Kerry, Obama, and the Turkish Prime Minister John Kerry’s recent rebuke of Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for “inflammatory verbal attacks on Israel” stands in sharp contrast to Barack Obama’s long-established indifference to them. In the three months prior to Obama’s speeches in Turkey in early April (6-7) of 2009, Jewish life had been […]
Can you just imagine that the Normandy Invasion had been hinted at, and bruited about in the news by pundits, legislators and military men who all hinted that a strike was coming but, then backed off because “sanctions” needed time to work?
Or, if the nation most immediately threatened kept moving the “red line” and the goal post assisted by a seditious media and the Don Quixotes of Israeli politics?
To every hawkish thrust there is a pacifist parry…..yup thrust with a sword and deflect with a carrot—-namely, more threats that there will be even more and greater threats.
What a spectacle.
And, by the way, that Son of a Ron is now a hero? Puleez! Read Daniel Greenfield’s notes today.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/342522/while-you-werent-looking-obama-kills-military-commissions-andrew-c-mccarthy In the blink of an eye, the second Obama term has turned the clock back to the pre-9/11 days, when al-Qaeda was a law-enforcement problem, not a national-security challenge. Remember the great ruckus over the administration’s attempt to give Khalid Sheik Mohammed & Co. a civilian trial in lower Manhattan? In what would, in […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/342568 It was Wednesday, shortly before Senator Rand Paul’s bravura 13-hour filibuster, the Jimmy Stewart star turn in Paul’s crusade to have the Constitution ban a bogeyman of his own making: the killing of American citizens on American soil by America’s armed forces — a scandal that clearly cries out for action, having occurred exactly […]
WHERE THE GOVERNMENT SEES, IT CAN SEND A DRONE…
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/342564
I shall leave it to others to argue the legal and constitutional questions surrounding drones, but they are not without practical application. For the last couple of years, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, has had Predator drones patrolling the U.S. border. No, silly, not the southern border. The northern one. You gotta be able to prioritize, right? At Derby Line, Vt., the international frontier runs through the middle of the town library and its second-floor opera house. If memory serves, the stage and the best seats are in Canada, but the concession stand and the cheap seats are in America. Despite the zealots of Homeland Security’s best efforts at afflicting residents of this cross-border community with ever more obstacles to daily life, I don’t recall seeing any Predator drones hovering over Non-Fiction E–L. But, if there are, I’m sure they’re entirely capable of identifying which delinquent borrower is a Quebecer and which a Vermonter before dispatching a Hellfire missile to vaporize him in front of the Large Print Romance shelves.
I’m a long, long way from Rand Paul’s view of the world (I’m basically a 19th-century imperialist a hundred years past sell-by date), but I’m far from sanguine about America’s drone fever. For all its advantages to this administration — no awkward prisoners to be housed at Gitmo, no military casualties for the evening news — the unheard, unseen, unmanned drone raining down death from the skies confirms for those on the receiving end al-Qaeda’s critique of its enemies: As they see it, we have the best technology and the worst will; we choose aerial assassination and its attendant collateral damage because we are risk-averse, and so remote, antiseptic, long-distance, computer-programmed warfare is all that we can bear. Our technological strength betrays our psychological weakness.
And in a certain sense they’re right: Afghanistan is winding down, at best, to join the long list of America’s unwon wars, in which, 48 hours after departure, there will be no trace that we were ever there. The guys with drones are losing to the guys with fertilizer — because they mean it, and we don’t. The drone thus has come to symbolize the central defect of America’s “war on terror,” which is that it’s all means and no end: We’re fighting the symptoms rather than the cause.
http://news.yahoo.com/egypt-angry-fans-torch-soccer-federation-111211284.html
CAIRO (AP) — Fans of Cairo’s Al-Ahly club have stormed Egypt’s soccer federation headquarters, setting it ablaze in anger after a court acquitted seven of nine police officials on trial for their alleged role in a deadly stadium melee last year.
Fire also swept through a nearby police club, but it was not immediately clear whether Al-Ahly fans were responsible for that blaze as well. Heavy black smoke billowed out of the rose-colored, three-story neocolonial building in central Cairo.
The fires followed a court verdict earlier Saturday that confirmed death sentences against 21 people for their role in the 2012 riot that killed 74 people after a game in the city of Port Said. The court also sentenced two senior police officers to 15 years in prison, but acquitted seven other security officials.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2013/03/friday-afternoon-roundup-senator-from.html
THE ROUNDUP
Rusty at The Jawa Report has a comprehensive and well thought out piece on the strategy for Obama and Rand Paul. I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s well worth a read.
Since the majority of the American people have not actually read the Holder memo on drone strikes, they simply do not know that the Administration never asserted a right to assassinate Americans on US soil.
Rand Paul knows this.
What he’s asking the Administration to do is prove that they don’t believe something which they never claimed they believe.
I can’t believe that even he believes the slippery slope argument that he’s making. I’m also not sure the political game he’s playing or what he thinks he’ll get out of this. He’s certainly getting a lot of attention and a lot of support from the Right.
…
Which is why Holder’s answer is so puzzling. If the administration wanted to clear the air why didn’t they just tell Sen. Ryan, “No, we can’t do that”?
Isn’t the answer simple? They don’t want to clear the air. They want to keep this political maelstrom going. They want to distract the American people from, well, everything!
$16.5 trillion in debt.
The worst recovery in US history — ever!
Millions of people unemployed or underemployed.
And no end in site of the economic misery. Obama’s failures are simply the new normal.
But, look kids, the Republicans are so nutty!
Rand Paul may be scoring some personal political points by trying to drag this thing out for as long as possible. It may help him with several elements in the base.
Sure. Politicians play to their base. It’s a careerist game. The real story isn’t in what they say, it’s in what they do. Don’t read their lips. Read their votes.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
RAND PAUL/VAN JONES 2016
Here’s an easy way to tell when your position isn’t a conservative one. When you’re standing with Van Jones, your position isn’t a conservative one. When you’re standing with Code Pink, then your position is not a conservative one.No amount of noise or chest-beating is going to change that.
The Republican Party has taken a severe beating in the last year. With so many hopes down the drain, some will take a victory where they can find it, even if it’s a younger version of Ron Paul.
There are Conservative sites that are positively giddy about Rand Paul getting positive mentions from John Cusack and Van Jones. Code Pink’s endorsement is being treated like some kind of victory.Are we really getting worked up about getting a pat on the head from the left? Are we all Paultards now or are we all RINOs now?
Or is finding someone to the left of Obama to side with… supposed to be a victory for conservative principles?
“Will the Left finally get the Tea Party now?” Breitbart’s site asks. If Andrew Breitbart were alive, he could have answered that question in one four letter word.
The left “gets” the Tea Party. It gets it as a middle class bourgeois defense of its property and rights against the the rule of the left.
That is what the Tea Party is. That is what the Left is.
Even saner heads are calling Rand Paul’s filibuster a political victory. The only place that it’s a victory is in the echo chambers of a victory-starved party. And to Code Pink and Van Jones who are happy to see the Republican Party adopting their views.
The “brilliant victory” was that some Republicans tried to go further on the left than Obama on National Defense. Maybe next they can try to go further left than him on Immigration, Gay Marriage and Abortion.
And if that doesn’t work, Rand Paul and Jon Huntsman can get together on ending the War on Drugs.
http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2013/03/07/john-kerry-to-anti-semites-fans-of-911-we-%e2%9d%a4-you/?singlepage=true
IBRAHIM WAS CANCELLED BUT KERRY’S OBTUSENESS IS NEVER CANCELLED…..RSK
You can tell a lot about someone by looking at those he admires. Over at The Weekly Standard, Samuel Tadros has a melancholy piece [1] about some of the people the Obama administration admires. Tomorrow, March 8, our new secretary of State, John Kerry, aided by First Lady Michelle Obama, will be honoring ten women with the “International Women of Courage Award,” an honor given to “women around the globe who have shown exceptional courage and leadership in advocating for women’s rights and empowerment, often at great personal risk.”
Gosh. “Women’s rights and empowerment.” We’re for that, right? (Right?) But look a little closer. “Five of these awards,” Mr. Tadros reports,
are being given to women from Muslim-majority countries, underscoring the unique plight of women in those countries. The only problem is that one of the women to be recognized is an anti-Semite and supports the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
Gosh redux. Here we have Samira Ibrahim [2], whom the State Department’s profile [3] commends for having been “among seven women subjected by the Egyptian military to forced virginity tests in March 2011″ — it’s a sort of distinction — and for having been “arrested while in high school for writing a paper that criticized Arab leaders’ insincere support to the Palestinian cause.”
But when Ms. Ibrahim is not having forced virginity tests or deploring insincere support for the “Palestinian cause,” she finds time to espouse ideas that have nothing to do with women’s “rights and empowerment” and a lot to do with anti-Semitism and pro-terrorist sentiments. Take a look her Twitter postings [4]. Mr. Tadros quotes a post from last July: After five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver were killed in a suicide bombing attack, Ibrahim rejoiced: “An explosion on a bus carrying Israelis in Burgas airport in Bulgaria on the Black Sea. Today is a very sweet day with a lot of very sweet news.” How’s that for “women’s rights and empowerment”?
Mr. Tadros quotes several other Twitter postings, including this little bijoux about A. Hitler:
I have discovered with the passage of days, that no act contrary to morality, no crime against society, takes place, except with the Jews having a hand in it. Hitler.
And then there are her views on 9/11. As Mr. Tadors notes, when a mob was attacking the United States embassy in Cairo on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, Ibrahim wrote on Twitter: “Today is the anniversary of 9/11. May every year come with America burning.” You won’t find this posting on her account because, Mr. Tadors reports, “she deleted it a couple of hours later, but not before a screen shot [5] was saved by an Egyptian activist.”
So why are Michelle Obama and John Kerry honoring this woman? Why? Mr. Tadros is quite right: “The decision to honor Ibrahim reflects poorly on the State Department, which is either incapable of doing the minimum amount of research required to find out who she is, or does not care that the secretary of state and First Lady are about to honor an anti-Semite who longs for violence against Americans.”
The ceremony is scheduled for tomorrow, March 8. Were I in Washington, I would be tempted to picket it.
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2013/03/08/kerry-morsi-genital-mutilation/ If the State Department wants to advance the rights of Egyptian women, why not ask President Mohammed Morsi to support a ban on female genital mutilation, a horrific form of violence perpetrated on more than 90% of Egyptian women, according to the World Health Organization? The point of the mutilation is to destroy a […]
