Uranium One: Do Hillary and Bill Have a Joint Bank Account?

In a Politico article entitled "Bill and Hillary’s Excellent Adventure," Michael Hirsh writes:

"It’s clear that Bill Clinton played a very concrete role in his wife’s State Department and was so well briefed that, as one Obama administration official put it to me in 2010, “When they say on the seventh floor, ‘We need to run this by the president,’ the phrase doesn’t necessarily refer to Obama.”

Nonetheless, it is highly unlikely that very much of what [Peter] Schweizer alleges [in "Clinton Cash"] will stick, if only because that classic Washington omelette made of equal parts policy and political reasons can never be unmade once it’s cooked: Especially among the uber-cautious Clintons, you’ll never find the smoking ingredient; no one will ever be caught saying, “Let’s make a policy decision for Bill’s donors.”

Beyond that, because it is impossible to peer into the sanctum of any marriage—especially this one—we will almost certainly never get at the rock-bottom truth of whether Hillary Clinton ever even hinted at altering a policy in office because Bill Clinton told her he wanted it done for his Foundation. State Department and Clinton Foundation officials say they never pried into those conversations.

You wouldn’t find it even in those deleted emails."

Or stated otherwise, if knowledge of Bill's conduct cannot be attributed to Hillary, Hillary cannot be held accountable.

To which I would answer: Hillary must prove that she did not benefit from Bill's lucrative speaking engagements, e.g., the $500,000 which, according to the Becker and McIntire article in The New York Times, was received "for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock."

Or stated otherwise, Hillary must provide documentation showing that the payments to Bill were not deposited in a joint bank account. It's that simple . . . or perhaps not that simple.

Paul Krugman, "Jobs and Skills and Zombies": Kill This Zombie?

In his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Jobs and Skills and Zombies" (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/opinion/krugman-jobs-and-skills-and-zombies.html?_r=0), Paul Krugman engages in a full frontal assault against those who link unemployment with insufficient labor skills. Krugman informs us that "multiple careful studies have found no support for claims that inadequate worker skills explain high unemployment." He goes on to say:

"The crucial point is that unemployment remains much higher among workers at all education levels than it was before the financial crisis. The same is true across occupations: workers in every major category are doing worse than they were in 2007.

. . . .

The point is that influential people move in circles in which repeating the skills-gap story — or, better yet, writing about skill gaps in media outlets like Politico — is a badge of seriousness, an assertion of tribal identity. And the zombie shambles on.

Unfortunately, the skills myth — like the myth of a looming debt crisis — is having dire effects on real-world policy. Instead of focusing on the way disastrously wrongheaded fiscal policy and inadequate action by the Federal Reserve have crippled the economy and demanding action, important people piously wring their hands about the failings of American workers.

Moreover, by blaming workers for their own plight, the skills myth shifts attention away from the spectacle of soaring profits and bonuses even as employment and wages stagnate. Of course, that may be another reason corporate executives like the myth so much."

Or stated more simply, the economy sucks, the Federal Reserve has pursued pigheaded fiscal policy, and mean-spirited corporate ogres are cashing in on this old wives' tale.

Well, I agree with Krugman that a "skills gap" is not responsible for American unemployment. I know too many middle-aged computer wizards who lost their jobs and couldn't get back on their feet.

But blame it on the Fed? Might it be possible that we have entered an era where computerized automation and efficiency are permanently reducing the need for laborers? Is this the beginning of a Brave New World in which the very talented few can do the jobs of the middling and mediocre masses?

Blame Politico for the skills myth? Peculiar how Krugman doesn't also point an accusing finger at fellow New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (see, for example, "If You’ve Got the Skills, She’s Got the Job" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/opinion/sunday/Friedman-You-Got-the-Skills.html)).

"[W]orkers in every major category are doing worse than they were in 2007"? Hey, Paul, that pretty much corresponds with the years of the Obama presidency, but of course, we also can't point an accusing finger at the first invertebrate to occupy the Oval Office. You see, Bush is still to blame.

Krugman's conclusion:

"So we need to kill this zombie, if we can, and stop making excuses for an economy that punishes workers."

Kill the zombie? Sorry, but I prefer not to use the word "kill," which has a habit of spawning violence. Reinstate the Uptick Rule and Glass-Steagall? Yes. Repeal the Affordable Care Act, which is proving anything but affordable? Yes. Resort to talk about killing? No.

Obama to Dance on "The Ellen Show" While America Burns?

As I stated in prior blog entries (for example: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.co.il/2014/03/thomas-friedman-from-putin-blessing-in.html), Obama is caught in Putin's pincers, given Obama's dependence upon Russian goodwill involving the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons arsenal and Iran's nuclear weapons development program. Well, blatant evidence of Obama's self-imposed dilemma surfaced yesterday when, according to an AP article entitled "Russia warns West it may change its stance on Iran" (http://bigstory.ap.org/article/russia-warns-west-it-may-change-its-stance-iran), Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov declared according to the Interfax news agency:

"Russia didn't want to use the Iranian nuclear talks to 'raise the stakes,' but may have to do so in response to the actions by the United States and the European Union."

Or stated more succinctly, Putin has Obama by the short and curlies.

Of course, the Ukraine is not Obama's only problem. The number of Affordable Care Act enrollments is far short of Obama administration March 31 goals, and the absence of enthusiasm of healthy young people for this program could blow it all asunder.

And so, the Obama administration is in damage control mode, attempting to inflate enrollment figures by ignoring persons who have signed up but not paid their premiums. As reported by Kyle Cheney in a Politico article entitled "So how many have paid ACA premiums?" (http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/obamacare-affordable-care-act-health-insurance-premiums-104602.html):

"The latest administration figures show that 4.2 million people have selected health plans in the new insurance markets. Insurance industry officials at four of the big national health plans tell POLITICO that about 15 to 20 percent people who have signed up have not yet paid their first monthly premium — the final step to get coverage.

And they’ve told the White House the same, insurance industry officials say."

Note the consistent refusal of Kathleen Sebelius and Jay Carney to address the number of persons not paying their premiums. Transparency? Even the Washington Post's Erik Wemple is today acknowledging the problem in an opinion piece entitled "HHS, playing selective with Obamacare enrollment numbers" (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/03/19/hhs-playing-selective-with-obamacare-enrollment-numbers/?hpid=z3).

So what does Obama do as the flames swirl around him? Simple. As reported in a Huffington Post piece by Paige Lavender entitled "Obama To Appear On The Ellen Show To Talk Obamacare, Maybe Dance" (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/19/obama-ellen_n_4993819.html?utm_hp_ref=politics), he has booked another date on Ellen DeGeneres's show, where he is sure to be lobbed softball questions while promoting Obamacare.

Can it possibly get any worse?

Paul Krugman, "Obama Gets Real": Obamacare Problems "Receding in the Rear-View Mirror"

In one of my blog entries yesterday entitled "Paul Krugman, "Obama Gets Real": Krugman Gets Delusional II" (http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.co.il/2013/12/paul-krugman-obama-gets-real-krugman.html), I noted how Nobelist Krugman is now claiming that Obama is "finally sounding like the progressive many of his supporters thought they were backing in 2008." In this opinion piece  (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/opinion/krugman-obama-gets-real.html?hpw&rref=opinion&_r=0) Krugman also made another "interesting" observation:

"HealthCare.gov is working much better, people are signing up in growing numbers, and the whole mess is already receding in the rear-view mirror."

Yup, HealthCare.gov is working much better. The website can now potentially handle 50,000 visitors at one time, but 15,000 of them are placed on a waiting queue. Moreover, it is estimated that back-end errors have affected approximately one-third of the people who have signed up for health plans since October 1, i.e. they might think that they have health care coverage, but they don't.

And whereas some 50,000 people may have succeed in obtaining health care packages via the Obamacare website, another 5 million people have had their health care insurance cancelled owing to enactment of the Affordable Care Act.

Furthermore, we are now learning that prior to the rollout of Obamacare, the president simply didn't bother meeting with his Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. As reported by Politico (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2013/12/the-zero-meeting-president-100767.html?ml=po_r):

"A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI) analysis finds that from July 12, 2010, to Nov. 30, 2013, the president’s public schedule records zero one-on-one meetings between Obama and Sebelius. Equally shocking, over the same period, the president's calendar lists 277 private meetings with his other Cabinet secretaries (excluding full Cabinet meetings).

Given these startling findings, and the fact that the White House calendar did not reflect meetings prior to July 12, 2010, GAI researchers then performed a second analysis using another respected recorder of presidential activity, the POLITICO presidential calendar. The results: Just one April 21, 2010 entry was found listing a White House meeting between Obama and Sebelius—and even that was a joint meeting with then Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner."

Yes, Obamacare is a disaster which is still playing out.

Krugman? Do you remember how he once wrote concerning Occupy Wall Street (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/opinion/krugman-confronting-the-malefactors.html):

"Occupy Wall Street is starting to look like an important event that might even eventually be seen as a turning point.

. . . .

It’s clear what kinds of things the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators want, and it’s really the job of policy intellectuals and politicians to fill in the details."

And just where is Occupy Wall Street today?

Well, let's see where Obamacare is in another year. My guess is that its future will be no more sanguine than that of Occupy Wall Street, to which the president was also sympathetically disposed.

Thomas Friedman, "Blowing a Whistle": The NSA Is Going to Save Us from Another 9/11

Suppose terrorists have hidden a dirty bomb in Manhattan and are threatening to detonate the bomb unless the US releases all of its Guantanamo prisoners. The bomb is timed to go off in another two hours, and there is no time to evacuate the city. Millions are expected to die slow painful deaths from radiation poisoning and cancer unless the bomb is found and defused. Then suddenly, one of the al-Qaeda conspirators is captured, but he refuses to talk. Would you waterboard him, or read him his rights and wait for his lawyer?

Me? Wait for his lawyer? I wouldn't hesitate to go far beyond waterboarding the bastard, and yet I am appalled by the revelations of NSA information gathering, which contribute very little to American security. Even with warnings from Moscow, this data didn't prevent the Boston Marathon bombing. You see, it has nothing to do with the quantity of the data accumulated, and everything to do with theory and focus.

In his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Blowing a Whistle" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/opinion/friedman-blowing-a-whistle.html), Thomas Friedman plays on our 9/11 paranoia:

"Yes, I worry about potential government abuse of privacy from a program designed to prevent another 9/11 — abuse that, so far, does not appear to have happened. But I worry even more about another 9/11. That is, I worry about something that’s already happened once — that was staggeringly costly — and that terrorists aspire to repeat.

I worry about that even more, not because I don’t care about civil liberties, but because what I cherish most about America is our open society, and I believe that if there is one more 9/11 — or worse, an attack involving nuclear material — it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it. If there were another 9/11, I fear that 99 percent of Americans would tell their members of Congress: 'Do whatever you need to do to, privacy be damned, just make sure this does not happen again.' That is what I fear most.

That is why I’ll reluctantly, very reluctantly, trade off the government using data mining to look for suspicious patterns in phone numbers called and e-mail addresses — and then have to go to a judge to get a warrant to actually look at the content under guidelines set by Congress — to prevent a day where, out of fear, we give government a license to look at anyone, any e-mail, any phone call, anywhere, anytime."

Tom wants to "prevent a day where, out of fear, we give government a license to look at anyone, any e-mail, any phone call, anywhere, anytime"? Me, too. But didn't Snowden just tell us that "I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal e-mail" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance)?

Friedman quotes from an essay by David Simon, the creator of HBO’s "The Wire": "this kind of data collection has been a baseline logic of an American anti-terrorism effort that is effectively asked to find the needles before they are planted into haystacks, to prevent even such modest, grass-rooted conspiracies as the Boston Marathon bombing before they occur." Okay, but did it stop the Boston Marathon bombing? Not a chance.

Sure, I want to prevent a future 9/11, which is more likely to arise today as the result of an Iranian cyber attack, but unlike Tom, I'm going to be politically incorrect. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey (http://www.pewforum.org/Muslim/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-exec.aspx):

"Few U.S. Muslims voice support for suicide bombing or other forms of violence against civilians in the name of Islam; 81% say such acts are never justified, while fewer than one-in-ten say violence against civilians either is often justified (1%) or is sometimes justified (7%) to defend Islam."

Only 1% of US Muslims "say violence against civilians is often justified," and only 7% say that such violence "is sometimes justified"? These numbers are frightening. As I said earlier, everything has to do with theory and focus - here is your focus. Thanks to Pew, there is no additional need for theory.

And where is Obama in the midst of this storm? From the isolation of Rancho Mirage in California, he will soon be traveling to Tanzania. On Tuesday, Politico reporter Glenn Thrush Tuesday asked Jay Carney whether President Obama should "have a fireside chat with the American people" about the NSA’s surveillance program. Carney's answer (see: http://freebeacon.com/carney-refuses-to-answer-why-obama-wont-speak-to-american-people-directly-about-nsa-scandal/):

"I’m not saying — I think I just said, Glenn, although I appreciate yours and the former Attorney General’s specific recommendations about the modalities of presidential communication, the president has and will speak about this subject."

Yup, they're already firing up the teleprompters, but in the meantime, the president is doing what he does best: He likes to watch.

Maureen Dowd, "Serving Up Schlock": No, She's Not Referring to Jay Carney

Television? I'll let you in on a deep, dark secret: I like "Game of Thrones," but that's the extent of my vice. I also liked "The Sopranos" and "The Wire," but in both of of these instances, I think I can now safely plead the statute of limitations.

In her latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Serving Up Schlock" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/22/opinion/dowd-serving-up-schlock.html), Maureen Dowd ridicules network television fare:

"It turns out that Washington isn’t the only place where ideas come to die.

TV honchos cling to outmoded programming traditions even as many younger Americans, gorging on a movable feast of platforms, are losing the habit of turning on the TV, and even as top talent peels off to enjoy the freedom of cable and imaginative hubs like Amazon, Hulu, YouTube and Netflix . . ."

Dowd is right! Who needs network programming, when it will be so much more entertaining to watch Lois Lerner plead the Fifth concerning her involvement in the IRS scandal. (She still hasn't been fired?) Recall that the editorial board of The New York Times has gone on record as stating that the IRS "acted inappropriately because employees couldn’t understand inadequate guidelines" (http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.co.il/2013/05/new-york-times-editorial-scandal.html). Just one big misunderstanding, yet here we have Lerner about to take the Fifth?

More comedy? Listen to Jay Carney try to avoid answering and then explain away why White House chief lawyer Kathryn Ruemmler purportedly chose not to inform the president that the IRS was targeting conservatives ("Let's not tell Daddy"?).

The prior day, Carney had said (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/20/press-briefing-press-secretary-jay-carney-5202013):

"In these situations the counsel made the decision that this is not the kind of thing that you notify the president of, of an investigation that’s not complete, because it wouldn’t be appropriate to do so."

But as Dan Balz of The Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/with-more-clarity-white-house-adds-to-confusion-on-irs/2013/05/21/a40c54f2-c24d-11e2-8c3b-0b5e9247e8ca_story.html?hpid=z2) asks today:

"Why would it be inappropriate for the president to know what his chief of staff, his counsel and others on his senior staff knew and were talking about with others in the government? Would telling him require him to do something inappropriate? Would he be open to criticism if he knew and stood idly by? Perhaps, but if his top advisers knew weren’t inclined to act inappropriately, why would the president?"

But that's just half of it. Do you honestly believe that Kathryn Ruemmler, all of 42 years old, took it entirely upon herself not to inform the president? What's that? You believe it? Okay, there's a bridge in Brooklyn that I would like to sell you.

And then there was also the scintillating repartee between former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and Maureen Dowd herself. On "Morning Joe," Gibbs let loose a broadside at Dowd, who has plainly fallen out of love with Obama.

As reported by Politico (http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/robert-gibbs-maureen-dowd-91608.html), Dowd was quick to fire back:

"'I don’t normally listen to Robert,' she wrote in an e-mail to POLITICO. 'I don’t largely because it’s sort of largely the same tired defense of President Obama for the last, like, six years.'"

You go, girl!

Heck, with this abundance of alternative entertainment, you might need medical marijuana to treat depression, but there is certainly no need for network sitcoms.

Is New York Times Columnist Maureen Dowd Anti-Semitic?

Everyone knows that Maureen Dowd once lifted a paragraph from Josh Marshall without attribution. This is called plagiarism.

We also know that Maureen is a hypocrite. In the past she has devoted many of her columns to the molestation of young boys by Catholic priests. On the other hand, during the course of a 2010 trip to Saudi Arabia, during which she was hosted by Prince Saud al-Faisal at "his sprawling, glinting ranch house with its stable of Arabian horses," she reported that the Desert Kingdom is "chipping away at gender apartheid and cultural repression" (see: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/opinion/03dowd.html), but forgot to mention the horrors being perpetrated against Saudi women. When I complained to Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor of The New York Times, about this paradox, he quickly came to Dowd's defense:

"Maureen has denounced the barbaric policies in Saudi Arabia against women more than once, including on an earlier trip to that country as I recall."

My response to Rosenthal:

"Re Ms. Dowd's most recent series of op-eds concerning Saudi Arabia, I read all of them and do not recall a single instance where she denounced their 'barbaric policies'. Although there was castigation of Israel, did she did not once mention the practice of 'honor' killings in Saudi Arabia. She never described how women who are gang raped are sentenced to prison and lashings. She never mentioned the problem of 'child brides' in this country.

I recall reading her op-ed, 'Driving Miss Saudi' . . . where she observed how "Young women in Riyadh try to balance Islam and modernity as the stunted desert kingdom makes progress in 'Saudi Time'", but didn't dare breathe a word concerning any of the above obscenities.

Reading this op-ed, one was made to believe that Saudi oppression of women amounted to little more than a dress code."

Rosenthal did not respond.

More recently, following her Sunday op-ed entitled "Neocons Slither Back" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/opinion/sunday/dowd-neocons-slither-back.html), Dowd has been accused of anti-Semitism. As summarized by Politico's Dylan Byers (http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/09/maureen-dowd-meets-antisemitism-charge-135700.html):

"New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd set the Jewish political community on fire today with a column about the Republican ticket's foreign policy proposals that, according to her critics, peddled anti-Semitic imagery.

Dowd fairly observed that neither Mitt Romney nor Paul Ryan are experts in the field of foreign policy, but asserted their strategy was orchestrated by a 'neocon puppet master' who was leading the neocon effort to 'slither back' into power.

Such language, to say nothing of the questionable legitimacy of her claims, struck experts on American-Israeli relations as an inappropriate (though perhaps unintentional) appeal to anti-Semitic stereotypes, and especially offensive ahead of the first night of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah."

Observing the outrage expressed by Steven A. Cook, Jeffrey Goldberg, Blake Hounshell, Daniel Halper and Jonathan Tobin, Byers reported that Andrew Rosenthal had defended Dowd from these charges by declaring:

"No fair-minded reading of Maureen Dowd's column supports the allegations you and others are making. She makes no reference, direct or implied, to anyone's religion."

Yeah, right. Not one of these commentators from both the left and the right is "fair-minded."

But why is everyone suddenly ganging up on poor Maureen?

Not long ago, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/opinion/friedman-newt-mitt-bibi-and-vladimir.html?ref=opinion):

"I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby."

Is this any less horrifying than what Maureen wrote?

And then there was Roger Cohen's New York Times op-ed "Obama in Netanyahu's Web" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/opinion/28iht-edcohen.html), whose title was painfully in keeping with the anti-Semitic tradition of depicting Jews as voracious spiders. As a "very senior" Times editor later acknowledged to me, this "was not a good headline."

More about Cohen? Earlier this year, following my complaint by e-mail to Andrew Rosenthal concerning the title of Roger Cohen's op-ed, "The Dilemmas of Jewish Power," the title was quickly changed online to "The Dilemmas of Israeli Power" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/opinion/cohen-the-dilemmas-of-jewish-power.html). Rosenthal did not write back to me, and when I protested to Jill Abramson, executive editor of the Times, she also failed to reply (see: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.co.il/2012/02/stench-of-anti-semitism-at-new-york.html).

Also, we mustn't forget the "contribution" of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof to this depravity. As I explained in an article entitled "Nicholas Kristof, Israel, and Double Standards" (http://www.jsantisemitism.org/essays/GrossmanJSA210(4).pdf) for The Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, Kristof routinely rails against purported Israeli injustices, while ignoring the improprities of other democracies:

"Ignorance, however, has never prevented Kristof from foisting twaddle upon the Times’s readership, particularly with respect to Israel. In an August 2011 op-ed, “Seeking Balance on the Mideast” (http://www.nytimes
.com/2011/08/04/opinion/seeking-balance-on-the-mideast.html?_r=1&hp), Kristof lambasted Israel at a time when Assad’s tanks were massacring the inhabitants of the Syrian city of Hama. Kristof sought to excuse himself by observing:

'Whenever I write about Israel, I get accused of double standards because I don’t spill as much ink denouncing worse abuses by, say, Syria. I plead guilty. I demand more of Israel partly because my tax dollars supply arms and aid to Israel. I hold democratic allies like Israel to a higher standard—just as I do the U.S.'

True, Syria has not been a recipient of U.S. aid. But whereas Egypt has received billions of dollars of American aid, Kristof doesn’t write about the persecution and murder of its Coptic Christian minority . . . And while Pakistan, a democracy of sorts, has also benefited from billions of dollars of U.S. aid while abetting the Taliban in Afghanistan, Kristof has been seeking a reduction of tariffs on Pakistani garment exports to the United States, purportedly in order to fight extremism.

. . . .

According to the 'working definition of antisemitism' of the European Forum on Antisemitism: 'Examples of the ways in which antisemitism manifests itself with regard to the State of Israel taking into account the overall context could include: . . . Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.'

. . . .

Kristof plainly has no problem ignoring the persecution of 30 million stateless Kurds, the oppression of Iran’s Baha’is, and the despair of Egypt’s Copts. He clearly holds Israel to rules unlike those that he would set for any other country, democratic or otherwise, be it Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey, or the United States. Kristof worries over whether he will be accused of applying a double standard to Israel, to which concern I would observe that there is an old Jewish maxim applicable to Kristof’s angst: 'The hat burns on the head of the thief.' In the best-case scenario, Kristof is guilty of applying double standards to Israel, notwithstanding his protestations to the contrary. In the worst-case scenario, Kristof is guilty of something far more insidious."

More? The New York Times has persistently published the vilest imaginable anti-Semitic comments from its readers notwithstanding review by its "moderators," e.g., "There is no country called Israel, just the squatting of tribal criminals from the Eastern Bloc." Although I repeatedly brought this practice to the attention of past New York Times public editors, I was ignored (see: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.com/2009/06/open-letter-no-2-to-clark-hoyt-public.html and http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.com/2010/10/sanchez-dismissal-spawns-more-anti.html). When I showed specific examples of these readers' comments to Andrew Rosenthal, he personally removed some of them, but the phenomenon persisted. (I have long ceased reading these comments or submitting them, given that I was routinely censored by the Times's "moderators.")

Still more? When Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu responded to a Times request that he submit a guest op-ed for publication, his senior adviser, Ron Dermer, responded this past December by observing (http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=249724):

"Not to be accused of cherry-picking to prove a point, I discovered that during the last three months (September through November) you published 20 op-eds about Israel in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune. After dividing the op-eds into two categories, 'positive' and 'negative,' with 'negative' meaning an attack against the State of Israel or the policies of its democratically elected government, I found that 19 out of 20 columns were 'negative.'

The only 'positive' piece was penned by Richard Goldstone (of the infamous Goldstone Report), in which he defended Israel against the slanderous charge of Apartheid.

Yet your decision to publish that op-ed came a few months after your paper reportedly rejected Goldstone's previous submission. In that earlier piece, which was ultimately published in the Washington Post, the man who was quoted the world over for alleging that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza, fundamentally changed his position. According to the New York Times op-ed page, that was apparently news unfit to print."

Well, over the past week leading up to Rosh Hashanah, The New York Times was again up to its old tricks. The Times published an Israel bashing guest op-ed entitled "Seven Lean Years of Peacemaking," written by Daniel Levy, whose inaccuracies are most kindly described as egregious (see: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.co.il/2012/09/daniel-levy-seven-lean-years-of.html). The Times didn't bother to inform its readership that Levy was a founder of J Street and continues to serve on its advisory board (see: http://www.newamerica.net/people/daniel_levy).

On Rosh Hashanah, the Times "feted" its readers with another Israel bashing guest op-ed entitled "A Preventable Massacre," written by Seth Anziska, a Columbia University graduate student, whose casual attitude toward historical facts speaks volumes about his inclinations (see: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.co.il/2012/09/seth-anziska-preventable-massacre-more.html). Again, the Times didn't take the trouble to inform its readers that Columbia lists Anziska's "Advisor" as Rashid Khalidi (see: http://history.columbia.edu/graduate/Anziska.html), a professor once linked to the PLO (see: http://www.martinkramer.org/sandbox/2008/10/khalidi-of-the-plo/). As known to all, a tape of Obama's 2003 tribute to Khalidi at a farewell party in Chicago is locked away in the offices of The Los Angeles Times (see: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/226104/i-l-times-i-suppresses-obamas-khalidi-bash-tape/andrew-c-mccarthy).

In short, why is everyone beating up on poor Maureen Dowd when the stench of anti-Semitism permeates the entirety of the Times's edifice?