Schmuck With Earflaps Goes Nuclear On Netanyahu

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[h=1]In possible U.S.-Iran conflict, Netanyahu leaves the Jews with no alibi[/h] [h=2]For us it's all in the family, but most of the world sees a brash Israeli leader backed by a powerful lobby and a casino magnate's billions, thumbing his nose at the president.[/h] By Chemi Shalev 00:33 06.03.15
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If anyone ever decides to make a movie of 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' the opening scene is already done. An Israeli prime minister bewitching hundreds of American Congress members who cheer him on as if he is their Caesar and they are his legions; a few short miles away, meanwhile, the leader of the free world and sole superpower sits in the White House, helplessly seething, pretending to be otherwise engaged, while his aides studiously ignore his very public humiliation.
For most Israelis and many Americans, of course, the picture is completely different: for us, the extraordinary scene that unfolded in Congress this week is but a manifestation – extreme, perhaps, but representative nonetheless – of the special if not unique relationship between Israel and the United States. These exceptional ties may include sharp disagreements from time to time, but they’re all in the family, or “mispokha,” as Benjamin Netanyahu described it this week.
Most of the world, however, finds it difficult to appreciate the Yiddishkeit: They see a brash Jewish leader, backed by battalions of loyal AIPAC lobbyists and one casino magnate with billions of dollars to spare, thumbing his nose at the U.S. president and openly trying to derail his efforts to achieve a nuclear deal with Tehran, which most of the world supports. Netanyahu’s success, the conventional wisdom goes, could ultimately lead to war.

This is exactly the area covered by Protocol VII of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious anti-Semitic forgery created in Czarist Russia at the turn of the last century. “We must create ferments, discords and hostility” the faked elders say “under the mask of honesty and compliancy.” The purpose is to manipulate countries to serve Jewish interests and to keep them occupied with each other while Jews continue to pursue their conspiracy to control the world.
The claim that Jews are warmongers has served anti-Semites throughout history, but in the past century, their efforts have been aided by the forged Protocols. The pogromist White Army in the Russian Civil War discovered a copy of the Protocols among the remains of the Czarina Alexandra who was murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918, viewing it as conclusive proof that it was the Jews who dragged Imperial Russia into the First World War in order to pave the way for their Communist Revolution. When Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer published their book on the Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy 90 years later, many of their critics accused them of drawing inspiration from the discredited Protocols.
Walt and Mearsheimer’s most controversial claim was that Israel and its lobby, in collaboration with their neo-conservative stooges in Washington, had pushed American and George Bush to launch the 2003 war in Iraq. Among others, they cite an article published by Netanyahu in the Wall Street Journal in September 2002, entitled “The Case for Toppling Saddam Hussein.” The Iraqi dictator, Netanyahu claimed, is “feverishly trying to acquire nuclear weapons.” He is doing so with “centrifuges the size of washing machines that can be hidden throughout the country – and Iraq is a very big country.” And lest no one be mistaken what he was preaching, Netanyahu added that “even free and unfettered inspections will not uncover these portable manufacturing sites of mass death.”
But what was almost a footnote in Walt and Mearsheimer’s book assumed center stage in the American media this week. The video highlights of Netanyahu’s testimony to a Congressional committee two weeks before the WSJ article was published were broadcast over and over before and after Netanyahu’s address. “There is no question whatsoever,” Netanyahu says there with complete and utter self-confidence, as he waves his arms resolutely and Ron Dermer peeks from behind his shoulders “that Saddam is seeking and working and is advancing towards the production of nuclear weapons. No question whatsoever.”
“Spoiler alert,” is the caustic response of MSNBC’s prime time anchor Rachel Maddow, who was one of many to screen the clip. “We preempted and invaded Iraq and none of the nonsense you just heard about Iraq turned out be true.” After 13 years, he’s back, she added, with another “end of the world speech” – but this time the target is Iran.

Israel and the lobby succeeded in extricating themselves from Walt and Mearsheimer’s accusation of having led the US to the ultimately ill-fated and unpopular Iraq war mainly by virtue of two main factors: First, contrary to the public testimony of Netanyahu, who was a private citizen at the time, official Israel expressed its support for the war, in as much as it did, behind closed doors and in secret conversations, as befits two governments whose leaders, Bush and Ariel Sharon, started to get along famously in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. The second factor is that the Bush administration included several senior non-Jewish figures, most notably Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who did not need Netanyahu’s prodding in order to seek the dismantling of Saddam’s regime. Israel, in other words, functioned as a corroborating witness, at most.
But if the current nuclear talks between Washington and Tehran end in failure, as Netanyahu seems to want, and deteriorate from there to armed confrontation, Israel won’t have an alibi. This time Netanyahu is not a private citizen but an Israeli prime minister, claiming to speak on behalf of the entire Jewish people, not in any discrete back room talks but in a rare joint session of Congress, in one of the most widely scrutinized speeches in modern history. And contrary to the Bush administration, if the Obama administration is compelled to take military action against Iran or to back an Israeli attack that it does not want, it will do so kicking, screaming, bearing a grudge and pointing a finger at the pyromaniac who lit the fuse that caused the Middle East to explode.

Netanyahu and his explainers protest that he had no intention of pushing America to war, but on the contrary, to prod it into making “a better deal,” as he told Congress. “I brought a practical alternative to a bad deal with Iran,” he said upon his return. The “alternative” debate might be debated but practical? Don’t make Netanyahu laugh. He and his aides know full well that from the moment the Israeli prime minister publicly demanded “more restrictions” on Iran that won’t be lifted “for as long as Iran continues its aggression in the region and in the world,” he killed off any chance that such changes will be accepted or even discussed.

If Netanyahu had sincerely wanted to submit “practical alternatives” he should have raised them in the intimate bilateral dialogue that he no longer enjoys. Once he made his demands into a public banner, he guaranteed they would end up as no more than hot air; he used the same tactic when he repeatedly clamored for the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, knowing full well that the louder he cried the less chances there were of them agreeing.

Netanyahu’s aides went on to claim that the prime minister proved his moderation and pragmatism by deleting his demand for the complete dismantling of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, including all of its centrifuges. They conveniently ignored the fact only 24 hours earlier, these were the exact marching orders handed down for 16,000 AIPAC delegates to take to Capitol Hill on their annual day of lobbying: zero infrastructure and zero centrifuges, period. As they did when they ignored AIPAC leaders in arranging John Boehner’s invitation to Netanyahu in the first place, the prime minister’s office once again undercut their loyal lobbyists without giving it a second thought.

In the first few hours after the speech it seemed that Netanyahu had succeeded in energizing his Republican loyalists and Democratic supporters into restarting efforts to legislate new sanctions and to increase Senate supervision over the nuclear talks. At week’s end, the momentum appeared to be waning, though proponents are promising to renew them later this month. If any one of these laws succeeds in garnering a veto-proof majority, they could achieve one of two targets: either accelerate the talks and spur the sides to reach an agreement, against Netanyahu’s wishes, or break up the talks but in a way that leaves Tehran with a distinct advantage – with a ready-made defendant, more than enough evidence to indict, and an eagerly given politically motivated confession owning up to his own responsibility. In the court of international public opinion, a quick, guilty verdict is assured.

Netanyahu’s speech may have been a brilliant PR ploy and could have possibly yielded some electoral gains, though the evidence for that right now isn’t entirely convincing. Looked at in any other way, the speech was completely useless, at best, potentially damaging and dangerous, at less than best. Netanyahu further undermined his already degraded relations with the administration, seriously corroded, despite his protestations, the support for Israel inside the Democratic Party, embarrassed the Jewish community and created an unhealthy conflict of loyalties for many Jews between him and their president.

And if the U.S. and Iran find themselves in an escalating conflict that leads to armed confrontation, Netanyahu, Israel and the Jewish people will find themselves in the dock, cast in a central role in a new chapter in the Protocols of the elders of Zion, but one which will be much harder to refute. As a student of Jewish history, this seems to be Netanyahu’s most reckless gamble of all.
 

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[h=1]The Catastrophe Bibi Is Courting[/h]Israel’s prime minister is in Washington to build American support, bolster his re-election campaign, and (clandestinely) push for war on Iran. He should be careful what he wishes for.
So Bibi Netanyahu did not back down, and he’s here now in the United States, and he’s giving the speech Tuesday. In doing so, he has forced a true low point in U.S.-Israel relations. As has been often observed, he’s turning Israel into a partisan issue—up to somewhere around a quarter of congressional Democrats are refusing to attend the speech. That’s a crack, a big one. If he remains prime minister after the March 17 elections, the fissures between Netanyahu’s government and Barack Obama and the Democrats will only widen.

Congressional support for Israel is due for a reconsideration. As Scott McConnell wrote last month in The American Conservative (an anti-neocon magazine), Congress “does not come close to representing the views of the American people” on Israel, either with respect to Iran or the occupation. McConnell cites all the requisite poll numbers that make the case.
Now, Congress can go a long time without representing American public opinion. On certain big-money issues like banking, that’s all Congress does. But on most issues, Congress at least has to act like it’s listening to the American people, and on foreign policy questions in particular, Congress, and for that matter the president, can’t usually go where the American people don’t want to go. Obama probably wanted to drop a smattering of bombs on Syria in 2013, but public opinion was dead set against it. And remember how the Bush administration had to work public opinion in 2002 and 2003 to make sure the lies about Saddam Husssein’s nuclear ambitions got support levels up to 60 percent or so before it launched the war.

So one of these days, in two years or five or six, congressional fealty to Israel will cease being so bipartisan and reflexive—and that will be entirely an outcome of Netanyahu (and John Boehner’s and Ron Dermer’s and AIPAC’s) making.

But all that is just politics. Netanyahu is creating a much bigger problem here. Ultimately, he wants war with Iran. And American neoconservatives want it, too. Few of them will say so (although some do—see below). But that’s what they want, and we need to be clear about it.

Netanyahu and his Republican backers are leading us down a potentially catastrophic path. And catastrophic not least for Israel itself.


Think about it. What is the alternative to negotiating with Iran? Well, there is only one: not negotiating with Iran. And what are the possible courses of action under that option? At the end of the day, there are two. Number one, let Iran do what it wants. Number two, ultimately, be willing to start a war to block Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Knowing the neocons’ world view as I’m sure you do, how willing do you think they’d be to let Iran do what it wants? Correct. Not very. That leaves war. There is the step of tougher sanctions as a middle course, but sanctions, even crippling ones, don’t usually change a regime’s behavior. So the clear implication of the anti-negotiation position is war—with a country of 77 million people, a huge army, and formidable wealth. As a point of comparison, Iraq in 2003 had about a third of Iran’s population.
As noted above, not many on the right are going to be honest enough to speak openly of war. The Republican presidential candidates, for example, don’t want the American public to think they’re crazy, so they won’t admit this—although interestingly, Rick Santorum became, I believe, the first Republican candidate to call for up to 10,000 U.S. combat troops on the ground to fight the so-called Islamic State.
With regard to Iran, the candidates hide behind the usual euphemisms. But a few war-makers are coming out of the closet. Matt Welch of Reason noted last week that on a panel at CPAC, both John Bolton and new Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton spoke openly of the desire for regime change in Iran. Bolton said U.S. policy toward Iran should be “overthrow of the ayatollahs.” Cotton added that we need regime change and “replacement with a pro-Western regime.”
Where is Netanyahu on this? Every indication he’s given us is that he’s on the Bolton-Cotton team. I don’t doubt that the prime minister sincerely believes that a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic would be catastrophic for Israel, and we should not dismiss that concern. No opponent of the neoconservative approach should be foolish enough to think that we can trust Iran. Israel has good reason to be worried. (I will, however, mention here Israel’s own 100-odd nuclear warheads, just on principle, because they always go unmentioned in columns like these.)

So Netanyahu wants, at the very least, a bombing campaign. But you know as well as I do that most of the leading experts say Iran’s centrifuge capacities are now too numerous and too geographically disparate for a bombing campaign of the usual scope to be very effective. That means a bombing campaign of unusual scope.
Do Netanyahu and Bolton really expect that Iran would not retaliate in such a case? Of course it would retaliate. And far more likely against Israel than against the United States. But the United States would be dragged into it, which is exactly what Bolton and Cotton told CPAC we should all want.
It seems to be what Netanyahu wants, too. It’s what he wanted back in 2002, when—then as a private citizen—he went to Congress and made the case for war against Iraq. As Josh Marshall noted last week, some of his words from back then are enough to make you shudder: “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”

It had the opposite effect, of course. It strengthened Iran and gave us ISIS. And now we’re supposed to make up for that huge mistake by trusting Netanyahu and the neocons again?
I’m sure Netanyahu’s words will be measured Tuesday. He wants Israel’s levels of support in America to be high, and he wants to win re-election. But don’t be fooled. He and his Republican backers are leading us down a potentially catastrophic path. And catastrophic not least for Israel itself: If this path someday reaches its logical end point, it won’t be only liberal Democrats in America who’ll conclude that we should just let Israel fight its own battles.
 

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[h=1]Tens of thousands expected to attend anti-Netanyahu rally on Saturday[/h] [h=2]Former Mossad chiefs Meir Dagan and Amiram Levin among the speakers, along with war widow whose husband died in last summer’s Gaza conflict.[/h] By Jonathan Lis 11:43 06.03.15
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A rally seeking change in Israel’s leadership is expected to attract tens of thousands to Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square on Saturday night.
Former GOC Northern Command and deputy Mossad chief Amiram Levin is among the speakers at “Israel Wants Change,” and former Mossad chief Meir Dagan announced last week that he will also speak. Michal Kesten-Keidar – the widow of Col. Dolev Keidar, who was killed in last summer’s war in Gaza – will also address the rally.
The rally, commencing at 7:30 P.M., is organized by the One Million Hands movement. It is expected to draw people from the center and left of the political map who are seeking a change in Israel’s priorities, refocusing on health, education, housing, wages, the cost of living and the elderly.
The organizers and key speakers say the rally will be about expressing support for a return to a way of life that is normal and sane, to a life with dignity and peace between Israel and its neighbors.
“If someone doesn’t care if there are wars, why should he care about the cost of living? I do not accept the claim that there is no one to vote for so don’t vote, or the claim that the Israeli public is fated to live with war. The leadership has responsibility to those combat soldiers and a responsibility to prevent the killing,” said Kesten-Keidar.
Levin, who was one of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s commanders in the Israel Defense Forces, said, “When the prime minister is in the United States he is the leader of all of us, but the little that he said in Congress would have better been said privately in the Oval Office – then there might have been a chance to exert influence.”
Speaking last week at a press conference called by Commanders for Israel’s Security, a movement of which he is a member, Levin added, “The rule of one people over another makes the strongest and most moral army in the world immoral and weak. Israel must take back the initiative, set its final borders to ensure security and a solid Jewish majority. Anyone who is afraid to lead the initiative to diplomatic and security arrangements in the region will, in the end, give it all up, down to the last millimeter. Only initiative can keep some of the territory and settlement in our hands.”
Dagan also criticized Netanyahu. “As someone who has served the country for 45 years in security posts, including during some of its hardest hours, I feel we are at a critical period for our future and security,” he said. “I have no personal interest in the prime minister, his wife, his expenses and his way of life. I am talking about the policy he leads. It is a destructive policy for the future and security of Israel. And as someone who raised children here and is now raising grandchildren here, and who believes with all his heart in the Zionist dream, I feel there is a danger to the continued existence of this dream, and that is why I will come to speak.”

Among the organizations taking part are the Kibbutz Movement; a group of combat soldiers who led the crossing of the Suez Canal in the 1973 Yom Kippur War; the Movement for the Future of the Western Negev; representatives of factory workers who recently lost their jobs; and residents of the Gaza border area.
Seventeen thousand people have so far confirmed their attendance on the rally’s official Facebook page.
 

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[h=1]U.K Jewish leaders fall out over Netanyahu's speech[/h] [h=2]Board of Deputies vice president Jonathan Arkush takes issues with treasurer Laurence Brass over whether Netanyahu went to Washington as the emissary of all Jews.[/h] By Haaretz | Mar. 6, 2015 | 9:29 AM



Prime Minister's Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress on Tuesday was the cause of a clash between two leaders of the British Jewish community this week, the Jewish Chronicle reported.


The two, Jewish Board of Deputies vice-president Jonathan Arkush and the organization's treasurer Laurence Brass, expressed widely divergent views about the speech in an exchange of emails.

It began when Brass, who has already announced that he is stepping down in May, retweeted a message from lawyer Adam Cannon that read: "Netanyahu boards plane for Washington: 'I go as an emissary of the entire Jewish people'… you are not my emissary."

In announcing his resignation recently, Brass said that he had been "bursting" to criticize Israeli policy for many years.

Arkush, who will be standing for the presidency of the board at the next elections, responded that "Netanyahu is going to the USA as the democratically elected Prime Minister of Israel…

"He is warning of Iran's nuclear determination which poses a mortal threat to Israel (and the west.)

Brass, an asylum judge, then emailed that, "Netanyahu has absolutely no right to say that he speaks for the entire Jewish people. He certainly doesn't. He speaks for his own dishonored administration which hopefully will cease in 16 days' time.

"In the meantime, he is wrecking Israel/U.S. relations and my friends in the Democratic Party in the U.S. tell me that they are exasperated at his behavior this week."

"I know you are 'bursting' to criticise the government of Israel but surely you can wait until you are no longer an officer of the Board?" Arkush replied.
 

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[h=1]By invoking Purim, Netanyahu calls for a preemptive strike on Iran[/h] [h=2]The Israeli prime minister conveniently ignores the first eight chapters of the Book of Esther, recruiting only the revenge tragedy part to justify his agenda.[/h] By Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi




Benjamin Netanyahu chose the day before the holiday of Purim on which to deliver his speech to Congress, and made the most obvious analogy: As in ancient times, the Persians intend to annihilate the Jews. Now, as then, the Jews will prevail over the villains and foil their genocidal plots. It doesn’t take more than a cursory reading of the text behind the festival, The Megillah ("Book of Esther,") to see that Netanyahu’s comprehension of scriptures is about as slanted as his apprehension of nuclear strategy and international relations. Although the holiday has become over the years an excuse for innocuous masquerade and revelry, the Megillah itself is problematic, revealing as much about our wounded psyches as our procession of enemies.
The Netanyahu approach ignores the first part of the Purim narrative, which is a comedy, and reflects only on the second part, a revenge tragedy, recruiting the popular version of the story to justify his militant position against Iran.
The first eight chapters, the crux of the Megillah, are an exercise in what might be called orientalist fantasy. King Ahasverus rules over an empire of 127 multilingual satrapies with Persian and faux-Persian names; he has an entourage of eunuchs and simpering officials who do his bidding, facilitating drunken revels lasting 180 days and punishing disobedient wives and instructing their husbands in the art of tyranny. The villain Haman is a grotesque counterpart to the virtuous Mordecai; the beautiful Esther is the damsel who will win the beauty contest. Parody, masque, commedia dell‘arte: what this text reflects in its early chapters is the comic impulse, nourished, as some scholars contend, by the rather beneficent conditions in which Jews lived in the Babylonian, Persian and even the Hellenistic diaspora (depending on where and when you date the composition of the text).
Clearly, although Netanyahu implies otherwise, the Book of Esther is a fantasy – not recounting any historical event. The only real “historical” reference is to Mordechai, who is presented as a fourth generation descendant of the Jews exiled from Jerusalem by King Nebuchadnezzer of Babylonia [2:1 – a verse singled out in public readings to be chanted in mournful tones].
The book’s middle is the part we – and the Israeli prime minister – know best: Mordechai, making the most of his luck, positions his niece Esther to become the queen in order to influence the hapless king to override Haman’s genocidal intent. But by the end of the book we might be too drunk to pay attention to the ways in which comedy has turned into revenge tragedy, an explosion of blood-curdling violence — not by Persians against innocent Jews, but by Jews against innocent Persians.
Esther, having thwarted Haman’s evil plot, is not satisfied with the public hangings of her arch-enemy and his 10 sons – but is granted permission to preemptively slaughter all who have received the order to kill the Jews. There is no textual hint that these Persians ever took up arms – “no one dared to stand up against them, out of the fear that they instilled” [9:2]. Yet the Jews go ahead and slaughter 500 innocent people in the satrapies that belong to the King. Then sweet Esther, the beguiling descendant of Babylonian exiles, wife of the clueless Ahasverus – whom little girls will emulate in gauzy costumes for centuries to come – asks for, and is granted, another day of slaughter: in the capital city of Shushan alone, 300 people are slaughtered, and in the surrounding satrapies 75,000 are slaughtered [9:15-16].
That is the text that all those Congressmen and women – who leapt to their feet with every platitude and oath Netanyahu uttered – should read. The prime minister of Israel, showing a pathetic lack of self-awareness, is valorizing the mind of Esther. The text he cites is the chronicle of how a people, shocked into seeking to thwart the evil decree, wind up using the excuse of preemption to justify vengeful, rampaging violence. (It is a universal story in this sense, not just a Jewish one: what genocidal act is not justified as retribution for some great or imagined grievance?) The historic persecution of the Jewish people has been real enough. But Jewish suffering has also engendered a fantasy of demon-enemies, of Jewish attacks as nothing but deterrence.
Two generations after the liberation of the concentration camps, Netanyahu brought Elie Wiesel to bear witness to his militant words. Another writer who survived the camps, the late Ilona Karmel, once warned about Jews like Netanyahu who have “scars but no wounds.”

Netanyahu declares: Don’t make a deal. He may have said the alternative is a "better deal" but by alluding to the Book of Esther, what he really implies is that the alternative is war. Esther – or at least the people who live in the chimerical world conjured by her book – would no doubt approve.
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Guggenheim Fellow.
 

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[h=1]Born to vote Bibi? Genetics may determine your vote[/h] [h=2]Not only does our anatomy influence our political bent: Conservatives and liberals react differently to non-neutral stimuli such as pictures of spiders and kittens. Or Netanyahu addressing Congress.[/h] By Ruth Schuster 16:01 04.03.15




Something in your mind tells you the peace camp makes sense. But when you step into the voting booth, you think of Benjamin Netanyahu defying the White House and addressing Congress to expound on the Iranian nuclear threat, or exploding buses, and you vote for the saber-rattlers on the right.
Or vice versa. Putting aside suspicion that the left-wing leaders might be as lily-livered as the "security" camp asserts, you loftily reject hatemongering and vote liberal.
In either case, you might be succumbing to matter over mind. A mounting body of evidence shows that biology – our primal nature, not only nurture – shapes our perception of the world around us, and even our political orientation.
In other words, you could be hard-wired to vote for Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud and the right-wing "security camp" as they whip up fear about Iran and its nukes. Or you could be biologically biased to see the bright side of life even when hanging on a crucifix, and vote left.
"There are two aspects correlating political opinions with something biological," says Professor David Leiser of the Department of Psychology, at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. "One is our reactions to non-political stimuli: people on the left and right of the political map react differently. The other thing is physical characteristics of the brain, which differ among liberals and conservatives."
Yes, the brains of self-professed conservatives and liberals differ, it turns out. Conservatives and liberals also react differently to non-political pictures, such as butterflies versus beheadings.
Hence the effectiveness of these excruciatingly inane campaign ads. They're speaking to your viscera, not your mind. They're pulling your biological levers and your mind will find a way to rationalize what your gut is telling you. You can't believe that anything so stupid would work, but your biology is listening.
My amygdala is bigger than yours
"We are all brothers" liberals would be appalled to hear this and conservatives would shrug that they figured as much all along, but left-right biological differences start in brain structure.
Self-described conservatives have bigger amygdalas than liberals, according to studies done in Britain and the United States.
"The amygdala is identified with anxiety, fear, dangers. People more susceptible to anxieties have a bigger amygdala," says Leiser. That certainly fits the description of the "surrounded by enemies" conservative camp in Israel, compared with the leftist "peace is the word" crowd.
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Barack Obama holding a cuddly koala: An image that Liberals would delight in, and conservatives would latch onto with horrified fascination.(Getty images)
Let's not argue about the chicken's amygdala or the egg's (if conservatism leads that ancient part of the brain to grow bigger, or if being born with a big one implies a future of eating red meat and voting Republican). The fact is that conservatives have a bigger one.
Liberals on the other hand have bigger anterior cingulate cortexes, though what that implies isn't clear, Leiser admits. It seems to be involved in emotional regulation and tolerance of uncertainty. Bottom line: "Neurologically we see a difference between conservatives and liberals," he says.
These morphological differences could also explain, postulates Leiser, why the left and right talk at each other but not with each other, both to strikingly little effect. They are hard-wired to understand their side of the political map and cannot really even comprehend what those other idiots are rabbiting on about.
“Once people join a political team, they get ensnared in its moral matrix,” wrote Jonathan Haidt, an expert on social psychology specializing in morality and emotion: they see "confirmation of their grand narrative" wherever they look.
Hard-wired conservatism and the spider/kitten divide
Conservatives and liberals also have different physiological and behavioral reactions to stimuli that aren't even political in nature.
Leiser, who's studying the connection between physiology and political bent in Israel, explains.
Take self-professed conservatives and liberals and show them a picture of a maggoty wound, or a great hairy spider, its eight eyes glittering. By a significant margin, conservatives will look at the picture longer than liberals, and their physiological reaction will be stronger.
At the sight of the horrible image conservatives blink more and sweat more than left-wingers (the image triggered their fight-or-flight response more strongly than it did for the liberals). Now show the two groups a picture of a kitten, its two eyes shining. Liberals will look at the picture significantly longer than the conservatives.
To a statistically significant degree, conservatives find it harder than liberals to disengage from pictures that frighten because they reinforce their world-view that the world is a scary awful place and they need to defend themselves and their kinfolk, possibly with guns.
Liberals don't find it hard to disengage from pictures that frighten them. They'd rather look at pictures of bunny rabbits that reinforce their world view that everything will be okay.
"People on the right say the others aren't looking reality in the eye, they just want to look at nice things. People on the left accuse the ones on the right of being mesmerized by bad things. To them, once Bibi delivers a horror show that's all the right-wingers will see, instead of considering what the alternatives are," Leiser says.
Chuckling, he notes that if shown pictures of Obama, both conservatives and liberals in America will take a nice long look; the conservatives because they can't stand him, and the liberals because they like him.

Evolutionarily, having the two basic types makes sense, in Leiser's opinion: it's good for the tribe to have a variety of reactions to deal with a variety of situations, some acutely aware of dangers, others keeping hopes up and working to attain it. If all the individuals of a species were clones, with no difference in physiology and behavior, they become more vulnerable to just about everything, from the disappearance of a staple food to climate change. But it could be useful to consider our reactions when watching those television ads by the parties, and ask ourselves why we believe or reject them, and whether we have given it any genuine thought. Or are we just seeking reinforcement of what we already believed.
Of course, when it comes to voting Baruch Marzel or Haneen Zoabi, or less extremely perhaps, Likud or the Zionist camp, our genes are not our destiny. We can try to outthink that genetic angel or demon whispering into our ear and soberly consider where the greater good lies. Good luck with that.
 

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[h=1]After Netanyahu Speech, Congress Is Officially High School[/h] [h=2]Israeli Prime Minister's visit inspires bitchy barbs and insults, and nobody came out of this week looking good[/h]
By Matt Taibbi March 6, 2015
Years ago, when I was just starting in this business, I had the privilege to meet a well-known muckraker and columnist. I asked him the secret of his success.


"Two things," he said. "One: when you're hammered after a night out, drink an entire liter of water before you go to bed. An entire liter, do you understand? Otherwise the whole next work day is shot."
"An entire liter," I said. "Got it."
"Second, never write about Israel. It just pisses people off. No matter what you say, you lose half your Rolodex."
I frowned. How he could ignore such an important topic? Didn't he care?
"Son," he said, "we're prostitutes. We don't enjoy the sex."
Mainly by accident, I sort of ended up following that advice, but I did watch the Benjamin Netanyahu speech and its aftermath this week. A few thoughts on one of the more unseemly scenes Congress has cooked up in a while:
First of all, the applause from members of the House and Senate was so over the top, it recalled the famous passage in the Gulag Archipelago about the apparatchik approach to a Stalin speech: "Never be the first one to stop clapping."

Watching it, you'd almost have thought the members were experiencing a similar terror of being caught looking unenthusiastic. I say almost because in reality, it's a silly thought, in a democracy: nobody's getting taken out back and shot for showing boredom.

But then, no kidding at all, a gif apparently showing Rand Paul clapping with insufficient fervor rocketed around social media.

It got enough attention that the Washington Post wrote about it and Paul himself had to issue a statement on Fox and Friends denying he wasn't clapping really, really hard. "I gave the Prime Minister 50 standing ovations. I co-sponsored bringing him here," Paul pleaded. Is the Internet age beautiful or what?
But the telescreens weren't just watching the Republicans. Cameras also captured Nancy Pelosi looking somewhat south of enraptured during the speech.
Those photos only circulated more after she said she was "near tears" because she was saddened by Netanyahu's speech, which she termed an "insult to the intelligence of the United States."
This in turn led to more social media avalanching and a cartoonish response from South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who told a donor at a fund-raiser: "Did you see Nancy Pelosi on the floor? Complete disgust. . .If you can get through all the surgeries, there's disgust!"
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the U.S. Senate! If Kathy Griffin ever bombs out on Fashion Police, Graham will have a job waiting for him.

After Bloomberg traitorously reported on Graham's locker-room joke about Pelosi's face, a storm of criticism from Democrat members raged and the Senator was forced to walk his comments back ("I made a poor attempt at humor," he said, in what is looking like the go-to lawyer-drafted apology line of our times).
All of this preening and adolescent defiance, all these bitchy homeroom-style barbs and insults: has the U.S. government ever seemed more like high school?
Indiana Republican Jackie Walorski apparently thinks school's still in. This is her reacting after Netanyahu's speech, according to Slate:

"Wooh, baby! That was awesome!"
Around the world, not everyone was so enthused. Several Israeli diplomats took to Twitter to voice their concerns over Netanyahu's appearance. (Everybody tweeted about this speech. There were more Iranian officials on Twitter Tuesday than there were sportswriters at the Super Bowl).
Yigal Caspi, Israel's ambassador to Switzerland, retweeted a line from an Israeli journalist: "Is it no longer possible to suffice in scaring us here in Hebrew? [Netanyahu] has to fly all the way to the US Congress and tell them in English how dangerous Iran's nuclear program is?"

Caspi and two other diplomats got the ax for their social media responses to the speech. Meanwhile, British journalist Jeremy Bowen got caught in the Twitter Punji-trap when he made a comment about Elie Wiesel, the author and Holocaust survivor who sat in the Speaker's box with Netanyahu's wife, Sara.
A safe joke to make about Wiesel's presence probably would have been something along the lines of, "I guess that book Elie was planning on co-writing with Barack Obama is on hold." The BBC's Bowen went in a different direction, bluntly declaring that Netanyahu was "playing the Holocaust card" by bringing the Nobel laureate and camp survivor.
Instantly accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, Bowen and the BBC insisted that he was just using "journalistic shorthand," and that the wording was appropriate because Netanyahu was raising the "specter of another Holocaust." As of this writing, Twitter warriors are still feasting on Bowen's head and should have him skeletonized by nightfall.
Nobody came out of this week looking good. Regardless of where you stood on a possible nuclear deal with Iran, the whole episode this week made the American government look like what some in the Iranian press apparently called it: a clown show.

Once upon a time, the opposition party pursuing a second line of foreign policy for domestic political purposes was considered unseemly.
Think candidate Dick Nixon submarining the 1968 Vietnam Peace talks behind LBJ's back, or the fabled October Surprise conspiracy theory. This was something one did in secret, preferably in trench coats instead of ties, with no press at all present, unless you count Sy Hersh's future sources.
But this was like the October Surprise as a pay-per-view MMA event. That this sleazy scheme was cooked up mainly for the political gain of both the hosts and the speaker (who faces an election in two weeks) was obvious in about a hundred different ways, beginning with the fact that the speech was apparently timed so that Israeli audiences could watch it over dinner.

But the gambit only sort of worked for Netanyahu, whose Likud Party has experienced only a modest bounce since the speech, if it got one at all. American news outlets humorously had different takes on the same polls showing Likud gaining one or two seats (HuffPo: "Netanyahu's Popularity Rises After Speech to U.S. Congress: Polls"; Washington Post: "Netanyahu's Speech to Congress Fails to Jolt Electoral Needle At Home").
Similarly, if the move had any benefit to the Republicans in congress, it was hard to perceive. Nobody in the media drew a link between Bibi's speech and the Republicans' surrender on the Homeland Security funding bill, but on some level there must have been one.
You can't invite a foreign leader into the House Gallery to accuse a sitting president of being soft on terrorism in an event covered by 10 million journalists, and then turn around the same week and defund the president's Homeland Security department over some loony immigration objective.
Even worse, the decision to try to conduct their own foreign policy in the shadow of the White House went over so badly with American voters, it actually gave Barack Obama a 5-point sympathy bump in his approval rating.

Put it all together, and the Republicans' big rollout this week had to be the most self-defeating political pincer move since the Judean Peoples' Front sent their Crack Suicide Squad to the rescue in Life of Brian.
This was a week that made everyone look bad: congress, the media, Netanyahu, the Tweeting Supreme Leader in Iran, everyone. Obama only came out looking OK because he mostly stayed off camera and kept his mouth shut.
Mostly, however, it was just a depressing, circus-like demonstration of how schizoid and dysfunctional Washington politics have become. The logical next step after a caper like this is the opening of Republican and Democratic embassies abroad. Let's hope it's a long time before anyone tries this again.






 

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[h=1]Netanyahu Falls Behind Election Rival Despite Congress Speech[/h] By Jack Moore 3/6/15 at 8:40 AM



Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party is two seats behind its main election rival with just over a week to go before the crunch vote, as his controversial Washington speech fails to translate into notable domestic political gains, according to a new poll.

The poll, conducted for The Jerusalem Post and Maariv News by Panels Research, showed that if Israelis went to the polls today, the opposition Zionist Union, led by Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni, would gain 24 seats in the Knesset, the Irsaeli parliament, to Likud’s 22.
A poll conducted immediately after Netanyahu’s speech by the same research company predicted 23 seats for the Zionist Union and 22 for Likud in the March 17 vote, showing that the Herzog’s Zionist Union had retrieved a seat in the days following the speech.

However, Avraham Diskin, professor of political science at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem says that, while Netanyahu is not witnessing an upturn in the polls ahead of the election, what is crucial is who can form the largest coalition, with 60 seats or more needed out of the Knesset’s 120.
The right-wing parties within Israel, such as economy minister Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party and foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party, hold almost enough to form a majority coalition government with Netanyahu’s Likud, adds Diskin.
“There is usually a big difference between what we have in the public opinion polls and on election day,” he says. “It doesn’t really matter what party comes first [in the polls], what matters is the possibility to form coalitions.”
“If the Right has a majority, it doesn’t really matter is the Zionist camp is ahead even by five seats because there is a majority for a coalition led by Netanyahu.”
In his speech to the U.S. Congress on Tuesday, the Israeli leader spoke at length of the international negotiations surrounding Iran’s nuclear programme. He warned of Tehran’s “three tentacles of terror” on Israel’s borders, referring to its “goons in Gaza, its lackeys in Lebanon” and its “revolutionary guards on the Golan Heights”.
“Backed by Iran, Assad is slaughtering Syrians. Backed by Iran, Shiite militias are rampaging through Iraq,” he warned. “Backed by Iran, Houthis are seizing control of Yemen, threatening the strategic straits at the mouth of the Red Sea,” he said.
In reaction to the speech, opposition leader Herzog condemned the remarks as ineffective because Netanyahu has damaged Israel’s relationship with the U.S., isolating it on the world stage.

“There is no doubt the prime minister knows how to speak well, but the truth is that the speech, as impressive as it was, did not prevent a nuclear Iran and won’t impact a deal that is being drafted – not on its content, nor on its timetable,” Herzog said. “The painful truth is that after all the applause, Netanyahu is alone and Israel is isolated, and the negotiations will continue without Israel’s input.”
Likud officials were not available for comment when contacted but, in comments made to the Jerusalem Post, they said that the poll results were not disappointing as they show that Netanyahu could form a coalition government.
 

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[h=1]Netanyahu’s Iran Thing[/h] MARCH 6, 2015



Roger Cohen



Let’s begin with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Iran logic. He portrays a rampaging Islamic Republic that “now dominates four Arab capitals, Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sana,” a nation “gobbling” other countries on a “march of conquest, subjugation and terror.” Then, in the same speech, he describes Iran as “a very vulnerable regime” on the brink of folding.

Well, which is it?
The Israeli prime minister dismisses a possible nuclear accord, its details still unclear, as “a very bad deal” that “paves Iran’s path to the bomb.” He says just maintain the pressure and, as if by magic, “a much better deal” will materialize (thereby showing immense condescension toward the ministers of the six major powers who have been working on a doable deal that ring-fences Iran’s nuclear capacity so that it is compatible only with civilian use). Yet Netanyahu knows the first thing that will happen if talks collapse is that Russia and China will undermine the solidarity behind effective Iran sanctions.

So, where is the leverage to secure that “much better deal”?
Netanyahu lambastes the notion of a nuclear deal lasting 10 years (President Obama has suggested this is a minimum). He portrays that decade as a period in which, inevitably, Iran’s “voracious appetite for aggression grows with each passing year.” He thereby dismisses the more plausible notion that greater economic contact with the world and the gradual emergence of a young generation of Iranians drawn to the West — as well as the inevitable dimming of the ardor of Iran’s revolution — will attenuate such aggression.
With similar sleight of hand, he dances over the fact that military action — the solution implicit in Netanyahu’s demands for Iranian nuclear capitulation — would likely set back the Iranian program by a couple of years at most, while guaranteeing that Iran races for a bomb in the aftermath.

What better assures Israel’s security, a decade of strict limitation and inspection of Iran’s nuclear program that prevents it making a bomb, or a war that delays the program a couple of years, locks in the most radical factions in Tehran, and intensifies Middle Eastern violence? It’s a no-brainer.
No wonder Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Party’s House Leader, saw Netanyahu’s speech to Congress as an “insult to the intelligence of the United States.” Netanyahu’s “profound obligation” to speak of the Iranian threat to the Jewish people proved to be a glib opportunity for fear-mongering and evasion above all.
Netanyahu’s credibility is low. In 1993, in an Op-Ed article in The Times headlined “Peace in Our Time?” he compared the late Yitzhak Rabin to Chamberlain for the Oslo Accords. Rabin’s widow never forgave him. For more than a decade now, he has said Iran was on the brink of a bomb and threatened Israeli military action — and hoped his hyperbole would be forgotten. He called the 2013 interim agreement with Iran a “historic mistake”; the accord has proved a historic achievement that reversed Iran’s nuclear momentum.

Invoking Munich and appeasement is, it seems, Netanyahu’s flip reaction to any attempt at Middle Eastern diplomacy. Here, once again, before the Congress, was the by-now familiar analogy drawn between Iran and the Nazis. Its implication, of course, is that Obama, like the great Rabin, is some latter-day Chamberlain.

The kindest thing that can be said of Netanyahu’s attempt to equate Iran with the medieval barbarians of Islamic State, and to dismiss the fact that Iranian help today furthers America’s strategic priority of defeating those knife-wielding slayers, is that it was an implausible stretch. Of course Netanyahu mentioned the Persian viceroy Haman, who plotted to destroy the Jews, but not Cyrus of Persia, who ended the Babylonian exile of the Jews. The prime minister’s obsessive Iran demonization runs on selective history.

The Islamic Republic is repressive. It is hostile to Israel, underwrites Hezbollah and has sponsored terrorism. Its human rights record is abject. The regime is wedded to anti-Americanism (unlike the 80 million people of Iran, many of whom are drawn to America). But the most important diplomacy is conducted with enemies. Given Iran’s mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle, there is no better outcome for Israel and the world than the successful conclusion of the tough deal sought by Obama; one involving the intensive verification over an extended period of a much-reduced enrichment program that assures that Iran is kept at least one year away from any potential “breakout” to bomb manufacture.

One word did not appear in Netanyahu’s speech: Palestine. The statelessness of the Palestinians is the real long-term threat to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Iran has often been a cleverly manipulated distraction from this fact.
Among foreign leaders, nobody has been invited to address Congress more often than Netanyahu. He now stands equal at the top of the table along with Winston Churchill. Behind Netanyahu trail Nelson Mandela and Yitzhak Rabin. That’s a pretty devastating commentary on the state of contemporary American political culture and the very notion of leadership.
 

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[h=1]Netanyahu squanders US relationship on illusory gains[/h]
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By David Gardner

Israel’s PM may be misjudging the mood in both America and his own nation

Israel has an almost umbilical relationship with the US, but its leaders generally tread a fine line between a unique ability to mobilise support in Washington and displaying an arrogant disregard for anyone there who disagrees with them — especially if that happens to be the president. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, this week rubbed out that line. In his speech on Iran to the US Congress — aimed at Israeli voters he wants to re-elect him on March 17 but also a brazen call for US lawmakers to derail the nuclear deal President Barack Obama is seeking with Tehran — he has damaged the US relationship for short-term, maybe illusory gain at home.
Opinion polls taken after Mr Netanyahu’s speech gave him a slight lift, but he is still level-pegging with his main opponent, Labor’s Isaac Herzog. Israeli voters, this polarising prime minister may recall, have been known to punish any leader they see jeopardising the vital alliance with the US. That is existential, whereas Iran is still a long way from the atomic bombs Israel already possesses. He has so far all but ignored, moreover, such galvanising voter issues as affordable housing and the cost of living.

The Israeli premier has recalled how Menachem Begin ignored US objections in 1981 and bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor and, after trailing in the polls, won re-election. But a year later, US President Ronald Reagan all but forced him to lift Israel’s bloody siege of west Beirut, and Begin shortly afterwards left public life.
A decade later, Yitzhak Shamir set his face against US-sponsored talks to settle the Palestinian question and President George HW Bush suspended $10bn in soft housing loans. These were eventually restored, but Shamir lost the 1992 election to Yitzhak Rabin, the soldier-statesman who signed the accords. Mr Netanyahu himself, during his first premiership of 1996-99, tried his first “end-run” around the White House to Congress and confronted Bill Clinton’s administration over Oslo. That was one reason he was voted out of office.
Things change. The Oslo vision of Israel living in peace alongside an independent Palestinian state lies in ruins. Israel has turned right. But Mr Netanyahu is taking aim at a deal with Iran that has become the main foreign policy goal of this US administration: Mr Obama’s chance to match Richard Nixon’s detente with China; the only plausible way of stopping Iran developing a nuclear bomb; and the possibility of securing Tehran’s co-operation on some of the worst problems of a Middle East in meltdown. The US-educated Israeli premier, used to wraparound adulation in the Congress he could only dream of in the Knesset, may be misjudging the mood in the US and Israel.
First, the US and world powers now near the crunch point of the talks with Iran are just as concerned to prevent the Islamic Republic making a bomb as Israel is. As US officials regularly point out, Mr Netanyahu offers no alternative to the current negotiations — except a war that would drag in America. None of his predictions about the timeline for a nuclear Iran — he first predicted Tehran would have a bomb by 1999 — have been borne out. In a histrionic presentation to the UN in 2012, he said Iran would have a bomb by the end of 2013 — almost exactly when Tehran signed the interim nuclear deal still in force, which not only froze but rolled back its uranium enrichment programme.

Second, while Mr Netanyahu wants to talk only about Iran, Israel cannot escape its inexorable expansion of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem. His protestations of peace are seen as cant in the White House, and European capitals, after he torpedoed efforts by John Kerry, US secretary of state, to revive negotiations.
All this is, third, highly visible at home, where former Mossad chief Meir Dagan said in a recent interview that Mr Netanyahu’s policies are “destructive to the future and security of Israel”. He is not alone. A lobby group of 200 former generals and spy chiefs came out against the prime minister’s visit to Washington, saying it jeopardised the security relationship with the US.
The collapse of Oslo brought down the peace camp in Israel, since when many of its citizens have hardly reacted to the Palestinians being walled into discontiguous cantons by settlements, segregated roads, checkpoints and a security barrier. But fear of isolation has grown among globalised Israelis.
The EU is partly responsible for that. Nine member states recognise the state of Palestine, and a cascade of EU parliaments last year voted to do so. It cannot be long before Europe brings a resolution to the UN Security Council calling for recognition of Palestine, as a state within more or less the land Israel conquered in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Will the US, which has exercised its veto 41 times to shield Israel’s behaviour from condemnation, continue to do so with Mr Netanyahu still in charge?

Meanwhile in Tehran, the ostensible target of Mr Netanyahu’s statesmanship, hardliners will be smirking. So long as he takes the lead in sabotaging a deal they see as the thin end of a wedge that could eventually bring about regime change in Iran, they do not need to lift a finger. Yet, if Iran does reach a deal, Israel’s shrill opposition will make it a lot easier to sell at home.
 

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Kerry seeks to smooth differences with France over Iran talks

Paris (AFP) - Top US diplomat John Kerry on Saturday sought to smooth differences with France over nuclear talks with Iran, agreeing with the French that there were still gaps to overcome in the "critical weeks" ahead.

Fabius had expressed his concerns over the deal on Friday, saying "as regards the numbers, controls and the length of the agreement, the situation is still not sufficient."

http://news.yahoo.com/kerry-seeks-boost-french-support-iran-deal-081130014.html

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You know you've got a problem when even France thinks you're acting like a pussy.

Maybe if Spammy The Sewer Rat posts another dozen anti-Bibi editorials Iran won't get the bomb.

face)(*^%
 

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Kerry seeks to smooth differences with France over Iran talks

Paris (AFP) - Top US diplomat John Kerry on Saturday sought to smooth differences with France over nuclear talks with Iran, agreeing with the French that there were still gaps to overcome in the "critical weeks" ahead.

Fabius had expressed his concerns over the deal on Friday, saying "as regards the numbers, controls and the length of the agreement, the situation is still not sufficient."

http://news.yahoo.com/kerry-seeks-boost-french-support-iran-deal-081130014.html

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You know you've got a problem when even France thinks you're acting like a pussy.

Maybe if Spammy The Sewer Rat posts another dozen anti-Bibi editorials Iran won't get the bomb.

face)(*^%

Kerry is about effective as Clinton was when it comes to negotiating.

I’ll bet he wishes he could get his hands on Clinton’s reset button.
 

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HA HA HA HA the sewer rat spammer has gone completely berserk in this thread!
 

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16 op-eds in a row with a brief interruption by Superbeets. SIXTEEN posts in a row by SPAMMY, that HE KNOWS no one is going to nothing but scroll by. Spammy pissing into the wind while 'Scott The Tout' who never charges unless his clients profit reels off a 4-0 afternoon (Louisville +3 pending) for his faithful followers!
ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON I HAVE 5 GAMES STARTING AT 2PM EASTERN
I lost 2 of 3 yesterday .... Back tonight between 6-6:30


531 Lsu

533 Alabama

540 Georgia STATE

557 California

604 Louisville
 

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16 op-eds in a row with a brief interruption by Superbeets. SIXTEEN posts in a row by SPAMMY, that HE KNOWS no one is going to nothing but scroll by. Spammy pissing into the wind while 'Scott The Tout' who never charges unless his clients profit reels off a 4-0 afternoon (Louisville +3 pending) for his faithful followers!
ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON I HAVE 5 GAMES STARTING AT 2PM EASTERN
I lost 2 of 3 yesterday .... Back tonight between 6-6:30


531 Lsu

533 Alabama

540 Georgia STATE

557 California

604 Louisville

Now the lowlife Tout is counting the number of posts of a person he's "ignoring". Funny way of ignoring a person, but no surprise the reality and the words are completely different from Bottom Feeder Scotty who is now doing what all good touts do, tells you about his great wins hours after the games were played.
 

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[h=1]Tens Of Thousands Attend Anti-Netanyahu Rally In Tel Aviv[/h]
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Posted: 03/07/2015 2:44 pm EST Updated: 5 hours ago




TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Tens of thousands of Israelis are gathering at a Tel Aviv square under the banner "Israel wants change" and calling for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be replaced in March 17 national elections.
Saturday night's rally at Rabin Square is the highest profile demonstration yet in the run-up to the election. It is organized by a non-profit organization seeking to change Israel's priorities and refocus on health, education, housing and the country's cost of living. Though not officially endorsed by any political party, it drew mostly supporters of leftist and centrist parties.
The rally's keynote speaker is former Mossad chief Meir Dagan who recently slammed Netanyahu's conduct and called him "the person who has caused the greatest strategic damage to Israel."
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An Israeli protester waves a national flag during a rally in Rabin Square, Tel Aviv on March 7, 2015. (JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images)
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Israelis take part in a rally in Rabin Square, Tel Aviv on March 7, 2015. (JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images)
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Israelis take part in a rally in Rabin Square, Tel Aviv on March 7, 2015. (JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images)
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Israelis take part in a rally in Rabin Square, Tel Aviv on March 7, 2015. (JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images)
 

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[h=1]Israelis gather for mass anti-Netanyahu rally[/h] John Reed in Tel Aviv



Tens of thousands of Israelis gathered in Tel Aviv and chanted “Bibi go home” in a mass demonstration against Benjamin Netanyahu’s government on Saturday evening, the largest opposition gathering yet during the current electoral campaign.
The rally, organised under the slogan “Israel Wants Change”, came ten days before a closely fought national election in which Mr Netanyahu’s Likud faces a growing challenge from Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni’s Zionist Union, but neither side has pulled ahead, despite heated debate over the economy, security policy, and Iran.


Meir Dagan, a former head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency and sharp critic of Mr Netanyahu, told the crowd that the country faced its worst crisis yet under the three-term rightwing prime minister’s leadership.

“Israel is surrounded by enemies,” Mr Dagan told the crowd, who packed into Rabin Square in central Tel Aviv, beneath City Hall. “Enemies do not scare me; I worry about our leadership.”
Mr Netanyahu made global headlines last week with a speech to the US Congress warning of the threats from Iran’s nuclear programme that defied White House policy and tested Israel’s relations with its closest ally.
“No one denies that Iran’s nuclear programme is a threat, but going to war with the US is not the way to stop it,” Mr Dagan said.

In an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 broadcast on Friday, the former Mossad chief described the Israeli prime minister’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear programme in his speech as “bullshit” and said that his policies toward the Palestinians were leading Israel toward “apartheid”.
Another speaker at the rally, Michal Kesten-Keidar — the widow of Dolev Keider, an Israeli colonel killed in last summer’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip — said: “Vote for someone who will avoid the next war.”

Participants in the demonstration wore insignia or slogans of the Zionist Union and leftwing Zionist parties, and T-shirts or signs saying “Change now” and “Enough, Bibi, Enough”.
According to the event’s organisers, at least 35,000 people attended the rally on Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square, the site of large leftwing and pro-peace demonstrations in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Opinion polls ahead of next week’s vote show Isaac Herzog’s centre-left Zionist Union is tied or slightly ahead of Mr Netanyahu’s rightwing Likud, with the two parties projected to receive about 23 seats each in the Knesset.

Mr Herzog boosted his party’s standing by recruiting former Ms Livni as his running mate, but polls show the centre-left is still far from attaining the 30 seats it hopes for, and many Israelis believe it will struggle to form a stable coalition with rival centrist, Orthodox Jewish, and other parties. One scenario being discussed in Israel is a grand coalition between the Zionist Union and Likud.
 

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[h=1]Netanyahu's long history of crying 'wolf'[/h] [h=2]There is nothing the prime minister loves to talk about more than his unheeded predictions of a black future.[/h] By Raviv Drucker 04:43 08.03.15
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In 1992, MK Benjamin Netanyahu said that within three to five years Iran would have a nuclear bomb. In 1993, he published an opinion piece in the Hebrew-language daily Yedioth Ahronoth in which he predicted that by 1999 Iran would have a nuclear bomb, and argued that this was the greatest threat to us.
In July 1996, newly minted Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed a special session of the U.S. Congress in which he warned of an Iranian bomb and said that the regime was approaching this goal with worrisome speed. In September 2002 “worried citizen” Netanyahu appeared once again before Congress. He encouraged its members to go to war against Iraq and said that there was “no doubt” that Saddam Hussein was approaching an atom bomb and his nuclear program was so advanced that he has centrifuges the size of “washing machines” (Saddam did not have a nuclear program). Netanyahu claimed that Saddam also had biological and chemical weapons (he didn’t) and warned that the moment the United States attacked, Saddam would launch these weapons against Israel and most interesting of all – he predicted that Saddam’s fall would have a particularly positive effect on the entire region, and might even lead to the fall of the regimes in Iran and Libya.
In November 2013, Netanyahu claimed that the interim agreement with Iran was the “deal of the century” for Tehran. He predicted that sanctions would collapse (even Israel concedes they didn’t) and that Iran would not hold to the agreement (it did).
There is nothing the prime minister loves to talk about more than his unheeded predictions of a black future. I said the Oslo Accords will bring Ashkelon under fire, you laughed at me. A check of Netanyahu’s record shows that he simply warns against things in almost every realm. In an environment like the Middle East, especially when you are prime minister for nine of the 19 previous years, there is a good chance that you will be right, but usually people simply forget the warnings that did not pan out.
In November 2004, after Yasser Arafat was hospitalized, Netanyahu predicted in conversation with journalists that the Palestinian Authority president’s successor would not come from among the known Palestinian leaders. At the end of 2004, Netanyahu envisioned that if the disengagement from Gaza took place, without a referendum, there would be “civil war” here.
In October 2011, still in the atmosphere of the social protests, Netanyahu told journalists “the global economy will go into 20 years of recession. That will impact all of us, without exception. We are going into a huge crisis. Huge! That’s not a spin of Netanyahu, write that it’s Netanyahu’s spin, the whole world will be talking about it in a few months.”
Netanyahu, as we recall, negotiated with Syrian President Hafez Assad over withdrawal from the Golan. When Netanyahu was leader of the opposition and with Assad’s son Bashar in office, he told me that if he were in power he would start negotiations with the junior Assad.
Netanyahu’s diplomatic-security message relies, ostensibly, on his warnings in real time, which, in our shortsightedness we did not heed. That leads to his next big claim – every centimeter from which we have withdrawn, whether in Lebanon or Gaza, ended up being filled by proxies of Iran. The conclusion – we must not withdraw. Did Netanyahu really issue such warnings?
In February 2000, then-former Prime Minister Netanyahu told me: “The security establishment did not allow me to withdraw unilaterally from Lebanon.” In October 2004, Netanyahu voted in the Knesset for disengagement. He said from the rostrum that the plan could end positively (yes, yes, he predicted that too), but it is also possible that it could end with missiles on Ashkelon. In the end, he voted for it. Only one week before the evacuation did he resign his post.
The absurdity of this election is that the PM is waving his disastrous diplomatic-security record and doing everything to avoid economic and social issues, in which he actually has chalked up some achievements.
 

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Netanyahu's speech wasn't just bad politics - it was unconstitutional: Marc A. Scaringi

By PennLive Op-Ed

on March 06, 2015 at 2:00 PM, updated March 07, 2015 at 5:12 PM
By Marc A. Scaringi

Media reports about House Speaker John Boehner inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress have centered on the break of diplomatic protocol and how it underscores the deep rift between Republicans and the president.


Following Netanyahu's speech, pundits talked of how Netanyahu's sharp criticism of President Barack Obama's negotiations with Iran makes it harder for Obama to get Congressional approval for any agreement.

All of this underscores why our Founding Fathers entrusted the president - not Congress - to conduct diplomatic relations. What we've seen this week isn't just bad politics - it was a violation of the Constitution.

Article II Section 3 of the Constitution empowers the president to "...receive ambassadors and other public ministers." Furthermore, under Article II Section 1, "The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America."

The power to receive ambassadors and public ministers and the executive power granted to the president means the president and only the president communicates foreign policy and conducts diplomacy between and among nations.
In keeping with the checks and balances that run through the Constitution, the Founding Fathers did include situations where power over foreign affairs is transferred in whole or in part to the Congress. For example, the president has the power to make treaties but the Senate must ratify them. The president has the power to conduct war, but Congress must first declare it.
But the Constitution clearly makes the president the chief diplomat and sole spokesman for the United States on the world stage.

This understanding extends back to George Washington, who made it clear when a French minister, Edmond Genet, attempted to contact Congress directly to gain support for America's help in his country's war with Britain. Washington's position was that of strict neutrality.
Washington was so incensed that he had his secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, write a letter to Genet censuring him for his conduct. Secretary Jefferson wrote to Genet that "no foreign agent can be allowed ... to interpose between him [the president] and any other branch of government." Later Washington became so annoyed by Genet's continued efforts to communicate with Congress that he had Genet recalled.

When former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin came to America and blasted President Ronald Reagan's negotiations with Saudi Arabia concerning the sale of AWACS planes, Reagan was furious. Reagan shot back, "It is not the business of other nations to make American foreign policy."

Later Reagan wrote in his autobiography, "I didn't like having representatives of a foreign country - any foreign country - trying to interfere in what I regarded as our domestic political process and the setting of our foreign policy."

The U.S. Supreme Court clearly established this presidential power in a 1936 case involving a company indicted for selling military equipment to Bolivia. The company had ignored a joint resolution by Congress and proclamation by President Franklin D. Roosevelt forbidding such transactions.

In its ruling, the high court stated, "In this vast external realm, with its important, complicated, delicate and manifold problems, the president alone has the power to speak or listen as a representative of the nation.
He makes treaties with the advice and consent of the Senate; but he alone negotiates. Into the field of negotiation the Senate cannot intrude; and Congress itself is powerless to invade it."
Having one voice in U.S. diplomacy is critical to the functioning of our government. The Founding Fathers understood this as have our greatest statesmen from George Washington to Ronald Reagan.
Congress cannot and should not give foreign ministers the forum of a joint session of Congress with the intent and goal of interfering in an ongoing negotiation between the president and foreign ministers.
As our country deals with dangers around the world and seeks to reassure allies, America needs to speak with one voice - and our Constitution clearly states the president is that voice.
Marc A. Scaringi is an attorney in the Harrisburg-based firm Scaringi & Scaringi, P.C. and a former candidate for the Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate.
 

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