Hamas orders West Bank cells to attack Abbas forces and Israel

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report
May 31, 2009

Hamas gears up to shoot missiles from West Bank

DEBKAfile's military sources disclose that Sunday night, May 31, Hamas commanders in Damascus and Gaza ordered all West Bank cells to unleash a terrorist assault on the West Bank with bomb cars, roadside bombs, snipers and missiles. They were told to set their sights on all Palestinian Authority officials including Mahmoud Abbas as well as taking aim at Israeli cities north of Tel Aviv.

Our sources quote the Hamas directive as saying: "From tonight, you must go into action without delay against every Palestinian/Israel target within reach, using all the resources prepared in recent months."

The directive continues: "There are no limits on targets, the more senior, central and important, the better."

Israel's homeland defense authority was notified of Hamas' declaration of war Sunday as it embarked on "Turning Point 3", Israel's largest civil defense exercise ever, designed to simulate simultaneous missile attacks from Iran, Syria, Hizballah from Lebanon and Hamas from the Gaza Strip.

The new Hamas directive placed Sharon towns north of Tel Aviv squarely within its sights. A number of Qassam missiles are believed to be hidden in Palestinian towns in Samaria, northern West Bank.

Hamas leaders' decision to unleash violence was triggered by three events:

1. In 48 hours, the fundamentalist Palestinian terrorists lost two top West Bank leaders in battle. Friday morning, May 29, an Israeli Border Guard counter-terror unit shot dead its Hebron commander, Abdullah Majid Dudin, when he resisted arrest.

Before dawn Sunday, May 31, a special Palestinian Authority unit killed Hamas' northern Samaria commander Muhammad Saman after a seven-hour shootout in Qalqilya.

PA troops also detained 22 members.

Hamas leaders, convinced that Israeli and Palestinian security forces acted in conjunction to liquidate their top commanders, determined not to let this go unanswered.

2. They believe that the Palestinian Authority US-trained security force directed by Gen. Keith Dayton, is not up to much and a determined Hamas offensive would blow the Fatah-led force away on the West Bank as easily as its comrades were defeated in the Gaza Strip.

3. Hamas is worried by the way the US President Barack Obama and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas are cooperating, as their White House talks Thursday, May 28 indicated. Its leaders are also fiercely opposed to Obama's forthcoming address Thursday, June offering America's hand of peace to the Muslim world.

From their command centers in Damascus and the Gaza Strip, Hamas chiefs have concluded that the most effective way to scuttle the US president's Middle East projects and his diplomatic and financial backing for Abbas' Fatah-led administration in Ramallah is to set the West Bank on fire by a wholesale terror offensive against the Palestinian Authority and Israeli urban targets.
Click to read the article

Obama Is Stabbing Israel In The Back

from The Jerusalem Post
By HAVIV RETTIG GUR
May 31, 2009

Israel fumes as Abbas undermines Netanyahu during US visit

Senior Israeli officials were dismissive and defiant on Saturday night, following Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's visit to Washington, highlighted by a report in which PA officials said the leadership is waiting for US pressure to bring down the Netanyahu government.
The report in Friday's Washington Post came a day after Abbas's White House meeting with US President Barack Obama.

"It will take a couple of years" for this American pressure to force Netanyahu from office, the Washington Post quoted one of Abbas's officials as saying, presumably bringing opposition head Tzipi Livni to power.

"With all due respect to the United States, our strategic ally, we are an independent democratic country, and our political leadership is chosen by internal democratic processes," coalition chairman and Likud MK Ze'ev Elkin said on Saturday night.

A senior government official recalled former foreign minister Abba Eban's declaration that the Palestinians "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Let that not happen this time as well."

"It would be a pity if the Palestinian leadership threw away the very real chance that exists to move forward with this Israeli government on our proposed three-track approach of political, economic and security issues. If they decide they don't want to work to move the process forward, they'll have no one to blame but themselves," the official added.

According to the report, Abbas and his leadership believe the government would likely fall if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu surrendered to American demands for a total freeze on construction in West Bank settlements.

"If it is true that Abu Mazen [Abbas] believes Livni will be a more comfortable negotiating partner for the Palestinians, then it shows the wisdom of the Israeli voter, who decided to place someone else in charge," Elkin declared.

He insisted the government was stable - "I think every member of the coalition is responsible enough to enable this government to last its appointed term" - and that it would not easily give in to American demands.

"Our experience with American dictates in the very recent past has not been a good one," he said. "It was the United States that insisted on allowing Hamas to run in the Palestinian elections. I don't think this government will very easily cave to demands that are not carefully considered and responsible, no matter how much we value our strategic partnership with the United States."

Abbas was interviewed the day before his Thursday meeting with the US president, during which Obama reiterated his calls on Israel "to stop the settlements, to make sure that we are stopping the building of outposts, to work with the Palestinian Authority in order to alleviate some of the pressures that the Palestinian people are under in terms of travel and commerce."

Setting out what the newspaper called "a hardline position," the Palestinian leader conditioned a resumption of talks with Israel on Netanyahu's agreement to a halt in all settlement building and formal Israeli government acceptance of Palestinian statehood.

Abbas added that he would not even assist Obama's special envoy, George Mitchell, in trying to encourage Arab states to begin warming relations with Israel until Israel accepted these conditions.

"We can't talk to the Arabs until Israel agrees to freeze settlements and recognizes the two-state solution," Abbas was quoted as saying. "Until then, we can't talk to anyone."

However, the Washington Post went on, "Abbas and his team fully expect that Netanyahu will never agree to the full settlement freeze - if he did, his center-right coalition would almost certainly collapse. So they plan to sit back and watch while US pressure slowly squeezes the Israeli prime minister from office.

"'It will take a couple of years,' one official breezily predicted."

Abbas "rejects the notion that he should make any comparable concession - such as recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, which would imply renunciation of any large-scale resettlement of refugees," the article continued.

Abbas intends to remain passive, he told the paper.

"I will wait for Hamas to accept international commitments. I will wait for Israel to freeze settlements… Until then, in the West Bank we have a good reality... The people are living a normal life."

Abbas also told the Washington Post that former prime minister Ehud Olmert accepted the principle of a "right of return" to Israel for Palestinian refugees and offered to resettle thousands of Palestinians in Israel. He said Olmert proposed a Palestinian state on 97 percent of the West Bank, and showed him its contours on a map.

Abbas said he turned down Olmert's peace offer because "the gaps were too wide."

"What's interesting about Abbas's hardline position," wrote the Washington Post's Jackson Diehl, who conducted the interview along with a colleague, "is what it says about the message that Obama's first Middle East steps have sent to Palestinians and Arab governments."

While the Bush administration placed the onus for change in the Middle East on the Palestinians, Diehl wrote, the Obama administration had shifted the focus to Israel.

The upshot is that "in the Obama administration, so far, it's easy being Palestinian," Diehl wrote.

Under George W. Bush, the Palestinians knew that "until they put an end to terrorism, established a democratic government and accepted the basic parameters for a settlement, the United States was not going to expect major concessions from Israel," wrote Diehl.

But Obama, with his repeated demands for a settlement freeze, "has revived a long-dormant Palestinian fantasy: that the United States will simply force Israel to make critical concessions, whether or not its democratic government agrees, while Arabs passively watch and applaud."

Diehl wrote that Netanyahu and the Likud Party had not reconciled themselves "to the idea that Israel will have to give up most of the West Bank and evacuate tens of thousands of settlers" for a permanent accord.

"But Palestinians remain a long way from swallowing reality as well," he added. "Setting aside Hamas and its insistence that Israel must be liquidated, Abbas - usually described as the most moderate of Palestinian leaders - last year helped doom Netanyahu's predecessor, Ehud Olmert, by rejecting a generous outline for Palestinian statehood."

Olmert's offer "was more generous to the Palestinians than either that of Bush or Bill Clinton," wrote Diehl. "It's almost impossible to imagine Obama, or any Israeli government, going further."

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's spokesman Tzahi Moshe confirmed on Saturday night that the foreign minister would go to Russia and Belarus on Monday for talks "that are part of the special strategic connection which the minister believes Israel has with Russia."

In Moscow, Lieberman will meet with President Dmitri Medvedev, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, "and will discuss many issues, including Iran and the strengthening of Israel's relationship with 'Eastern bloc' countries," Moshe said.
Click to read the rest of the article and the comments

Is Mohammed a Pimp for Terrorists?

Was Mohammad the Original Motivational Speaker???

Did he contrive the vision of Paradise and 72 virgins as a reward for martyrdom to motivate his army to continue to fight?

Why would you believe in a God that will reward you with 72 virgins if you will kill innocent men, women and children?

Why is 72 virgins the magic number?

If their God did not reward them with Paradise and 72 virgins, would they still kill with the same amount of enthusiasm and with no regard for their own life?

Do they treat their 72 virgins in Paradise as brutally as they treat their women here on earth?

The lives of most suicide bombers generally suck. Of course they going to be motivated to die for the cause when they can leave their hell-hole on earth and be rewarded with Paradise and 72 virgins. It's no wonder that they're lining-up and taking numbers wanting to die.

How can you actually believe in a God that is so deranged that killing your children in the name of honor is a considered a pious act?

How perverted is it that the parents want their children to become martyrs? How can they believe in a God that has them bring children into this life for the sole purpose of killing others?

Their ultimate dilemma is if there is no more war, no one to hate and kill. When that happens, how do they get to Paradise and claim their virgins?

That's the whole point! Their religion requires perpetual war and killing.

Wouldn't these beliefs of costant killing, even within your own family, be contrary to everything a loving God would desire for his children?

I believe my God must be horrified by the disgusting, barbaric, satanic behavior of some of his children.
Just my thoughts.
Rees

Someone needs to re-write their playbook.

GOP takes aim at Barack and Michelle Obama's NYC Trip

By POLITICO STAFF
May 31, 2009

President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama landed in New York Saturday afternoon, and after taking a helicopter from JFK into Manhattan, drove up the West Side Highway, where the northbound lanes were shut down by police for their visit, past Ground Zero, into the Village for dinner at the Village's Blue Hill restaurant. From there, they went north to Times Square, where they went to to see a production of "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" at the Belasco Theater on West 44 Street.

Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest read a statement from Obama: "I am taking my wife to New York City because I promised her during the campaign that I would take her to a Broadway show after it was all finished."

Asked about the cost of the trip, which Republicans have criticized as indulgent, coming just ahead of the expected announcement of GM's bankruptcy filing on Monday, Josh Earnest told pool reporter Dave Michaels of the Dallas Morning News, that he "didn't anticipate being able to provide a cost estimate tonight."

After the play let out at about 11:30 p.m., the presidential motorcade went down Sixth Avenue, shut down by the NYPD, and onlookers packed onto the East side of the street cheered as the presidential motorcade passed as the Obamas headed back to JFK for a return flight to Washington.

The Republican National Committee slammed the outing in an "RNC Research Piece": "As President Obama prepares to wing into Manhattan’s theater district on Air Force One to take in a Broadway show, GM is preparing to file bankruptcy and families across America continue to struggle to pay their bills. ... Have a great Saturday evening – even if you’re not jetting off somewhere at taxpayer expense. ... PUTTING ON A SHOW: Obamas Wing Into The City For An Evening Out While Another Iconic American Company Prepares For Bankruptcy."

The RNC's Gail Gitcho added: "If President Obama wants to go to the theater, isn’t the Presidential box at the Kennedy Center good enough?”

The president traveled in a smaller, Gulfstream-type plane rather than the larger planes typically used as Air Force One. Two other planes carried staff and reporters.

Here are Dave Michaels' pool reports to the White House press corps:

"We touched down at JFK International Airport about 4:35 p.m. in the first plane of three. We held in helicopter for POTUS AND FLOTUS arrival at 4:43 p.m., which we witnessed through windows. We took off before Marine One and passed over the rooftops of Queens before turning south over the East River. Just after passing over the Brooklyn Bridge we landed at the downtown Manhattan Heliport, which I'm told is also called the Wall Street landing zone.

"The sky is clear and blue here, same weather as in Washington. No traffic on West Street as NYPD had cleared the road. Some observers watched for Marine One from a pier about 100 yards north. I could see ten or more NYPD motor jocks, a bunch of cruisers and a rather large RV-style van, perhaps a mobile command center.

"We headed north on West Street in vans and passed Ground Zero. Southbound traffic on the Westside Highway seemed light, but probably slowed down as the rubber necking began. We turned right on Clarkson Street and headed cross town. Plenty of pedestrians and diners at the trattoria checking us out.

"POTUS waved to enthusiastic watchers as his vehicle headed toward the Blue Hill restaurant on Washington Place.

From an earlier report from Michaels as the presidential party took off from Washington: "Three presidential helicopters descended on Andrews Air Force Base about 3:42 p.m. A group of about 20 people, a few members of the military wearing camouflage and what must have been their families, watched from a distance of 50 to 75 yards.

"Exactly five minutes later, President Obama and Michelle Obama stepped down from Marine One. POTUS was business casual, but very sharp, in a dark blue suit and black shoes. His white shirt was unbuttoned at the top — no tie. Mrs. Obama wore a black cocktail dress and black heels. Her hair was up and she held a small blue purse, which I'm informed is called a clutch. They boarded a presidential Gulfstream 500 and we took off shortly before 4 p.m. en route to New York City, where the first couple is to have dinner and watch a play, 'Joe Turner's Come and Gone' at the Belasco Theater. The name of the production is courtesy of the New York Daily News.

"The first couple has left the Blue Hill restaurant in the West Village and headed north of the Belasco Theater, arriving at 7:55 p.m..

"NYPD had blocked 6th Avenue for our motorcade to move north from the restaurant toward Midtown. Pedestrians lined both sides of the street, taking photos and waving behind metal barricades, as if we were part of a parade.

"A bit earlier, your pooler asked Josh Earnest, deputy press secretary, how much this trip costs taxpayers. He said other reporters had asked and he 'didn't anticipate being able to provide a cost estimate tonight.'"
Click to go to the Politico article and read the comments

One Nation Under Obama - withOUT liberty and justice for all

The president is co-opting whatever he needs to remake this country. Why not religion too?

from Pajamas Media
May 30, 2009
by Awr Hawkins
image by rees

Barack Obama has long been known for his socialistic convictions and messianic tendencies. That he therefore wants to rule rather than represent and to dictate rather than debate is not hard to understand. And while he may not come right out and say it, he expects us to pledge allegiance to him. He said as much when he told Republican House members just three days after his inauguration that the quicker they quit listening to voices that run counter to his, the better for us all.

Obama has been encouraged down this kingly path by some very unsavory characters. Just a month before the 2008 presidential elections were held, he drew the praise of the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who said “when Obama talks ‘the messiah is absolutely speaking.’” And more recently, on April 24, 2009, he drew praise from communist dictators from “Boliva, Cuba, Dominica, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Venezuela” who are trusting Obama to join them in their efforts to prove that “capitalism is leading humanity and the planet to extinction” by incorporating everything from health care to cell service under the guise of “human rights” — and thus under the purview of government entitlements at taxpayer expense.

The scary news is that our president is a self-aggrandizing anti-capitalist with or without the support of Farrakhan and the Latin communists, and therefore has no problem overseeing a federal government eager to take over more aspects of our everyday lives. For the more Obama co-opts, the more we have to focus on him. And please don’t fail to understand that this includes religion in the United States — especially Christianity.

Obama wants his judgments and convictions to be our guide in all spheres of life, even when his judgments run 180 degrees counter to the natural law that guided our Founders or the Bibles that guided the Puritans. Therefore, it was as easy for him to skip the National Day of Prayer on May 7, 2009, and open the door to the legalized killing of “days-old unborn children for [stem cell] research” as it was for him to tell GM what type of cars they’ll be building in the future if they want to remain extant.

Obama has long been opposed to the traditional values that undergird this nation and has been wise enough to war against those values in the name of those values, thus disorienting those whom he can’t intellectually disarm. For example, when he discusses any of his personal positions that go against the Christian faith, such as his pro-abortion stance, he always makes certain to mention that he’s a Christian in the process. The implication being that Christianity’s chief characteristic is some vague acceptance of all positions as equally valid instead of the orthodox, historical Christian insistence on truth and justice, good and evil.

Ultimately, this allows him to dismiss Christianity’s ethical claims on the life of the believer altogether. This was clear when he spoke about the tensions between his pro-abortion stance and Christianity at the Call to Renewal Conference in 2006: “Democracy demands that … religiously motivated [individuals] translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values.”

This is also how Obama sidestepped the implications of his support for abortion when giving Notre Dame’s commencement address. He made it sound like the pro-abortion and anti-abortion positions are just two viable positions that Christians can hold. While he admitted that these two positions flow from “views … [which] are complex and even contradictory … [and] irreconcilable,” he wisely avoided the use of smaller but more important words such as “right” and “wrong,” and asked that members of the “irreconcilable” factions “honor the consciences” of those with whom they disagree on the abortion issue. Never mind that this tactic allowed him to continue down the path of supporting abortion without having to explain why he supports it or to justify his use of taxpayer dollars to fund the practice.

But how dare we expect the great and powerful Obama to explain himself, as if he too were a mere serf or subject, or even a run-of-the-mill politician from days gone by?

When it comes to economics, Obama’s mode of operation is similar to that which he uses when talking to religious universities and Christian congregations. Therefore, although he’s only been in office since January 20, 2009, he’s been able to move at a speed that disorients those he can’t convert and has succeeded in the quasi-nationalization of many banks, financial institutions, and the American auto industry. He’s openly setting his sights on our health care system now, which means the Latin American communist leaders who asked Obama to join their war against capitalism should feel encouraged that things are going their way here in the United States.

Of course, Obama always says government bailouts (takeovers) are just temporary and that he only resorts to them as a last-ditch effort to save the economy. But the fact that he has that cheese-eating grin on his face every time he announces more government involvement seems dubious.

In fact, in a style which only a two-bit revolutionary could love, the always-grinning Obama acts then explains or at best acts while explaining, so that by the time his explanation comes through it’s too late to do much more than go along with him. This is the epitome of what the late Harvard Professor Crane Brinton communicated in his book The Anatomy of Revolution, when he wrote of how extremists like Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin (and Obama) cannot wait until people share their views before acting, but must act and trust that the people will eventually see why the action was necessary to further the revolution.

The bottom line is this: Forget the “one nation under God” stuff and understand that for the foreseeable future we are to consider ourselves “one nation under Obama.” The quicker we figure this out, the easier the adjustment is going to be for us all.
Click to read the article and the comments

Israel to Obama: 'Stop favoring Palestinians'

from Haaretz.com
By Barak Ravid
May 31, 2009

Tensions between Washington and Jerusalem are growing after the U.S. administration's demand that Israel completely freeze construction in all West Bank settlements. Israeli political officials expressed disappointment after Tuesday's round of meetings in London with George Mitchell, U.S. President Barack Obama's envoy to the Middle East.

"We're disappointed," said one senior official. "All of the understandings reached during the [George W.] Bush administration are worth nothing." Another official said the U.S. administration is refusing every Israeli attempt to reach new agreements on settlement construction. "The United States is taking a line of granting concessions to the Palestinians that is not fair toward Israel," he said. Advertisement


The Israeli officials attributed the unyielding U.S. stance to the speech Obama will make in Cairo this Thursday, in which he is expected to deliver a message of reconciliation to the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Mitchell was joined at the London talks by his deputy David Hale, Daniel B. Shapiro (the head of the National Security Council's Middle East desk), and State Department deputy legal adviser Jonathan Schwartz.

The Israeli delegation consisted of National Security Adviser Uzi Arad, Netanyahu diplomatic envoy Yitzhak Molcho, Defense Ministry chief of staff Mike Herzog and deputy prime minister Dan Meridor.

Herzog spoke to Mitchell and his staff about understandings reached by former prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ariel Sharon with the Bush administration on allowing continued building in the large West Bank settlement blocs. He asked that a similar agreement be reached with the Obama government.

Meridor spoke of the complexities characterizing the coalition headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and said Washington's demands of a complete construction freeze would lead to the dissolution of the Netanyahu government.

The Israeli delegates were stunned by the uncompromising U.S. stance, and by statements from Mitchell and his staff that agreements reached with the Bush administration were unacceptable. An Israeli official privy to the talks said that "the Americans took something that had been agreed on for many years and just stopped everything."

"What about the Tenet Report, which demanded that the Palestinians dismantle the terror infrastructure?" said the official, referring to former CIA director George Tenet. "It's unfair, and there is no reciprocity shown toward the Palestinians."

The Israeli envoys said the demand for a total settlement freeze was not only unworkable, but would not receive High Court sanction. Tensions reportedly reached a peak when, speaking of the Gaza disengagement, the Israelis told their interlocutors, "We evacuated 8,000 settlers on our own initiative," to which Mitchell responded simply, "We've noted that here."

Defense Minister Ehud Barak will travel to Washington today in an attempt to put further pressure on the Obama administration.

"We want to reach an agreement with the United States on ways to advance the peace process," said a senior Jerusalem official. The U.S. stance, he said, "will stall the process and bring about tension and stagnation, which will hurt both Israel and the United States."
Click to read the article and the comments

Attention Whore World Tour Continues in Egypt - 3,000 Secret Servicemen airlifted...

Airlift of 3,000 Secret Servicemen to Cairo to secure Obama speech to Muslims
DEBKAfile Special Report
May 31, 2009

US president Barack Obama has not yet decided whether his historic speech reaching out to the Muslim world will be delivered on June 4 from a lecture hall at Al Azhar University in Cairo or its main mosque, DEBKAfile's Middle East sources report. If the second, his address will take place in the presence of Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, the Sunni Muslim world's greatest religious authority. In any event, Al Azhar is the most eminent school of Islamic learning in the world and the US president therefore expects its impact to far outweigh his first address to Muslims from Istanbul.

His arrival from a meeting with Saudi King Abdullah in Riyadh on June 3 is planned to add extra weight to Obama's dramatic outreach to Muslims, since the king officiates as Custodian of the Holy Places to Islam.

Radical Muslims will therefore have all the more reason for rejecting it.

Giant transports have been landing at Cairo airport, unloading a fleet of armored vehicles, White House helicopters, counter-terror weapons and the vanguard of the 3,000 Secret Service officers backed by CIA and FBI personnel who will secure the US president during his stay in Egypt. Cairo will soon be in turmoil as forces are deployed from a command center at the American Embassy to control sections of downtown Cairo, with guard posts on the Nile River's banks, the international airport, main railway terminals and approaches to the city.

Some 30,000 Egyptian security personnel including army units stationed in Cairo have been placed on special duty until the American president leaves. Their names and those of the welcoming party at Al Azhar University were submitted to the US presidential security center.

Obama is due to land in Cairo Thursday at 10 a.m., drive to the Abidin Palace to meet President Hosni Mubarak and proceed from there to Azhar University. His convoy will be escorted by vehicles equipped with sensors for detecting firearms and explosives and covered by Marine helicopters overhead.

Until the last minute, the president's routes to the university have been withheld from Egyptian security authorities as a safeguard against leaks to hostile elements.
Click to go to the article

UAW Workers - what a bunch of Einsteins

from Holger Awakens
Saturday, May 30, 2009

UAW Workers Vote At New York Plant: Work For Less or Lose All Jobs? They Voted To Lose Jobs

Way to go United Auto Workers! Once again you have proven your leadership to be nothing short of brilliant. At the Magna parts plant in Syracuse, New York, the UAW took a vote that would make wage and benefit concessions in order to keep the plant open and save their jobs - this from the article over at Breitbart. The UAW workers proceeded to vote "No" to the new contract and the plant will be closed and all 1,400 workers will lose their jobs. Like I said, what a bunch of Einsteins.

Now, perhaps the Union here has some inside information that President Obama will open the plant back up after his Government buys the plant and begins to run it, but I don't think Magna operations are quite visible enough for that to happen....lol.

So, 1,400 union drones just voted to slit their throats - and now they can all shuffle along in the unemployment lines and make the kind of wages the rest of us make. Enjoy your newfound economic security, putzes! Oh and don't let it bother you that your Union bosses who told you to vote "No" are all on a plane for their new assisgnment at another location where they will enjoy the same pay, the same benefits, the same perks...that you paid for.

North Korean Game of Chicken

North Korea is just daring Obama to shoot it down. It puts the squeeze on Obama, because if he shoots it down, North Korea might retaliate and attack the South Korean or U.S. Military. If Obama doesn't shoot it down, Obama continues to appear weak and will have been humiliated on the world stage.

I believe North Korea will fire another ICBM and I believe Obama won't do anything about it. And, Obama will continue to be unfit to be Commander in Chief.
Rees

'NK Preparing for Long-Range Missile Test'
from The Korea Times
May 30, 2009

North Korea appears to be preparing for a long-range missile test, defying the U.N. Security Council whose members are negotiating a resolution to punish it for its recent nuclear test, Yonhap News Agency reported Saturday, quoting an informed intelligence source.

The source, asking not to be identified, said an object that appeared to be an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) was recently spotted on a cargo train at an artillery research center near Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.

"We believe that the object is certainly an ICBM," said the official, adding that its size is somewhat similar to the one the North fired into the Pacific on April 5.

North Korea is believed to have started moving the object to a missile launch pad in Musudan-ri on the country's east coast, according to the official.

"The missile may be a modified version of a Taepodong-2 missile, which can travel over 4,000 km," the official said. A Taepodong-2 missile is theoretically capable of reaching the western U.S.
"It usually takes about two months to set up a launch pad, but the process could be done in as little as two weeks, which means the North could launch a long-range missile as early as mid-June," the source said.

The developments of what appears to be preparations for a missile launch follow Monday's nuclear test, which drew the international community's condemnation against North Korea. The test came less than two months after it fired a rocket that the U.S. and its allies say was a disguised form of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

The remarks came shortly after a South Korean defense source in Singapore said some activities were spotted at a North Korean munitions factory used to build long-range missiles.

Some watchers speculate that North Korea may launch a missile at a time close to a summit set for June 16 between South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and his U.S. counterpart, Barack Obama.

"There is a possibility that North Korea may push the 'fire' button right before or after the South Korea-U.S. summit," said a key diplomatic official at the presidential office, requesting to be unnamed.
Click to go to the article and read the comments

Everything Black Needs To Be White...

from Cheat-Seeking Missiles
Posted by: Laer
May 29th 2009

Paint It White

Our Nobel Laureat energy sec, Steven Chu, has been chewing on an idea for a while and finally spit it out: Let’s save the planet by painting all the roofs and roads white!

Chu, speaking at the St. James’ Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, said the calculations are based on work done at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he used to work and where three researchers concluded last year that changing surface colors in the world’s 100 largest cities would offset 44 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions. (Source)

Who’s to fault the good scientists at Lawrence Berkeley? After all, they’ve scored millions of bucks to study the terrible effects of global warming, so they can be trusted. And besides, the idea is simplistic as can be, right? Just step from a concrete sidewalk to an asphalt street on a hot, sunny day.

But wait. What is the urbanized land mass vs. the global land mass? Factoring in the oceans, the arctic and antarctic regions (which already are white) and the massive amount of undeveloped territory, I’m sure it’s under one percent.

And why hasn’t Chu proposed to dye the oceans white?

And what is the greenhouse gas impact from manufacturing, transporting and applying all that white paint?

And what the heck are we going to do if Chu & Co. are all wrong and the long-anticipated global cooling process kicks off soon?

You see, this save the planet biz isn’t as easy as they crack it up to be
Click to read the article and the comments

Obama gangland tactics at work.

White House pushing to gag stimulus critics
From Michelle Malkin.com
By Michelle Malkin
May 30, 2009

In keeping with his past campaign tactics to shut critics up through brute force, the White House appears to be taking steps to crack down on critics of the trillion-dollar porkulus law.

Is anyone surprised? Mark Tapscott at the Examiner reports:

A new White House policy on permissible lobbying on economic recovery and stimulus project has taken a decidedly anti-First Amendment turn. It’s a classic illustration of Big Government trying to control every aspect of a particular activity and in the process running up against civil liberty.

Check out this passage from a post on the White House blog by Norm Eisen, Special Counsel to the President on Ethics and Government Reform (emphasis added):

“First, we will expand the restriction on oral communications to cover all persons, not just federally registered lobbyists. For the first time, we will reach contacts not only by registered lobbyists but also by unregistered ones, as well as anyone else exerting influence on the process. We concluded this was necessary under the unique circumstances of the stimulus program.

Writes Tapscott:

The key passage is the reference to expanding regulation from registered lobbyists to “anyone else exerting influence on the process. We concluded this was necessary under the unique circumstances of the stimulus program.”

This is the Camel’s nose under the tent…

Click to go to the article and read the comments

Is Obama's Supreme Court Pick a Racist?

This is a great one!

DWB Unloads on Obama - as only he can...

from Drinking With Bob

Obama has a case of foreign policy whiplash

Administration: Now North Korea is a threat again

May 30, 2009
from Hot Air.com
by Ed Morrissey

Sometimes, we need a scorecard to keep up with the Obama administration’s positions on foreign policy and national security. The latest case of whiplash comes from the ping-pong position shifts on North Korea. When Pyongyang tested a long-range missile in April, Barack Obama called the DPRK a “regional threat” to security. Last weekend, he upgraded North Korea to a threat to global peace. Wednesday, though, Obama’s national security adviser James Jones dismissed Kim Jong-Il almost entirely, claiming that he poses no imminent threat to the US.

Today, Defense Secretary William Robert Gates goes back to Square One (via Flopping Aces):

The United States will not accept North Korea as a nuclear-armed state, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Saturday at an international conference.…

His comments came amid growing concern across the globe over North Korea’s latest nuclear test and test-firings of short-range missiles.

On Friday, two Defense Department officials said the latest U.S. satellite imagery has spotted “vehicle activity” at a North Korean ballistic missile facility.

“North Korea’s nuclear program and actions constitute a threat to regional peace and security. We unequivocally reaffirm our commitment to the defense of our allies in the region,” Gates said in Singapore.

Gates sounded a lot less concerned on Thursday:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, en route to an annual security summit in Singapore Friday, signaled as much, saying North Korea’s actions so far do not warrant sending more US troops to the region.

“I don’t think that anybody in the [Obama] administration thinks there is a crisis,” Mr. Gates told reporters aboard his military jet early Friday morning, still Thursday night in Washington.

Anyone playing Pyongyang Bingo should note that the Obama administration has covered almost all of the positions on the card.
Click to go to the article and read the comments

We are on the brink of a ‘man-caused disaster.’

Speak Softly and Carry a Big Teleprompter
from The National Review
by Mark Steyn
May 30, 2009

What does a nuclear madman have to do to get America’s attention? On Memorial Day, the North Koreans detonated “an underground atomic device many times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” as my old colleagues at the Irish Times put it. You’d think that’d rate something higher than “World News In Brief,” see foot of page 37. But instead Washington was consumed by the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, who apparently has a “compelling personal story.”

Doesn’t Kim Jong Il have a compelling personal story? Like Sonia, he grew up in a poor neighborhood (North Korea), yet he’s managed to become a nuclear power, shattering the glass ceiling to take his seat at the old nuclear boys’ club. Isn’t that an inspiring narrative? Once upon a time you had to be a great power, one of the Big Five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, to sit at the nuclear table: America, Britain, France, Russia, China, the old sons of power and privilege. But now the mentally unstable scion of an impoverished no-account backwater with a GDP lower than that of Zimbabwe has joined their ranks: Celebrate diversity!

Evidently, some compelling personal stories are more compelling than others. In the Washington Post, Stephen Stromberg argued that Kim’s decision to drop the Big One on a three-day weekend was evidence of his appalling news judgment. Other blasé observers shrug that it’s now an American holiday tradition. It began when Pyongyang staged the first of its holiday provocations on Fourth of July 2006, and, amidst all the other fireworks displays, America barely noticed. No doubt there’ll be another Hiroshima on Labor Day or Thanksgiving. Geez, doesn’t the hick in the presidential palace get it? There’s no point launching nukes when everyone’s barbecuing chicken or watching football.

Well, you never know: Maybe we’re the ones being parochial. If you’re American, it’s natural to assume that the North Korean problem is about North Korea, just like the Iraq War is about Iraq. But they’re not. If you’re starving to death in Pyongyang, North Korea is about North Korea. For everyone else, North Korea and Iraq, and Afghanistan and Iran, are about America: American will, American purpose, American credibility. The rest of the world doesn’t observe Memorial Day. But it understands the crude symbolism of a rogue nuclear test staged on the day to honor American war dead and greeted with only half-hearted pro forma diplomatese from Washington. Pyongyang’s actions were “a matter of . . . ” Drumroll, please! “ . . . grave concern,” declared the president. Furthermore, if North Korea carries on like this, it will — wait for it — “not find international acceptance.” As the comedian Andy Borowitz put it, “President Obama said that the United States was prepared to respond to the threat with ‘the strongest possible adjectives . . . ’ Later in the day, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the North Korean nuclear test ‘supercilious and jejune.’ ”

The president’s general line on the geopolitical big picture is: I don’t need this in my life right now. He’s a domestic transformationalist, working overtime — via the banks, the automobile industry, health care, etc. — to advance statism’s death grip on American dynamism. His principal interest in the rest of the world is that he doesn’t want anyone nuking America before he’s finished turning it into a socialist basket-case. This isn’t simply a matter of priorities. A United States government currently borrowing 50 cents for every dollar it spends cannot afford its global role, and thus the Obama cuts to missile defense and other programs have a kind of logic: You can’t be Scandinavia writ large with a U.S.-sized military.

Out there in the chancelleries and presidential palaces, they’re beginning to get the message. The regime in Pyongyang is not merely trying to “provoke” America but demonstrating to potential clients that you can do so with impunity. A black-market economy reliant on exports of heroin, sex slaves, and knock-off Viagra is attempting to supersize its business model and turn itself into a nuclear Wal-Mart. Among the distinguished guests present for North Korea’s October 2006 test were representatives of the Iranian government. President Bush was much mocked for yoking the two nations together in his now all but forgotten “axis of evil” speech, but the Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung reported a few weeks ago that the North Korean–built (and Israeli-bombed) plutonium production facility in Syria was paid for by Tehran. How many other Iranian clients are getting nuclear subsidies? It would be interesting to learn who was on the observation deck for the Memorial Day Hiroshima reenactment, but North Korea is one of the most closed societies on the face of the earth, certainly when compared with the more closely scrutinized corners of the Middle East. In other words, it’s the perfect partner for any state that wants to pursue certain projects under the Western radar screen.

It is remarkable in just five years how the world has adjusted to the inevitability of a nuclear North Korea and a nuclear Iran. Nudge it on another half-decade: Whose nuclear ambitions will be unstoppable by 2015? Syria’s? Sudan’s? Selected fiefdoms in Somalia?

Barack Obama came to power pledging to talk to America’s enemies anywhere anytime. Alas for America’s speak-softly-and-carry-a-big-teleprompter diplomacy, there are no takers for his photo-ops. In the ever more pitiful straw-clutching of the State Department, America is said to be banking on a post-Kim era. He’s apparently had a bad stroke, and might be dead within a decade or three. So what? It’s a safe bet that whoever emerges from a power struggle between the family, the party, and the military is committed to nuclearization as the principal rationale of the state. Likewise in Iran’s imminent election, both “extremists” and “moderates” are pro-nuke. You want an Iranian moderate? Here’s Hashemi Rafsanjani, the moderate guy who lost to that crazy Ahmadinejad last time round: He called Israel “the most hideous occurrence in history” which the Muslim world “will vomit out from its midst” with “a single atomic bomb.” Nuking the Zionist Entity is as bipartisan as motherhood and apple pie.

More to the point, the feeble bleatings from the State Department that there may be internal change down the road emphasize the central feature of the present scene: the absence of meaningful American power. While America laughed at North Korea, Iran used it as a stalking horse, a useful guide as to the parameters of belligerence and quiescence a nuclearizing rogue state could operate within. In what Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post calls “the post-American world,” other nations will follow that model. We are building a world in which the wealthiest nations on the planet, from Norway to New Zealand, are all but defenseless, while bankrupt dysfunctional squats go nuclear. Even with inevitable and generous submissions to nuclear blackmail, how long do you think that arrangement will last? In the formulation of Janet Napolitano, we are on the brink of “man-caused disaster.”

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2009 Mark Steyn
Click to go to the article and read the comments

YOU now OWE more than HALF A MILLION DOLLARS, not counting your mortgage, credit cards and other debt!

From Investor's Business Daily
May 29, 2009

What We Owe: $64 Trillion, And Counting...

Debt: OK, take a deep breath. You might need it after we tell you this: You now owe more than half a million dollars, not counting your home mortgage, credit cards and other debt. Don't remember running it up?

Well, technically, you didn't. The government did it for you. And USA Today has done us all a favor by taking out a calculator and doing the basic math. It's beyond ugly.

Each household owes an additional $55,000, thanks to the soaring spending by the federal government on retirement programs just in the past year.

All told, each household at the end of 2008 owed $546,668. That's four times what American households owe for mortgages, car loans, credit cards and other debt.

Looking long term is where it really gets scary. Recently, we learned the U.S. had $101 trillion in retirement and health care obligations over the next 75 years. The only problem is, at current tax rates we'll have only $53 trillion to pay for it all.

That leaves a gaping hole of $48 trillion.

It gets worse. The stimulus plans and bailouts pushed into the budget by President Obama and congressional Democrats will add $9 trillion to our national debt over the next 10 years alone.

Add to that an expected $1.1 trillion spent over the same time to fund a government takeover of our health care system — an estimate most health care experts, by the way, believe is laughably low — and you have the makings of an epic financial tragedy.

Total federal debt will soar from 41% of GDP to 82% in just 10 years — more debt than we rang up in 235 years of existence. And over the next half-century, Americans will owe $63 trillion — 4.5 times our current GDP of $14 trillion.

"We have a huge implicit mortgage on every household in America," David Walker, former U.S. comptroller, told USA Today. "Except, unlike a real mortgage, it's not backed up by a house."

Americans can't be blamed for hyperventilating when they see such numbers emerging from the most fiscally irresponsible government in our nation's history.

Even the nation's president, in a moment of unguarded frankness last week, admitted that "we are out of money."

Was that supposed to inspire confidence? Or was it merely a prelude to asking for a spate of new taxes to pay for it all — turning the U.S. economy from a vibrant, job-creation machine into a stagnant, European-style welfare state?

The current administration already has proposed or is mulling as many as 10 new taxes — everything from a European-style VAT (a national sales tax) to intrusive new taxes on beer, fast food, cigarettes and other sinful indulgences, to cap and trade, which is nothing more than a federal tax on energy.

Two weeks ago, Standard & Poor's warned Britain it could lose its AAA rating because its national debt will soon hit 100% of GDP. Well, guess what? We're heading down the same road. A story in the usually staid Financial Times of London last week said it all: "Exploding Debt Threatens America."

More brutal was last week's assessment of Russia's Pravda, the former house organ for the Soviet communist regime: "The American descent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed." Ouch.

We'd like to disagree, but at least one of those newspapers is right. And unless we Americans stand up and tell our elected officials to stop this insane surge in spending and taxing, we'll pay for it for decades to come.
Click to read the article and the comments

Pakistan and the Bomb - The security of their nuclear arsenal is shaky

from The Wall Street Journal
By BRUCE RIEDEL
May 30, 2009.security

What the U.S. needs to do to avert a crisis

The Pakistani army, backed by attack helicopters, is fighting intense gun battles in the Swat valley 60 miles outside the capital of Islamabad with Islamic extremists. Al Qaeda and the Taliban have struck back with suicide bombs in Pakistan’s major cities, including Lahore. A plot in Karachi was foiled but the extremists vow more carnage is imminent.

The battles are the latest in a deadly struggle for the control of Pakistan. Some are hoping this, at last, is the turning point when the army and the Pakistani government will finally defeat the extremists, but history suggests that conclusion is premature. More likely this will be yet another temporary setback for the Islamists to be followed by new advances elsewhere.

The fighting has cast a spotlight on the shaky security of Pakistan’s growing nuclear arsenal—the fastest growing arsenal in the world. Pakistan is finishing construction of several new reactors and is seeking to buy more from China to increase its production of fissile material. The United States has provided Pakistan with over $10 billion in military aid since 2001. No one outside Pakistan can say if some of that money was diverted directly to the nuclear program by the army, but undoubtedly the U.S. assistance indirectly made it easier for the army to use its own funds to accelerate the development of its nuclear weapons.

Today the arsenal is under the control of its military leaders; it is well protected, concealed and dispersed. But if the country fell into the wrong hands—those of the militant Islamic jihadists and al Qaeda—so would the arsenal. The U.S. and the rest of the world would face the worst security threat since the end of the Cold War. Containing this nuclear threat would be difficult, if not impossible.

The danger of Pakistan becoming a jihadist state is real. Just before her murder in December 2007, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto said she believed al Qaeda would be marching on Islamabad in two years. A jihadist Pakistan would be a global game changer—the world’s second largest Muslim state with nuclear weapons breeding a hothouse of terrorism.

Yet it’s not inevitable. For the past 60 years, U.S. policy toward the country has been inconsistent and mercurial, rife with double standards with Pakistan’s neighbor India. Increasing calls to “secure” the country’s nuclear weapons by force are far from productive—in fact, it’s making serious work with Pakistan more difficult.

Pakistan is a unique nuclear weapons state. It has been both the recipient of technology transfers from other states and a supplier of technology to still other states. It has been a state sponsor of proliferation and has tolerated private sector proliferation as well. Pakistan has engaged in highly provocative behavior against India, even initiating a limited war, and sponsored terrorist groups that have engaged in mass casualty terrorism inside India’s cities, most recently last November in Mumbai. No other nuclear weapons state has done all of these provocative actions.

The origins of the Pakistani nuclear program lie in the deep national humiliation of the 1971 war with India that led to the partition of the country, the independence of Bangladesh and the destruction of the dream of a single Muslim state for all of south Asia’s Muslim population. The military dictator at the time, Yaqub Khan, presided over the loss of half the nation and the surrender of 90,000 Pakistani soldiers in Dacca. The Pakistani establishment determined it must develop a nuclear weapon to counter India’s conventional superiority.

The new prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, convened the country’s top 50 scientists secretly in January 1972 and challenged them to build a bomb. He famously said that Pakistanis would sacrifice everything and “eat grass” to get a nuclear deterrent.

The 1974 Indian nuclear explosion only intensified the quest. Mr. Bhutto received an unsolicited letter from a Pakistani who had studied in Louvain, Belgium, Abdul Qadeer Khan, offering to help by stealing sensitive centrifuge technology from his new employers at a nuclear facility in the Netherlands. Over the next few years—with the assistance of the Pakistani intelligence service, the Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI)—Mr. Khan would steal the key technology to help Pakistan produce fissionable material to make a bomb.

This is a long article. Click to read the rest and the comments

Defense Sec. Gates changes tune from no crisis to...

I guess the latest missile launch finally got Gates's attention. The entire Obama Administration was in a mode of just dismissing everything North Korea was doing and saying. The nuclear bomb test - no big deal. Missile launches - no big deal. This is not a crisis. Kim Jong Il has said and done this before. No need to worry.

Then, another missiles launch. Gates goes Hmmn. Maybe, North Korea is actually trying to provoke something. YA THINK!!!

What a bunch of morons in the White House. They are going to have egg all over their face when there is a skirmish between North Korea and either the South Korean or U.S. Military. When it happens, Obama, Clinton and Gates will all look like naive fools.

And one more thing. Gates dropped the "helpful, open hand and unclenched fist" words. They all seem to be the favorite terminology the Obama Administration uses when making foreign policy statements. I wonder how many focus groups were required to come up with those terms? Did thye bother to include any North Koreans or Iranians in the focus groups so they would know if the words would have any effect? Hillary said is was "unhelpful" when North Korea launched their "satellite" about a month ago. Yeah, Hillary, keep on using that strong language to send a message to them.

They sound soft and squishy to me. Maybe they have a whole different meaning to our enemies.
Rees

from The Wall Street Journal
By PETER SPIEGEL
MAY 30, 2009

U.S. to Warn North Korea Against Nuclear Activity

Defense Secretary's Tough Talk, Following Another Missile Test, Signals Washington May Be Rethinking Pyongyang Policy

SINGAPORE -- Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates issued North Korea the sternest warning from Washington since Monday's test of a nuclear weapon, saying the U.S. "will not stand idly by" as Pyongyang develops nuclear and missile technologies that could threaten America and its allies in the region.

The warning came in a Saturday-morning address Mr. Gates delivered to an annual gathering of Asian defense officials here.

"President Obama has offered an open hand to tyrannies that unclench their fists; he is hopeful, but he is not naïve," Mr. Gates said. "North Korea's latest reply to our overtures isn't exactly something we would characterize as helpful or constructive."

Mr. Gates also said that the export of nuclear material by North Korea to other states or terrorist groups would be considered a "grave threat" to the U.S. and that Washington would hold Pyongyang "fully accountable" for the consequences if such technologies fell into the wrong hands.

Mr. Gates's tough language comes as tensions continue to escalate on the Korean peninsula, with Pyongyang testing its sixth short-range missile since the nuclear test on Friday, just hours after U.S. and South Korean troops based in the south raised their alert level to the highest point in two years.

The defense secretary's remarks were also the latest sign the Obama administration may be reconsidering its policy of reaching out to Pyongyang for a negotiated settlement to its nuclear program.

President Barack Obama campaigned last year on a commitment to re-engage with regimes the Bush administration had considered pariahs. But asked earlier in the week whether the U.S. is considering abandoning the so-called six-party talks -- the primary vehicle for negotiations over the North Korean weapons program, through multilateral talks hosted by China -- a senior administration official said the White House was focusing on sanctions at the U.N. and would decide on the future of its negotiations with North Korea down the road.

Mr. Gates didn't specify in his address what actions the U.S. was considering to end Pyongyang's weapons program or what Washington would do if North Korea was found to be proliferating its nuclear technology.

In a briefing with reporters traveling with him to Singapore, Mr. Gates said the Pentagon hadn't changed any of its contingency planning for the region and had no intention of taking military action against North Korea, "unless they do something that requires it." He also said the administration remains committed to working with allies to develop an effective counterproliferation regime.

U.S. military officials have emphasized that despite heavy commitments of ground forces to Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. would still be able to quickly use naval and air forces against any North Korean threat, if needed. Gen. George W. Casey, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army, said earlier this week it would take three months for the Army to be fully prepared for a conventional war with North Korea.

U.S. defense officials have said they have seen no unusual military moves by North Korea and have no plans to reinforce U.S. troops in South Korea, which now number about 28,000. But language from the Obama administration has become increasingly tough in recent days amid growing unease among American and allied governments over North Korea's motivations.

In an effort to calm anxious democracies in the region, Mr. Gates in his address reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to defend allies against North Korean aggression and said the Obama administration "would not accept" North Korea as a nuclear-weapons state.

"We will not sit idly by as North Korea builds the capability to wreak destruction on any target in Asia, or on us," he said.

The administration is attempting to walk a fine line between rallying the international community to punish North Korea even as neighboring countries, particularly China and South Korea, have raised concerns about a potential collapse of the North Korean regime.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is believed by U.S. officials to be in the midst of planning for his succession following an apparent stroke last year, which has led experts to believe the Pyongyang government is increasingly weak and using international brinksmanship to shore up its domestic support.

Write to Peter Spiegel at peter.spiegel@wsj.com
Click to read the article and the comments

It’s Time to Take North Korea Out - An interesting analogy

from North Star Writer Group
Gregory D. Lee
May 29, 2009

North Korea’s Memorial Day detonation of another nuclear bomb, coupled with the launch of five missiles in two days that are capable of carrying nuclear weapons, needs to be immediately addressed unilaterally by the United States. Relying on the United Nations is a waste of valuable time and energy.

Kim Jong Il has proven himself as a stealth, provocative and cunning leader of his country. In two days he has shown the world that he now possesses a nuclear weapon that is more powerful than the near-dud he exploded in October 2006. Someone there has read the assembly instructions provided by Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan, and although not perfect, the weapon he possesses is at least equal to the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan during World War II – a frightening proposition when the bomb’s owner is a certified nut.

Or is he?

So far, Kim Jong Il is running circles around the United States and the U.N., both of which are standing still wringing their hands. President Obama says that this latest test is a “grave concern.” That’s the understatement of the century! Who wouldn’t be “gravely” concerned that a crazy dictator possesses powerful nuclear bombs and the missiles capable of launching them onto U.S. soil? I don’t think Iran is too concerned because it will soon buy the same weapons system to launch toward U.S. interests from the opposite side of the globe. All this is happening right before our eyes as the U.N. postures and calls for “strong measures.” Will somebody please define for me what the U.N. means by “strong measures?” All the previous “strong measures” that the U.N. levied on North Korea only enhanced its ability to develop Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. Now North Korea is at the verge of arming the ICBMs with nuclear warheads, and the U.S. and the U.N. have done little to prevent it.

This is like Uncle Sam standing on a deserted roadway while an SUV rapidly comes his way. Uncle Sam raises one hand signaling the driver of the SUV to stop and while his other hand holds a bull horn, he declares, “Stop! Or I will punish you with economic sanctions if you get any closer.” The driver of the SUV, Kim Jong Il, ignores the veiled threat, and stomps the gas pedal even harder. As the SUV speeds ever closer, Uncle Sam is getting concerned and cries out, “If you don’t stop now, I’m really going to be mad this time, and my friends at the U.N. will double the economic sanctions against you.” Undaunted, Kim Jong Il barrels down ever closer toward hapless Uncle Sam while displaying a satanic smile that suggests, “I’m going to run you over, you S.O.B., and I don’t give a damn about your stupid sanctions!”

Within a few seconds, Kim Jong Il mows over a shocked Uncle Sam, who has a frozen look of disbelief on his face. As the SUV comes to a halt, Kim Jong Il ponders, “Why didn’t Uncle Sam just get out of the way? All he had to do was move to the right and I would not have been able to hit him.” Then it dawns on Kim Jong Il. Uncle Sam didn’t get out of the way because he still believed diplomacy would save him. Kim Jong Il puts the vehicle in park and walks up to Uncle Sam’s flattened body, basking in his glorious victory over the West. He sees that Uncle Sam had a short barrel Remington 870 12-gauge pump shotgun under his coat and an S&W .357 caliber revolver in his waistband. Intrigued, Kim Jong Il asks himself, “Why didn’t Uncle Sam just shoot me to prevent getting run over?” It quickly comes to him, provoking another smile. “He was a weakling whose threats were meaningless. He didn’t have the courage to pull the trigger.” Kim Il Jong then climbs back into his SUV, makes a speedy U-turn and squeals his tires toward South Korea before his final destination – Japan.

How long will Uncle Sam stand in the roadway while a crazy person driving a speeding SUV comes toward him? The time has come for the U.S. to pull the trigger and take out Kim Jong Il before it’s too late.

Gregory D. Lee is a nationally syndicated columnist for North Star Writers Group. You can reach him at info@gregorydlee.com.
Click to go to the article and read the comments

Pravda Mocks US Descent Into Marxism at Breakneck Speed

from Gateway Pundit
Friday, May 29, 2009

If only we had a fair and balanced media outlet like Pravda.

The last time we heard from this former Soviet news agency they were commenting on how there was major bias by the US media in this past year's national elections.

Now they are warning America about creeping Marxism.

You wouldn't dare see a US journalist do this. They'd risk getting dragged from the airport tarmac if they did. The reporters at Pravda are mocking America's decent into Marxism at breakneck speed:

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blind the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the "winning" side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama.

Click to read the article and the comments

Perhaps We Should Reconsider The Missile Defense Cuts...

by Michael Ramirez
from Investor's Business Daily

Obama: The Irrational President - A Wary Encounter

from The Spectator.co.uk
by Melanie Phillips

In remarks made after his meeting with Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Obama said:

I suggested to the Prime Minister that he has an historic opportunity to get a serious movement on this issue during his tenure. That means that all the parties involved have to take seriously obligations that they have previously agreed to. Those obligations were outlined in the road map...

But the first obligation in the Road Map was laid upon the Palestinians -- to dismantle their infrastructure of terror. It was their failure to meet that first obligation, without which the rest of the Road Map could not be implemented, which led to its collapse as a strategy. Yet Obama appears to think that the only obligations which must be met are those which apply to Israel, with the Palestinians apparently getting a free pass.

This is of course all of a piece with his belief that Israel is the cause of the Middle East impasse which would be solved by the creation of a state of Palestine. The fact that even now Fatah states explicitly that it won’t accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, let alone Hamas repeatedly restating its intention to destroy Israel and kill every Jew, is not, in Obama’s mind, the real obstacle to a solution. Not only does Obama not see the creation of ‘Hamastan’ in the West Bank as an obstacle -- he sees instead the refusal to treat Hamas as part of the solution as an obstacle. Accordingly, he presents as the obstacle not the people continuing to wage war but the country that is the victim of that war – which he blames for not agreeing to destroy its own security.

The irrationality and injustice of this is manifest on every level. But what cannot be stressed enough is the way both Obama and the ‘progressive’ legions behind him have made as their rallying cry support for a proposed racist and religiously exclusionary state that denies civil rights for all. Those screaming ‘apartheid’ at Israel are demanding the establishment of a putative Palestine state which would allow no Jews to live there, let alone enjoy the equal civil and human rights afforded to Arab citizens of Israel. As the former CIA Director James Woolsey is reported to have observed earlier this month:

...the world has a tendency to ‘define deviancy down for non-Jews.’ As a result, governments around the world, including the Obama administration, never even mention the possibility that Jews should be able to enjoy the same rights and privileges in any future Palestinian polity that Israeli Arabs exercise today in the Jewish state.

So, instead of what amounts to a Hitlerian program of Judenrein in any prospective Palestinian state - meaning, as a practical matter, if not a de jure one, that no Jews can reside or work there, there could be approximately twice the number of Israeli Jews as currently reside in so-called ‘settlements’ on the West Bank. They should be free to build synagogues and Jewish schools. And newspapers that serve the Jewish population in any future state of ‘Palestine’
should be permitted to flourish there.

Jews should also have a chance to elect representatives to a future Palestinian legislature. They should be able to expect to have representation as well in other governing institutions, like the executive and judicial branches. In order for the foregoing to operate, Jews in the Palestinian state must be able to live without fearing every day for their lives. In Mr. Woolsey`s view, ‘Once Palestinians are behaving that way, they deserve a state.’

On all these essential preconditions for a solution that pass the basic test of civilised values, Obama is silent. Quite apart from the injustice of his approach to the Middle East impasse and the irrationality of linking it with the Iran crisis, his policy of ‘engagement’ with Iran is hardly making him popular in the Arab world. He agreed with Netanyahu that there was a new and more promising mood in the Arab world. But he seems unable to grasp that what’s behind that new mood is terror of Iran getting the bomb – and despair at the way the US is resorting to the policy of appeasement. Accordingly, Obama is actually squandering the opportunity to enlist those Arab states in the fight against a common enemy of Iran. As John Hannah writes in the Washington Post:

Notably, the administration’s approach is increasingly at odds with that of U.S. allies in the Middle East that seek to maximize pressure on Tehran. For the past month, Egypt has mounted a courageous public effort to rally America’s Arab friends in opposition to an Iranian campaign of subversion that stretches from Iraq to Morocco. Instead of rushing to the defense of distressed allies, Obama has largely remained silent, instead opting to reiterate his interest in reaching some sort of accommodation with Tehran, the source of the region’s problems.

This was amplified by this telling exchange at the press conference after his talks with Netanyahu:

Q : Thank you, Mr. President. Aren’t you concerned that your outstretched hand has been interpreted by extremists, especially Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, Meshal, as weakness? And since my colleague already asked about the deadline, if engagement fails, what then, Mr. President?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, it’s not clear to me why my outstretched hand would be interpreted as weakness.

Q: Qatar, an example.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I’m sorry?

Q: The example of Qatar. They would have preferred to be on your side and then moved to the extremists, to Iran.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Oh, I think -- yes, I’m not sure about that interpretation.

On the face of it, the evidence that has emerged from this meeting between Obama and Netanyahu could not be more stark -- as David Horowitz observes -- that the Obama administration is set upon a strategy that would effectively throw Israel to the Islamist wolves. The worst fears of Israel’s government and friends appear to have been amply confirmed.

And yet and yet; notwithstanding all this, sanity might eventually still prevail. A small hope indeed – but it may just happen.

Consider. The fact that Obama is making this lethally false linkage between creating a state of Palestine and tackling the problem of Iran should not blind us to the fact that the overriding issue is indeed not Palestine but Iran. That is the issue which will define Obama’s presidency. The great question is whether Obama has concluded that, when push comes to shove, America will have no option but to ‘live with’ a nuclear Iran. My understanding is that, while there are those in his administration for whom the answer is ‘yes’, there are others for whom the answer is ‘no’. In his post-meeting remarks, Obama himself acknowledged the danger a nuclear Iran poses not just to Israel but to America and the whole of the Middle East. Certainly, he thinks ‘engagement’ can defuse that danger. But what will he do when it becomes apparent that it will not?

Obama has already demonstrated that, when brought up sharply against the suicidal consequences of his naivety, he can shift his position. We saw this in recent days by his twin retreats from publishing more pictures of ‘enhanced interrogation’ in Iraq and from his previous opposition to military tribunals for al Qaeda suspects. He has stated that if Iran hasn’t unclenched its fist by – variously – the autumn/end of the year he will introduce ‘tough sanctions’. This is not altogether reassuring, both in the vagueness of the timetable, the weakness of any sanctions regime and the fact that he is still giving Iran the greatest gift of all – time -- to progress towards its nuclear goal. But it may just be that he really does think in his liberal hubris that making nice with Iran will draw the poison – and when he realises it has not done so, he may not be too keen on becoming the President that allowed Iran to go nuclear on his watch.

A further point about Obama is this. He is a man of the left. The left is not merely Manichean, but insulates itself from any possibility of heresy by surrounding itself only by those with whom it agrees. It is therefore rarely forced to follow through its reasoning and thus see its patent falsehoods and idiocies exposed. From his history and past associations, it’s a fair bet that Obama has thus never had his assumptions properly challenged by exposure to rationality and evidence. In recent years, Israel has been led by politicians who were either incapable, for various reasons, of properly articulating that rationality or themselves subscribed to many of the false premises of post-modern, post-moral, ahistorical thinking that characterises ‘progressive’ opinion in the west. Netanyahu breaks that mould. By simply talking to him, Obama may have heard for the first time an argument that is intellectually capable of puncturing at least one or two of his illusions.

We have no way of knowing whether any of that took place; or, if it did, whether it had any significant effect at all. No-one should take too much notice of the public show of relaxation and relative harmony with which this meeting was subsequently spun. Nor should we believe the counter-spin that Netanyahu returned to Israel a grimmer and wiser man. He knew the score about Obama well before he set out on this trip; and he would indeed be a fool if he were not therefore playing a carefully thought-through diplomatic and strategic game. Let’s hope he is; because if ideologue Obama does indeed turn out to stifle pragmatic Obama over the issue of Iran, Israel really will be on its own.
Click to read the rest of the article and the comments