The conventional wisdom holds that Russia is not leaving Crimea; that Putin wants more; and that Putin has outmaneuvered Obama on the world stage. The conventional wisdom is about half-right. Russia Is Not Leaving Crimea Since the Russian incursion into Crimea, Vladimir Putin's popularity within Russia has soared. CNN has reported that he enjoys an

View Larger Map   If Viktor Yanukovych, the Russian-friendly President of Ukraine and his dentist son had been satisfied with stealing millions of dollars from the Ukrainian people instead of billions, the US-Russian confrontation over Ukraine and its autonomous province of Crimea would probably never have happened. Such, however, was not the case. The Yanukovych

If you are capable of believing National Football League teams wrongfully discriminate against weak people who run slow and weigh less than 150 lbs and that they wrongfully favor strong people who run fast and weigh over 250 lbs, then you are capable of believing FOX and thinking there actually is an IRS scandal. Let's

Around the time of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, I attended an event at a synagogue in Washington DC. The speaker was Abba Eban … former Foreign Minister of Israel, Cambridge-educated, erudite, probably the best public spokesman the state of Israel has ever had. He was there to make the case for Israel on

Working mostly in secret over a period of many months, Barack Obama and John Kerry have succeeded in putting together a deal on Iran’s nuclear program acceptable to our European allies plus China and Russia, whose closest border is less than 200 miles from Iran. The deal was accomplished with minimal hand-holding of Israeli Prime

Senator Amy Klobuchar grew up in Plymouth, MN, just down the road from Garrison Keillor's mythical lake Wobegon, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." Plymouth is the epicenter of the heartland … halfway between Portland, OR and Presque Isle, ME. Head west

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's annual pilgrimage to the UN constituted a three-part cluster of bombs. First, his Deputy Defense Minister, Danny Danon, published an Op-Ed in the New York Times, calling on Israeli to annul the Oslo Accords. Second, Bibi instructed his delegation to absent themselves from the hall during the speech by Iranian

The 1962 Mets or the 1927 Yankees? It depends on who you ask and what day you ask it. If you ask me, right now, the morning after the President's speech to the country, I think Obama stopped the bleeding in the public perception of his leadership, and is more than halfway towards reclaiming the

Whenever a really big issue consumes Washington … Syria is such an issue … a certain number of people seem to succumb to the need to say something really stupid. In their desperation to be involved, to be relevant, they melt down. Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School gave an interview to an online

Ruthie Blum writes a column for Sheldon Adelson's online daily, Israel Hayom. Ms. Blum sees the world as divided into two groups: those who love Israel enough; and those who don't. To qualify for the first group, the bar is high. It requires a level of obsequiousness towards all things Israel to which many are