Is Disagreement with Obama Racism?

Is Disagreement with Obama Racism?
Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Former president Jimmy Carter said, "I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man." That's from a man who earlier referred to Obama as "This black boy" on the Jim Lehrer "News Hour." New York Times social critic Maureen Dowd said, in reference to Rep. Joe Wilson's shouting "Liar" during Obama's address on health care before the joint session of Congress, "Some people just can't believe a black man is president and will never accept it." Washington Post's Howard Kurtz said he "began to suspect that race was a factor for at least some critics when I heard them shouting about 'the Constitution' and 'taking our country back.'" Kurtz asked whether the massive tea parties and other public protests reflect a "distinct discomfort with the country's first black president." House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, New York Gov. David Paterson, MSNBC's Chris Matthews, and other leftists claim that racism is behind criticism of President Obama.

For these people, it is inconceivable that many Americans are outraged by the president's spending policies, budget deficits, industry takeovers, not to mention the appointment of Czars, a term that ought to be alien and offensive to American values whether used by a Republican or Democratic president.

Obama's presidency is truly a remarkable commentary on the goodness of Americans and how far we've come in resolving matters of race. Obama convincingly won votes in states with insignificant black populations, such as the New England states, Iowa and Minnesota. For the nation as a whole, he managed 53 percent of the popular vote and 365 of the Electoral College votes when he only needed 270 to win. So now Jimmy Carter, Dowd, Rangel and other race-carders want us to believe that the massive discontent with Obama is racism. I say nonsense!

Speaking for the president, Robert Gibbs, White House spokesman, in no uncertain terms said that the president did not think the criticism directed at him and his policies was based on the color of his skin. President Obama refused to answer a reporter who queried him about Carter's comments. When Obama did respond, and much to his credit, he insisted that the "biggest driver" of the vitriol was distrust of government. His response was not only correct but the nation is better off as a result of it. We don't need the kind of divisiveness that would surely arise if Obama himself played the race card.

Race is no longer the problem that it once was. That doesn't mean there are not white and black bigots and that every vestige of racial discrimination has been eliminated. What little racial discrimination remains is nowhere near the insurmountable barrier it once was. For the most part, white bigots are no longer respected among whites and I look forward to the day when black bigots are no longer respected among blacks.

When one says that race is no longer the problem it once was, it is not the same as saying that there are not major problems that confront a large segment of the black population. Grossly fraudulent education is a major problem but it has nothing to do with racial discrimination as evidenced by the fact that the worse education received is in the very cities where blacks dominate the political structure. Crime is a major problem but it has nothing to do with racial discrimination, particularly in light of the fact that blacks commit most of the violent crime in America and well over 90 percent of their victims are black. The fact of a 70 percent illegitimacy rate and only 35 percent of black children raised in two-parent homes is a major problem but it has nothing to do with racial discrimination.

Americans should disavow and not fall prey to the racial rope-a-dope being played on us by the nation's race hustlers.

Is Obama Breaking the Law?

Is Obama Breaking the Law?
Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, September 30, 2009

In March 1850, Karl Marx spoke to the Central Committee of the Communist League. In order to bring about true change, Marx stated, the world needed not a massive, singular upheaval, but a "permanent revolution." The revolution would not be accomplished in a moment; it could be accomplished only through renewed and constant dedication to a political program, by a constant attempt "not to improve the existing society but to found a new one."

President Obama is not a communist, although he certainly has a soft spot for communists ranging from Van Jones to Frank Marshall Davis. Obama is, however, a devotee of the Marxist philosophy of politics: permanent change. Or, in his case, permanent campaigning on change.

While most presidents enter the White House and begin to engage in the business of executing the laws faithfully, President Obama has seized the massive power of the Oval Office to launch an unceasing, relentless campaign for his own re-election. He has used taxpayer money to pay off his friends and allies, ensuring that they remain in his camp. He has used the weight of the federal government to quash his private sector foes. And he has used the might of his office illegally, encouraging federal agencies to coordinate with "community organizations" in working with private actors to push the Obama agenda.

On May 12, 2009, according to a report from Arlene Goldbard, the Pratt Center for Community Development, State Voices and the Nathan Cumming Foundation, the White House sponsored a briefing for over 60 artists and community organizers on "Art, Community, Social Justice, National Recovery." Several agencies of the government were represented. The speakers included: Mike Strautmanis, chief of staff for the Office of Public Liaison, Joseph Reinstein, deputy social secretary for the White House, as well as Mario Garcia Durham, director of presenting for the National Endowment for the Arts.

Obama's buddies from the nonprofit world were there, too: Michelle Miller of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a group that spent almost $61 million on behalf of Obama's election in 2008 and is closely allied to the disgraced ACORN; Sally Kohn of the Center for Community Change, a far-left organization in support of illegal immigration and nationalized health care.

The meeting was dedicated to putting community organizers and artists in the same room, with the tacit promise of funding from the NEA ever present. According to the report, that promise was actually more than tacit: Garcia Durham allegedly told the assembled crowd that "government and its policies should be shaped by participants' voices in connection with the NEA."

There's only one problem with this: it's illegal. Under the Anti-Lobbying Act, government employees may not expressly urge individuals to "contact government officials in support of or opposition to legislation." Nor may they “provide administrative support for lobbying activities of private organizations." Under the Hatch Act, similarly, federal employees cannot solicit or discourage participation in political activity for anyone under consideration for a federal grant or contract.

Under the regulations of the Office of Management and Budget, all charitable 501(c)(3) organizations -- organizations like the Center for Community Change -- are forbidden from receiving funds that go to "the enactment or modification of any pending federal or state legislation by preparing, distributing or using publicity or propaganda." All of these laws may have been violated.

This isn't just about violation of federal law, however. This is about an administration that sees no problem with using its resources to entrench an extra-governmental mass movement it can mobilize at a moment's notice. President Obama himself has endorsed that strategy, keeping his non-governmental "Organizing for America" program up and running.

President Obama campaigned on change. He's echoing Marx in his embrace of perpetual change. What's more, he's abandoning his commitments to transparency and honesty by utilizing base political graft to achieve his permanent revolution.

Surrendering U.S. Sovereignty at G-20 Summit

Surrendering U.S. Sovereignty at G-20 Summit
Dick Morris and Eileen McGann
Wednesday, September 30, 2009

While all eyes were on the rantings of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the United Nations, the United States -- under President Obama -- was surrendering its economic sovereignty at the G-20 summit.

The result of this conclave, which France's president Nicolas Sarkozy hailed as "revolutionary," was that all the nations agreed to coordinate their economic policies and programs and to submit them to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for comment and approval. While the G-20 nations and the IMF are, for now, only going to use "moral suasion" on those nations found not to be in compliance, talk of sanctions looms on the horizon.

While the specific policies to which the U.S. committed itself (reducing the deficit and strengthening regulatory oversight of financial institutions) are laudable in themselves, the process and the precedent are frightening.

We are to subject our most basic national economic policies to the review of a group of nations that includes autocratic Russia, China and Saudi Arabia. Even though our gross domestic product is three times bigger than the second-largest economy (Japan) and equal to that of 13 of the G-20 nations combined, we are to sit politely by with our one vote and submit to the global consensus. Europe has five votes (Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the EU), while we have but one.

And the process will be administered by the IMF, whose counsel to less-developed nations over the past two decades has consistently called for social pain and economic austerity. The IMF's misguided policies have been responsible for more revolutions than Marx, Engels, and Lenin combined. Its bureaucrats' arrogance is legendary, and its search for appropriate punishments to fit the crime of spending too much on the poor smacks of colonialism and imperialism. They are our new overseers.

This combination of the IMF and the G-20 will not only work to structure national economic policies but to limit executive compensation at financial institutions. The watchful, wise leaders of such nations as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia -- among others -- will monitor Wall Street to assure themselves that their compensation is not out of line. One particularly looks forward to the views of the Saudi monarchy on this question of excessive personal enrichment.

Perhaps as part of his public spasm of apology, President Obama also strove successfully to increase the voting strength of the debtor nations on the IMF from the current 43 percent to 48 percent. This is the economic equivalent of giving deadbeat debtors more votes on their bank's governing board of directors.

Thus, the world's most successful economy, ours -- which is the only one that has produced reliable economic growth for three decades and has lifted real personal incomes almost every year -- is going to subject itself to the burden of justifying its own economic policies in front of a global community of 20 nations, some of which do not even embrace free-market economies in the first place.

Indeed, it is only through access to our markets that nations have been able to escape poverty. Japan, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, China and India have sequentially trod this path into prosperity.

Obviously, we live in a global economy. But the United States is 24 percent of it. We are entitled to more than one-twentieth of a voice, and it is the world that should be following our policies -- not the other way around.

Much of the damage of the Obama administration can be undone at the next election. But such grants of sovereignty to autocratic, backward, bureaucratic and even communist nations will be hard to undo.

The world is recovering from its leftist obsession -- e.g., the Angela Merkel victory in Germany. But by the time the voters discover how phony, failed and fraudulent these policies are, we may have given it all away already. Irrevocably.

Success No Matter What

Success No Matter What
John Stossel
Wednesday, September 30, 2009

This Friday, September's job-loss total will be announced. Whatever the numbers, administration officials surely will tell us that life is better -- because of them. "We brought the global economy back from the brink," President Obama said at the close of the G-20 meeting last week. "(B)ecause of the bold and coordinated action that we took, millions of jobs have been saved or created; the decline in output has been stopped; financial markets have come back to life."

This has been the president's theme: His so-called stimulus package, bailouts for politically connected banks and industries, ludicrously wasteful programs like Cash for Clunkers, etc. have saved America from the greatest disaster since the Great Depression.

But this theme runs up against some rather unfortunate facts.

In January, the administration's economic models warned that unemployment would hit 9 percent next year if its $787 billion "stimulus" wasn't passed. Passing it would keep the jobless rate under 8 percent before it begins to fall (http://tinyurl.com/nuuq5l).

Well, the packaged passed -- and unemployment in August rose to 9.7 percent.

Oops.

OK, economic forecasters make mistakes. Fair enough. But neither the administration experts nor President Obama will acknowledge that their models and strategy are flawed. Instead, they spin the numbers and proclaim success, insisting that the plan is working even though unemployment is higher than they said it would be.

For example, Christina Romer, chief of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, preferred to emphasize that the 216,000 jobs lost in August were about half a million less than six months before. Never mind that the economic strategy hasn't restored any of those 700,000 jobs previously lost. They'd rather distract us by focusing on the slowing rate of loss rather than the losses themselves.

But, New York University economist Mario Rizzo writes, to take credit for this is to imply that "in the absence of fiscal stimulus, the rate of increase in unemployment never falls." That's ridiculous. Should Obama get credit anytime things aren't as bad as they might have been?

"The stimulus apologists are ignoring the original prediction based on a model. By that prediction, the stimulus is doing harm," Rizzo commented.

As Harvard economist Greg Mankiw writes, "In light of the shifting baseline, it is impossible to hold the administration accountable for whether its policies are achieving their intended effects."

"The administration, however, has not been particularly in admitting to this lack of accountability. Indeed, the act of releasing quarterly reports on how many jobs have been 'created or saved' gives the illusion of accountability without the reality."

This lack of accountability -- this claim of success no matter what happens -- should surprise no one. Many of us warned about it months ago. Remember, Obama didn't promise to create 3.5 million jobs. He promised to create or save that many. There is no way to test that. If you still have your job, does that mean Obama saved it? If an entrepreneur created a new job, in spite of Obama's destructive anti-business regulatory apparatus, does Obama still deserve the credit?

As I wrote in February: "Given time, the economy, unless totally crippled by government intervention, will regenerate itself. That's because an economy is not a machine that needs jumpstarting. It is people who have objectives they want to achieve. They will not sit on their hands forever waiting for government to 'fix' things. Instead, they work to overcome obstacles to get what they want. Some banks are struggling, but there are still people who want to lend money and people who want to borrow it. They will find each other without government help."

But I underestimated this administration. I expected it to say, in the face of continued rising unemployment, that the "stimulus" wasn't big enough. Instead, it claims success.

I suppose I should be relieved. Claiming success is far less destructive than another irresponsible "stimulus." I'm grateful for small favors.

All the President's Olympic Cronies

All the President's Olympic Cronies
Michelle Malkin
Wednesday, September 30, 2009

When government officials play the Olympic lottery, taxpayers lose. That has been the disastrous experience of host cities around the world. (Forbes magazine even dubbed the post-Olympic financial burden the "Host City Curse.") So, why are President Obama and his White House entourage headed to Copenhagen, Denmark, this week to push a fiscally doomed Chicago 2016 bid? Political payback.

Bringing the games to the Windy City is Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley's "vision." The entrenched Democratic powerbroker -- in office since 1989 -- would like to cap off his graft-haunted tenure with a glorious $4 billion bread-and-circuses production. The influential Daley machine backed Barack Obama for the presidential primary. Obama lavished praise on Daley's stewardship of the city. Longtime Daley cronies helped pave Obama's path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Now, they're returning the favor for their hometown boss.

Senior White House adviser and Obama consigliere Valerie Jarrett is a Daley loyalist who worked as his deputy chief of staff, deputy corporation counsel and planning commissioner. She hired the future first lady of the United States, then-Michelle Robinson, as a mayoral assistant. Jarrett went on to serve as president and CEO of The Habitat Company, a real estate firm with a massive stake in federally funded Chicago public housing projects.

One of those public-private partnerships, the Grove Parc Plaza Apartments, was run into the ground under Jarrett's watch. Federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex a bottom-of-the-barrel 11 on a 100-point scale. "They are rapidly displacing poor people, and these companies are profiting from this displacement," Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle of Southside Together Organizing for Power, a community group that seeks to help tenants stay in the same neighborhoods, told the Boston Globe last year. "'The same exact people who ran these places into the ground,' the private companies paid to build and manage the city's affordable housing, 'now are profiting by redeveloping them.'"

Coincidentally enough, Grove Parc -- now targeted for demolition as a result of years of neglect by Obama's developer friends -- sits in the shadows of the proposed site of the city's 2016 Olympic Stadium. Jarrett served as vice chair of Chicago's 2016 Summer Olympics bid committee before moving to the White House, where she has helmed a new "White House Office on Olympic, Paralympic and Youth Sport" with an undisclosed budget and staff.

It's not just taxpayers in cash-strapped Chicago who should be worried about this field of schemes. Crain's Chicago Business reports that Jarrett and Chicago 2016 committee member Lori Healey met this month with federal officials at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development "to discuss financing options" for the estimated $1 billion Olympic Village.

The door is open, and the administration is "willing to meet and listen" to any federal subsidy proposals, Jarrett said. Hey, what happened to Obama's tough rules on interest-conflicted lobbying by his administration officials?

A majority of Chicagoans who live in pay-for-play-plagued Cook County oppose public funding for the Olympic party. The city has more than a half-billion-dollar deficit -- and just received word that its Olympic insurance policy will cover only about $1.1 billion of the $3.8 billion operating budget drawn up by Daley. Cost overruns, fraud and union-inflated contracts are inevitable. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs defended Obama's all-out campaign for Chicago's 2016 Olympics bid by claiming America will see a "tangible economic benefit."

But as is always the case with sports corporate welfare disguised as "economic development," an elite few will benefit far more than others.

Take senior White House adviser and Obama campaign guru David Axelrod. He's been a Daley loyalist since 1989, when he signed up as a political consultant for the mayor's first run. Axelrod's public relations firm, Chicago-based AKPD Message and Media, has pitched in work for the Chicago 2016 committee. It is unknown how much AKPD has received for its services -- or how much they'll make in future income if the bid is successful. AKPD currently owes Axelrod $2 million.

The head of the Chicago 2016 bid committee is Patrick Ryan, chairman of the Aon Corporation and a co-chair of Obama's deep-pocketed presidential inaugural committee. Also on both of those committees: Obama confidante Penny Pritzker, who, in addition, chairs the Olympic Village subcommittee and is president of Pritzker Realty Group -- a mega-developer in Illinois that could reap untold millions in project work if the Daley machine/White House campaign succeeds. Former Pritzker executive and Obama campaign treasurer Martin Nesbitt is also on the bid committee -- and serves as Daley's chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority.

Another bid committee member, Michael Scott Jr., is "trying to develop a for-profit real estate project that would sit within feet of the cycling venue if Chicago wins the 2016 Summer Games," according to the Chicago Tribune.

It takes a crony-filled White House to raise a Chicago Olympic village. Daley and Obama will get the glory. America will get stuck with the bill.

Leave Them Kids Alone

Leave Them Kids Alone
David Harsanyi
Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Children can be irritating -- especially your children. That is why the notion of a school year extending 12 months is not completely revolting. But alas, the government is not a baby-sitting service. Not yet. Let's hope not ever.

In the midst of grappling with a scattering of thorny issues, President Barack Obama took time to lend a fatherly hand this week. Your little Jake, it seems, doesn't spend enough time under the gaze of the state. As it turns out, Jake is at a tragic disadvantage when competing against Yuri from Kazakhstan.

If you believe this tale, the administration has an answer for you: Kill summer vacation, and add a few hours to the school day. "Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan claimed. "I want to just level the playing field."

He, generously, wants to level the playing field for ,your children. Hey, admittedly, I'm not a product of the dazzling Hungarian school system, yet I can't help but wonder: With the pitiful performance of so many of our school systems -- Duncan left Chicago's schools with a more than 40 percent dropout rate -- doesn't it seem counterintuitive to extend this interaction?

Where, after all, is the evidence that longer days translate into smarter kids?

We will hear all about Sweden, Belgium and Denmark's longer days and high test scores, but as The Associated Press points out, kids in the U.S. spend more "hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests -- Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013)."

In the U.S., we also piddle away more funding per student on education than nearly any other nation in the world. Employing Duncan's decidedly non-Singaporean calculus, this would necessitate a cut in education spending to achieve higher results and "even the playing field."

According to numerous studies, the most consistent indicator and predictor of a child's educational achievement is parental involvement. So while more time in the classroom may be beneficial to kids who lack parental participation, why would the administration peddle an across-the-board policy change that separates all kids from their parents?

If Duncan's theory is true, why do many school districts across this nation attain high standards of excellence with the same funding and a full summer vacation? Why do Asian-American students consistently outscore their counterparts in this country, within the same school systems and with the same class times?

Moreover, shouldn't local parents and educators be the ones making decisions about curricula and scheduling rather than having to adhere to the mandated vagaries of the newest "reform" efforts from Washington? (Some charter and public schools already shorten summer vacations.)

There is, of course, no denying that many school systems in the nation are failing. Students often are trapped in them. They need help ... to get out.

And though it horrifies some among us that Slovenian eighth-graders, on average, are more proficient at algebra than our kids, the Slovenian economy does not reflect this aptitude. Our achievement never has been about math scores. It's about a system that allows productive citizens to thrive. Unlike in nations chock-full of whiz kids, in this country, adults work. Children play.

When we don't work, we import. Surely my kids -- if I can afford to send them to college -- will be taught by a product of the Indian educational system. I'm cool with that.

But just as certain, the president's advice would hold more weight if he started sending his own children to public schools before mandating that your child be stuck in one during his or her God-given summer vacation.

Irena Sendler

The prize doesn't always go to the most deserving...

Irena Sendler

There recently was a death of a 98 year-old lady named Irena. During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an 'ulterior motive' ... She KNEW what the Nazi's plans were for the Jews, (being German.) Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried and she carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack, (for larger kids..) She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.. During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants. She was caught, and the Nazi's broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it and reunited the family. Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.

Last year Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize ... She was not selected..
Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.

Let us never forget!

63 years later





In MEMORIAM - 63 YEARS LATER

In Memoriam







It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians, 6 million Jews and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, starved and humiliated with the German and Russian Peoples looking the other way!

Now, more than ever, with Iraq , Iran , and others, claiming the Holocaust to be 'a myth,' it's imperative to make sure the world never forgets, because there are others who would like to do it again.

An Enfeebled Obama

An Enfeebled Obama
Caroline Glick
Monday, September 28, 2009

If Zbigniew Brzezinski had his way, the US would go to war against Israel to defend Iran's nuclear installations.

In an interview with the Daily Beast Web site last weekend, the man who served as former US president Jimmy Carter's national security adviser said, "They [IAF fighter jets] have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch? We have to be serious about denying them that right. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not."

Brzezinski has long distinguished himself as one of the most outspoken Israel-haters in polite circles in Washington. Under normal circumstances, his remarks could be laughed off as the ravings of a garden variety anti-Semite. But these are not normal circumstances. Brzezinski served as a senior foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign, and his views are not terribly out of place among Obama's senior advisers in the White House. In an interview in 2002, Samantha Powers, who serves as a senior member of Obama's national security council, effectively called for the US to invade Israel in support of the Palestinians.

The fact of the matter is that Brzezinski's view is in line with the general disposition of Obama's foreign policy. Since entering office, Obama has struck a hard-line position against Israel while adopting a soft, even apologetic line toward Iran and its allies.

For eight months, Obama has sought to force Israel to the wall. He has loudly and repeatedly ordered the Netanyahu government to prevent all private and public construction for Jews in Israel's capital city and its heartland in order to facilitate the eventual mass expulsion of Jews from both areas, which he believes ought to become part of a Jew-free Palestinian state.

Until this week, Obama conditioned the resumption of negotiations toward peace between Israel and the Palestinians on such a prohibition of Jewish building and so encouraged Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas to further radicalize his positions toward Israel. Until Obama came around, Abbas had no problem negotiating with Israeli leaders while Jews were building homes and schools and other structures in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. But with Obama requiring a freeze of all such construction, Abbas made clear in an interview with The Washington Post in May that he couldn't talk to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu without looking like a sellout.

Obama made no equivalent demands of the Palestinians. He did not precondition talks on freezing illegal Arab construction in Jerusalem, or on dismantling the Aksa Martyrs Brigades terrorist group, or even simply on setting aside the Palestinian demand that Israel release convicted terrorists from its prisons. To the contrary, he has energetically supported the establishment of a Palestinian unity government between Fatah and Hamas - which the US State Department has since 1995 designated as a foreign terrorist organization to which US citizens, including the US president, are required by law to give no quarter.

As for Iran, during his meeting with Netanyahu in May, Obama gave the clear impression that the Iranian regime had until September to accept his offer to negotiate the disposition of its nuclear installations. But it is now September, and in its belated response to Obama's generous offer of engagement, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime rejected the terms of Obama's engagement out of hand. Obama did not retaliate by taking his offer to negotiate off the table or - perish the thought - working to implement the sanctions he had pledged would follow an Iranian rejection of his open hand.

Instead, Obama announced that he is sending a senior US official to meet with the Iranians on October 1. And with that announcement, any residual doubt that Obama is willing to live in a world in which Iran is armed with nuclear weaponry dissipated completely.

In the meantime, in his address to the UN General Assembly on Wednesday and in his remarks at his meeting with Netanyahu and Abbas on Tuesday, Obama made clear that, in the words of former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, he has "put Israel on the chopping block." He referred to Israeli communities located beyond the 1949 armistice lines as "illegitimate."

Moreover, Obama explained that Israel can no longer expect US support for its security if it doesn't bow to his demand that it surrender all of the land it has controlled since 1967.

Apparently it is immaterial to the US leader that if Israel fulfilled his demand, the Jewish state would render itself defenseless against enemy attack and so embolden its neighbors to invade. That is, it matters not to Obama that were Israel to fulfill his demand, the prospect of an Arab war against Israel would rise steeply. The fact that Obama made these deeply antagonistic statements about Israel at the UN in itself exposes his hostility toward the country. The UN's institutional hostility toward Israel is surpassed only by that of the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

So given Obama's positions toward Israel on the one hand and Iran and its allies on the other, it seems clear enough that the logical endpoint of Obama's policies would look something like Brzezinski's recommended course of action. Moreover, Obama's foreign policy as a whole makes it fairly easy to imagine him ordering the US military to open hostilities against a US ally to defend a US adversary - even as that adversary goes out of its way to humiliate Obama personally and the US in general.

Since Obama took office, he has been abandoning one US ally after another while seeking to curry favor with one US adversary after another. At every turn, America's allies - from Israel to Honduras, to Columbia, South Korea and Japan, to Poland and the Czech Republic - have reacted with disbelief and horror to his treachery. And at every turn, America's adversaries - from Iran to Venezuela to North Korea and Russia - have responded with derision and contempt to his seemingly obsessive attempts to appease them.

The horror Obama has instilled in America's friends and the contempt he has evoked from its enemies have not caused him to change course. The fact that his policies throughout the world have already failed to bring a change in the so-called international community's treatment of the US has not led him to reconsider those policies. As many Western Europeans have begun to openly acknowledge, the man they once likened to the messiah is nothing but a politician - and a weak, bungling one at that. Even Britain's Economist is laughing at him.

But Obama is unmoved by any of this, and as his speech at the UN General Assembly made clear, he is moving full speed ahead in his plans to subordinate US foreign policy to the UN.

His stubborn insistence on advancing his feckless foreign policy in the face of its already apparent colossal failure is of a piece with his unswerving commitment to his domestic agenda in spite of its apparent colossal failure. Obama's economic stimulus package failed to stimulate the US economy and increased the US's economic deficit to heights undreamed of by his predecessors. His nationalization of major US corporations like General Motors, his cash-for-clunkers program to stimulate the US auto industry and his massive encroachments on the banking and financial industries have done nothing to increase economic growth in the US and indeed, unemployment has reached generational highs. And yet, rather than reconsider his belief in vastly expanding the size of the federal government's control over the private sector, Obama has insistently pushed for further governmental control over the US economy - most notably in his drive to transform the US health care industry.

Both Obama's supporters and his opponents have claimed that his presidency may well stand or fall on his ability to pass a health care reform law in the coming months. But the fact of the matter is that if he succeeds in passing such a law, his success will be a Pyrrhic victory because Obama has promised that his plan will do the impossible, and therefore it will unquestionably fail.

He has promised that the health care plan he supports will increase access to health services and improve their quality, but simultaneously will not increase the size of the federal deficit or be funded with tax hikes - and this is impossible. Obama's health care plan will fail either to pass into law, or if it becomes law, it will fail to live up to his promises.

Obama's failures in both foreign and domestic policy have weakened him politically. His response to this newfound weakness has been to put himself into the public eye seemingly around the clock. Apparently the thinking behind the move is that while Obama's policies are unpopular, Obama's personal popularity remains high, so if he personalizes his policies, it will become more difficult for his opponents to argue against them.

But alas, this policy too has failed. The more Obama exposes himself, the less he is able to leverage his personal celebrity into political power.

The question for the US's spurned allies in general - and for Israel in particular - is whether we are better off with a politically strong Obama or a politically weak Obama. Given that the general thrust of his foreign policy is detrimental to our interests, America's allies are best served by a weak Obama. Already this week Israel benefitted from his weakness. It was Obama's weakness that dictated his need to stage a photo-op with Netanyahu and Abbas at the UN. And it was this need - to be seen as doing something productive - that outweighed Obama's desire to put the screws on Israel by preconditioning talks with a freeze on Jewish construction. So Obama was forced to relent at least temporarily and Netanyahu won his first round against Obama.

During a television interview this week, Sen. John McCain was asked for his opinion of Brzezinski's recommendation that the US shoot down IAF jets en route to Iran in a hypothetical Israeli air strike against Iran's nuclear installations. He responded with derisive laughter. And indeed, the notion that the US would go to war against Israel to protect Iran's nuclear installations is laughably absurd.

The weaker Obama becomes politically, the more readily Democrats and liberal reporters alike will acknowledge that attacking US allies while scraping and bowing before US foes is a ridiculous strategy for foreign affairs. Certainly no self-proclaimed realist can defend a policy based on denuding the US of its power and forsaking a US-based international system for one dictated by its foes.

It is true that a weakened Obama will seek to win cheap points by putting the squeeze on Israel. But it is also true that the weaker Obama becomes, the less capable he will be of carrying through on his bullying threats against Israel and against fellow democracies around the world.

The Un-Aborted Obama

The Un-Aborted Obama
Mike Adams
Sunday, September 27, 2009

Hello Barry. I’ve decided to write you a few questions in response to the unsolicited emails I keep getting from BarackObama.com. Since most of your form emails concern health care I’ll confine most of my questions to one health-related subject: Abortion.

1. Did you know that about 150 young black people were admitted to Howard University School of Law this year? But, unfortunately, about 1370 black babies were aborted today. How can we effect “social justice” if the health profession kills far more blacks than the legal profession is currently accepting into its ranks?

2. Isn’t abortion sort of like liberalism in a nutshell? It’s just a way of asking others to suffer the consequences of your own bad decisions.

3. Doctors are supposed to save lives and not take them. Shouldn’t abortion doctors then be required to take the hypocritical oath?

4. You been supported by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals throughout your political career. What if I trapped a dog in a cage and dismembered him slowly with a pruning tool I stuck through the bars of the cage? What if I then sucked out the bloody body parts with my Black & Decker power vacuum? Would PETA demand my arrest? Would they succeed? Would this not be eerily similar to what licensed doctors do to babies? Isn’t that more serious than animal abuse? Even more serious than ACORN funding brothels with tax-payer dollars? Is this a procedure we want to nationalize?

5. When a white abortion doctor kills a black baby is it a hate crime?

6. Jesse Jackson was pro-life before he decided to run for president. He switched to the “pro-choice” position because he wanted to be the first black president. This, he thought, would show that America is no longer racist. Jesse still opposes the death penalty because – at least he claims - it is racist. In the American health care system, over 9000 black babies are aborted every week. Has the criminal justice system ever executed 9000 innocent blacks in a single week?

7. A Democrat historian once told me that, during its history, the mostly Democratic KKK lynched almost 5000 blacks. Today, the mostly Democratic pro-choice movement applauds (and even defends as a “right”) the mutilation of over 9000 blacks on a weekly basis. You probably think it is unfair to compare pro-choicers to the KKK. But unfair to whom? Klansmen were never such prolific killers.

8. What would happen if we started shooting unborn babies with guns? Would you then decide to oppose abortion?

9. I was recently told that, as a Christian, I should support your health reform bill. But I would not want to be treated in a universal Canadian-style health care system. So why should I wish my neighbor to be treated the way I do not want to be treated?

10. I just ran into a fellow who was wearing a "Jesus" fish around his neck and an "Obama" hat on his head. That's like wearing a Star of David around your neck and carving a swastika on your forehead. Jesus was the greatest friend of the weak and powerless. Are you not the most powerful opponent of the weakest segment of society, the unborn?

11. Social Security is going bankrupt because large numbers of people born before Roe v. Wade are drawing from the system. But 50 million people who would be paying into the system have been aborted since Roe. Is it fair to say that in the same way Democrats destroy lives they created they also destroy government programs they created?

12. Since abortion kills so many black males, shouldn't we call it "homie-cide"?

I didn’t sign up for your email newsletter but I guess someone did it for me as a joke. And I can’t seem to get off the list no matter how many times I ask to be removed. So, I’ll keep sending questions like these until you start responding with more than just your form email responses. Or maybe I’ll find a way to send them directly to your teleprompter.

Fact-Checking President Obama’s Health Care Talking Points

Fact-Checking President Obama’s Health Care Talking Points
John Boehner
Wednesday, September 23, 2009

“If you misrepresent what's in this plan, we will call you out,” President Obama warned in his health care address to Congress earlier this month.

Fair enough. But the President himself has made numerous claims during this debate that don’t meet the straight-face test.

When the President says that health care reform will not require anyone to drop their current coverage, he fails to account for an independent analysis by the Lewin Group showing that as many as 114 million Americans could lose their current coverage and instead end up on a government-run plan under House Democrats’ proposal (H.R. 3200.) Even the most conservative estimates say millions could be shifted to a government-run plan.

When the President pledges that reform will not add to the deficit, not even a little, he neglects to mention that House Democrats’ plan would increase the deficit by $239 billion over 10 years, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

What’s worse, when the President insists that middle-class families won’t see a tax increase – as he did repeatedly during his recent appearance on ABC’s This Week – it’s as if he failed to read the health care bills altogether. On page 167 of H.R. 3200, the title of section 401 reads: “TAX ON INDIVIDUALS WITHOUT ACCEPTABLE HEALTH CARE COVERAGE.” The Associated Press didn’t mince words when it began a fact check piece, “Memo to President Obama: it’s a tax.”

If the President read these bills, he’d also find that his pledge to protect seniors’ Medicare benefits rings hollow. According to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, House Democrats’ plan cuts Medicare Advantage programs by more than $172 billion.

As a result, six million seniors will be denied access to an affordable Medicare Advantage (MA) plan, including three million who will lose the plan they currently have, according to an analysis completed by Republicans on the House Ways & Means Committee. And that’s just the beginning. The House Democrats’ bill includes a total of more than $500 billion in Medicare cuts, meaning reduced benefits and fewer choices for seniors.

To be fair, there are areas in which the President has sought to make up for the shortcomings of Democrats’ costly government takeover of health care. It was encouraging when the President’s pledge to Congress that “no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions” was followed by a meeting at the White House with pro-life activists. It turns out, however, that the Administration would not commit to inserting a provision that explicitly excludes abortion from health care reform.

Thus, the status quo remains: House Democrats’ health care legislation would allow the U.S. Secretary of Health & Human Services to include abortion as a benefit in the government-run health care option.

It was also encouraging when the President assured law-abiding taxpayers that illegal immigrants should not and will not be covered under the Democrats’ health care plan. The non-partisan Congressional Research Service has confirmed, however, that there is no mechanism included in the House bill to verify that individuals are U.S. citizens or legal immigrants before they receive government benefits.

House Republicans offered two amendments in the committee process to correct this: the first would have prevented illegal immigrants from being automatically enrolled into Medicaid and the second would have required better screening for applicants for federally-subsidized health care to ensure they are actually citizens or legal immigrants. Both were rejected by Democrats.

These are just a couple of the many ideas House Republicans have offered to improve Americans’ health care. For instance, why not allow small employers to group together through national associations so they can buy health insurance for their employees like big companies and unions can today? Why not allow the American people to buy health care plans across state lines? Why not get serious about ending junk lawsuits and more importantly the costly defensive medicine that doctors are forced to practice?

We outlined these proposals in a letter to the President back in May and asked to sit down with him and discuss them. The response we received essentially said ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’

For his part, the President has talked about a “whole series of Republican ideas” being included in health care reform. This is just another myth perpetuated by the President, whose rhetoric simply doesn’t match the reality of congressional Democrats’ government-run health care proposals.

This isn’t about calling out President Obama for the sake of doing so. The American people deserve to know the unvarnished truth about the potential consequences of this costly government takeover of their health care. The President’s failure to meet this common-sense standard is yet another indication it’s time to hit the reset button and start over in a bipartisan way to achieve health care reforms hard-working Americans can support and afford.

Liberal Lies About National Health Care, Part 5

Liberal Lies About National Health Care, Part 5
Ann Coulter
Wednesday, September 23, 2009

(15) Democrats lost Congress in 1994 because President Clinton failed to pass national health care.

I'm not sure if this is another example of the left's wishful-thinking method of analysis or if they're seriously trying to trick the Blue Dog Democrats into believing it. But I gather liberals consider the 1994 argument an important point because it was on the front page of The New York Times a few weeks ago in place of a story about Van Jones or ACORN.

According to a news story by Jackie Calmes: "In 1994, Democrats' dysfunction over fulfilling a new president's campaign promise contributed to the party's loss of its 40-year dominance of Congress."

That's not the way I remember it. The way I remember it, Republicans swept Congress in 1994 not because Clinton failed to nationalize health care, but because he tried to nationalize health care. HillaryCare failed because most Americans didn't want it. (For more on this, see "ObamaCare.")

Bill Clinton had run as an old-school, moderate Democrat and then, as soon as he got elected, immediately became Che Guevara. (What is it with all our black presidents and these bait-and-switch tactics?)

Instead of pursuing "mend it, don't end it" on welfare and no "middle-class tax hike" -- as Clinton promised during the campaign -- he raised taxes, signed ridiculous gun restrictions into law, enacted "midnight basketball" as the solution to urban crime, announced that he was putting gays in the military and let Hillary run riot over health care.

But just to check my recollection, I looked up the Times' own coverage of the 1994 congressional races.

Republicans won a landslide election in 1994 based largely on the "Contract With America," which, according to the Times, promised "tax cuts, more military spending and a balanced-budget amendment." Far from complaining about Clinton incompetently failing to pass health care, the Times reported that Republicans were "unabashedly claiming credit for tying Congress up in knots."

These claims were immediately followed by ... oh, what was that word again? Now I remember ...

LANDSLIDE!

It was almost as if the voters agreed with the Republicans in opposing Clinton's risky health care scheme, then voted accordingly.

The Times' own polling showed that two-thirds of voters believed that "government should be less involved in solving national problems" -- which doesn't sound to me like voters being huffy with Clinton for failing to stage a government takeover of one-sixth of the economy.

In a Hail Mary pass just before the election, President Clinton pulled Hillary off the health care beat. CNN's repository of liberal cliches, Bill Schneider, reported that Clinton was trying to calm voters by "removing the most visible symbol of the liberal tilt of the last two years, which is the first lady."

And what a morale boost for the Democrats that must have been! Kind of like firing the manager of a losing baseball team in the last week of the season.

Too late. Shouldn't have tried to socialize health care.

(16) America's relatively low life expectancy compared to countries with socialist health care proves welfare-state health care is better.

The life expectancy argument is so stupid even The New York Times hasn't made it -- except in news stories quoting others or in the ramblings of the Times' more gullible op-ed columnists. You mostly hear the life expectancy argument from Hollywood actresses and profoundly dumb Democrats, such as Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland.

Trying to evaluate the quality of a nation's health care by looking at life expectancy is like trying to estimate the birthrate by counting the number of flowers bought on Valentine's Day. (Or estimating future pregnancies of women with low self-esteem by adding up the total number of U.S. cities on a Bobby Brown tour and then multiplying by 2.)

There are a lot of ways to get to a pregnancy besides flowers or a Bobby Brown tour, and a lot of ways to die without ever setting foot in a doctor's office.

For example, more Americans are murdered with guns than in any other industrialized country. (And it would be even more without concealed-carry laws! See John Lott, "More Guns, Less Crime.") According to a 1997 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the homicide rate with firearms alone was 16 times higher in the U.S. than in 25 other industrialized countries combined.

That will tend to reduce the U.S.'s "life expectancy" numbers, while telling us absolutely nothing about the country's medical care. (I promise that if you make it to a hospital alive, you are more likely to survive a gunshot wound in the U.S. than any place else in the world.)

It's comparing apples and oranges to talk about life expectancy as if it tracks with a country's health care system. What matters is the survival rate from the same starting line, to wit, the same medical condition. Not surprisingly, in the apples-to-apples comparisons, the U.S. medical system crushes the welfare-state countries.

For the glorious details, see next week's column.

The Letter Joe Wilson Should Write

The Letter Joe Wilson Should Write
Larry Elder
Thursday, September 24, 2009

Dear Madame Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi,

I apologized to President Obama for my "you lie" outburst during his recent speech. The President immediately accepted my apology. Yet you and nearly all members of your party in the House of Representatives demanded that I make yet another apology from the floor of the House. I refused and then received an admonishment by resolution -- passed almost completely down party lines.

Now it's your turn, Madame Speaker. I invite you and others in your party to apologize publicly to former President George W. Bush for vicious, personal and frequently race-based attacks.

"Bush is an incompetent leader," you said of the then-sitting president. "In fact, he's not a leader. He's a person who has no judgment, no experience and no knowledge of the subjects that he has to decide upon." If a Republican --especially a Southerner -- attacked Obama that way, former President Jimmy Carter would call him or her a racist. Apologize, Madame Speaker.

Sen. Ted Kennedy died never having apologized. Kennedy accused the Bush administration of lying about the intelligence leading up to the Iraq War. "Week after week after week," Kennedy said from the Senate floor, "we were told lie after lie after lie." Please check the rules for a posthumous resolution of admonition.

How about an apology from now-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton? She played the race card. Before a predominately black audience, Clinton said, "When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation. And you know what I'm talking about."

Imagine attacking Obama's intelligence the way members of your party did to that of President Bush. "I sometimes feel that Alfred E. Neuman is in charge in Washington," said Clinton, referring to the dimwitted icon of Mad magazine. She even used Neuman's catchphrase, "What, me worry?" to describe how Bush handled tough issues.

What about an apology from Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.? Like his colleague, the late senior senator from the Bay State, Kerry also accused Bush of lying. "Their plan," Kerry said on Don Imus' show in 2006, "is lie and die. And that's what they're doing. They lie to America about what's happening on the ground; they lie about why we're there; they lie about what's happening." Kerry, too, questioned Bush's intelligence. As the returns for the 2004 presidential race came in, Kerry said, "I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot." Imagine someone in my party -- based on the current standard of "civility" -- saying something like that about President Obama.

What about Democratic Sen. (and then-minority leader) Harry Reid of Nevada? He called Bush a "loser" and a "liar." Reid apologized for the "loser" comment but let stand "liar."

What about Democratic Rep. John Dingell of Michigan? On ABC's "Nightline," he compared the then-GOP-controlled House to "the Duma and the Reichstag" -- referring to the legislature set up by Czar Nicholas II of Russia and the German Weimar Republic's parliament, which brought Adolf Hitler to power. (Of course, "Bush equals Hitler" posters, swastikas and calls for assassination were commonplace at anti-Bush rallies.)

What about the use of the race card by now-chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Democrat Charlie Rangel of New York? He called President George W. Bush "our Bull Connor." Who was Bull Connor? He was the racist Birmingham, Ala., public safety commissioner who sicced dogs and turned fire hoses on civil rights marchers in the 1960s.

What about the use of the race card against Bush by then-candidate and now-Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri? About the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, she said, "George Bush let people die on rooftops in New Orleans because they were poor and because they were black."

What about Democratic Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who also accused Bush of racism in responding to Hurricane Katrina? Incredibly, he offered this conspiracy theory: Bush wanted blacks to leave Louisiana to make it a more solidly Republican red state. Frank called this "ethnic cleansing by inaction."

Neither then-presidential campaign manager Donna Brazile nor her boss, Al Gore, ever apologized for Brazile's assertion that the Republican Party possesses a "white-boy attitude." This means, she explained, "(the GOP) must exclude, denigrate and leave behind."

What about former governor/presidential candidate/Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean? He characterized the contest between Democrats and Republicans as "a struggle of good and evil. And," Dean said, "we're the good." Dean also told a National Public Radio audience, "The most interesting theory that I've heard so far -- which is nothing more than a theory, it can't be proved -- is that (Bush) was warned (about the 9/11 attacks) ahead of time by the Saudis."

And finally, what about "the tone" of President Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel? In a 2006 Chicago Tribune article, Emanuel succinctly expressed his feelings toward my party. "(Republicans)," he said, "can go f--- themselves."

I await your response.

Sincerely,

Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C.

Barack Obama: The Black Jimmy Carter

Barack Obama: The Black Jimmy Carter
Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, September 23, 2009

On Sept. 16, ex-president Jimmy Carter excoriated opponents of President Barack Obama as racists. "I think people who [attack] Obama have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he should not be president because he happens to be African-American," Carter blathered.

Obama's spokespeople quickly backed away from Carter's statements; Obama went so far as to remind David Letterman that he was black before the presidential election, and that the American public had elected him anyway.

The fact is this: the American public is not racist. In fact, we're downright evenhanded -- we elect incompetents of all color to high office. We don't just elect Jimmy Carter president -- we elect the black Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama.

Obama resembles Carter in virtually every way. Carter handed over the Panama Canal, built by the United States, to leftist dictator Omar Torrijos; Obama is currently in the process of handing over Honduras to leftist would-be dictator Manuel Zelaya, and he has already kowtowed to Venezuelan leftist dictator Hugo Chavez, Nicaraguan communist dictator Daniel Ortega and Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro.

Carter hated Israel, and along with his National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, sought to undermine it; Obama, along with covert foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, hates Israel and seeks to undermine it. Brzezinski came out this week in favor of American forces shooting down Israeli jets headed to Iran to bomb their nuclear reactors. Obama used the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashana as an opportunity to push Israel into concessions to Arab terrorists (his Ramadan message, by contrast, praised the contributions of Islam and pledged America's "unyielding" support for a Palestinian state).

Carter surrendered Afghanistan to the Soviets; Obama is on the verge of surrendering Afghanistan to the Taliban.

Carter pushed for nuclear disarmament. Under his administration, officials at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the U.S. State Department and the White House met with leaders of the disarmament movement. He offered a personal endorsement for SANE, the nation's leading disarmament organization. Carter even cited a discussion with his 9-year-old daughter, Amy, about nuclear weaponry. Obama is no less committed to unilateral U.S. disarmament. He recently surrendered the missile defense shield over Eastern Europe, and he has repeatedly stated that his goal is a "world without nuclear weapons" -- a goal that demonstrates naivete bordering on the treasonous (Russia, China, Iran and North Korea will never disarm their weaponry or stop development without some form of coercion).

Carter inflated the currency dramatically. Under Carter, the inflation rate started at 6.5 percent in 1977 and increased each year, ending at 13.5 percent in 1980. Under Obama, the nation's monetary supply (bank reserves and currency in circulation) has increased by over 100 percent since September 2008.

Carter attempted to control private markets through price controls on gas, which naturally caused the famous gas station lines -- and he tried to levy price controls on medicine and other consumer prices, too. Obama has nationalized or heavily regulated key industries: the car industry, the student loan industry and much of the nation's key financial infrastructure.

Carter wanted to impose a national health insurance system. His plan: regulated minimum health insurance paid for by businesses; public coverage for the poor and elderly; and a public option to sell coverage to the uncovered. Sound familiar? It should. Obama has been pushing a more extreme version of the Carter plan.

Carter was a racist back in his day. Upon his return to Georgia after serving in the Navy, Carter joined the Sumter County School Board, where he supported segregation. He called his segregationist Lt. Gov. Lester Maddox "the essence of the Democratic Party." When Carter campaigned for governor, he labeled himself a "redneck" -- surely a code word in early 1970s Georgia. Obama, too, is a racist -- his spiritual mentor was Jeremiah "United States of KKKA" Wright, he surrounds himself with folks like Van "White People Pollute Black Communities" Jones, and he is married to Michelle "I've Never Been Proud of My Country" Obama.

To be sure, there are many ways in which President Obama is even more extreme than Carter. Obama has used the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency) to push his re-election campaign; he has blackmailed private businesses in order to get them to support his proposals; he has threatened political opponents with "diversity" regulation in an attempt to shut them up.

But in the largest sense, Obama and Carter bear striking and disturbing resemblances. We can only hope they bear one last resemblance: a one-term presidency.

5 Reasons Obama's Election Is Bad For Race Relations

5 Reasons Obama's Election Is Bad For Race Relations
John Hawkins
Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Because of our nation's extremely complex history with racial issues, there have never been any "good old days" for race relations in America. We began as a slaveholding nation that simultaneously held the contradictory belief that "all men were created equal," actually fought a civil war in large part over slavery, and eventually we moved on from government mandated discrimination against black Americans for their skin color to government mandated discrimination against white Americans for their skin color.

Because of our tumultuous, knurly history, opinions over race vary wildly. Some people, many of whom grew up with ugly bigotry during the sixties, talk about the country today as if Democrats like Bull Connor and George Wallace were still representative of the views of many Americans. On the other hand, some Americans deny racism exists at all -- although most Americans, quite wisely, fall somewhere in between.

Against this backdrop came Barack Obama with an unspoken promise: elect me as President and America can put race in the rear view mirror once and for all. After all, if Americans elected a black President, how racist could the country really be? Moreover, if, as many liberals claimed, Barack Obama would win the presidency unless America is racist, then didn't his victory mean America isn't racist?

Over the long haul, Barack Obama's victory will probably improve race relations in America, but over the short haul? Not so much. There are several reasons why that's the case.

1) Black Democrats put race first to elect Obama: It's no longer a surprise when black Democrats vote as an almost monolithic block for Democratic candidates over Republicans. It's just something that has come to be expected.

However, when black Americans started voting for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton by the same lopsided margins that people normally saw in general elections, it sent a simple message: With black Americans, race comes first. If white Americans felt the same way, there's certainly no way that Barack Obama could ever have been elected President.

Additionally, many white Americans pride themselves on having internalized Martin Luther King's immortal words,

"I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." It's rather discouraging to know that the overwhelming majority of black Americans only believe those words when it suits their purposes.

2) After Obama's election, many white Americans stopped taking racism seriously: Over the long haul, this will be a fairly healthy development. Too many people have used racism as an all-purpose excuse for their failures in life. But, after a black man with mediocre qualifications rose all the way up to the become President of the United States, it seems natural to ask how much of an impediment race can really be in America?

Certainly racism still exists, but in many people's eyes, it's just no longer a credible excuse for failure. This change in attitude is going to be difficult for a lot of black Americans to accept and many white Americans need to be careful not to allow themselves to be fooled into thinking racism is non-existent, as opposed to rare, because of Obama's victory.

3) The race card is being played constantly: Pre-Obama, Democrats often played the race card for political advantage because it usually worked. Right or wrong, good or bad, when someone cried "racist," more often than not, he got his way.

Because of that, the temptation to play the race card proved to be just too much to resist for the Democratic Party after Obama got into office. So, despite the fact that Obama came to power promising unity, what we've gotten instead is incessant cries of racism over everything. Any effective attacks on Obama? Racism. Any opposition to his agenda? Racism. Any opposition at all to Obama? Racism.

That playing of the race card has been so ever present and so over-the-top that what was once a political trump card has been reduced to a Two-of Clubs that usually produces little more than eye rolling. That's not good for the actual victims of racism, nor is it good for the legions of Americans who are genuinely offended because they've been falsely accused of being racists.

4) Obama's exploitation of the race card: Barack Obama is playing an extremely cynical game with the race card. Although his administration has slipped up and used it a couple of times ("Henry Louis Gates" & "Nation of Cowards"), Obama has generally tried to stay away from racial issues.

However, it's also worth noting what Obama DOESN'T DO. He doesn't ask his supporters to stop crying "racism." So, everyone who opposes him politically gets smeared as a racist, while he doesn't have to personally get his hands dirty. For a cynical, sleazy, manipulative politician, it's the best of both worlds. For the rest of the country, it's an ugly game that serves the country poorly.

5) Obama is no Jackie Robinson: Because he's the first black President, Barack Obama's presidency is particularly meaningful to black Americans just as Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier meant a lot for the same reasons.

However, there is a huge difference between the two men: Jackie Robinson was genuinely talented. He ended up being Major League baseball's first Rookie of the Year. On the other hand, Obama is a bumbling, corrupt, megalomaniacal train wreck who has been a disaster at home and a weakling abroad. He can already legitimately be compared to the worst Presidents in American history -- yet, his approval rating with black Americans is still above 90%.

How healthy is it for the country to have 92% of black Americans approving of the job Obama is doing while only 42% of white Americans approve? When the gulf is that wide -- and getting wider -- what message does that send to both sides of the divide? Nothing good, I can assure you.

Our Irredeemable International System

Our Irredeemable International System
Caroline Glick
Monday, September 21, 2009

Our international institutions are irredeemably corrupted. From the United Nations to the International Criminal Court and their affiliate and subordinate bodies, these institutions are rotten at their core.

It isn't that they don't function. They function just fine. The problem is that through their regular functioning, they advance goals antithetical to those they were established to achieve. Instead of promoting global security, human rights, freedom and international peace, they facilitate war and aggression, human suffering and tyranny.

The UN General Assembly is now convening its 64th session. As they do every year, heads of state from across the globe are descending on the Big Apple to participate in the proceedings. As they convene, their agenda will demonstrate the failings of the UN. On the one hand, they will consider the UN Human Rights Council's latest broadside against Israel, which comes this week in the form of the UNHRC's 575-page report of its probe of Israel's behavior in its military campaign against the Hamas terror regime in Gaza this past December and January.

On the other hand, they will not give the slightest consideration to the fact that Iran is about to become a nuclear power, in contempt of its international obligations, and so is poised to become the gravest threat to international security in the past 25 years. Moreover, they will pay no attention to the fact that as it sprints toward the nuclear finishing line, the Iranian regime is engaged in a systematic and brutal repression of its political opponents, who since the stolen June 12 presidential election have been clamoring for freedom and democracy.

Both in its treatment of Israel and in its treatment of the Iranian regime, the UN demonstrates that its practices are an inversion of its stated mission. Despite its leaders' and supporters' repeated claims to the contrary, the UN stands shoulder to shoulder with tyrants and aggressors against democrats and democracies seeking to advance the causes of freedom, human rights and international security.

MANY ISRAELIS reacted angrily to the UNHRC's probe of Israel's prosecution of Operation Cast Lead, claiming that its final report presents Israel - a liberal democracy - as the moral equivalent of Hamas - an illegal terrorist organization dedicated to the commission of genocide against Israelis. Yet in their anger, they missed the real problem with the report.

As Prof. Avi Bell from Bar Ilan University law school notes, Richard Goldstone's report does not present Israel and Hamas as moral equivalents. Rather, it presents Israel as terrorist and Hamas as a legitimate government.

The Goldstone Report does not accept as fact that Hamas is a terrorist organization and that consequently, in accordance with binding UN Security Council resolutions, all UN member states are required to work to disband it and give no quarter to its members and supporters. Instead it treats Hamas - which is charter-bound to a policy of genocide against Jews and rose to power through a campaign of murder and intimidation - as the legitimate governing authority in Gaza, which, the report's authors irrationally claim, is simultaneously governed by an Israeli occupation four years after Israel withdrew its civilians and military forces from the area. In the UNHRC's parallel universe, Hamas is the only lawful actor in town. Israel - and the Palestinian Authority under Fatah - are guilty of illegally persecuting Hamas by arresting its members.

Hamas, which is working to establish a terrorist Islamic theocracy in Gaza, is not seen as systematically violating human rights and freedom. Israel is. Since it downplayed the 12,000 rockets, mortars and missiles that Hamas and its terror affiliates in Gaza have shelled southern Israel with during the eight years preceding Operation Cast Lead, the Goldstone Commission was unable to understand the overwhelming popularity the operation enjoyed among the Israeli public. Consequently, their report attributed that public support to Israel's abrogation of the civil liberties of the operation's opponents.

In contrast, the Goldstone Report downplays the importance of Hamas's systematic persecution of women, Christians and its political opponents.

And so it goes. For 575 pages, rather than promote the cause of human rights as one would expect from the UN's Human Rights Council, the Goldstone Report promotes a fiction of Israeli criminality and Hamas victimization. That is, it promotes the cause of human rights abusers against human rights defenders.

Many Israelis have expressed disgust with Goldstone, a South African Jew who purports to "love Israel."

This is a reasonable reaction, for Goldstone indeed disgraced himself by leading this commission. But the fact is that the report would have drawn the same conclusions based on the same lies regardless of who led the commission. By its very nature, the UNHRC is incapable of doing anything else. Like the UN itself, it is a body dominated by dictatorships and supported by leftist elites who love them. Its political agenda, of supporting dictatorships on the one hand and attacking Israel on the other, is indistinguishable from that of the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

THEN THERE is Iran. Before he flies to New York for his annual visit, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad intends to finish off his political opponents back home.

Friday is Jerusalem Day in Iran. Jerusalem Day is the day the regime organizes mass demonstrations throughout the country calling for Israel's destruction. The regime's democratic opponents, who since the stolen June 12 election have been doggedly maintaining their protests against Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the police state they run, are planning to use the day to stage renewed protests. Aware of their intention, Khamenei warned that anyone demonstrating for anything other than Israel's destruction will be severely punished. Reports abound of the regime's plan to use the day to arrest opposition leaders Mir Hossain Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, who both ran against Ahmadinejad in June.

Friday would be a good day to arrest them. After all, now that the US has agreed to hold negotiations with Ahmadinejad's representatives next month about whatever Iran would like to discuss, the Americans have lost any residual leverage they still held over Iran. Today it is Ahmadinejad, not the US or the UN Security Council, who sets the agendas and conditions for meetings. And Ahmadinejad can be certain that in light of this, no one will utter a peep if on the eve of his trip to America, he arrests or even murders his chief political opponents.

In the weeks following the election, before the regime began its crackdown and arrested, killed, tortured and raped thousands of its opponents, many of the demonstrators held signs demanding to know where the UN was. Why, they wished to know, was no one at the UN supporting them in their demands for democracy and human rights? Why was there no international community standing at their side as they sought to bring down the most dangerous regime on earth - a regime that has made genocide a strategic goal and is steadily working to acquire the means to commit genocide through nuclear war even as it murders its own people?

And that's the thing of it. The same UN that appoints a new commission to criminalize Israel seemingly on a weekly basis, has been a major facilitator of Iran's nuclear weapons program.

First, for three years, from 2003 until 2005, the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency ignored mountains of evidence that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons and refused to refer the issue to the Security Council. Then, after the IAEA finally referred the issue to it, the Security Council failed to pass anything but the mildest of sanctions against Iran. Worse than doing nothing to prevent Teheran from acquiring nuclear weapons, these Security Council sanctions actually facilitated the Iranian program. While passing ineffective sanctions, the council gave the appearance of addressing the issue and so made it impossible for individual states to convince other states to adopt harsher, and perhaps more effective measures - like for instance cutting off trade with Iran or divesting from companies that trade with Iran - outside the Security Council.

DUE TO the UN's unvarnished belligerence toward it, in recent years a consensus has formed in Israel that there is nothing to be gained from cooperating with this openly and dangerously hostile body. Reflecting this consensus, Israel's leaders, from former prime minister Ehud Olmert to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to President Shimon Peres, are united in their condemnation of the Goldstone Report.

For a time during president George W. Bush's first term in office, the US also recognized that the UN and the UN-based international system is irredeemably corrupt. Bush and his senior advisers spoke of the need to build international coalitions of willing governments to advance the causes of international security, human rights and freedom that the UN and its affiliated bodies are inherently incapable of advancing. Although this policy received public support at home, it provoked fierce opposition among the US foreign policy elites in Washington and in the media and among their allies on the political Left.

Due to their criticism, by his second term in office, Bush agreed to give the UN a leading role in dictating US foreign policy. He subordinated American policy to the Security Council on the issue of Iran's nuclear weapons program and cooperated with the UN as it advanced its openly anti-Israel agenda, even increasing US funding of such anti-Israel groups as UNRWA.

Bush's eventual surrender to the establishment set the course for what under President Barack Obama has become a cornerstone of US foreign policy. Unlike Bush, Obama has enthusiastically embraced the notion that the UN should by rights have a leading role in international affairs. He has also accepted the UN's basic notion that in the interest of world peace, the US and its democratic allies should bow to the desires of despots and dictators.

So it is that this week he abandoned US allies Poland and the Czech Republic in his bid to appease Russia. So it is that his administration has sided with ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, who, with the support of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, sought to undermine Honduran democracy against Honduras's lawful government and democratic defenders. So it is that the administration has sided with the genocidal mullahs in Teheran over their democratic opponents. So it is that the administration has adopted the view that Israel is to blame for the absence of peace in the Middle East and embraced as legitimate political actors Palestinian terror groups that refuse to accept Israel's right to exist.

Until Obama came along, Israel could afford not to make too much of the fact that its enemies control the UN-led system of international institutions, because it could trust that the US would use its Security Council veto to prevent these forces from causing it any real harm. This is no longer the case. With the Obama administration fully on board the UN agenda, Israel and other threatened democracies like Honduras, Poland, the Czech Republic, South Korea and Japan will have to loudly proclaim the UN-based international system's inherent moral, political and legal corruption and seek ways to undermine and weaken its power.