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Obama's sister, Maya said,
"There was always a joke
between my mom and
Barack
that he would be
the first black president."
Now the
joke's on us.
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| Ruled By A Radical |
The idea that Obama is a centrist who wishes to end the culture wars is
laughable.
The White House
website sets
out his agenda on "civil rights," which includes expanding federal "hate
crime" legislation, ending racial profiling, repealing the Defense of
Marriage Act and supporting full civil unions that give same-sex couples
legal rights and privileges equal to those of married couples, giving
adoption rights to gay couples, and lifting the federal ban on needle
exchange -- a policy promoted by drug legalizers on the disingenuous
grounds that this will reduce infection among drug users but which
actually helps normalize drug abuse.
The Telegraph
reports one of Obama’s first acts, to lift restrictions on
government funding for groups providing abortion services or counseling
outside the United States.
Then there’s the launch of Organizing
for America, an extension of the community activism Obama encouraged,
after he was elected, through a network of informal "house parties" to
discuss pressing issues. Now it’s to be a formal infrastructure of
activism -- see here.
As pointed out
here, such use of community organization also follows to the letter
the template for social revolution laid down by
Saul Alinsky, the Marxist ideologue and activist who set out in his
book Rules for Radicals how capitalism would be overthrown by the
mobilization of the masses and the whipping up of their discontent.
The strategy revolved around creating apparently moderate local
organizations that would be manipulated by community organizers --
effectively deniable political agitators -- to foment grievance and
dissent. Alinsky’s thinking permeates
ACORN and other community groups that in the past were associated
with or funded by Obama, and which push an agenda that is as coercive
and corrupt as it is seditious. America's First Community
Organizer promised ACORN during his campaign that within his first 100
days in office he would invite them in to discuss how they could help
him change America.
It has started already. |
| Obama Seeks Space Weapons Ban |
Obama's pledge to seek a worldwide ban on weapons in space marks a
dramatic shift in U.S. policy while posing the tricky issue of defining
whether a satellite can be a weapon.
Moments after Obama's
inauguration last week, the White House website was updated to include
policy statements on a range of issues, including a pledge to restore
U.S. leadership on space issues and seek a worldwide ban on weapons that
interfere with military and commercial satellites.
It also
promised to look at threats to U.S. satellites, contingency plans to
keep information flowing from them, and what steps are needed to protect
spacecraft against attack.
A defense official, who also asked not
to be named, said the Obama administration had not yet held briefings
for top officials working on military space issues, but it was clear
that the focus would shift toward more diplomatic initiatives.
Work on classified projects involving an "active" military response to
attacks against U.S. satellites might be halted in favor of more
monitoring and passive protection measures, he said. He declined to give
any more details.
"It's not going to happen immediately, but it
seems as though the wheels are in motion to initiate some sort of
cooperative measure," Samson said.
The new policy language used
by the Obama administration was "impossibly broad," the official said.
It also failed to acknowledge recent work by U.S. officials on
guidelines for space debris and conduct by nations active in space.
Remember this?
(video) |
| Obama's Legal Team |
Obama is
staffing his Justice Department with some of his predecessor's
fiercest critics, and lawyers who have spent years defining the limits
of executive power will now be helping to wield it.
The change
may be most dramatic at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel
(OLC), where a small cadre of lawyers who had an outsized influence on
legal criticism of Bush are taking the top three jobs.
Those
three -- Dawn Johnsen, Martin Lederman, and David Barron -- and others
made the case that Bush’s interrogation policy was justified by flawed
legal reasoning. Their arguments precipitated one of Obama’s most
dramatic early acts: flatly repudiating all government legal advice on
interrogation issued between September 11, 2001, and January 20, 2009.
The three signed one statement, which Johnsen principally wrote,
favorably quoting a comparison of Bush’s attorneys to mafia lawyers and
laying out principles for restoring the Office of Legal Counsel’s
independent tradition.
Barron and Lederman are the authors of a
pair of long articles in the Harvard Law Review examining President
Bush’s claim that he can wage war -- and the war on terror -- largely
free of congressional oversight or restraint. In the articles,
they argue that the notion of overriding war powers of any sort is a
modern invention, with few roots in precedent or the Constitution.
The Bush position, they wrote, is "a radical attempt to remake the
constitutional law of war powers."
Johnsen has described the Bush
Administration’s conduct as "illegal" and Lederman wrote that former
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other Bush aides appear to be
guilty of "conspiracy to violate the Torture Act." |
| Obama's Death Blow to Auto
Industry |
Obama will
direct federal regulators on Monday to move swiftly on an
application by California and 13 other states to set strict automobile
emissions and fuel efficiency standards, two administration officials
said Sunday evening.
The directive makes good on an Obama
campaign pledge and signifies a sharp reversal of Bush administration
policy. Granting California and the other states the right to
regulate tailpipe emissions would be one of the most emphatic actions
Mr. Obama could take to quickly put his stamp on environmental policy.
Once they act, automobile manufacturers will quickly have to retool
to begin producing and selling cars and trucks that get higher mileage
than the national standard, and on a faster phase-in schedule.
That means a costly retooling of the manufacturing plants, a whole lot
more money built into the price of the cars, and a commensurate drop in
the demand for the higher priced cars. This, in turn, will lead to
more bailout requests, which will eventually be refused and ultimately,
the government will take over the industry.
Obama's policies will
mean higher prices on cars, which will reduce demand at a time when the
automakers are on their knees.
Charles Territo, a spokesman for
the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, said the car makers would
prefer a single national standard and needed time to develop new
fuel-sipping models. "Applying California standards to several
different states would create a complex, confusing and very difficult
situation for manufacturers," he said. |
| Obama's Nonbeliever Nod |
Not everyone was happy with President Barack Obama's
nod to nonbelievers and non-Christians in his inaugural address when
he said, "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus,
and nonbelievers," and some of the stiff criticism about Obama’s
religious inclusiveness is coming from African-American Christians who
maintain that no, all faiths were actually not created equal.
By
mentioning, for the first time in an inaugural address, the 16.1 percent
of Americans who check "no"’ when asked about religion, Obama turned it
into the most controversial line in his speech -- praised by The New
York Times editorial board and cited by some Christians as evidence that
he is a heretic, and in his well-spoken way, a serious threat.
With that one line, the president "seems to be trying to redefine
American culture, which is distinctively Christian," said Bishop E.W.
Jackson of the Exodus Faith Ministries in Chesapeake, Va. "The
overwhelming majority of Americans identify as Christians, and what
disturbs me is that he seems to be trying to redefine who we are.’"
Jackson said he and others have no problem acknowledging that "this
country is one in which everybody has the freedom to think what they
want." Yet Obama crossed the line, in his view, in suggesting that
all faiths (and none) were different roads to the same destination: "He
made similar remarks in the campaign, and said, 'We are no longer a
Christian nation, if we ever were. We are a Jewish, Hindu and
non-believing nation.'"
Not so, Jackson says: "Obviously, Jewish
heritage is very much a part of Christianity; the Jewish Bible is part
of our Bible. But Hindu, Muslim, and nonbelievers? I don't
think so. We are not a Muslim nation or a nonbelieving nation."
Atheists were celebrating the unexpected mention, and indeed they
were: "In his inaugural address … President Barack Obama did what many
before him should have done, rightly citing the great diversity of
America as part of the nation's great strength, and including
'nonbelievers' in that mix," said Ed Buckner of American Atheists.
"His mother would have been proud, and so are we." |
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