The Good and Bad of Obama’s Counterterrorism Strategy "Finally, the president curiously omitted any reference to America's efforts to
prevent terrorist groups from acquiring weapons of mass destruction – a pillar
of America's efforts in the Global War on Terror since President George W.
Bush's 2002 State
of the Union address . As North Korea continues to increase the size and
effectiveness of its own nuclear arsenal, and terror-sponsoring Iran draws
perilously close to obtaining nuclear weapons-making capability, the United
States must work to actively thwart the nuclear ambitions of rogue nations."
The course President Barack Obama has set may lead to a direct war with Iran "Because it is transparently obvious that U.S. assistance is are too little, too late and will pose no real deterrent, it seems that the main purpose of the aid is not to help the rebels win but to increase pressure on rebel groups to join multilateral peace talks."
US News; Obama's Absentee Foreign Policy "There have been some actions taken, like the use of military force in Libya, but even that appears to have been more of an accident, a distraction if you will, than something growing out of a well thought out tactical and strategic vision. Even the Clinton administration had a more muscular foreign policy than the current occupant of the White House."
This president’s foreign policy seems to be oriented around not letting it get in the way of his domestic and political priorities — more action in Syria will require expending political capital, risking mistakes, angering some of his domestic allies and some of his opponents, too, but there are also costs to inaction that starts to look impotent (and to letting Assad gain the upper hand again). So the administration tries to make it look like they’re doing something, without doing anything
Obama Doctrine: America Allies with Muslim Brotherhood to Promote Middle East ‘Stability’ "Two and a half years ago, who would ever have thought that the United States would enter an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood? There were hints in President Barack Obama’s Cairo speech, yet now it is clear that this is the new basis for regional security sought by the Obama administration."
Jennifer Rubin; Obama’s multiple national security untruths "In foreign policy, the credibility problem plagues him. Consider all the things Obama has asserted that simply aren’t true:"....
Obama's upside down enemies list"Hanson concludes his tour of the upside-down world of Obama's friends and enemies withthe observation that Obama's "most pernicious" legacy "will be the creation of a rogue government that has cut off and terrified half the population - and for no other reason than that they seem to represent things that Mr. Obama simply does not seem to understand." "Or want to understand."
Obama’s Climate of Intimidation "Beyond the fact that biased reporting shapes public opinion to favor the left, it may also have an effect on law enforcement. The persistent lies that have been told about right-leaning political groups by leading Democrats, including President Obama himself, may have led to the IRS abuses of power that we’ve heard so much about in recent weeks."
Do You Trust This Man? "There is a common element to the so-called Obama scandals—the IRS targeting of conservatives, the fatal attack in Benghazi, and widespread spying on U.S. journalists and ordinary Americans. It is a lack of credibility."
Thomas Sowell asks the same question "But we the voters are not blameless. Having chosen an untested man to be president, on the basis of rhetoric, style, and symbolism, we have ourselves to blame if we now have only a choice between two potentially tragic fates — the loss of American lives to terrorism, or a further dismantling of our freedoms that has already led many people to ask, “Is this still America?” "
Note that the IRS is not interested in leaking to Democrat senators or former administration official rumors about George Soros’s income or the details of the tax returns of Warren Buffett, Steven Spielberg, or Bill Gates.
Victor Davis Hanson"There is currently a climate of fear growing throughout the United States. Millions of Americans are terrified of the IRS, the Department of Justice, the EPA, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and even perhaps the FBI, CIA, and State Department. Why? "These government agencies have never been bigger, more powerful, and more ideologically driven. Citizens fear them for understandable reasons: those who do nothing wrong, whether in filing tax forms or trying to buy a rifle, are considered suspect and deserving to be the target of either federal scrutiny or presidential slurs. But those who do a great deal of wrong, either by illegally entering the country, disrupting polling, trafficking in weapons in Mexico, eavesdropping on American citizens, pulling tax information for partisan purposes, subverting a government agency, or lying to the public about government activity, seem exempt from punishment — and, more chillingly, sense that they are so exempt."
IRS: 'Tea Party' Was Shorthand for Political "Internal Revenue Service director of rulings and agreements Holly Paz explained that the IRS simply used “tea party” as shorthand for politically-involved groups in profiling non-profit applicants. She said that when tax agents in Cincinnati referred to tea party groups as requiring special scrutiny, they simply meant all groups with a political activity level."
"Once installed, AMBER and Emergency alerts are automatically sent to your phone unless you switch them off via Settings, but you can't disable Presidential alerts."
Federal Alerts Have Invaded Your Phone "The presidential alert is any time Obama wants to talk to you. I remember when the federal law was passed, and it was not that long ago. But if Obama ever wants, or any president now, ever wants to issue a presidential alert, it's thought of as very, very rare, and only in the most dire emergencies. But that ability now exists for the president of the United States to send out emergency text messages essentially to every telephone."
Alana Goodman "Anti-Israel college students will trek to a scenic campsite in upstate New York this summer to learn how to launch campus boycotts against the Jewish state at a program subsidized and run by one of America’s largest Quaker faith groups.
....
“It doesn’t help a single Palestinian. It doesn’t improve the quality of life for Palestinians. It is simply anti-Israel,” the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Abraham Cooper told the Washington Free Beacon. “Unfortunately, the community of the people associated with this particular church have embraced [the BDS campaign] completely, so much so that they are using up whatever moral capital they have to do training for an immoral, hypocritical, and anti-Semitic undertaking.” Via Allyson Christie at Allyson’s Geo-Political Inspections,focusing on Israel, The West and Political Islam
A Letter to the Quakers ...."The massacre of this harmless family, all residents of one of the settlements you so despise, is only the latest in a long line of atrocities that have been carried out against Israeli civilians. Palestinian terrorist attacks have no excuse, yet I have never seen a supporter of the Palestinians march or protest against the very great evil they represent." By Teresa Parker in A Liberal Defence of Israel
Raymond Ibrahim "The Islamic jihad against Christians in Nigeria is proving to be the most barbaric. A new report states that 70% of Christians killed 41 people were killed in a suicide bomb attack at a bus station in a predominantly Christian neighborhood. According to the Christian Association of Nigeria, these attacks “were a signpost of the intended extermination of Christians and Christianity from northern Nigeria.” "
around the world in 2012 were killed in the African nation. Among some of the atrocities committed in March alone, at least
"Inside a deli they have an actor pretending to be an anti-Muslim bigot berating and insulting an oh-so-innocent sounding Muslim clerk to see what the reactions of other people in the store would be. They even use an actor dressed up like an American soldier to stick up for the Muslim clerk."
Nigerian Jihadist Group Boko Haram Attacks Four Churches, Slit Throat Of Pastor After He Refuses To Convert To Islam… " He said: “as the gunmen threw some explosives at our church, they forced the retired Reverend to renounce Christianity and be converted to Islam, but Rev. Jacob defied the gunmen’s threats of being killed, as he insisted on being a Christian among his people on the hills of Hwa’a. They slit his throat with sharp objects; and we started to flee for safety, as we don’t know the next targets of these gunmen.” "
Hoover Institution Stanford University "What we teach children can be a matter of life and death. Two pioneers of education confronted the power of indoctrination." ....
"Kandel and Brickman had much in common. Both were historians, identified
strongly as Jews, and generated ideas on education that were shaped by firsthand experiences with international conflict, revolution, and discrimination. As prolific scholars, they advanced many of comparative education’s most important topics: how schools indoctrinate children, build national identities, strengthen or weaken democracy, and reduce or exacerbate ethnic and racial cleavages and gender and social class inequalities." By Erwin H. Epstein.
Brickman (photo)saw the effects of Nazism first-hand. Drafted in 1943, he spent part of his military service behind enemy lines in Germany—where he donned an SS uniform and served as a spy for the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. Via Victor Davis Hanson
Conservative Daily News "The new rules being put in place by the administration would require soldiers to keep Bibles out of plain view. If soldiers are sitting on their bunks discussing the Bible, God, or Jesus and a non-believing soldier walks in and is offended they have to stop! Chaplains performing services can’t use the name of Jesus even if the family asks."
....
• The Air Force censored a video created by a chaplain because it included the word “God.” The Air Force feared the word might offend Muslims and atheists. • A service member received a “severe and possibly career-ending reprimand” for expressing his faith’s religious position about homosexuality in a personal religious blog. • A senior military official at Fort Campbell sent out a lengthy email officially instructing officers to recognize “the religious right in America” as a “domestic hate group” akin to the KKK and Neo-Nazis because of its opposition to homosexual behavior. • A chaplain was relieved of his command over a military chapel because, consistent with DOMA’s definition of marriage, he could not allow same-sex weddings to take place in the chapel
“Today, we face incredibly well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces' .
...."And the Obama administration is sitting down to talk with this man to craft new policies for “religious tolerance” in our military."
RealClearPolitics"In [White House image-maker's] telling, Barack Obama's greatness was foreshadowed by actions of almost every U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge. (Inexplicably, Gerald Ford was left out of the revisionism. One assumes it was an oversight.) "The word for this kind of thing is Orwellian, and it's overused in American politics today. Or, maybe not. The phrase comes from "1984," George Orwell's postwar classic. The novel is set in a frightening future controlled by a leader (Big Brother) whose power is enhanced by a pervasive cult of personality."
Stephen Hayes "At press time, even former vice president Dick Cheney was planning to strip off his waders and put down his fly rod in order to explain and support the surveillance in an appearance on Fox News Sunday. Virtually every public official with detailed knowledge of these programs has spent time over the past two weeks touting their reported successes and arguing for their continuation.
Clips from Eric Bolling’s Interview with Edward Snowden’s Father Dick "Cheney labeled Edward Snowden a traitor on Fox News Sunday yesterday. Fox commentator Eric Bolling, on the other hand, sees Edward Snowden as heroic and his viewpoint is likely the reason that Ron Snowden, Eric’s father, chose Bolling to conduct an interview about his son."
...."Ron Snowden’s father wants his son to stop leaking secrets, come home, and face what he has done." (Video)
China: The U.S. should really explain all of this unfortunate surveillance business "....the U.S. is indeed cyberspying on targets in both Hong Kong and China (as if both countries aren’t already perfectly well aware of the other’s activities, or something), but here it comes — complete with the usual hypocritical, “we’re just a victim here!”, thinly veiled outrageous outrage."
Snowden ‘Betrayed His Country, and He Should Be Treated Just Like That’ " “A whistleblower comes to the appropriate authorities with the appropriate classifications, so that we can investigate any possible claim,” he explain. “He didn’t do that — he grabbed up information, he made preparations to go to China.” "
Big Peace "The United Nations has long been a cesspool of hostility towards the United States, Israel, and freedom more generally. It is dominated by those who promote and protect our enemies’ interests, while undermining ours. Worse yet, we pay much of the UN’s budget.
"Past presidents have responded to this travesty by sending ambassadors to the UN who unapologetically challenged that agenda.....
"It is, therefore, a particularly repugnant irony that President Obama wants to entrust Dr. Kirkpatrick’s former post to Samantha Power, a woman who epitomizes the left-wing partisans President Reagan’s ambassador famously characterized as the “Blame America First crowd.” "
