Does Russia want to make a deal? (See 1 below.)
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Blue Wave theory could turn out to be a dream. Stay tuned. (See 2 below.)
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I have invited Devin Nunes to be next year's SIRC President's Day Dinner speaker and he would like to come but will not commit until the new Congressional Calendar is released. (See 3 below.)
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Off to Pittsburgh. Have a nice weekend.
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More Israeli health issue progress. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)
Let's Make A Deal – But Do The Russians Want One?
In recent days, German media[1] have reported that U.S. and European diplomats are ready to offer Russian President Vladimir Putin a deal on Syria, indirectly addressing Iran, which is the hardest nut to crack in the Syria crisis, even more so than President Bashar Al-Assad. MEMRI research on Russian media over the past two and a half years suggests that Russia might be interested.
According to details provided by the German media, the West is dangling three prizes before Putin:
1. Political-ideological recognition of Russia's parity with the U.S. as a great power – a status that Putin's Russia is striving to regain (after it was last conferred during the Nixon-Brezhnev era.)
2. Recognition of Russia's continued presence in Syria, which is of military-strategic importance for Russia.
3. Western and Gulf state capital injections for rehabilitating Syria, in a manner that will make Russia the prime contractor, with all the financial benefit that that entails for Mother Russia's economy.
The West finds many advantages in the plan, both for Russia and for itself:
- Cooperation with Russia in Syria can solve the protracted international crisis that has caused chaos (for example, the wave of refugees, though this is not attributable entirely to Syria), and has grave security consequences for Europe.
- It completely bypasses the problem of canceling the sanctions imposed after the annexation of Crimea. Surely no one would oppose the humanitarian effort of rehabilitation, that is also perceived as vital for curbing terror at its roots.
- Russia's recognized presence in Syria lays the infrastructure for massive pressure on Iran, that could even trigger a violent Russia-Iran clash for control of Syria. Even if such a clash is avoided, the end of Russian support of Iran's policies in the region could significantly impact Iran's expansionist capabilities.
Nevertheless, the question remains whether Russia would be willing to enter into such a deal even if it confers benefits and costs it nearly nothing.
MEMRI's monitoring and research on Russian media since January 2017 shows that there have been numerous Russian signals to the Trump administration that Russia is interested in a deal. The following are three out of numerous examples:
- Russian intellectual Fyodor Lukyanov assessed that Iran has become a bartering chip in the Russia-U.S. bargaining. Russia, he wrote, is tempted by a deal with the U.S. because "rapprochement and interaction with Iran... are not intrinsically valuable for Russia but are [merely] a tool, a means to influence the West or send it some message." He added: "As soon as the Kremlin manages to attract the serious attention of its European, and especially American, partners, they are immediately given priority over the non-Western countries."[2]
- Andrey Kortunov, director of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) think tank, also stressed that Russia's alliance with Iran is not a strategic one, but one that can be defined as a "cautious partnership." He observed: "Having a common enemy or suffering a severe regional crisis are by no means a guarantee that a strategic partnership will be formed."[3]
- Maxim Yusin emphasized, in his column in the Russian daily Kommersant, that the Kremlin considers Iran a "capricious" and "unpredictable" partner, and that this could open a window of opportunity for President Trump's diplomacy.[4]
Indeed, the Russian opinion makers did not define the contours of a deal that could interest the Kremlin. But one can venture an educated guess that Russia is mainly interested in the lifting of the sanctions and recognition of its 2014 Crimea annexation. The West cannot give such recognition, but lifting the sanctions – either directly or indirectly – is tantamount to de facto recognition of the Crimea annexation.
Although these ideas were broached in media outlets influenced by and loyal to the Kremlin, the possibility that they were merely tactics designed to weaken Western resolve regarding the sanctions cannot be ruled out. Russia may not be willing to enter into even a deal so beneficial to it with the West unless and until it is offered a full-fledged official lifting of the sanctions. The recent U.S.-European proposals provide an opportunity to test Russia's concrete interest in such a deal.
* Yigal Carmon is President of MEMRI.
[1] Faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/angela-merkel-und-wladimir-putin-sprechen-ueber-lage-und-entwicklungen-in-syrien-15553725.html, April 22, 2018.
[2] See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 6821, Renowned Russian Intellectual Fyodor Lukyanov: 'Rapprochement And Interaction With Iran, China, And India Are Not Intrinsically Valuable for Russia But Are A Tool.. To Influence The West', March 9, 2018.
[3] See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 6742, Director General Of Russian Government-Funded Think Tank: Current Russia–Iran Relations Cannot Be Called A Strategic Partnership, A One-Time Enemy Could Easily Become A Future Ally, January 16, 2017.
[4] See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 6808, Columnist For Russian Daily 'Kommersant': 'Moscow [Understands] That In Iran It Has A Really Capricious And Unpredictable Partner. That Opens A Certain Window Of Opportunity For Donald Trump's Diplomacy', March 1, 2017.
See also MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 7422, Russia-Iran Relations – Russia's Former Ambassador To Tehran: Current Tactical Alliance To Counter The U.S. Is Not A Strategic Partnership, April 10, 2018.
See also MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 6779, Pro-Kremlin Pravda.ru: 'Iran Is Becoming A Major Problem, First And Foremost For Russia's Interests', February 12, 2017.
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2)Feehery: The problem with the Dem wave theory
BY JOHN FEEHERY — THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
But money by itself is not enough. Just ask President Phil Gramm or President Jeb Bush.
You need to have the right message to fit the right time.
You can have great qualifications and a huge Rolodex, but if you can’t articulate simply and effectively what you want to do once you gain the political office you seek, you won’t win.
But for the message and the money to have an impact, you must have voters that are willing to hear what you are saying. That’s what makes the political map so very important, especially in congressional races.
Voters have their own particular biases and self-interests. Some folks vote for the same party over and over again, based on nothing more than family tradition. The solid South voted Democrat for decades after the Civil Rights Act was passed into law, for reasons stretching back to the Civil War.
It is the common assumption that Democrats are going to win back the House and make a real run at the Senate. That may be the case, because there is real anger among the Democratic base about President Trump and his tweets.
But a close analysis of the three Ms seems to indicate that the reality might play out a bit differently.
First, let’s look at the money race.
Certainly, Democrats have been successful in using social media platforms to raise lots of money for some of their candidates. Their United Blue program has been especially effective in connecting small-dollar donors to several different challengers, and as Bloomberg news reported, in the top campaigns Democrats took in $53.6 million through the first quarter of 2018, compared to $40.2 million for Republicans. But as they further report, “Those dollars, however, have been split among many more Democrats than Republicans, 75 to 38. When overall totals for the top Republican and top Democratic fundraising candidate in all 23 districts are aggregated, the Republicans have $27.6 million in the bank, compared with $17.7 million for Democrats.”
At the national level, Republicans have raised far more money than the Democrats. According to the latest number, the Republican National Committee has raised $171.6 million, while the Democratic National Committee has raised only $87.7 million, and it has only almost 10-to-1 advantage when it comes to cash on hand. This money is used for party building, get-out-the-vote operations and other essential elements to any campaign.
Now, let’s look at the message pushed by the two parties.
Democrats want to make this race all about President Trump. They want to repeal his tax cuts, as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) promised in a press conference, and replace it with more government spending.
But a battle over tax policy is not what is really animating the Democratic base. What really gets the progressive left is the chance to impeach the president and possibly remove him from office.
They don’t want to be a check on the president and his power. Instead, they want to nullify the election and install somebody more to their liking.
My own experience at using impeachment as a device to drive voters to the polls is that it doesn’t work. In the 1998 election, we promised to impeach Bill Clinton because he lied about his sex life, but that excited only the most partisan of the conservative base.
Most voters in 1998, and I think most voters in 2018, cared more about the growing economy than they cared about Washington parlor games. And that happens to fit in well with Republican messaging.
Finally, there is the map.
Republicans have a distinct national advantage going into this election. As Mother Jones reported in March, “A new report from the Brennan Center for Justice calculates just how much of a landslide Democrats will need in order to win in districts that were drawn specifically to withstand Democratic waves and elect Republicans. The result, report co-author Michael Li says, should be a ‘reality check’ for Democrats.” To win the House, the Democrats would have to win the popular vote by 11 points, according to this left-leaning organization.
Is that possible? Yes. Probably? No.
Feehery is partner at EFB Advocacy and blogs atwww.thefeeherytheory.com. He served as spokesman to former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), as communications director to former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) when he was majority whip and as speechwriter to former Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).
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3) Devin Nunes Is a Badass
Devin Nunes, the eight-term Republican congressman from California, is taking on the world’s most powerful law enforcement and intelligence apparatus to uncover exactly what happened before and after the 2016 presidential election. Although Nunes is undoubtedly earning some formidable enemies, he seems undaunted—perhaps even emboldened—by the anti-Trump mob on the Left and the Right trying to discredit his investigation and destroy his reputation.
Nunes, 44, goes about his business in a way that only a politician who doesn’t owe his career to billionaire benefactors or a privileged pedigree can: He is fearless, well-informed, and slightly snarky. The descendant of Portuguese immigrants, Nunes has a background in agriculture (a profession that has been mocked by some of our well-fed betters) and got his start in local politics. Since he was first elected to represent his San Joaquin Valley district in 2002, he’s never won less than 60 percent of the vote. (Jim Geraghty has a solid profile of the congressman.)
As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes has been relentless in exposing how top officials in the Obama Administration corrupted our most trusted federal agencies in order to spy on Trump’s presidential campaign, hoping then to undermine his nascent presidency after he won. What is unfolding now will be the biggest political scandal in U.S. history and Nunes is a central figure in exposing it.
The hard-fought release of his memo in February—which was opposed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray but sanctioned by President Trump—gave the American public its first glimpse into how Obama’s DOJ secured a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to wiretap Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page just days before the election.
Nunes revealed that James Comey’s FBI did not inform the court that the Christopher Steele dossier, the primary evidence cited on the application for the warrant, had been produced and funded by Trump’s rival campaign. Further, the FBI didn’t disclose that Steele had been terminated by the FBI for lying to federal officials prior to Election Day although the agency continued to use his work to reauthorize three more FISA warrants on Page. (The Senate Judiciary Committee referred Steele to the Justice Department back in January for a criminal investigation of charges that he misled FBI investigators.)
Nunes was immediately blasted by Trump foes on the Left and Right, including “Republicans for the Rule of Law” harpies. Bill Kristol said the memo would be a historical reminder of the “degradation of the Republican Party.” Max Boot, the Washington Post columnist who repeatedly warns that the Trump presidency is a threat to the rule of law, is a serial Nunes antagonist; Boot called Nunes an embarrassment, a disgrace, a Joe McCarthy “mini-me,” and called for Congress to censure him as a result of the memo. (But Boot calls the actions of now-disgraced Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe mere “mistakes.”)
With enemies across the ideological and political spectrum, Nunes must be doing something right.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) asked House Speaker Paul Ryan to remove Nunes from his committee chairmanship for authoring “a bogus memo [that] has taken the GOP’s cover-up campaign to a new, completely unacceptable extreme.” The memo was portrayed in the press as an “attack on law enforcement.”
Many of his Republican colleagues have acted cowardly in the face of this pushback, refusing to stand with him. Last April, the House Ethics Committee bowed to bullying by Democratic lawmakers and left-wing groups such as MoveOn.org to open an investigation into whether Nunes disclosed classified information about the Trump-Russia probe. (He was cleared in December.)
Detractors smear him as a conspiracy-minded, Trump lackey. In a nearly 7,000-word profile on the congressman in New York Times Magazine this week, Nunes is described as a Trump true believer: “Years before the Russia investigation, he was extremely skeptical of—if not paranoid about—the American military and intelligence establishments in a way that presaged Trump’s denunciations of the ‘deep state.’ Now he and Trump are waging war against these foes, real and imagined, together.”
With enemies across the ideological and political spectrum, Nunes must be doing something right.
Fortunately, the personal and professional attacks have not deterred Nunes. In March, his committee issued its report concluding there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to influence the 2016 election. It faulted intelligence agencies for leaking classified information and specifically condemned former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper for giving “inconsistent testimony” to Congress about his contacts with the media, including CNN, where Clapper is now an analyst.
But Nunes is just getting warmed up.
Earlier this month, he threatened to impeach Rosenstein and Wray if they didn’t finally release the original missive that prompted the FBI’s counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign in 2016, a document Nunes has been requesting for months: “We’re not messing around here, they’re to give us these two-page documents,” Nunes told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on April 10. “I haven’t found it [Russian collusion] yet, but I’ve found a whole lot of other stuff that always puts DOJ and FBI in a bad light.”
The next day, Nunes and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) were given access to the electronic communication the FBI used to open its investigation. And he was not convinced by what he saw.
In a jaw-dropping interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, Nunes said the communication did not justify launching a counterintelligence probe into Trump campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos in July 2016. Nunes disputed press accounts and official Washington’s plotline that foreign intelligence sources warned U.S. officials about a drunken encounter in London between an Australian diplomat and Papadopoulos, a low-level unpaid advisor who had been with the campaign less than three months, where he allegedly boasted that he had Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.
But Nunes insists there was no official intelligence from the “Five Eyes”—an agreement between the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—that validated the Papadopoulos probe. “This is about a counterintelligence operation that, at the height of a political campaign, where you opened up an investigation using these intelligence services, to spy on the other campaign,” he said. “It’s really serious stuff.”
He also revealed that Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer, long-time henchmen for the Clintons, were giving information to her former department that State Department officials subsequently forwarded to the FBI. His committee is now investigating the State Department’s role in fueling the initial counterintelligence probe.
Nunes is also no fan of James Comey. After the Justice Department released Comey’s memos last week, Nunes issued a joint statement with Gowdy and House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), mocking the former FBI director’s claim that he felt pressured by the president to drop the Michael Flynn case.
“The memos also show former Director Comey never wrote that he felt obstructed or threatened,” the congressmen wrote. “While former Director Comey went to great lengths to set dining room scenes, discuss height requirements, describe the multiple times he felt complimented, and myriad other extraneous facts, he never once mentioned the most relevant fact of all, which was whether he felt obstructed in his investigation.”
Nunes also gave Comey a shot after he suggested the Russians might still have dirt on the president. “It’s certainly possible that the Russians have information on Comey. It’s certainly possible that the Russians have information on Hillary Clinton. It’s certainly possible that they have information on all kinds of people.”
As the Trump-Russia conspiracy scam crumbles and some of the most powerful people in the world are exposed for their role, this battle will only get worse because they will not go down easily. While other Congressional leaders tasked with investigating this hoax are moving slowly, Nunes is picking up speed: Reluctant Republicans would be wise to stay out of his way.
Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.
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4)
4)
BREATH, URINE TESTS DETECT BREAST CANCER MORE ACCURATELY, SAY RESEARCHERS
Using readily-available technology, Israeli scientists have demonstrated unprecedented success in identifying early tumors.
BY JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVIch
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A screening method that, more accurately and earlier, detects breast cancer by identifying biomarkers has been developed Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Soroka-University Medical Center researchers.
The biomarkers are identified by using two electronic nose gas sensors for breath, along with gas-chromatography mass spectrometry to quantify patterns of substances in urine. The new technology, using commercially available technology, has just been published in the journal Computers in Biology and Medicine. In their study, researchers detected breast cancer with more than 95% average accuracy using two different commercial electronic noses (e-noses) that identify unique breath patterns in women with breast cancer. In addition, their revamped statistical analyses of urine samples submitted both by healthy patients and those diagnosed with breast cancer yielded 85% average accuracy. “Breast cancer survival is strongly tied to the sensitivity of tumor detection; accurate methods for detecting smaller, earlier tumors remains a priority,” says Prof. Yehuda Zeiri, a member of BGU’s department of biomedical engineering. “Our new approach utilizing urine and exhaled breath samples – analyzed with inexpensive, commercially available systems – is noninvasive, accessible and may be easily implemented in a variety of settings.” Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed malignancy among women and their leading cause of death around the world. In 2016, breast cancer accounted for 29% of all new cancers identified in the US and was responsible for 14% of all cancer-related deaths. Mammograms which are proven to significantly reduce breast cancer mortality, are not always able to detect small tumors in dense breast tissue. In fact, typical mammography sensitivity, which is 75% to 85% accurate, decreases to 30% to 50% in dense tissue. Current diagnostic imaging detection for smaller tumors has significant drawbacks; dual-energy digital mammography, while effective, increases radiation exposure, and magnetic resonance imaging is expensive. Biopsies and serum biomarker identification processes are invasive, equipment-intensive and require significant expertise. “We’ve now shown that inexpensive, commercial electronic noses are sufficient for classifying cancer patients at early stages,” said Zeiri. “With further study, it may also be possible to analyze exhaled breath and urine samples to identify other cancer types as well.”
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