Review & Outlook, Online WSJ.com

 

President Obama on Monday paid his first formal visit to CIA headquarters, in order, as he put it, to "underscore the importance" of the agency and let its staff "know that you've got my full support." Assuming he means it, the President should immediately declassify all memos concerning what intelligence was gleaned, and what plots foiled, by the interrogations of high-level al Qaeda detainees in the wake of September 11.

 

This suggestion was first made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who said he found it "a little bit disturbing" that the Obama Administration had decided to release four Justice Department memos detailing the CIA's interrogation practices while not giving the full picture of what the interrogations yielded in actionable intelligence. Yes, it really is disturbing, especially given the bogus media narrative that has now developed around those memos. Read article.

Editorial, NY Post.com

 

If nothing else, President Obama's decision to overrule his own intelligence officials and release Bush-era legal memos justifying what The New York Times sanctimoniously described as the CIA's "brutal" interrogation techniques proves what a bunch of pushovers we Americans are.

 

Al Qaeda kidnaps Americans, tortures them, then decapitates them on TV.

 

We deprive captives of sleep, push them into walls and put harmless caterpillars that we say are poisonous in their cells.

 

Then we're the ones who are condemned as the worst human-rights violators on the planet. Read article.

 

Edwin Mora, CNSNews.com

 

Inspired by his meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama at the Americas Summit, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez declared on Sunday that Venezuelan socialism has begun to reach the United States under the Obama administration.

 

“I am coming back from Trinidad and Tobago, from the Americas Summit where, without a doubt, the position that Venezuela and its government has always defended, especially starting 10 years ago, of resistance, dignity, sovereignty and independence has obtained in Port of Spain, one of the biggest victories of our history,” Chavez said. Read article.

 

David Lightman, McClatchydc.com

 

When President Barack Obama proudly announced last week that the government had approved its 2,000th transportation project under the economic stimulus plan, he hailed it as a moment "when a generation of Americans seized the chance to remake the face of this nation."

 

Many of those Americans apparently live in Obama's home state of Illinois.

 

The Obama list included 249 Illinois projects, far more than any other state. Six states — Ohio, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Alaska and Idaho — had no projects when he spoke, although Georgia has since added 22 projects, and the list has grown to 2,163.

 

The Illinois collection was explained by Marisa Kollias, a spokeswoman for the state transportation department: "We do have a new governor and a new secretary and they've been working diligently." [Oh, yeah!] Read article.

 

Jed Babbin, Human Events.com

 

White House lawyers are refusing to accept the findings of an inter-agency committee that the Uighur Chinese Muslims held at Guantanamo Bay are too dangerous to release inside the U.S., according to Pentagon sources familiar with the action.

 

This action -- coupled with the release of previously top secret legal opinions on harsh interrogation methods -- demonstrates the Obama administration’s willingness to ignore reality.

 

President Obama’s decision to close the terrorist detention facility (known as “Gitmo” to the military) was made despite Bush administration determinations that there were no realistic alternatives to it. Read article.

 

Jennifer Rubin, Commentary Magazine.com

 

The New York Times reports:

 

President Obama is running into stiff Congressional resistance to his plans to raise money for his ambitious agenda, and the resulting hole in the budget is threatening a major health care overhaul and other policy initiatives.

 

"The administration’s central revenue proposal — limiting the value of affluent Americans’ itemized deductions, including the one for charitable giving — fell flat in Congress, leaving the White House, at least for now, without $318 billion that it wants to set aside to help cover uninsured Americans. At the same time, lawmakers of both parties have warned against moving too quickly on a plan to auction carbon emission permits to produce more than $600 billion."

 

Well, it seems the administration is stumped. Who knew there would be a limit to the amount Congress would be willing to tax and spend? The Congress – Democrats included — are getting nervous about raising taxes to pay for a huge new domestic agenda. Read article.

 

Clive Crook, Financial Times.com

 

Who can fail to be impressed by Barack Obama’s energy, or a little stunned by his self-confidence? Show this man a financial crisis, sufficient to occupy or overwhelm an ordinary president, and he sees the chance to “remake” – as he puts it – the entire US economy. You might dismiss that as rhetorical exuberance, but it becomes ever more apparent that his ambition is real. For good or ill, he means to do it.

 

In foreign policy, one sees the same disposition – the same appetite, the same willingness to bring new thinking to old problems. In recent days, the administration has conceived a spate of new approaches and initiatives.

 

Just as the financial breakdown is too small a domestic canvas, so Iraq and Afghanistan – where the US currently has most at stake and which constitute by themselves a crushing workload – are too mild a test. The White House has recently made approaches to Cuba and Iran, alongside diplomatic “resets” on Mexico and Latin America, Russia, China, the Middle East, Nato, global summitry, global warming, the international financial institutions and almost anything you care to name.

 

In every case, Mr Obama seems to say, this administration starts afresh – and if it can break with the diplomatic and strategic failures of George W. Bush, remaking the world as well as the US economy is so much the better. Read article.

 

Betty Freauf, NWV.com

 

Sean Hannity on FOX had a jigsaw puzzle featured on his set and each day for the first 100 days of the Messiah Barack’s presidency he planned to remove a piece and he wanted to see who could guess what it was. At about the 75th day, he had a winner. It was a picture of Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton. The motto: “More of the Same” but allow me to share some of the differences from the Clinton’s first 100 days era.

 

Mitchell Locin and Carol Jouzaitis of the Chicago Tribune wrote on 4/29/1993 about Clinton’s first 100 days and how realities had dimmed the inaugural glow. The euphoria over a new administration ended quickly as President Clinton faced uphill battles in Congress and overseas.

 

Obama, the appeaser, flew to Europe to rebuild relationships he said were lost under the Bush Administration. He did something no previous American president has ever done. He sullied and insulted America’s good name and incensed most Americans, which probably helped with the huge turnout at the Tea Parties across America on April 15th, which Obama claimed he didn’t know about but I suspect Homeland Security cameras were registering faces and license plates of these “radical right extremists.” Read article.

 

William McGurn, Online WSJ.com

 

Helen Thomas: Why is the president blocking habeas corpus from prisoners at Bagram? I thought he taught constitutional law. And these prisoners have been there . . .

 

Robert Gibbs: You're incorrect that he taught on constitutional law.

 

You know we live in interesting times when Helen Thomas is going after Barack Obama. Miss Thomas was asking the White House press secretary last week why detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan should not have the same right to challenge their detention in federal court that last year's Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush gave to Guantanamo's detainees. All Mr. Gibbs could do was interrupt and correct the doyenne of the White House press corps about Mr. Obama's class as a law professor.

 

The precipitate cause of Miss Thomas's question was a ruling earlier this month by federal district Judge John Bates. Judge Bates says that last year's Supreme Court ruling on Gitmo does apply to Bagram. The administration has appealed, saying that giving detainees such rights could lead to protracted litigation, disclosure of intelligence secrets and harm to American security. The wonderful irony is that, at least on the logic, everyone is right. Read article.

 

Herbert Zweibon, Israel-Commentary.org

 

The importance of making energy plentiful and keeping prices down for the revival of our economy is obvious. The biggest stimulus has not come from Congress but the fall in the price of oil. Our energy policy also has a crucial impact on our international political standing and our ability to prevail against the forces arrayed against us. This administration’s messages of goodwill to the likes of Ahmadinejad and Bashir Assad will only solidify their contempt.

 

By increasing our domestic production of energy— coal, nuclear, oil, gas—we can put pressure on our outright enemies and those who wish us ill. Many of these enemies are concentrated in countries dependent upon oil sales to satisfy the needs of their population.

 

So, what is the Obama administration doing to keep up the pressure on the hostile oil producers? On every energy front, it is doing the opposite of what needs to be done. The administration has declared war on fossil fuels. Read article.

 

AJ DiCintio, NMJ.us

 

I thought it an entirely good thing for the nation to catch glimpses of President Obama pulling weeds in the White House Vegetable Garden — until I realized such images might cause some folks to place him in the tradition of nineteenth century American radicals, the deep-dreaming agrarians who were devotees of what Marx called “utopian socialism.”

 

The truth about utopian experiments (just as it became the truth about communism and other forms of socialism) is that those who believed staunchly in the evils wrought by oversupply could not produce enough food to keep themselves alive.

 

With images fresh in our minds of American Pollyannas brought to ruin by an arrogance that drove them to believe, “Thinking makes it so,” we are now able to tackle the question of where on the political scale to place those whom Karl Marx mocked as feckless primitives — but nevertheless praised for the role they played in laying a foundation for a world in which family, private property, and free enterprise are “abolished.”

 

What we find is that there is no reasonable answer other than this: We must place the utopians close to anarchists because those apolitical dreamers believed in moral suasion as the only proper means by which to enforce the “laws” of their communal societies.

 

Finally, the implications of that judgment allow us to dismiss nonsense about the president as kin to America’s idealistic agrarians and conclude as follows regarding his political ideology:

 

Politician Barack Obama loves centralized authority to the extent that he would astonishingly increase the power and reach of the level of government most remote from the people, burden present and future generations with a suffocating incubus of debt, and subjugate citizens to the autocratic thumb of liberal activist judges. Thus, by a stunning distance, he stoops closer to the dictatorial end of the political scale not just in contrast to utopians or presidents who went before him but to the vast majority of Americans, past and present.

 

Thus, by a stunning distance, he stoops closer to the dictatorial end of the political scale not just in contrast to utopians or presidents who went before him but to the vast majority of Americans, past and present. Read article.

 

 

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