Obama Cannot Win In Syria, Egypt, Iran etc. So Attack The Supreme Court

A Marine and Melanie Phillips seem to appear on the same page regarding the fact that Obama says he has Israel's back but then, when push comes to shove, he seems to stab them again! (See 1 below.)
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Proverb! (See 2 below.)
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Open Mic reveals treachery? (See 3 below.)
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Is Holder's antipathy towards whites a throwback from the segregation problems his sister faced? (See 4 below.)
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A big naval maneuver but does it mean anything if Obama is not going to do anything beyond make empty threats? (See 5 below.)
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Another foreign policy defeat as Obama and State Department totally misjudge Muslim Brotherhood strength as I always believed they would and so wrote. (See 6 below.)
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Obama cannot do anything about Syria because the Chinese and Russians will not let him. Obama cannot win in Afghanistan because he told our adversary he is leaving so they will wait him out. Obama will do nothing about Iran because he has decided sanctions is his weapon of choice. Ah! BUt he is preparing to attack The Surpeme Court! (See 7 below.)
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Obama's EPA admits what most already knew - water does not burn! (See 8 below.)AC
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Dick
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1) Former Marine Striker: It’s Time to “Start Viewing This Administration As an Existential Threat to Israel”
By Jim Hoft

Earlier this week the Obama Administration leaked information on a secret Israel-Azerbaijan Alliance. According to a Foreign Policy report based on “four senior diplomats and military intelligence officers” Azerbaijan has given Israel permission to land planes on Azeri airfields after an attack on Iranian nuclear sites. The Obama Administration endangered the two countries by leaking this information to the press.

On Friday a former Marine Corps strike planner weighed in on the implications of this leak Friday on The Mark Levin Show. In light of this latest leak, the Marine told Mark Levin, “I would start viewing this administration as an existential threat to Israel.”
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You have to ask for the motivation behind the leak. I mean, if the Israelis can do this operation, it’s to our benefit! From a diplomatic standpoint, if you wanted to tell the Iranians that the Israelis did this, it’s without our permission. And then try to butter up the Iranians after the strike, so they don’t close the Strait of Hormuz, that’s one thing.

But giving away all of the secrets of an ally? When you’re doing that, you have to ask whether we still have Israel as an ally. We are not acting like an ally. In fact, if you ask me, based on the amount of time I expect the Israelis put in this relationship with Azerbaijan, I would start viewing this administration as an existential threat to Israel.

In early March, an administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told reporters, “We’re trying to make the decision to attack as hard as possible for Israel.”



1a)By Melanie Phillips

Is the Obama administration using either leaks or black propaganda to sabotage Israel's defence against the threat of genocide? America's former ambassador to the UN John Bolton certainly thinks so - and he is not a man given to rash speculation.

An article on the website of Foreign Policy magazine last Wednesday, written by former unofficial Yasser Arafat adviser and established Israel-basher Mark Perry, quoted four unnamed 'senior diplomats' and 'intelligence officers' saying that Israel had been granted access to air bases in Azerbaijan on Iran's northern border. The article suggested that this meant Israel planned to use Azerbaijan either for a strike at Iran or for other support for such an attack.

An Azeri official has subsequently said the claim that Azerbaijan has granted Israel access to its air bases for an attack is 'absurd and groundless'. That denial, however, is clearly limited. And several observers have concluded that whether this is a genuine leak or disinformation, the story is an attempt to harm Israel by its principal western ally. Indeed, assuming it is not a total fabrication but is based on actual briefings, it is hard to conclude anything else.
On Fox News,Bolton said :

'I think this leak today is part of the administration's campaign against an Israeli attack.' ...Bolton, a Fox News contributor, noted that a strike launched from Azerbaijan would be much easier for the Israelis than a strike launched from their own country -- jets could stay over their targets longer and worry less about refueling. But he said tipping the Israelis' hand by revealing "very sensitive, very important information" could frustrate such a plan.
..."Clearly, this is an administration-orchestrated leak," Bolton told FoxNews.com. "This is not a rogue CIA guy saying I think I'll leak this out. It's just unprecedented to reveal this kind of information about one of your own allies."

As Dan Margalit asks in the Israeli paper Israel Hayom:

'What reasonable interest does someone in the Pentagon have in hardening the Iranian pharaoh's heart on the eve of Passover, and indicating to him that he has nothing to fear? This borders on insanity.'

Sabotaging an ally's defences in this manner goes much further than Obama's previous known position in trying to stop an Israeli attack on Iran. This actively assists Iran, and thus potentially places the lives of millions at risk from that regime's deranged belligerency. Is this what Obama meant when he tried to reassure American Jews recently that
'...when the chips are down, I have Israel's back'?
And since Iran does not merely threaten Israel but is already at war with America and the west it has pledged to destroy, is this not in fact a knife in the back of the west itself?
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2)Jewish proverb: “A Jewish wife will forgive and forget, but she’ll never forget what she forgave.”
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3)Obama was admitting his distrust of his fellow Americans to a leader of a nasty government that seeks to thwart our purposes.

When President Obama blurted out to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he couldn't do serious business during an election year, the New York Times characterized it as a "moment of political candor." It seems to me, actually, to be a moment of political contempt—for the issues at hand as well as for the demos itself. Mr. Medvedev meanwhile was in familiar territory: Dissembling is the routine of Russian diplomacy.

We are the big boys, Mr. Obama seemed to be telling Mr. Medvedev— or rather Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and I are, and you, Medvedev, are the messenger, to whom, as the newspaper photograph shows, I confide. "I will deliver this information to Vladimir," responded the second man in the Kremlin. Another news picture shows an image from the back, the two presidents walking together, the American chief executive with his big right hand firmly on his Russian junior partner's much slighter shoulder.

And what was the message to Vladimir? Mr. Obama was proffering the Russians "more flexibility" on missile defense, which he couldn't do, he said, in an election year.

But really the message, the important one, concerns us, here in America. It is that the American people can't be trusted if the president is honest with them about what he proposes. More bluntly, that the American people are not trusted by their own president. Otherwise the president would tell us the truth about his intentions. And here he is, admitting his distrust of his own people to a leader of a nasty foreign government that seeks to thwart our purposes in the Middle East and elsewhere. President Obama is in cahoots with the Russian regime against America's very body politic.

Mr. Obama's revealing comment, and the question of missile defense, and the question of Mr. Obama's bizarre desire for coziness with Vladimir Putin, is a matter about which our European allies have great concerns.

Additional "give" to Moscow on the nuclear issue was not something he admitted to the relevant senators that he was contemplating when they were weighing and approving the New Start Treaty a bare year ago. Yet it is a matter of deep interest to the Kremlin which, without any moral credit and without much material credit either, seems to be charting the cartography of another Cold War. (Remember, it pursued the last one from an impoverished base.) Mr. Obama's pliancy on the matter will encourage them to think that we are, in this matter, a patsy.


And not only in this matter, alas: Mr. Obama is presiding over what might be called a withdrawalist moment in American foreign policy. Throughout his presidency, Mr. Obama has seemed strangely unmoved by the claims and values of American nationalism as they were expressed in most of the last century—for the rights of other peoples to establish nation-states after World War I, to free Europe and Asia from the bloody rule of monstrous fascist tyrannies in World War II, to defeat the egalitarian phantasm of communism as a civilized way of life. You might say that he dislikes the 20th century and refuses to accord the lessons of its bitter experiences any pride of place in his view of the world.

I don't mean to say that the president is altogether against the use of force. In his counterterrorism policy he has been relentless. But his stewardship of the wars he inherited reveals a leader unsure of his beliefs, or else ruled by an almost cynical devotion to his own political survival.

In Afghanistan, Mr. Obama "surged"—it was, after all, the good war, support for which gave him political cover for his opposition to the war in Iraq, which was the bad war. But no sooner did the president escalate the war in Afghanistan than he was setting dates and orders for the troops' withdrawal. And withdraw they will.

But if Mr. Obama wanted to wind down the war, why did he wind it up? Why did the dove dissemble as a hawk? After all, the notion that U.S. troops and the small number of NATO comrades have achieved anything lasting in battle is frivolous, and it is an insult added to pain for the administration to say anything else in order to comfort kin.

The president's Afghan policy was divided against itself, and it puts one bitterly in mind of John's Kerry's warning about being "the last man to die for a mistake," the words on which he impaled his own war, the war in Vietnam. And meanwhile in Iraq, the bad war, there are many reasons for (if you will pardon the expression) hope: Hard as it is for Democrats to admit, President Bush's war in Iraq won a modicum of victories for democracy and pluralism in the Muslim world. And from that improving situation President Obama hastily fled.

The president is running for a second term. The Republican Party is having a different conversation. This leaves Mr. Obama free to abscond with the election without facing the issue of the real role of America in the world.

What exactly are his intentions, for example, about the threat of a nuclear Iran? It is, once again, hard to say. He told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that he is against containment, which is what he knew Aipac wanted to hear. But his false faith in the efficacy of sanctions and diplomacy will land him right in the lap of containment—unless he chooses force. Will he support Israel's use of force? Will he use American force?

Where is an open mic when we need one? It is ironic that this president, who is committed to the programmatic pacification of Russian anxiety about defensive nuclear policy, has wasted more than three years in trying to talk with the regime of the ayatollahs about its craving for an offensive atomic capability.US-backed Friends of Syria 2, which took place Sunday, April 1, in Istanbul, offered the Syrian Free Army no direct assistance or support, Saudi Arabia and Qatar established an international fund to pay rebel fighters a regular wage. They hope to lure more officers and men into defecting from the army units loyal to Assad.
Moscow and Tehran view this step as Arab intervention in the Syrian conflict.
2. The US, Israel and Greece launched a shadowy air-naval exercise in the Mediterranean Thursday, March 29. Codenamed “Noble Dina,” it appears to range across a broad sweep of sea up to Crete and including the waters off Turkey, Cyprus, and Israel Navy bases in Haifa and Ashdod ports.
None of the participants have admitted the maneuver is taking place, nor given out details. Some sources say it will end April 5, although this is not confirmed.

Russia and Iran appear to be treating the two events as interconnected.

Our military sources infer from the unusually broad area covered by the tripartite air and navy exercise - almost the entire eastern Mediterranean - that it is designed to simulate action in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Aden.

Western naval sources in Naples disclose that the American, Israeli and Greek fleets are supported by a British Royal Navy flotilla cruising around the Straits of Gibraltar. They also report that the exercise is led by the USS Enterprise Strike Force. As soon as it is over, this aircraft carrier and strike group will head through the Suez Canal to the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, raising the number of US aircraft carriers facing Iran to three.

Those sources also disclose that Israel contributed missile ships, submarines, fighter jets and assault helicopters to the drill.
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6) In major reversal, Muslim Brotherhood could end up controling all three branches of Egypt's new government
By Kristen Chick


Terrorist group will now also vie for Egypt's presidency

The Muslim Brotherhood has nominated its deputy leader as a candidate in Egypt's presidential elections, in a reversal that upends the race for Egypt's first post-revolution leader and could leave the Islamist group in control of all branches of Egypt's new government.
The decision to field Khairat El Shater, a wealthy businessman who has served mostly behind the scenes, came after nearly a year in which the Muslim Brotherhood said it would not contest the presidential elections so as not to provoke fear of Islamic rule in Egypt. But in a press conference Saturday night at their new headquarters, Brotherhood leaders said they found it necessary to change course because the transition to democracy is under threat, and the group was stymied in parliament.

"We have chosen the path of the presidency not because we are greedy for power but because we have a majority in parliament which is unable to fulfill its duties," said Mohamed Morsy, head of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party. Mahmoud Hussein, the group's secretary general, cited attempts to "abort the revolution."

The move is the Brotherhood's trump card in a recently escalating battle for power with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the military council currently ruling Egypt, say analysts. But it could cause a backlash, not only at home but also abroad, among Western governments wary of an Islamist regime in Egypt. The risky step from the conservative movement is an indication of the difficult political realities confronting the Brotherhood as it attempts to transition from a repressed opposition group to a majority power.

"This is the last-mile fight," says Khalil Al Anani, an expert on Islamist politics at Durham University who is currently in Egypt. "After [the Brotherhood] realized that the parliament is powerless, they decided to fight until the last point that they can reach to guarantee some kind of power over the new political system�. This is a serious conflict over power with the military."

STILL SEEKING CLOUT

The Brotherhood's political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, won nearly 50 percent of the seats in parliament in recent elections. But they have since found those seats gave them less clout than they had anticipated. The military refused repeated Brotherhood demands that SCAF sack the military-appointed cabinet and allow the parliamentary majority to form a government.
This lack of power, despite what was perceived as a strong victory in the elections, was embarrassing and damaging to their credibility, says Omar Ashour, an expert on Islamist movements who is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center. "They're not going to accept being marginalized with such a popular mandate," he says.

At the same time, the movement had few good choices when considering outside presidential candidates to back. They could not endorse any of the handful of Islamist candidates already in the race for various reasons, but risked revolt if they backed a non-Islamist candidate. Not backing a candidate was not an option, says Dr. Anani, because the leadership was afraid a president elected without their support might eventually turn on them. They deliberated mindful of 1954, when Gamal Abdel Nasser turned on the organization, officially banning it and imprisoning thousands of members. The SCAF invoked that history in a recent statement, as its confrontation with the Brotherhood heightened.

Though he is entering the race months behind other candidates, Mr. Shater will be an instant frontrunner because of the Brotherhood's clout.

THE MOST POWERFUL BROTHER

According to many in the Brotherhood, Shater is the most powerful figure in the organization, despite his official position as No. 2. The large, bearded leader who spent more than a decade in former President Hosni Mubarak's jails has consolidated a power base in the organization's executive body, the Guidance Bureau. It was a result of a power struggle between himself and prominent leader Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh that the latter was dismissed from the Guidance Bureau in 2009 and expelled from the organization when he announced his presidential bid last year, against orders from Brotherhood leaders.

Shater was convicted of money laundering in a 2007 military trial, for funding and managing the finances of the organization, and sentenced to seven years in prison. He was released last March, just weeks after a popular uprising forced Mr. Mubarak from power. The military recently pardoned him for an earlier conviction, but there was no indication that the amnesty extended to the second conviction, which would leave him ineligible to run for office under Egyptian law. Yet Brotherhood leaders and the organization's lawyer insist there are "no legal obstacles" to his candidacy. That has led some to speculate that his candidacy is not part of a confrontation between the Muslim Brotherhood and the military, but rather the result of a deal struck between the two.
Shater, who is very conservative, is also likely to gain the support of many ultraconservative salafis. Together, the Brotherhood and salafi parties took about 70 percent of parliament, though in the presidential race, Islamist votes will be split between four well-known candidates.

A RISKY DECISION

Yet fielding a candidate is a risky decision for the movement. The Brotherhood's shura council, a sort of legislative body, was split 56-52 when it voted on whether to nominate Shater, and his nomination could open a rift among the leadership. The organization's backtrack on promises could engender public resentment.

"I think Shater's nomination will backfire and will be counterproductive to the movement in terms of its public image, because they pledged in the past not to field a presidential candidate, and in terms of internal cohesiveness, which will be damaged significantly," says Anani.
If Shater wins, the Brotherhood will carry a heavy responsibility as it dominates the parliament, forms the government, and holds the presidency. In what is likely to be a rocky transition period, the Brotherhood will be the first to be blamed. If he loses, it will create even more internal divisions, and deal a decisive blow to the Brotherhood's image as the major political power in Egypt, says Anani. "It's a very risky game, and they miscalculated�. This might be a fatal mistake."
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7)Why Obama Shouldn’t Declare War on the Supreme Court
Even if he loses the health care case, the President ought to resist bashing the Supreme Court to please the base
By JON MEACHAM

With the Supreme Court weighing the constitutionality of a central element of President Obama’s comprehensive health care reform, there’s a lot of talk (in the places where people talk about such things, usually unburdened by responsibility or firsthand knowledge) of making the court an issue in the campaign if it were to rule against the White House.

But here is a pretty good rule of thumb for Democratic Presidents: if it didn’t work for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who won four terms and a World War, it probably won’t work for you either.

In one of the rare political debacles of his long life, FDR overreached after his landslide win against Alf Landon in 1936. (Roosevelt carried every state, save for Maine and Vermont.) A largely conservative Supreme Court had already struck down key parts of New Deal legislation, and there was the threat of more anti-Roosevelt decisions to come. And so FDR proposed a plan that would have enabled him to appoint additional justices in an attempt to shift the court’s political orientation. The effort failed, miserably.

Justified or not, the Supreme Court has a kind of sacred status in American life. For whatever reason, Presidents can safely run against Congress, and vice versa, but I think there is an inherent popular aversion to assaults on the court itself. Perhaps it has to do with an instinctive belief that life needs umpires, even ones who blow calls now and then.

Ironies abound. One of the great partisans of the early republic, John Marshall, created an ethos around the court that has largely protected it (even from itself) from successful partisan attack. Even when it makes bad law (Bush v. Gore), it has the last word. Even when it makes decisions that enrage vast swaths of politically, culturally and religiously motivated citizens (Roe v. Wade), it basically has the last word. (If you disagree with this example, ask yourself how successful pro-lifers have been in amending the Constitution over the past 40 years.) It has had the grimmest of hours (Dred Scott v. Sandford) and the finest (Brown v. Board of Education).

The court is, of course, a political institution. In no way is it a clinically impartial tribunal, for virtually every decision requires an application of values and an assessment in light of experience. “Activist judges” tend to be judges who make decisions with which you disagree.

Wise Presidents have learned that taking the court on directly rarely turns out well. Thomas Jefferson cordially hated his cousin Marshall, but even Jefferson trod carefully as he repealed John Adams’ extension of Federalist judicial power. “John Marshall has made his decision,” Andrew Jackson is alleged to have said after a Cherokee case. “Now let him enforce it.” The showdown between Marshall and Jackson over the fate of Native Americans, however, was much more subtle on both sides, with Marshall characteristically taking care not to force an existential crisis with the executive branch. Segregationist Southerners may have put up billboards urging the impeachment of Earl Warren in the 1950s, but the chief justice’s job — and his place in history — was never in actual jeopardy.

On a human level, Presidents who have to fight and claw their way to shape public opinion, pass legislation and then try to implement their policies must be mightily tempted to make a hostile Supreme Court a target to energize the base. But history shows that Obama should resist the temptation.

There are subtle ways to make the point about a given court’s seeming hostility to your agenda and still win over highly informed independents in swing states who tend to decide elections. The big thing experience shows is that you should not declare war on the court. More in sadness than in anger, just mention the issues on which you feel stymied by the justices. From health care to campaign finance, those independent voters will get the message without being frightened off by an unsettling rhetorical attack on the judiciary.

That’s what FDR got wrong. Obama may well have a chance to get it right.


Meacham is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House and executive editor at Random House, where he also runs The Conversation Online. The views expressed are solely his own.
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8)EPA Backpedals on Fracking

By DANIEL GILBERT And RUSSELL GOLD

The Environmental Protection Agency has dropped its claim that an energy company contaminated drinking water in Texas, the third time in recent months that the agency has backtracked on high-profile local allegations linking natural-gas drilling and water pollution.

On Friday, the agency told a federal judge it withdrew an administrative order that alleged Range Resources Corp. had polluted water wells in a rural Texas county west of Fort Worth. Under an agreement filed in U.S. court in Dallas, the EPA will also drop the lawsuit it filed in
A pond near water wells that the EPA had said were polluted by natural-gas drilling in Parker County, Texas. The agency dropped its claim Friday.

In addition to dropping the case in Texas, the EPA has agreed to substantial retesting of water in Wyoming after its methods were questioned. And in Pennsylvania, it has angered state officials by conducting its own analysis of well water—only to confirm the state's finding that water once tainted by gas was safe.

Taken together, some experts say, these misfires could hurt the agency's credibility at a time when federal and state regulators seek ways to ensure that natural-gas drilling is done safely.
A growing number of industry, academic and environmental experts say that while drilling can cause water contamination, that can be avoided by proper use of cement seals and other safety measures.
By year's end, the EPA is set to release initial results of a study on the impact on water of hydrofracturing, or fracking, which involves using a high-pressure mixture of water, sand and chemicals to break apart energy-rich rocks. State officials contend they are in a better position to evaluate drilling procedures and safety in their areas, but they have been accused of laxity by environmentalists and local governments officials.

EPA officials declined to comment on their broader efforts to regulate gas drilling. But in a statement, the agency said that settling with Range "allows EPA to shift the agency's focus in this particular case away from litigation and toward a joint effort on the science and safety of energy extraction." The agency said it and Range would continue to monitor water wells and share data.

Range is pleased the EPA has not found that its drilling was responsible for gas in water wells, said Matt Pitzarella, a Range spokesman.

Michael Webber, an energy and environment professor at the University of Texas in Austin, said the EPA's retreat in the Range case would give critics more ammunition and complicate the process of proposing rules for fracking.

"This is damaging to the EPA," he said, though he thinks the agency will move ahead with regulations.

On Dec. 7, 2010, the EPA publicly accused Range of causing natural gas to seep into water wells near some of its gas wells in north Texas. The agency largely based its decision on an analysis that compared the chemical makeup of the gas in Range's production wells and the gas found in private water wells, concluding they matched.

The EPA bypassed the Texas Railroad Commission, which it said failed to address an "imminent and substantial endangerment" to public health. It ordered Range to supply water to the affected residents, identify how gas was migrating into the aquifer, stop the flow and clean up the water.
After the EPA sued Range for not complying with its order, Range appealed, arguing that the agency's analysis was inconclusive. It pointed to nearby water wells that were known to contain high concentrations of gas long before it began drilling.

The railroad agency, which regulates oil and gas, concluded last year that gas most likely seeped into the aquifer from a shallow pocket of gas nearby, not the Barnett Shale, thousands of feet underground, from which Range was producing gas.

On Friday, the commission accused the EPA of "fear mongering, gross negligence and severe mishandling" of the case, calling for the firing of Al Armendariz, administrator of the region that covers Texas. The EPA would not make Mr. Armendariz available for an interview, and he did not respond to an e-mailed request for comment.

Kate Sinding, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the EPA's decision not to pursue a case against Range showed how important it is to test water quality before drilling begins. "This points out why it is so critically important to get a regulatory structure in place where companies are required to do thorough, publicly available baseline testing before they get in ground," she said.

In Pennsylvania, state regulators fined Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., COG +3.04%a Houston company that was found responsible for gas escaping into an aquifer in Dimock and that agreed to take remedial steps to clean up the water. After residents complained the efforts weren't good enough, the EPA in January said it would test drinking water at about 60 homes.
Earlier this month, the EPA released results from well water testing at 11 homes in Dimock and said the results "did not show levels of contamination that could present a health concern." This finding has been criticized by environmental groups, which argue that tests have found unsafe levels of gas and arsenic.

The EPA is also facing scrutiny from the gas industry and Wyoming's governor over an investigation of possible water contamination related to fracking near Pavillion, Wyo.

In December, the EPA released draft findings that groundwater there contained unsafe levels of benzene, a carcinogen, and other chemicals "consistent with gas production and hydraulic fracturing fluids."

But state officials and others disputed the findings, and the EPA has agreed to take more water samples and postpone a peer review of the findings. This process could take several more months, according to a spokesman for Republican Gov. Matt Mead.
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