If he did then the pressure on him to deny a less radical stance could make him ineffective in trying to stabilize Egypt. (See 1 below.)
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Destroy Romney and the bar is lowered for Obama. Neat strategy and typical of the Chicago Obamaite crowd of thugs. However, I doubt it will work because Obama has a record he neither can run from nor on because every American is effected by his failed leadership and destructive policies.
As for Romney's failed trip, Newsweek's last cover about 'Romney's Wimp factor' and Ann Romney's expensive blouse these are things one must expect from a biased press and media who are grasping at straws of their own creation.
As I pointed out earlier, Romney said what was on his mind and because it was true it was upsetting to politicians and diplomats who have made lying and ignoring reality a virtue and given employment to their friends in the press and media
Obviously a culture based on hate and killing is not as productive as one based on peace and prosperity so Romney told the truth about Palestinians and Israelis.
As for Poland: Obama pulled the plug out from under them when he caved to Russia so Romney suggested we should stand by friends and thereby make it harder for our protagonists to divide and conquer. Again the truth.
Poor old Ann R and her expensive blouse. There is no comparison to the First Lady's extravagant wardrobe and host of lackeys who attend to her every whim at tax payer expense.
Oh well, just another day from Disney East's press and media folk.(See 2 below.)
Perhaps South Koreans get it and Palestinians do not. Peace and love bring economic rewards. (See 2a below.)
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New Romney ad regarding Obama and his act of causing unemployment and then we have the keep it under your defense helmet act! (See 3 below.)
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Tom Friedman is not a happy fella. He proves, again, he is a New York Times team player and that should make Bud S very happy.
Does constantly sitting on your head make it flat? (See 4 below.)
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Dick
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1)Egyptian Spokesman Disavows Morsi Letter to Israeli President
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A letter to Israel from Egypt's new president hoping for regional peace kicked up a stir Tuesday when the Egyptian leader's Islamist movement denied he sent it. Israel insisted the letter was genuine.
The spat underlined the touchy nature of Egyptian-Israeli relations, always frosty but now especially sensitive in the wake of Muslim Brotherhood victories in Egyptian elections.
It also appeared to show some disarray in the fractured Egyptian government.
The letter, ostensibly sent by Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, was a response to a message from Israeli President Shimon Peres, conveying Israel's good wishes for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
The return letter, released by the Israeli president's office, was on the stationery of the Egyptian Embassy in Tel Aviv.
In it, Morsi appeared to write in English, "I am looking forward to exerting our best efforts to get the Middle east Peace Process back to its right track in order to achieve security and stability for all peoples of the region, including that Israeli people." The Israeli president's name was spelled "Perez."
Then a spokesman for Morsi, Yasser Ali, said in Cairo that Morsi had not written a letter to the Israeli president at all.
"This is totally untrue," Ali said, calling the letter a "fabrication." He blamed two Israeli newspapers for manufacturing the letter — though it was released by the president's office in Jerusalem.
An official in Peres's office — speaking anonymously because the issue concerned sensitive diplomatic relations between the two countries — said the president's aides received the official communique Tuesday from the Egyptian ambassador to Israel, both by registered mail and by fax from the embassy in Tel Aviv.
Peres's office asked the Egyptian ambassador if it could publicize the letter or if it should be kept secret, the official said. The Egyptian envoy phoned Morsi's office to inquire, the official said, and then told Peres's aides that Morsi's staff had given the green light to make the letter public.
Peres's office sent reporters a copy of what was said to be the faxed letter. The top of the letter featured a time stamp with Tuesday's date, the phone number from which the fax was sent, and the label "EGY EMB TEL AVIV."
The fax number, which appeared to be printed automatically from the machine that sent the message, was a number listed on Israel's Foreign Ministry website as belonging to the Egyptian Embassy in Israel.
The Egyptian Foreign Ministry did not provide an immediate response on the issue.
This could be a symptom of Egypt's murky governing situation. Though Morsi has taken office, it is still not clear what his powers are. The military council that took over after longtime President Hosni Mubarak was ousted last year assumed some presidential powers.
Also, the Brotherhood-dominated parliament has been dissolved, the military-appointed Cabinet is still in office, and the ministries and foreign service are mostly still in the hands of the old regime.
The disarray has led to conflicts, misunderstandings and power plays.
All that is in addition to the already complicated relations between Israel and Egypt. The two signed a peace treaty in 1979 but have rarely been close.
Morsi has pledged to respect Egypt's international treaties, but the Brotherhood has said it may need to make adjustments to the Israel-Egypt peace agreement. The movement historically has been hostile to Israel.
The Ramadan message was Peres's second letter to Morsi since he took office after winning Egypt's first-ever free presidential election.
The Israeli president's first letter, accompanied by a note from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was sent in late June. It congratulated Morsi on his election victory and emphasized the importance of peace to both Israel and Egypt.
The text of Netanyahu's letter was not released, but an official in his office said the letter emphasized the importance of maintaining the peace treaty.
© Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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2)The Romney Foreign Tour
He commits the Washington error of telling the truth.
So Mitt Romney's foreign tour has ended, and the media verdict is that it rated somewhere between an embarrassment and a fiasco. We guess that's one way to describe a trip that garnered virtual endorsements from Israel's Prime Minister and Poland's most famous citizen, raked in $1 million or so in campaign cash, and gave the presumptive GOP nominee a chance to lay out a foreign-policy agenda.
Granted, this is a trip that got off on the wrong foot. Many Londoners might privately agree that some of the security preparations for the Olympics were "disconcerting," as Mr. Romney put it in an interview, but they didn't need a traveling American politician to tell them.
Yet one definition of a gaffe is to tell the truth, and that's certainly the case with Mr. Romney's other supposed mistakes, this time in Israel. One was to call Jerusalem the capital of Israel. Another was to talk tough on Iran. The third was to suggest—egads!—that Israeli and Palestinian culture might have something to do with the respective state of their economies.
Jerusalem is the capital of Israel—the seat of its government, the home of its President and Prime Minister, the location of its parliament and supreme court. That's true even if the U.S. State Department puts its embassy in Tel Aviv.
The tough talk on Iran was no different from what Mr. Romney—or President Obama—has been saying for years. At least Mr. Romney showed that he understood that Tehran is a dedicated and fanatical enemy of Israel and the U.S., not a misunderstood nation seeking a better bargain from the West. Too bad Mr. Obama didn't demonstrate the same realism about the mullahs four years ago.
As for Mr. Romney's observations about "culture"—denounced as "racist" by one Palestinian spokesman—it's worth noting that forward-looking Palestinians are also seeking to emulate Israel's culture of innovation and entrepreneurship. The pity for Palestinians is a political culture in which Hamas is a dominating force, economic co-operation with Israelis is called "collaboration" and often punished by death, and children are reared to think of terrorists as martyrs. If Palestinians now complain of the restrictions Israel imposes on them, perhaps it has something to do with a "culture" they continue to celebrate.
Equally to Mr. Romney's credit was his celebration of Poland both as a role model for defying political tyranny during the Cold War and for its economic policies ever since. "A march toward economic liberty and smaller government has meant a march toward higher living standards," he said in Warsaw, one of the rare European capitals that has lived within its means and not tipped into a sovereign debt crisis.
That's another statement of the obvious that rankles in Washington because it's true, and because it is so markedly at odds with America's own economic mismanagement.
2a)
3) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf7Cxj5BZw8&feature=player_embedded
White House to defense contractors: Don’t warn employees before election they may get laid off
Obama’s Labor Department is trying to spare the president the embarrassment of having hundreds of thousands of layoff notices arrive in the mail just before Election Day, including in the crucial swing state of Virginia. It issued a guidanceyesterday to defense contractors that just happened to advise them not to send federally-required warnings to their employees that they could get pink slipped because Washington can’t get the budget under control.
At issue is a regulation called the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notice Act, which requires federal contractors, especially ones with Pentagon contracts, to send notices to their workers 60 days before their contract is expected to terminate. The point is to give the workers a heads up and time to get new employment or seek training.
That’s relevant because Congress is currently trying to prevent what’s been dubbed “sequestration,” a $110 billion budget cut, half coming from defense, that will take place on Jan. 2, 2013, if they cannot reach agreement on a deficit reduction package. Well, there is currently no agreement, sequestration is looming and both sides are pointing fingers over this.
Well, 60 days before Jan. 2 is Nov. 2. Election Day this year falls on Nov. 6. The Aerospace Industries Association estimates that as many as 2.14 million jobs could be affected. That’s an awful lot of layoff warnings days before an election – and Republicans having doing their best to pin the blame on the White House.
Well, the Labor Department announcement out yesterday said:
Questions have recently been raised as to whether the WARN Act requires Federal contractors – including, in particular, contractors of the Department of Defense (DOD) – whose contracts may be terminated or reduced in the event of sequestration on January 2, 2013, to provide WARN Act notices 60 days before that date to their workers employed under government contracts funded from sequestrable accounts. The answer is “no.” In fact, to provide such notice would be inconsistent with the purpose of the WARN Act.
The announcement’s reasoning is that the notices are not intended to go to workers who have only a “speculative chance” of being laid off and it still possible that Congress will prevent sequestration. Therefore the notices aren’t needed.
To give notice to workers who will not suffer an employment loss both wastes the states’ resources in providing rapid response activities where none are needed and creates unnecessary uncertainty and anxiety in workers.
Should sequestration happen – or even appear likely – some voters presumably blame the Republicans but will that number be more than the one blaming the Democrats and the White House? Apparently the administration is not eager to find out.
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4)Thomas Friedman: Romney's visit to Israel was all for Adelson's money
Romney's "whole trip [to Israel] was about how to satisfy the political whims of right-wing, super pro-Bibi Netanyahu, American Jewish casino magnate Sheldon Adelson," New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote Tuesday in a new op-ed.
4)Thomas Friedman: Romney's visit to Israel was all for Adelson's money
Stop making the Middle East conflict worse for your own political gain, urges NYT columnist of U.S. politicians, 'They can make enough trouble for themselves on their own.'
Romney's "whole trip [to Israel] was about how to satisfy the political whims of right-wing, super pro-Bibi Netanyahu, American Jewish casino magnate Sheldon Adelson," New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote Tuesday in a new op-ed.
"There are real lives at stake out there," he wrote, "If you're not going to do something constructive, stay away."
In his column published on Tuesday, "Why Not in Vegas?", Friedman writes that the Republican presidential candidate's whole trip to Israel was about money.
Friedman wrote: "Why didn’t they just do the whole thing in Las Vegas? I mean, it was all about money anyway — how much Romney would abase himself by saying whatever the Israeli right wanted to hear and how big a jackpot of donations Adelson would shower on the Romney campaign in return."
The New York Times columnist asserted that the Republicans are doing more harm than good to Middle East peace by making Israel a wedge issue.
"In order to garner more Jewish (and evangelical) votes and money, the G.O.P. decided to 'out-pro-Israel' the Democrats by being even more unquestioning of Israel," he wrote.
"This arms race has pulled the Democratic Party to the right on the Middle East and has basically forced the Obama team to shut down the peace process and drop any demands that Israel freeze settlements. This, in turn, has created a culture in Washington where State Department officials, not to mention politicians, are reluctant to even state publicly what is U.S. policy — that settlements are 'an obstacle to peace' — for fear of being denounced as anti-Israel."
The increasing role of money in U.S. politics and the importance of single donors, writes Freidman, has created a situation in which there are almost no brakes nor red lights concerning Israel emerging from America anymore.
Freidman criticized Romney's decision not to visit Ramallah, to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, share publicly any ideas on how he would advance the peace process, or witness "a Palestinian beehive of entrepreneurship, too, albeit small, but not bad for a people living under occupation."
"I still don’t know if they (the Palestinians) can be a partner for a secure two-state deal with even the most liberal Israeli government", writes Freidman, "But I do know this: It is in Israel’s overwhelming interest to test, test and have the U.S. keep testing creative ideas for a two-state solution. That is what a real U.S. friend would promise to do." The three U.S. statesmen who have done the most to make Israel more secure were those who told "blunt truths to every Israeli or Arab leader," writes Freidman, who goes on to list those statesmen as Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger and James Baker.
In his closing remarks, the columnist urges all U.S. politicians – Republicans and Democrats – to "stop feeding off this conflict for political gain… They can make enough trouble for themselves on their own."
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Panetta hints that US prepared to use military force, saying "we have options that we are prepared to implement to ensure" Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.
Opposition leader says Israel should only strike Iran's nuclear facilities if it sets program back 10 years.
