R.E. Bell
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Obama cannot let Republicans attend his ISIS briefing because they are the greatest threat to our nation . (See 1 below.)
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This from a very dear and old friend and fellow memo reader who also is retired but practiced in a field of medicine that should give him great insight into a person's psyche and personality. He also draws upon his own experiences as a refugee from a tyrannical dictator.
" If people understood that Obama is Muslim, and a traitor trying to destroy America, all of his actions and inactions would be perfectly understood.
This includes his non verbal communications and facial expressions when talking.
When saying from the podium that America had no choice (or something to that effect) to act on isis, his demeanor was apologetic. To whom? To Islam.
He is not naive, stupid, disinterested, out of contact with reality, etc. He is Goal Oriented, and committed to his cause.
He continues to succeed because nobody in the press, right or left, has had the guts to reveal his secret intentions. Or are afraid, or blind. In that case they all are co-conspirators. Fellow Travelers."
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This from another dear friend and fellow memo reader and LTE writer but, of course, quoting what a beautiful and very bright and educated Fox News Analysts reminds us of is not deemed 'Kosher' by the disbelievers!
"
Of course, as you read this remember, Bush was a prophetic dunce but it’s all his fault.
In light of events in Iraq, worth remembering G.W. Bush's warning 7/12/07: "I know some in Washington would like us to start leaving Iraq now. To begin withdrawing before our commanders tell us we are ready would be dangerous for Iraq, for the region, and for the United States. It would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to al Qaeda. It would mean that we'd be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It would mean we'd allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they lost in Afghanistan. It would mean increasing the probability that American troops would have to return at some later date to confront an enemy that is even more dangerous." H/T @Megynkelly"
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For those who read the local paper a Ms. Rountree responded today to my LTE which was published this past Sunday.
I learned, at an early age, not to engage in a pissing contest because it is a waste of good fluids however, when the accusations are outrageous and so off the mark, I feel compelled to respond though I doubt my rebuttal will be published. This is what I wrote in response to Ms Rountree. Me
"I want all American Presidents to be successful and hope and expect they possess attributes of excellence when it comes to leadership.
I measure them against Truman and Reagan and when I do Obama fails miserably.
That I found Obama's resume pitifully thin, undistinguished and beneath the demands of the job he sought was there for all to see but they were blinded by their hatred of GW, the pitiful campaigns of McCain and Romney and the fact that a black president could erase white guilt.
After five plus years of Obama's accomplishments, which now speak for themselves, he has fallen out of grace because he is not up to the demands of the office..
Those are facts and the world is not "tranquil" nor need always be"'messy'."
When America abdicates its role as the preeminent leader of Western Democracies, vacuums are created and filled by those whose intentions are dangerous and certainly not honorable.
I have no animus towards Obama. I do not care about his color. I judge him by his record, his words his actions.
He has failed us and that is the greatest tragedy of all."
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Was Global Warning a lot of hot air and if not at least hyped by the hystericals? (See 2 below.)
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Where israel's next war will likely be fought and will they be prepared? (See 3 below.)
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Moderate Muslims are more likely to be revealed by and found in our press and media but not in the usual places one would expect. Why is this? (See 4 below.)
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Hell he was just another damn General. What difference does it matter? (See 5 below.)
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Dick
1) Republicans: We Were Not Told of White House Briefing on ISIS
By Todd Beamon
The Obama administration is scheduled to brief members of Congress about the Islamic State (ISIS) on Friday after the beheading of two American journalists, but several Republicans on key committees involved told Newsmax on Thursday that they knew nothing about the classified session.
The briefing is to be conducted by officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center, news reports say.
The officials are expected to brief members of the congressional leaders' staffs, as well as the House Intelligence Committee, Foreign Affairs Committee, Armed Services Committee, and the defense and foreign operations appropriations subcommittees.
Secretary of State John Kerry is also scheduled to testify before the Foreign Affairs Committee the week of Sept. 15, an aide said.
Rep. Ed Royce, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said Kerry would testify on whether the administration has developed a strategy against ISIS.
"The president said his administration had no strategy against ISIS two weeks ago, despite it long being on the march," Royce said. "The administration is sending mixed messages now.
"ISIS is a serious threat to U.S. national security," he said. "The committee needs to hear a comprehensive strategy from Secretary Kerry on how the administration is going to confront this brutal and sophisticated terrorist group.”
A Royce spokeswoman did not respond to a Newsmax query late Thursday on whether the chairman was informed of Friday's session.
Others say they were not.
"I've received no notice of any such briefing," Pennsylvania Rep. Tom Marino told Newsmax. "As a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I am disgusted that this administration refuses to engage with Congress on a critical national-security issue where we could potentially agree.
"Unfortunately, that's nothing new," Marino added. "We know that this president would rather use and abuse executive power than have discussions with the elected representatives of the American people."
Kevin Fogarty, a spokesman for New York Rep. Peter King, said that "the congressman was not informed of the meeting or briefing." King sits on the Intelligence Committee.
A spokesman for a GOP member of the Armed Services Committee told Newsmax that the congressman was not told of the briefing.
Newsmax queried press representatives of 15 ranking GOP members of the panels. Only five responded, with three saying the legislators were not told of the session. Two referred Newsmax to House Speaker John Boehner's office, which did not respond to queries seeking comment.
Representatives of five top Democrats on the panels also did not respond to Newsmax queries.
Congress is scheduled to return from its recess on Monday.
The classified session comes as President Barack Obama faces widespread criticism from members of both political parties for lacking a strategy for defeating ISIS.
In Estonia on Wednesday, Obama said the United States would seek to diminish ISIS to "a manageable problem," while Vice President Joe Biden declared at a navy yard in New Hampshire that "we will follow them to the gates of hell until they are brought to justice."
The comments followed Obama's acknowledgment last week that "we don't have a strategy yet" to deal with ISIS in Syria.
ISIS beheaded two American journalists, James Foley, 40, of Rochester, N.H., and Steven Sotloff, 31, of Miami. The terrorists posted their executions in videos on the Internet.
The U.S. resumed airstrikes on Iraq last month after ISIS gained ground in its quest to establish a caliphate in Syria and Iraq. Three top Islamic State members, including an aide to leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, were reportedly killed by an airstrike Wednesday in Iraq.
Obama would need congressional approval to expand the airstrikes or to continue them for more than 60 days.
"At this point, I would simply like to see the president and members of his inner circle clearly define the threat and set a goal to defeat ISIS," Marino told Newsmax. "We can debate strategy and tactics later, but the president first needs to acknowledge the threat, recognize the evil nature of this enemy and its beliefs, and convey to the American people our determination to defeat them."
Other Republicans called on the president to develop a plan for ISIS, also known as ISIL.
"The U.S. position against ISIL must be clear and concise, but the administration sending mixed messages is not helpful during this time of unrest in the Middle East," said Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. "We cannot operate in a pre-9/11 mentality because the global threat of ISIL is real and poses a serious threat to our national security and stability in the region.
"As Congress returns to Washington, the White House must bring forward as soon as possible its plan to combat this threat and make its case to the American people," Ros-Lehtinen said.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told fellow Republicans on Thursday that the administration has been "too passive" on ISIS and other Islamic jihadists.
In his first memo as majority leader, the Californian chided the White House over a recent U.S. Forest Service report on roasting marshmallows with such healthy ingredients as fruit instead of chocolate.
"For the things that government is supposed to do — like confront terrorist groups — we don't have a strategy," McCarthy said, "but for things Americans are supposed to be able to do for themselves — like figuring out the best ingredients for s'mores — government bureaucrats have that figured out."
Congress is expected to adjourn again later this month, not returning until mid-November after the congressional elections.
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2) Whatever Happened to Global Warming?
Now come climate scientists' implausible explanations for why the 'hiatus' has passed the 15-year mark.
By
MATT RIDLEY
On Sept. 23 the United Nations will host a party for world leaders in New York to pledge urgent action against climate change. Yet leaders from China, India and Germany have already announced that they won't attend the summit and others are likely to follow, leaving President Obama looking a bit lonely. Could it be that they no longer regard it as an urgent threat that some time later in this century the air may get a bit warmer?
In effect, this is all that's left of the global-warming emergency the U.N. declared in its first report on the subject in 1990. The U.N. no longer claims that there will be dangerous or rapid climate change in the next two decades. Last September, between the second and final draft of its fifth assessment report, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change quietly downgraded the warming it expected in the 30 years following 1995, to about 0.5 degrees Celsius from 0.7 (or, in Fahrenheit, to about 0.9 degrees, from 1.3).
Even that is likely to be too high. The climate-research establishment has finally admitted openly what skeptic scientists have been saying for nearly a decade: Global warming has stopped since shortly before this century began.
First the climate-research establishment denied that a pause existed, noting that if there was a pause, it would invalidate their theories. Now they say there is a pause (or "hiatus"), but that it doesn't after all invalidate their theories.
Alas, their explanations have made their predicament worse by implying that man-made climate change is so slow and tentative that it can be easily overwhelmed by natural variation in temperature—a possibility that they had previously all but ruled out.
Getty Images
When the climate scientist and geologist Bob Carter of James Cook University in Australia wrote an article in 2006 saying that there had been no global warming since 1998 according to the most widely used measure of average global air temperatures, there was an outcry. A year later, when David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London made the same point, the environmentalist and journalist Mark Lynassaid in the New Statesman that Mr. Whitehouse was "wrong, completely wrong," and was "deliberately, or otherwise, misleading the public."
We know now that it was Mr. Lynas who was wrong. Two years before Mr. Whitehouse's article, climate scientists were already admitting in emails among themselves that there had been no warming since the late 1990s. "The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998," wrote Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia in Britain in 2005. He went on: "Okay it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn't statistically significant."
If the pause lasted 15 years, they conceded, then it would be so significant that it would invalidate the climate-change models upon which policy was being built. A report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) written in 2008 made this clear: "The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more."
Well, the pause has now lasted for 16, 19 or 26 years—depending on whether you choose the surface temperature record or one of two satellite records of the lower atmosphere. That's according to a new statistical calculation by Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Canada.
It has been roughly two decades since there was a trend in temperature significantly different from zero. The burst of warming that preceded the millennium lasted about 20 years and was preceded by 30 years of slight cooling after 1940.
This has taken me by surprise. I was among those who thought the pause was a blip. As a "lukewarmer," I've long thought that man-made carbon-dioxide emissions will raise global temperatures, but that this effect will not be amplified much by feedbacks from extra water vapor and clouds, so the world will probably be only a bit more than one degree Celsius warmer in 2100 than today. By contrast, the assumption built into the average climate model is that water-vapor feedback will treble the effect of carbon dioxide.
But now I worry that I am exaggerating, rather than underplaying, the likely warming.
Most science journalists, who are strongly biased in favor of reporting alarming predictions, rather than neutral facts, chose to ignore the pause until very recently, when there were explanations available for it. Nearly 40 different excuses for the pause have been advanced, including Chinese economic growth that supposedly pushed cooling sulfate particles into the air, the removal of ozone-eating chemicals, an excess of volcanic emissions, and a slowdown in magnetic activity in the sun.
The favorite explanation earlier this year was that strong trade winds in the Pacific Ocean had been taking warmth from the air and sequestering it in the ocean. This was based on a few sketchy observations, suggesting a very tiny change in water temperature—a few hundredths of a degree—at depths of up to 200 meters.
Last month two scientists wrote in Science that they had instead found the explanation in natural fluctuations in currents in the Atlantic Ocean. For the last 30 years of the 20th century, Xianyao Chen and Ka-Kit Tung suggested, these currents had been boosting the warming by bringing heat to the surface, then for the past 15 years the currents had been counteracting it by taking heat down deep.
The warming in the last three decades of the 20th century, to quote the news release that accompanied their paper, "was roughly half due to global warming and half to the natural Atlantic Ocean cycle." In other words, even the modest warming in the 1980s and 1990s—which never achieved the 0.3 degrees Celsius per decade necessary to satisfy the feedback-enhanced models that predict about three degrees of warming by the end of the century—had been exaggerated by natural causes. The man-made warming of the past 20 years has been so feeble that a shifting current in one ocean was enough to wipe it out altogether.
Putting the icing on the cake of good news, Xianyao Chen and Ka-Kit Tung think the Atlantic Ocean may continue to prevent any warming for the next two decades. So in their quest to explain the pause, scientists have made the future sound even less alarming than before. Let's hope that the United Nations admits as much on day one of its coming jamboree and asks the delegates to pack up, go home and concentrate on more pressing global problems like war, terror, disease, poverty, habitat loss and the 1.3 billion people with no electricity.
Mr. Ridley is the author of "The Rational Optimist" (HarperCollins, 2010) and a member of the British House of Lords.
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Israel's next war will be fought on the northern front
Op-ed: What worked in the fight against Hamas might not be enough in the fight against Nasrallah. To deal with 100,000 rockets and thousands of Hezbollah fighters gaining precious operational experience on the Syrian battlefields, the IDF needs a budget increase. Yossi Yehoshua
NIS 9 billion? NIS 11 billion? Perhaps just NIS 5 billion? It is unclear how high the addition to the defense budget is going to be. It is also not certain there is someone outside the defense establishment that could gauge the amount needed. But one thing is clear after the last war in Gaza: What happened, cannot repeat itself.
In the last four years the IDF hasn't had even one multi-year plan. The never-ending battle over the budget has forced the military to undertake only short-term plans, ones confined to one year ahead. That is why the army could not properly prepare its forces for the war. That is why it cannot save money by purchasing arms in bulk. The fight for the budget has harmed the IDF's preparedness for the war, and the army went into Gaza in near total shutdown.
 Reserve Battalion 9 exercise in the Golan Heights (Photo: IDF Spokesman)
Those who are closely familiar with the threats on that border and are familiar with the IDF's level of preparedness to these threats, should be very worried.
In addition to minimizing conscript units' trainings and cancelling training for reservist battalions - who make up the main fighting force in case of a war in the north - the army is also ill-equipped with protective tools.
 The army doesn't have enough advanced APCs (Photo: Yoav Zitun)
Nowadays, the IDF has a very small amount of Namer armored personnel carriers (APC) that can provide proper protection. The rest are light M113 APCs (nicknamed Zelda), and we've already seen how safe they are in the APC disaster during Operation Protective Edge. Had the public known the numerical ratio between the Zeldas and the Namers, it would've been outraged.
In a war in Lebanon, these old APCs would turn into a real death trap when facing Hezbollah's advanced anti-tank missiles. Since the army only has a small amount of Trophy active protection systems (APS), many of the advanced APCs would be left exposed as well.
As far as aerial protection is concerned, the situation is not much better. The IDF currently has only nine Iron Dome batteries, and it is clear they won't be enough to protect Israel from the catastrophe of thousands of rockets launched at its population. The David's Sling missile defense system, which is capable of intercepting long-range rockets and missiles, will only become operational in over a year, and even then it'll have one main shortcoming: One interception would cost $1 million.
 David's Sling. Each interception costs $1 million (Photo: Defense Ministry Spokesman)
While our reservists, because of insufficient budget, were sitting in their living rooms instead of going to Tze'elim for training, Nasrallah has turned the Al-Qusayr area in Syria to his own Tze'elim.
 Hezbollah fighters on the Syria-Lebanon border (Photo: AP)
The Northern Command knows the Hezbollah leader's warnings are serious, and because of that, the Command dramatically changed its battle plan, adding defensive elements to it. Just like in Gaza, except that in the north, the challenge is that much harder.
 The Northern Command takes Nasrallah's threats seriously (Photo: AFP)
So what's the solution? The army will have to use the additions to the budget to train the reservists. The IDF also needs to allocate funds to the acquisition of the most advanced systems and tools, and perhaps finally setting up a multi-year plan for arming.
 Just like in Gaza, just harder. Reservists returning their equipment at the end of Protective Edge.
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By Daniel Greenfield
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