Chris Stirewalt, Washington Examiner.com

 

It seems that Americans are a little tired of Barack Obama, and the feeling may be mutual.

 

Believing they had elected a postmodern medicine man for the Oprah era, voters are recoiling from Obama's attempt to become a PG-13 version of Lyndon Johnson.

 

His poll numbers have slid mostly because people are suffering economically. Obama promised to heal their pain and failed. He may yet succeed, but for now, disillusionment hangs like a pea-soup fog over the land.

 

In France, they call Nicolas Sarkozy the "omnipresident" because he is seemingly everywhere doing everything at once.

 

Obama is more of the commenter in chief, with something to say about everything from Michael Jackson's death to derivatives markets to parenting. But his quotidian commentary diffuses the force of his words.

 

An army of czars march forward through finance and industry, massive plans for reordering American life flow out of the White House, and Afghanistan boils. Yet Obama continues to behave as if these things are not his doing, that he is just another one of us looking for a solution. Read article.

GMS Place.com

 

"Obamacy is a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses" ~ Gerard Van der Luen

 

The degree of incompetence in this administration is astonishing! From the beginning we have seen cabinet level positions filled with tax cheats. stumble after stumble over foreign policy. Bowing to foreign monarchs, apologizing again and again and again for various supposed malodorous behaviors of the United States. Putting out “barbecue” fires while raging inferno forest fires are nearby!

 

Okay, so the last bit was hyperbole, and I admit it. Which is a hell-uv-a-lot more than Mr. Obama is willing to do. Lets face it, this is the first Potus in need of training wheels!

 

“What,” you say? Didn’t Carter need Training Wheels? Nah, Carter, as bad a choice as he was, at least had some executive experience. Obama has never run anything and it is showing. His picks for assistance suck, he has yet to fill critical jobs, he has underestimated the deficit, he has claimed jobs that do not exist except in the fevered imagination, he selected the one man in the Senate whose mouth no one can control – Joe Biden, and Mr. Motor-Mouth has entirely lived up to his reputation embarrassing Obama again and again. Read article.

Hilary Leila Keieger, JPost.com

 

Amid reports that Defense Secretary Robert Gates is heading to Israel next week for talks on Teheran's nuclear program, a senior US defense official has told The Jerusalem Post that an Israeli strike on Iran could be profoundly destabilizing and would affect US interests.

 

Israel needed to take its relationship with America into account in contemplating any such attack, he warned.

 

Gates, who last week described the Islamic republic's nuclear drive as the greatest current threat to global security, is set to spend six hours here next Monday, discussing the Iranian threat with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. He will also visit Jordan, according to officials involved in planning the trip.

 

In his interview with the Post at the Pentagon, the senior US defense official also suggested that Syria might be ready to "fundamentally" reorient its position toward the United States, which would include restarting talks with Israel, at a time when Hamas and Hizbullah have been put "on the defensive" by Obama administration policies and events in Iran. Read article.

 

Jonathan Tobin, JPost.com

 

When US President Barack Obama met with 15 representatives of American Jewish organizations on July 13, Haaretz reported that he told them that he wanted to help Israel achieve peace but that if they were to benefit from his well-intentioned counsel, Israelis must "engage in serious self-reflection." The breathtaking condescension toward the Jewish state that this remark betrays, as well as the implicit dismissal of the last 16 years of Middle East history, says a lot about Obama and the direction in which American foreign policy is heading.

 

The fact that Israel has already gone through several periods of serious self-reflection and made costly sacrifices in terms not only of territory but in blood has no significance for the president. Here a just a few items that the president seems to think don't matter in assessing the situation: The failure of a generation of peacemaking including the Oslo Accords and the successor agreements associated with that process, the 2000 Camp David summit, the second intifada, the withdrawal from Gaza, the subsequent use of that territory as a terror base and the failed attempt just last year to get the Palestinian Authority to take yes for an answer on statehood for its people. All have apparently been swept down the White House memory hole. In the age of Obama, like a fundamentalist religion that dates all events as being either before or after a divine revelation, that which occurred prior to his election is meaningless by definition. Read article.

Michael Goodwin, NY Daily News.com

 

Among Barack Obama's many firsts, we can now add this: He has made Hillary Clinton nearly invisible. Even Bubba never managed that.

 

The secretary of state surfaced in Washington the other day for a speech designed to highlight her heavyweight status within the Obama administration. Her appearance did just the opposite, confirming the sense she is being marginalized on foreign policy.

 

The campaign to puff her up was too obvious. She stacked the room with aides and her team talked up the "muscular" approach she would take toward Iran. To get ready for her closeup, Clinton shed the sling she has worn since breaking her elbow.

 

All for naught.

 

The appearance raised fresh questions about her reduced role because the speech was a tired rehash of existing themes and broke no new policy ground. "A damp squib" one disappointed critic called it.

 

It certainly didn't help that Obama upstaged her by appearing at about the same time to talk about health care.

 

That she and Obama are entering a Cold War phase was predictable. I wrote last December that signs of friction would appear within six months of the new team taking the field.

 

Like clockwork, that's been happening. It started with Iran, a sore spot from last year's bitter campaign where Clinton called Obama naive for thinking he could charm the mad mullahs out of nuclear weapons.

 

Five days after the June 12 elections, as Obama hesitated to condemn Iran for cracking down on protesters, The New York Times, citing anonymous sources, reported that Clinton and others were pushing Obama to get tougher. Read article.

 

Edwin Vieira, NWV.com

 

“Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York!” says the cunning Richard, Duke of Gloucester, of his brother, King Edward, in Shakespeare’s play, “Richard the Third”. That was then; this is now. And the coronation of the latest American “King”—or Duce, or Führer, or even (the piquant touch of blasphemy aside) “Messiah”, as may suit one’s taste in denominating exalted “leaders”—has not transformed America’s national winter into sunny days. Quite the contrary.

 

The private economy is collapsing. The ostensible public debt is ballooning. The latter-day Ponzis who run their “debt-currency” and other “paper-wealth” confidence games and swindles through the Federal Reserve System, the Department of the Treasury, and the big Wall-Street financial houses are looting America on a scale and with a ferocity not witnessed anywhere in the world since Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan. And rogue officialdom in the General Government work day and night to replace “America the Beautiful” with a first-class fascistic national-security police state, before the economic house of cards tumbles down entirely.

 

All this would be bad enough by itself. What renders the tragedy truly intolerable is the veritable Greek Chorus of complainers from the ranks of self-styled patriots who bemoan the supposed irreversibility of events: “We are losing all of our rights! They are ready to impose martial law! They are going to put us into concentration camps! There is nothing we can do! They are too smart, too rich, and too powerful to be stopped!” These people ridicule the rest of America’s population as being composed of frightened and ignorant “sheeple”. But who, pray tell, is bleating most loudly about the inevitability of defeat? Read article.

 

Jack Kelly, JWR.com

 

Shortly after a Quinnipiac University poll reported July 7 that President Barack Obama's job approval rating in Ohio had fallen 13 percentage points in two months to 49 percent, the White House dispatched Vice President Joe Biden to that crucial swing state to defend the administration's efforts to deal with the economic crisis.

 

This was a mistake, for two reasons.

 

The first is that almost every journalist reporting on the vice president's speech would feel compelled to reference the Quinnipiac poll. This, noted Jim Geraghty of National Review Online, was like "hanging a lantern" on the problem.

 

The second is that Joe Biden is a motormouth, liable to say anything. The White House slapped him down after Mr. Biden said on ABC's "This Week" program July 5 that the administration had "misread how bad the economy was." (When asked about the remark, Mr. Obama said there wasn't a misreading, just a lack of information in the early days of his presidency.)

 

Speaking in Cincinnati to a crowd of "about 200," some of them protesters, Mr. Biden asked for patience. "Remember we're only 140 days into this deal," he said. "It's supposed to take 18 months."

 

This isn't what Mr. Obama and his aides were saying in February. Back then we were told the $787 billion stimulus bill had to be rushed through Congress to keep unemployment from rising to 8 percent. Read article.

 

Sarah Steelman, Center for Security Policy.com

 

The pundits and politicians have debated how bellicose our nation's leadership should be toward Iran's brutal repression of its citizens. Instead, the talkers should examine the harm done by United States tax dollars and their (our) complicity in the horrors of the nightly news.

 

Impossible you say? This is not some conspiracy theory existing alongside fantasies of black helicopters and domestic spying. It does not even require top- secret clearance to get the information. In the June 22 edition of the Wall Street Journal were two articles about the German industrial conglomerate, Siemens AG. One headline read, "Siemens Expects to Land $21 Billion from Global Stimulus Spending" (with $8 billion in revenue from the U.S. stimulus spending alone). The other read, "Iran's Web Spying Aided by Western Technology" and reported that Siemens provided the technological equipment used to censor, eavesdrop and threaten the Iranian people.

 

Regardless of international implications, United States taxpayers should not be asked to subsidize a foreign company, Siemens, who saw its net profits increase 146 percent in the second quarter of 2009. Yes, you did read that right -- an increase in net profits while small business in this country is suffering and our communities see increasing unemployment. What is more problematic is that Siemens is not only profiting at the expense of the American taxpayer but also at the expense of safety and security throughout the globe. Read article.

 

Burt Prelutsky, Townhall.com

 

Nobody has to tell me things are going from bad to worse in America. The question that preys on my mind is when it was that we began our descent. Some would say it started when Jimmy Carter turned his back on the Shah of Iran, thus providing an impetus for latter-day Islamic terrorism. Others might say it was the first time Bill Clinton dropped his pants in the Oval Office, while still others might contend it began when the Supreme Court determined that the Pursuit of Happiness was a rationale for 80 million abortions on demand.

 

Whenever the slide began, in the months since Obama was crowned, we’ve slid faster and further than I would have dreamed possible. Obama keeps huffing and puffing and the federal government just keeps expanding like a gigantic balloon. It’s only a matter of time until it blows up in all our faces.

 

Not in my wildest nightmares would I have imagined that an American president would travel to countries we’ve bled and died to defend, and apologize for our arrogance. Read article.

 

I Hate The Media.com

 

Day in and day out, ABC’s John Stossel is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Here’s what he had to say about Obama and taxes:

 

Apparently President Obama wants America to lower taxes and shrink the regulatory state. After all, during his trip to Africa, he said: “No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top”.

 

But of course the American government skims off much more than 20%. Federal taxes alone are roughly that, and when you add in state and local levies, plus the burden of regulation, government in America eats at least 40% of GDP.

 

If African governments’ skimming off 20% is a bad thing, why is America’s 40% okay, and why is the President trying to make government bigger?

 

This is particularly timely since Democrats much-vaunted healthcare plan and is all built around tax increases or surcharges or whatever they’re calling them today. Read article.

 

Arnold Ahlert, Political Mavens.com

 

It’s hard to know where to start explaining what a debacle Obamacare is. So let’s go with something simple: the president is a liar, and it only took Investor Business Daily about fifteen minutes of slogging through the House’s version of the healthcare bill to discover a whopper.

 

Barack Obama promised the American people that even if universal coverage were enacted, they could opt to keep their private health insurance. So maybe someone in our comatose media could ask him about this clause which IBD discovered on page 16 of the 1,018 page bill:

 

“‘Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day” of the year the legislation becomes law.’”

 

Translation: whatever company you’re currently insured by, you’re stuck with for the rest of your life. Change your job where coverage was provided? Decide to work for yourself? Your private provider gets forced out of business because they can’t compete with a taxpayer-subsidized government plan? Welcome to Obamacare–whether you like it or not.

 

The Obama cheerleading squad will say this isn’t lying. Really? How many companies do you know that can stay in business if they’re forbidden to attract new customers? Read article.

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