- MUST READS
- PRODUCTS
- RESOURCES
- MULTIMEDIA
- ENFACTLOPEDIA
- FSM AUTHORS
- ABOUT US
- CONTACT US
- FSM BLOG
- DONATE
- PRESS COVERAGE
SEARCH FSM
- IN THIS SECTION
October 31, 2009
Exclusive: Oval Office Watch – Saturday, October 31
To understand the first couple's oratory, it helps to study their involvement with these two groups. CLICK HERE.
Barack Obama must stop campaigning and start governing
Toby Harnden, Telegraph.co.uk
Perhaps we should not be surprised that the land of the permanent campaign has produced a president like Barack Obama. During his White House bid, Mr Obama's staff argued that his masterful oversight of the machinery that ultimately got him elected was his highest achievement.
In many respects this was true, though Mr Obama was more chairman than CEO. Even Republican political operatives acknowledge that the Obama '08 campaign was a thing of beauty.
Essentially, however, Mr Obama won because of his persona – post-racial, healing, cool, articulate and inspirational. In a sense, therefore, his greatest achievement in life is being Barack Obama. Or the campaign version, at least.
Therein lies the problem. While campaigning could centre around soaring rhetoric, governing is altogether messier. It involves tough, unpopular choices and cutting deals with opponents. It requires doing things rather than talking about them, let alone just being.
Mr Obama is showing little appetite for this. Instead of being the commander-in-chief, he is the campaigner-in-chief.
After a disastrous summer that saw his approval rating drop more than any other president at the same stage since Harry Truman in 1953, Mr Obama has temporarily abandoned the campaign-style events promoting his stalled health-care reform initiative. Read article.
DNC group leaders compare Mid-East democracy to Nazis, oppose concept of Jewish state
Aaron Klein, WND.com
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and former Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., are among the keynote speakers slated to address the annual dinner of J Street, a controversial Israel lobby group accused of working against the Jewish state, while scores of lawmakers are backing out of the event amid news media coverage of the organization's agenda.
Nearly 160 congressional lawmakers, mostly Democrats, endorsed the Oct. 26 dinner with some reportedly slated to attend.
The night's speaker list includes politicians as well as poet Josh Healey, who has penned works implying Israel is perpetuating a Holocaust against Palestinians.
J Street brands itself as pro-Israel. It states on its website it seeks to "promote meaningful American leadership to end the Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts peacefully and diplomatically." Mostly left-leaning Israelis lead the organization, while it receives funds from Arab and Muslim Americans.
J Street has become close to the Obama administration. The group's leaders regularly consult with White House officials and are invited to official administration events, including meetings between Obama and top Jewish leaders.
The group supports talks with Hamas, a terrorist group whose charter seeks the destruction of Israel. J Street opposes sanctions against Iran and is harshly critical of Israeli offensive anti-terror military actions. Read article.
Obama wingnuts get a token of respect
Wesley Pruden, JWR.com
There was good news Monday for potheads, and even a little good news for states' rights, which once upon a time were thought to be important.
Barack Obama's Justice Department said it would encourage U.S. attorneys to look the other way when they see hollow-eyed potheads emerging from the legal pot shops dispensing the noxious weed to "medical smokers."
In theory the decision won't necessarily increase the use of pot, either for medicinal or recreational purpose, and the president might be throwing a toke to his followers on the left already high on wingnut politics. He might even pass this off as part of his health care reform, a Senate version of which arrived Monday at 1,502 pages. This could be reckoned as pot in lieu of public option.
Fourteen states now allow use of marijuana for "medical purposes." Medical marijuana was first sold in California in 1996, after voters adopted Proposition 215 enabling the dispensing of pot with a valid prescription from a legitimate doctor. The new Justice Department "initiative" will affect California most, where smoking pot is widespread. In fact, now that Los Angeles has no representation in the National Football League smoking pot is something of the state sport. More than 800 state-sanctioned dispensaries sell marijuana to "medical patients," most of whom walk in and out of the dispensary and but for hollow eyes and shambling gait appear to be healthy enough. There's no reliable estimate of the number of Californians who smoke pot for medical reasons, but with 800 dispensaries every one of them should have his own dedicated dispensary. Read article.
Nixon and Obama -- Soul Brothers?
Patrick J. Buchanan, Human Events.com
Four decades ago, Lamar Alexander worked in Richard Nixon's White House. Sen. Alexander today says Barack Obama's White House reminds him of that place, that time, that mindset and those people.
Intending no disrespect to my old colleague, these days are not at all like those days, and this president and White House are nothing like the White House in which this writer worked from Inauguration Day 1969 to August 1974, when Marine One lifted off the lawn.
Richard Nixon had been elected in the most turbulent year since the Civil War.
Between New Hampshire and November, there was the Tet Offensive, LBJ's announcement he would not run again, the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, race riots in 100 cities and Washington, D.C., the takeover of Columbia University by radicals, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, a Democratic convention in Chicago marked by rancor inside the hall and police-radical confrontations outside, and a campaign in which Hubert Humphrey was shouted down at rallies until he agreed to a bombing halt in Vietnam.
No, these times are not those times. Read article.
Why lefties fear strong women like Liz Cheney
Naomie Emery, Washington Examiner.com
For a feminist party, Democrats have a problem with women, or rather, with one certain type: Young and/or youngish, cute and/or stunning, with good hair, many children, and outspoken center-right views.
Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann (dark hair, with five children) first roused the beast, and misogynist instincts. Now there's Liz Cheney, (blond, with five children), whom they themselves have made into a star.
There she was, working away with her father on his memoir when they began to attack him, and she turned up on cable defending his record. She became a sensation, and they started to growl.
Now she's founded a Web site -- Keep America Safe -- with Bill Kristol and Debra Burlingame, (sister of the pilot whose plane hit the Pentagon) -- to critique President Obama on security issues. People began talking of "Senator Cheney." And then la merde hit the fan.
At Vanity Fair, Michael Wolff pawed through the adjective bin and came up with a handful, calling her "pernicious" and "venomous," and that was just the beginning. She was also "sour, wounded, aggrieved, graceless, paranoid ... self-pitying, doubtless, extreme, aggressive and defensive, she might literally kill you and your kind if she could." Read article.
What's In and What's Out of Health Care Legislation
Phyllis Schlafly, Townhall.com
As liberals rush Obamacare through Congress, let's review the disparity between promises and text. Joe Wilson's declaration "You lie!" is ringing truer with each passing day.
Barack Obama promised "transparency" and to give the public five days to read the bill, but Sen. Jim Bunning's amendment to require the bill, along with a final Congressional Budget Office score, to be posted online 72 hours before the vote was defeated. Reps. Brian Baird, D-Wash., and Greg Walden, R-Ore., have been trying to get the House to agree to post the bill 72 hours before the vote. Most Republicans have signed on, but the Nancy Pelosi leadership is unwilling.
The Democrats still hope to rush the bill through unread. The 1,100-page stimulus bill was posted online only 13 hours before the vote, and the 1,200-page cap-and-trade bill was posted only 15 hours before the vote. Obama promised that the health care bill would not cover illegal aliens, but Sen. Chuck Grassley's amendment to require immigrants to prove their identities with photo IDs was rejected. Read article.
The Kitty-Cat Who Roared
Victor Davis Hanson, JWR.com
President Obama keeps roaring out deadlines like a lion -- only later to meow like a little kitty.
Remember, for example, how he bellowed to cheering partisan crowds that he would close down the detainment facility at Guantanamo within a year?
The clock ticks -- and Guantanamo isn't close to being shut down. It once was easy for candidate Obama to deplore George W. Bush's supposed gulag. Now it proves harder to decide between the bad choice of detaining non-uniformed terrorist combatants and the worse ones of letting them go, giving them civilian trials or deporting them to unwilling hosts.
Going back further to September 2007, candidate Obama postured about Iraq that he wanted "to immediately begin to remove our combat troops. Not in six months or one year -- now!"
That "now!" sure sounded macho.
On Iraq, candidate Obama also railed that "the American people have had enough of the shifting spin. We've had enough of extended deadlines for benchmarks that go unmet."
Talk about "unmet" deadlines and "spin"-- here we are in October 2009, and there are still 120,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. The reason why Obama fudged on his promised deadline is that the surge in 2007 worked. American deaths plummeted. The theater is quiet. Iraqi democracy is still there after six years. Obama cannot quite admit these facts, but on the other hand he does not want to be responsible for undermining them.
This July, our president roared out another impending deadline. He warned Iran that it had to prove its compliance with non-proliferation protocols by September -- or face new consequences since the U.S. was not going to "wait indefinitely."
Now it's October, and even the French are exasperated that Obama still sounds like the king of the jungle but acts like a purring house kitten. Read article.
The Day the Dominoes Fell
Jeff Jacoby, Boston.com
Against all odds and to the astonishment of the world, it was Communism that came to a close before our very eyes. Twenty years ago this season, Moscow's Eastern European satellites threw off their chains. In a matter of months, the Communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania were consigned -- as Ronald Reagan had foretold -- to the ash heap of history. But not even Reagan had imagined that the dominoes would fall so quickly, or that Moscow would stand aside and let them fall.
"I learned in prison that everything is possible, so perhaps I should not be amazed," said Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who became Czechoslovakia's first post-Communist president. "But I am."
We all were. Some of us still are. The collapse of the Iron Curtain was the most remarkable political development of my lifetime, and if I live to be 120, I can't imagine that anything will displace it. Even now, the images from those days take the breath away: East German youths dancing and drinking atop the Berlin Wall. The reappearance of Alexander Dubcek, 21 years after he was exiled for flirting with reform during the Prague Spring. Romanians flooding the streets of Bucharest, waving flags with the Communist emblem torn out of the center.
1989 exemplified with rare power the resilience of Western civilization. In our time, too, there are brutal despots who imagine that their power is unassailable: that their tanks and torturers can keep them in power forever. But the message of 1989 is that tyranny is not forever -- and that the downfall of tyrants can come with world-changing speed. Read article.
White House Faith Adviser Defends Sharia Remarks
Dan Gilgoff, US News.com
Dalia Mogahed, one of two Muslim members of President Obama's faith advisory council, has come under fire from conservatives for her early October appearance on a British television show connected with an extremist Muslim group. In a story headlined "Barack Obama adviser says Sharia Law is misunderstood," the Daily Telegraph reported earlier this month that Mogahed told the show: "I think the reason so many women support sharia is because they have a very different understanding of sharia than the common perception in Western media . . . . The majority of women around the world associate gender justice, or justice for women, with sharia compliance." The television program, called Muslimah Dilemma, is hosted by a member of the Hizb ut Tahrir, a radical Muslim party in Britain. Mogahed, who is also the executive director for Gallup's Center for Muslim Studies, called in from the United States while another guest—a Hizb ut Tahrir representative—appeared in the studio. You can watch the episode
The television program, called Muslimah Dilemma, is hosted by a member of the Hizb ut Tahrir, a radical Muslim party in Britain. Mogahed, who is also the executive director for Gallup's Center for Muslim Studies, called in from the United States while another guest—a Hizb ut Tahrir representative—appeared in the studio. You can watch the episode HERE.
Reader Comments: Submit Your Comment (0)
| Print This E-mail This |
|
