Jay Ambrose, Scripps News.com

 

In the midst of emitting oohs and ahs over Barack Obama's first 100 days or so as president, Joe Klein of Time magazine quotes with glowing approval some words his hero spoke in a speech at Georgetown University.

 

"It is simply not sustainable," Obama said, "to have an economy where, in one year, 40 percent of our corporate profits came from a financial sector that was based on inflated home prices, maxed-out credit cards, over leveraged banks and overvalued assets."

 

True enough, and if there is something economically sensible and consonant with basic liberties that can be done to reduce our current dependence on this country's runaway consumerism, fine and good.

 

But here's what Klein and other like-minded Obama enthusiasts fail to grasp -- that Obama's policies amount to a governmental equivalent of this excess. What he has in mind is an unaffordable shopping spree giving us inflated prices for everything, maxed-out loans from China, over leveraged budgets and overvalued programs that could well be all cost and no benefit. Read article.

 

Scott S. Powell, Investors.com

 

U.S. recovery and progress is surely jeopardized if venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are diverted from economic to political calculation.

 

There is plenty of blame to go around for our current economic mess, with moral ambiguity and weak leadership from big business being increasingly acquiescent to the encroachment of the federal government.

 

Now is the time for entrepreneurs everywhere and those specifically in venture capital and Silicon Valley who delivered a disproportionately large Obama vote to speak up and demand some candor and accountability about all this. Read article.

 

Ben Bova, Naples Daily News.com

 

Does anybody in Washington understand the real world?

 

North Korea just lobbed a ballistic missile halfway across the Pacific Ocean and the Obama administration is talking about reducing funding for our ballistic missile defense program.

 

That doesn’t make sense.

 

Former President Ronald Reagan proposed building defenses against ballistic missiles in 1983. At that time the United States and our allies faced a Soviet Russia armed with thousands of long-range ballistic missiles that carried multiple warheads of hydrogen bombs.

 

Our policy at that time was mutual assured destruction (MAD). The idea was to maintain a nuclear arsenal powerful enough to destroy the Soviet Union even if it launched a devastating attack upon us. The MAD policy was aimed at deterrence; it was often described as a mutual suicide pact. Read article.

 

Tom DeWeese, FSM.org

 

Perhaps the most egregious action item offered in the Urban Environmental Accords dealt with the topic of water. Action item number 19 called for adoption and implementation of a policy to reduce individual water consumption.

 

The UN document begins by stating: “Cities with potable water consumption greater than 100 liters per capita per day will adopt and implement policies to reduce consumption by 10% by 2015.” There is no scientific basis for the 100 liter figure other than to employ a very clever use of numbers to lower the bar and control the debate over water consumption.

 

You must be aware that 100 liters is equal to about 26 gallons per person, per day. According to the UN, each person should have less than 26 gallons each day to drink, bathe, flush toilets, wash clothes, water lawns, wash dishes, cook, take care of pets, and more.

 

But, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, Americans actually need about 100 gallons per day to perform these basic life functions. The use of the 100 liters number versus 100 gallons is a direct attempt to mislead and actually cut water use by 75%. Read article.

 

CFIF.org

 

The Department of Homeland Security, never known for its institutional elegance (these are, after all, the people who brought us the color-coded terror alert system), reached a new low last week with the release of an Intelligence Assessment Report warning of the dangers of resurgent right-wing extremism in America.

 

The report deservedly drew the ire of conservatives throughout the nation for warning of the dangers posed by such menacing groups as military veterans returning stateside, pro-life activists, and border security advocates. But another, less remarked upon, item was perhaps even more distressing. According to the DHS, you may be a threat to national security if you believe in the Constitution.

 

To be clear, the relevant section of the Homeland Security document reads “Rightwing extremism in the United States [includes] groups, movements, and

adherents … that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority.”

 

The Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in turn, reads “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” Rightwing extremism, then, apparently owes its origins to Independence Hall. Read article.

 

Charles Krauthammer, Townhall.com

 

Unified theory of Obamaism, final installment:

 

In the service of his ultimate mission -- the leveling of social inequalities -- President Obama offers a tripartite social democratic agenda: nationalized health care, federalized education (ultimately guaranteed through college) and a cash-cow carbon tax (or its equivalent) to subsidize the other two.

 

Problem is, the math doesn't add up. Not even a carbon tax would pay for Obama's vastly expanded welfare state. Nor will Midwest Democrats stand for a tax that would devastate their already crumbling region.

 

What is obviously required is entitlement reform, meaning Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. That's where the real money is -- trillions saved that could not only fund hugely expensive health and education programs but also restore budgetary balance. Read article.

 

Mark Alexander, Patriot Post.us

 

Leon Panetta was certainly not appointed Director of Central Intelligence because of any related professional qualifications for the post. However, as the former White House Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton, Panetta has the political gravitas to run interference for the Obama regime, to best ensure that nobody will depart the Agency reservation with anything that poses a problem for Obama's agenda.

 

Of course, what could possibly pose a problem for a pathological socialist who launched his political career a few years back in the home of his terrorist neighbors, William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn -- and is now president?

 

Though Panetta lacks an intelligence background, at least he passed muster for the requisite DCI clearances. His boss, however, wouldn't qualify for the clearance level required of a desk clerk at the Social Security Administration. (Is this a great country, or what?)

 

This week, Panetta greeted Obama in the lobby of the CIA's Original Headquarters Building in advance of Obama's teleprompted regurgitation of the most overtly partisan pile of political horse pucky in CIA history. Feigning impartiality, Panetta said, "We must be careful not to spend so much time and energy in laying blame for the past that it interferes with our ability to focus on the fundamental mission we have for today and for tomorrow."

 

Notice Panetta did not say that we shouldn't lay political blame. He just qualified how much time should be spent doing so.

 

Blame for what? Read article.

 

Wesley Pruden, JWR.com

 

Opening a can of worms always tempts a mischief-maker, but it's risky business. That can of worms might turn out to be a can of snakes, like Barack Obama's latest gift to the nation.

 

The president's on-again, off-again, maybe-he-will and maybe-he-won't decision to punish someone who loosened tongues of Islamist terrorists at Guantanamo suddenly threatens not only the CIA interrogators and Justice Department lawyers, but even members of Congress. Maybe it won't stop there: if the lawyers who offered legal opinions are at risk of punishment for their legal advice, why not the members of Congress who knew what was going on? Why not the secretaries who typed up the transcripts? Why not the interns who fetched the coffee? All were accessories either before or after the fact.

 

We're on unfamiliar ground now. No president before has sought to punish his predecessor for policy decisions, no matter how wrong or wrong-headed. Lyndon B. Johnson's management of the Vietnam War was often ham-handed, as anyone who was there could tell you, and his policy makers sometimes verged on criminal incompetence.

 

But Richard Nixon was never tempted to send LBJ or any of those presidential acolytes to prison. Abraham Lincoln, by his lights, would have had ample opportunity to hang Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, but even the rabid Republicans who survived the assassination stopped short of putting Davis in the dock, finally releasing him from imprisonment at Fort Monroe when judgment overcame lust for revenge. Lee was never touched. Read article.

 

Rich Lowry, JWR.com

 

The calendar says President Barack Obama took office in 2009, although that's only a technicality. In his own mind, Obama ascended in Year Zero, a time of ritualistic cleansing in preparation for the relaunching of an America free from its past sins.

 

Has an American president ever appeared less vested in his nation's history than Barack Obama? He shrugged off a rancid attack on the United States by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega at the Summit of the Americas, including a rant on the Bay of Pigs operation in 1961, by saying he'd only been 3 months old at the time. Nothing to do with me.

 

It's Obama's own personal novus ordo seclorum. Or as an Obama official put it, "His expectation is that these debates of the past can remain that, debates of the past."

 

Obama's theory is that "if we are practicing what we preach and if we occasionally confess to having strayed from our values and our ideals, that strengthens our hand." This is an old strand in America foreign policy, associated with what the historian Walter Russell Mead calls "the Jeffersonian tradition." It is characterized, Mead writes, by the belief that the U.S. can best serve "the cause of universal democracy by setting an example rather than imposing a model," and by a diplomacy of "speak softly, and carry the smallest possible stick." Read article.

 

Sher Zieve, Reality Check.org

 

In order for global (AKA “one world”) government (AKA “rule”) to come into being, the United States of America must be destroyed. The USA and its Constitution are far too dangerous to the totalitarian Left for it to allow the country to continue its existence. For many years now, I have included in my Bio “if Leftists ran the country (and left to their own inane devices), it would be the end of of the United States as a sovereign nation.” Unfortunately and tragically, I was—and still am—correct.

 

The United States Constitution is a document that was designed and implemented to severely restrict government interference and control over individual states and We-the-People. The current US Federal Administration—under the rule of Barack Obama—is now operating under its leaders’ stated agenda of redistributing wealth (which is taken from the middle class and “redistributed” to the US and Global political power elite) and establishing new laws to take the US Constitution from limiting control over the US population to total control over We-the-People. Read article.

 

Matt Gurney, FrontPageMag.com

 

While Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic rhetoric at the UN’s laughably titled “Anti-Racism Conference” has been the main focus of the world’s attention, Iran has been garnering further international headlines for another outrageous act: the imprisonment of an innocent American woman for cynical political gain.

 

Academically successful and obviously brave, she has not shied away from reporting Iran’s most controversial actions, and has served as a voice for the Iranian people.

 

No longer. In late January of this year, Saberi vanished after being arrested by Iranian authorities, apparently for the crime of purchasing a bottle of wine.

 

Consider that Saberi is not the only American journalist currently being held hostage by a hostile power. Laura Ling and Euna Lee, both American citizens, are currently imprisoned by the North Koreans. Today, three Americans remain in captivity in hostile lands, their only crime having been to seek the truth in countries where truth is a dangerous thing. They deserve better than to be used as pawns in despots' twisted power plays. President Obama, acting as both the leader of the free world and the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in history, must commit himself fully to seeing these women returned to America. A free and vibrant press – and several courageous lives – depend on it.

 

Today, three Americans remain in captivity in hostile lands, their only crime having been to seek the truth in countries where truth is a dangerous thing. They deserve better than to be used as pawns in despots' twisted power plays. President Obama, acting as both the leader of the free world and the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in history, must commit himself fully to seeing these women returned to America. A free and vibrant press – and several courageous lives – depend on it. Read article.

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