Ed Lasky, Pajamas Media.com

 

The Obama administration is stepping up the pressure on the new Israeli government before a critical meeting between the president and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on May 18.

 

In the wake of comments made by influential National Security Adviser Jim Jones (the de facto secretary of state, in my opinion) to a European foreign minister that America will take a more “forceful hand” towards Israel than previous administrations, comes a new riposte to show that the State Department refuses to be one-upped by the NSC when it comes to dealing with Israel:

 

Rose Gottemoeller, assistant secretary of state and America’s chief nuclear arms negotiator, has called on Israel (along with Pakistan, India, and North Korea) to sign the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). By including Israel on a list of nations known to either have nuclear weapons or be close to acquiring them (North Korea), Gottemoeller broke with a decades old diplomatic policy of America. Since the late 1960s, America has pursued a policy of not demanding transparency from Israel and, in return, Israel agreed not to test a bomb or declare that it had developed a bomb. This policy was known as “strategic ambiguity.” Read article.

 

Obama's speech in Egypt to reach out to Muslims

Christina Bellantoni, Online WSJ.com

 

President Obama next month will travel to Egypt to address the world's Muslims in a major speech, seeking to strengthen U.S. relations with the Islamic world and fight extremism, the White House said Friday.

 

Mr. Obama chose Egypt as the venue for the long-promised speech, to be delivered June 4, because the country "in many ways represents the heart of the Arab world," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.

 

He said a city had not been chosen yet.

 

Mr. Gibbs said the president in his remarks will "extend a hand to those that in many ways are like us, but just simply have a different religion."

 

"Our hope is not to draw a large crowd, but our hope is to reach a large portion of the world with what we hope is a powerful message," Mr. Gibbs said.

 

The president's trip will include a visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, which Mr. Obama's great-uncle helped to liberate during World War II. He also will join world leaders in France to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landing in Normandy, France. Read article.

 

Bob Kemp, RenewAmerica.us

 

Mr. Obama's attack on our civil liberties will not be open attacks, obvious to all. No, true to his deceitful nature and that of his minion's, our civil liberties will be stripped from every American regardless of where you stand on issues.

 

The Obama administration is hard at work even as you read this article to disguise their attack on civil liberties as laws to be passed, in the best interest of the American people. There are many examples' to consider, but I will discuss only a few for now for the sake of brevity. We will see just how so much of these changes in law will have a domino effect, spreading over into other seemingly unrelated areas of our lives.

 

Let's start with Mr. Obama's support of abortion. I have written on this issue in the past at length, so I will not go into the moral issues concerning this. Knowing that Mr. Obama is THE most liberal person ever to occupy the White House, and knowing that one of the first things he did was start sending taxpayer money to Mexico to fund abortions, let's look at the broader implications of all this.

 

Mr. Obama said of himself when he was in Germany on the Campaign trail in 2008 that he was a "citizen of the world." He claimed no allegiance to the United States at all. By his own declaration, he aligned himself with other globalist entities that seek to establish a one-world government, ruled by one person, and at the same instant against every patriotic American. Read article.

Andrew C. McCarthy, NRO.com

 

The Obama Justice Department is engaged in the worst type of hypocrisy. Its Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is nearing completion of a 220-page report which will recommend that Attorney General Eric Holder refer former Bush administration lawyers to their state bar disciplinary committees over purported ethical lapses in the legal analysis those lawyers drafted to justify harsh interrogation techniques that critics — including President Obama himself — have labeled “torture.”

 

The draft report, which is not public, was nevertheless reported on last night by the Washington Post and New York Times — apparently based on leaks from the Justice Department (in an ethics case, no less). Such bar referrals could result in profound professional and financial damage, potentially including disbarment — all due to actions the lawyers took in defense of the United States after the 9/11 attacks.

 

Yet, even as the OPR report is being finalized, even after Obama declared himself open to the possibility of criminal prosecution against the Bush officials, and even after Holder promised to conduct an investigation that would “follow the evidence wherever it takes us, follow the law wherever that takes us” (emphasis added), the Obama Justice Department is relying on the very same legal analysis in order to urge a federal appeals court to reject torture claims. In fact, as the Obama Justice Department argued to that appeals court a little over a week ago, the torture law analysis in question has already been adopted by another federal appeals court. Read article.

 

Review & Outlook, Online WSJ.com

 

On his second day in office, President Obama ordered the Pentagon to mothball Guantanamo within one year, purportedly to reclaim the "moral high ground." That earned applause from the anti-antiterror squadrons, yet it is now causing all kinds of practical and political problems in what used to be known as the war on terror.

 

This mess grew even more chaotic this week, when Democrats refused the Administration's $50 million budget request to transfer some of the remaining 241 Gitmo detainees to a prison likely to be somewhere in the U.S. and perhaps to a new one built with taxpayer dollars. "What do we do with the 50 to 100 -- probably in that ballpark -- who we cannot release and cannot try?" Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently asked Congress.

 

The best answer is Gitmo. But the antiwar left wants terrorists treated like garden-variety criminals in the civilian courts or maybe military courts martial. The not-so-minor problem is that even states that send leftists to Congress don't want to host Gitmo-II. Read article.

 

Warner Todd Huston, American Conservative Daily.com

 

Looks like it is just starting to dawn on some lefties that Obama is ushering in an era of oppression of free speech. So it seems for Laura Varon Brown of the Detroit Free Press, at least. Oh, she isn’t saying that Obama himself is trampling on free speech, but she is starting to understand that the left’s penchant for political correctness is serving the function as a sort of self-imposed oppression no matter what Obama says. It’s getting so bad, according to Brown, that any criticism of Obama is treated as akin to treason… at least it is in the “circles” she runs in, anyway.

 

 She is finding herself a tad miffed that any criticism of the Obamamessiah at cocktail parties or around the water cooler is treated as the forbidden subject. She feels that her “right of self-expression is being squashed.” Brown finds that even Obama’s Special Olympics gaffe of a few months ago didn’t elicit the sort of wild attacks that it would have if it should have been Bush in the same situation.

 

Can you imagine the uproar had Bush said that? He’d be banished from bowling alleys for eternity. His bowling average and IQ would have immediately been compared in Twitter messages demanding his resignation.

 

But instead, media and water cooler conversations the next day were about bowling scores and how tough the game can be. Anyone bringing up the insensitivity of the president’s remark heard, “Come on, give the guy a chance. So he said one thing wrong. Anyone could have said something like that.”

 

Yeah, imagine that, eh? The One is being given a pass for any and all gaffes even though Bush would have been crucified for the same thing. We’ve been saying that here for some time.

 

Brown feels that there are things that Obama deserves to be jabbed over, nonetheless. Read article.

 

Victor Davis Hanson, NRO.com

 

Colin Powell keeps insisting that the Republicans lost the presidency because of right-wing extremists like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, who, in his view, have become the public face of the Republican party, and thus will ensure its permanent marginalization.

 

Others argue that the Bush administration had allowed Republicanism to become a cowboyish clique of the selfish who wanted a free hand to make money and let others less fortunate be damned. David Frum offered the novel notion that Rush Limbaugh’s girth, past drug use, checkered marital career, and palatial digs were emblematic of the party’s out-of-touch self-indulgence, especially when contrasted with the athletic, happily married, and transracial Barack Obama.

 

But none of these explanations rings true — especially since most of the current critics themselves were, in the heyday of 2002–03, either enthusiastically working for, or writing in praise of, the very administration whose policies they now claim caused the present mess.

 

First, the real public expressions of extremism in American politics recently have not been from the Right — not surprisingly, perhaps, given that for much of this new century the Republicans smugly controlled most of the government.

 

It was not Rush Limbaugh, for example, but Michael Moore who announced that the 9/11 killers wrongly selected a blue-state city, or that the al-Qaeda insurgents were Minutemen-like patriots. Moore, remember, was no marginal figure but the darling of the Democratic establishment, who flocked to the gala opening of his crude propaganda film Fahrenheit 9/11. Read article.

 

Merrill Matthews, Investors.com

 

One of the more contentious issues to emerge in the health care reform debate is what President Obama has referred to as the "public plan." What exactly is the public plan, and how does it work?

 

No one knows for sure, or I should say those who know aren't talking.

 

The president has described it as a Medicare-like health insurance program that anyone could join. It doubtless would be run by the government and largely subsidized by taxpayers, just like Medicare. And because Medicare imposes price controls on hospitals and physicians, you can bet the public plan would too.

 

The president has also said the plan would provide coverage benefits similar to the plans covering members of Congress, which means it will be comprehensive — and expensive. Read article.

 

Jason Clemens, Pacific Research.org

 

America has been irresponsible for too long, runs the rhetoric from the Obama White House, and that must be rectified. To that end, the president calls his budget blueprint, which outlines his spending and taxing priorities for the next 10 years, "A New Era of Responsibility." But calling something responsible doesn’t mean that it is.

 

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines responsibility as a moral, legal, or mental accountability. The link with accountability infers that people willingly accept and face the consequences (costs) of their actions and decisions. In other words, there is a relationship between one’s decisions and actions, and the ramifications of them. Make good decisions and one should generally experience benefits while bad decisions lead to costs.

 

The Obama blueprint for a "new America" loosens these links of responsibility and accountability. On both education and health care, for example, the President wants more decisions to be made in Washington, D.C., which means fewer decisions and thus less responsibility on the part of parents, patients, and doctors.

 

Similarly on energy, the President plans to make wholesale changes in the nation’s energy markets not by allowing consumers, investors, and entrepreneurs to react to changes. He prefers a grand decree from Washington. Read article.

 

David Harsanyi, Townhall.com

 

Washington always has been a thermonuclear cliché generator. But the Obama administration, with all its super-smarts, has taken the exploitation of the euphemism to spectacular new heights.

 

This week, we learned a bit more about what the terms "sacrifice" (do what we want, you filthy, unpatriotic swine), "era of responsibility" (double the "sacrifice," half the prosperity) and "investments" (we squander money so you don't have to) really mean.

 

"Transparency" is when Barack Obama promises that the enterprising citizen will be able to track "every dime" of the $787 billion forever-government stimulus bill via a nifty Web site, called Recovery.gov (sic).

 

Reality is when that much-heralded site won't be complete until next spring, when half the stimulus money will have been wasted and … well, it probably won't be especially helpful.

 

Earl Devaney, the chairman of the "Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board" -- who, to absolutely no one's surprise, admitted this week that fraud is a distinct possibility -- claims the site won't be ready for five months because there isn't enough data storage capacity to hold it all.

 

"Stimulus": too big for cyberspace. Read article.

 

Geoff Earle, NY Post.com

 

An NYPD program designed to protect the city from nuclear threats could lose funding if cuts proposed by the Obama administration go through.

 

The president put forward $17 billion in budget cuts yesterday, including homeland-security grants that have been used to arm law-enforcement officers with radiation detectors.

 

If the budget ax falls, plans to put detection devices on bridges and in tunnels around the city, and to set up a command post in lower Manhattan, may be scrapped.

 

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly called the proposed cut disappointing.

 

Meanwhile, some of Obama's other cuts appear to be cases of the government taking with one hand what it's giving with the other.

 

The "line-by-line" cuts are dwarfed by overall spending increases in the new budget and just-passed stimulus legislation, with some new programs getting cash in areas very similar to the ones getting sliced. Read article.

 

James C. Capretta & Yuval Levin, Weekly Standard.com

 

President Obama and the Democratic leaders of Congress have made it clear that health care reform is their top legislative priority this year. The administration laid down some general markers in its budget, and the president has enunciated principles in several speeches. Key committees in both houses of Congress are now beginning the work of drafting a bill.

 

The program's basic shape seems likely to follow the outlines of Obama's campaign proposal. Employers would be required to provide health coverage or pay a fine, proceeds from which would support the creation of a new government-run insurance option. There would be a national insurance exchange through which those without access to employer-provided coverage could enroll in the public plan or one of a range of private plans that agree to certain conditions (including covering all comers, regardless of health status). And those below a certain income threshold (likely around 300 percent of the poverty line) would receive subsidies to purchase such coverage.

 

This is clearly intended to be transitory, rather than a final program. It would create incentives for employers to drop their health coverage plan (by making it cheaper to pay the fine than offer coverage) and would enable the new public insurance plan to undersell private insurers by imposing price controls similar to those employed in Medicare. A large number of workers finding themselves without their old employer-based coverage would "opt" for the public plan, creating, in effect, a massive new public health insurance program.

 

Call it 'single payer' by degrees.

 

Conservatives can make it clear they support reform. But they must make it even clearer that the Democrats' plan would displace tens of millions of happily insured Americans and exacerbate the worst elements of the current system: gross inefficiency, high costs, and bureaucracy. President Obama and his congressional allies are pursuing a mammoth, complex, hugely expensive, ill-designed reform that is not likely to be popular when understood. Conservatives have a very real chance at stopping it if they highlight its key weaknesses and supply a superior alternative. Read article.

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