RUSSIAN OLYMPIC POLE-VAULTER SVETLANA GEVENSKAIA SAYS SHE DOESN'T KNOW
WHAT ALL THE FUSS IS ABOUT...
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This is a fabulous video and I urge you watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZWZHkGoarQ&sns=em
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"Any person subject to this chapter who, with intent to deceive, signs any false record, return, regulation, order, or other official document, knowing it to be false, or makes any other false official statement knowing it to be false, shall be punished as a court-martial may direct."
— Title 10 U.S.C. § 907 - Art. 107, False Official Statements
Title 10 of the U.S. Code applies to the Armed Forces. Perhaps it is time to apply a similar standard to our elected officials.
Israel, after many decades, discovered enormous gas fields and is able to supply their own needs as well as nations in the vicinity. Because of Erdogan's antipathy towards Israel, they may shift plans of supplying Turkey with energy. (See 1 below.)
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The New York Times has lost a great deal of credibility in its desire to join with other brethren in the mass media to destroy Trump. (See 2 below.)
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My friend Bernie Marcus who spoke at our Presdent's Day Dinner here at The Landings some three years ago tells it like he always does. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)
Who Needs You?
Israel's oil revenge
By Yaacov Benmeleh & David Wainer
A U.S.-backed initiative to build an undersea natural gas pipeline between Israel and Turkey looks increasingly troubled as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan escalates his public denunciations of the Jewish state.
Israel has shifted its priorities to exporting to Egypt and other markets because of the growing discord with Turkey, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the issue is sensitive. Efforts to reach governmental understandings with Turkey continue but the pace of talks has fallen off sharply, one of them said.
The frictions have destabilized a pillar of Israel's gas export strategy. The U.S. brokered a rapprochement between the two countries in 2016 after a six-year rupture, primarily in an effort to reach energy agreements that would let Israel export to Turkey, and from there to Europe. Turkey was to receive alternative sources of gas at a time when relations with top supplier Russia were strained.
Now Israel is focusing on other regional projects fraught with political risks or financially questionable. Noble Energy and Delek Group, the lead partners developing Israel's largest gas find, Leviathan, signed a $10 billion deal with Jordan in 2016, but have struggled to close other regional contracts.
Delek shares fell 7.2 percent on Monday, the most since August 2015 on a closing basis. Ratio Oil Exploration 1992, which owns a 15 percent stake in Leviathan, dropped 5.5 percent to 2.09 shekels as of 5:23 p.m. in Tel Aviv.
A spokeswoman for the Leviathan partners said exports to Turkey are still "a valid option" and that discussions with "the relevant players in Turkey" continue. Talks between Turkish and Israeli officials have so far yielded no results, a Turkish Energy Ministry spokesman sa
Erdogan's vitriol heated up after President Donald Trump's Dec. 6 recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Turkey "won't leave Jerusalem to the mercy of a child-killing nation," he vowed, calling Israel's soldiers "terrorists." His broadsides angered Israeli officials already critical of Turkey's continued support for Hamas, the Islamist militant group that controls the Gaza Strip.
Trump's Jerusalem move "triggered Turkey's recent reaction, and it's known that anti-Israeli rhetoric resonates with some Turkish voters" ahead of local, parliamentary and presidential elections next year, Nihat Ali Ozcan, an analyst at the Ankara-based Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey, said by phone on Monday. "However, Turkey's interest in Israeli gas is genuine and while talks on the pipeline project may have slowed, it's not over."
For Israeli energy executives, Turkey offers a relatively stable economy with large energy demands. But the political strains have highlighted long-term risks to gas flow.
Turkish pipeline company Botas canceled a December visit to Israel, according to one of the people familiar with the matter. Botas officials declined to comment.
And now that Turkey has reconciled with Russia, Leviathan partners suspect their negotiations with Ankara are being used as a bargaining chip against Moscow, one of the people familiar with the situation said.
Israel's alternative focus on Egypt carries its own risks. While Egypt is geographically closer and its president, Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, has better ties with Israel, legal wrangling over an earlier gas agreement is holding up progress on any deal. Egypt's economy isn't as strong as Turkey's, either.
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2)
New York Times Accuses Jewish Billionaires of Dragging US Into War With Iran
By Ira Stoll
The New York Times op-ed page carries an article by Lawrence Wilkerson headlined “A Familiar Road to War.” It warns, with zero factual basis, that the Trump administration is about to invade Iran the same way the George W. Bush administration invaded Iraq.
It’s a mystery what the Times is doing running a piece from this guy in the first place. As has been noted by both Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute andDexter Van Zile of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, Wilkerson went on television to speculate, groundlessly, that a poison gas attack on Syrian civilians “could have been an Israeli false flag operation.” (Thanks to online watchdog Mark Jacobs for tipping me off to this on Twitter.)
Second, once the Times piece went up online, it became clear pretty rapidly that there were some accuracy problems.
The website Newsdiffs tracks the changes — at least four different versions of the article. The piece originally said, “Today, the analysts claiming close ties between Al Qaeda and Iran come from the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, which vehemently opposes the Iran nuclear deal and unabashedly calls for regime change in Iran, while taking money from hawks like Sheldon Adelson and Paul Singer, who have made clear what their goals are with Iran.” About six hours after publishing the original piece, the Times stealth-edited it by correcting the name of the research and advocacy group to “the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.” If the Times is going, falsely, to accuse a think tank of dragging America into war with Iran on false pretenses, the least you can ask is that the Times would spell the organization’s name correctly. Alas, the Times couldn’t even initially manage that bare-bones level of accuracy.
Then, nearly ten hours after the original piece was published online, the Times deleted entirely the references to Messrs. Singer and Adelson, and appended a correction:
Correction: February 5, 2018
An earlier version of this article included outdated information about the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Sheldon Adelson is no longer a donor to the organization.
Finally, in the print edition of the Times, the correction disappeared, along with both references to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
That leaves readers wondering just who Wilkerson is talking about when he suggestively asks, “With China, Russia and North Korea all presenting vastly more formidable challenges to America and its allies than Iran does, one has to wonder where the Trump team gets its ideas.”
Before the antisemitism was sanitized out of the Wilkerson article, his answer was clear — the ideas were coming from rich Jews like Adelson and Singer. (This is probably the right spot to disclose that Singer was one of my partners in The New York Sun and that I wrote a weekly column for about a year for a Las Vegas newspaper that is owned by the Adelson family.)
If there are problems with the sections that the Times eventually edited out of at least some versions of the Wilkerson article, there are problems, too, with what was left in. To start with, the notion that, as the article puts it, “Trump and his team” are trying to “sell the American people on the case for war” with Iran is nonsense. During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump faulted Hillary Clinton for supporting the Iraq war. “I was opposed to the war from the beginning,” Trump said, faulting Clinton and some of his Republican primary opponents for squandering billions of dollars on Middle Eastern wars. Trump is actually quite war-averse. And so, by the way, are many of the regime-change advocates that Wilkerson seems to be obsesses with. Michael Ledeen of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, for example, one of the most effective, shrewd, and stalwart such figures, has proposed not wide-scale bombing of Iran, but rather airlifting food to the revolutionaries, talking to them, and supporting them with communications.
An entire Times op-ed piece fretting about the danger that President Trump and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley are going to deceive the American people into a war also neglects the important truth that America and Iran are already in a war. It’s a war that Iran started by seizing our embassy and holding our diplomats hostage there, and then by waging a violent global campaign against American targets including a Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, a US-based Saudi diplomat, and a college student from New Jersey who was studying in Israel. The question is whether we’ll realize it and try to win it, or whether we’re going to keep taking casualties while deluding ourselves that the war doesn’t already exist.
A final oddity worth mentioning about the Times article is that amid the global cultural phenomenon of the #MeToo movement, which the Times helped start with its investigative journalism, the women of Iran are bravely protesting against the requirement to wear veils. Rather than an article from an Iranian woman urging support for these protesters, or an article urging the prompt release of the dozens of such protesters that have been arrested by the fundamentalist Islamist regime, the Timeschooses to showcase instead an article from an American man dismissing the Iranian threat. Wilkerson’s only mention of the protests is not to express support for the Iranian women, but rather to express concern that the Trump administration might use them to concoct a narrative to support war with Iran. It’s hard to find the precisely right historical analogy for this. Imagine a Times op-ed during the 1850s greeting news of a slave rebellion with a warning that the abolitionists are planning to use it to deceive the American people into a war with the South. It misses the slavery issue entirely and skips right to the peace or war issue. That’s how Wilkerson deals with the Iran protests.
When the political prisons of Iran eventually empty and the protesters emerge in freedom to thank those who stood up for them, let them skip the office of whatever Times editor made the bad decision to publish Wilkerson, and let them instead visit the Washington offices of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
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3)
Home Depot Co-Founder Taunts Democrats, Saying ‘Use Your Stupid Brains’ on Tax Reform
3)
Home Depot Co-Founder Taunts Democrats, Saying ‘Use Your Stupid Brains’ on Tax Reform
Home Depot Co-Founder Taunts Democrats, Saying ‘Use Your Stupid Brains’ on Tax Reform
A co-founder of The Home Depot, Bernie Marcus, slammed Democrats who have criticized the Republican-led tax plan, telling the politicians to "use your stupid brains" on Fox News on Saturday.
In the weeks after President Donald Trump signed a sweeping tax-reform bill, Republicans have rushed to declare the bill a victory for middle-class workers who received bonuses, while Democrats scoffed at the returns as insignificant. Marcus, whose employees received up to $1,000 in one-time bonuses, criticized Democrats for not understanding that business owners will need time to improve the economy.
"They are going to do smart things. They are going to make smart moves, and that will take a period of time, just like the small businesses. This is not going to turn overnight. Corporations are not going to open 14 buildings overnight," Marcus said on Fox News. "Come on, give me a break, you've got to use your brains. I mean, Democrats, use your stupid brains, you don't have any stupid brains and don't understand what happens."
Fox News host Neil Cavuto quickly cut off Marcus while laughing: "Now, now, now, Bernie, be nice. Be a nice billionaire, all right?"
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