Thomas Sowell, Townhall.com

 

One of the many signs of the degeneration of our times is how many serious, even life-and-death, issues are approached as talking points in a game of verbal fencing. Nothing illustrates this more than the fatuous, and even childish, controversy about "torturing" captured terrorists.

 

People's actions often make far more sense than their words. Most of the people who are talking lofty talk about how we mustn't descend to the level of our enemies would themselves behave very differently if presented with a comparable situation, instead of being presented with an opportunity to be morally one up with rhetoric.

 

What if it was your mother or your child who was tied up somewhere beside a ticking time bomb and you had captured a terrorist who knew where that was? Face it: What you would do to that terrorist to make him talk would make water-boarding look like a picnic. Read article.

David Limbaugh, JWR.com

 

The government, through President Obama, has trotted the globe, painting the United States, the most magnanimous nation in the history of the world, as an international pariah and disgrace for which he must presume to apologize.

 

The government would have prosecuted officials of the previous administration for conducting enhanced interrogation techniques they reasonably believed were legal – and the lawyers who furnished the legal opinions approving the techniques – until it discovered, with egg on its face, that in a recent case, an appellate court – and the Justice Department, in another – had endorsed the prior administration's definition of torture.

 

The government threatens and intimidates creditors into transferring wealth to the administration's friends in labor. It uses taxpayer money to fund nefarious enterprises, such as ACORN, to engage in widespread illegal activities designed to corrupt and skew the census, elections and other democratic processes as we watch, with mouths agape, seemingly powerless – for now – to stop it. Read article.

John Rosenthal, Pajamas Media.com

 

According to reports in the German media, President Obama is planning a trip to Germany in the first week in June. The Germany trip would precede Obama’s June 6 participation in ceremonies in France marking the 65th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy.

 

That Obama would be planning a trip to Germany in connection with ceremonies marking the anniversary of the Normandy invasion is already rather odd. Following the turning point represented by the Battle of Stalingrad, the invasion was, after all, the crucial event that all but guaranteed Germany’s defeat in the Second World War.

 

But when one considers just where exactly in Germany Obama is headed, then the significance of the visit becomes more clear. There is some talk of Obama visiting the Buchenwald concentration camp outside Weimar, in whose liberation Obama’s great uncle Charlie Payne is famously supposed to have taken part. But the Buchenwald visit appears not to be the main event and indeed it can be presumed to have been included in discussions as something of an alibi. Read article.

 

James Taranto, Online WSJ.com

 

Many of Obama's critics have worried that he will translate his conciliatory rhetoric into a dangerous policy of appeasing America's enemies. That's an entirely legitimate worry, but it's hard to go very far down the road if those enemies refuse even to make a show of being appeasable. The burning of Obama's effigy symbolizes, to all Americans who may doubt it, that Obama is a war president.

 

The new president is undergoing another rite of initiation: facing the ingratitude of foreign allies. Bloomberg reports on comments by Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari over the weekend:

 

Obama has tied Pakistan to his strategy for dealing with Afghanistan as militant Islamic Taliban forces and other extremists threaten both nations from bases along their border. As part of an effort to reduce the appeal of extremists to Pakistan's people, Obama has said he will support legislation increasing nonmilitary aid by $1.5 billion a year. U.S. aid has not been enough, Zardari said. Read article.

 

Mecca’s Special Guest

Aaron Klein, Israel-Commentary.org

 

President Barack Obama’s paternal grandmother, Sarah Obama, will reportedly perform the Muslim Haj pilgrimage in November along with her son, Syeed Obama. A private Kenyan television channel, quoted extensively by the Kenyan and Pakistani media, reported that Sarah Obama and her son will also visit Dubai before going to Saudi Arabia to perform the Haj. The pair lives in Kenya.

 

The News, a newspaper in Dubai, confirmed the report. It quoted United Arab Emirates property tycoon Sulaiman Al Fahim as stating that he would personally sponsor Sarah Obama’s trip after meeting the elderly Obama in Kenya last week and learning she had always wanted to perform the Haj. “I found out that she had not been to the Haj and that she very much wants to go. As my own mother is no longer with us, our family has a spare place. So I invited her and she has accepted,” The News quoted Fahim as saying.

The Haj is the largest annual pilgrimage in the world. The fifth pillar of Islam requires all able-bodied Muslims to travel to Mecca at least once in their life in a demonstration of solidarity with fellow Muslims and in an act of individual submission to Allah. Read article.

 

Andrew McCarthy, NRO.com

 

This week's Obama administration Embarrassing Friday Night News Dump included alerting the Washington Post that the administration will be reinstating military commission trials for captured terrorists. Typical of the Obamedia, the Post uncritically accepts the administration's fig-leaf that Obama's new and improved commissions will correct flaws that made Bush commissions (approved by Congress in 2006) unfair, and therefore — so the claim goes — the reinstatement should not be considered a gargantuan flipperoo from the Obama campaign position that the commissions were a kangaroo-court of a travesty.

 

So Post reporter Peter Finn tells us:

 

The Obama administration is preparing to revive the system of military commissions established at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, under new rules that would offer terrorism suspects greater legal protections, government officials said. The rules would block the use of evidence obtained from coercive interrogations, tighten the admissibility of hearsay testimony and allow detainees greater freedom to choose their attorneys, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

 

This is utter nonsense. Read article.

 

 Jack Kelly, JWR.com

 

 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal) has been in the forefront of those Democrats who've been urging that the Justice Department lawyers who declared lawful the "enhanced interrogation techniques" the CIA employed on a handful of al Qaida bigwigs be prosecuted.

 

A report last week from the Director of National Intelligence to the Senate Intelligence Committee makes it plain Ms. Pelosi — then the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee — was fully briefed on those techniques, and made no objection to them.

 

On Sept. 4, 2002, Ms. Pelosi, Rep. Porter Goss (then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and later CIA Director) and two aides were briefed by the CIA. The briefing was entitled: "Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of particular EITs that had been employed."

 

Disclosure of the report makes it plain to all but the willfully blind that Ms. Pelosi was lying at a news conference in April when she said: "We were not, and I repeat, were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation techniques were used." Read article.

 

Wesley Pruden, JWR.com

 

Disconnecting the training wheels is a scary prospect for every apprentice biker, even with Daddy standing close by. We can sympathize with Barack Obama's fright as his moment approaches. It's not easy suddenly being on your own, paying the price of falling with your own skinned knees and bruised elbows.

 

Nevertheless, the dreadful moment approacheth. Anticipating D-Day, Peter Orszag, the president's budget director, said Monday that the scarier than expected economic news - the deficit out of control, tax receipts down and costs of bailouts and "stimulus" plans up - is all the fault of George W. Bush: "It's an economic crisis President Obama inherited."

 

But Mr. Obama has already been president for more than a hundred days, and passing the hundred-day mark, irrelevant milestone as it may be, was cited as dead-solid proof that the president is the messiah he told everyone he was. Reality, however, has begun to cast a shadow over the White House, still as faint as the bright golden haze on the meadow but visible enough. "Blaming George" still makes a tingle run up the legs of all the hymn-singing true believers, but outside the embrace of the cult, that tingle is beginning to sting instead. This is Mr. Obama's government now.

 

The White House on Monday said the new estimate of the budget deficit would nearly reach $2 trillion - that's trillion, with a "t" - and that's nearly 13 percent of the entire gross domestic product. Pretty gross any way you spin it, and the president's men (and women) are spinning it as best they can. Alas, the country's predicament, if not yet the president's, is probably worse than it looks. Read article.

 

Dr. Richard Benkin, NMJ.us

 

The Obama Administration continues to say all the “correct” things about Pakistan and its fight against the Taliban. Yet, knowledgeable observers in South Asia give the country no more than twelve months to stave off the terror group’s inevitable takeover of that nuclear Islamic Republic.

 

In a New York Times piece in early April, David Kilcullen, former adviser to United States military commander General David Petraeus, predicted Pakistan’s fall to the Taliban “within six months.” Shortly afterwards, his former boss agreed that the current Taliban “insurgency” could “take down” Pakistan. Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted later that month, “I think that the Pakistani government is basically abdicating to the Taliban and to the extremists."

 

Yet, the Administration continues to push its program of propping up the ineffective Pakistani government courtesy of US taxpayers.

 

The US should have two priorities for Pakistan: secure Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal; and lead an international effort to protect the country’s remaining minority populations on both sides of the Indo-Pak border, as they have been fleeing Taliban persecution in droves at least since February. The administration seems committed to doing neither. Thus, when Pakistan, along with its nukes and remaining minorities, falls to the Taliban; we can expect it to say that it tried everything it could, but that things were too far gone given the policies of its predecessor. And when it does, expect the media to fall behind it lock step, even though the same reporters gleefully blamed President George W. Bush for 9/11 and refused even to entertain the notion that the policies of the previous, Clinton, administration were the primary cause.

 

Obama’s consistent mistake is to believe that the Taliban is his enemy and that Pakistan is otherwise his ally. Read article.

 

Tony Blankley, Rasmussen Reports.com

 

Last Sunday, the British newspaper The Times published an interview with Jordan's King Abdullah II, in which the maturing king demonstrated a deft touch in putting pressure both on the new prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and on President Barack Obama.

 

The king's comments -- coming about two weeks after his Washington visit with our president, one day after his visit with the pope, and about one week before Prime Minster Netanyahu's Washington visit with Obama -- put heavy geopolitical pressure on Israel while simultaneously maximizing President Obama's personal stakes in the success or failure of this newest Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative:

 

"(President Obama) feels the urgency of the need to move today. . So this is a critical moment. . What we are talking about is not Israelis and Palestinians sitting at the table, but Israelis sitting with Palestinians, Israelis sitting with Syrians, Israelis sitting with Lebanese.

 

And with the Arabs and the Muslim world lined up to open direct negotiations with Israelis at the same time. . That is not a two-state solution; it is a 57-state solution. Read article.

 

Pamela Meister, American Thinker.com

 

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one Messiah to dissolve the historic bonds that have connected his subjects with the fundamental beliefs of a bunch of dead white guys, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of Marx entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that I should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

 

I hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men, womyn, transgendered and questioning individuals deserve equal division of goods, that they are endowed by Me with certain unalienable rights, that among these are the right to abort life, servitude to the state, and the pursuit of taxpayer-supported benefits. That to secure these rights, government is instituted in Me, deriving my just powers from the consent of a Democrat Congress, ACORN, and Universal Voluntary Public Service.

 

That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of Me to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Big Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing (with the help of the groups previously named) My powers in such form, as to Me shall seem most likely to effect My subjects' safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that My government short established should be changed for causes I deem appropriate; and accordingly all my inexperience hath shown that personkind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the oppressive regime instituted by dead white men to which they are accustomed.

 

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that My government short established should be changed for causes I deem appropriate; and accordingly all my inexperience hath shown that personkind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the oppressive regime instituted by dead white men to which they are accustomed. Read article.

 

 

Print This E-mail This

Share It: