Nile Gardiner, Telegraph.co.uk

 

As expected, Barack Obama’s 70 minute State of the Union address focused heavily on the economy and the domestic political agenda. This was hardly surprising in the aftermath of last week’s catastrophic defeat for his party in the Massachusetts special Senate election, where the Republicans scored an historic victory. American voters are turning strongly against the president’s health care reform package as well as his big government vision for the economy, which has contributed to spiraling public debt and mounting unemployment, now standing at over 10 percent.

 

But the scant attention paid in the State of the Union speech to US leadership was pitiful and frankly rather pathetic. The war in Afghanistan, which will soon involve a hundred thousand American troops, merited barely a paragraph. There was no mention of victory over the enemy, just a reiteration of the president’s pledge to begin a withdrawal in July 2011. Needless to say there was nothing in the speech about the importance of international alliances, and no recognition whatsoever of the sacrifices made by Great Britain and other NATO allies alongside the United States on the battlefields of Afghanistan. For Barack Obama the Special Relationship means nothing, and tonight’s address further confirmed this.

 

Significantly, the global war against al-Qaeda was hardly mentioned, and there were no measures outlined to enhance US security at a time of mounting threats from Islamist terrorists. Terrorism is a top issue for American voters, but President Obama displayed what can only be described as a stunning indifference towards the defence of the homeland. Read article.

Matthew Continetti, Weekly Standard.com

 

In April 2009, President Obama laid out his domestic agenda in a speech at Georgetown University. This was no ordinary chat; Obama envisioned nothing less than a reorientation of the American system. He sought to shift the economy from the rough and tumble cowboy capitalism of the past to a less risky, pricier, and perhaps slightly more comfortable European future. “We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity,” Obama said.

 

Less than a year later, this agenda is in shambles. The president’s “new foundation” is just another part of America’s crumbling infrastructure. Its pillars are strewn across the congressional landscape. Democrats are afraid to touch them—and for good reason. They are radioactive.

 

What brought Obama down to earth? Economic stagnation and public opposition. Democrats blame the president’s troubles solely on unemployment—get more people working, they say, and his agenda would pass. What the Democrats miss is the president’s own role in creating a hostile economic environment. They should try rereading his Georgetown speech.

 

“We’ve had no choice,” the president told his audience, “but to attack all fronts of our economic crisis at once.” Next came a reference to the $787 billion stimulus bill, the signature economic policy of the Obama administration and the most important mistake of his young presidency. Read article.

Rocky Warren, NMJ.us

 

It's very obvious that Barack Obama and his Administration are simply hell-bent on taking the United States over the edge into socialism. Far enough over that there's no possibility of turning back.

 

Giving known terrorist sympathizers Tariq Ramadan and Adam Habib entry into the United States is bad enough. It's even more troubling when the White House and Justice Department give known "enemy combatant" terrorists the same rights as an American citizen! In this case, the lack of Miranda and "waterboarding" will cause the court to declare all statements and evidence against all defendants to be "fruit of the poisoned tree." The terrorists will walk out of court laughing and they're supporters in the street will use the occasion to pound out a recruiting drive that will strengthen enemies and weaken America.

 

And in the shadow of all that, what does the White House and State Department do? They give Interpol an invitation into the U.S. and extend them a near-complete immunity. An immunity which is denied to and wouldn't even be considered appropriate for American police!

 

What in the world is going on here? Does the White House, President and State Department not know that some members of INTERPOL are "agents" of nations, factions and nationalities who consider themselves "at war" with the United States? Read article.

 

YidWithLid.Blogspot.com

 

Charlie Cook, is an acclaimed political analyst and publisher of The Cook Political Report newsletter, which publishes analysis of the primaries and general elections for federal political offices and state governorships. The Report's predictions are accorded high credibility among journalists and politicians.

 

Three weeks ago Cook's column in the National Journal predicted that if trends continue, the GOP will take over the house in 2010. He says that bad political news breeds more bad political news, and the Democrats have been faced with nothing but bad news.

 

This week Cook has now upped the ante, he now says Presidental screw-ups have created a situation where that the odds of a Republican Senate majority in the relatively near future are very high. Read article.

 

Humberto Fontova, Townhall.com

 

Nazis (and by implication all “right- wingers,” past and present) were inherently wicked. Their agenda was evil from A to Z, their methods along with their goals.

 

Communists (and by implication left-wingers) at least mean well. Oh, they might get a tad overzealous at times (killing more people than the Nazis and the Bubonic Plague combined, as documented in the Black Book of Communism, for instance) but at least their hearts were in the right place. Even Barry Goldwater might get it. “Extremism in the defense of socialism is no vice!”

 

In a one-hour special titled “Revolutionary Holocaust; Live Free or Die” run on January 22nd Glenn Beck mounted a full-frontal attack against the above notion—and left it a smoking cinder. First off, by sourcing Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, Beck swept aside a premise that often handicaps conservatives from the get-go: the premise that Nazis belong on the right. Bombarded by relentless documentation to the contrary, this liberal bromide quickly blew up, and the program proceeded to report on the notoriously under-reported Communist holocaust.

 

As a participant in the program, I’ll go on the record and report that the care given by the producers to proper documentation for all Communist crimes and Communist quotes amounted to a fetish. This care, of course, accounts for the program’s devastating effectiveness—and thus the anguished reaction by liberals. 

 

 “The Liberal cannot strike wholeheartedly at the communist for fear of wounding himself in the process," wrote James Burnham in his classic Suicide of the West. This little gem did much to explain the theme in the opening lines of this article. But so vividly did Revolutionary Holocaust document Communist butcheries—from Stalin’s to Mao’s to Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s-- that now some liberals are trying to weasel away from their years of alibis and rationalizations for the mass-murder. Read article.

 

Bret Stephens, WSJ.com

 

Mr. Obama's first year in office amounts to a long parade of rebuffs. His inaugural address famously offered the world's dictators an outstretched hand in exchange for an unclenched fist. From North Korea, he got missile and nuclear tests. From Iran, he got a contemptuous rejection of his extraordinary offer to enrich uranium for it. From Cuba, Fidel Castro said last month that "the empire's real intentions are obvious, this time beneath the kindly smile and African-American face of Barack Obama." From Venezuela, Hugo Chávez is now comparing Mr. Obama to the devil, a shtick he first tried out on George W. Bush back when liberals thought it was kind of funny.

 

Of course these are America's enemies, so we probably should not have expected better even if Mr. Obama seemed to believe we might. What about our (ostensible) non-enemies? The president pre-emptively conceded the Czech and Polish missile-defense bases to Russia in hopes of getting Moscow to take a tougher line on Tehran's nuclear programs. The Kremlin isn't biting. Neither is China, never mind Mr. Obama's gratuitous snub last year of the Dalai Lama.

 

As for the Muslim world that Mr. Obama has been at such pains to court (the Cairo and Ankara speeches, his opposition to Gitmo and the war in Iraq, etc.), the 2009 Pew Global Survey that measures opinions about the U.S. finds as follows: Turkey, 14% favorable views of the U.S.; Palestinian territories, 15%; Pakistan, 16%; Jordan, 25%; Egypt, 27%. Granted, this is up slightly from the last year of the Bush administration, but only by a couple of percentage points on average. So that's the great Obama perception dividend?

 

So what's Copenhagen Syndrome? It is a belief in your own miracles. It is thinking that those who crowned you king actually knew what they were doing. It is buying into your own tulip bulb mania. It is the floating evanescent bubble of self. God help you when it bursts. Read article.

 

Jay Ambrose, DailyNewsTribune.com

 

What gripes me almost as much as our president's confusion is the anti-libertarian stance of The New York Times, which once played a powerful role in defending free speech rights. No more. This current Times position is not a huge remove from book burning, for in fact the law as it was understood before the court's ruling could have prohibited the publication of a book endorsing a federal candidate.

 

Clearly, the Times does not care about the principle involved here. It only cares about putting a lid on opinions contrary to its own, at least when they come from corporations that might have as much influence at the Times has. Of course, the Times itself is a corporation, one which was excluded from the reach of the law with other media groups, but as one commentator points out, is as much at risk as any business if the message of the day is that the Constitution does not count.

 

The Constitution is clear, of course - it says Congress shall make no law abridging free speech and press, and no scholar doubts it was talking about political speech above all. It is pure sophistry to argue this is just money Congress is trying to control. Deny the Times its revenues and tell its owner it still has freedom of the press, and I promise you the Times would see through the argument. Then there's another piece of hokum that says corporations don't have rights because they are not really people, as if cats and dogs were in charge.

 

To me, it is dismaying to have newspapers siding with regulated speech and downright frightening to have a president who thinks it constitutionally imperative to grant non-citizen terrorists hugely expensive criminal trials but doesn't grasp that free speech for the American people is the most fundamental right of them all. Read article.

 

Donald Lambro, Townhall.com via Stupid Frogs.org

 

If President Obama thinks the political disaster that hit his party last month in Massachusetts was bad, he had better brace himself for the Congressional Budget Office's latest economic forecasts for the next two years. In testimony before the House Budget Committee last week, which got scant news media attention, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf painted a bleak forecast for the nation's economy under the White House's no-jobs, no-growth tax-and-spend policies. It spells even deeper political losses for the Democrats in Congress than are presently forecast.

Elmendorf, who was appointed by Democratic congressional leaders, told the committee that economic growth will be painfully slow over the next several years, which will keep the national unemployment rate at an average of 10 percent throughout fiscal 2011, which ends in September of that year.

 

Contrary to Obama's Herbert Hoover mantra that economic recovery and more jobs are just around the corner, the CBO budget chief said the economy will grow by a weak 1.6 percent this fiscal year and the jobless rate will average 10.2 percent.

 

CBO's outlook for 2011 is just as bleak. The nation's gross domestic product (GDP), the measure of its economic growth, is expected to barely reach 1.8 percent, while unemployment will show little or no improvement: averaging 9.8 percent for that fiscal year.

 

The administration's unprecedented budget deficits are expected to be more than $1 trillion this year and the next, and stay at very high levels for years to come. Read article.

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