CENTCOM General asserts Iran is America's greatest threat in that region of the world.
What about Russia and N Korea, China and ISIS? (See 1 below.)
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Will Trump's pressure on Israeli settlements backfire? (See 2 below.)
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Now this is genius: Click here: Amazing 4-Year-Old Piano Prodigy
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Kim is right on the mark for supporting Nunes and being critical of Schiff. I have repeatedly maintained Schiff is the House equivalent of Schumer. Both political worms.
By challenging Nunes' integrity, Schiff is engaged in trying to cast doubt upon Nunes' ability to investigate Russian influence on our election. The Democrats have downplayed the fact that Flynn was outed and that is a criminal act. They are more interested in playing the partisan card than in finding out the truth because the truth will reveal Obama and his thugs were actually tracking the Trump crew during the campaign and after and went the extreme in revealing their names and engaging in more felonious acts.
What Obama was aware makes Watergate look benign. (See 3 and 3a below.)
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Why are the polar bears still around? (See 4 below.)
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American interference in foreign elections. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)"The most significant threat"--
Iran poses the “greatest long-term threat to U.S. interests” in the region covered by United States Central Command (CENTCOM), which includes the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, CENTCOM’s commander told the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday.
“Iran poses the most significant threat to the Central Region and to our national interests and the interests of our partners and allies,” Gen. Joseph Votel wrote in testimony submitted to Congress. Iran’s behavior has not been moderated by the nuclear agreement reached between Tehran and the global powers in July 2015, he observed. To the contrary: “Iran aspires to be a regional hegemon and its forces and proxies oppose U.S. interests in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza, and Syria, and seek to hinder U.S. objectives in Afghanistan and some Central Asian States.” Furthermore, “[t]hey have a robust theater ballistic missile program, and we remain concerned about their cyber and maritime activities, as well as the activities of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – Qods Forces (IRGC-QF) and their network of affiliates.”
Votel emphasized that Iran operates in what he called a “gray zone,” a murky space short of military confrontation, but that serves as a trigger point that can easily lead to communication breakdowns and miscalculations. “Iran fosters instability by funding and promoting a threat network that employs provocation, violence, and covert arms transfers that serve as the stimulants for a range of conflicts across the region,” he wrote. This includes Iran’s support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, its propping up of the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and its sending of funds, arms, and advisors to the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Votel’s testimony tallies with what he told Congress a year ago: that Iran has become “more aggressive in the days since the [Iran nuclear] agreement.”
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2) Israel's silenced majority
The pressure the Trump administration is exerting on Israel to constrain the rights of Jews to property in Judea and Samaria is the direct consequence of the refusal of the American foreign policy establishment to reckon with the reality that Israelis have internalized
During Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s meeting with US President Donald Trump at the White House in February, the premier was reportedly taken by surprise when Trump gently prodded – ahead of their meeting – for Israel to “hold back on settlements for a little bit.”
Since their meeting, Trump’s prod that Israel curtail the property rights of Jews in Judea and Samaria has been the central issue Trump’s chief negotiator Jason Greenblatt has discussed with Netanyahu and his representatives.
From the moment Netanyahu returned from Washington, his government ministers have been asking him to brief them on his discussions with Trump. He has refused. But on Thursday, Netanyahu finally agreed to update his security cabinet.
His agreement is long past due. It is vital for Netanyahu to tell his cabinet ministers what is happening in his conversations with the Americans about Judea and Samaria. It is imperative that the cabinet determine a clear response to Trump’s apparent demand for a full or partial freeze on Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria.
Such an agreed response is urgent because Trump’s position is antithetical to the position of the vast majority of Israelis. If the government caters to Trump’s demands it will breach the trust of the public that elected it.
This state of affairs was brought home this week with the publication of a new survey of public opinion regarding the Palestinian conflict with Israel. The survey was carried out among adult Israeli Jews by veteran Israeli pollster Mina Tzemach for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
The results of the poll are straightforward. Since Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, Israeli support for territorial concessions to the Palestinians has collapsed. Whereas in 2005, 59% of Israelis supported the establishment of a Palestinian state in Gaza, Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria in exchange for peace, today a mere 29% of Israelis support such a policy.
And levels of Israeli opposition to territorial giveaways only grow when the specifics of withdrawal are considered.
Seventy-seven percent of Israelis oppose full withdrawal from Judea and Samaria in the framework of a peace deal. Sixty-four percent oppose a pullout under which Israel would trade sovereignty over the so-called “settlement blocs” for sovereignty over lands inside of the 1949 armistice lines.
Fifty-seven percent of the public opposes an Israeli withdrawal from everything outside the settlement blocs even without such a trade.
The dramatic drop in Israeli support for the establishment of a Palestinian state over the past 12 years has nothing to do with ideology. The Israeli public has not turned its back on the Left’s ideological vision of two-states west of the Jordan River because it has adopted the ideological convictions of the religious Zionist movement.
The Israeli public has abandoned its support for the two-state paradigm because it believes that Israel’s past moves to implement it have weakened the country and that any attempt in the future to implement it will imperil the country.
This conviction is revealed by the fact that 76% of Israeli Jews want Israel to permanently retain sole responsibility for security in all of Judea and Samaria.
Eighty-eight percent say that Israel must permanently control the territory bordering Ben-Gurion Airport. Eighty-one percent insist that Israel must permanently control the land that bordering the Tel-Aviv-Jerusalem highway Route 443.
Eighty-one percent of Israelis say that Israel must control the Jordan Valley in perpetuity. Fifty-five percent say that Israel cannot defend itself without permanently controlling the Jordan Valley. Sixty-nine percent of Israelis reject the notion that Israel can subcontract its national security to foreign powers that would deploy forces to the Jordan Valley in the framework of a peace deal.
In other words, Trump’s desire to mediate a deal between Israel and the PLO places him in conflict with anywhere between 60 and 85% of the Israeli public.
Throughout the US presidential race, Trump said repeatedly that his mastery of the art of the deal would enable him to succeed where his predecessors failed. His experience as a negotiator in the business world, he said, makes him more capable of mediating a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians than any of his predecessors.
It is possible that Trump is right about his relative advantage over his predecessors. But how well or poorly he negotiates is completely beside the point.
Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama didn’t fail to bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians because they were bad negotiators. They failed because there is no deal to be had. This reality is what informs the Israeli public.
The Israeli public rejects the two-state model that is now informing Trump, because it has become convinced that Israel’s partner in a hypothetical deal – the PLO – has no intention of ever making a deal with Israel.
The people of Israel has come to realize that the PLO demands Israeli concessions – like a freeze on Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria – not because it wants to make peace, but because it wants to weaken Israel.
The reality that informs the position of the Israeli public has been borne out by every PLO action and position since July 2000, when the PLO rejected peace and Palestinian statehood and opted instead to initiate a terrorist war against Israeli society and launch a campaign to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist.
In contrast to the Israeli public, the American foreign policy establishment never accepted the obvious meaning of Yasser Arafat’s rejection of then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak’s peace offer at Camp David in July 2000, and his subsequent initiation of an all-out war of terrorism against Israel.
The Americans responsible for determining US Middle Eastern policy, along with the American Jewish community, never acknowledged the significance of the Palestinians’ refusal to accept sovereign responsibility over Gaza after Israel withdrew from the area in 2005.
They never accepted the obvious meaning of Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian elections in 2006 or the post-Israeli withdrawal transformation of Gaza into a hub of global jihad and a launching pad for continuous aggression against Israel.
Unlike the Israeli public, the Americans closed their eyes to the significance of Mahmoud Abbas’s campaign to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist, to the PA’s refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist, to the PA’s finance of terrorism, and its indoctrination of Palestinian society to support and work toward the destruction of Israel.
This week, the willful blindness of the American foreign policy establishment and the American Jewish establishment to the reality that informs the position of the Israeli public was on display at AIPAC’s policy conference. Although the conference was held under the banner, “Many Voices, One Mission,” precious few voices were heard that reflected the view of the overwhelming majority of Israelis.
The view of the Israeli public that the two-state policy is entirely divorced from reality because there is no one on the Palestinian side who is interested in living at peace with a Jewish state, and that further Israeli concessions to the PLO endanger the Jewish state, was virtually ignored, particularly by the American speakers.
No senior American policy-maker explained that given the Palestinians’ commitment to the destruction of Israel, any policy that requires Israel to make territorial and other concessions is an anti-Israel policy – in substance if not in intent.
The reason the position of the majority of the Israeli public was ignored by the largest pro-Israel lobbying organization in America is that no senior American policy-maker on either side of the partisan aisle is willing to allow the reality that informs the Israeli public to influence its thinking. Although an ideological chasm separates Martin Indyk – John Kerry’s chief negotiator – from Elliott Abrams – George Bush’s point man on Israel – the substance of their views of the goal of US policy-making toward Israel and the Palestinians is largely the same. They both believe that Israel should surrender the vast majority of Judea and Samaria to the PLO.
And this again brings us to Israel and the security cabinet meeting on Thursday evening.
Ahead of the meeting, Netanyahu said that he intended ask his ministers to approve his plan to establish a new town in Judea and Samaria for the residents of the recently destroyed community of Amona.
There is no doubt that from a political perspective, and indeed from a humanitarian perspective, Netanyahu’s commitment to establishing a new community for the former residents of Amona is a positive development. But the question of whether or not Israel should build a new community in Judea and Samaria is not the main issue. Indeed, the issue of Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria has never been the main issue.
The pressure the Trump administration is exerting on Israel to constrain the rights of Jews to property in Judea and Samaria is the direct consequence of the refusal of the American foreign policy establishment to reckon with the reality that Israelis have internalized.
The Israeli public today recognizes that there is no deal to be had. The Palestinians will never make peace with Israel, because they remain committed to its destruction.
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3) What Devin Nunes Knows
Team Obama was spying broadly on the incoming administration
By Kimberley A.Strassel
California Rep. Adam Schiff may not offer much by way of substance, but give him marks for political flimflam. The ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee was so successful at ginning up fake outrage over his Republican counterpart that he successfully buried this week’s only real (and bombshell) news.
Mr. Schiff and fellow Democrats spent this week accusing Chairman Devin Nunes of carrying water for President Trump, undermining the committee’s Russia investigation, and hiding information. The press dutifully regurgitated the outrage, as well as Mr. Schiff’s calls for Mr. Nunes to recuse himself from the investigation into possible Russian electoral meddling.
All this engineered drama served to deep-six the important information Americans urgently deserve to know. Mr. Nunes has said he has seen proof that the Obama White House surveilled the incoming administration—on subjects that had nothing to do with Russia—and that it further unmasked (identified by name) transition officials. This goes far beyond a mere scandal. It’s a potential crime.
We’ve known since early February that a call by former national security adviser Mike Flynn to the Russian ambassador was monitored by U.S. intelligence. There’s nothing improper in tapping foreign officials. But it was improper that Mr. Flynn’s name was revealed and leaked to the press, along with the substance of his conversation. The media nonetheless excused all this by claiming one piece of Mr. Flynn’s conversation (sanctions) was relevant to the continuing investigation into Trump-Russia ties.
Around the same time, Mr. Nunes’s own intelligence sources informed him that documents showed further collection of information about, and unmasking of, Trump transition officials. These documents aren’t easily obtainable, since they aren’t the “finished” intelligence products that Congress gets to see. Nonetheless, for weeks Mr. Nunes has been demanding intelligence agencies turn over said documents—with no luck, so far.
Mr. Nunes earlier this week got his own source to show him a treasure trove of documents at a secure facility. Here are the relevant details:
First, there were dozens of documents with information about Trump officials. Second, the information these documents contained was not related to Russia. Third, while many reports did “mask” identities (referring, for instance, to “U.S. Person 1 or 2”) they were written in ways that made clear which Trump officials were being discussed. Fourth, in at least one instance, a Trump official other than Mr. Flynn was outright unmasked. Finally, these documents were circulated at the highest levels of government.
To sum up, Team Obama was spying broadly on the incoming administration.
Mr. Schiff’s howls about Mr. Nunes’s methods are bluster; the Republican was doing his job, and well. Mr. Nunes has spent years cultivating whistleblowers and sources as part of his oversight responsibilities, and that network scored him information that has otherwise remained hidden. It isn’t clear if the White House itself attempted to obtain these documents, but even if it did, the Senate has confirmed few Trump political appointees, which means there aren’t many loyal staffers among the Obama holdovers to attempt it. It’s also possible the Trump White House was wary of making such a demand, since it would inevitably leak. The last thing the administration wants is wild speculation that it was interfering with the FBI’s Russia probe.
Meantime, few things match the ludicrous furor over Mr. Nunes’s source-meeting place, or his visit to brief Mr. Trump. Congress members must view most classified material on executive-branch grounds, since that’s the only way to access it physically. Having discovered the former administration’s surveillance of Trump officials, Mr. Nunes had a duty to let the White House know. (Imagine if he’d sat on it.) He could hardly let Democrats know first, since their only interest these days is in leaking and twisting stories. And the reason he held press briefings before and after his meeting with Mr. Trump was to be transparent about his purpose.
Hint to the press corps: If Mr. Nunes wanted to tip off the White House about his Russia probe, it’d be a lot easier to speed-dial Steve Bannon secretly from his office.
If Mr. Schiff wants to be trusted with important information, he might start by proving he is trustworthy—rather than rumor-mongering that there is “more than circumstantial evidence” of Trump-Russia collusion. He might voice some concern that a prior White House was monitoring its political opponents. He might ask whether Obama officials had been “reverse monitoring”—tracking foreign officials solely so they could spy on the Trump team.
Mr. Nunes has zero reason to recuse himself from this probe, because he is doing his job. It’s Mr. Schiff who ought to be considering recusal, for failing to do his own.
3a)
Adam Schiff is a Traitor to HumanityBy
Adam Schiff is a traitor to the United States...because he is undermining American democracy and the forces for peace.
The Clintons and the Democratic Leadership Council sold out the Democratic constituency, that is, the working class and peace, because they were convinced that they could get more money from Wall Street, the global corporations, and the military/security complex than they could from the labor unions.
The labor unions were going to be destroyed by jobs offshoring and the relocation of US manufacturing abroad. This relocation of American manufacturing would destroy the budgets of the state and local governments in America’s manufacturing regions and result in fierce pressure on the public sector unions, which are being destroyed in turn.
In short, Democratic Party funding was evaporating, and Democrats needed to compete against Republicans for funding from the One Percent. George Soros helped the Clinton Democrats in this transition, and soon there was no one representing the working class.
Consequently, since Clinton the real median family income of the working class has been falling, and in the 21st century the working class has been buried in unemployment and debt.
But the Democratic Party has prospered, and so have Bill and Hillary Clinton. The Democratic Party raised far more money, especially from the One Percent, than Trump, who allied with the working class, in the past presidential election. Bill & Hillary have a personal fortune of $120 million at least, and $1.6 trillion in their personal foundation that supports their daughter.
Using Government to get rich is an old trick in America, but the Clintons took it to new highs when they flushed the working class and became the whores for Wall Street, Israel, and the military/security complex.
This is where the Democratic Party is today. The despicable Adam Schiff’s function is to discredit the presidency of Donald Trump by creating an atmosphere in which any interest in establishing normal relations with Russia, thus reducing the tensions that could result in nuclear war, is proof of being a “Putin agent” and a “traitor.”
What Schiff is doing is making it impossible for President Trump to reduce the dangerous tensions between the nuclear superpowers that the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes created. These tensions can easily result in nuclear war, as I have often emphasized.
It is extraordinary that Schiff, who endangers the existence of all life on planet Earth, is a hero of the liberal/progressive/left. The pressitute media whores love him. He always gets top billing as he urges on humanity to its final destruction.
How is it that Donald Trump, who says he wants to reduce tensions with Russia is portrayed as a threat, while the liberal/progressive/left, the CIA, and the Democratic Party are portrayed as the salt of the Earth for promulgating nuclear war with Russia (and China)?
I have no explanation as to why the peoples of the West, as ignorant and idiotic as they are, and their ignorance and idiocy are extreme, prefer nuclear war with Russia (and China) instead of normal relations.
But the utterly evil Adam Schiff prefers nuclear war, and that is where he is leading the insouciant West.
And you can bet your last cent that the media whores will continue cheering Schiff on.
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4)PLEASE READ TO THE END!!!!!
The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulate, at Beorway.
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone.
Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.
Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.
Oh...................I must apologize. I neglected to mention that this report was from November 2, 1922, as reported by the AP and published in The Washington Post - 93 years ago.This must have been caused by the Model T Ford's emissions.
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5)
Liberal Hypocrites Forget US Has Interfered in 81 Foreign Elections – That We Know Of
US Democrats and Lindsey Graham are VERY UPSET with unsubstantiated reports that Russia tried to interfere with the 2016 US election.
Democrats call the alleged Russian interference an act of war.
From The Gateway Pundit
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++These same hacks had no problem with Barack Obama using taxpayer dollars in an attempt to swing the Israeli election. The Obama State Department gave $349,276 in U.S. taxpayer-funded grants to try to influence Israelis to vote against conservative Benjamin Netanyahu in the March 2015 election.In fact the United States has worked to influence at least 81 elections around the world that we know of.The United States U.S. has tried to influence the outcome of another country’s election more than 80 times between 1946 and 2000.
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