WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The ‘Taiwan Card’ Is a Busted Flush, Beijing Believes By David P. Goldman

Posted By on December 5th, 2016

President-elect Trump’s brief telephone call with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen drew a stronger reaction from the American mainstream media than it did from Beijing. The official China Daily entitled its editorial yesterday “No need to over-interpret Tsai-Trump phone call,” writing:

For Trump, it exposed nothing but his and his transition team’s inexperience in dealing with foreign affairs. If he could make the unusual action due to lack of proper understanding of Sino-US relations and cross-Straits ties he will have to recognize the significance of prudently and appropriately addressing these sensitive issues after being inaugurated.

Is Beijing just trying to put a good face on a troubling situation? Probably not, according to some perspicacious China analysts. The military balance in the region has shifted towards China’s favor since 1996, when Bill Clinton sent two aircraft carriers into the Taiwan Straits in response to Chinese missile tests. Beijing thinks the “Taiwan card” is a busted flush.

First, China probably has two different ways to sink an American carrier, through quiet diesel-electric submarines, and with carrier-killer surface-to-ship missiles. There is some controversy about China’s ability to hit a moving target in open ocean, but if China cannot do so now, it likely will develop the capacity soon.

Second, China will acquire Russia’s S-400 air defense system, with a 400-kilometer range that can sweep the skies over Taiwan. The Russian system can handle 100 targets simultaneously. The system probably will not be in place until 2018, but China is patient. Within a few years China probably will have the capacity to control both the surface and the air around Taiwan.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

VA Scandal: 4 Quit After OK Veteran Dies With Maggots in Wound by Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on December 5th, 2016

Four staff at the Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs resigned after maggots were found in the wound of a Vietnam veteran who died in October. Another VA staff member insisted that the maggots did not cause his death.

Raymie Parker identified the man as his father, 73-year-old Owen Reese Peterson. “During the 21 days I was there … I pled with the medical staff, the senior medical staff, to increase his meds so his bandages could be changed,” Parker told the Tulsa World. “I was met with a stonewall for much of that time.”

Executive Director Myles Deering explained the maggots were discovered while Peterson was alive, but did not cause his death. Rather, the man came into the VA hospital with an infection and died “as a result of the sepsis,” complications from that infection. Nevertheless, Deering must have hated saying the words, “He did not succumb as a result of the parasites.”

That there were any parasites involved is a disgrace, and the staff members who resigned must have known it.

Shane Faulkner, a spokesman for the agency, announced that a physician’s assistant and three nurses “chose to resign before the termination process began.” This followed an investigation once the agency reported the incident to the Oklahoma Department of Health. The VA also submitted a report to the district attorney to see if charges are warranted.

The willing resignation of VA staff is surprising, since “there’s not an ability to fire individuals who aren’t doing their job,” said Cody McGregor, a retired Army sniper and national outreach director at Concerned Veterans for America (CVA). Sharon Helman, former head of the VA in Phoenix, AZ, was one of the first people fired after the VA reform law passed in 2014, but she has been able to sue for her job back, and seems to have won a legal victory.

The case of Owen Reese Peterson underscores the need for real accountability at the VA.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Real Illegal Settlements by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on December 5th, 2016

While construction in Jewish settlements of the West Bank and neighborhoods of Jerusalem has long been carried out within the frame of the law and in accordance with proper licenses issued by the relevant authorities, the Palestinian construction is illegal in every respect.

The Palestinian goal is to create irreversible facts on the ground. The sheer enormity of the project raises the question: Who has been funding these massive cities-within-cities? And why? There is good reason to believe that the PLO and some Arabs and Muslims, and especially the European Union, are behind the Palestinian initiative.

The Jewish outpost of Amona, home to 42 families, is currently the subject of fiery controversy both in Israel and in the international arena. Apparently, settlements are only a “major obstacle to peace” when they are constructed by Jews.

The EU and some Islamic governments and organizations are paying for the construction of illegal Palestinian settlements, while demanding that Israel halt building new homes for Jewish families in Jerusalem neighborhoods or existing settlements in the West Bank.

The hypocrisy and raw malice of the EU and the rest of the international community toward the issue of Israeli settlements is blindingly transparent. Yet we are also witnessing the hypocrisy of many in the Western mainstream media, who see with their own eyes the Palestinian settlements rising on every side of Jerusalem, but choose to report only about Jewish building.

As the international community continues to slam Israel for construction in Jewish settlement communities, Palestinians are quietly engaging in massive construction of entire neighborhoods in many parts of the West Bank and Jerusalem. In addition to overlooking the Palestinian building project, the West has clearly been neglecting a crucial difference between the two efforts: while the construction in the Jewish settlements of the West Bank and neighborhoods of Jerusalem has long been carried out within the frame of the law and in accordance with proper licenses issued by the relevant authorities, the Palestinian construction is illegal in every respect.

In this behind-the-scenes endeavor, which does not meet even the most minimum standards required by engineers, architects and housing planners, the Palestinian goal is to create irreversible facts on the ground.

A quick tour of the areas surrounding Jerusalem from the north, east and south easily exposes the colossal construction that is taking place there. In most cases, these high-rise buildings are slapped together without licenses or any adequate planning or safety concerns.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran to Trump: Death to America Will Live On by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on December 5th, 2016

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made it clear that Trump’s presidency causes “no difference” to Iran-US relationships. He called the Americans’ election “a spectacle for exposing their crimes and debacles.”

“Thank God, we are prepared to confront any possible incident.” — Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

From the perspective of Iranian moderates, reformists and hardliners, the US is not a superpower anymore; but a weak actor in the Middle East and on the global stage.

Iranian leaders also made it clear that Tehran will continue supporting Hezbollah and other groups that have been designated as terrorist groups by the US Department of State. These groups pursue anti-American and anti-Israeli agendas.

Ideologically speaking, Iran’s hardliners, primarily Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and senior officials of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) who enjoy the final say in Iran’s domestic and foreign policies, have made it clear that Iran will not change the core pillars of its religious and revolutionary establishment: Anti-Americanism and hatred towards the “Great Satan” and the “Little Satan”, Israel.

Supporters of Ayatollah Khamenei and the IRGC enthusiastically shouted “Death to America” in response to a recent speech that Khamenei gave, applauding the 1979 hostage-taking and takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran.

Iran’s major state newspapers carried anti-American headlines this week, quoting the Supreme Leader. In his latest public speech to thousands of people, which was televised via Iran’s state TV, Khamenei made it clear that Trump’s presidency will cause “no difference” to Iran-US relationships. Khamenei pointed out that, “We have no judgment on this election because America is the same America”. In his speech, Khamenei attacked President-elect Donald Trump and the American people. The Ayatollah called the US election “a spectacle for exposing their crimes and debacles.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Right not to Bow Down to China By Daniel John Sobieski TUiu1B Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

Posted By on December 5th, 2016

There once was a time when China was afraid of offending us, but liberal pundits, politicians, and those human equivalents of the dodo bird, career diplomats, are aghast that President-elect Donald Trump took a congratulatory phone call from the democratically elected president of Taiwan Tsai-Ing-wen. Trump acted to “buck diplomatic protocol”, the chattering class harrumphed, and offended China, whose leader, President Xi JinPing, President Obama bowed to in 2014 at the APEC Economic Leader’s meeting in China.

Trump’s hyperventilating critics forget that to accept a call from a foreign leader is not conducting foreign policy. President-elect Trump knows full well the President Obama will be both head of state and commander-in-chief for the next six weeks or so. He also knows that American foreign policy needs to be conducted in Washington, D.C., not Beijing. He knows that our ludicrous “one China” policy has not stopped China from becoming a strategic nuclear threat whose expansionist designs have caused Beijing to lay claim to Japanese islands in the East China Sea and to build its own islands in the South China Sea which China considers a Chinese lake. As Trump protested in a tweet,

We sell Taiwan billions of dollars in defensive weaponry and he can’t take a phone call? So we are arming one alleged part of China to defend itself against the rest of China? Hello?

Communist China’s designs on Taiwan are no different than Nazi Germany’s designs on the Sudetenland prior to World War II. China is rapidly building the naval, air, and missile forces needed to conquer Taiwan and eventually, challenge the U.S. for military, economic, and political domination of the Western Pacific. Why exactly do we have a foreign policy that treats Taiwan as the West treated Czechoslovakia in 1938? When China is ready to attack Taiwan, it will.

Former U.N. Ambassador and Secretary of State candidate John Bolton told Fox and Friends that Trump would be right if he decided to shake up the status quo and treat democratic Taiwan with respect and friendship:

Bolton responded to the news of a phone call between Trump and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, which caused China to submit a complaint with the U.S. through its foreign ministry.

“Honestly, I think we should shake the relationship up. For the past several years China has made aggressive… belligerent claims in the South China Sea,” he said on Fox & Friends.

Beijing views Taiwan as a rebel province of mainland China, and the United States has recognized China’s claim since President Jimmy Carter officially acknowledged the “one China” policy in 1979.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Kerry Knocks Israel on Settlements Secretary of State doesn’t rule out U.S. support for action at U.N. on Arab-Israeli conflict; Netanyahu plans to meet with Trump on Iran nuclear deal By Felicia Schwartz

Posted By on December 5th, 2016

WASHINGTON—Secretary of State John Kerry sharply criticized Israel’s continued construction on contested Palestinian territory and didn’t rule out administration support for action at the United Nations on the Arab-Israeli conflict before President-elect Donald Trump takes power.

Mr. Kerry, speaking at a Middle East forum in Washington, said Sunday that the Obama administration hasn’t made any decisions about actions at the United Nations Security Council, but that other countries are likely to introduce resolutions as they lose patience with the current situation, which Mr. Kerry said was “getting worse.”

“There’s been no decision made about any kind of step that may or may not be taken in that regard,” Mr. Kerry said, when asked if the U.S. would lay down new parameters for the conflict, possibly at the United Nations Security Council. “There are, however, other people out there, who because of this building frustration… [are] talking about bringing resolutions to the United Nations. If it’s a biased and unfair resolution calculated to delegitimize Israel, we’ll oppose it.”

‘If it’s a biased and unfair resolution calculated to delegitimize Israel, we’ll oppose it.’
—Secretary of State John Kerry, on a potential action at the United Nations Security Council

Mr. Kerry said Israel was “heading to a place of danger” as settlement building has narrowed the prospects for peace and a two-state solution. At the same forum earlier Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told attendees via satellite link that settlements weren’t an obstacle to peace. Mr. Kerry pushed back, saying, “Let’s not kid ourselves here.”

“I’m not here to say that settlements are the reason for the conflict.” he said. “But I also cannot accept the notion that they’re not a barrier to peace.”

The White House had earlier this year been exploring options to revive a Middle East peace push.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Rupert Hammond-Chambers :America’s Dangerous Drift on Taiwan Trump seems to understand that U.S. neglect of Taiwan has emboldened China.

Posted By on December 5th, 2016

President-elect Trump’s phone conversation Friday with Taiwan’s democratically elected leader is the kind of engagement that any new U.S. president should undertake as he prepares to take office. In talking with President Tsai Ing-wen, Mr. Trump demonstrated why his presidency has the potential to return badly needed credibility to a host of global challenges where the Obama Doctrine has left vacuums, rising tensions and conflict.

America’s relationship with Taiwan is a good example of the drift in U.S. interests. The Obama administration likes to declare that we are experiencing the “best relationship ever.” But this assessment is predicated on an expectation that neither the U.S. nor Taiwan has ambitions for their relationship. Both have been far too preoccupied with their ties with China—a focus that has emboldened Beijing and fostered instability in the Taiwan Strait.

As a result, a dangerous vacuum has opened up in the U.S. relationship with Taiwan. The administration has all but halted arms sales to Taiwan even though such sales are guaranteed under U.S. law and have long been a mainstay of U.S. security relations with the island. So, too, the trade relationship has faltered. Our trade ties are better suited to those between the U.S. and Malta than with our ninth-largest trading partner. Trade ties drift aimlessly in the absence of broader goals such as investment and tax agreements or a bilateral free-trade accord.

Meanwhile, the Chinese have been pressing their objective: the unification and occupation of Taiwan through peaceful or military means. Beijing pursues economic integration and its smothering embrace, while its military modernization focuses on invading and occupying Taiwan. It points nearly 2,000 cruise and ballistic missiles at Taiwan’s people.

The U.S. has failed to meet this challenge, and it is into this vacuum that Ms. Tsai was elected in January. China’s response to her election has been to pressure Taiwan’s remaining allies, cut off direct communications with Taipei, and damage commerce by restricting mainland Chinese tourism to the island. It has also undermined Taiwan’s efforts to broaden its engagement with the global health community and to integrate better into the world’s global aerospace and transportation organizations. CONTINUE AT SITE

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Trump SWAT Team for Regulation A Reagan idea to block and repeal Obama’s rules binge.

Posted By on December 5th, 2016

You can tell the regulation beat has reached critical political mass when even the folks at Politico are pushing it on the home page. “Obama’s agencies push flurry of ‘midnight’ actions,” the political website reported recently, adding that Republicans are preparing to block or repeal as many as of these and previous rules as possible.

This effort is going to be a political brawl—not least due to resistance from the bureaucracies in the executive branch and perhaps even some political appointees who go native quickly. If Donald Trump wants the deregulation effort to succeed—and it’s essential to promoting faster growth—he and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus could take a lesson from the Reagan era and appoint a political SWAT team to direct it from the White House.

The temptation will be to leave it to Congress or the office of regulatory affairs at the White House budget office. But the director of that office might not be confirmed for months, even as appointees in the departments find excuses not to move against Obama rules. Those appointees may want to keep their new political power or they might fear the media backlash, which will often be fierce.

The Reagan White House met this challenge by setting up a special task force to run regulatory policy for the first months of 1981. It was led by then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, with a big assist from his general counsel Boyden Gray. Key staff included such policy legends as Jim Miller, who later ran the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and White House budget office; Frank Blake, who would go on to run Home Depot; Jim Tozzi, who would become the ranking career official in the White House regulatory shop; Tim Muris, who ran the FTC under George W. Bush; and Jeffrey Eisenach, now with the American Enterprise Institute.

It’s not too much to say this task force ran much of the government for six months as the new appointees found their sea legs. In one famous February 1981 incident, the general counsels of agencies were called to the White House to review executive order 12291 on regulation. The counsels began to cross out huge chunks until they got to the end and discovered that Ronald Reagan had already signed it. The task force was so successful that Democrats John Dingell and Al Gore hauled some of them up to Capitol Hill for a public scolding.

Democrats also made the director of regulatory affairs subject to Senate confirmation for the first time, so they could haze nominees about opposing new rules. It’s no accident that Reagan was the only recent President to restrain the regulatory state. Neither Bush Administration had any comparable success, and George W. Bush set new records for pages in the Federal Register until President Obama took the crown.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump’s Taiwan Play The phone call with the island’s president looks like a calculated move. see note please

Posted By on December 5th, 2016

CALCULATED OR NOT THE ONE CHINA POLICY CRAVENLY INSTATED BY KISSINGER/NIXON IS RIDICULOUS. TAIWAN HAS GIVEN UP ANY CLAIM TO THE MAINLAND AND IS A THRIVING DEMOCRACY…..I EARNESTLY HOPE THAT TRUMP WILL GIVE TAIWN THE RECOGNITION IT DESERVES…..RSK

Americans had to get used to Donald Trump breaking all the rules of presidential campaigning, and it looks like the world will have to adjust to a President Trump who will also violate diplomatic convention. One early lesson is not to overreact to every break with State Department protocol as if it’s the start of World War III.

The U.S. media had their 19th nervous breakdown Friday after the Trump transition said the President-elect had taken a congratulatory call from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen. Mr. Trump also later tweeted that he had spoken to “the President of Taiwan.” Doesn’t he understand this simply isn’t done? No American President or President-elect has talked to a Taiwanese President since 1979, and this violation of tradition is being portrayed as a careless, bone-headed provocation to Beijing.

Well, maybe it was calculated—and perhaps even useful. Trump Asia adviser Peter Navarro has advocated cabinet-level visits to Taiwan and an end to the U.S. bow to Beijing’s “one China” policy, which insists that Taiwan is part of China and shouldn’t be treated as an independent state. Perhaps that goes too far, but it is past time for the U.S. to recalibrate its Taiwan policy.

Ned Price, spokesman at the Obama National Security Council, suggested that Mr. Trump made a mistake, saying the U.S. remains “firmly committed to our ‘one China’ policy based on the three Joint Communiqués and the Taiwan Relations Act.” But the communiqués from the 1970s and ’80s do not say that the U.S. supports Beijing’s view of “one China,” only that the U.S. acknowledges that both China and Taiwan agree on that principle. That is a crucial distinction.

Taiwan and the world have also changed since those communiqués. Taiwan has become a prosperous and democratic polity integrated into the world economy. Most Taiwanese now want to maintain their de facto independence. They resent Beijing’s bullying to force their leaders to move toward reunification. CONTINUE AT SITE

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Is Amona built on “private Palestinian land”? by Moshe Dann

Posted By on December 5th, 2016

An ongoing debate is raging within the government about how to insure the survival of the Jewish community of Amona. Located near the much larger community of Ofra, Amona is fighting a High Court order stating that it must be destroyed because it was built on “private Palestinian land.” In order to implement a just and sustainable solution, it would be wise to examine how Amona — which was established more than two decades ago with government backing on empty land — came to be considered “illegal.”

After the Six Day War in 1967, Israel placed the newly won areas of Judea, Samaria (the so-called West Bank), and eastern Jerusalem under military rule, hoping to trade all or most of them for peace treaties. With a few exceptions, Jews were not permitted to live in Judea and Samaria and its status seemed to be temporary and unclear. Government policy was ambiguous, at best. In order to provide a structure and authority that would allow normal life to continue, the government turned to the IDF which established the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), and the Minhal Ezrachi (Civil Administration).

Based on legal advisors, the IDF commander ruled that the IDF would follow Jordanian law completely and exclusively, except where it conflicted with IDF rules and regulations. This was an administrative decision, not law, and exceptions were made, for example to apply Israeli law concerning VAT. But regarding land ownership, the Minhal followed Jordanian law. This became important several decades later as Jews built new communities and as Arab Palestinians and NGOs Peace Now, Yesh Din and Rabbis for Human Rights, appealed to the High Court claiming that Jews had built their homes and property on “privately owned land.”

Their claims are based on massive land distributions that were carried out by Jordan during the early 1960’s in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). These arbitrary land grants were unconditional and, according to Mandate and Jordanian law, when recorded in the land registry, gave the recipients title and permanent possession. Most of the land was never used and no taxes were paid, which are required by Ottoman law, and therefore should have nullified any claims of ownership.