We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Is it all about the 2012 election or about national security?Without a doubt, the domestic economy will weigh most heavily. But, the question and peril in the background will be whether matters abroad make the US safer or not and whether our leadership is up to the challenges.
President Obama is, to say the least, conflicted between his leanings toward disengagement from prior foreign commitments and realities on the ground. Potential Republican candidates are, to say the least, also conflicted between Republicans’ ordinary strong suit of sticktoitness abroad and most Americans’ war weariness.
The restrained, many say half-way and too weak or too unfocused, administration path in Libya has highlighted the divide. It comes down to attitudes of do the least, or if doing it do the job. Not even doing the least in Syria, comparable to a comparatively stronger involvement in Libya, further argues for the weakness at our helm.
Nonetheless, the potential Republican candidates as well as the administration’s loyalists continue to spin their PR as if the choices are similar to the 2008 election, if not the 2006, in the case of the Democrats wanting withdrawal, or not important enough to take a strong stand, in the case of Republicans.
Let’s step back, then, to President Bush’s courageous decision to surge in Iraq in 2007. This game changer accomplished our core objective, to set up an Iraq that would not be a sanctuary for terrorists or home of WMDs.
President Obama reluctantly approved a surge-light in Afghanistan while at the same time announcing a quick drawdown and withdrawal. What the American press has presented the public with since is the bravery of our troops operating under highly restrictive rules of engagement, the corruption and backstabbing of Afghanistan’s Karzai, and the sanctuary for the Taliban in Pakistan. No wonder most Americans want free of the mess.
News reports (Washington Post, for example) have the Obama administration using the death of Osama bin Laden, though anymore a figure-head, as justification to speeding our withdrawal from Afghanistan. But, our core objectives are not met by that, setting up an Afghanistan that isn’t a source of terrorists or a Pakistan whose real nuclear weapons won’t fall into the hands of evil doers.
Peter Bergen, who has long studied bin Laden, national security analyst for CNN and the liberal New America Foundation, delivers a read-it-all analysis in the liberal New Republic of where we’re really at in Afghanistan, “Can We Win in Afghanistan.” Bergen’s article is full of useful background and current information.
In war, perceptions tend to lag behind reality by a considerable distance. In Afghanistan, our efforts were widely thought of as successful for several years after things had clearly begun to deteriorate on the ground. Today, it appears that we have the opposite problem: improvements on the ground that are widely dismissed amid a narrative of defeat.
Bergen believes that President Obama will stay the course. His article was likely written before today’s reports of the Obama administration trying to speed disengagement.
Regardless of whether Bergen will fall into line with this latest Obama administration gambit, his article stands as strong argument why President Obama more hastily trying to retreat should be confronted by those who care more for the US national security than pandering to war weariness for 2012.
Our neglect of national security challenges during the 1990s fed into our being forced to face harsher realities during the past decade. Will we repeat that grave error?
President Obama was literally pulled from a golf outing and escorted back to the White House to be informed of the mission. Upon his arrival there was a briefing held which included Bill Daley, John Brennan, and a high ranking member of the military. When Obama emerged from the briefing, he was described as looking “very confused and uncertain.” The president was then placed in the “situation room” where several of the players in this event had already been watching the operation unfold. Another interesting tidbit regarding this is that the Vice President was already “up to speed” on the operation. A source indicated they believe Hillary Clinton had personally made certain the Vice President was made aware of that day’s events before the president was. The now famous photo released shows the particulars of that of that room and its occupants. What that photo does not communicate directly is that the military personnel present in that room during the operation unfolding, deferred to either Hillary Clinton or Robert Gates. The president’s role was minimal, including their acknowledging of his presence in the room.
Sounds like the grown-ups took over. I wonder whether that report is accurate
You can sense, in the question she addresses, that childlike yearning for a scientific and medical utopia from which, presumably, unfair forces are excluding us. I call them Edenic fantasies.
The comment thread is interesting in that regard as well.
U.S. forces searched the compound and flew away with documents, hard drives and DVDs that could provide valuable intelligence about al-Qaida, a U.S. official said. The entire operation took about 40 minutes, officials said.
It sure would be interesting to be on the team which is reviewing those things.
The appointment at Brooklyn College of an adjunct, Kristofer Petersen, to teach Middle East politics in the Political Science department was defended as academic freedom. This was despite his involvement in touting Gazans as virtual lambs and Israel as a beast, and his heavily slanted reading list.
He continues. In brief, Petersen tells us, Israel is limited to some degree in its oppression but it is “beyond the threshold of atrocity,” and Israel’s oppression of Gazans is largely to maintain its own false identity “myth”, to create cohesion within Israel by creating and demonizing an “Other.”
Is anyone in Brooklyn College’s administration seeing, and is the Political Science department embarrassed? We’ll see, if he is re-appointed.
Kristofer Petersen’s latest is his posted draft of a paper he is to deliver at the American Political Science Association. Petersen asks that his draft not be quoted or cited without his permission. Sorry, Kris, but you posted it and there is a legal concept called “fair use.”
Wrapped in a discussion of two radicals' views of nationalism, Petersen’s piece titled “Beyond The Threshold Of Atrocity: Nationalism, Biopower and Israel’s Occupation of Gaza” offers us this:
While one may desire the Other’s total annihilation, it is impossible to do precisely because the Other helps the nation to imagine itself. The Other tells juridical society in part who they are as a group, as a nation, as an idea – but only insofar as they are permitted to exist as an idealized object of hatred.
Thus,
For late-modern society to derive any value at all from racial oppression, its enemies must be brought to a condition as close to total eradication as possible – without either crossing into conventional genocide or manufacturing suffering in such a way as to contradict myths of the national self-image.
Israel needs Hamas and Gaza to justify its existence!
In his other utterances, Petersen does not support terrorist acts by Hamas. But, Peterson does defend the Gazans who perform them. Rather a thin veil for, in effect, supporting terrorist acts. I’ve read almost all I can – or can stand -- of Petersen’s comments and writings I could find online, and nary a critique of Gazans. Rather he concentrates his focus on single-minded attacks upon Israel.
Israel did not create an “Other” nor does Israel oppress Gazans to serve its racist, colonialist needs.
Brooklyn College, indeed any even semi-credible academic, should recognize that Kristofer Petersen represents the rot within that must be reversed if academia is to retain any self-respect or respect from society or taxpayers.
We are pleased with the killing of Bin Ladin, the murderer of so many of our neighbors and neighbors' family members here in the Northeast. It had to be done. Whether it makes a difference or not, only time will tell. Let's hope so.
President Obama takes over all the TV networks and other media to tell us that Osama bin Laden is confirmed dead. Osama bin Laden is reported to have been in a mansion outside Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan.
Yaaay! And, what difference did it make when we captured Saddam Hussein? The evil had metastasized. And, Hussein was hiding in a hole in the ground.
In this case, as if any more evidence is needed, the evil metastasized into Pakistan's highest levels. -- Why the US Acted Alone
The credit is owed to the perseverence and dedication of those in our extraordinary intel and military in the region. -- And, getmo' Gitmo, or wherever they're being held, some of the intel came from detainees.
The question is whether President Obama has the intestinal fortitude and focus to follow through, and deserve credit. The Pakistan government has loudly complained about US actions, but has been playing both sides, including some help to the US behind the scenes. The double-play must end and not be tolerated, and the sanctuary of Taliban in Pakistan's border with Afghanistan be more heavily penetrated by US and Afghan forces. The Pakistan sanctuary is key to the prolongation of the war in Afghanistan. Pakistani ISI intelligence has been critical to the Taliban's emergence from out of the mujahideen that fought the Soviet Union, and often shelters its deemed asset.
Al Quaeda is much diminished, but its tentacles and their plans for terrorism in the West continues. Western security forces are on alert. Islamabad should be on alert for far less tolerance from the West.
Instead, there's speculation that Pakistan offered up bin Laden -- a figurehead, anymore -- as a sweetener to speed US withdrawal from Afghanistan. (Charles Krauthammer just speculated similarly, on Fox, that President Obama may well use OBL's death as an opportunity to decare victory and withdraw.)-- Actually, administration officials say the US did not tell Pakistan before going in. -- I'm purely guessing that's cover for Pakistan's government to so many Pakistanis who supported bin Laden. -- Hope: Pakistan better get hopping in the NW provinces; Reality: Don't hold breath. -- Confusion about Pakistan. -- Afghanistan's Karzai points finger, at US and Pakistan.
President Obama takes credit, saying he directed our CIA to make the taking or death of Osama bin Laden our priority. That had been a priority before his presidency. Typical Obama. Followed by President Obama reminding us that we are not at war with Islam but with mass murderers. Those mass murderers hide among a sea of many Moslems who smile at the murders.
A suggestion: embalm Osama bin Laden, no cosmetics, and display -- next to a urinal -- at the memorial at the World Trade Center. -- Muslim "scholars" say burial at sea only benefits the fish. I say, flushing his ashes is another way to the sea. I feel sorry for the fishes.
Update: More operational details. The guy was truly hiding in plain sight, next door to a police station.
All members of the team that put a bullet into Bin Laden's cranium and then took the body out with them deserve honors, medals, ticker-tape parades, and all bar tabs covered for life.
Somebody referred to the royal wedding as "chick crack." I think it was. I keep hearing about the hats, and I have learned over the years that hats and shoes are crack to females even though guys rarely notice them. Here are some good clips from the pageant.
Speaking of weddings, a horny Insty linked this piece on hot marital sex. Daily sounds pretty good to me. When I was younger, I was a twice-daily guy, or at least a would-be twice-daily guy. However, back then, one time did not mean just "once."
It doesn't take much to keep a guy happily married: lots of sex fun, decent and abundant meals made with love if not with expertise, letting him have his alone time, no nagging about his many flaws, some interesting conversation, no inquiring about his "feelings," and otherwise just generally appreciating his unique wonderfulness. Create a beautiful life for him to live in, and make home a soft, loving haven without the negativity and hassles of life out there. That's all we ask for, ladies. Without those things, our lives aren't very pleasant.
The problem is that the Mrs. is now imagining herself at age 24, marrying Prince William or Duke William or whoever he is. He's a military pilot, too, and most of us guys are neither prince nor military pilot. However, being a hard-working, honest, decent, horny, God-fearing, self-reliant American citizen ought to be enough for any lucky woman.
That explains it to me. It's the same reason the pols resist Costco in the big blue cities: unions vs. the citizens. Truth is, NYC needs WalMart much more than WalMart needs NYC. WalMart is doing just fine in the US and worldwide. These tough pols and union bosses are making fools of themselves and fools of the voters.
I have no WalMart in my area, but went to Costco this morning to get supplies for church coffee hour tomorrow (cheeses, strawberries, croissants, corn muffins, grapes, vegetables and veggie dip, bagels and cream cheese, etc), and remembered that Gwynnie had told me that they are now selling no-iron dress shirts that are as nice as the Brooks Brothers version at one-third the price. Despite being a loyal and life-long Brooks person, I bought one to try.
Nothing less than a complete redefinition of the role of government away from the nanny state trend and back to a renewed era of personal responsibility is needed.
This repeated lunge for the sour spot — the place where costs are high and benefits are low — now seems to be a trademark of the President’s decision-making style. On the left it is earning him Carter comparisons from people like Eric Alterman; on the right it means that despite his compromises and yielding of significant ground he continues to feed the incandescent hostility of his bitterest foes. Worst of all, it suggests to people abroad and at home that the way to manipulate this “split the difference”, consensus-seeking President is to raise your demands. If you are going to get something like 50 percent of what you ask for, ask for twice as much as you really want. And with this Presidential style, the squeaking wheel gets the grease. Not surprisingly, all the wheels have begun to squeak.
Here is the paradox we face: The President is a consensus-seeker whose decision making style rewards polarization and a conciliator who loses friends without winning over enemies.
I can tell you that some certainly are, some could care less, and some find it an abomination.
Porn, recreational sex, prostitution, rape, illicit seduction, perversions, etc. have been going on since there have been humans. That's a fact. Humans are endowed with the wackiest sex drives and wackiest imaginations of all animals and, depending on conditions and circumstances, not always the most mature or honorable behavior.
But what about the ladies? A teen gal recently told me that somebody said to her, in the bathroom after a frat party, "I am so pissed that I didn't get any dick tonight." How times have changed. Or have they?
A short time ago, Iran's Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urged the Muslim World to boycott anything and everything that originates with the Jewish people.
In response, Meyer M. Treinkman, a pharmacist, out of the kindness of his heart, offered to assist them in their boycott as follows:
"Any Muslim who has Syphilis must not be cured by Salvarsan discovered by a Jew, Dr. Ehrlich. He should not even try to find out whether he has Syphilis, because the Wasserman Test is the discovery of a Jew. If a Muslim suspects that he has Gonorrhea, he must not seek diagnosis, because he will be using the method of a Jew named Neissner.
"A Muslim who has heart disease must not use Digitalis, a discovery by a Jew, Ludwig Traube.
Should he suffer with a toothache, he must not use Novocaine, a discovery of the Jews, Widal and Weil.
If a Muslim has Diabetes, he must not use Insulin, the result of research by Minkowsky, a Jew. If one has a headache, he must shun Pyramidon and Antypyrin, due to the Jews, Spiro and Ellege.
Muslims with convulsions must put up with them because it was a Jew, Oscar Leibreich, who proposed the use of Chloral Hydrate.
Arabs must do likewise with their psychic ailments because Freud, father of psychoanalysis, was a Jew.
Should a Muslim child get Diphtheria, he must refrain from the "Schick" reaction which was invented by the Jew, Bella Schick.
"Muslims should be ready to die in great numbers and must not permit treatment of ear and brain damage, work of Nobel Prize winner, Robert Baram.
They should continue to die or remain crippled by Infantile Paralysis because the discoverer of the anti-polio vaccine is a Jew, Jonas Salk.
"Muslims must refuse to use Streptomycin and continue to die of Tuberculosis because a Jew, Zalman Waxman, invented the wonder drug against this killing disease.
Muslim doctors must discard all discoveries and improvements by dermatologist Judas Sehn Benedict, or the lung specialist, Frawnkel, and of many other world renowned Jewish scientists and medical experts.
"In short, good and loyal Muslims properly and fittingly should remain afflicted with Syphilis, Gonorrhea, Heart Disease, Headaches, Typhus, Diabetes, Mental Disorders, Polio, Convulsions and Tuberculosis and be proud to obey the Islamic boycott."
It kind of sucks in my business, which is one which is not usually very optional. We have not hired for over two years and have laid off quite a few professionals and assistants. Do I see a re-do of Carter's stagflation?
If opportunity in America is a sham — if the system is rigged and some people get the breaks only for reasons of luck, birth, or discrimination — then merit is fictitious and redistribution brings greater fairness. But if America is an opportunity society — if you have the chance to work harder, get more education and innovate — then rewarding merit is fair, and it is fair for some to make more money than others.
Most Americans believe we live in an opportunity society. The General Social Survey has asked Americans since 1973 to answer whether people get ahead because of “their own hard work” or because of “lucky breaks and help from other people.” For four decades, 60 to 70 percent of Americans have said “hard work,” while never more than 16 percent have said “lucky breaks.”
It’s hardly a shock that seven in 10 Americans believe in the American dream. If you descended from immigrants, ask yourself: Why did my ancestors come here? I suspect it wasn’t to find a fairer system of forced income redistribution. It was to find a place where they could get a fair shake, where they could start their own business, and where hard work and good ideas would be rewarded.
Politicians have denied the core American belief in opportunity at their peril.
Well, luck, motivation, and personality traits are involved too. However, luck favors the prepared mind, and "Showing up is 70% of success." Most heirs, like most lottery winners, blow their good fortunes on instant gratification. Furthermore, many people do not pursue wealth and "getting ahead" as a life goal anyway. It's just one of many possible choices of life goals, although the Marxists and Materialists might see it otherwise. Choosing life goals is a very big deal, differentiates the adults from the kids, and, for most, is probably best done in a partnership. "Chacun a son gout" - which does not mean each selects his own path to gout.
Great idea, Robert. But my Doc doesn't do Medicare. He wants to get paid for his time and interest in my well-being, and he should be. I pay him, with my own money. I thank him, too, and also send him a holiday basket of goodies for his family.
It's not mainly about oil prices. It's about hedging the dollar with commodities, it seems to me. Global investors must hedge their risks somehow, and China wants to dump dollars. Gold, silver, oil - anything real instead of paper money.
If you’re looking for a place with a remarkably high concentration of literary eminences who can be counted on to spout incredibly fatuous political clichés in a consistently self-regarding tone (though heaven knows why, aside from sheer masochism, you’d be looking for such a place), pack your mukluks and set sail for the frozen North. For the fact is that an extraordinary percentage of this region’s most honored and bestselling writers harbor an ardent, palpable, quivering contempt for America and Israel, and express it in a language that’s breathtaking for its utter lack of moderation, nuance, or restraint (or, for that matter, originality).
Mark Steyn reports that his childrens' Kinder Eggs were seized by US Customs as he and they crossed the border from Canada to the US. According to Customs: "Many of the toys that have been tested by the Consumer Product Safety Commission in the past were determined to present a choking hazard for young children....Last year, CBP officers discovered more than 25,000 of these banned chocolate eggs. More than 2,000 separate seizures were made of this product." As Steyn states, however: "And yet oddly enough generations of European and Latin American children remain unchoked."
If you don't know what Kinder Eggs are, they are hollow chocolate eggs with ingenious little assembly toys inside.
Each Summer, my wife and boys visit grandma in Germany. My wife brings back two egg cartons of twelve Kinder Eggs in each carton. Throughout the year they provide exceptional motivational rewards for the boys. My wife is as paranoid as most mothers about her childrens' safety, and as prone as most to believe most scares. The boys have collected several hundred of Kinder Egg toys. They reacted with deep disappointment this morning when I told them they are now illegal to bring into the US , then asked Mom if they could eat them all before getting on the plane home. My wife is trying to figure out something else as powerful a motivational reward as Kinder Eggs.
There's someone in Washington smiling that another motivation for individual effort has been broken and outlawed.
Jurassic President - Obama's preserved in the amber of an echo chamber where the romanticized version of the 1930s, seen through the new-age gauze of the 1970s, is paradise.
As we have always contended here, the Left are dinosaurs and the myth of the omniscient State is dead. Defunct. An ex-myth. Gone to the choir invisible.
The Lefties often express thoughts about killing, suppressing or censoring those with whom they disagree. Ideology is their Jihad. At Maggie's, we enjoy having our ideas challenged. We welcome fact-based disagreement, but not emotional rants.
America has 400 billionaires with a combined net worth of $1.3 trillion. Congress could confiscate their stocks and bonds, and force them to sell their businesses, yachts, airplanes, mansions and jewelry. The problem is that after fleecing the rich of their income and net worth, and the Fortune 500 corporations of their profits, it would only get us to mid-August.
...President Obama is the culmination of a century of foreign infiltration already in place. The turning of America’s institutions of higher education took place decades ago; it is too little too late to focus on such infiltration now. Beginning in the early 20th century, America’s colleges and universities were infiltrated by German thought, then thought to be the most sophisticated in the world. That school of thought, a merger of Hegelian utopianism and Marxist classism, quickly infected America’s halls of power. Theodore Roosevelt, always trendy, bought into the new “progressivism” with alacrity, jettisoning the Constitution and capitalism in the process. Bringing this perverse ideology to American shores, Teddy announced, “We of to-day who stand for the Progressive movement here in the United States are not wedded to any particular kind of machinery, save solely as means to the end desired.” This was the philosophy of incipient dictatorship. It was brought to its near-term apex under a college professor, Woodrow Wilson, who thought that the Constitution itself needed to be stripped away.
The fact is that we can't keep Medicare as it is. It's broke. We are only arguing about how to transform it. Obama wants the experts to ration, and Ryan wants individuals to chose the type insurance they prefer. Do you trust 50 million consumers making their own financial decisions, or a dozen carefully chosen experts? What could go wrong?
... the rate of income taxation on the highest earning Americans has fluctuated drastically, from 25 percent of income in 1930 to 92 percent of income in the early 1950’s. Despite these vast differences in these top marginal rates, the total percentage of GDP the federal government has collected in revenue has changed little.
The "rich" won't work for nothing. If you take too much of their compensation for their efforts, they just retire, cut back on work, invest in munis, or give their money away. One interesting fact in her essay is that the "rich," as measured by income, are not the same people from one year to another in the US. We have high income mobility here.
Credible, mainstream foreign policy analysts express dismay that President Obama’s foreign policy actions are so often contradictory, misdirected from commonly perceived national interests, and counterproductive to even stated goals.
Such critiques, seeking sanity and to avoid extremism and conspiracy theories, just stop there. In these analysts further defense, the facts of foreign policy failures are enough to indict. In their limited purview, that is sufficient. However, if one is searching for deeper explanation in order to avoid or prevent the repetition of such wrong-headedness impaling the US national interests, another additional approach is needed.
In the lack of extensive internal documents (a la, to some extent, the “Pentagon Papers”) a functional analysis of President Obama’s foreign policies looks at outcomes to discern cause(s). When the outcomes are similar, there is more reason to look for common cause. In other words, the outcomes are either consciously purposeful and may have a common purpose and cause, or highly likely due to conditioning. These two can come together when the structure of justification for the conditioning is verbalized and then used by the actor. President Obama’s leftist worldview is that conditioning and conscious purpose.
The caveat must be raised that functional analysis is, like any theory when applied to real life, unable to explain or predict every cause or action, and can be abused to impose an inadequately supported structure. For example, most wizened observers of human affairs agree that “stupidity” is usually a better explanation than “mendacity” in understanding the foibles or mistakes of men.
For example, this criticism was tellingly made by critics of the Cold War revisionist historians who ascribed its origins to exploitive and rapacious capitalism and the consequent purposeful expansionism of America’s leaders, downplaying the role and actions of the Soviet Union’s leaders as well as the gaps in information upon which our leaders had to act or react. Further analyses of the Cold War revisionist historians’ works more simply showed poor historiography. More measured contemporary historians, now with access to more Soviet archives and Western, see some less adventurous motivations and choices by Stalin, communist ideology at work alongside any realpolitik, and more confusion and reserved responses by and among Western leaders in the Cold War battles.
The Marxism underlying the Cold War revisionist historians’ world view was, as is Marxism, a form of functional analysis. From the outcome of post-war global dominance by the US and the conflicts with spreading communism, the cause was ascribed of a “mendacious,” conniving US pursuing resources and seeking the subjugation of colonial peoples.
There will be more future transparency into President Obama’s foreign policies that will expose greater confusion and reservations than seems the case now. The confidence of Americans after World War II, the expansion of our economy, and some racism may have been among causes for some US excesses. President Obama’s foreign policies appear almost the reverse: lack of confidence in US exceptionalism – our deserved heightened confidence in our good motives and actions, neglect of maintaining or growing the US economy, and siding with those opposed to states aligned with or benign toward US foreign policies. In this, President Obama is acting out his leftist upbringing and education.
As with the Cold War revisionist historians, and the wider leftist critique of America, President Obama basically takes and acts upon their view that the US and the West is mostly at fault for conflict and the unreached aspirations of those seen as oppressed.
President Obama was raised and educated in this leftist view. Yes, he is limited by others in our society and politics. But, he has been both consistent and determined in pursuing his view. His half-measures of continuity in Iraq and Afghanistan are compromises with contrary facts and views, but his half-measures are likely to fail and still, thus, further his view. Functionally, President Obama is the foe of the US.
In the Middle East, this functional analysis of President Obama’s foreign policies is most evident. President Obama buys that the source of conflict is the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, and that Israel – the stronger – is at fault. The Palestinians are oppressed by Israel. The other states in the Middle East – all autocratic or despotic -- that have come to terms with Israel or whose policies don’t really threaten Israel are viewed negatively. The states that more actively oppose and threaten Israel are viewed as whom we should favor. Islamist ideology is either ignored or seen benignly as a spur to violence and conflict. Arab states and Iran’s internal policies of corruption, exploitation and repression are not viewed as the source of their backwardness or hostilities.
In short, in functional analysis, President Obama really acts to lessen the power of the US and its exertion and to increase the power and exertions of those opposed to the US and its allies. The rationalizations he has inculcated from his leftist past try to publicly justify this in evasions and euphemisms. Indeed, he may not consciously want the defeat of the West and victories by its foes. But that is the result and it is all rooted in his leftist world view.
Those, of whatever political orientation, who avoid calling him out as, functionally, the foe of Western values and US national interests are doing their listeners a serious harm by reducing the justified wholesale rejection of President Obama’s foreign policies. Worse, they mask the cause and its rejection, allowing it to reappear among others and further harm the US, its values and its allies.
The administration has sat on its hands despite the fact that the Assad regime is one of the most implacable U.S. adversaries in the Middle East. It is Iran’s closest ally; it supplies Iranian weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip for use against Israel. Since 2003 it has helped thousands of jihadists from across the Arab world travel to Iraq to attack American soldiers. It sought to build a secret nuclear reactor with the help of North Korea and destabilized the pro-Western government of neighboring Lebanon by sponsoring a series of assassinations....
Yet the Obama administration has effectively sided with the regime against the protesters.
I was happy to find out that my Facebook page was doing pretty well,” he said, “I’ve got 19 million friends. Which only puts me half a million friends behind Sponge Bob Squarepants. So that’s something to aspire to, keep up with Spongebob.”
If it’s good, the government should subsidize it. If it’s bad, the government should ban it. If outcomes are in any way perceived by any group to be sub-optimal, then the government should regulate it. Anyone who opposes these bans, subsidies, and regulations must therefore be a supporter of bad outcomes, hate poor people, want people to get sick and die, etc.
Ever looked at the rage-driven Lefty site Wonkette? It's fairly immature and unenlightening in general, but I guess it makes people feel good. Well, they do posts about Trig Palin which probably will hurt the feelings of every parent with a mentally-disabled kid, but which are probably driving their traffic into the stratosphere: Humiliating Meltdown Continues… Wonkette Hatesite Hits Bottom… Digs
It's all our (evil Western Civilization's) fault that many Muslims seem to like to kill people who are different from them. We all accept that responsibility, don't we?
After all, true cultural understanding means understanding that some may lack moral agency, human empathy, and the idea of the "brotherhood of man," as we understand these quaint bourgeois notions from our culturally-limited viewpoint.
On Green Energy: 
President Obama takes over all the TV networks and other media to tell us that Osama bin Laden is confirmed dead. Osama bin Laden is reported to have been in a mansion outside Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan.
Al Quaeda is much diminished, but its tentacles and their plans for terrorism in the West continues. Western security forces are on alert. Islamabad should be on alert for far less tolerance from the West.
Somebody referred to the royal wedding as "chick crack." I think it was. I keep hearing about the hats, and I have learned over the years that hats and shoes are crack to females even though guys rarely notice them. Here are some 
C. Larry Pope, CEO of the world's largest pork producer, explains
Solar project 
It's 
The government makes