaganomics. Mr. Obama has done the following: (1) raised taxes, (2) unleashed a wild orgy of spending, including his disastrous so-called “stimulus,” (3) dramatically increased regulations and even nationalized industries and businesses, and (4) printed money out of “quantitative easing” thin air.

The results were predictable. Since the Obama stimulus - a collection of “shovel-ready” projects promised to save the economy - was signed into law, America has lost 1.9 million jobs and unemployment has surpassed 9 percent. GDP growth remains anemic. Consumer confidence has tumbled. Gas prices were at $1.81 per gallon before Mr. Obama put his “boot on the neck” of suppliers, and now it’s more than doubled, to $3.81. We burn our food supply in our gas tanks, and grocery prices have skyrocketed - some staples by as much as 40 percent. Since the president signed his mortgage rescue plan, Americans have seen 3.82 million foreclosures. Most disturbingly, the majority of Americans are receiving some type of welfare.

Want to better understand Obamanomics? Look no further than “cash for clunkers,” Mr. Obama’s laughably misguided idea to use American’s wealth to, quite literally, destroy American’s wealth, to use taxpayers’ money to destroy taxpayers’ working automobiles. Despite the propaganda, these weren’t “clunkers” at all. I continue proudly to drive one myself. Edmonds.com estimated the cost per new car sold at $24,000. Some estimates are much higher. A year later, auto sales were at their worst in 27 years and Americans - low-income Americans in particular - are suffering a government-created shortage of low-priced cars. Still the Democrats claim that the clunkers program “has been successful beyond our wildest dreams.” The truth is, it was motivated by environmentalism, not economics. It reflects Mr. Obama’s arrogant belief that he knows better than you what type of car you should drive. Controlling your behavior is one wild dream, indeed.

Mr. Obama, abandoning any pretense of economic literacy, has placed the blame for unemployment squarely on America’s archenemy: the ATM. The jobless rate remains high, according to the president, because - it’s hard to make this stuff up - “when you go to a bank you use the ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller.” Other Democrats share his ignorance. Recently, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. claimed that Apple’s iPad was “probably responsible for eliminating thousands of American jobs.” Mr. Jackson, an iPad owner himself, adds hypoc-risy to ignorance.

Mr. Obama, meet Ned Ludd. In the early 1800s, the Luddites - named for Ned Ludd, an alias used to conceal their leaders’ true identities - sabotaged factories for fear of new technology. Their mistake was a belief that jobs themselves are prosperity when, in fact, it’s the products and services of those jobs that create prosperity. The government could hire people to dig holes and other people to fill them back in, but America would be poorer for the wasted effort. In reality, new technologies, from the advent of the wheel to today’s nanotechnology - including the ATM and the iPad - increase efficiency, which frees people for more important endeavors. This is the precise mechanism that improves mankind’s standard of living.

And now, as Obamanomics continues to crumble, the president has made a stunning admission: ” ‘Shovel-ready’ was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” The line drew laughter from his friendly audience. This is not the first time his own supporters have been caught laughing at Obamanomics. Last week - before the Democratic National Committee, no less - the president made this wild claim: “Over the last 15 months, we’ve created over 2.1 million private-sector jobs.” That despite the record showing America has 1.9 million fewer jobs today than before his “stimulus.” According to the White House’s own transcript, what followed next was “laughter” (until later, that is, when Orwellian Ministry of Truth officials in the administration scrubbed the record and changed the transcript to read “applause”).

Americans are suffering, Mr. President, and it’s no laughing matter. It’s time to put Obamanomics where it belongs: on the trash heap of history. Got a shovel?

Dr. Milton R. Wolf, a Washington Times columnist, is a board-certified diagnostic radiologist and President Obama’s cousin.
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2)The Invisible Palestinians
Caroline B. Glick

Like the rest of the Left, the media hold Israel responsible for Hamas’s imprisonment of Schalit because they perceive the Arabs generally and the Palestinians specifically as objects rather than actors.

Sunday was the first day of Sgt. Gilad Schalit’s sixth year in captivity. Schalit was kidnapped on June 26, 2006 and has been held hostage by Palestinian terrorists affiliated with Hamas in Gaza ever since.

For five years, Schalit has been held incognito. His terrorist captors have permitted him to send but one letter to his family and released but one video of Schalit over this entire period. He has been denied visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross. He was clearly emaciated in the video.

Over the past five years, Hamas has engaged in periodic indirect negotiations with Israel through a German mediator and others. While their demands have varied from time to time, essentially they want Israel to release around 1,500 terrorists from its prisons in exchange for Schalit. And they want the terrorists to be released to their homes in Judea and Samaria and Gaza where they can pick up killing Jews where they left off.

And it isn’t only Hamas demanding these things. In an interview with IMRA news agency on May 25, Fatah negotiator Nabil Shaath said that the Fatah supports Hamas’s demands. Shaath explained that once the Fatah-Hamas unity government is formed Schalit will become the responsibility of the unified Palestinian Authority.

The Palestinian Authority will continue to hold Schalit hostage and demand that Israel release thousands of terrorists as ransom for his release. As he put it, “We have 7,000 political prisoners in Israel by design – taken by the Israeli authority. They have to be also freed.”

So the Palestinian leadership from Fatah and Hamas alike are unified in their view that it is perfectly acceptable to hold Schalit captive. As far as they are concerned, it is acceptable to stand in breach of international law and basic standards of humanity in order to extort Israel to free mass murderers from prison. And it is acceptable to the Palestinians for these murderers to return to their work killing as many Jews as they can get their hands on.

It is hard to think of a more despicable comment on the state of Palestinian society than their wall to wall support for the taking and holding of hostages or their desire to see mass murderers released from jail. A person could be forgiven for thinking that on the fifth anniversary of Schalit’s abduction that the media would be full of articles describing in detail the evil that is Hamas and Fatah which celebrate Schalit’s victimization and the suffering of his family.

But that person would be wrong. The media coverage of the fifth anniversary of Schalit’s kidnap devoted no attention to his Palestinian captors. In fact, if a person were simply going by what he learned from the Israeli media over the past several days, he would likely believe that either Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is hiding Schalit in his cellar, or that Netanyahu is colluding with Hamas to keep Schalit captive in Gaza.

Aping the increasingly grotesque genre of reality television shows, local celebrities and washed-out headline-starved failed former security brass got together with Yediot Aharonot and put on a reality TV stunt for the public to mark the anniversary.

One after another these supposedly concerned citizens walked into a knock-off solitary confinement cell furnished with a dirty toilet and television cameras. The beautiful ones sighed, cried, kicked, and whined for an hour apiece. Their performances were broadcast live on Yediot’s Ynet news portal. Channel 2 rebroadcast the highlights on the evening news.

The purported goal of the campaign was to “raise public awareness,” about Schalit’s plight. As if the Israeli public isn’t aware of his plight. For the overwhelming majority of Israelis, the mention of Schalit’s name evokes profound concern and sorrow.

BUT THEN, Yediot knows that. And raising public awareness was not the goal of their televised pimping of Schalit’s suffering with the help of shameless celebrities and far-left retired generals. Their goal was to turn the public against Binyamin Netanyahu – Schalit’s imaginary jailer.

This message was delivered not only by the likes of radical failed Shin Beit chiefs Ami Ayalon and Carmi Gillon. It was delivered by Gilad Schalit’s father Noam Schalit at his press conference on Sunday.

Noam Schalit declared, “Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, you do not have the right to sentence Gilad to death. The weakness and the stubbornness you are showing in this crisis is an immediate danger for Gilad’s life and health. More than that, it is a danger for the values of the State of Israel, on which generations of Israelis were raised.” There is no doubt that Noam Schalit is acting as he is because he wants to get his son home alive. But there is also no doubt that by pressuring Netanyahu and the government and accusing them of being responsible for his son’s captivity, Noam Schalit is only making things worse.

Hamas wants to destroy Israel. Its terrorists in prison want to destroy Israel.
Hamas’s leaders view Schalit’s illegal incarceration and the anguish it causes in Israel as a source of pride for the movement and Palestinian society as a whole. It views the release of terrorists as a means of strengthening the jihadist movement politically and militarily.

Every time Noam Schalit blames the government for his son’s plight and demands that our leaders free terrorists to bring him home, he strengthens Hamas’s negotiating position.

On Sunday, Netanyahu admitted that the pressure worked. Netanyahu did in fact agree to what had been Hamas’s demands for the release of more than a thousand terrorists for Schalit and Hamas didn’t even bother responding to the offer. On Monday, Hamas said that Netanyahu’s offer was too low.

With Noam Schalit and the media in its court, Hamas knows there is no reason to rush into anything. So its leaders raised the price still further.

SINCE SCHALIT was first kidnapped, his family has repeatedly invoked the plight of IAF navigator Col. Ron Arad who was taken hostage by Shi’ite terrorists when his plane crashed in Lebanon in 1986. Arad has been held hostage for the past quarter century.

The Schalits say their pressure campaign against the government is fuelled by their desire to prevent their son from sharing Arad’s fate.

These statements show that the Schalits fundamentally misunderstand what happened to Arad and what is happening to Gilad. It wasn’t for lack of will that Israel has failed to bring Arad home. Arad disappeared because Israel never had good intelligence information about his whereabouts.

If it had, Arad would have been rescued, dead or alive. According to recently retired IDF chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, the same has been the case with Schalit.

In their refusal to recognize that they are hurting their son by directing their anger at the government rather than the Palestinians and their international supporters, the Schalits are unconscionably egged on by the media. As Yediot marked the fifth anniversary of Gilad’s internment with their celebrity solitary confinement stunt, Maariv marked the fifth anniversary by interviewing 25 celebrities about their activism on behalf of Schalit.

All these celebrity attacks on Netanyahu are consistent with the past five years of media coverage of Schalit’s confinement. It is also consistent with their past coverage of the captivity of every other IDF hostage taken by Arab terrorists in recent years.

THE SCHALIT family’s counterproductive behavior is the result of a combination of desperation, ignorance and manipulation by PR agencies. But what explains the media’s behavior? Why are they helping Hamas? Some media critics attribute their behavior to journalistic laziness and a desire to create sensational stories that will sell newspapers. No doubt there is some of that at work.

But lazy reporters and editors in search of screaming headlines have other options.
They could pit Noam Schalit against the father of one of the victims of the murderers whose release the Schalits and their supporters are demanding. That would make colorful page 1 copy.

The media could have a reporter spend an hour researching the Israeli and international self-described human rights community’s silence on Schalit’s plight and the shameless absence of any concerted demand by the self-proclaimed human rights community for his immediate release. Over the weekend, Israeli and international “human rights” groups B’Tselem, Amnesty International, Israel; Bimkom; Gisha; Human Rights Watch; International Federation for Human Rights; Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Gaza; Physicians for Human Rights, Israel; Public Committee Against Torture in Israel; and Yesh Din all got together to release a statement about Schalit. They failed to call for his immediate release.

Certainly a banner headline reporting this outrage would have sold papers.
All of these stories and journalistic stunts are low-cost and would sell newspapers.
And at a minimum, none of them would harm Schalit’s chances of getting released.
Yet the media have opted to sell the tale of the government’s culpability for his suffering due to its failure to bow to Hamas’s ever-escalating demands.

The media’s behavior is puzzling not merely because they have options besides supporting Hamas. It is puzzling because their obsessive coverage of Schalit arguably hurts their tireless efforts to sell the public on the notion that it is a terrific idea to give Judea and Samaria and parts of Jerusalem to Schalit’s captors. By reminding the public of Schalit, the media are also reminding the public that the Palestinians are not interested in peace and that they use the land Israel gives them to attack us. That is, their Schalit campaign undermines their appeasement campaign.

Finally, their demand that Netanyahu “release” Schalit is alienating their readers.
In the face of their intense campaign, “for Gilad” according to a poll published last month by Maariv, only 41 percent of the public agrees with their surrender at all cost strategy and 51 percent opposes it.

So by any rational measure, the media are acting against their own interests by pushing the pro-Hamas line. The only explanation that remains is irrational. But it is also consistent with the media’s serial irrationality on everything concerning Israel’s relationship with the Arab world generally and the Palestinians in particular.

The explanation is that like the rest of the Left – in Israel and worldwide – the media hold Israel responsible for Hamas’s imprisonment of Schalit because they perceive the Arabs generally and the Palestinians specifically as objects rather than actors. The only actors they see are Israel and the US.

Just as the international Left sends ships to aid and comfort Palestinian terrorists in Gaza to fight the so-called “occupation” which ended six years ago, so the Israeli media says the government is holding Gilad Schalit hostage. In both cases, the Palestinians are invisible, and inert.

To its credit, after five years of inaction, last Thursday, the Red Cross finally asked Hamas to prove Schalit is still alive. Gazans reacted to the move by attacking the Red Cross office in Gaza.

This major story received little mention in the media. And that makes sense. How can they cover a story about a group of people they can’t be bothered to notice?
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Tuesday, June 28, 2011

It Is Not The Economy, Stupid It Is Obama Who Is Stupid!

I publish a great deal of material which most never read it because it is too long etc.

That said, I believe the previous memo entitled: " Obama The Poker Play or Goodbye Mr Chips!" and this one are must reads for anyone who wishes to get a better handle on why our economic status is failing, why our future is less than robust and why Obama is anything but intelligent and, in fact, is actually abysmally ignorant in matters of economics and what creates wealth.

The Saul Alinsky philosophy is spreading. The attacks on the merit of our Constitution are mounting and the intellectual effete and academic elites are actively seeking the destruction of our Republic.

Ben Franklin's prophetic response to the scullery maid's inquiry is, in fact proving prophetic: 'We have a Republic if we can keep it."

I continue to believe we are heading in the wrong direction and Obama has quickened the pace. I further believe we re-elect him at our peril. In fact, by the time he completes his first term , and has built upon the destructive economic policies of his many predecessors and Congresses, it could well be too late and our heirs will inherit a bankrupt nation both fiscally as well as morally speaking.

That is sad indeed for when America goes 'chaos adherents' will take over.
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The latest issue of Commentary Magazine has an outstanding article by Douglas Feith and Seth Cropsey entitled: "The Obama Doctrine Defined." The article goes into great length to explain why Obama has taken the radicalized tack he has with respect to America's former role as leader of the West. The article also discusses several appointees who are prominent advisers and whose influence is significant in shaping Obama's attitude that America must shrink back and be an apologist for causing so much angst and grief.

I too continue to believe Obama sees America through a prism shaped by those who have a contempt for our nation, its power, its success and its role in the world!(See 1 and 1a below.)
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A black attorney and clergyman's view of the genesis of Obama's negative attitude towards Israel. (See 2 2a and 2b below.)
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Porter Stansberry explains what economic system we have and asks has it created the wealth we believe it has? (See 3 below.)
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Even the Brits now acknowledge Iran's nuclear missile activities. (See 4 below.)
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Far too many believe Obama's meteoric rise is because he is brilliant and few believe his ascendancy to the presidency is because he ran against an incompetent campaigner and the nation was ready for change. This time around, Obama's darkening prospects are beginning to test his ability to keep his own campaign on track as stress fissures develop within his staff due to the increasing prospect of losing.

Whomever the Republicans select they will be formidable if they consistently hammer away at Obama's failed accomplishments. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1) Last week my colleague Eric Ames addressed the bias and some misstatements of fact in Richard Stengel's recent attack on the Constitution/defense of ObamaCare here.

Today, Aaron Worthing over at Patterico's Pontification's ticked off 13 factual errors in the Time magazine editor's piece and systematically addressed each one.

It's an excellent piece. Here's an excerpt that I think addresses some of Stengel's biggest errors:

False Claim #1: The Constitution does not limit the Federal Government.

The relevant passage:

If the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn’t say so. Article I, Section 8, the longest section of the longest article of the Constitution, is a drumroll of congressional power. And it ends with the “necessary and proper” clause, which delegates to Congress the power “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.” Limited government indeed.



(Emphasis added.) [Update: If you want to check the veracity of my quotes from Stengel's piece, I suggest you use this single-page version of the piece, and then perform a Control-F search.]



Proof that he is wrong: The Constitution is filled with limitations on Federal Power. For instance, Article I, Section 9 says:



The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person. [A.W.: They’re talking about the slave trade.]



The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.



No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.



No capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.



No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.



No Preference shall be given by any Regulation of Commerce or Revenue to the Ports of one State over those of another: nor shall Vessels bound to, or from, one State, be obliged to enter, clear, or pay Duties in another….



No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States[.]



And then there is Article III, Section 3, limiting what the government can do to a traitor:



Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.



The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.



It should be noted that Corruption of Blood is a doctrine by which the family of a traitor would suffer because of their alleged corrupted blood, so this is limiting the government’s ability to punish the children of a traitor for his or her treason.



And then there is the Bill of Rights. As I noted last time, Mr. Stengel considered them as of a piece with the original Constitution, an interpretation I concurred with. Every single one of them represents a limitation on federal power, so it is sufficient to only quote a few of them:



Amendment 1

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.



Amendment 2

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.



Amendment 9

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.



Amendment 10

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.



So contrary to his suggestion, the Constitution does indeed limit the power of the Federal Government, a point most of us learned in elementary school.



False Claim #2: The Constitution is not law.

The relevant passage:

Originalists contend that the Constitution has a clear, fixed meaning. But the framers argued vehemently about its meaning. For them, it was a set of principles, not a code of laws. A code of laws says you have to stop at the red light; a constitution has broad principles that are unchanging but that must accommodate each new generation and circumstance.(emphasis added)



Proof that he is wrong: Again, the Constitution itself contradicts this claim. Article VI, Paragraph 2:



This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land[.]



And of course in my long fisking piece, I cite several passages from Marbury v. Madison that is on point as well, but the Constitution is enough.
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Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/ken-shepherd/2011/06/28/conservative-blogger-spots-13-factual-errors-time-editors-attack-us-co#ixzz1QfwARQcL

1a)At Obama's Pentagon, ‘be all that you can be’ becoming ‘dress for success’
By Anna Mulrine

Army move is meant to signal a change in military culture, from 'muddy boots' to military 'corporate'


Just as the US troop drawdown in Afghanistan announced by President Obama has been characterized as the beginning of the end of the war, the US Army is making a highly symbolic change that similarly signals an ebb in combat footing.

Starting next month, US Army servicemembers will no longer wear their Army Combat Uniform — or ACU's, otherwise known as fatigues — around the halls of the Pentagon.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Pentagon-based soldiers began wearing their camouflage uniforms. It was one way of signaling that though not all forces were deployed to the conflicts overseas, the entire US military was at war.

It was then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker's intent after he took the job in 2003 to "get people to realize that we are in combat," says the US Army's top noncommissioned officer, Sgt. Maj. Raymond Chandler — and that the war "wasn't going to get done with anytime soon."

The current Army chief of staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, decided that starting in July Army troops at the Pentagon will wear their BDUs — or battle dress uniforms — considered business attire for troops.

"Everyone understands that we are at war," Chandler said. "Everyone has been touched by it." Now, he added, there is a gradual shift within the Pentagon to emphasize "the corporate part of the Army" as well.

This marks a key movement away from "this muddy boots culture that has pervaded everything" in the US military, says retired Col. Charles Allen, professor of cultural science at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pa.

The downside of an extensive emphasis on war fighting is that "sometimes it can take away from the long-term focus of the Army," Dr. Allen added.

With the drawdown in Afghanistan, "the Army needs to bring back the best and the brightest now fighting the wars and bring them back into the institutional side of the house."

There will be other uniform changes as well. Soldiers will no longer be required to wear the black beret that has been part of the Army Combat Uniform since 2001.

The beret was not particularly popular among soldiers, and during the decade that it was in use it proved difficult to wear, Allen says. "You couldn't put it on with one hand, you had to shave it, stand in the shower to get it wet and form it." On sunny days, it didn't offer a bill to shield the eyes. "All those things which seemed overburdensome in some cases."

Dempsey's decision to change the beret may have been part of his decision to emphasize trust, discipline, and fitness among the soldiers, Allen says. "Changing the uniform is a trust issue — you trust that your leaders will listen to what you want, and that the small things sometimes matter. When you're trying to do the big things, those small things can sometimes be a foundation."

Though the decision to move away from the beret has been greeted with enthusiasm, Chandler acknowledges that the decision for soldiers not to wear fatigues at the Pentagon was "an emotional issue" for some. "Frankly there was discussion about whether or not this would take people away from the idea that we were still at war."

He added that here was a concern among some leaders involved in the discussion that not wearing camouflage uniforms "somehow" means "not being in touch with the soldiers" fighting the war.

Allen adds that, alternately, there may also have been a perception among other services in the Pentagon that chose not to wear fatigues that the Army's decision to wear BDUs over the years "was dismissive of other services."

The shift, Allen adds, could be interpreted as a signal that "everybody involved in the defense enterprise is important to the fight — not just those wearing the combat uniforms and their muddy boots."
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2) Pawlenty Slams Obama on ‘Anti-Israel Attitude’: ‘He Thinks Israel Is the Problem’
By Christopher Santarelli

The Council on Foreign Relations in New York City set the stage this afternoon for Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty to deliver the most hawkish and extensive Middle East policy agenda speech to date among candidates in the 2012 field. The speech outlined a four category approach to Middle Eastern governments, criticized President Obama’s murky policy of “engagement” when handling democracy movements, and condemned the President’s treatment of our ally Israel.

“The revolutions now roiling that region offer the promise of a more democratic, more open, and a more prosperous Arab world. From Morocco to the Arabian Gulf, the escape from the dead hand of oppression is now a real possibility.

Now is not the time to retreat from freedom’s rise.”

The former Minnesota governor slammed President Obama for being “timid, slow, and too often without a clear understanding of our interests or clear commitment to our principles,” and claimed the president failed in his response to the Arab Spring.

As several Republican candidates have advocated for a isolationist-leaning approach to foreign policy, Gov. Pawlenty affirmed himself as someone who would take a different approach if president:

“The leader of the United States should never leave those willing to sacrifice their lives in the cause of freedom wondering where America stands. As President, I will not.

We need a president who fully understands that America never ‘leads from behind.’”

The race for the GOP 2012 presidential candidate is as open as it has ever been, and as the media frenzies over each new candidate that files FEC paperwork, attention on Gov. Pawlenty has begun to dilute. Some see today’s speech as a turning point for Gov. Pawlenty, and a move to cement himself among the ticket’s top contenders. From the New York Times:

“The speech comes as Mr. Pawlenty is struggling to break out in a campaign that has been dominated recently by the entries of Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former governor of Utah. Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, is leading in polls that show Mr. Pawlenty at the bottom of the pack.

Mr. Pawlenty is trying to take advantage of a rift in his party over the extent of the country’s involvement overseas.”

It remains to be seen if Gov. Pawlenty’s foreign policy approach will be in line with majority of voters in the GOP primary. That said, Tuesday’s speech hedged the Governor of a state over 2000 miles from any ocean as the Presidential candidate with the most extensive global ambitions.
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2a)Why Obama is Opposed to Israel

A BLACK AMERICAN CLERGYMAN POINTS TO THE SOURCE OF THE PRESIDENT'S ANTI-ISRAELISM


Like Barack Hussein Obama II, I am a graduate of Harvard Law School. I too have Muslims in my family. I am black, and I was once a leftist Democrat. Since our backgrounds are somewhat similar, I perceive something in Obama's policy toward Israel which people without that background may not see. All my life I have witnessed a strain of anti-Semitism in the black community. It has been fueled by the rise of the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan, but it predates that organization.

We heard it in Jesse Jackson's “HYMIE town” remark years ago during his presidential campaign. We heard it most recently in Jeremiah Wright's remark about “them Jews” not allowing Obama to speak with him. I hear it from my own Muslim family members who see the problem in the Middle East as a “Jew” problem.

Growing up in a small, predominantly black urban community in Pennsylvania , I heard the comments about Jewish shop owners. They were “greedy cheaters” who could not be trusted, according to my family and others in the neighborhood. I was too young to understand what it means to be Jewish, or know that I was hearing anti-Semitism. These people seemed nice enough to me, but others said they were “evil”. Sadly, this bigotry has yet to be eradicated from the black community.

In Chicago, the anti-Jewish sentiment among black people is even more pronounced because of the direct influence of Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Most African Americans are not followers of “The Nation”, but many have a quiet respect for its leader because, they say, “he speaks the truth” and “stands up for the black man”. What they mean of course is that he viciously attacks the perceived “enemies” of the black community – white people and Jews. Even some self-described Christians buy into his demagoguery.

The question is whether Obama, given his Muslim roots and experience in Farrakhan's Chicago, shares this antipathy for Israel and Jewish people. Is there any evidence that he does? First, the President was taught for twenty years by a virulent anti-Semite, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In the black community it is called “sitting under”. You don't merely attend a church, you “sit under” a Pastor to be taught and mentored by him. Obama “sat under” Wright for a very long time. He was comfortable enough with Farrakhan – Wright's friend – to attend and help organize his “Million Man March”. I was on C-Span the morning of the march arguing that we must never legitimize a racist and anti-Semite, no matter what “good” he claims to be doing. Yet a future President was in the crowd giving Farrakhan his enthusiastic support.

The classic left wing view is that Israel is the oppressive occupier, and the Palestinians are Israel's victims. Obama is clearly sympathetic to this view. In speaking to the “Muslim World, “he did not address the widespread Islamic hatred of Jews. Instead he attacked Israel over the growth of West Bank settlements. Surely he knows that settlements are not the crux of the problem. The absolute refusal of the Palestinians to accept Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state is the insurmountable obstacle. That's where the pressure needs to be placed, but this President sees it differently. He also made the preposterous comparison of the Holocaust to Palestinian “dislocation”.

Obama clearly has Muslim sensibilities. He sees the world and Israel from a Muslim perspective. His construct of “The Muslim World” is unique in modern diplomacy. It is said that only The Muslim Brotherhood and other radical elements of the religion use that concept. It is a call to unify Muslims around the world. It is rather odd to hear an American President use it. In doing so he reveals more about his thinking than he intends. The dramatic policy reversal of joining the unrelentingly anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and pro-Islamic UN Human Rights Council is in keeping with the President's truest – albeit undeclared red – sensibilities

Those who are paying attention and thinking about these issues do not find it unreasonable to consider that President Obama is influenced by a strain of anti-Semitism picked up from the black community, his leftist friends and colleagues, his Muslim associations and his long period of mentor-ship under Jeremiah Wright. If this conclusion is accurate, Israel has some dark days ahead. For the first time in her history, she may find the President of the United States siding with her enemies. Those who believe, as I do, that Israel must be protected had better be ready for the fight. We are.
NEVER AGAIN!

E. W. Jackson is Bishop of Exodus Faith Ministries, an author and retired attorney
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2b) Obama may be losing the faith of Jewish Democrats
By BEN SMITH


David Ainsman really began to get worried about President Barack Obama’s standing with his fellow Jewish Democrats when a recent dinner with his wife and two other couples — all Obama voters in 2008 — nearly turned into a screaming match.

Ainsman, a prominent Democratic lawyer and Pittsburgh Jewish community leader, was trying to explain that Obama had just been offering Israel a bit of “tough love” in his May 19 speech on the Arab Spring. His friends disagreed — to say the least.

One said he had the sense that Obama “took the opportunity to throw Israel under the bus.” Another, who swore he wasn’t getting his information from the mutually despised Fox News, admitted he’d lost faith in the president.

If several dozen interviews with POLITICO are any indication, a similar conversation is taking place in Jewish communities across the country. Obama’s speech last month seems to have crystallized the doubts many pro-Israel Democrats had about Obama in 2008 in a way that could, on the margins, cost the president votes and money in 2012 and will not be easy to repair.

“It’s less something specific than that these incidents keep on coming,” said Ainsman.

The immediate controversy sparked by the speech was Obama’s statement that Israel should embrace the country’s 1967 borders, with “land swaps,” as a basis for peace talks. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seized on the first half of that phrase and the threat of a return to what Israelis sometimes refer to as “Auschwitz borders.”

Obama’s Jewish allies stressed the second half: that land swaps would — as American negotiators have long contemplated — give Israel security in its narrow middle, and the deal would give the country international legitimacy and normalcy.

But the noisy fray after the speech mirrored any number of smaller controversies. Politically hawkish Jews and groups such as the Republican Jewish Coalition and the Emergency Committee for Israel pounded Obama in news releases. White House surrogates and staffers defended him, as did the plentiful American Jews who have long wanted the White House to lean harder on Israel’s conservative government.

Based on the conversations with POLITICO, it’s hard to resist the conclusion that some kind of tipping point has been reached.

Most of those interviewed were center-left American Jews and Obama supporters — and many of them Democratic donors. On some core issues involving Israel, they’re well to the left of Netanyahu and many Americans: They refer to the “West Bank,” not to “Judea and Samaria,” fervently supported the Oslo peace process and Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and believe in the urgency of creating a Palestinian state.

But they are also fearful for Israel at a moment of turmoil in a hostile region when the moderate Palestinian Authority is joining forces with the militantly anti-Israel Hamas.

“It’s a hot time, because Israel is isolated in the world and, in particular, with the Obama administration putting pressure on Israel,” said Rabbi Neil Cooper, leader of Temple Beth Hillel-Beth El in Philadelphia’s Main Line suburbs, who recently lectured his large, politically connected congregation on avoiding turning Israel into a partisan issue

Some of these traditional Democrats now say, to their own astonishment, that they’ll consider voting for a Republican in 2012. And many of those who continue to support Obama said they find themselves constantly on the defensive in conversations with friends.

“I’m hearing a tremendous amount of skittishness from pro-Israel voters who voted for Obama and now are questioning whether they did the right thing or not,” said Betsy Sheerr, the former head of an abortion-rights-supporting, pro-Israel PAC in Philadelphia, who said she continues to support Obama, with only mild reservations. “I’m hearing a lot of ‘Oh, if we’d only elected Hillary instead.’”

Even Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who spoke to POLITICO to combat the story line of Jewish defections, said she’d detected a level of anxiety in a recent visit to a senior center in her South Florida district.

“They wanted some clarity on the president’s view,” she said. “I answered their questions and restored some confidence that maybe was a little shaky, [rebutted] misinformation and the inaccurate reporting about what was said.”

Wasserman Schultz and other top Democrats say the storm will pass.

They point out to anyone who will listen that beyond the difficult personal relationship of Obama and Netanyahu, beyond a tense, stalled peace process, there’s a litany of good news for supporters of Israel: Military cooperation is at an all-time high; Obama has supplied Israel with a key missile defense system; the U.S. boycotted an anti-racism conference seen as anti-Israel; and America is set to spend valuable international political capital beating back a Palestinian independence declaration at the United Nations in September.

The qualms that many Jewish Democrats express about Obama date back to his emergence onto the national scene in 2007. Though he had warm relations with Chicago’s Jewish community, he had also been friends with leading Palestinian activists, unusual in the Democratic establishment. And though he seemed to be trying to take a conventionally pro-Israel stand, he was a novice at the complicated politics of the America-Israel relationship, and his sheer inexperience showed at times.

At the 2007 AIPAC Policy Conference, Obama professed his love for Israel but then seemed, - to some who were there for his informal talk - to betray a kind of naivete about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians: “The biggest enemy” he said, using the same rhetoric he applied to American politics, was “not just terrorists, it’s not just Hezbollah, it’s not just Hamas — it’s also cynicism.”

At the next year’s AIPAC conference, he again botched the conflict’s code, committing himself to an “undivided Jerusalem” and then walking it back the next day.

Those doubts and gaffes lingered, even for many of the majority who supported him.

“There’s an inclination in the community to not trust this president’s gut feel on Israel and every time he sets out on a path that’s troubling you do get this ‘ouch’ reaction from the Jewish Community because they’re distrustful of him,” said the president of a major national Jewish organization, who declined to be quoted by name to avoid endangering his ties to the White House.

Many of Obama’s supporters, then and now, said they were unworried about the political allegiance of Jewish voters. Every four years, they say, Republicans claim to be making inroads with American Jews, and every four years, voters and donors go overwhelmingly for the Democrats, voting on a range of issues that include, but aren’t limited to Israel.

But while that pattern has held, Obama certainly didn’t take anything for granted. His 2008 campaign dealt with misgivings with a quiet, intense, and effective round of communal outreach.

“When Obama was running, there was a lot of concern among the guys in my group at shul, who are all late-30s to mid-40s, who I hang out with and daven with and go to dinner with, about Obama,” recalled Scott Matasar, a Cleveland lawyer who’s active in Jewish organizations.

Matasar remembers his friends’ worries over whether Obama was “going to be OK for Israel.” But then Obama met with the community’s leaders during a swing through Cleveland in the primary, and the rabbi at the denominationally conservative synagogue Matasar attends — “a real ardent Zionist and Israel defender” — came back to synagogue convinced.

“That put a lot of my concerns to rest for my friends who are very much Israel hawks but who, like me, aren’t one-issue voters.”

Now Matasar says he’s appalled by Obama’s “rookie mistakes and bumbling” and the reported marginalization of a veteran peace negotiator, Dennis Ross, in favor of aides who back a tougher line on Netanyahu. He’s the most pro-Obama member of his social circle but is finding the president harder to defend.

“He’d been very ham-handed in the way he presented [the 1967 border announcement] and the way he sprung this on Netanyahu,” Matasar said.

A Philadelphia Democrat and pro-Israel activist, Joe Wolfson, recalled a similar progression.

“What got me past Obama in the recent election was Dennis Ross — I heard him speak in Philadelphia and I had many of my concerns allayed,” Wolfson said. “Now, I think I’m like many pro-Israel Democrats now who are looking to see whether we can vote Republican.”

That, perhaps, is the crux of the political question: The pro-Israel Jewish voters and activists who spoke to POLITICO are largely die-hard Democrats, few of whom have ever cast a vote for a Republican to be president. Does the new wave of Jewish angst matter?

One place it might is fundraising. Many of the Clinton-era Democratic mega-donors who make Israel their key issue, the most prominent of whom is the Los Angeles Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban, never really warmed to Obama, though Saban says he will vote for the Democrat and write him a check if asked.

A top-dollar Washington fundraiser aimed at Jewish donors in Miami last week raised more than $1 million from 80 people, and while one prominent Jewish activist said the DNC had to scramble to fill seats, seven-figure fundraisers are hard to sneer at.

Even people writing five-figure checks to Obama, though, appeared in need of a bit of bucking up.

“We were very reassured,” Randi Levine, who attended the event with her husband, Jeffrey, a New York real estate developer, told POLITICO.

Philadelphia Jewish Democrats are among the hosts of another top-dollar event June 30. David Cohen, a Comcast executive and former top aide to former Gov. Ed Rendell, said questions about Obama’s position on Israel have been a regular, if not dominant, feature of his attempts to recruit donors.

“I takes me about five minutes of talking through the president’s position and the president’s speech, and the uniform reaction has been, ‘I guess you’re right, that’s not how I saw it covered,’” he said.

Others involved in the Philadelphia event, however, said they think Jewish doubts are taking a fundraising toll.

“We’re going to raise a ton of money, but I don’t know if we’re going to hit our goals,” said Daniel Berger, a lawyer who is firmly in the “peace camp” and said he blamed the controversy on Netanyahu’s intransigence.
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3)New American Socialism
By Porter Stansberry


No one knows what to call it…

That's part of the problem. It's difficult to criticize something that doesn't yet have a proper name.

You can't just call our economic system "socialism." It's not. There's a profit motive and private ownership of nearly all assets. Socialism has neither of these. Besides, far too many people have become far too rich in our system to simply label it "socialism."

If you have ever traveled to an actual socialist country – with a power grid that never works, little public sanitation, petty graft at every turn, and endemic, horrifying poverty – you realize our system and real socialism aren't the same at all.

But our system isn't truly capitalism, either. The State intervenes in almost every industry, often in a big and expensive way. With government at all levels making up more than 40% of GDP, it's fair to say we live in a State-dominated society.

And as with all socialist experiments, it is the poor who suffer the worst economic outcomes. It is their cash savings that get wiped out by inflation. It is their jobs that disappear when regulations reduce capital investment or government debt crowds out private capital in the markets.

If the poor knew the first thing about economics, they wouldn't keep voting for socialist politicians and their programs. Alas, they don't even know the basics.

The poor in America, like the poor everywhere, still believe you can rob Peter to pay Paul. They still believe their "leaders" are trying to serve their best interests. It is a sad hoax. What has really happened is clear: Bamboozling the poor has become a way of life for American politicians.

And the poor's willingness – even eagerness – to embrace the resulting economic slavery is the linchpin of our system.

But it's not only the poor who have become addicted to the system. Businessmen like Warren Buffett embrace it, too – despite its limitations and taxes. Buffett calls it the "American System." He says it's the greatest system for creating wealth the world has ever seen.

We're not so sure.

Yes, it certainly makes it easy for big businessmen like Buffett to become wealthy. But those same benefits don't accrue to the society at large. For example… even though the value of America's production has soared over the last 40 years and asset prices have risen considerably, our debts have grown even more.

When you adjust for debt and inflation, you discover America hasn't gotten richer at all. Yes, we have become more affluent. And yes, some individuals have gotten vastly richer. But as a whole, when you add back the debts we've racked up, the country hasn't gotten richer at all.

Since the end of the gold standard in 1971, real after-tax wages, per capita, stagnated. On average, we haven't gotten any richer at all in 40 years.























What happened over the last 40 years?

Why did so many people rush so eagerly into debt? Why did they borrow more and more to buy the same things at ever-higher prices – again and again and again? And why do people in America continue to work, day after day, for jobs that offer no opportunity and declining real wages? Most important, how did a few people end up getting so rich from this merry-go-round economic system that never takes us anywhere?

To answer this question, we need only answer one core question: Who benefits?

Whose wealth and power increases with inflation? Whose stature in society grows alongside the government? Who profits from increased spending on wars, prisons, and social programs that are doomed to fail? And most of all… who profits from an explosion in debt?

A certain class of people has the power to not only protect itself from these policies but to profit as well. These people have used the last 40 years to produce massive amounts of paper wealth. And they are now desperately trying to convert those paper accounts into real wealth, which explains the exploding price of farmland and precious metals.

This explosion of wealth at the top of the "food chain" is the main feature of what I call New American Socialism. It's a system fueled by paper money, the constant expansion of debt, and a kind of corruption that's hard to police because it occurs within the boundaries of the law.

Like the European and totalitarian socialism of the last 100 years, New American Socialism harnesses the power of the State to grow and maintain production. Like in traditional socialism, the poor pay the costs of New American Socialism. But unlike socialist systems of the past, this new American version has one critical improvement…

In the New American Socialism, the power of the system produces private profits.

In this way, it provides a huge incentive to entrepreneurs and politicians to work together on behalf of the system. This is what keeps the system going. This is what keeps it from collapsing upon itself. And this, unfortunately, is why the imbalances in the world economy will continue to grow until the entire global monetary system itself implodes.

Regards,

Porter
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4)Iran has secretly tested nuclear-capable missiles – UK Foreign Secretary


British Foreign Secretary William Hague stated Wednesday, June 29: "Iran has also been carrying out covert ballistic missile tests and rocket launches, including testing missiles capable of delivering a nuclear payload in contravention of UN resolution 1929."

This was reported last year and repeated in the face of US and Israeli denials. Hague was the first Western leader to confirm thhese disclosures. Military sources stress Iran plans to launch a monkey into space – and therefore a 330-kilo payload - by the Kavoshgar-5 is evidence it has developed a rocket capable of delivering a nuclear warhead at any point on the planet.

Haguein, a statement to parliament, pointed out Iran had announced plans to triple its capacity to produce 20 percent enriched uranium - "enrichment levels far greater than is needed for peaceful nuclear energy."

Again, military and intelligence sources note the Foreign Secretary's words follow the concentration of large-scale American naval, air and marine forces in the Mediterranean, the Aden and Oman straits, the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. This seaborne army is positioned for strikes against targets in Iran, Syria and Libya at 12 hours' notice. It may be safely assumed that Hague's ominous disclosure was pre-arranged with Washington.

In the past month,sources have also quoted several Saudi royal princes as warning that if Iran attained a nuclear capability, it would not be the only Persian Gulf nation to be armed with a nuclear weapon and missiles for its delivery.

As Iran's military exercise went into its third day, Aerospace commander of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Amir Ali Hajizadeh announced the launching of the new Ghadir radar system which he said had been "designed and manufactured to discover air targets, stealth planes, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and satellites at low orbits." The system, claimed to have a range of 1,100 kilometers in radius and height of 300 kilometers, was said to be operational in Iran for the first time.

In another blatantly hostile gesture towards the United Sates, Hajizadeh announced Russian military experts had been allowed to examine American drones said to have been shot down in the Persian Gulf for a close-up examination.This disclosure came on top of his announcement Tuesday that the fourteen 2,000-kilometer range missiles tested Tuesday were designed exclusively to hit American bases in Afghanistan and Israel.

He referred to the downed US drones in the plural while not indicating where, when and how they were shot down. The sort of inspection permitted the Russian military delegation of the pilotless aircraft's electronic systems is normally conducted discreetly so as not ruffle relations. This time, it was most unusually made public –not a good message for Russian-US ties especially in view of Moscow's steps against Washington's war on Libya and bid for sanctions against Syria.

By letting Russia know how they were shot down and displaying models constructed by reverse engineering, Tehran and Moscow indicated they shared the secrets of the US drones' vulnerabilities to attack.

Six months ago, Iran announced it had downed two American drones on January 2. At the time, Revolutionary Guards navy commander Ali Fadavi said the planes shot down were among the most modern US navy drones with a long-range capability.

The US Fifth Fleet operating in the Persian Gulf never responded to this Iranian statement but it did not deny it either. Generally, the American navy in the Middle East uses the unmanned MQ-8B Fire Scout helicopter for information-gathering missions, but the Iranians did not specify whether the American drones came from ships or from other air bases in the Middle East.
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5)Nerves Show on Team Obama
Recent scrambling by the president’s political advisers indicates they’re very worried about his reelection chances.
By Josh Kraushaar,



4 Reasons Obama's Advisers Are Worried

It’s been a rough June for the White House. Instead of being able to run a campaign taking credit for economic improvement, President Obama will, according to the latest forecasts, be trying to win four more years amid a grim economy next year. The president’s reelection team, once hoping to run on a “Morning in America” theme now doesn’t have that luxury. No wonder, the president’s advisers over the past month have been making moves that suggest they’re awfully concerned about his prospects:

1. Searching for an economic message. Veteran Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg recently offered perceptive advice to the president’s team by criticizing its “getting the car out of the ditch” metaphor meant to suggest the economy is slowly improving. As Greenberg wrote: “People thought they still were in the ditch.”

This is a time when the president needs to find his inner Bill Clinton, and feel Americans’ pain. If he wants to be one of the few presidents to win reelection in a stagnant economy, he’ll have to devote less time to defending past policies, like the auto bailout, and more to offering specific solutions to help people get back to work. Think a 21st century version of FDR’s fireside chats.

But there are few signs that the president’s economic messaging has changed. Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz recently said Democrats own the economy, but they don’t seem to be adapting their message to the bad economy likely to face them in November 2012.

2. Doubling down on manufacturing. The latest White House effort to wring good news out of a bad economy focuses on successes in the manufacturing sector: the auto bailout that put GM and Chrysler on sounder footing, as well as green initiatives.

Politically, it’s a puzzling message. While there has been a small uptick in manufacturing jobs, it’s hardly enough to be felt by the blue-collar electorate, who have been bearing the brunt of the recession and never viewed Obama too favorably in the first place. The latest Gallup weekly tracking poll shows Obama’s approval with college graduates at 51 percent, with a 40 percent approval among nongraduates.

The president’s emphasis on green jobs doesn’t help. It’s tough for many steelworkers to see themselves producing solar panels. Clean-energy jobs may be the future, but they’re not seen by displaced workers as a panacea.

Instead, Obama’s key to winning reelection is solidifying his support with college-educated whites, a swing demographic that has been more receptive to his message, along with high turnout among minorities. His key to victory is rallying white-collar professionals in swing-state suburbs, like Fairfax/Loudoun County, Va.; Wake County, N.C.; Franklin County, Ohio; Bucks County, Pa.; Clark County, Nev.—none hotbeds of manufacturing.

3. Fresh fundraising concerns. With a strong connection to the grassroots and expertise with social networking, President Obama’s reelection team mastered the art of hitting up small donors in the 2008 campaign.

But there are telltale signs that the grassroots army that propelled him is in a much less giving mood. It’s not a huge surprise; the bad economy has hit Obama’s small donors too. When you’re having trouble paying the bills, you’re not exactly pining to pitch in hard-earned money to help a powerful president.

A sign Team Obama is looking elsewhere: A Los Angeles Times report that Obama’s reelection team is already asking wealthy donors to commit the maximum $75,800 to the president’s campaign funds.

If Obama’s re-election starts looking more difficult next year, donors may well be inclined to give to the Democratic Senate and House campaign arms, seeing them as the better investment. But if they’re locked in with early maximum donations to the president’s re-election, that won’t be doable.

4. Raising the stakes in the upper South. Obama’s strategists are raising the stakes in the two battleground upper South states, North Carolina and Virginia.

They’ve never been critical cogs in a presidential strategy. If Team Obama sees them as such in 2012, it suggests the campaign is struggling in states that were comfortably on its side in 2008, particularly those in the Rust Belt.

When I interviewed leading Democratic and Republican strategists about the states toughest for Obama to hold, most were pessimistic about his prospects in North Carolina, a state that he won by just 14,000 votes.

Publicly, his strategists are arguing that the Tar Heel State’s growing numbers of college-educated suburbanites and minorities plays to Obama’s advantage. It’s no coincidence the Democrats are holding next year’s convention in Charlotte.

But if North Carolina looks like a challenge, Virginia looks within Obama’s grasp. Unemployment in the Old Dominion is far lower than most battleground states, and the growth of government jobs in the Washington, D.C., suburbs and a diversifying population play to the Democrats’ favor.

Not everyone on the Democratic side is as optimistic, however. One senior Democratic operative involved with key Virginia races believes Obama would need an African-American turnout close to his historic 2008 levels to win—a tough task in a down economy.

“When folks start to depend on recreating a specific snapshot in time, it is most always a disappointment,” the strategist said.
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