Surprise, Surprise!

This financial crisis is forcing governments and business at all levels to make some tough decisions. If things continue like this for much longer, there's a real risk that we may have to lay Fred off…

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Surprise!!! (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)
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Disunion purposeful?  You decide. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1)  Obama's Brother joins Hamas, says 'Jerusalem is ours; We are Coming'

While in Sanaa, Yemein in 2010, President Barack Obama’s brother Malik Obama was at an event billed as the Orphans Development Fund (ODF) Conference. It’s quite the ironic title considering a group photo Malik is in that he has posted to his website. In the photo, he can be seen wearing a Hamas scarf (keffiyeh) that bears a well-known Palestinian slogan – ‘Jerusalem is ours – WE ARE COMING!’ It also includes a map of Palestine that says, ‘From the River to the Sea!’ In other words, Malik is saying, THERE IS NO ISRAEL.

Scarf translated: Jerusalem is ours – WE ARE COMING!

Malik: Expressing support for Hamas at an 'orphan' conference.

Here is Malik Obama’s boss (Malik works for him officially in his capacity as IDO Executive Secretary), Suar al-Dahab during a visit to Gaza last year at a Hamas event with the group’s Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Notice he’s wearing a similar keffiyeh at a conference entitled, ‘Aiding Jerusalem and Gaza”:

Malik’s boss, Suar al-Dahab, wearing a similar keffiyeh in Gaza.

Here is Malik in 2010, with al-Dahab in Khartoum, Sudan during the Islamic Da’wa Organization (IDO) conference, presided over by Sudan’s terrorist leader Omar al-Bashir, who belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood and is wanted for crimes against humanity:

Malik Obama and Suar al-Dahab.

Like British politician George Galloway, Malik is comfortable associating with those who support the message emblazoned on these scarfs:

British politician George Galloway and Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh with similar scarfs.

Galloway and Haniyeh, wearing and surrounded by keffiyehs.

Just in case we’re told that Malik was conned into wearing such a hateful and racist symbol like Swedish King Carl Gustaf and his wife Queen Sylvia were, consider a few things. Carl and Sylvia quickly took the keffiyeh’s off after having them placed on them by an opportunist and distanced themselves from the message.

Malik is a much different story.

Swedish King Carl Gustaf and Queen Sylvia: deceived into wearing hateful keffiyehs.

Malik reads and speaks fluent Arabic as do many in his family, like cousin Musa Ismail Obama and uncle Sayyid, who’ve been to at least one prominent Wahhabist university in Saudi Arabia. Barack recited the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer with a ‘first-rate accent’ according to the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof.

Musa Obama and Sayyid Obama at Umm al-Qura University.

The keffiyeh (or scarf) doesn’t just say, ‘Al Aqsa is ours and is not their temple’. It also says ‘Innana Qadimun’, which translates to mean ‘We are marching forward’. This famous battle command which is a reference to the prophecy that some day the Muslim world will march on Jerusalem and then the trees and stones will cry out, ‘here is a Jew hiding behind me… come O Muslim, come and kill him’.

Here is Khansa, the Mother of the Resistance movement, donning the keffiyeh:

Khansa, mother of the Resistance movement, dons the keffiyeh.

This is a photo of Khansa sandwiched between Haniyeh (L) and Hamas leader Khalid Mash’al, who is donning the keffiyeh in this picture:

Khansa between Hamas Prime Minister and Hamas leader Khalid Mash’al.

Those who see this as a matter of guilt by association run into some major problems. President Barack Obama and Malik are much closer than is being admitted publicly. In an interview published in GQ Magazine last July, Malik took offense at the characterization of him and the president as being merely ‘half’ brothers:

“Everyone’s referring to us as half, quarter,…step, things like that,” he says, displeased even by the taste of those words. “I think that’s like weights and measures. This didn’t even occur to us until he became president, until he gained prominence. And now we’re sort of like celebrities.

“But this is a streak of ignorance,” he adds. “Here in Africa we don’t think of each other as ‘half’ this or that. In an extended family, someone is your brother even if he is just in your clan. So I…am Obama.”

A photo of Malik as best man at Barack’s wedding tends to back up the claim:

Malik best man at Barack’s wedding.

So do photos of Malik visiting Barack at the White House on more than one occasion:

Barack and Malik in the Oval Office.

In the same GQ interview, Malik insists that he and his brother (the word ‘half’ left out in deference to Malik) are indeed close:

Ask Malik how often he and his brother talk nowadays and he boasts that it’s about once a year, as though that’s proof of their intimate bond. “Of course we’re close!” Malik says, just a bit too loudly. “I’m the one who brought him here to Kogelo in 1988! I thought it was important for him to come home and see from whence his family came—you know, his roots.”

OBAMA LIED ABOUT HIS FAMILY
As for Barack’s take on the relationship with his brother, well, he doesn’t say much about it but Barack has a history of dishonesty when it comes to being forthcoming about how close he is to his family. Late last year, Barack had to admit that he’d stayed with his uncle Onyango during the former’s days at Harvard. Prior to the admission, the American public had been told that Barack never met his uncle. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney put forth a very unbelievable explanation for the inconsistency.

Onyango Obama: Barack lied about knowing him.

Another Obama brother – Mark Ndesanjo Obama – accused the President of lying about their relationship as well, after Barack said the two had only met one time, presumably during the President’s visit to China in late 2009. Ndesdanjo insists they met several times, dating back to the 1980′s, during an interview with Laura Ingraham, via National Review:

“I heard that after the meeting we had in Beijing and I can tell you I was floored by it — I don’t know why he said it,” Ndesandjo said to Laura Ingraham, adding that he had met the president several times over the years and still isn’t sure what his motivation was for making the claim. “I think he was being president and was not being my brother,” Ndesandjo said.

Ok, so according to Barack, he only met his brother Mark once and that meeting was in China, right?

Barack and brother Mark Ndesanjo Obama met in China in 2009.

If Barack only met Mark once (in China), how does he explain this photo of Mark in the White House ten months earlier, half-way around the world during Barack’s inauguration (Mark is circled and Malik is on the far left)?

Mark Ndesandjo Obama at White House for Barack’s inauguration in 2009.

The point here is that Barack cannot be trusted to issue a full disclosure when it comes to the relationships he has with his family members.

Once again, this leads us to his relationship with Malik. How is it that Malik received 501(c)(3) status for his Barack H. Obama Foundation in less than 30 days and had it illegally backdated 38 months by Lois Lerner? If Barack had anything to do with it, history says he might be lying if he denies it. In order to come full circle here, Malik’s foundation is tied to a State Sponsor of Terrorism in Sudan.

As we’ve said before, Lois Lerner should be granted immunity and compelled to testify about why she granted tax exempt status to a man who is tied to terrorism and just so happens to be the brother of the President of the United States.

Lerner: Granted Malik Obama’s foundation illegal tax exempt status.

If Osama bin Laden’s driver was convicted of material support for terrorism, shouldn’t Malik be brought up on charges of supporting Omar al-Bashir, a world-renowned terrorist? After all, the Egyptian government wants Malik Obama to appear for questioning about this.

1a)Diplomacy and engagement

“Iran's rulers are not open to engagement no matter what mix of carrots and sticks are offered.” Peter Beinart, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, attributed that remark to me on a National Public Radio show last week. I emailed to ask him when I had said it. He quickly came back with a link to a piece I wrote for National Review Online in 2011, just after it was revealed that agents of the Islamic republic had planned to blow up a ritzy Washington, D.C. restaurant while the Saudi ambassador and other diners were enjoying their risotto Armani and penne integrali Valentino. “Wow!” I thought. “What a memory Beinart has!”

Not exactly. A few days later, he published a piece attacking as hypocrites and warmongers those Republican and Democratic congressmen favoring a bill that would tee up additional sanctions on Iran should negotiations fail. To support his case, Beinart assigned “two talented college students … to investigate” — meaning they dug up quotes from “some of the most prominent commentators now justifying new sanctions.” Since such commentators are, he said, “allies” of the members of Congress supporting the sanctions-in-waiting bill, their quotes reveal what those members really believe. (A rather tenuous thesis, don't you think? )

My words — along with those of Max Boot, Matthew Kroenig, Joshua Muravchik, Bill Kristol, Eliot Cohen and Abe Greenwald — were included. Beinart further noted: “After I quoted May on the radio last week, he emailed to explain that he considers 'diplomacy' and 'engagement' to be different things.” Yes, I do make that distinction. Allow me to explain why.

Beinart earns part of his living as an associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York. I would hope that when he's not assigning his students to investigate us “prominent commentators,” he's familiarizing them with significant thinkers of the past.

For example, Carl von Clausewitz, the early 19th century German military theorist, famously said: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Zhou Enlai, the Chinese communist leader, took that a step further when he pronounced: “All diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means.”

If this is the view that Iran's rulers embrace — if, in other words, they don't buy into such fuzzy and fashionable Western notions as “confidence building” and “conflict resolution” — Beinart and others (not least in the Obama administration) are wrong to believe that Iranian diplomats are pursuing “engagement,” or a “peace process,” or, to use the older diplomatic lingo, rapprochement and detente.

Actually, it's pretty clear that Iran's rulers are proponents of machtpolitik: “Negotiations do not require concessions,” Iranian parliamentarian Ali Motahari recently said. “Negotiations are a tool for us to receive concessions.” And last week, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, warned U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry: “[A] direct conflict with America is the strongest dream of the faithful and revolutionary men around the world. … Muslim leaders for years have been preparing us for a decisive battle.”

Ignoring such evidence, Beinart accuses me and others of attempting “to torpedo talks while blaming Iran for their failure.” Iranians, he argued on the radio program, “bravely” went to the polls last spring and elected Hassan Rouhani — whom Beinart believes is a “moderate”– as Iran's president. Beinart goes on to say that “to justify new sanctions as a means of settling the Iranian nuclear dispute 'without the use of force' is patently dishonest.”

In truth, no one knows whether increased economic pressure will convince Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader (“the title itself is repugnant to decent modern ears,” writes Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic — of which Beinart was once editor), that his nuclear weapons program is more liability than asset, endangering rather than strengthening his regime. But even if the odds are against a good outcome (that would be my judgment) surely muscular diplomacy is preferable to feckless diplomacy — which only emboldens authoritarians, as long historical experience has established.

I'd also turn Beinart's accusation around. I suspect that he and most of those who oppose even the threat of tougher sanctions are not saying what they really believe: that they want President Barack Obama to accept what he has called “unacceptable”: Iran's rulers — self-proclaimed jihadist revolutionaries and the world's leading sponsors of terrorism — becoming nuclear-armed and, before long, the hegemon of the Middle East.

I further charge that they've given no serious thought to what that would mean for America and the West — e.g., the end of nuclear nonproliferation and the likelihood of a nuclear “cascade”; Iran gaining enormous leverage over much of the world's global oil supplies and, by extension, Europe's economy; Iran becoming an existential threat to Israel and Saudi Arabia and other nations.

Which brings to mind two other Clausewitz quotes: “To secure peace is to prepare for war,” and “the best strategy is always to be very strong.” Perhaps Beinart might assign his talented college students a paper on those themes.

Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security.

1b)  Harvey Silverglate: Justice Goes After the GOP

Investigating Chris Christie's administration, indicting another prominent Republican. Is it political?

 By  

HARVEY SILVERGLATE

Is Eric Holder's Justice Department driven by a political agenda, or are the department's recent prosecutorial decisions simply signs of overzealousness?

The Justice Department has focused on two prominent Republicans, announcing a corruption indictment of former Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell and launching an active and very public criminal investigation into the antics of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's administration. In doing so, federal prosecutors have created at least the appearance that they are targeting two men who have been touted as plausible candidates for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016.

A reading of the McDonnell indictment raises the obvious question of why the feds are charging someone who, as governor, engaged in conduct that is run-of-the-mill political activity in virtually all jurisdictions, but especially in states, like Virginia, whose laws quite clearly allow it. Certainly Mr. McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, don't come off well in the indictment. She in particular is painted as greedy even by political standards. Both are charged with receiving expensive gifts as well as loans from businessman Jonnie R. Williams Sr., whose commercial dietary supplements were promoted by the governor. Mr. McDonnell and his wife also invited Mr. Williams to dinners and events at the governor's mansion and arranged audiences for him with state health officials.

Mr. McDonnell's legal team responded to the accusations in a blistering motion in federal court in Richmond on Jan. 21, the day the indictment was announced, asserting that the activities alleged against Mr. McDonnell are no different from those of political figures nationwide. To charge Mr. McDonnell on these counts would, according to the defense, suggest an "untested, novel construction of the federal bribery statutes" that would put every state—and, for that matter, federal—officeholder in jeopardy of federal indictment.

The defense motion points out that Anthony Troy, a former Democratic attorney general of Virginia, "conducted an in-depth investigation into this issue" and concluded that since Mr. Williams and his company "neither sought nor received any special benefits from any public official," no crime was committed. Defense counsel argue that "political courtesies" extended to campaign donors or to generous friends are not crimes under any reasonable interpretation of the federal bribery statutes.

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The attorney general testifies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Jan. 29. Getty Images

Were it otherwise, notes the unusually acerbic motion, "President Obama's recent visit to DreamWorks DWA +2.23% studio in Hollywood, a company run by one of his top donors," would put Mr. Obama into the same club as Mr. McDonnell. As much could be said of every president who has awarded ambassadorships to campaign donors.

The investigation into the Christie administration by U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman (a registered Democrat) likewise raises eyebrows. The story is by now familiar: In the run-up to the New Jersey gubernatorial election, the Christie administration asked the mayor of Fort Lee, Democrat Mark Sokolich, to support the governor's re-election bid. Mr. Sokolich declined. In return, it is alleged that Mr. Christie's office coordinated with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to invent a four-day traffic study that closed two lanes approaching the George Washington Bridge, thereby creating epic traffic jams in Fort Lee.

Further suspected wrongdoing involves claims that the Christie administration abused its power to distribute federal disaster funds after Hurricane Sandy, withholding funds from another Democratic mayor who wasn't being sufficiently helpful with a development project favored by Mr. Christie.

The notion that a federal felony is committed when state officials reward political friends and punish enemies in this manner has become surprisingly widespread within the Justice Department. Because of vague and broad federal criminal statutes, there isn't much in public or political life these days that is not an arguable ground for an indictment. Obviously lost on federal prosecutors is the irony that their prosecutions of state politicians often create the same appearance of bias that the feds consider criminal when it is seen at the state and local level.

With the careers of two popular Republican governors—who might have been destined for national office—hanging in the balance, such suspicions of federal prosecutorial partisanship have become inevitable. But given that such federal prosecutions for state political activities abound, one must not be too quick to conclude that the department's motives are purely partisan. There may be some nonpartisan recklessness too.

Consider Justice's behavior in Massachusetts, a state dominated by a long-entrenched Democratic political machine that also has a U.S. attorney championed by Ted Kennedy and appointed by Barack Obama. Former state probation department officials are about to go on trial for awarding jobs to candidates sponsored by Democratic state legislators in exchange for support in departmental appropriations. U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz is applying a bizarre theory of criminality to this patronage—and her efforts recently received a black eye when it was learned that recommendations for hiring positions were made not only by state legislators, but also by judges and even the chancellor of Boston College, the Rev. J. Donald Monan.

There's no telling whether the feds can succeed in criminalizing "politics as usual" in a state where the legislature and judiciary have routinely failed to adopt the Justice Department's prescription for an acceptable political culture. What has become clear, however, is that the department's war against local politicians will continue, and that its motivations will lie somewhere between the quest for federal power and partisan politics.

Mr. Silverglate is the author of "Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent" (Encounter Books, updated in paperback 2011).

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2)  Obama's State of Disunion

His operating method has been social and political division.

By Dan Henninger

The 2008 campaign phrase "hope and change" will haunt future histories of the Obama presidency.

Many Americans voted Barack Obama into the White House for that reason alone. That reason is gone. The notion that this president would unify the nation by allowing people to summon their better spirits, as he promised, faded fast.

Even Mr. Obama's supporters see now that his operating method wasn't unification, but political and social division. Support for the president among the independents who gave him 52% of their vote in 2008 has fallen into the 30s.

Dividing the nation in his first term so that some Americans would vote in anger against his opposition was clearly the game plan from the start. He repeatedly scapegoated "the wealthiest" and the "1 percent." In 2012 when House Republicans published their deficit-reduction proposals, Mr. Obama dismissed the document as "laughable," "social Darwinism" and "antithetical to our entire history."

After four years of the politics of divide-and-conquer, Mr. Obama had stirred sufficient resentment in his political base to win a second term. What he has produced entering the sixth year of his presidency is a nation in a state of disunion.

This includes not only the famous 1%, but also the upper-middle class, Southern states, charter schools, politically active conservatives, private businesses, the Catholic church, electric utilities, doctors driven out of ObamaCare's health networks and those famous partisans, the Little Sisters of the Poor.The pollsters at Gallup wrote last week that Mr. "Obama is on course to have the most politically polarized approval ratings of any president." Segments of the U.S. population see themselves not just in disagreement with the Obama administration, but as the target of its policies.

All have been vilified, investigated, audited or sued by the president himself, Eric Holder's Justice Department, the National Labor Relations Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency and, not least, the Internal Revenue Service. Last year's most remarkable polling number from Gallup said in December that 72% of Americans regard big government as the greatest threat to the U.S. They got the message.

Even ObamaCare has contributed. The law's rules pit the healthy against the unhealthy by forcing them to pay higher premiums to subsidize the unhealthy. Catholics, some of whom might have supported ObamaCare, see their hospitals as singled out for retribution by their government.

The administration's supporters dismiss complaints about the in-your-face tenor of the Obama presidency as conservative sour grapes. "We won," they say, "get over it." OK, you won, but what have you done with it? Where's the upside?

The slow fade of hope is revealed in last week's Fox News poll, with 74% saying the country feels as if it's still in a recession, no matter that the real one ended in early 2009. It's hard to pretend hope is coming when, five years after the 2008 election, December's monthly jobs report said 347,000 Americans have given up looking for work. That's your real income inequality—the legions of chronically unemployed Americans who now have no earned income whatsoever.

In his speech, Mr. Obama pitched the causes of weak employment back "more than three decades." This 30-year-old problem has three major policy solutions available to him in 2014: tax reform, pending free-trade legislation and immigration reform. All require doing business with the other party in Congress. He can't, and by personal disposition doesn't want to. The speech made that clear.

Progressives justify coerced public policy with their belief that what they are doing is good. Setting aside several hundred years of unhappy world history with this notion, a glitch always occurs in the U.S.: Because the Founding Fathers designed an arduous system for producing progress, the far left has never been able to put its most purebred ideas consistently across the legislative goal line. Too many citizens resist. One might say the same of the far right, but they're not running anything just now. In frustration—and Mr. Obama is nothing if not frustrated—the White House is defaulting, as the left does everywhere, to direct executive action. We are at the dawn of the Unilateral Presidency.Instead, Mr. Obama said his overdue promise of change is going to roll in on a cascade of unilateral executive orders and directives from his regulatory bureaucracies. (This includes sentencing Joe Biden to reforming all the federal job-training programs, another 30-year failure.)

How can this be good, if the price is more national disunion than we have now? Disunion is a dangerous political virus that sends a nation as complex as the U.S. toward a state of permanent, embittered opposition, which can be difficult for mere politicians to set right. We're about there.

Barack Obama could have allowed some accommodation to decompress the discord and political tension. For example, he could have lifted the economy with a bipartisan cut in the corporate tax rate in his first term. Instead, he raised taxes on "the wealthiest," and defined them as people with before-tax incomes above $200,000. Instead, the IRS audited his opponents. Get over it? Not anytime soon.

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