Tuesday, March 5, 2019
House Dems will take floor action to confront Omar’s latest Israel comments
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and top Democrats will take floor action Wednesday in response to controversial remarks by Rep. Ilhan Omar about Israel, the second such rebuke of the freshman Democrat from party leaders in recent weeks.
Pelosi and other senior Democrats have drafted a resolution to address the controversy, which ballooned over the weekend following a public clash between Omar and senior Jewish lawmakers.
The resolution, which began circulating to members Monday night, comes after a backlash from top Democrats who accused Omar of anti-Semitism for referring to pro-Israel advocates’ “allegiance to a foreign country.”
The draft measure is four pages that largely details the history and recent rise of anti-Semitism in the U.S. but does not specifically name Omar, which had been an internal dispute among Democrats.
Monday, March 4, 2019
OF COURSE JARED KUSHNER GOT HIS TOP-SECRET SECURITY CLEARANCE THROUGH NEPOTISM
vanityfair
Earlier this week, Ivanka Trump explained that a federal jobs guarantee was a terrible idea that no one should support because “Americans, in their heart, [don’t] want to be given something. . . . People want to work for what they get.” This struck many as something of a curious philosophy, given the circumstances under which both the First Daughter and her husband earned their jobs in the White House (having them handed to them, despite their egregious lack of qualifications), in addition to everything else in their lives. And on Thursday, a new report suggested that Ivanka and Jared may not subscribe to the “no handouts” policy, for themselves, at all!
The New York Times reports that the only reason Jared Kushner was granted the highest level of security clearance last May was because his father-in-law, Donald Trump, demanded it—over the objections of intelligence officials, the White House’s top lawyer, and the chief of staff at the time. Prior to May, Kushner had been assigned clearance on an “interim top-secret” basis, which was downgraded to “secret” in February 2018, and which limited his access to classified information. And for good reason!
Unsurprisingly, the holdup did not sit well with either Kushner or Ivanka (who had also been operating on a temporary clearance), creating a situation that the couple presumably dealt with in a professional and reasonable fashion, i.e., by stomping their feet and yelling, “DADDY, WE WANT OUR TOP-SECRET SECURITY CLEARANCE, AND WE WANT IT NOW!”
To be clear, the normal process for granting someone a security clearance involves the White House’s personnel security office making a determination after an F.B.I. background check. If there is a dispute about how to move forward—something that rarely happens—the White House counsel makes the call, which, in this case, was overruled by the president, another highly unusual occurrence. Also highly unusual? For the president, his daughter, and his son-in-law’s lawyer to insist everything was done by the book when that clearly wasn’t the case:
(Ivanka’s exact words: “There were anonymous leaks about there being issues. But the president had no involvement pertaining to my clearance or my husband’s clearance, zero.”)
In a statement on Thursday, White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “We don’t comment on security clearances.” Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Kushner’s lawyer, offered the bizarre explanation that new revelations don’t change the original statements, even if said revelations suggest the original statements were lies. (“In 2018, White House and security-clearance officials affirmed that Mr. Kushner’s security clearance was handled in the regular process with no pressure from anyone,” Mirijanian said. “That was conveyed to the media at the time, and new stories, if accurate, do not change what was affirmed at the time.”)
Sunday, March 3, 2019
House Democrat blasts Ilhan Omar for ‘vile anti-Semitic slur’
Rep. Eliot Engel, the Jewish chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called on fellow Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar to apologize for her “vile anti-Semitic slur.”
Engel’s statement released on Friday evening came more than a day after Omar, of Minnesota, accused pro-Israel activists and lawmakers of “allegiance to a foreign country.” Dual loyalties is a common anti-Semitic trope.
“I welcome debate in Congress based on the merits of policy, but it’s unacceptable and deeply offensive to call into question the loyalty of fellow American citizens because of their political views, including support for the U.S.-Israel relationship. We all take the same oath. Worse, Representative Omar’s comments leveled that charge by invoking a vile anti-Semitic slur,” Engel said in a statement released by his office.
Omar said Wednesday during a town hall in Washington that “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”
Engel called her comments “especially disappointing” because they follow on the heels of another incident in which she evoked another anti-Semitic stereotype, that Jews pay lawmakers to support Israel.
Engel continued that her comments “were outrageous and deeply hurtful, and I ask that she retract them, apologize, and commit to making her case on policy issues without resorting to attacks that have no place in the Foreign Affairs Committee or the House of Representatives.”
Saturday, March 2, 2019
Trump first suggested North Korea wasn’t responsible for Otto Warmbier’s death. Now he’s walking it back.
President Donald Trump can be shamed into (kind of) walking back comments that reflect kindly on known tyrants — all it takes is resounding criticism that overshadows any of his related accomplishments.
After receiving widespread negative coverage of comments he made earlier this week appearing to absolve North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in the death of Otto Warmbier, a US student who died after being imprisoned in North Korea for over a year, Trump said Friday he was “misinterpreted.”
At a summit between the US and North Korea earlier this week, Trump was asked by reporters if he had confronted Kim about Warmbier’s death. The president confirmed that he did ask about the young American’s mysterious death in 2017, and said he believed Kim “felt badly,” but claimed to have known nothing about it at the time.
It’s highly unlikely that the North Korean dictator wasn’t aware of the high-profile case of an American captive that made headlines around the globe. Still, Trump on Thursday said it wasn’t in Kim’s “advantage to allow that to happen.”
“He tells me that he didn’t know about it and I will take him at his word,” Trump told reporters after the summit held in Vietnam.
A day later, however, Trump backtracked his statement, tweeting that he holds North Korea responsible for Warmbier’s brutal treatment.
Friday, March 1, 2019
WAS DONALD TRUMP’S NORTH KOREA SUMMIT A FAILURE?
President Donald Trump’s much-feted summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ended early and in disappointment on Thursday, when the U.S. delegation announced it could not reach any concrete deal on denuclearization with the authoritarian state.
For all Trump’s bombast on North Korea, little material progress has been made in denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. The president has boasted of his achievements in American-Korean relations, but his self-described successes have all come at a price.
Though atomic weapon and ballistic missile tests have stopped, Trump agreed to end joint military exercises with South Korea. And though Trump lauded the diplomatic significance of a sitting U.S. president meeting a North Korean leader for the first time, the June 2018 Singapore summit gave Kim a priceless propaganda win. In the meantime, Pyongyang is reportedly continuing its nuclear research program regardless.
The Vietnam summit held this week was designed to build on the mutual commitment of both nations to work toward improved relations and disarmament on the peninsula. But observers were left disappointed when the meeting broke up early.
Thursday, February 28, 2019
Santorum: Trump's decision to side with Kim on Otto Warmbier was 'reprehensible'
cnn.
washingtonexaminer.
President Donald Trump's decision not to hold North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un responsible for Otto Warmbier's death was "reprehensible," former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum said Thursday.
"This is the conundrum of Donald Trump for many of us who like his policies and don't like a lot of the things he does and says," Santorum said of the decision to CNN's John Berman on "New Day."
"But, this is reprehensible, what he just did. He gave cover, as you said, to a leader who knew very well what was going on with Otto Warmbier," Santorum, who is a CNN political commentator, said. "And again, I don't understand why the President does this. I am disappointed, to say the least, that he did it."
The ‘America first’ president just gave Kim Jong Un cover for the murder of an American student
It’s amazing how far people can get with President Trump so long as they dangle in front of him the promise of prestige.
You can be a murderous third-world dictator and oversee the slow execution of an American citizen, and the president will defend you for it before the entire world just so long as he believes doing so will get him closer to boosting his own personal and professional capital.
This isn’t hyperbole either. The president did exactly this Thursday during a joint press conference in Hanoi, Vietnam, with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Trump actually defended the potbellied tyrant king’s claim that he was in the dark in 2016 when his regime imprisoned and tortured a University of Virginia student from Ohio.
Otto Warmbier, who was beaten into a coma by North Korean prison guards during his 17-month imprisonment, died shortly after arriving back in the U.S. in June 2017.
"He felt badly about it. He felt very badly," Trump saidThursday after his second summit with Kim, adding they discussed Warmbier’s death privately. "He tells me that he didn't know about it and I will take him at his word."
The president added that it wouldn’t have been in Kim’s interest for Warmbier to be irreparably harmed, saying, "I don't think that the top leadership knew about it. I don't believe that [Kim] would have allowed that to happen."
'After 5 years of drought we finally have a good year'
israelnationalnews
Uri Schor, spokesman for the Water Authority, welcomed the heavy rains Israel has experienced this week. "After five years of drought we have finally had a relatively good year, one that is even slightly above the average in terms of the water sources. If we take the Kinneret, for example, we see that it has risen six centimeters as a result of the rainfall from yesterday until this morning. We're exactly eight and a half centimeters above the lower red line."
"Since the beginning of the season we've seen a rise of 72.5 centimeters. This is a fantastic rise. The average winter rise of the Kinneret level is about 65 centimeters, so we are above average.
Schor told Arutz Sheva that the winter is not yet over and that a further rise in the Kinneret is expected. "The rain now in the north and also over the weekend will add many more centimeters to the Kinneret, which is good.
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