What Is This World Coming To?

by Karl Rove

Barack Obama inherited a set of national-security policies that he rejected during the campaign but now embraces as president. This is a stunning and welcome about-face.

For example, President Obama kept George W. Bush’s military tribunals for terror detainees after calling them an “enormous failure” and a “legal black hole.” His campaign claimed last summer that “court systems . . . are capable of convicting terrorists.” Upon entering office, he found out they aren’t.

He insisted in an interview with NBC in 2007 that Congress mandate “consequences” for “a failure to meet various benchmarks and milestones” on aid to Iraq. Earlier this month he fought off legislatively mandated benchmarks in the $97 billion funding bill for Iraq and Afghanistan. Read the rest of this entry »

It isn’t just the far right nut-bars that think Obama is actually targeting American wealth for destruction.  The far left nut bars think so too.

YouTube - Jim Cramer: Obama is causing the greatest destruction of wealth I have ever seen by a president.

The standard playbook for new members of Congress includes this time-honored piece of advice: Lay low, focus on constituent service and avoid drawing too much attention to yourself.

But Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) hasn’t paid much attention to the old adage about being seen and not heard. Just two months into his first term, he’s already making a name for himself with a shoot-from-the-lip style and an ideological edge that some argue is ill-suited for the competitive, suburban Orlando seat that he represents.

On Wednesday, Grayson weighed in on the dispute between the Obama administration and Rush Limbaugh, calling the conservative talk show host “a sorry excuse for a human being.” In January, he referred to Limbaugh as a “has-been hypocrite loser” who “was more lucid when he was a drug addict.”

via Rep. Grayson won’t hold his tongue - Josh Kraushaar - POLITICO.com.

So who’s more important, President Barack Obama or radio personality Rush Limbaugh? The answer may surprise you. By at least one mainstream media measure, it’s Rush.

For those who aren’t familiar with the dying newspaper business, it’s critical to remember that editors tend to put the stories they consider most important on page A-1. Thus, the front page of an August 1945 Indianapolis Times carried the headline: “Japs Surrender.” That was the big story at the time, although a framed copy of the newspaper was recently removed from the halls of an Indiana VA hospital in the interest of political correctness.

via Rich Tucker : Media Out on a Limbaugh - Townhall.com.

I found it interesting that the London Sunday Times has already found enough similarities between Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter in Obama’s first two weeks to merit an entire column.

“Barack Obama thinks he can charm his adversaries into changing their ways but his personality can’t change the dynamics,” said Tom Edmonds, a Republican consultant. “Carter [president from 1977 to 1981] had the same belief in naive symbolism. Their styles are very different but the political similarities are there.”

Considering the fact that Obama has already entered into secret negotiations with both Syria and Iran,  the Jimmy Carter label may one day be a relative compliment.

Nuclear non-proliferation experts had several “very, very high-level” contacts in the last few months with Iranian leaders, said Jeffrey Boutwell, executive director for the US branch of the Pugwash group, an international organization of scientists which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.

Former defense secretary William Perry, who served in Obama’s election campaign, participated in some of these meetings focused on “a wide range of issues that separate Iran from the West: not only their nuclear program but the Middle East peace process, Persian Gulf issues,” Boutwell told AFP.

The Pugwash official declined to name the other participants, except to say they had considerable clout.

“We had very, very senior figures from both the Iranian policy establishment and from the US; people who have very close, good access to the top leaders in both countries,” Boutwell said.

“The Cable,” the blog of the specialist magazine Foreign Policy, said Iran’s permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (AIEA), Ali Asghar Soltanieh, was “among the Iranian officials who attended the Pugwash dialogues.”

Change is what he promised.  And change is about all that will be left. The country is in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression,  or so the rumor goes.   And Barack Obama has promised an administration that will govern for the ordinary guy, unlike the cozy relationship the Bush administration had with Wall Street fat cats.

But it is the Wall Street fat cats (and the government) who are ponying up one hundred and seventy million dollars ($170,000,000.00) for the Obama Nation lallapaloozas.

The federal government estimates that it will spend roughly $49 million on the inaugural weekend. Washington, D.C., Virginia and Maryland have requested another $75 million from the federal government to help pay for their share of police, fire and medical services.

There is another $45 million for parties, paid for courtesy of Wall Street fat cats and West Coast liberals.

Noted ABCNews,   “They are not the $20 and $50 donors who helped propel Obama through Election Day,” said Massie Ritsch, communications director for the Center for Responsive Politics. “These are people giving mostly $50,000 apiece. They tend to be corporate executives, celebrities, the elite of the elite.”

Really?   The elite?

Billionaire investor George Soros and his family contributed $250,000 to the inauguration, and Google co-founder Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt each donated $25,000.

Other big-name donors who gave $50,000 include filmmaker George Lucas, artist Dale Chihuly, Los Angeles Dodgers President Jamie McCourt. Citigroup managing director Raymond J. McGuire; Oracle President Charles E. Phillips Jr.; actresses Halle Berry and Sharon Stone; and Melvin Simon, co-founder of Simon Property Group, the largest mall owner in the United States.esides Wall Street firms, a large chunk of the money came from employees at companies such as Microsoft, Google and DreamWorks Animation, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer and his wife, Connie, both gave $50,000. So did Microsoft chairman and co-founder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda.

DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg and his wife, Marilyn, both gave $50,000. Filmmaker and DreamWorks co-founder Steven Spielberg and his wife, Kate, both also gave $50,000. And DreamWorks employees gave a total of $275,000.

Just like Lincoln. By the people and for the people.  If they can swing it.

It appears that the Reverend Jesse Jackson is not quite as enamored of Senator Barack Hussein Obama as are the majority of his constituents.

Unaware that his microphone was on before a television interview Wednesday, Jackson expressed anger that in his view, Obama has been overly critical of the black community.

“See Barack Obama been, um, talking down to black people on his faith based — want to cut his n*ts off,” Jackson said in a video that aired Wednesday on the Fox News program “The O’Reilly Factor.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Isi Leibler

Sen. Barack Obama is possibly the most charismatic US presidential candidate since John Kennedy. He is young, charming, passionate and extremely bright. He has overcome the barrier of racial bias and defeated a powerful adversary considered unbeatable. He is adored by many idealistic young people, who see in him a hope for a brighter future. Read the rest of this entry »

Barack Obama reacted to the latest racially charged dust-up at Trinity United Church by publicly resigning his membership. Evidently, he believes that withdrawing from the congregation will erase his twenty-year membership as an issue in the general election.

Given that most of his supporters seem to have the attention span of a gnat, it just might work. . .

“We had prayed on it. We had consulted with a number of friends and family members,” Obama said. “Frankly, it’s one that I made with some sadness. Trinity was where I found Jesus Christ, where we were married, where our children were baptized.”

Obama said he has “tremendous regard” for the church community, but said he could not live with a situation where everything said in the church, including comments by a guest pastor, “will be imputed to me, even if they conflict with my long-held, views, statements and principles.”

It still doesn’t seem like the senator from Illinois ‘gets it’. The issue isn’t Jeremiah Wright or Otis Moss or Father Flueger. None of them are running for president. The problem isn’t that they are racists; the problem is that Obama either didn’t notice they were racists for twenty years, or he didn’t care for twenty years.

It isn’t what we learned about Jeremiah Wright, Otis Moss or Father John Flueger — it’s what we learned about Barack Obama. I don’t agree with everything my pastor says, but I agree with most of it.

If I didn’t, I would find one whose views were more in keeping with my own. That is NOT what Barack Obama is doing. He’s resigning his membership under duress and with admitted regret — it isn’t a conscience-driven decision, it is a political one.

“I’m confident we’ll be able to find a church that we’re comfortable with,” he said. “We probably won’t make any firm decision on this until January, when we know what our lives are going to be like.”

“Our faith remains strong and I expect that we will find another church home for our family,” Obama said. “We understand that our faith is something that we apply each and every day. We wish only the best for our friends and the wonderful people at Trinity. They’ll be in our thoughts and our prayers.”

The ‘wonderful’ people who believe that white America invented AIDS as a method of genocide against blacks, that white America deserved the 9/11 attacks, the ‘wonderful’ people who embrace the Nation of Islam as their ideological cousins, the wonderful people who believe that all whites are devils.

Obama’s resignation from the church is as meaningless as his denunciation of its doctrine. He claimed he ‘never heard’ any of the inflammatory sermons — despite having sat for twenty years under Pastor Wright’s tutelage. Does that sound even remotely credible?

No more credible than believing Obama’s resignation has anything to do with a difference of opinion. “I’m not denouncing the church and I’m not interested in people who want me to denounce the church,” he said.

Then why resign?