Mitt Romney Foreign Policy Speech at VMI – Video

Obama wants to have an “alert system” if massacres on the ground in Libya

Come on Barack. A pathetic pretense of caring.

He’s lecturing about history.

You know, Mr. President. You will either be a footnote or go down as one of the worst presidents this country has ever suffered.

Obama as Hamlet.

Obama: Being president of China would be easier

Then you could just use tanks on your own people, no alert system operable.

…I’m reminded of 2007, when he was campaigning. It was all there (since then I remembered how to spell judgment):

On the Daily Show last night, Obama claimed he doesn’t need experience to be President, just good judgement. (The Swamp has the clip.)Did he use good judgement when he threatened to unilaterally invade an ally? Commander Obama.

Did he use good judgement when asked what he would do if two US cities had just suffered a terrorist nuclear attack? He talked about Katrina, “The first thing we’d have to do is make sure we’ve got an effective emergency reponse.” Mayor Barack.

Do we want a president who is cozy and bankrolled by a slightly unhinged anti-Semite like George Soros? Are we comfortable with a president who chooses a church by its leader who thinks black separatism is OK and Ghadaffi, who blew up an American jetliner, is a good guy? Apologist Barack.

…I give credit to the president for staying the course in Afghanistan, with General Petraeus. But that’s only because he was boxed in during the campaign by calling it the good war, hoping he would never have to do anything about it again. And no one in the world should expect any substantive help on anything from this president–despite his posturing during the campaign at the Brandenburg Gate.

Nor does anyone in the U.S., except his union buddies.

–crossposted at BackyardConservative

Brave Iranian Women Hold Hands

They have to be brave. Video via Gateway Pundit. WSJ story on National Student Day:

Student activists in Iran said that under the past year’s crackdown on the opposition and student activism, their demands have grown.

“A lot of students hoped until last year that the Islamic Republic could be reformed but many of us think this system needs a complete overhaul,” said a student from a northeastern city in Iran.

Opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, as well as former Presidents Mohamad Khatami and Hashemi Rafsanjani, issued statements of support for the occasion and encouraged students to not give up.

“You must have hope; you must try and not fear the heavy price you have to pay,” Mr. Khatami said in a statement posted on Iranian websites.

Iran continues to develop the bomb while attempting to loosen economic sanctions. For those who worry about how the Iranian people will fare if we instead tighten them, keep in mind Iran’s leaders and its Revolutionary Guard are kleptocrats, stealing the country blind.

Sticky Wiki Morality

No Sheeples has covered the subject admirably in the previous two posts. Victor Davis Hanson explores the man-child playing god that is Julian Assange.

The closest I can come to judging this lack of morality play is in the context of school board meetings. The agenda was online, the attachment packet could be picked up a few days in advance, the meetings were on cable, and there was room for public comment. The board retired to the back room only to discuss personnel issues.

And there still could be incredible rancor.

It is very telling that the Obama administration is only now getting exercised about this all legally when diplomats and their administration’s cover is being blown. It was pretty much OK for our military and friends in Iraq and Afghanistan to be exposed–you know when actual lives, not reputations were at stake.

But why are we surprised by the dangerous, yes dangerous vanity of this presidency.

 

 

Child Emperor’s White House As Nervous As A Virgin At A Prison Rodeo Over Latest WikiLeaks Bombshells

Der Spiegel quoted the State Department as saying that President Barack Obama “prefers to look East rather than West,” and “has no feelings for Europe”.  That’s the last sentence in a two-page article at The Nation.

With statements like the one above, is it any wonder that our American Child Emperor is bracing himself for the body blows sure to come his way from the latest document dump from WikiLeaks?

Toby Harnden, writing for The Telegraph, succinctly portrays the diplomatic cables this way:

“The ramifications for Mr. Obama could be enormous. With his popularity flagging at home, one of his remaining political strengths has been his high standing abroad—assiduously cultivated in a series of speeches in which he apologized for past U.S. actions and promised a kinder, gentler America.”  He further added, “He was the type of American president, apparently straight from a West Wing episode, that Europeans had dreamed of.”

It is fair to say now, as it has been for the past two years, that America’s Child Emperor has no clothes.  The reason I quote Harnden here is because his observations about this president and this administration are candid.  America’s corporate-controlled media habitually treats facts with imagination.  Reality bites and doesn’t let go. “The Messiah” they helped to elect and failed miserably at vetting is proving to be a monumental lapse in their collective judgment.  Harnden does not pander to his readers.

Harnden points out that during the 2008 election campaign, a cable written by Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the British ambassador to Washington, was leaked to The Daily Telegraph.

In it, Sir Nigel noted that Obama “does betray a highly educated and upper middle class mindset,” that he was “maybe aloof, insensitive” at times and that charges of elitism were “not entirely unfair”.

The assessment about his personality has been borne out over time but the Obama operation despised leaks, was highly protective of Obama’s carefully-crafted life “narrative” and extremely sensitive to any criticism. Now the shoe is on the other foot.

Here’s the money quote from Harnden:  “Once the WikiLeaks release happens, Mr. Obama will no doubt offer emollient words and reassurance. Unfortunately for him, however, he is likely to find that the power of his words will now be greatly diminished abroad as well as at home.”

You can read more about the WikiLeaks revelations at Memeorandum.

Hillary’s Tremulous Foreign Policy

Not earning plaudits, but maybe Hugo was right.

Earthquakes dog Clinton on overseas trips…

Perhaps you should stay overseas, though, Hillary, we have enough issues at home.

I suggest a visit to the Ahmadinejad manse.

–crossposted at BackyardConservative

Building the Next Bailout…and BUST

TWS:

In July, Illinois went to market with a $900 million BAB issue that attracted 93 investors, including 17 from overseas. The international investors accounted for about 30 percent of the offering. Illinois state officials even joined their underwriters, Citigroup, on a road show through Europe and Asia to drum up interest in the sale.

Setting up the next bust in Illinois and around the country.

Screwing up the current one. From e21 Morning eBrief:

In Foreclosure Controversy, Problems Run Deeper Than Flawed Paperwork (Round Up)Millions of U.S. mortgages have been shuttled around the global financial system – sold and resold by firms – without the documents that traditionally prove who legally owns the loans. Now, as many of these loans have fallen into default and banks have sought to seize homes, judges around the country have increasingly ruled that lenders had no right to foreclose, because they lacked clear title. The court decisions, should they continue to spread, could call into doubt the ownership of mortgages throughout the country, raising urgent challenges for both the real estate market and the wider financial system. The White House has announced that President Obama will pocket veto H.R. 3808 which would have allowed banks to shortcut the current notarization process. See Alphaville for and the Washington Post for more more.

Goldman Sachs: The US Economy Is Weaker Than You Think (Seeking Alpha)Goldman Sachs issued a very bullish note on the Euro this morning. Not because they think Europe is entering a period of robust growth. No, in fact they reduced their estimates for European growth based on the recent Euro strength; however, they see the U.S. economy simply deteriorating more than Europe. The chart in this presentation that jumped out was the ISM’s index compared to the orders & inventories. The orders and inventories data shows a very strong leading indication of future ISM growth. Currently, the orders and inventories data is forecasting ISM readings in the low 40s.

Peggy Noonan on Greece and America’s reaction:

Mr. Lewis: “The Greek state was not just corrupt but also corrupting. Once you saw how it worked you could understand a phenomenon which otherwise made no sense at all: the difficulty Greek people have saying a kind word about one another. . . . Everyone is pretty sure everyone is cheating on his taxes, or bribing politicians, or taking bribes, or lying about the value of his real estate. And this total absence of faith in one another is self-reinforcing. The epidemic of lying and cheating and stealing makes any sort of civic life impossible.”

Thus can great nations, great cultures, disintegrate, break into little pieces that no longer cohere into a whole.

Read it all.

Outrage. Outrage.

This election is so damned important.

Related post: Obama Desperately Trying to Save His Own Senate Seat

–crossposted at BackyardConservative (I’m going crazy, people)

Afghan Election Today: Women Vote

Early reports are mixed, some promising:

In the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar in the south, voters ventured out in small groups despite rocket strikes and bomb blasts. One bomb targeted the convoy of Gov. Tooryalai Wesa as it drove between voting centers but no one was injured, police officer Abdul Manan said.

Wesa still urged Kandaharis to come out and vote.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said. “The enemy wants the election to fail, so if you want the insurgents out of your land, you’ll have to come out and vote.”

Voters even lined up in the Zhari district, west of Kandahar city, where Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s radical Islamic movement was born 16 years ago. Hundreds of Afghan and international troops secured the area.

And it appears some women are engaging in vote fraud:

“The women coming here have so many cards that don’t have the stamp and are not real cards but still they are voting,” said Nazreen, a monitor for the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan, which has dispatched observers throughout the country.

Fake voter cards flooded into Afghanistan ahead of the balloting, but election officials had promised that poll workers were trained to spot them.

NATO’S senior civilian representative said some fraud was expected, and that it would not necessarily undermine the vote.

“The real issue is the scale of that and does it affect the result. And does it affect the credibility of the election, not in our eyes but in the eyes of the Afghan people,” Mark Sedwill said.

Interesting.

P.S. Nina Burleigh in Huffpo: A Holy War on Women:

If anyone still doubted, or hadn’t noticed, that misogyny is the fundamental pillar on which radical Islam is based, the news that poison gas was pumped into girls’ schools in Afghanistan, likely by the Taliban, ought to confirm it.

I’m with you, Nina.

–crossposted at BackyardConservative

A few from J-Ru

Some great stuff from Jennifer Rubin today. I don’t know how she does it. A sampling:

Is Obama Trying to Force BP Into Bankruptcy?

As for the bullying of business, this is simply the natural extension of the administration’s abject lawlessness — stomping on the rights of car-company bond holders, snatching bonuses away from AIG executives, pushing for mortgage cram-downs — which views contracts and statutes as mere annoyances. This is what comes from electing people with no private-sector experience and no understanding that the rule of law is central to our economic prosperity.

Giving Hamas a Helping Hand

Obama’s efforts in ways big and bigger are destructive to our own credibility, to the security of our allies, to our efforts to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran, and to the American people, who have had far too much of their hard-earned money confiscated for idiotic purposes under this administration. But few match this one.

Lindsey Graham Discovers Cap-and-Trade is a Bad Idea

Lindsey Graham has had an encounter with reality — whether it is political or scientific is uncertain. But for whatever reason, he is starting to make sense:

How close is the Senate to a bipartisan climate deal? Here’s the Democrats’ best hope for compromise — Lindsey Graham, at a press conference today: “The science about global warming has changed. … I think the science is in question. … I think they’ve oversold the stuff.”

You don’t say.

Read the rest.

If America Fails, Freedom Dies

The NY Times’s Friedman wants China for a day? What would the world be like if it was all China, all the time. Or worse, as Obama’s America cedes (!)  its leadership. Feckless Europe on bended knee. (Cut off your head)

If America Fails, Freedom Dies.

More. Heritage Morning Bell: Slouching Towards Irrelevance

Thursday various & sundry

Off prompter, Obama bares his statist soul: “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” Of course he thinks that. When it comes to other peoples’ money. But he certainly seems to enjoy his own wealth. Edited to add JP Friere’s take on Obama’s $5 million-plus income.

An aside from Andy McCarthy’s immigration piece:

In his spare time, on April 8, President Obama signed an arms-reduction treaty with Russia. He urges swift ratification of the accord even though, as former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton observes, important provisions are still being negotiated. In the spirit of the times, though, the pact would become the law of the land before those details are finalized, while its authors either don’t know what it says or are lying about it. Administration officials told Arizona Republican Sens. Jon Kyl and John McCain — who will be central to the Senate’s ratification debate — that the treaty referred to missile defense only in the hortatory, non-binding preamble. Yet when the senators looked at the treaty’s binding terms, they found, right there in black and white, a provision (Art. V, para. 3) that would require the United States to refrain from placing “defense interceptors” in existing missile launchers — a severe compromise of American national security.

Read the whole thing.

In Quincy, IL, it’s the riot squad vs. your gramma. There must have been a threat we’re not privy to, right? But the photos tell a story of, er, a disproportionate response. Supply your own bingo/peach cobbler jokes.

Too bad more of that strength hasn’t been applied at our borders.  Gov. Jan Brewer makes an impregnable case for signing Arizona’s new law: The federal government dropped the ball, and her state’s citizens are being harmed.

Brewer, on whether AZ feels “abandoned” by nat’l leaders on immigration: “Since I’ve been governor since last January, I have written numerous letters to the administration in regards to securing our borders with absolutely no response. So we have been facing this crisis, and it’s devastating the people of Arizona. And I feel as governor I have a responsibility to protect the citizens. We’ve been inundated with criminal activity. It’s been outrageous.”

More Brewer: “And we’re not going to put up with it any longer. And I hope that now we’ve got senate bill 1070 signed and ready to go into law that we’ll get somebody’s attention. But it is the federal government’s responsibility to secure our borders. Our states cannot sustain it.”

Brewer, on Obama calling the bill “misguided”: “He has a right to say whatever he wants to say. But ‘misguided’ — I think he’s wrong. I have a responsibility to the people of Arizona. And I’m sure he’s concerned because of the brouhaha and over-dramatic comments about racial profiling. I made perfectly clear when I signed the bill that we would not tolerate racial profiling. It’s illegal.”

And even before he became president, Obama was a force against, rather than for, securing our borders. Jennifer Rubin quotes Lynn Sweet from 2008:

“When it came time to putting that bill together, he was more of a problem than he was a help. And when it came time to try to get the bill passed, he, in my opinion, broke the agreement we had. He was in the photo op, but he could not execute the hard part of the deal,” Graham said,” Graham said.

J-Ru comments:

So will Broder add Obama to the list of culprits? Well, here’s an easy way for Obama to redeem himself: have the McCain-Kennedy bill reintroduced and fight for its passage. After all, there is a large Democratic majority now. Or does Obama want an issue, and not a bill? We’ll find out whether he’s up to his old tricks — or whether he really is interested in solving the immigration problem, which Arizona and the other states must cope with.

I think we all know the answer to that one.

When smart power fails

This is pretty scary.

John McCain and William Jacobson already knew that Obama has no Iran nuclear strategy. But now it’s official.  NYT:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has warned in a secret three-page memorandum to top White House officials that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability, according to government officials familiar with the document.

Several officials said the highly classified analysis, written in January to President Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, came in the midst of an intensifying effort inside the Pentagon, the White House and the intelligence agencies to develop new options for Mr. Obama. They include a set of military alternatives, still under development, to be considered should diplomacy and sanctions fail to force Iran to change course.

Jennifer Rubin comments:

Really, it’s jaw-dropping that, at this stage, Gates must sound the alarm, reminding everyone that nothing they’ve done so far has or is likely to work. Indeed, it’s hard to see how what the Obami are presently doing won’t impair those military options. After all, Obama is giving the Iranians cover to move ahead with their nuclear program while the UN dithers over negotiations about ineffective sanctions. The problem, we must conclude, is Obama, himself, who seems blissfully unaware of his own inadequate and misguided efforts. (”Some officials said his memo should be viewed in that light: as a warning to a relatively new president that the United States was not adequately prepared. He wrote the memo after Iran had let pass a 2009 deadline set by Mr. Obama to respond to his offers of diplomatic engagement.”)

Allahpundit’s take:

Of course they didn’t prepare alternatives. How could they possibly fathom that diplomacy might fail? The core plank of “smart power,” such as it is, has always been the Obama charm offensive. Simply by being the anti-Bush and offering an open hand to Iran, he would convince Tehran to unclench its fist and open a dialogue. Bush was the problem (he always is!) and once the problem was removed, solutions would inevitably follow. So why bother developing a Plan B? The result: Iran’s now enriching uranium to 20 percent purity and rolling out advanced centrifuges, which means nuclear “breakout” capacity, i.e. the ability to build a bomb quickly even if they haven’t yet done so, won’t be long in coming.

Hubris can bring down more than just the tragic hero. Obama’s ego is a national, even international, liability.

Not an accident

Sad:

It’s worse than you thought, Victor. It’s not confusion at all. It’s a campaign to cut America down to size.

– Michael Ledeen

He’s talking about foreign policy but the same might be said for Obama’s domestic agenda.

Read the rest.

Shoes for Obama

Who’s A Terrorist Now?