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Defense: The administration announces a leaner version of our military involving the cutting of tens of thousands of ground troops as a leading defense contractor closes a major plant due to budget cuts. In an unusual appearance at the Pentagon on Thursday, President Obama laid out his plans for a "leaner" military based on the need "to renew our economic strength here at home, which is the foundation of our strength in the world." In other words, failed domestic policies require us to cut our military in a dangerous world. Obama insisted that even after the currently budgeted $460 billion...

National Security: Portrayed as just a shuffling of priorities, the president's defense cuts reduce our two-war strategy to maybe one war and cross your fingers. Champagne corks are popping from Beijing to Tehran. Imagine a scenario in the not-too-distant future when an Iranian Shahab missile mated with an unexpectedly ready nuclear warhead is test-fired and detonates somewhere over the Indian Ocean. The next day Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz as China announces a blockade of Taiwan. The administration's defense cuts, or shifts in priorities as President Obama would have us believe, leaves us woefully unprepared for the unexpected in...

SEOUL - A US military reconnaissance plane came under electronic attack from North Korea and had to make an emergency landing during a major military exercise in March, a political aide said Friday. The aide said the plane suffered disturbance to its GPS system due to jamming signals from the North's southwestern cities of Haeju and Kaesong as it was taking part in the annual US-South Korea drill, Key Resolve.

...new poll from Pew Research Center and The Washington Post suggests that none of the ideas is a guranteed clear winner in the eyes of the public. For example, 36 percent of Americans think additional infrastructure spending would do a lot to help the nation’s job situation, while 21 percent think an infrastructure plan wouldn’t do anything at all. When it comes to cutting taxes on businesses, as many leading Republicans suggest, there’s a similar pattern: 31 percent say it would do a lot to create jobs, while 27 percent think it wouldn’t do anything at all. It's the same...

If gas prices were on a train right now it would definitely be riding the President’s high speed rail. Steve posted on this in March when gas was around $3. The we told you a week ago that gas prices (then $3.90) were headed in this direction and got no interest from callers. Something tells me gas will soon be center stage. CNBC thinks so … so do others. Obama video below the fold. CNBC’s report is getting plenty of play, and well it should. While Trump has been grabbing the headlines inside the beltway … oil has been grabbing...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama said on Sunday the U.S. economy was expanding but not at a robust enough pace and there was no "magic bullet" that will fix its problems. Obama said in an NBC interview that the batch of grim economic data over the past few weeks was something his administration had anticipated. ... "The economy is still growing, but it's not growing as fast as it needs to," Obama told NBC in the interview in New Orleans, where he stopped after a vacation on the Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard. Obama faces a dilemma in trying...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Stocks tumbled Tuesday afternoon across the board, as investors eyed weak global markets, a rising dollar, falling oil and gold prices and some disappointing profit news from 3M, McDonald's and Kroger. The Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) tumbled 100 points, or 1%, with more than two hours left in the session. The S&P 500 index (SPX) lost 10 points, or 0.9%. The Nasdaq composite (COMP) shed 11 points, or 0.5%. Stocks slipped right out of the gate as investors took a cue from falling global markets and a rising dollar. The weak dollar has added to...

Sorry is not the hardest word for the Obama administration. Since Obama won the presidential election, the former senator from Illinois and top-ranking officials of his administration, including Vice President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, have delivered a handful of apologies. At his first press conference as president-elect, for example, Obama made a remark about Nancy Reagan that he quickly regretted. Asked if he had spoken with any ex-presidents since the election, Obama said he had contacted all former presidents “that are living.” “I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about, you know, doing any...

No intro today...instead supplies for what we will need to get through this crap. Barf bags for everyone. ***Please note Jimmay Cartah is being introduced as I did this....so I have plenty of barf bags.

White House reporters for The New York Times predict that the market collapse will force President-elect Barack Obama to abandon for now many of his campaign promises. If his stimulus plan "doesn’t work out, he may very well be a one-term president,” said Jeff Zeleny, who covered Obama’s campaign. “It’s hard to imagine that he could be reelected if the economy’s in the exact same position four years from now.” “A lot of the things he said on the campaign trail you can now dispense with,” said correspondent Peter Baker. “For the moment he has to focus on the economy.”...

Slideshow: President-elect Barack Obama Play Video Barack Obama Video: Illinois House impeaches Gov. Rod Blagojevich AP Play Video Barack Obama Video: Web only: Obama names intelligence team WRAL Raleigh Reuters – President-elect Barack Obama arrives to make a speech on the economy at George Mason University in Fairfax, … WASHINGTON – President-elect Barack Obama said Friday that he and Congress will "hone and refine" his nearly $800 billion economic recovery plan, as he seeks to patch fissures with senior Democrats over key features of the still-emerging plan. The job was made more urgent with the release of a Labor Department...

BREAKING NOW... Does this mean it's over????

"Then he is asked if he regrets “having given arms and advice to future terrorists,” and he responds, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?” The interviewer then says, “Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.” But Brzezinski responds, “Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam….” [Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris), 1/15/1998]"

Earlier this month, in a curious instance of life imitating art, the "3 a.m. phone call" that Hillary Clinton made famous in her campaign advertisement (suggesting that Barack Obama was not ready to handle international emergencies) became all too real. On August 8, 2008, at around 3 a.m. in Washington, the story broke that Russia was bombing several sites in neighboring Georgia. Minutes later, Georgian president and American ally Mikhail Saakashvili announced that Russia was conducting a large-scale military invasion of his country. How the candidates handled that call and reacted to the crisis may have a major impact on...

BACK TO JIMMY - What Biden Pick Really Signals BY choosing Sen. Joseph Biden as his vice-presiden tial running mate, Barack Obama sent three messages. The first two are implicit admissions that Hillary Clinton had a point in the primaries. The third tells us more of what Obama means by "change." Biden is supposed to make up for Obama's lack of the knowledge and experience needed to leader on national security and international affairs. And the Delaware senator, with his humble working-class origins, is also meant to reassure the "simple folk" that Obama seems to be losing. But the third...

I'M A BIG FAN OF JIMMY CARTER'S. I WAS, AS YOU REMEMBER, HIS NATIONAL CAMPAIGN CHAIRMAN IN 1976, THE FIRST PERSON TO ENDORSE HIM.~ Joe Biden http://www.iptv.org/iowapress/transcript_detail.cfm?ipShowNum=3435&play=true

For those of you who remember the Carter Administration, you remember how horrible it was. Democrats and Republicans agree that it may have been the worst presidency in memory. So why would we want to re-elect Carter? That’s what an Obama presidency would be. Check it out: Carter instituted “windfall profit taxes” on oil companies and prices went up (if you understand basic economics, you know why). Obama wants to create new “windfall profit taxes” on oil companies. Carter opposed nuclear and oil independence...prices went up...and Obama is also opposed to nuclear and oil independence. When people complained about oil...

Last week raised important questions about whether Barack Obama is strong enough to be president. On the domestic political front, he showed incredible weakness in dealing with the Clintons, while on foreign and defense questions, he betrayed a lack of strength and resolve in standing up to Russia’s invasion of Georgia. This two-dimensional portrait of weakness underscores fears that Obama might, indeed, be a latter-day Jimmy Carter. Consider first the domestic and political. Bill and Hillary Clinton have no leverage over Obama. Hillary can’t win the nomination. She doesn’t control any committees. If she or her supporters tried to disrupt...

Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama have much more in common than their woeful understanding of the Islamist threat. As is by now apparent, Barack Obama and his crack team of foreign policy experts have proven themselves totally tone-deaf when it comes to understanding the American people and their views toward the rest of the world. His campaign’s strategy to convince voters that the way to win their hearts is to cozy up to those who hold them in disdain has resulted in a dip in his poll numbers. So, having failed to impress any of those who have not already...

Barack Obama doesn't just talk about conservation, he practices it. In his thinking and proposals on energy, the Illinois senator has expertly recycled Jimmy Carter. Though there may be a difference here or there, the Obama policies are essentially Carter's. You have doubts? Read through Carter's energy speech from April 1977. In a nationally televised addressed, Carter struck themes that are echoed by Obama today. - Whereas Jimmy Carter accused the United States of being "the most wasteful nation on earth," Obama is fond of saying that Americans are energy hogs, consuming a quarter of the world's energy while being...

There aren’t many who long for a return to the 1970s. Those of us old enough to recall that decade tend to think of gas lines, a hostage crisis and Watergate. President Carter never used the word “malaise,” but he acted as if America was doomed to decline, and it was his job to make sure it went smoothly. There’s some malaise around today, too. High gasoline prices are back. Petroleum-producing nations (such as Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia) again hold us hostage -- this time for petro-dollars, even as the value of our currency slides. And polls show both...

Former White House national security adviser says if John McCain becomes the next US president the world will move toward World War IV. Former US President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski criticized US officials in Senator McCain's camp for pushing the presumptive Republican nominee toward a radical foreign policy on issues such as Iran. Brzezinski described McCain's presidency as an 'appalling concept' as it would lead to the World War IV, arguing that from the viewpoint of figures surrounding the Arizona senator the Cold War counted as World War III. "Well, if McCain is president and if his...

The Obama campaign website makes no mention of missile defense. Indeed, there is no national security issue area as there is on the McCain site. Discussion of defense topics is subordinated under the heading of foreign policy. This reflects Obama’s focus on diplomacy over military options. For example, consider the following statement, “Iran has sought nuclear weapons, supports militias inside Iraq and terror across the region, and its leaders threaten Israel and deny the Holocaust. But Obama believes that we have not exhausted our non-military options in confronting this threat; in many ways, we have yet to try them. That’s...

Barack Obama, the US presidential candidate, has called the situation in Afghanistan "precarious and urgent". Obama, who visited US troops in Afghanistan and met Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, said on Sunday the US should start planning immediately for a shift of soldiers from Iraq to Afghanistan. "I think the situation is getting urgent enough that we have to start doing something now," he told the US TV network CBS. Television pictures showed a relaxed Obama at the heavily guarded presidential palace in Kabul, talking to Karzai and flanked by Afghan ministers and fellow senators Chuck Hagel and Jack Reed....

Even here in his home state of Georgia, Jimmy Carter does not receive universal acclaim. He is regarded by many as a weak-kneed appeaser or a naive do-gooder with a puritanical bent. Much of that reputation can be traced back to his widely noted July 1979 speech on the nation's "crisis of confidence," remembered as the "malaise" speech, though he didn't use that word. The response to that televised talk taught politicians one thing: Never ask Americans to make sacrifices. After all, it is now accepted wisdom that the speech — combined with hyperinflation, hostages and an oil spike —...

YES, folks, it's déjà vu all over again. That charismatic American politician Jimmy Carter II, aka Barack Obama, is carrying all before him – at least in Europe – riding a tsunami of media-driven hysteria. When you are possessed of unlimited reserves of rhetoric, boundless ambition, an increasingly undisciplined ego and – er – not a lot else, the soap-box becomes addictive.

...The Ford ad team told them more — how he had grown up in Middle America, played football for the University of Michigan (the name of the team was omitted in ads aired in Ohio) and served in the military in World War II. There's an assumption this year that voters know John McCain pretty well. But my sense is that there is still a lot of filling in the blanks that the McCain campaign can do. Second, they filled in the blanks on Jimmy Carter. Most voters wanted to support a Democrat, and one who had smoothed over the...

Many of Barack Obama’s national security policies are sideways, backward-looking and re-treaded from the Carter Administration. As examples, Obama supports direct negotiations with the Iranian theocracy, opposes support for pro-Democracy Iranian groups, and advocates open lines of relations with the most corrupt members of this despicable regime. All of this works only to legitimize the dictatorship, both in the eyes of the beleaguered Iranian people and in the eyes of the world, friends and foes alike. if enacted, this would be another very dangerous and short-sighted strategic blunder, and one from which we may never recover.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki says his government is hoping that a President Obama will reestablish a U.S. diplomatic presence in his country. “The absence of a U.S. Embassy reduces the ability of our government to effectively communicate with the U.S. government,” Mottaki asserted. “The present arrangement is no substitute for the face-to-face interaction we enjoyed when Jimmy Carter was the U.S. president.” The United States has not had a formal diplomatic presence in Iran since the embassy was overrun by Iranian “students” and the staff taken hostage in 1979. Since that time, the Swiss Embassy has represented U.S. interests...

Perusing the Sunday newspapers with plagiaristic intent, I come across an article about who's responsible for the current energy debacle. Politicians are mentioned along with the amazingly shortsighted auto executives and the oil industry itself. Names — lots of names — are dropped, everyone from the current Bush to the previous Bush to Clinton. But not a mention of the culprit-in-chief, Ronald Wilson Reagan — still, after all these years, the Teflon president.

Barack Obama gave another eloquent, thoughtful, thought-provoking speech this week, this time about patriotism in Independence, Missouri. Obama knew that the July 4th holiday gave him an opportunity to undo some of the damage that Hillary Clinton's primary campaign had done to him. But rather than being defensive, trying to prove his loyalty to America or refuting the claim that he was not-unpatriotic, Obama did what he did best. He spoke powerfully about patriotism - love of country - in a broad expansive way. He insisted that "no party or political philosophy has a monopoly on patriotism" - a sharp...

During the 1970’s, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had acceded to the monarchist governmental leadership role present throughout Iran’s history, implemented economic, educational and social reforms. In 1978, in the midst of democratic reforms, the Shah and the Iranian people celebrated 2,500 years of Persian Monarchy. Thereafter, the Carter Administration, awkwardly wielding a contorted rhetoric of “human rights” thoughtlessly encouraged the overthrow of the Shah and thereby hastened the arrival of an exiled and obscure cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, and with him the Islamic Republic of Iran. President Carter’s misguided approach to raising human rights (catered to fundamentalists and communists) in...

Mr. Obama: Don't Betray My People July 03, 2008 Mr. Obama: Don't Betray My People By Amil Imani It looks like Mr. Obama may well be the next resident of the White House. It also looks like my people are going to be betrayed once again by a badly misguided American president. Jimmy Carter helped give birth to the virulent Shiite Islamism by forbidding the Shah of Iran to crush the bloodthirsty Ayatollah Khomeini and his band of rabid Islamists. Now, Mr. Obama intends to confer legitimacy on the illegitimate child, the Islamic Republic of Iran. Jimmy Carter, the self-appointed...

DESPITE HIS PLEA, OBAMA WILL BETRAY HIS PEOPLE Further proof that a bad President is not merely four bad years for our country. Who can forget Carter's gas lines, hostage crises, notch babies, and interest rates skyrocketing from 5 - 21% percent? We are still suffering from that even though interest rates came down after he left office in disgrace. Credit cards and loans stayed high, high, hish. And credit card rates are still obscene in many cases. But worse than that, Carter's failed foreign policy helped give birth and usher in the age of Islamic jihad. Carter threw our...

New Threat: The 'Obama Market' By DAN DORFMAN June 30, 2008 http://www.nysun.com/business/new-threat-the-obama-market/80913/ As if investors didn't have enough to worry about, a new land mine is lurking: "the Obama market." That's what I heard over the weekend from a veteran investment adviser, Charles Allmon. "Political ramifications represent a significant added market risk that should not be ignored," he says. Initial polling suggests that Senator Obama will be the next president, a view Mr. Allmon shares. An Obama presidency is certain to mean a big tax increase, he says. He also points to the likelihood that the senator will seek to...

As Barack Obama coasts to his coronation as the Democratic nominee in late August, he’s managed to convince many that he wears the mantle of Camelot. Toward that end, he’s been chasing Kennedy coattails every bit as much as he has delegates. Some who are clearly less-than-enamored of Mr. Obama have tried to suggest that his candidacy looks more like George McGovern’s in 1972 than that of Jack Kennedy in 1960, or brother Bobby in 1968. But that argument hasn’t developed much traction. A closer look at current personalities and patterns suggests another comparison, one that may actually be the...

Don't you hate it when old Navy guys just can't get along? John McCain took a swipe at Jimmy Carter the other day in an interview, with the transcript getting posted over at the Las Vegas Sun earlier today. As the folks at CNN's Politicker point out, it's not just a gratuitous political shot, since McCain has been trying to tie Obama to Carter, generally considered by the right (and quite a few centrists) to have been an ineffectual president. But the comments are a bit jarring. McCain was asked by interviewer Jon Ralston, a Nevada political observer and blogger,...

In selling his economic plan, President Clinton is gambling that voters never took seriously his campaign promise to lower the tax burden of the middle class and will respond favorably to an aggressive pitch based on equal measures of hope, fear and class revenge.

"The more things change, the more they stay the same." --author unknown For the past 32 years, the election cycle has revolved in a most familiar way. Every sixteen years, the Democrat candidate for president has been a relatively-unknown who campaigned as an agent of "CHANGE!" "One reason why this constant mantra of “CHANGE! HOPE!” is so irritating is that they’ve been peddling this snake oil for decades." --Charles Johnson, Little Green Footballs[video of Carter commercial] Thirty-two years ago, it resulted in a squeaker of an election that wasn't decided until the next day. Jimmy Carter became just the...

WASHINGTON -- Pitching himself to voters as a centrist candidate with a slight adjustment to the left who appeals to both sides of the political aisle and is a prototypical outsider is going to be a tough sell for Barack Obama who has supported his party's line for the two years he has been in the Senate and is advised by leading insiders. His economic mantra of readjusting the nation's incomes to soak the rich and help the middle and lower classes through government spending is pure liberal dogma. It is the solution to our economic ills that the Democratic...

Barack Obama may be the political equivalent of a rock star with his huge crowds and his celebrity endorsements, but his economic policies are simply the warmed over liberalism of the sixties and seventies. Stale liberalism doesn’t have a history of success in America and doesn’t match his image of Hope and Change. This same old big government tax and spend liberalism is a far cry from a “New Politics.” So Obama has been forced into some creative marketing to sell his leftist ideology as post-partisan solutions to the country’s problems. If you can cut through the hype and the...

Barack Obama: HATE We Can Believe In It is Barack Obama, not white voters, who has chosen to make this election an exercise not only in racial but also religious divisiveness, and even gender divisions. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, the problem is not the color of Barack Obama’s skin, but the content of his character or lack thereof. The problem is not that Barack Obama is of mixed race, but that he surrounds himself with racists, anti-Semites, Catholic-hating bigots, and even misogynists. Whites (and Jews, Catholics, and women) who refuse to vote for this phony smile on top of...

Another example of that famous Obama good judgment. According to today’s Washington Post, Obama’s veep vetter Jim Johnson is linked to an accounting scandal at his former company, Fannie Mae. The newspaper reported this morning that Johnson “was the beneficiary of accounting in which Fannie Mae’s earnings were manipulated so that executives could earn larger bonuses. The accounting manipulation for 1998 resulted in the maximum payouts to Fannie Mae’s senior executives — $1.9 million in Johnson’s case — when the company’s performance that year would have otherwise resulted in no bonuses at all.

Democrat Barack Obama is continuing his tour this week of battleground states, where his biggest campaign vulnerability comes from swing voters. Obama's strengths are obvious. The Illinois senator can draw huge crowds, register millions of new voters and raise money like no other candidate in history. He is also a giant-slayer, meaning he managed to outmaneuver the powerful Clinton machine in a one-on-one contest. But in the end, Obama wheezed across the finish line. He lost nine of the last 14 primaries, and although Democrats are uniting behind their nominee, there is a lot to make them nervous about Obama's...

The doubts Barack Obama faces are far more existential than the more superficial questions raised about most candidates. They go to his very core as a person and call into question his values, his worldview, and even his patriotism. He is a bit of a reach for the average American voter. Hard racial divisions have softened in America, but unfounded fears persist. Obama has a strange name. He grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia. He had a Muslim Kenyan father who left when he was a baby. He made his political career in the cesspool of American politics — the...

Oklahoma City (AP) - Democratic Rep. Dan Boren of Oklahoma said Tuesday Barack Obama is "the most liberal senator" in Congress and he has no intention of endorsing him for the White House. ... Boren, the lone Democrat in Oklahoma's congressional delegate, said that while Obama has talked about working with Republicans, "unfortunately, his record does not reflect working in a bipartisan fashion."

The government of the District of Columbia is defending a gun ban before the Supreme Court, with a decision expected this month. The National Rifle Association Web site has a list of those "common sense" restrictions Obama has favored. One of them caught the eye of blogger David Hardy: Barack Obama supported a proposal to ban gun stores within 5 miles of a school or park, which would eliminate almost every gun store in America. [Snip] Five miles? As Hardy notes, the effect of this would be to "eliminate almost every gun store in America." Alan Korwin, a Phoenix-based gun-rights...

Despite the hopes of Democrats, the economy isn't going to tank, at least not unless Barack Obama gets into the White House. While the media would like to help along the meme that McCain's financial plan of low taxes and lowered government spending is a continuation of Bush's economy, that is fiction. McCain's policies are in line with Ronald Reagan's successful conservative economic plans; of the two Presidential candidates, it is Obama's plan that is more like those practiced by Bush. The bloated government and increased spending seen under the Bush Administration is horrific from a fiscally conservative standpoint, and...