Cartoon predicts the future 50 years ago.

Bolton: Oval Office antics creating world instability

By Ellis Washington:

President Barack Obama speaks before signing the middle-class tax cut bill in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on December 17, 2010 in Washington DC. The measure would extend tax cuts for families at every income level, renew jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed and enact a new one-year cut in Social Security taxes that would benefit nearly every worker who earns a wage. UPI/Olivier Douliery/POOL Photo via Newscom

President Obama’s equivocation on matters of national interest and security – such as his lukewarm response to WikiLeaks release of classified documents – are creating instability around the globe and might be encouraging U.S. enemies to push their own agendas, including violence, according to former Ambassador John Bolton.

In a series of recent interviews, including with WND, Bolton said he has a high level of concern that “America’s adversaries will take the measure of our equivocation on world events and question whether or not we are willing to protect our allies.”

“The weak pace and scope in challenging our adversaries will incentivize them to increasing bad acts,” he warned.

Consequently, according to Bolton, America’s allies also might be in the crosshairs.

“The president,” Bolton elaborated in a report in the London Guardian, “unlike the long line of his predecessors since Franklin Roosevelt, simply does not put national security at the center of his political priorities.
“Thus, Europeans who welcomed Obama to the Oval Office should reflect on his Warren Harding-like interest in foreign policy. Europeans who believe they will never again face real security threats to their comfortable lifestyle should realize that if by chance one occurs during this administration, the president will be otherwise occupied.”

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ut-Face Like Orwell’s farm animals, we have awakened to see the new commandments on the barnyard wall.

Victor Davis Hanson:

This week Attorney General Holder was warning about the threat of terrorism — but not terrorism in the usual liberal Timothy McVeigh, “even Christians can be terrorists” sort of gobbledy-gook. Rather, Eric Holder, as this Christmas’s new Dick Cheney, is warning about U.S. citizens who are stealthy radical Islamists. Holder fears that they wish to succeed where the would-be Times Square, subway, Portland, and Christmas airliner bombers all failed. He assumes that the terrorists among us for some reason did not read the Al-Arabiya interview, fully appreciate the Cairo speech, see the famous bow to the Saudi king, or hear of administration pressure on Israel. In short, “All religions produce terrorists,” is now followed by “But some religions produce more terrorists than others.”

So, gone for the moment at least are we “cowards” who racially stereotype, oppose the Ground Zero mosque in Neanderthal fashion, and fail to appreciate Holder’s own commitment to shutting down Guantanamo and trying KSM in a New York federal court. Much like his colleague Harold Koh (who, as an Obama State Department justice official rather than a Yale law dean, is no longer suing to put an end to waterboarding at Guantanamo, but is instead opposing those who are suing to stop Predator assassination missions), Holder in a blink of an eye went from trashing the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols to sighing that it is almost a matter of when, not if, home-grown Islamic radicals will kill lots of us. Holder’s road to Damascus is eerily reminiscent of the sudden conversion in 1938 of British intellectuals, who, as Czechoslovakia was swallowed, abruptly went from 15 years of trumpeting League of Nations pacifism to calling for British military deterrence against fascism. Unlike Holder, however, they at least explained why they had made their about-faces.

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Unions profiting from favoritism by Obama’s GSA

By: Examiner Editorial:

Why is the federal General Services Administration, the government’s purchasing agent and landlord, sending millions of tax dollars to unions? Last week, 19 members of Congress, including incoming House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., sent a letter to Martha Johnson, administrator of the GSA, asking why it is forcing contractors that are refurbishing federal buildings to accept Project Labor Agreements. A PLA mandates the use of union labor on government construction projects, which translates to inflated costs, delays, and inflexible work rules.

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Ignatieff steers clear of C-word

Ezra Levant:

Michael Ignatieff’s Christmas card isn’t a Christmas card.

It’s a “holiday” card. It has a Jewish menorah on it, which is great. Fully 1% of Canadians are Jewish and though Hanukkah was three weeks ago, it’s a nice thought.

The card has some snowflakes on it, too, and mittens and a gingerbread man (or a ghost, it’s not clear). Those are symbols of winter. Which is great, because it is winter time.

But there’s not a single Christian symbol on the card, the religion of the majority of Canadians. It’s the faith our Queen Elizabeth is officially the “defender” of, the religion that inspired the names of so many places in this country, from the St. Lawrence Seaway to St. John’s.

It is the religion whose cross adorns the coats of arms of almost every province, the religion from whose Bible comes Canada’s motto, “From sea to sea.” Our anthem asks God to keep our land, and the French version says we will “carry the cross.”

Even the Charter of Rights begins with the reminder that neither judges nor politicians are at the apex of Canadian society, but rather both are under the “supremacy of God.”

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Venezuelan socialists defy voters in lame-duck session

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES:

The United States isn’t the only country suffering a lame-duck power grab. On Friday, Venezuela’s outgoing socialist-dominated parliament granted President Hugo Chavez the power to rule by decree for 18 months. If democracy is not already dead in Venezuela, it’s about to breathe its last breath.

Chavez’s drive for dictatorship comes in the wake of an unexpected electoral reverse. In September’s parliamentary elections, the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela, which had controlled 83 percent of the legislative seats, dropped to 59 percent control, while the opposition Coalition for Democratic Unity surged from 4 percent to 40 percent. More troubling to Chavez was that his party attracted only 48 percent of the popular vote against the opposition’s 47 percent. Had the election been more free and fair, the opposition likely would have found itself in the majority.

The new parliament doesn’t sit until Jan. 5 so the old majority took a page from the Pelosi-Reid playbook and decided to ram through as much of its unpopular agenda as possible while their supermajority lasted. The crowning achievement was the grant of dictatorial powers to Chavez, who – like President Obama – will face the electorate in 2012, if there is a Venezuelan electorate to face.

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The Left Twists Net Neutrality into a “Civil Rights” Issue

by Michelle Malkin, FrontPage:

When bureaucrats talk about increasing our “access” to x, y or z, what they’re really talking about is increasing exponentially their control over our lives. As it is with the government health care takeover, so it is with the newly approved government plan to “increase” Internet “access.” Call it Webcare.

By a vote of 3-2, the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday adopted a controversial scheme to ensure “net neutrality” by turning unaccountable Democratic appointees into meddling online traffic cops. The panel will devise convoluted rules governing Internet service providers, bandwidth use, content, prices and even disclosure details on Internet speeds. The “neutrality” is brazenly undermined by preferential treatment toward wireless broadband networks. Moreover, the FCC’s scheme is widely opposed by Congress — and has already been rejected once in the courts. Demonized industry critics have warned that the regulations will stifle innovation and result in less access, not more.

Sound familiar? The parallels with health care are striking. The architects of Obamacare promised to provide Americans more access to health insurance — and cast their agenda as a fundamental universal entitlement.

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Catholic NHS worker ‘faces sack’ after giving colleague booklet warning of abortion risks

dailymail:

A Roman Catholic health worker is facing the sack after she gave a colleague a booklet about the potential dangers of abortion.

Margaret Forrester, 39, feels she was bullied and ‘treated like a criminal’ after she handed the pro-life leaflet to a family planning worker at an NHS centre.

It warned of the physical and psychological problems suffered by five women after terminating pregnancies.

Miss Forrester said she offered the booklet during a private conversation with a colleague, because she felt the NHS did not give enough information about potential risks associated with abortion.

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Terrorizing Our Own

By Daniel Greenfield:

Airline travelers flying the unfriendly skies are presented with two options, that are actually only a single option, to have themselves and their children degraded in public in order to spare Muslim feelings. That we have a ban on profiling travelers, but no ban on molesting or humiliating them, tells us everything we need to know about why we have the current system that we do.

In a war we terrorize the enemy. In a siege we terrorize our own. And we have been terrorizing our own for a long time now.

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Obama, EPA to expand regulatory regime for climate change

Ed Morrissey:

After initially appearing to retreat in the face of the midterm onslaught, Barack Obama and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson have decided to pursue an end-run strategy to impose regulation on energy producers regarding greenhouse-gas emissions. The move sets up a confrontation between the White House and Congress, which has already signaled a willingness to play hardball with Obama on regulatory innovation:

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Anti-Semitism’s useful idiots

Barbara Kay:

To understand birthright-bashing Jews such as Peto and company, you have to understand the leftist contribution to modern anti-Semitism, a contribution that would be anathema to the grandparents of any living Jew, including Peto’s. That is the bogus notion that Zionism produces anti-Semitism; rather than the truth, which is that Zionism is a response to anti-Semitism.

The Left is a conduit for the self-pitying Arabist narrative, and that is what the credulous Peto has internalized. If you have been brainwashed to believe that Zionism causes anti-Semitism and Zionism is oppressive, then you may even believe anti-Semitism is justified if it hastens Israel’s redemption (read: dissolution).

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