Obama - The Most Corrupt Lying Presidents In Modern History. Bless Their Hearts and Clueless Souls!. The Hillary Fix! Avi To Speak!

Some of my liberal friends, and even some conservative ones, were enthralled with Comey's book and encouraged me to buy and read it.  I replied I was low on money allocated for buying toilet paper. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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After observing Obama, I concluded, early on, he would do more to manipulate various Federal Agencies and turn them into unmitigated disasters that would no longer serve the people, if they ever do, but screw the people.

This is ultimately what he did with the IRS, The FBI, The Justice Department, The EPA, the Department of Consumer Affairs and even ICE among others.

When the definitive, objective biography of Obama is written he will be revealed as one of the most corrupt lying presidents in modern history.

There will always be those loyalists who will deny history and protect him because they have too much emotionally invested in their belief. These are the same ones who cannot accept Trump is our duly elected president. They live in their cocoon , sleep on a Central Park bench wrapped in The New York Times listening to CNN and MSNBC etc.

Bless their hearts and clueless souls.

As for my "biased" self if you believe, as I do, Obama wanted Hillary protected and elected then everything the FBI did was done with that purpose/goal in mind.  They/Comey changed the interpretation of the written law/statute, they/Comey cleared her before interrogating and then allowed her to have her lawyer present and she was  not under oath when questioned.  Comey made a decision he had no legal right to make because Lynch was also in on the fix under Obama's direction.(The Tarmac airport visit by "Ole" Bill, discussing their grandchildren and yoga.)

Intent is difficult to prove so you have to connect factual dots and evidence.  I learned this in law school but any fool can come to conclusions based on facts without having to go to law school. Even us "Suthners."

Wray chose to swallow the IG report's conclusion for reasons that only he knows but I suspect to  protect The FBI and Mueller's investigation, which is being conducting by another assemblage of Trump Haters.  The FBI did not even examine Hillary's eyes or take her temperature yet, Mueller, and his thuggish investigators,  have engaged in a colonoscopy when it comes to Trump and those connected with him.

The entire episode is just another tragic effort on the part of that thing called "The Deep State," and/or "The Potomac Swamp Gators" trying to perpetuate their control and protect their power over "We The Pitiful People.".
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A different way is tried. (See 2 below.)
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Avi Jorisch is a close personal friend and he has accepted my invitation to discuss his fascinating book: "Thou Shalt Innovate"  under the auspices of the SIRC's  informative monthly discussions 

The program and book signing will begin at 4:30PM, Tuesday, Nov 13th, and will be held at The Plantation Club.

I urge you attend, place this on your calendar and if you are coming from outside The Landings let me know so I can arrange a pass at The Main Gate. (See 3 below.)

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Dick

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1)

James Comey’s Chutzpah

Editorial of The New York Sun

Change the classic definition of chutzpah, we say. Classic chutzpah used to involve the lad who, convicted of murdering his parents, pleads for mercy because he’s an orphan. How, though, can that compete with the disgraced director of the FBI, James Comey, congratulating the Justice Department for its indictment of the way he handled the investigation of Hillary Clinton?

The lawless lawman extended his congratulations via an op-ed piece in the New York Times. That opus may yet win the Pulitzer Prize for Self-Righteousness. “This Report Says I Was Wrong. But That’s Good for the F.B.I.,” is the headline the Times stuck on Mr. Comey’s mind-boggling non culpa mea. Mr. Comey’s lack of self-awareness, his absence of contrition smack of a psychopath.

We say that not because The New York Sun was any fan of prosecuting Hillary Clinton. We endorsed Mr. Trump, but we were never in the lock-her-up camp. On the contrary, we were the first to call for President Obama to pardon Mrs. Clinton. The editor of the Sun wrote two columns to that effect, the second was issued in the New York Post, a day after the election.

Our hope was to heal the country and clear the deck for President Trump, so that his first term wouldn’t get consumed by litigation against his vanquished foe. Mr. Obama lacked the kishkes. He should have gone ahead with it, particularly in view of the support by the Inspector General of the Justice Department for the finding that Mrs. Clinton would not have been prosecuted under normal procedures.

Mr. Comey, of course, makes much of that in his piece in the Times. There’s no escaping, though, that the headline over Mr. Comey’s career will be that he was found to have been a dishonest director. This comes from the finding of the Inspector General that Mr. Comey concealed from the Justice Department his intentions regarding his July 5 press conference clearing Mrs. Clinton.

The reason Mr. Comey concealed his plan to make a statement on the Democratic candidate, he admitted to inspectors, is that he was “concerned that they would instruct him not to do it.” Any honest American, of course, would understand that such a concern would mean he had to address his plan with his superiors. Yet Mr. Comey concealed his intentions and instructed his staff to do so, too.

Remember, it was the attorney general of America who was being kept in the dark. No wonder the Inspector General called it “extraordinary and insubordinate.” It marked a deep character flaw, one that, we suspect, was precisely the flaw that led President Trump to fire Mr. Comey. It is the flaw that led him to scurry out of the president’s presence and craft self-severing memos.

And then, once he was fired, to purloin them and leak them to the Times in the hopes of igniting a special prosecutor. Mr. Comey has got his wish, in that the special prosecution has become a bonfire of justice that threatens to suborn a decision of the voters of 30 of the 50 states. No ordinary prosecutor would have let this get out of hand. It took one disgruntled director to do it by dishonesty.

We will see how the the various authorities, from the ancien regime and the new, come out in what is reportedly a separate look by Justice’s Inspector General into the “Russia investigation,” as the Times calls it. Given the evidence that’s trickled out so far, it’s clear that we have an FBI and special prosecution team infected with fear (and loathing) of Mr. Trump. If the president fired the whole lot of them it wouldn’t be the epic’s greatest act of chutzpah.

1a) The Disgrace of Comey’s FBI

The damning IG report shows the urgent need to restore public trust.

The Editorial Board

The long-awaited Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton investigation makes for depressing reading for anyone who cares about American democracy. Self-government depends on public trust in its institutions, especially law enforcement. The IG’s 568-page report makes clear that the FBI under former director James Comey betrayed that public trust in a way not seen since J. Edgar Hoover.

We use the Hoover analogy advisedly, realizing that the problem in this case was not rampant illegal spying. Though IG Michael Horowitz’s conclusions are measured, his facts are damning. They show that Mr. Comey abused his authority, broke with long-established Justice Department norms, and deceived his superiors and the public.

While the IG says Mr. Comey’s decisions were not the result of “political bias,” he presided over an investigating team that included agents who clearly were biased against Donald Trump. The damage to the bureau’s reputation—and to thousands of honest agents—will take years to repair.

The issue of political bias is almost beside the point. The IG scores Mr. Comey for “ad hoc decisionmaking based on his personal views.” Like Hoover, Mr. Comey believed that he alone could protect the public trust. And like Hoover, this hubris led him to make egregious mistakes of judgment that the IG says “negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice.”

The report scores Mr. Comey in particular for his “conscious decision not to tell [Justice] Department leadership about his plans to independently announce” an end to the investigation at his July 5 press conference in which he exonerated but criticized Mrs. Clinton. And the IG also scores his action 11 days before the 2016 presidential election, on October 28, to send a letter to Congress saying the investigation had been reopened.

The decision to prosecute belongs to the Attorney General and Justice, not the FBI. And the FBI does not release derogatory information on someone against whom it is not bringing charges. Regarding the October letter informing Congress that the FBI was renewing the investigation, FBI policy is not to announce investigations. “We found unpersuasive Comey’s explanation,” deadpans the IG.

“We found that it was extraordinary and insubordinate for Comey to conceal his intentions from his superiors, the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, for the admitted purpose of preventing them from telling him not to make the statement, and to instruct his subordinates in the FBI to do the same,” says the report.

“Comey waited until the morning of his press conference to inform [Attorney General Loretta] Lynch and [Deputy Attorney General Sally ] Yates of his plans to hold one without them, and did so only after first notifying the press. As a result, Lynch’s office learned about Comey’s plans via press inquiries rather than from Comey. Moreover, when Comey spoke with Lynch he did not tell her what he intended to say in his statement.”

All of this underscores the case that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made when he advised President Trump in May 2017 that he should fire Mr. Comey. The President’s mistake was not firing Mr. Comey immediately upon taking office on Jan. 20, 2017, as some of us advised at the time.

As for political bias, the IG devotes a chapter to the highly partisan texts exchanged over FBI phones between FBI personnel. The IG says he found no evidence that political bias affected investigative decisions, but the details will be fodder for those who think otherwise.

For one thing, the political opinions ran in only one direction—against Mr. Trump. Then there is the case of FBI agent Peter Strzok and his decision to prioritize the Russian investigation over following up on Mrs. Clinton’s emails. The IG concludes that Mr. Strzok’s “text messages led us to conclude that we did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision was free from bias.”

The specific Strzok message the IG cites is one in which he responded to a text from his paramour, Lisa Page, asking for reassurance that Mr. Trump was “not ever going to become president, right?” Mr. Strzok replied, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”

Senator Ron Johnson’s office reports that his committee had received the first part of this exchange— Ms. Page’s question—from Justice. But somehow Mr. Strzok’s astonishing reply wasn’t included. If this was deliberate, the official who ordered this exclusion should be publicly identified and fired.

The report also chronicles a long list of other questionable judgments by the FBI and Justice. These include waiting until late October to announce that the FBI was seeking a search warrant for Anthony Weiner’s laptop, though “virtually every fact that was cited” to justify the move had been known a month before.

And the report criticizes the decision to let Mrs. Clinton’s attorneys, Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, attend the FBI’s interview with Mrs. Clinton when they were potential witnesses to her possible offenses. This was “inconsistent with typical investigative strategy and gave rise to accusations of bias and preferential treatment,” the IG says.

The unavoidable conclusion is that Mr. Comey’s FBI became a law unto itself, accountable to no one but the former director’s self-righteous conscience. His refusal to follow proper guidelines interfered with a presidential election campaign in a way that has caused millions of Americans in both parties to justifiably cry foul.

This should never happen in a democracy, and steps must be taken so that it never does again. Mr. Horowitz deserves credit for an investigation that was thorough, informative and unplagued by leaks. But it is not the final word. Next week he will be testifying before Congress to flesh out and clarify his findings. Congress should also call FBI agents as witnesses.

The larger damage here is to trust in institutions that are vital to self-government. Mr. Trump will use the facts to attack the FBI, but most agents are honest and nonpartisan. Christopher Wray, the new FBI director, promised Thursday to implement the IG’s recommendations, but his cleanup task is larger. He can start by ending the FBI’s stonewall of Congress on document requests.

Mr. Wray and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have to understand that radical measures are needed to restore public trust in both the FBI and Justice Department. If they won’t do it, someone else must.

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2) The Donald Trump Negotiations Academy

By Caroline B. Glick

The president's playbook involves doing essentially the opposite of what American and Israeli negotiators have been doing for the past 30 year

We didn’t learn this week whether North Korea will give up its nuclear weapons. Only time will tell.

But we did learn that US President Donald Trump knows how to negotiate.

All of the negotiations experts insist the opposite is true. “How could they agree to a presidential summit without first

guaranteeing its end product?” they sigh, knowingly.

“Trump’s showmanship is dangerous and counterproductive,” they sneer.

“At the end of the day, for this to work, Trump will have to copy Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran,” they insist.

Dennis Ross, who mediated the negotiations between Israel and the PLO that led directly to the largest Palestinian terrorism campaign against Israel in history, and Wendy Sherman, who negotiated Bill Clinton’s horrible nuclear deal with North Korea in 1994 and Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, as well as all their esteemed colleagues have taken up their pens and stood before the cameras and clucked about how Trump’s Singapore show is amateur hour.

But what we actually saw in Singapore, for the first time since Ronald Reagan went to Reykjavik, was a US president who actually knew how to negotiate with America’s enemies.

Indeed, Singapore was the first time a Western leader from any nation has gotten the better of his opponent at the negotiating table.

There are three dangers inherent to the process of negotiating with enemies. And to understand how Trump succeeded where everyone since Reagan has failed, it is important to keep them in mind.

First, you have no guarantee that the other side will agree to a deal.

Trump can make the case for denuclearization to Kim. But he can’t make Kim agree to denuclearize.

Since the US has not defeated North Korea militarily, only Kim can decide whether to go along with Trump or not.

The first inherent danger of negotiating then, is that the other side walks away and – as PLO chief Yasser Arafat did in 2000 – chooses to make war instead of peace. Negotiations give credibility to the other side and may, as a consequence, make war a more attractive option for your opponent after a period of negotiations than it was when the talks began.

The last two dangers inherent to negotiations have to do with the actions of Western negotiators and leaders.

Democratically elected leaders have a greater tendency than dictators to become convinced that their political survival is dependent on their ability to deliver a deal. Once that happens, once a leader believes that the risk of failure is too great to accept, he becomes a hostage of the other side. 

In 2000, then-prime minister Ehud Barak believed that his only chance of political survival was to convince Arafat to accept a peace deal with Israel. As a consequence, Barak stayed in the negotiations even after Arafat rejected his offer and tanked the Camp David summit in July. He remained in talks with Arafat and his deputies even after they launched the most murderous terror war Israel had ever seen.

The third danger inherent to negotiating with your enemy is related to the second danger. If a leader believes his future depends on getting a deal, the likelihood that he will accept a terrible deal skyrockets.

Obama made reaching a nuclear deal with Iran the chief aim of his second term. To achieve this goal, Obama abandoned every redline he set for himself. He let Iran continue enriching uranium.

He made no demand that Tehran curtail its ballistic missile development. He agreed to gut the inspections regime to the point of meaninglessness. And so on down the line.

Obama was so averse to coming home empty- handed that he agreed to a deal that far from blocking Iran’s path to a nuclear arsenal, paved Iran’s path to a nuclear arsenal. And he threw in $150 billion in sanctions relief to pay for Iran’s efforts to achieve regional hegemony as a sweetener.

With these risks in mind, we turn to the Singapore Summit. Trump’s playbook involves doing essentially the opposite of what American and Israeli negotiators have been doing for the past 30 years.

Five lessons stand out.

1. Don’t make light of your counterpart’s failings, play them up.

For decades, Israeli negotiators praised Arafat as a man of courage and Abbas as a moderate. Obama and his team praised Iranian President Hassan Rouhani as a moderate. By praising their opponents, the Israelis and Americans justified making concessions to their counterparts, without requiring them to reciprocate. In other words, Israeli and US negotiators put the burden to prove good intentions on themselves, rather than their opponents, who actually had no credibility at all.

Trump took the opposite approach. After North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile last July, Trump called Kim “Little Rocket Man” and a “madman.”

By polarizing Kim and blaming him for the growing danger to US national security, Trump made the case that Kim had to prove his good intentions to Trump, not the other way around, as a precondition for negotiations. Kim was required to release three American hostages and blow up his nuclear test site.

He was the one who needed to prove his credibility. Not Trump.

2. Intimidate, don’t woo, your opponent’s friends.

Trump’s three predecessors all begged the Chinese to rein in the North Koreans. In doing so, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama handed all the leverage to Beijing. To curb North Korea even temporarily, the Chinese demanded continuous US concessions, and they received them.

Trump on the other hand, threatened China. He linked US-China trade deals to Chinese assistance in curtailing North Korean threats and aggression and agreeing to a US goal of denuclearizing China’s client state.

To prove his seriousness, Trump managed to lob 58 missiles at Syrian targets in retaliation for Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons while he was eating dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping at his golf club in Florida.

Trump’s linkage of US-China trade to North Korean denuclearization has paid off. Xi cut off North Korean coal exports to China and limited fuel shipments from China to North Korea. A month later, Kim announced he wanted to meet with his South Korean counterpart.

3. Make it easy for your side to walk away from the table and hard for the other side to jump ship.

Trump accomplished this goal through a series of moves. First, he and Defense Secretary James Mattis threatened to destroy North Korea. Second, Trump coupled the threats with the largest increase in defense spending in memory. Third, Trump has repeated, endlessly, that he has no idea whether talks with Kim will lead to an agreement, but he figures it’s worth a shot. Finally, after Kim insulted National Security Adviser John Bolton, Trump canceled the summit.

Not only did Trump’s polling numbers not suffer from canceling the summit, they improved. As for Kim, Trump’s nixing the summit taught him two lessons. First, he learned the price of failure.

Second, Kim learned that unlike his predecessors, Trump doesn’t fear walking away. Indeed, he’ll walk away over something that none of his counterparts would ever dream of jumping ship for. If Kim wants to negotiate with Trump, he will respect Trump’s choices.

4. Appoint hard-line negotiators.

Kim’s attack on Bolton was reasonable from his perspective. Ever since Clinton signed his failed nuclear deal with Kim’s father in 1994, Bolton has been the most outspoken critic of nuclear diplomacy with North Korea in Washington. Bolton opposed – rightly – every diplomatic initiative and agreement every administration adopted with Pyongyang. There is literally no one in Washington more skeptical of the chances that an agreement with North Korea will succeed than Bolton.

And there he was on Tuesday, sitting at the negotiating table in Singapore.

For the past generation, American and Israeli leaders engaging in negotiations with their enemies have given their opponents a say – indeed, they have routinely given them veto power – over the members of their negotiating teams. US and Israeli leaders used their team roster as yet another tool to appease the other side. This, while ignoring the concerns of their domestic constituencies.

Trump took the opposite approach. After setting up the talks in a manner that minimizes the cost of walking away from the table for him and maximizes the cost for Kim, he chose negotiators that would both minimize the chance of reaching a bad deal and assuage and encourage his constituents that he can be trusted. Both Trump’s supporters and detractors know that so long as Bolton is at the table, the chance of the US agreeing to a bad deal is fairly close to zero. Trump’s rising poll numbers and the fact that the majority of Americans support his negotiations with Kim show that his efforts have paid off politically.
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3)Thou Shalt Innovate

How Israeli Ingenuity Repairs the World

Avi Jorisch

Thou Shalt Innovate profiles wondrous Israeli innovations that are collectively changing the lives of billions of people around the world and explores why Israeli innovators of all faiths feel compelled to make the world better. This is the story of how Israelis are helping to feed the hungry, cure the sick, protect the defenseless, and make the desert bloom. Israel is playing a disproportionate role in helping solve some of the world’s biggest challenges by tapping into the nation’s soul: the spirit of tikkun olam – the Jewish concept of repairing the world.

There is no single narrative that fully describes the State of Israel. But there is also no denying that Israel has extraordinary innovators who are bound together by their desire to save lives and find higher purpose. Thou Shalt Innovate introduces the reader to Israelis who exude light in the face of the darkness, people who have chosen hope and healing over death and destruction. In a world that has more than its share of darkness, these stories are rays of light.

Key Points

·      Features fifteen astonishing Israeli inventions that are changing the world, plus Israel's top 50 innovations since the founding of the State.

·      Examines the driving force behind Israel’s outstanding contributions to technology, science, agriculture, water management, and defense.

·      Based on extensive research and over one hundred personal interviews.

·      Written by a Middle East insider.

Avi Jorisch is a seasoned entrepreneur and Middle East expert. He is a Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council and founder of IMS, a merchant processing company that services clients nationwide. Mr. Jorisch is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Entrepreneur’s Organization. A thought leader in exploring global trends in the Arab world, radical Islam, counterterrorism, and illicit finance, Mr. Jorisch served as a policy advisor at the Treasury Department’s office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. He holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Binghamton University and a master’s degree in Islamic history from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also studied Arabic and Islamic philosophy at the American University in Cairo and al-Azhar University, the preeminent institution of Sunni Islamic learning. His articles have appeared in influential outlets including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Forbes, and Al-Arabiya.net.

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