The State Department Puts Bill Maher's Conspiratorial Theories to Rest: Stephen Walt Invited to Lecture

Do you remember how Bill Maher recently declared, "Based on every statement I’ve heard out of any Republican in the last two years, the Israelis are controlling our government" (see: http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/02/18/shocking-bill-maher-says-the-israelis-are-controlling-our-government-video/)? Well, the US State Department has put to rest his conspiratorial, anti-Semitic theories.

As reported by Adam Kredo of The Washington Free Beacon (http://freebeacon.com/israel-lobby-author-addresses-state-department/):

"Stephen Walt, coauthor of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy and professor of international affairs at Harvard University, was the featured speaker at the Secretary’s Open Forum on Friday afternoon. His topic: 'Top reasons American foreign policy fails,' according to a copy of the event flyer posted in the hallways of Foggy Bottom.

. . . .

The Secretary’s Open Forum was established in 1967. Speakers are handpicked by a 'chairperson who serves directly under the Secretary of State,' according to the State Department.

. . . .

Jewish human rights group B’nai B’rith International was critical of Walt’s being invited to speak.

'Walt is known for his biased and provocative comments about Israel and its friends and supporters,' B’nai B’rith said in an official statement to the Free Beacon. 'Israel is a close friend and ally of this country and his appearance at this forum is at odds with the long-standing and continuing friendship between the United States and Israel.'

Neither Walt nor the State Department responded to Free Beacon requests for comment."

Not need to worry. During Obama's second term, it's only going to get worse.

Bill Keller, "Obama’s Fault": Yes, the King Has No Clothes

Bill Keller, in his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Obama’s Fault" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/opinion/keller-obamas-fault.html?pagewanted=all), has finally gotten around to acknowledging that Obama owns America's economic mess. Keller begins:

"Our feckless leaders may be incapable of passing a budget, but, boy, can they pass the buck. The White House spent last week in full campaign hysteria, blitzing online followers with the message that heartless Republicans are prepared to transform America into 'Les Misérables' in order to protect 'millionaires and billionaires, oil companies, vacation homes, and private jet owners.'"

After making the obligatory references to "pigheaded" Republicans (true, it takes two to tango), Keller continues:

"But if you care about the long-term health of the country, the president has more to answer for than just inventing a particular type of fiscal time bomb. The large mess we are in is in no small part the result of missed opportunities and political miscalculation at 1600 Pennsylvania."

Keller finishes:

"Clearly the days of 'putting off unpleasant decisions' are not over. And this is where they get you."

Will Keller also be castigated and threatened with banishment as he joins Bob Woodward in recognizing the truth?

US national debt? Quickly closing in on $17 trillion and never to be repaid.

Is Obama Lifting Sanctions Against Iran?

As reported by Iran's semi-official Fars News Agency in its lead online item (http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=9107149444):

FM: West to Ease Sanctions against Iran from March 3

TEHRAN (FNA)- Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi announced that the US-engineered sanctions against the Islamic Republic will be gradually removed from today, March 3.

"With the measures devised by the Iranian diplomatic apparatus, from today we will witness the gradual removal of the sanctions," Salehi said on Sunday, Islamic republic news agency reported.

Was there an agreement, tacit or otherwise, between the P5+1 and Iran in Kazakhstan, which is being kept secret?

Perhaps the White House would care to comment.

Opponents of Muslim Brotherhood Boycott Kerry in Cairo

Opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood are refusing to meet with the new US secretary of state, John Kerry, during his visit to Egypt. As reported by The Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/kerry-urges-unpopular-reforms-in-egypt/2013/03/02/269d0c52-8353-11e2-a671-0307392de8de_story.html?hpid=z4):

"The ruling Islamists are at an impasse with secular and leftist opposition parties. The umbrella National Salvation Front has called for a boycott of upcoming parliamentary elections in protest of a national constitution whose strong Islamist stamp also worries some in the United States.

Political liberals and secular parties resent the U.S. push for them to take part in voting they say will further divide the country. They say the U.S. is showing favor to Morsi and Islamists."

Kerry is a problematic figure in the Sunni Muslim Middle East, after frequently visiting with Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad and declaring Assad to be his "dear friend."

Kerry is not visiting Israel after his stop in Cairo, but says he will accompany Obama when the American president arrives in Israel later this year.

On Friday, Kerry met in Ankara with Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, one of five world leaders whom Obama lists as his closest friends (see: http://www.todayszaman.com/news-269076-obama-names-turkeys-erdogan-among-top-five-international-friends.html). On Wednesday, Erdogan told a United Nations forum in Vienna that Zionism is "a crime against humanity."

As reported by The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/02/world/europe/kerry-criticizes-turkish-prime-minister-over-zionism-remark.html?_r=0):

"On Friday night, Mr. Kerry dined at Mr. Erdogan’s residence. The session began inauspiciously when Mr. Kerry apologized for being a little late because of his lengthy discussions with Mr. Davutoglu.

Mr. Erdogan, who seemed irritated, said that Mr. Kerry and Mr. Davutoglu 'must have spoken about everything, so there is nothing left for us to talk about.'

'There’s a lot to talk about,' Mr. Kerry said. 'We actually didn’t talk about everything.'

. . . .

American officials did not provide details on the exchange regarding Mr. Erdogan’s Zionism comments or whether the Turkish prime minister believed they had in any way been excessive."

Turkey is one of the strongest supporters of the rebels fighting against Assad, and Kerry's past socializing with Assad and his wife also does not make him popular in Turkey.

Thomas Friedman, "The Scary Hidden Stressor": Israel Offers Solutions

In his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "The Scary Hidden Stressor" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/friedman-the-scary-hidden-stressor.html), Thomas Friedman observes the potential "interplay between climate change, food prices (particularly wheat) and politics." Friedman writes:

"Scientists like to say that, when it comes to climate change, we need to manage what is unavoidable and avoid what is unmanageable. That requires collective action globally to mitigate as much climate change as we can and the building of resilient states locally to adapt to what we can’t mitigate."

True, we can't control the weather, but we can build desalinization plants to mitigate the effects of draught. Abiotic stress tolerance to drought, soil salinity and heat can also be significantly improved in many plants, and thereby facilitate the use of semi-arable lands for agriculture.

Who is leading the world in both these fields? Answer: tiny Israel.

Now if only Israel's neighbors would take advantage of the answers being offered by Israel.

And if only Thomas Friedman would make the effort to contact me and allow me to show him Israel's advances in these areas.

But don't hold your breath.

Maureen Dowd, "How Mary Feels About Being a Virgin": Is It All About Sex?

"Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory."

- Irena Sendler

It's rarely black and white, except at The Times.

In her latest New York Times op-ed entitled "How Mary Feels About Being a Virgin" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/dowd-how-mary-feels-about-being-a-virgin.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0), Maureen Dowd recounts her discussion concerning "The Testament of Mary," a show soon previewing on Broadway, with it's iconoclast author, Colm Toibin. Dowd concludes:

"Toibin says that the church must have tolerance, and that its leaders have lost any sense of how their sanctimonious denunciations clash with their scandals and imagery, causing nothing but pain.

'I remember being at the Vatican at Easter 1994,' he recalled, 'and watching all the cardinals and bishops, wonderfully powerful old men with great chins, sitting nobly with a long row of extraordinarily beautiful young seminarians standing behind, shading them with different colored sun umbrellas, some of which were pink.

'It was remarkable that none of them seemed to know what it looked like, and I watched it thinking, somebody must tell them.'"

No question about it: The Vatican's attitude toward women and homosexuals is troublesome for someone like me. (I also question why orthodox synagogues separate between men and women.)

And then there is the behavior of the Vatican during the Holocaust, which goes unmentioned in this opinion piece.

Yet, if one is troubled by the conduct of Pope Pius XII while millions of Jews were massacred by the Nazis throughout Europe, there can also be no forgetting the angelic conduct of Oskar Schindler, a Catholic member of the Nazi Party, who single-handedly saved 1,200 Jews.

Far less famous than Schindler, immortalized by Steven Spielberg, was Irena Sendler, a Catholic woman of extraordinary valor, who saved the lives of 2,500 Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto from certain death.

Irena, born in 1910, joined the Żegota resistance in Poland, and owing to her work with the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, she was able to enter the ghetto to check for signs of typhus. Irena smuggled Jewish children out of the ghetto in crates, boxes and suitcases and hid them with Polish families and Catholic convents and rectories. She made lists of the children's former and assumed names and promised that after the war they would be returned to their families.

Arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, she was tortured and left for dead in the woods with broken limbs. Irena was forced to go into hiding until the end of the war, but immediately thereafter sought to reunite the Jewish children whom she saved with those of their parents who remained alive (90% of Polish Jewry was exterminated by the Nazis).

In 2007, at the age of 97, a year before her death, she was nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Irena did not receive the award. As we all know, the prize is reserved for such renowned men of peace as Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama.

In short, religion is capable of inspiring unspeakable acts of hatred as well as all that is noble in our lives.

Again, it's never black and white, except at The Times.

Is Obama the Most Dysfunctional President in Contemporary American History?

Why listen to Jeffrey? He's just another a neocon. Sure, he favors gay marriage, is pro-choice, opposed the Second Gulf War, opposes US ground involvement in Afghanistan, and deplores the ravenous conduct of avaricious US financial institutions, but he has also dared to question the One. Jeffrey is "bad" and will never set foot in the White House.

Actually, the state of the union is bad. In fact, it is terrible owing to the arrogance of a president, who never possessed the skill set to be president.

The sequester? I don't know how many jobs will be lost or exactly what further damage will be done to a reeling economy. As observed by Charles Blow in his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Poison Pill Politics" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/02/opinion/blow-the-sequester-poison-pill-politics.html?_r=0):

"The deadline has passed. The sequester is in effect. And Congress is not in session.

We now know that our political system is broken beyond anything even remotely resembling a functional government.

The ridiculous bill was designed as a poison pill, but Republicans popped it like a Pez. Now the body politic — weak with battle fatigue, jerked from crisis to crisis and struggling to recover from a recession — has to wait to see how severe the damage will be."

But unlike Bob Woodward, Blows lacks the courage to acknowledge that the sequester was Obama's idea.

What about Woodward? What are the full implications of this imbroglio? As noted by Kathleen Parker in her latest Washington Post opinion piece entitled "Why the 'threat' on Bob Woodward matters" (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kathleen-parker-the-obama-white-house-threat-to-bob-woodward-matters/2013/03/01/f5d36d5e-82b3-11e2-b99e-6baf4ebe42df_story.html?hpid=z2):

"This is no tempest in a teapot but rather the leak in the dike. Drip by drip, the Obama administration has demonstrated its intolerance for dissent and its contempt for any who stray from the White House script. Yes, all administrations are sensitive to criticism, and all push back when such criticism is deemed unfair or inaccurate. But no president since Richard Nixon has demonstrated such overt contempt for the messenger. And, thanks to technological advances in social media, Obama has been able to bypass traditional watchdogs as no other president has."

Yes, the First Amendment is under attack.

Obama's new cabinet of thick-witted white guys? They are indeed the worst and the dumbest. We have John Kerry, who called Bashar al-Assad his "dear friend" and who is given to inventing new countries (see: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.co.il/2013/02/vice-president-joe-biden-just-fire.html), as secretary of state. We have Chuck Hagel, an anti-Semitic imbecile, as secretary of defense. And Jack Lew, the former chief operating officer of Citigroup’s Alternative Investments, who doesn't "believe that deregulation was the proximate cause" of the 2008 American economic meltdown (see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/21/obama-nominee-jacob-lew-f_n_732594.html?view=print&comm_ref=false), as secretary of the treasury.

Access to the president? An ambassadorship? All you need to do is pay money (see: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/politics/obamas-backers-seek-deep-pockets-to-press-agenda.html?pagewanted=all and http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/02/28/sources-obama-picks-for-ambassadorships-include-top-donors/?hpt=po_c2).

A rogue Iranian regime building nuclear weapons? The recent P5+1 talks in Kazakhstan brought no results, although the P5+1 is no longer demanding the closure of the underground Fordow facility. That Obama is one tough negotiator who knows how to bring those crazy mullahs to heel. Yeah, right.

Bottom line: I used to think that the cataclysm would come after my lifetime and that my children would be forced to deal with it. No more. Obama is literally bringing the house down.