Isaiah 54: 15-17—“If anyone fiercely assails you it will not be from Me. Whoever assails you will fall because of you. Behold, I Myself have created the smith who blows the fire of coals and brings out a weapon for its work; and I have created the destroyer to ruin. No weapon that is formed against you will prosper; and every tongue that accuses you in judgment you will condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of Yahweh, and their vindication is from Me,” declares Yahweh.

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“On your walls, O Jerusalem, I have appointed watchmen; all day and all night they will never keep silent.  You who remind Yahweh, take no rest for yourselves; and give Him no rest until He establishes and makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth.” (Isaiah 62: 6-7)

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“For here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” (Thomas Jefferson)

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Isaiah 54: 15-17—“If anyone fiercely assails you it will not be from Me.  Whoever assails you will fall because of you.  Behold, I Myself have created the smith who blows the fire of coals and brings out a weapon for its work; and I have created the destroyer to ruin.  No weapon that is formed against you will prosper; and every tongue that accuses you in judgment you will condemn.  This is the heritage of the servants of Yahweh, and their vindication is from Me,” declares Yahweh.

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“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” (Hosea 4: 6)

News Items of Interest:

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Israeli Uncensored News

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INSS Memorandum

This is a good source document.  You can review it and save it on your computer for future reference.

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The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs

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CHANUKAH

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“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” (Thomas Jefferson)

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The left-leaning legal organization has issued a list of alleged “hate groups” that includes mainstream Christian ministries because of their opposition to the sin of homosexuality. Among the 13 groups are several prominent national groups — American Family Association, Coral Ridge Ministries, Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, Liberty Counsel, Traditional Values Coalition, and the National Organization for Marriage.

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This weekend, Egyptians will go to the polls—and few of their votes will be counted. The country’s elections are, after all, a pseudo-democratic façade carefully choreographed to appease the regime’s Western benefactors. For that reason, Egyptian electoral outcomes are mostly expressions of the regime’s political interests at a particular moment in time. And this year, the regime’s interests have changed dramatically.

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A chanting sign-waving crowd, about 50-strong, worked its way through the Mit Nama neighborhood, singing the praises of Dr. Mohammed El-Beltagui — the district’s incumbent parliamentarian and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s oldest and best-known Islamist group.

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Egyptians voted Sunday in parliamentary elections marred by sporadic violence and clouded by allegations of fraud.

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A certain Arab country recently held parliamentary elections. The vote was reasonably free and fair. Turnout was 67 percent, and the opposition won a near majority of the seats — 45 percent to be exact. Sounds like a model democracy. Yet, rather than suggesting a bold, if unlikely, democratic experiment, Saturday’s elections in Bahrain instead reflected a new and troubling trend in the Arab world: the free but unfair — and rather meaningless — election.

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The outlawed but partly tolerated Brotherhood held a fifth of seats in the outgoing lower house. The Islamists, who run as independents, are the main rivals of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP) which has swept elections for decades.

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He spent part of his childhood with his father in the arid plains of central Oklahoma, where classmates made fun of him for being a geek. He spent another part with his mother in a small, remote corner of southwest Wales, where classmates made fun of him for being gay.

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Yet if there’s a salient difference between the Pentagon Papers and the WikiLeaks disclosures, it’s that the Nixon administration went to court to prevent publication, whereas it was only yesterday that President Obama ordered a review of security procedures for handling confidential documents and his Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into the leaks. Couldn’t the administration have acted sooner, particularly since, as Mr. Kerry has belatedly noticed, lives have been put at risk?

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John Boehner knows that today’s White House get- together with Barack Obama is a distraction.  Yes, the Democratic president will exchange much-photographed smiles and handshakes with the Republican House speaker-to-be. Yes, each side will talk about how the American people want them to come together to find “common ground.” Mr. Boehner also knows, however, that the Beltway’s obsession with this kind of high-profile sit-down will only distract people from the real story in today’s Washington.

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Not so this Australian practitioner of electronic piracy. Mr. Assange feeds off the taste for high gossip. Doubtless, he sees himself as truth-teller at war with an American “empire” with a lot to hide. But he communicates brazenness and a love of the limelight that is of a piece with this time when all discretion and privacy are now things of the past.

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European Union finance ministers agreed late Sunday on more than just an €85 billion bailout for Ireland. They also turned the currency union into a de-facto debt union by choosing to turn May’s €750 billion rescue fund into a permanent feature of the euro zone. What’s more, they promised that no sovereign creditor would face a haircut on their debt holdings until 2013, and that’s at the very earliest.

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When congressional leaders of both parties meet at the White House today, all of us will have an opportunity to show the American people that we got the message of the elections earlier this month.

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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was wicked mad over WikiLeaks. “This disclosure is not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests,” she declared Monday. “It is an attack on the international community.”

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With more than 80 freshmen House Republicans ready to demolish the Capitol but unable to find its washrooms, influence will shift to leaders (think Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Tom Price) who possess both Tea Party credibility and governing experience. Their mix of boldness and discretion will determine much about the outcome of the conservative uprising of 2010. They have a serious, intricate plan – in which much can go wrong.

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I am sure the Russian people will be shocked – shocked! – to discover that U.S. diplomats think the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, “plays Robin to Putin’s Batman.” Italians will be equally horrified to learn that their prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is considered “feckless, vain and ineffective as a modern European leader,” just as the French will be stunned to hear President Nicolas Sarkozy called “thin-skinned and authoritarian.” As for the Afghans, they will be appalled to read that their president, Hamid Karzai, has been described as “an extremely weak man who did not listen to facts.”

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As of Monday, fewer than 250 of a promised 251,287 confidential State Department messages had been made public. Perhaps somewhere in that enormous trove is evidence to the contrary, but what we’ve seen thus far shows that post-Cold War rumors of American global hegemony are vastly overstated. If ever there were a time when being a superpower meant never having to say you’re sorry, that time is long gone.

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Julian Assange’s reckless and arrogant publication onWikiLeaks of some 250,000 sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables violates U.S. law and should be punished – but it should also motivate government officials to more thoroughly examine the problem of leaks and what to do about them.

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Although North Korea’s attack last week on the island of Yeonpyeong was the first time since the Korean War that is has directed artillery fire on South Korean land, targeting civilians and homes, it follows a long pattern of calculated acts designed to compel South Korea and the United States to resort to crisis management; that is, to reward the North for little more than temporarily backing down. The response by Seoul and Washington this time should be to impose a palpable penalty on Pyongyang.

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Yes, these leaks are embarrassing to many diplomats who expected their reports and opinions would remain private. But they are also fascinating reading for Americans who usually witness diplomats in public, smiling, shaking hands and issuing bromides about “frank exchanges.”

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The WikiLeaks documents have multiple ramifications, but I will focus on one: the confirmation that the Obama “linkage” argument was pure bunk. Recall that the Obama team over and over again has made the argument that progress on the Palestinian conflict was essential to obtaining the help of the Arab states in confronting Iran’s nuclear threat. We know that this is simply and completely false.

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While sanctions have so far failed to put an end to the threat of the Iranian nuclear program, there is again increasing debate on how to approach the conflict over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The debate gathered some momentum following Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent article in The Atlantic, in which he discussed the prospect of a military campaign targeting Iran’s nuclear installations.

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Is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a closet Persian nationalist trying to de-Islamize Iran? Is he part of a plot to send the mullahs back to the mosques to make way for an Islamist military regime?  These are some of the questions raised in the Majlis, Iran’s ersatz parliament, by members who are trying to impeach the president. As astonishing as this might be for Western observers, Ahmadinejad is challenged by people who claim that he is not Muslim enough and that he harbors a hidden anti-clerical agenda to promote a mixture of messianism and chauvinism. His closest friend and aide, Esfandiar Rahim Masha’i, has even suggested that “within one year Ahmadinejad’s enemies would declare him to be an infidel.”

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Despite that, the Environmental Protection Agency recently decided that we aren’t consuming enough of it. Instead of mandating that 10 percent of gasoline sold at the pump be ethanol, as has been required for years, the EPA issued its so-called E15 rule, which raised to 15 percent the allowable blend of ethanol for cars and certain trucks built since 2007. In that, the EPA ignored studies pointing to the harmful effects that 50 percent increase will have on cars, including the agency’s own conclusion that it would damage the catalytic converters of tens of millions of cars now on the road.

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A couple of weeks ago, on the occasion of the annual hajj, in which 2.5 million Muslim pilgrims fulfill their obligation to travel to Mecca, prominent Muslim clerics from Asia, Africa, and Europe, along with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq denounced violence in the name of Islam and issued a manifesto, signed by all, declaring that “murder of innocents is never justified and violates the teachings of Islam.”

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But instead, Wikileaks’ release of the documents on Sunday has proved to be something of a public relations coup for Israel: on-the-record confirmation that its Arab neighbors are just as frightened as the Jewish state by a nuclear Iran. The cables confirmed previous anonymous reports that Israel has quiet partners in the region pushing the US to take bolder steps to stop what they consider an existential threat.

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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has positioned himself as a left-wing whistleblower whose life mission is to call the United States to task for the evil it has wreaked throughout the world. But after poring through the diplomatic cables revealed via the site yesterday, one might easily wonder if Assange isn’t instead a clandestine agent of Dick Cheney and Bibi Netanyahu; whether his muckraking website isn’t part of a Likudnik plot to provoke an attack on Iran; and if PFC Bradley Manning, who allegedly uploaded 250,000 classified documents to Wikileaks, is actually a Lee Harvey Oswald-like neocon patsy.

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By now, most people (with the exception of many psychotherapists) recognize that the self-esteem movement officially launched by California in 1986 has been at best silly and at worst injurious to society, despite whatever small benefit it may have had to some individuals.

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So far we’ve seen and heard nothing explode, except for a few soggy firecrackers, like rude noises in a church pew. A few editors, notably at the New York Times, are posing as heroes of the free world, but it’s only a pose. The leaker, Julian Assange, an Australian, is painted as James Bond, but he’s more like – in the apt description of one anonymous Internet blogger – “a little boy playing at being a mystery hero, and like so many of the childish left, he is utterly bewitched by his sense of self-importance.”

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The first batch of WikiLeaks documents undermined the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, violent conflicts started by the hated, warmongering Bush administration. The latest batch undermines American diplomacy, the soft art of international bargaining and persuasion as practiced by the highly anticipated, engagement-loving Obama administration.

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Since the procedural reforms initiated by Democrat George McGovern – that carried over into the Republican Party as well – primaries have determined the winner of the nominations in each party. Iowa and New Hampshire – the first caucus and the first primary in the nation – have tended to sort out the candidates for us. They narrowed down the field and left the rest of the nation with two or three alternatives in each party.

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In 2007, the Democrat-led Congress and White House enacted legislation raising the minimum wage law, in steps, from $5.15 an hour to $7.25. With some modification, the increases applied to our Pacific Ocean territories. Republicans and others opposed to the increases were labeled as hostile toward workers. According to most opinion polls taken in 2006, more than 80 percent of Americans favored Congress’ intention to raise the minimum wage. Most Americans see the minimum wage as a good thing, and without it, rapacious employers wouldn’t pay workers much of anything.

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The biggest battle in the lame duck session of Congress may well be over whether or not to extend the Bush administration’s tax cuts, which are scheduled to expire in January. The fact that this decision has been left until late in the eleventh hour, even though the expiration date has been known for years, tells us a lot about the utter irresponsibility of Congress.

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I’m with Louisiana Republican Governor Bobby Jindal, who told Human Events last week, “Make them part time; give them term limits. Don’t let them become lobbyists. When they have to live under the same rules and laws they pass for the rest of us, maybe you’d see some more common sense coming out of Washington.” Jindal, a former congressman, said once elected, too many lawmakers become entrenched in Washington and are transformed into the very people they campaigned against.

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Time for the daily diplo document dump, which should be a 5 p.m. staple for at least the next week. Most of you will go looking for the Times’s write-up but the Guardian’s is better in this case. Here’s what I meant yesterday when I said that, for an ostensibly anti-war organization, Wikileaks sure is cavalier about the sort of escalation between rivals that some of these documents might ignite. At a moment when U.S./ROK war games are going on in the Yellow Sea, with four South Koreans dead within the past week from North Korean shelling, how’s crazy Kim going to react upon learning that his chief benefactor might soon be ready to pull the plug on foreign aid and let North Korea disintegrate? Anyone excited to toss that particular match into the powder keg and see if anything pops?

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Could the Obama administration have stopped any or all of the three Wikileaks data dumps?   Former Bush aide Marc Thiessen argues that not only could the White House have disrupted Julian Assange’s operation, but that given the potential damage that a breach of diplomatic and military security could mean on this scale, Obama had a duty to do so.  The failure to act shows a weakness in Obama that increases the risk for the US, Thiessen argues in today’s Washington Post.

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The GOP has indicated that it will fight to reduce federal spending in the next budget cycle.  What about this budget cycle?  After all, Democrats put off creating a budget for FY2011 (which started on October 1) to avoid having to account for higher spending in the midterm elections.  Republicans could block attempts to pass an omnibus bill and give themselves an early grip on the purse strings by forcing Democrats to issue a continuing resolution instead of a full budget, which would put the GOP in charge of spending several months ahead of schedule.

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Barack Obama is only halfway through his term, but it’s not too early to ask: What is the biggest whopper he has told as president? So far, the hands-down winner is, “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people. If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your healthcare plan, you’ll be able to keep your healthcare plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”

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North Korea is not an easy issue. I’ve dealt with it since the early 1990s, beginning at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. I had few answers then, and I still have few today.

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As an American Muslim, I’ve come to recognize, sadly, that there is one common denominator defining those who’ve got their eyes trained on U.S. targets: MANY of them are Muslim—like the Somali-born teenager arrested Friday night for a reported plot to detonate a car bomb at a packed Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in downtown Portland, Oregon.

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For the millions of Americans who opposed the war in Iraq, including Barack Obama, Afghanistan was the good war—“The War We Need to Win,” as candidate Obama titled a key foreign-policy speech he gave in August 2007. Iraq, Obama said, was a sickeningly misguided gift to Osama bin Laden: “a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.” Iraq posed no threat to American national security; Afghanistan and Pakistan did. Obama vowed to wind down the war we didn’t need to win in order to ramp up the one we did. He was elected president for many reasons, but that pledge was among the most important.

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In a recent cover story entitled “Who Needs Marriage?” the news-weekly (itself on the verge of extinction) unveils Pew Research Center findings that today fewer American adults are married than ever before (about 50 percent compared to nearly 70 percent in 1960), only 46 percent of unmarried people would like to get married and almost 40 percent of American adults think marriage is obsolete.

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The Obama Administration’s propensity for overreach and for overplaying its hand is laying the groundwork for getting the American economy back on track. The resulting devastating Democratic defeats in November’s elections mean that all the Bush tax cuts of 2003 will be extended. Because 21 Democratic senators will be up for reelection in 2012 – and a number of them from red states such as Virginia, Florida and Nebraska–they will be very wary of doing anything that could hurt the economy. They know what happened to the Obama-style soak-the-rich initiative in Washington State, which would have imposed an income tax on only high-income earners and no one else: It went down by a margin of nearly 2-to-1. Republicans are also ready to begin prolonged attacks on the numerous damaging features of ObamaCare, which will spare untold grief for the economy–and our health.

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“I was recently told by a media person that if something happens in this city, I’m toast.”  So said Tom Potter, mayor of Portland, Oregon, on April 28, 2005 as he and the city council voted to bar Portland police from participating in one of the federal government’s key anti-terrorism initiatives, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. In Portland’s deep-blue precincts, there was intense opposition to the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror; residents worried the task force might violate state anti-discrimination laws by targeting Muslims for their religious and political views. So city leaders forbade police from taking part in it.

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Republican leaders need a lesson in economics 101 and the courage to tell the truth.

Republicans across the fruited plain seem to be oblivious to economic reality.  Take, for instance, the GM IPO just before Thanksgiving.  Senator Bob Corker (R-Tennessee) said, “If you’re a taxpayer in this country, you’ve got to be very happy.  It’s my hope that we’ll get most if not all of our money back over time.” (See Corker Says He’s `Vindicated’ by GM IPO for Pressing Demands on Automakers.)  Appearing on “Fox News Sunday” on November 21, 2010, Governor Rick Perry (R-Texas) fumbled a question about the IPO that was posed by Chris Wallace.  Wallace wanted to know if Perry was willing to admit that the GM bailout worked.  Perry should have said “No!” flat out, but instead he offered a lame and evasive response.

Fact is the GM bailout didn’t save one job, much less the auto industry.  It did little more than protect unionized autoworker jobs at the expense of non-union autoworkers who are paid a lower hourly wage and reward groups and individuals that supported candidate Obama in 2008.  The average union autoworker in the US makes $75 an hour – or more than $150,000 per year.  That’s $30 per hour more than nonunion autoworkers in the US plants of Honda and Toyota. (See Even with the recent changes, the average hourly wage at GM is still $75 per hour.)  Of course the auto unions are elated, but average taxpayers – people like you and me – should be outraged.

I’ve written about this before so I won’t go into it in detail here, but the GM bailout didn’t affect new car demand or sales in the US one iota.  Stated another way, the same number of new cars in the US would have been sold with or without GM.  That means the losers in the GM bailout were (1) the taxpayers who subsidized an inefficient auto company at the expense of efficient auto producers and (2) efficient auto producers who lost sales to an inefficient competitor solely because of federal government intervention.  That’s true regardless of how “good” the GM IPO was at the outset.  If GM continues to operate inefficiently, GM’s stock price will tank in time just as it has in the past, and the losers will be the buyers of GM stock.

Some of you may be thinking, But Toyota and Honda are Japanese firms.  That’s true in part because their home offices are in Japan.  But they hire US workers to make cars in the US just like GM; they buy parts made in the US just like GM; they pay taxes in the US just like GM; and their stock is owned by people all over the world including people in the US just like GM.  The major difference between GM and its Japanese competitors is that the Japanese car companies make better cars than GM for less money, and the beneficiaries are car buyers.  There is no silver lining to the GM bailout for the average US taxpayer.  Period!

It makes no sense for GOP officials who have been elected to high office to stumble around when they’re asked questions about the GM bailout or to praise the outcome which is a losing proposition for the average taxpayer.  Either they don’t know anything about economics, or they know and don’t care.  In either case, they are doing themselves and the country a disservice by not telling the American people what the GM bailout really means.  Republican leaders need a lesson in economics 101 and the courage to tell the truth, and somebody needs to remind them why they were elected.

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Take on The TimesTM

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Trolling, defined as the act of posting inflammatory, derogatory or provocative messages in public forums, is a problem as old as the Internet itself, although its roots go much farther back. Even in the fourth century B.C., Plato touched upon the subject of anonymity and morality in his parable of the ring of Gyges.

Take: This is a good piece – one to which I can relate.  I have 2 websites and a blog.  I get hundreds of messages and emails each day.  Most of them are spam.  The ones that aren’t spam are generally sincere, but there are the occasional trolls.  Thank Yahweh for the delete button.  I don’t have time to fool with them, and you’ll never see them posted on my sites.

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Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, had moved 37 times by the time he reached his 14th birthday. His mother didn’t enroll him in the local schools because, as Raffi Khatchadourian wrote in a New Yorker profile, she feared “that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority.”

Take: This is a good take on the WikiLeaks document dump.

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As Adam Liptak noted in The Times on Sunday, Justice Stevens had once thought the death penalty could be administered rationally and fairly but has come to the conclusion “that personnel changes on the court, coupled with ‘regrettable judicial activism,’ had created a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria.”

Take: An interesting piece.

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The Times and other news media have already reported much of this. What the cables add is sizzle: Defense Minister Ehud Barak of Israel warning that the world has just 6 to 18 months to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon; King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia imploring Washington to “cut off the head of the snake”; Bahrain’s king warning that letting Iran’s program proceed was “greater than the danger of stopping it.”

Take: The NYT editorial slant on the WikiLeaks document dump.  It’s worth reading.

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The Dream Act, the immigration bill that opens a path to legalization for undocumented young people who go to college or serve in the military, has a shot at passing the lame-duck Congress. Not a clear or sure shot, given the danger of Republican filibustering and Democratic wobbliness, but a shot.

Take: Given what we’ve been through over the past 2 years and the voters’ rejection of the mauling we took from this Congress, I think any substantive legislation can wait until the next Congress.  The Dream Act is substantive legislation.

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This is a story about a courageous policy in an unexpected place. In this place homeless shelters have vending machines selling clean syringes for injecting drugs.  Drug users are not prosecuted as long as they are in treatment programs.  Drug addicts are given clean needles and methadone maintenance therapy ─ available on a widespread basis even in prison.  These tactics have worked to reduce crime, lower H.I.V. rates among drug users and keep AIDS from spreading out into the general population.  The place is not Amsterdam.  It is Tehran.

Take: An interesting piece.  Thought provoking.

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Natural Healthcare Store, Live the Natural Life!TM

If you haven’t been there already, you should take the opportunity to visit Natural Healthcare Store.  Each product selected for sale at Natural Healthcare Store undergoes rigorous research to make sure that it is the highest quality at an affordable price.

Natural Healthcare Store carries skin care, hair care, and oral care products.  Be sure to check out the Dead Sea products imported from Israel and support the Israeli economy with your purchases.  Natural Healthcare Store carries makeup, deodorant, and detoxification products.  It also carries supplements, weight loss products, and loose leaf tea.  Rounding out its product mix, Natural Healthcare Store carries natural household cleaning products.

Katie and I believe strongly in healthy living, and we use the products.  We’re proud to say that our daughter Melanie owns the store.

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His Name is Yahweh:

There is a wealth of material available for free download on www.hisnameisyahweh.org including the book His Name is Yahweh.  His Name is Yahweh is also available at Amazon on Kindle for just $5.  If you haven’t read His Name is Yahweh, you should.  The importance of Yahweh’s Name is becoming more apparent with each passing day.

Available on Amazon Kindle and it can be downloaded at www.hisnameisyahweh.org

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