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DAMASCUS, SYRIA – Former President Jimmy Carter Thursday reiterated that there can be no peace between Israel and the Palestinians without involving the militant group Hamas. His comments came shortly before he met with the militant group's Syrian-based leader, Khaled Mashaal. Carter met with Mashaal twice under the Bush administration, angering some in the U.S. government who said he was legitimizing a group the U.S. considers a terrorist organization. But this was his first meeting under the Obama administration, which has launched a fresh quest for peace in the Middle East, and came as Obama's Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, was...

BARACK OBAMA’S special envoy to the Middle East is to visit Syria this week after the president said “the moment is now” to push for peace. Former senator George Mitchell’s expected visit follows a fortnight’s intensive diplomatic wooing of Syria in the hope of splintering its alliance with Iran. There has been no official confirmation of Mitchell’s trip, but one State Department official said he was “95% sure” that Syria was on the itinerary: “The president is committed to comprehensive peace. The initiative follows Obama’s ground-breaking speech last week in Cairo, which impressed his audience but left the Arab world...

(IsraelNN.com) Two U.S. diplomats who were sent to Syria to see if direct diplomacy with the blacklisted country could get talks off the ground have returned with their answer: No. Still, special envoy George Mitchell will travel to Syria for another try very soon.

THE Obama administration is increasingly fixed on resolving the "Arab-Is raeli dispute," seeing it as the key to peace and stability in the Middle East. This is bad news for Israel - and for America. In its purest form, this theory holds that, once Israel and its neighbors come to terms, all other regional conflicts can be duly resolved: Iran's nuclear-weapons program, fanatical anti-Western terrorism, Islam's Sunni-Shiite schism, Arab-Persian ethnic tensions. Some advocates believe substantively that the overwhelming bulk of other Middle Eastern grievances, wholly or partly, stem from Israel's founding and continued existence. Others see it in process terms...

Barack Obama's Middle East envoy George Mitchell arrived in Israel for his second visit. Whereas Mitchell's last visit - which took place in the last days of the electoral campaign -- was touted as a "listening tour," Mitchell made clear that during his current stay, he intends to begin calling shots. His first order of business, we are told, is to pressure the outgoing government to destroy the so-called outpost communities in Judea and Samaria and expel the hundreds of Israeli families who live in them. To defend this call for intra-Israeli instability and violence, Mitchell notes that Prime Minister...

US President Barack Obama faced a host of personnel problems this week, as two top appointees bowed out because of unpaid income taxes and another pick distressed some in the Jewish community. Slideshow: Pictures of the week Samantha Power, a Harvard University genocide expert and former Obama campaign adviser, has been appointed to the the National Security Council's multilateral institutions office. She has been criticized in the past for making statements critical of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians. In one clip making the rounds courtesy of YouTube, Power accuses Israel of "major human rights abuses," though she distinguishes...

George Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader tapped by the Obama administration as its special envoy for the Middle East, was chairman of the international law and lobbying firm DLA Piper until the end of 2008. Mitchell, a well known rainmaker for the firm, now holds the title of chairman emeritus of DLA's global board. The firm has considerable international reach: It boasts a fast-growing Middle East practice with some big government and private clients, plus offices in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Kuwait, Oman, and Saudi Arabia. Partner William Minor said that Mitchell intends to resign from the firm in several weeks...

As you can tell by my earlier posts on the subject, I am fan of George Mitchell. He has mistakenly compared the Mid East conflict to that of Northern Ireland, and he has shown an inability to understand right and wrong when evaluating the Mid East conflict. Disagreement is one thing, but never had I thought former Senator Mitchel to be an absolute idiot, well not until today. You see, today, Mitchell met with Palestinian Authority Chairman and "Moderate Terrorist" Mahmoud Abbas and when he came out he says that Israel should open the borders with Gaza, because open borders...

George Mitchell is about to discover that you cannot make peace with those who seek your destruction. (Tel Aviv, Israel) With the recent appointment of former U.S. Senator George Mitchell as the Obama administration's special Middle East envoy, discussion will inevitably turn to Mitchell's personal involvement in the Belfast "Good Friday" Agreement of April 1998 that involved the decommissioning of Irish Republican Army (IRA) weapons, and the commitment of the IRA to pursue its political goal of reunification of Northern Ireland with Ireland by peaceful means. In 2003 and later in December 2008, Mitchell shared his vision for the Middle...

You may remember that near the end of the Gaza War, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livini rushed to the United States to sign an agreement with with Condoleezza Rice. That agreement committed the US to making sure that Hamas did not re-arm. As part of that agreement Egypt promised to stop the smuggling through tunnels on their border with Gaza. Despite all of those promises some of the tunnels are up and running and more are being "opened" every day. If the US is really serious about peace in the Middle East the smuggling tunnels must remain closed. And if...

Israel's air force fired around 20 missiles at targets in Gaza City on Saturday, causing heavy damage, a Reuters witness said. The IDF has confirmed the report. (Hanan Greenberg and Reuters)

George Mitchell wants us to believe that the peace process in Northern Ireland holds insights for other areas of conflict in the world. In June-July 1972, top IRA operatives were flown to London in order to meet senior British politicians, leading the IRA to believe its violent campaign had forced the British to the negotiating table. After the talks failed, on 21 July 1972, the IRA exploded 22 bombs in Belfast in the space of 75 minutes - killing 9 and injuring another 130 on what became known as "Bloody Friday." By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Republic...

In the words of the great Bette Davis "Fasten Your seat belts...." The appointment of George Mitchell as Mideast envoy is just the first official step in President Obama's promise to screw Israel as best as he can. Mitchell doesn't get it on so many levels. First there is Mitchell's comparison of the Middle East to the British Conflict with the terrorists in Northern Ireland. There is so much more that Mitchell doesn't get. Mitchell does not believe that morality or right and wrong should comes into to play in negotiations. Or to put it this way, if George Mitchell...

Here is video of President Barack Obama appearing at the State Department this afternoon alongside Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to lay out the principles that will guide America's Foreign Policy during his administration. He also announced Richard Holbrooke and former Sen. George Mitchell to serve as Special Envoys - Mitchell as Envoy for Middle East Peace, and Holbrooke as Envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan. . . . . . (watch video)

Obama has asked former Sen. George Mitchell (D-ME) to be an envoy to the Middle East situation. The situation has changed significantly since 2001 when the report was issued. First, consider the Jonathan Pollard issue. Clinton promised and reneged to commute his sentence. President Bush just left office without commuting the sentence. Israel will demand his release. Hamas is a much larger player, and Iran is a much more open player. Syria will play the role of The Two-faced Diplomat – Mitchell by day, Iran by night. The PA cannot control Hamas, and Hamas will not accept any change of...

NEW YORK — George Mitchell's report on drugs in baseball will finger MVPs and All-Stars and call for beefed-up testing by an outside agency to clean up the game, The Associated Press learned Wednesday. The report will not address amphetamines, which long have been recognized as part of the baseball drug culture, two sources with knowledge of the findings told the AP. But it will include names of 60 to 80 players linked to performance-enhancing substances and plenty more information that exposes "deep problems" in a drug culture that plagues the sport, one of the sources said.

Doctor Feels It Can Be Cured (AP) NEW YORK -- Former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, who's leading the investigation into steroid use by baseball players, has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, according to his law firm. "The cancer is small, low grade, and localized, and can be effectively treated and cured," Mitchell's doctor Harvey Klein said in a statement released by the firm. "The prognosis is very good." Mitchell, 73, said the diagnosis and treatment will not affect his baseball probe. "The investigation, which is in its final phases, will be completed in the coming months and neither the...

WASHINGTON - North Korea’s threatening spate of missile launches — including an unsuccessful try with an advanced version of its Taepodong 2 Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile that is capable of hitting the United States — has sparked a cacophony of talk from leaders and foreign policy experts around the world. As they debate and discuss various options at the United Nations and in capitals around the globe, the rudimentary U.S. missile defense system is poised to shoot down anything launched from North Korea that threatens the American homeland or the critical interests of our regional allies like Japan and Australia. Noticeably...

...A recent study by... found that over 20 years the Joint Committee on Taxation] has always underestimated the revenues from tax hikes, while overestimating the revenues that are lost when taxes are cut.... The Joint Tax calculations of the "cost" of death tax repeal have been particularly wild and inexplicable. In 2001, JCT famously estimated that repeal would cost the Treasury $600 billion over 10 years -- twice as much as the death tax actually raises. The Joint Tax whiz kids built into their computer models the behavioral effects of lawyers working the interplay between the death and gift tax...

The former Senate Majority Leader, now a noted peacemaker, may be tapped to help lead the party's strategy on a new high court nominee The battle on Capitol Hill over filling one, possibly two, U.S. Supreme Court vacancies is heating up fast. Faced with a high-powered lineup of GOP tacticians and advisers, Senate Democrats are now working to assemble their own team. One key person under consideration to lead the effort, several Democratic sources tell BusinessWeek Online, is former Democratic Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine, chairman of the board at Walt Disney (DIS ) and chairman of law...