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According to the preview offered by Vanity Fair: [Todd] Purdum spends a day inside the West Wing and talks to Obama’s top aides, who tell him about the challenges of playing the Beltway game, ugly as it has become, even as their boss insists they find a way to transcend it. “There’s a relentlessness to this that’s unlike anything else, especially when you come into office in a time of crisis,” says Obama senior adviser David Axelrod. “We did not exactly ease into the tub. The world is so much smaller, and events reverberate much more quickly, and one person...

Banner headline at Foxnews. 0.5% drop.

RIOTS, petrol bombs, tear gas and strikes greeted the Greek's government's latest attempt to persuade its citizens of the merits of reducing the country's budget deficit. In Athens demonstrators stormed up to the very steps of the parliament building, where an austerity plan was about to be debated, calling on the parliamentary “thieves” to come out. Three people were killed when protesters set fire to a bank building on Wednesday May 5th. Hours later, with tear gas drifting through the adjacent square, parliamentary leaders held a brief, sombre exchange on the signficance of the deaths, vowing to protect the principle...

What’s the clearest sign the Obama agenda is in trouble? That’s easy: the string of jeremiads in the pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets of fashionable opinion. Unable to tout the administration’s successes, and worried about Republican ascendancy, liberals have assigned responsibility for the mess they’re in neither to their program nor to their methods but to larger, structural faults in American politics and society. Beginning with you. You aren’t too bright, for one thing. After all, opines Jacob Weisberg in Newsweek, the “biggest culprit” behind “our political paralysis” is the “childishness, ignorance, and growing...

"Hear our cry, Obama." "Deliver us, Obama." Video at link.

AFTER a mere 100 days, the "Obama Doctrine" for our foreign and security poli cies has emerged. And it's terrifying. The combination of dizzying naivete, dislike of our allies, disdain for our military, distrust of our intelligence services and distaste for our own country promises the worst foreign policy of our lifetimes. That includes President Jimmy Carter's abysmal record of failure. The core tenets of the Obama Doctrine to date would make a charter member of the Weather Underground cheer: We're to blame. If there are problems anywhere, they're America's fault. This central conviction of leftist ideology appears to have...

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration inherited a mess in strategic Somalia and may be leaving President-elect Barack Obama with a worse one. The explosion of piracy off Somalia's coast is an attention-grabbing product of internal chaos in the Horn of Africa country, and a problem that will outlast the administration's success this past week in winning U.N. backing for possible pirate-hunting raids on Somali territory. "We have a framework in place now to deal with this issue, but it's not going to be a very easy one," State Department spokesman Robert Wood said. Wood meant that there is more to...

The designation this summer of $465 million in U.S. aid to combat drug trafficking in Mexico and Central America — along with the valuable cross-border dialogue that helped bring about this Merida Initiative — is a step in the right direction....But given the urgency of the problems we face, this step is disappointingly small...The Merida Initiative is stingy by any standard but especially by U.S. standardsFighting drug traffickers is not only a Latin American responsibility, it is also an American responsibility...Like all developed nations, the U.S. must confront the fact that no country can be safe while poverty, illiteracy, violence,...

Quarter of Russians blame U.S. for conflict - poll 13 Aug 2008 18:47:42 GMT Source: Reuters MOSCOW, Aug 13 (Reuters) - Russians blame the United States and Georgia for triggering the conflict in Georgia's breakaway region of South Ossetia, with just one percent pointing the finger at Moscow, an opinion poll showed on Wednesday. When asked who was guilty for the conflict in South Ossetia, 54 percent of those polled blamed Georgia and another 22 percent blamed the United States, a survey carried out by Russia's largest pollsters VTsIOM showed. A further 12 percent said Russia, South Ossetia and Georgia...

Put the fireworks in storage. Cancel the parade. Tuck the soaring speeches in a drawer for another time. This year, America doesn't deserve to celebrate its birthday. This Fourth of July should be a day of quiet and atonement. For we have sinned. We have failed to pay attention. We've settled for lame excuses. We've spit on the memory of those who did that brave, brave thing in Philadelphia 232 years ago. The America those men founded should never torture a prisoner. The America they founded should never imprison people for years without charge or hearing. The America they founded...

As they map out a strategy against Republican presidential candidate John McCain, Barack Obama and his advisers plan to emphasize big themes and generational contrasts. .... More broadly, Obama will be using the theme of "yesterday versus tomorrow," with McCain billed as the candidate of the past and Obama as the candidate of the future. This would also bring the age issue into the campaign. McCain would be the oldest person ever sworn in as president, at 72, and many Americans have expressed concern to pollsters that the Arizona senator is past his prime.

Historians credit left-wingers with coining "politics of fear" to belittle Sen. Joseph McCarthy's campaign against communists in the U.S. government. The phrase went into hibernation in the 1960s, a torpidity even warmonger-in-waiting Lyndon Johnson's daisy-girl ad couldn't disturb, only to reemerge in the 1980s to denigrate Ronald Reagan's Cold War-winning strategy. These days, the phrase has become the lefties' No. 1 rhetorical trump card against the war against Islamic terrorism. To them, Americans have more to fear from the Bush administration than from the terrorists who seek to bring America to heel. Sen. Barack Obama uses it in almost every...

In the wake of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, Wolf Blitzer of CNN made much of an e-mail, exclusively provided to him by a close associate of Bhutto and a Hillary Clinton supporter, casting blame on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf for her murder. We can now understand why Musharraf’s November 3 state-of-emergency decree took foreign news outlets like CNN off the air. Musharraf, who is one of the main targets of the Al Qaida international terrorist organization, recognizes that the so-called “CNN effect” in global affairs can destabilize foreign governments, including his own. It’s no wonder that he recently complained about being...

World climate talks in Bali have gone into their scheduled last day amid fierce disagreement over targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. EU ministers have warned they will boycott a US-led climate summit next month unless the Bush administration backs firm targets for emissions cuts. The US favours allowing governments to set voluntary targets. Indonesia is trying to broker a compromise that would remove firm targets from the final text. Delegates spoke of some progress behind the scenes. My own country, the US, is principally responsible for obstructing progress in Bali Al Gore Q and A: Bali summit "We are...

Is Ron Paul crazy for his position on the war and for criticizing our nation's foreign policy? Many believe this to be the case. But, might we be mischaracterizing Ron Paul by over simplifying or clouding the issues? A much closer examination based on facts and sound principles is in order. In the end I will conclude that Ron Paul is indeed crazy. Sorry to spoil it for you. There are many things in his favor. To answer pressing questions of our time, Ron Paul relies on historical facts many American's are ignorant of. He isn't afraid to reveal clandestine...

CHICAGO - Late on a balmy Friday night in Wicker Park, a gentrifying neighborhood just northwest of the Loop, a small tribe of 20-somethings gathers outside a corner bar. Their leader, a petite, energetic 25-year-old named Meghann Walker, hands out leaflets to people heading inside. "Do you guys know Ron Paul is going to be in town tomorrow?" Walker asks a short-haired young woman in jeans and flip-flops. "There'll be a lot of good people there, that's for sure."

WASHINGTON (AP) - Congress signaled its disapproval of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a vote Tuesday to tighten sanctions against his government and a call to designate his army a terrorist group. The swift rebuke was a rare display of bipartisan cooperation in a Congress bitterly divided on the Iraq war. It reflected lawmakers' long-standing nervousness about Tehran's intentions in the region, particularly toward Israel—a sentiment fueled by the pro-Israeli lobby whose influence reaches across party lines in Congress. "Iran faces a choice between a very big carrot and a very sharp stick," said Rep. Tom Lantos, chairman of the...

CPT Part 1 - A Corrupt, Un-Christian Legacy In 1984, Ron Sider's impassioned speech in Strasbourg, France, at the Mennonite World Conference, led to the formation of the "Christian Peacemaker Teams". No matter how sound the original idea, it quickly became corrupted into yet another leftist, blame-America group. The use of Vietnam-era war protester and socialist Gene Stoltzfus as the first director of the group made it clear what direction the group would follow. I will put up more details when I have a chance, but for now, let's look at where CPT is not: CPT's supposed expertise in encouraging...