Are Our Nuclear Secrets Safe In Obama’s Hands?
IBD:
The administration is considering reviving a ’90s-era nuclear scientist exchange program with China. Does no one in the White House remember how much damage the previous arrangement caused?
Of the many regrettable initiatives dreamed up by the Clinton administration, few were as perverse as the nuclear scientist exchange program. The arrangement turned out to be a gift to the Chinese, who were able to steal U.S. nuclear secrets virtually in plain sight.
Either unable or unwilling to learn from the past, the Obama administration wants to bring the program back. The Washington Times reports that “Deputy Energy Secretary Daniel B. Poneman is working on a major Obama administration initiative that would renew scientist exchanges between U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories and Chinese nuclear facilities.”
The 1990s version of the exchanges yielded unprecedented espionage. How bad was it? An internal lab document obtained and reported by IBD in 1999 indicated that “during the Clinton administration, the number of Chinese nationals working” at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico had “catapulted 411%.”
[...]
Krauthammer blasts Holder as one of the most incompetent AGs in US history
by The Right Scoop:
In a blistering opinion, Krauthammer blasted Holder as one of the most incompetent Attorneys General in US History and said that his use of the race card in defense of himself over Fast and Furious was, to use Holder’s own words, “a cowardly use of the race card”:
[...]
Obama Derangement Syndrome?
by Victor Davis Hanson:
I’d say if you live in the United States of America and you vote for George Bush, you’ve lost your mind. — John Edwards
When does the legitimate “I oppose Obama” descend into the illegitimate “I hate Obama”?
It is popular now to suggest that conservatives in general and congressional Republicans in particular suffer from an obsession characterized by an uncontrolled antipathy for Barack Obama — personal and visceral — that warps their entire political outlook. No doubt some do experience the same obsessions that infected the Left in their furor at George W. Bush. One can find unhinged posters at anti-Obama rallies similar to those at anti-Bush demonstrations. Bloggers can show hatred for Obama in the manner one found them despising Bush. Perhaps for Howard Dean’s rants about Bush’s supposed foreknowledge of 9/11, we have Donald Trump insisting on a fraudulent Obama birth certificate. Truthers are analogous to Birthers. And for every conspiracy theory that Bush was continuing a long family tradition of profiting from Nazi trade, there was a suggestion that Obama was a Manchurian candidate planted here by Islamic interests to destroy from the inside the United States.
But again, I am not talking about conspiracy rants and raves, but a general psychiatric affliction that infects the influential political class — politicians, journalists, and those in popular culture and the arts.
So how does one distinguish natural political opposition from a psychotic state? In other words, when will we know that popular opposition to Obama’s worldview and a dislike at the way he seeks to divide the country degenerate into the paranoid venom that was unleashed against Bush?
Here are some things to watch on the national scene to warn us:
[...]
Dear America: Get help — Your friends in Canada are worried about you
By Lorrie Goldstein:
As for you Democrats, including you, President Obama, have you gone collectively insane with regard to your energy policies?
You don’t seem to want our oilsands oil from Alberta, or Mideast oil, or offshore oil, or to drill for oil.
Where then, do you plan on getting your oil, which you’re going to need for decades to come until someone can figure out how to make wind turbine and solar power work on an industrial scale?
Do you seriously prefer tankers carrying oil from dictatorial regimes like Venezuela (isn’t Obama pretty ticked off with Hugo Chavez right now?) leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, as opposed to oilsands oil delivered with far less risk by pipeline from a reliable ally like Canada?
If you’re worried about climate change, stop ranting about the oilsands, which account for one-10th of 1% of global carbon dioxide emissions, and start worrying that you generate almost half your electricity from coal, which has an impact on the planet up to 70 times greater than the oilsands.
(In Canada, by the way, we get almost 75% of our electricity from non-emitting sources, mainly hydro power, at 59%).
[...]
New Middle East will be paradise for Muslim men, hell for women and Jews
Giulio Meotti:
In Tunisia, the country that had the highest percentage of mini-skirts in the Arab world, Islamism got 40% of the vote. In Morocco, which was once considered a pillar of Arab secularism, the Islamists won 30%. Meanwhile, some 70% of Egypt’s new Parliament is in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood and the salafists, who praised Osama bin Laden last April.
In Libya, Islamic law supporters and former al-Qaeda bosses took power after Gaddafi’s fall. The Syrian National Council, the opposition group to Assad’s rule, has 19 members: 15 Islamists, 2 Christians and 2 Druze.
It’s possible that in the coming years the Arab masses will revolt against their new Islamic rulers. Today it’s the turn of Sayid Qutb’s children. The Islamic revolutionaries are offering to the Middle Eastern people a proud and totalitarian way of life. They are much stronger than their secularist fellows.
[...]
This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies.
The Virginian:
The recent editorial in the Virginian Pilot Pointless fight over light bulbs is a great example of ideological lying. In seeking to deny people the ability to buy incandescent light bulbs, the editors turn reason inside out and truth upside down.
The initiative to outlaw the incandescent light bulb was both a bald faced example of crony capitalism and an act of cheap grace on the part of lawmakers. But it turned out not to sit well with most people. The old light bulb was a commodity that cost less than a dollar and could be made cheaply. Light bulb makers like GE, Philips and Osram Sylvania could not make much profit, so why not lobby to have the old light bulb outlawed so they could sell us bulbs that cost 5 to 50 times more? Legislators, in turn could line their pockets with campaign contributions while pretending to be champions of the environment.
It turns out that the new, more expensive, replacement bulbs were neither as long lasting, much more hazardous and gave off a harsher light than the bulbs we were used to. But “the people who know better” at the Pilot once again tell us to shut up, sit down and do as we’re told. And then they tell us that repealing the incandescent bulb ban is like mandating buggy whips or coal shuttles.
[...]
Holder’s Voter ID Fraud
WSJ:
The Obama Administration’s re-election mobilization continues: Witness Eric Holder’s attempt to play the race card and perhaps twist the law in a campaign against voter identification laws.
In the Attorney General’s telling, the movement in the states to require voters to show some ID is a revival of minority disenfranchisement a la Jim Crow. A growing number of minorities, he said in a speech last week, are now worried about “the same disparities, divisions and problems” that beset the country in 1965 and “many Americans, for the first time in their lives . . . now have reason to believe that we are failing to live up” to the promise of democracy for all.
If you haven’t heard about this national crisis, perhaps that’s because you don’t travel in Mr. Holder’s political circles. He is merely repeating the howls of groups like the NAACP and the George Soros-funded Brennan Center, which claim without evidence that voter ID laws hurt minorities.
[...]
Thirty states now require some form of ID at the polls, and one goal of Mr. Holder’s attack is to intimidate other states that want to toughen their laws. He’s probably also signaling that Justice will strike down the Texas and South Carolina statutes. This would please the Democratic Party’s left while not-so-subtly inventing a threat of Republican racism to drive minority turnout in 2012. Mr. Holder’s voter ID alarums are one more reason he’s earning a reputation for politicized, partial justice.
The War on Christmas
by Mark D. Tooley:
The multiculturalist Left wants to dilute Christmas into a vacuous, stern celebration of Winter, divorced from culture and religion. Not content with banning crèches, trees and carols, anti-Christmas zealots are often even threatened by Santa Claus. The transcendent authority behind Christmas, even in its commercialized form, is an unwanted challenge to the Left’s preference for all authority vested in the state and its secular clerisy.
Fox News has delighted in lampooning the ongoing absurdities of the “War on Christmas,” which sometimes even include banning green and red from classrooms. The American Family Association, a para-church group, has also challenged the anti-Christmas campaign by affirming companies that affirm Christmas.
Naturally the Religious Left is troubled by this defense of Christmas, especially by Fox News or conservative Christians, both of whom it despises. So the Religious Left has decided that the cultural defenders of Christmas are instead betraying Christmas by actually promoting commercialism.
[...]
Ending the insanity in the peace process
by Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi:
Einstein said that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. The sad truth is that, after 63 years of good people trying, top-down diplomacy in the Arab-Israeli conflict has produced little more than a jobs program for diplomats and the airlines that bring them back and forth between Washington and Jerusalem.
Israel and America can’t want peace more than the Palestinians on the ground. Palestinians have to want it for themselves.
[...]
Double Standards And The Reverend Wright
by Charles C. Johnson:
Rep. Ron Paul, the presumptive frontrunner of the Iowa caucuses, has come under fire again for racist material that appeared in a series of newsletters, written he says by someone else and published under his name nearly two decades ago. Paul has disavowed the letters’ content repeatedly in numerous interviews.
The newsletters’ racially incendiary content were first made public by James Kirchick, a pro-war, neoconservative writer critical of Rep. Paul’s anti-war, libertarian politics. Kirchick has collected some of Paul’s newsletters over at The New Republic and wrote about them in run up to the 2008 election. Paul disavowed those remarks in January 2008 when they surfaced again on CNN with Wolf Blitzer, but CNN and Blitzer are back again now.
[...]
Israel: Some Basic Facts
By Victor Sharpe:
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Nothing could attest to that fact more than the Israel-Arab conflict, which in reality is the Israel-Islamist conflict.
This is not a territorial dispute between Israel and those Arabs who call themselves Palestinians, though it is framed as such. No, the stark reality of the Muslim war against the Jewish state is rooted in one fundamental fact: namely, the unchangeable refusal by Muslims to ever accept a non-Islamic nation in territory once conquered in the name of Allah, even if that nation — the Jewish nation — precedes Islam by millennia.
Peace overtures and endless territorial concessions by tiny Israel to the giant Muslim and Arab world have been, and are, as worthless as a thirsty soul in the desert seeking to survive by staggering towards an inviting mirage.
[...]
Arab Apartheid
by Khaled Abu Toameh:
In recent months, Egyptian authorities have finally began granting Egyptian citizenship to children born to Egyptian mothers and Palestinian fathers.
So far, according to Palestinian sources, more than 500 children have been issued Egyptian passports that enable them legally to live and work in Egypt without having to worry about being detained or deported. The Palestinian population in Egypt is estimated at approximately 100,000.
Egypt is only one of several Arab countries that have always subjected Palestinians to apartheid systems and discriminatory laws.
With the exception of Jordan, the Arab countries have refused to grant their citizenship to Palestinians. Arab governments claimed that this measure was aimed at “protecting the Palestinian identity” of the Palestinians so that one day they would be able to return to their original homes inside Israel.
In most Arab countries, Palestinians are banned from purchasing houses or lands. They are also denied many jobs in the private and public sectors.
This has been happening at a time when Arab citizens of Israel are free to purchase houses in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem and in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Upper Nazareth.
[...]
“Kairos Palestine”: From Mendacity to Megalomania
by Malcolm Lowe:
Late in 2009, a small group of Palestinian Christian clergy and laity banded together to produce a document entitled “Kairos Palestine.” Basically, it promoted familiar Palestinian aspirations, dressed up with some theological flourishes. Even by current Palestinian standards, it was an extreme statement. For instance, it avoided endorsement of the two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians.
Now, two years later, the hard core of the original authors has held an anniversary conference in Bethlehem together with foreign supporters. This time they constituted themselves a tribunal before which to arraign all the churches of the world for not showing enough enthusiasm for their original document. Thus mendacity morphs into megalomania.
The utterances emerging from this conference manifest a mixture of triumph and fury.
[...]
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