Thursday, July 31, 2014

If I Say The Right Thing Money Will Roll In! Toameh Gets It!


===If I say the 'right 'thing  to the 'right 'group I can/will get the bucks and I will not be 'left' out! 

But I am still a 'lefty!' (See 1 below.)
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My friend ,Toameh gets it.  He is one of the most courageous reporters in Israel. He is an Arab Israeli.  (See 2 below.)
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How is this for irony? America, Turkey and Qatar versus Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia! (See  3 below.)
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Gowdy does not need a pen and a cell phone because he has a heart and a brain!  "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzZT9gW5gp8"
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Left click and then scroll down and listen to this pathological  liar who never meant what he said!

Video: Obama in Sderot in 2008 - Has He Forgotten What He Said? 

Not sure he ever meant it!

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You can run but you cannot hide. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)  Michelle Nunn’s Campaign Plan 
A leaked document gives the public a look. 

Michelle Nunn can come across as a “lightweight,” “too liberal,” not a “real Georgian.” While she served as CEO for the Points of Light Foundation, the organization gave grants to “inmates” and “terrorists.” And her Senate campaign must feature images of her and her family “in rural settings with rural-oriented imagery” because the Atlanta-based candidate will struggle to connect with rural voters.
These may sound like attacks from the Senate candidate’s Republican rival, but in fact, those are a few of the concerns expressed in her own campaign plan, which sources say was posted online briefly in December and appears to have been drafted earlier that month. Drawing on the insights of Democratic pollsters, strategists, fundraisers, and consultants, the document contains a series of memos addressed to Nunn and her senior advisers.
From all appearances, the document was intended to remain confidential. It outlines the challenges inherent in getting Nunn, who grew up mostly in Bethesda, Md., elected to the Senate in a state with a large rural population. Her father, Sam Nunn, was elected to the Senate when she was six, and Michelle Nunn attended Washington’s prestigious National Cathedral School and then the University of Virginia and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government before returning to Georgia to do nonprofit work and, now, to seek higher office.

The documents reveal the campaign’s most sensitive calculations. Much of the strategizing in the Georgia contest, as is typical in southern politics, revolves around race. But the Nunn memos are incredibly unguarded. One is from Diane Feldman, a Democratic pollster and strategist who counts among her clients Minnesota senator Al Franken, South Carolina representative James Clyburn, and former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Feldman, who did not return calls seeking comment, is frank in her characterization of the demographic groups — Jews, Asians, African Americans, Latinos, and gays — that are essential to a Democratic victory. The Nunn campaign declined to comment about the document on the record.

The campaign’s finance plan draws attention to the “tremendous financial opportunity” in the Jewish community and identifies Jews as key fundraisers. It notes, however, that “Michelle’s position on Israel will largely determine the level of support here.” That’s a position she has yet to articulate — her message on the subject is marked “TBD” in the document — and Israel goes unmentioned on her campaign website.

Asians are also identified as key fundraisers. The community is described as “very tight,” one in which people work to “become citizens quickly.” Nunn’s strategists also say there is a “huge opportunity” to raise money from gays, bisexuals, and transgender individuals, who are described as having “substantial resources.”

This graphic, labeled “confidential and proprietary,” comes from the BlueLabs group, an analytics, data, and technology company founded by former Obama campaign staffers. It is included in the document’s “voter activation and mobilization” memo.

As southern whites have moved to the right, Democrats have been forced to cobble together a coalition of minority voters. Feldman recommends as a goal winning just 30 percent of the white vote while working to increase turnout among African Americans and Latinos. So while Jews, Asians, and gays are characterized as potential “fundraisers,” African Americans and Hispanics are the ones the campaign needs to get to the polls in historic numbers, the document makes clear.

“This constituency group is critical,” it says of the African Americans who make up much of Georgia’s Democratic base, adding that Nunn must win “a very high percentage of the African-American vote” and attract “a large number of voters who do not typically turn out in an off-election year.” The plan puts a particular emphasis on black clergy. It also highlights the need to “generate passion and enthusiasm” for Nunn in the black community. And it raises concern that Hispanics have not yet been “appropriately engaged” on her behalf.

That concern is reflective of the phenomenon that Bo Moore, who served as political director for former Georgia senator Paul Coverdell and as a strategist for Phil Gramm’s presidential campaign, describes as the “two Georgias”: Atlanta and the rest of the state. “Metro Atlanta is made up mostly of transplants from other parts of the country and then everything south and east of Atlanta is more traditional, rural, and southern,” he says. African Americans also constitute over half of Atlanta’s urban population.

The memos express concern that Nunn, who lives in an upper-class Atlanta neighborhood, will struggle to appeal to voters outside of the city. A document from the direct-mail firm Ambrosino Muir Hansen Crounse recommends sending small postcards featuring “Michelle and her family in rural settings with rural-oriented imagery” to “combat the notion that she is an Atlanta-based candidate uninterested in, or unfamiliar with, the rural parts of the state.”

To compensate for her difficulties with rural white voters, Nunn’s strategists emphasize the need to turn out blacks and Hispanics. “They know that in order to have a chance of winning, they’ve got to change the turnout from what it would ordinarily be in a midterm election,” Kerwin Swint, a professor of politics at Atlanta’s Kennesaw State University, said, when asked about the document’s conclusions. Former Democratic senator Max Cleland won 30 percent of the white vote when he ran unsuccessfully for reelection in 2002, but since then no Georgia Democratic Senate candidate has come within striking distance of that number: In 2008, Jim Martin won just 26 percent of the white vote and in 2004, Denise Majette won less than a quarter of it. As the daughter of an enormously popular former senator, though, Nunn has the potential to pull it off.

Her strategists are optimistic that the media won’t prove much of an obstacle. They write that at some point her opponent, who at the time the document was written had yet to be determined, will be “shoveling research” against her. But they say they anticipate they will often have “fair warning” about negative news stories and can work to “kill or muddy” them.

“I would love to know what kind of already-formed relationships they have in Atlanta and even in the national media that they’re planning on using as sources and conduits of information,” Swint says. “It’s certainly interesting to see it in writing like that.”
Democrats intensely recruited Nunn, and the seat, which is being vacated by Republican senator Saxby Chambliss, is widely considered their best pickup opportunity in the Senate of this election cycle. Though Nunn announced her candidacy last July, many of her positions have remained vague: She skipped most of the debates with her Democratic-primary opponents and artfully dodged questions on tricky political issues such as Obamacare.

Though the campaign plan recommends emphasizing Nunn’s accomplishments at the Points of Light Foundation, which she has done on the campaign trail, her strategists express enormous concern about attacks that might arise from her work there. She has served as CEO of Points of Light since 2007 and, according to the document, it has made grants to “terrorists” and “inmates” during her tenure. The document also makes reference to a 2010 audit that concluded Points of Light’s accounting system was “not adequate to account for federal funds.”

According to the IRS Form 990s that Points of Light filed in 2008 and 2011, the organization gave a grant of over $33,000 to Islamic Relief USA, a charity that says it strives to alleviate “hunger, illiteracy, and diseases worldwide.” Islamic Relief USA is part of a global network of charities that operate under the umbrella of Islamic Relief Worldwide. Islamic Relief USA says on its website that it is a legally separate entity from its parent organization, but that they share “a common vision, mission, and family identity.”


Islamic Relief Worldwide has ties to Hamas, which the U.S. designates as a terrorist organization. In June, Israel banned the charity from operating in the country because, according to Israeli officials, it was funneling cash to Hamas. In 2006, Israelis arrested Islamic Relief Worldwide’s Gaza coordinator, Ayaz Ali. They said he was working to “transfer funds and assistance to various Hamas institutions and organizations.” Ali admitted to cooperating with local Hamas operatives while working in Jordan and, on his computer, Israeli officials found photographs of “swastikas superimposed on IDF symbols,” and of Nazi officials, Osama bin Laden, and al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Islamic Relief USA highlighted the work of Islamic Relief Worldwide in Palestine in its 2012 annual report, in which it talks generally about the work of Islamic Relief charities in the region without drawing a distinction between the branches. The organization has raised eyebrows before. According to a 2012 report, its bank account was closed by UBS and it was “under constant scrutiny by other banks due to nervousness about counterterrorist regulations.” The group’s terror ties extend beyond Hamas, according to a former Israeli intelligence official. He says that Islamic Relief Worldwide’s country director in Palestine, Muneed Abugazaleh, met in April 2012 with Dr. Omar Shalah, a leader of the terror group Islamic Jihad and of the Riyad al-Saleheen Charitable Society, which is affiliated with the group. He is also the brother of Ramadan Shalah, the leader of Islamic Jihad.

Nunn and the Hands On Network, which operates under the umbrella of Points of Light, also heaped praise on a former death-row inmate even after his continued run-ins with the law. Shareef Cousin is one of the contributors to Nunn’s 2007 book, Be the Change, a collection of quotations and reflections from people who, according to Nunn, have embraced their “capacity to make a difference.”

Cousin’s inspiring story was bookended with troubling behavior. In 1996, at the age of 16, he became the country’s youngest-ever death-row inmate. His conviction was overturned in 1998, but he remained in prison until 2005 on a 20-year sentence for armed robberies he had pled guilty to before his murder trial. In 2008, while he was still on parole, Cousin pleaded guilty to using his boss’s Social Security number to obtain credit cards and then, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, using the cards for a “$42,000 spending spree on audio equipment and a paint job for his car.” In August 2010, the HandsOn Network recognized Cousin as a “voice of change.”

Former president George H. W. Bush founded the Points of Light Foundation in 1987 to encourage volunteerism across the country. Since Nunn became the CEO in 2007, it has awarded grants to hundreds of charitable groups, and the campaign document raises alarm bells about “grants to problematic entities” and “notable line items” in its 990 forms. It has given money to organizations whose charitable missions appear questionable, including the International Mountain Bicycling Association, which sponsors gatherings of mountain-biking “thought leaders,” and the Lesbian and Gay Band Association, which seeks to foster a global network of lesbian and gay bands.

The Nunn campaign plan also contains details about messaging, fundraising, staffing, organization, and scheduling that are usually closely held. “All campaigns are kind of chaotic and mistakes happen,” says Bo Moore, the Georgia Republican strategist, of the document’s release online. “It was probably just an innocent mistake of the campaign.”
The document in its entirety can be viewed below.
— Eliana Johnson is a national reporter for National Review Online.
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2)

Kerry Trying To Save Hamas, Restore Muslim Brotherhood

Author:  Khaled Abu Toameh
Source:  Gatestone Institute.   


The U.S. Administration's main objective in cease-fire talks is clearly to empower Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian branch, Hamas.
This is how the Palestinian Authority [PA] sees the recent efforts of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to achieve a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.
It is no secret that the PA, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates would like to see an end to Hamas's rule over the Gaza Strip. Moreover, they seem to support the idea of disarming Hamas as part of any agreement to end the current crisis.
PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who has been issuing strong condemnations of the Israeli “aggression” on the Gaza Strip over the past few weeks, is hoping that the war will result in the return of his loyalists to control the Gaza Strip or, at least to the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.
Abbas and his Arab allies are not going to shed a tear if Hamas is removed from power and the Gaza Strip is demilitarized at the end of the war.
There is growing concern in Ramallah, Cairo, Riyadh and Dubai, however, that the U.S. Administration is now working to prevent the collapse of Hamas.
This concern was reinforced by Secretary of State John Kerry's recent tour of the region. His trip ended with last week's Paris meeting to discuss the Israel-Hamas war.
That Kerry chose to invite Qatar and Turkey — the only two countries that support Hamas — to the conference was received with anger and shock by the Palestinian Authority and its Arab allies.
The Paris conference was actually a spit in the face of anti-Hamas forces in the Arab world.
By failing to invite the PA to the conference, Kerry indicated that he does not see any role for Abbas and his loyalists in a post-Hamas Gaza Strip. Kerry chose to conduct indirect negotiations with Hamas through their patrons in Doha and Ankara.
By ignoring Egypt, which considers Hamas a threat to its national security and has been conducting its own war against the Islamist movement over the past year, Kerry sent a message to the Arabs and Muslims according to which the U.S. Administration is on the side of the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies.
“Kerry is exploiting the war to restore the influence of Muslim Brotherhood in the region,” charged a Palestinian official in Ramallah. “The Americans mistakenly think that moderate political Islam, represented by Muslim Brotherhood, would be able to combat radical Islam. The Americans are trying to bring the Muslim Brotherhood back to the region.”
Another Palestinian official accused President Barack Obama and Kerry of organizing a “Friends of Hamas” conference in Paris. “How can you hold such a conference without inviting representatives of the Palestinian Authority and Egypt?” he asked. “Qatar and Turkey are happy to see the Obama Administration help them in their effort to save Hamas and embolden Muslim Brotherhood.”
Alarmed by Kerry's alliance with Qatar and Turkey, Abbas flew earlier this week to Jeddah for emergency talks with Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdel Aziz.
According to a senior Abbas advisor, the Palestinian Authority president urged the Saudi monarch to exert pressure on the Obama Administration to keep Qatar and Turkey out of the picture.
The advisor said that Saudi Arabia voiced support for demands to demilitarize the Gaza Strip as part of any cease-fire agreement. “Demilitarizing the Gaza Strip would mean the end of Hamas,” the advisor said. “The Egyptians, Saudis and other Arab countries also share this view. They are also upset with Kerry's effort to rely on Qatar and Turkey to solve the crisis. These two countries are interested in keeping Hamas in power.”
Abbas and the PA continue to insist that any solution to the current crisis be achieved only through Egypt, which is interested in seeing an end to Hamas' rule over the Gaza Strip.
But the Obama Administration obviously does not share this view. It has chosen a different path — one that would result in keeping Hamas in power and empowering the Muslim Brotherhood at the expense of moderate, pro-Western Arabs and Muslims.
Palestinian officials in Ramallah made it clear this week that they no longer trust the US Administration because of Kerry's attempt to “appease” Qatar and Turkey at the expense of the Palestinian Authority and Egypt.
“Someone needs to remind Kerry that Qatar is not the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinians,” said a senior Palestinian official in Ramallah.
Another official, Ahmed Majdalani, warned that the Palestinians and Egyptians wouldn't allow Kerry to “bypass” their leaders and meddle in the internal affairs of the Palestinian people.
By siding with Qatar and Turkey, the Obama Administration is effectively expressing its opposition to the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip. Moreover, the Obama Administration now finds itself on the same side with Iran, which is also vehemently opposed to disarming Hamas.
By turning its back on the Palestinian Authority, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the Obama Administration has paved the way for Iranian intervention in the conflict.
The Iranians, with whom the U.S. is negotiating on nuclear weapons — amid fears in the Middle East that the U.S. will capitulate to Tehran's demands if it has not effectively capitulated to them already — have now joined Qatar and Turkey in opposing any attempt to confiscate Hamas's weapons.
On Wednesday, a senior Iranian military official, Gen. Qassem Slimani, issued an unprecedented warning against any attempt to disarm Hamas and other terror groups in the Gaza Strip.
“Disarming the (Palestinian) resistance groups is an illusion and it will not happen,” he said.
Such a warning would not have been issued had the Iranians not sensed weakness on the part of the Obama Administration. Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and their patrons in Qatar, Turkey and Iran are clearly satisfied with the way the Obama Administration is handling the conflict.
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Author:  David D. Kirkpatrick
Source:  The New York Times.     


CAIRO — Battling Palestinian militants in Gaza two years ago, Israel found itself pressed from all sides by unfriendly Arab neighbors to end the fighting.
Not this time.
After the military ouster of the Islamist government in Cairo last year, Egypt has led a new coalition of Arab states — including Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — that has effectively lined up with Israel in its fight against Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip. That, in turn, may have contributed to the failure of the antagonists to reach a negotiated cease-fire even after more than three weeks of bloodshed.
“The Arab states’ loathing and fear of political Islam is so strong that it outweighs their allergy to Benjamin Netanyahu,” the prime minister of Israel, said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington and a former Middle East negotiator under several presidents.
“I have never seen a situation like it, where you have so many Arab states acquiescing in the death and destruction in Gaza and the pummeling of Hamas,” he said. “The silence is deafening.”
Although Egypt is traditionally the key go-between in any talks with Hamas — deemed a terrorist group by the United States and Israel — the government in Cairo this time surprised Hamas by publicly proposing a cease-fire agreement that met most of Israel’s demands and none from the Palestinian group. Hamas was tarred as intransigent when it immediately rejected it, and Cairo has continued to insist that its proposal remains the starting point for any further discussions.
But as commentators sympathetic to the Palestinians slammed the proposal as a ruse to embarrass Hamas, Egypt’s Arab allies praised it. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt the next day to commend it, Mr. Sisi’s office said, in a statement that cast no blame on Israel but referred only to “the bloodshed of innocent civilians who are paying the price for a military confrontation for which they are not responsible.”
“There is clearly a convergence of interests of these various regimes with Israel,” said Khaled Elgindy, a former adviser to Palestinian negotiators who is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. In the battle with Hamas, Mr. Elgindy said, the Egyptian fight against the forces of political Islam and the Israeli struggle against Palestinian militants were nearly identical. “Whose proxy war is it?” he asked.
The dynamic has inverted all expectations of the Arab Spring uprisings. As recently as 18 months ago, most analysts in Israel, Washington and the Palestinian territories expected the popular uprisings to make the Arab governments more responsive to their citizens, and therefore more sympathetic to the Palestinians and more hostile to Israel.
But instead of becoming more isolated, Israel’s government has emerged for the moment as an unexpected beneficiary of the ensuing tumult, now tacitly supported by the leaders of the resurgent conservative order as an ally in their common fight against political Islam.
Egyptian officials have directly or implicitly blamed Hamas instead of Israel for Palestinian deaths in the fighting, even when, for example, United Nations schools have been hit by Israeli shells, something that occurred again on Wednesday.
And the pro-government Egyptian news media has continued to rail against Hamas as a tool of a regional Islamist plot to destabilize Egypt and the region, just as it has since the military ouster of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood one year ago. (Egyptian prosecutors have charged Hamas with instigating violence in Egypt, killing its soldiers and police officers, and even breaking Mr. Morsi and other Brotherhood leaders out of jail during the 2011 uprising.)
The diatribes against Hamas by at least one popular pro-government talk show host in Egypt were so extreme that the government of Israel broadcast some of them into Gaza.
“They use it to say, ‘See, your supposed friends are encouraging us to kill you!’ ” Maisam Abumorr, a Palestinian student in Gaza City, said in a telephone interview.
Some pro-government Egyptian talk shows broadcast in Gaza “are saying the Egyptian Army should help the Israeli Army get rid of Hamas,” she said.
At the same time, Egypt has infuriated Gazans by continuing its policy of shutting down tunnels used for cross-border smuggling into the Gaza Strip and keeping border crossings closed, exacerbating a scarcity of food, water and medical supplies after three weeks of fighting.
“Sisi is worse than Netanyahu, and the Egyptians are conspiring against us more than the Jews,” said Salhan al-Hirish, a storekeeper in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya. “They finished the Brotherhood in Egypt, and now they are going after Hamas.”
Egypt and other Arab states, especially the Persian Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are finding themselves allied with Israel in a common opposition to Iran, a rival regional power that has a history of funding and arming Hamas.
For Washington, the shift poses new obstacles to its efforts to end the fighting. Although Egyptian intelligence agencies continue to talk with Hamas, as they did under former President Hosni Mubarak and Mr. Morsi, Cairo’s new animosity toward the group has called into question the effectiveness of that channel, especially after the response to Egypt’s first proposal.
As a result, Secretary of State John Kerry turned to the more Islamist-friendly states of Qatar and Turkey as alternative mediators — two states that grew in regional stature with the rising tide of political Islam after the Arab Spring, and that have suffered a degree of isolation as that tide has ebbed.
But that move has put Mr. Kerry in the incongruous position of appearing to some analysts as less hostile to Hamas — and thus less supportive of Israel — than Egypt or its Arab allies.
For Israeli hawks, the change in the Arab states has been relatively liberating.
“The reading here is that, aside from Hamas and Qatar, most of the Arab governments are either indifferent or willing to follow the leadership of Egypt,” said Martin Kramer, president of Shalem College in Jerusalem and an American-Israeli scholar of Islamist and Arab politics. “No one in the Arab world is going to the Americans and telling them, ‘Stop it now,’ ” as Saudi Arabia did, for example, in response to earlier Israeli crackdowns on the Palestinians, he said. “That gives the Israelis leeway.”
With the resurgence of the anti-Islamist, military-backed government in Cairo, Mr. Kramer said, the new Egyptian government and allies like Saudi Arabia appear to believe that “the Palestinian people are to bear the suffering in order to defeat Hamas, because Hamas cannot be allowed to triumph and cannot be allowed to emerge as the most powerful Palestinian player.”
Egyptian officials disputed that characterization, arguing that the new government was maintaining its support for the Palestinian people despite its deteriorating relations with Hamas, and that it had grown no closer to Israel than it was under Mr. Morsi or Mr. Mubarak.
“We have a historical responsibility toward the Palestinians, and that is not related to our stance on any specific faction,” said a senior Egyptian diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks. “Hamas is not Gaza, and Gaza is not Palestine.”
Egyptian officials noted that the Egyptian military and the Red Crescent had delivered medical supplies and other aid to Gaza. Cairo continues to keep open lines of communication with Hamas, including allowing a senior Hamas official, Moussa Abu Marzouq, to reside in Cairo.
Other analysts, though, argued that Egypt and its Arab allies were trying to balance their own overriding dislike for Hamas against their citizens’ emotional support for the Palestinians, a balancing act that could grow more challenging as the Gaza carnage mounts.
“The pendulum of the Arab Spring has swung in Israel’s favor, just like it had earlier swung in the opposite direction,” said Mr. Elgindy, the former Palestinian adviser.
“But I am not sure the story is finished at this point.”
Correction: July 30, 2014
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4)  Desperate Democrats Can't Escape Obama
"President Obama's new EPA rule is more proof that Washington isn't working for Kentucky." Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democrats' great hope for beating Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, is doing her best to keep voters from associating her too closely with the president.
She's not the only one. Natalie Tennant, the Democratic Senate candidate in West Virginia, is running a pro-coal ad in which she shuts off the power to the White House.
Democrats are distancing themselves from the president across the country, even in blue states.
Colorado, a state Barack Obama won twice, has a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators. One of those senators, Mark Udall, is up for re-election this year. He decided not to attend a fundraiser with the president in his own state a few weeks ago. It was more important for Udall to stay in Washington to take part in the 71-26 confirmation vote for Obama's nominee to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Not coincidentally, about 54 percent of Coloradans disapprove of Obama's job performance.
If they win, Grimes, Tennant and Udall will almost always vote with the Obama administration over the next two years, then spend four more largely voting in ways Obama would approve of. The parties are pretty unified these days ideologically.
What's more, voters seem to know it. Most candidates who try to separate themselves from their party's leadership end up losing. (There are occasional exceptions: In 2010, Joe Manchin was able to separate himself from Obama in West Virginia by running an ad in which he took a shotgun to a copy of the cap-and-trade bill the administration was backing. But he was already a popular governor.)
When there's a wave for one party or the other in an election, voters simply don't seem to do much discriminating among the candidates. Bob Ehrlich was a successful governor of Maryland in 2006, when he ran for re-election. But that was a terrible year for Republicans. He was a moderate and had healthy approval ratings. None of it saved him. He was brought down by the unpopularity of the Iraq war, even though, as a governor, he had nothing to do with it.
Likewise, a lot of conservative Democrats who had voted against Obama's main priorities -- including about half the House's "Blue Dog" coalition -- got swept out in a huge Republican wave in the 2010 midterm elections.
When a candidate tries to separate himself from his party's leadership, he's assuming that the party's core supporters will understand that he needs to do it: that the checks will keep arriving and the activists will keep knocking on doors. But there's always the risk of demoralization.
In a poll released over the weekend, Tennant was eight points behind in her race. If that keeps up, national Democrats will turn off the power to her campaign well before Election Day.
To contact the writer of this article: Ramesh Ponnuru at rponnuru@bloomberg.net
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Michelle Nunn and Her Money Bags! Hollywood's Hamas Empathizers - Will/Can They Ever Get Real? Will Iran Be Next?

From Daniel: "One of the most meaningful days off life. Safe, sound and in a hotel in beer sheva.  Love you guys. Check my Facebook to see what's doing and I'll call tomorrow. Xoxoxox"
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So "Sunni" me!
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More call up of IDF Reserves!

Having served in an elite military division of the IDF, Netanyahu understands war and knows when to defer to the recommendations of his military advisers! (See 1, 1a, 1b and 1c below.)

I met my retired Marine Col. friend in the gym today and he volunteered that  two of the world's great democracies are being attacked: Israel from without and America from within.

I had the distinct privilege of listening to an IDF Lt. General this afternoon bringing me up to date  on Gaza  and Israel's Protective Edge. The speaker has a BA from an Israel University in Arab History, is fluent in Arabic and an MA from Harvard's Kennedy School in Management .
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Words have meaning but then they can also be manipulated..  (See 2 below.)
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After Gaza, will Iran be next? (See 3 below.)
and
My sentiments exactly! (See 3a below.)
and
More tunnels (See 3b below.)
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Hillary, bless her heart because she is soul less! (See 4 below.)

I served on The Woodrow  Wilson Center"s Board  for a brief time .

I first met Sam Nunn, when he was running for the Senate, I sent him a check for $1000, and it was returned because he had no opposition in his second term.

When he ran the third time I sent him another check for $1000 and he kept it though he had no opposition.

Politics has become all about money and that is  partly what is wrong with our system.

Only wealthy candidates can run  and need apply or those with wealthy connections.

Every once in a while a dark horse makes it but that is rare!

Consequently, we have the best government money can buy!

For those who believe Michelle Nunn is a sweet innocent young lady simply running because she wants to unite the nation,  her fund raising strategy is anything but and her father's Rolodex is her treasure trove.

Her campaign is all about money and this excellent article by Linda Killian, of The  WoodrowWilson Center, reveals the money facts behind Nunn's campaign.

Warrent Buffet, Jeff Immelt, and all the people her father knows and whose boards he serves and from his long political career, are being tapped in order to buy Michelle her Senate seat.

Nothing illegal or wrong  about this, unless she does  violate some obscure election  law and by  then it will be too late, but it is something to think about.

When Sam Nunn, chose not to run again, I happened to be meeting with him on Feb 1, 1990, in his Atlanta Office, and as we parted he said he had to go out and make some money because he had two kids in college.  Sam certainly has and now he and his friends will be funding his daughter with millions. (See 4a and 4b below.)
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An apology is due! (See 5 below.)
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Will/Can Hollywood's Hamas empathizing bleeders ever get real? (See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1)  IDF forces clash with Hamas in Gaza as operation continues



Several clashes occurred between the IDF and Hamas overnight between Wednesday and Thursday. The Givati Brigade's Tzabar Battalion killed two terrorists in gun battles in southern Gaza early in the morning.
A Golani infantry brigade unit saw a terrorist surfacing from a tunnel on Thurday morning, killing the gunman.
Paratroopers identified five terrorists and dispatched an air force craft, which struck the suspects, killing them.
The IDF is examining a number of peers found in Gaza to see if they are connected to new tunnels, or to underground passages that the army already knows about.
The IDF destroyed several tunnels in the past 24 hours, a senior IDF source said Thursday morning.
The air force is continuing to strike Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets, based on newly arrived intelligence, some of which comes from ground forces inside Gaza. It destroyed 110 targets in the past 24 hours, the army source said, and 4,200 targets since the start of hostilities.
On Wednesday, Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon spoke by phone with his American counterpart Chuck Hagel, who called for a humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza that would lead to a permanent end in fighting along with the disarmament of Hamas.
Hagel's call came amid US concern over the rising number of deaths on both sides of the conflict, said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby.
The US secretary of defense stressed that any comprehensive resolution to the over three-week conflagration would need to result in the demilitarization of Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza.
Hagel also reiterated Washington's stance in support of Israel's right to defend itself from attempts to harm its citizens. Ya'alon in turn thanked Hagel for his expression of support for Israeli defense, citing especially US contributions for the development of the Iron Dome rocket defense system.
Separately, the Pentagon said it had allowed Israel to stock up on grenades and mortar rounds from a US munitions store located in Israel as part of bilateral emergency preparedness arrangement.
The security cabinet on Wednesday approved continuing Israel's campaign launched on July 8 in response to a surge of rocket attacks by Gaza's dominant Hamas Islamists. But Israel also sent a delegation to Egypt, which has been trying, with Washington's blessing, to broker a ceasefire.
Israel briefly halted its strikes in Gaza after accepting an Egyptian truce proposal on July 15, but resumed attacks the next day as terrorists in Gaza pounded Israel with fresh salvos of rockets.
1a)
PM Netanyahu's Remarks at the Start of the Cabinet Meeting: neutralization of tunnels only first stage in demilitarization of Gaza Strip


"The IDF is continuing to act with full force across the Gaza Strip. IDF
soldiers are completing the neutralization of the terrorist tunnels. These
tunnels would have enabled Hamas to abduct and murder civilians and IDF
soldiers via simultaneous attacks from many tunnels that penetrate our
territory. We are now dismantling this ability.

I said at the start of the campaign: There is no guarantee of 100% success,
just as Iron Dome does not provide a complete answer, but the IDF actions
have impressive results in the field and these actions are continuing at
full strength even now.

As of now, we have neutralized dozens of terrorist tunnels and we are
determined to complete this mission, with or without a ceasefire, and
therefore I will not agree to any proposal that does not allow the IDF to
complete this work which is important for the security of Israel's citizens.

Hamas has taken harsh blows from the IDF and ISA. We have struck hard at
thousands of terrorist targets: Command centers, rocket arsenals, production
facilities, launch areas and hundreds of terrorists have been killed. These
achievements and the neutralization of the tunnels are only the first stage
in the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip. The US, the EU and other
important elements in the international community have accepted our position
and I must say that this was not an easy thing to achieve but we did it
together, with hard work.

I would like to express my deep appreciation to the soldiers and commanders
of the IDF who are fighting in the field with extraordinary heroism. I would
like to express special appreciation to IDF Chief-of-Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny
Gantz and Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon.

We are working around the clock, shoulder to shoulder, sagaciously and
responsibly, for the people of Israel. Naturally, we cannot share with the
public all of the information and all of the considerations at our disposal.
We have an orderly plan and we are acting accordingly.

On behalf of the citizens of Israel, I would like to send condolences to the
bereaved families. I speak with them daily, with the parents and family
members who have sacrificed what is most precious to them on behalf of our
country. I have spoken with dozens of families. My wife and our sons have
visited many families as well. I tell them with a heavy heart that their
sons have fallen in the most just of campaigns – guarding our common home.

I would like to say to the citizens of Israel: You serve as examples. Your
resilience in the face of our enemies is impressive. It causes deep
appreciation around the world. I must say that your strong stand is a
national force multiplier that enables us to conduct this campaign in a
sagacious and responsible manner, in a way that will give the best possible
results for the State of Israel and its people.

A unified leadership is important for the success of the campaign and it is
very important for the people of Israel. Unity among the people gives us the
strength to continue our hard and responsible work. I have no doubt that
this unity provides additional strength to our soldiers who are fighting on
the ground. And yet there is a minority among the public which, precisely at
these times, chooses to take a more extreme position on this or that side. I
say to you: Do not harm the special unity that we have. Mind your words and
be careful with your deeds. And, more than anything, government ministers
must serve as personal examples for the public at large. At this time, the
nation expects all of us, especially government ministers, to unite behind
the goal. When our soldiers are fighting the enemy and endangering their
lives on behalf of us all, we owe them this. The more we are united, the
stronger we are."

Following the remarks by Defense Minister Yaalon and IDF Chief-of-Staff
Gantz, Prime Minister Netanyahu added: "The IDF is a moral army without
peer. It is vigorously fighting an enemy whose brutality is without peer. It
tries, as much as possible, to avoid harming civilians. We in the leadership
think about the soldiers. Every IDF soldier is precious to us. At this time,
on behalf of the entire government and people of Israel, I would like to
send my best wishes for a quick recovery to the wounded. We know your
bravery and your desire to rejoin your comrades. I have visited some of
them. Right now, their doctors are their commanders but we know that they
are led by the spirit of the entire nation."
1b)
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31
JULY
2014

3 Important Things to Know About the “Gaza Siege”



The current border restrictions still allowed Hamas to build up an arsenal of 10,000 rockets and create over thirty tunnels into Israel. Read more...

Journalist Backs IDF on Hamas Rocket Misfire



The deaths of ten Palestinians at the Shati refugee camp in Gaza and a further explosion within the Shifa Hospital complex were falsely blamed on Israel by Hamas and Palestinian “eyewitnesses.” Read more...

WSJ Columnist: "Palestine Effect" Makes People Irrational



Nothing makes people lose their logical reasoning quite like the Palestine Effect. Read more...

Casually Smearing Israel With a Charge of Genocide



How does The Daily Telegraph explain a reporter casually accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinians?Read more...

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1c)
PMW           
Bulletin  
July 31, 2014
Hamas: We "love death for Allah"

by Itamar Marcus

Two of the most senior Hamas leaders appeared on Hamas TV yesterday saying that Hamas loves death like Israelis love life.

Hamas leaders: We love death like Israelis love life

A recorded statement by Hamas Chief of Staff Muhammad Deif, prepared during the current Gaza war, announced:

"Today you [Israelis] are fighting divine soldiers, 
who love death for Allah like you love life, 
and who compete among themselves for Martyrdom 
like you flee from death." 

Hamas TV also chose to broadcast yesterday a statement former Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said in the past:

"We love death like our enemies love life! 
We love Martyrdom, the way in which [Hamas] leaders died."

[Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas), July 30, 2014]

Palestinian Media Watch reported last week that Hamas TV claimed Palestinian civilians who died in the current conflict were privileged to have died as Martyrs.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)
Don't Be Fooled By Friday'sUnemployment Report
By Bill Bonner, editor, The Bill Bonner Letter

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said, in the spring of 2013, that 7.8% of the workforce was unemployed.

Simple enough.

But what does that mean? What is the "workforce"? And what does it mean to be "unemployed"?

Think of all those people who work for cash – the immigrant laborers waiting at gas stations and Home Depot for day work, the college students who babysit and tutor your children, everyone selling stuff on Craigslist or eBay. Are they unemployed? How about the guy who couldn't find a job, so he went back to school? Is he unemployed? What about the housewife who would like to find a job but isn't actively looking for one?

Are these people part of the workforce?

It's obvious that you can change the assumptions a bit and change the reported unemployment rate a lot.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)
 The Iran Talks’ Gaza Connection


Lost amid the understandable focus on the fighting in Gaza was a major Middle East news story. On July 18, the U.S. and its Western allies agreed to extend the Iran nuclear talks for four months. But rather than the fighting between Hamas and Israel allowing the negotiations to continue under the radar, the events unfolding in Gaza ought to make it harder rather than easier for the Obama administration to evade its obligation to deal with this threat.

The leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee groused in public yesterday about the way the Iran talks are proceeding with little public accountability. Both Democratic Chair Senator Robert Menendez and ranking Republican Bob Corker expressed dismay about the way the supposedly finite period for negotiations with Iran had effortlessly transitioned into injury time with every possibility that the four-month period could be extended again in November. There was no appetite on the committee for a rerun of the bruising and losing fight Menendez waged against the administration on behalf of tougher sanctions on Iran in order to strengthen the West’s hand in the talks. Yet the frustration about the P5+1 process is clear.
While their comments didn’t get much attention, Menendez and Corker are right to be worried. More to the point, the Gaza crisis ought to be causing more concern about the Iran talks rather than allowing Secretary of State John Kerry’s negotiating team a free pass to continue to work toward an agreement that will both legalize Tehran’s nuclear program and fail to curb its support for terrorism.
It is important to understand that without Iran much of what is happening in Gaza wouldn’t be possible. Iran supplied Hamas with advanced rockets and money for years enabling it to create the infrastructure of terror that has plunged the region into conflict. Iran and Hamas had a very public spat in recent years when the Islamist terrorists chose to oppose Tehran’s ally Bashar Assad in the Syrian civil war. But the breach between the two may be over. Yesterday, Iran’s Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said he supported replenishing Iran’s arsenal. If, due to international pressure and the desire of the Obama administration to halt the current fighting, Hamas is left standing and in control of Gaza, the odds are good that Khamenei will make good on his pledge.
Economic sanctions on Iran made it harder for the regime to divert money to Hamas as well as to Islamic Jihad, which has stayed in Tehran’s good graces these past few years. But if Kerry gets the deal he is looking for, the sanctions that were weakened in the interim deal concluded last November would be eviscerated. At that point, Hamas may be able to count on refinancing and resupply from Iran as well as from their ally Qatar.
What has this to do with the nuclear talks?
The assumption on the part of most foreign-policy observers is that these are two separate issues. But that belief is a mistake. Iran’s status as the leading state sponsor of international terrorism through its support of Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and perhaps Hamas again makes it imperative that the P5+1 process not limit itself to talks that ignore the threat that Tehran’s auxiliaries pose to the West.
Kerry signed a weak deal with Iran last fall because, as he publicly admitted, the secretary decided sticking to the West’s demands for Iran to dismantle its nuclear program was not possible. Instead, he appeased Iran and granted tacit recognition to their “right” to enrich uranium in exchange for concessions that do little to retard the Islamist regime’s nuclear ambitions. The willingness of the West to go into overtime with an Iranian negotiating partner that has clearly signaled their unwillingness to agree to measures that would make it impossible for them to build a weapon may herald another retreat by Kerry. If so, that will bring us closer to the day when Iran will not only be able to threaten the West with a nuke after a brief “breakout” period but also hasten the moment when it can extend a nuclear umbrella over its allies in Lebanon and Gaza.
While the prospect of such a dismal outcome to these negotiations raises the possibility that Israel will decide at some point to act on their own to stop the Iranians, it also raises the stakes in Gaza. The U.S. decision not to keep its word about limiting negotiations with Iran makes it even more imperative for Israel not to allow Hamas to escape the current fighting with its arsenal and control of the strip intact. Just as Iran’s nuclear dream poses an existential threat to Israel, the American willingness to kick the can down the road on the nuclear issue makes it more vital that Israel finishes off Hamas now before an end to the blockade and Western appeasement of Tehran changes the strategic equation in Gaza and the Middle East.


3a)   It’s Okay. Don’t Cry for Us Israelis
By Naomi Ragen

I’m sitting here in Jerusalem after a week of heartbreak over three murdered teens, followed by  two weeks of sirens, bomb blasts, and finally, the funerals of young IDF soldiers, of whom one-third are students who should be taking their final exams, instead of risking their lives.  I’m  reading on the internet about what a horrible person I am as an Israeli and as a Jew, and what a terrible, immoral country I live in.

All this criticism comes mainly from the European press: The Guardian, the BBC, papers in Italy, Norway, France, and don’t forget America: The New York Times, CNN.  And I’m thinking: Gee, the British should understand.  After all, they lived through the blitz, Nazis raining bombs indiscriminately down on them, the way Hamas is raining bombs down on us.  And when the brave pilots of the RAF aimed their bombs at Dresden killing 300,000 men, women and children, they didn’t throw down leaflets telling people to politely evacuate; didn’t send their soldiers to knock on doors to see if they’d followed the leaflets instructions ( as CNN complained Israel failed to do at an UNRWA school, which was probably hit by a Hamas bomb anyway.)

And I think of the rest of Europe, who rounded up our  grandparents and great-grandparents, and relatives –men, women and children—and sent them off to be gassed, no questions asked.  And I think:  They are now the moral arbiters of the free world?  They are telling the descendants of the people they murdered how to behave when other anti-Semites want to kill them?

As for Americans, represented by the New York Times, that bastion of high-minded hypocrisy and mediocre journalism parading as the “newspaper of record,” one has only to read the article by Professor Auerbach in the New York Observer (Two Weeks of Shallow, Facile Moral Equivalency From the New York Times) to see how Jodi Rudoren and other Times apparatchiks have learned to close their minds and love Hamas.  After all, there are CHILDREN DYING.  It doesn’t matter that the Palestinians have educated an entire generation to be little Nazi-wannabes, who worship death and hate Jews, murdering their  souls, and are now callously putting their bodies in harm’s way to use for touching photo ops.  We shouldn’t be shocked by this omission by the Times. After all,  The New York Times was one of the last news outlets to bring to the attention of the reading public the Nazi atrocities in Europe.  Read the Times during the nightmare years, and see if you can’t find a pattern here.

And so, as an Israeli, brought up with Jewish values, and an American, taught to love freedom, justice, democracy and fair play, I have to tell all of you- Europeans, Americans, and last of all Muslim terrorist sympathizers and barbarians,  that what you are saying no longer moves anyone of good moral judgment and intelligence. The current crisis in Gaza is so morally clear-cut, so absolutely a case of self-defense, that I must say to you, as someone finally said to Senator McCarthy: “Sir, have you no shame?”

I prefer that you - writers of these lies and libels-- hate me and my country, if it means that you can save your tears for other peoples dead. We aren’t greedy for sympathy.  After all, we got so much after the Holocaust, we prefer other people to have their share now. These days, we prefer to live, rather than have people cry over us and the injustices done to us.

So by all means, cry for the Palestinian people - men women and children- whose duly elected leadership has callously left them without protection from just retribution for their terrorist crimes. Who took their aid money and are living in Qatar in five star hotels building shopping centers for themselves. Who built terrorist tunnels under their homes, mosques, hospitals and schools, and recruited their sons to die for Allah, while they sit in bunkers waiting for the U.N. to rescue them.

Don’t cry for us, or our families, or our children, or grandchildren.  Not this time. Not ever.  Not  if we can help it. Because this time, thank God, we have a country.  We are armed.  This time, with God's help,  we know how to protect ourselves from Nazis and their high-minded media cheerleaders.

I would like to end this with an expletive and a hand gesture towards the people I’m addressing.  Please choose one you think would be fitting.  I can think of many.


3b)
Amos Gilad: completion of neutralizing of tunnels delayed as finding more tunnels
 By Dr. Aaron Lerner

The head of the Defense Ministry’s political-defense desk, Amos Gilad, said
in a live interview on Israel Radio Reshet Bet today that the reason it is
taking longer than previously anticipated to neutralize the tunnels in the
Gaza Strip is that Israeli security activities continue to find more
tunnels.

Gilad said that Israel would not stop the operation to neutralize the
tunnels until all KNOWN tunnels are neutralized.

When Gilad was asked if there is a maximum time that the operation could
take, he responded that a finite number of tunnels actually exist so there
is, by definition, a limit. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

4)  More bad luck for Hillary

If she weren’t such a ruthless and pathological power-hungry phony, I would almost feel sorry for Hillary Rodham Clinton. It’s starting to look as though 2016 may be another election like 2008, in which the presumptive nominee runs into sheer bad luck that ends up derailing her plans.

She never anticipated in 2008 that a young, untested, almost unknown freshman senator would trump her “historic first” woman president candidacy with the “historic first” black president strategy. This time around, the problem is slightly different, although a freshman senator who can meet (but not trump) the “historic first” appeal exists in the form of Elizabeth Warren, who has already captured the affections of the Democratic Party’s powerful left wing activists.

No, this time around, the problem is qualitative, a matter of electoral fashion. Who could have predicted that the fickle voters would start craving authenticity? Josh Kraushaar explains the national mood inNational Journal:
( One of the most underappreciated attributes in politics is a candidate's authenticity.)  In an era when politicians' talking points are scripted, and they worry about a gaffe going viral, the candidate who comes across as genuine holds a real advantage. It's one reason why Barack Obama was able to defeat Hillary Clinton, why Mitt Romney struggled to capitalize on a favorable environment in 2012, and why someone like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is able to use his force of personality to overcome ideological differences with both Democrats and conservatives.
And the authenticity factor has played a critical role in this year's midterm elections, from the challenges red-state Democrats face in winning over skeptics to the problems establishment Republicans have faced in reaching out to the tea-party grassroots. Just take a look at the successful and flailing candidates this cycle, and a lot of the gap comes down to authenticity.
Barack Obama bears a lot of responsibility for sensitizing voters to the dangers of electing a phony. His notorious lies about ObamaCare are now costing many Americans dearly, in the form of lost health insurance policies, higher taxes, and shockingly high deductibles.  He is regarded a untruthful by a majority of the public.
And poor Hillary just doesn’t do authenticity. Witness this very awkward moment with Jorge Ramos of Fusion TV, compounding her earlier problems dealing with her wealth:
Ramos: Do you know your net worth?  Do you know how much money you have?
Clinton: You know, within a range, yeah.  I mean,  we have two very nice houses which we're very proud of and not selling anytime soon so...
Ramos: But millions…
Clinton: Yeah.  Yes, yes, indeed.
Liberal Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post seems almost flabbergasted that Hillary still hasn’t figured out how to handle questions about her wealth:
Um, ok.  Again, it just seems hard for me to believe that Clinton, who has been repeatedly battered in the media -- and by conservative critics -- about her comments about her wealth doesn't have a clearer answer to questions like the one posed by Ramos.  
There is a simple reason why Hillary can’t seem to come up with the right response: she has a chip on her shoulder about money, and is in the process of getting revenge on a large cast of figures who made her feel inadequate and humiliated in past decades, when she was uncomfortable about being poorer than those she regarded as her peers in the elite circles which she was joining.
If she were to be authentic, she would be very unappealing.

And, she is not nearly as good a liar as her husband and the guy who beat her out for the nomination in 2008.
At the age of 67, it is not likely that Hillary Clinton is going to become a gifted actor. She might well have gotten away with her phoniness in an earlier time frame. But now that Obama has poisoned the waters for phonies, she is experiencing her characteristic run of bad luck
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4a)   Think Tank
By Linda Killian
.

The internal memos and 144-page campaign plan prepared for Democratic Senate candidate Michelle Nunn are a fascinating if somewhat horrifying glimpse of the political industrial complex.


The document–available here–was first made public by National Review. Much of the reporting so far has focused on internal opposition research in the memo exploring the potential weaknesses of Ms. Nunn’s 
candidacy.

But I’d argue that the real revelations involve fundraising’s central role in every aspect of political campaigns. That’s not really news, but it is described in the memo in incredible detail.

Ms. Nunn is advised to focus on fundraising “with relentless intensity” and to raise $15 million to $20 million if she is to have any chance of winning.

A section called “Strategic Use of Michelle’s time” suggests that in the third quarter the candidate should spend 70% of her time on fundraising, 20% on media and political events, and 10% on debate prep.
Ms. Nunn’s political advisers estimated that more than $80 million would be spent on this U.S. Senate race, with $30 million coming from the two major campaigns, $30 million from various party organizations and $25 million from independent expenditures.

So far the Nunn campaign has raised more than $9 million.


The campaign of millionaire Republican businessman David Perdue, a former CEO of Reebok and Dollar General who won a competitive GOP primary and runoff election, has spent $5 million, including $3 million of the candidate’s money. Mr. Perdue is expected to contribute additional personal resources.
The memo calls Ms. Nunn “a fundraiser’s dream” because of her national connections, which include Warren Buffett, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt and pop singer Usher. The document also says that her father, former senator Sam Nunn, has a contact list that is a “treasure trove.”The memo makes explicit links between taking political positions and fundraising, with references to specific constituencies such as the gay community “and their substantial resources.” Ms. Nunn is advised to exploit her support for same-sex marriage to raise at least $300,000 in donations.Another strategy outlined is “to use the attacks against Michelle to raise even more money.” To that end, publication of the memo may serve as a fundraising tool for the Nunn campaign.


These documents are worth studying if only to confirm most voters’ worst fears about our cynical, money-driven political system.

Linda Killian is a journalist and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Her most recent book is “The Swing Vote: The Untapped Power of Independents.” She is on Twitter: @lindajkillian.




4b)  Organization Formerly Headed by Nunn May Have Given to Group with Terrorist Ties

National Review Article says the nonprofit previously headed by Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Michelle Nunn, gave grant money to a charitable organization whose parent organization has alleged ties to Hamas. Hamas has been at war with Israel and is considered a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department.
National Review wrote the article after receiving an internal campaign document from an unnamed source.

The document cited potential vulnerabilities in the campaign that Republicans could use to attack Nunn, such as alleged service awards by the Points of Light Foundation.
The article said IRS 990's from Points of Light show the foundation gave $33,000 in grants in 2008 and 2011 to Islamic Relief USA.
Eliana Johson wrote the article and says the organization is part of a worldwide network of charities that operate beneath Islamic Relief Worldwide, which she says has ties to Hamas and other terrorist groups.
“Islamic Relief USA , on its website, says that they’re legally separate entities, but then notes Islamic relief charities all operate, they’re all part of the same family. If you look at their annual report it talks about their work in Palestine as if they’re interchangeable organizations.”
But Nunn’s campaign said Points of Light never directly gave to Islamic Relief USA. Instead, a spokesman says a points of light subsidiary was hired by eBay to verify the tax exempt status of organizations including Islamic Relief USA.
They said it was individual eBay users who gave to the organization instead.
Nunn’s campaign manager, Jeff DiSantis, spoke about the internal document itself in statement.
This was a draft of a document that was written eight months ago.  Like all good plans, they change.  But what hasn’t changed and is all the more clear today is that Michelle’s opponents are going to mischaracterize her work and her positions, and part of what we’ve always done is to prepare for the false things that are going to be said. 
Michelle has always sought to run a campaign that brings people together and gets Washington focused on the real challenges the country faces.  And that’s the kind of Senator she’ll be.
University of Georgia Political Science professor Charles Bullock said it’s likely those supporting Nunn opponent  David Perdue will use the leaked document to their advantage.
"It looks like we’re going to be seeing more about that as the campaign wears on. It looks like it is very ripe for an attack ad that opponents tend to run.”
WABE contacted David Perdue’s campaign but did not hear back by deadline.-
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5)  When Obama voters apologize


A good friend of mine apologized to me today.  You see, he voted for Barack Hussein Obama in the 2008 election and he lives in a so-called “swing state.”  He told me that he had not voted for Obama in the 2012 election, but that he realized that by supporting him in 2008, he had help unleash a deadly virus onto the American scene.  He simply said he was sorry.
I think a good many Americans feel much the same as my good friend.  They know that they were seduced by the very slick presentation that Barack Obama made in the 2008 campaign.  They bought into the promises that he made about deficits and transparency and ethical government.  They also know that there is a vast constituency of the Democratic Party that is entitlement bound.  These welfare “victims” never thought through the implications of America’s fiscal crisis.  They believed everything and anything that Barack Obama was slinging their way.  And most of all, they loved hearing what Obama was going to give them.
So, my more aware friends who knew the true nature of the crisis were, nevertheless, seduced by the rhetoric and became the deciding swing vote in an election that did “fundamentally change America.”  When 2012 came around, the welfare “victims” and the hard-core union and liberal base of the Democrats still hung onto the belief that Barack Hussein Obama was driving America in the right direction.  And so, Obama was granted another four years to hammer America into something of his own liking.
Now, with 2 ½ years to go in Obama’s second Administration, I think most folks, including many in the solid core union and liberal base of the Democratic Party, are beginning to see the light.  Many now suspect that Barack Hussein Obama is an empty suit.  In Texas, people refer to someone who has no true experience or accomplishments as a person with “all hat and no cattle.”
But now our greater fears about Mr. Obama are confirmed.  He has made his way through this world by lying and deceiving.  There are no childhood friends recalling their growing up together.  There are no college classmates reminiscing about dear old Occidental, Columbia, or Harvard. Obama is a manufactured fraud.
There is only the Chicago political machine and the Reverend Wrights of this world to partially fill in the many blanks where Obama was and what was he doing.  Mr. Obama didn’t even write his famed Dreams of My Father.  He simply has no documentable accomplishments to justify his political rise to power.  Yet, the American people twice elected him to the highest office in our land.  How did this happen?  
Barack Hussein Obama has used his smooth public manner and a web of deception to gain a political foothold on the American landscape.  But, as Lincoln said, “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time.  But you cannot fool all of the people all of the time”.
What do you call a person whose statements turn out to be false and it becomes known that he knew his statements were false at the time he made them.  That, my friend, is the definition of a liar. 
Liar is a word that rarely pops up in the media.  It is considered too harsh and not appropriate for modern discourse.  In a legal setting, a liar can be subject to imprisonment.  In those instances, we call it perjury. 
But the man occupying the White House is plainly and simply just a liar.  From Fast and Furious to the IRS targeting of conservative groups to the shame of the Benghazi killings, what we have is a liar in the White House who has surrounded himself with many of his same ilk. 
Putin, too, knows that Obama is not a man of his word.  Rather, Putin recognizes a feckless President that can be bullied and manipulated to serve Putin’s ambition.
Once America fully comes to grip with the fact that Barack Hussein Obama and his henchmen (women) are liars, then maybe we can begin to unravel to mess of false promises and economic “snipe hunts” we have been fed.                
 Maybe we can regain our stature on the international scene.
As regards my good friend, apology accepted!  What else could I do?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------6)  Time for Hamas's Hollywood Sympathizers to Snap out of It!


I love actors. Honestly -- that wasn't sarcasm. I started out as an actor before I began writing for a living. I shared my life with an actress who was/is a wonderful artist and woman. As they used to say about Jews And African Americans some of my best friends ... actors and writers, directors, musicians, artists of every type are the most empathetic people on earth. We have to be. It's not just a job, for the ones who are serious about it, it's our calling. When we say, "I feel your pain," we mean it. Because we must feel the pain of every character we portray or create. We feel the pain of that part of our own soul that corresponds to that of the character.
And no writer, actor or director ever plays, creates or directs a villain. Each character we create is the hero of his own story, and we find the humanity in each, no matter how villainous the character's actions may be.
That is even more so with the truly great artists like Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz and Pedro Almadovar. Their work, collectively and individually, is an alter at which, I, as a screenwriter, playwright and novelist, worship often. They are my artistic Rabbis and teachers. They feel others' pain, no matter how villainous the character.
Bardem portrayed a chilling mass murderer in No Country For Old Men, and deservedly won the Academy Award for it. His portrayal was riveting, not because he portrayed the character's villiany, but because he somehow managed to convey his humanity, despite the fact that the character was a heartless serial killer who murdered, or not, depending on the outcome of the toss of a coin. That makes for great acting.
Unfortunately it can, and does, cloud both the moral and intellectual compass of many artists like the truly wonderful Bardem, Cruz, Almadovar et al.
They look at pictures of Palestinians, who truly are suffering in this war, which Hamas and its terrorist army have perpetrated against Israel and our civilian population, and they "feel their pain" or as close as you can get to doing that in Madrid or Malibu.
Palestinian homes are being destroyed. Israel is the one shelling them, as they rightly state, by land, air and sea. Therefore Israel, a white European Colonial transplant persecuting a brown skinned indigenous people, are the villains in this reality show watched by millions on TV. Therefore Israel must be condemned, damned, censured and stopped by the international community!
They have signed a letter stating," Palestinian homes are being destroyed!"
That is indeed true. The reason for that, my brothers and sisters in Cinema, are the actions of Hamas, a murderous and cynical terrorist organization which seized power, not from Israel but from the Government of the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas!
They lined up their fellow Palestinian brothers against walls and machine gunned them to death. If you have the stomach for it the videos are still on YouTube. They blindfolded and bound their Palestinian Brothers and pushed them off multiple storied buildings to horrific deaths.
That's Hamas. That's how they seized power.
Those were their crimes against their fellow Palestinians.
With the greatest respect, Javier, Penelope and Pedro, from one who admires your artistic achievements more than words can express, did you write any letters of outrage and condemnation then? Did you call on the international community to end the suffering then?
Well, but the deaths were only in the hundreds then, not over a thousand like now, and besides that was a Palestinian internal affair, one, which I'm sure, you felt uncomfortable in condemning.
But what Israel is doing is clear-cut.
It's genocide!
Is it really?
We're all visual artists at the end of the day, creating images for the screen. Look, then, at the picture below.
I can get you literally hundreds more just like it. I'd be happy to. Just ask. The picture is of the entrance to a terrorist tunnel that was uncovered in the tiny space between two Palestinian homes. The tunnel to which it connects goes underneath the internationally recognized borders of Israel, the borders you demand we return to  put a pin in that thought for a moment). The tunnel, and scores of others like it, then comes up next to and in some cases inside Israeli civilian farming communities. One tunnel came up in the communal dining hall of a farming village where as many as eight hundred people would have been gathered for holiday meals in normal times. Terrorists armed with anti tank missiles, machine guns, hand grenades, thousands of rounds of ammunition, handcuffs and tranquilizers then come up out of those tunnels with the intent of murdering, maiming and kidnapping hundreds of Israeli men, women and children. That's not in theory. Hamas terrorists have tried to do that almost half a dozen times in the last few weeks.
Well, but you say, no such killings of hundreds of Israelis have taken place!
Meanwhile the poor Palestinian people are suffering from Israeli bombardment.
My dear friends, no such killings of hundreds of Israeli civilians have taken placebecause of Israeli bombardment.
They have not taken place because my brothers and sisters in arms watch the border diligently, and when necessary, lay down their lives to protect our men, women and children from the terrorists who entered those tunnels next to, and many times from within, those very Palestinian homes whose destruction you rightly bemoan, as by the way do I, and, oddly, most other Israelis.
Those Palestinian homes are being destroyed because Hamas is committing a war crime under the Geneva accords, which you cite, against their own people, by launching their rockets, hiding their terrorist tunnel entrances and missiles, rockets mortars and machine guns, inside those homes, thus turning their own people's dwellings into Military targets . Why in the name of all that is holy, don't you at least acknowledge, let alone condemn, that clear and cruel war crime, not just against Israeli civilians but Palestinian civilians?
In your letter you state, "they (the Palestinians) are being denied.. electricity and free movement to their hospitals, schools and fields while the international community does nothing."
My friends, Hamas has fired from, launched rockets from, put terrorist tunnel entrances in, and hidden weapons inside, not just people's homes, but inside their schools and mosques and hospitals. Hamas has hidden their rockets in UN operated schools! That's not a wicked Zionist lie, that's a UN finding, against which they have, albeit weakly, protested.
I personally have been in Gaza as an Israeli soldier and have had Palestinian farmers come up to me, personally, because I wear an officer's rank, and demand of me that we, the Israel Defense Forces, not stop until we have killed all the Hamas operatives. Those aren't my words. They were the words of Palestinian farmers in El Atatra, and the reason they made that demand of us was because Hamas had confiscated the fields that had once supported them and their family by growing sunflowers, and now used them as rocket launching sites aimed at Israeli civilians.
Why in the name of the humanity I know you treasure, are you not condemning that?
That was a rhetorical question.
I know why you're not condemning that.
It's because they look weak and we look strong. And one always roots for the underdog in the movies. Except this isn't a movie. There's no one to say "cut" when the terrorist comes up out of the tunnel or the rocket or mortar is hurtling toward you.
It's not even a reality show though I know many in the media try to milk the ratings by presenting it as such.
But we're not Honey Boo Boo or The Housewives of whatever.
We're a country that was attacked, that said calm would be answered with calm and was answered instead with thousands of rocket attacks aimed almost exclusively at Israeli civilians while hiding behind Palestinian civilians. Hamas is committing war crimes against both our peoples not only while the international community dies nothing, but while well-meaning, empathetic people like you enable them like a well-meaning friend turning a blind eye to a junkie's addiction. Except in this case the junkie is a terrorist organization as wicked as any on earth.  Don't you see that your misguided enabling is killing both our peoples?
I know it takes more effort to understand something than to simply emotionally react with whatever the bumper sticker mentality if the day is. But honestly, both the Palestinian people and we deserve better of you.
But you may excuse Hamas's terrorist tactics because they don't have an air force or tanks and thus is the only way they can fight back against a wicked force of Zionists who have invaded" the Palestinian territories instead of returning to the 1967 borders."
Friends, there's no excuse for not getting the facts straight -- you can Google them. With regard to Gaza, which is, after all, where the war is, Israel unilaterally withdrew to the 1967 borders almost ten years ago!!
In that time Hamas had launched three wars against us. There was no air campaign against Hamas until they began firing hundreds of rockets a day against us.
Because of the Iron Dome anti-missile system we developed, the rockets caused no loss if life on our side and so when Egypt proposed a cease fire and thePalestinian President and the Arab League endorsed it...we accepted it. I know history is a bore but this was only two weeks ago!
That's when Hamas launched its first terrorist tunnel attack against our civilians. Had we not intercepted and killed and driven back the terrorist force, it would have resulted in the worst terrorist attack, the highest loss of civilian life, in Israel's history .
That's when we had no choice but to begin the ground operation … after Israel, Egypt, the Arab League and the President of the Palestine Authority all agreed to end the violence, stop the killing And destruction and try to create a cycle of peace. It Is Hamas that has brought about this awful cycle of death.
I wrote a movie called The Hurricane that Norman Jewison directed. It gave me an opportunity to complement what I thought was one if the best scenes he had ever directed. The scene is in Moonstruck between Cher And Nicholas Cage, in which an emotional Nick Cage prattled on about his endless love blah, blah, blah.
Cage is pitch perfect the sincere, emotive lover. But he's just spewing so much nonsense that Cher hauls off and slaps him so hard his grandchildren probably felt it. She then shouts the same two words that, with the greatest respect, we who are suffering from Hamas' dual war crimes, have every right to demand of you, and every other armchair enabler, snap out of it!
Dan Gordon is a captain in the IDF (Res)