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Obama Says He Won’t Meet With Israeli Leader During Visit

WASHINGTON—The diplomatic fracas over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ’s planned speech to Congress next month escalated with Vice President Joe Biden ’s disclosure that he would miss the appearance while traveling abroad.

The announcement by his office—which gave no details about his travel plans—made it more likely that congressional Democrats will follow suit and skip the appearance, which increasingly threatens to fray a rare, long-standing bipartisanship in Congress over U.S. dealings with Israel.

President Barack Obama has said he won’t meet with the Israeli leader while he is in Washington, after House Speaker John Boehner ’s (R., Ohio) office arranged it with Israeli officials without consulting the White House. The visit is planned just two weeks before Israeli voters head to the polls. In his speech, Mr. Netanyahu is expected to question a central foreign-policy objective of Mr. Obama’s: rapprochement with Iran over its nuclear program.

Democrats over the past week were sharply critical of the plans for the prime minister’s speech during closed-door meetings with the Israeli ambassador and the speaker of Israel’s parliament. “I just think it’s a serious mistake by the speaker and the prime minister,” Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.) said, suggesting the speech would be a “divisive event.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) was more blunt, telling reporters on Thursday, “I think it would be better if we didn’t have it.”

he Army commander in Europe on Putin’s new way of war, Russia’s growing arsenal, and coping with U.S. military budget cuts.

Wiesbaden, Germany

‘I believe the Russians are mobilizing right now for a war that they think is going to happen in five or six years—not that they’re going to start a war in five or six years, but I think they are anticipating that things are going to happen, and that they will be in a war of some sort, of some scale, with somebody within the next five or six years.”

So says Lt. Gen. Frederick “Ben” Hodges, commander of U.S. Army Europe. It’s Monday evening at the Army’s Lucius D. Clay garrison near Wiesbaden, a small town in southwest Germany. The air outside is freezing, the ground coated by a thin layer of snow. Moscow lies 1,500 miles east, but Russia comes up almost immediately as I sit down to dinner with Gen. Hodges and one of his aides in a cozy dining room at the base.

“Strong Europe!” reads a sign on one of the walls. Next to it is the U.S. Army Europe insignia, a burning sword set against a blue shield. The two signs represent the strategic framework the three-star general has introduced—building on America’s decades-long role on the Continent—since taking command last year of the 30,000 or so U.S. soldiers stationed in Europe.

Obama rejects a role for Congress that it has long played on arms control.

The ghost of Scoop Jackson is hovering over the Obama Administration’s troubles with the Senate and its nuclear negotiations with Iran. Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson, a respected national-security Democrat from Washington state, was often a thorn in the side of Presidents who were negotiating arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union in the 1970s. President Obama wishes Senate critics such as Democrat Robert Menendez and Republican Bob Corker would simply get their noses out of the deal. This President needs a history lesson: Senate involvement in arms-control agreements goes back at least 50 years.

Threatening vetoes of anything the Senate sends him on Iran, President Obama seems to think his job is to negotiate nuclear arms agreements unilaterally, while the Senate’s job is to keep its mouth shut.

It was never thus.
The idea of nuclear-arms agreements negotiated by an Administration with little or no input from Congress is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Clinton Administration unilaterally negotiated the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea to stop its construction of nuclear reactors. The George W. Bush Administration followed, producing five sets of Six-Party Talks with North Korea. They all fell apart because the North Koreans cheated by continuing to test nuclear devices and develop missiles capable of delivering a bomb.

Argues the Crusades began in 1096 in response to Islam conquering the Holy Land.

There has been strong reaction to President Barack Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday when he compared the murderous acts being committed by Islamic terrorist groups and centuries-ago Christian campaigns.

And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

The founder of StandAmerica, Bishop E. W. Jackson, told Elizabeth Hasselbeck on Friday morning’s Fox and Friends that he had a message for President Obama:

The Jewish homes in Israel are not an obstacle to peace. The only obstacle to peace is the hatred of Israel’s neighbors.

Many of us in other countries in the Middle East see Israel as the only light of freedom and democracy in the midst of darkness, terrorism and hatred in the region.

The concept of real freedom and democracy seems foreign to anti-Semites. From here, it looks as if many of these self-proclaimed liberals have a self-congratulatory concept of what is right and wrong as closed-minded, un-free and un-democratic as that of the most rigid tyrant.

When people show solidarity with the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas, or with those who jail, try or flog people for free speech, it just further proves Israel’s rightfulness and legitimacy.

You would defend yourself against incoming rockets; why shouldn’t they? Israel has nothing to apologize for.

It is really hard to please the Jew-haters.

The GOP may have found its own candidate for the age of fluidity represented—and accelerated—by the presidency of Barack Obama.

Margaret Thatcher famously said that her greatest success as a politician was the rise of Tony Blair to lead a party he called New Labour: “We forced our opponents to change their minds.” As yet, Barack Obama can make no similar boast. Just the opposite: He radicalized his Republican opponents, and empowered most those who agreed with him least. With the presidential campaign of Jeb Bush, Obama can finally glimpse Thatcher-style success. Here, at last, is an opponent in his own image.
What can the son and brother of a president, grandson of a senator, and great grandson of the founder of the Walker Cup have in common with the son of a failed Kenyan politician? Look beyond the biography to the psychology.
Unlike his more guarded elder brother, Jeb Bush talks openly and candidly about himself. Of course, there are limits to candor. Jeb Bush has spent almost all of the past 20-plus years either in public office or in pursuit of it. He understands self-presentation and is adept at it: There is artfulness in his artlessness.
Yet when a man speaks for the record as often as has Jeb Bush, he deposits there enough material to learn something interesting about the man he is, rather than the boy he was.

Jeb Bush will tell you that, thanks to his marriage to his Mexican-born wife, he is bicultural. Here he is speaking at New York’s 92nd Street Y in November 2013:
I’m bicultural—maybe that’s more important than bilingual. For those who have those kinds of marriages, appreciating the culture of your spouse is the most powerful part of the relationship. Being able to share that culture and live in it has been one of the great joys of my life. We chose Miami to live because it is a bicultural city. It’s as American as any, but it has a flair to it that is related to this bicultural feeling. I wanted my children to grow up in a bicultural way.

Neither King Abdullah of Jordan, nor the new King of Saudi Arabia, nor any other Mideast tyrant has “renounced” Islam. They simply repeat what Western politicians and the MSM have been saying ad infinitum and what Islamic spokesmen in the West have been telling the West, that ISIS’s actions and barbarity have nothing to do with Islam. They deny it even when the perpetrators quote Koranic chapter and verse to sanction their actions. I do wish people would stop being so desperate to see some forthright action against ISIS that they’re willing to see what isn’t there. Abdullah’s actions have a three-fold purpose: to salvage Islam in the eyes of the world by making a false distinction between his version of Islam and that practiced by ISIS, when in fact the distinction is illusory; to engage in an Arabic “blood feud,” a practice that goes back at least 14 centuries or more; and to save his kingdom from ISIS, which menaces his reign.

Scott Walker is the only ambidextrous candidate in the Republican field. He appeals equally to the Republican establishment and the Tea Party/evangelical wingers.

All other candidates fit neatly in one or the other box. While Jeb Bush’s record in Florida used to make him the most attractive member of his family to conservatives, he has blown that accolade with his strong support for immigration amnesty and Common Core.

Chris Christie was never the darling of conservatives, but his appeal to establishment Republicans is obvious.

Neither Bush nor Christie is a switch-hitter.

On the right, Ted Cruz’s views fit the Tea Party like a glove but his brand of fiery politics may be too much for establishment ears. He is so effective and so on target that he scares the cautious GOP establishment to death. Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum have perfect pitch in appealing to evangelicals, but, perforce, are too out there for the more establishment types.

Mycorrhiza is a secret sauce that can help many crops thrive. An Israeli firm has developed a way to use it more effectively
Among humans, “fungus” is a scary word, but in the plant world, fungi are more than welcome — particularly mycorrhizae, “good” fungi that attach themselves to the roots of plants and help them grow and thrive.

Modern agricultural methods have not been kind to mycorrhizae: Pesticides kill them off; and modern methods of tilling and harvesting uproot them.

Which is a shame, according to Israeli agritech start-up Groundwork BioAg. Mycorrhizae, say company researchers, effectively extend plant roots using long microscopic filaments called hyphae, increasing the root-system surface area by a factor of up to 1,000. This “secondary root system” absorbs valuable nutrients (and water) that otherwise are simply unavailable to the plant. Restoring the mycorrhizae, according to the start-up, will help to increase yields, to restore depleted soil, and even to reduce the need for pesticides.

Ruthie Blum is the Web editor of Voice of Israel radio (voiceofisrael.com).
When the video of Jordanian pilot Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh being burned alive in a cage appeared on the Internet on Tuesday, Jordanian King Abdullah II happened to be in Washington on a previously scheduled trip.

A few hours after the clip began circulating — the most recent example of the prurient interest Westerners have been taking in Islamic State pornography — Abdullah arrived at the White House for a private meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama. The tete-a-tete was arranged at the last minute, because Abdullah had to cut his trip short.

Unlike Obama, whose response to the beheading of American captives by the same Islamic State behemoths was to resume playing golf and assert that none of their actions had anything to do with Islam, Abdullah was in a hurry to return home to exact revenge.

After the meeting, White House spokesman Alistair Baskey stated: “The president and King Abdullah reaffirmed that the vile murder of this brave Jordanian will only serve to steel the international community’s resolve to destroy ISIL.” (Obama remains among a minority who still refer to the Islamic State terrorists as ISIL, rather than ISIS, a distinction worthy of note.)