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Obama blasts terrorists, returns to golf President Barack Obama got down to business Wednesday afternoon, flooring it to the golf course after giving a speedy statement on the beheading of an American journalist and a threat from ISIS to spill more blood. Obama sported a grin the size of Mount Rushmore as he sat behind the wheel of a golf cart in Martha’s Vineyard, where he’s currently vacationing. Donning casual khakis and a white Nike polo, the president enjoyed laughs, and even a fist pound, with ex-NBAer Alonzo Mourning and businessmen Glenn Hutchins and Cyrus Walker. The president didn’t mention...

Authored by Eric Holder, via The St.Louis Post-Dispatch, Since the Aug. 9 shooting death of Michael Brown, the nation and the world have witnessed the unrest that has gripped Ferguson, Mo. At the core of these demonstrations is a demand for answers about the circumstances of this young man’s death and a broader concern about the state of our criminal justice system. At a time when so much may seem uncertain, the people of Ferguson can have confidence that the Justice Department intends to learn - in a fair and thorough manner - exactly what happened. Today, I will be...

It may sound pedestrian to point out, but it’s critical to restate why it’s so important that our nation is called the United States of America, and not simply America. The full name emphasizes that the Founders viewed the nation not as one monolithic entity but as a union of sovereign entities delegating limited powers to a central government. To preserve this balance, the Founders put a number of checks in the U.S. Constitution, most notably creating the Senate, which allows for equal membership from every state, thus preventing states with larger populations from running roughshod over the interests of...

By PETER BAKERAUGAugust 15, 2014 WASHINGTON — In this summer of global tumult, the debate in Washington essentially boils down to two opposite positions: It is all President Obama’s fault, according to his critics; no, it is not, according to his supporters, because these are events beyond his control. Americans often think of their president as an all-powerful figure who can command the tides of history — and presidents have encouraged this image over the years because the perception itself can be a form of power. But as his critics have made the case that Mr. Obama’s mistakes have fueled...

"I think this is going to take some time," our president warned last Saturday as he took off for a vacation on Martha's Vineyard, maybe because he felt he had to offer some explanation as Iraq collapsed along with his foreign policy in general. What was once Iraq is now divided, like ancient Gaul, into three parts -- Shi'a, Sunni and Kurdish -- all of which are themselves crumbling. So now Barack Obama tells us that it may take some time to put Iraq together again after it fell apart in record time once he withdrew American forces there in...

...But the warnings, which also came from other senior officials—including then-CIA chief David Petraeus and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta—fell on deaf ears...

The executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police criticized President Obama Thursday for his remarks about law enforcement in Ferguson, Mo. "I would contend that discussing police tactics from Martha's Vineyard is not helpful to ultimately calming the situation," director Jim Pasco said in an interview with The Hill.

House Democrats are frustrated with what they say is a lack of election-year communication from the White House. The lawmakers say it’s difficult to defend President Obama from GOP attacks, when he doesn't confer with his allies about his strategy and intentions. Some are scratching their heads why, after nearly six years in office and a reshuffling of his legislative affairs team, Obama's working relationship with Congress remains prickly. “It's hard for us to fathom; I mean, is it just lack of full staffing and resources? [Is it] professional commitment? Is it a disdain for the legislative branch? I mean,...

Sitting with Knesset Member Dov Lipman earlier this week, I could not resist asking, tongue-in-cheek, who was less popular in Israel nowadays – Hamas chief Ismael Haniyeh or U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. “Kerry is certainly not popular on the Israeli street right now,” he answered, as only a politician could. Joking aside, in my estimation, a poll to find out who is hated more would actually put them quite close. As a result of his constant attempted impositions, condescension, double standards, hypocrisy, strategic blundering and harsh condemnations throughout Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, Mr. Kerry, and by extension his...

President Obama won't make any major announcements on immigration reform during his secretive mid-vacation trip back to Washington next week, the White House said Wednesday. The president is expected to return to the White House on Sunday, but officials won't say why Obama is taking the unusual, and costly, trip back to Washington. He's expected to return to Martha's Vineyard, where he's been vacationing, on Tuesday. Speculation has circled around whether Obama might make an announcement of executive actions he's taking on immigration reform, or a surprise visit from a foreign leader. But the White House is "not anticipating a...

August 11 Obama Is Responsible for the Deaths in Iraq By Jim Yardley ISIS, ISIL, the Islamic State, or whatever it’s called today is a group of homicidal thugs, drunk on their own sense of power and bolstered by their military successes in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. Thousands have been murdered – and not just by a bullet to the head, but decapitated while they are alive. Thousands of women and children have been slaughtered. For those who think that the only “war on women” is perpetrated by Republicans who think that if women want abortifacients, they should pay for...

07.06.14 Why the White House Ignored All Those Warnings About ISIS Team Obama was told, over and over, that the Iraqi army couldn’t stop a terror group that was ready to pounce. But Washington was a prisoner to its paradox of an Iraq policy. On November 1, 2013, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki visited the White House, and made a rather stunning request. Maliki, who celebrated when the last U.S. troops left his country in 2011, asked Obama to quietly send the military back into Iraq and help his beleagured Air Force develop targets for air strikes; that’s how serious...

In 2008 then Senator Obama campaigned on the promise of ending the war in Iraq and bringing combat troops home. In 2012, Obama touted that promise as complete (one of the only campaign promises he actually kept) and critics warned leaving Iraq without a residual U.S. force would result in a power vacuum and vulnerable state. Now as the country falls apart and the radical Islamic State army continues its march unchallenged in Iraq, Obama is claiming he wasn't the one who made the decision to pull U.S. combat troops out of the country and that claims to the...

This comes from a UK journalist embedded with the Iraqi military. I wouldn’t treat it as final. Some other reports really raise questions about the 70% number and even the quotes in his own account don’t lead me to believe that such a huge number have died.But it’s safe to say that quite a few are dead. Mount Sinjar stinks of death. The few Yazidis who have managed to escape its clutches can tell you why. “Dogs were eating the bodies of the dead,” said Haji Khedev Haydev, 65, who ran through the lines of Islamic State jihadists surrounding it.On...

The Christian genocide taking place in the Middle East currently has reached alarming levels. Last week, the jihadist terrorist group ISIS, which means the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria – although it is unrecognized as a nation – took over Qaraqosh, the largest Christian town in Iraq, warning Christians to “leave, convert or die.” They are systematically beheading children. It is a part of an unprecedented, recent effort by the ISIS to extinguish Christians from northern Iraq. In 2003, there were about 1.5 million Christians in Iraq. After the Iraq War, that number dropped to as low as 200,000....

Barack Obama is not a huge fan of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In 2011 Obama reportedly whined to then French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, “You’re tired of him; what about me? I have to deal with him every day.” Israel National News reported: U.S. President Barack Obama opined in a New York Times interview that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is too popular at the moment to make territorial compromises with the Palestinian Authority. Asked whether he should be more vigorous in pressing Netanyahu, and the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, to reach a land-for-peace...

With prospects for major legislation nonexistent, Obama is looking to plant seeds that he hopes his successors can cultivate.President Obama spent much of his first term fending off criticism that he hadn’t done enough for the black community, and that he wasn’t paying enough attention to Africa, where his father was born and where expectations soared after his election. In his second term, he’s making up for lost time. Earlier this year, he launched his “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative aimed at boosting opportunities for boys and young men of color, and this week, he hosted 50 heads of state from...

The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true- Robert K. Merton Merton’s self-fulfilling prophecies are as prevalent today, as they were when he coined the phrase in 1948, and expressed that we live in a nation where dark clouds of despair are becoming darker, where prophets of doom understand the more they scream, the greater the likelihood there dire warnings will come true. For me, the greater risk is the former. We live in a nation with slumped shoulders that cannot produce an...

The U.S. gambled on local militias to keep ISIS in check. The president’s authorization of airstrikes is an admission that bet didn’t pay off. Friday morning, with a humanitarian mission already underway, the United States began airstrikes on ISIS in northern Iraq. What had been the U.S. policy—to rely on local forces to contain ISIS while waiting for a new Iraqi government to reach a political solution—is finished. The new policy is still taking shape, but it may eventually lead to more involvement from the special operations troops who have been in Iraq for weeks. President Obama said Thursday night...

As Iraq’s biggest Christian town fell to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) slammed President Obama Thursday for “doing nothing” in response to the atrocities being committed against religious minorities in Iraq, saying it was evident his past assertions on preventing genocide were hollow.Pope Francis added his voice Thursday to appeals for urgent international intervention to help hundreds of thousands of religious minority civilians fleeing ahead of the jihadist advance.The fall of the Christian town of Qaraqosh (also known as Bakhdida) 20 miles from Mosul, reportedly prompted as many as 100,000 people to...