Tag Archives: Barack Obama

Jul 8 2014

Sarah Palin: ‘It’s Time to Impeach’ President Obama


Sarah has it 100% right!

Re-Post from Breitbart by 8 Jul 2014, 8:05 AM PDT 

Enough is enough of the years of abuse from this president. His unsecured border crisis is the last straw that makes the battered wife say, “no mas.”

Without borders, there is no nation. Obama knows this. Opening our borders to a flood of illegal immigrants is deliberate. This is his fundamental transformation of America. It’s the only promise he has kept. Discrediting the price paid for America’s exceptionalism over our history, he’s given false hope and taxpayer’s change to millions of foreign nationals who want to sneak into our country illegally. Because of Obama’s purposeful dereliction of duty an untold number of illegal immigrants will kick off their shoes and come on in, competing against Americans for our jobs and limited public services. There is no end in sight as our president prioritizes parties over doing the job he was hired by voters to do. Securing our borders is obviously fundamental here; it goes without saying that it is his job.

The federal government is trillions of dollars in debt, many cities are on the verge of insolvency, our overrun healthcare system, police forces, social services, schools, and our unsustainably generous welfare-state programs are stretched to the max. We average Americans know that. So why has this issue been allowed to be turned upside down with our “leader” creating such unsafe conditions while at the same time obstructing any economic recovery by creating more dependents than he allows producers? His friendly wealthy bipartisan elite, who want cheap foreign labor and can afford for themselves the best “border security” money can buy in their own exclusive communities, do not care that Obama tapped us out.

Have faith that average American workers – native-born and wonderful legal immigrants of all races, backgrounds, and political parties – do care because we’re the ones getting screwed as we’re forced to follow all our government’s rules while others are not required to do so. Many now feel like strangers in their own land. It’s the American worker who is forced to deal with Obama’s latest crisis with our hard-earned tax dollars while middle class wages decrease, sustainable jobs get more scarce, and communities become unrecognizable and bankrupted due to Obama’s flood of illegal immigration.

Who’s looking out for the American workers? Who has their backs? Who fights for them?

We should.

President Obama’s rewarding of lawlessness, including his own, is the foundational problem here. It’s not going to get better, and in fact irreparable harm can be done in this lame-duck term as he continues to make up his own laws as he goes along, and, mark my words, will next meddle in the U.S. Court System with appointments that will forever change the basic interpretation of our Constitution’s role in protecting our rights.

It’s time to impeach; and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment.

The many impeachable offenses of Barack Obama can no longer be ignored. If after all this he’s not impeachable, then no one is.

Jul 7 2014

Why Does Obama Want to Reduce CO2 Emissions?


Follow the money!

Posted on PowerLine July 6, 2014 by John Hinderaker

As his policies, foreign and domestic, are collapsing on pretty much every front, President Obama has increasingly sought refuge in talk about global warming. He wants the U.S. to reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide, and the EPA has done its best to bring this about via increasingly stringent regulations on coal-fired power plants. The Democrats wanted to enact cap-and-trade, but couldn’t get it through Congress, so Obama is doing the best he can through administrative action. Simultaneously, the administration has poured billions of dollars into specious “green” energy projects, many of which can’t be kept alive even with lavish subsidies, although their developers always walk away with their pockets full.

But why? Even if we assume that the climateers’ bogus models reflect scientific reality rather than left-wing politics–an assumption that is plainly contrary to fact–does any plausible reduction in American CO2 emissions make any difference?

The answer is: no, it doesn’t. If the climate alarmists’ models are correct, then the Obama administration’s efforts to reduce CO2 emissions are pointless.

Ed Hoskins explains at Watts Up With That?:

The USA, simply by exploiting shale gas for electricity generation, has already reduced its CO2 emissions by some 9.5% since 2005. That alone has already had more CO2 emission reduction effect than the entire Kyoto protocol.

But the US’s emissions reductions are irrelevant. These two charts tell the story. First, a simple comparison of CO2 emissions from developed and underdeveloped countries:

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Do India, China et al. have any interest in keeping their citizens in poverty to make the climateers happy? No. As Hoskins points out, 25% of India’s population still has no access to electric power. CO2 production in the underdeveloped world will continue to skyrocket, and there is nothing we can do about it.

This chart shows how China’s CO2 emission has eclipsed that of the U.S., as well as Europe, Japan, and so on. Any marginal reduction that the U.S. might achieve, short of going out of existence entirely (as some liberals might prefer for other reasons), simply won’t matter:

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Hoskins notes Bjorn Lomborg’s calculation that if the climateers’ disaster scenarios are correct, then Germany’s investment of $100 billion in solar power schemes “can only reduce the onset of Global Warming by a matter of about 37 hours by the year 2100.” A similar calculation would show the futility of the Obama administration’s “green” initiatives.

So what’s the point? I don’t have a high opinion of President Obama’s abilities, but he isn’t a complete idiot. So I assume he understands that his war on CO2, and his provision of billions of dollars in subsidies to “green” energy, won’t make any perceptible difference to the Earth’s climate, if you assume the alarmists’ models are correct. So why does he do it? I think there are two reasons.

First, the Left has made an enormous investment in promoting misinformation about global warming. You can’t get through elementary school in the U.S. without being hectored about your family’s carbon footprint. (“I will never live in a house bigger than John Edwards’,” my then-third-grade daughter wrote in response to a question about what she, personally, intended to do to change the Earth’s climate.) Those millions of misinformed people are now voters, and Obama is secure in the knowledge that the newspapers and television networks haven’t done anything to educate them.

Second, to the Obama administration, the fact that “green” energy cannot survive without government subsidies and mandates isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It allows the Democrats to slide billions of dollars to their cronies, like Tom Steyer, the left-wing billionaire who is now the number one financial supporter of the Democratic Party. Steyer made his first fortune by developing coal projects, and is making his second fortune as a Democratic Party crony, developing uneconomic but heavily subsidized “green” energy projects. So the war on coal and other sources of CO2, while it can’t have any impact at all on the climate, has turned into a funding mechanism for the Democratic Party.

Next time someone produces a dictionary and is looking for a definition of the word “cynic,” all he needs is a picture of Barack Obama.

Jul 2 2014

The Obama Scandal Bracket


Which scandal will bring down this administration?

Re-Post from Powerline John Hinderaker Junly 1 2014

One of the few things that interest Barack Obama, other than golf, is the annual NCAA basketball tournament bracket. So reader Brad Mirakian came up with the Obama Scandal Bracket. He did a good job of it too; he probably left off a scandal or two, but he also wisely left one blank for the scandal yet to come. Here it is. In comments, feel free to make your own observations about which is the worst of the Obama scandals, or which ones have the most potential to bring down the most corrupt administration within memory. Click to enlarge:

Obama Scandal Bracket

Jun 28 2014

The ISIS vers Obama, Round One goes to the ISIS


Mid East is sizzling: Armed US drones over Baghdad, Saudi, Jordanian tanks deploy

DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis June 28, 2014, 8:23 PM (IDT)

The Obama administration announced Friday, June 27, that unmanned aerial vehicles flying over Baghdad would henceforth be armed in order to defend the US Embassy in the Green Zone. The embassy was originally assigned the tasks of guardian of Iraq’s central government and symbol of post-Saddam national unity. These roles have remained out of reach ever since the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003. Today, the armed drones overhead are reduced to holding back the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) and its local Sunni allies from overrunning the Green Zone and seizing the embassy, most of whose 5,000 staff were evacuated as a precaution.

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President Barack Obama has again decreed that no US soldiers will take part in combat in Iraq. Therefore, American military personnel on the ground will be there to guide the drones to their targets. Those targets were defined Saturday, June 28, by Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, as striking at ISIS leaders and defending Iraq’s strategic facilities. He did not elaborate.

debkafile reports that he was referring to the Haditha dam on the Euphrates. ISIS fighters have been battered the town of Haditha on and off for some days. Its dam is the key to the water supply of most of Iraq, including Baghdad. With its capture, Al Qaeda’s affiliates will have gained control of northern Iraq’s oil refineries and pipeline networks.

US Secretary of State John Kerry in Jordan Friday laid out another piece of the Iraq-Syria imbroglio. He estimated that the Syrian rebel recruits enlisted from among the nearly one million Syrian refugees sheltering in Jordan could be deployed in Iraq for fighting ISIS. His words were accompanied by the Obama administration’s application to Congress for half a billion dollars to arm and train such a force. President Obama is therefore in the midst of yet another U-turn on the Syrian-Iraqi war scene – this one involving Israel too. Until now, the Syrian rebels undergoing training by US instructors in Jordan wre sent into southern Syria to hold a line up to the outskirts of Damascus and act as a buffer between the Syrian, Iranian, Hizballah and Iraqi Shiite militia units and the Israeli and Jordanian borders.

Their presence in this sector of the Syrian warfront was to have provided Washington with a bargaining chip against the Assad regime. This operation was run from an underground US-Jordanian-Israeli war room situated not far from the Jordanian capital of Amman. Kerry’s latest statement gave this bunker-command a new war focus and diverted Jordan-based Syrian rebel forces from their mission south of Damascus to contesting the rapidly-advancing Sunni Islamists in Iraq. Our military sources note that these forces – albeit with full US-Jordanian-Israeli intelligence and logistical back-up – were not an outstanding success in their Syrian mission and should not be expected to do much better in Iraq.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, the Lebanese army and Hizballah militia are bracing against the latest round of ISIS-engineered suicide bombing attacks, which was in fact launched last week with two explosions in Beirut – one by a female bomber. To the south of Lebanon, Israel’s unusually mild military retaliation against “terrorist targets” in Gaza for the swelling hail of rockets aimed day by day at Ashkelon, Hof Ashkelon and the Eshkol District , points to a decision by Israel’s government military leaders to avoid being dragged into the cauldron boiling up around its borders.

Israel’s armed forces and three intelligence services, the Shin Bet, Mossad and AMAN,  are in fact nursing the blow to their prestige from the failure of their massive, all-out hunt of two weeks discover the three teenagers abducted on June 10. Some serious soul-searching is taking place about the wisdom of throwing all of the IDF’s deterrent strength against the kidnappers, who have since been identified as a pair of Hamas operatives, who outsmarted Israel’s mightiest resources and vanished off the face of the earth with their captives.

Israel’s conduct in this episode appears in retrospect to have been ruled less by sense than by emotions. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was sidetracked by his fixed desire for a reckoning with Hamas and with the Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas for dealing with this extremist group – notwithstanding their near-irrelevance to the main stream of events in the region. Three months after Israel’s National Intelligence Estimate judged the prospect of a conventional war close to nil, Al Qaeda’s cohorts are grabbing wide stretches of Iraq and knocking on the doors of Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

Iran, Hizballah – and now ISIS – must be wondering what makes Israel tick in view of this behavior.  Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s jihadis are fighting under the flag of the Islamist State of Iraq and the Levant. For them, the Levant is not just Syria and Lebanon and Jordan, but also “Palestine” i.e. Israel. Jerusalem had better wake up fast. Jordan and Saudi Arabia have deployed tank divisions on their borders against ISIS encroachments. The two kingdoms are Israel’s eastern and southern next door neighbors.

Jun 24 2014

The jihadi menace reaches a high water mark


Re-Blog from Power Line Posted on June 23, 2014 by Paul Mirengoff in Iraq

“From the ruins of the Obama Administration’s Middle East strategy, the most powerful and dangerous group of religious fanatics in modern history has emerged in the heart of the Middle East.” So says Walter Russell Mead, the distinguished historian of American foreign policy (who reportedly has said he voted for Barack Obama in 2008).

The fanatical group in question is, of course, ISIS. According to Mead, who cites analysts at the Brookings Institution and the Washington Institute, ISIS is more radical, better organized, and better financed than al-Qaeda. It commands the loyalty of thousands of dedicated fanatics, including many with Western and even U.S. passports. And it now controls some of the most strategic territory at the heart of the Middle East.

Given these advantages, Mead concludes that ISIS is “much better positioned to launch attacks in the U.S. and Europe than any of its predecessors.” And though it is preoccupied for the moment in Syria and Iraq, when the dust settles ISIS’s desire to attack the U.S. and Europe will likely be at least as great as that of its predecessors who did attack us.

How did ISIS attain its current status? It flourishes in Iraq because President Obama pulled our troops out. Without our influence and presence in Iraq, the military rotted and ISIS filled the vacuum. ISIS flourishes in Syria in part because Obama dithered (to use Mead’s word) over aiding its rivals in the Syrian opposition.

What can be done now? It’s not clear that anything much can be done in Iraq. Obama likes to talk about “exit strategy.” But the issue now is reentrance strategy. Obama does not seem to have left us with a viable one in Iraq. I assume this was deliberate. In any case, there may be no exit from our exit strategy.

What happens next? Mead says we should watch two developments. First, will ISIS’s momentum carry forward when it reaches the Shia districts of Iraq? It may. According to Mead, the “militias and parade groups currently marching around Baghdad and thumping their chests may not be very effective in the field, and it is not yet clear whether the Iraqi Army will fight any better on Shia home turf than it did in the north and the west.” After all, “the Sunni crushed the Shia in Iraq for decades and there is no law of nature that says they can’t do it again.”

But even if ISIS halts or is halted before it reaches the Shia districts of Iraq, it will still control a large swath of territory in Iraq and Syria. Barring a major rollback, the threat to the U.S. will remain significant.

This brings us to the second key development to watch, namely the political balance that emerges within ISIS held territory. Mead observes:

Tribal leaders, Baathist activists, other religious groups and their allies outnumber the true ISIS cadres by an immense factor. It is far from clear whether the rebel region in Syria and Iraq will be under one increasingly powerful and effective government or whether it falls apart into factionalism and internal power struggles.

For ISIS to impose real order and authority on the population under its military control, and to build up its forces from a guerrilla army to a force capable of imposing dictatorial religious rule on a large civilian population, would be a victory as difficult and in some ways more astonishing than the triumph of its forces on the ground.

Accordingly, Mead suggests that “the U.S. might do better to try to strengthen the non-ISIS components of the Sunni movements in Syria and Iraq than to look to Tehran and the Kremlin for help.”

Right now, though, it’s difficult to imagine that the U.S. has any credibility left with the Sunni movements in Syria and Iraq. We did, but Obama squandered it. Any fissure between ISIS and the Sunnis will have to increase significantly before the U.S. — presumably under a new president — is again taken seriously by Sunnis in Iraq and Syria.

As Mead says:

Rarely has an administration so trumpeted its superior wisdom and strategic smarts; rarely has any American administration experienced so much ignominious failure, or had its ignorance and miscalculation so brutally exposed. . . .

Six years into what the President and his supporters thought would be an era of liberal Democrats seizing the national security high ground from enfeebled, discredited Republicans, the outlook is much grimmer than the President’s team could have dreamed.

The jihadi menace reaches a high water mark

Jun 10 2014

West Point Class of 2014


This was from a friend but not inconsistent with what I saw and know.

May 30, 2014

The West Point graduating class of 2014 “spoke” volumes as their commencement speaker, Barack Obama, used the speech NOT to laud them for their accomplishments and their sacrifice to serve in the U.S. Military, no, instead he chose to use that precious time to tell them how effective his foreign policy has been, how the military role in foreign policy going forward (paraphrasing) “ain’t what it used to be” and is no longer a leading line of defense. At times he stumbled over the words on the teleprompter to the point of embarrassment but he didn’t seem to be in the least bothered by it.

To top off his narcissistic ramblings in which he claimed successes in Syria and Ukraine for God’s Sake and bragged about ending the war in Iraq (and as every cadet sitting there knew, his actions of pulling all troops on a date certain, handed Iraq right back to Al Qaeda linked terrorist groups as if the sacrifices our military made was of no consequence and stood for nothing). Believe me, every one of those intelligent, well informed cadets knew the sacrifice this president flushed down the toilet and for what; political gain.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, he then lectured the cadets that they must focus on the progressive social policy of GLOBAL WARMING! He told them they must be prepared to help the government enforce the legislation. The looks on the cadets’ faces said it all!!! I could read their minds. “Since when has ANY of our military been used to enforce social policy? How ‘bout NEVER! And for good reason, Mr. president, that kind of use of the military only happens under DICTATORS, you ass. We studied long and hard to learn how to lead troops to defend our country from enemies both foreign and domestic, not enforce domestic and social policy at a president’s whim!”

The cadets, as is the custom, were prompted to applaud at designated intervals throughout the speech. At first, the majority of the cadets clapped on cue (out of respect for the office I would imagine) but there was no enthusiasm in it. Not even at the beginning. As the speech progressed, fewer and fewer cadets clapped. Many chose to stare at the ground. By the end there were only five or six clapping when prompted. Did the president seem to notice the cadets’ silent protest? Oh hell no. He was so enthralled by the sound of his own voice he stood there and beamed like the cat that swallowed the canary.

Here’s the topper; as the president handed out the diplomas to the West Point cadets; each one very accomplished, intelligent and dedicated to serving their country, their Commander-in-Chief BOPPED AROUND on the stage CHEWING GUM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Disrespectful? Yeah, I’d say. He is clueless six years in to his presidency. There again, the expressions on the cadets faces told it all. Contrasts don’t get much more stark than that.