Obama and Gaddafi: Old Pals I would hate to be his Good friend!!

Obama and Gaddafi: 

Some have expressed amazement at how much quicker Obama was to condemn America's unsavory ally Hosni Mubarak than the far more unsavory enemy Muammar Gaddafi, who has killed Americans in terror attacks. After all, Gaddafi has used the military to suppress resistance far more brutally than Mubarak, who even in extremis only resorted to rough-em-up tactics comparable to those employed by the SEIU. But others are aware than Qaddafi and Obama are old friends. In September 2009, WaPo reported on a Gaddafi speech at the United Nations:

[W]hen it came to America's 44th president, Gaddafi offered only warm words, calling him "our son" and "our Obama," and saying, "The election of Obama is the beginning of change."

"We are content and happy if Obama can stay forever as the president," Gaddafi said during a rambling, 95-minute speech during which he read from notes, exhausted at least one of his interpreters, threw the U.N. schedule into disarray, and put much of his audience to sleep.

Replace the notes with a teleprompter and you can see why they hit it off.

Another reason is that they have close friends in common. In 1984 Jeremiah Wright — Obama's spiritual mentor for over 20 years — traveled to Libya to kiss Gaddafi's ring as part of an anti-American propaganda junket that also included radical pal Louis Farrakhan.

If America's foreign policy appears to make no sense whatsoever, just keep in mind that people like this are running the country now.

Libya truly is a foreign policy disaster

October 26, 2011

Libya truly is a foreign policy disaster

Dr. Judith WellerCumberland Times-News

Out of Moammar’s tyrannical frying pan and soon into Muhammed’s totalitarian Islamic fire.

Our adventures in Libya are another foreign policy disaster for Obama. Many are cheering the death of Gadhafi and hailing his death as a foreign policy success. But if you dig deeper and look at the Middle East as a whole, anyone can see that it is in reality a disaster of great magnitude.

Our adventures in Libya cost the taxpayer $1.1 billion. We ended up having to do most of the intelligence gathering missions as our NATO allies lack the technical expertise for modern warfare. We have the drones, the GPS packages for smart bombs and the mid-air refueling capacity. The U.S. supplied all that! No NATO campaign is possible without the U.S. And in the end Libya required “boots on the ground” to win — granted those were Libyan boots but they would still be sitting in Benghazi without lots of foreign assistance, supplies, money and training. The Libyan military was hardly up to the standards of Quds Force or Syria’s elite army.

In the end Gadhafi’s death will hurt our foreign policy — something Obama and Clinton do not understand. In 2006 after the capture of Saddam Hussein, Gadhafi an-nounced that Libya would surrender its weapons of mass destruction and submit to international inspections. He was hailed and welcomed back to the community of nations. He was received in Britain by Tony Blair and in the U.S. by Obama.

Since February, a series of uprising known as the Arab Spring broke out in the Middle East. Gadhafi moves to crush a handful of Islamist rebels in Benghazi. France and Britain, who buy oil from Libya, rushed to call for Intervention under a fig leaf supplied by the U.N. It was not in our national security interest but Obama let the U.S. get sucked into a war which he said on March 18 would last “days not weeks.” It lasted eight months and it turned out to be a lot harder than anyone thought.

But the real importance is the lessons other leaders have learned from U.S. Libyan War. The main lesson is: Never give up your WMD or the U.S. will bomb you and kill you. So anyone who thinks that Iran or North Korea will give up WMD is truly naïve. Those countries saw what happened when one leader gave up his WMD and they will not let it happen to them. Our negotiations over WMD with Iran and North Korea or Pakistan are DOA — dead on arrival.

Also, since NATO exceeded the terms of the U.N. mandate, Russia and China will be exercising their veto in the Security Council to ensure NATO never against gets U.N. authority to carry out regime change under the fig leaf of “responsibility to protect.”

Our Arab allies watched us throw our ally of 35 years, Hosni Mubarak, “under the bus.” What did we get for not supporting Mubarak or at least granting him asylum in the U.S.? We got Iranian warships sailing through Suez and into the Mediterranean — something never allowed by Mubarak. The barrier on Gaza was ripped down in support of Hamas. It is looking more and more as if we will either get a military dictatorship or an Islamist government in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group, looks set to gain power in those countries where our allies have been booted out.

They will not be friendly to the U.S.

What is happening is an unparalleled set of diplomatic failures in the Middle East under Obama which will hurt this country for decades to come.

Dr. Judith Weller

Obama taxpayer funded battleground state listening tour/campaign bus tour –FAIL.

Obama has lost 14 percentage points in the Gallup poll in the last three months. With the economy continuing to list and unemployment hovering around 9%, it is not difficult to imagine the slide continuing.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that [only --Ed.] 19% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-five percent (45%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -26 (see trends).

This is the lowest Approval Index rating yet measured for President Obama. The previous low was -24 reached yesterday and also in September 2010. Additionally, the level of Strong Approval matches the lowest yet recorded. By way of comparison, President Bush had ratings near the end of his second term in the minus 30s.

In 31 months of Barack Obama’s presidency, according to the Treasury and CBS News, the US has added $4 trillion to its national debt.  That approaches the presidential record set by George W. Bush of $4.9 trillion, but there’s a catch to that.  Bush set that record in two terms — in 96 months:

The latest posting by the Treasury Department shows the national debt has now increased $4 trillion on President Obama’s watch.

The debt was $10.626 trillion on the day Mr. Obama took office. The latest calculation from Treasury shows the debt has now hit $14.639 trillion.
It’s the most rapid increase in the debt under any U.S. president.

The national debt increased $4.9 trillion during the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush. The debt now is rising at a pace to surpass that amount during Mr. Obama’s four-year term.

Let’s cast this by month rather than by year.  Bush added an average of $51 billion a month to the national debt.  In his 31 months in office, Obama has added to the national debt at an average monthly rate of $129 billion.  That is 152% more per month than Obama’s predecessor.

Mark Knoller lists Obama’s excuses for the debt buildup on his watch, which not surprisingly all get blamed on Bush:

• “Two wars we didn’t pay for”

• “A prescription drug program for seniors…we didn’t pay for.”

• “Tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 that were not paid for.”

Well, there are big problems with these excuses, chief among them that none of this explains the sharp difference between the rate of debt under Bush and under Obama.  After all, the wars all started early in Bush’s tenure.  So too did the tax cuts and the Medicare Part D program.  Yet not only did deficit spending remain under control throughout almost all of the Bush years, deficit spending actually declined in Bush’s second term until the economic collapse occurred.

So what changed?  We’re spending more on entitlements, for one thing, but not that much more.  Byron York argues that while conservatives are rightly focused on entitlements to solve the long-term structural deficit, the rapid short-term increase in deficit spending is the result of a Democratic spending spree:

There’s no doubt federal spending has exploded in recent years. In fiscal 2007, the last year before things went haywire, the government took in $2.568 trillion in revenues and spent $2.728 trillion, for a deficit of $160 billion.

In 2011, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, the government will take in $2.230 trillion and spend $3.629 trillion, for a deficit of $1.399 trillion.

That’s an increase of $901 billion in spending and a decrease of $338 billion in revenue in a very short time. Put them together, and that’s how you go from a $160 billion deficit to a $1.399 trillion deficit.

But how, precisely, did that happen? Was there a steep rise in entitlement spending? Did everyone suddenly turn 65 and begin collecting Social Security and using Medicare? No: The deficits are largely the result not of entitlements but of an explosion in spending related to the economic downturn and the rise of Democrats to power in Washington. While entitlements must be controlled in the long run, Washington’s current spending problem lies elsewhere. …

Spending for Social Security and Medicare did go up in this period — $162 billion and $119 billion, respectively — but by incremental and predictable amounts that weren’t big problems in previous years. “We’re getting older one year at a time, and health care costs grow at 7 or 8 percent a year,” says Holtz-Eakin. If Social Security and Medicare were the sole source of the current deficit, it would be a lot smaller than it is.

The bottom line is that with baby boomers aging, entitlements will one day be a major budget problem. But today’s deficit crisis is not one of entitlements. It was created by out-of-control spending on everything other than entitlements. The recent debt-ceiling agreement is supposed to put the brakes on that kind of spending, but leaders have so far been maddeningly vague on how they’ll do it.

Finally, let’s recall that Congress passes budgets, not the President.  The proper measure of deficits and debt should be allocated on the basis of Congressional control as well as control of the White House.

  Ten months ago, when Obama blasted through the $3 trillion debt mark, I calculated the true allocation of debt along those lines:

First, let’s break down the last 10 years of the Bush/Obama era by control of Congress, starting on January 1, 2001.  The starting point for the national debt was $5.662 trillion.  On January 6, 2007, when Democrats took over, Republicans in total control had added $3.011 trillion in debt in six years, just slightly less than Obama has added since taking office less than two years ago.  Since taking control of Congress less than four years ago, Democrats have added $4.992 trillionto the national debt.

Perhaps it would be more fair to look at the entirety of Republican control of the House, which lasted 12 years and bridged the Clinton and Bush administrations.  In that entire span, Republican budgets added $3.873 trillion to the national debt.  That is not only far below what Democrats have added in just one-third of the time, it’s also far below the Obama administration’s own projections of how much they will add to the national debt in just one term.

We can also do the same calculations by fiscal year, from October 1 to September 30 each year, matching the budgets. Using that guide, we find the following scenarios:

• Republicans in control for 12 years: Added $4.034 trillion (avg $336.17 billion per year)
• Republicans in control during Bush era: Added $3.201 trillion (avg $533.5 billion per year)
• Democrats in control of Congress during Bush/Obama era:  Added $4.603 trillion (avg 1.48 trillion per year)

Now, with an extra $1 trillion in ten months, we can change that last line to $5.6 trillion for Democrats in less than 4 years.  It’s an astonishing explosion of federal spending, much of it in the increased regulation that’s strangling job growth.  It’s no coincidence, after all, that this massive expansion in federal size and power accompanies an extended economic slump and a refusal of investors to put their capital to work.

Arizona did the right thing!! USA BANKRUPT

 Bankruptcy  101...why Arizona did the right thing!! 

It's easy to dismiss individual programs that benefit non-citizens until they're put together and this picture emerges.. Someone did a lot of research to put together all of this data. Often these programs are buried within other programs making them difficult to find.  

A Real Eye Opener 

WHY is the USA BANKRUPT? 

Informative, and mind boggling! 

You think the war in Iraq was costing us to much?

Read this: 

We have been hammered with the propaganda that it was the Iraq war and the war on terror that is bankrupting us. 

I now find that to be RIDICULOUS. 

I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them.

I also have included the URL's for verification of all the following  facts... 

1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments. 

Verify at: http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=iic_immigrationissuecenters7fd8  <http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=iic_immigrationissuecenters7fd8>

 2. $22 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens. 

Verify at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.HTML <http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.HTML>  

3.$2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens. 

Verify at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.HTML <http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.HTML>  

4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent  on primary
and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English!

 Verify at: http://transcrip ts.cnn.com/TRANscriptS/0604/01/ldt..0.HTML <http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANscriptS/0604/01/ldt....0.HTML>  

5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies. 

Verify at http://transcrip ts.cnn.com/TRANscriptS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML <http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANscriptS/0604/01/ldt...01.HTML>

 6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.  

Verify at: 

http://transcrip ts.cnn..com/%20TRANscriptS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML
<http://transcripts.cnn.com/%20TRANscriptS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML>  

 7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens. 

Verify at: http://transcrip ts.CNN..com/TRANscriptS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML <http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANscriptS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML> 

 8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal Aliens for Welfare & social  services by the American taxpayers. 

Verify at: http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.HTML <http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.HTML> 

9. $200 Billion dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens. 

Verify at: http://transcrip ts.cnn.com/TRANSCRI <http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute..org/PDF/deportationPDF>  

13. In 2006, illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances to their countries of origin. 

Verify at: http://www/. <http://www/...rense.com/general75/niht.htm>  rense.com/general75/niht.htm <http://www/...rense.com/general75/niht.htm>  

 14. The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration:  Nearly One million sex crimes committed  by Illegal Immigrants In The United States. 

Verify at: http: // www.drdsk.com/articleshtml <http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml>; 

 The total cost is a whopping 

$338.3 BILLION DOLLARS 

A YEAR AND IF YOU'RE LIKE ME, HAVING TROUBLE UNDERSTANDING THIS AMOUNT OF MONEY; IT IS 

$338,300,000,000.00 WHICH  WOULD BE ENOUGH TO STIMULATE  THE ECONOMY FOR THE CITIZENS OF  THIS COUNTRY.
Now for a drop in the bucket that you do not have  to to Snope.  The U.S. State Dept. spent $55,000,000.00 for wood stoves for other third world countries.
The U.S. is to fund $50 million over five years to provide clean cooking stoves to developing countries. Clinton says it’s in order to reduce deaths from smoke inhalation and fight climate change.
Led by the United Nations Foundation, the alliance aims to have 100 million homes using clean stoves and fuels by 2020. “Our long term goal is to have universal adoption all over the world,” said Clinton.
The new alliance gathers U.S. government agencies with the United Nations Foundation, Germany, Norway, Peru the World Health Organization and corporate backers including Morgan Stanley and Shell.
This isn't the first time Clinton has pushed for market standards in industry. While Senator in 2007, Hillary Clinton pushed for new energy standards phasing out incandescent light bulbs. Reports now claim that measure has forced American jobs to go overseas.

http://www.mrctv.org/public/checker.aspx?v=hdkUkU8zDk

$823,200 out of a $12,000,000.00 grant to a UCLA college was spent to teach African men how to wash their genitals after sex.  Yes ladies NOT BEFORE ……. AFTER.  

Paying for this from Stimulus Funds probably is truth in advertising. I bet the field researcher found it highly stimulating.
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), spent $823,200 of economic stimulus funds in 2009 on a study by a UCLA research team to teach uncircumcised African men how to wash their genitals after having sex. The genitalia-washing program is part of a larger $12-million UCLA study examining how to better encourage Africans to undergo voluntary HIV testing and counseling – however, only the penis-washing study received money from the 2009 economic stimulus law. The washing portion of the study is set to end in 2011...
Because AIDS researchers have been unsuccessful in convincing most adult African men to undergo circumcision, the UCLA study proposes to determine whether researchers can develop an after-sex genitalia-washing regimen that they can then convince uncircumcised African men to follow...
The study’s lead investigator Dr. Thomas J. Coates was the fourth highest-funded researcher in the country in 2002 and is currently conducting HIV research on three continents. CNSNews.com asked both Coates and NIMH the following question: “The Census Bureau says the median household income in the United States is $52,000. How would you explain to the average American mom and dad -- who make $52,000 per year -- that taxing them to pay for this grant was justified?”

Coates, who was unavailable for comment, directed CNSNews.com to ask grant-related questions of his assistant, Darya Freedman, who did not respond. The NIMH also declined to respond to CNSNews.com’s question.  If Clinton wants to wash African men’s genitals I have no problem with it I just don’t want to pay for it.

http://www.recovery.gov/Transparency/RecipientReportedData/pages/RecipientProjectSummary508.aspx?AwardIdSur=12567&AwardType=Grants
You put your right hand in,
You take your right hand out,
You put your right hand in
Then you shake it all about…..

What about the “jobs created” part of the stimulus? Think of all the penis washing jobs that could be created. Does a person need teaching credentials to do this job? Would Barney even be qualified? Or could he by pass the educational requirements with “life experience” credits?
Are  we THAT Stupid? 

YES, FOR LETTING THOSE  IN THE U.S. CONGRESS  GET AWAY WITH LETTING  THIS HAPPEN

YEAR AFTER  YEAR!!!!!  

If this doesn't bother you, then just  delete the message..  If, on the other  hand, it does raise
the hair on the back  of your neck, I hope you forward it to every  legal resident in the
United States ..

OBAMA'S OWN WORDS TRAP HIM:

2008: "Navy Seal Team 6 is Cheney's private assassination team."

2011: "I put together Seal Team 6 to take out Bin Laden."

2008: "Bin Laden is innocent until proven guilty, and must be captured alive and given a fair trial."

2011: "I authorized Seal Team 6 to kill Bin Laden."

2008: " Guantanamo is entirely unnecessary, and the detainees should not be interrogated."

2011: "Vital intelligence was obtained from Guantanamo detainees that led to our locating Bin Laden."!

JSOC and Seal Team 6: Liberals “Against It” Until They Were “For It”

May 3, 2011 by mayrant

‘Cheney’s assassination squad’ just killed bin Laden

by Mark Hemingway – Washington Examiner – 05/02/2011

It’s been reported that bin Laden was killed by SEAL Team Six, officially known as Naval Special Warfare Development Group or DevGru. Marc Ambinder has a good report that fills in some of the particulars:

DevGru belongs to the Joint Special Operations Command, an extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions units. They report to the president and operate worldwide based on the legal (or extra-legal) premises of classified presidential directives. Though the general public knows about the special SEALs and their brothers in Delta Force, most JSOC missions never leak. We only hear about JSOC when something goes bad (a British aid worker is accidentally killed) or when something really big happens (a merchant marine captain is rescued at sea), and even then, the military remains especially sensitive about their existence. Several dozen JSOC operatives have died in Pakistan over the past several years. Their names are released by the Defense Department in the usual manner, but with a cover story — generally, they were killed in training accidents in eastern Afghanistan. That’s the code.

Under Bush, JSOC was routinely smeared by the left and placed at the center of many Bush/Cheney conspiracy theories. Specifically, New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh alleged it was Dick Cheney’s personal assassination squad: 

“After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet.”
Hersh then went on to describe a second area of extra-legal operations: the Joint Special Operations Command. “It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” he explained. “They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. … Congress has no oversight of it.”
“It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on,” Hersh stated. “Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.”

Now that a Democratic President has employed JSOC to take out Osama bin Laden, will the fever swamps of the Left continue to assert that it’s just a Bush/Cheney plot to run around unjustifiably killing people?

Senate to begin impeachment proceedings When!!!

Barack Obama Jr. released his long form birth certificate, clearly proving he is NOT a natural born citizen. So, why has there been virtually no call in the Senate to begin impeachment proceedings? And why are so many news reporters acting as if all Obama needed to substantiate he was a Natural Born Citizen was to prove he was born in the U.S.A?

The U.S. Constitution and U.S. law, as of the time of Obama Junior’s birth, still required a President to have a father (pictured top left) who was a U.S. citizen. Clearly Obama’s father was a British citizen (since Kenya at the time was controlled by Great Britain), as clearly shown on the very document Obama released.

Still not convinced? Let’s take a refresher course in U.S. history. Our founding fathers didn’t want any U.S. President to have mixed loyalties so they required that both parents of a President be U.S. citizens in order to qualify their son or daughter to be a Natural Born U.S. Citizen. Period. Simple. Not complicated.

Here’s the exact language of the Naturalization Act of 1790, passed by the first U.S. Congress:
“And the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens: Provided, That the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States…”

And if you are still not absolutely convinced and you prefer to take Obama's word on this matter, then, please do. In 2008 when John McCain was running against Barack Obama for President, Democrats put McCain under the microscope for having been born in the Panama Canal Zone and not in the United States. After much discussion and debate to determine John McCain's eligibility, The U.S. Senate passed a Resolution defining the phrase "Natural Born Citizen" that validated McCain as a bona fide "Natural Born Citizen" who was eligible to run for President of The United States.

And guess who was a U.S. Senator--and a co-sponsor of this resolution that set forth the definition of a "Natural Born Citizen" and requiring that BOTH parents have to be U.S. citizens if their son or daughter was to become President of the United State? You guessed it: Barack Obama, Jr. But in classic Obama double standard fashion, he quickly breached his own resolution and brazening moved into the Oval Office as squatter-in-chief!

Our Viral Video that further elaborates on this topic: “Our Outlaw Presidency” 

Obama victory in 2012?

By PEGGY NOONAN

What if everything we think we know about the president's political position is wrong? That's what I think became clear this week.

You know the conventional wisdom. It is that unemployment ticking down, plus the economy inching back, plus the power of the presidency to affect events, equals a likely Obama victory in 2012. Smart people, especially Republicans, believe this. But how about this for a thought: It's not true. It's all wrong. Barack Obama can be taken, and his adversaries haven't even noticed. In fact, he will likely lose in 2012. Only one thing can save him. More on that further down.

Let's start with the immediate and go to the overarching. The president is immersed in another stressed and unsuccessful spring after a series of losing seasons. Internationally, he's involved in a confused effort that involves bombing Libyan government troops and sometimes their rebel opponents, leaving the latter scattered and scurrying. Responsibility to protect is looking like tendency to deflect.

Domestically, the president's opponents seized the high ground on the great issue of the day, spending and debt, and held it after the president's speech this week. In last week's budget duel, the president was outgunned by Republicans in the House and outclassed by Paul Ryan, who offered seriousness and substance as a unique approach to solving our fiscal problems.

 

In this week's polls: An Ipsos survey says 69% of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, up five points since March. Zogby has only 38% of national respondents saying Mr. Obama deserves re-election, with 55% wanting someone new. Mr. Obama carried Pennsylvania in 2008 by double digits; a poll there this week shows only 42% approving of his leadership, with 52% disapproving. Gallup had the president's support slipping among blacks and Hispanics, with the latter's numbers dramatic: 73% supported him when he was inaugurated, 54% do now. Support among whites on Inauguration Day was 60%. Now it is 39%.

We're all so used to reporting the general trend of these polls that we fail to see their significance: The more that people experience his leadership, the less they like his leadership. There's no real reason to think upticks in this direction or that will seriously change this. Another way to say it is that there have been upticks that might have benefited the president, and so far they haven't.

At this point everyone mentions Mr. Obama's personal approval numbers, which are consistently higher than his leadership numbers. The RealClearPolitics average puts his personal approval at 47.6%, which doesn't sound bad.

But let me offer a hunch based on conversations with people from many walks of life and all regions the past 18 months. The president's personal numbers are probably lower than the polls report. Not that the polls are dishonest, but the American people don't want to not like Mr. Obama. They don't want to tell a young pollster that they don't like a man they elected two years ago, with excitement and hope, by a margin of 9.5 million votes. There are two things I have never heard, not once, in the past year: "I love this guy—I love Obama," and "If only John McCain were president, everything would be better."

I suspect, and it's only a suspicion, that there's a degree to which people tell pollsters they like Mr. Obama to take the sting out of the fact that they just told the pollster they don't approve of his leadership.

We all get stuck in the day-to-day and lose sight of the overarching, but the overarching fact of Mr. Obama's presidency is that he made a bad impression his first years in office and has never turned that impression around.

He spent his first 14 months moving on what he was thinking about—health care—and not what the public was thinking about: the economic crash, jobs, spending. He seemed not to be thinking like everyone else, which underscored the idea that he was unresponsive to the crises they were seeing. It's hard to get past that.

His speech this week brought together all the strands of his flawed leadership. It was at moments clever, but merely clever, not up to the needs of the moment—and cleverness in a time of crisis comes as an affront. The speech seemed oblivious to recent history, as if the president had just discovered something no one knows about, a problem with spending, and has decided to alert us to the danger. He said other politicians attempt to cut by focusing on "waste and abuse," but he knows the real secret: The problem is entitlement spending. But addressing entitlements is all anyone serious has been talking about for years; it's what the Ryan plan is all about!

The speech was intellectually incoherent. An administration that spent two years saying, essentially, that high spending is good is suddenly insisting high spending is catastrophic. The president appealed for bipartisan efforts, but his manner and approach leave his appeals sounding like diktats. His attempts to seem above the fray leave him seeming distanced and unwilling to risk anything.

Most important, the speech signaled that the White House, after all this time, sees the question of spending as a partisan tool, a weapon to be deployed in an election, and not an actual crisis. This is disrespectful toward citizens who feel honest alarm.

Because of these flaws, the speech will have no afterlife, and a major speech with no afterlife might as well not have been given.

***

You would think Democratic professionals, who read the same numbers Republicans do and pick up similar trends, would be hanging their heads in despair.

They are not. They have hope. Their hope is that Republicans in the early caucus and primary states will go crazy.

They hope the GOP will nominate for the presidency someone strange, extreme or barely qualified. They hope that in a mood of antic cultural pique, or in a great acting out of disdain for elites, or to annoy the mainstream media, Republican voters will raise high candidates who are unacceptable to everyone else. Everyone else of course being the great and vital center, which hires and fires presidents. The Democrats' hope is that centrists will look at the Republican nominee and, holding their nose, choose the devil they know. Especially if the one they don't know seems to have little horns under his hair.

Republicans voting in recent presidential primaries have tended to pick the candidates who are viewed as the moderate in the race—Bob Dole in 1996, George W. Bush in 2000, John McCain in 2008. But in truth, there are some pretty antic candidates out there this year.

The great question of the coming year is not, "Will Obama reignite his base?" or, "Will the Democrats outraise and outspend the GOP?" It is: Will the GOP be serious? Will Republicans be equal to their history, their tradition and the moment? If they are—if they recruit and support candidates who can speak to the entire country, who have serious experience and accomplishments, who are grounded and credible, then they will win centrist support. And with it they will likely win the thing without which they cannot achieve the big changes they seek, and that is the presidency.

Obama’s Muslim Brotherhood Ties

 

Obama’s Muslim Brotherhood Ties

by Robert Spencer

02/08/2011

Barack Obama has declared that all opposition groups should have representation in the next Egyptian government, which essentially ensures that the Muslim Brotherhood will be part of that government.  The Brotherhood is the largest opposition group in Egypt, so it will probably end up in the driver’s seat in any new regime, and steer Egypt toward becoming an Islamic state inveterately hostile to the United States.

So why isn’t Obama working to limit the Brotherhood’s scope and influence?  Maybe because he doesn’t really have a problem with the Brotherhood, despite its hostility to America.  He made sure to invite Brotherhood leaders to attend his notorious speech to the Islamic world in Cairo, Egypt, in June 4, 2009.  Starting in the earliest days of his administration, he showed an intense desire to establish friendly ties with Brotherhood-linked organizations—despite the Brotherhood’s stated goal of “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.”

Obama first reached out to the Brotherhood when he chose the leader of a Muslim Brotherhood-linked group that had been named an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case to give a prayer during his inauguration ceremonies.  Ingrid Mattson, then-president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), offered this prayer at the National Cathedral on Obama’s Inauguration Day—despite the fact that the ISNA has admitted its ties to the Brotherhood.  The previous summer, federal prosecutors rejected a request from the ISNA to remove its unindicted co-conspirator status.

Obama didn’t ask Mattson to explain the ISNA’s links to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.  On the contrary:  He sent his senior adviser, Valerie Jarrett, to be the keynote speaker at the ISNA’s national convention in 2009.

Even worse, in April 2009, Obama appointed Arif Alikhan, the deputy mayor of Los Angeles, as assistant secretary for policy development at the Department of Homeland Security.  Just two weeks before he received this appointment, Alikhan (who once called the jihad terror group Hezbollah a “liberation movement”) participated in a fund-raiser for the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).  Like the ISNA, MPAC has links to the Muslim Brotherhood.  In a book titled In Fraternity:  A Message to Muslims in America, co-author Hassan Hathout, a former MPAC president, is identified as “a close disciple of the late Hassan al-Banna of Egypt.  "The MPAC-linked magazine The Minaret spoke of Hathout’s closeness to al-Banna in a 1997 article:  “My father would tell me that Hassan Hathout was a companion of Hassan al-Banna. ... Hassan Hathout would speak of al-Banna with such love and adoration; he would speak of a relationship not guided by politics or law but by a basic sense of human decency.”

The late al-Banna, of course, was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Terror researcher Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project has documented MPAC’s indefatigable and consistent opposition to virtually every domestic anti-terror initiative.  Its magazine The Minaret has dismissed key counterterror operations as part of “[t]he American crusade against Islam and Muslims.”  For his part, while Alikhan was deputy mayor of Los Angeles, he blocked a Los Angeles Police Department project to assemble data about the ethnic makeup of mosques in the Los Angeles area.  This was not an attempt to conduct surveillance of the mosques or monitor them in any way.  LAPD Deputy Chief Michael P. Downing explained that it was actually an outreach program:  “We want to know where the Pakistanis, Iranians, and Chechens are so we can reach out to those communities.”  But Alikhan and other Muslim leaders said that the project manifested racism and “Islamophobia,” and the LAPD ultimately discarded all plans to study the mosques.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a pro-Sharia group.  Obama’s chief adviser on Islamic affairs, Dalia Mogahed, is a pro-Sharia Muslim.  In their Gallup survey published under the hubristic title "Who Speaks for Islam?  What A Billion Muslims Really Think," Mogahed and Saudi-funded dhimmi, or non-Muslim, pseudo-academic John Esposito cooked their data to increase the number of Muslim “moderates,” counting as “moderate” Muslims who wanted Sharia rule, hated America , supported jihad-martyrdom suicide bombing, and opposed equality of rights for women.  Mogahed also defended Sharia on a British TV show.

With Brotherhood operatives in the American government and working closely with it, thanks to Barack Obama, it’s no surprise that he would have no problem with their being part of the Egyptian government too.

Obama Beware the Muslim Brotherhood

Beware the Muslim Brotherhood

It might eventually take over a post-revolution Egypt

 

Sunday, February 13, 2011

By Jack Kelly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

 

What will happen next in Egypt? We don't know. But the consequences -- for good or ill -- will be enormous.
Egypt is the most important nation in the Arab world. It's population (80.5 million) is more than that of Iraq (29.7 million), Saudi Arabia (25.7 million), and Syria (22.1 million) combined.

If Egypt becomes a stable, Western-style democracy, it will transform the region.

But if Egypt becomes an "Islamic republic," as Iran did after its revolution in 1979, war and depression are likely.
So it's important to get the transition right.
We're off to a rocky start. The protests caught the Obama administration by surprise, and it's been behind the power curve ever since.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigned Friday -- a day after he said he wouldn't -- and turned power over to the military. This is probably the best result possible under the circumstances.

It happened in spite of the Obama administration's ever-shifting policy. In his rambling televised address Thursday night, Mr. Mubarak stuck a rhetorical finger in the president's eye. "I would never permit ... any sort of intervention that would come from outside," he said.
"This was a direct slap at Obama," said Middle East expert Barry Rubin. "He basically said: 'I am an Arab warrior, not a community organizer.' "

To give the impression they're on top of things, President Obama and his aides have spoken out frequently. But their many shifts in position have alienated both supporters of the regime and those protesting it.

"The official U.S. position is that Mubarak needs to go immediately, he needs to stay indefinitely, he needs to stay for a bit and then go, he needs to stay for a bit longer and then go sooner rather than later, unless he decides to stay until September," summarized humorist Mark Steyn.
"The improvisational -- critics say closer to schizophrenic -- nature of U.S. diplomacy during the crisis leaves the administration in the unwelcome position of having to make amends with whichever side emerges from the Egyptian tumult as the governing power," wrote Ben Smith in the Webzine Politico.

Our news media have been of little help in understanding what's going on. The networks sent their big names to Cairo though none spoke Arabic, knew the culture or knew the players.

"Their being in Cairo was adding zero news value other than making the plight of Western reporters the focal point of the story, which was not the point of their being in Cairo in the first place," said Rich Galen, who had been press secretary for House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Few journalists have mentioned the protests were sparked by a doubling of food prices in the last year. But the greatest disservice they have done is to misrepresent the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood.
When journalists tout the brotherhood's "moderation" because it has publicly eschewed violence, they fail to mention that its goals are similar to al-Qaida's; that it grew to prominence because of its alliance with Adolf Hitler and that -- according to Kuwait's education minister -- it is the father of all current terror groups in the Middle East.

Confusion about the Muslim Brotherhood is not limited to journalists. In testimony to the House Intelligence Committee Thursday, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, described the brotherhood as "largely secular."
"This is one of the most reckless and irresponsible statements ever made publicly by an American official at a critical and delicate moment," said John Podhoretz of Commentary magazine.

Obama administration cluelessness about the brotherhood is dangerously reminiscent of Carter administration policy toward Iran in 1979. President Jimmy Carter's U.N. ambassador, Andrew Young, once described the Ayatollah Khomeini as "some kind of saint."

The Muslim brothers are bad guys. But they seem to have been as surprised by the protests -- which have been dominated by young people who seem genuinely interested in freedom and democracy -- as the Obama administration was.

Mr. Obama should be providing the democratic elements among the protesters with more than lip service. But it's evident his administration has few contacts among them, and they have little regard for him.

So maybe it's good that few in Egypt are paying much attention to what Mr. Obama has to say.

Jack Kelly is a columnist for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com, 412 263-1476).

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11044/1124812-373.stm#ixzz1Dotx5H89

President is an atheist or fake Christianity

Obama’s fake Christianity?

Liberals argue whether the president is an atheist

President Obama‘s coddling of Islam has many Americans questioning his national-security judgment, if not his intentions. In his administration’s muddled response to the crisis in Egypt, one clear message came from all the president’s men: A new government in Cairo “has to include a whole host of important nonsecular actors,” as stated by White House spokesman Robert L. Gibbs. The hitch is that in the Middle East, nonsecular means radical Islamist, like the Muslim Brotherhood. Now, in the middle of this global clash of civilizations, Mr. Obama‘s own religious disposition is being questioned – and not from the right, but the left.

On his HBO show “Real Time” on Friday, host Bill Maher said of Mr. Obama, “I think he’s a centrist the way he’s a Christian – not really.  … His mother was a secular humanist and I think he is.” When Princeton University professor Cornel West challenged Mr. Maher‘s point about Mr. Obama‘s religion, saying, “He changed his mind on the God question, brother Bill,” the comic retorted, “It’s like when he says ‘I struggle with gay marriage’ – you don’t struggle with gay marriage, you’re fine with gay marriage.” Another guest – who insisted Mr. Obama has “always been pretty centrist” – helpfully reminded that Mr. Obama “did go to church before he was a candidate for the presidency.” That church, of course, was presided over by the racist, anti-American, hate-spewing Rev. Jeremiah Wright. 

Bill Maher can be a funny guy. His website flashes the crack, “It doesn’t make me un-American to say I’d rather live in Paris than in places where cheese only comes in individually wrapped slices.” Aside from the fact that bashing France is a national pasttime and a pretty reliable measure of patriotism, a man who prefers unpasteurized fromage can’t be all bad. That said, his humor has a very tangible dark side, especially when it comes to faith. In the past, Mr. Maher has called Christianity “the ultimate hustle” and ridiculed the fight of good versus evil as a shakedown: “If God gets rid of the devil – and he could, he’s all powerful – well, then there’s no fear. There’s no reason to come to church. There’s no reason to pass the plate.”

Liberals hate it when anybody throws their own gaffes back in their faces. Media Matters can chuck bricks at us all they want for taking purported cheap shots at the president. This debate over Mr. Obama‘s religion is happening among his most ardent supporters, just like the birther flames being fanned by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and Hawaii’s Democratic Gov. Neil Abercrombie. Mr. Obama‘s critics just sit back and laugh while Democrats do their dirty work for them. With friends like Mr. Maher, Mr. Obama doesn’t need enemies.

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