Meanwhile, the Judicial Left are out to stop Trump at all cost. Their recent decisions have nothing to do with vetting. They are interested in their own political agenda, not the law, not the power of the president, not his ability to protect our nation, not potential terrorist threats. They are interested in what they think is relevant and will walk the judicial plank to deliver. (See 1 and 1a below.)
Another aspect causing divisiveness relates to the fact that we remain a bar bell nation. Two two large population centers on both the East and West Coasts are major bubbles in which the mass media reside and from which they dictate and define. Lamentably, they reflect a limited scope of what America is all about and their focus is naturally on what they learn, see, hear and eventually come to believe and report. This is why they missed the last election, seldom understand why they are out of step and end up burying themselves in their own elitist self-righteousness.
Since they are out of step they also remain out of touch with core values that motivate large segments of America. The mass media do not understand those who comprise the "hustings." Even the few who might reject what they hear because "they know better" eventually become corrupted. The pseudo-sophisticates who comprise our mass media have been ingrained with values they learned in the education cocoons they attend. They are bathed in their professor's liberal socialist oriented jargon and philosophies. Their minds are cleansed of logic and common sense.They attend the "right" education factories where they are taught to turn "left."
Upon graduation, they bury themselves into the bowels of government, write the legislation which the elected political masters, they serve, seldom read and may not even understand and then are surprised when the results do not reflect what they intended. Even worse, many of these " half-baked loafs" seek employment in the mass media where they immediately learn advancement means "going along." Those possessing creative minds, those who pursue truths, find they are not welcome in what was once the vaulted halls of "objective opinions." Same for Hollywood where conservatives are outcasts and the same is true for the other "bon bons" who join the State Department. Don't fight the anointed if you want to advance. Fresh ideas are unwanted ones.
President Trump uses the mass media as his "whipping boy" just as Obama did with FOX. The "hustings" crowd get the message. They are wise enough to feel their very freedoms are threatened by those who comprise the "anti-Trump" crowd. This is why they willingly disregard some of the bizarre charges, unsubstantiated accusations Trump makes. It is pay back time and they now have the upper hand. At least this will be the case unless Republicans blow the opportunity the bar called Middle America gave them.
Eventually, it is critical America come together and become, more or less, united again if Trump is to succeed with his pitch about "Making America Great Again." 9/11 was a tragic costly wound but served as a unifying event. Will it take another event or war to bring us together? Time will tell.
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Will Greenblatt and Kushner prove to be miracle workers and, if so, at what cost to the original opinion Israeli's formed about Trump's espoused intentions? (See 2, 2a and 2b below.)
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More Irish Humor. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) The Travel Ban Is about Vetting — Which means It’s about Islam Because the United States is in a defensive war against sharia supremacism.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
It is not about the executive orders. When it comes to protecting the United States from the threats posed by radical Islam, it has never been about President Donald Trump’s executive orders: the first one that was torpedoed by the radical judiciary in January, and the new and improved version that was suspended this week — the Lawyer Left having conveniently managed to shop its challenge to Barack Obama’s fellow Hawaiian and Harvard Law School classmate Judge Derrick Watson.
The issue is vetting. Each executive order was conceived as a temporary step, a “hold in place” measure while the permanent solution, vetting, was carefully crafted and ultimately implemented.
Now, just as the Left hoped, the temporary step has not only overwhelmed the permanent solution. It has made the permanent solution much more difficult — perhaps impossible — to achieve.
The president’s first order was not invalidated because it was invalid. It was invalidated by an outrageous political maneuver disguised as a judicial decision by the Ninth Circuit federal appeals court. Yet government lawyers — especially the law-and-order, have-faith-in-the-system types — can’t help themselves. They see litigation as a high-minded chess game, winnable by reasoned strategy: Look at what the court said the infirmities were, address them, and then take another crack at persuading the tribunal.
But that’s not the game being played by the Ninth Circuit and the many progressive activists among the 300-odd lawyers President Obama placed on the federal bench (that’s life tenure, boys and girls). They are about winning the war, not the skirmish.http://www.nysun.com/editorials/feud-in-the-9th-circuit/89929/
WASHINGTON – Seasoned diplomats and ambitious politicians from the Left and Right have tried and failed spectacularly in their efforts to forge peace in the Middle East, one following the other, promising a fresh approach to peacemaking and to rid Israelis and Palestinians of stale thinking and faint hearts.
Never did Jason Greenblatt, a lawyer from New York, think he would be among this esteemed group of frustrated deal-makers.
He enters the fray, as President Donald Trump’s special representative for international negotiations, armed with a critical trait: sincere humility, for the privilege to work toward peace in a region he cares deeply for and in service of a man he believes has the capacity to deliver.
As with Jared Kushner, Trump’s Orthodox son-in-law and senior adviser to whom he will report, Greenblatt brings no diplomatic or governmental experience to the table. But that is what Trump represents, and the experiment that America has chosen to try in electing him.
And so that experiment is now applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israelis and Palestinians are hopeful his lack of conventional experience will lead Greenblatt to approach the world’s most intractable conflict with an open mind and genuinely fresh ideas.
Despite his atypical background, Greenblatt does enter the job with some fixed opinions and a vision for what America’s role should be in any peace talks.
“In order to make a deal – whether it’s a business deal or a peace agreement that lasts – both sides need to be leaving the table satisfied,” Greenblatt told me in our first interview together at Trump Tower last June. “They may not be happy with each aspect, but they both have to leave saying this deal is going to work for us. We weren’t forced into it – there are items on it perhaps we’re not happy with, but we traded them ourselves. We made all of the decisions.
“That’s very different than talk that has existed for many years in various camps about trying to force the sides into a peace,” he continued. “[Trump] doesn’t believe forcing the sides works – he thinks it’s an unrealistic thing. Maybe it could be achieved, and then it would just break apart.”
This was Greenblatt’s position at a moment when he was advising an underdog presidential candidate. But his approach has proven consistent as he has started his job at the White House, based on Trump’s recent comments on the conflict, in which the president distanced himself from prejudging the outcome of negotiations.
“I’m looking at two states and one state, and I like the one both parties like,” Trump told a joint news conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month. “I can live with either one.”
Greenblatt’s visit to the region this week was an “orientation,” according to State Department officials who worked with National Security Council aides to coordinate the trip. Greenblatt plans to return several times in order to quietly build relationships and trust, before ultimately jump-starting a formal US-led peace process.
Greenblatt did “a lot of listening, discussing the views of the leadership in the region,” said Mark Toner, acting spokesman for the State Department.
Greenblatt hoped to “create a climate” for fresh peace talks in “the first of what will become many visits,” he said.
But over the summer, Greenblatt suggested it was the Palestinians – not the Israelis – who were actively avoiding the negotiating table.
“I think the Palestinians need to come to the table,” he said at the time. “They have avoided this for too long now. It is time for them to sit and have a realistic discussion for the benefit of their people.”
Greenblatt is no longer using this sort of language in public, now that he is uniquely responsible for rebooting peace talks. Indeed, he is trying to shed any image of himself that may be interpreted as biased toward one side or another: An Orthodox man, he chose to remove his yarmulke before entering meetings this week with Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
For all the hope that has been placed in Greenblatt and Kushner, because of, or in spite of, their lack of conventional experience, they do not seem intent – at least thus far – on engaging with their predecessors for guidance and advice.
Career US diplomats who have worked on this portfolio for years are not being consulted; State Department officials were not present on the trip, according to several officials, and their role in the trip was organizational.
Figures who have served in Democratic and Republican administrations in pursuit of peace, such as George Mitchell, Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, have not been approached for consultation.
Nevertheless, Washington experts have thus far heard generally positive things of Greenblatt and Kushner, several have told The Jerusalem Post. While Kushner in particular has been inundated with other, unrelated commitments, both have reportedly demonstrated deep interest in learning the policy machinations that have made the Israeli- Palestinian conflict so difficult to end.
They both also have strong relations with Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, who has respected their desire to rebuild trust after several publicly contentious years between his government and the Obama administration.
They have achieved this by leaking to the press virtually nothing of substance of their conversations.
Their desire to keep disagreements behind closed doors is remarkably similar to plans for the US-Israel relationship that Hillary Clinton’s aides outlined to the Post, plans that were to be followed should she have won the presidency: It is not that disagreements would not persist, but simply that we, the public, won’t know about them.
Israel’s cultivation of both men will not take them far from where they started, as men politically sympathetic to the Jewish world and the Zionist cause. The question remains whether Greenblatt and Kushner will succeed in securing the trust of Palestinian leadership, and whether those relationships will be enough to achieve what Barack Obama and John Kerry never could: direct negotiations that forge the deal of all deals.
President Trump continues to be the focus of confusion within the Jewish world. At first he was hailed as massively pro-Israel. He said he was opposed to the Iran deal and Israel's treatment by the UN, promised to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and appointed as U.S. ambassador a supporter of the settlers. But then he invited Mahmoud Abbas to the White House and sent his envoy Jason Greenblatt to make nice with him in Ramallah, asked Benjamin Netanyahu to hold back on settlement building and back-pedaled on moving the embassy. The writer is a columnist for The Times (UK).
1a) Feud in the Ninth Circuit
Whatever else one can say about President Trump’s so-called travel ban, it has ignited a fabulous feud among the riders of the 9th United States Appeals Circuit. One has called the whole case a “folly” and likened it not just to a dog being wagged by its tail but also to a St. Bernard “being wagged by a flea on its tail.” It’s hard not to imagine that, from the high bench, the sages of the Supreme Court are enjoying the spectacle.
The business about the St. Bernard and the flea is from of one the clearest-thinking judges on the whole appeals bench, Alex Kozinski. He issued a dissent from the refusal of the 9th circuit to give a full, en banc review of a district court’s decision to block President Trump’s travel ban. He warns of a chilling effect of courts holding politicians to account for comments made on the stump.
Politico’s Josh Gerstein (our former coast-based national correspondent) has published a terrific summary of the feud, in which Judge Kozinski is but one of five circuit-riders who want the full bench to hear this case. A filing Friday, comprising ripostes from both sides, makes delicious reading. In it, one joey, Stephen Reinhardt, characterizes Judge Kozinski’s opinion as a “diatribe” and insists no issue is left for the appeals court.
Judge Kozinski fixes on two features of the current case. One is the question of due process. The reasoning of the 9th Circuit majority, Judge Kozinski points out, “rests solely on Due Process.” He goes on to point out, however, that the “vast majority of foreigners covered by the executive order” — being foreigners who have never set foot at America — “have no Due Process rights.”
It’s a devastating point. As Judge Kozinski sums it up, it means the court has supported an injunction against the President on “a rationale that applies to a small percentage of those covered by the President’s order.” It’s a point that really goes to the good faith of the 9th Circuit, which, we imagine, is why Judge Reinhardt and his colleagues are in such a defensive posture.
The “second peculiar feature” of the 9th Circuit’s opinion on which Judge Kosinski focuses is the Establishment Clause. That is the clause of the First Amendment that says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. Judge Kosinski dissents from the Circuit’s willingness to bring into consideration President Trump’s statements made about Muslims in the thick of the election campaign.
An “evidentiary snark hunt” is the phrase Judge Kosinski uses for the 9th Circuit’s ruling. “This is folly. Candidates say many things on the campaign trail; they are often contradictory or inflammatory. No shortage of dark purpose can be found by sifting through the daily promises of a drowning candidate, when in truth the poor shlub’s only intention is to get elected.”
Warns Judge Kosinski: “No Supreme Court case — indeed no case anywhere that I am aware of — sweeps so widely in probing politicians for unconstitutional motives. And why stop with the campaign? Personal histories, public and private, can become a scavenger hunt for statements that a clever lawyer can characterize as proof of a -phobia or an -ism, with the prefix depending on the constitutional challenge of the day.”
“This path is strewn with danger,” Judge Kosinski writes. He warns it “will chill campaign speech, despite the fact that our most basic free speech principles have their ‘fullest and most urgent application precisely to the conduct of campaigns for political office.’” Does, he asks, a Meet the Press interview cancel out an appearance on Face the Nation? And what about “an overzealous senior thesis or a poorly selected yearbook quote?”
Judge Kosinski is sometimes called a libertarian. He certainly came by his love of liberty the hard way, having started out in life in the Stalinist youth of communist Romania. He was 12 when his family escaped with him to freedom in America. He so gloried in American liberty that but 14 years after he landed as a lad he was clerking for Chief Justice Burger. Even with all he’s achieved since then, this is certainly one of his finest hours.
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2) Trump’s negotiator Greenblatt tries to reach what no envoy has before
| By MICHAEL WILNER |
Never did Jason Greenblatt, a lawyer from New York, think he would be among this esteemed group of frustrated deal-makers.
He enters the fray, as President Donald Trump’s special representative for international negotiations, armed with a critical trait: sincere humility, for the privilege to work toward peace in a region he cares deeply for and in service of a man he believes has the capacity to deliver.
As with Jared Kushner, Trump’s Orthodox son-in-law and senior adviser to whom he will report, Greenblatt brings no diplomatic or governmental experience to the table. But that is what Trump represents, and the experiment that America has chosen to try in electing him.
And so that experiment is now applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israelis and Palestinians are hopeful his lack of conventional experience will lead Greenblatt to approach the world’s most intractable conflict with an open mind and genuinely fresh ideas.
Despite his atypical background, Greenblatt does enter the job with some fixed opinions and a vision for what America’s role should be in any peace talks.
“In order to make a deal – whether it’s a business deal or a peace agreement that lasts – both sides need to be leaving the table satisfied,” Greenblatt told me in our first interview together at Trump Tower last June. “They may not be happy with each aspect, but they both have to leave saying this deal is going to work for us. We weren’t forced into it – there are items on it perhaps we’re not happy with, but we traded them ourselves. We made all of the decisions.
“That’s very different than talk that has existed for many years in various camps about trying to force the sides into a peace,” he continued. “[Trump] doesn’t believe forcing the sides works – he thinks it’s an unrealistic thing. Maybe it could be achieved, and then it would just break apart.”
This was Greenblatt’s position at a moment when he was advising an underdog presidential candidate. But his approach has proven consistent as he has started his job at the White House, based on Trump’s recent comments on the conflict, in which the president distanced himself from prejudging the outcome of negotiations.
“I’m looking at two states and one state, and I like the one both parties like,” Trump told a joint news conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month. “I can live with either one.”
Greenblatt’s visit to the region this week was an “orientation,” according to State Department officials who worked with National Security Council aides to coordinate the trip. Greenblatt plans to return several times in order to quietly build relationships and trust, before ultimately jump-starting a formal US-led peace process.
Greenblatt did “a lot of listening, discussing the views of the leadership in the region,” said Mark Toner, acting spokesman for the State Department.
Greenblatt hoped to “create a climate” for fresh peace talks in “the first of what will become many visits,” he said.
But over the summer, Greenblatt suggested it was the Palestinians – not the Israelis – who were actively avoiding the negotiating table.
“I think the Palestinians need to come to the table,” he said at the time. “They have avoided this for too long now. It is time for them to sit and have a realistic discussion for the benefit of their people.”
Greenblatt is no longer using this sort of language in public, now that he is uniquely responsible for rebooting peace talks. Indeed, he is trying to shed any image of himself that may be interpreted as biased toward one side or another: An Orthodox man, he chose to remove his yarmulke before entering meetings this week with Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
For all the hope that has been placed in Greenblatt and Kushner, because of, or in spite of, their lack of conventional experience, they do not seem intent – at least thus far – on engaging with their predecessors for guidance and advice.
Career US diplomats who have worked on this portfolio for years are not being consulted; State Department officials were not present on the trip, according to several officials, and their role in the trip was organizational.
Figures who have served in Democratic and Republican administrations in pursuit of peace, such as George Mitchell, Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, have not been approached for consultation.
Nevertheless, Washington experts have thus far heard generally positive things of Greenblatt and Kushner, several have told The Jerusalem Post. While Kushner in particular has been inundated with other, unrelated commitments, both have reportedly demonstrated deep interest in learning the policy machinations that have made the Israeli- Palestinian conflict so difficult to end.
They both also have strong relations with Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, who has respected their desire to rebuild trust after several publicly contentious years between his government and the Obama administration.
They have achieved this by leaking to the press virtually nothing of substance of their conversations.
Their desire to keep disagreements behind closed doors is remarkably similar to plans for the US-Israel relationship that Hillary Clinton’s aides outlined to the Post, plans that were to be followed should she have won the presidency: It is not that disagreements would not persist, but simply that we, the public, won’t know about them.
Israel’s cultivation of both men will not take them far from where they started, as men politically sympathetic to the Jewish world and the Zionist cause. The question remains whether Greenblatt and Kushner will succeed in securing the trust of Palestinian leadership, and whether those relationships will be enough to achieve what Barack Obama and John Kerry never could: direct negotiations that forge the deal of all deals.
2b) How far can Israel push Trump?
By Jonathan S. Tobin
When Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee last week that a push toward annexation of Judea and Samaria would result in "an immediate crisis" with the Trump administration, he provoked a firestorm of criticism from many within the Netanyahu government. Members of the Likud and Habayit Hayehudi parties decried what they felt was a timid approach that would squander a presumed historic opportunity to create new facts on the ground with the approval or indifference of the new American president.
But while that point of view may echo some of the more extravagant hopes of U.S. President Donald Trump's American Jewish supporters, Lieberman isn't wrong. Israelis may well celebrate the marked shift in tone from former President Barack Obama's attitude, but they would be foolish to think Trump has any intention of handing them a blank check. The reasons need to be understood in the context not only of the chaos that is the Trump administration's early days but also Israel's strategic needs.
Unlike his predecessor, Trump has no personal agenda vis-a-vis Israel and is inclined to reverse any stand of Obama's. That makes him favorably disposed toward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government that Obama so despised. Yet Israelis should not mistake that sympathy for any real ideological affinity for the nationalist camp's worldview. Trump is deeply influenced by his son-in-law Jared Kushner's ardent pro-Zionist point of view but his views are not going to be the only factor shaping U.S. foreign policy.
Defense Secretary James Mattis is also going to have a lot to say about the direction of the administration. Mattis, who was unknown to Trump before last November but since seems to have won his trust and admiration as a military hero, has already gone on record as subscribing to traditional establishment views about settlements being an obstacle to peace and the U.S. alliance with Israel being a liability in America's dealings in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
But no matter who has the president's ear at any given moment, the notion that Trump is likely to grant approval to Israel annexing any part of the West Bank is a fantasy.
It remains to be seen how committed Trump will be to reviving the peace talks that he has tasked Kushner with conducting. The idea of achieving something all his predecessors have failed to do appeals to the president's considerable hubris. But even if he understands that Kushner's assignment will remain a fool's errand so long as the Palestinians are uninterested in recognizing the legitimacy of a Jewish state, Trump is not going to stand for anything that could stand in the way of what he sees as the real estate deal of the century.
That's why, even during his love fest with Netanyahu last month, Trump made it clear that he didn't want Israel to do anything provocative, like expanding settlements. Trump may be amenable to shifting U.S. policy back to what it was under George W. Bush, whose 2004 letter to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made clear that the U.S. wasn't opposed to growth in the major settlement blocs or the Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem, but he has yet to say so. Much like the dashed hopes of moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the longer he waits, the less likely it is to happen. Regardless, after making his views clear to Netanyahu, someone as touchy as Trump would be likely to regard annexation as a personal insult.
There is also the fact that, as Lieberman reportedly made clear in his talks with Mattis this week, Israel has other objectives. Israel doesn't want Trump to punt responsibility for the war against ISIS. It needs America to be actively engaged in the Middle East if the growing threat from Iran and its terrorist auxiliaries is to be countered. If that does happen, the U.S. will want quiet on the Israel-Palestinian front even if America's woes in the Muslim world have nothing do with settlements.
Netanyahu understands that while Trump is sympathetic to Israel and a significant improvement over Obama, he won't spend his political capital defending the agenda of the Israeli far Right. Trump is likely to allow Israel more freedom of action to defend itself and strengthen the settlement blocs, even if the embassy never moves. And unlike Obama, Trump is not obsessed with imposing a two-state solution in order to "save Israel from itself." But to think that the American president has any desire to watch Israel scuttle peace talks even before they begin is to badly misunderstand a relationship that still requires a delicate balancing act on Israel's part.
Jonathan S. Tobin is opinion editor of JNS.org and a contributing writer for National Review.
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3)Irish Viagra
An Irish woman of advanced age visited her physician to ask his advice on reviving her husband's libido.
"What about trying Viagra?" asked the doctor.
"Not a chance" she replied. "He won't even take an aspirin".
"Not a problem," said the doctor. "Give him an Irish Viagra.”
"What on Earth is Irish Viagra?" she asked.
"It's Viagra dissolved in his morning cup of coffee. He won't even taste it.
Let me know how it goes," he said.
She called the doctor the very next afternoon. "How did it go?" he asked.
"Oh faith, bejaysus and begorrah, doctor, it was terrible. Just horid, I tell ya! I'm beside meself!"
"Oh, no! What in the world happened?"
"Well, I did the deed, Doctor, just as you advised. I put the Viagra in his morning coffee, and he drank it. Well, you know, it took effect almost immediately, and he jumped straight up out of his chair with a smile on his face, a twinkle in his eye and his pants a-bulging.
Then, with one fierce swoop of his arm, he sent the cups, saucers, and everything else that was on the table flying across the room, ripped me clothes to tatters and passionately took me then and there, right on top of the table. T’was a nightmare, I tell ya, an absolute nightmare!"
“Why so terrible?" asked the doctor "Wasn't the sex good?"
"Freakin jaysus, it was the best sex I've had in me last 25 years, but sure as I'm sittin here, doctor, I'll never be able to show me face in Starbucks again!"
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3)Irish Viagra
An Irish woman of advanced age visited her physician to ask his advice on reviving her husband's libido.
"What about trying Viagra?" asked the doctor.
"Not a chance" she replied. "He won't even take an aspirin".
"Not a problem," said the doctor. "Give him an Irish Viagra.”
"What on Earth is Irish Viagra?" she asked.
"It's Viagra dissolved in his morning cup of coffee. He won't even taste it.
Let me know how it goes," he said.
She called the doctor the very next afternoon. "How did it go?" he asked.
"Oh faith, bejaysus and begorrah, doctor, it was terrible. Just horid, I tell ya! I'm beside meself!"
"Oh, no! What in the world happened?"
"Well, I did the deed, Doctor, just as you advised. I put the Viagra in his morning coffee, and he drank it. Well, you know, it took effect almost immediately, and he jumped straight up out of his chair with a smile on his face, a twinkle in his eye and his pants a-bulging.
Then, with one fierce swoop of his arm, he sent the cups, saucers, and everything else that was on the table flying across the room, ripped me clothes to tatters and passionately took me then and there, right on top of the table. T’was a nightmare, I tell ya, an absolute nightmare!"
“Why so terrible?" asked the doctor "Wasn't the sex good?"
"Freakin jaysus, it was the best sex I've had in me last 25 years, but sure as I'm sittin here, doctor, I'll never be able to show me face in Starbucks again!"
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