Queen Hillarious, The Baltimore Mayor and Jane Fonda!

Grandma Hillarious has got to be delighted with the Mayor of Baltimore who decided it was a wise thing to give looting animals space to destroy and burn property. Anarchy is such a positive endeavor.

At least for the time being it took our next queen off the front page.

Were I technologically capable I would design an ad with Hillary's face morphing into Jane Fonda's and then back again.

After all, the woman who wants to be our next president and the Democrats who seem willing to nominate her  has demonstrated she is willing to sell our nation down the river so her husband could receive some bloated speaking fees and their foundation could receive donations from sources interested in raping our nation and controlling a large portion of our uranium production.

Typical behaviour we have come to expect from the Arkansas Clinton Hillbillies who know how to manipulate the system for their personal gain and greed. (See 1 below.)
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And now for some more humor from our Nun Friend:

For all of you who went to Catholic School and for those who didn't

Click here

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I was invited by  one of my daughter's father in law but was unable to go.  (See 2 below.)

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Israel and its right to exercise "anticipatory self-defense" (See 3  below.)

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Dick

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1) As you know, my dear people, the last year for me has been an annus horribilus. The Royal House of Clinton has been tormented by questions about our handling of finances and subjected to tiresome questions about the tragic events in Benghazi –

in the furthest regions of our empire. And, sadly, also questions about my Royal e-mails.

Nevertheless, I will not be daunted in my desire and commitment to serve you the people. 

For the next seventeen months I will be traveling among you as one of you, to listen to your deepest longings and needs. I will be with you in your Wal-Mart and beside you in your Burger Kings. I will drive with you down the busy interstate highways of our land sharing your poverty and needs with you.

How well I remember the days when the Duke of Arkansas and I were impoverished. After we were expelled from our Washington Palace we hardly had two mansions to rub together. We were so poor we had to remove thousands of dollars of china, flatware, carpets

and gifts from the Washington Palace just to survive. Now, happily, benefactors from around our empire have given just enough for us to scrape by.

During those difficult times we had to cut back when our daughter was married. We only had three million dollars to spend on her wedding and I remember our hopes as she moved into her $10 million Manhattan apartment that one day she would be able to move on from that humble abode to something more fitting. So as I travel across our land to meet you all, I will be listening and sharing with you.

Then when the time for the royal election comes I know you will crown me as your rightful monarch so that we can all live happily ever after.

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2) George W. Bush Bashes Obama on Middle East Policies

By Josh Rogin

In a closed-door meeting with Jewish Donors Saturday night, former President George W. Bush delivered his harshest public criticisms to date against his successor on foreign policy, saying that President Barack Obama is being naïve about Iran and the pending nuclear deal and losing the war against the Islamic State.

One attendee at the Republican Jewish Coalition session, held at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas with owner Sheldon Adelson in attendance, transcribed large portions of Bush's remarks. The former president, who rarely ever criticizes Obama in public, at first remarked that the idea of re-entering the political arena was something he didn't want to do. He then proceeded to explain why Obama, in his view, was placing the U.S. in "retreat" around the world. He also said Obama was misreading Iran's intentions while relaxing sanctions on Tehran too easily. 

According to the attendee's transcription, Bush noted that Iran has a new president, Hassan Rouhani. "He's smooth," Bush said. "And you've got to ask yourself, is there a new policy or did they just change the spokesman?"

Bush said that Obama's plan to lift sanctions on Iran with a promise that they could snap back in place at any time was not plausible. He also said the deal would be bad for American national security in the long term: "You think the Middle East is chaotic now? Imagine what it looks like for our grandchildren. That's how Americans should view the deal."  

Bush then went into a detailed criticism of Obama's policies in fighting the Islamic State and dealing with the chaos in Iraq. He called Obama's decision to withdraw all U.S. troops in Iraq at the end of 2011 a "strategic blunder." Bush signed an agreement with the Iraqi government to withdraw those troops, but the idea had been to negotiate a new status of forces agreement to keep U.S. forces there past 2011. The Obama administration tried and failed to negotiate such an agreement.

Bush said he views the rise of the Islamic State as al-Qaida's "second act" and that they may have changed the name but that murdering innocents is still the favored tactic. He defended his own administration's handling of terrorism, noting that the terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed to killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was captured on his watch: "Just remember the guy who slit Danny Pearl's throat is in Gitmo, and now they're doing it on TV."

Obama promised to degrade and destroy Islamic State's forces but then didn't develop a strategy to complete the mission, Bush said. He said that if you have a military goal and you mean it, "you call in your military and say 'What's your plan?' " He indirectly touted his own decision to surge troops to Iran in 2007, by saying, "When the plan wasn't working in Iraq, we changed."

"In order to be an effective president ... when you say something you have to mean it," he said. "You gotta kill 'em."

Bush told several anecdotes about his old friend and rival Russian President Vladimir Putin. Bush recalled that Putin met his dog Barney at the White House and then later, when Bush went to Moscow, Putin showed him his dog and remarked that he was "bigger stronger and faster than Barney." For Bush, that behavior showed him that Putin didn't think in "win-win" terms.

Bush also remarked that Putin was rich, divorced his wife and loves power. Putin's domestic popularity comes from his control of Russian media, according to Bush. "Hell, I'd be popular, too, if I owned NBC news," he said.

Regarding his brother Jeb's potential run for the presidency, Bush acknowledged that he was a political liability for Jeb, that the Bush name can be used against him, and that American's don't like dynasties. He also said that foreign policy is going to especially important in the presidential campaign and that the test for Republicans running will be who has got the "courage" to resist isolationist tendencies.

Regarding Hillary Clinton, Bush said it will be crucial how she plays her relationship with the press. Also, she will eventually have to choose between running on the Obama administration's policies or running against them. If she defends them, she's admitting failure, he said, but if she doesn't she's blaming the president.

For George W. Bush, the remarks in Vegas showed he has little respect for how the current president is running the world. He also revealed that he takes little responsibility for the policies that he put in place that contributed to the current state of affairs.

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3)

AFTER FAILING TO PREEMPT: ISRAEL, IRAN AND NUCLEAR WAR

Author:  Louis Rene Beres, PhD 

Back in January 2003, the Project Daniel Group had advised Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Iranian nuclearization. In its then still-confidential final report to the premier, titled Israel's Strategic Future, the Group underscored a significantly core conclusion: Allowing Iran to become a nuclear weapons state can never be construed as an acceptable option. To further support this position legally, as well as strategically, the Group  referenced a very basic or “peremptory” national right under international law. This prerogative, we had counseled, is known formally as “anticipatory self-defense.”

Our jurisprudential message was loud and clear. International law is never a suicide pact. Under no circumstances can a state ever be expected to become complicit in its own annihilation. Indeed, following the authoritative 1996 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, a country may even maintain a limited right to use nuclear weapons.

In any event, for a variety of both known and unknown reasons, the Group's early advice on preemption and self-defense was not taken. Now, it is effectively certain that Israel will have to face a fully nuclear Iran sometime in the next several years. It is also plausible that Israel's overall strategic position has been compromised by pertinent decisions of the Obama presidency, most recently, by the Pentagon's surprise publication of a 1987 document detailing once-secret elements of Israel's nuclear program. Oddly, although the Obama Administration was willing to declassify and publish the specific sections on Israel's nuclear program, it simultaneously redacted all sensitive sections on the NATO countries.

Looking ahead, Israel's nuclear weapons and posture will become increasingly indispensable to that mini-country's survival. Rather than risk any further compromise by its principal ally, Jerusalem will need to garner every conceivable strategic advantage merely to endure. Lacking even a respectable splinter of mass (classic Prussian military strategist, Karl von Clausewitz, had famously warned, even before nuclear weapons, “mass counts”), Israel will soon have to: (1) reassess the regional “correlation of forces;” and, correspondingly, (2) refashion its substantially complex “order of battle.”

Mass? Israel, it should be recalled, is smaller than America's Lake Michigan.

In the matter of Iran, Israel's abandonment by Washington goes back many years. In 2008, a much-publicized National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) summary report stated that Tehran had already halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Even then, it had been a plainly speculative conclusion.

What was Israel to do? Not unexpectedly, Washington took no hand in assisting with any prudentially considered Israeli expressions of anticipatory self-defense. Further, following very conspicuous release of the American NIE, Russia and Iran reached an agreement on completion of the plutonium-based nuclear facility in Bushehr. Soon after, China signed a $2.3 billion energy agreement with Iran. Now, in April 2015, Russia has formally announced its intention to lift a five-year ban on the delivery of S-300 air defense missile systems to Iran.

For Israel, Russia's announcement likely puts the final nail in the coffin of any once-meaningful preemption option. Yet, Jerusalem must still plan purposefully to avoid any eventual use of nuclear weapons by Iran. In essence, Israel now requires a residual strategic doctrine that can somehow combine all vitally interpenetrating protective elements of deterrence, targeting, war fighting, preemption, and defense.

More precisely, now that diplomacy with Iran has failed – there is no reasonable argument for optimism about President Obama's P5+1 agreement, especially when the pact will freely allow newly-unfrozen Iranian assets to be used for military purchases –  – Israel’s updated program for survival must quickly fashion a suitably general strategy. Among other things, this broadened Israeli doctrine, from which an array of needed operations and tactics could then be suitably drawn, will have to include a fundamental policy shift from deliberate ambiguity (the “bomb in the basement”) to disclosure. This nuanced shift would need to be timed so as not to embarrass Germany, which is now providing Israel with a fifth Dolphin-class diesel submarine.

For Israel, a country with effectively no mass, appropriate sea-basing will become a progressively more critical expression of survivable nuclear retaliatory forces.

For many observers, it will be difficult to imagine nuclear weapons as anything but manifestly evil.  Yet, notwithstanding Obama's oft-stated preference for a “world free of nuclear weapons,” there are circumstances where a particular state's possession of such bombs and missiles could be all that prevents catastrophic war or even genocide. In this connection, the International Court of Justice had ruled, in its Advisory Opinion on July 8, 1996, “The Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defense….” Where “…the very survival of a State would be at stake,” said the ICJ, even the actual use of nuclear weapons could be permissible.

Should it ever be deprived of its presumed nuclear forces, Israel would promptly become vulnerable to massive attacks from selected enemy states, and also their terrorist surrogates.  In essence, Israel’s nuclear weapons are not the problem. In the Middle East, the only real problem remains a far-reaching and wholly unreconstructed Iranian/Islamist commitment to blot out the “Zionist Entity.”

With its nuclear weapons and a corollary nuclear strategy, Israel could deter a rational enemy’s unconventional attacks, as well as most large conventional aggressions. With such weapons, Israel could also still launch non-nuclear preemptive strikes against enemy state hard targets that might threaten Israel's annihilation. Without these weapons, such potentially essential acts of anticipatory self-defense would likely represent the onset of a much wider war. This is because there would then be no compelling threat of Israeli counter-retaliation.

Now, before it is too late, is the time to call things by their correct name. Israel's nuclear arsenal offers a potentially indispensable impediment to the actual regional use of nuclear weapons. Joined with a fully-coherent strategic doctrine, one that would include, inter alia, more explicit codifications of counter-city (“counter-value”) targeting, and also certain enhanced efforts at ballistic missile defense, these weapons could come to represent the entire Middle East’s principal line of defense against Iranian nuclear aggression, and regional nuclear war.

Always, Israeli nuclear weapons and doctrine comprise a key part of the solution. Under no circumstances, should they be alleged to represent a part of the problem.

Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is the author of many books and articles dealing with nuclear strategy and nuclear war. Chair of Project Daniel, and Professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue, he lectures widely in the United States and abroad on strategic and legal issues.

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