---
Does contempt define Obama's presidency? (See 2 and 2a below.)
More commentary why Obama's recent appointments are political rather and not beneficial to our nation's foreign policy. In fact, they are an affront. (See 3 and 3a below.)
---
Obama's administration is unraveling and lost all credibility and though it is unlikley he can put humpty dumpty back the sad fact is that nothing will come of it until he is out of office if then.
With every day comes another report of how out of control Obama is when it comes to managing the various government agencies and departments he presides over. Worse, his direct efforts to spy, to restrict our freedoms and to go after his enemies is evidence he not only does not care about what the founding fathers intended when they conceived and drafted our Constitution but also is arrogant enough to proceed in the face of obvious public angst and disgust.
Obama's florid rhetoric does not match his actions and his government is more a threat to freedom than anything alQaeada and Islamic radicals can throw at us. America will fall from within not without.
Meanwhile, what we hear are apologies by bureaucrats supposedly in charge and that about sums it up. Millions have been wasted in worthless conferences, insultingly lavish and wasteful spending and on and on it goes.
Bigger government? Why? Government is untrustworthy. What citizens should be demanding is personnel firings, jail sentences, resignations, sharply reduced government, agency closings and even further decrease in funding.
Lamentably, history suggests what we are most likely to get is a series of whitewash investigations and eventually larger government.
---
Glick warns Israel do not get sucked in by Obama and Perry's tom foolery, dangerous and boondoggle policies!
Obama and Perry propose more spending lunacy as if buying Palestinian promises is a dependable way to engage in foreign policy.
Why not just transfer IRA partying to Egypt and the area controlled by Palestinians. That should help their economies. (See 4 below.)
----
Mel Brook's new foundation to preserve the word "schmuck" should not be a problem. America is not in short supply of them. He can start with those who voted for Obama and then go to D.C. and include the many bureaucrats and members of Congress.
Since it is a tax free foundation no doubt he will be investigated by the IRS. (See 4a below.)
---
Dick
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)Show Me the Memo
Obama should share his legal justification for collecting Verizon's phone records
The revelation by The Guardian that the Obama administration’s National Security Agency has been secretly collecting logs of domestic and international telephone calls from Verizon “on an ongoing daily basis” under the Patriot Act is the most disturbing misuse of the government surveillance authority since the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretaps, some of which were later authorized by Congress. But the Obama surveillance program, which may represent a continuation of the Bush program under different legal authority, has an even more disturbing antecedent: the abuse of government surveillance powers by the NSA, FBI, CIA, and IRS during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations that led to the Church commission.
The Church commission asked a central question—does the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures apply to domestic surveillance? In answering yes, Congress created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA, in 1978 to supervise domestic eavesdropping by issuing secret warrants for specified items, such as the records of car-rental companies or storage facilities. But then came Section 215 of the U.S.A. Patriot Act of 2001, which broadened the scope of data for which secret warrant could be issued to include “any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents and other items).” In other words, the government could now seize anything in secret, and without notification to those being spied on. The only qualification was that the seized data had to be relevant to a terrorism investigation and “not conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution.”
The order authorizing the massive surveillance through Verizon was signed by Roger Vinson, a retired federal judge in Florida who in 2011 issued a sweeping opinion striking down the Affordable Care Act. The Obama administration insists that its invocation of Section 215 is legal, but refuses to release the secret memorandum justifying its legal conclusion—just at it had earlier refused to release its legal memorandum justifying targeted drone killings, before changing its mind.
That 215 memorandum should be released so that Congress and American citizens can debate publicly whether or not this kind of blanket surveillance is consistent with the Fourth Amendment. The Supreme Court has not ruled definitively on the question of warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance, and earlier this year made it harder to challenge foreign intelligence surveillance by finding that potential victims of surveillance had no standing to challenge it in court. One lower court allowed a constitutional challenge against Section 215 of the Patriot Act to proceed, but no court has ruled squarely on the question of the blanket surveillance that Verizon has allowed.
It’s clear at the very least that surveillance under the Patriot Act is being used far more broadly than Obama and Bush administration officials previously acknowledged. In May 2005, President Bush’s deputy attorney general, James Comey, who Obama is expected to nominate the FBI, gave the following testimony to Congress:
Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act allows the FBI to obtain an order from the FISA Court requesting production of any tangible thing, such as business records, if the items are relevant to an ongoing authorized national security investigation, which, in the case of a United States person, cannot be based solely upon activities protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. The Attorney General recently declassified the fact that the FISA Court has issued 35 orders requiring the production of tangible things under section 215 from the effective date of the Act through March 30th of this year. None of those orders were issued to libraries and/or booksellers, and none were for medical or gun records. The provision to date has been used only to order the production of driver's license records, public accommodation records, apartment leasing records, credit card records, and subscriber information, such as names and addresses, for telephone numbers captured through court-authorized pen register devices. Similar to a prosecutor in a criminal case issuing a grand jury subpoena for an item relevant to his investigation, so too may the FISA Court issue an order requiring the production of records or items that are relevant to an investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.
But we now know that the Bush and Obama administrations have used Section 215 in ways that make it look nothing like a grand jury subpoena for obtaining credit card or hotel information. Grand jury subpoenas are issued for a limited set of documents in a specific criminal investigation, launched on a showing of probable cause. Here, the telephone logs of millions of innocent Americans are being stored with no showing that they have done anything wrong. That’s why two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Mark Udall (D-Colorado), wrotelast year that Eric Holder: “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act.”
This week began with the Supreme Court upholding the power of government to seize the DNA of Americans on arrest. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a passionate dissentreminding Americans that “At the time of the Founding, Americans despised the British use of the so-called 'general warrants'—warrants not grounded upon a sworn oath of a specific infraction by a particular individual, and thus note limited in scope and application.” The massive surveillance begun by the Bush administration and now justified by the Obama administration under the Patriot Act makes the intrusions of general warrants that concerned the Framers look tame. It’s time for a national debate about whether the Patriot Act, in fact, justifies this mass surveillance; and if so, whether that act is consistent with the Fourth Amendment. The only way to have that debate is for the Obama administration to release the legal analysis that it believes justifies its actions in the first place.
Jeffrey Rosen is the legal affairs editor of The New Republic.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)Once Upon a Time, There Was a President ...
Last week I wrote about why the myth of the magical hero-king— what others call the "Green Lantern" presidency—just won’t die. The reason? Because it seems the myth is in the interest of the presidents themselves!
In some ways, however, this particular myth is only one of the many ideas of the presidency that were essential in the institution’s development. Many of the things that presidents do, after all, aren’t explicitly in the Constitution, and many of the things we associate with the presidency weren’t done for years and years after the Constitution was adopted. A president just set a precedent, and it stuck. For a minor example, there’s the president’s Saturday radio address, invented by Ronald Reagan and then copied by everyone since, although Barack Obama added a twist with YouTube versions. There’s more: Everything from cabinet meetings to press conferences to “pardoning” Thanksgiving turkeys is part of the slowly built-up White House job requirements.
Congress, on the other hand, has its role well delineated in the Constitution. After all, the framers knew all about Congresses and parliaments—but they were inventing the presidency from scratch. There had never been anything like it.
In my pocket copy of the Constitution, Article I—setting up the Congress—goes on for about nine pages and is full of detail. The House shall choose a “Speaker and other officers.” Both chambers “shall keep a Journal” of their actions, and there are even provisions for what to do if they need to keep some of their business secret. And of course there are all the enumerated powers in Section 8, telling Congress exactly what they should write laws about.
Contrast that with Article II. That’s only four pages in my edition, less than half as long. And of that, a good chunk of it is devoted to laying out the convoluted rules of the Electoral College. There are really only five paragraphs that say anything about the responsibilities and duties of the president, and even then a good deal of it is about the limitations (“with the Advice and Consent of the Senate”). Yes, the president can “require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments,” but that’s not much of a power, I don’t think—although it’s better than my favorite presidential power: that he can “recommend” to Congress “such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient." That's a power he happens to share with pretty much every living citizen.
The truth is that outside of a few big ones—commander in chief, nominations—a whole lot of the formal powers of the presidency comes down to “the executive Power shall be vested in a President” and “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Beyond that, the job is mostly an empty shell filled up with 44 presidencies worth of precedents. Some of these precedents wind up being enshrined in law, but others are just shared expectations of the job.
A lot of the traditions of the office are nevertheless close to binding. Imagine if Barack Obama (or imagine if the new president in 2017) just decided to submit his State of the Union message in writing, instead of delivering it in person to the joint session of Congress. That’s how presidents after Thomas Jefferson and before Woodrow Wilson did it; it’s how Abraham Lincoln did it. Yet a president who tried it now would be playing defense for days, maybe weeks, on what would ultimately be a fairly trivial point. Going against expectations just isn’t worth it, at least unless something very large is at stake.
But beyond single actions, images of the presidency inform the entire enterprise. The idea that presidents have a legislative agenda—following the lead of Wilson, and especially Franklin Roosevelt—is considered a perfectly normal part of the job now (yes, some nineteenth century presidents had legislative ideas, but it wasn’t quite the same). So is the idea that presidents will attend summits to negotiate with allies, and even enemies—the idea that the president is the leading figure on the world stage. And so is the idea that the president will be mourner-in-chief in the case of national tragedies.
In each case, the expectations of both these roles give the president influence; the expectation that presidents will have a legislative program and that Congress will treat it as part of its agenda gives his power to “recommend” a force that the empty Constitutional provision doesn’t appear to have. At the same time, it constrains him—recall, for example, criticisms of Barack Obama for not visiting Israel, or one can go back to criticisms of Ronald Reagan for not meeting with Soviet leaders during his first term.
Or consider another expectation: that a president will unveil new initiatives in the State of the Union Address. In some ways, it’s a bit of an oddity; why can’t a president simply repeat the agenda he’s already been working on? Or for that matter, why can’t a president report on past triumphs? But no, the State of the Union must be filled with a laundry list of current proposals, and if there’s nothing new then the pundits, the opposition, and even his own party may complain that the presidency is growing stale. So they find something. Indeed, one of George W. Bush’s greatest successes, his initiative to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa, may well have happened because he needed a feel-good something new in his 2003 State of the Union speech.
When we see presidents act, what we’re usually seeing isn’t the words of the Constitution in action—we’re seeing attempts to copy what George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt did, or even what Cleveland or Taft or Carter did, or perhaps even old stories about kings. Those stories of presidents and kings, and not the Constitution, are responsible for much of what makes the presidency such a formidable office.
2a)NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily
Exclusive: Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama
The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.
The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.
The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.
The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.
Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.
The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government's domestic spying powers.
Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama.
The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.
The Guardian approached the National Security Agency, the White House and the Department of Justice for comment in advance of publication on Wednesday. All declined. The agencies were also offered the opportunity to raise specific security concerns regarding the publication of the court order.
The court order expressly bars Verizon from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI's request for its customers' records, or the court order itself.
"We decline comment," said Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman.
The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls".
The order directs Verizon to "continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order". It specifies that the records to be produced include "session identifying information", such as "originating and terminating number", the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and "comprehensive communication routing information".
The information is classed as "metadata", or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such "metadata" is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data – the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to – was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order.
While the order itself does not include either the contents of messages or the personal information of the subscriber of any particular cell number, its collection would allow the NSA to build easily a comprehensive picture of who any individual contacted, how and when, and possibly from where, retrospectively.
It is not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone provider to be targeted with such an order, although previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks. It is also unclear from the leaked document whether the three-month order was a one-off, or the latest in a series of similar orders.
The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, about the scope of the Obama administration's surveillance activities.
For roughly two years, the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on "secret legal interpretations" to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be "stunned" to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted.
Because those activities are classified, the senators, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, have been prevented from specifying which domestic surveillance programs they find so alarming. But the information they have been able to disclose in their public warnings perfectly tracks both the specific law cited by the April 25 court order as well as the vast scope of record-gathering it authorized.
Julian Sanchez, a surveillance expert with the Cato Institute, explained: "We've certainly seen the government increasingly strain the bounds of 'relevance' to collect large numbers of records at once — everyone at one or two degrees of separation from a target — but vacuuming all metadata up indiscriminately would be an extraordinary repudiation of any pretence of constraint or particularized suspicion." The April order requested by the FBI and NSA does precisely that.
The law on which the order explicitly relies is the so-called "business records" provision of the Patriot Act, 50 USC section 1861. That is the provision which Wyden and Udall have repeatedly cited when warning the public of what they believe is the Obama administration's extreme interpretation of the law to engage in excessive domestic surveillance.
In a letter to attorney general Eric Holder last year, they argued that "there is now a significant gap between what most Americansthink the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows."
"We believe," they wrote, "that most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted" the "business records" provision of the Patriot Act.
Privacy advocates have long warned that allowing the government to collect and store unlimited "metadata" is a highly invasive form of surveillance of citizens' communications activities. Those records enable the government to know the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication.
Such metadata is what the US government has long attempted to obtain in order to discover an individual's network of associations and communication patterns. The request for the bulk collection of all Verizon domestic telephone records indicates that the agency is continuing some version of the data-mining program begun by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack.
The NSA, as part of a program secretly authorized by President Bush on 4 October 2001, implemented a bulk collection program of domestic telephone, internet and email records. A furore erupted in 2006 when USA Today reported that the NSA had "been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth" and was "using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity." Until now, there has been no indication that the Obama administration implemented a similar program.
These recent events reflect how profoundly the NSA's mission has transformed from an agency exclusively devoted to foreign intelligence gathering, into one that focuses increasingly on domestic communications. A 30-year employee of the NSA, William Binney, resigned from the agency shortly after 9/11 in protest at the agency's focus on domestic activities.
In the mid-1970s, Congress, for the first time, investigated the surveillance activities of the US government. Back then, the mandate of the NSA was that it would never direct its surveillance apparatus domestically.
At the conclusion of that investigation, Frank Church, the Democratic senator from Idaho who chaired the investigative committee, warned: "The NSA's capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter."
Additional reporting by Ewen MacAskill and Spencer Ackerman
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One theme connects all the Obama administration scandals.
The Obama Administration has presented such an array of botched domestic and foreign policies that an observer can become disoriented. Seeing a blur of so many negative events is like watching a Jason Bourne movie, with the camera on high speed. Each alleged malfeasance or scandal is worthy in itself of deliberate scrutiny, yet as we start to examine each one, others suddenly compete for our attention. It is a dazzling tapestry of mismanagement at best. But there is one theme that connects it all: contempt.
First, we have a rogue agency named the Internal Revenue Service interfering in the lives of ordinary folks with views that are conservative or at odds with the Administration. This contemptuous act against Americans who have committed no apparent wrongdoing or financial legerdemain is heavy-handedness reminiscent of banana republics or authoritarian regimes of yesteryear.
Testifying on Capitol Hill about his reportedly 157 visits to the White House, former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman dismissively cited “the Easter Egg roll with my kids” among the reasons for such an astonishing number of meetings. Lois Lerner, Director of the IRS Exempt Organizations pleaded the Fifth Amendment, and Steven Miller, Acting Commissioner referred to the debacle as “horrible customer service” in his apology. To make it worse, the IRS will judge whether Americans are in compliance with Obamacare, not supported by a majority of the American people and railroaded into existence by the President. And it is the same IRS, which investigates U.S. companies for excessive corporate entertainment expenses that are reported as income tax deductions, that spent $50 million on conferences over a recent three-year period, with certain IRS officials staying in $3,500 hotel suites, according to findings of the Treasury Department’s inspector general. Indeed, the IRS has shown itself to be unworthy in its principal role as the instrument of revenue collection from American people and companies.
Further, the Department of Justice that has shown contempt for the First Amendment through highly unusual surveillance of journalists of the AP who like those harassed by the IRS, are seen to be a threat to the Administration’s narratives. In a disingenuous and cynical act, Attorney General Eric Holder invited journalists to an “off the record meeting,” again evidencing contempt for openness and the principle of transparency which the Administration has piously affirmed. All this comes from an Attorney General already held in contempt by the House of Representatives for not presenting documents relating to the mismanaged Mexican Fast and Furious gun tracking operation, the first such a sanction of a Cabinet official in American history. Moreover, it has been revealed that an anti-abortion group in Iowa was directed to commit to the IRS that it would not demonstrate in front of Planned Parenthood, a crudely repressive action by the Department of Justice that seems at odds with the First Amendment.
The same contempt prevails in foreign policy. Benghazi is enshrouded in fog and allegations of deception by the Obama Administration, which before the November election desperately put out the story that the massacre of U.S. foreign service staff was the result of a video offensive to Muslims produced in California, and not a concerted ambush by Al Qaeda or its affiliates — to avoid the inference that America had not successfully broken the back of Islamist jihadism.
To this day, we do not know who denied requests for security at the American mission; who ordered a Special Forces unit in Tripoli to stand down, as charged by Gregory Hicks, formerly deputy chief of mission; who directed Susan Rice, ambassador to the United Nations, to take to the air waves and call it a reaction to a video offensive to Muslims; and who ordered that this misrepresentation be maintained for seventeen days until President Obama finally acknowledged that it was a terrorist attack. Further, we do not know exactly what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama were doing during all seven hours of the siege of the U.S. consulate. And now, the controversial and highly criticized Susan Rice has been named national security advisor.
Perhaps the Administration hopes that Americans have attention deficit disorder — absorbed with buying and selling, family problems, and the distractions of a consumer economy — making them unable to assimilate and concentrate on so many issues of incompetence, or worse, illegality if proved.
What we have is a matrix of contempt — contempt for the American people, or at least about half of them; contempt for the principles of transparency and stewardship; and contempt for the pursuit of truth. Let us hope the electorate will speak out and make its will known; resignations of shameless senior U.S. officials could be too much to hope for.
Who knows — we might even get to hear Jay Carney, White House Press Secretary, state that in an era of moral relativism, we must make allowances for our government
Politics first, foreign policy last
There are three big losers from President Obama’s cynical appointment of Susan Rice as his new national security adviser: Secretary of State John Kerry, Congress and the American people.
As for the nomination of left-wing activist Samantha Power to replace Rice as UN ambassador, the losers are our foreign policy, our allies and the lefties bellowing for the closure of Gitmo. (It ain’t shutting down soon; this nomination’s a consolation prize to O’s base.)
These personnel choices are brilliant hardball politics — but, once again, the Obama White House has elevated politics above serious strategy.
Media pundits promptly opined that Rice’s appointment will alienate Republicans. But our president’s written off Republicans as dead meat. Bringing Rice into the Executive Branch’s innermost circle rewards her for being a good soldier in taking the fall on Benghazi, and it makes it virtually impossible for Congress to subpoena her for a grilling, thanks to our government’s separation of powers. Sharp move, Mr. President.
Pity poor John Kerry, though: He really, really wanted to be a noteworthy secretary of state. Already held at arms-length, now he’ll be relegated to visiting countries that never make the headlines and handing out retirement awards (plus working on the Middle East “peace process,” the ultimate diplomatic booby prize).
Rice has the weakest credentials of any national security adviser in the history of the office, but she has the president’s ear as his old pal. And she’ll work in the White House: Proximity to POTUS is trumps in DC. Kerry’s desk in Foggy Bottom might as well be a hundred miles from the Oval Office.
However incompetent, Rice may become the most influential national security adviser since Henry Kissinger eclipsed the entire State Department. Which means that Obama’s foreign policy, already disastrous, is now going to get worse.
As for the earnest Ms. Power, she has zero qualifications to serve as our UN ambassador. She’s a left–wing militant who has yet to show the least interest in defending America, rather than merely using our might as her tool. Her cause is human rights abroad, and that’s her only cause. And while respect for human rights should be a major factor in our foreign policy, it can’t be the only factor.
Both Power and Rice consistently advocate using our military to protect the human rights of often-hostile foreign populations. Of course there are, indeed, times when measured intervention is strategically wise and morally imperative — but our military’s fundamental purpose is national defense, not mercy missions to those who spit in our faces.
(By the way, I know of no instance when Power has vigorously defended Jews or Christians murdered or driven from their homes by the Arabs she wants to “save”; guess human rights aren’t universal, after all.)
As leftists cheer both choices, one can’t help recalling the cries of “Chicken hawk!” directed at the neocons in the Bush years. Much was made of the neocons’ enthusiasm for sending in our troops, although none of the movement’s leaders had served in our military. Now we have leftist kill-for-peace activists who never served in uniform. That’s different, of course.
On a purely practical level, Power is a terrible choice to be our UN rep. It’s a job for a veteran, polished ambassador who understands the arcane ways of diplomacy and the UN’s exasperating rules and procedures — which the Russian and Chinese ambassadors employed to humiliate Rice. It’s not a job for a zealot on a hobby horse.
Obama knows that, of course. But the Power nomination’s a win for him, even if she’s not confirmed. He just covered his left flank on the cheap. It’s not about Power, just about power.
Ralph Peters’ new book is “Hell or Richmond,” a Civil War novel.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4)Wounded . . . and dangerous
By Caroline B. Glick
US Secretary of State John Kerry looks like a bit of an idiot these days. On Monday he announced that he will be returning to Israel and the Palestinian Authority and Jordan for the fifth time since he was sworn into office on February 1. That is an average of more than one visit a month.
And aside from frequent flier miles, the only thing he has to show for it is a big black eye from PLO chief and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
When Kerry was here last month he unveiled a stunning plan to bring $4 billion in investment funds to the Palestinian Authority. If his plan actually pans out, its champions claim it will increase the PA's GDP by a mind-numbing 50 percent in three years and drop Palestinian unemployment from 21 to eight percent.
Standing before world and regional leaders on May 26, Kerry said plaintively, "This will help build the future. Is this a fantasy? I don't think so."
Abbas and his underlings however wasted no time in demonstrating that indeed, Kerry's plan is fantasy. Abbas appointed Rami Hamdallah, a Fatah apparatchik with perfect English to replace America's favorite moderate Palestinian Salam Fayyad as PA Prime Minister. As the Post's Khaled Abu Toameh has pointedly explained, Hamdallah was appointed for two reasons. First, to facilitate Fatah's absconding of hundreds of millions of dollars in donor aid to the PA and to Palestinian development projects precisely of the type that Kerry hopes to finance with his $4 billion dollar grant. The second reason Abbas appointed Hamdallah the English professor from Nablus, was because his language skills will enable him to make American and European donors feel comfortable as his colleagues in Fatah pick their taxpayer funded pockets.
Aside from mooning Kerry in the middle of his speech in Jordan, Abbas couldn't have thought of a more graphic way to show his contempt for Kerry and the Obama administration.
But that wasn't the only thing the Palestinians did. Again, as Abu Toameh has reported, the popular Palestinian response to last week's World Economic Forum in Jordan where Abbas and Kerry rubbed elbows with President Shimon Peres and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni was to attack the businessmen who accompanied Abbas to the conference. Their crime was meeting with Israeli businessmen who came to the conference in Peres's entourage. Led by Fatah activists, Palestinian writers, unions and others also went after Palestinian businessmen from Jenin who went to Haifa to meet with Israeli business people at the invitation of Haifa's Chamber of Commerce. The "anti-normalization" crowd is calling for Palestinians to boycott Palestinian businesses that do business with Israelis.
And again, that isn't all. At the PLO's birthday celebrations this week, Abbas said that the group's 1964 charter reflects the will of the Palestinian people. That charter calls for the destruction of Israel. It was written three years before Israel took control of Judea, Samaria and northern, southern and Eastern Jerusalem.
But wait, there's more. The Palestinian leadership attacked Kerry personally and his plan as an attempt to bribe them. They promised that while they will happily take the money, four billion measly dollars won't convince them to moderate one iota. They still demand that Israel release all Palestinian terrorists from its jails, agree to its demographic destruction through the so-called "right of return," or unfettered immigration of millions of foreign Arabs to Israel, and the surrender of all of Judea, Samaria, northern, southern and eastern Jerusalem to the PLO as a precondition to beginning negotiations.
And for all that, Kerry responded by applauding Hamdallah's appointment and announcing he will return here next week and is planning to roll out his own comprehensive peace plan very soon.
Israeli leaders for the most part have reacted to Kerry's constant harping by rolling their eyes. He seems like a complete lunatic. Obviously he will fail and the best thing we can do is smile and nod, like you do when you are dealing with a crazy person. Even when Kerry claimed that the reason Israelis aren't interested in peace is because our lives are too happy, we didn't take offense. Because really, why take anything he says seriously?
And aside from that, they ask, what can the Obama administration do to us, at this point? Every single day it becomes more mired in scandal. The Guardian's revelation Wednesday that the US government has been confiscating the phone records of tens of millions of Americans that use Verizon business network since April is just the latest serious, normal presidency destroying scandal to be exposed in the past month. And every single scandal — the IRS's unlawful harassment and discrimination of conservative organizations and individuals, the Justice Department's spying on AP journalists and attempt to criminalize the normal practice of journalism through its investigation of Fox News correspondent James Rosen — makes it more difficult for President Barack Obama to advance his agenda.
As for foreign policy, the whistle blower testimony that exposed Obama's cover-up of the September 11, 2012 al Qaida attack on the US consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi has caused massive damage to Obama's credibility in foreign affairs and to the basic logic of his foreign policy. Ambassador Chris Stevens was tortured and murdered by al Qaida terrorists who owed their freedom of operation to the Obama administration. If it hadn't been for Obama's decision to bring down the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, who had been largely harmless to the US since he gave up his illicit nuclear weapons program in 2004, those al Qaida forces probably wouldn't have be capable of waging an eight hour assault on US installations and personnel in Benghazi.
With the Benghazi scandal hounding him, the Syrian civil war and, for the past week, the anti-government protests in Turkey all exposing his incompetence on a daily basis, these Israeli leaders take heart, no doubt in the belief that Obama's freedom to attack us has vastly diminished.
Although this interpretation of events is attractive, and on its face seems reasonable, it is wrong. And it would be a devastating mistake for Israeli leaders to believe it.
Since he entered office, Obama has responded to every defeat by doubling down and radicalizing. When in 2009 public sentiment against his plan to nationalize the US healthcare industry was so high that Republican Scott Brown was elected Senator from Massachusetts for the sole purpose of blocking Obamacare's passage in the US Senate, Obama did not accept the public's verdict. He used a technicality to ram the hated legislation through without giving Brown and the Senate the chance to vote it down.
And now, as his Middle East strategy of appeasing Islamists under the slogan of lies in the ruins of the US consulate in Benghazi and in the cemeteries interning the Syrians murdered in sarin gas attacks as Obama shrugged his shoulders, Obama is again doubling down. Wednesday he announced that he is elevating the two architects of his policy to senior leadership roles in his administration.
Obama's appointments of UN Ambassador Susan Rice to serve as his National Security Adviser, and former National Security Council member Samantha Power to serve as Ambassador to the UN are a finger in the eye to his critics. These women rose to national prominence through their breathless insistence that the US use force to overthrow Gaddafi in spite of clear evidence that al Qaida was a major force in his opposition.
Power is reportedly the author of Obama's policy of apologizing to foreign countries for the actions of past administrations. Certainly she shares Obama's hostility towards Israel. And she has been outspoken in expressing her negative opinions.
In a nutshell, Power's vision for US foreign policy is a noxious brew of equal parts self-righteousness, ignorance and prejudice. And now she will be responsible for defending Israel, (or not) at the most hostile international arena in the world, where Israel's very right to exist is subject to assault on a daily basis.
Obama's decision to appoint Rice and Power in the face of the mounting scandals surrounding his presidency generally and his foreign policy particularly is not the only reason Israeli leaders should not expect for his weakened political position to diminish Obama's plan to put the screws on Israel in the coming years. There is also the disturbing pattern of the abuse of power that the scandals expose.
To date, all administration officials questioned have denied that Obama was in any way involved in directing the IRS to use the tax code to intimidate with the aim of discrediting and destroying conservative organizations and donors. Likewise they say he played no role in the Justice Department's espionage operations against American journalists, or in the intentional cover-up of the al Qaida assault on US installations and personnel in Benghazi. But mounting circumstantial evidence indicates that this is not true. White House visitor records show that IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman visited Obama's White House 157 times. His predecessor Mark Everson who served under President George W. Bush only visited the White House once.
So too, as Andrew McCarthy reported last month in National Review, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney admitted that Obama spoke with then secretary of state Hillary Clinton at 10 pm on September 11, 2012, during the al-Qaida assault in Benghazi.
It was after that phone conversation that the administration changed its talking points about the nature of the assault, purging details on the identity of the perpetrators and blaming an unrelated internet movie trailer for inciting the attack.
The one thing all the scandals share is a single-minded willingness to pursue radical goals to the bitter end. The IRS's targeting of conservatives was an appalling abuse of executive power, unlike anything we have seen in recent history. The passage of Obamacare in the face massive public opposition was another means to the end of destroying his opponents. The cover-up of the Benghazi attack was a bid to hide the failure of a policy in order to double down on it — despite its failure. The only reason you would want to double down on an already failed policy is if you are ideologically committed to a larger goal that failed policy advances.
The similarities of the pattern of behavior in all of these actions, as well as the circumstantial evidence already unearthed indicate strongly that despite the denials, Obama was in fact involved and may have directed the actions of all of his underlings in all of the scandals now unfolding.
What this means for Israel is we cannot be lured into complacency by Kerry's buffoonery or Obama's apparent political weakness. This is a man who is most dangerous when attacked. And this is a man who is absolutely committed to his ideological agenda. We had better be ready, because if we are not, we won't know what has hit us.
4a) Mel Brooks starts a foundation to save the word schmuck
NEW YORK-Saying he could no longer stand idly by while a vital part of American culture is lost forever, activist and Broadway producer Mel Brooks has founded a private nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the word "schmuck."
"Schmuck is dying," a sober Brooks said during a 2,000-person rally held in his hometown of Williamsburg, Brooklyn Monday. "For many of us, saying 'schmuck' is a way of life. Yet when I walk down the street and see people behaving in foolish, pathetic, or otherwise schmucky ways, I hear only the words 'prick' and 'douche bag.' I just shake my head and think, 'I don't want to live in a world like this.'"
The nonprofit, Schmucks For Schmuck, has compiled schmuck-related data from the past 80 years and conducted its own independent research on contemporary "schmuck" usage. According to Brooks, the statistics are frightening: Utterances of the word "schmuck" have declined every year since its peak in 1951, and in 2006, the word was spoken a mere 28 times-17 of these times by Brooks himself. The study indicates that today, when faced with a situation in which one can use a targeted or self-deprecating insult to convey a general feeling of disgust, people are 50 times more likely to use the word "jerk" than "schmuck," 100 times more likely to use "dick," and 15,000 times more likely to use "fucking asshole."Perhaps more startling, only 23 percent of men know what schmuck means, and only 1.2 percent of these men are under the age of 78. If such trends continue, Brooks estimates that by 2011, such lesser-used terms as "imbecile," "dummy," "schlub," and "contemptible ne'er-do-well" will all surpass schmuck, which is projected to completely disappear by the year 2020 or whenever Brooks dies.
"We must save this word!" Brooks said to thunderous applause as those in attendance began chanting "Schmuck! Schmuck! Schmuck!" "How will we be able to charmingly describe someone who acts in an inappropriate manner? Especially given the tragic loss of the word 'schmegeggie' in 2001. So I urge you: Tonight, when you get home, please, call up your family, your friends, your loved ones, and tell them they're a bunch of schmucks."
"I've never told anyone this before," Brooks added, choking back tears, "but my father was a schmuck."
The foundation has already raised more than $20 million, thanks to donations from supporters such as Jackie Mason, Albert Brooks, the Schtupp Institute, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), and the Henny Youngman Endowment for the Preservation of Schmekel. The money will go toward projects aimed at reintegrating "schmuck" into the English lexicon, including billboards and flyers plastered with the word "schmuck," the upcoming 5K Schlep for Schmuck Awareness, and a new Mel Brooks film< /SPAN>.
"The world cannot afford to lose this valuable and versatile word," Brooks told reporters during a charity auction in Manhattan's Upper West Side Tuesday, where attendees bid for the chance to have a private lunch with Brooks and repeatedly call him a schmuck. "You can be a poor schmuck, a lazy schmuck, a dumb schmuck, or just a plain old schmuck. A group of people can be collectively referred to as schmucks. You can call someone a schmuck, and you can be called a schmuck. You can even call yourself a schmuck." Plus, it's just so fun to say, Brooks added. "Schmuck."
Many of the foundation's volunteers say they share Brooks' passion for the word "schmuck," as well as his outrage that it is slowly disappearing from everyday use. They claim that if they do not act now, the trend could create a snowball effect.
"Today it's schmuck, tomorrow it might be toochis," said SFS volunteer Harry Steinbergmann, 82. "What's next, schlemiel? Putz? Schlimazel?"
Steinbergmann went on to classify this scenario as farcockteh.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment