Finally, Selected PIctures From Our Eataly Trip, A peaceful Arab Kidnapping and Ice Chest Hillary by M.Dowd

Finally, Lynn  posted some of  pictures from our trip to Eataly.  I will do my best to describe them.

My friend, Charile Bourland, does the best job of posting his pictures with his memos. We do not know how.

I will proceed to describe going left to right!

Top left is a scene of the women making the pasta that holds the red sauce. Becoming a lost art

to the right is a picture of a town we visited that housed a church for the Templars and a sign depicting the sole remaining Jewish Synagogue, which was not open

The next row left  is a picture of the cup pasta the ladies were making.
Again, left to right is Lynn and her sister in law, Eva, at the town with all the homes with the thatched roofs - Tulees!

The next three pictures are from the wine tasting vineyard we visited and where we had a delicious meal.  The wine taster is my brother in law, Lynn's brother Stuart, and the owner of the vineyard pouring his wines.

The next row is me sitting on the steps while our guide discusses what we  were visiting and then
pictures of a magnificent church,Italian Military posing outside the church  and a scene from the Colosseum in Leches.

These are the famous Italian military who parade while running and blowing bugles. They were among Mussolini's favorites because of their pomp.

the next scenes are taken from our hotel in Polignano and a typical fruit store/produce display from the region

The next scene is Lynn and I, at a fabulous  restaurant in Polignano and another magnificent church.

The last three pictures are when we visited the olive processing plant, their products displayed and a picture of the beautiful dining room of our hotel.
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Three Israeli youth took a walk and were apparently kidnapped by a 'peaceful' group of Arabs.  No doubt they will return them , all Israel has to do is make a 'make nice' request like Obama does and all will be right. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Maureen Dowd on Hillary, the ice chest queen!(See 2 below.)
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Our friends. who visited from Atlanta, had a good time touring Savannah , as we did showing them around and The Landings and the wonderful Plantation Brunch, going to The Savannah Theater production "Savannah Sings" featuring Huxie Scott and they visited with Kim Gidden's sister who is a long time family friend and who writes wonderful cook cooks.

We look forward to their return.
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Hope all my 'father' friends had a great Day!
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Dick

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The PA and Fatah celebrate kidnapping 

of three Israeli youths

by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik

In an odious distortion of the World Cup 2014 logo, the official Palestinian Authority daily printed  a cartoon today celebrating the kidnapping of three Israeli youths on Thursday night. Instead of the famous logo of the World Cup 2014, in which three victorious hands hold the globe, together creating the prestigious trophy, the PA cartoon shows a "trophy" of three hands holding three people with their hands up in surrender. Instead of the text "Brasil" below the "trophy," the word "Khalil" is written - Arabic for Hebron, a city near where the Israeli youths were kidnapped. 

























1a)  Obama’s Retreat and Jihad’s Rise
By

Abe Greenwald 

Back in 2012, the State Department’s “Country Reports on Terrorism” stated that “The loss of bin Laden and these other key operatives puts the [al-Qaeda] network on a path of decline that will be difficult to reverse.”

In 2014, the terrorist organization stands on the brink of statehood. Not so difficult, really. The United States withdrew from the Middle East and al-Qaeda didn’t. With jihadists now taking city after city in Iraq, we’re hearing murmurs of a rising caliphate.

Through it all, the Obama administration has bragged about its grit and wisdom. As the president told Mitt Romney in their third debate, “We ended the war in Iraq, refocused our attention on those who actually killed us on 9/11, and as a consequence, al-Qaeda’s core leadership has been decimated.” Responding to charges of appeasement at a White House press conference in 2011, Obama boasted: “Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 30 top al-Qaeda leaders who’ve been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement.”

It would probably be more useful to ask the thousands of al-Qaeda associates who’ve been bombing and beheading their way to glory in Mesopotamia. You could also ask the Taliban five. And for good measure, you might want to pose the question to Hamas, whose political legitimacy has been given the Obama seal of approval.

Most Americans consented to our retreat from the Muslim world. It was easy to look back at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with regret as long as you ignored the alternatives. If warnings of a regional jihadist uprising were nothing more than hyped-up neocon scare-mongering, American military action looked like tragic overreach. But with that alternative no longer hypothetical, George W. Bush’s post-9/11 policies are beginning to look more like what they were: difficult but necessary initiatives aimed at stunting Islamist aggression.

Undoubtedly many Americans still think of the Great Islamist Comeback as a foreign disturbance with little bearing on their day-to-day lives. But that too requires some ignoring. Today, reports abound of terrorists plotting against the United States in Libya and the Syria-Iraq corridor. Even the Nigerian kidnapping crew Boko Haram is reportedly working on plans to hit American targets. Will Americans wait until those hypothetical concerns also become real before they accept the necessity of a strong U.S. presence in the Middle East? Al-Qaeda roared back to life with ease. Somehow the path that still remains difficult to reverse is our own.

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2)-  When Will Hillary Let It Go?
By Maureen Dowd

Elsa from Disney’s “Frozen” learns how to let her hair down and move forward. Credit Walt Disney Pictures

Continue reading the main story

Continue reading the main story

Maureen Dowd

WASHINGTON  NO one wrote about blondes like Raymond Chandler.

There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare, he wrote in The Long Goodbye.There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very, very tired when you take her home.

There's the pale, anemic, languid blonde with the soft voice. You can't lay a finger on her, Chandler notes, because in the first place you don't want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original.And when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith, he writes dryly, she can tell you which one of the six bass violas came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them.

None of his descriptions, however, conjures the two regal blondes transfixing America at the moment: Hillary and Elsa.

Those close to them think that the queen of Hillary and the Snow Queen from Disney's Frozenâ have special magical powers, but worry about whether they can control those powers, show their humanity and stir real warmth in the public heart.

Just as Elsa's coronation suddenly became fraught, so has Hillarys. Like Arendelle, America is frozen: The war still rages in Iraq, the Clintons still dominate the political scene and Hillary still obsesses about money, a narrative thread that has existed since she was thwarted in her desire to build a pool at the governor's mansion in poor Arkansas and left the White House with a doggie bag full of sofas, rugs, lamps, TVs and china, some of which the Clintons later had to pay for or return. Even Chelsea was cashing in, getting a ridiculous, $600,000-a-year scion salary from NBC, far greater than that of many of the network correspondents.

As a Clinton White House aide once explained to me, Hillary, though a Methodist, thinks of herself like an Episcopal bishop who deserves to live at the level of her wealthy parishioners, in return for devoting her life to God and good works.

After feeling stifled at times and misunderstood, after suffering painful setbacks, the powerful and polarizing Elsa and Hillary proclaim from their lofty height that they're going to let it go and go for it. (Although Elsa wolves are not as fierce as the Fox predators after Hillary.) don't care what they âre going to say, Elsa sings at the climactic moment when she decides to let down her hair, ratchet up her star power and create her glittering ice palace. Let the storm rage on. The cold never bothered me anyway!

Hillary had a similar cri de coeur in her interview with Diane Sawyer. When Sawyer asked her about the focus on her appearance that once kept her so scripted, cautious, safe, Hillary replied: When you are in the spotlight as a woman, you know you âre being judged constantly. I mean, it is just never-ending. And you get a little worried about, O.K., you know, people over on this side are loving what I am wearing, looking like, saying. People over on this side aren't.

Hillary Rodham Clinton's scripted comments on everything from sexism to Iraq would make a great Disney anthem. Credit Patrick Smith/Getty Images

You know, your natural tendency is how do you bring people together so that you can better communicate? I âm done with that. I mean, I'm just done. She continued: I am over it, over it. I think I have changed; not worried so much about what other people are thinking. She vowed to now say what I know, what I believe, and let the chips fall.

It would make a great Idina Menzel anthem, but it's not believable that Hillary Rodham Clinton will suddenly throw caution and calculation to the wind. Having market-tested the gender-neutral model in 2008, this time Hillary is presenting herself as a woman who has suffered the slings and arrows of sexism.

Her apology for being wrong about voting to authorize W. to invade Iraq took 11 years to spit out, and she told the Council on Foreign Relations on Thursday that she could not have predicted the success of Al Qaeda-inspired insurgents in seizing control of Iraqi cities. If some bold voices had fought going into a patently unnecessary war against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11,  waged ignorantly for silly, macho reasons, that was never properly debated or planned in the White House ” America would not be in a global crouch now, and Iraq would not be a killing field.

Hillary's new memoir, like her last one, is a testament to caution and calculation. It doesn't feel written so much as assembled by a Hillary for President algorithm. All this excitement is being ginned up, but nothing exciting is happening. There isn't one surprising or scintillating or provocative word in the whole book. "Hard Choices "is inert, a big yawn.

In her self they'd listened to me mode, she is distancing herself from the president on Syria, Russia and the Bergdahl trade because she does not, as Republican strategist Matthew Dowd puts it, want to be defeated by Obama twice.

The opening of her book tour/presidential campaign has featured some stumbles, causing some commentators to wonder if she has grown rusty and tone-deaf, isolated in the ice palace she erected to keep out the loathed press.

No one doubts that Hillary is tough and knowledgeable. But the question of how scarred and defensive she is, given all the fights and rough times she has gone through, and how that affects her judgment now, is a legitimate one.

Has she given up the my-way-or-the-highway imperiousness that doomed her health care efforts? Has she toned down the defensiveness that exacerbated the Whitewater affair? Has she modified the ends-justify-the-means mind-set that allowed her to participate in the vivisection of young women she knew Bill had been involved with? Has she tempered the focus on political viability that led her to vote to allow W. to scamper into a vanity war? Has she learned not to surround herself with high-priced mercenaries like Mark Penn and Dick Morris?

In the last few days, two women interrogators have rattled Hillary's ice palace gates with questions that were obvious and reasonable.

With Sawyer, Clinton said she hadn't known enough to know the Benghazi outpost was unprotected, despite what Ambassador Chris Stevens had called â never-ending security threat.

On NPR Fresh Air,Clinton grew testy when Terry Gross pressed her on whether the decision to finally publicly embrace gay marriage was a personal evolution or a political calculus now that it's not as much of a political liability and now that the court has dismantled the dreadful Defense of Marriage Act, which her husband cravenly signed into law in 1996. Clinton said she couldn't do it as secretary of state. But the vice president was not constrained from saying what was in his heart and pushing the president in the right direction.

What Elsa discovers at the end of â Frozenâ is that her powers can actually be used for good, once her heart is filled with love. She escapes from her prison, leaves behind the negative things that held her back, and leads her kingdom to a happy and prosperous future.

Can Hillary?

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