---
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Bob was sitting on the plane to Detroit when a guy
took the seat beside him. The guy was an emotional
wreck, pale, hands shaking, moaning in fear.
"What's the matter?" Bob asked.
"I've been transferred to Detroit - there are crazy people there. They've got lots of shootings, gangs, race riots, drugs, poor public schools, and the highest crime rate in the nation."
Bob replied, "I've lived in Detroit all my life. It's not as bad as the media says. Find a nice home, go to work, mind your own business, and enroll your kids in a nice private school. It's as safe a place as anywhere in the world."
The guy relaxed and stopped shaking and said, "Oh, Thank you. I've been worried to death. But if you live there and say it's OK, I'll take your word for it. What do you do for a living?"
"I'm a tail gunner on a Budweiser delivery truck."
---
I told my wife recently I suspect the increase in many of the undetermined fires have been started by terrorists and now there seems to be growing evidence my suspicions are smack on target.
Terrorists cannot defeat us militarily, we are too large a nation.
However, they can destroy us economically and that is what they are about. Every time they attack us they disrupt our way of life and cause economic burdens which are increasingly costly, adding to our debt burdens.
This administration cannot afford the political fall out of admitting we are being attacked in various subtle ways but we are.
FIRE WARFARE - The public still has not been told what has been used to start these fires.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFHM0rd9cX8&feature=share&fb_source=message
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Yesterday, I had the dubious pleasure of attending a lecture on 'Obamascare' by two knowledgeable presenters. One was a highly placed executive in the insurance industry who helped businesses, large and small, with determining suitable employee health care plans. The second was an administrator of one of the largest health care organizations, a customer of the insurance company, whose problem was implementing this monstrosity called Obamacare.
They talked about the implications for businesses to an audience of retired seniors mostly on Medicare and when they got around to discussing Medicare matters the audience had become antsy and their eyes were glassed over.
In order to bring 'fairness' to those who currently have no medical coverage, Democrats have taken money from Medicare so it will be available for Medicaid and have introduced all kind of crippling rules and regulations which will have several effects as follows:
1) To sweeten the rope which will eventually hang us all Medicare has been expanded to cover more issues previously uncovered.
2) Practitioners are required to become more electronically record keeping efficient.
3) The patient will have less time with their practitioner and many functions will be relegated to other service people in larger less personal practices. In other words, the day of the Norman Rockwell doctor will soon be total history.
4) The patient will be subjected to a lot of training manuals, films etc. telling them how to take care of themselves. This will result in higher costs and wasted time and money.
5) It is obvious those who supported the legislation are now seeking to be excluded from its impact and even those who voted for it are running for the hills to avoid the inevitable 'train wreck."
6) Eventually, like everything the government touches, individualism will be crushed, costs will escalate and service will decline. I would suggest looking at education as the model of what nosy government bureaucrats can do to a once functioning system.
My conclusion is simple: To pay for this monstrosity, while protecting our nation, we should close The Pentagon, which takes 30% of our nation's budget, drop this 2700 page and growing monstrosity called Obama's Affordable Health Care Act on our enemies because it is far more destructive than any nuclear weapon.
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Let's hear it for Hillary!
Our nation seems to have sunk into anatomical voting patterns.
Brainless for Obama and now Vaginal voting for Hillary.
And then there is this schmuck!
Who cares about liars and incompetence any more! Facade, glamour and sex captures the day! (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Is Netanyahu, like his predecessor, Golda, making a huge military mistake underestimating Israel's enemies' intentions and capabilities? (See 2 below.)
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Vacuums get filled. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton for President
By Bruce Walker
The left, especially the unruly mob of feminists, seems likely to rally around Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton for the Democrat nomination for president in 2016. She has certainly earned that right. Her first major life success was being married to the Democrat nominee for Congress in 1994, and her husband also defeated Congressman Hammerschmidt.
Then she was the loyal wife of the attorney general of Arkansas.
After that, she was the faithful wife of the governor of Arkansas for four terms, and Mrs. Clinton stood by her husband when he lost his bid for re-election as governor in strongly Democrat Arkansas in the 1982 election.
As the wife of President William Jefferson Clinton, she served a sacrificial wifely role as cannon fodder for an ill-fated comprehensive health care reform bill.
Then, in the best tradition of country music, Frau Clinton performed the duty to "Stand by Your Man" even when those who believed in protecting women from creepy male bosses and other forms of male intimidation of women must have been rolling their eyes in disgust.
This is all in the grand tradition of leftist champions of the myriad elements of their cobbled coalition. Young black women are encouraged to cripple themselves and hobble the lives of their children by out of wedlock child-rearing. Hispanics seeking to become American citizens are urged not to learn English so that they are utterly at the mercy of the rhetoric of their notional "leaders." Public-school children learn nothing but are persuaded that they are fully educated by the bosses of public teachers' unions -- moreover, the poor are connived into "investing" into state lotteries as a way of helping themselves and education, often in states which have "gambling addiction" government programs to help the poor.
Mrs. Clinton is in that same grand tradition of other leftist feminist icons. Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example, had the wisdom to be born into one branch of the Roosevelt presidential family and to marry into the other branch. Mrs. John Kennedy was born into an aristocratic European family and then married into a rich political family led by a patriarch who had wished to abandon Britain to Hitler in 1940.
All three of these women who so enchant leftists are were cheated on by their husbands -- in the cases of Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Kennedy, cheated on so flagrantly and widely that it took a deep sense of obedience to their husbands and a willingness to put their rights as wives and their pride as human beings aside.
We now have begun to understand just how deeply the spouses of Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Kennedy sank in the muck of moral depravity: very young and naïve women serviced their husbands while these champions of women's rights bit their tongues and turned the other way -- or even, in Mrs. Clinton's case, accused the powerless young ladies victimized by her lord and master of lying.
Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton stands in the long and proud tradition of leftist women who railed against America or against the notional misogyny of Christianity while ignoring the stoning of girls in Iran for the offense of being gang-raped or the gendercide of girls in China and India caused by selective abortion of unborn girls -- and, in some parts of India, the calculated death by neglect of newborn girl-babies.
Conservatives have nothing to compete with these giants. Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, whose rise in politics happened without a powerful husband or great wealth, are merely self-made women who rose to national prominence based upon intelligence, work, and persistence. There are a number of conservative Republican women, like Susana Martinez, Nikki Haley, and Mary Fallin, who rose to power by their own skill and now run states.
Phyllis Schlafly, whose book A Choice Not an Echo was decisive in gaining Goldwater the Republican nomination in 1964 and whose battle to defeat the so-called Equal Rights Amendment was almost unprecedented in American political history, fought with courage, eloquence, and grit -- not something leftists like to see in women.
Jeane Kirkpatrick was probably the most passionate and coherent voice in Reagan's plan to win the Cold War (she obviously thinks too much for a good feminist leftist).
Claire Boothe Luce, a brilliant writer, a congresswoman, an ambassador to two key posts, and stuff like that was also too smart for her own good.
What leftists like in Mrs. Clinton is her utter predictability, her liberation from independent thinking, and her loyal mouthing of leftist cant on every occasion.
Expect all the regiments of leftism to line up behind her -- she is just what they want in a woman.
1a) Weiner Not Quitting NYC Mayoral Race Amid Sexting Scandal
!
Former New York Rep. Anthony Weiner said on Tuesday he was not dropping out of the New York City mayoral race in light of newly revealed explicit online correspondence with a 22-year-old woman.
And his wife, Huma Abedin, is standing by him.
"This is entirely behind me," Weiner, a Democrat, said at a news conference. "We knew it might come up. It's in our rear-view mirror. We still work on this every day.
"I am sure a lot of my opponents would like for me to drop out of the race,” he said, referring to immediate calls by three of his rivals to quit the race. He has been near the top of most mayoral polls since his late entry into the race this spring.
Weiner admitted on Tuesday to exchanging racy photos and having sexually explicit chats with a woman whom he had met online. He had resigned his House seat in June 2011 after acknowledging having sexual conversations with at least a half-dozen women.
The newly revealed correspondence was posted Monday by the gossip website thedirty.com.
The woman involved was not identified, but said their online relationship began in July 2012 and lasted for six months. She told thedirty that she was 22 when she began chatting with Weiner, who is 48 now, and they found each other on the social networking site Formspring.
Thedirty.com said the woman had been "lured" into an online relationship by Weiner using the alias "Carlos Danger" and that she believed he would provide her with an apartment in Chicago and a job, among other things.
The woman told thedirty that she and Weiner had exchanged nude photographs of themselves and engaged in frequent phone sex.The website also posted a pixelated photo of what appears to be a man's genitals.
"This was a bad situation for me because I really admired him," the woman was quoted telling thedirty.com. "Even post-scandal, I thought he was misunderstood. Until I got to know him, I thought I lived him. Pretty pathetic."
The woman told the website that her relationship with Weiner "fizzled" in November 2012. She said she last heard from him in April, when his intention to run for mayor was first revealed in The New York Times Magazine.
Under questioning by reporters on Tuesday, Weiner acknowledged that the most recent incident occurred "sometime last summer" — after an interview with People magazine that was published last July 18.
In the interview, Weiner said, "I'm very happy in my present life," and said that he was looking forward to seeing his son Jordan, who was 6 months old at the time, take his first steps.
Abedin, who was a top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said on Tuesday that her husband "made some horrible mistakes." It was her first time speaking at a news conference regarding Weiner's activities.
She was pregnant with Jordan when Weiner resigned.
"I love him. I have forgiven him," Abedin said. "I believe in him. And, as we have said from the beginning, we are moving forward."
Meanwhile, two of Weiner's mayoral rivals — Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and former City Councilman Sal Albanese, both Democrats, and Republican John A. Catsimatidis — immediately called on Weiner to drop out of the running for mayor.
"Enough is enough," de Blasio said. "The sideshows of this election have gotten in the way of the debate we should be having about the future of this city."
John C. Liu, another Democratic mayoral candidate, issued a more cautious statement, The New York Times reports.
"The issue of Anthony's relationships, online or otherwise, is between he and his wife, however, the propensity for pornographic selfies is a valid issue for voters," Liu said in his statement. "Ideas and eloquence can propel candidates, but judgment and character still do count."
Two other leading Democratic candidates for mayor, William C. Thompson Jr. and Christine C. Quinn, declined to comment, the Times reports.
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2)IDF faces oncoming Al Qaeda tide on three Israeli borders: Golan, Lebanon, Sinai
That the Netanyahu government took a wrong turn in its policy of non-intervention in the Syrian conflict was manifested by the warning coming from the IDF’s military intelligence (AMAN) chief Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi Tuesday night, July 23, when he said that Syria had become a global battleground for al Qaeda.
Addressing a passing-out ceremony at the IDF’s Officers’ School, Kochavi warned that the thousands of al Qaeda pouring into Syria from around the world are fighting to create an Islamic state there, just as they are in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. This peril, he said, is closing in on Israel, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
At the UN Security Council in New York, his words were echoed by Robert Serry, UN Coordinator of the Middle East peace process, who said Syria “is increasingly turning into a big global battleground.”
It is important to note that Gen. Kochavi issued his warning shortly after returning home from meetings in
Washington with senior US military and intelligence officers. He flew to the US on July 17, on the day that hostilities flared between the Israeli and Syrian armies in the southern Golan on a scale which was never released to the public.
That clash marked the bankruptcy of the government and army command’s efforts to stop the tide of violence from reaching Israel’s northern borders by means of a tactic of virtual non-involvement, aside from limited aid to certain Syrian rebel groups, medical care for some of their wounded and certain unreported small-scale operations.
Threats from five separate sources now threaten to swamp those efforts entirely. They are posed by the Syrian army; Hizballah; global jiahdists; armed Syrian rebel militias funded by Saudi Arabia; and Al Qaeda groups bolstered for the first time by the arrival in recent weeks Pakistani Taliban groups of fighters.
Islamist forces are thrusting forward strongly in eastern, northern and western Syria. They murder any non-Islamist rebel chiefs, especial Free Syrian Army commanders, standing in their way and are moving on towards Lebanon and Jordan as well.
What strikes most concern in Jerusalem, are the first signs of a tie-in between al Qaeda in Syria and al Qaeda in Sinai. The intelligence chief’ went to Washington with a report that coordinated terrorist operations against Israel were shaping up for the first time from Syria, Sinai and possibly Lebanon too.
It was suddenly borne in on Israel that its two strikes against Syria’s chemical weapons and the transfer of advanced hardware to Hizballah were wide of the mark.
The greatest danger has turned out to be Al Qaeda’s spreading potency. Anyway, chemical warfare has since spread across the Syrian battlefield and Hizballah forces fighting in Syria simply take direct delivery of advanced weapons from the Syrian army, without even trying to transfer them to Lebanon.
The IDF has failed to come to grips with Al Qaeda on the Syrian front no less than the Egyptian army, for different reasons, has succeeded in curbing the jihadist marauders in Sinai.
As the mainstream Syrian rebel movement crumbles, al Qaeda is bolstered by an influx of fighters, weapons and funds from across the Muslim world, including the Persian Gulf. Over the past year, the IDF has had to reconfigure its deployment against Syria – first to contend with the potential of chemical weapons, then Iranian military involvement, followed by Hizballah’s advance towards the Israeli border and now al Qaeda’s inroads.
Gen. Kochavi was not led to expect a sympathetic hearing in Washington for Israel’s concerns.
The Obama administration is up to its neck in its efforts to speed the US military drawdown in Afghanistan and break off contact with the Taliban, whose Pakistani branch has meanwhile turned up in Syria.
The Israeli intelligence chief found Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the US Chiefs of Staff, fully engaged in phrasing an open letter to senators to rebuff their criticism of President Barack Obama’s decision to stay out of the Syrian conflict:
In his letter, he outlined the five options for involvement with price tags:
1. Training, advising and assisting the opposition;
2. Conducting limited strikes;
3. Establishing a no-fly zone;
4. Creating buffer zones inside Syria;
5. Controlling Damascus’s chemical arms.
Gen Dempsey estimated that the first option would cost about $500m a year, while each of the other four actions would require roughly $1bn a month, i.e., $12bn a year.
The US army chief did not elaborate on the long-term cost to the US treasury of non-involvement in operations to keep al Qaeda at bay as it fights to get a stranglehold on Syria, like in Yemen and North African Sahara.
Israel’s
Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and its chief of staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz are struggling with imperatives to cut down on military outlay at the very moment when they need extra funding too keep the Al Qaeda menace away from Israel’s door.
Gen. Dempsey has helped them by calculating costs. But that’s as far as it goes. For the fight, Israel is on its own.
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3)
Absent strong US policy on Mideast, nations compete for influence
By Roy Gutman
Some of America's closest Middle East allies, viewing U.S. policy as adrift, are competing for
influence in the region's trouble spots, producing discord that might get in the way of stable
outcomes and take decades to put right, experts in the region say.
Analysts blame the Obama administration, which they say still doesn't have a strategy to deal
with the aftershocks of the 2011 Arab Spring — in particular the war in Syria and Egypt's latest
political upheaval. Instead, the U.S. aim appears to be to "contain" the crises and manage
them at the margins, they say.
"We are in a situation where the United States doesn't want to lead. It has quite an effect on
the region," said Salman Shaikh of the Brookings Institution in Doha, Qatar.
In its place,
regional powers such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar are devising their own policies, but
without coordination and often with different aims, he said.
"The Gulf states and the Turks thought they would own the Syrian problem in the early period
of the uprising," said Emile Hokayem, a Bahrain-based analyst at the International Institute for
Strategic Studies who has just written a book about the Syrian war. "Then they realized the
limits of their power and begged for U.S. leadership, figuring the U.S. could harmonize the
various approaches toward Syria and de-conflict them." But the United States wants only to
manage the Middle East crises "at the margins," he said. Both men spoke in telephone
interviews.
The discord is on display in both Syria and Egypt. Saudi Arabia recently upstaged Qatar and
helped force a shakeup in the leadership of the internationally recognized Syrian Opposition
Coalition, displacing the power of delegates from the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood by adding
liberal secular Syrians. The coalition was created last year at the behest of the United States to
become a government in exile, prepared to step in should President Bashar Assad fall.
But
the U.S. has provided no funds to the group — State Department officials have told McClatchy
they think the coalition is too unstable to be counted on to spend the money wisely — and
senior members of the coalition say the United States gives widely inconsistent advice and
doesn't follow through on its pledges of support.
Saudi Arabia is trying to step in with arms and funds to make up for the lack of U.S. military
and civilian aid. But the oil-rich kingdom isn't able to deliver all the necessary arms at a time
rebel forces have sustained major setbacks at the hands of forces loyal to Assad, aided by
arms deliveries, training and financial aid from Russia, Iran and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah.
The Saudis have promised the aid, to be sent via Gen. Salim Idriss, the commander of the
rebels' Supreme Military Council, with the intention that no weapons or ammunition go to the
al-Qaida-affiliated rebel groups that have proved to be the most effective anti-Assad force. "But
they have a problem with delivering," said Shaikh, the director of the Brookings Doha Center,
an initiative of the Washington-based nonpartisan think tank.
And it's still a question whether Qatar will defer to the Saudis or go its own way, as it has in the
past, including allowing military supplies to flow to al-Qaida-affiliated groups that the United
States has designated as international terrorist organizations.
Qatar has a new ruler, after Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani handed over power last month to his son
Sheik Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, and it's undergoing a review of the effectiveness of its
enormous foreign-policy investment over the past decade, which included taking a major role
in the NATO-led intervention in Libya in 2011.
The Saudis and the Qataris have pursued distinctly different approaches to the Muslim
Brotherhood in Syria and Egypt; the Saudis fear the Brotherhood as a pan-Arab movement
determined to undermine the region's monarchies, whereas Qatar sees the Brotherhood more
opportunistically as a force that will bring results, Hokayem said.
The clearest example may be in Egypt. The Saudis refused to send financial support to the government of former President Mohammed Morsi, who rose to prominence through the Brotherhood. But Qatar committed $8 billion in aid and material support, and Turkey, governed by the Justice and Development Party, the Turkish equivalent of the Brotherhood, pledged $2 billion.
Days after the Egyptian military overthrew Morsi early this month, the Saudis stepped in with $5 billion in various forms of aid for the military-backed interim government, and the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait added another $7 billion.
The Persian Gulf countries can provide "some legitimacy, some regional cover" to the military for overthrowing Morsi, "but they don't have the strategic vision, the expertise … the democratic vision that would lead to an inclusive political scene in Egypt," Hokayem said, "preferring one side over the other."
"In their competition and their machinations, the regional players are making a mess of it," Shaikh said. "They should have come together with a series of actions to stabilize the country. But we're not in that situation.
The simple fact is that the Emiratis, the Kuwaitis … jumped on the chance to do one over on the guys that the Turks and the Qataris were supporting."
Since Morsi was toppled July 3, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his senior aides have called almost daily for Morsi's reinstatement, leading Egypt's new rulers to issue a diplomatic protest.
Tensions between Saudi Arabia and Turkey and the United Arab Emirates and Turkey "are huge," Hokayem said.
Shaikh predicted that the competition "in the end of the day will come back to haunt them," for an unstable Egypt "is not good for any of them."
But the country that's suffering the most from what Shaikh calls a policy "that is adrift" is Syria, where the country's civil war has claimed more than 100,000 lives on both sides. A leading figure in the opposition coalition's new Saudi-backed civilian leadership says the U.S. has "a policy of vagueness."
In principle, the United States backs the coalition, said Fayez Sara, a writer and journalist who's now a member of the coalition's political committee.
However, he said, "until now, no money has been received from the U.S."
When the U.S. offers advice, "it is inconsistent," he said in an interview.
"In the morning, they say, 'Unite.' In the afternoon, it's 'Fight terror groups.' In the evening, they say, 'Work for a political settlement with the regime.' "
He said there was a contradiction in the U.S. message, which declared on one hand that "Assad must go" and on the other demands of Assad's opponents that "You have to arrive at some sort of agreement with him." Sara says that when he points this out to U.S. officials, he receives different responses. Some say, "You're right," and others "just walk away," he said.
The Americans have, "for now, abandoned the Syrian situation to its fate," he said. "They will not take on the political or moral responsibility. They may come back to it. But it will be much more difficult when they do."
Hokayem, whose book, "Syria's Uprising and the Fracturing of the Levant," describes the 2011 uprising as coming as a complete surprise to outside observers, said the Obama administration had defined its policies in the region in terms of avoiding another Iraq.
But Syria "has already overtaken Iraq" in terms of its humanitarian, regional and strategic significance, he said. "Syria is going to be the defining issue of the decade" in the region, he said, and the Obama administration may soon get the "worst of both worlds."
"We're going to see an Assad surviving in a weakened fashion, more dependent on Iran and Hezbollah, with no strategic gain," Hokayem said.
There will be "a range of radical groups, whose identity we don't know, which will be very difficult to contain."
Shaikh agreed. "I don't think we've got a grip on this," he said. "The legacy of that is quite, quite devastating in the future."
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