A great analysis by John Bolton

Jewish Russian Telegraph posted a link to a great analysis by John Bolton about possible Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear program:

What If Israel Strikes Iran?
The mullahs would retaliate. But things would be much worse if they had the bomb.

By JOHN R. BOLTON

Whatever the outcome of Iran's presidential election tomorrow, negotiations will not soon -- if ever -- put an end to its nuclear threat. And given Iran's determination to achieve deliverable nuclear weapons, speculation about a possible Israeli attack on its nuclear program will not only persist but grow.

So what would such an attack look like? Obviously, Israel would need to consider many factors -- such as its timing and scope, Iran's increasing air defenses, the dispersion and hardening of its nuclear facilities, the potential international political costs, and Iran's "unpredictability." While not as menacingly irrational as North Korea, Iran's politico-military logic hardly compares to our NATO allies. Central to any Israeli decision is Iran's possible response.

Israel's alternative is that Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs reach fruition, leaving its very existence at the whim of its staunchest adversary. Israel has not previously accepted such risks. It destroyed Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981 and a Syrian reactor being built by North Koreans in 2007. One major new element in Israel's calculus is the Obama administration's growing distance (especially in contrast to its predecessor).

Read it all.

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Obama Tells American Businesses to Drop Dead

That is the title of the article posted by the Jewish Russian Telegraph.  Here is the original article:

Obama Tells American Businesses to Drop Dead
By Kevin A. Hassett
Bloomberg.com
Monday, June 8, 2009

President Obama plans to raise America's corporate taxes to even higher levels. This policy will be destructive to U.S. firms' competitiveness, pushing more jobs and companies overseas.

I've finally figured out the Obama economic strategy. President Barack Obama and his team have been having so much fun wielding dictatorial power while rescuing "failed" firms, that they have developed a scheme to gain the same power over every business. The plan is to enact policies that are so anticompetitive that every firm needs a bailout.

Once that happens, their new pay czar Kenneth Feinberg can set the wage for everybody and Rahm Emanuel can stack the boards of all of our companies with his political cronies.

I know, it sounds like an exaggeration. But look at it this way. If there were a power ranking of U.S. companies, like the ones compiled by football writers for National Football League teams, Microsoft would surely be first or second to Google. But last week, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer came to Washington to announce what Microsoft would do if Obama's multinational tax policy is enacted.

The U.S. now has about the highest combined corporate tax rate, second only to Japan among industrialized countries.

"It makes U.S. jobs more expensive," Ballmer said, "We're better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S." If Microsoft, perhaps our most competitive company, has to abandon the U.S. in order to continue to thrive, who exactly is going to stay?

At issue is Obama's policy to end the deferral of multinational taxation.

The U.S. now has about the highest combined corporate tax rate, second only to Japan among industrialized countries. That rate is so high that U.S. firms have an enormous disadvantage versus competitors. The average corporate tax rate for the major developed countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2008 was about 27 percent, more than 10 percentage points lower than the U.S. rate.

Read the whole thing.

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Great analysis of Netanyahu's speech

Bookworm analyzed Obama's speech, and now she offers a similar analysis of Netanyahu's speech.  Go there to read it: you'll get the complete speech along with Bookworm's comments on it.

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Insanity

The other day I found this article:

Detainees Freed in Bermuda Say China Worse Than Gitmo

The four of the Chinese Muslims, or Uighurs, released to Bermuda from the Guantanamo Bay prison told FOX News that they are innocent, glad to be free and hold no grudges against the United States for their captivity.

The men, who range from 31 to 38 years old, also said they think life in China, where they face persecution, is worse than life at Guantanamo.

With the help of a translator, they said they didn't know anything about Al Qaeda or Usama bin Laden, despite past allegations that they had aided the terror mastermind's escape.

"I am not a terrorist. I have never been terrorist," one of the men told FOX News. "I want to live peacefully."

The Uighurs, released this week, are staying at a guest cottage complex on the island without security or electronic monitoring, but their attorney said they will have to periodically check in with local police.

The release of the Uighurs comes amid increasing political tensions in Washington over what to do with the more than 200 detainees being held at the Guantanamo facility following President Obama's pledge to close the facility within a year of taking office.

But the Uighurs may be among the least threatening of the detainees whose fate must be decided, given that the Justice Department under the Bush administration already had decided that they should no longer be classified as "enemy combatants."

A September 2008 federal court motion filed by the Justice Department confirmed their change of status and declared that all 17 Uighurs being held at Gunatanamo should be resettled in a foreign country.

The Uighurs will be eligible for Bermudian passports in the future, but the U.S. has a mechanism in place to block their entry into the U.S. unless the federal government chooses to let them in.

Their attorney says the Uighurs are determined to stay in Bermuda as part of a guest worker program. There is a provision in that program that in limited circumstances allows guest workers to get Bermudian citizenship.

However, the transfer of the Uighurs has been criticized not only by U.S. Republican lawmakers but by the governments of the United Kingdom, which controls the territory of Bermuda, and China, which wants the Uighurs returned.

On Friday, some members of the Bermudan government who said they'd not been informed of the transfer questioned the wisdom of moving the inmates to the island located 640 miles off the coast of North Carolina, saying it could hurt tourism, which is Bermuda's chief industry.

But the Bermudan government defended its decision to take the Uighurs, whom the U.S. feared would face torture if sent back to China.

The Uighurs told FOX News that they plan to make their home in Bermuda, probably working first in some form of manual labor. They also may open a restaurant and look forward to swimming and fishing.

The article is too small for excerpts.  Still, you might want to go there for the comments.  So, these 17 Uighurs were apparently captured in Afghanistan.  Suppose, 16 of them are innocent.  It takes only one to do tremendous damage.

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Obama and the Jews

Bookworm has the most complete round-up of commentaries on the recent Obama speech in Cairo.  Just go there and follow her links, including her own commentary.  Indeed, there was some good stuff there and some not so good.  But here is the article that points out some disturbing moral equivalency so prevalent on the Left:

Just days ago Obama traveled to Cairo, Egypt. It was his second trip in a short time to visit Muslim countries. He sent a clear message by not visiting Israel.

But this was code.

In Cairo, Obama said things that pose a grave danger to Jews in Israel, in America and everywhere.

And if his views are not vigorously opposed they will help create a danger as great as that posed by the Nazis to the Jewish people.

Just last week, Obama told his worldwide audience — more than 100 million people — that the killing of six million Jews during the Holocaust was the equivalent of Israel’s actions in dealing with the Palestinians.

This remark is incredible on its face, an insult to the six million Jews who died as a result of Hitler’s genocide — and it is a form of revisionism that will bode evil for Jews for years to come.

While Obama acknowledged that “six million Jews were killed — more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today” — his discussion about the Holocaust was followed by this statement: “On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.” (Emphasis mine - Eric-Odessit).

“On the other hand . . . ”?

Obama’s clever construct comparing the mass genocide of six million Jews to the Palestinian struggle will not be lost on the estimated 100 million Muslims who tuned into to hear him.

This is the worst kind of moral equivalency.  Read it all.  And now we hear about the anti-Semitic statement of Obama's mentor.  Do you think 20 years of attending this guy's church rubbed off on Obama?  You know, to certain extent I feel vindicated when Obama's anti-Israel and anti-Semitic associations come out: I hope that this will teach those 77% of American Jews that blindly voting for Democrats is not always good for them.  But then, those people usually refuse to hear and see the evidence.  Just like the Jews under Nazi occupation refused to see the evidence of mass slaughter, so the modern American Jews keep blindly voting for Democrats despite growing anti-Semitism on the Left.  A disclaimer: no, I do not compare Obama to the Nazis.  But the refusal to see the evidence on the part of the 77% of American Jews is the same.

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In case you missed it...

It's been a while since this has been posted, but it is worth reminding.

Back when the Left was screaming about harsh interrogations (waterboarding etc.), and when Obama declared that those techniques would no longer be used, Dick Cheney asked for the results of those interrogations be released along with with those memos authorizing them.  Indeed, the question of effectiveness of those interrogations is very valid.  In fact, this question even gets asked by some leftist at Huffington Post.  So, here is the summary of what those interrogations revealed:

Not one of the liberal pundits decrying the use of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) appears to have read the complete set of memos released by President Obama. I know this because I cannot find a single, plain-text version of the scanned memos anywhere on the web. And, the most critical section -- the results obtained from EITs -- is nowhere to be found.

Most of the anti-American leftists seem strangely incurious regarding the key question asked even at The Huffington Post: what did the enhanced interrogations reveal?

I (Doug Ross) herein present the actual results of the EITs as described in the partially redacted 5/30/2005 memo (U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel, MEMORANDUM FOB JOHN A. RIZZO, SENIOR DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, "Re: Application of 'United States Obligation; Under Article 16 of the Convention Against Torture to Certain Techniques That May Be Used in the Interrogation of High Value al Qaeda Detainees'", originally classified TOP SECRET/NOFORN).

…………………………………………………………………………….

To put things in simple terms for any "progressives" reading along, here's what the EITs revealed after 3,000 American civilians were slaughtered in cold blood by Al Qaeda:

• FACT: EITs produced 3,000 of the 6,000 critical counter-terror intelligence reports only after normal techniques had proven fruitless;

• FACT: EITs used on Zubaydah revealed KSM's identity as a mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks;

• FACT: KSM ratted out a number of mass-murderers including Hambali;

• FACT: Hambali's brother ratted out a cell bent on "9/11 Wave 2" on the West Coast;

• FACT: Zubaydah also revealed Padilla and his plan to detonate a simplistic dirty bomb in Washington, DC;

So, drones, you can either believe the CIA forged 3,000 documents and magically captured mass-murderers without EITs... or you can believe the truth.

Obviously, read the whole post by Doug Ross.

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