"Our Position on Jerusalem Hasn't Changed"

Michael Totten writes at World Affairs that...

White House press secretary Jim Carney refused to publicly name the capital of Israel yesterday. All he was willing to say when asked repeatedly is that the White House position on Israel’s capital hasn’t changed...

It’s a fact—not an opinion—that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. Anyone who insists otherwise is in denial.  You may wish Tel Aviv was its capital. You may even wish a united Al Quds was the capital of the Arab state of Palestine. But those things can only be true in an alternate universe or in the future. In this universe, in 2012, Israel exists and Jerusalem is its capital.

 Only one of Israel’s national government buildings—the ministry of defense—is in Tel Aviv. All the others are in Jerusalem. And all of them are on the western side of the city inside the internationally recognized borders. The only people who dispute Israel’s right to exist in west Jerusalem are those who dispute Israel’s right to exist anywhere.

Apparently the only people who don't know that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel are those in the Obama administration.

Crony Capitalism Update for Today

Even the Obama-worshipping apologists at the Washington Post found this newsworthy:

Big donors considering whether to work the phones raising money for President Obama’s reelection campaign might consider the fate of his 2008 bundlers. Many of them, it turns out, won plum jobs in his administration.

Obama campaigned on what he called “the most sweeping ethics reform in history” and has frequently criticized the role of money in politics. That hasn’t stopped him from offering government jobs to some of his biggest bundlers, volunteer fundraisers who gather political contributions from other rich donors.

More than half of Obama’s 47 biggest fundraisers, those who collected at least $500,000 for his campaign, have been given administration jobs. Nine more have been appointed to presidential boards and committees.

Let's not forget that Obama has taken in more cash from Wall Street fat cats, a.k.a. the 1%, than any political candidate in history.


 

Defense Department: Ft. Hood Massacre was Workplace Violence

Remember when the Obama administration inexplicably renamed a terrorist attack as a man-caused disaster?

Well, believe it or not, U.S. military officials appear to have doubled down on political correctness by referring to the Ft. Hood massacre as merely "workplace violence."

Congressional leaders weren't pleased reports Fox News:

Sen. Susan Collins on Wednesday blasted the Defense Department for classifying the Fort Hood massacre as workplace violence and suggested political correctness is being placed above the security of the nation's Armed Forces at home.

During a joint session of the Senate and House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, the Maine Republican referenced a letter from the Defense Department depicting the Fort Hood shootings as workplace violence. She criticized the Obama administration for failing to identify the threat as radical Islam... The chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Connecticut independent Sen. Joe Lieberman, said the military has become a "direct target of violent Islamist extremism" within the United States.

The BlackFive military blog adds this comment about homegrown terrorism:

I really don’t know what more to say other than I agree with Senator Collins. What happened at Ft. Hood wasn’t a case of “workplace violence”, it was a case of a radicalized Islamist going on a murderous rampage because of his radicalization. It was also a total failure of leaders to recognize the threat and act on it well before it ended in the death of 13 at the Texas military installation.

If the Obama administration was in charge on December 7, 1941, what absurd terminology would they have dreamed up to describe the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor?

Added: Political correctness-bonus coverage:

Business Owner Won't Hire Until Obama Leaves Office

A Georgia businessman is not a big fan of Hope and Change: He says he can't afford to add new employees to his company until economic conditions improve under a new president.

Steyn on Hope and Change: "Soft Choices Have Hard Consequences"

As we have written several times, private-sector employers economy can often be unfair, unethical, arbitrary, corrupt, and even illegal. Nonetheless, socialism, crony capitalism, centralized government planning, an entrenched regulatory-litigation bureaucratic system, whatever you want to call it, has never worked in any nation it has been tried. It's even worse when the architects of such failed polices never themselves ever held a real job. You may have noticed that this general state of affairs has recently caused some of President Obama's most devoted media groupies to have second thoughts about all that hope and change stuff.

The president recently commented in a television interview that the country has gotten "a little soft." In a superb column, Mark Steyn agreed, observing that "This is a great, great country that got so soft that 53% of electors voted for a ludicrously unqualified chief executive who would be regarded as a joke candidate in any serious nation."

Steyn notes that remorseful buyers in the elite or mainstream media helped hand over "a multitrillion-dollar economy to a community organizer and you're surprised that it led to more taxes, more bureaucracy, more regulation, more barnacles on an already rusting hulk?"

Steyn adds: "To a fool such as your average talk-radio host, His Majesty appears to be a man of minimal accomplishments other than self-promotion marinated in a radical faculty-lounge view of the world and the role of government. But, to a wise man such as your average presidential historian or New York Times columnist, he is the smartest guy ever to become president."

Read the entire column here.

DOJ Whistleblower: Justice Department is Lawless

Is anyone really surprised that the Obama is presiding over the most politicized Justice Department in history? Consider the purely political lawsuit challenging the Arizona immigration law, dropping the Philadelphia voter intimidation case despite a default judgment against the perpetrators, and now allegations that the DOJ facilitates ACORN-like vote fraud according to whistleblower J. Christian Adams, a lawyer who worked in the agency's Voting Rights section:

In November 2009, the entire Voting Section was invited to a meeting with Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes, a political employee serving at the pleasure of the attorney general. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss Motor Voter enforcement decisions.

The room was packed with dozens of Voting Section employees when she made her announcement regarding the provisions related to voter list integrity:

We have no interest in enforcing this provision of the law. It has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it.

Jaws dropped around the room.

It is one thing to silently adopt a lawless policy of refusing to enforce a provision of federal law designed to bring integrity to elections. It is quite another to announce the lawlessness to a room full of people who have sworn an oath to fairly enforce the law.

Adams recently gave this interview on FNC following his testimony before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission:



Should the Republicans take control of Congress after the November, one of their first legislation actions should be to require photo ID in all 50 states to vote. This in addition to requiring full enforcement of Section 8 of the Motor Voter Law.

Blatant vote fraud is what the Democrats really mean by voter "outreach." That's how "Stuart Smalley," among others got elected to Congress. Democrats want every vote counted rather than every legal vote counted. Think of it as a form of community organizing...

Addendum: The lawyer (and now federal prosecutor) who represented the American Taliban is quarterbacking the DOJ's legal effort to block Arizona's immigration law. That speaks volumes about the administration's priorities, does it not?

Is the Obama Presidency Unraveling?

Earlier this month, when the news broke that the Washington Post was putting Newsweek up for sale, Erick Erickson (the boss at RedState.com) wrote the following:

 Jon Meacham, the overly pretentious editor of Newsweek, has finally succeeded. He has driven Newsweek into the ground.

Meacham and the rest of the Newsweek gang decided to turn Newsweek into leftwing political pornography in order to get access to Barack Obama. Increasingly, their audience has shrunk to a few blocks on the Upper West Side, various newsrooms, Democrat offices in Washington, and some college libraries.

The rest of the world jumped to Time, which still at least pretends to be unbiased, or got off the weekly circuit altogether.

Now comes word that Christopher Ruddy, the proprietor of Newsmax.com, is apparently one of the bidders for the failed magazine. Even if you're right of center, NewsMax content may not be your cup of tea.

Against the backdrop of the BP disaster, Ruddy just penned a column that reminds us how Joe Biden predicted the inexperienced president would be tested by an international crisis within the first six months of his term (this was after Biden said that Obama was unqualified to be president):

Biden was wrong on the timing, but prophetic on the point.

Our president has been tested by al-Qaida, which apparently has tried to pull off two major terror attacks in the past year alone, first with the Detroit plane incident and recently in Times Square.

 Obama also was tested after the Fort Hood incident, again treating this case as a criminal matter. His chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Eric Holder, won’t even say that these terrorist incidents could be linked to “radical Islam.”

Since Obama has taken office, he has been tested consistently by the Iranian regime, which flouted free elections to keep its radical president in power. Once again, Obama was timid and delayed in his response to this outrage.

And his administration has looked silly as Iran has refused continually to comply with international demands that it stop its nuclear weapons program.

Obama has failed another test, this time from Iran’s rogue ally North Korea.

Since North Korea’s brazen act of war with its torpedo attack on a South Korean vessel, President Obama has appeared feeble.

This is no time for such weakness coming from the leader of the free world.

My God, Joe Biden was right. We elected a 47-year-old senator who has no real-world experience, and he is being tested by our enemies. They are seeing his true mettle.

Ruddy also asserts that "What we are witnessing is harsh reality bumping up against President Obama’s façade and shattering the glass — a glass image created by oratory, image and an adoring press."

Ruddy's Newsmax colleague, John LeBoutillier, doesn't hold back either:

The Obama presidency is finally being exposed for what it is: an empty vessel piloted by a guy who can’t speak without a teleprompter and who just follows the Western European anti-American, anti-free enterprise, liberal socialistic model.

And some months ago, William Katz of Urgent Agenda, wrote the following:

And so we still ask: Who is the president? We will get an inkling in the coming months as he deals with Iran, perhaps the biggest foreign policy challenge of 2010. Our answer to the question will decide Barack Obama's future, both as president and as potential (but not definite) candidate in 2012. This is political theater, and very good theater at that. And it requires acting. Ronald Reagan was a real actor, and a distinguished statesman. Barack Obama is a fake actor, with statesmanship yet to be assessed.

If the Obama administration is coming apart at the seams, should we be surprised?

Terror Plots Less Isolated, More Connected

New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin is properly calling attention to the administration's strange and ultimately self-defeating tendency to call every terrorist attack an isolated incident. It's kind of like those ordinary criminal defense lawyers hanging around the courthouse arguing that their client is a good kid who merely got involved in bad crowd. If every kid is good, where does the bad crowd come from?

One of the most troubling tics of Team Obama is the frantic rush to declare that every terror attack on American soil is carried out by an isolated individual with no connection to al Qaeda or other groups. It was the gist of their rapid response to the failed airline bombing on Christmas Day, to the Fort Hood shooter and, most recently, to the plot by Faisal Shahzad to set off a car bomb in Times Square...

It's a reasonable theory, but it has a problem. The claims have been dead wrong in all three cases. Each "lone wolf" was quickly shown to have had contacts with or received training from a terror group abroad.

Administration Considers Flexibility on KSM Trial

The administration may be laying the groundwork for some major backpedaling:

The Obama administration prefers a civilian trial for the alleged 9/11 mastermind, but says that in the face of public and political opposition it must be open to a military tribunal.

In an interview published Monday in The New York Times, Attorney General Eric Holder said, "I have to be more forceful in advocating for why I believe these are trials that should be held on the civilian side."

However, Holder did not rule out a military trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, saying, "You have to be flexible." [AP]

As we have pointed out previously, Holder should have recused himself from this entire transaction given that his former law firm represented various detainees.

And administration officials have repeatedly claimed that KSM will be found guilty. Doesn't that taint the jury pool?

Terrorists Wanted Dead Rather Than Alive?

It's obvious that the Obama administration is in total disarray in connection with its confused interrogation policies for enemy combatants and ill-advised plans to put terrorists on trial in civil courts. But according to the Washington Post, the administration has apparently come up with a third way, one that that eliminates all that messy and complicated legal mumbo jumbo:

When a window of opportunity opened to strike the leader of al-Qaeda in East Africa last September, U.S. Special Operations forces prepared several options. They could obliterate his vehicle with an airstrike as he drove through southern Somalia. Or they could fire from helicopters that could land at the scene to confirm the kill. Or they could try to take him alive.

The White House authorized the second option. On the morning of Sept. 14, helicopters flying from a U.S. ship off the Somali coast blew up a car carrying Saleh Ali Nabhan. While several hovered overhead, one set down long enough for troops to scoop up enough of the remains for DNA verification. Moments later, the helicopters were headed back to the ship.

The strike was considered a major success, according to senior administration and military officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified operation and other sensitive matters. But the opportunity to interrogate one of the most wanted U.S. terrorism targets was gone forever.

The Nabhan decision was one of a number of similar choices the administration has faced over the past year as President Obama has escalated U.S. attacks on the leadership of al-Qaeda and its allies around the globe. The result has been dozens of targeted killings and no reports of high-value detentions.

Illegal Foreign Political Contributions? Look In the Mirror

Justice Samuel Alito may have been channeling in a more genteel way his inner Joe Wilson, but President Obama seems to have set up a straw-man argument in railing against the Supreme Court's decision in the Citizens United campaign finance case.

Professor William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection says that if the Obama has real concerns about illegal foreign contributions to political campaigns, he should appoint a special prosecutor--to investigate his own 2008 presidential run:

And the place the special counsel can start is with Obama's 2008 campaign, which disabled security features in its credit card web portal so as to allow donors to evade restrictions on numerous aspects of the federal campaign laws, including the prohibition on foreign contributions

Given that Obama was wrong that the decision allows foreign campaign contributions, Jacobson suggests that this grandstanding is an attempt to grease the skids for the nomination of an ultra-leftist judicial activist to the Court in the event that Justice Stevens retires at the end of this term.

By the way, campaign commercials get very tedious, but why shouldn't U.S. corporations be placed on the same level playing field as unions when it comes to political speech under the First Amendment?

Intelligence Reviewer Has Major Conflict of Interest

Remember all that cockamamie campaign rhetoric about banning all those horrible lobbyists from the administration? According to Politico, never mind about all that:

President Barack Obama promised a “thorough review” of the government’s terrorist watch list system after a Nigerian man reported to U.S. government officials by his father to have radicalized and gone missing last month was allowed to board a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit that he later allegedly tried to blow up without any additional security screening.

Yet the individual Obama has chosen to lead the review, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, served for 35 years in the CIA, helped design the current watch list system and served as interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center, whose role is under review.

In the three years before joining the Obama administration, Brennan was president and CEO of The Analysis Corp., an intelligence contracting firm that worked closely with the National Counterterrorism Center and other U.S. government intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security agencies on developing terrorism watch lists.

In the meantime, Newsweek claims that Obama received pre-Christmas intel about terror threats to the homeland:

President Barack Obama received a high-level briefing only three days before Christmas about possible holiday-period terrorist threats against the US, Newsweek has learned. The briefing was centered on a written report, produced by US intelligence agencies, entitled "Key Homeland Threats", a senior US official said.

The senior Administration official, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, said that nowhere in this document was there any mention of Yemen, whose Al-Qaeda affiliate is now believed to have been behind the unsuccessful Christmas Day attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to bring down a transatlantic airliner with a bomb hidden in his underpants. However, the official declined to disclose any other information about the substance of the briefing, including what kind of specific warnings, if any, the President was given about possibly holiday attacks and whether Yemen came up during oral discussions.

By the way, as we've mentioned previously, the media used to go nuts about Bush's Crawford, Texas, vacations, but have they said word one about Obama's extended Hawaiian holiday in the midst of a terror attack?

In a related development, Obama reached back into the Bush administration to appoint Howard Schmidt as White House cybersecurity "czar." Schmidt, a former special cybersecurity advisor to President George W. Bush, specialized in computer security and forensics as an investigator for the FBI, the Air Force, and local law enforcement. In the private sector, he held executive positions related to cyber-security at Microsoft and eBay.

Who Is In Charge Of The Failed System?

If Bush had waited three days to publicly speak about the Northwest Airlines terrorist attack, the media would have demanded his head on a platter. In any event, the London Telegraph gives 10 reasons why the Obama administration gets an F in homeland security:

There is no more solemn duty for an American commander-in-chief than the martialling of “all elements of American power” – the phrase Obama himself used on Monday – to protect the people of the United States. In that key respect, Obama failed on Christmas Day, just as President George W. Bush failed on September 11th (though he succeeded in the seven years after that).

Yes, the buck stops in the Oval Office. Obama may have rather smugly given himself a “B+” for his 2008 performance but he gets an F for the events that led to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarding a Detroit-bound plane in Amsterdam with a PETN bomb sewn into his underpants. He said today that a “systemic failure has occurred”. Well, he’s in charge of that system.

...In his studied desire to be the unBush by responding coolly to events like this, Obama is dangerously close to failing as a leader. Yes, it is good not to shoot from the hip and make broad assertions without the facts. But Obama took three days before speaking to the American people, emerging on Monday in between golf and tennis games in Hawaii to deliver a rather tepid address that significantly underplayed what happened. He described Abdulmutallab as an “isolated extremist” who “allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device on his body” – phrases that indicate a legalistic, downplaying approach that alarms rather than reassures. Today’s words showed a lot more fire and desire to get on top of things – we’ll see whether Obama follows through with action. In the meantime, he went snorkelling.

On this side of the Atlantic, Col. Ralph Peters (ret.) warns that we are dealing with the international equivalent of "Bill Ayers and the Weathermen, pampered kids unhappy with the world."

Despite limited Special Operations strikes beyond our recognized combat zones, we still don't accept the nature of the threat from jet-set jihadis. Our leaders and our military are obsessed with holding ground in Afghanistan -- even though al Qaeda's growth areas are in Yemen and Africa.

We voluntarily tie ourselves down, while our enemies focus on mobility. Worse, we've convinced ourselves that development aid (the left's all-purpose medicine) is the key to defeating al Qaeda.

That's utter nonsense. Abdulmutallab's a rich kid. He didn't come from a deprived background, bearing the grievances of the slum. He's a graduate of a top English university. And Osama bin Laden's from a super-rich family. How does building a footbridge in Afghanistan deter them?

U.S. Surrenders Internet Control: ICANN Goes International

In general, this policy giveaway seems initially benign--until you consider that many foreign governments run by oppressive, totalitarian dictators lack a fundamental appreciation, shall we say, for freedom of speech. And when you consider how the dysfunctional, corrupt United Nations operates, do we really want a "virtual U.N." playing any role in Internet connectivity?

After complaints about American dominance of the internet and growing disquiet in some parts of the world, Washington has said it will relinquish some control over the way the network is run and allow foreign governments more of a say in the future of the system.

Icann – the official body that ultimately controls the development of the internet thanks to its oversight of web addresses such as .com, .net and .org – said today that it was ending its agreement with the US government.

The deal, part of a contract negotiated with the US department of commerce, effectively pushes California-based Icann towards a new status as an international body with greater representation from companies and governments around the globe.

The Obama administration's foreign policy has run the gamut from inept to devious (and let's remember it has also has put forth its own potentially unconstitutional initiatives to try to control the Internet), so once again we are left with the the fundamental question: how does this policy change make American safer and more secure?