#HOLLYWOODSIGN UPDATE: Crews working to remove black tarps after vandal alters landmark to read '#Hollyweed' https://t.co/cmkNgpA1D5 pic.twitter.com/bMuWRk6j8u
— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) January 1, 2017
In his waning days in the White House, President Obama is desperately trying to make his policies as permanent as possible by tying the hands of his successor — and far more than other presidents have done on their way out.Still more.
From his dramatic and disastrous change of US policy on Israel to his executive order restricting 1.65 million acres of land from development despite local objections, Obama is trying to make it impossible for Donald Trump and a GOP-controlled Congress to govern.
Even Thursday’s announcement of wide-ranging sanctions against Russia presents Trump with a foreign-policy crisis immediately upon taking office.
By contrast, many of Obama’s predecessors have stood back in their final days in office and refrained from any dramatic shifts, in deference to the agenda of the man voters sent to succeed them.
But Obama won’t accept the election results. As he suggested the other day, Trump’s election was a fluke — and he himself would have easily been re-elected if allowed to stand for a third term.
He believes this not just because he’s an effective campaigner, but because he thinks his “vision” and policies continue to be backed by “a majority of the American people.”
But Obama, like many Democrats, fails to understand what happened in the election: Voters were calling for real change from the status quo — from his policies. Indeed, before the vote, he himself said it was a referendum on him and his policies.
Memo to the president: You lost.
Whether it was the lackluster economy, ObamaCare, trade, the sweeping failure of his foreign policy or illegal immigration, voters sought something very different.
Trump, on the other hand, did more than just energize his base: He flipped six states that voted for Obama in 2012.
The results, as many have since come to realize, is that the Democratic Party now caters to a hard-left, elite core located on the two coasts — and has abandoned the working-class Americans in the heartland it so loudly claims to champion...
Vladimir Putin is betting that the smartest move is to do nothing.
The Russian president announced Friday that his government would not expel any U.S. diplomats in retaliation for U.S. punitive measures unveiled by the White House a day earlier in response to Russia’s alleged cyber-attacks.
Putin’s sidestep away from confrontation was widely read as a deliberate bow to President-elect Donald Trump -- and a final hard slap at President Obama in the waning weeks of the U.S. leader’s tenure.
“We will not create any problems for U.S. diplomats. We will not expel anyone,” Putin said in a statement posted on the Kremlin website that followed well-publicized calls from senior Russian officials for a sharp pushback against the U.S. administration over steps that included the expulsions of 35 Russian diplomats.
The Russian leader said the Kremlin would instead base future moves on “the policies of the Trump administration.” Trump quickly praised Putin for putting off any action, tweeting: “I always knew he was very smart!”
Great move on delay (by V. Putin) - I always knew he was very smart!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 30, 2016
ICYMI: After 13 months outside the octagon, Ronda Rousey lasted just 48 seconds against Amanda Nunes at #UFC207. https://t.co/h6tPObfqUw
— ESPN (@espn) December 31, 2016
#UFC207 reactions: https://t.co/BeT2slC6Cg
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) December 31, 2016
Coach may have doomed #RondaRousey's fight, career. https://t.co/wjgQpGqpJk
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) December 31, 2016
.@DLoesch #RondaRousey must retire after crushing loss to Amanda Nunes. https://t.co/FMTGNRkEZV v
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) December 31, 2016
Amanda Nunes did not hold back on Ronda Rousey's coach Edmond Tarverdyan after her dominant #UFC207 win. pic.twitter.com/m6FAPZBIOb
— ESPN (@espn) December 31, 2016
Ronda Rousey loses again; what now? https://t.co/rhzJzibKoj #ufc207
— Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) December 31, 2016
Tweet of the year? https://t.co/mpy0LmetXM
— Heat Street (@heatstreet) December 31, 2016
SOCIAL JUSTICE! "Josh Marshall ... tweeted out a lesbian porn list to the entire world." https://t.co/ef7yYcuXlA @TheRalphRetort #tcot
— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) December 31, 2016
no way no way no fuckin way. 2016 just delivers right down to the wire https://t.co/se1hgiVJtP
— Virgil Texas (@virgiltexas) December 31, 2016
#HappyNewYearsEveEve #happy2017 to all! #MAGA #trump #FlashbackFriday #BenGarrison #cartoon at https://t.co/Oj98iIxEAZ pic.twitter.com/OdCod9PMhz
— BenGarrison Cartoons (@GrrrGraphics) December 31, 2016
#ItsTheEndOfTheWorldAnd I laughed! #LameDuckBarack #Obama #Putin #PresidentTrump https://t.co/Oj98iIxEAZ pic.twitter.com/K6vobwlQ2S
— BenGarrison Cartoons (@GrrrGraphics) December 31, 2016
New #BenGarrison #Cartoon #LameDuckPresident #ObamasLegacy #LameDuck #Russia #TRUMP #putin More at https://t.co/Oj98iIxEAZ #happynewyear pic.twitter.com/rGygoq2LRA
— BenGarrison Cartoons (@GrrrGraphics) December 30, 2016
Fentanyl Outpaces Heroin as the Deadliest Drug on Long Island. #Opioids https://t.co/SZ7ArqAvPA
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) December 31, 2016
Donald Trump hits back at Democrats in triumphant tweet mocking Barack Obama's sanctions on Russia https://t.co/cJkTWxAj4k pic.twitter.com/bLeVXamZIg
— Daily Mail US (@DailyMail) December 31, 2016
Trump tweets: Happy new year to my enemies who "lost so badly" https://t.co/taDkSWHLDD pic.twitter.com/NkT1ABWpfG
— The Hill (@thehill) December 31, 2016
The arc of history is long, but it won't ever judge Obama's Syria policy kindly. https://t.co/XKgUCrXAyY pic.twitter.com/tFN8uV1I03
— Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) December 30, 2016
Long before the Holocaust, Germany killed tens of thousands in Namibia. It will soon recognize this as genocide. https://t.co/C0QN5ShDJx pic.twitter.com/gkf9cuKKN5— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 29, 2016
WATERBERG, Namibia — In this faraway corner of southern Africa, scores of German soldiers lie in a military cemetery, their names, dates and details engraved on separate polished tombstones.More.
Easily missed is a single small plaque on the cemetery wall that gives a nod in German to the African “warriors” who died in the fighting as well. Nameless, they are among the tens of thousands of Africans killed in what historians have long considered — and what the German government is now close to recognizing — as the 20th century’s first genocide.
A century after losing its colonial possessions in Africa, Germany and its former colony, Namibia, are now engaged in intense negotiations to put an end to one of the ugliest chapters of Europe’s past in Africa.
During German rule in Namibia, called South-West Africa back then, colonial officers studying eugenics developed ideas on racial purity, and their forces tried to exterminate two rebellious ethnic groups, the Herero and Nama, some of them in concentration camps.
“It will be described as genocide,” Ruprecht Polenz, Germany’s special envoy to the talks, said of a joint statement that the two governments are preparing. Negotiations, which began this year, are now also focusing on how Germany will compensate and apologize to Namibia.
The events in Namibia between 1904 and 1908 foreshadowed Nazi ideology and the Holocaust. Yet the genocide in this former colony remains little known in Germany, the rest of Africa and, to some extent, even in Namibia itself.
Throughout Namibia, monuments and cemeteries commemorating the German occupiers still outnumber those honoring the victims of genocide, a concrete reminder of the lasting imbalance of power.
“Some of us want to remove that cemetery so that we can put our own people there,” said Magic Urika, 26, who lives about an hour away from the cemetery here in Waterberg. “What they did was a terrible thing, killing our people, saying all the Herero should be eliminated.”
While Germany’s efforts to atone for crimes during World War II are well known, it took a century before the nation began taking steps to acknowledge that genocide happened in Namibia decades before the Holocaust...
Putin won't expel U.S. diplomats as his foreign minister urged. He is apparently betting on better ties under Trump. https://t.co/deFtUkJJFh
— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 31, 2016
MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia announced Friday that he would not retaliate against President Obama’s decision to expel Russian diplomats and impose new sanctions — only hours after his foreign minister recommended doing just that.Shrewd, like I said. He's making Obama look like a petulant child.
Mr. Putin, betting on improved relations with the next American president, said he would not eject 35 diplomats or close any diplomatic facilities, rejecting a tit-for-tat response to the actions taken on Thursday by the Obama administration.
The switch was remarkable, given that Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, had just recommended the retaliation in remarks broadcast live on national television. He called for punitive measures mirroring the ones imposed by the Obama administration, which accuses Russia of intimidating American diplomats and hacking institutions like the Democratic National Committee to influence the 2016 election.
The two countries have a long history of reciprocal expulsions, and Russian officials had been threatening to retaliate for days. Then Mr. Putin abruptly changed course.
“While we reserve the right to take reciprocal measures, we’re not going to downgrade ourselves to the level of irresponsible ‘kitchen’ diplomacy,” Mr. Putin said, using a common Russian idiom for quarrelsome and unseemly acts. “In our future steps on the way toward the restoration of Russia-United States relations, we will proceed from the policy pursued by the administration” of Donald J. Trump.
Mr. Putin has a flair for smart, unexpected tactics, and his announcement on Friday appeared to be in keeping with that. To some observers, the sudden shift seemed carefully stage-managed, a way of building up suspense before Mr. Putin’s surprise announcement, helping portray him as a wise leader above the fray.
Mr. Putin even said he did not want to close a wooded picnic area on a Moscow River island used by diplomats because he did not want to deprive their children. Then he went one step further, inviting all children of American diplomats accredited in Russia to celebrate the New Year and the Russian Orthodox Christmas with him at the Kremlin.
“Putin showed that he is above his own officials, that he doesn’t want to take the retaliatory action suggested by his foreign minister,” said Vladimir Frolov, an international relations analyst and columnist. “This is an attempt to show that he is a figure not just of worldly scale, but of planetary.”
Should Mr. Putin have chosen to retaliate harshly against the United States, he would most likely have deepened the rift between the two countries and left President-elect Trump with a nettlesome diplomatic standoff from the moment he arrived in the Oval Office.
But by choosing essentially to disregard Mr. Obama’s punitive measures, Mr. Putin can try to disarm his American critics, including members of Congress who consider him an aggressive foe of the United States. That could give Mr. Trump more room to pursue the closer cooperation with Russia that he has advocated.
Despite all of the statements from senior officials about the need to respect “reciprocity,” Mr. Putin essentially warned Washington that he was waiting for the Trump administration...
Exodus by Leon Uris must rank high on any list of the most influential books about the Middle East. The novel, published in 1958, popularized the story of Israel’s birth among millions of American readers. The 1960 film, based on the book and starring Paul Newman as Ari Ben Canaan, reached many more millions. Exodus is still of interest, not for what it says about the creation of Israel (the commander of the ship Exodus said Uris “wrote a very good novel, but it had nothing to do with reality. Exodus, shmexodus”), but for what it reveals about mid-twentieth-century America. So more inquiry into the American context of Exodus is welcome—provided you get the facts right.Keep reading.
Last fall, Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, offered his audiences an account of how Leon Uris came to write the book. In a speech at Brooklyn Law School, Khalidi made this claim:
This carefully crafted propaganda was the work of seasoned professionals. People like someone you probably never heard of, a man named Edward Gottlieb, for example. He’s one of the founders of the modern public relations industry. There are books about him as a great advertiser.
In order to sell the great Israeli state to the American public many, many decades ago, Gottlieb commissioned a successful, young novelist. A man who was a committed Zionist, a fellow with the name of Leon Uris. He funded him and sent him off to Israel to write a book. This book was "Exodus: A Novel of Israel." Gottlieb’s gambit succeeded brilliantly. Exodus sold as many copies as Gone With the Wind, which up to that point was the greatest best-seller in U.S. history. Exodus was as good a melodrama and sold just as many copies.
Khalidi made a similar assertion in another speech a few weeks later, this time at the Palestine Center in Washington...
The purpose of mythNow, also check Haaretz, "The 'Exodus' Effect: The Monumentally Fictional Israel That Remade American Jewry":
In sum, the Gottlieb “commission” never happened. Uris’s biographers dismiss it, Gottlieb’s most knowledgeable associate denies it, and no documents in Uris’s papers or Israeli archives testify to it. It originated as a boast by Gottlieb to another PR man, made almost thirty years after the (non-)fact. And given its origin, it’s precisely the sort of story a serious professional historian would never repeat as fact without first vetting it (as I did).
Yet it persists in the echo chamber of anti-Israel literature, where it has been copied over and over. In Kathleen Christison’s book, it finally appeared under the imprimatur of a university press (California). In Khalidi’s lectures last fall, it acquired a baroque elaboration, in which Edward Gottlieb emerges as “the father of the American iteration of Zionism” and architect of “one of the greatest advertising triumphs of the twentieth century.” What is the myth’s appeal? Why is the truth about the genesis of Exodus so difficult to grasp? Why should Khalidi think the Gottlieb story is, in his coy phrase, “worth noting”?
Because if you believe in Zionist mind-control, you must always assume the existence of a secret mover who (as Khalidi said) “you probably never heard of” and who must be a professional expert in deception. This “seasoned” salesman conceives of Exodus as a “gambit” (Khalidi) or a “scheme” (Christison). There is no studio or publisher’s advance, only a “commission,” which qualifies the book as “propaganda”—an “advertising triumph.” In Khalidi’s Brooklyn Law School talk, he added that “the process of selling Israel didn’t stop with Gottlieb…. It has continued unabated since then.” It is Khalidi’s purpose to cast Exodus, like the case for Israel itself, as a “carefully crafted” sales job by Madison Avenue mad men. Through their mediation, Israel has hoodwinked America...
The pantheon of Jewish-American novelists is as populous as it is distinguished. Among its titans are two Nobel laureates, Canadian-born Chicagoan Saul Bellow and Polish-born Isaac Bashevis Singer; a justly celebrated string of Pulitzer winners from Edna Ferber through Philip Roth to Michael Chabon; and the creators of such works as "The Catcher in the Rye" and "Catch 22."More.
Yet, a half-century ago, when a single book transformed American Jews as no other work has done, before or since, its author was none of these.
The book was "Exodus" - and like its creator, Leon Uris, it was savaged by critics and academics, and resoundingly ignored by literary prize committees. When the book appeared in 1958, however, it sold in the millions. It was said that it was nearly as common to find a copy of "Exodus" in American-Jewish households as to find the Bible - and, of the two, not a few Jewish households apparently had only "Exodus."
Tailoring, altering and radically sanitizing the history of the founding of the State of Israel to flatter the fantasies and prejudices of American Jews, Uris succeeded well beyond his own wildest dreams, essentially remaking his eager readers and himself as well. That is, he helped foment a significant change in his fellow Jews' perceptions of Israel and, indeed, of themselves.
"As a literary work it isn't much," sniffed David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister, still in power at the time "Exodus" was published. "But as a piece of propaganda, it's the best thing ever written about Israel."
Some 40 years after the novel's publication, the prominent Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said would ruefully remark of its demonized treatment of Arabs that "the main narrative model that dominates American thinking still seems to be Leon Uris' 1958 novel 'Exodus.'"
To put it simply, the United Nations contains a nest of Jew-hating vipers.More.
Jew hatred at the UN flies under the false flag of condemning Israel for human rights violations, while all but ignoring them everywhere else.
This effort is spearheaded by Mideast dictatorships, whose goal has always been to delegitimize the Jewish state, the same goal as the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign and Israeli Apartheid Weeks.
In the latest instalment, a now-passed UN Security Council resolution slammed Israel unfairly and selectively on the settlement issue in the Occupied Territories last week.
President Barack Obama has been criticized by Israel’s supporters over the US abstaining from voting on the resolution (rather than vetoing it), which allowed it to pass.
But this Security Council resolution is just the latest example of the UN’s war against the Jews masquerading as legitimate criticism of Israel...
