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===While I am typing this, I am listening to Netanyahu's speech at The AIPAC CONFERENCE.
In essence, Bibi explained he came not to interfere in U.S. politics but confirm the strong existing relationship and because he felt it was his duty to openly discuss the difference that exists between America and Israel because that would make the relationship stronger.
He praised America for its help and friendship, said he respected Obama and the office he occupies .
Netanyahu pointed out that for over 2000 years Jews had no nation of their own and thus no voice and now that has changed and Israel will speak out against threats to its existence. By being strong and capable of defending itself it meant Israel was respected and could enter alliances.
The disagreement is over how best to accomplish the mutual goal. Bibi pointed out what Iran is doing now to further terrorism without a nuclear weapon and what they could do with a nuclear weapon and the capacity to deliver it and how more dangerous Iran would be.
He pointed out the differences between America and Israel in terms of nation size, the nations which surround each and the position Israel finds itself in - total annihilation - which is not the case with America.
He contrasted Israel versus its neighbors and how Israeli doctors treat Syrians wounded by bombs delivered by their leader, the rights of women, the thriving Christian community in Israel versus the slaughtering of Christians in surrounding lands etc.
Netanyahu ended by pointing out, as Israel's P.M, he worried every day about the shouldered responsibility of protecting his nation in that volatile region of the world and this is why he felt an obligation to address an ally and the world. (See 1 and 1a below.)
(AIPAC is not a political action committee and I have been a member for over 40 years. Sam Nunn urged me to join in the mid 60's because he said AIPAC gave his staff invaluable information which helped him strengthen the relationship between Israel and America which he thought vital to our mutual interests.
Our new Senator, David Perdue, recently returned from a visit to Israel and personal meeting with Netanyahu and I hope our new Rep. Buddy Carter will soon experience for himself what Israel is all about.
Jack Kingston visited Israel many times and hosted many of his fellow Representatives on their initial trips. Jack was a solid supporter of the American-Israeli relationship and was most respected and held in the highest regard by senior members of The IDF.)
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Who would want to speak for Feinstein! Netanyahu is speaking to those who will listen. Feinstein has been busy castigating our intelligence community from her perch on her high horse!
California would be wise to get rid of her along with Boxer's retirement. Both have outlived their productivity if they ever had any. (See 2 below.)
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Republicans deserted Newt, when Democrats attacked him on trumped up charges, because Newt was dictatorial. Yes, Newt was that and more but he got things done and was willing to stifle the House Prima Donnas. Boehner has a tough job but he is incapable of corralling the stallions.Maybe Republicans would be better if they were not allowed to possess guns because they are constantly shooting themselves in their feet and Obama keeps providing the bullets. (See 3 below.)
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California's technology crowd are mostly liberals and they too just shot themselves in both feet.
Obama forced the FCC, that formerly independent agency, to solve an Internet problem that did not exist but which will now because the government will insure that one occurs.
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This is not the first time it is the second and maybe even the third. (See 5 below.)
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Putin has actually used the reset button. He has moved Russia from a nation that was autocratic to one that is totalitarian and totally authoritative.
Two more years of Obama and one might be able to say something similar about America.
Meanwhile Obama has sent two administration senior representatives to AIPAC to head off Netanyahu gaining momentum - Our Amb. To the U.N. and his chief intelligence advisor. He really should send his mother figure, Valerie Jarrett. Because she is the pro-Muslim one whose mouth pulls Obama's.
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Putin has actually used the reset button. He has moved Russia from a nation that was autocratic to one that is totalitarian and totally authoritative.
Two more years of Obama and one might be able to say something similar about America.
Meanwhile Obama has sent two administration senior representatives to AIPAC to head off Netanyahu gaining momentum - Our Amb. To the U.N. and his chief intelligence advisor. He really should send his mother figure, Valerie Jarrett. Because she is the pro-Muslim one whose mouth pulls Obama's.
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Dick
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1) Will Obama’s Iran Deal Be the Worst Deal Ever Made?
by Roger L. Simon
It seems hyperbolic to say that Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran — if Ayatollah Khamenei, in his “wisdom,” allows it to happen — will be the worst deal ever made. But if what we have been learning about it is true, it almost certainly will be.
To begin with, the agreement is said to have a sunset clause of 10-15 years. Whatever the number turns out to be, that tells us that Iran is free to do anything it wants in the nuclear weapons field after a set amount of time, assuming that it hadn’t disobeyed the strictures of the agreement before then — a monumental assumption given past history. (Ironically, in this one way Iran is not unlike other states, all of which, to my knowledge, do their best to hide their nuclear programs, including the U.S.)
The idea — if it can be called that — behind this sunset clause is a kind of bet that Iran will turn into a normal country during the time frame, abjuring the fanatical religious doctrines (global war bringing about the twelfth Imam/Mahdi, etc.) inherent in Khomeinist Shiism that would make allowing Iran the bomb equivalent to giving a loaded gun to a two year old, only with global implications. Of course the more modern view of the world is true for many Iranians now, but will it be true in the future for all or even most? Who will be in power? The ayatollahs — almost all, from what we know, true believers in this apocalyptic ideology or willing to pretend they are — seem to have a stranglehold for now. And what about the Revolutionary Guard, evidently a universe unto itself in Iran, with expansionist goals that already have been largely successful across the Middle East through Iraq, Lebanon and Syria and now into Yemen?
Is all the endless chanting of “Death to America! Death to Israel!” merely “patriotic rhetoric” to appease the Iranian version of low-information voters? Or is it, like many things repeated literally since birth, buried deep in the unconscious of the populace? If it’s merely rhetoric, why are those same Revolutionary Guard now on the border of Israel hundreds of miles from home, apparently plotting an invasion with their Hezbollah lackeys over the Golan Heights? (As a sidelight, it has been shown that those who talk most about suicide are those most likely to do it.)
And why exactly is Iran building ICBMs — not part of the deal evidently — if not to deliver nuclear weapons? And just what weapons would Iran be building in 10-15 years, if not now? The atom bomb itself was 1944-45 technology. The U.S. detonated the first hydrogen bomb at Eniwetok in 1952, making the Hiroshima bomb seem like a pop gun. Are the Iranians that far behind that they can’t do as well, or close enough, 70 or more years later?
Consider this: a thermonuclear weapon dropped on Tel Aviv would have fallout extending throughout the Arab world (the part it hadn’t already demolished — bye-bye, Beirut and forget about the Dome of the Rock) and probably beyond to Greece (certainly to Cyprus) and possibly more of Southern Europe and Northern Africa down to the Sudan. And that’s if the winds were favorable. Israel would certainly reciprocate with its arsenal of nuclear submarines and weapons that no doubt dwarf the Iranian. The results of this would be catastrophic to the entire world. Who knows where it would end?
And yet Obama, Kerry and Wendy Sherman wish to give the Iranians a sunset clause. That’s sunset for everybody. And this is the “negotiation” that began supposedly to prevent Iran from enriching uranium while destroying all it had enriched.
Read more: http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2015/03/01/obamas-iran-deal/#ixzz3TFIXAUII
1a) Danger Ahead For Obama On Iran
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The deal that seems to be taking shape right now does not fill me—or many others who support a diplomatic solution to this crisis—with confidence. Reports suggest that the prospective agreement will legitimate Iran’s right to enrich uranium (a “right” that doesn’t actually exist in international law); it will allow Iran to maintain many thousands of operating centrifuges; and it will lapse after 10 or 15 years, at which point Iran would theoretically be free to go nuclear. (The matter of the sunset clause worries me, but I’m more worried that the Iranians will find a way to cheat their way out of the agreement even before the sun is scheduled to set.)
Obama’s greatest argument against Netanyahu is simple and dispositive: The Israelis have not offered a better solution to the Iranian challenge. But the fact that Netanyahu has no actual ideas—other than strategies that lead to endless sanctions of diminishing effectiveness and bombing runs of similarly dubious long-term effectiveness—does not absolve the Obama administration of its responsibility to secure the toughest deal possible.
This is a very dangerous moment for Obama and for the world. He has made many promises, and if he fails to keep them—if he inadvertently (or, God forbid, advertently) sets Iran on the path to the nuclear threshold, he will be forever remembered as the president who sparked a nuclear-arms race in the world’s most volatile region, and for breaking a decades-old promise to Israel that the United States would defend its existence and viability as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
In an interview with me three years ago, President Obama said he was motivated to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon in part because he worried that a nuclear Iran would cause its many Middle East rivals to pursue their own nuclear programs.
“It will not be tolerable to a number of states in that region for Iran to have a nuclear weapon and them not to have a nuclear weapon,” he said. “Iran is known to sponsor terrorist organizations, so the threat of proliferation becomes that much more severe.” He went on, “The only analogous situation is North Korea. We have applied a lot of pressure on North Korea as well and, in fact, today found them willing to suspend some of their nuclear activities and missile testing and come back to the table. But North Korea is even more isolated, and certainly less capable of shaping the environment (around it) than Iran is. And so the dangers of an Iran getting nuclear weapons that then leads to a free-for-all in the Middle East is something that I think would be very dangerous for the world.”
If Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey respond to an Iran nuclear agreement by ramping up their own nuclear programs, we may be able to judge the deal a provisional failure.
On Israel, here’s the promise Obama made that stays with me the most: “I think that the Israeli government recognizes that, as president of the United States, I don’t bluff,” he said. “I also don’t, as a matter of sound policy, go around advertising exactly what our intentions are. But I think both the Iranian and the Israeli government recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say.” He went on to say four words that have since become famous: “We’ve got Israel’s back.”
Netanyahu obviously believes that Obama doesn't have his, or Israel's, back. There will be no convincing Netanyahu that Obama is anything but a dangerous adversary. But if a consensus forms in high-level Israeli security circles (where there is a minimum of Obama-related hysterics) that the president has agreed to a weak deal, one that provides a glide path for Iran toward the nuclear threshold, then we will be able to say, fairly, that Obama's promises to Israel were not kept. One of Netanyahu’s most strident critics, Meir Dagan, the former head of the Mossad intelligence agency, said recently, “A nuclear Iran is a reality that Israel won't be able to come to terms with.”
He went on to say, “Two issues in particular concern me with respect to the talks between the world powers and Iran: What happens if and when the Iranians violate the agreement, and what happens when the period of the agreement comes to an end and they decide to pursue nuclear weapons?”
In the coming weeks, President Obama must provide compelling answers to these questions.
This article available online at:
Copyright © 2015 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
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2)
Feinstein slams 'arrogant' Netanyahu: 'He doesn't speak for me'
Diane Feinstein, the Democratic senator from California, told CNN on Sunday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's contention that he is speaking for all Jews in lobbying against an agreement between the US and Iran is "arrogant."
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3) Squandering a GOP Majority
House Republicans walk into Obama’s immigration trap.
A majority in Congress is a terrible thing to waste, but only two months into their largest majority since the 1920s Republicans are well on the way. Their latest mental breakdown is over their attempt to overturn President Obama ’s order ending deportations for some five million illegal immigrants.
Once again the fight comes down to recognizing political reality, or marching off a cliff to almost certain failure. The Cliff Marchers refuse to vote to fund the Department of Homeland Security without a provision barring the enforcement of Mr. Obama’s immigration orders going back to 2012. But the House bill has failed to get the 60 votes needed to pass the Senate. That puts DHS on the cusp of a partial shutdown.
On Friday the House and Senate voted to fund DHS, but only for a week and only with the help of Democrats. Speaker John Boehner ’s plan to fund the department for three weeks came crashing down when 52 Republicans revolted. The revolters effectively put Nancy Pelosi in charge of the House. So the GOP will now consume itself in more recriminations as it squanders more of its first 100 days.
The sad if predictable irony is that this is exactly what Mr. Obama hoped to incite with his November immigration order. He wanted to goad an overreaction that made the GOP look both anti-immigrant and intemperate enough to shut down the government.
The double irony is that, in shutting down part of DHS, the Republicans would also give Mr. Obama an opening to claim the political high ground on national security. He’d blame the GOP for putting at risk the defenses against a terrorist threat that his own policies have allowed to proliferate.
The smart play now would be for Republicans to fund DHS and move on to more promising policy ground including the budget. Texas and other states that oppose the order have already won a legal victory when a federal court issued a preliminary injunction against implementing it. The Administration has appealed, but even if it wins in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the issue is likely to go the Supreme Court.
The Cliff Marchers dismiss this as surrender and are insisting on a long fight over the immigration order even if it means a partial DHS shutdown. (We say partial because some 85% of DHS’s 240,000 workers are deemed essential and would still report for duty even if the government deferred their pay. The core security functions of DHS would continue.) The GOP dissenters say they’d prevail over time as the public came to see Mr. Obama’s fealty to his immigration diktat as the real cause of the shutdown.
Miracles do happen, but in every previous shutdown the voters blamed Republicans more than Mr. Obama. And if there is a terror attack, good luck explaining that Congress isn’t to blame because those DHS workers were supposed to be on the job even if they weren’t being paid.
Some of the Cliff Marchers are also demanding that Republicans break Senate rules and cashier the filibuster to pass the House bill. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy picked up that theme Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He pointed out that 57 Senators, including four Democrats, had voted to oppose Mr. Obama’s November order.
But busting the filibuster on policy would have ramifications far beyond this fight. Republicans would have to violate Senate rules, which require a two-thirds vote to change a rule midsession. They would also exceed what even Democrat Harry Reid did in breaking the filibusters for executive nominations.
Most important, this would remove what has long been a procedural barrier to narrow liberal majorities rewriting labor and election laws to hurt conservatives. If Republicans are going to throw out the filibuster, it should be done based on more than the desperation of a rump group in the House.
The immigration fiasco raises the larger question of whether House Republicans can even function as a majority. Some backbenchers are whispering that they’ll work with Democrats to oust Mr. Boehner as Speaker if he doesn’t follow their shutdown strategy. Some are also plotting to take down a procedural rule, which would mean handing control to Democrats.
Mr. Boehner has made mistakes, one of which is bending too much to the shutdown caucus. But let’s say the no-compromise crowd did succeed in humiliating the Speaker, and he resigned. What then? Whom do coup plotters want to put in charge?
Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan has support across the House GOP, but why would he want to run a majority that is hostage to the whim of 50 Members who care more about appeasing talk radio than achieving conservative victories?
Republicans need to do some soul searching about the purpose of a Congressional majority, including whether they even want it. If they really think Mr. Boehner is the problem, then find someone else to do his thankless job. If not, then start to impose some order and discipline and advance the conservative cause rather than self-defeating rebellion.
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4)-Liberals Mugged by Obamanet
Buyer’s remorse is already setting in for Google and other ‘net neutrality’ proponents.
By L. GORDON CROVITZ
When Google’s Eric Schmidt called White House officials a few weeks ago to oppose President Obama ’s demand that the Internet be regulated as a utility, they told him to buzz off. The chairman of the company that led lobbying for “net neutrality” learned the Obama plan made in its name instead micromanages the Internet.
Mr. Schmidt is not the only liberal mugged by the reality of Obamanet, approved on party lines last week by the Federal Communications Commission. The 300-plus pages of regulations remain secret, but as details leak out, liberals have joined the opposition to ending the Internet as we know it.
The Progressive Policy Institute said: “There is nothing progressive about the FCC backsliding to common carrier rules dating back to the 1930s.” The Internet Society, a net-neutrality advocate, said: “We are concerned with the FCC’s decision to base new rules for the modern Internet on decades-old telephone regulations designed for a very different technological era.” Former Clinton official Larry Irving wrote in the Hill: “Most of today’s proponents of a utility model for the Internet either have forgotten or never knew the genesis of the ‘regulatory restraint’ model that helped spur and continues to support Internet expansion.”
Verizon poked fun at the FCC’s retrograde move by issuing a news release in Morse code and in an old-fashioned typewriter font, dated “February 26, 1934,” the year Congress passed the Communications Act to regulate the telephone monopoly—the law the FCC is now applying to the Internet.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which supports applying the 1934 law to the Internet, nonetheless objects to a new regulation giving the FCC open-ended power to regulate the Internet. “A ‘general conduct rule,’ applied on a case-by-case basis,” the EFF wrote, “may lead to years of expensive litigation to determine the meaning of ‘harm’ (for those who can afford to engage in it).”
The general-conduct rule reportedly has seven standards, one of which is the “effect on free expression.” Net neutrality was supposed to ban online discrimination based on content. Instead, it is empowering the FCC—the agency that for decades enforced the “Fairness Doctrine” and that last year proposed studying “bias” in newsrooms—to chill speech.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler justified Obamanet by saying the Internet is “simply too important to be left without rules and without a referee.” He got it backward: Light-handed regulation made today’s Internet possible.
What if at the beginning of the Web, Washington had opted for Obamanet instead of the open Internet? Yellow Pages publishers could have invoked “harm” and “unjust and unreasonable” competition from online telephone directories. This could have strangled Alta Vista and Excite, the early leaders in search, and relegated Google to a Stanford student project. Newspapers could have lobbied against Craigslist for depriving them of classified advertising. Encyclopedia Britannica could have lobbied against Wikipedia.
Competitors could have objected to the “fast lane” that Amazon got from Sprint at the launch of the Kindle to ensure speedy e-book downloads. The FCC could have blocked Apple from integrating Internet access into the iPhone. Activists could have objected toAOL bundling access to The Wall Street Journal in its early dial-up service.
Among the first targets of the FCC’s “unjust and unreasonable” test are mobile-phone contracts that offer unlimited video or music. Netflix , the biggest lobbyist for utility regulation, could be regulated for how it uses encryption to deliver its content.
Until Congress or the courts block Obamanet, expect less innovation. During a TechFreedom conference last week, dissenting FCC commissioner Ajit Pai asked: “If you were an entrepreneur trying to make a splash in a marketplace that’s already competitive, how are you going to differentiate yourself if you have to build into your equation whether or not regulatory permission is going to be forthcoming from the FCC? According to this, permissionless innovation is a thing of the past.”
The other dissenting Republican commissioner, Michael O’Rielly, warned: “When you see this document, it’s worse than you imagine.” The FCC has no estimate on when it will make the rules public.
The silver lining is a valuable lesson for Silicon Valley executives who thought it was safe to lobby for net neutrality, but instead got Obamanet: The only place on the Internet for Washington regulators is at arm’s length.
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5) "Central View," by William Hamilton, J.D., Ph.D.
Proxy War: The President and the Prime Minister
Since 2009, the Obama Administration has favored the Palestinians over Israel. Meanwhile, in order to retain U.S. funding for Israel's essential Iron Dome missile-defense system, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu has turned the other cheek. But now, President Obama has gone a step too far by dispatching four of his top political operatives to teach Prime Minister Netanyahu's political opponents how to defeat Mr. Netanyahu in the upcoming Israeli elections. Their leader, Jeremy Bird, was the genius behind President Obama's grass-roots election campaigns in 2008 and 2012. Bird has now joined Victory 2015, the "anybody but Bibi," political campaign.
This week, Prime Minister Netanyahu struck back by telling the American Congress and people that the secret negotiations conducted with Iran by President Obama and his closest advisor, the Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett, will give Iran the atomic weapons Iran needs to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.
President Obama's great hope for historic achievement is to be the president who ends the 36-year-old "war" with Iran. But the Obama/Jarrett efforts are already truly historic. This is the first time the U.S. has ever tried to unseat the democratic government of one of our closest allies while actively aiding and abetting a brutal dictatorship in a way that could, eventually, lead to the total destruction of our democratic ally.
So why has President Obama gone out of his way to snub Prime Minister Netanyahu and repeatedly insult our only democratic ally in the Middle East? Recently, former New York City Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, made a stab at the answer; however, Giuliani got it backwards when he opined that President Obama may not love America. Instead, Mayor Giuliani might have expressed his wonder that President Obama, given how he was raised, loves America at all.
His two autobiographies told us that Candidate Obama's Kenyan father was an anti-colonial, anti-British, Communist Muslim who abandoned him and his mother in Hawaii. His divorced mother, a disciple of the avowed communist Frank Marshal Davis, married an Indonesian Muslim, and then moved young Barry Soetoro to Indonesia -- the world's largest Muslim country -- where he spent his most impressionable years in a Sunni Muslim environment.
Recall, the serial colonial occupations of Indonesia by the Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, and Japanese (1512-1945) were extremely brutal. A young Barry Soetoro (later, Barack Hussein Obama) could not attend school in Indonesia from age six-to-ten without developing an understandable hatred for colonial oppression.
Returning to Hawaii, he was enrolled in Punahou, Hawaii's most exclusive private prep school, while he lived with his maternal grandparents in an environment which is rife to this day with talk of secession from the United States and talk of the exploitation of Hawaii by the five, white missionary families who were the virtual rulers of Hawaii from 1837 to 1954.
So, without even discussing Mr. Obama's further education at the elite bastions of anti-Semitism as found in the faculty lounges of Occidental, Columbia, Harvard, and in the "God Damn America!" sermons of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, President Obama's efforts to throw Prime Minister Netanyahu out of office tell us about President Obama's motivations much more concretely than the somewhat ambiguous concerns expressed by Mayor Giuliani.
Nationally syndicated columnist, William Hamilton, is a laureate of the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame, the Colorado Aviation Hall of Fame, and the Oklahoma University Army ROTC Wall of Fame. He was educated at the University of Oklahoma, the George Washington University, the U.S Naval War College, the University of Nebraska, and Harvard University.
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