Editorial, Washington Times.com

 

The "liar, liar pants on fire" argument usually isn't the most effective. But when it comes to guns, President Obama is lying through his teeth.

 

On Thursday, while on a visit to Mexico, the president continued his Blame America First tour. "This war is being waged with guns purchased not here but in the United States," he said, referring to the drug wars that are tearing apart our neighbor to the south. "More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that lay in our shared border."

 

It is completely untrue that 90 percent of guns recovered in Mexico are from America. The Mexican government separates guns it confiscates that were made in the United States and sends them here to be traced. U.S. weapons are easy to identify because of clear markings.

 

Of the ones sent here to be traced, 90 percent turn out to be from America, but most guns recovered in Mexico are not sent here so are not included in the count. Fox News reported that 17 percent is a more accurate number. Read article.

Masry Anastasis O'Grady, Online WSJ.com

 

If President Barack Obama's goal at the fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago this weekend was to be better liked by the region's dictators and left-wing populists than his predecessor George W. Bush, the White House can chalk up a win.

 

If, on the other hand, the commander in chief sought to advance American ideals, things didn't go well. As the mainstream press reported, Mr. Obama seemed well received. But the freest country in the region took a beating from Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, Bolivia's Evo Morales, and Nicaragua's Danny Ortega. Read article.

John T. Simpson, Big Hollywood.com

 

You all know the drill. The recent vague and controversial DHS report on right-wing extremism, the cover of which DHS might just as well have put on the Republican Party platform. The endless puerile teabagging jokes from the fourth estate’s finest, giggling into their microphones like ten-year-olds who just found a tittie mag.

 

CNN reporter Susan Roesgen even called a Tea Party “anti-government and anti-CNN” when her pro-government handout rant to a Tea Partier was rudely interrupted. Ms. Roesgen took particular offense at a sign of Obama with a Hitler moustache. “Why be so hard on the President of the United States though with such an offensive message?” the offended Ms. Roesgen asked.

 

Yet in 2006, Ms. Roesgen was perfectly comfortable with this Satan/Hitler Bush mask, jokingly calling it a Bush ‘look-alike.’ I guess it all depends on which POTUS you’re hard on. Right, Suzie?

 

And therein lies the rub. Dissent was SO patriotic not so long ago, wasn’t it? Dissent against war, dissent against torture, dissent against wiretapping, dissent against Gitmo, dissent against rendition, dissent against government abuse of power. In fact, now-Secretary of State Clinton was quite vocal on the matter back in the day:

 

“I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration, somehow you’re not patriotic. And we should stand up and say we are Americans, and we have a right to debate and disagree with ANYadministration!” (ear shattering - remember?) Read article.

Victor Davis Hanson, NRO.com

 

The Washington Post informs us of the presidential visit to Latin American with a headline “Race a Dominant Theme at Summit.” It then goes on to describe how Obama resonates with those leaders of “indigenous” heritage in Latin America.

 

Something here is not quite right. Our president ran on a platform of racial transcendence, but he now heads south to talk race ("The president put it [race] on the table very explicitly" at the opening ceremony, said a senior Obama administration official who participates in closed-door meetings with the president.”) with some leaders who have explicitly employed racially charged stereotypes, such as Chavez’s use of “Go to Hell, Gringos,” or Brazil’s president Lula's reference to “white blue-eyed” bankers who caused the financial meltdown.

 

A common denominator with Obama's easy emphasis on racial divides—when juxtaposed to past evocation abroad of his Muslim sensitivities and middle name, serial apologies about American sins and pathologies, and constant denunciation of his predecessor—is a sense that the past tradition of America is culpable and therefore not his own—made explicit in his response to Daniel Ortega's diatribe that he was just three months old during the Bay of Pigs troubles, and by extension not responsible for American transgressions.

 

Again, separately all these new approaches are in themselves understandable, but in the aggregate they form a disturbing pattern seen earlier with the off-handed remarks about "typical white person," the stereotyping of rural Pennsylvanians along lines of class and race, and the 20-year long patronage of a clearly racist preacher. Read article.

NY Post.com

 

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says she owes an apology to the millions of American veterans she libeled last week as dangerous extremists and potential terrorists.

 

But she's not backing down on what she insists was an accurate "assessment" of a "right-wing" terrorist threat -- saying only that "to the extent veterans read it as an accusation, an apology is owed."

 

Not good enough.

 

In fact, the report that DHS released last week was a bizarrely paranoid rant.

 

Which no doubt is why the agency's own civil-rights division raised red flags over some of the language in the report -- only to see Napolitano release it anyway.

 

And it's particularly slanderous of the brave Americans who've fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who -- or so DHS claims -- are thus susceptible to recruitment by violent extremists because they're "facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities."

 

Shades of the 1960s, when similar slanders were aimed at Vietnam vets. Read article.

 

John W. Whitehead

 

Two years ago, I alerted people to the fact that the groundwork was being laid for a new kind of government where virtually everyone is a suspect and it will no longer matter if you're innocent or guilty, whether you're a threat to the nation or even if you're a citizen. What will matter is what the president--or whoever happens to be occupying the Oval Office at the time--thinks.

 

At the time, I was voicing concerns about the liberties the Bush administration was taking in its application of the term "enemy combatant." Today, under the Obama administration, the perceived threat is coming from an altogether different direction: "rightwing extremists." 

 

In a recent report issued by the Department of Homeland Security, "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," an extremist is defined as anyone who subscribes to a particular political viewpoint. Rightwing extremists are broadly defined in the report as individuals and groups "that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely."

 

The report is problematic on many levels, but several things in particular stand out. Read article.

 

Paul Greenberg, Arkansas Gazette.com

 

Being both a Frenchman seeking refuge from the violent swings of politics in his own country (from autocracy to democracy to terror and back), and a student of classic political theory, Alexis DeToqueville had little doubt that democracy would prove a prelude to tyranny.

 

He was in doubt only about what shape such a tyranny would take. For in this unique society, surely tyranny, too, would come in a unique form. He saw democracy in America as always teetering between its two desires: liberty and equality. After long deliberation, the answer came to him: In the end, an oppressive equality would triumph. But it would be a velvet-gloved oppression new in the annals of man. He explained how it would work in a chapter entitled

 

What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear. Read article.

 

John Griffing, American Thinker.com

 

In our recent election, many Americans voted for a Savior, not a president. 

 

Americans were enamored with the idea of making history in this election, and in that sense we have gotten what we wanted. Unfortunately, Barack Obama is the wrong man, and this is definitely the wrong time.

 

America is now seeing the results of its own revolution, a peaceful November Revolution unlike Russia's of almost a century ago, responding to multiple staged crises with pleas for our new leader to save us from ourselves. Our leader is ready and willing, and we have given President Obama the keys to the kingdom. Many of us warned of the dangers of expanding presidential powers, arguing that what might work under a trustworthy administration might be dangerous in the hands of an unscrupulous one. 

 

But even we could not have imagined the speed with which our most dire warnings might come true. Had Obama's ascendency been foreseen, we'd have won that argument hands-down. He's the poster-child for the worst case scenario. Read article.

Patrik Jonsson, CS Monitor.com

 

By some estimates, over half a million Americans took to the streets last Wednesday to protest taxes and Washington spending – the largest single-day turnout of protesters in the US since 750,000 people marched in Los Angeles in support of rights and protections for immigrants on March 25, 2006.

 

Pitched as a non-partisan protest, but dominated by conservatives and libertarians, the national Tea Party protests took place in over 800 locales – from mega-city Atlanta to little Craig, Colo. – with people waving mostly homemade signs, chanting "USA! USA!" and recalling the spirit of the country's revolutionary roots to demand smaller, more responsible and more constitutional government.

 

Critics doubt the higher estimates of the turnout, and say the numbers represent the extreme right rather than a burgeoning political counterpoint to President Obama and current Washington policies. http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0418/p25s03-usgn.html

 

Yet the idea of non-traditional protesters using bottom-up organizing to foment a national movement in the span of 60 days may have marked a turning point for the tea partiers – especially since the high attendance estimates rivaled the estimated 500,000 or so protesters who converged on New York City and several other major cities to oppose the Iraq War on Feb. 15, 2003. Read article.

 

Noel Sheppard, NewsBusters.org

 

As Tea Parties ensued from coast to coast last week, the Obama administration and their media minions depicted attendees as not understanding that the new president has decreed taxes will be going down for 95 percent of Americans.

 

On Sunday's "Meet the Press," Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein let the cat out of the bag: Tea Partiers are right. Taxes are going up.

 

This revelation occurred after host David Gregory said to the Post's Pulitzer Prize winner, "There may be doubts about President Obama, but he is cutting taxes."

 

Pearlstein responded:

 

"That's right. And the level of taxation, overall tax, the federal taxation, which includes the income tax, but also the corporate tax and the excise tax and things like that, it's, it's at one of the lower points it's been in the last 30 years. And one of the things that everyone has to get sort of comfortable with is it's going up. And Dick [Armey] is right about that, it's going up. It has to go up." Read article.

 

Andy McCarthy, NRO.com

 

I don't know why today's NYTimes made me think of this, but here's a post from October 11 last year — three weeks before the election when all the media Left, and our Obamaphiles of the Right, were pooh-poohing the Ayers connection.

 

What kind of education reform did Ayers & Obama have in mind?

 

You can draw plenty of rational inferences from Stanley [Kurtz]'s rich work. But for a clear statement of Ayers's frightening vision, I submit that his November 2006 speech at the World Education Forum should be required reading. 

 

As Cornerites know, I've been arguing that our emphasis on Ayers's prior terrorism, while highly relevant, is not the essential point. The real issue is Ayers's revolutionary leftism (at around the time Ayers and Obama began working on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, by the way, Ayers described himself as "a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist”). 

 

Obama is clearly lying when he claims ignorance about Ayers's terrorism, but even if you wanted to pretend otherwise, it is impossible that he was in the dark about Ayers's revolutionary leftism: Ayers has never made a secret of it and can't seem to help himself from mentioning it about every 30 seconds.

 

Obama not only knew about Ayers's views in this regard; he obviously subscribed to them: was a member of the Chicago New Party begun by the Democratic Socialists of America; he worked closely with Ayers on "education reform" for years, he approved of Ayers's similarly fringe-Left views of the criminal justice system's treatment of juvenile crime, and, we are learning; and he was tightly aligned with ACORN, which he and Ayers funded and whose practices fit comfortably with the Ayers view of "participatory democracy"). In any event, here are excerpts of Ayers's 2006 speech before Hugo Chavez and other assembled "comrades":

 

In any event, here are excerpts of Ayers's 2006 speech before Hugo Chavez and other assembled "comrades": Read article.

 

 

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