If Obama, or any president (Harry Truman comes to mind) believes his policies are the right course for the nation they should be willing to go down or rise accordingly.' To thine own self be true and as night follows day thou cans't be false to any man.' to paraphrase The Bard!
If Obama believes his policies have created more employment and less debt why does he need to lie, explain and defend the facts as he sees them? Just do it man and let the chips fall where they may. I suspect his paranoiac need to justify, blame others and everything has something to do with the fact that he deems voters to be stupid and they do not understand what an accomplished performance he and his lackeys have carried off for us unwashed menials.
So I guess Obama feels compelled to get down in the gutter seeking more constituencies who will see the light and what an accomplished leader he is.
Certainly tearing down Romney and his wife is one way to go but I suspect the nation will eventually tire of this tactic because we need 'serious' and, if anything, Romney suffers from being serious!
Obama is serious as well just wrong headed.(See 1, 1a and 1b below)
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Fluke is another example of staging by The White House that flopped because, once exposed it was seen as a set up and contrived situation. I thought this worth revealing again.
At the time, I also suggested Fluke was no fluke but purposeful.(See 2 below.)
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A former Justice Department lawyer blows the whistle again on Holder and our next President Day Speaker, John Fund, asks Holder about the new Black Panther's call for murder. (See 3and 3a below.)
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Obama gets uncharacteristically tough with Iran and tells them it is their move. Grrrrr!
Who is going to be check mated? Stay tuned. (See 4 below.)
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If The GSA can blow our money in their frivolity why not Clinton and The State Department? (See 5 below.)
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Shaul Mofaz - Kadima's man with the plan! Will it work? Does it make sense? (See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1) Yes, he told us in advance what he planned to do. Few were listening.
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1a) Liberals or Conservatives: Who’s Really Closed-Minded?
Conservatives understand their ideological opposite numbers far better than do liberals.
By Andrew G. Biggs
To be “close-minded” is, according to the dictionary, to be “intolerant of the beliefs and opinions of others; stubbornly unreceptive to new ideas.” To be conservative and closed-minded, according to popular portrayal, is a redundancy—a package deal that liberals can and do take for granted.
But University of Virginia Professor Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Righteous Mind doesn’t simply suggest that conservatives may not be as closed-minded as they are portrayed. It proves that the opposite is the case, that conservatives understand their ideological opposite numbers far better than do liberals.
Haidt’s research asks individuals to answer questionnaires regarding their core moral beliefs—what sorts of values they consider sacred, which they would compromise on, and how much it would take to get them to make those compromises. By themselves, these exercises are interesting. (Try them online and see where you come out.)
But Haidt’s research went one step further, asking self-identified conservatives to answer those questionnaires as if they were liberals and for liberals to do the opposite. What Haidt found is that conservatives understand liberals’ moral values better than liberals understand where conservatives are coming from. Worse yet, liberals don’t know what they don’t know; they don’t understand how limited their knowledge of conservative values is. If anyone is closed-minded here it’s not conservatives.
1b)Obama’s reelection hinges on uniting the disaffected and ignoring the state of the nation.
By Victor Davis Hanson
In 2008, a mostly unknown Barack Obama ran for president on an inclusive agenda of “hope and change.” That upbeat message was supposed to translate into millions of green jobs, fiscal sobriety, universal health care, a resetting of Bush foreign policy, and racial unity.
Four years later, none of those promises will be themes of his 2012 reelection campaign. Gas has more than doubled in price. Billions of dollars have been wasted in insider and subsidized wind and solar projects that have produced little green energy.
Unemployment rates above 8 percent appear the new norm, when 5 percent in the past was dubbed a “jobless recovery.
From the Middle East to the Korean peninsula, the world seems on the brink.
Modern racial relations are at a new low.
If borrowing $4 trillion in eight years was “unpatriotic,” as Obama once labeled George W. Bush, no one quite knows how to term the addition of $5 trillion in new debt in less than four years. Obamacare is unpopular with the public. Its constitutionality now rests with the Supreme Court.
After four years, the claims of “Bush did it” and “it might have been worse” grow stale. So reelection will rest not on a new agenda, or an explanation of what happened, but on a divide-and-conquer strategy. Translated, that means campaigning-grievances. Obama finds fissures in the voting public over fairness, expands them, and then cobbles together various angry partisans in hopes of achieving a bare majority. Such an us/them strategy is not new in American history.
There are suddenly new enemies called the “1 percent” — those who make more than $200,000 per year and who “do not pay their fair share.” Apparently, in a zero-sum economy, this tiny minority has taken too much from the majority and thereby caused the four-year lethargy that followed the 2008 meltdown. Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, and Franklin D. Roosevelt all ran, with varying success, against the selfish “rich.
Congress is also now a convenient enemy of the people. Although it was Democratically controlled in Obama’s first two years, and the Senate remains so, the new theme insists that a Republican House stops from finishing all the good things they started. When support for 16 years of the New Deal had evaporated by 1948, Harry Truman ran successfully against a “do-nothing” Congress that had blocked his own big-government “Fair Deal” follow-up and thus supposedly stalled the economy.
In 2009, Obama pushed through his health-care plan by a narrow partisan margin in the House, despite constitutional questions about the individual mandate. Now, as the Supreme Court seems skeptical of the legality of Obamacare, the president seems to be running against “unelected” justices. That could work too. In 1968, Richard Nixon squeaked by Hubert Humphrey in a divisive campaign, in part by lambasting the activist Earl Warren Court that had done everything from outlawing school prayer to supporting school busing.
Team Obama has seized on the Democrats’ allegations of a “war on women,” waged by both Republican and Catholic grandees against federal subsidies of birth control. For the first time since the campaign of John F. Kennedy a half-century ago, the role of the Catholic Church in politics is suddenly a landmark issue.
The president faults “Big Oil” and tension in the Middle East — not his own failure to develop vast new gas-and-oil reserves on public lands — for high gas prices. Jimmy Carter likewise blamed greedy oil companies and the Middle East in 1980, after gasoline prices spiked and lines formed at filling stations.
Suddenly, after the Trayvon Martin tragedy and what may prove to be murderous white vigilantism in Oklahoma, race again looms large. President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have weighed in often on that issue. The former castigated police for acting “stupidly” in one incident, and more recently reminded the nation of the racial affinities between himself and Trayvon Martin. The latter blasted the nation’s reluctance to discuss race as cowardly, and alleged racial bias among his own overseers. Race is always an explosive wedge issue. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson ran successfully in part on the need to expand civil rights, while in 1968 Richard Nixon found traction in the backlash against racial violence.
If Obama can cobble together disaffected young people, greens, women, minorities, and the poor — who all believe some nefarious “they” have crushed their dreams — then massive debt and deficits, high unemployment, sluggish growth, and spiraling gas prices won’t decide the election.
Lots of presidential candidates have run by identifying such enemies of the people, rather than debating the general state of the nation — sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
But the problem with an us/them strategy is not just winning an election, but trying to put back together what was torn asunder.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author most recently of The End of Sparta.
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2) The poor innocent law student
By Thomas Purcell
Purcell happens to be a conservative writer and blogger who lives in Arizona.
You obviously wouldn't expect a Progressive to write a piece like this, however, it doesn't alter the fact that it is factually correct.
Not mentioned in the following is the fact that Ms. Fluke’s boyfriend is the son of a major Democrat Party contributor William Perlmutter. Her PR agent (she needs a PR agent) is Anita Dunn, former White House Communications Director under Obama that said “Mao Tse Tung (a mass murderer) was her favorite political philosopher”. Anita Dunn is the one that got Ms. Fluke to testify before the committee as a poor struggling student who could not afford to have safe sex. Ms. Dunn’s husband, Robert Bauer is Obama’s chief “birther” lawyer. His job is to keep Obama’s personal artifacts hidden from the American People. He has demonstrated that he will use all available means to do this. Records show that $1,352,378 was paid to Mr. Bauer’s Law Firm by Obama for America. As council for Obama’s 2008 campaign Bauer wrote letters to TV station managers stating that if they aired anti-Obama ads pointing to the known association between Obama and Weather Underground radical Bill Ayers it would violate federal election rules.
Having gone on information junket trips and been involved with how those sorts of things work, I can tell you that not just anyone is picked to have a seat before a congressional hearing and have a say on particular issues. Your name typically is submitted by people that either have a lot of drag with Congress or you are well known enough about a subject to be considered.
That’s why it came as a bit of a surprise when a supposed innocent college student by the name of Sandra Fluke sat before Congress and testified about the horrors of having to pay for her own contraception pills. The media types and pundits portrayed her as a struggling young student being victimized by the insurance companies and forced into poverty by the fact that she is a woman living in a man’s world.
The red flag for me was twofold; one, that she was attending a very expensive school (Georgetown) and two, that she was self-described as a ‘public interest’ scholarship recipient. Public interest scholarships are not given as poverty scholarships, they are typically credits given for political purposes.
Fluke is not your normal young college student. For one, she is a 30 year old experienced community activist, older and wiser than your typical college student. Experienced in spades—she sits or has been a part of no less than 6 different advisory boards to women’s rights groups, including the Manhattan Borough President’s Taskforce on Domestic Violence and numerous other New York City and New York State coalitions. She is also a recipient of the 2010 Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles Fran Kandel Public Interest Grant. The foundation is a non-profit charitable corporation established by the Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles ("WLALA") to increase the utility of the law as an instrument of social justice. The Grant is given to law students for projects that make governmental and social institutions and agencies more accessible and responsive to members of society whose interests are not otherwise adequately recognized or asserted. In short, this is a woman who knows all the ins and out of the government and government aid systems, and a strong proponent of the concept of 'social justice'.
‘Social justice’ seeks to create economic egalitarianism through taxation, income, or even property redistribution. It is merely just another term for socialism and communism.
Therefore, the story about her friend that couldn’t get affordable birth control, eventually leading to an ovarian cyst just doesn’t ring true. As a career expert in women’s rights and with access to at least a dozen different methods in getting low cost or free contraception, either Ms. Fluke is incompetent in her positions, or is a bald faced liar about the story. Keep in mind, even a rookie women’s activist could and should have directed her to the Planned Parenthood site, which directly offers ways to get birth control pills for about fifteen bucks per month.
So instead of an innocent poor college student discussing the difficulty in getting affordable birth control, we have career women’s rights advocate making the case for the redistribution of wealth in society. Quite a different matter than was originally portrayed.
Furthermore, how is the argument for empowering women in society furthered by arguing that women are merely victims of the free market? Fluke is a member of the Polaris Project, a group that works toward ending human trafficking—a noble cause. But making women slaves of the state instead is no way to go about it; and that’s what she is doing by encouraging women to become reliant on the state and insurance payouts rather than on their own ability to earn a wage and educate themselves in institutions of higher learning. That’s not empowerment, that’s servitude.
Georgetown is not innocent either, and ironically are creators of the very instrument that may be their own demise. An examination of the mentors of their public interest scholarship reveals some very interesting facts. The mentors of the program include but are not limited to Katherine Barton, Attorney, Appellate Section, Environment and Natural Resources Division, U.S. Department of Justice, Bridgette Kaiser, Staff Attorney, Office of General Counsel, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Sarah Lichtman Spector, Staff Attorney, Family and Children’s Health Programs at U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Lynn Overmann, Senior Advisor, Office of the Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice, Judith Scott, General Counsel, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), James and Hoffman.
This is the same SEIU that we all know and love as the purple shirted thugs of the AFL-CIO. It’s interesting that these mentors are also the most likely lawyers to represent the Department of Health and Human Services in the Supreme Court case on Obamacare. It’s no wonder they are so desperate to defend the issue of free contraceptive care because it rests upon the elimination of the First Amendment rights of Georgetown and other religious groups.
If the President backs down on the Georgetown case, or any other Catholic objection to Obamacare mandates, it means that the First Amendment would apply directly to Obamacare—and thus be struck down in its entirety. This explains why Fluke was called to testify, and why Obama is risking political suicide to defend this issue.
So when you see these sob stories on the news take care and look into them carefully. When they are televised they are often used to manipulate the hearts and minds of those watching at home, who typically do not have the time or experience in understanding the motivations of those making the speeches.
As for Ms. Fluke, you are no struggling college student defending an unaffordable need for yourself or others. You are just another leftist activist with an agenda, and that is something this nation does not need more of, nor should be addressing Congress under the false pretense of poverty or need.
The cold hard light of truth should be the beacon upon which Congress makes its decisions. And that is something, Ms. Fluke, you simply do not represent.
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3) A former Justice Department attorney says U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is demonstrating a clear double-standard in his dealings with the Trayvon Martin case.
During a recent address before the annual convention of the National Action Network, a group founded by civil rights leader Al Sharpton, Holder pledged that the Justice Department will take whatever action is necessary in the killing of Trayvon Martin if it finds evidence that a federal civil rights crime has been committed.
But the top law enforcement official in the country did not utter a word about the actions of the New Black Panther Party, which put up a $10,000 bounty for the "capture" of confessed shooter George Zimmerman. Their poster offering the bounty read: "Wanted Dead or Alive."
J. Christian Adams is the former Justice Department attorney who blew the whistle on certain members of the DOJ who allowed members of the New Black Panther Party to get off the hook despite evidence of blatant voter intimidation in Philadelphia during the 2008 presidential election. He says putting a bounty on someone's life is soliciting kidnapping -- a federal offense.
As recently as February, Eric Holder's Justice Department prosecuted individuals who were accused of attempting to solicit kidnapping from people they thought were white supremacists," Adams tells OneNewsNow. "So this is a Justice Department that has been willing to enforce the law against some people."
And Adams is fearful of what will happen if Zimmerman is acquitted.
"If there is strong evidence presented in court that George Zimmerman acted in reasonable self-defense, he's going to be acquitted," says the attorney. "And I am certainly not going to be strolling the streets of Sanford, Florida [if that happens]. This really is a powder-keg -- and I fear for the country when that [possible] verdict is released."
Zimmerman surrendered to authorities in Florida on Wednesday, where he faces charges of second-degree murder. He appeared in court on Thursday, and was scheduled for arraignment May 29.
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3a)The New Black Panthers’ Unpunished Threats
By John Fund
George Zimmerman is facing charges of second-degree murder. A jury will decide his guilt or innocence. Here’s hoping the criminal-justice system cools rather than exacerbates the passions the killing of Trayvon Martin has raised.
But Attorney General Eric Holder isn’t helping. Wednesday, he appeared before the Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network to praise Sharpton “for your partnership, your friendship, and your tireless efforts to speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless, and to shine a light on the problems we must solve, and the promises we must fulfill.”
This is the same Al Sharpton who has led several rallies against Zimmerman, in which he called for civil disobedience and an “occupation” of Sanford, Fla., where the shooting occurred, if an arrest wasn’t made.
This is the same Al Sharpton who has never apologized to Steven Pagones, the assistant district attorney he falsely accused of raping Tawana Brawley, a black teenager. The “dastardly deed” Sharpton accused Pagones of was found to be a complete fabrication. In 1998, Sharpton was found liable for seven defamatory statements he’d made against Pagones and ordered to pay $65,000.
Earlier in the 1990s, Sharpton had become famous exacerbating racial tensions in New York’s Crown Heights neighborhood, tensions that led to the killing of Anthony Graziosi. In 1995, Sharpton denounced the owners of Freddy’s Fashion Mart in Harlem as “bloodsuckers” and “white interlopers” over a rent dispute the business had with tenants. A short time later, a man entered Freddy’s and told all the black people present, patrons and employees alike, to leave. Once they did, the man firebombed the building, killing seven people — including a black security guard. Sharpton insisted he bore no responsibility for the incident, saying it was only a tenant/landlord dispute that had escalated out of control.
It is exceedingly strange for Holder to praise the likes of Al Sharpton and bring him greetings from President Obama. But it is even stranger that Holder should pledge to the Sharpton activists that he will take appropriate federal action against any civil-rights crime, while he appears completely uninterested in the ugly forces calling for violence against George Zimmerman.
It’s been three weeks since Mikhail Muhammad, leader of the New Black Panther Party, offered a $10,000 bounty for the “capture” of Zimmerman and warned that Zimmerman “should be fearful for his life.” The Panthers have distributed wanted posters of Zimmerman and offered the bounty “dead or alive.” Just this week, Michelle Williams, the chief of staff for the Panthers, told WTSP-TV in Tampa, “Let me tell you, the things that’s about to happen, to these honkies, these crackers, these pigs, these pink people, these [inaudible] people. It has been long overdue. My prize right now this evening . . . is gonna be the bounty, the arrest, dead or alive, for George Zimmerman. You feel me?”
Ms. Williams later apologized for her remarks, but her statements and those of other Panthers amount to criminal threats, and could break federal hate-crime laws.
Indeed, a relative of George Zimmerman wrote to Attorney General Holder this week noting the threats. “The Zimmerman family is in hiding because of the threats that have been made against us, yet the DOJ has maintained an eerie silence in this matter,” read the letter, which was obtained by the Daily Caller. “Why, when the law of the land is crystal clear, is your office not arresting the New Black Panthers for hate crimes? . . . Since when can a group of people in the United States put a bounty on someone’s head, circulate Wanted posters publicly, and still be walking the streets?” The DOJ’s public-affairs office has not responded to inquiries by reporters asking if Holder’s statement on federal civil-rights crimes also applies to the New Black Panther Party.
Holder’s Justice Department has taken a pass on the New Black Panther Party in the past. In 2009, it inherited from the outgoing Bush administration a civil-rights lawsuit against the Party and three of its members for showing up armed outside a Philadelphia polling place in 2008 and shouting racial threats at voters. Bartle Bull, a former civil-rights lawyer who had been arrested in the South in the 1960s and later went on to become publisher of the liberal Village Voice, actually witnessed the intimidation and reported the Panthers’ actions to Justice.
When the defendants failed to answer Justice’s lawsuit, a federal court in Philadelphia entered a default judgment against them. The Holder Justice Department responded by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, suddenly dropping the charges against the Panthers and two defendants. The third defendant was merely barred from displaying a weapon near a Philadelphia polling place for the next three years. The bizarre decision prompted congressional outcries and a formal investigation by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, which sent a letter to Justice in August 2009 saying, “We believe the Department’s defense of its actions thus far undermines respect for rule of law.” The Commission later issued a harshly condemnatory report of Justice’s behavior in the case. Could Justice’s leniency encourage the Panthers to think they can act with impunity in the future?
Bartle Bull says he is very concerned that Justice is practicing a double standard when it comes to enforcing civil-rights laws. “When he took office, Attorney General Holder stated that America was a ‘nation of cowards’ when it comes to race,” he told me in 2010. “But who are today’s ‘cowards’ on race? This kind of double standard is not what Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy stood for.”
John Fund, a writer based in New York, is the author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy
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4)Obama to Iran: It’s your move in nuclear talks
By Olivier Knox
On the eve of high-stakes talks with Iran, the White House on Friday signaled a willingness to consider giving Tehran economic incentives—but only after the regime takes "concrete steps" toward freezing its suspect nuclear program.
"We would certainly explore reciprocal actions that are responsive to concrete steps by the Iranians," said Ben Rhodes, President Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser for strategic communications.
"We'll be ready to reciprocate steps that they take, but again we'll have to see actions, not just words, from the Iranian government," Rhodes told reporters aboard Air Force One as Obama headed via Florida to a summit in Colombia.
His comments came with negotiators from the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China—the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council as well as Germany set to hold talks Saturday with Iran in Istanbul.
The so-called P5+1 want Iran to take actions to reassure the world that it is not seeking nuclear weapons under the guise of what it insists is a civilian atomic energy program.
Tehran denies the charges. But recent reports from the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), have stoked concerns about Iran's refusal to bow to world demands that it freeze its uranium enrichment. Enrichment can be a key step toward building a nuclear weapon.
Rhodes set low expectations for the talks in Turkey—the first such face-to-face discussions in over a year.
"We believe that the talks that are going forward is a positive sign," he said. "I think nobody expects to resolve all differences in one meeting, but what we want is a positive environment where the Iranian government demonstrates its seriousness and its commitment to pursuing serious negotiations with the P5+1."
"We want to begin with a negotiation that can address our concerns about their nuclear program, and we want that negotiation to move forward with a sense of urgency," said Rhodes. "Because as the president has said, we do believe there's time and space for diplomacy, but it's not unlimited." Obama has said he has not ruled out military action against Iran. Israel has made clear it views a nuclear Iran as a threat to its very existence and will use force to keep this from happening.
The official said the talks would partly look to set the stage for further negotiations and said another round could take place in Baghdad.
"It would be a positive step forward to see those negotiations continue," he said.
U.S. officials have expressed hopes that Iran, laboring under crippling economic sanctions and facing the prospect of Europe halting imports of its oil, will bow to pressure to halt uranium enrichment and take other concrete actions.
Obama came to office seeking to engage Tehran and offering to meet with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But when Iran rebuffed his overtures, the president moved to tighten U.S. and international sanctions, which have never been tougher.
U.S. lawmakers will also be watching the talks with an eye on imposing another round of sanctions.
In their different ways, the rulers of Iran, North Korea and Syria this week tried to throw US President Barack Obama off balance by exploiting the foreign policy balls he is juggling to win the November election – a combination of tough talk and maneuvers to avoiding military confrontation.
Wednesday, April 11, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad chose Abu Musa island near the Strait of Hormuz to offer the Arab Gulf rulers a piece of advance: “…they should take a look at the map of Iran so that they understand about which great and powerful country they are talking.”
Turning to threats, he said: “Some of these countries give their oil money to the arrogant powers so that it can be used against another country. But they must be aware that their days are numbers and one day, the oil money will be used against themselves.”
Was he setting the tone for the resumed nuclear talks opening in Istanbul Saturday, April 14, between his government and six world powers (US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany)?
Or reminding them that when sanctions were first imposed on Iran to counter its nuclear program oil sold at $25 the barrel whereas it has since soared to $110.00/bbl.
As for Iran’s Arab neighbors across the Gulf, Ahmadinejad was giving them an ominous geostrategic lesson: Saudi Arabia was 1,034 kilometers away from Abu Musa and the Hormuz waterway which carried their oil to market, whereas Abu Musa was only 183.5 kilometers and bristling with a profusion of Iranian military hardware, notably sea-mines, explosives-packed speedboats and shore-to-sea missiles. They are all in position to block the Strait of Hormuz and strike at the lifelines of Gulf oil producers, their wells and infrastructure. No need to wage full-blown war on Saudi Arabia to bring disaster down on the world’s key oil-producing region.
Therefore, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s remark Thursday, April 12, that Tehran has sent “mixed signals, hinting toward a compromise” hardly connects with reality, unless she was referring to signals filtered through secret channels.
The Iranian president was obviously crowing over Tehran’s success in preserving Syrian President Bashar Assad in power and vowing to make Gulf nations pay for backing his enemies.
A large Saudi delegation headed by Defense Minister Prince Salman visited London and Washington this week. In addition to their top-level talks with President Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron and their heads of defense, they also talked to British and US army chiefs dealing with the military side of the Persian Gulf. In London, Prince Salman had a long conversation with Air Chief Marshal Sir Simon Bryant and later in Washington with Gen. James Mattis and the president’s adviser on terror John O. Brennan.
Their focus of concern appeared to have shifted from a possible US or Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program and its consequences over to a potential clash between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
On Syria, Obama and Saudi King Abdullah are at odds. The former stands solidly against US military intervention against the Assad regime, whereas the latter is pressing for heightened Western and Arab military involvement in Syria including a supply of heavy weapons for the rebels fighting government forces. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan was in Riyadh Wednesday but failed to convince the king to line up behind the Washington-Ankara policy on Syria.
With Iranian and Russian support, Assad has managed to turn the tables on Turkey. Friday’s Saudi newspaper mocked Ankara and its oft-repeated, never-fulfilled proposal to set up a buffer zone in Syria for refugees with a sarcastic headline: “Did al-Assad set up a buffer zone in Turkey?”
The first two days of the Syrian ceasefire, which was declared as part of UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan’s six-point peace plan, were encouraging in that the number of deaths from violence declined from the horrendous norm. At the same time, outbreaks here and there were still current and Syrian troops and heavy weapons remained in the cities.
The UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon and peace envoy Kofi Annan are convinced that rushing UN observers into Syria and getting them on the ground will stabilize the ceasefire. But most Syria watchers are skeptical. Assad is firm in the saddle.
As for the Istanbul talks, military sources report the conviction in the State Department that Iran is not coming to the table to resolve its nuclear dispute with the world, but rather as a toe in the water to gauge the strength of Obama’s resolve to terminate its nuclear program. Iran’s resolve is unquestioned. As Ahmadinejad put it, “Iran will not retreat one iota from its nuclear rights.”
Like Syria and North Korea, Iran is gambling on Obama dropping back in time to avoid real confrontation with the Tehran-Moscow-Beijing.
Military sources report that North Korea is playing on the same pitch. Despite the breakup of the Unha-3 carrier rocket, supposedly to boost a satellite into orbit, shortly after takeoff from Sohae Satellite Launching Station in Tongchang-ri Thursday, April 13, North Korea has established four facts:
1. It is very close to the capacity for building multistage intercontinental ballistic missiles and will keep on conducting tests until the technology is fully mastered:
2. Pyongyang is set for its third nuclear test;
3. It is well on the way to an ICBM with a nuclear warhead capable of reaching Washington and not just Tokyo;
4. As it forges ahead, North Korea displays extreme indifference to the threats of world powers, United Nations censure or even the cancellation of US food aid just announced.
Its rulers are bucked up by the information reaching them about the mood in Washington - not from Chinese intelligence but American mainstream media. They agree that President Obama aims to woo the American voter by sounding tough but staying clear of military confrontations with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Bashar Assad and Kim Jong-un.
This posture was summed up succinctly by Leslie H. Gelb in the Daily Beast: “Typically, Mr. Obama is reacting like almost all his predecessors in presidential-election years: he is trying to simultaneously show strength and avoid war. He is walking the familiar tightrope…”
Going into critical talks in Istanbul Saturday with a tough customer like Iran on a tightrope, the US president wobbles over dangerous waters. A misjudgment could suddenly make him lose his balance; Iran, Syria or North Korea may push him off-balance; in his anxiety to avoid war, he may, as is often the case, cause one - maybe without American involvement but most certainly one that sets up high turbulence across the entire Middle East
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5)Clinton Overrules Republican Lawmaker's Hold on Palestinian Aid
Ros-Lehtinen: "Where is the accountability for U.S. taxpayer dollars?"
By Sara Sorcher
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton addresses the G8 foreign ministers at the start of a working session at Blair House in Washington on Wednesday.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is allowing U.S. funds to flow to the West Bank and Gaza despite a hold by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., a rare display of executive-branch authority that angered the key lawmaker concerned about protecting her congressional oversight role.
A State Department official said that a letter was delivered on Tuesday to key members of Congress informing them of Clinton's decision to move forward with the $147 million package of the fiscal year 2011 economic support funds for the Palestinian people, despite Ros-Lehtinen's hold. Administrations generally do not disburse funding over the objections of lawmakers on relevant committees.
The funds deliver "critical support to the Palestinian people and those leaders seeking to combat extremism within their society and build a more stable future. Without funding, our programs risk cancellation," the official, who was not authorized to speak about the issue, said in an e-mail. "Such an occurrence would undermine the progress that has been made in recent years in building Palestinian institutions and improving stability, security, and economic prospects, which benefits Israelis and Palestinians alike.”
Late last month, Ros-Lehtinen sent a letter to Clinton and U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Rajiv Shah, informing them she will lift her hold on some $88.6 million of the Palestinian aid package -- out of the full $147 million -- under special conditions. Appropriations State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee Chairwoman Kay Granger, R-Texas, agreed to release her hold on the full assistance package on humanitarian grounds.
"The U.S. has given $3 billion in aid to the Palestinians in the last five years alone, and what do we have to show for it?" Ros-Lehtinen said on Wednesday in a statement to National Journal. "Now the administration is sending even more. Where is the accountability for U.S. taxpayer dollars?"
Ros-Lehtinen earlier said she was disappointed that the administration "would employ hardball tactics against Congress and threaten to send, over congressional objection, U.S. taxpayer dollars to the Palestinian Authority." She does not want the funds used for assistance and recovery programs in Hamas-run Gaza; road construction projects in the West Bank, unless vital for security; or trade facilitation, tourist promotion, or scholarships for Palestinian students.
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6)Shaul Mofaz: Man with a plan?
Shaul Mofaz may have been a latecomer to Kadima, but with his landslide victory over Tzipi Livni he is firmly ensconced as party chairman. Yet, if the polls are to be believed, he may not have much of a party left after Israel’s next round of general elections.
If Kadima is to survive, Mofaz must articulate a vision for the party, and Israel, moving forward. The road ahead will not be easy for Kadima’s new chairman, but Mofaz’s best chance to shake the party out of its doldrums is to articulate a proactive, centrist vision. In finding his voice, Mofaz should look to his own past, as well as Kadima’s raison d’etre: moving Israel forward toward a political solution of the Palestinian conflict.
Ariel Sharon established Kadima to champion a third way in confronting Israel’s most pressing and perennial challenge: the future of the territories and the conflict with the Palestinians. Faced with diplomatic paralysis and an ever-ticking demographic clock, Sharon offered a new vision for Israel’s future. After withdrawing from Gaza and part of the West Bank, Israel would attempt to negotiate an agreed settlement with the Palestinian Authority. If a credible partner couldn’t be found, Israel would set its own boundaries (presumably along the route of the security barrier) and disentangle its civilian population from the Palestinians.
Kadima’s take-charge approach to the questions of territory and the Palestinians was derailed by a confluence of crises and corruption. Ariel Sharon’s debilitating stroke ushered in the era of Ehud Olmert, whodisavowed one of the party’s founding tenets: Israel’s unilateral option. At the same time, a steady stream of corruption probes undermined Olmert’s attempts to negotiate an agreement with Mahmoud Abbas.
After Olmert was forced to resign while under indictment, Tzipi Livni took over at the helm of Kadima. After twice failing to cobble together a coalition, Livni took Kadima into the opposition. Without the constraining influence of coalition partners, Livni was free to articulate Kadima’s vision for Israel’s future from the bully pulpit of leader of the opposition.
If nothing else, Livni’s resounding defeat demonstrates that she failed to communicate that vision to Kadima’s rank and file, let alone the broader public. She lambasted Netanyahu over the stalled diplomatic process with the Palestinians; she lamented the tension in US-Israel relations; she tried to ride the wave of grassroots social protest. But at the end of the day, Livni’s message never went far beyond, “I can be better than Bibi.”
Enter Shaul Mofaz, an Iranian-born former IDF chief of Staff and the defense minister who co-signed the orders for the Gaza disengagement. He lacks Netanyahu’s charisma, economic bona fides, and diplomatic experience; however, Mofaz has one thing a majority of Israelis want, and no Likud prime minister has yet to offer: a credible plan to reach an agreement with the Palestinians.
In 2009, Mofaz proposed his own plan for resolving Israel’s lingering territorial uncertainty and reaching a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians. The crux of his proposal, a provisional Palestinian state in approximately 60 percent of the West Bank, essentially repackaged elements of the Quartet road-map. However, Mofaz also stated that he would be willing to guarantee that the final boundaries of a Palestinian state would include no less than 92 percent of the West Bank. Over time, approximately 60,000 Jewish settlers would be compensated and relocated, with Israel annexing the major settlement blocs. Mofaz also proposed time-limited negotiations on Jerusalem, refugees, security, and final borders.
When Mofaz first unveiled his initiative, he argued that “the existing stalemate is dangerous. We have to think differently, to go in another direction. Netanyahu won’t do anything, and every day that goes by is more damaging to Israel.” Now that he is Kadima chairman and leader of the opposition, Mofaz needs to clarify whether he still believes in the urgency of a proactive, incremental alternative to Netanyahu’s diplomatic “stallmate.”
For the first time, a provisional Palestinian state may be implementable. PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has undertaken significant reforms in governance and economics, while the US continues training security forces whose mission is to combat, not abet, terrorism. Hamas remains firmly ensconced in Gaza, but has been unable to close a deal that would give it a toehold in the West Bank, where it has been effectively repressed. After Abbas’s failure to receive recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN, the PA president needs a win. The recognition of a provisional Palestinian state by Israel and the UN Security Council would be a significant political victory.
The current diplomatic stagnation provides an opportune moment for Kadima to reassert itself as the pragmatic, centrist party capable of surmounting the impasse. The only question is whether Shaul Mofaz is ready to stand by his plan from the Knesset rostrum, so that in the coming elections, Kadima will stand for something.
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