Jules Crittenden.com

 

Obama’s laudable decision to issue a kill order, it turns out, has follow-through consequences. It means he can not simply talk the talk, when it comes to challenging pirates, but has some walking to do. I hope he has a plan for that, or gets one soon. It will get uglier before it gets better, and we may well see some al-Qaeda-style hostage abuse and terror tactics play out as the pirate warlords attempt to make Obama flinch.

 

Here’s the thing about being leader of the free world, which is what for better or worse, Obama got elected to be. You actually have to exert leadership. It isn’t easy. Leadership isn’t about being liked. In tough times, it’s usually the opposite.

 

When they say power hates a vacuum, it doesn’t just mean other people will try to grab bits of that power … anarchistic Somali pirates, kleptocratic Chinese expansionists, terror-supporting Iranian Islamists, etc. It also means that the people who have been living under the protection of your power will expect you to exert it, even as they despise you and disparage you for doing so. Read article.

 

Mackubin Thomas Owens, Online WSJ.com

 

When Somali pirates hijacked the U.S.-flagged Maersk Alabama this week and took 20 Americans hostage, President Barack Obama refused to comment. It seems that our new president is desperate to do everything he can to distance himself from his predecessor, which is why his team has launched a campaign to rebrand the War on Terror. The results are mystifying. "Overseas contingency operations" is the new name for the war, while "man-caused disasters" is a euphemism for terrorist attacks.

 

Instead of calling the detainees enemy combatants, the administration has opted to refer to them as "individuals captured in connection with armed conflicts and counterterrorism operations," or "members of enemy forces," or "persons who [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, and persons who harbored those responsible for the September 11 attacks."

 

Though these changes might seem superficial, unfortunately, they represent a substantive shift. They signal a return to the policy mindset that existed before 9/11, and the consequence will be material harm to U.S. security. Read article.

Paul Driessen, Townhall.com

 

America is diving into a Marianas Trench of red ink. There is barely a digit of black anywhere on the balance sheet, and spendthrift lawmakers are closing off numerous sources of positive revenue.

 

On the spending side of the ledger, the White House and Congress enacted a $700-billion financial bailout, followed by an earmark-laden $787-billion “stimulus” law and plans to ladle out $1.6 billion in federal government bonuses in 2009. Then came a $3.5 trillion FY 2010 budget, and the prospect of $9.3 trillion in total indebtedness over the coming decade.

 

A March 31 Bloomberg study found that the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, FDIC and HUD have thus far obligated generations of Americans to $12.8 TRILLION in debt. That’s 90% of our nation’s entire 2008 Gross Domestic Product! Read article.

 

Jed Babbin, Human Events.com

 

Shades of Tim Geithner. President Obama and Defense Secretary Gates are forcing a cramdown of our Pentagon budget that sells our military’s ability to defend America dangerously short.

 

Obama and Gates have set up a big political battle over proposed cuts in purchases of key weapon systems ranging from the F-22 fighter to the Navy’s proposed Zumwalt-class stealthy destroyer and ballistic missile defense systems. As the media will characterize it, it will be a battle waged between the forces of good -- the Obama team -- and the greedy defense contractors and their political shills in Congress. Gates’ proposed cuts are wrong-headed. About which more in a moment.

 

But a more important battle over the long-term Pentagon budget is concealed beneath the sound bite fight. In the Obama-Gates Pentagon budget cramdown, who speaks for the warfighters? Read article.

 

Aaron Klein, WND.com

 

In anticipation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Washington next month, the Obama administration has been briefing Congress on its position regarding establishing a Palestinian state, according to informed Israeli diplomatic sources.

 

The sources said Obama's team fears Netanyahu may try to rally support in Congress against the president's policies, prompting the White House to act first by detailing for members of Congress Obama's positions regarding a Palestinian state and freezing Jewish construction in the West Bank.

 

The diplomatic sources, who also spoke with a reporter from Israel's Haaretz newspaper, said Obama anticipates a possible clash with Netanyahu on several issues. Read article.

 

David Warren, Ottawa Citizen.com

 

Hillary Clinton has apparently spent the last week in a state of deep concern.

 

She was "deeply concerned" about North Korea's missile launch, in defiance of all agreements the psycho-dictatorship had made. She expressed "deep concern" about maritime conditions off Somalia, after the first American-flagged ship in about 200 years was boarded by pirates. She was moreover "deeply concerned" about the fate of an Iranian-American journalist, who was arrested for being a "spy" in Tehran, right after her boss's latest dialogue overture.

 

Her president, Barack Obama, is back in Washington after an apology tour to Europe, Turkey, and Iraq. He received no European commitments whatever for his proposed surge-like strategy in Afghanistan. (The word "surge" is now banned in White House parlance, along with the phrase "war on terror" and several related terms.

 

The strategy behind the new Obama foreign policy, so far as any can be discerned, is to disavow everything the Bush administration did in eight years, and then harvest the resulting good will.

 

People, including the deadliest enemies of America and the West, may have hated Bush, but they knew where he and America stood. That in itself promoted peace and order. President Obama and his secretary of state may sincerely think what Neville Chamberlain sincerely thought, about the value of non-confrontation. But nature does not reward such fatuity. Read article.

 

Alicia Colon, American Thinker.com

 

In 1993, many of the citizens who voted for Obama last year were probably still in grade school. They can be forgiven for not remembering the early years '93-‘94 of the Clinton administration. Their parents, however, have either lapsed memories or are simply simple-minded.

 

I well recall the euphoria at the Clinton inauguration. So many young people excited about having a youngish president who played the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show.

 

Clinton appealed to the lowest common denominator of the American electorate who came out to vote for the man who promised to improve the economy that was proven not to be as bad as his campaign alleged.

 

Just as Barack Obama's campaign misled the public and ran against his own ultra liberal record, Clinton ran as a centrist and won. Once in office however, his actions exposed his liberal bent and his allegiance to the left wing Democrats who laid low during his campaign.

 

The man who loathed the military immediately cut the defense budget and laid the background for future attacks on the U.S. and its interests. Barack Obama has done the same in spite of the looming threats by Korea and Iran.

 

In 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed. Clinton treated it as a criminal act rather than a national security threat. It has been argued that this sent a message to terrorists that the U.S. was a paper tiger. Read article.

 

Henry Lamb, WND.com

 

The people who created the government were absolutely convinced that the people had to control the government. The people who now run the government are absolutely convinced that the government has to control the people. This transformation of the function of government is the primary reason why America's manufacturing industry has moved offshore; why it has created an "entitlement" society; and why it has made America's educational system devolve into an embarrassment.

 

And it is getting worse.

 

Every day, the Obama administration announces some new way to expand the power of government to control the people in new ways.

 

This new crowd in Washington has announced to the world its intention to control the kind of automobiles the people may buy, and the type of energy the people may use. Government – not a free market – will dictate what the people may have. There is no authority in the Constitution for the U.S. government to usurp this power from the people.

 

Neither Obama nor his congressional majority care about the limits the Constitution imposes on the federal government. What they do care about is forcing their values and procedures on everyone else. Read article.

 

John Stossel, JWR.com

 

Did you go to preschool? When I was growing up, few kids did. But now there is a new movement that says every child in America should have a chance to start school before kindergarten — at taxpayer expense.

 

It's part of President Obama's massive spending plans. His "stimulus" bill includes an Early Learning Challenge Grant to encourage states to "Develop a cutting-edge plan to raise the quality of your early learning programs". It's a popular idea. Sixty-seven percent of Americans favor universal pre-K funded by the government. But I doubt that most Americans have thought it through.

 

Mia Levi has. She told me, "This whole thing is a scam."

 

Levi runs six preschools. I thought she'd favor the program, since she'd collect easy money from the government.

 

"I don't want to have to answer to the government," she said. "Our programs are so far superior." Read article.

George Will, Townhall.com

 

Rampant redistribution of wealth by government is now the norm. So is this: It inflames government's natural rapaciousness and subverts the rule of law. This degeneration of governance is illustrated by the Illinois Legislature's transfer of income from some disfavored riverboat casinos to racetracks.

 

What is to prevent legislators from taking revenues from Wal-Mart and giving them to local retailers? Or from chain drugstores to local pharmacies? Not the tattered remnant of the Constitution's takings clause.

 

Suppose Congress, eager to aid newspapers hurt by competition from new information technologies, decides to take a percentage of the assets of Bill Gates and half a dozen other beneficiaries of those technologies, and give the money to newspapers. Would not this "take and transfer" scheme be unconstitutional? Read article.

 

Janet Daley, Telegraph.co.uk

 

America has become quite accustomed to being despised by Europe. I wonder how Europe will adjust to being hated – or worse, dismissed – by America.

 

What's that? You thought that the contemptuous attitude to Old Europe had been definitively trounced when the swaggering Texan was replaced by Barack Obama, the cosmopolitan sophisticate who took time out from his own domestic political campaign to address adoring crowds in Berlin? Bizarrely enough, precisely the opposite has happened. Paradoxically, what Mr Obama has succeeded in demonstrating to his own nation is that no amount of charm and flattery, no degree of self-abasement and apology for American "arrogance" is going to get any meaningful reciprocity from the Old Europeans (which is to say France and Germany, and the EU which they dominate) who could give lessons in sublime, transcendental arrogance to any American president however urbane and nuanced his message might be.

 

Paradoxically, what Mr Obama has succeeded in demonstrating to his own nation is that no amount of charm and flattery, no degree of self-abasement and apology for American "arrogance" is going to get any meaningful reciprocity from the Old Europeans (which is to say France and Germany, and the EU which they dominate) who could give lessons in sublime, transcendental arrogance to any American president however urbane and nuanced his message might be. Read article.

 

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