Ben Smith, Politico.com

 

Micah Sifry reports that an effort at government openness seems to have been swamped by questions about Obama's birth certificate:

 

Right now, the Open Government Dialogue created as part of the Obama administration's new initiative to engage the public in a participatory discussion of ways to make the federal government more transparent and collaborative looks like it is being overrun by the so-called "birthers"--conspiracy nuts who think the President isn't legitimately a U.S. citizen. Here's a screenshot of recent tweets from @ogovbrainstorm, which automatically shows which ideas have recently gotten 20 positive votes or more: Read article.

 

 

NewsMax.com

 

In a new overture to Iran, the Obama administration has authorized U.S. embassies around the world to invite Iranian officials to Independence Day parties they host on or around July 4.

 

A State Department cable sent to all U.S. embassies and consulates Friday said U.S. diplomats could ask their Iranian counterparts to attend the festivities, which generally feature speeches about American values, fireworks, and, of course, hot dogs and hamburgers.

 

The posts "may invite representatives from the government of Iran" to the events, a State Department official said Tuesday, quoting from the document. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an internal communication.

 

It was not clear how many embassies and consulates would invite Iranian diplomats to the July 4 parties or whether any Iranians would accept the invitations.

 

The cable was first reported by The New York Times. Read article.

 

Judi McLeod & Jean Coutu, CFP.com

 

Putting it in the vernacular of little people everywhere: “The worst has happened”.

 

The 4th Annual New Hampshire Live Free or Die Rally is quickly sinking into a quagmire of bureaucratic red tape, and with no 11th hour reprieve on the horizon, chief organizer Jean Coutu may have to cancel.

 

Billed as the All Free, Only TRUE First Amendment Rally in the U.S., this years Live Free or Die Rally is scheduled for August 21, 22 and 23.

 

“It looks like it’s finally over. Not just for us, but for the right to assemble, Coutu wrote Canada Free Press (CFP) in an email today. “Though I don’t agree with the ACLU on everything, almost every year the ACLU has gone after city hall bureaucrats to get our permits.”

 

The landscape has changed, dissent is being suppressed in America and now the ACLU is refusing to back the LFDR, in part because of the rally’s Appleseed Project Instructional Shoot Feature--even though it meets all state ordinances.

 

This is not a good sign for the scores of Tea Parties planned for July 4th.

 

Politically correct and compromised by stimulus money, the bureaucrats of town and city halls decide whether Tea Parties and rallies can be held in their jurisdictions.

 

Coutu sees it as the death of the right to assemble in President Barack Obama’s USA. Read article.

 

Robert Murphy, Mises.org

 

In two of his recent op-eds for the New York Times, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has challenged critics of the government's intentions to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, and he has even specifically endorsed the pending Waxman-Markey bill which includes a "cap-and-trade" program. According to Krugman, the costs of such legislation are no big deal, and in exchange we avert catastrophe. So why all the criticism?

 

In the present article, I want to show the fragility of Krugman's position. For one thing, the true economic harms of "global-warming" legislation could be much higher than his own cited figures. For another, the benefits of such measures — in terms of averted climate-change damage — are quite negligible, unless other countries follow suit.

 

Finally, Krugman's strategic position on carbon legislation — "this bill is better than nothing" — is inconsistent with his own views of Obama's "inadequate" stimulus bill and Geithner's plans for revamping the banking sector. In short, if the world really is on the verge of catastrophe — which many alarmists tell us it is, and that's why we need to take immediate action — then why are so many of these same activists supporting legislation that their own models show will do virtually nothing? Read article.

 

Karl Rove, Online WSJ.com

 

Tomorrow will likely bring more bad news for President Barack Obama on the number one issue for voters -- the economy. The Labor Department's monthly job report will almost certainly show unemployment topping 9%, with a couple hundred thousand more jobs lost in May.

 

It will get worse before jobs get better. Congressional Budget Director Douglas W. Elmendorf recently predicted that unemployment will continue rising into the second half of next year and peak above 10%.

 

Mr. Obama has an ingenious approach to job losses: He describes them as job gains. For example, last week the president claimed that 150,000 jobs had been created or saved because of his stimulus package. He boasted, "And that's just the beginning."

 

However, at the beginning of January, 134.3 million people were employed. At the start of May, 132.4 million Americans were working. How was Mr. Obama magically able to conjure this loss of 1.9 million jobs into an increase of 150,000 jobs?

 

As my former White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto points out on his blog, the Labor Department does not and cannot collect data on "jobs saved." So the Obama administration is asking that we accept its "clairvoyant ability to estimate," and the White House press corps has let Mr. Obama's ludicrous claim go virtually unchallenged. Read article.

 

Tony Blankley, Rasmussen Reports.com

 

The Roman historian Livy famously described the terminal plight of the late Roman Republic: "Nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus"

("We can bear neither our shortcomings nor the remedies for them").

 

As I reread this phrase in Christian Meier's biography of Julius Caesar this past weekend, I couldn't help thinking of America's current fiscal profligacy -- which has been growing for years at an ever-accelerating rate.

 

Of course, since last fall's financial/economic crisis, the rate of profligacy has become supercharged. Like the Roman Republic's lament, we think we can't survive without deficit spending -- but we soon won't be able to survive with deficit spending, either.

 

In 2012, federal debt will be more than $15 trillion. Annual interest probably will be between $1 trillion and $1.7 trillion -- depending on whether long bonds remain at about 3.5 percent or go to recent historic rates (6 to 7 percent). Deficits will average about $1 trillion a year --

$22 trillion by 2019. Yearly interest payments then will be more than $2 trillion. That's the good news. Read article.

 

Stephanie Hessler, Weekly Standard.com

 

On his second day in office, President Obama issued an executive order to shutter the Guantanamo Bay detention camp within one year--without any plan for how to dispose of the 241 detainees held there. With the clock ticking, the president is discovering that closing Guantanamo is more easily said than done, especially now that his own party in Congress has deserted him.

 

Recently, the Senate, including the Democratic leadership and nearly all of its members, refused to grant the president the $80 million he asked for to close the facility, voting 90 to 6 to strip the requested funds from a war-spending bill. In a stunning rebuke, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said "Democrats under no circumstances will move forward without a comprehensive, responsible plan from the president. We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States."

 

The president may find it nearly impossible to meet his deadline to close Guantanamo without Congress's support. And the $80 million may be the least of his challenges. His greatest obstacle could be a national security law--and one that he voted for. The REAL ID Act of 2005 prohibits anyone affiliated with terrorist activity from entering and living in the United States. (It does not cover people brought here to be incarcerated.) Primarily an immigration reform measure, the act specifically excludes from our nation any foreigner who "has engaged in a terrorist activity . . . is a member of a terrorist organization . . . endorses or espouses terrorist activity...has received military-type training . . . [from] a terrorist organization." This would cover many, if not all, of the prisoners at Guantanamo. The act was included in an appropriation bill, which then-Senator Obama voted for, along with 98 other Senators. Read article.

 

James Taranto, Online WSJ.com

 

It occurred to us recently that the terrorist detention facility at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base has something in common with Social Security. A new Gallup Poll, reported by USA Today, reinforces the analogy:

 

Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to closing the detention center for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and moving some of the detainees to prisons on U.S. soil, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds.

By more than 2-1, those surveyed say Guantanamo shouldn't be closed. By more than 3-1, they oppose moving some of the accused terrorists housed there to prisons in their own states. . . .

In the survey, Americans were inclined to accept the argument by Cheney and former president George W. Bush that the detention center had made the United States safer. By 40%-18%, they said the prison [sic] had strengthened national security rather than weakened it.

Those who want the prison to remain open feel more strongly on the subject that those who want to close it. A 54% majority of those polled say the prison shouldn't be closed, and that they'll be upset if the administration moves forward to close it.

 

How can this be? Didn't Obama run on the promise to close Guantanamo and be kind to terrorists? Didn't he win the election?

 

Yes on both counts. Similarly, George W. Bush ran for re-election on the promise to reform Social Security. He won and declared that he was going to expend his "political capital" on achieving that goal. He found no support in Congress and little in public opinion, and Social Security remains unreformed. Read article.

 

Col. Oliver North, Fox News.com

 

During the presidential campaign, Senator Barack Obama famously said that he was willing to meet "without pre-conditions" with the "leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea." It was a pledge that he repeated — with minor modifications — throughout his campaign and it never failed to bring forth enthusiastic applause. Last November the voters endorsed the approach and handed him a sweeping victory. But that commitment — like his oft repeated promise to close Gitmo — may prove to be our undoing.

 

Unfortunately for us, it wasn’t just idealistic American voters who were listening to Obama’s naïve campaign rhetoric. So too were our adversaries. And now, little more than four months into his administration, it should be apparent that his grip and grin, "I like you — you should like me," approach to foreign policy is a potential disaster.

 

This week’s North Korean nuclear test and flurry of ballistic missile launches should not be viewed in isolation. It is but the most recent indicator that the O-Team is out of touch with the increasingly dangerous realities of a new world disorder. Read article.

 

Fouad Ajami, Online WSJ.com

 

The drama of the Swat Valley -- its cynical abandonment to the mercy of the Taliban, the terror unleashed on it by the militants, then the recognition that the concession to the forces of darkness had not worked -- is of a piece with the larger history of religious extremism in the world of Islam. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari was the latest in a long line of secularists who cut deals with the zealots, only to discover that for the believers in political Islam these deals are at best a breathing spell before the fight for their utopia is taken up again.

 

The decision by Pakistan to retrieve the ground it had ceded to the Taliban was long overdue. We should not underestimate the strength of the Pakistani state, and of the consensus that underpins it. The army is a huge institution, and its mandate is like that of the Turkish army, which sees itself as a defender of secular politics.

 

The place of Islam in Pakistani political culture has never been a simple matter. It was not religious piety that gave birth to Pakistan. The leaders who opted for separation from India were a worldly, modern breed that could not reconcile themselves to political subservience in a Hindu-ruled India. The Muslims had fallen behind in the race to modernity, and Pakistan was their consolation and their shelter. Read article.

 

David Limbaugh.com

 

It amazes me that for all the attention Judge Sonia Sotomayor has attracted for a racially charged statement in a 2001 speech, few are tying her attitude to President Barack Obama's. Just as he knew precisely what his 20-year pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was about and approved, he knew, prior to nominating her, what Sonia Sotomayor is about and approved. In both cases, he just didn't want us to know.

 

In her 2001 speech at Berkeley, Sotomayor said, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

 

Obama's apologists claim Sotomayor's statement was taken out of context. But the context of her prepared remarks makes the statement more -- not less -- incriminating.

 

First, it's important to note that she's not talking about trial judges, for example, who might be more or less lenient in their sentencing within the prescribed sentencing guidelines, but about appellate judges applying the law.

 

Next, Sotomayor is not just saying that as imperfect human beings, judges sometimes rule differently because, try as they might to be impartial, no human being can be totally impartial.

 

Nor is she merely saying that women, based on their gender, rule differently from men or that those of different nationalities rule differently based on those differences, but that they should do so and that their rulings usually are superior because of it. Are you getting this?

 

Are you getting this? Read article. 

 

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