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Barack Obama Tag

Posted by Amy Miller on May 11, 2015 21 Comments
Well, that's embarrassing. What if you threw a summit and no one came? That's Obama's reality this week as four of six Persian Gulf heads of state have declined his invitation to a summit at Camp David later this week. The kings of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have dropped out entirely, as have the heads of state from the United Arab Emirates and Oman. (Kuwait and Qatar haven't dropped out yet, but there's still time.) This is a huge deal, considering the purpose of the summit is (in part) to address Iran's growing influence in the region, and to discuss security guarantees from the Obama administration. Although Saudi and the other absentee nations will be sending deputies, the absence of their figureheads sends a strong message about the state of relations between the Middle East, and Barack Obama. Via Fox News:
"We first learned of the King's possible change of plans from Saudis on Friday night," a senior U.S. administration official told Fox News. "This was confirmed by the Saudis on Saturday. We coordinated closely with our Saudi partners on the alternate arrangement and timing of the announcement and look forward to welcoming Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. This is not in response to any substantive issue."

Posted by Amy Miller on April 09, 2015 27 Comments
Back in 2012, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood before the body of the United Nations with a piece of poster board and a red marker. During the two weeks prior to that moment, he had been waging a public battle with the Obama Administration over the dangerous progression of Iran's nuclear program---sound familiar---and made the decision to cut through the rhetoric in hopes that a visual aid might wake up the rest of the world. So, he picked up his marker and drew a literal red line that served as an ultimatum: “At this late hour there is only one way to peacefully prevent Iran from getting atomic bombs, and that is by placing a clear red line on Iran’s nuclear weapons program.” Remember? NATIONS-articleLarge Yesterday, the Obama paid passive-aggressive homage to Netanyahu's famous "bomb" with one of their own:

Posted by Amy Miller on April 07, 2015 34 Comments
At this point, I've pretty much given up on the idea that I'll be able to make it through a week without somehow being maligned, insulted, or "made to care" about something by the President of the United States. He is who he is, and he's made it abundantly clear that he's not going to turn a 180 anytime soon. Yet I was somehow still shocked when I heard that he had taken a beat during a recent speech to lob an insult at Christians in general for being...un-Christian, or something. Did I mention this happened during his speech at the White House Easter Prayer Breakfast?
“On Easter, I do reflect on the fact that as a Christian, I am supposed to love,” Obama said. “And I have to say that sometimes when I listen to less-than-loving expressions by Christians, I get concerned.” As the crowd began to murmur, the president backed off, saying, “But that’s a topic for another day.” “I was about to veer off,” he explained. “I’m pulling it back.” “Where there is injustice we defend the oppressed,” Obama said, returning to his prepared remarks. “Where there is disagreement, we treat each other with compassion and respect. Where there are differences, we find strength in our common humanity, knowing that we are all children of God.”
Watch:

Posted by Amy Miller on April 06, 2015 24 Comments
Last week's "nuke deal" with Iran has drawn criticism both at home and overseas as being less of a "deal" and more of a capitulation to a belligerent enemy of freedom. (I wouldn't argue with those criticisms one bit.) It has caused many to call into question President Obama's motives for making such a deal, and forced discussions about what a nuclear Iran would mean for the future of the Middle East as we know it. Of course, the elephant in the room is Israel, a country whose future depends on the efforts of more powerful allies to block Iran's path to a nuclear weapon. Not only have we have failed to do so, we have also set Benjamin Netanyahu up as the chief fall guy in the event of a breakdown in negotiations. CNN's Jim Acosta interviewed Prime Minister Netanyahu yesterday, and spent a lot of time focusing on the breakdown of the relationship between Israel and the United States.

Posted by Mike LaChance on March 31, 2015 18 Comments
At this point, it should be obvious to most people that Obama doesn't have Israel's best interests in mind. Even Democratic members of the Senate are coming around. The Times of Israel:
Senators warn Obama against rescinding UN veto As reports proliferate that US leadership is considering stripping Israel of the protective diplomatic umbrella with which it has historically provided the Jewish state in the international arena — including its previously guaranteed vetoing of UN resolutions damaging to Jerusalem — a bipartisan group of US senators urged President Barack Obama in a letter Monday to avoid threatening Israel with such punitive measures and to reassert Washington’s support for the state. The letter obtained by the Times of Israel was signed by two Democrats and two Republicans who did not directly criticize the president’s policies, but did warn that “using the United Nations to push Israel and the Palestinians to accept terms defined by others will only ensure that the parties themselves are not committed to observing these provisions.”...

Posted by Mike LaChance on March 28, 2015 20 Comments
As if things in the Middle East couldn't get any worse, we're now at a point where our allies don't trust us. It's becoming quite clear that the only person who thinks Obama's pursuit of a deal with Iran is a good idea, is Obama. Daniel Bassali of the Washington Free Beacon:
Richard Engel: Military Officials Say Allies No Longer Trust Us, Fear Intel Might Leak to Iran NBC’s Richard Engel reported Friday that U.S. officials were stunned they were not given any notice before Saudi Arabia launched attacks against Houthi rebels. According to Engel, military leaders were finding out about the developments on the Yemen border in real time. Engel said officials from both the military and members of Congress believe they were not given advanced warning because the Arab nations do not trust the Obama administration after they befriended Iran. “Saudi Arabia and other countries simply don’t trust the United States any more, don’t trust this administration, think the administration is working to befriend Iran to try to make a deal in Switzerland, and therefore didn’t feel the intelligence frankly would be secure. And I think that’s a situation that is quite troubling for U.S. foreign policy,” Engel said.
Watch the segment: Ed Morrissey of Hot Air commented:
Engel’s report strongly suggests that it’s not just incompetence that has the Saudis and other US allies rattled, but a suspicion that they’re being purposefully sold out by Obama to get a deal with Iran that will unleash their ambitions to dominate the region.

Posted by Jay Caruso on March 24, 2015 35 Comments
Texas Senator Ted Cruz became the first "official" contender to announce he is running for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016. One of the more bizarre narratives to quickly form after Cruz made his announcement, has been the comparison between him and President Barack Obama. While there are some similarities --- both first term Senators, both graduates of Harvard, both are prone to more grandiose type speeches and both lacked executive experience, that's where the comparison really ends. However, there are some who arguing Ted Cruz being a first term Senator leads to him being a bad President, were he to win the nomination and ultimately the election in 2016. This accusation is not just being thrown around by random people on social media. It's appearing in Commentary Magazine. After listing a handful of points of comparison between Cruz and Obama the post concludes:
In short, Ted Cruz is not, except for his highly distinguished academic career and legal clerkships, dissimilar to the present incumbent of the White House. It seems to me that the last thing this country needs come January 20th, 2017, is a right-wing Barack Obama.
Charles Krauthammer made a similar point on Fox News during Special Report saying, "We already tried a first term Senator." 

Posted by Mike LaChance on March 21, 2015 14 Comments
Since Netanyahu's victory last week, the Obama administration has offered little more than a cold shoulder to Israel, and seems more interested in talking to Iran. The fact that Israel is our best ally in the region is overlooked while Obama continues working on his so-called "non-binding agreement." This morning on FOX and Friends, Tucker Carlson discussed the issue with Ann Coulter: Obama and others on the left seem to harbor a belief that things would be different if someone other than Netanyahu was the prime minister of Israel.

Posted by Mike LaChance on March 20, 2015 15 Comments
Senator Marco Rubio gave one of the best speeches of his career yesterday when he took to the floor in defense of Israel while calling out its critics, including President Obama. Alyssa Canobbio of the Washington Free Beacon reported:
Rubio Delivers Blistering Speech on Obama’s Assault on Israel It has taken two days for Obama to call Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and congratulate him on his reelection. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have taken part in very sensitive talks with Iran about its nuclear program. Rubio began speaking on how Obama has always been among the first to call controversial leaders and congratulate them on winning their elections but has remained silent when it came to congratulating on the United States’ biggest ally in the Middle East. Rubio continued, making multiple points that the Obama administration has not stood with Israel.
Rubio cites a litany of examples of the unfair treatment of Israel by the Obama administration and its regional enemies such as Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. This video is 15 minutes long and well worth your time.

Posted by Amy Miller on March 19, 2015 6 Comments
At a speech to the City Club of Cleveland yesterday afternoon, President Obama summoned once again the hobgoblin of his presidency: Guantanamo Bay. During a Q&A session the President revealed that, if he could start his presidency over, with perfect hindsight, he would close Gitmo on day one. Who does he blame for this error in judgment? The bipartisan coalition to close the facility, of course!
“I thought we had enough consensus there that we could do it in a more deliberate fashion,” Obama added. “But the politics of it got tough, and people got scared by the rhetoric around it. Once that set in, then the path of least resistance was just to leave it open, even though it’s not who we are as a country and it’s used by terrorists around the world to help recruit jihadists.” Instead, Obama said, we’ve been forced to “chip away it” a little bit at a time, releasing a small number of detainees who could not be charged but leaving more than 100 still in captivity with no trials in sight.
Watch:

Posted by Amy Miller on March 18, 2015 3 Comments
So much for The Most Open and Transparent Administration in the History of the World©." Analysis by the Associated Press shows that last year the Obama Administration set a new record for either denying access to or censoring government documents when responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. From the AP:
The government's new figures, published Tuesday, covered all requests to 100 federal agencies during fiscal 2014 under the Freedom of Information law, which is heralded globally as a model for transparent government. They showed that despite disappointments and failed promises by the White House to make meaningful improvements in the way it releases records, the law was more popular than ever. Citizens, journalists, businesses and others made a record 714,231 requests for information. The U.S. spent a record $434 million trying to keep up. It also spent about $28 million on lawyers' fees to keep records secret. The new figures showed the government responded to 647,142 requests, a 4 percent decrease over the previous year. It more than ever censored materials it turned over or fully denied access to them, in 250,581 cases or 39 percent of all requests. Sometimes, the government censored only a few words or an employee's phone number, but other times it completely marked out nearly every paragraph on pages. On 215,584 other occasions, the government said it couldn't find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the government determined the request to be unreasonable or improper.
In 1 in 3 cases, the Administration admitted when challenged that denials of open records requests were improper under the law. Officials also took longer than previous Administrations to process requests, replied saying they had lost or could not find the requested material, and, according to the AP, "refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy." This report hit just two days after the White House made the call to remove its Office of Information from underneath the FOIA umbrella.

Posted by Amy Miller on March 14, 2015 8 Comments
The cult culture surrounding our president gets so weird that sometimes I don't even get it. Just when we thought we'd finally gotten used to the idea that Barack Obama is about 100 levels cooler than anyone else on the planet, we find out that he is not, in fact, just a phone call away from good times with A-list celebrities and cultural icons like Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, and Jay-Z. In this past week's appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Obama put to rest rumors that he hits up Kanye West's home phone (no one has those anymore, Kanye) on the regular for Very Important Discussions© about...whatever it is that the President of the United States would talk about with Kanye West. From CNN:
In a characteristic brag, West recently said during a lecture at Oxford University that he can "call Obama out of the blue," adding that "Obama calls the home phone." The president was complimentary toward the Chicago rapper — who he's previously called a "jackass" — but said he doubted that was true. "Look, I love his music, he's incredibly creative, but I don't think I have his home number," he told Kimmel.
TMZ has video of Kanye defending his honor against shared nemesis Rush Limbaugh, who recently said that, had Kanye rapped the lyrics to the now-infamous racist SAE fraternity chant, it would have become a chart-topping hit:

Posted by Amy Miller on March 13, 2015 15 Comments
Rep. Jared Polis started calling Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton "Tehran Tom" after word got out that the Senator had led a coalition of 47 Republicans in the drafting of a letter to Iran. The "#47Traitors" hashtag took off on Twitter, and over 200,000 people have signed a petition accusing those senators of violating the Logan Act. You'd think we'd never seen anything like this before, right? Well, that's exactly what progressives want you to think. Tom Cotton may have caused a scandal, but he hasn't come close to the misdeeds of Democrats who came before him.

1983: Kennedy appeals to Moscow

ted_kennedy_and_the_soviets-620x382 In 1991, the London Times published a memo pulled from the Soviet archives offering proof that in 1983, Senator Ted Kennedy worked with an old law school friend by the name of John Tunney to relay a message from himself to Yuri Andropov, a top official in Russia's Communist regime.

Posted by New Neo on March 12, 2015 49 Comments
I had thought that the press would stand by Hillary Clinton in the same way they've stood by Obama---through thick and thin. After all, Obama has committed acts far worse than Hillary's, has covered up more, and has been just as egregious in his lies. And yet I can't recall Obama having been subjected to questions even remotely as difficult as the ones Hillary faced (and answered poorly) this week, although the press could have grilled him that way any time he appeared before them. They chose not to do that, but they chose to ask some real questions of Hillary Clinton. Why the differential treatment? As soon as the email story broke, the NY Times led the attack. Originally it seemed that they may have wanted to get it over with in a perfunctory way and then let her candidacy continue, or that this was being done at the direction of Obama who wanted another candidate for various reasons. But now I've come to think that the first reason isn't operative (at least, not any more), and that although the second may be true, it doesn't account for the fervor of the criticism. Perhaps part of the reason this thing has gotten bigger is that Clinton has handled it poorly. Perhaps the MSM is piling on because they thought Hillary would be better at dealing with it than she has demonstrated so far, and they're panicking because her performance means she will be a bad candidate come 2016. Or perhaps they know of other scandals, and they want her out before the revelations multiply (and end up reflecting poorly on their favorite, Obama, or on liberalism itself?) If they can't put out this fire they may want to fan the flames so that the sacrifice happens more quickly and a new and more viable candidate is chosen, and they can get credit for "objectivity" (for hurting one of their own) into the bargain.

Posted by Amy Miller on March 02, 2015 10 Comments
There are snipers on the White House roof. Forget teams of fences, dogs, pressure-triggered alarms, or roving bands of secret agents. We have snipers. Can you imagine the conversations those snipers have when some yahoo hops a barrier and makes a run at the front door? Because that happened again today. Twice. Via the Daily Mail:
On Sunday night, an unnamed suspect stepped over a bike rack situated outside the White House fence. The bike racks were installed last year following a high-profile fence-jumping incident that involved an Army veteran armed with a knife. Early Monday morning, another person attempted to walk through a gate while a construction crew were leaving. According to NBC, both men were taken into custody, and the Secret Service has given the all-clear at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The agency has been tight-lipped about the two breaches, which are now under investigation. The suspects have not been named. The bike rack-jumping incident took place at around 11.30pm Sunday near the southwest corner of the presidential residence, reported MyFox DC. The male suspect was arrested and charged with unlawful entry. The breach led to a 30-minute lockdown at the White House. Just before 7am Monday, another man allegedly tried to walk into a pedestrian entrance as construction workers were leaving the area. A Secret Service agent stopped the intruder in his tracks and arrested him after a brief confrontation. The White House was placed on another lockdown that lasted only a few minutes following the second incident.

Posted by Amy Miller on February 28, 2015 8 Comments
Obama knows he's vulnerable on Iran, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's impending visit to the U.S. and Congressional address isn't doing him any favors when it comes to gaining a vote of confidence from lawmakers and other world leaders. The White House expects Netanyahu to hit back against its efforts to strike a nuclear deal with Iran---and they're already rebutting what they anticipate Netanyahu will say:
In a briefing for reporters, senior administration officials contended that even an imperfect agreement that kept Iran’s nuclear efforts frozen for an extended period was preferable to a breakdown in talks that could allow the leadership in Tehran unfettered ability to produce enriched uranium and plutonium. “The alternative to not having a deal is losing inspections,” said one senior official, who would not be quoted by name under conditions that the administration set for the briefing, “and an Iran ever closer to having the fissile material to manufacture a weapon.”
Since House Speaker John Boehner announced the invitation, reactions from Democrats and the White House have unraveled, from boycotts, to snubs, to outlandish statements like one from national security advisor Susan Rice, who said that the address would be "destructive" to the U.S. - Israel relationship. This is nothing new. The tension began the moment Obama took control of the White House.

Posted by Mike LaChance on February 22, 2015 13 Comments
This morning on FOX and Friends, Ann Coulter responded to buzz over Rudy Giuliani's recent comments calling into question Obama's love for America. Calling the issue non-controversial, Coulter pointed out that if critics think Giuliani can't see into Obama's heart, then why are Democrats always calling conservatives racist? Can they see into our hearts? She then goes on to point out reasons why one might arrive at such a conclusion about Obama. This is classic Coulter. Watch the entire exchange below.

Posted by Amy Miller on February 22, 2015 14 Comments
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn't flinch when Democrats called for a boycott of his upcoming address to a joint session of Congress. Most would agree he had no reason to---for all of their bluster, only 23 dems signed on to a trumped-up letter demanding the speech be cancelled; Nancy Pelosi put out a statement insisting Netanyahu stay home, but Netanyahu is famous for ignoring those who insist he go away. The man is no stranger to backlash. That Netanyahu will address Congress is becoming increasingly inevitable; but the White House is still busy making moves to rebut the speech while bolstering the President's controversial upcoming nuclear deal with Iran. From ABC News:
Among them: a presidential interview with a prominent journalist known for coverage of the rift between Obama and Netanyahu, multiple Sunday show television appearances by senior national security aides and a pointed snub of America's leading pro-Israel lobby, which is holding its annual meeting while Netanyahu is in Washington, according to the officials. The administration has already ruled out meetings between Netanyahu and Obama, saying it would be inappropriate for the two to meet so close to Israel's March 17 elections. But the White House is now doubling down on a cold-shoulder strategy, including dispatching Cabinet members out of the country and sending a lower-ranking official than normal to represent the administration at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the officials said. Vice President Joe Biden will be away, his absence behind Netanyahu conspicuous in coverage of the speech to Congress. Other options were described by officials, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.
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