"Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, while Democrats believe every day is April 15." --- Ronald Reagan
---
A woman was sipping on a glass of wine, while sitting on the patio with
her husband, and she says, "I love you so much, I don't know how I could
ever live without you."
Her husband asks, "Is that you, or the wine talking?"
She replies, "It's me ............ talking to the wine."
---
Rubio does not refer to our president as Mark Halperin did but Rubio thinks about Obama's presidency in much the same way.
In Democrat politics, we have gone from Weiner to 'schmuck' all in one month and the latter on the most liberal of all cable stations- MSNBC! (See 1 below.)
---
Can Obama's foreign policy outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood be likened to that telephone TV ad - 'reach out and touch someone!' (See 2 below.)
Is The White House beginning to be concerned about the Jewish vote? They must have talked to Jimmy and followed his advice - turn your back on your ally and everything will work out just fine as it did in Iran.
Are Liberal Jews beginning to open their eyes? Probably some but I still believe at least 50% are going to cast their votes for Obama because they will find a convenient excuse not to vote for GW and Palin even though they are not running. (See 2a below. [Posting again.])
---
Obama's new policy to protect our nation from terrorists is investigate and then prosecute members of The CIA. Maybe The Black Panthers should be enlisted by the CIA - they seem to be Teflon protected.
To further protect our nation from terrorists the Obama Administration, according to Dick Morris, has placed citizens of Israel visiting our country on their terrorist watch list. (See 3 and 3a below.)
Elliot Abrams, who is in Israel as I write, offers his thoughts regarding Obama and Israel. (See 3b below.)
Meanwhile, Obama is preparing to answer critics of his policies towards Israel because he is worried about losing the Jewish vote and money.
I suspect Obama will drive more Jews away because I doubt his defense will hold water. Why? Because Obama's spokespersons' defense will be seen as questionable in view of their own lack of objectivity and closeness to Obama. Methinks they will protest too much and be seen as overreaching. Why the need for such an effort? Simply because Obama has been found wanting and more are now focusing on his walk and paying less attention to his talk.
Obama's lack of believability with respect to Israel is further buttressed by his talk and walk routine on a host of other issues.Obama's silver tongue has become tarnished.(See 3c below.)
---
If you cannot win legitimately then steal it and I would not put anything past Obama and his crowd. (See 4 below.)
---
Does Obama use the shield of the U.N. as his weapon to bludgeon Israel? Has Obama replaced Congress by the U.N. You decide! Libya is his latest homage. (See 5 below.)
---
One of the hardest things is to find reliable people who are competent in servicing various equipment. Dale Taylor fixes lamps and lighting fixtures and will pick up. His cell is 912 481 2937.
---
Dick
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)Rubio Blasts Obama: ‘Left-Wing Strong Man’
By Robert Costa
Earlier this month, Sen. Marco Rubio made an auspicious debut.
Unlike so many first turns in the upper chamber, Rubio’s stirring remarks, which celebrated American exceptionalism, caught fire. The Florida Republican’s words were cited by Senate colleagues and championed by conservatives. To no one’s surprise, the push to put Rubio on the 2012 ticket only increased, even though the charismatic freshman continues to swat away the chatter.
Look for the Rubio buzz to continue. In an interview with National Review Online, he says that he will take to the Senate floor for his second speech this week — and this time he will have President Obama in his crosshairs.
Rubio tells us that he will respond to Obama’s recent press conference, where the president reveled in class-warfare bluster. “Quite frankly, I am both disappointed for our country and shocked at some of the rhetoric,” he says. “It was rhetoric, I thought, that was more appropriate for some left-wing strong man than for the president of the United States.”
“Talking about corporate jets and oil companies,” Rubio says, missed the point. “Everybody here agrees that our tax code is broken,” he says, and he is open to discussing tax reform. “But don’t go around telling people that the reason you are not doing well is because some rich guy is in a corporate jet or some oil company is making too much money.”
Watching Obama brandish such talking points made Rubio wince. “Three years into his presidency, he is a failed president,” he says. “He just has not done a good job. Life in America today, by every measure, is worse than it was when he took over.”
“When does it start to get better?” Rubio asks. “When does the magic of this president start to happen?”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)Obama Reaches Out To Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood
The Obama administration is reaching out to the Muslim Brotherhood in a "limited" effort to build ties and promote democratic principles ahead of Egypt's upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says the U.S. isn't adopting a new policy. The administration simply wants to engage all Egyptian groups that espouse non-violence.
Clinton says hardline group must also respect minority rights and complete inclusion of women in the political sphere.
The Brotherhood favors a regime guided by Islamic Sharia law and was outlawed under former strongman Hosni Mubarak.
Israel is wary of any engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood because of the hostility of many of its members.
2a)White House worried about losing Jewish support
Democrats are very concerned that the administration's policy toward Israel will cost them money and votes in 2012. Ben Smith reports in Politico:
David Ainsman really began to get worried about President Barack Obama's standing with his fellow Jewish Democrats when a recent dinner with his wife and two other couples - all Obama voters in 2008 - nearly turned into a screaming match.
Ainsman, a prominent Democratic lawyer and Pittsburgh Jewish community leader, was trying to explain that Obama had just been offering Israel a bit of "tough love" in his May 19 speech on the Arab Spring. His friends disagreed - to say the least.
One said he had the sense that Obama "took the opportunity to throw Israel under the bus." Another, who swore he wasn't getting his information from the mutually despised Fox News, admitted he'd lost faith in the president.
If several dozen interviews with POLITICO are any indication, a similar conversation is taking place in Jewish communities across the country.
...Most of those interviewed were center-left American Jews and Obama supporters - and many of them Democratic donors. On some core issues involving Israel, they're well to the left of Netanyahu and many Americans... But they are also fearful for Israel at a moment of turmoil in a hostile region when the moderate Palestinian Authority is joining forces with the militantly anti-Israel Hamas.
READ MORE
A discussion at Politico's forum, The Arena, centered on whether Obama's Jewish support is slipping. RJC Executive Director Matt Brooks got into the debate:
While it is a fact that no modern Republican presidential candidate has yet matched the 39 percent of the Jewish vote that Ronald Reagan received in 1980, there has, however, been an unmistakable trend in Jewish voting, with Republicans gaining a larger share of the Jewish vote in presidential elections and doing well in the community in other races.
Looking just at presidential elections, the percentage of the Jewish vote that went to Republicans was: 1992 - 11 percent; 1996 - 16 percent; 2000 -19 percent; and 2004 - 24 percent. John McCain held on to 22 percent of the Jewish vote in 2008 but that drop off was small and understandable considering the tremendous political tsunami the GOP faced that year.
...Today, there is a significant sense of "buyer's remorse" in the Jewish community. We hear frequently from former Democrats who are horrified by Pres. Obama's policies toward Israel, alarmed at his health care policies, and dismayed at the economic policies that have kept Americans out of work and mired in a deep recession.
...Without question, that is why the Democrats are working at a feverish pace to try to engage in damage control and end the erosion of support that is taking place among Jewish voters.
-
The Jewish vote reconsidered
In a multi-part series at Commentary, Jonathan Tobin takes a new look at how Jewish voters may respond to Pres. Obama's strained relations with Israel:
Every time anyone suggests Barack Obama's hostility to Israel will cost him some Jewish votes, the anger from both the Democratic Party establishment as well as outraged liberals is considerable. So it was little surprise Ben Smith's report yesterday in Politico generated considerable pushback from those invested in the continuation of the political status quo in the Jewish community. But, as I wrote yesterday, the problem for Democrats is not the once fashionable idea Jews were being seduced by the lure of conservative ideology, but the plain fact the leader of their party is someone who has a problem with Israel.
...Obama has picked fights with Israel almost from the first day of his administration. While he has not trashed the alliance altogether, something that would be too politically costly to even contemplate, the president has staked out new ground on settlements, borders and particularly Jerusalem that were different from those of his predecessors and which have tilted the diplomatic playing field against Israel. His ambush of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month may have backfired on him as the Israeli was able to make his defiance of the president's dictat on borders stand up to the cheers of Congress, but there was no mistaking Obama's hostility. The idea this can be explained or rationalized is wishful thinking on the part of Democrats. Those voters who consider a candidate's attitude toward Israel when they decide whom to vote for are bound to think less well of Barack Obama next year.
READ MORE OF PART ONE
Tobin continues with a look at who the pro-Israel, Jewish Democrat swing-voters are:
[A] majority of Jewish voters will probably stick with Barack Obama next year no matter how bad his relationship gets with Israel. But that does not mean a significant shift in the Jewish vote might not occur. Though many Jews either don't care about Israel or even actively identify with those who want more U.S. pressure on it, there are still a large number of liberal Democratic Jews who are passionate supporters of Israel. As their support for Obama in 2008 demonstrated, their standards for judging Democrats are far more lenient than those applied to Republicans. But it is simply untrue to claim this group is unaware of or unmoved by Obama's hostile actions, or the basic fact most Israelis view the president as an adversary of their country.
It is this group that may account for as much as 20 percent or more of the Jewish vote. That total is the difference between the nearly 80 percent Obama garnered in 2008 and the combined vote for Jimmy Carter and John Anderson in 1980 that came to nearly 60 percent, which represents the historic low point for the Democrats in terms of the Jewish vote. It is this group that could make up as much as a fifth or more of all Jewish voters who are in play in 2012.
Is that something for Democrats to worry about? You bet it is.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)Holder Orders Probe of CIA Al-Qaida Interrogations
The Justice Department inquiry into CIA interrogations of terrorist detainees has led to a full criminal investigation into the deaths of two people while they were in custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, Attorney General Eric Holder announced Thursday.
The attorney general said that he accepted the recommendation of a federal prosecutor, John Durham, who since August 2009 has conducted an inquiry into CIA interrogation practices during the Bush administration. Holder said Durham looked at the treatment of 101 detainees in U.S. custody since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and concluded that only these two deaths warranted criminal investigation. Holder said Durham found some of the 101 had never been held by the CIA.
Holder did not identify the two death cases. But former and current U.S. officials who requested anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation said Durham was looking at the deaths of Gul Rahman and Manadel al-Jamadi.
Rahman died in the early hours of Nov. 20, 2002, after being shackled to a cold cement wall in a secret CIA prison in northern Kabul, Afghanistan, known as the Salt Pit. He was suspected of links to the terrorist group al-Qaida. Rahman is the only detainee known to have died in a CIA-run prison.
Al-Jamadi died in 2003 at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The death has been known to the public for years and a military autopsy declared al-Jamadi's death a homicide.
This month, a former Abu Ghraib prison guard at the time of al-Jamadi's death, Lynndie England, was ordered to testify in a grand jury probe in Alexandria, Va. A subpoena signed by Durham for England's appearance says her testimony is needed in a probe of federal criminal laws involving war crimes, torture and other offenses. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the subpoena.
England, an Army reservist serving as a military policeman at Abu Ghraib, was among 11 soldiers found guilty of wrongdoing in the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003 and 2004. Photographs showed England holding a restraint around a man's neck, and giving a thumbs-up and pointing at the genitals of naked, hooded men, a cigarette dangling from her mouth.
England's attorney, Roy Hardy, told the AP that England testified along with former MPs Chip Frederick and Sabrina Harman before the grand jury earlier this month.
On his last day as CIA director, Leon Panetta emphasized the wide scope of Durham's preliminary review.
"After extensive examination of more than 100 instances in which CIA had contact or was alleged to have had contact with terrorist detainees," the prosecutor "has determined that no further law enforcement action is appropriate in all but two discrete cases," Panetta, who will be sworn in Friday as the new defense secretary, said in a statement.
Panetta added that "both cases were previously reviewed by career federal prosecutors who subsequently declined prosecution."
"I welcome the news that the broader inquiries are behind us," Panetta said. "We are now finally about to close this chapter of our agency's history."
Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he welcomes the Justice Department's decision to end criminal investigations "against the vast majority of CIA interrogators."
The outlines of al-Jamadi's death have long been known.
A CIA officer at Abu Ghraib was sanctioned for not having a doctor examine al-Jamadi when he arrived at the prison badly injured from a struggle with Navy SEALs.
That officer, whom the AP is identifying only as Steve because he worked undercover, was a focus of the CIA's internal investigation. Steve ran the detainee exploitation cell at Abu Ghraib and had done similar work with the agency in Afghanistan. Steve later retired from the CIA. The AP also has identified another CIA officer with the agency's Special Activities Division connected to al-Jamadi's death. He remains undercover.
Rahman's identity was not known until revealed by an AP investigation.
Former CIA officials say Rahman was acting as a conduit between militant Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and al-Qaida. Hekmatyar's insurgent group is believed to be allied with al-Qaida. The former officials said the CIA had been tracking Rahman's cell phone at the time of his capture and were hoping the suspected militant would provide information about Hekmatyar's whereabouts.
But Rahman never cracked under questioning, refusing to help the CIA find Hekmatyar. Former CIA officials described him as one of the toughest detainees to pass through the CIA's network of secret prisons.
The young CIA officer running the prison at the time was never formally reprimanded in the case and remains working undercover for the agency.
The same day in August 2009 that the government made public a CIA inspector general's report that said the agency had used some "unauthorized, improvised, inhumane" tactics in terrorist interrogations, Holder directed Durham to look into claims of abuse during CIA interrogations. At the time, Durham was already investigating the destruction of CIA interrogation videos showing waterboarding of terrorist suspects. That part of Durham's investigation ended last November, when Durham cleared the CIA's former top clandestine officer and others of any charges for destroying the agency videotapes of waterboarding, which evokes the sensation of drowning.
AP Intelligence Writer Kimberly Dozier in Washington and AP writer Vicki Smith in Morgantown, W.Va., contributed to this report.
3a)OBAMA ADMIN LISTS ISRAEL AS TERROR SPONSOR
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) maintains a list of “specially designated countries” (SDCs) that “have shown a tendency to promote, produce or protect terrorist organizations or their members.” The folks from these nations get special scrutiny when they enter the U.S.
Here’s the list:
Afghanistan
West Bank
Algeria
Bahrain
Oman
Bangladesh
Pakistan
Philippines
Egypt
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Indonesia
Somalia
Iran
Sudan
Iraq
Syria
Israel
And so forth.
Israel? Yes Israel is one of the thirty-six SDCs that “promote, produce, or protect” terrorists, according to the Obama Administration. With splendid equality, they manage to list the world’s biggest victim alongside the globe’s leading perpetrators of terrorism. Israelis coming into America get the same high level of scrutiny that Iranians do!
This information, which comes to us courtesy of the wonderful website www.ruthfullyyours.com, is as shocking as it is credible.
That Obama has tried to maintain that there is a moral equilibrium between Israel and the aggressive Arabs that surround it is well known. But to list Israel as a promoter, protector, or producer of terrorism is quite extraordinary.
Doubtless some politically correct soul at ICE or in the State Department felt that the U.S. needed to show impartiality in making up its list and include non-Muslim countries. What better rebuttal to those who would claim that the ICE is profiling Muslims than to say that Israel is also on the list?
But Israel’s inclusion on the list, to say nothing of the indignity inflicted on its citizens as they seek to enter the United States, is an insult and must be corrected at once!
3b)Abrams on Obama: He sees Israel as a problem to solve
By HERB KEINON
In an interview with ‘The Jerusalem Post,’ the former top aide to George W. Bush explains his difficulties with the current president’s positions.
Elliott Abrams, one of former US president George Bush’s top Middle East advisers, is not known to mince words. So it was no surprise, really, when at a panel last week at the Presidential Conference in Jerusalem he said bluntly that “there is no great love” in President Barack Obama’s heart for Israel.
But as he was sitting on a panel with two strong Obama supporters, former congressman Robert Wexler and former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, this comment did not go unchallenged.
Wexler launched into a spirited and sarcastic rebuttal, presenting a checklist of actions Obama has taken that he said proved where the president’s heart was.
These steps included encouraging a security relationship between Israel and the US that is “unprecedented in terms of depth and profound engagement”; cancelling involvement in a Turkish military maneuver when the Turks disinvited Israel; sending the largest contingency of US military ever to dock at Haifa Port; ensuring that the OECD countries voted to let Israel into that prestigious club; lobbying the leaders of Britain, France and Germany not to support the PA’s statehood bid at the UN; overseeing the largest amount of military aid, $3 billion, ever approved for Israel; and pushing through an additional $205 million appropriation for Iron Dome development and purchase.
Sounds, Wexler said, like a whole lotta love to him.
Abrams didn’t really get to reply at the panel, but was able to do so in a later interview with The Jerusalem Post, in which he explained what he meant on this particular issue, and expanded on others.
“Bob was making a campaign speech,” he said of Wexler’s checklist. “I don’t want to be portrayed as saying the president hates Israel and is an enemy of Israel, because that is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that we had two consecutive presidents [Bush and Bill Clinton] who had a special consideration for Israel, who viewed Israel as a great ally. I think President Obama views Israel as a problem that needs to be solved.”
Abrams said that this was most evident at the United Nations.
Bush’s attitude, Abrams said, was that the UN “is against Israel, and that it is completely unfair and biased.” The upshot of that during his term was that “if something comes up, you veto it, and you’re done with it. You’ve then done a good deed.”
Indeed, he said, the Bush administration cast nine vetoes blocking anti-Israel resolutions in the Security Council over an eight-year span.
The Obama administration, by contrast, “is desperate to avoid vetoes,” he said.
“They don’t like to veto anything at any time. I believe they hoped initially to get through four years without a veto, and they got through two years without a veto.”
Earlier in the year, the US cast a veto against an anti-settlement resolution. But Abrams said that if you looked at US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice’s explanation of the veto, in which she, too, slammed settlement activity, “you see how unhappy she was” at casting it.
Abrams also suggested Wexler was being a bit disingenuous by giving Obama credit for this year’s $3b. military assistance package, saying that package had been negotiated during the Olmert-Bush years. “To give Obama or Netanyahu credit for that is wrong,” he said.
Regarding the security cooperation and Iron Dome assistance, Abrams – who did not contest that US-Israel security cooperation is now at its highest point ever – said there was no question that the president or the defense secretary could, if they wanted to, tone down the military-to-military relationship.
That the president had not interfered, Abrams said, was indeed to Obama’s credit.
And then Abrams added the “but”: Were the president to reduce the level of cooperation, or cancel exercises or high-level meetings between generals, that would become known, “and the rumblings, the unhappiness in the American Jewish community would become greater. So there is politics that would play here,” he said.
As to the additional Iron Dome funding, Abrams said, “First, it is a terrific thing that he did.” Second, he added, it is “very much in the interest of the US that he did it,” since a good, working Iron Dome system is beneficial to the US as well.
“After all, we have missile threats, too,” he said of the system that defends against short-range rockets and artillery shells.
“We are the only country with serious [military] bases all over the world,” he continued. “Missile defense is a very important thing for us – we are very good with long-range missile defense systems developed in the days of USSR, but Israel is at the forefront in the short-range missile defense – systems like Iron Dome.
This is very critical for a country with lots of bases in disputed locations. We have tens of thousands of troops in Korea within range of Korean missiles; we have troops in the Persian Gulf. The Iron Dome is great for the US.”
Abrams, who today is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Washington- based Council on Foreign Relations, had a hand in drafting the 2004 Bush letter to then-prime minister Ariel Sharon stating that the US believed the Palestine refugee problem should be settled in a Palestinian state, rather than Israel, and that it was unrealistic to expect that an Israeli-Palestinian agreement would mean a full and complete return to the 1949 armistice lines.
One of the sources of contention between the Netanyahu and Obama administrations since they took power in early 2009 was the status of that letter, with the prime minister wanting to pin Obama down to reaffirm it, and Obama unwilling to do so.
And this, at least for Abrams, signified a “huge” Obama mistake.
“I think the administration from the very beginning has taken the opinion that it was kind of a private letter from Bush to Sharon. But that’s wrong – it was very public, and was endorsed in overwhelming votes in both houses of Congress,” he said.
“Now we are asking Israel to take risks, we are always asking Israel to take risks, and it is reasonable to say, ‘What is the American position?’ If the American position is going to change every couple of years, then there is no American position, and there are no guarantees at all.”
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, according to Abrams, is very well within his rights to ask Obama how he views the letter.
If Obama’s answer is that the letter has no significance, that it “is just the private promise of a former president,” then Netanyahu could fairly ask why any future Obama promise would be any different, he said.
And the implications of that question are serious, not only for Israel, he went on; “I think it is very damaging to the US as an actor in international politics for a president to say, ‘Whatever my predecessor said, forget about it.’ Particularly, when it is formal, not private, and both houses of Congress endorsed it.”
Also disconcerting, Abrams said, was that certain comments Obama had made recently ran against the grain of the letter.
“First, I don’t think that the president has been as clear as he should have on the Palestinian refugee issue. I think he ought to say clearly that the Palestinian refugee problem will be addressed and solved in Palestine, as the Bush letter put it, rather than Israel. I don’t think there should be any pressure at all to take one single Palestinian.
There wasn’t in the Bush administration, and there shouldn’t be now. That is one big difference,” he said.
“The other big difference is this question of borders and swaps, because the position in the Bush letter was that you guys have to agree on a border, and that we are not going to dictate a border,” he continued.
“But one thing is pretty clear; it is not going to be the 1949 armistice line.”
ABRAMS SAID there was a significant difference between what appeared in the Bush letter and Obama’s comment that negotiations ought to start now on the basis of the 1967 lines, with mutually agreed swaps.
“When Obama says you need to agree on a border, and that it will be based on 1967 lines with agreed swaps, that undermines the Israeli negotiating position. By saying that, you are giving that border greater weight. You are not saying, ‘Hey, look, that was an armistice line from 1949 – it has no legitimacy, you guys have to negotiate a border.’ And then, when Obama added in the comment about mutually agreed swaps, my question is always, ‘Are you telling me Israel has to give up sovereign Green Line territory to keep the Kotel?’ That is ridiculous.”
Abrams said that while it was conceivable that Israel would agree to swaps, and that former prime minister Ehud Olmert had proposed one-to-one swaps for everything, “[it] is the sovereign right of Israel to make any deal it wants. But why should the US be weakening the Israeli negotiating position by even suggesting there have to be swaps for every deviation from the 1949 armistice line? It’s one thing to say there will be swaps for Ariel, another for the Kotel.”
He added that “Bush did Israel a favor by saying there would be no return to the 1949 lines, and I think you have to say that helped Israel, and didn’t help the Palestinians. I think the additional Obama formulation hurt Israel, and helped the Palestinians.”
He dismissed the notion that Sharon was “naïve” in putting so much faith in the Bush letter, and in fact used to wave it as “ideological compensation” for withdrawal from Gaza.
“I don’t think it was naïve. You have a very formal communication, it is not a law, not a treaty, but it was a carefully negotiated document endorsed by both houses of Congress. It was reasonable to expect – it was wrong – but it was reasonable to expect that another president would treat it pretty seriously, and this president has not treated it seriously.”
One element of the letter that Obama did incorporate in his speeches on the Middle East in May was that the US remained committed – as the letter stated – to Israel’s ability to “deter and defend itself, by itself, against any threat or possible combination of threats.”
Or, as Obama said at the annual AIPAC conference, “every state has the right to self-defense, and Israel must be able to defend itself – by itself – against any threat.”
What that line meant, Abrams explained, was that the US “is not going to say, ‘Don’t worry about taking security risks because we are behind you,’ because that is a meaningless guarantee.”
He said this line was important because it was a US commitment to “help Israel defend itself so it won’t get into a situation where it will need American troops or an American airlift.”
“Putting American munitions here, which we started doing in a big way under Bush, is a way of saying the same thing,” he said. “Why are we doing this? So that in an extreme situation there won’t be the need to airlift munitions here, so that Israel will be able to defend itself by itself.”
With the 2012 US presidential election now beginning to loom large, Abrams was asked whether Israel had what to fear from a second Obama term.
“The question is, to what degree is his pressure on Israel constrained by domestic politics and the need to be reelected?” Abrams replied. “If the answer is not at all, then you have nothing to fear. But if the answer is that it is probably constrained a good deal, and that in a second term he would be putting much more pressure on Israel – he would be allowing UN votes condemning Israel that he wouldn’t veto, he would be putting much more pressure on behalf of the Palestinians to get a deal that Israel may not like – then you have to worry about it.”
Abrams said he felt that domestic politics had constrained Obama until now.
“I think that the president, as I said, doesn’t get it fundamentally. There is something missing in his attitude toward Israel that Bush and Clinton had; some kind of fundamental sympathy with the plight of Israel in the world community.
He has an intellectual understanding of this, but he doesn’t seem to have an emotional understanding of this at the deepest level. He seems to view Israel, as I believe, as a problem for the US, one of our many problems around the world, rather than having an emotional attachment to it or viewing it fundamentally as a very valuable ally.”
Israel, Abrams implied, should not be intoxicated by the resounding reception Netanyahu received when he addressed Congress in May, because “fundamentally the foreign policy of the US is under the control of the president.”
Granted, Congress has power of the purse and can “wreck” the president’s foreign policy, but “normally the foreign policy is under the president. And if the president decides that he is going to force Israel into negotiations, and force it to make compromises in those negotiations, despite the views of its prime minister, then he can go pretty far.”•make compromises in those negotiations, despite the views of its prime minister, then he can go pretty far.”
3c)Obama campaign to go on the offensive against conservative critics of Israel stance
By Greg Sargent
Obama’s top presidential campaign advisers are putting together a plan to go on the offensive against critics of his stance on Israel, I’m told, and are assembling a team of high profile surrogates who are well respected in the Jewish community to battle criticism in the media and ensure that it doesn’t go unanswered.
Obama’s supporters say the plan is in effect an acknowledgment that conservative attacks on Obama’s Israel stance have made defections among Jewish voters and donors a possibility they must take seriously. Obama’s advisers see a need to push back even harder on the attacks than they did in 2008, in part because Obama now has a record on the issue to defend — a record that even Obama’s supporters concede has not been adequately explained.
A group of well-known figures in the Jewish community has been in discussions with senior Obama adviser David Axelrod about how to respond to the criticism, which is expected to intensify as the campaign heats up. Among them: Alan Solow, the former head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; former Congressmen Mel Levine and Robert Wexler; and executive Penny Pritzker.
“We will have highly credible spokespeople and surrogates speak out in a general manner in support of what this administration has done, and articulate it in a way that we think will resonate with voters who care about this issue,” Solow said in an interview. “We will meet with supporters who have expressed concerns or want to be briefed on these issues on a one-on-one basis.”
“We got close to 80 percent of the vote among Jewish Americans in 2008, but we had to aggressively bat down efforts to divide the community and to inflame,” David Axelrod told me. “Plainly we have to be at least as assiduous about it this time. If we’re passive in response it would be a mistake.”
Politico reported this week that many Jewish Dems and donors are privately expressing doubts about Obama’s Mideast policies. But the piece was largely anecdotal, and a recent Pew poll found that a plurality of Americans who identify themselves as sympathetic to Israel think his Mideast policies get the balance right between Israelis and Palestinians. And pundits have been predicting that Obama is perpetually on the verge of losing Jewish support since before the 2008 election.
But the difference now, Obama’s supporters say, is that conservatives are having some success in distorting his record. Obama supporters do in fact worry about the concerns conservatives have succeeded in sowing among Jewish Democrats, and they expect conservatives to invest substantial resources in continuing that effort.
“I can’t deny that people express to me concerns about the president’s policies,” Solow said. “But when I run through the record with them, they are by and large convinced that the president’s policies are correct.”
The effort to make this point, I’m told, will also be proactive, with surrogates publishing op ed pieces that represent the White House’s point of view. And it will include a renewed effort to highlight other aspects of Obama’s record that have gone under-discussed, like increased military cooperation between Israel and the United States.
Two of the primary conservative arguments against Obama are that he called for Israel to return to 1967 lines and that he has not publicly stated with enough clarity that Israel will not be expected to negotiate with a government that includes a Hamas that has not recognized Israel’s right to exist.
The first point is false, though reasonable people can debate whether Obama was right to go public with a call for talks around 1967 lines with swaps or whether his timing was sound. Pushed on whether there’s anything to the second point, Axelrod flatly denied it.
“The president does not believe that any country can be asked to negotiate with a terrorist organization that is sworn to its destruction and unwilling to abandon that goal or embrace a peaceful settlement of the conflict,” he said. “He could not have been clearer about that.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4)Is Another Ballot Heist Coming?
By Tom Rowan
The integrity of American elections ought to be above reproach. Unfortunately, recent history suggests that when candidates are desperate, serious hanky-panky is not out of the question.
The 2000 Florida Presidential election was severely marred by Al Gore's botched election robbery. The massive vote fraud in Palm Beach County stands as immutable proof of the extent that crooked Democrats will go to steal an election. After botching the robbery in "ballot box boiler rooms," the Democrats resorted to stall tactics, the courts, and endless recounts to steal the election for Gore. The only mistake the voter frauds made is that they did not destroy enough valid votes.
Only in Palm Beach
Robert Cook emailed me during and after the 2000 Florida recounts. I remember that Robert lived in Georgia at the time and he and I were certain of voter fraud in Florida and that the media were actively covering it up. Robert ran the election numbers and sent them to me. At the time I forwarded the information to every single member of the Florida House and Senate in a push for fraud-proof electronic voting. What Robert mathematically deduced was that Florida was the victim of a massive vote fraud scheme in Palm Beach County. Robert recounted his analysis and sent it to Michael Reagan. This short report is required reading for anyone who really wants to understand what actually happened in the 2000 Florida Presidential election.
The analysis leaves exactly zero room for the possibility for anything other than massive vote fraud. As Newsmax.com's Carl Limbacher reported: "Robert is a nuclear engineer with a track record for analyzing and correcting trends, errors and mistakes in heavy construction projects (ships, power plants, nuclear reactors, military and aerospace vehicles, etc.) for more than twenty years, put forth a compelling case that the 19,120 presidential race ballots at issue in Palm Beach County were 'destroyed by deliberate double-punching ballots with a "second punch" for Al Gore or Pat Buchanan.'" The results are shockingly clear evidence of vote fraud:
•Only Palm Beach County, Florida voters seem incapable of understanding and using this style of ballot (butterfly ballot -- chosen by local Democrats).
•Only in Palm Beach, FL were 15,000 ballots "invalidated" (for double-punched ballots) in the 1996 Presidential election. (Past history of vote fraud in 1996.)
•Only in Palm Beach (and in only the most heavily Democratic precincts) were 19,120 ballots rejected in 2000 for double-punching.
•Only in Palm Beach did this "double-punch" error happen only in the Gore-Bush-Buchanan selections for President.
•Only in Palm Beach has the news media complained about "massive" ballot confusion.
•Only in Palm Beach did Gore gain 750 votes in a recount.
•Only in Palm Beach County that more than 20% of the registered Republicans "forgot" to vote for their party's presidential candidate.
•Only in Palm Beach did Bush receive less than 65% of the registered Republican voters.
•Only in Palm Beach did Buchanan get less than half of the votes he received before in 1996.
Cook provides the probable means by which a Democrat conspirator could have disenfranchised thousands of voters and destroyed their "punch ballot cards":
Stamping 45,000 ballots with a tool (or other device) through the Gore slot gives: Every Gore vote = still a valid Gore vote. (No change in the total, no change in the recount.) Every Bush, Buchanan, Workers Party, and Libertarian Party ballot IS IMMEDIATELY INVALID. They will be thrown out because they have two votes. They NEVER were counted in the first place = no change in the recount. The double-punch occurs ONLY in the presidential race, and no position on the ballot is disturbed. All other races are correctly counted. EVERY ballot that had no vote (a "protest vote" against both major candidates) becomes a Gore vote. All other races on the ballot are not disturbed, and are correctly counted.
In this way, stacks of ballots cards (valid votes) were destroyed in a matter a few fevered post election moments. This simple vote fraud technique explains all the ridiculously improbable statistical outliers of that election. There simply is no other plausible mathematical explanation.
As the 2012 election looms, concerned voters should recall the nationwide voter registration frauds of ACORN, Al Franken's brazenly stolen Minnesota Senate election, and George Soros' SOS Project which seeks to install crony Secretaries of State to "oversee" how close elections are "decided." The massive vote fraud in Florida in 2000 ought to concern every voter in every state. If the Democrat party so brazenly tried to steal Florida's 2000 election, chances are very good that they will try to steal other "close" elections in 2012.
Recall too that the groundwork is already being laid for vote fraud in 2012. Donna Brazile is already complaining about nonexistent "voter disenfranchisement" (just as the Democrats did in 2000). Editorials are being written and lawsuits are being filed in an attempt to thwart any meaningful measures to eliminate vote fraud. Whomever the GOP nominates for president, he or she will face Obama's vicious nonstop smear machine, the usual network media bias, and a massive George Soros-funded effort to steal this election. With Obama's poll numbers as bad as they are and with his reelection prospects as bleak as any President's in living memory, a massive and nationwide voter fraud campaign is already underway. And, if past elections are any indication, this vote fraud campaign will be successful to varying degrees. The degree to which the 2012 Democrat vote fraud campaign will be successful depends on whether voters who care enough to show up to vote care enough that their votes are being stolen and complain about it. And if they care that they are the voters who are actually being "disenfranchised."
Of my most bitter memories of the 2000 Florida recount (and attempted election theft) was that our military votes were being challenged at our local courthouse by Gore lawyers dressed in pinstriped suits with thick New Jersey accents. This was simultaneously happening all across Florida. Gore's "election" lawyers were dressed like (and talked like) the typical Hollywood typecast depiction of a sleazy mobster. Another laughable and lighter moment was when Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley offered to "help" us Floridians "count" our votes. That would be like asking Al Gore for a weather report.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5)Unmasking the ‘international community’
By Caroline B. Glick
Given the utter depravity of the UN and the international system it oversees, what can explain the international Left's kneejerk obeisance to it?
For many years, the Left in Israel and throughout the world has upheld the so-called "international community" as the arbiter of all things. From Israel's right to exist to climate change, from American world leadership to genetically modified crops, the Left has maintained that the "international community," is the only body qualified to judge the truth, lawfulness, goodness and justice of all things.
Most of those who uphold this view see the United Nations as the embodiment of the "international community." US President Barack Obama has repeatedly made clear that his chief litmus test for the viability or desirability of a foreign policy is the support in garners in UN institutions.
Obama is so averse to acting against the will of the UN that he is trying to strong arm Israel into making suicidal concessions to the Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority. Obama claims that if Israel agrees to accept indefensible borders, then he will be able to convince the Palestinians not to ask the UN to endorse Palestinian sovereignty in September. Since the success of the Palestinian initiative is entirely dependent on the US Security Council veto, by acting as he is, Obama is showing that he prefers sacrificing Israel's future viability as a nation state to standing up to the "will of the international community" as embodied by the UN.
Furthermore, in a bid to maintain faith with the UN Security Council resolution permitting the use of force in Libya to protect civilians, Obama has refused to articulate a clear goal for the US military involvement in Libya. The fact that the Security Council resolution essentially dooms NATO's military intervention in Libya to strategic incoherence stalemate that can lead to the break-up of Libya is unimportant to the US President. The only thing that is important is that the US abides by the limitations dictated by the UN Security Council resolution.
As to Libya, Obama's decision to send US forces to Libya without Congressional permission makes clear that from his perspective, the UN Security Council, rather than the US Congress is the source of authority for US military action. To the extent that the US Congress calls for the US President to act in a manner that is contrary to the UN Security Council, as far as Obama is concerned, it is the duty of the President to disregard Congress and obey the Security Council.
Given the totemic stature of the UN in the minds of the American President and the international Left, it is worth considering its nature.
A glance at UN affairs in recent days is revealing. Last week UN members elected Qatar President of the UN General Assembly and Iran one of the body's Vice Presidents. Both countries' representatives will use their platform to advance their regimes' anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-Western agendas.
As Prof. Anne Bayefsky noted in the Weekly Standard last week, their first order of business will be leading the Durban III conference that will take place in New York on the sidelines of September's General Assembly meeting. The first Durban conference was of course the infamously racist and anti-Jewish UN conference in Durban, South Africa in September 2001. At Durban Israel was singled out as the only racist, xenophobic country in the world and Jewish people were denied their right to national rights and self-determination.
The conference ended three days before the jihadist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001.
In addition to their anti-Jewish conference, the Qatari and Iranian leaders of the General Assembly will reliably advance a General Assembly resolution embracing Palestinian statehood and condemning Jewish statehood.
Perhaps anticipating its new leadership role in the "international community," last weekend Iran hosted its first "World Without Terrorism Conference." Speaking at the conference, Iran's supreme dictator Ali Khamenei called Israel and the US the greatest terrorists in the world. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the US was behind the Sept. 11 attacks and the Holocaust and has used both to force the Palestinians to submit to invading Jews.
Aside from the fact that the leaders from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan -- who owe their power and freedom to the sacrifices of the US military -- participated in the conference, the most notable aspect of the event is that it took place under the UN flag. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon sent greetings to the conferees through his special envoy.
According to Iran's Fars news agency, "In a written message…read by UN Envoy to Teheran Mohammad Rafi Al-Din Shah [Ban] Ki-Moon [commended] the Islamic Republic of Iran for holding this very important conference."
According to Fars, Ban added that the UN had "approved a large number of resolutions against terrorism in recent years and holding conferences like the Teheran conference can be considerably helpful in implementing these resolutions."
When journalists inquired about the veracity of the Iranian news report, the UN Secretary General's office defended its position. Ban's spokesman Farhan Haq sniffed, "If we're reaching out and trying to make sure that people fight terrorism, we need to go as far as possible to make sure that everyone does it."
So as far as the UN's highest official is concerned, when it comes to terrorism there is no qualitative difference between Iran on the one hand and the US and Israel on the other. Here it is worth noting that among the other invitees, Iran's "counter-terror" conference prominently featured Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir. Al-Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court on genocide charges for the genocide he has perpetrated in Darfur.
The new General Assembly Vice President is not merely the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism. It is also a nuclear proliferator. This no doubt is why Iran's UN representative expressed glee when earlier this month his nation's fellow nuclear proliferator North Korea was appointed the head of the UN's Conference on Disarmament. This would be the same North Korea that has conducted two illicit nuclear tests; constructed an illicit nuclear reactor in Syria; openly cooperated with Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile program; attacked and sank a South Korean naval ship last year, and threatens nuclear war any time anyone criticizes its aggressive behavior.
What these representative examples of what passes for business as usual at the UN show is that the international institution considered the repository of the will of the "international community" is wholly and completely corrupt. It is morally bankrupt. It is controlled by the most repressive regimes in the world and it uses its US and Western funded institutions to attack Israel, the US, the West and forces of liberty and liberalism throughout the world.
Given the utter depravity of the UN and the international system it oversees, what can explain the international Left's kneejerk obeisance to it? From San Francisco to Chicago to Boston; from Stockholm, to Paris to London, members of the international Left claim they support the victims of tyranny. They claim they stand for liberal values of freedom and tolerance and human rights. But like the UN, the truth about the international Left shows that its members are the opposite of what they claim to be.
Here too, a few examples from the past week suffice to tell the tale of liberal intolerance and violence. On Sunday US Congresswoman and Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann appeared on ABC News' This Week with George Stephanopolous. Towards the end of her interview, Stephanopolous informed Bachmann that she can expect the media to begin attacking her family, and specifically the 23 foster children that she and her husband cared for.
As he put it, "I know you want to shield them [the foster children] but are they prepared and are you prepared for the loss of privacy that comes with the president [sic.] campaign? And is that something you are concerned about for them?"
Stephanopolous's menacing warning was notable for what it says about the nature of the leftist-dominated media. In a recent interview First Lady Michelle Obama thanked the media for protecting her family from scrutiny. Yet Stephanopoulis had no compunction about threatening Bachmann's family with a journalistic lynch mob.
And this makes sense.
As fellow leftists, the Obamas get a free ride. But as a conservative Republican, and as a non-leftist woman, Bachmann - like the Sarah Palin -- has no right to expect tolerance for her family's privacy from the enlightened, feminist, liberal media.
Then there was the mob assault on Israeli historian Benny Morris outside the London School of Economics two weeks ago. As Morris described it at the National Interest, on his way to give a lecture at the university, "a small mob…of some dozen Muslims, Arabs and their supporters, both men and women, surrounded me and, walking alongside me for several hundred yards as I advanced towards the building where the lecture was to take place, raucously harangued and bated me with cries of "fascist," "racist," "England should never have allowed you in," "you shouldn't be allowed to speak."
He added, "To me, it felt like Brownshirts in a street scene in 1920s Berlin."
No less appalling than the behavior of the mob was the behavior of the professor at LSE who hosted Morris's lecture. As Morris described it, in his "brief introductory remarks," the professor "failed completely to note the harassment and intimidation (of which he had been made fully aware) …, or to criticize [Morris's attackers] in any way."
In New York last weekend when conservative television and radio host Glenn Beck went to New York's Bryant Park to watch a movie with his family, they were accosted by the people around them who professed hatred for "Republicans."
The extraordinary intolerance of the Left for Israel is on full display among the participants in the so-called flotilla. The purpose of the "flotilla" is to break international law by providing aid and comfort to Hamas-controlled Gaza and weaken with the intention of ending Israel's lawful maritime blockade of Gaza's Hamas-controlled coastline.
As Ehud Rosen exposed Thursday in a report for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, this year's flotilla is organized by Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood with the active participation of leftist anti-Israel groups.
In their public statements, participants in the Hamas flotilla profess bottomless tolerance for Hamas and its genocidal agenda. And they profess no tolerance whatsoever for Israel or its right to exist.
In their behavior, participants in the flotilla from the Obama-aligned Code Pink group and sister organizations ape the behavior of UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon in celebrating Iran's provocative conference on terrorism, overseeing North Korea's ascension to the head of the UN's Conference on Disarmament' and Qatar's and Iran's leadership of the General Assembly.
While emptily mouthing slogans of tolerance, all these adherents to the rule of the "international community" embrace the agenda of the most violent, intolerant, totalitarian forces in the world. Not only do they embrace them, they serve them.
It doesn't take much to tear off their flimsy mask of sweetness and light. Pity so few can be bothered to do it.
