Columnist.
June 27, 2013 -- ABC News: >[President] Obama said has called neither Russian President Vladimir Putin nor Chinese President Xi Jinping to ask that Snowden be turned over because "I shouldn't have to" -- expelling a criminal should be a routine legal matter. > >"No, I am not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker," Obama said. August 7, 2013 -- New York Times: >President Obama canceled next month's Moscow summit meeting [with Russian President Vladimir Putin], ending for now his signature effort to transform Russian-American relations. It was the first time an American leader had called off such a trip in decades. Oh, yeah. That Obama swagger is working really well everywhere outside of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.
As recently as Monday, according to CBS News, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney continued the Obama Administration's Orwellian use of language by insisting that Al Qaeda is still "on the run" even though "We face an ongoing threat from al Qaeda and its affiliates." ... If anyone is on the run, it is Barack Obama chased by his own foreign policy.
America's Texter, Anthony Weiner (D-NY), has been caught doing it again -- delivering of lewd text messages. If you've forgotten, Weiner was a Congressman from New York who got caught "sexting" underage girls. At first he claimed his account might have been hacked but when a photo surfaced of him sending out what is now called a "selfie" from the Members' gym, he 'fessed up and resigned from the House.
The City of Detroit filed for bankruptcy yesterday afternoon. It owes as much as $20 billion and there is no conceivable way that debt will ever be paid. The city offered its debtors 10 cents on the dollar but the debtors refused. A good deal of the blame -- rightly or wrongly -- will be placed at the feet of municipal workers -- sanitation, water, sewer, cops, firefighters and so on. The pressure of ever-rising wages for no additional work, leading to ever-rising pension costs, plus ever increasing benefits and ever more closely defined work rules will likely be found to be at the bottom of all this.
The national press corps held its collective breath on Monday night as members of the United States Senate wrangled over whether the holiest of holies -- the filibuster rule -- would be changed or scrapped altogether by the 55 Democrats in the majority. This is known as the "nuclear option" and it is generally threatened by the Majority Leader -- Republican or Democrat -- when the Minority Leader -- Republican or Democrat -- successfully uses the existing filibuster rules to slow progress on legislation or nominations to a crawl. The modern version of a filibuster can be broken if the majority can muster 60 votes. As the AP's Dave Espo wrote: "While a simple majority vote is required to confirm presidential appointees, it takes 60 votes to end delaying tactics and proceed to a yes-or-no vote."
We often hear about a "miscarriage of justice" but rarely a "carriage of justice." Much as we call people inept, but never say someone is really, really, etp. Ok, there is no such word as "ept" so that doesn't count. The national news corps was all a-twitter -- including being ON Twitter -- when the jury came back with its not guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial for the death of Trayvon Martin.
Edward Snowden is still, as far as we know, hiding out in the transit lounge of an airport in Moscow, Russia. He is, as President Obama referred to him "a 29-year-old hacker" who leaked damaging information about what the National Security Agency is doing to, according to our government, protect American citizen from foreign attack.
This has to have been the longest yet least relaxing Independence Day ever. As you know, the 4th was on a Thursday so here, in Our Nation's Capital, almost everyone I know pretended they had been sequestered out of having to work on Friday and made it a four day weekend.
America's Traitor, Edward Snowden has allegedly applied for asylum in 20 countries. None have granted it.
An American teacher guilty of nothing more than wanting to help school children in Egypt learn English was stabbed to death while watching a demonstration against Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi.
The President is in Africa on a perfectly meaningless goodwill trip to somewhere and somewhere else while back here in Our Nation's Capital it was one of the most important weeks in the history of the Republic. On Tuesday the U.S. Supreme Court announced its ruling on a case involving the Voting Rights Act -- that part of the act that required nine states to get U.S. Justice Department permission to make just about any changes to voting.
It's now official. America is the France of the 21st century. France was a big power in the 18th and 19th Centuries. The French were pretty much in a constant in state of war what with everything from the Seven Years' War to the French and Indian Wars to the American Revolution to the Napoleonic Wars. Then came the 20th Century when World War I was mostly fought on French soil leading to their preemptive surrender in World War II. Since then the French still pretend to be a full-fledged member of the Planetary Cool Kids Table, but they have to sit on the end and fetch extra pints of milk for the real members.
Heads of state -- presidents, prime ministers, dictators, whatever -- cannot know all the details of what is going on in their country much less in the other person's country. That's why before a modern "summit" between or among heads of state, battalions of high- mid- and low-level staffers go through every conceivable subject and produce forests of briefing papers to prepare the principal. According to the late William Safire writing in the New York Times, the word "summit" to describe a meeting of heads of state was coined by (no surprise) Winston Churchill in 1950 when he called for a "parley on the summit" of a few heads of state to chart the post-war world rather than, as Churchill put it, "'hordes of experts and officials drawn up in a vast cumbrous array.'"
Most Presidents of the United States love going on an international trip. You get to fly on Air Force One. You get to travel around in The Beast that was flown over for your benefit. You get to stay in the biggest suite in a Western-style hotel. There are about 300 staffers from the White House and various Executive Branch agencies who have traveled ahead of you or with you to make sure your every whim is appropriately dealt with. And you get to meet with foreign leaders to remind them that, as Chevy Chase might have said on the old Saturday Night Live: "I'm the President of the United States ... and you're not."
There is almost no good news for President Barack Obama in the CNN/ORC poll that was released earlier this week. As the President giggled and played rock, paper, scissors with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-8 Conference in Ireland, the bloom appears to have begun to come off the Obaman Rose as far as the American people are concerned. This is one poll taken last week (Tuesday through Thursday) so it might not signal a trend, but it certainly won't generate confidence in the West Wing.
Human beings need enemies. Often for good; sometimes for ill. But having an easily definable enemy is very helpful. Organizations need enemies to send you mail and call your home asking for donations. The March of Dimes was established by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to combat the crippling disease of polio. With the advent of the Salk and later the Sabin vaccines, polio was effectively wiped out in the United States and the March of Dimes needed a new cause. It found one in preventing birth defects later expanding into helping women have healthy pregnancies.
The hard Left and the hard Right -- who sometimes share seats in black helicopters -- are among the groups most upset by the recent disclosures of NSA, DoJ, and CIA snooping on Americans. President Barack Obama promised to shut down Guantanamo; but it remains open these five years later. Obama promised to reverse, or at least cut down, on the activities of the NSA and CIA against Americans, but that has not happened either.
As if President Barack Obama didn't have any embarrassing issues to deal with, now come the reports -- not proof -- of some really ugly allegations. The original reporting came from CBS which came into possession of a memo from the Diplomatic Security Service alleging wrongdoing and possible interference in at least eight investigations.
