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Anyone in this country who mentions the legal suits now being brought before state and federal courts about Barack Obama's citizenship question is seen as a fluke. The most common retort is "the American people have spoken" but have they?

 

In fact the sixty seven million people who voted for Barack Obama make up only twenty two percent of the entire population of this country. Regardless of how they voted seventy eight percent of the country remains largely in the dark due to a mainstream media blackout on the subject that could just be the calm before the storm.

 

The real issue the Obama eligibility question raises isn't about what the American people said, but it is about what was said to the American people.

 

In short they were told even if only by omission (un-vetted qualifications) that Barack Obama was perfectly eligible to be a candidate in accordance with the Constitution. In fact with or without the much disputed birth certificate, he is not. Read article.

Carol Peracchio, American Thinker.com

 

I've been a registered nurse for 30 years, so the future of American health care is one of my greatest concerns. Now that Mr. Obama has won the election, I decided to investigate what may be facing patients and health care workers.

 

I started my research at Barack Obama's website and his Plan for a Healthy America. What a waste of time. It read like a treatise from a beauty pageant contestant.

 

What kind of medical expertise does Barack have? Remember this youtube where his teleprompter malfunctioned? He stumbled through an excruciatingly inept explanation of how health care costs can be lowered if kids with asthma could just be provided "breathalyzers," or "inhalators" instead of cluttering up emergency rooms.

 

This brilliant (as we're told ad nauseam) Ivy League lawyer-savant wants to run our health care but apparently is ignorant of the word inhaler. (There must have been more than one nurse in that crowd shaking her head and thinking, "Great. Another dunce.") Read article.

 

Phyllis Schlafly, Washington Times.com

 

Ted Kennedy and Barack Obama are planning that the new Democratic Congress' first order of business will be to extend the Massachusetts health-care mistake to all 50 states. Like other legislative rush-acts (i.e., the 2007 amnesty bill and the 2008 bailouts), details are currently withheld to avoid giving members of Congress and the public adequate time to analyze the bill before the vote is called.

 

The Massachusetts plan is a fiscal disaster, costing far more than estimated, with no end in sight. Massachusetts is wealthier than most states, but this plan threatens to bankrupt even the Bay State.

 

The Massachusetts plan forces people to buy insurance under threat of having to pay a penalty on their income tax return. Mr. Kennedy's staff has been quietly meeting with the insurance industry to make sure it will be as happy with a national version of mandatory insurance as it is in Massachusetts.

 

As HHS secretary, Mr. Daschle will write the regulatory details that Congress doesn't dare to put in the proposed statute. So much for Mr. Obama's promise to change Washington, eliminate the influence of lobbyists, and avoid conflicts of interest!

 

Mr. Obama plans to use his giant campaign data base to pressure Congress into speedy action. Americans will have to protest quickly if they want to prevent the mandatory and expensive Massachusetts plan from being forced on the country. Read article.

William McGurn, OnlineWSJ.com

 

Headlines have begun to concede that closing the detention center will not be as easy as the critics suggested. "Closing detainee camp a minefield of critical steps," notes the Miami Herald. "Closing it may be the easy part; With Guantanamo, the issue for Obama will be deciding what to do with the 250 prisoners, experts say" reports the L.A. Times. "Close Guantanamo prison? Sure. But that's the easy part," says USA Today.

 

What unites all these stories is the acknowledgment of the basic fact of Guantanamo: The problem is the people, not the place.

 

What the American people need today is a sensible policy that recognizes three facts: that terrorists present a unique challenge to our rules of war; that capturing and holding terrorists is different from capturing and holding criminals or prisoners of war; and that the men and women who set up Guantanamo did so not because they were out to shred the Constitution but because, faced with some very imperfect choices, this was thought to be the best way to protect the American people.

 

It's true that Mr. Obama repeated his pledge to close Guantanamo during his recent "60 Minutes" interview. But he also declined to set a date. No doubt he is now realizing a hard truth. While senators can say what they please and go to sleep untroubled, presidents cannot escape the consequences of their decisions. Read article.

 

Review & Outlook, Online WSJ.com

 

Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo get more press, but among the most urgent national security challenges facing President-elect Obama is what to do about America's stockpile of aging nuclear weapons. No less an authority than Secretary of Defense Robert Gates calls the situation "bleak" and is urging immediate modernization.

 

On the campaign trail, Mr. Gates's new boss appeared to take a different view. Candidate Obama said he "seeks a world without nuclear weapons" and vowed to make "the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element in our nuclear policy." His woolly words have given a boost to the world disarmament movement, including last week's launch of Global Zero, the effort by Richard Branson and Queen Noor to eliminate nuclear weapons in 25 years. Naturally, they want to start with cuts in the U.S. arsenal. Read article.

 

IBD Editorials.com

 

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell wants his party stripped of the Reaganite values that won it the presidency for 20 of the last 28 years. Meet the "Grand Obama Party."

 

For many years it has been accepted that Gen. Colin Powell — who became a national icon thanks to appointments by President Ronald Reagan and both President Bushes — was more moderate than many of his colleagues.

 

What was not known until lately is how much animus he has for the governing philosophy of those who gave him the opportunity to achieve fame and millions in book sales.

 

In a Sunday CNN interview, Powell charged that Republicans have been "shouting at the world and at the country." They "use polarization for political advantage," listen to talk radio hosts who "seem to appeal to our lesser instincts rather than our better instincts," and aren't looking into the "hearts and minds" of blacks, Hispanics and Asians.

 

What exactly does that mean? The answer can be found in Powell's October NBC "Meet the Press" interview in which he not only backed the most liberal Democrat ever nominated for president — an endorsement timed to inflict maximum damage for John McCain — but said Obama would be "an exceptional president," even "a transformational figure" on the world stage. Read article.

 

Philip Jenkins, American Conservative Magazine.com

 

Historical analogies have been much in vogue since this election. Are we living at the end of 1932, preparing to face the glories and disasters of a revived New Deal? Or are we in a mirror-image 1980, the beginning of an era of liberal dominance, with a massive party realignment that might not even reach full fruition for another decade or so? These questions matter, not just because such debates give employment to academic historians. Deciding which year offers the closest parallel to the present forces conservatives to think how they will adjust to the new order. Just how radically have public attitudes shifted?

 

Actually, the year that offers the closest historical parallels to the present might be neither 1932 nor 1980 but 1976, and that analogy helps us understand the directions in which the country will be moving. Both in government and opposition, people might want to hold off on planning for the next New Deal, still less for a coming generation of liberal hegemony. In three or four years, the main political fact in this country could well be a ruinous crisis of Democratic liberalism.

 

Why 1976? That was the year Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford for the presidency by a slim but convincing margin: Ford won 48 percent of the popular vote, a little more than John McCain’s 46 percent. Democrats did significantly better in the House in 1976 than they did last month. They held a two-to-one majority of seats, and they retained a supermajority of 61 in the Senate. Broadly, however, the 1976 results look similar to 2008. Read article.

 

Rudy Takala, NewsWithViews.com

 

Watching the early moves of Barack Obama has been enlightening. They have been the actions of someone who does not completely understand the politics of Middle America, but who is at least aware of that shortcoming.

 

A recent example of this was his choice to wait until 2010 before considering the possibility of repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for homosexuals. Though it was formerly a campaign promise, Obama’s sudden hesitancy betrayed a realization that it was not a priority that he could fulfill unscathed.

 

Similarly, stacking his cabinet with Clinton-era bureaucrats suggests that Obama is not yet sure enough of himself to create his own administration. That hesitancy is shrewd, and it has been the norm ever since he received a months-long backlash for calling religious Americans “bitter.”

 

It seems likely that Obama will spend more time testing the waters than he does taking action. It will be interesting to see how he moves on certain issues, particularly those with which he has little experience. Read article.

 

Monica Davey, International Herald Tribune.com

 

Governor Rod Blagojevich is a polished speaker who can win over elderly women at luncheons in southern Illinois with his earnest attention, and eloquently recite from memory historical passages from the lives of the leaders he says he most admires — Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Robert F. Kennedy, Alexander Hamilton, Ronald Reagan.

 

And yet, Blagojevich, 52, rarely turns up for work at his official state office in Chicago, former employees say, is unapologetically late to almost everything, and can treat employees with disdain, cursing and erupting in fury for failings as mundane as neglecting to have at hand at all times his preferred black Paul Mitchell hairbrush. He calls the brush "the football," an allusion to the "nuclear football," or the bomb codes never to be out of reach of a president.

 

In 1996, a Democrat who shared a campaign office with Blagojevich, John Fritchey was told that his stepfather had suffered a serious stroke. He walked over to Blagojevich, who was making fund-raising calls, and shared the news.

 

"He proceeded to tell me that he was sorry, and then, in the next breath, he asked me if I could talk to my family about contributing money to his campaign," recalled Fritchey, now a state representative and a critic of the governor. "To do that, and in such a nonchalant manner, didn't strike me as something a normal person would do." Read article.

 

Giles Kepel, Newsweek.com

 

Barack Obama did not have to wait long before receiving a major warning from Al Qaeda. Last month an audio recording appeared on militant Web sites in which Ayman al-Zawahiri, the group's main ideologue, warned the president-elect against pursuing military actions in Muslim countries.

 

While the tape was supposedly about Obama, it was actually much more revealing about the current state of Al Qaeda. It showed how quickly the group has adjusted to Obama's foreign-policy goals—pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq, reaching a deal with Iran and refocusing America's war on terror on destroying the jihadists' sanctuaries on the Afghan-Pakistani border. Above all, it revealed how defensive the group has become.

 

The power of Al Qaeda and LeT will be seriously diminished if the United States continues to pursue them militarily in the tribal zones and to pressure Pakistan's intelligence services to crack down on them. The terrorists have now shown—twice—that they are desperate. The coming months may represent the final lap in the race against them. So the stakes could not be higher as Obama begins his presidency. Read article.

 

David R. Stokes, Townhall.com

 

As President-Elect Barack Obama moves toward the transition finish line, he has been busy putting his cabinet together, collecting what is now routinely referred to as a “team of rivals.” But this may be more than a reference to the fact that he is trying to avoid “group-think.” The man seems, in fact, to be putting together a team of former-and-would-be pretenders to his political throne.

 

It is certainly understandable that the party out of executive branch power for the past eight years would find positions for the faithful. Though for a man who campaigned on yes-we-can change there is more than a little irony in many of Mr. Obama’s decisions since the election. What I find curious is something few seem to be noticing. Read article.