To Play Hard Ball You Have To Have Them!

Not a flag waiver? No proof offered and that makes me skeptical that it was said. (See 1 below.)
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Obama persists in programs that divide and appear worthless and costly. He continues to run the country as if he were a community organizer owned by the unions rather than a president doing what is best for the nation. (See 2 below.)
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It is little wonder Palestinians take the action they do for they would be fools to do otherwise. The West and the U.S. reward them constantly for their intransigence and, of course, UNRWA, employees would be out of a job if the Palestinian Refugee problem disappeared.

Israel solves its refugee problems, grows its economy and Buffet invests. What do the Palestinians have to show for their 63 years of victim hood? Textbooks that teach hate, a society bent on destruction?

It is always easier to extract concessions from your friends than to expect them from your adversaries unless you are committed to being tough and resourceful.

As for the amoral, if not immoral, U.N. they were hi-jacked decades ago and the organization continues useless unless meaningless talk is a worthy game to pursue.

The Wall Street Journal editorial reminds us about Yankee ingenuity and gumption which we lost eons ago. Yes, Obama should cut off Palestinian welfare, quit funding the U.N. and send Abbas his telephone number as former Sec. Baker once did with Israel. Whereas, I thought Baker's action was petulant and inappropriate in the case of a democratic ally, it would be most appropriate for Obama under current circumstances.

It is time to play hard ball but how can he. Obama lacks them?

If you want to perpetuate a situation spend money on it. If you want to restrain it withdraw funding. (See 3 below.)
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When it comes to explaining the "Buffet Tax" Obama is being disingenuous again. Warren Buffet's main source of taxable income, dividends, is taxed at a lower rate than had his income been earned. His secretary pays a tax on earned income not dividend income and earned income is taxed at a higher rate than dividend income.

Our president continues to lie and continues to sell snake oil when he uses the word fair as if the government should be the determinant of what fair means. Get a progressive to define fair. They never wil or can. They simply resort to their worn out fall back position - 'we need to spend more.' Why? Because progressives believe all their flawed ideas and theories are underfunded.

Seems to me if making the wealthy pay more is the equivalent of being fair and is good for the economy, I submit we make the wealthy be truly fair and give everything they earn and have to the government.

Wake up America - quit being taken for suckers . Perhaps we become incapable of reasoning and no longer can discern a snake oil salesman on a podium? Since we elected one maybe we have lost the power of informed and objective reasoning.(See 4, 4a and 4b below.)
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This is the ringer Obama has gotten us into with his feckless, dreamy and misguided foreign initiatives. Now Obama is trying to get us out because the prospect of a conflict his incompetence may create has mounted. (See 5 and 5a below.)
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More join the chorus lamenting Obama's sad state. (See 6 and 6a below.)
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Dick
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1)Michelle Obama: “All This Just For a Flag”
James S. Robbins

The internet was buzzing this week with video of First Lady Michelle Obama apparently showing extreme disrespect to the American flag at a ceremony in honor of the victims of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. As police and firefighters fold the flag to the sound of marching bagpipers, a skeptical looking Mrs. Obama leans to her husband and appears to say, “all this just for a flag.” She then purses her lips and shakes her head slightly as Mr. Obama nods.

Just for a flag? If that is what she said it is regrettable. Even with all her years being around those who hold high public office Mrs. Obama does not seem to understand the purpose and importance of ceremonies. They reaffirm the bonds of loyalty and fellowship that cement our national unity. Yes, at one level a flag is just a colorful piece of cloth. But it symbolizes much more. It is the emblem of our land and all its ideals. It has been present at every major event of any importance to the country, battles, celebrations, meetings, and the lunar landings. It is a symbol of unity that transcends party, faction and time. It is something uniquely and explicitly American. Men and women have fought and died for it. Our enemies hate us for it and burn it in the streets. All that should mean something.

Perhaps Mrs. Obama thinks that all the pomp and circumstance she experiences in her daily life has something to do with her, rather than the unofficial office she holds. If so she should disabuse herself of that notion quickly. The official gestures of respect shown to her are the same shown to any First Lady, and if she wasn’t married to the president she would be just another citizen. Ruffles and flourishes are not hers by right, but by coincidence of marriage. Yet this is the same woman who said she had never in her adult life been really proud of America before her husband ran for president, so it is no wonder she might dismiss a flag ceremony as just so much nonsense.

All this just for a flag? Has anyone said, “All this just for Michelle Obama?”
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2)Ryan: Obama’s $1.5 Trillion ‘Buffett Tax’ Is 'Class Warfare'

U.S. Republican leaders criticized President Barack Obama's proposal for a new tax on millionaires, calling it "class warfare" and predicting it will face heavy opposition in Congress.

Obama is expected to propose a "Buffett Tax" on Monday on people making more than $1 million a year as part of his recommendations to a congressional super committee seeking long-term deficit savings.

Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, and Mitch McConnell, Senate Republican leader, said the proposal would limit growth and hurt corporate investment in an already stagnating economy.

"It adds further instability to our system, more uncertainty and it punishes job creation and those people who create jobs," Ryan said on Fox News Sunday. "Class warfare may make for good politics but it makes for rotten economics."

McConnell said Congress had already debated the issue last year, when Obama and Republicans forged a compromise that extended the reduced tax rates, approved during the administration of George W. Bush, for high-earners for two years.
"It's a bad thing to do in the middle of an economic downturn," McConnell said on NBC's Meet the Press. "There is bipartisan opposition to what the president is recommending already."

The "Buffett Tax" refers to billionaire U.S. investor Warren Buffett, who wrote last month that rich people like him often pay less in tax than those who work for them because of loopholes in the tax code, and can afford to pay more.

Obama will lay out his recommendations in White House Rose Garden remarks at 10.30 a.m. EDT Monday and is expected to urge steps to raise tax revenue as well as cuts in spending.

MANDATE TO SEEK SAVINGS

The super committee of six Democratic and six Republican lawmakers must find at least $1.2 trillion in deficit savings before the end of the year to avoid painful automatic cuts, and is mandated to seek savings of up to $1.5 trillion.

Those savings are on top of $917 billion in deficit reduction agreed to in an August deal to raise the U.S. debt limit and Obama wants it to go further.

The populist proposal for a millionaire tax would appeal to Obama's Democratic base heading into the 2012 election, setting the stage for a battle with Republicans over tax and spending priorities.

"I just think that's a political move by the president," Republican U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said of the millionaire tax on CNN's State of the Union.

"When you pick one area of the economy and you say, we're going to tax those people because most people are not those people, that's class warfare," he said.

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois said on CNN that the proposal to raise taxes would be a good idea as long as it targeted "the wealthy and comfortable and those who wouldn't even notice it."

Congress also is considering Obama's jobs-creation proposal sent to them earlier this month. Durbin, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, said a Senate vote on Obama's jobs plan would likely come in October.

© 2011 Thomson/Reuters. All rights reserved.
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3)The Palestinian Statehood Gambit
The U.S. should respond by cutting funds for the U.N.

Are Palestinians entitled to a state? Before certain readers erupt at the mere suggestion that Palestinians may not be so entitled, we'd note that the Kurds—one of the oldest ethnic groups in the world—don't have a state. Neither do the Tamils of Sri Lanka, the Uighurs and Tibetans of China, the Basques of Spain, the Chechens of Russia or the Flemish of Belgium. The list of peoples with plausible claims to statehood is as long as the current number of U.N. member states, if not longer.

Yet when the United Nations holds its annual meeting in New York this week, the session will be dominated by the efforts of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to declare statehood. First the PA will apply to the Security Council for full membership in the U.N., which the Obama Administration has promised to veto. Then the General Assembly will hold a vote on whether to give the Palestinians "observer state" status on a par with the Vatican. This is almost certain to pass by a two-thirds, 129-nation majority.

A vote at the U.N. won't create a Palestinian state and will likely retard the creation of one, perhaps for years. It won't remove any Israeli settlements from the West Bank and might well give Jerusalem reason to accelerate the pace of construction. It could also lead Israel to take various punitive measures against the Palestinians, including freezing tax transfers worth about $100 million a month. The U.S. Congress might follow by cutting off the $600 million in annual aid to the Palestinians.

Why, then, are the Palestinians intent on winning the sort of symbolic trinket with which their cupboards are already full? The charitable explanation is that they are using the statehood bid as a gambit to get Israel to agree to various demands, including a halt in settlement construction.

But Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas offered a hint of his real ambition when he wrote, in the New York Times in May, that "Palestine's admission to the United Nations would pave the way for the internationalization of the conflict as a legal matter, not only as a political one. It would also pave the way for us to pursue claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the International Criminal Court."

That means not the usual feckless resolutions at the U.N.'s Human Rights Council, but travel bans and international arrest warrants for Israeli soldiers involved in the "occupation" of a supposedly sovereign state.

In other words, what Palestinians seek out of a U.N. vote isn't an affirmation of their right to a state, but rather another tool in their perpetual campaign to harass, delegitimize and ultimately destroy Israel. "We are going to complain that as Palestinians we have been under occupation for 63 years," Mr. Abbas said the other day. That's another way of saying that the "occupation," in Mr. Abbas's view, began with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and not with Israel's takeover of the West Bank and Gaza after a war that threatened Israel's existence in 1967.

Mr. Abbas may also see the U.N. gambit as a cost-free exercise, since the international community (including Israel and the U.S.) hasn't exactly been punctilious in holding Palestinians to account for violating their diplomatic or political undertakings. Sooner or later, we will read an op-ed explaining that defunding the PA will only help the radicals of Hamas, and that the only way forward is for Israel to make new concessions to entice the PA back to the very negotiating table they spurned by going to the U.N.

Here is a better course: The Obama Administration, which has wasted six months begging the Palestinians to change course, might instead announce that a declaration of Palestinian statehood in New York would lead to the closure of the Palestinian representative's office in Washington. Congress could also enact Florida Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen's bill to cut funding to the U.N. if it endorses a Palestinian state. This worked wonders the last time the Palestinians sought to have the U.N. declare their state during the George H.W. Bush Administration.

Perhaps it's also time to rethink the fundamental desirability of a Palestinian state so long as the Palestinians remain more interested in tearing down their neighbor than in building a decent political culture of their own.
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4)Obama's Hope and Lies
By Jeffrey Folks

One thing about the Obama White House: you can't fault them for a lack of optimism. Obama has been operating on little more than "hope" for three years now, with rosy predictions of economic improvement just around the corner. Back in June 2010, the president kicked off "recovery summer" with "groundbreakings and events across the country." When that recovery failed to materialize, he insisted that we were just going through a "soft patch." We're still in that soft patch, which is starting seem more like an endless swamp.

No problem. When rosy predictions fail, one can always resort to lies.

The monthly jobs report issued by the Department of Labor has not provided much cause for hope lately. Following weak reports in June and July, the August report showed an increase of precisely zero. That report, the first time a jobs report had shown zero improvement since 1945, grabbed the media coverage. But at the same time it was issued, the June and July numbers were revised downward by 58,000. Month after month, it seems, Obama's Labor Department has come up with rosy numbers that have to be adjusted downward. If that trend continues, we'll be up to full employment in no time, but no one will actually be working.

Maybe they've been playing too much fantasy football, or basketball, at the White House these days to know the difference. Obama is particularly fond of the kind of large numbers that impress small minds, "millionaires and billionaires" being a prime example. Aside from the fact that millionaires and billionaires are two very different classes of individuals -- there are plenty of millionaire retirees who are getting by on municipal bonds that currently yield 2.40% a year -- the president seems to have no conception of how capital creation is related to jobs. Every dollar that government confiscates from millionaires and billionaires is one fewer dollar invested in businesses that create jobs. Obama shows no more understanding of how this works than does his buddy, James Hoffa, Jr., head of the Teamsters Union.

Appearing with Hoffa at a Labor Day rally in Detroit, Obama appeared to second Hoffa's "declaration of war" against the Tea Party. In a CNN appearance the same weekend, Hoffa questioned the patriotism of businesses that have held back on investing their capital in the face of new regulation and taxation.

It is a charge that Obama's supporters have been kicking around for months. If only businesses would put all their reserve capital to work, millions of new jobs would be created. Of course, part of the reason they do not is prudence in the face of a deteriorating economy. Another is that excessive regulation has foreclosed business opportunities. Drilling has been all but banned in the Gulf of Mexico, in Alaska, and on federal lands elsewhere. Construction of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner in South Carolina has been threatened by Obama's National Labor Relations Board. Businesses face uncertainty over increased taxes associated with ObamaCare and possible expiration of the Bush tax cuts.

Meanwhile, Dodd-Frank has forced financial firms to maintain higher capital ratios even as it has reduced their profitability by sharply limiting fees and charges. But if only they would forget about taxes and regulation and shovel some of that money out to union workers, the economic numbers would look a lot better. It's almost as if businesses were withholding that money until they have some assurance of making a profit. How unpatriotic can you get?

When it comes to rosy predictions, Obama's promise of 5 million green jobs was about as far-fetched as Al Gore's claim to have invented the internet. According to Energy Department figures, the administration has spent $17.2 billion in loan guarantees to create 3,545 jobs, a cost of nearly $5 million per job. And as the bankruptcy of Solyndra, Evergreen Solar, and other green energy firms demonstrates, many of those jobs are likely to be short-lived.

Still, DOE sees the glass as a lot more than half-full. After news of the Solyndra bankruptcy broke, an Energy Department spokesman insisted that the loan guarantee program was "helping America win the clean energy race." Attempting to excuse its apparent loss of $500 million in loan guarantees to Solyndra, DOE's Deputy Secretary Poneman claimed that Solyndra was the victim of a "perfect storm." Despite repeated warning signs, including warnings from inside the department, DOE pressed ahead with loan guarantees to the failed solar panel maker. Half a billion dollars of taxpayer money has been squandered, and still Obama's Energy Department insists that "now is not the time to stop investing" in companies like Solyndra.

That combination of hope and lies is endemic within the Obama White House. At the beginning of the year, following his thrashing in the 2010 elections, Obama claimed to have seen the light on government regulation -- going so far as to issue an executive order to departments requiring them to eliminate needless regulation. Yet not a single regulation of any significance was reversed. In fact, hundreds of new regulations continue to be published each week in regard to health care, financial services, energy, and other areas.

When business leaders pressured the president to reverse costly greenhouse-gas standards for industrial boilers, the EPA resisted and finally agreed only to delay regulation for one year. But the fact that implementation has been postponed from 2014 to 2015 does nothing to lessen the job-killing effects of the ruling. Businesses large and small will immediately factor in the burden of this regulation and reduce their spending on jobs accordingly.

Desperate to show that regulation has been reduced, the White House Office of Management and Budget issued a report showing that Americans were having to spend less time filling out government forms. That might sound like a step forward, but most of the "improvement" resulted from reduced estimates of how long it takes to fill out those forms. In other words, if you want to reduce the burden of regulation, why not just reduce your estimates of how burdensome government regulations are?

Incredible as it may seem, Labor Department forms that took 183 million hours to complete in 2009 take only 141 million hours today, a 23% reduction in compliance time. The best part of it was that for the most part there was no actual reduction in the amount of time it took to complete the paperwork. All it took was a new estimate of the time it needed to do it and that burdensome regulation disappeared. Next thing you know, the IRS will issue a report showing that the top bracket of 35% has shrunk to just over a third of income.

If this all sounds a lot like Alice in Wonderland, it's because we have the mad hatter in charge. Alice in Wonderland is, after all, a tale in which a number things appear larger (or smaller) than they really are, so perhaps the Obama administration is simply exercising creative license as it issues economic reports. The last few years have been a mad tea party, just like the one in Lewis Carroll's book. Hopefully, a real tea party will put an end to that next year.

Jeffrey Folks is author of many books and articles on American culture, most recently Heartland of the Imagination (2011.


4a)te Times Three
By Robert J. Mack

You think Richard Nixon's presidency was the worst scandal ever? Well, so far, anyway.

It all started with a tape holding a door open at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., discovered by a security guard 39 years ago on June 17, 1972. That discovery started a sinister chapter in America's history, fueled by the fervent investigative work of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post and ending with the president, Richard M. Nixon, exiting the White House in disgrace on August 9, 1974.

A similar Watergate scandal could erupt for Barack Obama. The only difference is that there may be three of them.

The insane Solyndra loan, the LightSquared cronyism, and the Operation Fast and Furious gun-running debacle have all come into America's consciousness at the same time. How could the government invest in a solar panel start-up that had no prospects for any kind of success, and to the tune of $535 million dollars? Why would a four-star Air Force general say that the White House tried to pressure him to change his testimony before the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee to make it more favorable to a company tied to a large Democratic donor? What were directors at the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and the ATF thinking when they persuaded gun dealers to allow more than 2,000 firearms to get in the hands of drug lords in Mexico, resulting in over 200 deaths?

These are questions that demand answers. And the American people are not mesmerized enough by the star power of their president to avoid those answers and where they might lead.

Are the current body blows to the president's political stature of these humiliating events, not to mention the legal ramifications, enough to distract voters next year from returning him to the progressive throne? If Obama had provided any explorer's gold or spices to lard the treasury from the first term, then maybe all might be forgiven, assuming no laws were broken. But with Obama's poll numbers in the toilet over the economy (and the awkward question of competence in the air), Americans are ticked off. And when the populace gets mad, watch out. Royalty's crowns get removed unceremoniously when the people revolt. And, so far, Obama, the king of the progressives, has taken a "let 'em eat cake" position about the three scandals.

"What did the president know and when did he know it?" This was the famous question posed by then Senator Howard Baker during the Watergate hearings. Will this question be raised about Obama? MSNBC will continue, no matter what, to carry the president's water. But the Washington Post and ABC News have broken stories based on emails leaked to them in the Solyndra scandal, and with more hearings coming, it will be difficult to maintain radio silence on the scandals mushrooming.

We can expect underlings who will be scapegoated and have to walk the plank, as Bob Haldeman and John Erlichman did in the Watergate saga. As a matter fact, two federal officials have already been reassigned, and a third has resigned in the Operation Fast and Furious scandal. The acting director of the ATF, Kenneth Melson, has been reassigned by Attorney General Eric Holder. Dennis Burke, Arizona's U.S. Attorney who approved the operation, resigned immediately, and Emory Hurley, a Phoenix U.S. Attorney's Office prosecutor involved in the operation, has been reassigned to civil cases. But will there be a John Dean who will not willingly go loyally and quietly? Will, for instance, Eric Holder resign in shame over the Fast and Furious disaster but tell all? Considering his ego, he just may be Obama's John Dean.

When hubris invades a leader's mindset, he can do no wrong. And when he can do no wrong, then all those who question his actions are questioning his authority and must be eliminated. This was the fatal flaw of Richard Nixon's presidency regarding Watergate. His paranoia about those on the left who were out to get him finally did him in. The fact that he used his power to try to destroy people's lives constituted the criminal element in the tragedy. Fortunately, we did have the Watergate hearings, and Nixon quit before there was a constitutional crisis.

Obama is no Nixon, locking himself in the White House, getting inebriated, and praying with his secretary of state -- at least not yet anyway. And right now that's a very good thing for him because he has enough to worry about with his ridiculous jobs initiative, his poll numbers, and the failed "Arab spring" turning out Islamic extremists. The smoking guns, if any, are waiting to be discovered, perhaps in the vast data archives the White House must maintain.

For a guy trying to quit smoking, Barack Obama is facing a lot of stress. Pass the Nicorette.



5b)Obama's Recipe for Tax Disaster
By Adam Yoshida

President Obama's "Buffett Tax" proposal to change the nation's tax laws may sound seductively reasonable. Ensuring that nobody earning over a million dollars a year pays a lower percentage than the middle class sounds like justice. The truth, however, is that -- no matter how well-packaged it may be -- Obama's proposal is a nasty bit of class warfare that will destroy jobs, drive investment out of the economy, and harm the middle class, and it is certain to raise far less revenue than predicted.

Let's begin our discussion of this with the last part. Those, such as Warren Buffett, who feign outrage at the idea that a handful of extremely productive citizens might pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes than those with other kinds of income are being intentionally dishonest. They know full well that the reason why this occurs it that the sort of income being earned by these individuals consists largely of money that is realized in forms other than ordinary wage income, such as capital gains. Income of this sort is deliberately treated differently from how other kinds of income are treated because it accumulates over time, and is realized all at once. And for decades, inflation has been causing illusory capital gains to be reported.

Obama's proposal would amount to a massive increase in taxes on capital gains and other similar sources of income. People whose income comes in this fashion tend to have a very high degree of control over how and when they get paid. Does anyone think that such a massive change in taxation would not be accompanied by a corresponding change in behavior? Because most individuals with incomes in this range have the resources to engage in all sorts of behavior for the purpose of tax avoidance, it seems likely that a tax of this nature would raise far less revenue than any initial predictions would suggest.

Republicans need to absolutely home in on this point. It's bad enough to have a tax that's unfair and economically destructive. It's altogether another level of terrible to pass a tax that is both of those things and which doesn't bring in very much money

This is not an issue of seeking to protect our friends. I -- and I think I speak for many other conservatives in saying this -- oppose increasing taxes on the "rich" not because I have any great affection for most of them. I oppose it because all of the evidence that we have suggests that it won't work, that it will hurt the economy, and that any measures passed to target the "rich" today will come to haunt the middle class tomorrow.

It is important, in this context, to remind the general public of two things. First, almost all taxes that initially target only the "rich" -- the original income tax immediately comes to mind -- typically trickle down to target the middle class. This will especially prove to be the case for a tax, such as this one, where the facts on the ground make it likely to bring in far less money than initially estimated. Second, one doesn't even need to look as far back as the introduction of the income tax to see how this will go wrong: there's already a tax of this exact nature on the books called the Alternative Minimum Tax. Plenty of middle-class Americans already know how the AMT, also a tax passed to target supposedly tax-avoiding millionaires, has come to attack them. The Congress knows this as well, given that they have to annually pass "patches" onto the AMT to keep it from harming most of the middle class.

The sort of tax-avoiding behavior that these measures would incentivize are just about the worst thing that could happen to a fragile economy. Investors and other millionaires would defer income whenever possible, leaving money in already swollen corporate coffers and keeping it out of general circulation. We often underestimate the distorting effects that high taxes have on the economy and society as a whole. To pick just a single example, the strange state of American health care and the unique American reliance on private health insurance is a quirk that came to be as a result of extremely high taxes during the Second World War, when employers sought to hire away workers by offering tax-deductible health insurance to potential employees in lieu of other forms of compensation.

"The suspension of one man's dividends," Calvin Coolidge once reminded us, "means the suspension of another man's pay envelope." It is hard to think of anything that the government could do to better illustrate that essential truth than making it less attractive for the wealthy to dynamically invest their money.

There is one other point to consider. We are in the preliminary stages of one of the greatest public policy battles in our history. The government has current obligations that far exceed its ability to pay. In the coming years we will find ourselves with a choice: we can either pay, or we can reject as odious the promises made on our behalf by past generations. If we give in now, to this supposedly "reasonable" demand, we will simply have set the stage for the showdown over the next demand, and then for the one after that.

What we must do instead is stand firm in support of the policy that we know to be both best for the economy and morally right. It is morally wrong when laws are written to do special favors for a single individual or group. As conservatives, we believe in equality before the law and, just as it is wrong that the law should treat anyone with special favoritism, it is equally wrong to write laws that target a specific group for special mistreatment. The solution to a tax code full of easily exploited loopholes is not to target any single group for attack through addition to the code; it is to rewrite the code from the ground up in order to ensure equitable treatment for all
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5)Top US Intel official in Ankara to head off naval clash, bring Palestinians to talks

The US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper arrived in Ankara on an urgent surprise visit Sunday night Sept. 18 as Turkish saber-rattling threatened three major US interests:

Sunday, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the information gathered by the US radar system to be stationed in Turkey's Malatya province as part of the NATO missile-shield would not be shared with Israel – thereby disrupting the entire system; Monday, US Noble Energy began drilling gas off Cyprus in defiance of Turkish threats; and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' headed to New York to promote UN acceptance of a Palestinian state – with Ankara's encouragement.

Clapper went straight into talks with the Turkish General Staff, the National Intelligence Agency (MIT) and Foreign Ministry. No official statement was issued on the visit. Turkish sources indicated only that it concerned the planned deployment of the NATO radar system, the fight against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) "as well as other developments in the Middle East."

However, intelligence sources report Clapper was in Turkey for a last-ditch Obama administration bid to avert sea and air hostilities erupting between Turkey, Greece, Cyprus and Israel in the eastern Mediterranean where tensions have been building up over Turkish threats inter alia against offshore gas exploration by Israel and Cyprus.

The US intelligence official's assignment in Ankara tied in with another last-ditch Washington effort, namely to break down Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas's stubborn resolve to press for UN acceptance of a Palestinian state and to sidestep peace negotiations with Israel.

Intelligence reaching the Obama administration traces that obduracy to a quiet conversation Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan held with Abbas in Cairo on Sept. 12. Since then, the Palestinian leader has dug in his heels against every effort to divert him from his UN gambit – even after Middle East Quartet envoy Tony Blair persuaded Israeli Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to show flexibility on such thorny issues as Palestinian acceptance of a Jewish national state and the 1967 borders.
The reason was so unreceptive - even to the near-certainty of US aid cutbacks - was a guarantee, administration sources found he obtained from Erdogan, that Turkey would provide the Palestinian Authority with the financial assistance it needed to make up for the reduced flow of aid from the US and Israel – provided he stuck to his guns.

On the day of their Cairo conversation, Ankara leaked tough new instructions issued by the Erdogan government to the Turkish Navy to pen Israeli warships inside their 12-mile territorial waters and disable the weapons of any vessels sailing beyond that limit.

Erdogan's purpose was to impress the Palestinian leader with the seriousness of Turkish willingness to confront Israel and the United States and persuade him that the Palestinians' best interests lay with aligning with Ankara.

Palestinians fell for the Erdogan line and Abbas determined to stage his own confrontation with Washington and Jerusalem at the United Nations. Friday, Sept. 16. He formally announced he was committed to filing an application with the UN Security Council for Palestinian membership of the world body, despite repeated warnings that it would fail.

Washington sources report that, as a last resort, after Israel's flexibility had no effect, the administration sent a high-ranking envoy to take all the issue up with the Turkish prime minister. Since Erdogan had enough influence to persuade Abbas to clash with the US and Israel, he was also believed capable of persuading him to back off.

James Clapper was also commissioned to caution Turkish leaders against continuing their threatened military brinkmanship in the Mediterranean. Another demand was that Ankara line up behind Washington's campaign to revive Palestinian-Israeli negotiations in lieu of their UN initiative and makes sure Mahmoud Abbas knew about the Turkish policy switch.

Following Davutoglu's statement on the X-band radar, Clapper was authorized to warn the Erdogan government that if it barred the sharing of information with Israel, the plan for its installation in Turkey would have to be abandoned. The entire missile shield system is based on a network of advanced radar stations scattered across the Middle East, including the Israeli Negev, and Israel's highly-developed ability to intercept Iranian ballistic missiles.

President Obama has scheduled a meeting with Erdogan for Tuesday, Sept. 20 , on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session in New York. The expeditious Clapper mission was meant to make sure ahead of the interview, Ankara smoothed out the bumps in the ground between Turkey and the United States on the three explosive issues.


5a)The UN Disaster is Obama's Fault
By Jonathan Tobin


For many liberal pundits, the blame for the circus that will unfold this week at the UN with the start of a debate over Palestinian statehood is to be assigned to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu whom they wrongly claim has obstructed peace talks. Others are inclined, with more justice, to put the onus for the problem on Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas whose pursuit of UN recognition of statehood without first making peace with Israel is seen as both futile and counter-productive to the end that he claims to seek.

But the lion's share of the blame ought to fall on President Obama. Though peace talks were stalled when he took office in January 2009, the deterioration of a relatively stable standoff into the volatile situation that exists today is due in no small measure to the blunders that the president's team has committed over the past 32 months. Though friends of Israel will rightly give Obama credit for sticking to his word and vetoing the Palestinian resolution — a stand that will be undertaken as much if not more in defense of U.S. interests than those of the Jewish state — the diplomatic disaster that is about to be played out is the fruit of his own misjudgments.

It was three years ago in the fall of 2008 when then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Abbas a Palestinian state in almost all of the West Bank, Gaza and a share of Jerusalem. Though the Palestinians had spent much of the previous months dickering with the Israelis over the terms of a peace agreement, in the end Abbas refused to sign much in the same way his predecessor Yasir Arafat had also declined to make peace after he had received such offers in 2000 and 2001. By the end of that year with a new American president about to take office, it was clear that the state of Palestinian politics was such that no PA leader could afford to make peace with Israel, no matter what the terms or where its borders would be drawn. Even if they were inclined to make peace, with Gaza in the hands of Hamas, Fatah leaders like Abbas couldn't survive an accord.


That should have signaled the new American president that prioritizing the Middle East peace process would do more harm than good. But Obama was convinced the problem had more to do with his predecessor's closeness with Israel than the realities of Palestinian politics. So instead of watching and waiting for the Palestinians to come to their senses, Obama plunged ahead with a new strategy that distanced the United States from Israel in a futile effort to entice its foes to come back to the negotiations that they had abandoned months earlier.

The result of this tactical switch was the opposite of what Obama intended. The president's decision to ask Israel to make unilateral concessions to bribe Abbas to talk as well as his inexplicable decision to pick fights with the newly elected Netanyahu over the status of Jerusalem only persuaded the Palestinians that they need only sit back and watch while America battered its Jewish ally. Rather than working on the Palestinians to take yes for an answer and accept a state that would recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state next door and conclusively end the conflict, Obama's actions encouraged Abbas to believe that he did not have to make concessions. Every demand from Obama on Israel was taken up by the Palestinians and put forward as a non-negotiable condition for the resumption of talks. Yet even when the Israelis gave in on some points and accepted a settlement freeze, the Palestinians still refused to negotiate.

Previously the Palestinians understood that any progress toward their stated goal of a state must come through the aid of the United States. Yet ironically it was Obama's ham-handed efforts to signal that America was demanding such an outcome without forcing the Palestinians to compromise that convinced Abbas that he could only profit by abandoning the U.S.-sponsored peace process. Obama's determination to distance himself from Israel upset the precarious balance that made an accord at least a theoretical possibility. Though the Palestinians claim they are going to the UN because the peace process failed the truth is what they are doing is an effort to evade negotiations. Obama's weakening of Israel had the effect of undermining America's own diplomatic standing leaving the Palestinians thinking they could ignore Washington's interests. Their UN gambit is a crude maneuver aimed at clipping America's influence in the region.

The debate in the UN this fall is just one more chapter in the ongoing war against Israel. The Palestinians will not get a state from this show and it may well be that Abbas and the PA will lose more from the resulting tumult than anyone else including Netanyahu. But it must also be understood as a profound defeat for American diplomacy that was only made possible by the hubris of Barack Obama.
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6)Whip Unemployment Now?
The Obama presidency enters its pathetic phase.
By Fred Barnes


It’s come to this: The president touted for his brainpower, idealism, and global esteem has been reduced to leading captive audiences in chants of “Pass this bill,” a measure that Republicans loathe, Democrats regard warily, and Congress is un-likely to approve even in truncated form.


The Obama presidency has entered the pathetic phase. This occurs when a president acts in a demeaning fashion while trying to rebuild his popularity and political strength. It’s a product of desperation.

There are numerous examples from earlier presidencies. Gerald Ford had his WIN buttons (Whip Inflation Now). George H. W. Bush told New Hampshire voters, “Don’t cry for me, Argentina.” Jimmy Carter boasted endlessly he hadn’t “panicked in the crisis” and insisted he wasn’t contrasting his conduct with rival Teddy Kennedy’s at Chappaquiddick.

For Obama, the pathetic phase began over the summer when the economy weakened further and his job approval rating tanked. He recklessly called for a joint session of Congress to announce his jobs initiative. During his speech, he demanded 18 times, “Pass this bill.”

That was on September 8. Then Obama hit the road. He spoke at two colleges and one high school to crowds whose enthusiasm was expected. Mary Bruce of ABC News kept count of the injunctions to “pass the bill”: 18 at the University of Richmond, 24 at North Carolina State, 18 at Fort Hayes High School in Columbus, Ohio.

He looped back to the White House last week to announce he’d sent the bill to Capitol Hill and uttered “pass the bill”—by then his signature slogan—another dozen times. When he addressed the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute in Washington later in the week, there were a dozen more instructions to “pass the bill.”

What’s wrong with all this? At least the president has shown a burst of energy. This was salve to Democrats and his supporters in the media who have been pleading with the president for months to step up his fight against congressional Republicans.

But the fight is not going well, and for good reason. For one thing, Obama suffers from what Maureen Dowd of the New York Times has identified as the “speech illusion.” This is the notion that he can swoop down from on high, deliver a speech, persuade millions, and move the political needle in favor of his legislation. And, naturally, make himself more popular.

Quite the opposite has happened. The speech wasn’t a bomb, but it was close. Individual parts of his proposal—the payroll tax cut, for instance—drew a positive response in polls. Overall, though, it was a downer. Poll numbers for both the president and his plan sank gradually after the speech. The truth is, Obama is simply not persuasive.

Summoning a joint session was a problem in the first place. Besides the annual State of the Union, joint sessions are traditionally reserved for issues of overriding and urgent national concern, often involving national security. The content of Obama’s speech didn’t qualify. He cheapened the idea of a joint-session address.

Press, politicians, and the public were unenthused. Republicans opted out of replying on national television, figuring Obama wouldn’t sway the nation or cause them any trouble with his criticism. They were right. It was a rare occasion when Dowd and Republicans agreed.

Obama’s conceit is that he stands high above the crass politics of Congress and represents the needs of the entire country, while Congress—he means Republicans—pursues narrow party interests. Does anyone, including those in the White House, believe this? I don’t think so.

One reason is the president has protested too much. “It’s the members of Congress who put party before country because they believe the only way to resolve our differences is to wait 14 months till the next election,” he told the Hispanic group. “I’ve got news for them. The American people don’t have the luxury of waiting 14 months.” And so on.

The suspicion has been that Obama has attempted to use the joint session and the “jobs bill” to further his chances of reelection. He can’t run on his record with unemployment so high and the fiscal mess worsening. He needs a villain.

By themselves, his speeches aren’t confirmation he’s following the so-called Truman strategy. In 1948, an unpopular President Truman called a phony joint session and offered up legislation he knew Republicans would block. Then he campaigned against them as the “do-nothing Congress.” And won.

In 2012, Obama’s villain would be congressional Republicans. He’d have to argue the economy would be booming if only they’d approved his bill. Job growth would be soaring. America would be back on track, not falling behind China with its high-speed trains and flashy airports or South Korea with its better schools.

But suspicion became fact when the president disclosed he’d pay for his $447 billion bill entirely with tax increases. He knew Republicans would never go along. If they did, he knew it would split their party bitterly. He knew he’d have a “do-nothing Congress” of his very own.

Obama isn’t as clever as he thinks. A back-to-the-future strategy from 63 years ago isn’t likely to work. Politics has changed, and the president’s devices and desires are transparent. Truman himself couldn’t pull off the strategy today.

But Obama’s machinations aren’t the clearest evidence of his desperation. His unpresidential conduct is. In 2008, he led crowds in chanting, “Yes, we can.” He was a candidate then, and it demonstrated the loftiness of his appeal and the passion of his partisans.

Now he’s president. We can have fast railroads like China’s, he said in Columbus. “So let’s tell Congress, pass this bill right away.” The crowd shouted back. “Pass this bill! Pass this bill! Pass this bill!”

Now get ready for the “Pass this bill” buttons.



6a)Obama Is Careening Down the Wrong Path
By Mark Penn

Barack Obama is careening down the wrong path towards re-election.

He should be working as a president, not a candidate.

He should be claiming the vital center, not abandoning it.

He should be holding down taxes rather than raising them.

He should be mastering the global economy, not running away from it.

And most of all, he should be bringing the country together rather than dividing it through class warfare.

When Al Gore faced a close presidential race in 2000, he abandoned running on peace and prosperity in favor of the people vs. the powerful, only to see his lead evaporate. When John Kerry was facing a tough race in 2004, he spent the last few months after the convention tacking to the left on the Iraq war and other issues to stimulate the base, only to fall even farther behind.

But when Bill Clinton was facing the fight of his political life in his 1996 re-election, he got rid of all the class warfare language used by traditional Democrats, got behind welfare reform and the balanced budget, and supported a strong, activist government that spent and taxed less rather than more. As a result, Clinton trounced the Republican nominee and was the first Democrat to serve a full eight years since Roosevelt. And the country got behind the president.

Obama's team actually believes that in the last six months they have courted independent voters and that didn't work, so now they are turning to activating the base with higher taxes on the wealthy. However, he never made any meaningful appeal to those voters in terms they would understand. He supported extending the Bush tax cuts, temporarily zoomed up in the polls, and then promptly repudiated what he had done, only to then fall back down.

The 2010 mid-term elections were fought over Obama's healthcare plan and on his plan to raise taxes on the wealthy by ending the Bush tax cuts. The results were, in his own words, a "shellacking." After his most recent speech to Congress, voters in New York City's Ninth Congressional District just elected a Republican for the first time since 1920.

And now, Obama is pressing the case for higher taxes, following in the footsteps of Walter Mondale. Higher taxes always seem to poll well, but in reality the country sees that as a last resort.

In Obama's case, it is particularly damaging to his chances for re-election because of the unique coalition he put together in 2008 to win. The President won the lion's share of everyone making under $35,000. He then did very poorly with middle class voters, but he got a remarkable half of the 26% of the voters whose households make over $100,000. Never before have so many voters fallen into that category and never before had so many of them voted Democratic. Even the so-called top 1% making over $200,000 is actually according to the exit polls 6%, and they mostly (52%) voted for Obama. Without similar support from those upper-income voters, Obama has no way to recreate the numbers that sailed him to victory. And while these voters have become far more socially tolerant, they have also become far more impatient when it comes to economic issues.

What was so brilliant about the Obama 2008 election was that it brought together the upper and lower classes in a common mission of hope and change. Today, he is smashing apart that coalition with policies that seem to be about expanding the scope of government by the trillions of dollars (starting with health care) and raising taxes. Such policies will allow him to hold on to his under $35,000 support, but are anathema to the rest -- and especially the unique coalition of new professionals he forged in 2008.

No question that the fiscal problems have become intense, especially after a trillion of stimulus and a trillion of new health care spending that contains a 4.5% tax increase that no one has yet focused on. But if Obama thinks the way to re-election is increased taxation and spending, he is misreading the mid-terms and last week's elections.

America was mad at George W. Bush for increased spending, taking his eye off the economic ball and most of all for a war they thought should never have been fought. America is today just as upset with Obama, who they elected to bring the parties together in the Reaganesque style he championed as a candidate and bring a new generation to government. Instead, they see a tax and spend liberal trying to take taxes and spending to new levels. The independents and upper middle class voters who were with him last time are abandoning him in droves.

America wants to see the president focused on stimulating jobs and innovation, not on raising taxes in a near recession. The president could be out there with tax reform that promotes America's greatest asset -- the country's hard working and ever successful professionals -- and yet raises funds by closing the gap on taxes on capital. He could have tax reform that righted the balance between capital and wage income without opening up class warfare. And he could be moving forward on immigration reform, on trade deals, on new policies and programs that put America at the frontier of new technologies on energy and pharmaceuticals.

Instead, the president has wandered into the thicket of class warfare that will only compound the difficulties before his climb to re-election.

Mark Penn is worldwide CEO of Burson-Marsteller, a leading global public relations and public affairs agency, and President of Penn, Schoen and Berland, a strategic research firm.
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