In one picture, all you need to know about Obama

 

  American Thinker found a photo of Obama who he is: far, far above the compassion, caring and simple courtesy a less arrogant person would display.

  Like this guy, for example:

  The whole story is here.

More proof that Obama is biased against Israel

  Check out the website of the US Consulate to Jerusalem.

  Not a word about Israelis. Just one item after another on so-called Palestinians.

  Doesn’t leave much doubt about where the Obama administration is coming from.

  View the U.S. Consulate to Jerusalem’s web page here.

In a White House filled with the ethically challenged, Obama makes guests pay for their lunch.

  This is simply too funny. In a White House loaded with lobbyists, former special interest staffers, Chicago machine crooks, tax cheats and other miscreants, Obama makes visiting CEOs pay for their own lunch to avoid “ethical taint”.

  Politico has it here.

Obama appoints a nutcase as science czar, NYT is silent, but . . .

When Obama appoints another scientist who is also a devout Christian, the New York Times blasts off. Utter hypocrisy. Read it here.

What voting places will look like in 2010? 2012?

  Perhaps this episode from the 2008 general election when members of the New Black Panthers Party patrolled a polling place in black uniforms, carrying nightsticks and spouting racial insults at white voters is just a tryout for future elections.

  The Eric Holder Justice Department dropped all charges against these hoodlums – even though the federal government had already won the case.

  The Washington Times has done an extensive investigation of the case and reports on the DoJ’s stonewalling. Turns out the #3 at the Justice Department okayed the dropping of charges. He is a major Obama fundraiser.

  Remember the stink when Bush exercised his legal right to fire eight U.S. Attorneys and how the left-wing media howled? Why are they silent now?

Obama’s Great Health Scare

  Karl Rove has produced an excellent column describing Obama’s use of scare tactics and intimidation in his increasingly desperate campaign to get his health care plan – a misnomer if there ever was one – passed.

“Facing numbers like these, Mr. Obama is dropping his high-minded rhetoric and instead trying to scare voters. During last week’s news conference, for example, he said that doctors routinely perform unnecessary tonsillectomies on children simply to fatten their wallets. All that was missing was the suggestion that the operations were conducted without anesthesia.

This is not a healthy way to wage a policy debate. It also risks making the president look desperate at a time when his proposals are looking increasingly too expensive for Americans to accept. “

  Rove’s perceptions are spot-on. Read it all here.

Obama: “Disaster in the Making”

“This is a president on a mission to remake American society in every aspect, by whatever means are necessary and available. That requires taking all kinds of decisions out of the hands of ordinary Americans and transferring them to Washington elites — and ultimately the number one elite, Barack Obama himself.
Like so many before him who have ruined countries around the world, Obama has a greatly inflated idea of his own capabilities and of what can be accomplished by rhetoric or even by political power. Often this has been accompanied by an ignorance of history, including the history of how many people before him have tried similar things with disastrous results.
During a recent TV interview, when President Obama was asked about the prospects of victory in Afghanistan, he replied that it would not be victory like in World War II, with “Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur.” In reality, it was not Emperor Hirohito who surrendered on the battleship Missouri. American troops were already occupying Japan before Hirohito met Gen. Douglas MacArthur for the first time.
This is not the first betrayal of his ignorance by Obama, nor the first overlooked by the media. Moreover, ignorance by itself is not nearly as bad as charging full steam ahead, pretending to know. Barack Obama is doing that on a lot of issues, not just history or a local police incident in Massachusetts.
While the mainstream media in America will never call him on this, these repeated demonstrations of his amateurism and immaturity will not go unnoticed by this country’s enemies around the world. And it is the American people who will pay the price.”

  Occasionally, pundits capture the essence of a politician or other public figure in a few words: “Tricky Dick”, “Camelot”, “Slick Willy”.

  Now, the essence of Obama has been captured in two expressions: Michael Barone’s “Gangster Government” and Thomas Sowell’s “Disaster in the Making”.

  Sowell’s newest column is must reading.

Thomas Sowell nails Obama, the race baiter.

“Those who were shocked at President Obama’s cheap shot at the Cambridge police for being “stupid” in arresting Henry Louis Gates must have been among those who let their wishes prevail over the obvious implications of Obama’s 20 years of association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Anyone who can believe that Obama did not understand what the racist rants of Jeremiah Wright meant can believe anything. “

Thomas Sowell is, I believe, one of he most perceptive public intellects of our era.

In this column, he explains why Obama is hardly the post-racial person he claimed to be. He is, Sowell explains, just another black race-baiter.

Read it all here.

Why does Obama want to kill me?

  Obama wants to kill me by denying me medical care.

  Is it because I’m old? White? White and old? White, old and Jewish?

  Union members appear to be exempt from this death sentence as do Congresspeople, their staffs and other federal employees.

  Under Obama’s program, as detailed in this Wall Street Journal column by Betsy McCaughey, “seniors” would be subject to rationing of medical care. Got arthritis? Hip joint worn out? Enjoy the pain, baby, because you’re too old to merit medical care.

  It appears that Obama has absorbed not only the teachings of Saul Alinsky, Jeremiah Wright, but of a 20th Century leader who took an aggressive attitude toward “useless eaters” and “life unworthy of life”.

Why didn’t Jimmy Carter say no to Muslim money?

Jimmy Carter has made a big to-do over quitting his church, claiming it discriminates against women. You can read his stomach-churning, self-serving essay in the Australian Age publication.

While paying lip-service to Islamic discrimination of women, which makes anything in Western culture appear insignificant, Carter says nothing of turning down the millions of dollars he received from Muslim, particularly Saudi Arabian, sources. Women aren’t permitted to drive in Saudi Arabia or do a thousand other things.

But Jimmy Carter is not about to say no to the millions he receives from Saudi Arabian and other Muslim funders.

It is easier to quit his church and insult his former fellow parishioners.

What a hypocrite.

Defeating the First Amendment the Muslim way

  Muslims are forcing the cancellation of events they consider anti-Islamic through pressure, including intimidation and threats.

  Free speech for me, not for thee, seems to be the Islamic mantra.

  American Thinker reports on this disturbing development here.

Obama to American Jews: fooled you!

  Obama held a meeting with leaders of some American Jewish groups. He tried to keep it secret. He proclaimed himself the President most hostile to Israel.

  American Jews who voted for Obama should feel ashamed.

  Read the whole thing here.

Obama wants to be pals with these people

  Obama wants to be pals with the Iranians. The Iranians can not, by Islamic law, execute young women who are still virgins. So they honor prison guards by temporarily marrying them to these women so they can be raped the night before their execution.

  Mark Steyn has an item here.  And the Jerusalem Post has one here.

  Is Obama merely naive? Or is it more sinister than that?

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) plays the race card again – and, for a change, loses.

  Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) played the race card and, for a change, lost.

  The video is hilarious, especially at about 5:50 into it where Boxer utters an absolutely hilarious “defense” of herself.

A descriptive article is at http://reason.com/blog/show/134858.html

Human Rights Watch raises money in Saudi Arabia by bragging of its anti-Israel efforts

I am always amazed at how clearly leeft-wing groups get the media to portray them as "neutral". Organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are, to me at least, notorious for coddling left-wing tyrannies, while constantly chastising democracies of any kind.

In the Atlantic, Human Rights Watch is criticized for allegedly telling Saudi Arabians that their donations are needed to help fight the pro-Israel lobby.

Uh huh. Tell me again how unbiased Human Rights Watch is.

Read it here.

How the racist Sonia Sotomayor tried to bury white firefighter Frank Ricci

  Stuart Taylor, Jr.  explains how the racist Sotomayor tried to bury firefighter Frank Ricci for being a white male.

For all the publicity about the Supreme Court's 5-4 reversal of Judge Sonia Sotomayor's decision (with two colleagues) to reject a discrimination suit by a group of firefighters against New Haven, Conn., one curious aspect of the case has been largely overlooked.

That is the likelihood that but for a chance discovery by a fourth member of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, the now-triumphant 18 firefighters (17 white and one Hispanic) might well have seen their case, Ricci v. DeStefano, disappear into obscurity, with no triumph, no national publicity and no Supreme Court review.

The reason is that by electing on Feb. 15, 2008, to dispose of the case by a cursory, unsigned summary order, Judges Sotomayor, Rosemary Pooler and Robert Sack avoided circulating the decision in a way likely to bring it to the attention of other 2nd Circuit judges, including the six who later voted to rehear the case.

And if the Ricci case -- which ended up producing one of the Supreme Court's most important race decisions in many years -- had not come to the attention of those six judges, it would have been an unlikely candidate for Supreme Court review. The justices almost never review summary orders, which represent the unanimous judgment of three appellate judges that the case in question presents no important issues.

Left-wingers urge media to destroy New Haven firefighter

  When it comes to the politics of personal destruction, no one equals the left-wing. Now they’re going after the hard working New Haven firefighter whose case exposed Sonia Sotomayor as a racist.

Supporters of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor are quietly targeting the Connecticut firefighter who's at the center of Sotomayor's most controversial ruling.

On the eve of Sotomayor's Senate confirmation hearing, her advocates have been urging journalists to scrutinize what one called the "troubled and litigious work history" of firefighter Frank Ricci.

. . .

"The whole business of getting Supreme Court nominees through the process has become bloodsport," said Gary Rose, a government and politics professor at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn.

On Friday, citing in an e-mail "Frank Ricci's troubled and litigious work history," the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way drew reporters' attention to Ricci's past. Other advocates for Sotomayor have discreetly urged journalists to pursue similar story lines.

  Full story here.

Why Palin quit – an articulate explanation

The Weekly Standard has the best explanation I’ve found so far about Palin’s recent actions.

Obama really does intend to send political opponents to camps

 

From the Washington Examiner:

Political opposition is not a hate crime
Examiner Editorial
July 10, 2009
Attorney General Eric Holder talks with Deputy Attorney General for Legislative affairs Judith Applebaum on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, June 25, 2009, prior to his testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on hate crimes legislation. (AP Photo/Harry Hamburg)

What's wrong with this picture? The federal government spends billions on homeland security, but apparently can't stop foreigners from illegally crossing the border or overstaying their visas. The Obama administration wants to bring violent terrorists captured overseas to the mainland and close the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Yet in the latest bizarre twist, legislation quietly making its way through Congress would give the White House power to categorize political opponents as hate groups and even send Americans to detention centers on abandoned military bases.

Rep. Alcee Hastings - the impeached Florida judge Nancy Pelosi tried to install as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee until her own party members rebelled - introduced an amendment to the defense authorization bill that gives Attorney General Eric Holder sole discretion to label groups that oppose government policy on guns, abortion, immigration, states' rights, or a host of other issues. In a June 25 speech on the House floor, Rep. Trent Franks, R-AZ, blasted the idea: "This sounds an alarm for many of us because of the recent shocking and offensive report released by the Department of Homeland Security which labeled, arguably, a majority of Americans as 'extremists.'"

Another Hastings bill (HR 645) authorizes $360 million in 2009 and 2010 to set up "not fewer than six national emergency centers on military installations" capable of housing "a large number of individuals affected by an emergency or major disaster." But Section 2 (b) 4 allows the Secretary of Homeland Security to use the camps "to meet other appropriate needs" - none of which are specified. This is the kind of blank check that Congress should never, ever sign.

It's not paranoid to be extremely wary of legislation that would give two unelected government officials power to legally declare someone a "domestic terrorist" and send them to a government-run camp. After all, the federal government has done exactly this sort of thing before. During World War II, more than 120,000 law-abiding Japanese Americans were rounded up by the government and confined for four years in ten internment camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. Joy Kogawa chronicled the trauma her family experienced firsthand under FDR's executive order: "Families were made to move in two hours. Abandoned everything, leaving pets and possessions at gun point..."

It was wrong then, and it would be doubly wrong now should members of Congress somehow fail to learn from past mistakes.

House Dems try to protect Pelosi – and endanger the nation

  No one can rationally doubt that Democrats do whatever is necessary in their quest to retain and expand their power. Nancy Pelosi recently claimed that the CIA routinely lied to Congress.

  The CIA, never very effective, has been repeatedly gutted by Democrats. The Church Commission. Clinton’s depredations. And now Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi refused to prove her claims. No surprise there. Democrats are well-known for their technique of tossing out the big lie, letting their media friends expand and never providing facts to support their claim.

  They seem to be in the process of doing it again.

  Several House Democrats claim that Leon Panetta has told them that they were lied to by the CIA since 2001.

  The Wall St. Journal says it isn’t so. Rather, Panetta told Congress that they hadn’t been informed of a program discussed at the CIA, but never implemented.

We're told that he informed the Members that the agency had considered, then abandoned, a major covert antiterror program. (Our sources wouldn't say what it was.) Bush-era CIA officials didn't tell Congress because it never got off the ground. But this is the "at least one case" Mr. Reyes claims his committee was "lied to" about in the Bush years.

  It’s a huge difference. Not that a Democrat would ever care about getting to the truth - or damaging what little morale is left at the CIA.

Hillary Clinton – eugenics fangirl.

‘We want fewer and better children . . . and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on us.”
That ghastly message appeared in the introduction to Margaret Sanger’s 1922 book, The Pivot of Civilization.
In a little-noticed incident, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently announced that she is “really in awe” of Sanger. “The 20th-century reproductive-rights movement, really embodied in the life and leadership of Margaret Sanger, was one of the most transformational in the entire history of the human race,” Clinton declaimed upon receiving an award from the organization that Sanger founded, Planned Parenthood.”

Eugenics fans live – and one of them is our Secretary of State.

Great column. Read it all.

Palin says it: stupid. Biden says the same thing: brilliant.

  James Taranto points out in the Wall St. Journal that when Palin says it, it is stupid. But when Biden or Obama say the same thing, well, a different set of rules apply. 

The Biden Curve
Palin was "stupid" for saying what he says now.

Over the weekend, as we noted yesterday, Vice President Biden said that if Israel decides it needs to take military action against the Iranian nuclear-weapons program, the U.S. will not "dictate" otherwise. A reader points out that Sarah Palin, who ran against Biden in last year's election, said much the same thing in a September interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson:

    Gibson: What if Israel decided it felt threatened and needed to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities?

    Palin: Well, first, we are friends with Israel and I don't think that we should second-guess the measures that Israel has to take to defend themselves and for their security.

    Gibson: So if we wouldn't second-guess it and they decided they needed to do it because Iran was an existential threat, we would cooperative [sic in ABC transcript] or agree with that.

    Palin: I don't think we can second-guess what Israel has to do to secure its nation.

    Gibson: So if it felt necessary, if it felt the need to defend itself by taking out Iranian nuclear facilities, that would be all right.

    Palin: We cannot second-guess the steps that Israel has to take to defend itself.

Palin reiterated the point in a later interview with CBS's Katie Couric.
Podcast

James Taranto on Biden, Palin, Israel and Iran.

This column agrees with both Biden and Palin and is glad to see that the bipartisan consensus recognizing Israel's right to defend itself appears sturdy. But we suspected not everyone would be so consistent, so we went back to see what people had said about Palin.

Matthew Yglesias, who when he was young drew much praise for his thoughtful and fair-minded commentary, wrote a blog post titled "Palin: If Israel Wants to Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran, That's Okay With Me":

    Palin reiterated her absurd view that the President of the United States shouldn't "second-guess" Israeli policy under any circumstances.

    Palin is okay at repeating various "pro-Israel" buzzwords, but she can't run away from the fact that her underlying position on this topic is stupid.

So when Biden said the same thing, did Yglesias call it "absurd" and "stupid"? Well, is the pope Italian? Here's what he wrote yesterday:

    This is being read by some . . . as a "green light" for an Israeli attack. . . . I think the most straightforward reading of what Biden said is rather different, he's trying to distance the United States from any possible Israeli military action by making it clear that what Israel does or doesn't do is decided in Israel rather than in Washington.

    The main problem with this, I think, is that probably nobody's going to believe it. Already you see many Americans taking Biden's statement that the U.S. doesn't control Israeli policy to "really" mean that the U.S. is encouraging Israel to attack.

When Palin says it, it's stupid. When Biden says it, he gets graded on a curve: The problem is that other people are too stupid to understand the deep subtlety of Biden's thinking.

Then there's M.J. Rosenberg of TalkingPointsMemo.com. In September, he described Palin as "robotic" and suggested that she is the puppet of a Jewish cabal:

    Now we know why among the very first people Sarah Palin sat down with after being nominated was [sic] Joe Lieberman and the head of AIPAC.

    She needed the latest talking points and, boy, did she learn her lines. . . .

    In other words, under the Palin administration, we won't second guess Israel. I think I've got it.

    Palin sure has.

And when Biden said it? Rosenberg kept mum until he was persuaded that the vice president's words didn't really reflect U.S. policy. Then he wrote this:

    The President said today that he has "absolutely not" given Israel a "green light" to attack Iran.

    So Biden either misspoke, was misinterpreted, or has just been corrected by his boss. Israel will get no green light to attack. We will, as Obama said all along, rely on diplomacy to solve the Iran problem.

Fair enough, right? Wrong. Look what Palin said to Charlie Gibson just before he asked about a hypothetical Israeli strike:

    Gibson: So what do you do about a nuclear Iran?

    Palin: We have got to make sure that these weapons of mass destruction, that nuclear weapons are not given to those hands of Ahmadinejad, not that he would use them, but that he would allow terrorists to be able to use them. So we have got to put the pressure on Iran and we have got to count on our allies to help us, diplomatic pressure.

    Gibson: But, Governor, we've threatened greater sanctions against Iran for a long time. It hasn't done any good. It hasn't stemmed their nuclear program.

    Palin: We need to pursue those and we need to implement those. We cannot back off. We cannot just concede that, oh, gee, maybe they're going to have nuclear weapons, what can we do about it. No way, not Americans. We do not have to stand for that.

What Palin said last year was precisely what Obama and Biden have now said: Diplomacy is the optimal way of dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat, but if it fails, Israel has a right to defend itself. In a way, the inconsistency of some of Palin's critics is reassuring. It shows that a good deal of anti-Israel sentiment is mere partisanship masquerading as something uglier.

“Israel approaches a moment of decision on Iran's nuclear threat” – a very important article

  Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University – and has a compelling article in the Weekly Standard analyzing the choices that confront Israel and the feckless, timid Obama about Iran and its nuclear weapons program.

  This article is must reading.

Washington Post gets caught selling access.

 

 

  The Washington Post tries to explain its way out of a scheme to sell access to Washington officials and its own propagandists journalists. After it got caught, of course.

    Read it here.