Obama's Berlin Speech & Three Views...

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No. 44 Has Spoken

Europe is witnessing the 44th president of the United States during this trip.

George W. Bush is yesterday, the Texas version of the arrogant world power. Obama is all about today: the "everybody really just wants to be brothers and save the world" utopia. As for us, we who sometimes admire and sometimes curse this somewhat anemic, pragmatic democracy, we will have to quickly get used to Barack Obama, the new leader of a lofty democracy that loves those big nice words -- words that warm our hearts and alarm our minds.

Let's allow ourselves to be warmed today, by this man at the Victory Column.

[this is Spiegel {Germany's largest paper}]

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Barack Obama - the world can expect better of America

Berlin - Barack Obama, already hailed as a political Messiah by the German press, tonight took the US presidential campaign to Europe with a thunderously applauded speech promising a better, more sensitive America and urging a new global partnership...

[better of America, more sensitive America. Promised to the country that didn't stand with us in Iraq, and who's pitifully few 'troops' in Afghanistan are explicitly prohibited from fighting (or even entering 'contested areas')]

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Obama's Berlin Subtext
[HT:HR]
Obama gave his long awaited speech in Berlin today. With classic Obama arrogance, he appropriated Ronald Reagan's rhetoric seeming to think that he was being original. The walls that must come down, according to Obama, are racial and religious walls. The theological differences between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, must become nothing.

Had Obama made that speech in Gaza, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia, then his speech would have been courageous and there would have been some merit to it. For, the Islamic countries of the mid-East are hotbeds of racial and religious intolerance, hellholes in which torture is par for the course, in which Jews are as cattle for slaughter and blacks are "abd." [snip]

Instead, Obama tossed the entire United States under the bus and played the race card before an America-hating international audience and accused it of torture, of racial discrimination against non-European type immigrants, of religious discrimination. There was no acknowledgment that the U.S. has a right to self-defense or that U.S. law should be upheld and not infringed by illegals who boldly violate our immigration policy.

Thus, we Americans have discovered, irrefutably, that Obama has a Eurocentric view of the U.S. and its people, and he will not defend her staunchly against condemnation by outsiders. In fact, he will join them in hurling the first stone...

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TEXT OF SPEECH
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McCain visits German restaurant in Ohio

Republican presidential candidate John McCain had his own German experience Thursday—at a restaurant in Ohio. He asserted that he was happy to devote his time this week to touring the nation's heartland. "I'd love to give a speech in Germany. But I'd much prefer to do it as president of the United States rather than as a candidate for president," McCain told reporters...

[there, equal time. proof the old media isn't biased]

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Gergen: Obama erred in airing Maliki talks

WASHINGTON - Political pundit David Gergen said U.S. Sen. Barack Obama should have kept the contents of his discussions with Iraq's prime minister confidential. Gergen told CNN it was a mistake for Obama to release a statement detailing "exactly" what Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told him. "We have a long tradition in this country that we only have one president at a time...

[evidently that's 'change'd]

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Newsweek CW: Surge Worked, Helps... Obama?

Finally an admission that the surge in Iraq has worked. What's the catch? You guessed it, it helps the Obamessiah.

From the July 24 "Conventional Wisdom" on Newsweek.com:

[up arrow] Obama: It worked--but, ironically, benefiting Obama more than McCain.

Is that why the latest tracking poll by Rasmussen shows Obama with a small single-digit lead?

[sometimes the spin is insultingly overt]

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“If there is one element of moral and political certainty that cements the liberal consensus more than any other, it is the complacent view that while Iraq is ‘a war of choice,’ it is really and only Afghanistan that is a war of necessity. The ritualistic solidity of this view is impressive.

It survives all arguments and all evidence.”

Christopher Hitchens, 'On Wars of Choice'

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The Soldier Voting Scandal

Analysis by the federal Election Assistance Commission, rejecting inflated Defense Department voting claims, estimated overseas and absentee military voting for the 2006 midterm elections at a disgracefully low 5.5 percent. The quality of voting statistics is so poor that there is no way to tell how many of the slightly over 330,000 votes actually were sent in by the absentee military voters and their dependents and how many by civilian Americans living abroad -- 6 million all total.

Nobody who has studied the question objectively sees any improvement since 2006, and that is a scandal. Retired U.S. Marine Corps Capt. Charles Henry wrote in the July issue of the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings: "While virtually everyone involved ... seems to agree that military people deserve at least equal opportunity when it comes to having their votes counted, indications are that in November 2008, many thousands of service members who try to vote will do so in vain."

Rep. Roy Blunt, the House Republican whip, on July 8 introduced a resolution demanding that the Defense Department better enable U.S. military personnel overseas to vote in the November elections. That act was followed by silence. Democrats normally leap on an opportunity to find fault with the Bush Pentagon.

But not a single Democrat joined Blunt as a co-sponsor, and an all-Republican proposal cannot pass in the Democratic-controlled House...

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Poll: Obama "Not Likely" to Be Effective Commander-in-Chief

[HT:SE]
On the night of January 20, 2009, a new commander-in-chief will leave the inaugural podium, parade, and festivities for the Oval Office. A national security staff ready with the latest “threat briefing” will join him there.

On his desk, they will place a thick binder of reports, each focusing on real or emerging threats to our national security...

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Dots...

Iran missile launch renews urgency

WASHINGTON -- The head of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency says Iran's recent missile launch proves the value of deploying a missile defense system. Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry Obering said Tuesday that Iran's launch of several different missiles, including one with more than 1,200 miles of target range, is an example of the importance of the missile defense system deployed in Eastern Europe and in the United States, the Missile Defense Agency reported.

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Iran ends cooperation with IAEA probe

Vienna, Austria - Iran on Thursday signaled it would no longer cooperate with International Atomic Energy Agency experts investigating for signs of nuclear weapons programs, confirming that the probe - launched a year ago with great expectations - was at a dead end.

[experts in the field have been saying to watch for this for years - it's a prerequisite for completing Iran's ambitions - they're likely nearing their goals]

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The Sharia debate: we can't all be equal under different laws

Sneakily, Britain's first Muslim Minister, Shahid Malik, has ducked the critics that he will enrage in an interview to be broadcast on Channel 4's Dispatches programme on Monday.

Knowing that the phrase he uses to describe the situation of British Muslims - “the Jews of Europe” - will make the headlines, he has put it in the mouths of others. “If you ask Muslims today what do they feel like,” he says, “they feel like the Jews of Europe.” He does not say if he thinks that they are right.

I'll respond in the Malik method. If you asked most non-Muslims what they feel about the suggestion, they would say that it was disgraceful, outrageous and insulting... [snip]

Allowing British Muslims recourse to Islamic law would be a charter for male dominance and peer-group bullying...

[another problem caused by judges rather than handled by them]

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Mosques increasingly not welcome

Europeans are increasingly lashing out at the construction of mosques in their cities as terrorism fears and continued immigration feed anti-Muslim sentiment across the continent. The latest dispute is in Switzerland, which is planning a nationwide referendum to ban minarets on mosques. (Snip) Some analysts call the mosque conflicts the manifestation of a growing fear that Muslims aren't assimilating, don't accept Western values and pose a threat to security.

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Talk of wind power is just that: talk

IN his commercials, T. Boone Pickens seems minted in Hollywood. He is the grizzled oilman who sagely tells the public that we can't drill our way out of this problem. But here is what he told Newsweek about wind power: "There are no turbines on my ranch, because I think they are ugly."

Add Pickens to that list of hypocrites - notably Walter Cronkite and the Kennedy family (Robert Kennedy Jr. is a major global warming alarmist) - who tell us we need alternative energy while opposing the installation of wind turbines near them.

If the world were in serious trouble, Pickens, Cronkite and the Kennedys would put windmills in their back yards. But they know it is all snake oil, and they peddle it while luxuriating in their air-conditioned second and third homes along the beach. The only wind power they want is for their sailboats...

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They've got that global warming thing down cold

Thursday's episode on environmentalism opened with a morose-looking Penn Jillette waving a magazine as he recited one ecotastrophe after another -- drought in Africa, flooding in Pakistan and Japan, -- I snapped to attention. ''It says right here in Time magazine -- the weather's gone nuts and we humans are to blame!'' Teller wailed. ``We have bleeped up the environment and now we're going to pay for it!''

Yeah, that global warming is pretty bad. You know, Al Gore says -- oops, never mind. Turns out Penn's not reading from the infamous Time cover story of 2006 on global warming, the one headlined BE WORRIED. BE VERY WORRIED. No, this Time is from 1974, and the headline is, ANOTHER ICE AGE? And all those violent paroxysms of nature are the pernicious work of global cooling

I sometimes find myself longing for the good old days of the Ice Age scare, because at least back then, dissent was possible. These days, deviating from the orthodoxy on global warming is almost enough to get you thrown in jail. One of Gore's former science advisors said that oil company executives who argue against him ``should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.''

Consider it a certainty that the Climate Police will lock up Penn & Teller after Thursday's show. Not only does it feature interviews with some scientists who aren't totally sold on the idea that the Earth is toast, it whispers an even more inconvenient truth:

A lot of the scariest global-warming tales are told by people who stand to make a buck if they can scare you enough...

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