Too Much Money

clipped from www.townhall.com So let’s get something straight. Most Americans cannot fathom publishing a book, and will never have the opportunity to do so. Likewise most Americans - - even most published authors - - can’t fathom earning $1 million a year in royalty income. Yet the possibility of becoming such a successful author exists because of capitalism. Clinton and Obama are apparently okay with this, yet if a corporate executive earns what these two characters believe is “too much money,” well that person ought to be punished. Arguably, their marketability at the bookstore has to some extent been subsidized by the federal government. Yet Clinton and Obama are first in line to question the legitimacy and “morality” of purely private sector enterprise, and can’t wait to punish those who are successful with it. Capitalism has indeed been “bery bery good” to the Obamas and the Clintons. Their “okay for me but not for you” attitudes are absolutely elitist, and even aristocratic.

No, I Don't Either

clipped from campaignspot.nationalreview.com Do you, personally, know anyone who has ever tried to blow up the Pentagon? Do you know of anyone who actually brags that they did, successfully, plant and detonate a bomb at the Pentagon? Do you, personally, know anyone has ever planned to blow up an officer's dance at a military base, say, Fort Dix? Do you, personally, know anyone who has gotten someone killed in an explosion because of their actions? Even if these bombings and attempted bombings occurred forty years ago, is that the sort of thing you could forgive, and/or dismiss? Do you believe that assembling a bomb, and intending to kill police, members of the military, and ordinary innocent civilians is the sort of thing that should be considered "water under the bridge" once enough time has passed? Could you shake hands with this person? Go to a party at their house? Accept a donation from them? Do you relate to having people like that in your social circle? No, I don't, either.

The Interest -- And Sanity -- Free Ivy League

clipped from www.ivyleagueconservatives.com And Sweetness & Light reports on a disturbing trend within Harvard’s hallowed halls, as covered by Investor’s Business Daily: Islamofascism: Separate gym hours for Muslim coeds. Calls to prayer. Lectures on Shariah finance. A campus in the Mideast? Nope. It’s all happening at America’s pre-eminent college. Over the past few years, Harvard University has received millions in endowments from rich Saudi and Emirate sheiks. Now it’s returning the favor by Islamizing its campus and promoting the Shariah agenda of its new Arab masters. Recently, the Ivy League school has made special accommodations for the religious needs of Muslim students, including, and rescheduling of exams to observe Islamic holidays. And this weekend it hosted a $400-per-person conference on Shariah finance led by officials from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The goal of the forum — sponsored by Harvard’s Islamic Finance Project — is to “integrate” Islamic finance into the mainstream economy.

O'Peeling The Cling

clipped from hotair.com While working as a director at the Joyce Foundation, the organization funneled almost $3 million in grants to political groups opposing gun rights: Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has worked to assure uneasy gun owners that he believes the Constitution protects their rights and that he doesn’t want to take away their guns. But before he became a national political figure, he sat on the board of a Chicago-based foundation that doled out at least nine grants totaling nearly $2.7 million to groups that advocated the opposite positions. The foundation funded legal scholarship advancing the theory that the Second Amendment does not protect individual gun owners’ rights, as well as two groups that advocated handgun bans. And it paid to support a book called “Every Handgun Is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns.” Does anyone else see a pattern? If Obama doesn’t want to ban handguns, he certainly chose the wrong foundation to help run.

Tough Questions

clipped from hotair.com Gallup Poll Daily tracking shows that Hillary Clinton now receives 46% of the support of Democrats nationally, compared to 45% for Barack Obama, marking the first time Obama has not led in Gallup’s daily tracking since March 18-20. Obama has to show that he can handle tough questioning, and not just to get through the primaries against Hillary Clinton. He can keep claiming to have been victimized by ABC, but Americans don’t usually elect people for whining. He has to overcome a little hostility from the press, or voters will rightly wonder whether he can handle himself under much more pressure once ensconced in the White House. Even the superdelegates may be asking themselves that question.

WWKD?

clipped from hotair.com Sloan contends that the purpose of his document is to outline what he conjectures will be the tactics of Republican operative Karl Rove, an informal adviser to John McCain’s campaign, if Obama is the nominee. The title of Sloan’s paper is: “What Is Rove Up To?” Well, this is really convenient, isn’t it? Not only can they indulge in what they call McCarthyism, they can blame their bete noir Karl Rove for it before he even utters a word. This frees up both Democratic contenders to fling as much mud at each other under the WWKD concept. We can call it pre-emptive McCarthyism, another great concept in campaigning from the people who brought us the vast right-wing conspiracy. And it’s not McCarthyism by any stretch of the imagination. As Andrew McCarthy ironically noted yesterday, the Obamas have political ties to Ayers and Dohrn, not just a one-off chance meeting.

Don't MoveOn Afghanistan

clipped from www.mydd.com As they staked out their own anti-war position, Blades and Boyd were also following the progress of 9-11peace.org. In a September 2004 interview for The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, I asked Blades how she had come to know Pariser. "It was after 9/11," she told me. "He put out a message similar in results to the one we had, basically an e-mail petition asking for restraint. It went viral on an international scale. . . . Eli's petition grew to half a million in half a week. Peter [Schurman, the executive director of MoveOn] contacted him because he figured he probably needed some help. We did provide him with some assistance, and we started working together on other issues and eventually merged." I'd say reasonable people would have to come to the conclusion that in the least, main players associated with moveon.org did support the "no military action" in Afghanistan position.

The (O'Marxian) Basis

clipped from hotair.com However, the construct still appears to follow the Thomas Frank assumption that voters who don’t vote for economic pandering are essentially idiots. Rose even mentions at the end how difficult it will be to keep the massive condescension it requires from becoming too obvious. Obama says, “Exactly” — but three years later, failed to heed Rose’s warning. Three weeks after cruising to an easy victory over Alan Keyes, Obama told Rose that men went hunting and women went to church out of frustration with economic hardships because of the comfort of family and cultural traditions. He told Rose that Democrats had to learn to speak that kind of cultural language if they wanted to gain votes in these areas (h/t: BrianA): Both Paul Krugman and Larry Bartels note that liberal elites also vote against their economic interests when they support higher taxes and redistributionism (h/t: Scott M). The reliance on economics as the basis for political determinism serves as the basis for Marxist thought.

And Nobody Knows Why

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com Do you suppose Robert Mugabe imported a shipload of ammunition, including three million rounds of 7.62 x 39 not to use it? The Daily Mail reports: A huge cargo of Chinese guns and ammunition sits marooned aboard a ship off South Africa. It would have been used to arm the tyrant Robert Mugabe's thugs in Zimbabwe. But dockers in South African port of Durban won't unload the 77 tons of mortars, ammunition and rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons. ... Congratulations to the dockworkers for doing what governments can't nerve themselves to do. Unfortunately, they can only delay the inevitable. However, I am given to understand that things happen in Africa without any apparent cause. If I recall aright, when I was in equatorial Africa, a Congolese Navy ship sank in harbor without definite culpability. Bridges fall down. Airplanes fall out of the sky. Vehicles mysteriously run themselves into trees. And nobody knows why.

The Last Being Dependent

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com A Marine officer responds by private email to an earlier post examining the question of whether it is propitious to shift the focus in Iraq from the AQI to Iran. He writes: In your recent post about Petraus shifting the front to Iran, you asked: "First: is MNF-I correct to open this Second Front? Might not the AQI flare up again? Second: how will Iran be tackled? It will depend on three things. The Iraqi Army, the Elections in 2008 and the command plan. Right now those are three variables, the last being dependent." My take: Yes -- they are correct. The only remaining fight that is predominantly against Al Qaeda is in Mosul. It seems to be going well judging by its absence in the news. My only other tidbit is that there are two sets of elections in 2008: Iraq is scheduled to have local and provincial elections in October. The fact that these are scheduled for October, and the US poll is in November, is most certainly not a coincidence.

Impecunious?

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com Is al-Qaeda running out of money? Matthew Levitt, writing in the West Point counterterrorism review, Sentinel, notes that donations to al-Qaeda ain't what they used to be. Speaking before congress in February, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Michael McConnell commented that during the previous 12-18 months the intelligence community noticed that “al Qaeda has had difficulty in raising funds and sustaining themselves.” The question is why. And the answers are several. Three straightforward reasons for al-Qaeda's financial decline are the crackdown on "charitable" organization, pressure on major individual donors and the disruption of their networks. In his July 2005 letter to Abu Mus`ab al-Zarqawi, Ayman al-Zawahiri humbly asked the leader of al-Qa`ida in Iraq if he could spare “a payment of approximately one hundred thousand” because “many of the lines have been cut off. Would al-Qaeda have been reduced to dire straits if their attacks had continued, unanswered, across the world?

Hillary And Karl In The Crosshairs

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com The Huffington Post has obtained another audio recording from a private fundraiser, and this time it was Hillary Clinton who got caught on tape saying what she really thinks about Democratic voters. She complained about "the activist base of the Democratic Party," which she claimed turned against her after MoveOn.org endorsed Barack Obama. "MoveOn didn't even want us to go into Afghanistan," Hillary told her donors. "I mean, that's what we're dealing with." MoveOn's executive director Eli Pariser told the Huffington Post, "Senator Clinton has her facts wrong again. Back in 2005, when Pariser first denied that MoveOn opposed the war in Afghanistan, NR's Byron York debunked their debunking: "Despite Pariser's contention, there is solid evidence that MoveOn did in fact oppose the war in Afghanistan, and that MoveOn founders Joan Blades and Wes Boyd hired Pariser in significant part because of his activism against the war."

VOTD: Baracky

clipped from theamericanscene.com

But how did that movie end again?

On Wrench Worship

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com As a practicing biologist, I find evolutionary theory to be exceedingly useful.  It's a very powerful tool.  But it has, unfortunately, sometimes been used in negative ways, in particular as an alternative to God.  I find this philosophically silly; no scientific theory can tell you ultimately where the laws of nature came from, why we're here, etc.  So I have some sympathy with the many evangelicals who are uncomfortable with evolutionary theory.  On a philosophical basis, I am a creationist, in the broad sense of the term, meaning that creation is the result of God's work.  Exactly how he accomplished that is another issue, and I'm open to whatever science can establish as actual historical record. But in the final analysis, evolutionary theory is just a useful tool.  If I was an auto mechanic, a wrench would be an indispensable tool of daily use.  But I wouldn't worship it because of that utility.

The (Non)Debate

clipped from www.nationaljournal.com Oddly, however, you don’t hear leading members of either party debating them. Bush and McCain don’t want to concede that the current strategy may be inadequate, so they harp on the surge’s tactical success. The Democrats don’t want to offer strategic proposals that concede that America may need to stick around a while in Iraq, so they harp on Bush’s strategic failures. With the economy in trouble and Bush blocking any change of course in Iraq until next year, maybe it is unrealistic to expect politics to address the real question. That question is not “Is the surge working?” It is “What else needs to be done to make the surge work?” The 2008 election cycle is ideally timed to take up this question—if only someone would. Maybe someone will. So far, however, the most dispiriting lesson of the surge is that on the crucial political front, which is where the war’s outcome will ultimately be determined, Washington is not coping much better than Baghdad.

Mais Non (Partie Deux)

clipped from www.ocregister.com I was struck by the words of Oscar van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay humanist (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool). Reflecting on the Continent's accelerating Islamification, he concluded that the jig was up for the Europe he loved, but what could he do? "I am not a warrior, but who is?" he shrugged. "I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it." Sorry, it doesn't work like that. If you don't understand that there are times when you'll have to fight for it, you won't enjoy it for long. That's what a lot of Reade's laundry list – "gun-totin'," "military-lovin'" – boils down to. As for "gay-loathin'," it's Oscar van den Boogaard's famously tolerant Amsterdam where gay-bashing is resurgent: The editor of the American gay paper the Washington Blade got beaten up in the streets on his last visit to the Netherlands. God and guns. Maybe one day a viable society will find a magic cure-all that can do without both, but Big Government isn't it.

Mais Non

clipped from www.ocregister.com But we shouldn't let it go by merely deploring coastal condescension toward the knuckledraggers. No, what Michelle Malkin calls Crackerquiddick (quite rightly – it's more than just another dreary "-gate") is not just snobbish nor even merely wrongheaded. It's an attack on two of the critical advantages the United States holds over most of the rest of the Western world. In the other G7 developed nations, nobody clings to God 'n' guns. The guns got taken away, and the Europeans gave up on churchgoing once they embraced Big Government as the new religion. How's that working out? Compared with America, France and Germany have been more or less economically stagnant for the past quarter-century, living permanently with unemployment rates significantly higher than in the United States. Has it made them any less "bitter," as Obama characterizes those Pennsylvanian crackers? No.

Obuncombe On Iraq

clipped from reason.com He effectively told the Iraqis, once again, that they weren't worth anything to America. If violence and corruption were controllable, if al Qaeda was still around but was limited to Iraq proper, if Washington could stomach the Iranian manipulation of Iraqis, then it made little difference what the deeper aspirations of Iraqis in general were. Iraq could be a suppurating wound at the heart of the Middle East—a suppurating wound, Obama has tirelessly reminded us, which the U.S. helped create—but that counted for little when faced with the American urge to get out as soon as possible. For as long as American leaders don't treat Iraqis as important in their own right, the Iraqis will have no incentive to tie their long-term interests to America's wagon. Should that matter? Both realists and idealists would probably answer in the affirmative. But where does Barack Obama stand? It's hard to imagine that Iraqis see in him change they can believe in.

As Jefferson Rightly Pointed Out ...

clipped from www.weeklystandard.com Buried in the article, we learn that the Mahdi Army assaulted a police station and the Iraqi forces were running low on ammunition. As the U.S. military prepared to reinforce the position, the Iraqi Army beat them to the punch: The militias’ main effort on Thursday was focused on dislodging Iraqi forces from a police station. American advisers took up positions with the Iraqi unit. As the fighting intensified and there were reports that militia fighters had closed to within 100 yards, Colonel Barnett moved tanks into position so they could rush to the Iraqis’ aid. Stryker vehicles also moved forward. But two Iraqi T-72s and four other Iraqi armored vehicles arrived on the scene before the American tanks were needed. There is certainly nothing wrong with reporting the defection of the Iraqi company on April 16, although the context of the story was seriously flawed. But when the Iraqi Army exceeds its expectations, that is news as well, and it should be treated in the same manner.

... "The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers."

Explaining The "Withdraw So We Can Re-Invade And Fight Al-Qaeda" O'Lunacy

clipped from mypetjawa.mu.nu Continuing to allow politicians to criticize the war in Iraq by criticizing the decision to topple the Hussein regime is to allow them to conflate two very separate issues: 1) should we have invaded Iraq? 2) should we now give up fighting al Qaeda and anti-government Islamist elements in Iraq? Answering no to question number one says nothing about how question two should be answered. Nothing. The Second Iraq War may have been of our own making, but it is the very war the Democrats say they want to fight: a war against terrorists. In fact, until recently our greatest enemy in this Second Iraq War has been al Qaeda, the very people that all Americans claim as common enemies. What they do not see-- and in fact cannot see, because how can you see what you cannot articulate? -- is that they are voting to end a war that is already over! Simultaneously, a vote for Obama is a vote to end the very war on terror that they claim they fully support!

The Enemy Has A Vote

clipped from abumuqawama.blogspot.com it is still a puzzle why an operation that was supposed to be targeted set of raids evolved into a frontal assault? The conventional wisdom attributes it to plain old Iraqi bungling. But, again, some new information from my sources complicates this picture. Apparently, the details of the assault were leaked to JAM (no surprise given militia infiltration of the ISF). And, in an attempt to pre-empt Maliki’s plan, JAM began attacking Iraqi Army units as they moved south and shelled the prime minister upon his arrival in Basra. This brought JAM-proper into the game—not just the special groups—and Maliki responded by ordering regular Iraqi Army units into the city, escalating the operation far beyond its original design. This puts into context something else Crocker told the Washington Post on April 3: “I was not expecting, frankly, a major battle from Day One. But then again it's not clear to me that they'd decided that's what they were going to do. The enemy has a vote in combat.”

Welcome To Hell, Janjaweed Style

clipped from hotair.com The UN has found it difficult to keep the “food pipeline” open to the people in Darfur, thanks to a lack of security along the roads and in the villages. The Sudanese government does not provide reliable escorts, and UN workers have had their trucks hijacked and their stations robbed. Thanks to the rainy spring, the crisis could escalate into a deadly famine — and all of this may sound familiar to Americans: The World Food Programme is to halve food rations for up to 3 million people in Darfur from next month because of insecurity along the main supply routes. At least 60 WFP lorries have been hijacked since December in Sudan’s western province, where government forces and rebels have been at war for five years. The hijacks have drastically curtailed the delivery of food to warehouses ahead of the rainy season that lasts from May to September, when there is limited market access and crop stocks are depleted.

O Che Can You See

clipped from hotair.com On September 11, 2001, A Story About William Ayers’ Memoir Was Published In The New York Times; The Interview Occurred Prior To Publication. “‘I don’t regret setting bombs,’ Bill Ayers said. ‘I feel we didn’t do enough.’ I think almost everyone sophisticated enough to hold a newspaper right-side-up understands that an interview gets conducted before publication. No one claims that Ayers said this at the moment the towers fell. The point is that after a decade of terrorist attacks against American interests, Ayers still hadn’t reconsidered his own terrorism after 30 years, and the publication of that fact on 9/11 had its own twisted sense of irony. The bigger question is why Obama spends so much energy defending Ayers. If he wasn’t that important to Obama, why offer this page on the campaign website to rehabilitate Ayers?

O'Penalization

clipped from hotair.com If the risk carries a heavier tax burden, less money will go towards investment. People will instead put their money into safer, less risk-intense areas, such as savings or low-yield bonds and commodities such as gold. That will create fewer opportunities for employment, which translates across the board into less revenue for the government as well as a stalled economy. The surest way to start an economic disaster is to increase penalties for investment. Obama’s blindness on capital gains reveals a hard-Left mindset. He sees investors always profiting and never losing, while the people who work at jobs created by successful investment as victims of this exchange rather than the beneficiaries of it. Obama wants to use the heavy hand of government to take away the rewards of risk from those who invested, and instead redistribute it to those who took no risk to create economic growth. In doing so, he will kill the engine that drives the American economy.

Stuck Framing Change

clipped from www.frontpagemagazine.com The rich liberals must have nearly fainted at the revelation that the denizens of small towns in Pennsylvania have absolutely no concern for the rich's ability to acquire servants from Mexico at a reasonable price. It's going to take a lot of "framing" for Democrats to recast Obama's explanation to San Francisco cafe society that gun ownership and a belief in God are the byproducts of a psychological disorder brought on by economic hardship. The Democrats' last phony American (or perhaps I should say "faux American") was John Kerry, who famously said that if "you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq." Obama had been so careful until now, "framing" his message as "change" -- rather than partial birth abortion, driver's licenses for illegal aliens, tax hikes, socialized medicine and abandoning mandatory minimum prison sentences for federal crimes. One can only hope that Obama got his shots before bowling

Come On, Man

clipped from campaignspot.nationalreview.com Obama, last night: "I have never said that I don't wear flag pins or refuse to wear flag pins." Obama, October 4, 2007: "You know, the truth is that right after 9/11, I had a pin," Obama said. "Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we're talking about the Iraq War, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security, I decided I won't wear that pin on my chest." Come on, man. But the "ordinary citizen" questioner asked a simple, pretty straightforward one: NASH MCCABE (Latrobe, Pennsylvania): (From videotape.) Senator Obama, I have a question, and I want to know if you believe in the American flag. I am not questioning your patriotism, but all our servicemen, policemen and EMS wear the flag. I want to know why you don't. If you can't answer that question without... well, either lying, or forgetting what your originally said about wearing a flag pin, then don't run for President.

They Really, Really Like Him

clipped from tank.nationalreview.com Hamas, on the State Department Designated Foreign Terrorist Organization list, has all but endorsed Senator Obama, and as E.M. Zanotti points out "They like him. They really, really like him . . . Barack Obama is the one that is going to love terrorists the most."  This report has the details: During an interview on WABC radio Sunday, top Hamas political adviser Ahmed Yousef said the terrorist group supports Obama’s foreign policy vision. “We don’t mind–actually we like Mr. Obama. We hope he will (win) the election and I do believe he is like John Kennedy, great man with great principle, and he has a vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community but not with domination and arrogance,” Yousef said in response to a question about the group’s willingness to meet with either of the Democratic presidential candidates.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

clipped from campaignspot.nationalreview.com HILLARY CLINTON: It is clear that, as leaders, we have a choice who we associate with and who we apparently give some kind of seal of approval to. And I think that it wasn't only the specific remarks, but some of the relationships with Reverend Farrakhan, with giving the church bulletin over to the leader of Hamas to put a message in. You know, these are problems, and they raise questions in people's minds. She called the attention of everyone watching to the much-ignored fact that Jeremiah Wright's church had a message from Hamas in the church bulletin. (BizzyBlog posted the bulletin pages here.) I think I need a moment... I'm getting verklempt. God bless you, Hillary Clinton.

A World Of O'quivalency

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com When it was noted that Obama was "friendly" with Ayers, Obama said, "The fact is that I'm also friendly with Tom Coburn, one of the most conservative Republicans in the United States Senate, who during his campaign once said that it might be appropriate to apply the death penalty to those who carried out abortions."  In the column, I go through the history of Coburn's remark, and then: Wouldn't Coburn be more comparable to Ayers if he, Coburn, had bombed abortion clinics in the past — and then said that he not only did not regret bombing the clinics but wished that he had done more? And then, after bombing abortion clinics and refusing to express regret, he held a political event in his home for Barack Obama, which Obama attended? And if all that had happened, would Obama say it wasn’t a problem because Coburn had bombed those clinics a long time ago, when Obama was just 8 years old?

Global A.D.D.

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com Britain's The Independent is, in many ways, Britain's most irritating broadsheet, not least because of its relentless, and catastrophe-laden, enviropreachiness. That unkind Mr. Eugenides has now posted this gem from an editorial that ran in the paper back in November 2005: At last, some refreshing signs of intelligent thinking on climate change are coming out of Whitehall. The Environment minister, Elliot Morley, reveals today in an interview with this newspaper that the Government is drawing up plans to impose a "biofuel obligation" on oil companies. And here is what that same newspaper was asking on April 15th, 2008, less than three years later: The production of biofuel is devastating huge swathes of the world's environment. So why on earth is the Government forcing us to use more of it?

The Marines Couldn't Be Happening To Nicer People

clipped from www.defenselink.mil WASHINGTON, April 16, 2008 – Use silenced guns to kill coalition forces at Iraqi security checkpoints, smuggle weapons in gradual shipments to reduce the risk of detection, and poison Iraq’s water supply with nitric acid to spread disease and death. Such tactics were fleshed out in a terrorist letter intended for Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the foreign-born leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. But the document never reached Masri. Instead, coalition forces lifted it from the body of a terrorist they killed last month during an operation 30 miles northwest of Baghdad. Contaminating Iraqis’ water can produce “killing and dangerous illness,” and also convince the enemy “that we have a dangerous chemical weapon,” Safyan wrote. “But in fact,” he continues, “it’s a psychological war that places fear in the enemy. Later in the briefing, Bergner told reporters that coalition forces had captured or killed 53 al-Qaida in Iraq leaders since his most recent news conference early this month.

The Face Down Culture

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com It comes to something when immigrants from Moscow and St Petersburg are complaining that Brit women are a bunch of bottled blonde slatterns face down in their own vomit: The first thing that struck me was the way women dress at night. Even in the winter they brave the cold in little more that a mini-skirt and bra..! Fake tan, fake breasts and peroxide hair is not my idea of beauty. Yet, it seems, the average British young woman, regardless of her size, is brainwashed into dyeing herself orange and wearing skinny jeans, leggings or mini-skirts. They then spend 30 minutes squeezing themselves into them, only for them to burst open the minute they are too drunk to keep sucking in their stomach!

The Nightmare Beyond Next

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com Up to now, Republicans have missed the boat on Obama. Everyone keeps talking about what kind of president Obama might be. But the real problem with Obama may be what sort of ex-president he’d be. Think about it. It’s taken decades for Jimmy Carter to shift from grave weakness in the face of the Iranian revolution to an even more extreme stance as ex-president. Now it’s reached the point where Carter is undercutting U.S. foreign policy by negotiating unconditionally with the terrorist extremists of Hamas. Given Carter’s performance, I dread an Obama ex-presidency. Obama would actually begin his term in office very near to the point that it’s taken Jimmy Carter years to arrive at. After all, Obama is already willing to negotiate unconditionally with most of our foreign foes. If that’s where Obama stands now, what’s going to happen when he’s freed from political constraint as an ex-president? The prospect is truly frightening.

Hangin' Tribes

clipped from www.michaeltotten.com MJT: So what kinds of things do you do with Sheikh Mishan and the mayor? Captain Jones: I do everything with them. My battlespace is pretty big. We deal with the security issues. We get out to the surrounding areas. Karmah is Jamaeli-centric. The whole Jamaeli tribe covers Karmah, but we've got these others smaller tribes around. So we try to get the mayor out to see these other smaller villages around Karmah. That way people don't think everything in Karmah is all about the Jamaeli tribe. So we go out there. They need contracts in their areas to fix things like schools, businesses, stuff like that. That's generally what we do. We eat dinner together. We eat lunch together. And pretty much the same thing with Sheikh Mishan, but on the tribal level. Everything has to run through the head sheikh, and he's the head sheikh over all this area.