Ron Paul Counters Obama Policy on Israel, Middle East

A sneaky move by Paul to deflect the recent criticism that he never took back his accusations based on the Goldstone Report which proved fraudulent by Richard Goldstone himself. Paul's presidential hopes depend on quieting the Zionists in his own party... this is a way to attack Obama and build his own Pro Israel credentials... while at the same time push the idea of equivalence for all Foreign Aid. The denied correlative is that America has countries it trusts more then others and that is sound policy. Absolutes like Obama's giving to terrorists... and Paul's absolute of no help for friends have no reality to the struggles our country has had historically

Congressman Ron Paul issued a blistering critique of President Obama's recent proposal for Israel to surrender its territory to pre-1967 borders and create a Palestinian state.
“Unlike this President, I do not believe it is our place to dictate how Israel runs her affairs," the Texas Republican wrote in a May 20 press statement. "There can only be peace in the region if those sides work out their differences among one another. We should respect Israel’s sovereignty and not try to dictate her policy from Washington." Representative Paul has announced an electoral challenge to Obama as a Republican, and will face Obama in November 2012 if he can win the GOP nomination.
Obama had proposed May 19 that "We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states." The proposal rocked the relationship between the United States and Israel, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rebuffed Obama in person the next day from an Oval Office press conference, complaining that "while Israel is prepared to make generous compromises for peace, it cannot go back to the 1967 lines — because these lines are indefensible; because they don’t take into account certain changes that have taken place on the ground, demographic changes that have taken place over the last 44 years."
Obama also promised some $2 billion in additional direct foreign aid to Egypt in the May 19 address. Egypt was until the 1980s an enemy of the Jewish state. Obama pledged an additional $2 billion investment from the U.S. government's Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) to North Africa and the Middle East.
By way of contrast, Rep. Paul has proposed eliminating all foreign aid. “I am not the only one who can see the absurdities of our foreign policy. We give $3 billion to Israel and $12 billion to her enemies," Paul wrote. "Most Americans know that makes no sense.... We are facing $2 trillion dollar deficits, and the American taxpayer cannot afford any of it."
Representative Paul also noted that U.S. foreign aid has often worked at cross-purposes with freedom in the Islamic world. Paul pointed out that for 30 years U.S. aid propped up the corrupt Mubarak regime in Egypt, a regime overthrown by the peaceful "Jasmine revolution" this spring. “As the President prepares to send even more support to Egypt, we should be reminded that it was our foreign aid that helped Mubarak retain power to repress his people in the first place. Now we have to deal with the consequences of those decisions, yet we keep repeating the same mistakes."
Obama's May 19 speech also took special note of the Jasmine revolution sweeping the Islamic world, a revolution that began in December in Tunisia and has since touched just about every Islamic nation. Obama claimed that "the people of the Middle East and North Africa had taken their future into their own hands." Obama even acknowledged that the United States and its policies had nothing to do with the peaceful demonstrations: "It’s not America that put people into the streets of Tunis or Cairo -– it was the people themselves who launched these movements, and it’s the people themselves that must ultimately determine their outcome."
But despite traditional U.S. foreign aid support for dictatorships, Obama implicitly threatened further intervention in Islamic nations and devoted particularly harsh criticism to Syria. "Most recently, the Syrian regime has chosen the path of murder and the mass arrests of its citizens.  The United States has condemned these actions, and working with the international community we have stepped up our sanctions on the Syrian regime –- including sanctions announced yesterday on President Assad and those around him." Syria has indeed launched a month-long bloody campaign against peaceful protesters, a campaign that appears to be getting bloodier.
Obama stressed that the United States stood for "universal human rights" and that "Our support for these principles is not a secondary interest. Today I want to make it clear that it is a top priority that must be translated into concrete actions, and supported by all of the diplomatic, economic and strategic tools at our disposal." To many observers, "strategic tools" is a code word for U.S. military action.
Representative Paul, by way of contrast, has opposed Obama's Libyan war and strongly condemned the implicit threat to attack Syria. “The President also defended his unconstitutional intervention in Libya, authorized not by the United States Congress but by the United Nations, and announced new plans to pressure Syria and force the leader of that country to step down," Paul wrote. “Our military is already dangerously extended, and this administration wants to expand our involvement. When will our bombing in Libya end? Is President Obama seriously considering military action against Syria?...We need to come to our senses, trade with our friends in the Middle East (both Arab and Israeli), clean up our own economic mess so we set a good example, and allow them to work out their own conflicts." via thenewamerican.com

If Paul is serious about moving into the American political mainstream then he is going to have to do more then sneaky tricks.  He is going to have to apologize for endorsing the findings of the Goldstone Report. There is a major flaw in both Obama and Ron Paul's thinking.  If the objective is really to end the role of America's police man status, then why would a downsized power be interested in not having allies?  Only parental figures appear to be even handed with their children.  Both Ron Paul and Obama have endorsed a policy that acts like a police state... Ron Paul's version being an economically sustainable policeman, though he won't admit why he intends to position America as neutral.  A real non internationalist nation would never be afraid to commit to it's friends.

Obama's Middle East Speech: The Opposite of Strategy Is Catastrophe

Obama is trying to mimic G W Bush in that he supports Islam, but not radical Islam... but the real radical departure was that he no longer shows any loyalty to Islamic allies who have no Democracy.  The moral statement rings hollow, but it is going to scare the hell out of the Saudis... who Obama is trying to play nice with.  This shows how incompetent Obama really is.  He can't even help the so called "Moderates" he believes exist.

Obama's Middle East Speech:
The Opposite of Strategy Is Catastrophe

...this was not a speech about Israeli-Palestinian issues. On the contrary, he was trying to find a framework for pushing that question onto a backburner. Here he failed completely...

President Barack Obama’s big Middle East speech is extraordinarily important. I think that it has been largely misinterpreted and deserves a very detailed examination. Forgive me then for analyzing it at length but that’s necessary to understand both Obama’s thinking and policy.
First and foremost, this could be called Obama’s George Bush speech.
The intention was to find some way to make the main priority of U.S. policy the support of democracy in the Arab world. This is precisely the theme that Obama’s supporters ridiculed when Bush did it. So Obama had to find some way to approach the issue without anyone realizing he had copied Bush. He succeeded! No one seems to have caught on yet.

Continue reading: Obama's Middle East Speech: The Opposite of Strategy Is Catastrophe

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). His latest book is Israel: An Introduction, to be published by Yale University Press later this year. You can read more of Barry Rubin's posts at Rubin Reports, and now on his new blog, Rubin Reports, on Pajamas Media

via daledamos.blogspot.com

Bering in Mind: Sex, Sleep and the Law: When Nocturnal Genitals Pose a Moral Dilemma

It may seem to you that, much like their barnyard animal namesake, men’s reproductive organs the world over participate in a mindless synchrony of stiffened salutes to the rising sun. In fact, however, such "morning wood" is an autonomic leftover from a series of nocturnal penile tumescence (NPT) episodes that occur like clockwork during the night for all healthy human males—most frequently in the dream-filled rapid eye movement (REM) periods of sleep from which we’re so often rudely awakened in the A.M. by buzzers, mothers, or others.
For those with penises, you may be surprised to learn how frequently your member stands up while the rest of your body is rendered catatonic by the muscular paralysis that keeps you from acting out your dreams. (And thank goodness for that. Carlos Schenck and his colleagues [pdf] from the University of Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center describe the case of a 19-year-old with sleep-related dissociative disorder crawling around his house on all fours, growling, and chewing on a piece of bacon—he was ‘dreaming’ of being a jungle cat and pouncing on a slab of raw meat held by a female zookeeper.) Scientists have determined that the average 13- to 79-year-old penis is erect for about 90 minutes each night, or 20 percent of overall sleep time. With your brain cycling between the four sleep stages, your "sleep-related erections" appear at 85-minute intervals lasting, on average, 25 minutes. (It’s true; they used a stopwatch.) I didn’t come upon any evolutionary theories or a proposed "adaptive function" of NPT, but we do know that it’s not related to daytime sexual activity, it declines (no pun intended) with age, and it’s correlated positively with testosterone levels. Females similarly exhibit vaginal lubrication during their REM-sleep, presumably with many dreaming of erect penises.
Now, you may not think that such tedious biological details would be fodder for a moral quandary, but you underestimate our species’ massive confusion when it comes to understanding how its coveted free will articulates with its genitalia. Consider the case of a young Frenchman whose sleep-related erection was interpreted by another man as a sign of sexual interest but, swore the former, was nothing of the kind. As described by a group of investigators at the Annual Meeting of the French Sleep Research Society in 2001, the 24-year-old heterosexual male awoke to his horror with painful anal lesions. Although he had no conscious recollection of any such incident occurring, this led him to deduce that he must have been raped during the night. "The legal medical examination indeed reported on visibly recent tears of the anal margin," confirmed the researchers.
Then comes the sobering whodunit. What was especially disquieting is that the man’s boss had slept over the night before. The two had earlier been lounging in the pool and roasting together in the sauna. There was absolutely no evidence of date rape drugs, but alcohol, as it so often does in the south of France, flowed with relatively gay abandon that evening, and so the straight employee, being a gentleman, had invited his employer to sleep it off on his sofa while he retired to the mezzanine. Apparently, however, it was the employee that slept particularly hard that night, not the inebriated boss. The older man admitted readily that of course they’d had sex overnight, and he could only assume that his colleague’s erection, combined with the fact that the other didn’t resist as he mounted him, suggested that he was a consensual partner. (You thought you were a deep sleeper—imagine the somnambulistic fortitude required to snooze through your first anal penetration.) While the courts tried to sort it all out, the alleged rapist was imprisoned for two years, until finally a judge decided that both men were more or less right and the accused should be set free.
This is but one of many curious examples of sex and law intertwining. In recent years, the related phenomenon of sexsomnia ("sleep sex") has witnessed periodic public interest through a spate of high-profile cases, stories that have in turn motivated intriguing academic research on this little-known subject. Even Alfred Kinsey, the grand archivist of carnal facts, while spending a considerable deal of time on the subject of "wet dreams" and nocturnal orgasms in both sexes, didn’t mention how some people act out sexually during their sleep.
Unlike the aforementioned case of the sleeping employee being the passive, immobilized recipient in unwanted intercourse, it’s the sleeper that instigates the trouble in bouts of sexsomnia. Although researchers don’t yet have an exact figure on the frequency of this parasomnia, most specialists believe that it’s probably fairly common. Nearly all people who exhibit recurrent sexual acts while sleeping have a history of sleepwalking. In fact, many experts believe that sexsomnia is simply a variant of sleepwalking, which affects 1 to 2% of adults, and this is how it’s presently classified in the main diagnostic manual, the International Classification of Sleep Disorders, Revised. Most people do not seek out clinical treatment due to either their ignorance of the condition or embarrassment, and oftentimes their sexual ‘automatisms’ are innocuous enough—such as fugue-state masturbation, weak pelvic thrusts or steamy pillow talk. (More on the concept of automatism in a moment.)
In a 2007 issue of Brain Research Reviews, however, psychobiologist Monica Andersen and her co-authors [pdf] investigated all case studies that had, at that point, been published in the literature, and they attempted to piece together some common denominators underlying sexsomnia. They found that the most common precipitating factors of sleepsex are sleep deprivation, stress, alcohol or drug consumption, excessive fatigue, and physical overactivity in the evening. Being male and under the age of 35 is also a major factor; furthermore, when women do lapse into this altered nocturnal state, their actions tend to be comparatively innocent, moaning and masturbating rather than, like male sexsomniacs, fondling and grinding whatever is unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of their bed that night.
One of the most extraordinary things about sexsomnia is that the sleeping person’s inappropriate behaviors are sometimes directed at people that, during their waking lives, are not particularly arousing to them. In a 1996 issue of Medicine, Science and the Law, psychiatrist Peter Fenwick describes the case of an allegedly heterosexual male cadet who was court-martialed for homosexual assault after he’d crawled into bed with another soldier and caressed that private’s privates. The case was dismissed after the court accepted that the absence of an erection in the accused—sexsomnia may or may not involve erections—meant that it was unlikely that the episode was "purposeful," but instead just a bizarre sleepwalking incident. (I’ll refrain, but there’s a clever Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell joke just waiting for you.) Another example of atypical homosexuality in sexsomnia involved a 16-year-old who walked into his aunt and uncle’s bedroom one night and began molesting his adult uncle.
Erections, as I hinted at earlier, complicate matters for the judicial system. One notorious case garnering international media attention, and as reviewed recently [pdf] in Current Psychiatry by a group of sleep researchers from The Cleveland Clinic, centered on a 30-year-old landscaper named Jan Luedecke, who drank far too much at a wild croquet party in the Toronto suburbs one night back in 2003 and fell asleep on a couch. "Some time later," explain the authors, "he approached a woman who was sleeping on an adjacent couch, put on a condom, and began sexual intercourse with her." From her terrified perspective, the woman awoke to discover that her underwear had been removed and a glassy-eyed Luedecke was trying to rape her. She pushed him off, ran to the washroom, and returned to find him standing there bewildered. Luedeke, who had an established history of sleepwalking behaviors, was acquitted after University of Toronto psychiatrist Colin Shapiro testified for the defense that the accused was in a dissociative state when the incident occurred and therefore he was not consciously aware of his actions.
Difficult legal cases such as these hinge entirely on the demonstrability (or at least strong probability) of an automatism—a crime committed during sleep. This is a concept for which Fenwick provided one of the clearest definitions:

An automatism is an involuntary piece of behavior over which an individual has no control. The behavior is usually inappropriate to the circumstances, and may be out of character for the individual. It can be complex, co-ordinated and apparently purposeful and directed, though lacking in judgment. Afterwards the individual may have no recollection or only a partial and confused memory for his actions.

In other words, sexsomniacs are basically lascivious zombies. There’s presently no way to determine with absolute certainty if the phenomenon, when invoked as a defense, was really the cause or just a really convenient alibi. Still, certain criteria (detailed sleep pattern data from a nocturnal polysomnography, or PSG; sleepwalking and sleep-related sex in the past; known trigger factors, such as intoxication, fatigue, and stress; timeline of the alleged assault, since episodes typically occur within two hours of sleep onset during non-REM sleep; amnesia for the event; no attempt to conceal or "cover up" the incident, but instead confusion) can at least aid a jury in its decision-making. It’s tempting, to say the least, to be skeptical that a sleepwalker could act so purposefully as to fiddle successfully with a condom wrapper yet be conscious as an orthopteron, but London sleep researcher Irshaad Ebrahim reminds us that sleepwalking behaviors are highly variable and can be very detail-oriented, citing people preparing meals and eating, driving motorbikes and cars, even riding horses, all while getting a good night’s sleep.
For those for whom sexsomnia has become a serious problem, in a legalistic sense or otherwise, the good news is that it responds well to pharmaceutical intervention. Just a small dose of benzodiazepines—most notably clonazepam—before bedtime seems to do the trick for most. You might want to consider this if you’ve shown a history of sexual violence during sleep or, say, you’re a frequent sleepwalker and there are children in the home. (Several cases have, in fact, involved very unsettling child abuse charges being filed against alleged sexsomniacs.) But sexsomnia can be a problem even for those who live and sleep alone. After five years of waking up several nights a week with ejaculate mysteriously between his fingers, one 27-year-old was distressed to realize that he was a somnambulistic masturbator. The poor man broke two fingers when his nocturnal alter ego tore off the restraints he’d used to avoid moving in bed.
There are also those, I should point out, whose sex lives have actually benefited courtesy of their sexsomnia. Schenck and his coauthors review several such cases, including a woman who "reported infrequent and hurried sex with her [awake] husband, whom she described as distant and reluctant during wakefulness." This lady found that "nocturnal sex was more satisfactory, even if associated with bruises at times."
So, in closing, how do you determine if your partner’s overnight prurient poking is thoughtless or thoughtful? This is the very question that prompted me, several nights ago, to write this article. Apparently, snoring during sex is a good sign, and something that the partners of many sexsomniacs mention as occurring, quite out of the blue, during even the most complicated sex acts. It occurred to me also that zombified nocturnal penile tumescence (NPT) episodes may be distinguished from actual conscious sexual arousal by the presence or absence of, oh what to call it, "penile flicking." (That’s not a technical term, but since I dredged the depths of the literature in vain trying to find the proper term for this voluntary lateral, up-and-down movement of the erect penis through the clenching of the cremaster muscle—oh c’mon, don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about—please permit me a little poetic license.) I always thought such penile flicking responses must serve some communicative signalling function in our species, but apparently nobody has thought to study it from an adaptive perspective. Imagine that.
Anyway, could a sexsomniac use his social cognition to deliberately communicate a message of sexual interest by flicking his penis at his partner? It’s probably not a failsafe NPT detector, but I suspect not. And bear that helpful hint in mind in the days to follow, since God only knows the coming apocalypse will deliver it’s share of sex-crazed male zombies—a lot of randy gay ones too, according to Family Radio.
Image: Paul Delvaux: The 'Sleepwalker of Saint-Idesbald' (1897-1994) (from)
About The Author: Want more Bering in Mind? Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseBering, visit www.jessebering.com, or friend Jesse on Facebook. Jesse is the author of newly released book,  The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life (W. W. Norton).

via scientificamerican.com

The Abbas-Obama Border Threatens Israel

The Abbas-Obama Border Threatens Israel
Fair observers have never considered the old armistice line as a non-negotiable starting point for peace talks.

By DORE GOLD
It's no secret that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas plans to lobby the U.N. General Assembly this September for a resolution that will predetermine the results of any Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on borders. He made clear in a New York Times op-ed this week that he will insist that member states recognize a Palestinian state on 1967 lines, meaning Israel's boundaries before the Six Day War.
Unfortunately, even President Barack Obama appears to have been influenced by this thinking. He asserted in a speech Thursday that Israel's future borders with a Palestinian state "should be based on the 1967 lines," a position he tried to offset by offering "mutually agreed land swaps." Mr. Abbas has said many times that any land swaps would be minuscule.

Remember that before the Six Day War, those lines in the West Bank only demarcated where five Arab armies were halted in their invasion of the nascent state of Israel 19 years earlier. Legally, they formed only an armistice line, not a recognized international border. No Palestinian state ever existed that could have claimed these prewar lines. Jordan occupied the West Bank after the Arab invasion, but its claim to sovereignty was not recognized by any U.N. members except Pakistan and the U.K. As Jordan's U.N. ambassador said before the war, the old armistice lines "did not fix boundaries." Thus the central thrust of Arab-Israeli diplomacy for more than 40 years was that Israel must negotiate an agreed border with its Arab neighbors.
The cornerstone of all postwar diplomacy was U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, passed in November 1967. It did not demand that Israel pull back completely to the pre-1967 lines. Its withdrawal clause only called on Israel to withdraw "from territories," not from all territories. Britain's foreign secretary at the time, George Brown, later underlined the distinction: "The proposal said 'Israel will withdraw from territories that were occupied,' and not from 'the' territories, which means that Israel will not withdraw from all the territories."

Prior to the Six Day War, Jerusalem had been sliced in two, and the Jewish people were denied access to the Old City and its holy sites. Jerusalem's Christian population also faced limitations. As America's ambassador to the U.N., Arthur Goldberg, would explain, Resolution 242 did not preclude Israel's reunification of Jerusalem. In fact, Resolution 242 became the only agreed basis of all Arab-Israeli peace agreements, from the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli Treaty of Peace to the 1993 Oslo Agreements between Israel and the Palestinians.
How were Israel's legal rights to new boundaries justified? A good explanation came from Judge Stephen Schwebel, who would later be an adviser to the State Department and then president of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Writing in the American Journal of International Law in 1970, he noted that Israel's title to West Bank territory—in the event that it sought alterations in the pre-Six Day War lines—emanated from the fact that it had acted in lawful exercise of its right to self-defense. It was not the aggressor.

The flexibility for creating new borders was preserved for decades. Indeed, the 1993 Oslo Agreements, signed by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn, did not stipulate that the final borders between Israel and the Palestinians would be the 1967 lines. Borders were to be a subject for future negotiations. An April 2004 U.S. letter to Israel, backed by a bipartisan consensus in both houses of Congress, stipulated that Israel was not expected to fully withdraw, but rather was entitled to "defensible borders." U.S. secretaries of state from Henry Kissinger to Warren Christopher reiterated the same point in past letters of assurance.
If the borders between Israel and the Palestinians need to be negotiated, then what are the implications of a U.N. General Assembly resolution that states up front that those borders must be the 1967 lines? Some commentators assert that all Mr. Abbas wants to do is strengthen his hand in future negotiations with Israel, and that this does not contradict a negotiated peace. But is that really true? Why should Mr. Abbas ever negotiate with Israel if he can rely on the automatic majority of Third World countries at the U.N. General Assembly to back his positions on other points that are in dispute, like the future of Jerusalem, the refugee question, and security?
Mr. Abbas's unilateral move at the U.N. represents a massive violation of a core commitment in the Oslo Agreements in which both Israelis and Palestinians undertook that "neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of Permanent Status negotiations." Palestinian spokesmen counter that Israeli settlements violated this clause. Yet former Prime Minister Rabin was very specific while negotiating Oslo in preserving the rights of Israeli citizens to build their homes in these disputed areas, by insisting that the settlements would be one of the subjects of final status negotiations between the parties.
By turning to the U.N., Mr. Abbas wants to use the international community to change the legal status of the territories. Why should Israel rely on Mr. Abbas in the future after what is plainly a material breach of this core obligation?
The truth is that Mr. Abbas has chosen a unilateralist course instead of negotiations. For that reason he has no problem tying his fate to Hamas, the radical organization that is the antithesis of peace. Its infamous 1988 Charter calls for Israel's complete destruction and sees Islam in an historic battle with the Jewish people. In 2006, Dr. Mahmoud al-Zahar, the Hamas leader who attended the recent Cairo reconciliation ceremony with Mr. Abbas's Fatah movement, stated openly that Hamas was still committed to its 1988 Charter, noting, "the movement [would] not change a single word." Hamas's jihadist orientation was reconfirmed when Ismail Haniyeh, its prime minister in Gaza, condemned the U.S. for eliminating Osama bin Laden.
All Israeli prime ministers have spoken about negotiations as a vehicle for ending the Arab-Israeli conflict. There would be an end of claims.

However, Mr. Abbas has now revealed his intention of using the U.N. for perpetuating the conflict.

As he wrote this week: "Palestine's admission to the United Nations would pave the way for the internationalization of the conflict as a legal matter, not only a political one."
Mr. Abbas clearly is not prepared to make a historic compromise. By running to the U.N. and to Hamas, he is evading the hard choices he has to make, and he is leaving any resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict far more difficult for future generations.
Mr. Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, is president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704816604576335520135033048.html?mod=WSJ_newsreel_opinion

The 1967 Line of Fire
Obama creates a needless furor over Israel's borders.
President Obama's address Thursday on the Middle East

had much to recommend it, so it's a pity that he stepped all over his own headline by diving back into the Israel-Palestinian maelstrom.

Mr. Obama went to the State Department to offer a mostly inspiring vision of U.S. policy amid the political upheavals sweeping the region. But all attention is now focused on the coda he offered about the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which he said that "the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines." Though he immediately added that those lines should be adjusted "with mutually agreed swaps" of territory "so that secure and recognized borders are established for both parties," it's the 1967 line that is sticking.
And with good reason. At its neck, the distance from the Mediterranean coast to the West Bank is nine miles. Foreign analysts may imagine that strategic depth no longer matters, but Israelis know better thanks to the thousands of short-range rockets fired at their towns from Hamas-controlled Gaza. As candidate Obama said when he toured one such Israeli town in 2008, "If someone was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that, and I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."
Well, exactly. Which is why it was strange to hear Mr. Obama, in a speech otherwise devoted to

urging change in the nature of Arab societies, suddenly revert to the tired land-for-peace formula that has so often failed.

Since the rest of Mr. Obama's speech borrowed heavily from President Bush's Freedom Agenda, he might also have taken a cue from his predecessor's June 2002 speech, which conditioned Palestinian statehood on renouncing terrorism and liberalizing politics.
That concept is all the more appropriate now that Hamas has joined the Palestinian government, a point Mr. Obama acknowledged in his speech. Most Israelis would not object to a Palestinian state, even on the 1967 lines, if its politics resembled those of, say, Canada. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's problem is that political trends among the Palestinians lean more in the direction of Iran, despite some recent promising economic trends.

Nor does it help that Mr. Obama wants Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territory even before the two sides resolve the issues of the status of Jerusalem and of the 1948 Palestinian refugees, recently in the news with their attempt to force their way through Israel's borders.

No Israeli leader is going to give up the West Bank without resolving those existential issues, since it would merely allow the Palestinians to pocket the territorial gains while perpetuating the conflict.
The President's team is explaining the speech as an attempt to restart the moribund Israeli-Palestinian talks, but it will accomplish no such thing. It's more accurate to say he obscured the important substance of his speech by needlessly raising an irrelevant and neuralgic subject. He provided Palestinian hardliners with a negotiating line that will become totemic to them and their sympathizers in the years ahead, no matter what happens on the ground.
He also alienated the leader of a key U.S. ally, as yesterday's chilly photo-op of the President with Prime Minister Netanyahu made clear. If this is what Hillary Clinton likes to call "smart diplomacy," we'd hate to see what qualifies as dumb.

via docstalk.blogspot.com

I don't usually believe anything the AP prints, but who can resist a good spanking story?

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) — Single mothers, former drug addicts and other struggling young women who came to wealthy businessman Henry Allen Fitzsimmons for a chance to climb out of their financial hole knew his help came with a catch. In exchange for an allowance, a place to live and promise of a college education, they agreed to be spanked if they broke his rules.
At least six of the women say his corporal punishment went too far, including one who says he sexually assaulted her, and the 54-year-old Virginia Beach restaurant owner faces felony charges.
"These women are victims. They're single moms. They need their bills paid," prosecutor Tom Murphy said at a court hearing Thursday. "It's bizarre, there's no doubt."
Fitzsimmons' attorney claims his slight, white-haired client is the victim, taken advantage of by women half his age who knew what they were getting into and filed charges only after a falling out.
"He's not a danger," Fitzsimmons' attorney, Moody "Sonny" Stallings Jr., told The Associated Press of his jailed client. "Strange, but he's not a danger to anybody."
A judge on Thursday allowed a grand jury to decide whether to indict Fitzsimmons on two felony abduction charges and three felony object sexual penetration charges filed against him. Six other assault and sexual battery charges were dropped because prosecutors acknowledged the women had agreed to the spankings.
For months, Fitzsimmons gave each of the women $200 weekly, promised to pay for their college tuition, treated them to lavish nights on the town and even bought one a car as part of his so-called Spencer Scholarship Plan. They were spanked if they violated rules, such as failing to call Fitzsimmons or drinking too much alcohol.
Several websites, including one run by Fitzsimmons, tout the Spencer plan and the scholarship program, which provides full tuition, room and board in addition to an allowance for participants as long as they follow the plan.
It is unclear how many women have participated in Fitzsimmons' program. The six who filed the criminal complaints had all been members, but Fitzsimmons' attorney said there have been several others.
The Spencer Plan started in the 1930s as a form of "carefully regulated corporal punishment" between husband and wife. Couples agreed to a list of things the wife needed to change, such as not spending money frivolously. If the rules were broken, the husband punished her by spanking and it was put behind them. It has expanded through the years.
One 21-year-old woman testified Thursday that the day she joined the program in November, Fitzsimmons spanked her and gave her $300. He paid for her to live in an oceanfront suite and gave her a $200 weekly allowance. In return, she was required to walk 20 blocks each day, keep a log of her meals and spending and refrain from drugs. When she didn't, she was spanked.
Fitzsimmons took it further, she said, when on three occasions he sexually assaulted her with a curtain rod, a hairbrush and a horse riding crop. When asked by attorneys why she allowed it to happen, she replied: "I'm not allowed to tell him no."
The Associated Press does not identify those who say they were sexually assaulted.
Another 22-year-old woman said she thought the program was an amazing opportunity. She had only been spanked once before she went to him in January to discuss him paying for her 3-year-old child's birthday party. She said he refused to let her leave until she let him spank her.
She and others said they feared Fitzsimmons, who walks with a limp. They say he made vague threats and convinced them they couldn't make it without him.
"He terrorized my life," one woman said. "He took me away from all my friends and family and convinced me nobody loved me but him."
None of the women filed charges until Fitzsimmons in April accused one of them of stealing money and fired her from his restaurant, the oceanside Envy Bar and Grill, where many of them worked. A week later, six women began filing charges. On Thursday, that former employee's complaint was dropped, along with those of two other women whose only complaints were that they had been spanked.
"Who's the victim here?" Stalling asked in court. "They were taking the money and all of a sudden when the mother gets fired they all run down to the police station and want to file charges."
Fitzsimmons came to Virginia Beach last year from Minnesota, but much of his past is a mystery. He has a master's in business administration, but his much of his attention is spent counseling young women and helping those in need, friends said.
Terry Schantz and his girlfriend are helping run Fitzsimmons' bar since he was arrested in April and denied bond. He said Fitzsimmons was a generous and caring man who would buy groceries for those in need or find the homeless a place to live. He said he can't imagine Fitzsimmons being violent.
Stallings admits the case is strange but says Fitzsimmons is no predator.
"They're trying to say he preys on these women," he said. "These aren't 15-years-olds. These are all adults and they're getting the money from this old guy."

via Associated Press @ google.com

I did not know.....
Not only am I a dirty old man, I am also a 'Constitutionalist'!
....image via some crack head Ron Paul Retards on sodahead.com

A History Lesson for Obama

Who needs history! Obama making up 1967 borders?

Obama’s Middle East Speech: A Big and Revealing Mistake That Nobody Has Noticed

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, Sen. John Kerry, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations Susan E. Rice, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and George Mitchell, U.S. Special Envoy for Middle East Peace, listen as President Barack Obama delivers a speech on the Middle East and North Africa at the State Department in Washington, D.C., May 19, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Obama’s Middle East Speech: A Big and Revealing Mistake That Nobody Has Noticed

There is a small detail at the end of Obama’s big Middle East speech that everyone has overlooked up until now but which shows how inept this administration is at understanding the Israel-Palestinian issue and why it continually makes Israel mistrustful.
In doing his balancing act on Israeli and Palestinian fears and hostility, he says this:

“I’m convinced that the majority of Israelis and Palestinians would rather look to the future than be trapped in the past….We see it in the actions of a Palestinian who lost three daughters to Israeli shells in Gaza. ‘I have the right to feel angry,’ he said. ‘So many people were expecting me to hate. My answer to them is I shall not hate. Let us hope,’ he said, ‘for tomorrow.’”

That’s genuinely touching. But in the specific case Obama cites — that of Izzedin Abuelaish on January 16, 2009 — there is strong reason to believe that the three girls were killed because of Hamas, that is Palestinian, actions.
According to an official Israeli inquiry, Hamas snipers on the roof of their five-story building were shooting at Israeli soldiers. The tank returned fire. In addition, though, the investigation could not rule out the possibility that the girls were killed by an explosion of explosives and ammunition being stored in the building by Hamas or even by fire from Hamas forces.
In other words, the president took an incident where the cause was unclear and blamed Israel for it. And of course the tragic deaths of these girls took place because the United States did nothing to help prevent Hamas from taking over the Gaza Strip and then Hamas broke a ceasefire and attacked Israel.
Since then, the Obama Administration has pressured Israel to reduce sanctions on Hamas to an absolute minimum and provided $400 million to pay salaries in the Gaza Strip, which benefits Hamas’s rule.
In addition, since the Palestinian Authority has just announced it will pay money to those who are prisoners of Israel, U.S. taxpayer money will now go to reward those who have committed terrorist attacks.
And that tells us what we need to know: President Obama and his colleagues don’t get the facts straight and tend to blame Israel. In other words, Obama counterposed the reaction of an Israeli father whose son was murdered by Palestinian terrorists to that of a Palestinian father whose daughters were murdered by or because of the actions of…Palestinian terrorists.
And that’s the trouble with an “even-handed” approach to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
But, as with the Abu al-Aish case, it is the radicals who lead the Palestinian movement, several states, and the revolutionary Islamist oppositions — not Israel — are killing the peace process.
Terrorists attack Israel; Israel defends itself.
The revolutionary Islamists — not Israel or Husni Mubarak or the Saudi regime, or past U.S. policy — are destroying the Middle East. And since Obama Administration policy fails to realize these things then it, too, is destroying the Middle East.

---

About the author,
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/ His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org. His PajamaMedia columns are mirrored and other articles available at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/.

Fri, May 20, 2011 | Rubin Reports | By Barry Rubin via crethiplethi.com

Obama berates Israel, embraces idea of terrorist-led state of Palestine, indefensible pre-1967 borders for Israel

......... ... ... ......... ... ... did any of my Jewish Brothers and Sisters vote for Obama because of what he said on TV?

WASHINGTON (AP) - Exasperated by stalled Middle East peace talks in a season of tumultuous change, President Barack Obama jolted close ally Israel Thursday by embracing the Palestinians' terms for drawing the borders of their new nation next door. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel rejected the idea as "indefensible" on the eve of his vital White House meeting with Obama.

The U.S. president said that an independent Palestine should be based on 1967 borders—before the Six Day War in which Israel occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza—as adjusted by possible land swaps agreed upon by both sides. He said Israel can never live in true peace as a Jewish state if it insists on "permanent occupation." More... via eye-on-the-world.blogspot.com

Obama's #MESpeech -
the 1967 lines that NEVER was

Here is the full text of Obama's speech today. In it the President says:

The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state.

Before I get to some of the reactions, I would first like to address the fact that Obama's call for a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines (1949 armistice lines) was not new for this administration. (h/t Jeffrey Goldberg)

"We believe that through good-faith negotiations the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements." - Hillary Clinton 2009

Now for the responses.

CHALLAH @ Israel

Israel appreciates President Obama’s commitment to peace. Israel believes that for peace to endure between Israelis and Palestinians, the viability of a Palestinian state cannot come at the expense of the viability of the one and only Jewish state.
That is why Prime Minister Netanyahu expects to hear a reaffirmation from President Obama of U.S. commitments made to Israel in 2004, which were overwhelmingly supported by both Houses of Congress. 
Among other things, those commitments relate to Israel not having to withdraw to the 1967 lines which are both indefensible and which would leave major Israeli population centers in Judea and Samaria beyond those lines.
Those commitments also ensure Israel’s well-being as a Jewish state by making clear that Palestinian refugees will settle in a future Palestinian state rather than in Israel.
Without a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem outside the borders of Israel, no territorial concession will bring peace.
Equally, the Palestinians, and not just the United States, must recognize Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, and any peace agreement with them must end all claims against Israel.
Prime Minister Netanyahu will make clear that the defense of Israel requires an Israeli military presence along the Jordan River.
Prime Minister Netanyahu will also express his disappointment over the Palestinian Authority’s decision to embrace Hamas, a terror organization committed to Israel’s destruction, as well as over Mahmoud Abbas’s recently expressed views which grossly distort history and make clear that Abbas seeks a Palestinian state in order to continue the conflict with Israel rather than end it.

Mahmoud Abbas has called an emergency meeting to discuss Obama's speech. Hamas has rejected the speech and has said that the Arab nation does not need advice about democracy. 
The ADL has welcomed Obama's speech.
Jackson Diehl says Obama's speech is filled with the soaring rhetoric.
Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Allen West are all upset as they believe Obama has thrown Israel under the bus.  Roy Blunt says Obama is dreaming if he thinks unilateral concessions will bring peace.

John Bolton is upset that there was not enough of a focus on Iran. 
Danny Danon thinks Netanyahu should tell Obama to forget about it. 
ElderofZiyon has written a great piece that you should all check out.  In it Elder writes: I expected much worse. But I think that the Palestinian Arabs expected much, much more. Their tweets so far are reflecting sheer anger. Given that they regard everything as a zero-sum game, then at least from their perspective this is a huge win for Israel and Netanyahu.
Obama's speech may be fundamental shift in U.S. Policy - Josh Rogin
Michael Rubin says we should not rush the aid, wait and see how things play out. 
The AP makes shit up about Obama's speech - Charles Johnson

Jonathan Tobin writes: The problem with this strategy is that even this unprecedented move won’t convince those who hate Israel to love America. And by damaging Israel’s diplomatic position and making its isolation more likely, he has also undermined U.S. interests. In another post Jonathan says that Obama's call regarding the 1967 lines is a radical policy shift. 
Yaacov Lozowick says that Obama has clearly learned something as President.
Yisrael Medad says it could have been worse.
Jeffrey Goldberg says the big deal of the entire speech was "Obama's forthright denunciation of the unilateral Palestinian plan to seek the General Assembly's endorsement this September."
Max Boot says that Obama has been mugged by the events in the Middle East.
Senator Kirk says that "Palestinian calls for ‘1967 borders' should be outweighed by Israel's need for secure borders to ensure the survival of a critical U.S. ally."
Walter Russell Mead says Obama has embraced his inner Bush. 
Alana Goodman is confused by all the bashing as she thought Obama's speech was "excellent."

Danielle Pletka asks what was major about today's speech?
Senator Mike Lee to not happy. 

Omri Ceren says that decades of American policy have just been abandoned. 

The Republican Jewish Coalition is concerned with some of Obama's statements. 

Obama's speech may worry some in American Jewry.
JStreet tries to take credit for Obama's speech. 

Obama gave the most pro-Israel speech of his life, or at least he thought so. 

Obama's misstep, oh boy says Robert Satloff.

Eli Lake says speech was good for Palestinians and Israel.
Noah Pollak thinks the 2004 Bush-Sharon Letter referenced by Netanyahu will become bigger issue in coming days.
Jeffrey Goldberg doesn't see where Obama threw Israel under the bus, rather says same view on border as George W. Bush.  Hussein Ibish says not exactly the same, a little better.
“No American president has ever used this formulation before,” said former State Department official Aaron David Miller.

Elliot Abrams says Obama's words will have no real effect.

Marco Rubio is not happy with the Israel portion of Obama's speech. Neither is Pat Toomey.

via challahhuakbar.blogspot.com

How About Them Tacos?

Corpus Christi woman's son finds face of Jesus in her homemade tortilla via caller.com

China's McDonald's Will Give You a Discount, Just for Being Male

...even cross dressing Chinese?..

Tired of paying a cover charge and not getting a break? Chinese McDonald's restaurants are taking pity and introducing a "man-only discount" for those with the Y chromosome.

image via bengootscar.blogspot.com

To_commemorate_the_introduction_of 100% pure beef in their burgers, China's golden arches is offering a 50% discount on second burgers for men only. The deal is only available on Wednesdays.

McDonald's China general manager, according to Shanghaiist, says that the promotion is a reaction to the special treatment that women and children can sometimes receive. We're sure it's not also because the general manager is a dude.
Regardless, males outnumber females by more than 30 million in the Communist country. Sadly, as a side effect of China's one-child policy and a societal preference for males, the gender ratio discrepancy is growing. Well, at least the discount includes the majority of the population.

via news.yahoo.com

...this offer does not include the Progressives in Washington State or any other Westerners who blame the male sex for their woes.

Shooting al-Aqsa

Explosive composition.
It's Rememberance Day in Israel today, and the wire services are full of solemn memorial services to the Israeli victims of terrorism [Ed.:--Corrected w/ apologies for the mix-up]. Including this shot, taken by AP stringer Sebastian Scheiner:

With the Dome of the Rock Mosque in the background, Israeli soldiers empty their rifles after a ceremony for Israel's annual Memorial Day at a military cemetery on the Mount of Olives, overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem, Monday, May 9, 2011. Israel marked its Memorial Day for fallen soldiers and victims of militant attacks Monday, with ceremonies and a wailing siren that brought the country to a standstill in two minutes of silence. (AP Photo/Sebestian Scheiner)

Notice the composition carefully -- The soldiers, firing their rifles in rememberance of those who lost their lives to terrorists over the years, are superimposed over the golden Dome of the Rock at al-Aqsa Mosque, a source of frequent outbursts of anti-Jewish anger and terrorism by the muslim world. The implication of this particular visual alignment is even stranger when one considers the fact that the graveyard at which this honor guard is performing their duties is nowhere near al-Aqsa.
Take a look at the AFP shot below, which illustrates exactly how far apart these two locations really are:

Notice the tiny golden circle there?
Yeah, that's the Dome of the Rock. And from where these soldiers are standing, it really is quite a distance away.

Israeli soldiers unload their rifles after a memorial ceremony for fallen soldiers at the military cemetery on Mount of Olives overlooking the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem on May 9, 2011. Remembrance Day is followed immediately by the 63rd anniversary of the creation of Israel in 1948 according to the Jewish calendar. AFP PHOTO/GALI TIBBON (Photo credit should read GALI TIBBON/AFP/Getty Images)

So why did our AP stringer go through so much effort to zoom the dome into the background of their shot? I can safely assume that it's not an innocent accident, as the Dome has very clearly been purposefully enlarged via zoom lens to fit exactly where it did. So if it's not a mistake, why was the photo arranged the way it was?
Every picture tells a story, after all. And from where I'm sitting, this particular story seems to be ginned up to aggravate the Muslim world, and to enflame the passions of Islamic Rage Boys everywhere.
Which makes me wonder: Is the Associated Press really reporting the news in Israel these days? Or are they trying to invent it?

via snappedshot.com

Cloud Busting Zionists! Ahmadinejad claims Europeans are "emptying the clouds" to dry out Iran

MEMRI finds a beauty. You have to go to their site to watch it, but here's the transcript:

Following are excerpts from an address by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which aired on IRINN, the Iranian news channel, on May 19, 2011.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: In Europe, there is a lot of rain – an average rainfall of over 1,500 millimeters. They do not need [watering] systems because they have natural irrigation, but they used equipment at their disposal to empty the clouds
As you know, clouds move from west to east. They are formed over the ocean, and then move over the Mediterranean, where the air undergoes changes. Then they pass over Iran, moving eastward. The clouds were emptied of most of their content.
As you saw on the news, there was an unusual amount of rainfall and snow in Europe, while [Iran] was dry during the fall. A certain politician, who is not an expert on water or construction, wrote an article, 7 or 8 months ago, about a water crisis in the next 30 years, in which he included a map of the world, with an area that he claimed would be arid, stretching from Turkey to us, and then further east. This is precisely the area that they are afraid of, due to the creation of [our] civilization and culture. These were the arid areas.
I was at a meeting where someone said that there was a water crisis, and that someone had written an article about it. I told him that this guy does not work in this field, and that he is not an expert on water, meteorology, or hydrology. How did he reach this conclusion? We had reports that they are doing this in Europe. They are emptying the clouds, so that they will not move our way.
Then we conducted studies and became convinced that what this gentleman had written was not a scientific forecast. Rather, this is a premeditated event. We will deal with this through legal channels. We will not permit such a disgraceful thing to take place.

Here's the EoZ exclusive picture of Iran's leading scientists who came to thsis startling conclusion:

via elderofziyon.blogspot.com
image via panoramio.com

China Says Internet Freedom Assured as Baidu Faces New York Suit

May 19 (Bloomberg) -- China, responding to a lawsuit in the U.S. that accused the Chinese government and local search engine Baidu Inc. of censoring Internet information, said Web users are free to express themselves.

China guarantees “freedom of speech” on the Internet, Jiang Yu, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said today in response to questions about the case. Eight Chinese residents in New York filed a lawsuit in the city yesterday against Baidu, saying the Chinese company helps the government censor political expression in violation of the U.S. constitution.

Foreign courts have no jurisdiction in China, Jiang said today at a regular press briefing in Beijing.

China requires websites to self censor pornography, gambling and content critical of the ruling Communist Party, a rule that led Google Inc. to pull its search engine out of the country last year. The world’s largest Internet market by users blocks Google’s YouTube video-sharing site as well as social networking services run by Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc.

The plaintiffs seek $16 million in damages from the company and the Chinese government after their “writings, publications and coverage of pro-democracy events” were censored and banned from Baidu’s search engine, according to the complaint filed in Manhattan federal court. They also charge Baidu and China violated New York State civil rights laws.

Kaiser Kuo, a spokesman for Baidu, declined to comment. The Beijing-based company, which operates China’s most popular search engine, trades on the Nasdaq Stock Market, where its American depositary receipts rose 3 cents to $131.84 yesterday.

“China will be required to answer the complaint or there will be a default judgment against them,” Stephen Preziosi, the New York-based lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said in a telephone interview.

Baidu has enjoyed a “near monopoly” in Internet searches in China since Google Inc. cut back on operations there, according to a presentation this month by brokerage CLSA Ltd.

Nasdaq Trading

The complaint refers to the plaintiffs as “promoters of democracy in China through their writings, publications, reporting.”

“They put their stuff on the Internet,” Preziosi said. “Now you have a foreign state using a private corporation as its arm, agent and enforcer in suppressing and censoring political speech.”

Two of the plaintiffs list addresses in Flushing, a neighborhood in Queens, New York, that has a large concentration of Chinese-speaking Americans.

The case is Zhang v. Baidu.com Inc., 11-3388, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan.)

--With assistance from Michael Forsythe in Beijing, and Mark Lee in Hong Kong. Editor: Andrew Dunn, Fred Strasser, Young-Sam Cho.
To contact the reporter on this story: Don Jeffrey in New York at djeffrey1@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Hytha at mhytha@bloomberg.net

via businessweek.com