Shmuley Boteach, Jerusalem Post.com

 

There's a storm coming. It will pit a well-organized community of substantial resources but also substantial insecurity - particularly when it comes to charges of dual loyalty - against a popular president of considerable eloquence but misguided policies that identify Israeli settlements as the main obstacle to Middle East peace. The inevitable clash will separate sunshine Jewish patriots who back Israel when convenient against those who stand with Israel even when it means losing their invitation to the White House Hanukka party.

 

The bogus issue of settlements is already being swallowed whole by many well-meaning Jews. Last week Dan Fleshler, a leader of Americans for Peace Now, wrote in the New Jersey Jewish Standard that Obama has no choice but to pressure Israel because "it is fruitless for a well-armed, occupying power to negotiate the terms of a viable settlement with an almost defenseless occupied people unless a third party mediates and presses both sides."

 

In reading Fleshler one wonders whether he has been himself occupied with building a settlement on the moon with no knowledge of events on Earth. Is he seriously suggesting that the thousands of Katyusha rockets and nonstop suicide bombers that have killed more than a thousand Israelis (the equivalent of 30,000 dead Americans) have come from a "defenseless" foe? Read article.

The Obama File.com

 

America Talks blog opines that with the dropping of the phrase "war on terror" and his recent diatribe in Cairo, Barack Hussein Obama has effectively waved the white flag at the radical faction of Islam that would seek to destroy us.

 

Hussein Obama, now recognizing his Muslim roots, has reached out with open arms to the very people who on September 11, 2001 murdered nearly 3000 of our fellow citizens in one of the most horrific attacks ever perpetrated on a nation.

 

Why is he doing this?

 

For one of two reasons. Some would have us believe that by Hussein Obama embracing Islam, the violence and jihad will end and we will reach some sort of common ground on which to forge a new relationship. Others say that Hussein Obama is in the camp of the jihadists, winking and nodding at thugs like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose re-election in Iran was fixed by the government because they know that the United States has reversed over 30 years of policy regarding their nuclear ambitions.

 

Evidence seems to indicate the latter view.

 

Through his cozying up to the Islamic world, Hussein Obama has also thrown Israel under the bus, leaving them under a severe threat of annihilation by enemies such as Iran and the Palestinians hell bent on their destruction.

 

One can only conclude that Hussein Obama is a radical Islamic sympathizer, now proudly admitting that he is one of them, prostrating our country before them, and surrendering the United States to their agenda of conversion or obliteration.

 

Allah must be smiling. Read article.

 

David Limbaugh, Townhall.com

 

Excuse my mastery of the obvious, but I have to believe the greatest obstacle to America's return to policy sanity is the electorate's cultish adoration of Barack Obama.

 

If it weren't for this disturbing phenomenon -- not to discount a healthy dose of blind partisanship -- it is inconceivable that the majority of people would tolerate Obama's dismantling of America's free market system, his returning America to a pre-9/11 mindset against terrorists, his increasing usurpations of power, and his corrupt ties and practices, from the public funding of ACORN to the summary dismissal of the case against the Black Panthers to his firing of inspector general Gerald Walpin apparently for uncovering corruption by Obama's friends.

 

I don't quite understand how people, especially religious people, can place their trust for salvation in a fellow mortal, but history shows they do, and present-day America shows they are. From MSNBC's Chris Matthews' admitting Obama sends a thrill up his leg to audience members' fainting at his speeches to young girls' kissing his statue like brainless bookends, the trend continues unabated. Read article.

 

William Ehart, Washington Times.com

 

When people think of "bondholders," they imagine tycoons. J.P. Morgan. Warren Buffett. Even the fictional Gordon Gekko of "Wall Street" fame.

 

In fact, tens of thousands of the bondholders of General Motors Corp. are not rich at all — and never were, even before the value of their bonds collapsed in the months leading up to the giant automaker's bankruptcy filing.

 

Plenty of GM's bondholders are Wall Street types. Most of the company's $27 billion in private debt is held by investment firms. But many of those firms are actually managing the money of individual investors. And fully 20 percent of the bonds are owned personally by roughly 100,000 mom-and-pop investors across the country, according to Main Street Bondholders, a group organized to lobby on their behalf.

 

Paralegals, pilots, small-business owners and lots and lots of retirees have poured their life savings into the bonds of GM, once a blue-chip company so blue that it was considered safe for widows and orphans to own. Read article.

 

Walter E. Williams, Patriot Post.us

 

Philosopher Bertrand Russell suggested that "Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education." And, it was Albert Einstein who explained, "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." So which is it -- stupidity, ignorance or insanity -- that explains the behavior of my fellow Americans who call for greater government involvement in our lives?

 

According to latest Rasmussen Reports, 30 percent of Americans believe congressmen are corrupt. Last year, Congress' approval rating fell to 9 percent, its lowest in history. If the average American were asked his opinion of congressmen, among the more polite terms you'll hear are thieves and crooks, liars and manipulators, hustlers and quacks. But what do the same people say when our nation faces a major problem? "Government ought to do something!" When people call for government to do something, it is as if they've been befallen by amnesia and forgotten just who is running government. It's the very people whom they have labeled as thieves and crooks, liars and manipulators, hustlers and quacks.

 

Aside from the general level of disgust that Americans have for congressmen, there's the question of whether there is anything that Congress does well. What about Social Security and Medicare? Congress has allowed Social Security and Medicare to accumulate an unfunded liability of $101 trillion. That means in order to pay promised elderly entitlement benefits, Congress would have to put trillions in the bank today earning interest. Congressional efforts to create "affordable housing" have created today's financial calamity.

 

Congress props up failed enterprises such as Amtrak and the U.S. Postal Service with huge cash subsidies, and subsidies in the forms of special tax treatment and monopoly rights. I can't think of anything that Congress does well yet we Americans call for them to take greater control over important areas of our lives. Read article.

 

Mona Charen, JWR.com

 

Some people are slow learners. Leave aside the 20 million dead under Stalin, the subjugation of Eastern Europe, the Gulag, and the show trials. In just the previous decade, the Soviets had tried and jailed Natan Sharansky and Alexander Ginsburg for the crime of attempting to hold the U.S.S.R. to the Helsinki human rights agreement; imprisoned countless dissidents in psychiatric "hospitals"; supported a number of terrorist groups worldwide, maintained an elaborate disinformation campaign to spread defamatory lies about the U.S.; brought the world to the brink of nuclear conflict over the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East; and armed and supplied the deadly North Korean, North Vietnamese, Somali, and Ethiopian regimes.

 

The liberal tendency to believe that international relations are a form of social work is unchanged. Just as liberals like Carter believed in the 1970s that tensions with the Soviets were the result of misunderstandings and "paranoia" on our part, liberals today believe that international tensions are the result of lack of respect for Islam or bellicosity on our part. Liberals are keen to bolster the self-esteem of our enemies. If we were not so provocative (didn't Bush label Iran, North Korea, and Iraq the "axis of evil"?) the world would be a more tractable place. If we demonstrate humility, our former foes will meet us halfway. Read article.

 

IBD Editorials.com

 

"Everyone guessed wrong," Vice President Joe Biden said Sunday, on the impact of stimulus legislation. Not exactly. In fact, there was no shortage of people who knew the stimulus wouldn't work.

 

In his appearance on NBC's "Meet The Press," Biden was asked by host David Gregory to explain why job losses have continued even after the passage of economic stimulus legislation that was supposed to keep a lid on unemployment at 8%.

 

Biden tried to rationalize the sad state of affairs, in which the jobless rate is now 9.4%, but finally just said that, "Everyone guessed wrong at the time the estimate was made about what the state of the economy was at the moment this was passed."

 

Anyone who guessed that Biden was wrong would have guessed right. On Feb. 18, we said: "The (stimulus) bill Congress hurried to pass late last week without anyone having read the entire 1,434 pages will in fact not stimulate much of anything."

 

We further noted that the $787 billion package would not be an economic stimulus but a spending bill filled with "pork and outright waste." Read article.

 

Sher Zieve, CFP.com

 

In light of the now almost daily bombardment of the US Constitution by the sitting US Commander in Chief, the question ‘is our Constitution still the law of the land?’ is increasingly being asked by We-the-People. The problem of Barack Hussein Obama seeming not to be a natural-born citizen is still an extremely salient issue—an issue that has led Obama to hire a team of lawyers to keep all information on his actual country of birth and all of his college records hidden. The latest estimate on the fees charged to do so is over $1Million. 

 

This, coupled with Obama’s continued and strong apparent push to completely bankrupt the USA and turn it into his own personal totalitarian utopia has led to unprecedented actions by some US citizens. 

 

Recently, retired Navy Commander Walter Francis Fitzpatrick III filed a criminal complaint of Treason against Barack Hussein Obama. This has prompted other individuals around the country to do the same. As our Republic now stands on the brink of complete collapse, I thought an interview of Commander Fitzpatrick was in order. Read article.

 

Tony Blankley, Rasmussen Reports.com

 

A century ago, medical science had faith in lobotomies. Today, it seems, Washington political science has faith in new financial regulation.

 

Medical science began to gain wisdom when it learned what previously unrealized damage it caused when it lobotomized human brains. We must hope that the "experts" today who are drafting new regulations by which they would impair our financial system gain wisdom soon by recognizing how little they understand the effects of these new regulations on our economy's future health.

 

However, the current financial regulatory efforts in Washington may not even deserve the honor of being compared to intelligent design or a lobotomy. At least with those two processes, each has the intellectual dignity of an internal logic -- even if that logic does not accurately describe the reality it attempts to explain and manipulate.

 

Rather, the current likely financial regulatory efforts have an almost random nature to them, as the legislative logrolling is collecting unrelated and sometimes-inconsistent ideas that eventually will be called, I assume, the Frank/Dodd Comprehensive and Rationalized National Financial Redemption Act of 2009.

 

The final bill will be the compilation of the results of various political battles being fought among the president, his various White House economic and political advisers, the Treasury and various powerful committee and subcommittee chairmen in the House versus their equivalents in the Senate, as well as the successful interventions of various interests, the institutional partial victories that are gained in the battles among the half-dozen or so overlapping financial regulatory agencies in existence, plus whatever the whimsical effects are of the backbenchers, the states, the commentators, the media and, of course, the public. Read article.

 

David Solway, FrontPageMagazine.com

 

It is obvious that Obama has stumbled over Iran. It is equally obvious that he is intensely preoccupied with grooming his image.

 

When it comes to the principal dilemma confronting American foreign policy, Obama is utterly clueless. He is the wrong President for the wrong time. The undeniable truth is that he is totally out of his depth—or shallows. And that his main talent resides in the art of parrying instances of political awkwardness, diplomatic gaffes and visionary impotence by drawing on his undoubted charm and self-assurance, which his admirers interpret as presidential savvy.

 

Obama is not unintelligent nor is he overly impressionable—at least, not any longer—but he is, on the evidence, exceedingly vain and disturbingly arrogant. This is a man who relies on his urbanity and pizzazz to impose his will upon an awed electorate. A man who responds to an unwelcome query with the rejoinder, “I won” and who appears to regard himself as pretty well infallible, irrespective of what reality is telling him. It is this character trait which likely disables him from scrupulously assessing the real nature of the world’s preeminent conflict. It is this which may well account for his obvious reluctance to develop a robust and workable strategy on the Iranian file.

 

Obama is very good at stalking his smaller domestic adversaries but is extremely wary of anything that imperils the suave kinetics of his savoir faire. Obama is wholly cat, supple in his manifestations and graceful in his demeanor, but a cat who has faltered upon an issue before which he cannot admit his helplessness and lack of moral resolve, his failure of audacity. All he can do is divert attention from his incompetence and partisanship by seizing upon a lesser and comparatively nugatory matter—the natural growth of several previously accepted Israeli settlements. Read article.

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