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At the top of Friday’s Hardball on MSNBC, host Chris Matthews discovered the reason for President Obama’s political difficulties in recent months: “President Obama has his chin out on just about every hot issue out there....He’s exposed and vulnerable. His poll numbers are dropping. Is he just too darned intellectual? Too much the egg head?” Later in the show, Matthews talked to Atlantic Media’s Ron Brownstein and USA Today’s Susan Page about Obama’s great flaw. He began by wondering: “I’m not attacking intellectuals because I do appreciate their contribution – but when politicians begin to get a little too intellectual,...

Original article from Thursday (19), links to the Japanese "Sankei Shimbun" website. FReepranslation is provided as a summary; the original Japanese version directly by the author governs and takes precedence over the unofficial English.Troubling developments.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday. That stance comes in the midst of forceful reservations about a possible troop buildup from the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, according to a second top administration official. In strongly worded classified cables to Washington, Eikenberry said he had misgivings about sending in new troops while there are still so many questions...

(IsraelNN.com) The world is against Israel because of its own moral weakness and not because of alleged human rights violations, according to Rabbi Yaakov Medan, rabbi of Har Etzion Yeshiva, located in Gush Etzion, south of Jerusalem. “Islam is strong, and it is convenient for people to go with strength,” the rabbi explained in an interview with Arutz-7. He added that the world’s preoccupation with individual rights, as well as the infiltration of Western culture into Israel, are “illnesses” that have led to “an erosion of obligations to the country and of the significance of Israel as a nation.”

“Here a question arises: whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. The answer is, of course, that it would be best to be both loved and feared. But since the two rarely come together, anyone compelled to choose will find greater security in being feared than in being loved.” -Nicolo Machiavelli, "The Prince" In wake of the disclosure that Iran's been secretly developing (at least one) secret underground uranium enrichment facility (sounds like spies were caught) or face more harsh words and stern warnings from the "outraged" international community, Iran offers the following response: Iran...

President Obama will chair a special nuclear-disarmament meeting by the United Nations Security Council. The White House bills this as a historic first, but it is typical of Mr. Obama's emphasis on style over substance. He will appear before the body with the weakest foreign-policy record of any new U.S. president in recent memory... In the Middle East, Mr. Obama's unprecedented obsequiousness in dealing with the Muslim world has generated no tangible returns... In Afghanistan, the president has hit turbulence within his own party, and as the going gets tough, he seems ready to repudiate his "stronger and smarter" strategy...

WASHINGTON -- President Obama says he has no plans to ask the Justice Department to end its criminal investigation into the harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists during the Bush administration. Seven former CIA directors have asked the president to do just that. In a letter to Obama on Friday, they warned that the probe could discourage CIA officers from doing the kind of aggressive intelligence work needed to fight terrorism. Obama tells CBS' "Face the Nation" that he appreciates that the former CIA chiefs are wanting "to look after an institution that they helped to build."

<p>LONDON -- Ppolitical fallout from Scotland's release of the convicted Lockerbie bomber has spread to London, as questions arise about whether the U.K. government played a bigger role in the decision than it publicly acknowledged...The political stakes for U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown mounted after a son of Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi, Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, issued a statement thanking "our friends in the British government who played an important role in reaching this day." He said he believed the decision to release Abdel Baset al-Megrahi would further improve relations between the U.K. and the oil-rich North African nation.</p>

MOSCOW, July 4 (RIA Novosti) - The speaker of the Russian parliament's upper house said Saturday the United States could give up its plans to deploy a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.

WASHINGTON – Days from his first Moscow summit, President Barack Obama declared Thursday that former Russian President Vladimir Putin "still has a lot of sway" in his nation and needs an in-person reminder the Cold War is over. On next week's trip, Obama will meet not only with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev but with Putin, the prime minister who hand-picked Medvedev as his successor. Said Obama: "I think that it's important that even as we move forward with President Medvedev that Putin understand that the old Cold War approaches to U.S.-Russian relations is outdated. ... Putin has one foot in...

EDITOR'S NOTE: Iranian authorities have barred journalists for international news organizations from reporting on the streets and ordered them to stay in their offices. (snip) Iranian authorities have detained several local employees of the British Embassy in Tehran, a move that Britain's foreign secretary Sunday called "harassment and intimidation" and reflected a hardening of the regime's stance toward the West. Iranian media said eight local embassy staff were detained for an alleged role in postelection protests, but gave no further details. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said "about nine" employees were detained Saturday and that four had been released. The...

North Korea has been busy, busy, busy since the election of our weak President. This week, they have sharply increased their war rhetoric. On Wednesday they issued this threat: "If the U.S. imperialists start another war, the army and people of Korea will ... wipe out the aggressors on the globe once and for all." And on Thursday they promised a "fire shower of nuclear retaliation" if the U.S. attacked them. The media is pretending that it isn't happening, whistling in the dark, but how can anyone avoid noticing that since Obama's failed policies have been introduced, the evil forces...

....Overseas, the coolest president in history was giving a speech. Or, as the official press release headlined it on the State Department Web site, "President Obama Speaks To The Muslim World From Cairo." Let's pause right there: It's interesting how easily the words "the Muslim world" roll off the tongues of liberal secular progressives who would choke on any equivalent reference to "the Christian world."... There is an Organization of the Islamic Conference, which already is the largest single voting bloc at the United Nations and is still adding new members. Imagine if someone proposed an Organization of the Christian...

...a gaggle of Johnnys - notably former Clinton Defense Secretary William J. Perry and other worthies who should know better - are telling the American people that it is safe and responsible to do the national equivalent of jumping off a bridge. They contend that the United States can prudently get rid of most of our nuclear arsenal, en route to what they say is a desirable end-state: a "nuclear-free" world. For a sense of how surreal this recommendation is, consider the prospect that Pakistan's virulent Taliban may be within weeks of joining the nuclear "club" by taking over the...

Inasmuch as Barack Obama fancies himself alternatively the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a closer perusal of FDR’s policies is in order. Beyond the disastrous New Deal, a massive expansion of government bureaucracy and spending which extended the length of the Great Depression; FDR’s dealings with the homicidal Joe Stalin are revealing.

PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago -- President Obama endured a 50-minute diatribe from socialist Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega that lashed out at a century of what he called terroristic U.S. aggression in Central America and included a rambling denunciation of the U.S.-imposed isolation of Cuba's Communist government. Obama sat mostly unmoved during the speech but at times jotted notes. The speech was part of the opening ceremonies at the fifth Summit of the Americas here. Later, at a photo opportunity with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Obama held his tongue when asked what he thought about Ortega's speech. "It was 50...

THE world has rabies and our swooning media de liver headlines about the new Obama family dog. Yeah, the puppy's cute. But must journalists be lapdogs? The week kicked off with gushing media declarations that President Obama had "passed his first test" in a foreign "crisis." Three pirates held an American hostage far too long. It was an embarrassment, not a crisis. Our president was reluctant to authorize deadly force. Against pirates, for God's sake. Then, 24 hours after the Obama White House declared "Mission Accomplished," Somali pirates attacked another US-flagged ship. This time, the pirates used rocket-propelled grenades and...

The North Koreans, in violation of a U.N. Resolution, launch a rocket that flies over Japan and into the Pacific Ocean, possibly with the capability of reaching the U.S. What do we do? We send it to the United Nations, which doesn’t even pass another U.N. Resolution, which would certainly be ignored. It agrees to meet again. Yes, the U.N. is so pathetically weak, it can’t even come up with another toothless tiger resolution. It can’t even say North Korea is in violation of a resolution adopted in 2006 after a North Korea missile launch of July 5 and a...

We now call terrorist attacks “man-caused disasters.” We now call the global war on terror “overseas contingency operations.” This neutered terminology will hardly strike fear into our enemies. But it will evoke anxiety in our friends − if we still have any.

North Korea's much-anticipated long- range missile launch on Sunday was a technical dud: The satellite it was trying to put into orbit apparently landed in the Pacific Ocean. But the nuclear upstarts learned something important about President Obama, so they're probably pleased. Speaking in Prague just hours after the launch, Obama responded to the provocation by pledging to negotiate reductions in America's nuclear stockpile. The launch underscored the need for "a world without nuclear weapons," he argued, pledging to do his best to reduce America's warhead inventory. Talk about pie-in-the-sky. Sure, nuclear proliferation poses a serious long-term security threat to...