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Ruth King

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Cruz, not Rubio, is the alternative to Trump By Robert A. J. Gagnon see note please

By on March 3rd, 2016

I still like Rubio but this is a persuasive column…..because I still loathe Trump….more than ever….rsk

“Trump will destroy first the Republican Party and then, with a likely Democratic victory, the nation. It’s now or never. Let all who recognize the train wreck that is Donald Trump unite. Cruz is not perfect. He’s not the Messiah (that role is already taken). But he has the brains, the conviction, and the guts to lead our nation in the direction that we want it to go and that the country needs it to go.”

With almost all the votes counted on Super Tuesday, Cruz finished with 2.5 million votes, compared to Rubio’s 1.9 million and Trump’s 2.9 million. Cruz bettered Rubio by 600,000 votes, which makes him the candidate around which other Republicans opposed to Trump need to coalesce. The latest polls before Super Tuesday indicated that Texas would be a close race between Cruz and Trump, yet Cruz ended up crushing Trump by 17 percentage points and nearly half a million votes. Trump was expected to beat Cruz in Oklahoma – so the latest polls told us. Yet Cruz defeated Trump decisively there. He also won the small-population state of Alaska.

What of Rubio? He did better in Virginia than polls predicted but still finished second to Trump. He won one primary, Minnesota, beating Cruz by only 8,000 votes. He did overtake Cruz for second place in Georgia, but only by less than one percent. He finished a distant third to Trump and Kasich in tiny Vermont and third to the same pair in Massachusetts. Cruz finished ahead of Rubio everywhere else, with second-place finishes in Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee, in addition to his three victories.

In the latest Florida poll (Feb. 26), Trump was leading Rubio in his home state of Florida by 20 percentage points. If Rubio cannot carry even his own home state, and that by a wide margin (as Cruz crushed Trump in his own home state), he stands no chance of beating Trump. It is time to face the math. It is time for Rubio supporters to come around to Ted Cruz as the only candidate left who both respects our values and can beat Trump. Let’s put our differences aside and make this a two-person race, before it is too late.

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French Diplomacy on ‘Palestine’ Will Run Aground By Shoshana Bryen

By on March 3rd, 2016

France is proposing to lead the Middle East Quartet on a new foray into Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. This is understandable as a part of French politics. The Palestinians, however, are setting up to be at least as difficult a client for France as they have ever been for the U.S.

Of the members of the P5+1 negotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran last summer, France was least happy with the result and said so publicly. Since President Obama needed all five other nations to sign onto the deal, he bowed to a previously expressed French interest in midwifing a Palestinian state in exchange for French acquiescence on Iran.

Aside from its traditional delusions of influence in the Middle East, France wanted to appease its large, unassimilated, unhappy, and increasingly violent Muslim population, which is predominantly Sunni with no love for Iran – and not much love for the French State. France is also part of the anti-Sunni ISIS coalition, which angers parts of the French Muslim population as well. President François Hollande perhaps thought he could buy time or space by inserting himself in the issue of Palestinian statehood – not resolving the problems that bedevil Israelis and Palestinians, but just producing a Palestinian state.

Hollande & Co. will run afoul of two trends: one French, one Palestinian. First, France’s Muslim population, while increasingly anti-Jewish, is not particularly interested in a Palestinian state. Watching Israel sold down the river by a Western country may have some visceral appeal, but it will not let Hollande off the hook for France’s perceived sins against its Muslim population or the Sunni Muslim cause. Second, France is offering the Palestinian Authority nothing the Palestinians have not previously rejected – and will reject this time as well for the same reasons.

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Trump Already Is a Third Party Candidate By G. Murphy Donovan

By on March 3rd, 2016

Questions have dogged the Donald Trump campaign from the start. Who is this guy? What does he believe? What are his party loyalties? And finally, will Trump run as a third party candidate if Republicans try to torpedo his quest for the White House?

Third Party?

Let’s start with the easiest question first. Donald Trump has already staged a coup. He is the third party candidate, albeit campaigning under a Republican guidon. Given his success up to this point, Trump seems to have outmaneuvered his critics on all sides. Indeed, he has hijacked a major political party and is now reshaping it to his purposes. Trump believes that he has the answer to national malaise and he is willing to pay his own way to the levers of power.

Self-funding alone makes Trump revolutionary. He’s “all in” to resuscitate his vision of the American dream.

Say what you will about Trump, but the phenomenon is vintage Americana. He has reinvented himself, reinvented political campaigns, reinvented American politics, and may be on the way to reinventing the country too. Trump is a third party, a party of one until done.

Now, to those other questions.

Who is Trump?

Defining Donald Trump is best done by saying what he is not. He is not a Republican, nor a Democrat. He is not a liberal, nor a conservative. And surely, he is not a lawyer. Not that any of the usual branding means much these days.

Most traditional labels are now captured in a few words: call them elites, establishment, or the usual suspects. Personalize the left as Chris Matthews or the right as George Will; it really doesn’t much matter. Both represent varieties of tired platitudes.

Trump isn’t running against, or for, any labels or specific ideology. He’s running against “business as usual,” or for an opportunity to make things work again. Trump wants to win first and sift the details later. Whether or not he is the guy to fix Washington is arguable, but none of the traditional pigeonholes apply in his case.

For the moment, you could call Trump a pragmatic populist. If business models are relevant, he probably thinks that he can build a better mousetrap. If his career and campaign to date is evidence, the Donald is pretty good at building, period.

Lawyers have dominated American politics now for generations. The time may be right to give a cocky guy who has had a real job, and concrete accomplishments, a shot at fixing decades of domestic and foreign policy folly. The Beltway status quo is Trump’s real target in 2016.

What does He Believe?

At heart, Donald Trump probably believes in three things: God, country, and Donald Trump. Surely God and America have been good to him and his family. Why should he not believe in himself?

Trump had the opportunity the other day to shame a pandering prelate in Mexico, a papal hypocrite — and he didn’t. Such restraint might be the fear of God — or intimations of a lighter touch once the electoral battles are done.

If Trump picks a fight with a church, it will not be Christians or Jews in any case. Francis and Bibi, like Trump, are both fond of walls too. And bye-the-by, Trump could pay for his southern wall with tariffs, applying a tax on the $20-some billion in annual remittances to Mexico, or withholding foreign aid from Mexico.

Vicente Fox and other scions of dystopic narco-states south of the border should be careful about “f—king walls” and related obscenities. If Trump becomes president, Vicente may have an open-ended opportunity to “foxtrot” himself and Mexico on a grand scale.

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New Migrant Crisis Flares in Greece Thirty thousand stranded in Greece as EU tries to halt inflow from Middle East, South Asia and Africa By Nektaria Stamouli

By on March 3rd, 2016

IDOMENI, Greece—A clampdown along Balkan borders has left 30,000 migrants trapped in Greece, marking a new stage in the humanitarian crisis swamping Europe.

Countries farther up the migration trail, from Macedonia to Austria, are now letting in only a few hundred a day, and sometimes no one.

Allowing migrants to be stranded in Greece is considered the EU’s last option to halt the relentless inflow of people from the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. More and more EU governments have lost faith in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy of stopping irregular migrants at Turkey, spreading bona fide refugees around the EU, and keeping Europe’s internal borders open.

Ms. Merkel warned this week of “chaos” in Greece, but other European Union leaders say there is no alternative to shutting down the Balkan migration route.

“The first priority is to rapidly stem the flows,” European Council President Donald Tusk said on Wednesday while visiting Croatia, a country on the now-constricted Balkan trail. Europe’s monthslong furor over migration “is testing our Union to the limit,” Mr. Tusk said.

Senior EU officials argue that a humanitarian crisis in Greece, ameliorated with EU money, would help deter further migrants from traveling to Europe. On Wednesday, the EU executive in Brussels said it could send Greece €300 million ($326 million) quickly, from a new €700 million emergency fund for the bloc.
Greece is rapidly becoming a pressure cooker. Refugees and other migrants are growing frustrated and angry. Hundreds tried to storm the border with Macedonia on Monday, only to be driven back with tear gas. The presence of riot police and military vehicles is growing daily. Authorities are hastily building a network of camps around the country, hoping to spread the trapped migrants and avoid major unrest. CONTINUE TO SITE

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Trump’s Pottery Barn GOP Even as he wins, GOP resistance to his nomination builds.

By on March 3rd, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-pottery-barn-gop-1456965435

Donald Trump claims to have opposed the Iraq war before opposition was fashionable. So perhaps he won’t mind if we apply Colin Powell’s adaptation of the Pottery Barn rule to Mr. Trump’s attempted takeover of the Republican Party: If you break it, you bought it.

The rule comes to mind after examining the paradox of Super Tuesday’s primary results: Mr. Trump was the clear winner and his support is solidifying, but Republican resistance to his candidacy is mounting at the same time. A front-runner at this stage of the primaries would normally be expanding and consolidating his party support, as Hillary Clinton is among Democrats. This is what happened in every other recent GOP presidential race.

Mr. Trump is winning, but his Super Tuesday performance was less than commanding. He generally underperformed his percentages in the pre-election polls, and he cracked the 40% mark in only two states—Massachusetts and Alabama. Overall he averaged about 35% of the vote, lower than his totals in Nevada and about what he received in New Hampshire. Yet the same media sages who said he could never win now say the race is over.
One possible explanation is that the attacks on Mr. Trump that began in earnest only late last week have begun to break through to voters. In two of Mr. Trump’s weakest states, Oklahoma (28% and second place) and Arkansas (33% and a narrow first), the Club for Growth ran ads against him.CONTINUE AT SITE

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POLITICS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Helplessly watching Trump’s rise, world reacts with dread, confusion.

By on March 3rd, 2016

From Mexico to India to Israel, pundits, papers and people on the street unite in astonishment that GOP juggernaut could become world leader By John-Thor Dahlburg
BRUSSELS (AP) — Following Donald Trump’s breathtaking string of Super Tuesday victories, politicians, editorial writers and ordinary people worldwide were coming to grips Wednesday with the growing possibility the brash New York billionaire might become America’s next president –a thought that aroused widespread befuddlement and a good deal of horror.

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“The Trump candidacy has opened the door to madness: for the unthinkable to happen, a bad joke to become reality,” German business daily Handelsblatt wrote in a commentary for its Thursday edition. “What looked grotesque must now be discussed seriously.”

There was also glee from some Russian commentators at how American politics is being turned topsy-turvy in 2016. And in Latin America, Ecuador’s president predicted a Trump win could boomerang and become a blessing to the continent’s left.

However, the dominant reaction overseas to the effective collapse of the Republican Party establishment in the face of the Trump Train appeared to be jaw-dropping astonishment, mixed with dread at what may lie ahead.

“The meteoric rise of the New York magnate has left half the planet dumbfounded,” wrote columnist Andrea Rizzi in Spain’s leading newspaper, El Pais.

“To consider Donald Trump a political clown would be a severe misconception,” said another European daily, Salzburger Nachrichten. If Trump is elected to the White House, the Austrian paper predicted, his ideas “would bring major dangers for the USA and the world … basically a nationalist-chauvinist policy that would make America not great but ugly, and risk the stability of the international order.”

Eytan Gilboa, an expert on US-Israeli relations at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, said the best word to describe Israeli feelings about Trump is “confusion.”

There are certain parts of him that Israelis can relate to, such as his aversion to political correctness, his tough stance on Islamic terrorism and his call for a wall with Mexico to provide security, Gilboa said.

But others have been particularly jarring to Israelis, such as comments about Jews that many consider insensitive and his derision of US Sen. John McCain’s captivity in Vietnam.

“This is something that every Israeli would reject. It’s a highly sensitive issue in a country where prisoners of war are heroes and people go out of their way to release them,” he said.

‘We pray to God that a racist, politically incorrect personality does not win the election’
Thuraya Ebrahim al Arrayed, a member of Saudi Arabia’s top advisory body, the Shura Council, said a Trump presidency would be “catastrophic” and set the world back “not just generations, but centuries.”

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Is the Palestinian issue the crux of the Arab-Israeli conflict? Amb.(Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on March 3rd, 2016

1. Erroneous assumptions produce erroneous policies, as has been the case of all US initiatives towards the Palestinian issue, which has been erroneously perceived – by the US foreign policy establishment – to be the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

2. For example, the first 1948/49 Arab-Israeli War was not launched, by Arab countries, on behalf of Palestinian aspirations. The Arabs launched the war in order to advance their own particular – not Palestinian – interests through the occupation of the strategic area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, the Palestinians blame Arab leaders for what they term “the 1948 debacle.”

3. Moreover, the 1948/49 War was aimed to prevent the establishment of an “infidel” Jewish entity on a land, which Muslims believe is divinely endowed to the “believers” (Waqf). The Secretary General of the Arab League, Abdul Rahman Azzam, stated: “The establishment of a Jewish state would lead to a war of extermination like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades….”

4. Jordan joined the 1948/49 War, in order to expand its territory to the Mediterranean. Egypt wanted to foil Jordan’s ambitious strategy, and therefore deployed a military force to the Jerusalem region to check the Jordanian advance. Iraq wanted to control the oil pipeline from the Kirkuk oil wells to the Haifa refineries, and Syria aimed at conquering some southern sections of so called “Greater Syria.”

5. At the end of the 1948/9 war, Iraq occupied Samaria (the northern West Bank), but transferred it to Jordan, not to the Palestinians. Jordan occupied Judea (the southern West Bank), and annexed both Judea & Samaria to the Hashemite Kingdom on the East Bank of the Jordan River, prohibiting Palestinian activities and punishing/expelling Palestinian activists. Egypt conquered the Gaza Strip, imposed a nightly curfew, which was terminated when Israel gained control of Gaza in 1967, prohibited Palestinian national activities and expelled Palestinian leaders. Syria occupied and annexed the al-Hama area in the Golan Heights. In 1948, the Arab League formed the “All Palestine Government” as a department within the Arab League headquarters in Cairo, dissolving it in 1959.

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Combating a toxic message – ‘the occupation’ : Dr. Moshe Dann

By on March 3rd, 2016

As UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon wrote in The New York Times to explain why Arabs murder Jews, “Occupation provokes anger and despair which are the major drivers of violence and extremism….”

It’s not Islamic Jihad, or Palestinian Authority/Hamas hate campaigns; it’s the “occupation of Palestinian territory,” “the settlements” – all of them.

It’s a demand that Israel withdraw unilaterally to the 1949 armistice line without any consideration of Israel’s claims or thought about the consequences.
It’s a call for Israel’s demise. In this case, therefore, the messenger is the message.

Instead of regurgitating lies, Ban could have told the truth: Arabs who try to kill Jews are not driven by political or economic concerns, but by hatred. They are willing to give up their lives in the process of murdering Jews because they believe that will bring them honor and public acclaim.

Arabs are not angry because they don’t have a state; they are angry because Jews have one. They do not hate because they lack political rights and economic benefits, but because they believe that Jews are infidels, and that martyrdom and jihad are supreme values.

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The so-called “occupation” began in 1967, but Muslims murdering Jews did not. Paula R. Stern

By on March 3rd, 2016

On May 8, 2001, a Palestinian brutally beat to death two 13-year old
boys exploring a cave – Koby Mandell and Yosef Ishran.

On August 9, 2001, a Palestinian walked into a pizzeria in Jerusalem
with a guitar case loaded with explosives and blew himself up, killing
15 people, including 7 children and a pregnant woman. One victim is
still unconscious.

On Octobr 7, 2004 32 people were murdered in two Sinai hotel resort
hotels by Palestinian terrorists who knew that Israelis frequented the
hotels. Among the dead, two brothers – Gilad, aged 11, and little
Lior, aged 3.

On December 5, 2005, Palestinian terrorists attempted to enter a mall
in Netanya but blew up themselves and 5 others at the entrance.

On March 6, 2008, Rosh Chodesh Adar, eight students of the Mercaz
Harav Yeshiva were murdered by terrorists who entered the school and
opened fire.

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DOJ grants immunity to ex-Clinton staffer who set up email server By Evan Perez

By on March 3rd, 2016

Washington (CNN)Bryan Pagliano, a former Clinton staffer who helped set up her private email server, has accepted an immunity offer from the FBI and the Justice Department to provide an interview to investigators, a U.S. law enforcement official told CNN Wednesday.

The FBI has been asking for Pagliano’s cooperation for months as dozens of investigators pored over thousands of Clinton emails in a secure room on the fourth floor of FBI headquarters.

The probe shifted into a new phase recently as investigators completed the review of the emails, working with intelligence agencies and the State Department to determine whether they were classified.

The Washington Post first reported Pagliano’s cooperation.

“As we have said since last summer, Secretary Clinton has been cooperating with the Justice Department’s security inquiry, including offering in August to meet with them to assist their efforts if needed,” said Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Fallon added that the campaign was “pleased” Pagliano was cooperating with the Justice Department.

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