Exclusive – Oval Office Watch – Saturday, May 8
by OVAL OFFICE WATCH
May 8, 2010
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President to visit Buffalo next week - SEE HERE.
Obama praises Indonesia on test ban treaty - CLICK HERE.
News sites funded by think tanks take root - HERE.
U.S. reverses stance on treaty to regulate arms trade
Reuters.com
The United States reversed policy on Wednesday and said it would back launching talks on a treaty to regulate arms sales as long as the talks operated by consensus, a stance critics said gave every nation a veto.
The decision, announced in a statement released by the U.S. State Department, overturns the position of former President George W. Bush's administration, which had opposed such a treaty on the grounds that national controls were better.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States would support the talks as long as the negotiating forum, the so-called Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty, "operates under the rules of consensus decision-making."
"Consensus is needed to ensure the widest possible support for the Treaty and to avoid loopholes in the Treaty that can be exploited by those wishing to export arms irresponsibly," Clinton said in a written statement.
While praising the Obama administration's decision to overturn the Bush-era policy and to proceed with negotiations to regulate conventional arms sales, some groups criticized the U.S. insistence that decisions on the treaty be unanimous.
"The shift in position by the world's biggest arms exporter is a major breakthrough in launching formal negotiations at the United Nations in order to prevent irresponsible arms transfers," Amnesty International and Oxfam International said in a joint statement.
However, they said insisting that decisions on the treaty be made by consensus "could fatally weaken a final deal."
Read article.
Lieberman Proposes Stripping Terrorists of American Citizenship
Stephanie Condon, CBS.com
Joe Lieberman (I-CT) is proposing a plan to avoid reading Miranda rights to suspects like Shahzad. The Connecticut senator, who typically votes with Democrats but is hawkish on national security issues, wants to see a new law that would strip people like Shahzad of their citizenship and, subsequently, their Miranda rights.
Lieberman is planning to introduce a bill that would allow the government to revoke the citizenship of an American who joins a foreign terrorist organization, the Hill reports. The proposed legislation would amend current law that strips a person's citizenship if they fight with a foreign army.
"I think it's time for us to look at whether we want to amend that law to apply it to American citizens who choose to become affiliated with foreign terrorist organizations, whether they should not also be deprived automatically of their citizenship and therefore be deprived of rights that come with that citizenship when they are apprehended and charged with a terrorist act," Lieberman, head of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said on Fox News.
Earlier in the day, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said it was a mistake to read Shahzad, a 30-year-old naturalized American citizen from Pakistan, his Miranda rights, while Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said it was questionable whether Shahzad should face criminal charges, even though he is a citizen.
Read article.
Denying Jihad - Again.
Robert Spencer, FrontPageMag.com
We know now that the car bomb in Times Square was an attempted Islamic jihad attack. But the mainstream media, following its usual pattern, is once again denying, minimizing, or obfuscating this fact.
Writing in The Nation on Monday, Robert Dreyfuss epitomized the mainstream media’s hope that the car bomber would turn out to be a right-wing extremist: “It may be that the Pakistan-based Taliban, the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), has quietly established a Connecticut franchise while we weren’t looking. That’s possible. But it seems far more likely to me that the perpetrator of the bungled Times Square bomb plot was either a lone wolf or a member of some squirrely branch of the Tea Party, anti-government far right. Which actually exists in Connecticut, where, it seems, the car’s licence plates were stolen.”
In reality, according to Pakistani authorities, Faisal Shahzad, the would-be car bomber, attended a jihad training camp in that country. He spent five months in Pakistan recently, including some time in Peshawar, a center of Al-Qaeda and Taliban activity. Yet for all this, virtually no media reports are saying anything about Shahzad being a Muslim. Such a reference, however, would hardly be gratuitous: Islamic jihad theology and the death penalty enshrined in Islamic law for anyone who insults Allah or Muhammad are the most likely keys to Shahzad’s motivation. But the politically correct, multiculturalist imperative demands that Islam and Muslims, being (at least in this addled view) non-white and non-Western, must always be portrayed as victims, no matter how imaginative the lengths to which analysts must go in order to find something, anything, to blame for the carnage.
Read article.
'Fearmongers' were right about Obamacare – Now they tell us!
Michael Tanner, OC Register.com
The ink was barely dry on President Barack Obama's signature before the RAND Corp. released a report concluding that, not only would the hard-won health care package fail to curb health insurance premium increases, but the bill itself would drive premiums for young people up as much as 17 percent.
This should not have been a surprise: the Congressional Budget Office had already warned that the plan would do almost nothing to reduce premium hikes. And when New York implemented the same type of insurance reforms in the 1980s, it led to an increase of nearly $500 per year for young people. But somehow, the media didn't pay much attention.
And, of course, during the health care debate, no presidential speech was complete without a promise that "if you have health insurance today, and you like it, you can keep it." But the Congressional Budget Office now says that as many as 10 million workers will lose their current insurance under Obamacare. Some of those workers will have to buy new insurance through the government-run exchanges. Millions more will be thrown onto Medicaid.
In addition, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Studies reports that half of seniors currently enrolled in the Medicare Advantage program will lose their coverage under that program and be forced back onto traditional Medicare.
Read article.
How Arizona became center of immigration debate
Jonathan J. Cooper & Amanda Lee, Forbes.com
The frustration had been building for years in Arizona with every drug-related kidnapping, every home invasion, every "safe house" discovered crammed with illegal immigrants from Mexico.
The tensions finally spilled over this month with passage of the nation's toughest law against illegal immigration, a measure that has put Arizona at the center of the heated debate over how to deal with the millions of people who sneak into the U.S. every year.
A number of factors combined to produce the law: a heavily conservative Legislature, the ascent of a Republican governor, anger over the federal government's failure to secure the border, and growing anxiety over crime that reached a fever pitch last month with the slaying of an Arizona rancher, apparently by an illegal immigrant.
"It's something that should have been taken care of for years. It's not something we can keep slacking on," said one Arizona resident.
Read article.
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