==
Why does Putin ignore Kerry and Obama? Could it be because he does not respect them, does not fear them and has a better strategy? You decide. (See 2 below.)
===
It has always been part of Obama's strategy to curry favor with Muslims. Though it has backfired that will not deter a man who is so convinced of his strategy that he ignores reality.
I have written repeatedly Obama's next ploy will be to buy off Netanyahu with more arms and use that bait to make him concede more to Abbas. If Netanyahu falls for this trap he is a fool. Israel does not need a relationship with an American president whose goal is to stab them in the back. (See 3 below.)
What Iran can do under JCPOA? (See 3a below.)
===
D.C works well, just not for you. (See 4 below.)
===
Final comment: The consequences of shutting the government down, over Planned Parenthood Funding, is more hyped drama and theater from the media and press crowd than reality. Essential services remain, Vets will still not be treated as they should because they never will be as long as the Federal Government is in charge. Terrorists will still function whether government is open or not, bureaucrats will continue to spend like water and fraudulent and/or wasteful spending of tax payer money will persist if not expand, and checks for SS etc. can still be mailed.
Some government workers will get paid for the holiday and some lights will be turned off in cavernous buildings but most Americans will not even know the government is closed. Planes will fly and controllers will work, TSA guards will continue to allow everyone through stopping a few old people. AMTRACK trains will run, the mail will be delivered because they no longer are run by government and the military will be fed.
Obama will still selectively determine many functions and he will make political choices which will capture deadlines like shutting down The White House and closing Parks. He will continue to play golf and fly around raising money.
Christie and Cruz are right when they point to the fact that Establishment Republicans were elected to take action and have failed to do so either because they are frightened and/or do not understand in politics, particularly against a monarchical president, you have to play hard ball, you have to return fire.
No Demwit respects or fears the current Republican leadership. Mitch and his counterpart in The House do not even draw red lines in the sand and then vacate like Obama in Syria, and Libya. They just buckle.
There is no reason why tax dollars should fund private abortions. After all, fund something and you get more of it. There is no reason why billions of tax dollars should go for a variety of private functions the Federal Government funds but they do because it helps various elected servants continue in office. Sen. Pell was given his college grant foundation after serving in Congress because his successor wanted to be re-elected., President Wilson was even honored with an expensive think tank long after he was dead because it was the brainchild of those who wanted to pay off constituents who thought it would be a good idea and so it goes in Disney East!
And this is why number 4 below is akin to the truth. D.C is not there for us and this is why Trump, Fiorina and Carson are at the top of the list. They are a visible way Conservative Republicans can express their dissatisfaction with those who constantly promise and never deliver. These anti-Establishment folks are truly 'pissed' and they are sending another message they demand to be heard.
Will they? Time will tell.
Lamentably, they are the best hope the Demwits have going for them in order to pull the chestnut out of the fire once again when, in fact, their candidates should be rejected if only because they are more than unqualified and because Obama has been the greatest American tragedy in my lifetime.
===
The picture in 5 below is the one you get when you appease a tyrant and have no plan or strategy other than retreat.
Obama is now rethinking his Syrian debacle and by the time he does Putin will be staring down on us with a full array of military equipment ringing Assad.
So much for another Obama disaster. (See 5 below.)
===
Dick
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1) Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump walk into a bar and grab a booth. Donald leans over, and with a smile on his face, says:
“The media is really tearing you apart for that scandal.”Hillary: “You mean the Mexican gun running?”
Trump: “No, the other one.”
Hillary: “You mean SEAL Team 6?”
Trump: “No, the other one.”
Hillary: “You mean the State Dept. lying about Benghazi?”
Trump: “No, the other one.”
Hillary: “You mean voter fraud?”
Trump: “No, the other one.”
Hillary: “You mean the military not getting their votes counted?”
Trump: “No, the other one.”
Hillary: “The NSA monitoring our phone calls, emails and everything else?”
Trump: “No, the other one.”
Hillary: “You mean the of drones in our own country without the benefit of the law?”
Trump: “No, the other one.”
Hillary: “Giving 123 Technologies $300 Million and right after it declared bankruptcy and was sold to the Chinese?”
Trump: “No, the other one.”
Hillary: “You mean Obama arming the Muslim Brotherhood?”
Trump: “No the other one:”
Hillary: “The IRS targeting conservatives?”
Trump: “No, the other one.”
Hillary: “The DOJ spying on the press?”
Trump: “No, the other one.”
Hillary: “Sebelius shaking down health insurance executives?”
Trump: “No, the other one.”
Hillary: “Giving SOLYNDRA $500 MILLION DOLLARS and 3 months later they declared bankruptcy and then the Chinese bought it?”
Trump: “No, the other one.”
Hillary: “The NSA monitoring citizens’ phone calls, emails and everything else?”
Hillary: “The NSA monitoring citizens’ phone calls, emails and everything else?”
Trump: “No, the other one.”
Trump: “No, the other one.”
Hillary: “Obama’s ordering the release of nearly 10,000 illegal immigrants from jails and prisons, and falsely blaming the sequester?”
Trump: “No, the other one.”
Hillary: “Obama’s threat to impose gun control by Executive Order in order to bypass Congress?”
Trump: “No, the other one.”
Hillary: “Obama’s repeated violation of the law requiring me to submit a budget no later than the first Monday in February?”
Trump: “No, the other one.”
Hillary: “The 2012 vote where 115% of all registered voters in some counties voted 100% for Obama?”
Trump: “No, the other one.”
Hillary: “Obama’s unconstitutional recess appointments in an attempt to circumvent the Senate’s advise-and-consent role?”
Trump: “No, the other one.”
Hillary: “The State Department interfering with an Inspector General investigation on departmental sexual misconduct?”
Trump: “No, the other one.”
Hillary: “Me, The IRS, Clapper and Holder all lying to Congress?”
Trump: “No, the other one.”Hillary: “I give up! … Oh wait, I think I got it! You mean that 65 million low-information voters who don’t pay taxes and get free stuff from taxpayers and stuck citizens again with the most pandering, corrupt administration in American history?”
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Trump: “THAT’S THE ONE!”
2)
Putin’s gambit, Obama’s puzzlement
Once again, President Obama and his foreign policy team are stumped. Why is Vladimir Putin pouring troops and weaponry into Syria? After all, as Secretary of State John Kerry has thrice told his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, it is only making things worse.
But worse for whom? For the additional thousands of civilians who will die or flee as a result of the inevitably intensified fighting. True, and I’m sure Lavrov is as moved by their plight as by the 8,000 killed in Russia’s splendid little Ukrainian adventure.
Kerry and Obama are serially surprised because they cannot fathom the hard men in the Kremlin. Yet Putin’s objectives in Syria are blindingly obvious:
1. To assert Russia’s influence in the Middle East and make it the dominant outside power. Putin’s highest ambition is to avenge and reverse Russia’s humiliating loss of superpower status a quarter-century ago.
Understanding this does not come easily to an American president who for seven years has been assiduously curating America’s decline abroad.
2. To sustain Russia’s major and long-standing Arab ally. Ever since Anwar Sadat kicked the Soviets out of Egypt in 1972, Syria’s Assads have been Russia’s principal asset in the Middle East.
3. To expand the reach of Russia’s own military. It has a naval base at Tartus, its only such outside of Russia. It has an airfield near Latakia, now being expanded with an infusion of battle tanks, armored personnel carriers, howitzers and housing for 1,500 — strongly suggesting ground forces to follow.
4. To push out the Americans. For Putin, geopolitics is a zero-sum game: Russia up, America down. He is demonstrating whom you can rely on in this very tough neighborhood. Obama has given short shrift to the Kurds, shafted U.S. allies with the Iran deal and abandoned the Anbar Sunnis who helped us win the surge. Meanwhile, Putin risks putting Russian boots on the ground to rescue his Syrian allies.
Obama says Bashar al-Assad has to go, draws a red line on chemical weapons — and does nothing. Russia acts on behalf of a desperate ally. Whom do you want in your corner?
5. To re-legitimize post-Crimea Russia by making it indispensable in Syria. It’s a neat two-cushion shot. At the United Nations next week, Putin will offer Russia as a core member of a new anti-Islamic State coalition. Obama’s Potemkin war — with its phantom local troops (our $500 million training program has yielded five fighters so far) and flaccid air campaign — is flailing badly. What Putin is proposing is that Russia, Iran and Hezbollah spearhead the anti-jihadist fight.
Putin’s offer is clear: Stop fighting Assad, accept Russia as a major player and acquiesce to a Russia-Iran-Hezbollah regional hegemony — and we will lead the drive against the Islamic State from in front.
And there is a bonus. The cleverest part of the Putin gambit is its unstated cure for Europe’s refugee crisis.
Wracked by guilt and fear, the Europeans have no idea what to do. Putin offers a way out: No war, no refugees. Stop the Syrian civil war and not only do they stop flooding into Europe, those already there go back home to Syria.
Putin says, settle the war with my client in place — the Assad regime joined by a few “healthy” opposition forces — and I solve your refugee nightmare.
You almost have to admire the cynicism. After all, what’s driving the refugees is the war and what’s driving the war is Iran and Russia. They provide the materiel, the funds and now,increasingly, the troops that fuel the fighting. The arsonist plays fireman.
After all, most of the refugees are not fleeing the Islamic State. Its depravity is more ostentatious, but it is mostly visited upon minorities, Christian and Yazidi — and they have already been largely ethnically cleansed from Islamic State territory. The European detention camps are overflowing with Syrians fleeing Assad’s barbarism, especially his attacks on civilians, using artillery, chlorine gas and nail-filled barrel bombs.
Putin to the rescue. As with the chemical weapons debacle, he steps in to save the day. If we acquiesce, Russia becomes an indispensable partner. It begins military and diplomatic coordination with us. (We’ve just agreed to negotiations over Russia’s Syrian buildup.) Its post-Ukraine isolation is lifted and, with Iran, it becomes the regional arbiter.
In the end, the Putin strategy may not work, but it’s deadly serious and not at all obscure. The White House can stop scratching its collective head whenever another Condor transportunloads its tanks and marines at Latak
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3)-
Can Obama Ignore Abbas’s Anti-Jewish Slurs?
In November, President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will meet for the first time since the debate on the Iran nuclear deal heated up. The expectation by many friends of Israel here is that the president will seek to paper over his differences with Netanyahu over the U.S. decision to allow Iran to keep a nuclear program that he pledged to dismantle in 2012. However, the problem with that sort of optimism is that the history of the last seven years should have taught us that, when it comes to Israel, Barack Obama is almost always (except when running for re-election) looking to pick a fight with the Israelis. In this case, the most likely outcome isn’t a firming up of an alliance that was shaken to its core but a new administration initiative aimed at pressuring Israel into more concession to revive a peace process with the Palestinians that is dead in the water. Obama’s Middle East policy has always been completely divorced from reality, especially with regard to his inability to understand that the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected peace. But even the president and Secretary of State Kerry may have taken a deep breath today when they heard the latest statements from Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas about not wanting “filthy Jewish feet” to “desecrate” holy sites in Jerusalem.
Abbas’s comments were the latest Palestinian incitement about Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. For a century, Arab leaders have used canards about mythical plots to destroy the mosques on the site of the ancient Jewish temples to whip up anti-Semitic hatred that fuels the conflict with Jews. In the 1920s and 30s, this led to pogroms against Jews. Nowadays it serves not only ramp up tensions that allow Abbas to avoid peace talks and to try to firm up his Fatah Party’s tenuous hold on power in the West Bank. It also encourages the sort of lone wolf terrorism that afflicts the holy city as individual Palestinians engaging in stabbings, hit and run incidents as well as the sort of rock and firebombing throwing that resulted in the murder of a 64-year-old Jew on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. Last year Abbas praised the terrorist who attempted to murder a Jewish activist as a “martyr.”
But Abbas has now compounded that dismal record by engaging in the sort of incitement on Jerusalem that doesn’t just stall negotiations but could serve as a justification for another intifada terror war.
The notion that the Palestinians are the aggrieved party in any dispute over the Temple Mount is as absurd as the notion of Abbas as a force for peace. After the 1967 war that reunited Jerusalem, Israel allowed the Temple Mount — the holiest spot in Judaism — to be placed under the authority of a Muslim Wakf. While Israeli rule allowed free access to all the holy sites for members of all faiths for the first time in the history of the city, the Temple Mount was the one exception. To this day, Jews are forbidden to pray there. But not even those restrictions are enough for Palestinians as groups organized for the purpose harass Jewish and other non-Muslim tourists. The mosques on the Mount are often used as staging areas for rioters with the sacred sites that Abbas says are threatened with contamination and routinely employed to store firebombs, rocks and shelter rioters from Jerusalem police.
While some Jews believe that restrictions on prayer on the Temple Mount are a form of illegal discrimination, the supposedly hard line Netanyahu government has not budged from them. The tiny minority of extremists that dream of replacing the mosques with a rebuilt temple have no support with Israel’s political parties and are prevented from doing anything that might threaten the site. Israel has also done nothing to stop the Wakf from committing widespread archeological vandalism on the area in an effort to erase Jewish history.
Rather than defending their holy sites what Abbas and the Palestinian mobs he is inciting want is to deny access to the Temple Mount to Jews. Moreover, this is part and parcel of their campaign to not merely re-divide the city but to return to the pre-1967 situation where Jews were banned from entering the Old City. While Abbas knows that Israel will never permit this to happen, the point of this campaign is to allow him to compete with the Islamists of Hamas for the affections of Palestinians who continue to view hostility to Jews and Israel as the only measure of political legitimacy. The more he talks about peace, the less popular he becomes and the more of a threat Hamas is to the maintenance of Fatah’s corrupt kleptocracy in the West Bank, notwithstanding his constant insincere threats about resigning. He is, after all, currently serving the 10 th year of the four-year term as president of the PA to which he was elected. If fueling Palestinian anti-Semitism serves the cause of the corrupt Fatah kleptocracy, that is what he will do.
The most useful thing Obama could do now to further the cause of peace would be to send Abbas a stern warning that any further provocations will result in the end of U.S. aid to the bankrupt PA. He might also seek to reduce the amount of “daylight” between himself and Netanyahu, since the belief that Obama will eventually betray Israel to the Palestinians at the UN is also bolstering Abbas’s faith that he can get away with this sort of behavior. But instead, we hear nothing but silence about his vile language from Washington. Until that changes, it is foolish as well as counter-productive for the U.S. to talk about pressuring Israel to make more concessions for the sake of a peace the Palestinians don’t want.
3a) What Iran Is Permitted To Do Under The JCPOA
By: Yigal Carmon*
Support or opposition to the nuclear deal should be predicated on the text
of the JCPOA.
Here are a few examples of what Iran can do under the JCPOA. These
actions –permitted under the JCPOA – clearly contradict statements and
arguments raised recently by U.S. administration officials.
Iran Can Pursue The Development Of A Nuclear Device And Key Nuclear
Technologies
Under the JCPOA, Iran can conduct activities "suitable for the development
of a nuclear device" if the joint commission approves it as being "monitored
and not for weapons purposes".[1] If anything should have been totally and
absolutely banned by this agreement, it is activity suitable for the
development of a nuclear device. President Obama's declared rationale for
the agreement is to distance Iran from a nuclear device. The JCPOA, under
certain conditions, allows even that.
Also nowhere in the JCPOA does Iran promise to refrain from development of
key technologies that would be necessary to develop a nuclear device. To the
contrary, Ali Akbar Salehi head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran
stated that: "We are building nuclear fusion now that is the technology for
the next 50 years."[2]
Iran Can Prevent The Inspection Of Military Sites
Under the JCPOA the IAEA cannot go wherever the evidence leads. The JCPOA
allows Iran to reject a priori any request to visit a military facility.
This exclusion was included in the JCPOA by introducing a limitation under
which a request that "aims at interfering with military or other national
security activities" is not admissible. [3]
The ban on visits to military sites has been enunciated by all regime
figures from Supreme Leader Khamenei downwards. Supreme Leader Khamenei
specified: "(The foreigners) shouldn’t be allowed at all to penetrate into
the country's security and defensive boundaries under the pretext of
inspection, and the country's military officials are not permitted at all to
allow the foreigners to cross these boundaries or stop the country's
defensive development under the pretext of supervision and inspection." [4]
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said that such visits crossed a red
line and were successfully rejected by Iran during the negotiations.[5]
Supreme Leader Khamenei's top adviser for international affairs, Ali Akbar
Velayati, stated: "The access of inspectors from the IAEA or from any other
body to Iran's military centers is forbidden."[6]
Administration spokespersons persist in claiming that military facilities
will also come under inspection, in total contradiction to the language of
the JCPOA and the Iranian position.
There Will Be No Snapback Of Sanctions
Under the JCPOA, snapback is not automatic, but will be dependent on UN
Security Council approval.
Additionally, a declaration has been introduced into the JCPOA and thus
became an integral part of the agreement. Iran "will treat such a
re-introduction or reimposition of the sanctions specified in Annex II, or
such an imposition of new nuclear-related sanctions, as grounds to cease
performing its commitments under this JCPOA in whole or in part."[7] The
inclusion of this clause in the agreement makes the re-imposition of
sanctions, in the optimal case, the subject of litigation, when Iran can
contend that the other sides is in violation of the agreement.
Sanctions Regime's Duration Can Be Shortened To Less Than Eight Or Ten Years
Under the JCPOA the duration of the sanctions regime need not extend to
eight or ten years but can be much shorter if the IAEA so determines. Upon a
report from the director-general of the IAEA to the board of governors of
the IAEA and in parallel to the UN Security Council stating that the IAEA
has reached the broader conclusion that all nuclear material in Iran remains
in peaceful activities whichever is earlier (emphasis added)"[8]
Arak Will Remain A Heavy Water And Hence A Plutonium Capable Facility; Iran’s
Plutonium Pathway Was Not Totally Blocked
Arak houses Iran's heavy water facility. Despite the vague wording in the
JCPOA, (i.e. Iran will "redesign" the reactor and it will be
"modernized"),[9] it will also continue to operate partially as a heavy
water facility a key element needed in plutonium production.
*Yigal Carmon is President and Founder of MEMRI.
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4)Washington Works Really Well, But Not for You
Washington isn’t broken. It is a well-oiled machine that works for the well-connected and responds to the well-heeled. This corrupt nexus of favoritism and cronyism tends to leave hardworking Americans behind. To paraphrase Howard Beale, voters are mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore.
In the Democratic primary, an insurgent socialist senator from Vermont is leading the former First Lady turned Senator turned Secretary of State in both Iowa and New Hampshire. On the Republican side, candidates supported by the party’s national leadership garner the support of less than one-quarter of primary voters in recent national polls.
A grassroots uprising is forcing the political establishment to retreat. But to ensure the establishment does not retrench and reemerge, the insurgents must give voters a plan to create an America that offers opportunity for all and favoritism to none.
For all the excitement created by Bernie Sanders, his ideas are just as stale and ineffective as those blandly offered by Hillary Clinton. Both would increase the size and scope of government. And as we’ve seen with Obamacare, the bigger the government, the bigger the Bigs become.
Can an authentically conservative candidate inspire and galvanize a deeply cynical electorate around a serious and hopeful policy agenda? We think so.
A second-shift worker shouldn't see his hard-earned money funneled to a fledgling corporation. Nor should he be concerned regulations advocated by competitors would force his job overseas. The value of his work shouldn’t be determined by bureaucratic decrees in Washington.
Hard working moms should be confident that energy and food prices won’t erode the family budget simply because one industry lobbied for a tariff or a mandate.
Seniors longing to retire should not be trapped in a system that produces a negative rate of return. By 2030, Social Security will return just 90 cents on the dollar for a single female earning average wages. It is immoral, and seniors deserve the option to do better.
Young graduates starting careers should be confident their degree is worth something more than a mountain of debt. By breaking up the higher education accreditation cartel that funnels kids into four-year programs, young Americans would pay less while having more options.
The unifying theme of these proposals is simple: no one should need an army of lawyers, lobbyists and accountants to succeed in this great nation. It is time we take back America.
Michael A. Needham is the chief executive officer of Heritage Action for America (heritageaction.com).
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5)
The Rubble of Obama’s Syria Policy
I kept asking why the administration wasn’t doing more to help my people. Then the Iran deal came through, and I knew.
The aftermath of a reported airstrike by Syrian-regime forces in the rebel-held area of Douma, near Damascus, Aug. 30. PHOTO:AFP/GETTY IMAGES
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was meeting with high-level Obama administration officials in Washington, D.C., two months after escaping Syria in February 2014, and I had just described to them all the horrors I had seen: the torture of protesters, the rape of women, the bombardment of civilians, the barrel bombs, the massacres, the sieges, the starvation, and the gassing of hundreds of innocents with sarin in August 2013. I had recounted how I barely survived those sarin attacks and the siege of my hometown, Moadamiya, near Damascus; and how, by some miracle, I managed to trick the regime into letting me leave Syria.
Now, I was asking the officials to take simple steps, to do something, anything, that would protect the millions of civilians I had left behind from further starvation and slaughter. But as I pressed these officials for answers, their replies grew increasingly divorced from the Syrian conflict:
Why couldn’t there be military action to protect civilians? The reply: The U.S. is helping Syrians through humanitarian and nonlethal means. Me: Thanks for your generosity, but can Band-Aids take down a fighter jet as it bombs civilians? Them: President Bashar Assad’s air-defense systems are too strong for a no-fly zone. Me: Then how does Israel keep bombing the regime? Them: The U.S. wants to avoid a military solution. We also need to stabilize the whole region. Me: Assad’s barrel bombs and starvation sieges are driving extremism, I’ve seen it with my own eyes—you call that stabilizing the region?
In this meeting and in numerous other meetings with people familiar with Mr. Obama’s personal thinking—at the State Department, with Democrats in Congress, at the White House—we would eventually reach a moment of honesty when someone would say, in effect: President Obama does not wish to upset the Iranians.
When I was growing up in Syria under the Assad dictatorship, the United States was always described to me as the “Imperial Devil.” But my views changed after my late father managed to smuggle copies of a forbidden magazine called Reader’s Digest, from which I learned that many people in the world lived better than we Syrians did. I also read an inspiring entry on the American Revolution, when people took a brave stand for a better life and then picked up arms when forced to do so. Suddenly, the “Imperial Devil” didn’t seem so bad, and the “Syria of Assad” didn’t seem so good.
When President Obama was elected in 2008, I celebrated alongside most of my friends. I had goosebumps during Mr. Obama’s Cairo speech of 2009, when he called Islam a religion of peace and used the Arabic greeting “Salaam Alaikum.” All around me in Syria, I heard excited talk of a new era of peace spurred on by a black American president who knew what slavery, racism and injustice felt like.
Syrians had high hopes for the Free World when the Syrian Revolution began in 2011. I told my friends that Americans had a million reasons to support us, because we were fighting for democracy against their geopolitical rivals. We waited for help as the Assad forces tortured thousands of protesters, raped thousands of women, turned thriving cities into ghost towns and exterminated people with sarin gas. Help never arrived.
I remember hopefully watching speech after speech in which President Obama said “Assad must go.” I remember when in August 2012 the president announced that chemical weapons were a “red line.” I also remember the burn of sarin gas in my lungs on Aug. 21 a year later, and then seeing the mass graves and piles of bodies and consoling myself with the simple thought that at least now the U.S. would act.
It never did.
When I first heard words to the effect that “President Obama does not wish to upset the Iranians,” I thought it was one more bad excuse for inaction. But in the aftermath of the Iran deal, I realize that those who gave me that absurd line were actually the most honest.
President Obama wishes for a legacy of peace through diplomacy; that I understand. What I can’t understand is why he believes that making deals with dictators can bring peace. During the Obama presidency, millions of people in Iran, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine protested for a better life only to be met with bullets, tanks and fighter jets.
Now tens of thousands in the Middle East are fleeing for Europe, despairing of ever seeing peace or freedom in their homelands. Had the president supported these people against oppression, he would have made the world a better place and achieved a true legacy. Instead he risks leaving behind disappointment and memories of drowned refugee children lying on beaches.
Mr. Eid, who often uses a pseudonym, Qusai Zakarya, that he adopted while opposing the regime in Syria, now lives in Washington, D.C.
