Andrea Lafferty, Alain's Newsletter.com

 

With the announced resignation of Justice David Souter, Obama will likely appoint a hard-left judicial activist to the Supreme Court

 

The U.S. Supreme Court is on the verge of taking a huge lurch to the far left with the exit of Justice Souter from the Court. Souter is certainly no loss for Constitutionalists, but he will most likely be replaced with someone far worse.

 

During the election, President Obama stated that he wanted to appoint judges who had “empathy” and who understood what it was to be poor, black or gay. He clearly stated that he wanted judges who would not confine themselves to the Constitution or to the original intent of the Founding Fathers.

 

From Obama’s public statements, it is clear that he will appoint a Justice who views the U.S. Constitution like a Wikipedia entry that can be edited, revised and distorted for the political agenda of the Justice. Read article.

Jed Babbin, Human Events.com

 

Obama’s first 100 days did enormous damage to our entire intelligence community. It’s all too clear that Speaker Pelosi will do much more if she believes it will help her out of the corner she’s in. Panicked people make mistakes. Pelosi has made a big one in propelling the inquisition into the CIA interrogations She will make more, and the damage to our intelligence gathering ability may be fatal to many Americans.

 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has had a bad week. Caught between her own involvement in the CIA interrogations now condemned as torture and her party’s inquisitions, Pelosi floundered. Her fear and frustration have apparently given way to panic after word reached her of the CIA’s reaction to the damage she, President Obama and other Democrats have done to the spy agency in the last three months. Read article.

 

Debra J. Saunders, Rasmussen Reports.com

 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been pushing for a "truth commission" to investigate the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques like waterboarding -- until Republicans started shining the spotlight on Pelosi herself. Now she is not so adamant.

 

Spokesman Brendan Daly told me that Pelosi wants a truth commission, "but she still realizes the political reality" -- as in the opposition of President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

 

The rest of the reality may well be this: Pelosi knew that White House lawyers had sanctioned waterboarding in 2002 -- and did not protest.

 

According to the Senate Intelligence committee, the CIA briefed Pelosi, then the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah -- who was waterboarded -- in 2002.

 

The Washington Post reported in 2007 that the 2002 briefing provided Pelosi and company with a "virtual tour" of interrogation techniques. At the time of the story, a congressional source speaking for Pelosi, however, told the Post that Pelosi thought waterboarding was in the planning stages. The source admitted Pelosi did not object.

 

Who then is Pelosi to go after Bush lawyers for sanctioning waterboarding, which she now refers to as torture? Read article.

Emanuel A. Winston, JewishIndy.com 

 

Obama - in every speech - tells the world how bad, how wrong America is in dealing with the world. Granted, he easily gathers in the applause of the nations who despise Americans for being the rich generous uncle most have come to for handouts.

 

We all know how relatives must feel when they come to a rich uncle for a loan. Then they are embarrassed, anxious and momentarily grateful but then resentment begins to blossom especially when they can’t and won’t pay back the loan.

 

Then the generous loaner is viewed as the enemy. Nations are the same.

 

America has loaned trillions of dollars to nations who cannot and never intended to pay back the loans. We all remember the nations of Europe which America rescued in times of war, sacrificing American men and treasure. After the wars, those nations America saved hated Uncle Sucker.

 

Remember the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe - including Germany and Japan?

 

Now President Obama, a charming, articulate man who never ran a business, never did anything of note as a Junior Senator from Illinois, now apologizes for all America because we were 'not generous enough or demanding that borrowing nations use the loans to build the business infrastructure of their nation instead of wasting the money on enriching their political elite'.

 

Obama doesn’t blame them - he blames America and apologizes in the name of America because we do not follow the theories of his mentors to adopt Socialism, aspects of Communism and his moves to weaken America’s Armed Forces. Read article.

 

Reza Khalili, Pajamas Media.com

 

President Barack Obama’s recent video message to Iranians and their ruling mullahs for the Persian new year was both kind and heartfelt. Norouz, the Persian new year, has been celebrated by Iranians for almost 3,000 years. Norouz means new day and it represents two symbolic ancient concepts: end and rebirth — or end of evil and rebirth of good.

 

But the ruling mullahs in Iran are trying to usurp our Persian heritage and replace it with Arab/Islamic events. They have even tried to ban the new year celebration, calling it un-Islamic. If it were not for the courage and resistance of Iranians, our new year would have been replaced with an Islamic event just like the many other social changes since the Iranian Revolution.

 

Forcing Iranians to adhere to a strict Islamic dress code is the least of it. We have been subjected to amputation as the punishment for stealing, lashing for drinking, stoning for adultery, and execution by hanging from cranes for speaking against our rulers. Read article.

 

Caroline B. Glick, JWR.com

 

It is a strange situation when Egypt and Jordan feel it necessary to defend Israel against American criticism. But this is the situation in which we find ourselves today.

 

On Friday, April 24, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee that Arab support for Israel's bid to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is contingent on its agreeing to support the rapid establishment of a Palestinian state.

 

In her words, "For Israel to get the kind of strong support it's looking for vis-a-vis Iran, it can't stay on the sidelines with respect to the Palestinians and the peace efforts." As far as Clinton is concerned, the two, "go hand-in-hand." Read article.

 

Norman Podhoretz, CommentaryMagazine.com

 

Is there a threat to Israel from the United States under Barack Obama? The question itself seems perverse. For in spite of the hostility to Israel in certain American quarters, this country has more often than not been the beleaguered Jewish state’s only friend in the face of threats coming from others. Nor has the young Obama administration been any less fervent than its last two predecessors in declaring an undying commitment to the security and survival of Israel.

 

Nevertheless, during the 2008 presidential campaign, friends of Israel (a category that, speculations to the contrary notwithstanding, still includes a large majority of the American Jewish community) had ample reason for anxiety over Obama. The main reason was his attitude toward Iran. After all, Iran under its current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was vowing almost on a daily basis to “wipe Israel off the map” and was drawing closer and closer to acquiring the nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles that would give the ruling mullocracy the means to do so. And yet Obama seemed to think that the best way to head off the very real possibility this posed of another holocaust was by entering into talks with Iran “without preconditions.” Read article.

 

Arnold Ahlert, Political Mavens.com

 

With the kind of 20/20 hindsight that only “progressive” thinkers possess, demands are being made to prosecute those who authorized the use of coercive interrogation techniques on hardened terrorists. Too bad those of us who believe in protecting America couldn’t engage in the same kind of “after the fact” choices. Maybe some of us would choose the alternative to waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: letting Los Angeles suffer the same kind of attack New York and Washington D.C. did on September 11, 2001.

 

Perhaps 3000 dead Californians–with possibly some high-profile celebrities among the casualties–might have been worth it, in retrospect. It is apparent that the atrocity perpetrated on 9/11 is no longer considered sufficiently horrifying to those who consider all “rights”–with the notable exception of the right to live–beyond debate.

 

These are the same people who have concluded that waterboarding is torture–after the fact. Not in 2002, when Congress was kept in the loop regarding this and other interrogation techniques. Apparently then, when those same members of Congress and others didn’t know whether or not other attacks on America were imminent, waterboarding didn’t seem like such a bad idea. Read article.

Suzanne Fields, JWR.com

 

What is banal is the moral preening of those who judge the way others stand up to evil, who judge those who compromise in their human fallibility to fight evil so that the rest of us can enjoy the good (and the good life). What's banal are the pundits and partisan ideologues who get their hands dirty only changing an ink cartridge but who seek revenge on others who, acting in good faith, did what they believed was right in thwarting evil. What's banal are those who round up the usual suspects from history, usually the cliched villains of Nazi Germany, and trot them out for comparison in show trials of their fantasies.

 

The debate is not one of good vs. evil, but of moral abstraction vs. grim reality. The debate has moved from saying that "torture is wrong" — almost everybody agrees with that, in the abstract — to seeking revenge against those falsely perceived as moral enemies in our midst. It's easy to scorn lawyers who abuse the right to sue, but making lawyers criminals for the advice they offer is alien to everything we are as Americans.

 

Defending certain rough interrogation techniques to squeeze evil men for information that could prevent catastrophe, at a time when everyone was terrified, was commonplace, driven by common sense. Thousands of Americans were regarded as at risk of mass murder by evil men plotting mayhem. But now that the risk is regarded as small, even as nonexistent by some, and the debate has moved away from preventing mass murder to punishing those who in a moment of national peril thought the best techniques were those that were necessary — and legal.

 

What a difference eight years make. We forget the agony, the gruesome details of death in the Twin Towers........We forget how appreciative we were of George W. Bush that the outrages of human decency following 9-11 were not in New York or Washington but in Madrid and London. But it's not fashionable to remember all that this season. The absence of mayhem is just a happy coincidence. Read article.

 

Thomas E. Brewton, Alain's Newsletter.com

 

By giving or withholding material things that can be purchased with money, the political state can control its citizens when they have been reduced to dependency upon the state for medical care, food, clothing, housing, jobs, and education.

 

Socialism, the motivating ideology of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, is the opposite of the political state envisioned in the Bill of Rights. Socialism requires that your individual liberties be subordinated to the needs of the political state.

 

Whatever its proclaimed intentions for the betterment of society, socialism must diminish your range of individual political and economic freedoms, transferring them to state bureaucrats who promulgate regulations. Read article.

 

Jonah Goldberg, NRO.com

 

In his press conference last Wednesday night, President Obama offered a nice little sermonette on “shortcuts.”

 

Asked about his decision to release the “torture memos” and ban waterboarding, Obama said: “I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, ‘We don’t torture,’ when . . . all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat. . . . Churchill understood, you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.”

 

It’s a nice, honorable statement. But there’s not much evidence it’s true.

 

Churchill and Great Britain didn’t quite take the firm stand against “torture” that Obama and Sullivan suggest. During the war, the Brits ran an interrogation center, “the Cage,” in one of London’s fanciest neighborhoods, where they worked over 3,573 captured Germans, sometimes brutally. The Free French movement, headquartered in London, savagely beat detainees under the nose of British authorities. From 1945 to 1947, Colonel Stephens himself ran the Bad Nenndorf prison near Hanover, Germany, where Soviet and Nazi prisoners were treated far more brutally than those at Guantanamo Bay. Read article.

 

Review & Outlook, Online WSJ.com

 

Dick Cheney is often critical of President Obama, but on one issue we suspect the former Vice President has a grudging admiration: In a mere 100 days, the Democrat has silenced eight years of criticism about the Imperial Presidency. It is once again the liberal hour in American politics, and the media and political classes now see energy in the executive as a national asset.

 

Though we disagree with much of Mr. Obama's agenda, this turnaround has its benefits. A worried electorate wants to feel better about the country after the bitterness of the Bush years, and his cool confidence has lifted the public mood. He is a likable man who seems open to other arguments, even if he really isn't. Read article.

 

Jack Kelly, RCP.com

 

"Can somebody please tell us how U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano got her job?" asked Canada's National Post in an editorial April 22. "She appears to be about as knowledgeable about border issues as a late night radio call-in yahoo."

 

In a speech to the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., Ms. Napolitano said: "One of the things that we need to be sensitive to is the very real feelings among southern border states and in Mexico that if things are being done on the Mexican border, they should also be done on the Canadian border." There are a few differences between Canada and Mexico, which Ms. Napolitano overlooked...........

 

There are a few differences between Canada and Mexico, which Ms. Napolitano overlooked........... Read article.

 

Joseph Curl, Washington Times.com

 

President Obama said his prime-time press conference on Day 100 of his presidency was intended as a "look forward to ... all of the hundreds of days to follow," but it turned into more of a look back in anger, complete with finger-pointing.

 

Throughout his hourlong session in the White House East Room on Wednesday, the candidate who vowed a new post-partisan Washington, free from the rancorous bickering that often grinds the city to gridlock, ripped Republicans as the members of a do-nothing party of no.

 

He began at the top, calling his predecessor, the former head of the Republican Party, a torturer. Read article.

 

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