It is feared that the Obama administration's Middle East policies will lead to the US in essence losing the war in Iraq. Difficult to believe at this point, but that appears to be the situation that is now developing. A referendum, SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) postponed until January 2010 would require US forces to leave Iraq within 12 months. With the Iraqi people largely resenting and disapproving of US "occupation", it is expected that SOFA will fail; wreaking Obama's planned slow departure. Adding to insecurities in Iraq are Obama' comments; calling the Iraq war, one that "should never have been authorized and never been waged," and his calling the war in Afghanistan as being "fundamental to the defense of our people." Not exactly words that would give a leader of this troubled nation any sense of security. Because of this, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been placed in an untenable position of looking for an new ally.
Maliki has a tenuous hold on his government and has sought to strengthen ties with Iran. He has received a warm welcome there during a recent visit. Also, recall he had spent extended periods of time in Iran in exile during Saddam's rule. In addition, Iraq is attempting to control the Shiite- Sunni sectarian violence. Shiite militias are thought to be blamed for this situation; militias that are linked to certain parties in Iraq's government as well as with Iran itself. Not a good scenario. What with the Obama administration's apparent lack of serious interest in ensuring success in Iraq as well as Maliki attempting to hold onto power with whatever alliances that are available, the future of Iraq now hangs in the balance.
The Obama administration needs to remember that the US has a responsibility to the Iraqi people not to stand by while Maliki destroys any possibility of democracy in Iraq. He also owes it to our troops that fought and died for this cause.
It all seems reminiscent of Pakistan acquiring nuclear weapons during the Clinton administration. Let's hope that this administration won't be known throughout history as the one which did nothing to prevent Iran becoming a nuclear power and the one which did nothing to prevent an alliance to be made between Iran and Iraq.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty -Thomas Jefferson
Our Debt Retirement Disaster
There is a common but mistaken belief that the children and grandchildren of older Americans will be the ones who will be paying for today's massive government deficits. The truth is that the deficits are far too large to be repaid by taxpayers decades from now, but will be instead effectively repaid through the destruction of retiree savings and retirement investment portfolios in the coming years.
According to a 2011 study by USA Today, total unfunded obligations of the United States federal government are approximately $62 trillion.
When we take $62 trillion in total unfunded federal government obligations, and divide by 97 million above poverty line households, then the total comes to just shy of $640,000 per household, as shown in the graph. This means that each of us is obligated to pay the equivalent of four additional mortgages over the coming decades, over and above our real mortgage and all our other costs and obligations.
--By: Dan_Amerman
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article31080.html
Obama Turns MLK Memorial Dedication Into Campaign Speech
The dedication of the Martin Luther King memorial in Washington D.C. was hijacked by our dear leader today. Here's some of the unfortunate passages from our prez, using any occasion to advance himself and his agenda:
"We gather here at a moment of great challenge and great change. In the first decade of this new century, we have been tested by war and by tragedy; by an economic crisis and its aftermath that has left millions out of work, and poverty on the rise, and millions more just struggling to get by. Indeed, even before this crisis struck, we had endured a decade of rising inequality and stagnant wages.
First and foremost, let us remember that change has never been quick. Change has never been simple, or without controversy. Change depends on persistence. Change requires determination."
Also included; some economic justice drivel, tedious repetitious use of that code word "change," as well as the everpresent Bush blaming. This from a guy that has brought us the worst job record since the Depression, unprecedented unemployment, including Black unemployment at 40% for those under 30 years old. A disgrace...
Obama and the Peter Principe For 2012: Time to Retire, You Have Reached Your Level of Incompetence
* Son of far left-wing Political Activists. (Records available consist of confirmed 'Fraudulent Long Form Birth Certificate, and Purloined SSN.)
* Extensive history of association with left-wing extremists.
* Attended Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Law. (NO public records of any description available to confirm scholastic achievement.)
* Employed as ACORN Community Activist.
* In collaboration with William Ayers published two biographical books aggrandizing his personal image of himself.
* Zero public sector experience.
* Served in the Illinois Senate where his only noteworthy endeavor was his impassioned defense of the infanticide of children who had survived a blotched abortion.
* Elected to the US Senate after exposing his favored opponent for alleged marital indiscretions.
* Non-existent accomplishments as a US Senator, where he initiated his teleprompter campaign for the presidency after a brief few months in office.
* Zero Executive experience prior to his entry to the WH.
* Total absence of executive skills painfully evident in the 'Obama Jobs Depression' created by his destructive policies as president.
* Solyndra and LightSquared are but the 'Tip of the Corrupt Iceberg' unraveling in the Obama Administration.
* Repeatedly demonstrates a pro-Muslim bias.
* In an attempt to obfuscate his miserably failed record, pursuit of every divisive tactic imaginable to fracture his opposition.
* --- Barack Obama, undeniably, is the most incompetent American tragedy ever to pursue the presidency of the United States.
America's Road to Serfdom
Our "leadership" in America is sending us down the wrong road at an ever increasing clip. We are just steps away from the abyss, unless we act. It may be inevitable, or it may be too late. In either case, very soon, this could be us:
A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.
-- By H. W. Prentis, from 1943 speech Industrial Management in a Republic.
THE AMERICA ATTACKED SLIDESHOW - with Enya's "Only Time"
A very moving tribute to the heroic souls lost that day:
http://www.frugalsites.net/911/sept11.html
The polls aren't Obama’s only problem....
What's worse, this president has no inkling how to act presidential
-This White House's aversion to transparency undermines good government---
Barack Hussein Obama II was born on Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. For over two years, the president has resisted pressure to divulge this simple biographical information, which proves he’s a natural-born citizen. The belated White House release of the “long form” birth certificate answers one constitutional issue, but a host of other questions remains about the most mysterious president in modern history.
Mr. Obama’s hostility to openness drives the public’s curiosity about the most basic facts of his life. For example, he has refused to release his college and law-school transcripts, information recent presidential candidates have openly shown the public despite some embarrassment over decades-old bad grades. What is there for this president to hide? Maybe he flunked government classes or got busted for dope. He has openly discussed his past drug use, but is there more to it? Secrecy breeds speculation.
The list of hidden Obama documents includes medical records from his annual physical - which other presidents have made public - and first lady Michelle Obama’s law-firm records. Is she covering up a Hillary Clinton-type Whitewater case? Who knows. Perhaps the biggest secret in the Obama administration: What is the president’s golf handicap? He’s played 65 rounds in two years, so is his swing improving? Or, does he force staff aides in his usual foursome to let him take presidential mulligans?
Donald Trump takes full credit for the timing of Wednesday’s long-delayed Obama disclosure, as the real-estate mogul launched his own investigation into the presidential birth certificate. “Today I’m very proud of myself because I’ve accomplished something that no one else was able to accomplish,” Mr. Trump boasted after landing his Trump-branded helicopter in New Hampshire.”Now we can talk about oil; we can talk about gasoline prices; we can talk about China ripping off this country. … We can get onto issues.”
The fact that Mr. Obama did his own dirty laundry reminds that this president has no inkling how to act presidential. Standing at the podium over the seal of the presidency, he claimed, “We don’t have time for this silliness.” He then flew to Chicago with Michelle to tape the Oprah Winfrey show and attend three fundraisers. It’s not as if he didn’t have more important news to discuss such as the appointments of Leon E. Panetta as secretary of defense and Gen. David H. Petraeus as CIA director, Middle East turmoil or America’s multiple wars. Let a flack handle the tabloid fare.
The birth-certificate brouhaha reiterates an old political truth: It’s always the cover-up that causes the most trouble. Too bad Mr. Obama didn’t learn his lesson.
Obama More Loser than Leader
- Jerry McConnell --
Having been there himself on occasion, Oliver North, former U. S. Marine Corps Lt. Colonel, sees Barack Obama in “serious trouble.” The good colonel, never shy with comments on current events or, I might add, bravery in military or political actions, says in an online column for Townhall.com. “Laureates and Leaders” on March 25, 2011, “Nobel laureate Barack Obama, fresh from his Latin American spring break, is in serious trouble. Globalists and Utopians who once lauded his constant contrition now want POTUS to return his Peace Prize.”
North sees Washingtonians including all the classifications that are so abundant in that self-anointed “swamp” such as libertarians, progressives and conservatives as being outraged that our U. S. military forces were committed to combat in the Middle East without Congressional participation.
And the Colonel is correct, except for one who, though known for always picking the absolutely wrong time to speak up, and has been boisterously silent on Obama’s very possible illegal actions, and that is stone-headed, flap-jaws Joe Biden, Obama’s VEEP.
Joe “the Lip” Biden once declared loudly and clearly to Congress, the lamestream Media and just about anybody who would listen that any president who placed our military forces into a combat attack on a foreign country without Congressional authorization should face impeachment.
Newsmax.com in its Insider Report online on March 27, 2011 reported that “a videotape has surfaced from the 2007 campaign trail showing Biden threatening to impeach President George W. Bush if he attacked Iran without the approval of Congress.” Biden, according to Newsmax, communicated with legal scholars, the “best-known Constitutional scholars in America because for 17 years I was chairman of the Judiciary Committee.”
Joe, the inept, went on to say “And I want to make it clear, I want it on the record if he does, (attack without Congressional approval) as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and former chair of the Judiciary Committee, I will move to impeach him.”
Can’t you just see the angst at the White House right now, the picture of a 24-7 vigil with perhaps even some large labor union thugs keeping a ‘closer-than-skin’ physical monitor action on Joe Biden to prevent his granting any conference time to ANY news media, and in particular, not one from outside the mainstream media. Old Joe just might forget who the president is right now and make a similar statement to that in the preceding paragraph.
Getting back to Colonel North, he insists to the Insider Report that “The commander in chief’s approval ratings are dropping faster than a JDAM (procedure to convert unguided bombs into controlled directions.) And no matter what happens to Moammar Gadhafi, the turmoil in the Middle East is likely to get a whole lot worse before it gets better. For all of this, President Obama has nobody to blame but himself.
The President, according to North decided on his own that “what was needed to be done and finding allies to support it, a process employed by American leader for two centuries, Obama turned over to the United Nations and the Arab League to build an ‘international coalition’ to determine the outcome.”
But by the time the U. N. Security Council got a Resolution passed, North says that “our military forces were ready and French President Sarkozy was ready to lead; our president was not; and when the first airstrikes to be launched against targets were beginning in Libya, Sarkozy seized the moment and delivered his message that French aircraft was headed for action in Libya on March 17th..
Of course by the time this was taking place our fearless leader was thousands of miles away in Brazil where he bravely announced that the U. S. forces would contribute “unique capabilities” at the front end of the mission, as Lt. Col. North explains, in the form of intelligence, surveillance, signal jamming, and other logistical capabilities. And at that time he repeated his pledge that ‘we will not deploy any U.S. troops on the ground.’
The Newsmax Insider Report went on to state that this promise was “modified” on the night of March 21-22 when a Marine Expeditionary Unit launched an air-ground force from the USS Kearsarge to rescue an Air Force pilot who had bailed out of his damaged F-15.
Of course all of this activity in and out and around Libya was carried on while Obama was enjoying the South American sunshine in Brazil and other vistas. To paraphrase Lt. Col. North, Obama’s dithering and trying to avoid offending any of the nations in the Middle East while others such as Bahrain, Yemen, Syria get deeper involved in tumult and citizen unrest can not replace leadership.
And as North states, “This is no time for artful rhetoric and equivocation. Even a Nobel laureate must know that a leader who tries to placate everyone ends up pleasing no one.”
That’s why I said at the top, Obama is more loser than leader.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/35443
Obama's new anti-American Secretary of State
- Ben Shapiro -
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made it clear that she will not serve another term under President Obama. Who can blame her? She has become the face of a fecklessly reckless administration, a pathetic press relations lackey for the worst foreign affairs president in the history of the country.
To replace her, Obama is reportedly looking to tap another prominent female diplomat. Her name is Samantha Power, and she bills herself as a human rights activist. A Yale University graduate, Power became a leftist foreign policy journalist for various major news organizations. She then came back to the United States, where she attended Harvard Law School. Her book, "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," implicated the United States in virtually every major genocide of the last century. As a fellow radical Harvard Law School grad, she quickly penetrated Barack Obama's inner circle and became his senior foreign policy adviser during the 2008 campaign.
Now she is a member of the National Security Council, and according to media reports, successor to Hillary's throne. There's only one problem: Power is an anti-Israel fanatic and a myopic internationalist who couldn't care less about doing what is right for America.
Back in 2002, Power told a University of California at Berkeley interviewer that America should put military forces on the ground in Israel to prevent Israeli "human rights abuses." "What we need is a willingness to actually put something on the line in sort of helping the situation," she said.
Channeling the conspiratorial ruminations of anti-Semitic scholars the world over, Power added, "And putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import. It may more crucially mean sacrificing -- or investing, I think, more than sacrificing -- literally billions of dollars not in servicing Israel's, you know, military, but actually in investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing billions of dollars it would probably take also to support, I think, what will have to be a mammoth protection force."
Then Power went even further -- she stated that America should impose a solution on Israel. "You have to go in as if you're serious, you have to put something on the line," she explained.
Not only does this ignore the fact that the human rights abuses in the Israel-Palestinian conflict have been almost universally attributable to the Palestinian Arabs, it throws our liberal democratic ally under the bus. But then again, Power is used to throwing allies under the bus. She, along with her NSC colleague Ben Rhodes, reportedly told President Obama to undercut Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in order to please the Arab street.
Pleasing the Arab street seems to be first priority for Power. It was Power, along with Hillary Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who pushed President Obama to go to non-war in Libya. Her fingerprints cover this abortive military operation. The problem in Libya isn't that we have no exit strategy -- it's that we had no entrance strategy, no definable goals or reasons for being there. That is, no reason except for prevention of "genocide" as broadly defined by Power. Each time Obama cites the prevention of genocide as a rationale for intervention -- even as Muslims slaughter Christians wholesale in Darfur, Ivory Coast and Nigeria, and kill non-radicals in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan -- Samantha Power's ventriloquism shines through.
Samantha Power is, at best, an ignoramus when it comes to long-term American policy. At worst, she uses human rights rhetoric as a club to wield against America itself. She has argued in favor of the so-called "responsibility to protect," an internationalist fantasy requiring the United States to place its men and women in harm's way in order to stop anything bad going on anywhere in the world. Unless it's something bad being committed by radical Muslims, of course -- in that case, we must look for root causes in Western behavior.
Power is yet another theory-first, know-nothing liberal who places her vaguely cotton candy ideals above realistic appraisal of American interests. Unfortunately, her asinine ideas have disastrous real-world consequences. Consequences about which President Obama does not care, apparently. When it comes to the White House, idiocy loves company.
Hate and violence? It comes from the left
How much longer can the Democratic Party, the mainstream media and other leftists successfully maintain the ruse that intolerance, hatred and the propensity for violence mainly come from the right in this country? The lie is getting old.
The left's ideas continue to fail in the real world, and the majority of the people reject them, which is why their proponents so often disguise their true intentions. Partially because they can't prevail on a level playing field, they use whatever means they can to advance their agenda. One of those means is to pre-emptively strike their political opponents by falsely condemning them for behavior that they – leftists – actually engage in. It's called "projection."
Thus, intolerant, dogmatic leftists paint the right as reality-challenged and science-averse, when leftists are the ones who refuse to allow any contradictory evidence to penetrate their blinders about alleged catastrophic manmade global warming. They insist on continuing to deficit spend our nation into bankruptcy on the rationale that such reckless spending is the only recipe for stimulating an economy, despite dispositive historical and recent evidence proving otherwise.
Instead of joining Republicans in good faith to radically curb this spending, they accuse Republicans of "draconian" cuts. Fully aware that runaway entitlement spending is guaranteed to bankrupt us eventually – even if we do get a handle on discretionary expenditures – they refuse seriously to address entitlement reform. They choose to exploit the issue as a political weapon to scare seniors and other entitlement beneficiaries.
But one of the worst examples of leftists' projection is their depiction of conservatives as hateful, violent Neanderthals whose mere participation in the marketplace of ideas and the democratic process is inherently dangerous.
If I'm overstating the case, it's not by much. Consider that Bill Clinton, with no basis in reality, slandered and scapegoated conservative talk radio for the Oklahoma City bombing; that Obama's Department of Homeland Security issued a report suggesting that tea-party protesters are potential domestic terrorists; that the left uniformly rushed to judgment in indicting conservatives, including Sarah Palin, for the Arizona shootings and persisted with the charge even after it was abundantly clear that it was factually erroneous; and that the left continues to equate conservative talk with hate speech that will lead to violence and advocates selectively suppressing conservative speech through such insidious means as the Fairness Doctrine.
President Obama himself characterized small-town Midwesterners (read: conservatives) as bitter clingers who hold on to their guns, religion and antipathy for people who aren't like them. There was no mistaking his implication that mostly white Christians from small Midwestern towns who embrace the Second Amendment are angry, bitter, violent, backward and racist. It is surprising that he was careless enough, even in an unscripted moment, to reveal those dark thoughts, but it was hardly surprising that he in fact has those thoughts. For leftists habitually portray conservatives as angry, mean-spirited, close-minded and violent.
Most Americans realize just how wickedly inaccurate these smears are. Tea-party protesters, to be sure, are righteously indignant about the government's abuse of powers, its defiance of the rule of law, its trampling on the Constitution and, most of all, its reckless spending. But they are invariably peaceful, reasonable and restrained in their decorum. Unlike many leftist protesters, they even clean up after themselves. They are not racists and do not engage in violent behavior. The only racism or violence that surfaces at tea-party rallies is that fabricated or fomented by opportunistic leftists.
Those same leftists, meanwhile, often do engage in the very type of behavior they condemn. We are seeing that in spades in the Wisconsin union protests. Talk about hate – and violence!
Where are the leftist media to call out the thugs who assaulted Fox News national reporter Mike Tobin in Madison on Saturday night? Where are their reports about the alleged involvement of international socialists in similar protests, such as the rallies to "save the American dream"? Why didn't they report on the calls by union thugs for blood in the streets? And where are their fair and balanced reports that even after Gov. Scott Walker's proposed cuts, the Wisconsin state workers would do much better than private-sector and even federal workers?
The political left has increasingly shown its ugly face since Democrats won both political branches of the federal government in 2008, and they show no signs of pulling back, despite growing popular resistance from the American people. Their arrogance, extremism and brutality should be their undoing.- - David Limbaugh
Hate and violence? It comes from the left http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=269377#ixzz1FT9IUVk2
Obama is dismantling Bahrain, undermining Jordan, endangering Saudi Arabia...
...turning Iran into the leading regional power
By Ari Shavit-- The great Arab revolution holds great promise. Like any uprising against tyranny, it arouses solidarity, enthusiasm and hope. Despite the terrible massacre in Libya, there is no doubt - 2011 is the Middle East's 1989. It could even be the Middle East's 1789. The secular Arab despotism is collapsing before our eyes. The Arab giant is awakening from a coma. A decadent, degenerate, corrupt world order is crumbling. Millions of oppressed people are experiencing their first sense of liberation.
The new era that started in Tunisia last month is spreading rapidly to Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan and Bahrain. The Arab men and women of the 21st century have received an unprecedented proposal of freedom.
But the great Arab revolution also holds great danger. In the past decade, the United States dismantled Iraq, took Egypt apart and lost Turkey. In doing so, it broke down the Sunni buffer against Iran. These days Washington is dismantling Bahrain, undermining Jordan and endangering Saudi Arabia - thereby turning Iran into the leading regional power. Unless the American policy changes, the result could be a geostrategic disaster.
Under the heading of "democratization," the Shi'ite Muslims will take over a considerable part of the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Under the heading of "liberation," radicals will take over a considerable part of the Arab world. Peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and between Israel and Syria will become impossible. The Israeli-Egyptian and Israeli-Jordanian peace treaties will fade away. Islamic, neo-Nasserist and neo-Ottoman forces will mold the Middle East. The 2011 revolution could end up the same way as the 1789 French Revolution did - some Bonaparte will hijack it, take advantage of it and turn it into a long succession of bloody wars.
The change in the Arab world should have been sparked during another era - a decade or two ago. The change in the Arab world should have been generated in a different way - by reform, rather than revolution. But now it is too late, there is no turning back; the revolution is in full swing. This is why the Americans are right in wanting to be on the correct side of history. The Americans are right in siding with the masses who are demanding their rights. But the Americans are wrong to start with toppling their allies' regimes. The Americans are wrong in paving with their own hands the road to victory for the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran.
There is only one way out of this catch-22. Moving from defense to offense. Is Barack Obama the new George Bush? Is David Cameron the new Tony Blair? Is Hillary Clinton determined to implement the neoconservatives' ideological platform? Good luck to them. But don't do it only in the West's backyard. Don't do it only in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain. Do it alongside forceful humanitarian intervention in Libya as well. Do it in Iran, too.
Take the spirit of freedom blowing through Cairo's squares and bring it to Tehran's squares. Take the Google, Facebook and Twitter revolts and bring them to the ayatollahs. Topple Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's tyranny as you toppled Hosni Mubarak's. Fight the Shia's religious fascism and Muammar Gadhafi's madness with the same relentlessness you fought the pro-Western dictatorships.
Only in this way will you be able to implement the West's democratic values along with its strategic interests. Only in this way will you be able to empower freedom without sparking zealotry and igniting war.
For three weeks, most of the Western media told us that the Tahrir Square revolution was the faceless revolution of the Google generation. But on February 18, 2011, when a million Egyptians celebrated their liberation in Cairo's central square, it turned out that the revolution's face is that of the fanatic Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
If the Western powers don't come to their senses quickly, they could discover that the face of the new Middle East is al-Qaradawi; Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan; Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The face of those who are trying to turn the winds of change blowing across the Middle East into a violent, fanatic hurricane.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/u-s-should-direct-mideast-storm-of-change-toward-iran-1.345363
Egypt doesn't have a democratic culture; my country is doomed to either radicalism or repression
By Francis Fukuyama -
Recent events first in Tunisia and now in Egypt demonstrate that there is no Arab cultural exception to the broad desire for freedom around the world.
The act of self-immolation that set off these dramatic events was that of a Tunisian vegetable seller who had his cart repeatedly confiscated by the government and then was slapped and insulted by a policewoman when he went to complain. People want political rights because they want their governments to treat them with dignity, a wish that obviously reverberates throughout the Arab world.
The revolt does not seem to be driven by the poor, the marginalized or the religious, but by the middle-class—technologically savvy Tunisians and Egyptians who don't have opportunities for meaningful work or political participation. They want to join the rest of the world and not cut themselves off from it.
But why is the Arab world coming so late to a democracy party that Latin Americans, Eastern Europeans, Asians and Africans first started attending 20 years ago? Part of the answer is the deliberate strategy that authoritarian leaders like Hosni Mubarak have pursued—of gutting liberal opposition and permitting the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood to operate just enough to scare the United States and other Western backers.
This strategy worked on a series of American administrations that paid lip service to the need for democracy but were never willing to push their ally, for fear of empowering the Islamist opposition. Those chickens are now coming home to roost.
If Mr. Mubarak indeed leaves office and there is a clean break with his regime—meaning that longtime aides like Omar Suleiman, now the vice president, leave power too—then Egyptians' central task will be the unglamorous one of institution-building.
Democracy does not magically spring to life once the dictator is gone, or even after the first free and fair election has taken place. The color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgystan, as well as the U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, invariably disappointed their hopeful early backers by not producing effective democratic governance.
Facebook and Twitter are great at mobilizing flash mobs to bring down tyrants, but they are less useful in building political parties, forming coalitions, negotiating political programs or making officials honest.
At present, the best-organized forces in Egypt are the military and the Muslim Brotherhood. Egyptians who want a free and democratic future had better get busy organizing themselves if those groups are not to inherit the future.
Revolution in Egypt? And Could Jordan Be Next?
Is Egypt about to erupt in a full-blown revolution that could lead to the fall of President Hosni Mubarak’s regime? Might Jordan’s government be next?
One thing’s for certain: No one predicted the demonstrations in Egypt would grow so big so fast. Momentum for the protests is growing. A Facebook page promoting the democracy protests grew from 20,000 members on Wednesday to 80,000 on Thursday. The government then reportedly shut down Facebook, and disrupted Internet service in parts of the country. Twitter has been blocked. Police are beating protesters. As of Friday, more than 1,000 Egyptians have been arrested for demonstrating. Now an overnight curfew has been imposed and the Egyptian army has been deployed to urban centers.
One key factor fueling events: economics. Egyptians have been suffering double-digit inflation — averaging between 10 percent and 14 percent — and soaring food prices in recent years. Reports Reuters: “The Food and Agriculture Organization, a body of the United Nations, said on January 5 that food prices hit a ‘record high’ in December 2010, topping 2008 levels when riots shook Egypt as well as other countries.”
Most Egyptians are already dirt poor. Skyrocketing food prices are causing them to fear they may not be able to feed their families. This is creating a “perfect storm” of anger against the Mubarak regime — it’s corrupt, authoritarian, anti–human rights, and resistant to all positive economic and political reform. It’s been bad for the 30 years Mubarak has been in power, since the assassination of Pres. Anwar Sadat, the bold reformer. But now Egyptians are being pushed over the brink.
Calls for Mubarak to step down are growing. “Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog turned Egyptian reform campaigner, said he expected big demonstrations across Egypt on Friday, and that it was time for President Hosni Mubarak to go,” reported Reuters. “ElBaradei, 68, left Vienna, where he lives, for Cairo on Thursday to join a growing wave of protests against Mubarak inspired by Tunisia’s overthrow of their authoritarian president. He told Reuters he would not lead the street rallies, but that his role was ‘to manage the change politically.’” On Friday, however, ElBaradei was placed under house arrest in Egypt.
In my 2009 non-fiction book Inside The Revolution, I described Mubarak as a “classic Resister.” While nominally a Sunni Muslim, he’s not an Islamic radical. He’s not a revolutionary of any kind. To the contrary, he doesn’t want real change of any kind. He just wants to retain power, keep things stable, keep wealth and power for himself, and pass the keys to the kingdom on to his son Gamal. But such resistance to positive change is inflaming the “rank-and-file,” everyday Egyptians who feel increasingly desperate and see others in the region (Tunisians, Iraqis, and the people of southern Sudan) changing their governments and having more of a say in affairs of state. Egyptians are yearning for something better, and now they’ve taken to the streets in hopes of getting it.
Meanwhile, protests have mounted in recent days in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. There, too, economics is playing a critical role. Reports the AP: “The economy saw a record deficit of $2 billion this year, inflation rising … to 6.1 percent just last month and rampant unemployment and poverty — estimated at 12 and 25 percent respectively. ‘The government buys cars and spends lavishly on its parties and travel, while many Jordanians are jobless or can barely put food on their tables to feed their hungry children,’ said civil servant Mahmoud Thiabat, 31, a father of three who earns $395 a month.”
In Egypt, I don’t see the protests being driven initially or primarily by the Muslim Brotherhood (which started in Egypt in the 1920s) or by other radical Muslim groups, though the Islamists are certainly trying to take advantage. This would be a nightmare scenario we must pray never happens. We don’t want this to be another Iranian Revolution where an Islamic-radical madman takes over. If Mubarak falls, we want to see a group of pro-democracy, pro-free market, serious reformers come to power.
In Jordan, there is a very high risk that Islamic radicals would take over the regime. As I write in Inside The Revolution, “It is precisely because the Jordanians have made such progress [with positive political and economic reforms in the past two decades] that I am worried by the Radicals’ determination to launch a jihad there, seize the capital, and create a new anti-Israel, anti-Western base for Iran and al Qaeda. Therefore, I often pray for Jordan’s peace, prosperity and continued progress. I pray for King Abdullah’s health and safety, and I pray that the Lord would grant him the wisdom to know how best to move forward in such challenging times.”
On top of all this, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terror movement has just toppled the government in Lebanon. Iran’s leaders are convinced their so-called messiah known as the Twelfth Imam is coming to earth at any moment, and feverishly trying to build nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to help usher in a new messianic age and an Islamic caliphate.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration doesn’t get it. “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people,” said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Is she kidding? The Mubarak regime is not stable. It is an authoritarian, corrupt, anti–human rights, anti–free speech regime. The Egyptian people deserve better. They deserve freedom and democracy and free markets. Perhaps the greatest democracy in the world should be backing them.-- Joel C. Rosenberg
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/258304/revolution-egypt-and-could-jordan-be-next-joel-c-rosenberg
U.K. Obama Gets Another F For World Leadership
The remarkably dull State of the Union address was dominated by Obama’s heavily flawed vision for reviving the American economy, with plans that remain overwhelmingly mired in an outdated Big Government mentality, and which spectacularly failed to include a coherent strategy for eliminating America’s massive $14 trillion debt.
But the State of the Union is also traditionally a major opportunity to project US leadership on the world stage, and once again Obama has fallen short.
In 2010 I gave the president an F for the foreign policy section of his lacklustre first State of the Union address. His 2011 address was certainly no better. For the second year running, Obama has demonstrated that he is no world leader, and frankly has little interest at all in foreign policy.
The war in Afghanistan was barely a blip on the president’s teleprompter. With over 100,000 American troops on the ground fighting the Taliban in defence of the United States and the free world, one would have expected the president to have dedicated more than a miserly 132 words to the war effort and the stakes involved. There was no sense from the president of a plan for victory in Afghanistan, or the wider importance of the conflict within the context of a global war against Islamist terrorism, which he resolutely refuses to even identify.
Similarly, the Iranian nuclear crisis, arguably the biggest foreign policy challenge facing the Obama administration in 2011, was barely mentioned, meriting a single, rather pathetic line in the speech. Nor was there any declaration of support for dissidents in Iran, or a clear signal that the United States stands with those who are being brutally suppressed by the Islamist dictatorship.
Again in a major speech, Obama has shied away from taking a clear stand on human rights issues, in marked contrast to predecessors including George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. The plight of hundreds of millions living under tyranny, from Burma to Zimbabwe to North Korea, was ignored altogether. No US administration in living memory has paid less attention to the spread of liberty and freedom across the world than the Obama presidency, and this was glaringly apparent in Obama’s State of the Union address.
Nor was there any sense tonight of America as a great, unique superpower, that has made huge sacrifices in the defence of liberty across the world, from the beaches of Normandy to the battlefields of Afghanistan. For Obama, American exceptionalism has been a meaningless concept, rather than a central part of US strategic thinking.
In every respect, Obama’s leadership is the antithesis of Ronald Reagan’s. Reagan’s leadership was driven by a fundamental belief in American greatness on the world stage and a clear vision of a superpower standing up to tyranny and threats to US security. Instead of projecting US power and values abroad, Obama has been content to engage and appease America’s enemies, while paying scant attention to traditional allies. Tonight’s State of the Union address was simply the latest in a string of weak-kneed statements on foreign policy – statements that increasingly resemble the words of a European Union bureaucrat rather than the leader of the most powerful nation on earth.
-- Nile Gardiner
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100073506/state-of-the-union-2011-barack-obama-gets-another-f-as-a-world-leader/
Britain: Obama's New Best Friend is Sarkozy (and we don't care)
In their responses to the appalling murders in Tucson a week ago, both sides of the American political spectrum have shown how disgusting they are: nothing is too dreadful to be exploited for political advantage. Mr Obama is said to be enjoying a brief rehabilitation as a result of his response to the atrocity, but it won't last. He has mastered the self-inflicted wound, as was shown this week when he said that France is now America's best friend.
We needed no further proof of his loathing of Britain, which he has fostered because of his conviction that we oppressed his Kenyan forebears. But what a coincidence that he likes France more than us; for I
must say that I like France much more than I like America under him.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/simonheffer/8260195/Barack-Obamas-new-best-friend-is-Sarko-and-we-dont-care.html
“Toning Down The Rhetoric” Means Obeying Big Government
Despite the fact that Jared Lee Loughner was a psychotic loner with “left-wing” beliefs according to those who knew him, the establishment has hastily exploited yesterday’s tragic shooting in Tucson to demonize conservatives, libertarians and gun owners while ordering Americans to “tone down the rhetoric,” which is nothing more than a euphemism for stifling dissent and coercing people to roll over on Obamacare, bailouts and whatever big government is preparing to unleash next.
“The nation’s caustic political climate has become a suspect of sorts in the rampage that left six dead and a lawmaker critically injured in Arizona. Already, appeals are being heard to tone down the rhetoric,” reports the Associated Press, in doing so framing the debate and profiting from the actions of a deranged lunatic to launch a fresh assault on freedom of speech.
Make no bones about it – “tone down the rhetoric” means stifling dissent, it can have no other possible meaning. Because a lunatic decided to kill others in a bid to give his worthless life some meaning, Americans are being ordered to shut their mouths about Obamacare, endless bailouts, and the fact that their political representatives in Washington (with some notable exceptions) have ceased to represent their interests.
Arizona Sheriff Dupnik wasted no time in blaming the deaths on conservative talk radio and television presenters, despite the fact that Loughner was a “left-winger” who listed amongst his favorite books The Communist Manifesto.
“The vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business … This has not become the nice United States that most of us grew up in, he said.”
Dupnik then took a swipe at people opposing the growth of big government, wasting no time in blaming them for the tragedy.
“When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government,” he said. “The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on this country is getting to be outrageous and unfortunately Arizona has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”
“Toning down the rhetoric,” or becoming afraid to speak out against the government, will do nothing whatsoever to stop mentally ill people with no political affiliations committing crimes.
By exploiting tragedies to coerce Americans into “toning down the rhetoric,” the establishment hopes to suffocate criticism of the state, opposition to Obamacare (next week’s hearings on a repeal have already been cancelled), and allow the march of big government to continue unimpeded.
http://www.infowars.com/toning-down-the-rhetoric-means-obeying-big-government/
U.S. Health-Care Law Thrown Out by Judge -- How Obama Will Rule by Executive Order in 2011
A reporter asked the head of the Office of Public Engagement Valerie Jarrett what she would tell her close friend Obama about the American uprising against his aggressive liberalism. She replied, “To stay the course and to know that it will get better.” Those were not idle words of comfort; they were marching orders. The president told the New York Times he runs every decision by Jarrett, and she has admitted to Vogue magazine, “I kind of know what makes [both Obamas] who they are.” When she speaks, Obama listens.
The day after the election, as pundits forecast how he would compromise with the Republican House, Obama revealed that he planned to continue moving this country to the Left. As though he were invincibly ignorant to the will of the people, Obama told Democratic volunteers on a conference call, “We’ve just got to work harder to deliver the change the American people want.”
Last week, the Center for American Progress (CAP), which received significant seed money from George Soros, released a 47-page paper illustrating how he could do that: by ruling through executive order, as this author reported he would. Some of their proposals include blocking legislation passed by Congress, advancing the Cloward-Piven Strategy, and levying a new fee on foreign oil. Now, Soros is threatening to dry up the cash flow if Obama does not comply. Obama appears poised to continue shoving the big government liberalism Americans repudiated this month down their collective throat through executive action.
http://floydreports.com/the-agenda-revealed-how-obama-will-rule-by-executive-order-in-2011/
WHY NO SALUTE BY OBAMA AT MEDAL OF HONOR CEREMONY?
By Attorney Rees Lloyd.
A moment of national pride took place recently in the White House when an American soldier, Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta, received the Medal of Honor for bravery above and beyond the call of duty in combat in Afghanistan.
Sgt. Giunta became the first living American soldier to receive the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War. He is now one of only eighty-eight (88) living holders of the Medal of Honor.
As modest and self-effacing as he is brave, Sgt. Giunta brought further honor to himself by his humility in receiving the nation’s highest medal of valor. While he made no comment in the ceremony, Giunta said before the ceremony that he was “not at peace” with being “singled out” for the honor as so many other soldiers did so much. And after the ceremony, he said he would trade the honor in a moment if he could bring back those whose lives he attempted to save under enemy fire but was unable to save. He definitely showed that he was an American in whom America could be proud.
In contrast, there was another “first” at the ceremony involving the Commander-in-Chief, President Barack Hussein Obama, in whose conduct the nation cannot and should not take pride: As far as is known, Obama became the first President, the first Commander-in-Chief , not to salute the living recipient of the Medal of Honor after presenting the medal.
It is a tradition in the military for all military personnel, no matter how high their rank, including the Commander-in-Chief, to salute a holder of the Medal of Honor no matter how lowly his or her rank. If General David Petreas was to encounter Sgt. Giunta, it would be the General who would salute the enlisted man, as a sign of respect for that soldier’s extraordinary bravery, but also to show respect to all those who have received the Medal of Honor.
At all gatherings of veterans of the American Legion, or VFW, or other veterans organizations, if a Medal of Honor recipient enters the room, even a National Convention involving thousands, the proceedings stop to render military honor to that holder of the Medal of Honor. All veterans rise, come to attention, and salute. It is a matter of pride, of respect, of tradition.
And, as far as is known, it is tradition that every President who has had the honor to present the Medal of Honor to a living recipient, has shown humility, respect, and national pride in that recipient by stepping back and rendering a salute.
It was missing in action in the Obama presentation. He is apparently above all that; “like a God,” as an editor of Newsweek once wrote.
Instead of rendering the traditional salute, after fumbling as if all-thumbs in trying to affix the blue-ribboned Medal of Honor, Obama, equally awkwardly, tried to “hug” the Sergeant. Yes, a “hug” for the soldier who remained at attention with eyes front in military bearing.
But a “hug” is not a “salute,” even in the Age of Obama. While there may be some comedic value in Obama’s pathetic display, it was more emetic than comedic. I didn’t write about it at the time, so as not to distract from Sgt. Giunta’s receipt of the Medal of Honor. But days have past, and it needs to be said.
Why? Is it naught but petty carping of poor President Obama? I think not. He is the “Commander-in-Chief” who has in his power the lives of those who serve in defense of the country, which he himself did not deign to do. It is pointing out that this man, this professional politician, repeatedly evidences contempt for America, for America’s traditions, and for Americans who respect those traditions.
It is as if he loathes the nation he was so desperate to lead, and be loved by, Messiah-like. It is of a piece with his constant misquoting of the Declaration of Independence by leaving out the words “endowed by their Creator” when speaking of “unalienable rights.”
Perhaps more aptly: It is of a pathetic piece with Obama’s penchant for declining to abide by the U.S. Flag Code when the Flag passes to place his hand over his heart. Instead, he drapes his arms down and enfolds his hands at his crotch Michael Jackson-style. It is now mocked as Obama’s “crotch salute.” But it isn’t funny. It is contempt by Obama for the Flag, for America.
http://newswithviews.com/Lloyd/rees110.htm
Israel: "We are not for sale!"
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is playing with fire. And Israel is getting burned.
Over the past week, it has been widely reported that the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government are conducting secret negotiations regarding future Israeli land surrenders to the Palestinians in the Jordan Valley and Jerusalem. According to the reports, the Obama administration has presented Netanyahu with a plan whereby Israel will cede its rights to eastern Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley to the Palestinians and then lease the areas from the Palestinians for a limited period.
The reports on the length of the lease vary. Some claim that the White House is offering a seven year rental. Others claim the Americans are offering Israel to lease Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley for several decades before relinquishing them completely.
Netanyahu has reportedly accepted Obama's proposal in principle. The only remaining dispute is the length of the lease. Netanyahu is demanding that Israel be permitted to lease Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley from the Palestinians for somewhere between forty and ninety-nine years. The Americans foresee a shorter timeframe.
The fact that these discussions are taking place is deeply disturbing both for what they tell us about the Obama administration's view of Israel and for what they tell us about Netanyahu's wisdom and character.
By calling for Israel to cede the Jordan Valley to the Palestinians, US President Barack Obama is ignoring the most fundamental reality of the Middle East: Israel is besieged by its neighbors who seek its destruction. Without the Jordan Valley Israel would become the modern day equivalent of Czechoslovakia stripped of the Sudetenland in 1938. It would be utterly indefensible.
None of Israel's neighbors have accepted Israel's right to exist. The absolute majority of the Arabs in all of the states neighboring Israel wish to see Israel destroyed. By relinquishing the Jordan Valley Israel would effectively be committing national suicide by inviting an invasion it would be incapable of staving off.
This is the truth today and given the depth of Arab hatred of Jews, in all likelihood, it will remain the case in forty years and in 99 years. At any rate, Obama's suggestion that Israel entrust its future to an unsubstantiated hope that the Arab world will be fundamentally transformed is both ignorant and dangerous.
As for Netanyahu, he has no right to gamble away Israel's future. He has no right to commit future generations to strategic suicide on the basis of Obama's strategic myopia.
The very notion that Israel ought to ever surrender control over the Jordan Valley is egregious and unacceptable. And by proposing that Israel do so, the Obama administration is destroying the last vestiges of its credibility as an ally to the Jewish state. But that is not the worst aspect of the reported US proposal to Israel.
The worst aspect of the US proposal is that it calls for Israel to cede Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley to the Palestinians and then lease them from the Palestinians. Speaking to Army Radio, Science Minister Daniel Herschkowitz explained, "If we agree to the offer, we will be broadcasting to the Palestinians that the land is actually theirs."
Indeed, we would. But it is worse than that.
Jerusalem is the center of Jewish history, civilization, culture, and faith. It is the lifeblood of the Jewish state and the Jewish people. As for the Jordan Valley, Jerusalem cannot be defended without it. When the US asks Israel to lease the areas from the Palestinians, what the US is telling Israel is that it rejects the very notion of Jewish national rights to the State of Israel.
Perhaps one day Israel's leaders may be foolish enough to withdraw from Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley. Perhaps one day they will be stupid enough to withdraw from the Galilee and the Negev. But no Israeli leader has the right to cede the Jewish people's national rights to the land of Israel to anyone.
At heart, the US proposal entails an Israeli submission to the Palestinians. It requires Israel's leaders to say that the Palestinians have all the rights. We just have some minor security and political considerations. These considerations in turn are of limited duration and once they are settled, we will be out of everybody's way. The Palestinians will be free to enjoy all of their rights without the troublesome Jews around bothering them.
NETANYAHU KNOWS full well that Israel cannot survive without the Jordan Valley. He also knows that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people and that we are the rightful owners of this land. So what explains his actions?
In acting as he is, Netanyahu is clearly trying to avert yet another crisis with the Obama administration. No doubt he believes that the Palestinians will save the day again by refusing to make a deal with Israel. Just as the Palestinians refuse to accept Israel's right to exist, just as they refuse to give up on their demand that Israel destroy itself by accepting millions of foreign born Arabs as full citizens in the framework of a "peace" agreement; and just as they refuse to accept any limitations on the sovereignty of a future Palestinian state, so Netanyahu believes, they will refuse to lease the Jordan Valley and Jerusalem to Israel for 40 or 99 years.
Netanyahu may be right to think this. The Palestinians may reject the deal. But he is taking an enormous risk.
http://www.carolineglick.com/
What Obama Could Learn About Leadership From Chile's President Pinera
By Martin Sieff - What a man is this President Sebastian Pinera of Chile! He believes in God and is not afraid to say so. He doesn't care about being ridiculed by the American Civil Liberties Union or its Chilean equivalent: He orders church bells to be rung to celebrate the amazing, truly miraculous rescue of 33 miners trapped underground for more than two months in his country's San Jose mine.
Pinera doesn't give endlessly long speeches that are packed with so many weightless, meaningless clichés that they rise out of sight and out of memory as soon as the worthless, empty words are uttered. When Sebastian Pinera simply says, “We are not the same Chile we were 69 days ago,” he brings tears to the eyes of millions of people far beyond the borders of his own admirable country.
In other words, Sebastian Pinera is not Barack Obama. Pinera is a real leader for the 21st century. He is a real man.
President Pinera did not sit back passively when the miners were trapped. He did not show his so-called, metrosexual, 21st century cool head and so-called “emotional balance” by showing no passion. He felt it and he showed it.
Pinera put his presidency on the line by committing himself publicly to make sure those miners were rescued come what may. How Rahm Emanuel must have laughed.
But did we get any leadership like that when BP (Yes – that’s BRITISH Petroleum, or maybe we should start calling them RUSSIAN Petroleum (RP) since they're investing so heavily in Siberia now) was choking the Gulf of Mexico with an unstoppable deep sea oil leak? The president of the United States you’ll recall, did nothing, absolutely nothing, for months except pout his mouth and grit his teeth – his usual substitute for any effective action on anything.
Obama didn't call in the best experts personally from around the world. He didn't put the vast resources of the United States government or assemble the unmatchable expertise of the U.S. oil industry, the best in the world, on the job. He just sat back passively and let RP -- sorry, BP – make things worse.
Barack Obama and his shameless acolytes like economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, The Washington Post's Richard Cohen and Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, have redefined democratic leadership
as pious, whining, passive, dignified ineptitude. The only time Obama expresses any passion at all is when he’s whimpering about how all those big bad conservative talk show commentators are being so horrible to him.
The Chilean people in their democratically-expressed wisdom picked a brave and magnificent leader as their president. We got an empty suit who makes Jimmy Carter look like Rambo. Can we swap?
- Martin Sieff is the author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East.”
Keep America Safe's Debra Burlingame's Response to Obama's remarks about the Ground Zero mosque
This morning, Debra Burlingame, Keep America Safe Board Member and Co-founder of 9/11 Families for a Safe & Strong America, released the following statement in response to President Obama's remarks about the Ground Zero mosque.
"Barack Obama has abandoned America at the place where America's heart was broken nine years ago, and where her true values were on display for all to see. Since that dark day, Americans have been asked to bear the burden of defending those values, again and again and again. Now this president declares that the victims of 9/11 and their families must bear another burden. We must stand silent at the last place in America where 9/11 is still remembered with reverence or risk being called religious bigots.
"Muslims have worshipped in New York without incident both before and after the attacks of 9/11. This controversy is not about religious freedom. 9/11 was more than a 'deeply traumatic event,' it was an act of war. Building a 15-story mosque at Ground Zero is a deliberately provocative act that will precipitate more bloodshed in the name of Allah. Those who continue to target and kill American civilians and U.S. troops will see it as a symbol of their historic progress at the site of their most bloody victory. Demolishing a building that was damaged by wreckage from one of the hijacked planes in order to build a mosque and Islamic Center will further energize those who regard it as a ratification of their violent and divinely ordered mission: the spread of shariah law and its subjugation of all free people, including secular Muslims who come to this country fleeing that medieval ideology, which destroys lives and crushes the human spirit.
"We are stunned by the president's willingness to disregard what Americans should be proud of: our enduring generosity to others on 9/11--a day when human decency triumphed over human depravity. On that day, when 3,000 of our fellow human beings were killed in a barbaric act of raw religious intolerance unlike any this country had ever seen, Americans did not turn outward with hatred or violence, we turned to each other, armed with nothing more than American flags and countless acts of kindness. In a breathtakingly inappropriate setting, the president has chosen to declare our memories of 9/11 obsolete and the sanctity of Ground Zero finished. No one who has lived this history and felt the sting of our country's loss that day can truly believe that putting our families through more wrenching heartache can be an act of peace.
"We will honor the memory of our loved ones. We will protect our children, whose lives will never be the same. We will not stand silent."
-Debra Burlingame,
Board Member,
Keep America Safe
We Muslims know the Ground Zero mosque is meant to be a deliberate provocation
By Raheel Raza and Tarek Fatah - -
Last week, a journalist who writes for the North Country Times, a small newspaper in Southern California, sent us an e-mail titled "Help." He couldn't understand why an Islamic Centre in an area where Adam Gadahn, Osama bin Laden's American spokesman came from, and that was home to three of the 911 terrorists, was looking to expand.
The man has a very valid point, which leads to the ongoing debate about building a Mosque at Ground Zero in New York. When we try to understand the reasoning behind building a mosque at the epicentre of the worst-ever attack on the U.S., we wonder why its proponents don't build a monument to those who died in the attack?
New York currently boasts at least 30 mosques so it's not as if there is pressing need to find space for worshippers. The fact we Muslims know the idea behind the Ground Zero mosque is meant to be a deliberate provocation to thumb our noses at the infidel. The proposal has been made in bad faith and in Islamic parlance, such an act is referred to as "Fitna," meaning "mischief-making" that is clearly forbidden in the Koran.
The Koran commands Muslims to, "Be considerate when you debate with the People of the Book" -- i.e., Jews and Christians. Building an exclusive place of worship for Muslims at the place where Muslims killed thousands of New Yorkers is not being considerate or sensitive, it is undoubtedly an act of "fitna"
So what gives Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf of the "Cordoba Initiative" and his cohorts the misplaced idea that they will increase tolerance for Muslims by brazenly displaying their own intolerance in this case?
Do they not understand that building a mosque at Ground Zero is equivalent to permitting a Serbian Orthodox church near the killing fields of Srebrenica where 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered?
There are many questions that we would like to ask. Questions about where the funding is coming from? If this mosque is being funded by Saudi sources, then it is an even bigger slap in the face of Americans, as nine of the jihadis in the Twin Tower calamity were Saudis.
If Rauf is serious about building bridges, then he could have dedicated space in this so-called community centre to a church and synagogue, but he did not. We passed on this message to him through a mutual Saudi friend, but received no answer. He could have proposed a memorial to the 9/11 dead with a denouncement of the doctrine of armed jihad, but he chose not to.
It's a repugnant thought that $100 million would be brought into the United States rather than be directed at dying and needy Muslims in Darfur or Pakistan.
Let's not forget that a mosque is an exclusive place of worship for Muslims and not an inviting community centre. Most Americans are wary of mosques due to the hard core rhetoric that is used in pulpits. And rightly so. As Muslims we are dismayed that our co-religionists have such little consideration for their fellow citizens and wish to rub salt in their wounds and pretend they are applying a balm to sooth the pain.
The Koran implores Muslims to speak the truth, even if it hurts the one who utters the truth. Today we speak the truth, knowing very well Muslims have forgotten this crucial injunction from Allah.
If this mosque does get built, it will forever be a lightning rod for those who have little room for Muslims or Islam in the U.S. We simply cannot understand why on Earth the traditional leadership of America's Muslims would not realize their folly and back out in an act of goodwill.
As for those teary-eyed, bleeding-heart liberals such as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and much of the media, who are blind to the Islamist agenda in North America, we understand their goodwill.
Unfortunately for us, their stand is based on ignorance and guilt, and they will never in their lives have to face the tyranny of Islamism that targets, kills and maims Muslims worldwide, and is using liberalism itself to destroy liberal secular democratic societies from within.
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Mischief+Manhattan/3370303/story.html#ixzz0w2GxxQDP
Justice Department obstructs military voting rights; advises felons how to regain voting privileges
Obama Justice Department outrages never cease. The politically charged gang led by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is more interested in helping felons vote than in helping the military to vote. Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican, has put a legislative hold on the already troubled nomination of James M. Cole to be deputy attorney general until the attorney general ensures full protection for voting rights of our military (and associated civilian personnel) stationed abroad. The senator is right to raise a ruckus.
Mr. Cornyn co-authored a 2009 law mandating that states mail absentee ballots to military voters at least 45 days before the election. Yet, as former Justice Department lawyer Eric Eversole first reported in The Washington Times last week, the department seems to be encouraging states to apply for waivers so they won't have to follow that law. More than 17,000 Americans serving overseas were denied the vote in 2008 - but, presumably because military personnel are thought to lean conservative, the liberal Obama administration is in no hurry to correct the situation.
The Justice Department is so unenthusiastic about military voting that its website still lists the old requirement for a shorter 30-day military voting window, rather than the current law mandating 45 days. On the other hand, the Justice Department has no legislative mandate whatsoever to involve itself with helping felons to vote, but its website devotes a large section - 2,314 words - to advising felons how to regain voting privileges.
As confirmed by The Washington Times last week, Justice Department official Rebecca Wertz told a Feb. 1 conference of the National Association of Secretaries of State that the new law's requirements are somehow open to interpretation. On July 28, an attendee at that conference - heretofore uninterviewed - told The Washington Times that Ms. Wertz's message was "totally undermining" the law. The earlier reports actually underplayed the effect of Ms. Wertz's comments. "It was even more pronounced at the meeting," said the source. "She undermined [the law] right in front of everybody. When I heard what she was saying, I thought: 'You've got to be kidding!' ... It was a clear reversal of roles for Justice to no longer be enforcing the law."
After looking at the minutes of that conference, Mr. Cornyn responded forcefully. His office confirmed that he did place the hold on Mr. Cole because of the military voting issue. His July 26 letter to Mr. Holder does not actually mention his hold, but its tone was strong stuff.
"The statute does not create any discretion for the Executive Branch to decide whether or not to enforce its legal requirements," the senator wrote. Ms. Wertz's comments "fly in the face of the clear statutory language, undermine the provisions in question and jeopardize the voting rights of our men and women in uniform."
The senator laid out a series of four steps he wants Mr. Holder to take to ensure that states respect the 45-day deadline, including a demand that the Justice Department provide a state-by-state accounting of compliance efforts. The hold on Mr. Cole, reportedly a personal friend of Mr. Holder, is sure to grab the attorney general's attention. Our troops deserve his respect.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jul/28/holder-puts-felons-over-soldiers/
Squandering lives in Afghanistan to save the faces of politicians
By Gerald Warner.....
The thrashing around of military and political leaders in the quagmire of Afghanistan is an increasingly desperate exhibition of impotence. Yet, through the contradictions and incoherence, a familiar pattern is emerging. The latest symptom is the remarks of the Army chief General Sir David Richards, advocating talks with the Taliban: “If you look at any counter-insurgency campaign throughout history there’s always a point at which you start to negotiate with each other…”
Not quite every counter-insurgency campaign: the IRA, EOKA, Mau-Mau and the IRA again – yes. Wherever we were on a losing wicket we were reduced to jaw-jaw as a prelude to capitulation. But when we saw off the Communists in Malaya we were unconcerned about conference tables. The call for negotiations is an implicit admission that we have lost the war in Afghanistan. The whole country and the dogs in the street know it. So do the brass and the politicians, but the rhetoric of delusion must be maintained.
General Richards kept up the pretence, saying: “But at the same time you’ve got to continue the work we’re doing on the military, governance and development perspectives to make sure they don’t think we’re giving up.” Of course they don’t think we’re giving up – they know we are. Barack Obama told them, when he announced US troop withdrawals would begin in July 2011. In Toronto, David Cameron has just said: “We can’t be there for another five years, having been there for nine years already.”
Do they think the Taliban have no access to the media? The Taliban know they have won: it is just a matter of waiting, killing as many infidel soldiers as possible in the interim. They have been here before. In the days when the Taliban were known as the heroic Mujahideen, including in their ranks an audacious jihadist named Osama bin Laden, they accounted for almost 470,000 Soviet troops, though a significant proportion of those died from disease rather than bullets. Britain has so far lost 308 killed and a larger number wounded and sometimes mutilated.
Why should we enlarge that death toll by continuing “the work we’re doing on the military, governance and development perspectives”? That is coded language for throwing more Western taxpayers’ money after the £2bn already embezzled by Afghan officials. When we eventually withdraw, our retreat will be seen as the naked defeat it is, whether we go now or in five years’ time.
What are these “patrols” in Helmand during which so many British troops are killed? Why pursue this macabre game of sending our men out into a wilderness to be shot and bombed, with just a sporting chance of returning unscathed? What is the purpose, other than providing target practice for the Taliban? Now the predictable demand is for talks with the “moderate” Taliban. Presumably that means those whom the departed General Stanley McChrystal characterised as financially rather than ideologically motivated. If so, all they will do is demand money, for no return.
What would be the worth of any guarantee given by a Taliban commander or warlord? They will always do exactly as they please, in the established pattern of Afghan treachery. Hamid Karzai, the corrupt president, has given up on the West and is making overtures to the Taliban. They are not responding because they do not need him. When the allied troops depart, he and his cronies will be toast, like the Communist regime after the Red Army left Afghanistan. The country will be ruled by the Taliban and the warlords.
Then the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban, now united under Mullah Omar, the Commander of the Faithful, will turn the heat on Islamabad, advised and abetted by sympathisers in Pakistan’s intelligence agency… The whole exercise is just another gem out of Tony Blair’s glittering legacy.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100045239/britain-is-squandering-lives-in-afghanistan-to-save-the-faces-of-politicians/
Demonizing Israel and the Surrender of the West
One of the world's oldest stories is playing out before our eyes: The Jews are being scapegoated again.
By SHELBY STEELE
The most interesting voice in all the fallout surrounding the Gaza flotilla incident is that sanctimonious and meddling voice known as "world opinion." At every turn "world opinion," like a school marm, takes offense and condemns Israel for yet another infraction of the world's moral sensibility. And this voice has achieved an international political legitimacy so that even the silliest condemnation of Israel is an opportunity for self-congratulation.
Rock bands now find moral imprimatur in canceling their summer tour stops in Israel (Elvis Costello, the Pixies, the Gorillaz, the Klaxons). A demonstrator at an anti-Israel rally in New York carries a sign depicting the skull and crossbones drawn over the word "Israel." White House correspondent Helen Thomas, in one of the ugliest incarnations of this voice, calls on Jews to move back to Poland. And of course the United Nations and other international organizations smugly pass one condemnatory resolution after another against Israel while the Obama administration either joins in or demurs with a wink.
This is something new in the world, this almost complete segregation of Israel in the community of nations. And if Helen Thomas's remarks were pathetic and ugly, didn't they also point to the end game of this isolation effort: the nullification of Israel's legitimacy as a nation? There is a chilling familiarity in all this. One of the world's oldest stories is playing out before our eyes: The Jews are being scapegoated again.
"World opinion" labors mightily to make Israel look like South Africa looked in its apartheid era—a nation beyond the moral pale. And it projects onto Israel the same sin that made apartheid South Africa so untouchable: white supremacy. Somehow "world opinion" has moved away from the old 20th century view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a complicated territorial dispute between two long-suffering peoples. Today the world puts its thumb on the scale for the Palestinians by demonizing the stronger and whiter Israel as essentially a colonial power committed to the "occupation" of a beleaguered Third World people.
This is now—figuratively in some quarters and literally in others—the moral template through which Israel is seen. It doesn't matter that much of the world may actually know better. This template has become propriety itself, a form of good manners, a political correctness. Thus it is good manners to be outraged at Israel's blockade of Gaza, and it is bad manners to be outraged at Hamas's recent attack on a school because it educated girls, or at the thousands of rockets Hamas has fired into Israeli towns—or even at the fact that Hamas is armed and funded by Iran. The world wants independent investigations of Israel, not of Hamas.
One reason for this is that the entire Western world has suffered from a deficit of moral authority for decades now. Today we in the West are reluctant to use our full military might in war lest we seem imperialistic; we hesitate to enforce our borders lest we seem racist; we are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new immigrants lest we seem xenophobic; and we are pained to give Western Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremacist. Today the West lives on the defensive, the very legitimacy of our modern societies requiring constant dissociation from the sins of the Western past—racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704198004575311011923686570.html?mod=djempersonal
Obama has a solution to the Gulf oil spill...
That's a Harvard University study's estimate of the per-gallon price of the president's global-warming agenda. And Obama made clear this week that this agenda is a part of his plan for addressing the Gulf mess.
So what does global-warming legislation have to do with the oil spill?
Good question, because such measures wouldn't do a thing to clean up the oil or fix the problems that led to the leak.
The answer can be found in Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's now-famous words, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste -- and what I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before."
That sure was true of global-warming policy, and especially the cap-and-trade bill. Many observers thought the measure, introduced last year in the House by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), was dead: The American people didn't seem to think that the so-called global-warming crisis justified a price-hiking, job-killing, economy-crushing redesign of our energy supply amid a fragile recovery. Passing another major piece of legislation, one every bit as unpopular as ObamaCare, appeared unlikely in an election year.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/gallon_gas_9GlF3o1xIcIBelOV3k0RsK
Obama turns the oil spill into his poor man's 9/11 to revive Cap-and-Trade climate legislation
By Gerald Warner - “You never let a serious crisis go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s chief of staff, famously remarked. “And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” The extent to which his master has absorbed this maxim is demonstrated by Obama’s exploitation of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
After obsessively demonising “British Petroleum”, as his administration calls BP – a company 40 per cent British and 40 per cent American owned – Obama plumbed new depths this week by comparing the accident to the Twin Towers atrocity in 2001. To equate an environmental accident in which 11 workers tragically lost their lives with a ferocious terrorist attack that killed 2,995 people, 67 of them British, shows the extent to which Obama has lost touch with reality.
His agenda is to exaggerate the significance of the oil spill crisis to massive proportions, for two reasons. The first is that, the more Americans can be persuaded to regard the accident as a monumental, historic disaster, the less his patent impotence in the face of it will appear blameworthy. His second reason is that, in accordance with the Emanuel doctrine, he sees this as an opportunity to breathe new life into his moribund Cap-and-Trade climate change legislation.
The House of Representatives narrowly passed the climate change Bill last year, but it has stalled in the Senate. Last month, in the wake of the BP oil rig explosion, Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman introduced a “compromise” Bill in the Senate to which Obama is desperate to give a fair wind. He is trying to whip up a green frenzy, to persuade Americans of the evil of oil. Yet ironically, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reminded his colleagues last week, “it’s been widely reported that a major part, a major part of the Kerry-Lieberman Bill was essentially written by BP”.
Cap-and-Trade is extremely difficult to pass in Congress, especially after the forcing through of the unpopular health care legislation, as more and more Americans begin to waken up to the consequences of Obama’s climate change programme. A freedom of information initiative has disclosed that, in contradiction of claims made by the administration, a study by the US Department of Treasury estimated that Cap-and-Trade laws would impose new taxation of up to $200bn a year, equivalent to a 15 per cent increase in income tax.
That is why Obama is trying, very unconvincingly, to brainwash Americans into thinking they are facing a crisis as grave as 9/11 – presumably casting BP as the new al-Qaeda – in order to gain support for legislation that would ratchet up energy prices, destroy jobs and cause the economy to contract. The fact that he is reduced to so transparent an imposture is testimony to how dramatically his status and credibility have shrunk during his 17 months in office. The latest Rasmussen Presidential Tracking Poll has his Presidential Approval Index rating at a humiliating –18, with 42 per cent strongly disapproving of his performance and just 24 per cent strongly approving. It is that haemorrhaging of support in the run-up to mid-term elections, rather than the oil leak, that is Obama’s real crisis.
The Turkish Government - Global Arbiter of Ethnic Violence?
by Victor Davis Hanson
The virulent worldwide reaction to Israeli’s handling of the Gaza flotilla has been quite instructive. The bankrupt Greeks, for example, are taking a holiday from railing at the Germans to demonstrate in solidarity with the Turkish-organized Gaza effort, which puts them on the same side as those whose government supports the occupation of much of Greek-speaking Cyprus and its divided capital.
No one in Europe worried much about the constant shower of missiles from Gaza in the past. No one in Europe said a word when North Korea torpedoed and slaughtered South Koreans on the high seas. No one objected when the Iranians hijacked a British ship and humiliated the hostages.
We ourselves seem to be getting a sort of novel pass for executing scores of suspected terrorists — and anyone in their vicinity — in our new, stepped-up Predator drone assassinations.
But the Western and Islamic worlds have a preexisting furor at the Jewish state that can be tapped at will by almost any pro-radical-Palestinian group clever enough to do proper PR after a desired asymmetrical confrontation. The fallout from Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, the distortions around the 2002 terrorist storming of the Church of Nativity, the 2006 Lebanon war — over time, these incidents do their part, in weird fashion, to incur hatred for a liberal democracy while creating sympathy for a theocratic thugocracy like Hamas.
What explains this preexisting hatred, which ensures denunciation of Israel in the most rabid — or, to use the politically correct parlance, “disproportionate,” terms? It is not about “occupied land,” given the millions of square miles worldwide that are presently occupied, from Georgia to Cyprus to Tibet. It is not a divided capital — Nicosia is walled off. It is not an overreaction in the use of force per se — the Russians flattened Grozny and killed tens of thousands while the world snoozed. And it cannot be the scale of violence, given what we see hourly in Pakistan, Darfur, and the Congo. And, given the Armenian, Greek, and Kurdish histories (and reactions to them), the currently outraged Turkish government is surely not a credible referent on the topic of disproportionate violence.
Perhaps the outrage reflects simple realpolitik — 350 million Arab Muslims versus 7 million Israelis. Perhaps it is oil: half the world’s reserves versus Israel’s nada. Perhaps it is the fear of terror: draw a cartoon or write a novel offending Islam, and you must go into hiding; defame Jews and earn accolades. Perhaps it is anti-Semitism, which is as fashionable on the academic left as it used to be among the Neanderthal right.
Perhaps there is also a new sense that the United States at last has fallen into line with the Western consensus, and so is hardly likely to play the old lone-wolf supporter of Israel in the press or at the U.N.
At this point, it doesn’t much matter — as this latest hysterical reaction reminds us, much of the world not only sides with Israel’s enemies but sides with them to such a degree as to suggest that, in any existential moment to come, the world either will be indifferent or will be on the side of the side of Israeli’s enemies.
Quite frightening, when you think of it.
http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson060110.html
WTC prosecutor warns: The left 'hell-bent' on not linking Islam to terror
Anath Hartmann-- A profound misunderstanding of Islam and a cultural tendency to see terrorism as the errant behavior of a few could transform the West for the worse if perceptions do not soon change, Andrew McCarthy, a federal prosecutor in the first World Trade Center bombing trial, said this week at a Heritage Foundation event.
Mr. McCarthy recently came out with a book on this topic, “The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.”
Terrorists “won’t stop until the entire world is brought to heel, either converting to their construction of Islam or agreeing to live under shari’a as non-Muslims, which would mean to live in an inferior status,” McCarthy said at the event Thursday. “So the title of the book may be provocative but I’m sad to say … all this information has been available to us in plain sight if we would only have looked at it.”
The Obama administration’s inability – or unwillingness - to make the explicit connection between Islamic doctrine and Islamic terror because of a fear of being seen as ‘declaring war on Islam’ wil only aid terrorists’ agenda, Mr. McCarthy said.
“If we’ve seen anything in the last two decades, it’s that this society - and this government in particular - is hell-bent on not allowing us to look at the ideology that’s behind these attacks,” he said. “Because Islamic doctrine cannot be reasonably divorced from Islamic terror.”
However, neither the political left nor the political right has defined the concept of “jihad” accurately, Mr. McCarthy said. He mentioned as examples top White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan’s statement this week that jihad was “a holy struggle” to become a better person, as well as the general view among conservatives that the term means “holy war” with the intention to kill non-Muslims.
“John Brennan … yesterday apparently unburden himself on the topic of jihad and he rejected the idea that there could be a war on terrorism because terrorism is a state of mind and jihad is … the struggle to become a better person,” Mr. McCarthy said. “That is a very flawed understanding of jihad. It is a struggle to become a better person - but by that they don’t mean brush your teeth three times a day. … What they mean is struggle to become a better Muslim and that has a very different meaning in Islamist circles.”
Part of the left’s misunderstanding of jihad comes from the Western assumption that Islam is a religion after the fashion of other faiths with which it is familiar, such as Christianity and Judaism.
“Islam is not a religion as we have come to know religions in the West,” Mr. McCarthy said. “It aspires to much more than governing the spirit realm. It is a full-purpose social, political, legal and religious system. It is an authoritarian system in that it has an immutable legal code, shari’a, which governs all aspects of life. What that ends up meaning is that if you take the position that Islam is a religion … you’re turning your eyes away from a lot of things that are not spiritual” and could have an impact on our national security, he said.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/watercooler/2010/may/28/blind-sheikh-prosecutor-jihad-and-west/
Obama's budget monstrosity: Deficits huge, VAT coming?
-- Betsy Mccaughey. I'm not interested in another debate over big government versus small government," President Obama told a Buffalo crowd on May 13. What this means is that the President doesn't care about how much freedom you have.
When government spends more, less is left for people to spend as they choose. And the events of the last four months indicate that Americans are being conned into giving up their freedom.
On Feb. 1, President Obama released his fiscal 2011 budget. It's a whopper. It calls for federal spending of $3.8 trillion, soaring to $5.7 trillion in 2020.
A 5-foot-high stack of hundred-dollar bills totals $1 million. To get to $1 billion, you need 10 stacks as high as the Washington Monument. To get to $3.8 trillion, you need 38,000 Washington Monuments.
$3.8 trillion also equals 25% of everything produced in the U.S. (Gross Domestic Product). State and local government spending brings the total to 42% of GDP.
Government spending has crossed the 40% line just twice in American history: when the nation plunged into World War II and again last year, during the economic crisis. The Obama administration intends to make big government permanent, with spending at 40% even in 2020, when no crisis is expected. The White House rosily predicts full employment that year.
The President claims he pared the budget line by line - which is what he promised to do when he was a candidate in 2008. But the numbers prove otherwise. Foreign aid is increased 50% from 2011 to 2015. Most Americans would rather pay their mortgage.
The President's budget was supposed to be voted on by April 15, but hearings drag on. Civil servants making budget requests seem numb to the layoffs and belt tightening in the private sector. Dr. James Billington, head of the Library of Congress, requested a "lean increase" of 4.6% "in recognition of the difficult budget environment." Lean? Hasn't it dawned on Washingtonians that people would rather have money to spend on books for their own kids instead of on the Library of Congress?
It's a tradeoff: More money for government programs means less money for you to spend on your family.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2010/05/24/2010-05-24_bams_budget_is_a_monstrosity.html?page=0#ixzz0oyLT5oi2
How Liberal Jews Are Enabling the Second Holocaust
By Philip Klein-
In the past, I've remarked to friends that the difference between a Jewish liberal and a Jewish conservative is that when a Jewish liberal walks out of the Holocaust Museum, he feels, "This shows why we need to have more tolerance and multiculturalism." The Jewish conservative feels, "We should have killed a lot more Nazis, and sooner."
I thought of this as I read Peter Beinart's new essay, "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment," which argues that "liberal Zionism" is in danger unless groups such as AIPAC start to take a more critical view of Israel's actions. Beinart, using a Frank Luntz survey of young American Jews as a jumping off point, writes:
Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster -- indeed, have actively opposed -- a Zionism that challenges Israel's behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism's door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.
The problem, however, isn't with leading Jewish organizations that defend Israel, but with liberalism. As sickening as it sounds, Jewish liberals see their fellow Jews as noble when they are victims being led helplessly into the gas chambers, but recoil at the thought of Jews who refuse to be victims, and actually take actions to defend themselves. It isn't too different from American liberal attitudes toward criminal justice or terrorism, where morality is turned upside down and the lines between criminals and victims become blurred, and in certain cases, even reversed.
In the case of Israel, what changed over time was that Israel went from a state that exemplified Jewish victimhood (a role that Jewish liberals are comfortable with) to one in which Jews were actually in a position of power, which liberals are not comfortable with. Meanwhile, Palestinians, aided by the media, effectively exploited Jewish liberals by portraying themselves as the real victims, and Israel as the oppressors. I experienced this first hand once when I went on a Birthright Israel trip (which is a paid trip for American Jews to travel to Israel). At one point, we went to the cemetery at Mount Herzl, which is sort of Israel's equivalent of Arlington National Cemetery, and is located by Yad Vashem, Israel's main Holocaust Museum. While stopping at the cemetery, we were asked to offer our feelings standing in a cemetery honoring fallen Israeli soldiers, and the first American Jew who commented was this liberal girl who reflected, "All I can think about is how many Palestinian graves there are."
Israel, right now, is surrounded by terorrist groups dedicated to the nation's destruction. Palestinian society teaches its children to aspire to slaughter Jews much in the same fashion as the Nazis indoctrinated their young. Suicide bombers who die in the act of killing Jewish civilians are celebrated as heroes. It's a culture that glorifies death and uses women and children as human shields to gain sympathy from the international community -- and especially liberal Jews. And the terrorists are receiving aid from Iran, a radical nation that vows to wipe Israel off the map within the context of seeking a nuclear weapon.
Yet against this backdrop, all liberal Jews want to do is to pin the blame on Israel's efforts to defend itself, and engage in the magical thinking that more Jewish concessions will create peace and security. By doing so, they are helping the enemies of the Jews who are intent on finishing the job that Hitler started. While Israel has no shortage of critics, when Jewish liberals attack Israel, it's that much more damaging, because Israel's enemies can say, "See, even Jews admit that Israel is the oppressor."
While I would never suggest that Jews who happen to be politically liberal would want a second Holocaust to happen, I do think that by participating in a campaign to defang Israel and prevent it from taking the actions necessary to defend itself, that Jewish liberals are making things significantly easier for those who do want to carry out a second Holocaust.
Luckily, though, there are a lot of Jews in Israel who are determined not to let that happen.
http://spectator.org/blog/2010/05/17/how-liberal-jews-are-enabling
Greek Bailout Dependent On Privatizing Health Care; What?
Policy Failure: Greece was told that if it wanted a bailout, it needed to consider privatizing its government health care system. So tell us again why the U.S. is following Europe's welfare state model.
The requirement, part of a deal arranged by the IMF, the European Union and the European Central bank, is a tacit admission that national health care programs are unsustainable. Along with transportation and energy, the bailout group, according to the New York Times, wants the Greek government to remove "the state from the marketplace in crucial sectors."
This is not some cranky or politically motivated demand. It is a condition based on the ugly reality of government medicine. The Times reports that economists — not right-wingers opposed to health care who want to blow up Times Square — say liberalizing "the health care industry would help bring down prices in these areas, which are among the highest in Europe."
Of course most of the media have been largely silent about the health care privatization measure for Greece, as it conflicts with their universal, single-payer health care narrative.
The public health system in the Hellenic Republic is operated by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, where centralized decisions and rules are made.
It provides free or low-cost treatment through what is essentially a single-payer system established in 1983 when the Socialist Party was in power. Family members and retirees are also covered. Like the systems in Britain and Canada, it has agonizingly long waiting lists.
It should be no surprise that in Greece, health care spending as a percentage of the economy is relatively steep. According to Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development data, it's higher than that in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and Japan. Despite all the spending, Greece could never cover 100% of its citizens, reaching only about 83% for primary care.
Today, the patient most in need of a room in the intensive-care ward is Greece itself — what with government debt nearing 120% of GDP and the deficit at 13% of GDP.
The mere possibility of government spending cuts sent striking workers and public employees into the streets. Groups upset with the budget cuts have protested, rioted, looted and killed.
On May 5, three died in a bank fire fueled by a Molotov cocktail during a riot against the austerity measures that have been intended to save the government from bankruptcy and, as well, secure aid from other nations.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=534021
Angry, hateful, violent, extremist liberals; Unlike Tea Parties, the left really is uncivil
Imagine a group of angry demonstrators toting swastika-festooned protest signs calling politicians Nazis, shouting obscenities and racial remarks and throwing rocks and bottles at police officers sent to keep order. No, these are not Tea Partiers. They are the mob that turned out last week to protest Arizona's new immigration-enforcement law. This group of liberal rowdies has been dubbed the Tequila Party.
For the most part, liberal media coverage overlooked all the leftist violence. Typical headlines described the protest as "mostly peaceful," with media outlets avoiding details about why they had to use the qualifier "mostly." Reporting a near-riot by the opponents of the Arizona law doesn't fit the dominant media storyline.
Some of the editorial bias is blatant. An Associated Press story about the Arizona immigration law quoted a 13-year-old Hispanic boy saying, "We can't be in the streets anymore without the pigs thinking we're illegal immigrants." The Washington Post sanitized the boy's views towards law enforcement by replacing the word "pigs" with "[police]." If a Tea Partier used a slur of any kind, it's doubtful it would be given the square-bracket treatment. It would probably be a banner headline.
The assumption that Tea Partiers are hate-filled bullies explains why major media outlets rushed out reports that demonstrators in Washington opposing the government health care takeover subjected black members of Congress to racial slurs and spat on them. The accusations were never proved, and substantial video evidence and eyewitness accounts suggest the events never happened. There was no press coverage, however, when supporters of illegal immigration used physical intimidation tactics and made threats of violence against demonstrators on the National Mall the same day.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/28/angry-hateful-violent-extremist-liberals/
Is Goldman Obama's Enron? No, it's worse
By: J.P. Freire -
Campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs employees to President Obama are nearly seven times as much as President Bush received from Enron workers, according to numbers on OpenSecrets.org.
President Bush's connections to Enron were well-hyped during the company's accounting debacle that rippled through the economy. Time magazine even had an article called, "Bush's Enron Problem." The Associated Press ran with the headline, "Bush-backing Enron makes big money off crisis." David Callaway wrote that Enron for Bush was worse than Whitewater for Clinton.
In 2002, the New York Times wrote: "President Bush is seeking to play down his relationship with Enron's embattled chairman, Kenneth L. Lay. But their ties are broad and deep and go back many years, and the relationship has been beneficial to both." (h/t Lachlan Markey)
But the mere $151,722.42 (inflation adjusted) in contributions from Enron-affiliated executives, employees, and PACs to Bush hardly add up to Obama's $1,007,370.85 (inflation adjusted) from Goldman-affiliated executives and employees. That's also not taking into account how much Goldman contributed to Obama cabinet member Hillary Clinton ($415,595.63 inflation adjusted), which was itself almost three times as much as Bush received as well.
It would be fair to say that the total amount the Obama administration has received from those affiliated with Goldman Sachs is ten times that of what Bush received from Enron.
Goldman is being sued for civil fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission for deliberately putting unwitting clients on the wrong side of a mortgage security trade that had been designed to fail.
UPDATE: It's not even just campaign contributions. There's quite the revolving door. According to our own Tim Carney:
Greg Craig, Obama's first White House counsel, has joined Goldman, we learned this week. He may not have too much pull in the West Wing, which drove him out for hewing too close to Obama's campaign promises, but as a former insider he will provide valuable intelligence to the world's largest investment bank.
Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff, was paid $35,000 as a consultant to Goldman while also working as Bill Clinton's top fundraiser. Obama's fundraiser and economic adviser Warren Buffett is very long on Goldman, having bet on them in 2008 in the expectation of a bailout. Mark Patterson, chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, was a Goldman Sachs lobbyist until months before joining Team Obama.
What does that add up to? Getting a hand in making the regulations:
Politico quoted a Goldman lobbyist Monday saying, "We're not against regulation. We're for regulation. We partner with regulators." At least three times in Goldman's conference call Tuesday, spokesmen trumpeted the firm's support for more federal control.
... Goldman's annual report explicitly endorsed stricter federal capital and liquidity requirements. Goldman reported on the conference call that it holds 15 percent "Tier 1 capital," meaning it is very liquid and not very risky. Goldman can play it safe, you see, without needing a regulation. But regulations prevent smaller competitors from taking the risks needed to compete with Goldman (and every competitor is smaller).
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Is-Goldman-Obamas-Enron-No-its-worse-91613449.html#ixzz0lklYMA5m
Barack Hussein Obama vs. Israel
Obama, true to his Muslim heritage and Arab roots, is leading America down the most dangerous foreign policy road in the history of the United States and perhaps all of human history. A path that will have prophetically disastrous consequences for the United States and the world, and one that is setting the stage for a war that was prophesied over two thousand years ago.
The political hubris, anti-Semitism and pro-Islamic attributes of Obama as they relate to the nation of Israel are nearly equivalent to his disingenuous approach to Islamic terrorism in the U.S. As Mark Levin stated yesterday during his radio program, the phrase Islamic extremism was banned from the counter-terrorism lexicon, yet it is now a justification for turning on Israel. If you want to understand Obama’s approach to Israel, I strongly urge take ten minutes to listen to this ten minute segment from Mr. Levin’s program.
As reported in December 2008 based on my interview with a U.S. intelligence source, the worst was yet to come. Now, it’s closer than you think.
http://homelandsecurityus.com/archives/3703
Eloquent No More; The mainstream media is slowly waking up to the fact that Obama is a bore.
Obama long since stopped saying anything new or interesting, and he talks constantly, at great length. So when he went into a mind-numbing filibuster to a perfectly reasonable question from a woman at a Q&A session in Charlotte as to whether it was smart to throw a load of new taxes into health-care “reform,” not even the Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut could conceal her — and the audience’s — disdain for the Condescender in Chief:
He then spent the next 17 minutes and 12 seconds lulling the crowd into a daze. His discursive answer — more than 2,500 words long — wandered from topic to topic, including commentary on the deficit, pay-as-you-go rules passed by Congress, Congressional Budget Office reports on Medicare waste, COBRA coverage, the Recovery Act and Federal Medical Assistance Percentages (he referred to this last item by its inside-the-Beltway name, “F-Map”). He talked about the notion of eliminating foreign aid (not worth it, he said). He invoked Warren Buffett, earmarks, and the payroll tax that funds Medicare (referring to it, in fluent Washington lingo, as “FICA”). . .
Halfway through, an audience member on the riser yawned.
But Obama wasn’t finished. He had a “final point,” before starting again with another list — of three points.
“What we said is, number one, we’ll have the basic principle that everybody gets coverage,” he said, before launching into the next two points, for a grand total of seven.
His wandering approach might not matter if Obama weren’t being billed as the chief salesman of the health-care overhaul. Public opinion on the bill remains divided, and Democratic officials are planning to send Obama into the country to persuade wary citizens that it will work for them in the long run.
It was not evident that he changed any minds at Friday’s event. The audience sat politely, but people in the back of the room began to wander off.
And, of course, he never answered the lady’s question. Why is it we are raising taxes for those making less than $200,000? Why are we raising $52.3 billion in new taxes over 10 years? Obama has no response, or no effective one, to these queries; so he vamps and bloviates, as he did in the health-care summit when confronted with troublesome facts to which he had no adequate response (e.g., Rep.Paul Ryan’s list of fiscal tricks). Just as he failed to keep the attention of the Charlotte crowd, he’s long since lost the American people who now tune him out. Eloquent? Hardly. Persuasive? Not in the least, as evidenced by multiple polls showing that a large majority of Americans aren’t buying his health-care arguments. (And he’s eroding his party’s credibility on issues over which they previously held a commanding advantage. Rasmussen reports, for example: “Following the passage of the health care bill, 53% now say they trust Republicans on the issue of health care. Thirty-seven percent (37%) place their trust in Democrats.”)
His rhetoric (which to the amazement of many conservatives – who noticed he was largely talking New Age gibberish during the campaign – transfixed a great number of people for a very long time) is now seen for what it is — a smokescreen for bad ideas and an exercise in misdirection. Unfortunately for Obama, he may discover that once the president has lost the interest and trust of the voters, it’s hard to get these precious commodities back.- Jennifer Rubin
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/rubin/270351
Peter Schiff: 'Very good reason' to believe home prices will collapse
The latest housing initiative announced today by the Obama Administration draws the U.S. government and, by proxy, all taxpaying Americans, further into the inescapable quagmire of a devastated real estate market.
By transferring more underwater mortgage balances onto the public books, the plan puts taxpayers on the hook for further losses if housing prices continue to fall. Given the massive support for real estate already afforded by record-low interest rates and massive federal tax and policy incentives, there are very good reasons to believe that home prices will indeed collapse when these crutches are removed. Recent spikes in long-term interest rates warn of this prospect.
If the Administration had allowed losses to fall where they rightfully belong, namely on those who foolishly loaded up on toxic mortgage bonds, then the housing market would have already found its true clearing level. Instead, every measure is working to prolong and delay the ultimate reckoning, while setting up taxpayers as the patsy. Given the horrendous government deficit projections for the next several years, any losses incurred by the government mortgage portfolio may add a critical stress on America's fiscal viability.
In addition, the moves add even more incentives detrimental to economic growth. By targeting benefits toward unemployed homeowners, or those who are delinquent in mortgage payments, the program will encourage some mortgage holders to defer job-hunting and miss payments. Also, in offering loan-balance reductions, the program makes no distinction between homeowners who naively overpaid during the speculative peak and those who willfully put themselves underwater by taking advantage of home equity loans on existing mortgages. In short, these policies reward profligacy and penalize prudence.
The longer the government continues to distort the underlying economics of the real estate market, the longer it will take for the sector to heal itself - and the longer the sickness will infect the broader economy.
http://www.investmentnews.com/article/20100326/FREE/100329901
Biden's latest 'big ****ing deal' – undermining America's nuclear defenses
Healthcare is not the only “big ****ing deal” embraced by Vice-President Joe Biden’s worldview. At the risk of inflicting chronic insomnia on millions of Americans, it can be revealed that Joe is taking an active interest in the United States’ nuclear defences – in neutering them, that is. Anybody who felt a bit leery of Barack Obama signing away all those warheads to please his friend Vladimir Putin will be rather more disturbed to learn that Biden is leading the charge in reducing America’s strategic nuclear options.
The repeated postponements of the publication of the US Nuclear Posture Review was partly due to the stand-off within the government, in which Biden has been pressing for a policy that minimises the scenarios under which America could resort to nuclear war, in opposition to Defense Secretary Robert Gates who wants to preserve the flexibility of the status quo. The traditional US policy has been “calculated ambiguity” – not allowing an enemy to know the precise circumstances in which he might provoke nuclear retaliation.
That is sound common sense, so you would naturally not expect it to appeal to Democrats in general or to Joe Biden in particular. Biden wants America to pledge “no first use” of nuclear weapons. That sounds superficially reasonable: the United States would hardly want to brand itself a nuclear aggressor. Harsh reality, however, dictates otherwise.
Behind the technical vocabulary of the Biden advocacy, its down-to-earth meaning is: let’s see how many American soldiers we can let a massive army such as that of North Korea kill, before we get mad and vaporise the Reds. Was that not exactly the reason why Harry Truman used atomic bombs against Japan – to save the lives of thousands of American troops? But to the Obama administration and its chief bag carrier Joe Biden fine words and grandstanding attitudes on the world stage are more important.
The first principle of war is to keep your enemy guessing. Biden’s infantile stance puts a new gloss on the term “nuclear posture”. Meanwhile, President Pantywaist has his pen poised to sign any and every agreement that will earn him the plaudits of America’s implacable enemies. The latest White House maxim being fed to commentators is that a United States with fewer nuclear weapons will be able to exert more pressure on Iran. Go figure.
As it is, the scariest news for American and Western security is the intimation that Joe Profanity Biden is attempting to mastermind nuclear strategy. This could be another “big ****ing deal” for Joe. For the rest of us – be very afraid.-- By Gerald Warner
http://tinyurl.com/yggu77q
No Obamacare for Obama
President Obama declared that the new health care law "is going to be affecting every American family." Except his own, of course.
The new health care law exempts the president from having to participate in it. Leadership and committee staffers in the House and Senate who wrote the bill are exempted as well. A weasel-worded definition of "staff" includes only the members' personal staff in the new system; the committee staff that drafted the legislation opted themselves out. Because they were more familiar with the contents of the law than anyone in the country, it says a lot that they carved out their own special loophole. Anyway, the law is intended to affect "ordinary Americans," according to Vice President Joe Biden (who - being a heartbeat away from the presidency - also is not covered), not Washington insiders.
Mr. Obama frequently tossed around the talking point that the new law gave people the same type of coverage as Congress enjoyed. In his March 20 health care pep talk to wavering Democrats on Capitol Hill, the president said one of the advantages of the health care legislation was that "people will have choice and competition just like members of Congress have choice and competition." At yesterday's signing ceremony, Mr. Obama said Americans will be "part of a big pool, just like federal employees are part of a big pool. They'll have the same choice of private health insurance that members of Congress get for themselves." But the American people will have a public pool; the executive branch and congressional staffers kept their country-club pool private.
Last year, Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, spearheaded efforts to have all Americans included in the plan, but he ran into heavy opposition from unions representing federal workers - the same unions that were pro-Obamacare stalwarts. In September, the Senate approved a scaled-down amendment that covered members of Congress and their staff. When this provision later emerged from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's office, the leadership and committee staff loophole had appeared. A move in December by Mr. Grassley and Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, to close this loophole and to extend the law to senior members of the executive branch - including the president, vice president and Cabinet members - was blocked by Senate Democratic leaders.
Mr. Grassley has introduced an amendment to the Senate health care reconciliation bill that also will apply the law to the upper tier of the executive branch and all Capitol Hill staffers, but it remains to be seen whether Democrats will let this measure move forward.
The special exemptions slipped into the health care law are another example of how those statists who rule consider themselves a privileged class, imposing burdens on the country that they will not accept themselves. Candidates for office in 2010 should pledge to close these and other loopholes in the law that impose unequal burdens and create exclusive privileged classes in America. Meanwhile, we await Mr. Obama's explanation why if his "historic" health care law is so great for America, it's not good enough for him and his family.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/23/obamacare-for-everyone-but-obama/print/
Congress health care vote: a dark day for freedom in America
The passage last night of Barack Obama’s health care reform bill through the House of Representatives is yet another blow to freedom in America inflicted by the Obama administration. The legislation, which comes at a staggering cost of $940 billion, will hugely add to the already towering national debt, now at over $12 trillion. It is yet another millstone round the necks of the American people, already faced with the highest levels of unemployment in a generation.
It is also a great leap forward by the United States towards a European-style vision of universal health care, which will only lead to soaring costs, higher taxes, and a surge in red tape for small businesses. This reckless legislation dramatically expands the power of the state over the lives of individuals, and could not be further from the vision of America’s founding fathers. It has also been rushed through Congress without proper scrutiny, in the face of overwhelming public opposition, and with not an ounce of bipartisan support.
Above all the health care bill is a thinly disguised vanity project for a president who is committed to transforming the United States from the world’s most successful large-scale free enterprise economy, to a highly interventionist society with a massive role for centralized government. The United States has thrived as a nation for over 230 years precisely because of its love for freedom and its belief in free markets.
What we have just witnessed is a massive slap in the face for limited government and the principle of individual responsibility. Its net result will be the erosion of freedom in America, and a further undermining of the country’s economic competitiveness. This may be a political victory for the president and his supporters in Congress, but it is in reality a defeat for America as a great power, and another Obama-led step towards US decline.- By Nile Gardiner http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100030793/a-dark-day-for-freedom-in-america/
Double Dip Is Coming in 2011
In a recent presentation in Orlando, Christopher Thornberg noted the likelihood of a double dip in 2011. Thornberg famously predicted the real estate bubble, disastrous downturn in California and the high probability of recession in 2008. He is a former economist at UCLA and currently works at Beacon Economics, the firm he founded. I relied heavily on Thornberg’s analysis in helping to side-step the housing debacle and I have found his research to be not only straight forward, but well reasoned.
Thornberg says the economic recovery is mostly government induced and could lead to a double dip as the government steps aside and attempts to hand over the baton to the private sector. In the presentation Thornberg noted the continuing concerns:
The bad news: we haven’t completely fixed the problems, instead the economy is being driven by government policy
The worse news: government policy is causing its own set of problems: namely public debt and the potential for inflation
Thornberg says 2010 is likely to be a good year for the economy, but as the stimulus wears off the true colors of the private sector will shine through and result in a double dip. On the bright side, Thornberg notes that export growth is likely to remain strong and businesses are well positioned. Unfortunately, in the long-run, he says the following 7 negatives are likely to outweigh the few positives:
Consumer weakness will likely continue
Businesses are a wild card
Housing bounce won’t last
Banks not out of the woods yet
Commercial trouble to continue
Significant chance of a double dip
Higher Rates coming down the pike
http://www.beaconecon.com/products/Presentations/2010/RoboticsOrlando10.pdf
Obama's State of the Union dodgy dossier: I know that my redeemer lieth
By Gerald Warner--
He is at it again – being economical with the actualité. Barack Obama’s State of the Union address was about as accurate and informative as Tony Blair on Weapons of Mass Destruction. Jobs were his great theme and the old smoke-and-mirrors technique was sadly in evidence.
“Because of the steps we took, there are about two million Americans working right now who would otherwise be unemployed,” claimed The One. How does he figure that out? Three million Americans have lost their jobs and the unemployment rate has hit double percentage figures. But Barack has his own methods of assessing job statistics.
The original method was the good old “saved or created” formula. Unhappily, a report by the Government Accountability Office found that one in 10 jobs “saved or created” by the stimulus package did not exist. So the administration was forced to resort to a new formula; but, according to ABC News, this is an even better system. If a project is funded by stimulus cash, even if the same person is doing the same job as before, in the same place, that counts as a stimulus job. No wonder Barack is claiming credit for two million Americans in employment.
Did you think the Obama healthcare plan was expensive? Don’t be silly – its real purpose is to bring down the deficit: “And according to the Congressional Budget Office – the independent organization that both parties have cited as the official scorekeeper for Congress – our approach would bring down the deficit by as much as $1 trillion over the next two decades.” That is not the view of the experts at the Department of Health and Human Services’ Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), whose actuarial studies have found that the House healthcare Bill would increase costs by $289bn over the next 10 years, while the latest version of the Senate Bill would increase costs by $222.3bn.
Funny that Obama should mention the Congressional Budget Office: that is the very body that warned a Senate energy panel last October of “significant shifts” in employment if a National Energy Tax were to be introduced. Yet there was Barack behaving as if Green fiscal banditry was the best job-creation scheme since sliced bread. He cannot have been listening to the National Black Chamber of Commerce, which has calculated the cost of energy taxes as “A net reduction in US employment of 1.5 million job-equivalents in 2015…” In any case, a President who prates about “the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change” is both out of date and out of touch.
Then, playing yet another chameleon role, we had Obama the nemesis of public spending, announcing a freeze on government expenditure, starting in 2011. The reality is that his freeze would reduce the projected $42 trillion of government spending from 2011 to 2020 by little more than 0.5 per cent. “We can’t wage a perpetual campaign,” whined Obama, who has done nothing else and is off to Tampa, Florida today to continue campaigning. And so it went on: pleas for bipartisan co-operation punctuated by more hardline politically correct initiatives such as the divisive proposal to end the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy over homosexuals in the armed forces – it works, it isn’t broken, but Obama proposes to mend it.
The silence from one half of the audience throughout this predictable oration said it all. The proverbial visitor from Mars would have assumed Democrats are three feet taller than Republicans, but it was just that they were on their feet for most of this same-old, same-old performance. After Massachusetts, this was a desperate attempt to push water uphill and deny reality. Much of that denial was too transparently dishonest to be anything other than counter-productive: I know that my redeemer lieth…
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100024098/barack-obamas-state-of-the-union-dodgy-dossier-i-know-that-my-redeemer-lieth/
Obama's change we can believe in: he has turned Camelot Republican - Gerald Warner
One year ago Barack Obama was inaugurated as President of the United States amid scenes more appropriate to the enthronement of a Pharaoh than the initiation of a democratic leader. Remember the hysteria, the gushing sycophancy of the liberal media, the Disneyland hype? One year later, it is all over for the Messiah. Obama has finally provoked change we can believe in: he has turned Massachusetts Republican.
Camelot has turned bright red. It is comfortably in the hands of the GOP. From early in the count Republican Scott Brown established an unassailable 5-point lead over Martha Coakley, the arrogant Democrat candidate who epitomised the sense of entitlement that characterises the members of the liberal establishment. She was a caricature of Democrat prejudices, down to being a cradle Catholic who championed abortion – like her rebarbative predecessor Edward Kennedy. At 2.15am (our time) the Boston Globe reported that Coakley had telephoned Brown to concede defeat. That historic conversation effectively called time on the Obama administration.
It takes a real mental effort to come to terms with the notion of a man named Brown being an effective and worthwhile politician, but in Massachusetts that is the reality. Brown created an electoral insurgency. He articulated all the resentment of decent Americans against the liberal establishment. In doing so he has overturned the Democrats’ 60-seat presence in the Senate which until last night made them invulnerable to a Republican filibuster and made it possible for them to railroad Obama’s insane, statist, totalitarian health care “reforms” through Congress.
No more. If the Democrats even attempted to use procedural tricks to rush the healthcare dog’s breakfast through before Brown takes his seat, America would not stand for such a blatant evasion of the popular will on so controversial a measure. It simply isn’t going to happen. Nor is any of the rest of the Obama fantasy. The Republicans are now poised to take control of the House in November. Obama has had his year of power, but now he is a busted flush.
And what a year it was. Retreat, abasement and blunders in every area of foreign policy, from North Korea to sell-out to Russia on nuclear weapons. This blog always insisted Obama would be a one-term president. Even I, however, had not counted on his being a one-year wonder. Even Anne of the Thousand Days had a longer run than that. Americans have proved they can spot a phoney in 12 months. That shames Britain’s record: the deluded electorate here voted three times for the Great Charlatan Blair.
To see the pricking of the Obama balloon is delightful. Congratulations, America. Happy anniversary, Mr President.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100022917/barack-obamas-change-we-can-believe-in-he-has-turned-camelot-republican/
Obama’s Boss Gets Death Panels: Soros is poised to celebrate a major triumph: his euthanasia agenda.
As the left forces nationalized health care on us, we may want to consider the George Soros funded Project on Death in America. Soros is a leading promoter of the assisted suicide movement. He papers over it with tripe about compassion; in reality, the project is a push for palliative care rather than treatment for gravely ill patients:
“Can we afford to care for the dying properly? The number of people dying in the United States currently stands at 2.2 million annually. Increases in cancer and AIDS and the aging of the baby boomers will cause this figure to climb faster than the population . . . [But] [a]ggressive, life-prolonging interventions, which may at times go against the patient’s wishes, are much more expensive than proper care for the dying.” discoverthenetworks.org
That was George Soros in a 1994 speech. What precisely did he mean by “proper care” for the dying? The unrepentant Nazi collaborator is a euthanasia enthusiast.
The same George Soros who told Steve Kroft on 60 minutes in 1992 that he had no remorse for his role in sending Jews to death camps now presents himself as the very soul of beneficence as he crusades to exterminate seriously ill patients.
The stated agenda of Soros’ Open Society Institute is:
“to understand and transform the culture and experience of dying and bereavement through funding initiatives in research, scholarship, the humanities, and the arts, and to foster innovations in the provision of care, public education, professional education, and public policy.”
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/18206
Terrorists in the Land of Lincoln
The repatriation of Kuwaiti National Fouad Al Rabiah to his homeland is a further attempt by the Obama Administration to reduce the number of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay as much as possible before his self-imposed one-year deadline arrives in January.
What disturbs me is the administration’s haste to reduce the number of Guantanamo detainees without regard to the reasons these people became detainees in the first place. Upwards of half of all previously released detainees have returned to the jihad battlefield, and there is no reason to believe Al Rabiah won’t do the same.
The U.S. counterterrorism strategy appears in retreat. Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and four others in the Southern District of New York, yet try other detainees by military commission at Guantanamo, gives KSM the forum he requested at the time of his capture.
The prison is less than one mile from the Mississippi River. Field trips should include steam boat rides and outings at Harrah’s casino in nearby St. Louis.
But wait! There’s more! These notorious killers now benefit from the U.S. Constitution. Where else on Earth can they find “due process of law,” and free legal counsel? A thing called “discovery,” in which the prosecutor and defense attorneys exchange information before trial, means that their ACLU attorneys will probably have access to highly classified U.S. government secrets they can leak to the New York Times and use in their clients defense.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.5013/pub_detail.asp
Climate: The new god of left-wing Christianity
With the ClimateGate revelations of flimsy “science” behind the man-made global warming theory, the role of the religious left in promoting this fraudulent scheme now deserves serious media scrutiny. Because that is unlikely, consider the following:
Dr. James Wanliss, Associate Professor of Physics at Presbyterian College, has written The Green Dragon, a book about how environmentalism is actually committed to “the reconstruction of a pagan world order” and “rejection of Christian spirituality.” Wanliss argues that the environmental movement “is a religion with a vision of sin and repentance, heaven and hell. It even has a special vocabulary, with words like ‘sustainability’ and ‘carbon neutral.’ Its communion is organic food. Its sacraments are sex, abortion, and when all else fails, sterilization. Its saints are Al Gore and the InterGovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2009/ss_politics0954_12_10.asp
Climategate: Obama's rule by EPA decree shows his dictatorial mentality
By: Gerald Warner - Who needs tanks on the lawn when you have the Environmental Protection Agency? Barack Obama’s use of the EPA to pressure the Senate to pass his climate change Nuremberg Decrees shows his dictatorial mentality. He wants to override Congress, which is hostile to his climate gobbledegook because it is representative of the American electorate, and sideline the nation’s elected Senators by ruling by decree, courtesy of the EPA. This is a coup d’état. And what is the justification for this undemocratic action? The allegedly imminent threat from “Anthropogenic Global Warming”. There is always a supposed threat, when tyrants take the stage. The President of the United States has just reduced his moral authority to the level of any Third World dictator heading a “Government of National Emergency”. Fortunately, the world’s leading democracy, which he is trying to subvert, has guarantees of liberty so deeply embedded in its Constitution that US citizens are well placed to fight back. Obama hates America and, increasingly, that sentiment is being reciprocated. This is a socialist, World Government putsch. Have the American people the resolution to resist it? We shall soon know.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100019206/climategate-barack-obamas-rule-by-epa-decree-is-a-coup-detat-against-congress-made-in-britain/
Essay On The Gathering Storm- From Naval Aviator, Commander Jerry Wilson
All of last year I told everyone that Obama was not a Democrat, he was a Marxist. He is far to the left of any European leader and even far left of the NDP.
Socialism is not the correct descriptor for what Obama and the Democrats are doing. They are going to be much more far reaching than anything Sweden has ever been able to do. Obama is following Alinsky's plans, those set out in "Rules for Radicals" and his other writing. The Democrats are attempting to create one party rule in the U.S. and in achieving that, will create crisis after crisis by their own actions and use those crisis to nationalize the means of production in the U.S. You are in the middle of a communist revolution and few in the U.S. can actually see it for what it truly is.
The U.S. is now on the path of financial destruction. The Constitution has been shredded and individual human rights are being trampled. In less than 8 months Obama has used a recession to take over the two largest industries in the U.S. He will debase the Dollar and is on the road to creating an incredible energy shortage that will allow him and Congress to take over the energy industry.
More: http://earthpurification.blogspot.com/2009/12/essay-on-gathering-storm.html
Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation. By Christopher Booker
Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash
A week after my colleague James Delingpole on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.
There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That ), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.
They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.
Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html
Obama: the politics of hypocrisy and cynicism
It was supposed to be all about the end of politics as usual. But while President Barack Obama has been happy to bring about change while abroad by doing all he can to diminish the superpower status of the United States, at home it's been the same old.
Take the case of Greg Craig, the first big figure to depart the Obama White House and the victim of the Washington equivalent of a back-alley stabbing. A respected lawyer who defended President Bill Clinton during impeachment, the former State Department official was one of the first big guns to break with the Clintons and go all in for Obama.
Bowing to the wishes of Hillary Clinton, who blocked him from his preferred field of foreign policy, Craig was made White House Counsel.
He was charged with closing Guantanamo Bay, overhauling interrogation rules and translating Obama's high-minded campaign ideals into workable policy.
Having issued a directive on his second full day in office that Guantanamo Bay would close "no later than one year from the date of this order", Obama soon came up against reality. Last week, he lamely conceded that he would miss his own deadline but "would anticipate" the jail shutting in 2010.
Faithfully implementing Obama's wishes, Craig drew up plans for the release of photos of American troops engaging in the abuse of prisoners.
Faced with fierce opposition from generals and former CIA chiefs the President then changed his mind.
Before you could whisper "change we can believe in", Craig became the designated scapegoat for Obama's photos U-turn and the Guantanamo debacle. The campaign had been free of leaks but Craig was knifed by Team Obama in time-honoured Washington. He was toast, confided anonymous officials who portrayed him as an incompetent in the thrall of bed-wetting human rights types.
On the record, officials flatly denied Craig might be fired and airily dismissed reports of the authorised leaks as "typical Washington parlour games". A bemused Craig wondered who his enemy might be, realising too late that it was Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, operating with Obama's blessing.
White House officials were demonstrably lying to reporters when they said Craig was not under threat. With breathtaking chutzpah, they briefed last week that his departure had been on the cards "for months".
In the Clinton era it was OK to lie about sex. Under Obama, it seems, it's just fine to lie about running the country.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/6622103/Barack-Obama-the-politics-of-hypocrisy-and-cynicism.html
Obama: President Pantywaist restores the satellite states to their former owner- Russia
Barack Obama’s chances of re-election in three and a half years’ time may be evaporating at unprecedented speed, but his presidential ambitions could still be realised in another direction. He would be a shoo-in to win the next Russian presidential election, so high is his popularity now running in the land of the bear and the knout. Obama has done more to restore Russia’s hegemonial potential in Eastern and Central Europe than even Vladimir Putin.
His latest achievement has been to restore the former satellite states to dependency on Moscow, by wimping out of the missile defence shield plan. This follows on his surrender last July when he voluntarily sacrificed around a third of America’s nuclear capability for no perceptible benefit beyond a grim smile from Putin. If there is one thing that fans the fires of aggression it is appeasement.
Despite propaganda to the contrary, 58 per cent of Poles were in favour of the missile shield. But small nations must assess the political will of larger powers. Thanks to President Pantywaist’s supine policies, the former satellite states can see that they are fast returning to their former status. The American umbrella cannot be relied upon on a rainy day. They have been here before. Poles remember how a leftist US president sold them out to Russia at Tehran and Yalta. The former Czechoslovakia was betrayed twice: in 1938 and 1945.
If the word is out that America is in retreat, it will soon find it has no friends. The satellites will pragmatically accept their restored subordination, without openly acknowledging it, and co-operate with their dangerous neighbour, ushering in a new generation of Finlandisation.
Bringing unstable states like Georgia into Nato would be a liability, not a defence. The crazy notion of a US-Nato-Russian combined defence policy has all the staying power of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Ronald Reagan, assisted by Margaret Thatcher, implemented the sensible principle that Russia, from the time of Peter the Great, respects only strength and steely political will. A pushover in the Oval Office is the best news Russian expansionists have heard since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Barack Obama is selling out America and, by extension, the entire West. This is a catastrophe for America and the wider world.- By Gerald Warner
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100010499/barack-obama-president-pantywaist-restores-the-satellite-states-to-their-former-owner/
Obama on the wrong side of history as ungrateful voters trash their redeemer
By Gerald Warner
Well, that didn’t last long, did it? The apotheosis of Barack Obama, I mean. The results from yesterday’s electoral contests in the United States are a massive slap in the face for The One. I blame Fox News. Or, rather, he will. It is always embarrassing for a messiah to find himself on the wrong side of history and Barack’s face has more egg on it than a six-portion omelette. It is a delight to see.
In Virginia – the key swing state whose rejection of John McCain a year ago was hailed by Democrats as a paradigm of the new electoral order – the Republican Bob McDonnell beat the Democrat incumbent by a massive 17 per cent to win the governorship, a margin reflected in accompanying GOP victories in the lieutenant-governor and attorney general races. In New Jersey the Republican Chris Christie similarly sent his Democrat opponent off for an early bath.
Obama’s people are struggling to extract some consolation from the fact that in the New York special congressional election their man squeaked in by a whisker, after the anti-Republican Republican candidate had been forced to retire and leave the opposition to Conservative Doug Hoffman.
Yet there was hope. The politically correct zealots in the White House hoped at least to snatch a victory for anti-Christian social radicalism in Maine, where voters were having a referendum (British readers may need to have that unfamiliar term explained to them) on whether to endorse or reject a law passed by legislators to introduce same-sex marriage. The count took longer there, but the turnout was unusually high. This heartened homosexual activists and White House cheerleaders, on the assumption this would be favourable to their cause.
The same assumption was made by liberals on the night of Dubya’s second election when a large turnout was presumed to indicate that The People, like extras in a grainy Eisenstein film, had turned out to do their revolutionary duty at the bidding of their socialist elitist betters. The same rude awakening was administered in Maine, where the extra large turnout trashed the homosexual marriage legislation. This was the 31st state in the Union to reject same-sex marriage by popular referendum. In the five states where it has been legalised by legislators the issue has never been put to the electorate.
Psephologists today are reluctantly getting their heads round the fact that the obituaries they wrote this time last year for the Christian right and social conservatives are now just discredited yellowing clippings. McDonnell, the victor in Virginia, is a strong supporter of the Christian right. Christie in New Jersey is anti-abortion and anti-same sex marriage. He was endorsed by the influential group Family Research Council Action PAC; such groups were disdained by his Republican predecessor as “social fundamentalists”. In New York, social conservatives were influential in ousting Dede Sozzafava, the socially liberal GOP candidate. The Maine result speaks for itself.
Then, of course, there was the great redeemer Obama’s personal record: healthcare chaos, billions lavished on Wall Street, 10 per cent unemployment, deeper engagement in the Afghan quagmire, climate change hysteria threatening American prosperity, support for Marxists in Latin America, President Pantywaist’s jettisoning of America’s nuclear defences, a crass and humiliating failure to secure the Olympics for his own backyard in Chicago – what’s not to like? Wait till 2010, Barack. It gets worse.
Comment: absurd decision on Obama makes a mockery of the Nobel peace prize
The award of this year’s Nobel peace prize to President Obama will be met with widespread incredulity, consternation in many capitals and probably deep embarrassment by the President himself.
Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. It was clearly seen by the Norwegian Nobel committee as a way of expressing European gratitude for an end to the Bush Administration, approval for the election of America’s first black president and hope that Washington will honour its promise to re-engage with the world.
Instead, the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace.
The pretext for the prize was Mr Obama’s decision to “strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples”. Many people will point out that, while the President has indeed promised to “reset” relations with Russia and offer a fresh start to relations with the Muslim world, there is little so far to show for his fine words.
The spectacle of Mr Obama mounting the podium in Oslo to accept a prize that once went to Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi and Mother Theresa would be all the more absurd if it follows a White House decision to send up to 40,000 more US troops to Afghanistan. However just such a war may be deemed in Western eyes, Muslims would not be the only group to complain that peace is hardly compatible with an escalation in hostilities.
Mr Obama becomes the third sitting US President to receive the prize. The committee said today that he had “captured the world’s attention”. It is certainly true that his energy and aspirations have dazzled many of his supporters. Sadly, it seems they have so bedazzled the Norwegians that they can no longer separate hopes from achievement. The achievements of all previous winners have been diminished.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6867711.ece
There's good reason not to trust Obama
Let me say it again – I don't trust Barack Obama, and neither should you. And it has nothing to do with the color of his skin. How can we trust a commander in chief who values playing basketball more than he does giving immediate and full attention to his general's desperate plea for more troops? What other president, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro notwithstanding, has publicly threatened and bullied privately owned companies in his own country for providing accurate information pursuant to what his proposed measures will truly mean for their clients?
Obama promised that his administration would be based on transparency. Yet, it took external news and information sources to expose Van Jones. And to date, Obama still has not revealed that which we are finding out on our own about his other czars, the power they have and their true political affiliations.
Where is his transparency pursuant to legislation intended as payback to unions for their support? Has he taken to his teleprompter to tell the nation that in order for non-union contractors to get government contracts they must hire union laborers, even though they are non-union? Has he told the nation that he is forcing non-union contractors to pay union wages and in some instances even contribute to union pension funds? Has he told us by what constitutional authority he took over the banking and automobile industries?
Speaking of transparency, why won't he produce his birth certificate? Why are his transcripts and most other artifacts that concern his life being kept from public scrutiny?
-Mychal Massie is chairman of the National Leadership Network of Black Conservatives-Project 21
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=111310
Barack Obama's missile shield decision will be cheered in Russia
The Kremlin will allow itself a wry smile today. Reports that Barack Obama has scrapped plans for a missile defence shield in Eastern Europe are music to its ears.
In Eastern Europe, there is likely to be real anxiety and soul-searching.
Many politicians in the missile shield's putative host countries – Poland and the Czech Republic – will undoubtedly feel jilted and let down by Washington. Former Soviet bloc countries had already begun to voice concerns that Washington's vaunted reset of relations with Moscow would come at their expense. For many, this move is likely to be seen as a disappointing confirmation of that. Washington could be busy mending fences and reassuring some of is staunchest European allies about its future intentions for months to come.
The big question now though is what if anything is Russia ready to do in return? Washington has a meaty wish list. It wants Russia to back tough sanctions against Iran to curb the Islamic Republic's nuclear alleged ambitions. It would also like Russia to make deep cuts in its own nuclear arsenal when it comes to renegotiating a key arms control treaty due to expire in December.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/6201654/Analysis-Barack-Obamas-missile-shield-decision-will-be-cheered-in-Russia.html
Maureen Dowd's disgusting insinuation that Joe Wilson is a racist would land her in court in Britain
Nasty piece of work, Maureen Dowd. In the Barack Obama-worshipping New York Times over the weekend, she insinuated that Congressman Joe Wilson’s “you lie” outburst during the presidential address was inspired by racism.
Please, don’t give me that first amendment crap. The New York Times demands high enough standards of evidence when the target of a defamatory remark is a liberal. But Joe Wilson is fair game – not because he behaved so badly, but because the financially troubled “old gray lady” and her employees are still in the grip of Messianic delusions.
This might seem a mean thing to say about an old lady, but I really hope she croaks soon.(The Times, that is, not Maureen Dowd.)
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100009567/maureen-dowds-disgusting-insinuation-that-joe-wilson-is-a-racist-would-land-her-in-court-in-britain/
America's exceptional ally; Israel worth defending at all costs.
There has been much talk in recent months about the prospect of Syria bolting the Iranian axis and becoming magically transformed into an ally of the West. Although Syria's President-for-life Bashar Assad's daily demonstrations of fealty to his murderous friends has exposed this talk as nothing more than fantasy, it continues to dominate the international discourse on Syria.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1251804542810&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter
Stop the imminent deportation of ‘apostate’ Hussain Muradi to Afghanistan
Deporting an Apostate: "If I went back to Afghanistan myself, I would call it a suicide; if I am sent back to Afghanistan, it's an execution."
Hussain Muradi, activist of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB) and One Law for All Campaign, has been detained on September 10, 2009 and is facing imminent deportation back to Afghanistan where he will face the death penalty for ‘apostasy.’
As part of his fight against the Islamists, Hussain has publicly renounced Islam in order to break the taboo that comes with such a renunciation and push for the right to leave religion, particularly crucial given that apostasy is punishable by death under Sharia law.
As Hussain has said on the CEMB’s website: ‘I was not born to be a Muslim and be afraid of God and more importantly I did not sign an agreement with him/her /it to worship him. As a child, religion has been forced upon me. I have been forced to pray, fast, etc. In Afghanistan where I was living, questioning the existence of god or religion is deemed blasphemy and punishable by stoning to death. Now in the UK I have the opportunity and courage to declare who I am. I AM A FREE MAN WITHOUT ANY EXTRA BONDAGE ON ME.’
Hussain was detained after being summoned to the Gillingham police station in Kent on September 10. In a statement right before he was detained, he said: ‘If I went back to Afghanistan myself, I would call it a suicide; if I am sent back to Afghanistan, I would see it as an execution.’
You can see the rest of his statement here.
http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/09/12/stop-the-imminent-deportation-of-apostate-hussain-muradi/
Betraying our dead
We resolved that we, the People, would never forget. Then we forgot.
We've learned nothing.
Instead of cracking down on Islamist extremism, we've excused it.
Instead of killing terrorists, we free them.
Instead of relentlessly hunting Islamist madmen, we seek to appease them.
Instead of acknowledging that radical Islam is the problem, we elected a president who blames America, whose idea of freedom is the right for women to suffer in silence behind a veil -- and who counts among his mentors and friends those who damn our country or believe that our own government staged the tragedy of September 11, 2001.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/betraying_our_dead_H6T95r1BTCnkC1UbEdUfsO
Japan's 1st lady: I have been abducted by aliens
She also has been to the planet Venus and knew Tom Cruise in a former incarnation – when he was Japanese. Move over Michelle, watch your backs, Carla and Sarah. There's a new kid on the first lady block, and she looks like upstaging the lot of you.
(Still, I'd trade Japan's First Lady, Miyuki Hatoyama with the Marxist America hater we are now stuck with).
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/i-have-been-abducted-by-aliens-says-japans-first-lady-1780888.html
PUNISHING PATRIOTS
WITCH HUNT AT CIA ENDANGERS US
THE Obama administration's determination to hold witch-hunt "investigations" of CIA interrogators who did their patriotic best to keep us safe endangers us all.
Castrate the CIA, and Americans will die. But the Obama White House wants vengeance against those who don't fit its ideology. Your family's safety comes a distant second.
And let's get real: Attorney General Eric Holder (whose top career achievement was finessing the presidential pardon of a criminal Clinton donor) is not acting independently.
Anyone who believes that Holder didn't pre-brief the president and get the nod prior to announcing his determination to crucify high-achieving CIA agents probably believes that government-run health care will balance the federal budget.
I followed this travesty as I worked with our military at various bases last month. I could have been listening to old BBC World Service reports from the Third World. This is the sort of politicized retribution that prevails in backwater countries when regimes change.
Our wise tradition has been for new administrations to accept that their predecessors did their best, however disagreeably, and move on. Gerald Ford sacrificed himself to that end, and even Jimmy Carter understood that presidencies are not for domestic revenge.
And the lesson the left should draw from its own wretched global history is that those who stage the show trials this time may wind up in the dock themselves when the wheel turns.
But Obama's political base wants blood. American blood. This inquisition isn't about justice. It's about punishing those who fought terror with all their might.
What have we come to when our attorney general frees terrorists, then threatens to prosecute patriots who treated butchers too harshly for left-wing tastes?
What Holder intends -- with Obama's blessing -- isn't about cleaning up a rogue agency, but cleaning out those who believed that protecting our country trumped all else in wartime. This ideological purge promises to do more damage to the intelligence community than even the crippling Carter-era shenanigans -- whose effects are still felt today.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/09012009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/punishing_patriots_187490.htm
President Pantywaist in retreat: Barack Obama hoists the white flag over Stalinist health care
The white flag is flying over Camp Obama, which makes a pleasant change from the red flag that, metaphorically speaking, has been flying there since January 20. Barack Obama’s plan for socialized health care on the Stalinist model across the United States is now in full retreat. Not only will it not play in Peoria, it will not play anywhere.
Obama has no notion of cautious, consensual reform: he wants a Union of Soviet States of America and he wants it now. A realist would have taken up the existing reform proposals, perhaps radicalized them a little, and tried to take them forward. Above all, he would not have alienated the pro-life lobby by rolling abortion into the plan. But not Obama. He brings to the White House the abilities and experience of a Chicago community organizer. As Sarah Palin witheringly said: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer’ except that you have actual responsibilities.”
This will be a one-term presidency.
Bravo.
MORE:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100006701/president-pantywaist-in-retreat-barack-obama-hoists-the-white-flag-over-stalinist-health-care-proposals/
Barack Obama and the CIA: why does President Pantywaist hate America so badly?
By Gerald Warner
If al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the rest of the Looney Tunes brigade want to kick America to death, they had better move in quickly and grab a piece of the action before Barack Obama finishes the job himself. Never in the history of the United States has a president worked so actively against the interests of his own people - not even Jimmy Carter.
Obama’s problem is that he does not know who the enemy is. To him, the enemy does not squat in caves in Waziristan, clutching automatic weapons and reciting the more militant verses from the Koran: instead, it sits around at tea parties in Kentucky quoting from the US Constitution. Obama is not at war with terrorists, but with his Republican fellow citizens. He has never abandoned the campaign trail.
More:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/9614177/Barack_Obama_and_the_CIA_why_does_President_Pantywaist_hate_America_so_badly/
FCC 'diversity' chief to regulate talk radio?
FCC's new "diversity" director, Mark Lloyd, may seek to regulate talk radio through the "back door." There is concern that the new diversity chief would implement a back-door return of the “Fairness Doctrine,” a now-defunct policy which mandated that broadcasters devote equal airtime to both sides of controversial issues. A return to the Fairness Doctrine would spell the end of opinion talk radio.
This tactic along with the implementation of "localism" policies (ending most syndication) would would take away from conservative Americans one of the very few forums for conservative thought. If this implementation takes place, (something which the Obama administration no doubt wants and would in no way resist), expect similar tactics to be attempted regarding restrictions put on cable news (Fox) as well as the internet.
The only surprise here is that this administration has not moved already on this prohibition against free speech; meaning, any point of view that goes against their agenda.
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/52633
The “Second American Revolution” Has Begun
America is seething. Not since the Civil War has anything like this happened. But the protests are either being intentionally downplayed or ignorantly misinterpreted.
Conditions will continue to deteriorate. The global economy is terminally ill. The recession is in a brief remission, not the early stages of recovery. Cheap money, easy credit and unrestrained borrowing brought on an economic crisis that cannot be cured by monetary and fiscal policies that promote more cheap money, easy credit and unrestrained borrowing.
Nevertheless, Washington will continue to intervene, tax and exert control. Protests will escalate and riots will follow.
Fourth Shot of the “Second American Revolution”: While there are many wild cards that could light the fuse, The Trends Research Institute forecasts that if the threat of government-forced Swine Flu vaccinations is realized, it will be the fourth shot.
Before the momentum of the “Second American Revolution” becomes unstoppable, it could be derailed through some false flag event designed to deceive the public. - By Gerald Celente
http://yonkerstribune.typepad.com/yonkers_tribune/2009/08/the-second-american-revolution-has-begun-by-gerald-celente.html
Pressure (Countdown) Toward Breakdown
Reports that at the end of August, a financial breakdown is due, and a shutdown of US banks is planned.
Tax receipts are on pace to drop 18% this year, the biggest single-year decline since the Great Depression. 48% of all US mortgage loans to be underwater by 2011. The $3.5 trillion commercial real estate market is eroding; defaults are doubling. The end of the General Motors plant shutdown, and the magnificent but costly ‘Clunker’ rebate program do not a recovery make. Almost half a million people fell off the state unemployment insurance system in July, which was hailed as evidence of a recovery.
http://www.kitco.com/ind/willie/aug132009.html
Look for another round of home foreclosures as a collapse of the $3.5 trillion commercial real estate market.
And the Obama Administration continues with it's lies and distractions.
Congressman Broun: Socialistic elite' looking for excuse to declare martial law.
Obamacare a 'rotten fish,' says U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, R-Athens at town hall. He also of a "socialistic elite" - Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid - who might use a pandemic disease or natural disaster as an excuse to declare martial law.
"They're trying to develop an environment where they can take over," he said. "We've seen that historically."
http://onlineathens.com/stories/081209/new_480756985.shtml
Obama Administration’s Decision to No Longer Wage War with Jihadists is a Dangerous Mistake
Wishful Thinking Can't Change Ideologies, the administration's doctrine on the threat understanding is entirely disconnected from reality.
“In short, " Phares said, "the new doctrine asserts that the U.S. is no longer engaged in a ‘war on terrorism.’ They disengage from the conflict as if is in a wishful, thinking that they can redesign world realities in different colors and names. As if one party in a conflict can decide on the ideology and the strategies of the foe.”
The Obama Administration's Doctrine is Dangerous to the U.S.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.4003/pub_detail.asp
Nancy Pelosi, Yes, There is Still Hope
Artificial brain '10 years away'
A detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years, a leading scientist has claimed. http://www.nowpublic.com/world/artificial-brain-10-years-away-end-human-race
'Hezbollah plotting attacks abroad'
Comes amid war of words between Lebanese group, Israel
By Aaron Klein
JERUSALEM – The Lebanese Hezbollah terrorist organization has decided to carry out attacks against Israelis abroad, including possibly assassinating high profile figures, Israeli defense sources told WND.
The information comes amid a war of rhetoric between Israel and Lebanon. Also, Israel yesterday advanced temporarily toward the Lebanese border following reports the militia has stockpiled 40,000 rockets
in the area and is training its guerrillas to use missiles capable of striking Tel Aviv. "http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=page.view&pageid=106593>
Anti-Obama trinkets explode in sales; 'No, he can't'
Trinkets that stick it to Obama start to sell- A good sign that the people are FINALLY waking up to a depraved, incompetent, Marxist, Chicago thug in chief. Hopefully, anyway.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/11/cashing-in-on-no-he-cant/
Tension on Israel-Lebanese border rises
Iran sends Hezbollah upgraded missiles http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=6215
Israel warned Syria that if these missiles are allowed to cross its border into Lebanon, they would be judged to be a violation of the regional balance of strength and legitimate targets for attack.
Why is the US loaning $10 billion to Brazilian state oil company Petrobras?
http://tinyurl.com/m2p4jl
WHY IS "THE EXPORT-IMPORT BANK OF THE UNITED STATES" (established by Executive Order in 1934) LOANING $10BILLION TO A GLOBAL OIL COMPANY WHILE AMERICANS ARE LOOSING JOBS AND BEING FORECLOSED?
Climate change excuse for US military intervention?
Study: Children Ruin the Environment
According to statisticians at Oregon State University, an American woman who has a baby will generate nearly seven times the carbon footprint of that of a Chinese woman who has a child. http://tinyurl.com/lt9ay7
Wonder why the rush to vaccinate your kids with lethal vaccines? href="http://tinyurl.com/lt9ay7">
Kepler Shows Exoplanet Is Unlike Anything in Our Solar System
The Kepler Space Telescope, which launched earlier this year to find Earth-like planets elsewhere in our galaxy. The ultimate quest to find other planets that support life will require a series of other missions and telescopes, which focus on planets much closer to home.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/kepler_hello">
The Enemy of My Enemy:
A disturbing trend; radical Islamists are finding new allies with extreme leftist groups. http://tinyurl.com/lakf7k
ALG Condemns SEIU Beating
ALG Condemns SEIU Beating; Calls for Special Prosecutor to “Investigate White House Complicity” http://www.getliberty.org/
Re-education camps?
U.S. Army website is seeking an "Internment/Resettlement" specialist http://tinyurl.com/nkvk7o A roundup of dissidents? Re-education camps?
Unemployment rate at 20%
Unemployment rate at 20% after adjustments are made to eliminate US government tampered numbers. http://tinyurl.com/l3uk7c
Saudis to pay $3.5 billion for fence around country
ATTENTION DHS: Saudis to pay $3.5 billion for fence around country http://tinyurl.com/kmu92u Gee, I thought border fences didn't work.
