JACK WHEELER'S DESCRIPTION OF BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA

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Jack Wheeler is a brilliant man who was the author of Reagan's strategy to break the back of the Soviet Union with the star wars race and expose their inner weakness. For years he wrote a weekly intelligence update that was extremely interesting and well structured and informative. He consults(ed) with several mega corporations on global trends and the future, etc. He is in semi-retirement now. He is a true patriot with a no-nonsense approach to everything. He is also a somewhat well-known mountain climber and adventurer. Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler

Jack Wheeler

The O-man, Barack Hussein Obama, is an eloquently tailored empty suit. No resume, no accomplishments, no experience, no original ideas, no understanding of how the economy works, no understanding of how the world works, no balls, nothing but abstract, empty rhetoric devoid of real substance.

He has no real identity. He is half-white, which he rejects. The rest of him is mostly Arab, which he hides but is disclosed by his non-African Arabic surname and his Arabic first and middle names as a way to triply proclaim his Arabic parentage to people in Kenya . Only a small part of him is African Black from his Luo grandmother, which he pretends he is exclusively.

What he isn't, not a genetic drop of, is 'African-American,' the descendant of enslaved Africans brought to America chained in slave ships. He hasn't a single ancestor who was a slave. Instead, his Arab ancestors were slave owners. Slave-trading was the main Arab business in East Africa for centuries until the British ended it.

Let that sink in: Obama is not the descendant of slaves, he is the descendant of slave owners. Thus he makes the perfect Liberal Messiah.

It's something Hillary doesn't understand - how some complete neophyte came out of the blue and stole the Dem nomination from her. Obamamania is beyond politics and reason. It is a true religious cult, whose adherents reject Christianity yet still believe in Original Sin, transferring it from the evil of being human to the evil of being white.

Thus Obama has become the white liberals' Christ, offering absolution from the Sin of Being White. There is no reason or logic behind it, no faults or flaws of his can diminish it, no arguments Hillary could make of any kind can be effective against it. The absurdity of Hypocrisy Clothed In Human Flesh being their Savior is all the more cause for liberals to worship him: Credo quia absurdum, I believe it because it is absurd.

Thank heavens that the voting majority of Americans remain Christian and are in no desperate need of a phony savior.

His candidacy is ridiculous and should not be taken seriously by any thinking American.

WE'VE GOT GUYS DEAD!

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Retired Lt. Col.: My Sources Say Obama Was in the Room Watching Benghazi Attack Happen

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/retired-lt-col-my-sources-say-obama-was-in-the-room-watching-benghazi-attack-happen/

Retired Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer said Saturday he has sources saying President Barack Obama was in the room at the White House watching the assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya unfold.


Two unarmed U.S. drones were dispatched to the consulate and recorded the final hours of the attack, which killed U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
“This was in the middle of the business day in Washington, so everybody at the White House, CIA, Pentagon, everybody was watching this go down,” Shaffer said on Fox News’ “Justice with Judge Jeanine.” “According to my sources, yes, [Obama] was one of those in the White House Situation Room in real-time watching this.”


Shaffer served as a senior operations officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency in Afghanistan in 2003 and wrote a book critical of the policies there. The U.S. government purchased the entire print run for $47,000 in an attempt at censorship just before its 2010 publication, claiming it contained classified material.


Shaffer said the question now is what precisely Obama did or didn’t do in the moments he saw the attack unfolding. The CIA reportedly made three urgent requests for military backup that were each denied.


“He, only he, could issue a directive to Secretary of Defense Panetta to do something. That’s the only place it could be done,” Shaffer said.


Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said last week the military did not intervene because they did not have enough information about what was happening on the ground.
Col. David Hunt, a Fox News military analyst, said the military could have had jets in the air within 20 minutes and forces on the ground within two hours.


“The issue is always political with the White House, but the secretary of defense gives the order, has to be approved by the White House, they wouldn’t pull the trigger, and it’s disgraceful,” Hunt said. “We’ve got guys dead.”

OH, SAY CAN YOU SEE, HOW SICK IS OUR NATION?

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Published: Oct. 26, 2012 Updated: 4:39 p.m.

Mark Steyn: Benghazi bungle requires act of urgent political hygiene

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By MARK STEYN

Syndicated columnist

"We're going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video," said Hillary Clinton. 

No, not the person who made the video saying that voting for Barack Obama is like losing your virginity to a really cool guy. I'll get to that in a moment. But Secretary Clinton was talking about the fellow who made the supposedly Islamophobic video that supposedly set off the sacking of the Benghazi consulate. And, indeed, she did "have that person arrested." By happy coincidence, his bail hearing has been set for three days after the election, by which time he will have served his purpose. 

These two videos – the Islamophobic one and the Obamosexual one – bookend the remarkable but wholly deserved collapse of the president's re-election campaign.

You'll recall that a near month-long attempt to blame an obscure YouTube video for the murder of four Americans and the destruction of U.S. sovereign territory climaxed in the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden's bald assertion that the administration had been going on the best intelligence it had at the time. By then, it had been confirmed that there never had been any protest against the video, and that the Obama line that Benghazi had been a spontaneous movie review that just got a little out of hand was utterly false. The only remaining question was whether the administration had knowingly lied or was merely innocently stupid. The innocent-stupidity line became harder to maintain this week after Fox News obtained State Department emails revealing that shortly after 4 p.m. Eastern, less than a half-hour after the assault in Benghazi began, the White House situation room knew the exact nature of it.

We also learned that, in those first moments of the attack, a request for military back-up was made by U.S. staff on the ground but was denied by Washington. It had planes and Special Forces less than 500 miles away in southern Italy – or about the same distance as Washington to Boston. They could have been there in less than two hours. Yet the commander-in-chief declined to give the order. So Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods fought all night against overwhelming odds, and died on a rooftop in a benighted jihadist hell hole while Obama retired early to rest up before his big Vegas campaign stop. 

"Within minutes of the first bullet being fired, the White House knew these heroes would be slaughtered if immediate air support was denied," said Ty Woods' father, Charles. "In less than an hour, the perimeters could have been secured, and American lives could have been saved. After seven hours fighting numerically superior forces, my son's life was sacrificed because of the White House's decision."

Why would Obama and Biden do such a thing? Because to launch a military operation against an al-Qaida affiliate on the anniversary of 9/11 would have exposed the hollowness of their boast through convention week and the days thereafter – that Osama was dead, and al-Qaida was finished. 


And so Ty Woods, Glen Doherty, Sean Smith and Chris Stevens were left to die, and a decision taken to blame an entirely irrelevant video and, as Secretary Clinton threatened, "have that person arrested." And, in the weeks that followed, the government of the United States lied to its own citizens as thoroughly and energetically as any totalitarian state, complete with the midnight knock-on-the-door from not-so-secret policemen sent to haul the designated fall guy into custody.

This goes far beyond the instinctive secretiveness to which even democratic governments are prone. The Obama administration created a wholly fictional storyline, and devoted its full resources to maintaining it. I understand why Mitt Romney chose not to pursue this line of argument in the final debate. The voters who will determine this election are those who voted for Obama four years ago and this time round either switch to the other fellow or sit on their hands. In electoral terms, it's probably prudent of Mitt not to rub their faces in their 2008 votes. 


Nevertheless, when the president and other prominent officials stand by as four Americans die and then abuse their sacrifice as contemptuously as this administration did, decency requires that they be voted out of office as an act of urgent political hygiene.

At the photo-op staged for the returning caskets, Obama et al seem to have been too focused on their campaign needs to observe even the minimal courtesies. Charles Woods says that, at the ceremony, Joe Biden strolled over to him and by way of condolence said in a "loud and boisterous" voice, "Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?" One assumes charitably that the vice president is acknowledging in his own inept and blundering way the remarkable courage of a man called upon to die for his country on some worthless sod halfway across the planet. But the near-parodic locker-room coarseness is grotesque both in its inaptness and in its lack of basic human feeling for a bereaved family forced to grieve in public and as crowd-scene extras to the political big shot. Just about the only formal responsibility a vice president has is to attend funerals without embarrassing his country. And this preening buffoon of pseudo-blue-collar faux-machismo couldn't even manage that.

But a funny thing happened over the next six weeks: Obama's own cue balls shriveled. Biden had offered up a deft campaign slogan encompassing both domestic and foreign policy: "Osama's dead, and General Motors is alive." But, as the al-Qaida connections to Benghazi dribbled out, leak by leak, the "Osama's dead" became a problematic boast and, left to stand alone, the General Motors line was even less credible. Avoiding the economy and foreign affairs, Obama fell back on Big Bird, and binders and bayonets, just to name the B's in his bonnet. 


At the second presidential debate, he name-checked Planned Parenthood, the General Motors of the American abortion industry, half-a-dozen times, desperate to preserve his so-called gender gap. Yet, oddly enough, the more furiously Obama and Biden have waved their binders and talked up Sandra Fluke, the more his supposed lead among women has withered away. So now he needs to enthuse the young, who turned out in such numbers for him last time. Hence, the official campaign video (plagiarized from Vladimir Putin, of all people) explaining that voting for Obama is like having sex. The saddest thing about that claim is that, for liberals, it may well be true.

Both videos – the one faking Obamagasm and the one faking a Benghazi pretext – exemplify the wretched shrinkage that befalls those unable to conceive of anything except in the most self-servingly political terms. Both, in different ways, exemplify why Obama and Biden are unfit for office. One video testifies to a horrible murderous lie at the heart of a head of state's most solemn responsibility, the other to the glib shallow narcissism of a pop-culture presidency, right down to the numbing relentless peer-pressure: C'mon, all the cool kids are doing it; why be the last holdout?


If voting for Obama is like the first time you have sex, it's very difficult to lose your virginity twice. A flailing, pitiful campaign has now adopted Queen Victoria's supposed wedding advice to her daughter: "Lie back and think of England." Lie back and think of America. And then get up and get dressed. Who wants to sleep twice with a $16 trillion broke loser.


 ©MARK STEYN

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Report: Help in Benghazi was Available, Waved Off

Max Boot | @MaxBoot 10.26.2012 - 2:55 PM

  

COMMENTARY MAGAZINE 

Earlier today I wrote about the baffling failure to call in the U.S. military to rescue our diplomats besieged in Benghazi. That failure becomes even more puzzling if this Fox News article is right. Reporter Jennifer Griffin writes that former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were working as CIA security personnel at a CIA annex not far from the consulate, and they not only saw the entire attack unfold, but communicated what they saw to Washington in real time.

They wanted to aid the diplomats at the consulate but were told to “stand down”; they ignored those orders and made their way to the consulate and brought back the remaining diplomats, minus the ambassador, who was already dead. Then they took more fire at the CIA annex–this was where Woods and Doherty were killed by a mortar shell at 4 a.m., nearly seven hours after the initial assault began. But their urgent cries for help were not answered. Griffin writes:

In fact, at least one member of the team was on the roof of the annex manning a heavy machine gun when mortars were fired at the CIA compound. The security officer had a laser on the target that was firing and repeatedly requested back-up support from a Specter gunship, which is commonly used by U.S. Special Operations forces to provide support to Special Operations teams on the ground involved in intense firefights. The fighting at the CIA annex went on for more than four hours — enough time for any planes based in Sigonella Air base, just 480 miles away, to arrive. Fox News has also learned that two separate Tier One Special operations forces were told to wait, among them Delta Force operators.

This would seem to directly contradict Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s contention that the Pentagon knew too little about what was going on to scramble military forces. As does this tidbit from Griffin’s article: “Fox News has learned that there were two military surveillance drones redirected to Benghazi shortly after the attack on the Consulate began. They were already in the vicinity. The second surveillance craft was sent to relieve the first drone, perhaps due to fuel issues. Both were capable of sending real time visuals back to U.S. officials in Washington, D.C.”
Assuming this account is accurate, it is downright mystifying–and alarming–that in spite of real-time knowledge about the assault as it was happening, and the presence only a short flight time away of considerable military resources, someone in the government (one wonders who?) decided to limit the response to sending 22 lightly armed personnel from Tripoli. Someone at a senior level needs to be held to account for this failure.

GUARD YOUR KITCHEN SINK, WITH YOUR LIFE IF NECESSARY

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October 26, 2012

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Throwing the kitchen sink

By Wes Pruden

If you've got a nice kitchen sink, guard it well. A surrogate for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney (or someone pretending to be) could be lurking in the shrubbery under the kitchen window, plotting to scavenge something to throw into the campaign.

It's the season of the October surprise.


If you see a woman in red it's probably Gloria Allred, the Los Angeles lawyer for scorned women just arrived from hell with their furies and long memories. Mzz Allred promised the president she had a doozie for this October. The doozie so far looks like only bitter recriminations of a scorned floozie, but the October surprise season is still young.


Mzz Allred is peddling the story of a contentious divorce of 25 years ago, and paints Mitt Romney as the villain of the piece because he testified for the husband about the value of stock shares in the settlement, which the wife agreed to and later decided she didn't like.


This tastes like pretty thin soup, something the National Enquirer might have found in a musty bound volume in the basement of the court house. Husbands and wives have been known to shout in Divorce Court. That's about the value of a kitchen sink. You heave it over the side and hope it hits somebody. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.


The origin of the October surprise lies in the 1968 campaign, when Lyndon Johnson announced a "peace breakthrough" in Vietnam and halted the bombing of North Vietnam to guarantee an end of the war and "co-incidentally" assure the triumph of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The veep got a little bounce but Richard Nixon won by a margin of less than a percentage point.


Four years later, the Vietnam war was still alive and well and Mr. Nixon and George McGovern were fighting it out over who could end it. On Oct. 26, just 12 days before the November election, 

Henry Kissinger, the president's national-security guru, announced that "peace is at hand." Peace, such as it was, would wait for three more years, but Mr. Nixon won 49 states and defeated Mr. Magoo by 20 points. The president would have won, anyway, but "peace is at hand" might have contributed to the landslide.


In late October 1980, the Iranian government and President Jimmy Carter announced that it wouldn't release the American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran until after the November election. This was not much of a surprise, but it fed fevered speculation in Washington that the Reagan campaign had made a secret deal with Iran to delay their release to avoid giving Mr. Carter the happy surprise. There was actually a January surprise, when the hostages were released minutes after Mr. Reagan took the oath of office. The controversy over what had happened lasted for years, but two congressional investigations concluded there was no deal, and best of all, we didn't have to give the hostages back.


The vultures were not finished. Caspar Weinberger, the defense secretary for Ronald Reagan, was accused of criminal complicity in a deal to send missiles to fight Saddam Hussein, which he opposed, and a special prosecutor with not much to show for his investigation pursued Mr. Weinberger after he left office, and indicted him on the eve of the 1992 election, hoping to prevent George H.W. Bush's re-election. Mr. Bush was defeated and gave Mr. Weinberger a full pardon the day before he left office.


Since then, the October surprises have become smaller stuff. On the eve of the 2000 election there was the news that George W. Bush had been arrested for drunk driving 24 years earlier, when he was young and callow. He won anyway. Eight years after that, The Associated Press discovered that Barack Obama's aged Aunt Zeituni Onyango was living in Boston as an illegal immigrant from Kenya. Her nephew won anyway.


This year the October surprises, such as they are, are -- so far -- even less consequential. Donald Trump promised something about Barack Obama's college transcripts if the president would release them for a $5 million contribution to his favorite charity. A man went to the Romney campaign with "proof" that Mr. Obama scored cocaine hits in college and the Romney campaign told him to get lost.

All we've seen this year are frail skeletons from closets long since abandoned, and Gloria Allred's well-done nothingburger from an ancient divorce proceeding. She should stick to chasing more promising ambulances. One of them might have a kitchen sink inside.



Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

GEORGE McGOVERN. R.I.P.

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• BEST OF THE WEB TODAY
• October 22, 2012
• THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE

Decency and Division

George McGovern wouldn't be proud of Obama's re-election campaign.

By JAMES TARANTO

George McGovern, who died yesterday at 90, and Barry Goldwater make for a nifty historical parallel. Both were U.S. senators who became their parties' nominee for president. Both were men of principle, or ideologues if one views them unfavorably. Both got trounced in the general election by the other party's flawed incumbent, largely because voters saw them as too extreme.
But both had long-lasting effects on the ideological outlooks of their respective parties. 


Without Goldwater, it's often argued, there would have been no President Reagan. We'd add that without McGovern, there would have been no President Obama.

McGovern helped move his party to the left on defense and social issues, but of particular importance was the influence he wielded over his party's presidential nomination process, described in his New York Times obituary:

He . . . became the chairman of a Democratic Party commission on delegate selection, created after the fractious 1968 national convention to give the rank and file more say in picking a presidential nominee.

What became known as the McGovern commission rewrote party rules to ensure that more women, young people and members of minorities were included in delegations. The influence of party leaders was curtailed. More states began choosing delegates on the basis of primary elections. And the party's center of gravity shifted decidedly leftward.

Though the rules were not written specifically to help Mr. McGovern win the nomination, they had that effect.

One might say McGovern reinvented the Democratic Party by putting identity politics at its center--by encouraging members to think of themselves first in terms of sex or age or skin color (or, later, by sexual orientation). E pluribus, multis.


In the 1973 book "Sexual Suicide," George Gilder speculated that such an approach "would find its reductio ad absurdum in a President who is an exact ethnic and sexual composite of the American demography--some kind of multiracial hermaphrodite from Kansas City."


When Gilder wrote that, Barack Obama was 12.


McGovernism has never proved sufficient to win an election for the Democrats. Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama both made gauzy promises to unify the nation, and Bill Clinton, 20 years after volunteering for the McGovern campaign as a law student, ran as a centrist. This year, however, Obama is being forced to try. With a record that is both lousy and divisive, he has little alternative but to attempt to construct a majority via appeals targeted to electoral subgroups.


One of the words most associated with McGovern is "decency." "Everybody noticed George S. McGovern's decency," writes political scientist Bruce Miroff in a Times op-ed remembrance. Robert F. Kennedy called him 'the most decent man in the Senate.' " In case you didn't get that, Miroff adds: "Mr. McGovern, who died early Sunday at the age of 90, was a decent man."


At The New Republic's website, the lefty author Rick Perlstein writes that McGovern's "unlikely victory" for the 1972 nomination "seemed to vindicate an abiding liberal fantasy, which President Obama sometimes seems to share: that if you just show yourself to be decent enough, the skeptics cannot help but come around."


Stipulating that McGovern was thoroughly decent and Richard Nixon far from it, it seems to us that Obama personifies a different liberal fantasy, namely the delusion that left-wing politics and decency are one and the same thing. This moral vanity leads the left to excuse, or even not to notice, indecent behavior on the part of their own. It is the reason Obama's re-election campaign has been less McGovernite than McCarthyite (and we don't mean Gene).


A mild example comes from the Hill: "President Obama on Friday mocked Mitt Romney's recent efforts to appeal to centrist voters, telling supporters at a Virginia rally that his Republican rival is suffering from 'Romnesia.' "-


Such juvenile wordplay may be worthy of Mother Jones's David Corn, who came up with "Romnesia" a few months ago, or of MoveOn.org ("General Betray Us"), or of Tailgunner Joe, who used to mock Arkansas's William Fulbright as "Senator Half Bright." Barack Obama does not regard it as beneath the dignity of the office with which he has been entrusted.

Would George McGovern have approved this message? Barack Obama did.

In a more sinister vein is a new Obama ad touting Obama's bailout of General Motors and Chrysler and aimed at Ohio. The ad is highly misleading: It criticizes Romney for penning an op-ed titled "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" but doesn't note that GM and Chrysler did in fact go bankrupt.


But that's within the bounds of ordinary political tendentiousness. What's shocking is the words that appear on the screen at the end of the ad, over a silhouette of the Buckeye State: MITT ROMNEY. NOT ONE OF US.


If a Republican candidate for dogcatcher in Bugtussle, Ky., said Barack Obama was NOT ONE OF US, every liberal journalist in America would be demanding to know if Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner agreed. No one is asking that of Barack Obama. Then again, he's already answered. The ad begins with the president's voice: "I'm Barack Obama, and I approved this message."


"Journalists need to do more than call the play-by-play this election cycle," declares the New York Times's Nicholas Kristof. "We also need to blow the whistle on such egregious fouls calculated to undermine the political process and magnify the ugliest prejudices that our nation has done so much to overcome." This, of course, was in a 2008 column titled "The Push to 'Otherize' Obama." And here's a YouTube compilation of MSNBC's Chris Matthews and some Turkish dude complaining that Obama's critics were trying to portray him as "not one of us."


Have any lefties criticized the Obama campaign for not only trying to "otherize" Romney but actually using the phrase NOT ONE OF US? We put out a query on Twitter the other day, and the only examples anyone came up with were a tweet from the Washington Post's Karen Tumulty (" 'Not one of us' has a specific, ugly history in US politics. Bad place for the Obama campaign to go"), whom we hadn't thought of as especially left-wing. Tumulty follows up with an article today.
Then there was this comment in a Daily Kos thread (quoting verbatim):

The "Not One of Us" tagline at the end is very powerful, but also slightly disturbing, given that Obama's had to put up with all the "otherness"Kenyan-Muslim/un-American"exotic" crap since 2007.

Then again, I suppose that's the whole point of using that phrase.

 Even this weak and swiftly rationalized-away expression of discomfort met with hostile responses from defenders of the foul ad, such as this one (again quoting verbatim):

I tend to encourage courtesy over rudeness on most occasions, which this is not.

We are in a fight that must be won. Not won at all costs, but as loosing isn't an option, I'm willing to go to the mat with counter-tactics that are effective. And calling out BS and divisiveness and lies is necessary. And citing the 'otherness' of the super-rich and super-entitled is necessary. The super-rich are mostly 'other'.

Like me, Obama had one foreign-born parent. Mine happened to be from Canada, but he was foreign-born. There are millions and millions of us with foreign-born parents.

But there are not millions and millions of us as rich as the Romneys. Those are the true 'others', which I think the Obama ad captures very well.

There are many adoptable cats and dogs being rescued around the country. You can save a life by adopting one.

You see how the logic works here. It's OK for us to "otherize" you, because, well, we're us, the good people, and therefore to say that you're NOT ONE OF US is a simple statement of fact. Plus, loosing isn't an option.


"There's safety in numbers / When you learn to divide," Peter Gabriel observed in his catchy 1980 tune "Not One of Us." Obama certainly hopes that's true, and in that sense he is a disciple of McGovern, with his bean-counting approach to politics.
But if McGovern were alive, he would strongly disapprove of the ugly turn the Obama campaign has taken. He was, after all, a decent man.

OUR MUSLIM PRESIDENT'S FAILED FOREIGN POLICY WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY LEAD US INTO WAR WITH IRAN

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ROS-LEHTINEN: Obama still trying to sweet-talk Iran out of building the bomb

Weak foreign policy poses serious threat

By Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen

Friday, October 19, 2012 

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

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  Enlarge Photo
  Illustration Iran’s Weapons by Greg Groesch for The Washington Times more >

Just a few days ago, Mansour J. Arbabsiar pleaded guilty to working with Iran’s Quds force to carry out an attack on U.S. soil and assassinate a foreign diplomat stationed in Washington. 


Earlier this month, Hezbollah, a terrorist proxy of the Iranian regime, reportedly launched an Iranian-supplied drone that penetrated Israel’s airspace before being shot down. 


Late last month, the Iranian navy launched four missiles as a show of force and its capacity to shut down access to the Persian Gulf. 


These are just a few examples of how the Iranian threat has become more dangerous since the Obama administration took office.
Unfortunately, despite its rhetoric to the contrary, the administration has not done what is necessary to effectively address the threat from Tehran. 


Iran’s nuclear program, particularly its ability to produce enriched uranium, has expanded exponentially since President Obama took office in 2009. Yet the president continues to embrace engagement and meaningless negotiations with Tehran while refusing to set clear red lines with respect to Iran’s nuclear program. 


The administration’s behavior has sent a clear message to our allies and the Iranian regime: The United States is not willing to do what it takes to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capability.
Nonetheless, sanctions spearheaded by Congress — even with the administration fighting us every step of the way — have made an impact. Iran’s oil revenues are falling and could drop much lower as the embargo on Iranian oil expands and investment in Iran’s oil sector dries up. Economic sanctions also are inflicting increasing damage on Iran’s long-term oil-production potential. Concurrently, Iran is experiencing a currency crisis that could threaten the stability of the regime. 


The Iranian regime also reports that consumer prices rose more than 40 percent from spring 2010 to spring 2012. Updated data have not been published in recent months, presumably because the data show further hyperinflation. 


We must exploit this vulnerability. To do so, the president must make full and immediate use of the tools Congress has provided him. Sanctions on Iran’s oil industry and banking system are curtailing the foreign partnerships on which Iran’s oil industry has relied. Given these trends, it is not unreasonable to contemplate the end of oil exports from Iran, with resulting damage to government finances, foreign exchange earnings and the larger Iranian economy.


However, incremental, a la carte implementation of sanctions limits the potential impact on the Iranian regime’s ability to pursue its dangerous activities. The effectiveness of these foreign-policy tools has been further undermined by the Obama administration’s naive view that if we keep “talking” to the Iranians and convince them to return to the negotiating table, Iran will stop its drive for nuclear capability.


 he Iranians in the past have agreed repeatedly to discussions over their nuclear program, in some cases even giving the impression that a deal was in place before reneging. Thus, Tehran’s tactics have another, more fundamental purpose: Iran benefits from dragging out the negotiations as long as possible in order to provide its nuclear program extra time to keep refining uranium, getting Iran its goal of a bomb. Again, if the Iranians can convince the P5+1 countries that negotiations are leading toward an agreement, it is possible the European Union and the administration will quietly ease sanctions, as part of the “flexibility” Mr. Obama thinks he will have in his second term.


There is a growing disconnect between the president’s public rhetoric and the process by which U.S. diplomatic efforts have allowed Tehran to do the stalling that he claims he opposes.


We need an administration that will implement a coherent policy to compel the Iranian regime to abandon its nuclear program and other dangerous activities. America and our ally Israel cannot afford another four years of failed Obama administration policies on Iran, policies that will not produce a deal but only buy Tehran more time to cross the nuclear finish line.



Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Florida Republican, is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Read more: ROS-LEHTINEN: Obama still trying to sweet-talk Iran out of building the bomb - Washington Times http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/oct/19/obama-still-trying-to-sweet-talk-iran-out-of-build/#ixzz29x4o0bes
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COMING SOON TO A NEIGHBORHOOD NEAR YOU

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Muslims in America

This is great satire in the UK ... rest assured this

is

  coming to the USA, to a neighborhood near YOU.

  

 

www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=wq_lhlIn1e0

HERE ARE FIVE QUESTIONS ROMNEY NEEDS TO ASK OBAMA AT MONDAY NIGHT'S DEBATE

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Five (Non-Libya) Questions for Monday’s Debate

Alana Goodman | @alanagoodman 10.19.2012 - 3:35 PM 

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/10/19/five-non-libya-questions-for-mondays-debate/ 

 

Are you safer now than you were four years ago? That’s the most important question that needs to be answered in Monday night’s foreign policy debate. Unfortunately for President Obama, there’s ample evidence that the answer is no. His administration killed Osama bin Laden, but the war on terror is still very much alive. And while the Benghazi attack has been getting most of the attention lately, it’s just the latest symptom of a much more systematic national security problem for this administration.
Here are some questions that are indirectly related to Benghazi that would be interesting to raise at Monday’s debate. And since it’s never a good idea to ask a question at a debate that you don’t know the answer to, the answers to all of these are already known:


Question One: Did you underestimate al-Qaeda’s Arabian Peninsula affiliate before the 2009 Christmas Day bombing attack?
Answer: Yes.


Obama’s counterterrorism advisor John Brennan surprised reporters when he referred to AQAP as “one of the most lethal, one of the most concerning” extensions of al-Qaeda at a press briefing two weeks after the attack, and noted that “They carried attacks against Prince Mohammed bin Nayef in Saudi Arabia, against Saudi targets, inside of Yemen, against Yemeni as well as against U.S. targets.”
U.S. targets — and yet the Obama administration hadn’t even designated the group as a terrorist organization until after the failed attack.
“We had a strategic sense of sort of where [al-Qaeda-Arabian Peninsula] were going, but we didn’t know they had progressed to the point of actually launching individuals here,” Brennan added. “And we have taken that lesson, and so now we’re all on top of it.” At least until the next attack.


Question Two: Did you call the Christmas Day bomber an “isolated extremist” three days after the attack?
Answer: Yes.


Despite the fact that there was already evidence that showed Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had been training in Yemen weeks before the attack, and despite a statement from AQAP taking credit for the attack, President Obama called him an “isolated extremist” in his first public speech on the matter.
“This incident, like several that have preceded it, demonstrates that an alert and courageous citizenry are far more resilient than an isolated extremist,” said Obama.
It’s one thing for the president to say he wanted to wait for facts before making a definitive judgment on Abdulmutallab’s al-Qaeda ties. But Obama actually did make a definitive judgment — that Abdulmutallab was not affiliated with al-Qaeda, despite evidence to the contrary.


Question Three: Did John Brennan admit before the U.S. attack that al-Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate was capable of attacking the homeland?
Answer: Yes.


In John Brennan’s January 2010 press conference, he said the Obama administration “saw the plot was developing, but at the time we did not know in fact that they were talking about sending Mr. Abdulmutallab to the United States.” Again, if they saw the plot developing, why had they not characterized AQAP as a threat to the country? Why was Obama so reluctant to say Abdulmutallab was tied to al-Qaeda?


Question Four: Did you underestimate the Pakistani Taliban’s ability to attack the homeland prior to the Times Square bombing?
Answer: Yes.


The administration was caught flat-footed by the 2010 failed Times Square car bomb attack, which was carried out by a terrorist tied to the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Until then the TTP was not widely regarded as a group that was capable of carrying out an attack on U.S. soil.
And yet after the attack, Brennan told Fox News that the TTP was a significant threat that was “almost indistinguishable” from al-Qaeda.


Question Five: Did you miss warning signs in 2009, when CIA officers were killed in a suicide attack by a double-agent?
Answer: Yes.


Seven CIA operatives were killed when a fake informant working for the Pakistani Taliban blew himself up inside a U.S. base in Afghanistan. A subsequent investigation found numerous red flags and intelligence breakdowns, including one CIA officer who had been warned about the informant weeks in advance, but hadn’t passed on the information. The investigation said that CIA officials may have ignored warning signs because they were desperate to find someone who could lead them to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.


The U.S. can’t have eyes everywhere all the time, and there is always the possibility that a plot will be missed. But all of these incidents show that the Benghazi attack wasn’t an isolated lapse. The Obama administration has a pattern of intelligence breakdowns and missing clear signs prior to an attack. It also has a pattern of downplaying threats that may be politically harmful.


This isn’t just a critique of past failings. There are implications here for the future. As Jeffrey Goldberg wrote yesterday: “Biden said [at the vice presidential debate] the U.S. would know if the Iranians had begun to manufacture a warhead. But the U.S. didn’t know its ambassador in Libya would be assassinated. It didn’t know that the World Trade Center would be attacked. American intelligence doesn’t know a lot of things. Such is the nature of intelligence. Biden’s sanguine approach to weaponization suggests either that he strayed far from Obama administration policy, or that the White House is more relaxed and confident about stopping Iran than it should be.”


Can we rely on the Obama administration — the same administration that overlooked the threat from AQAP, dismissed the threat from the Pakistani Taliban, and ignored the multiple attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi that led up to the 9/11/12 attack — to have a clear grasp of the Iranian nuclear threat? 

Preventing an Iranian bomb means that we’ll need to rely heavily on intelligence, something the Obama administration has not had a great track record of gathering, processing, or acting on for the past four years.

Topics: 2012 presidential election, al-Qaeda, Benghazi, Iran, national security, Pakistiani Taliban, war on terror

THE ECONOMY IS IMPORTANT BUT ROMNEY CANNOT AFFORD TO NEGLECT BENGAZI

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October 19, 2012

Clearing the record of a fiasco in Libya

By Wes Pruden

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are on a collision course over Libya, and both men want to talk about something else.

Mr. Romney wants to talk about the economy. When he does, his questions and answers are sure, sharp, crisp and right on target. He doesn’t have to look at a teleprompter for facts and figures. 


The economy is his home field. Foreign policy is his road game.
The president wants to talk about anything but Libya. It’s his No. 1 screw-up abroad and he knows it. He thought he could talk his way out of taking responsibility for what happened in Benghazi and in the subsequent public-relations fiasco. But for once his remarkable gifts of blab and bluster have failed him. The cover-up of the sad, tragic story of what happened to Ambassador Chris Stevens, and why, continues to unravel. The president promises an investigation, but is trying to run out the clock until after the election, when the real story can’t any longer cost him.



The mainstream media, as usual, is doing what it does best, rooting through effluvia in search of trivia, sensation and irrelevancy. Some of the media glitteries seized on Mr. Romney’s use of the word “binders” to describe where he kept names of qualified women for high positions in state government when he was governor of Massachusetts. 


Certain women too delicate to go out in the sun without a parasol accuse Mr. Romney of wanting to put them in some sort of kinky exercise. But “binder” is a perfectly appropriate word for “loose-leaf notebook” (available at any Staples or Office Depot); if he had said “loose-leaf notebook” he could be accused of wanting to consort with “loose women” -- and it’s a good thing for him he didn’t say he kept the lists of women “under covers.”



The New York Times even took Mr. Romney to task for recalling how, as governor, he prescribed flexible hours for women with small children, to enable them to leave the office early to get home to make supper for them. This enraged the editorialists: “But what if a woman had wanted to go home to study Spanish? Or rebuild an old car? Or spend time with her lesbian partner?” (Neither Jonathan Swift nor Evelyn Waugh could make up satire as good as this.)



But Mr. Romney isn’t addressing his campaign to lesbians eager to get home to finish ring-and-valve jobs on old Pontiacs while listening to their partners tutor them in Spanish pronoun declensions. Instead, he’s casting a wider net for votes. He wants to assure women – even “the little lady [eager] to go home early and tend to her children” – that he understands the burdens and responsibilities of women and wants to make their lives easier. Such women, as alien as they may be to the mainstream media, have been hurt, and badly, by the economic incompetence of Barack Obama.



Just ask them. When CBS News, no friend of Republican candidates, asked a polling sample just after the second presidential debate who they thought was better on the economy – the most important issue in the campaign – 65 percent of them answered “Romney.” Only 34 percent said “Obama.”



Results like this encourage Mr. Romney, as some of his wise men have, to go easy on the Libyan fiasco in the final debate. But he shouldn’t. With considerable help from an inept moderator, President Obama further muddled the miserable record on how he screwed up on Libya. Candy Crowley admitted afterward that Mr. Romney was “essentially” correct when he said that for two weeks the president couldn’t admit the Benghazi tragedy was a terrorist attack.



The president, with Miss Crowley’s help, took refuge in the ambiguous transcript of his muddled remarks in the Rose Garden the day after the attack, but Mr. Romney has one last opportunity to put the record straight. For 14 days, the president, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his ambassador to the United Nations, and his press flack spun the imaginative tale that the tragedy was the result of an Internet video that almost nobody saw. This conflicted with the fiction, peddled endlessly by the president, that he destroyed Islamic terrorism when he dispatched Osama bin Laden to wherever evil Muslims go when they die. This is the lie Mr. Romney must drive a stake through.

Pool Photo

Going after Obama foreign-policy mistakes and misadventures cries out for the sure, sharp, crisp questions and answers Mr. Romney displays when he talks about the economy. The overriding concern in this campaign is the consistent, driving incompetence of Barack Obama in everything he touches – at home and abroad. That’s what Mr. Romney must make him talk about.



Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

WELFARE RECIPIENTS MAY WELL DETERMINE THE OUTCOME OF THE VOTE ON NOVEMBER 6

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Welfare spending jumps 32% during Obama’s presidency.

• People wait in line to enter the Northern Brooklyn Food Stamp and DeKalb Job Center, Friday, Feb. 24, 2012 in New York. The state of the nation's economy is a dominant issue in this presidential election year. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
• In this photo provided by the Michigan Lottery, Amanda Clayton holds her $1 million lottery check. The state says Clayton who won a $1 million lottery prize but continued to get food stamps has been removed from a food assistance program. (AP Photo/Courtesy Michigan Lottery via Detroit Free Press) DETROIT NEWS OUT; AOL OUT
• In this Sept. 15, 2011 photo, Bill Ricker, 74, looks out the screen door of his trailer home on a rainy day, in Hartford, Maine. Ricker, who has two college degrees, has worked as an electronics repairman, a pastor and a TV cameraman. He and his first wife had seven children. Now he receives food stamps and heating fuel assistance and gets donations from a local food pantry. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
• A photo shows a brochure promoting the Food Stamp Friday event at the Rose Supper Club in Montgomery, Ala., Friday, March 30, 2012. The club will start "Food Stamp Friday" theme nights in April. Manager Harman Wilson says the night is meant to complement the club's other theme nights, such as Fat Tuesday, Karaoke Wednesday or Thirsty Thursday. Wilson says patrons will not be able to use their food stamps to purchase alcoholic beverages. He says he hopes the novel approach will draw people to the club. (AP Photo/Dave Martin)
•      s goes into effect in Pennsylvania, which critics say will disqualify thousands of low-i

The Washington Times

Thursday, October 18, 2012

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Federal welfare spending has grown by 32 percent over the past four years, fattened by President Obama’s stimulus spending and swelled by a growing number of Americans whose recession-depleted incomes now qualify them for public assistance, according to numbers released Thursday.



Federal spending on more than 80 low-income assistance programs reached $746 billion in 2011, and state spending on those programs brought the total to $1.03 trillion, according to figures from the Congressional Research Service and the Senate Budget Committee.
That makes welfare the single biggest chunk of federal spending — topping Social Security and basic defense spending.



Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee who requested the Congressional Research Service report, said the numbers underscore a fundamental shift in welfare, which he said has moved from being a Band-Aid and toward a more permanent crutch.

“No longer should we measure compassion by how much money the government spends but by how many people we help to rise out of poverty,” the Alabama conservative said. “Welfare assistance should be seen as temporary whenever possible, and the goal must be to help more of our fellow citizens attain gainful employment and financial independence.”

Welfare spending as measured by obligations stood at $563 billion in fiscal year 2008, but reached $746 billion in fiscal year 2011, a jump of 32 percent.



Complex story



The numbers tell a complex story of American taxpayers’ generosity in supporting a varied social safety net, including food stamps, support for low-income AIDS patients, child care payments and direct cash going from taxpayers to the poor.



By far, the biggest item on the list is Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for the poor, which at $296 billion in federal spending made up 40 percent of all low-income assistance in 2011. That total was up $82 billion from 2008.



Beyond that, the next big program is food stamps at $75 billion in 2011, or 10 percent of welfare spending. It’s nearly twice the size it was in 2008 and accounts for a staggering 20 percent of the total welfare spending increase over those four years.



Several programs to funnel cash to the poor also ranked high. Led by the earned income tax credit, supplemental security income and the additional child tax credit, direct cash aid accounts for about a fifth of all welfare.



Mr. Sessions’ staff on the Senate Budget Committee calculated that states contributed another $283 billion to low-income assistance — chiefly through Medicaid.



Richard Kogan, senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that while the dollar amounts for low-income assistance are growing, they still represent about the same slice of the budget pie when viewed over the long run. He said the costs may have spiked during the recession, but are projected to drop back to more normal levels once the economy recovers.  “In short, whatever one thinks about the merits or costs of these programs, other than Medicaid, they are contributing nothing to long-run budgetary pressures,” he said.



As for Medicaid, where major spending increases have been made, Mr. Kogan said even there it may be a savings.
“Medicaid provides health care at a noticeably cheaper price than Medicare does, and both are cheaper than the cost of private-sector health insurance,” he said. “The problem is not that the programs are badly designed — it is that the entire health care system in the U.S. is much more expensive than in any other advanced country.”
Combined with several programs also directed at health care, the category made up 46 percent of total welfare spending in 2011.
Mr. Kogan said the cash assistance figure was “a shockingly small amount of money” in the scheme of things.



“Virtually all the rest is in the form of in-kind assistance: Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, housing vouchers, Pell Grants, LIHEAP and child care vouchers; or in the form of direct services, such as community health centers, Title 1 education, foster care, school lunch and Head Start,” he said.



Rather than straight transfers, those other programs provide support for services Congress has deemed worthy of funding. SNAP is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that used to be called food stamps; LIHEAP is the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program; WIC is the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program; and Pell Grants provide assistance for college costs.
The conservative Heritage Foundation said roughly 100 million Americans get benefits from at least one low-income assistance program each month, with the average benefit coming to around $9,000.



The think tank estimates that if welfare spending were transferred as straight cash instead, it would be five times more than needed to lift every American family above the poverty line — though many of the programs help those above the poverty line.



Mr. Sessions’ Budget Committee staff said that at current projections, the 10 biggest welfare programs will cost $8.3 trillion over the next decade.



The Congressional Research Service looked at obligations for each program as its measure of spending. It included every program that had eligibility requirements that seemed designed chiefly to benefit those with lower or limited incomes. The report looked at programs that had obligations of at least $100 million in a fiscal year, which meant some small-dollar welfare assistance wasn’t included.



Political wrangle



The report was released as President Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney fight over the size and scope of government assistance.



Mr. Obama has taken heat from Republicans for a new policy that Republicans argue would remove work requirements from the 1996 welfare reform. The administration said it is merely adding more flexibility for states, which still would have to prove the law is meeting its jobs goals.



Mr. Romney was damaged last month by caught-on-camera remarks in which he said 47 percent of Americans are dependent on government and see themselves as victims.
In Tuesday’s debate, Mr. Romney blasted Mr. Obama for overseeing a 50 percent increase in the number of people on food stamps, which has risen from 32 million to 47 million.
But the two men also share some agreement on safety-net programs. In the debate, Mr. Romney said he wants to increase the Pell Grant program to help low-income students pay for college.

 

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