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I was just recalling how, about a year ago, my country was swept up in a spasm of self-congratulation. Not only had Barack Obama broken a seemingly insuperable historical barrier in winning the presidency, the media told us, but "we" had as well. We had overcome centuries of gruesome history and proved to the world that America could live up to its promise. The US press in those days duly reported but tended to downplay events that told the opposite story. The footnote, for instance, that the white supremacist website stormfront.org temporarily went dead on 5 November, the day after...

Egyptian Cleric Amin Al-Ansari – Hatred of Jews is Prevalent in Sports and in the Animal Kingdom: "'Judgment Day Will Not Come Before the Muslims Fight the Jews and Kill Them'; The Muslims Will Kill the Jews – Be Patient" Following are excerpts from an address by Egyptian cleric Amin Al-Ansari, which aired on Al-Rahma TV on October 12, 2009.Earlier this year, Amin Al-Ansari appeared on Al-Rahma TV to show footage of torture and killing of Jews in Nazi concentration camps, stating, "This is what we hope will happen, but, Allah willing, at the hand of the Muslims. [1] "To...

Health experts say they are hardly astonished that the suspect in the worst mass murder ever at a U.S. military base is an Army psychiatrist — the very person who is supposed to be helping soldiers deal with the traumatic stress of war. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, suspected of gunning down 13 and wounding 30 at the Fort Hood Army Post in Texas, treated soldiers at the Darnall Army Medical Center there after being transferred in July from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he had worked for six years. Dr. Robin Kerner, an attending psychologist who specializes in...

Borrowing from Ron Paul, U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson kicked off a "money bomb" today, and by his telling, it's going really well. As of 4 p.m., Grayson's Web site shows $433,000 has been collected, exceeding a stated goal of $400,000.

Rocco Landesman, the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) chairman, said, in part: "This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists."...

War without end Gene Lyons One of the enduring oddities of American foreign policy debate is that asking the most obvious questions is all but forbidden. For example, how does Afghanistan pose a threat to the United States? Certainly not in any military sense. The impoverished, largely illiterate Afghans have no army apart from the one U.S. and NATO forces, with very limited success, are trying to train, no air force, no navy, no offensive military capacity whatsoever. From the U.S. perspective, Afghanistan is the absolute end of the earth. Indeed, it’s not a nation at all. The idea that...

News reporting that holds accountable those with power and influence has been a vital part of American democratic life, especially in places with daily newspapers profitable enough...to maintain substantial reporting staffs. That journalism is now at risk...American society must now take some collective responsibility for supporting news reportings....In a comprehensive report commissioned by the Columbia University Journalism School, we suggest a number of public sources of support for this news reporting: - The Internal Revenue Service or Congress should clarify tax regulations to explicitly allow new or existing local news organizations to operate as nonprofit or low-profit entities, allowing them...

The lies and idiocy does not stop it only continues to get worse every day as Republicans get increasingly desperate to stop Obama, Democrats, and empathy. Lindsey Graham says Republicans are poised to come roaring back. God help us! He better look at his big tent party again, it is the Big Top party, a circus.....

Evidence continues to mount in support of the theory that Sarah Palin - the scourge of the "Washington elite" - simply doesn't have much to say. After delivering her memoirs in just three months - a stunningly short period of time for a political biography - it has now been revealed that Palin, beloved of ordinary, common sense Republicans, is a flop on the lecture circuit. The Washington Speakers Bureau, an elite lecture agency which counts Tony Blair, George W Bush, Condoleezza Rice - and now the former governor of Alaska - among its star after-dinner speakers, is believed to...

When originally endeavoring to write an approximately 800-word opinion piece on Glenn Beck, I hadn’t taken into account what a truly difficult task it would be. I’ve no desire to alienate some of my many friends on the right currently embracing Beck. But I do have this terrible habit of usually speaking my mind. Glenn Beck deserves credit for what he is doing to hurt Obama — there is no question about that. But in thinking about the man overall as a media figure today, one allegedly aligned with the right, I also have serious concerns. I tried to do...

This was conservatives’ seething summer of discontent and unhinged hysteria: town halls, tea parties and tirades. They captured headlines and gained momentum. Misinformation ran amuck. President Obama’s approval ratings tumbled. Through it all, Obama maintained a Pollyannaish, laissez-faire disposition. Some found this worrisome. Others, like me, even thought it weak. But maybe not so fast...

We're making the president of the United States look pathetic - and the Republicans are laughing along with us. It's been a terrible week for tough love. One of the worst. First the Goldstone report was left to twist in the wind by the Obama administration, by Europe, by J Street and by the ghost of the Israeli peace camp. Then, at Tuesday's "summit" in New York, President Barack Obama gave his clearest signal yet that he was caving in to the Netanyahu government on the peace process, dropping the idea of a "freeze" on settlements for the softer, kinder...

He is of a diaspora. Has often been compared to Star Trek's Vulcans. His pedigree is that of the overachieving Ivy Leaguer. A lawyer who married a lawyer. He emerged in Chicago activism as a disciple of Jewish urban organizer Saul Alinsky. He is Hyde Park liberal--urbane with a preference for arugula. An intellectual's intellectual, in virtue and in vice. This is a man famous for his Talmudic-like mind. He deconstructs, deduces, feels compelled to cover all sides of a debate. His humor leans heavily on self-deprecation. He even held the first Passover Seder inside the White House. Two of...

I received lots of comments and mail about an entry here Thursday relating Ron Paul to Sarah Palin in a political atmosphere where 43 percent consider themselves independents. Many were from Paul supporters who didn’t like the connection. Others did. Glen, who says he has supported Paul for 20 years and Palin for one possibly got closest to the current reality: “I think Palin and Paul have a lot in common,” he wrote. “They are both libertarians, but they come to it from different approaches. Paul is an erudite scholar on both economics and foreign policy. Palin comes at it...

As someone who enjoys standing on the moral high ground, I worry that a flash flood of insanity will knock me into the mud. The moral high ground I stand on is conservative principles. The insanity is the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and disgruntled citizens at town hall meetings. The mud is where the line is blurred between conservatism and liberalism. I'm a good swimmer, but even I doubt that I could swim through the thick muck that conservatives have created with ludicrous attacks on Obama and other Democrats. My father once told me that he...

On Sept. 12, a large crowd gathered in Washington to protest ... what? The goals of Congress and the Obama Administration, mainly — the cost, the scale, the perceived leftist intent. The crowd's agenda was wide-ranging, so it's hard to be more specific. "End the Fed," a sign read. A schoolboy's placard denounced "Obama's Nazi Youth Militia." Another poster declared, "We the People for Capitalism Not Socialism." If you get your information from liberal sources, the crowd numbered about 70,000, many of them greedy racists. If you get your information from conservative sources, the crowd was hundreds of thousands strong,...

Add another Obama insult to injury on 9-11. First, he desecrated the memory of 9-11 with his planned proclamation of his mandatory civilian service on 9-11, which he has designated a "National Day of Service." And now 9-11 has yet another title: State Department personnel are supposed to pray with Muslims on the newly declared "Interfaith Day of Service," whatever that means on 9-11. September 11, which should be a somber day of mourning and reflection (on how the hell we got here), will be a day when Obama -- in a celebratory mode -- makes his big announcement. The...

By PUMA Pundit on September 2, 2009 Remember, the Dept. of Education expects your kids to read books on the life of Barack Obama before the monumental speech on September 8th, well here’s a look at two of the books that shall be used: The first book is aptly titled: Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope and here is the description, direct from the Publisher’s Website: Ever since Barack Obama was young, Hope has lived inside him. From the beaches of Hawaii to the streets of Chicago, from the jungles of Indonesia to the plains of Kenya, he...

Some of the country's biggest media subsidizers, including AT&T, P&G and Campbell's, have decided to stop advertising during Glenn Beck's program. Beck, a pretender to the populist throne who has made a name for himself on YouTube through catchy remixes of his crying tirades, recently accused President Barack Obama of racism. So Oakland-based ColorOfChange.org has arranged an advertiser boycott -- since viewer disinterest doesn't affect the bottom line of network or cable news directly. Which leaves Beck shrill and popular among his demographic, but likely losing money for News Corp. investors. Never a good position to be in if your...

That the nation is so moved by the passing of Edward Moore Kennedy testifies to his skill, grace and determination at playing a role that must have been infinitely more difficult than it sounds: a prince fated never to be king. Ted Kennedy was the youngest of nine children in a family whose ruthless patriarch was intent on building an American dynasty. The old man, business titan Joseph Kennedy, was a king. Ted's older brother Jack, the handsome young president, was a king. The other two brothers, Joe and Robert, were slated for the throne but died too soon. Ted...

(snip) Before the Republican Party can make a comeback consistent with its principles, it needs help from the private sector. Specifically, it needs a private sector the public can believe in. The core selling point of a conservative political party is that the private sector is inherently more efficient, dynamic and ethical than the public sector. That’s a hard sell these days. There are too many examples of public-sector excess for the public to swallow free-market fundamentalism. It was the private sector, not the government, that got the bright idea to insure bundled mortgages. It’s a private-sector bureaucrat, not a...

Betsy McCaughey -- an outspoken proponent of the myth that Democrats' health care reform proposals will lead to the creation of "death panels," as well as a former lieutenant governor of New York and adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute -- has stepped down from her position as a director of Cantel Medical Corp., which bills itself as a "leading provider of infection prevention and control products in the healthcare market." From a press release: CANTEL MEDICAL CORP. (NYSE: CMN -- News) announced that on August 20, 2009 it received a letter of resignation from Ms. Elizabeth McCaughey as a...

The world's first Muslim cartoon superheroes have taken the Arab world by storm, and now they are headed for British television screensNamed the 99, as each possesses one of Allah's 99 attributes, the characters include a burka-clad woman named Batina the Hidden and a Saudi Arabian Hulk-type man named Jabbar the Powerful. They have proved a hit from Morocco to Indonesia and were recently named as one of the top 20 trends sweeping the world by Forbes magazine. Now they are being brought to British television by Endemol, the production company behind Big Brother, with a mission to instill Islamic...

Try this on for size: Palinism. What is it? It is an updated version of McCarthyism, which takes its name from the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin liar, demagogue and drunk, and means, according to Wikipedia, "reckless, unsubstantiated accusations, as well as demagogic attacks on the character or patriotism of political adversaries." As far as we know, Sarah Palin is not a drunk. But she certainly shares McCarthy's other attributes -- and this one as well: the ability to drive the debate. In McCarthy's day, it was anti-communism coupled with national security, and it hardly mattered that he frequently...

It’s a thought to madden a Manichaean, but the usual outcome of any struggle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ isn’t victory for one or the other, but stalemate. Good and evil both survive to fight another day. Thus, the astonished delight over Barack Obama’s victory in the US presidential elections last November hadn’t even begun to subside before the resultant rage of racist America was making itself heard. In a column written three weeks after November 2, this columnist (‘Keeping him safe’) remarked on that fury. Yet, in the euphoria of the moment, I was inclined to dismiss it as “the...

President Barack Obama has rightly been regarded as the liberal equivalent of Ronald Reagan, if not the second coming of Franklin Roosevelt. Like Reagan, the current president combines an attractive and compelling personality with superb communication skills to blunt the hard edges of his ideology and appeal to the broad spectrum of non-ideological voters who decide most elections (and who decided the 2008 election). Reagan also proved that it is possible, within limits, to govern successfully as an ideological president. Obama himself acknowledged this during the campaign, commenting that "Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America ... He put us...

At some point, the Great Recession will end. Newsweek even says it's already over. Whenever it happens, we will see that the downturn was but a minor blip in the long story of the economy. In the next chapter, abundance beckons -- for some. Advances in technology drive economic growth, and there is no sign that they are slackening. The American economy is likely to continue unabated on the upward path that began with the Industrial Revolution. No, the economic problems of the future will not be about growth but about something more nettlesome: the ineluctable increase in the number...

Democratic senators went to the White House on Tuesday to join President Obama in celebrating his 48th birthday and to plot strategy to pass a comprehensive health bill that would offer affordable insurance to nearly all Americans. When Democratic leaders left the meeting, they gave a rosy, upbeat account of the lunch, which apparently featured a big dish of bipartisanship, along with salad and rockfish. The Senate Democratic leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, said there was “absolute unity” among members of the normally fractious Democratic conference. ... The chairman of the Finance Committee, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana,...

Helen Thomas, the Hearst columnist and long-time scourge of Republican presidents as UPI White House correspondent, was "miffed" at Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau because he joked that the rumors were that she was Harry Truman's lover: "I wished he said I was Jack Kennedy's lover." If that makes Thomas sound like a liberated woman, that would be in line with her recent Planned Parenthood luncheon speech in Iowa, where she claimed conservatives would love to deny women even their right to vote: "It seems now, more than ever, the Supreme Court is prepared to put Americans -- especially women --...

First, credit where it's due: A few lonely Republican leaders are belatedly trying to clean up the party's mess of crazy, from the racially tinged character attacks on Sonia Sotomayor to the unhinged rhetoric of the Birthers to the overall vicious and fact-free spew of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. It's not working yet -- Beck's claiming Obama "has a deep-seated hatred for white people" on Tuesday might be a new low -- but at least someone's trying. Sen. Lindsey Graham tried to kick off a new GOP flirtation with decency when he announced his vote to confirm Sotomayor last...

No more than five or six minutes elapsed from the time the police were alerted to the possibility of a break-in at a home in a quiet residential neighborhood and the awful clamping of handcuffs on the wrists of the distinguished Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. If Professor Gates ranted and raved at the cop who entered his home uninvited with a badge, a gun and an attitude, he didn’t rant and rave for long. The 911 call came in at about 12:45 on the afternoon of July 16 and, as The Times has reported, Mr. Gates was arrested,...

Kennedy is making a final press for universal healthcare, from his sickbed As Congress wrestles with legislation to give Americans access to quality care, which the Democrat worked toward for 46 years, the senator is sidelined with brain cancer, but not out of the game. Faye Fiore and Noam N. Levey July 25, 2009 Reporting from Washington -- Ted Kennedy wakes up mornings in his house on Cape Cod to a packet of news clippings put together by his wife. If there's a hearing going on in Washington, he watches on his computer. Five hundred miles away, Congress is wrestling...

Could Colin Powell run against Barack Obama as a Republican and win? The idea is more than a little fanciful. Alma Powell, Colin Powell's wife, has long opposed her husband's political forays. And of course a presidential campaign would be an ordeal for a man Powell's age, his robust health notwithstanding. It doesn't help that there is no clamor for a Powell presidential campaign. Back in 1996, he was seen as an Eisenhower-like figure who could unite Republicans and independents to defeat Bill Clinton. Since then, Powell has alienated Republicans with his sharp criticisms of social conservatives and his support...

ORLANDO, Florida (CNN) -- He looks like President Barack Obama, speaks like him, and even gestures like him, but he is not exactly the president of the United States. This president is an audio-animatronic Obama surrounded by the 42 other U.S. presidents at Walt Disney World's newly revamped Hall of Presidents in Orlando, Florida. Disney gathered a team of what it calls "Imagineers," each trained in various disciplines such as artistry, design and engineering, to update the attraction that has been around since 1971. It's hard to believe the figures are not real people and, according to Disney officials, that's...

Will the New York City school system be compelled to commemorate Islam on Sept. 11? It has been widely reported the New York City Council passed a resolution Tuesday recommending the school system shut down to commemorate two of the most important Muslim holidays, however the reports did not note the holidays fall on Sept. 11 in some years.... Islamic holidays are set based on the lunar calendar, meaning the dates corresponding to the Gregorian calendar change each year. As first noticed by Andrew Walden, publisher and editor of the Hawaii Free Press Eid al-Adha falls on Sept. 11 in...

For weeks, Michelle Obama had been telling her staff and closest confidantes that she wasn't having the impact she wanted. She is a woman of substance, with a background in law, public policy and management, who found herself relegated to role model in chief. The West Wing of the White House -- the fulcrum of power and policy -- had not fully integrated her into its agenda. She wanted more. snipHer new chief of staff, Susan Sher, 61, is a close friend and former boss who the first lady thinks will be more forceful about getting her and her team...

On this Father's Day, the American public should proudly note that our president takes his personal role as father (and spouse) as seriously as he does his job as father of the country. The nation has become better acquainted with President Obama in his first five months of office, and we've learned that his value to our society goes far beyond his vision for ending the economic crisis, his passion for reducing our dependence on foreign oil and his efforts to woo foreign leaders. He also has spent hours wooing some key decision-makers closer to home, namely Sasha, Malia and...

CHICAGO -- Once she was the first lady of Illinois. Now Patti Blagojevich is gagging down bugs and crawling through tropical slime in a race to be named Queen of the Jungle on a reality TV show.

If you were trying to find a staff lawyer in Washington, D.C. who could automatically turn off party moderates and push the GOP further into its social issues cave, you'd have to look long and hard. Not Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-al.) though. He found one in record time after taking over the ranking Republican seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. From the Legal Times: The new chief Republican counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote a blog post last month in which he linked same-sex marriage to pedophilia, according to a Web site that has since been taken down. The...

The Maxim Hot 100--and it's No. 1 hottest female--were just announced, and joining the bootylicious ranks of Scarlett Johansson, Megan Fox and Jessica Biel is ... drumroll ... Olivia Wilde, who plays Dr. Remy Hadley on House. Now. Wilde is drop-dead gorgeous, with stunning, almost feline features and one of those enviably lithe yoga-bods. She's definitely very attractive. But is she hot? There's a noted absence of those signature lad-mag curves that have characterized most of the other No. 1 hotties. Meaning either Maxim is being more expansive in its evals--she's intelligent (spent time at Andover and Georgetown Day) and...

Many American presidents have been lawyers, but almost none have come to office with Barack Obama’s knowledge of the Supreme Court. Before he was 30, he was editing articles by eminent legal scholars on the court’s decisions. Later, as a law professor, he led students through landmark cases from Plessy v. Ferguson to Bush v. Gore. (He sometimes shared his own copies, marked with emphatic underlines and notes in bold, all-caps script.) Now Mr. Obama is preparing to select his first Supreme Court nominee to replace retiring Justice David H. Souter. In interviews, former colleagues and students say they have...

It is a curious fact of American history that many of the great men of the Republic never ended up in the White House. Benjamin Franklin was too old, having turned 83 the year of the first presidential election. Henry Clay - despite five attempts to make it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue - had to settle for being one of the most important members in the history of the U.S. Senate. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the preeminent public intellectuals of the late 20th century, was perhaps too blunt for the presidency, once telling a Third World audience "Food growing...

During his first 100 days as president of the United States, Barack Obama revealed how different he is from all the white men who preceded him in the Oval Office, and the differences run deeper — in substance and style — than the color of his skin. Barack Hussein Obama is the nation’s first hip president. This, of course, is subject to debate. But watch him walk. Listen to him talk. See the body language, the expressions, the clothes. He’s got attitude, rhythm, a sense of humor, contemporary tastes. This much is clear: Whether dealing with the Wall Street mess,...

If Karl Rove thought Meghan McCain might soften her views on his use of Twitter when she cohosted "The View" today, he tuned in for nothing. He may be employing today's technology, McCain said, but he's still yesterday's news. "You've had your eight years," she said. "Now go away."

The eldest child of John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate during last year's US election, has launched a foul-mouthed and extended defence of herself on the "microblogging" service Twitter after she was accused of having accomplished nothing in her life. Meghan McCain, 24, used her Twitter account, which limits users to messages of no more than 140 characters, to send out a long string of "tweets" in which she listed her achievements. The curriculum vitae apparently includes teaching children at church, delivering flowers to hospital patients, and writing a best-selling children's book about her father's life.

Meghan McCain, whose father apparently ran for some political office at one time, certainly knows how to attract attention. Unfortunately, at least among doctrinaire Republicans, it’s generally of the wrong sort. Her most recent outing was a speech delivered to the Log Cabin Republicans’ 2009 convention. In an occasionally rambling but hopeful address, Ms. McCain drew fire from the punditry for daring to give voice to an ugly truth which many party loyalists would rather not contemplate: if the ideological purists of the GOP — particularly the social conservatives — wish to thin the herd by driving all the RINOs...

Abraham Lincoln was Born a Muslim, Says Film Maker Apr 20 12:26 PM US/Eastern ATLANTA, April 20 /PRNewswire/ -- Barack Hussein Obama is not alone. The 16th President of The United States, Abraham Lincoln, was born a Muslim, says Faruq Masudi, producer and director of the new Islamic movie, Quran Contemporary Connections. In a casting coup, Abraham Lincoln shares equal footage with luminaries of Islamic history like Saladin, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia and the former President of the UAE, Sheikh Zayed. What do they have in common? Faruq Masudi said, "According to the Quran, everybody is born a Muslim....

Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as...

in Richmond, Va. -- one of hundreds held every weekend across the state of Virginia and the country. We gave Samaha $5,000 and one hour to see how many guns he could buy, and how many questions he would be asked. For Samaha, the Glock handgun was a particularly painful purchase. It was the same kind of gun used to kill his sister Reema when she was a freshman at Virginia Tech. Just holding the gun in his hand was difficult. < snip > Samaha walked back into the gun show, and within minutes he was out again, this time...

WASHINGTON -- Words count, as President Barack Obama once said. Words spoken truthfully count even more. The president's triumphal eight-day six-country overseas tour, ending with his emotional visit to U.S. troops in Iraq, will go down in history as an opportunity for us to collect Obama's words and save them in our computers so we can match them with the administration's future actions. It's refreshing to hear words of optimism, courage and determination aimed at solving long-standing problems and threats. As the president said in Turkey, "If we don't reach high, then we don't make progress." So let's firmly assign...