A former CIA director says concerns about environmental impact have prevented the White House from bombing oil wells that finance the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
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Who is funding ISIS?
…just last week in the aftermath of the French terror attack but long before the Turkish downing of the Russian jet, we wrote about “The Most Important Question About ISIS That Nobody Is Asking” in which we asked who is the one “breaching every known law of funding terrorism when buying ISIS crude, almost certainly with the tacit approval by various “western alliance” governments, and why is it that these governments have allowed said middleman to continue funding ISIS for as long as it has?”
Hint: It isn’t Halliburton.
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Russia’s Foreign Ministry recommended Thursday that Russians refrain from visiting Turkey, and called on those already in the country to return home.
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Obama doesn’t win wars. He lies about them.
Sadly, Life Doesn’t Always Imitate Art
Considering what has been going on the past 7 years, the following juxtaposition is striking:
The Type of President that Americans Want
From the 1997 action thriller, Air Force One, here’s a speech from ‘President James Marshall’:
The President that Americans are Stuck With
Barack “Lead From Behind” Obama
JV Chemists
It’s probably nothing.
Coulda Had A Pipeline
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Instapundit: OBAMA WON’T READ INTELLIGENCE ON GROUPS HE DOESN’T CONSIDER TERRORISTS.
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Bush Doctrine: “I can hear you, the rest of the world can hear you and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”
Obama Doctrine: You’ll get used to it.
The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire
“What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning or whatever other slogans they come up with that has no relationship to what is actually going to work to protect the American people and to protect the people in the region who are getting killed and to protect our allies and people like France,” Obama said. “I’m too busy for that.”
Forward!
Barack Obama’s presidency has been pockmarked by rioting, looting and protests. That’s no coincidence. It’s what the former community organizer sought from Day One. And it’s just going to get worse before he leaves office.
The senseless protests we’re seeing break out on the campuses of the University of Missouri, Yale and other colleges, as well as on bridges and highway overpasses and outside police stations, are precisely the kind of thing Obama was trained to organize while attending leftist agitation schools founded by Chicago communist Saul Alinsky. He learned to a fare-thee-well how to “rub raw the sores of discontent.”
Now Obama is returning the favor of his Alinsky masters, training and cloning an army of social justice bullies to carry on his revolution to “fundamentally transform America.” He’s doing it mainly through a little-known but well-funded group called Organizing for Action, or OFA, which will outlast his administration.
But what about Climate Change?
Is There Nothing That Obama Can’t Do?
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“If you like your boots-free Syria, you can keep your boots-free Syria.”
JV Team
The Russians and Egyptians claim otherwise. Who to believe? ISIS claims responsibility for Russian jet crash
What Just Happened in Syria?
Last week, after the White House announced its support for Syrian rebels was finished, the United States said it dropped 50 tons of ammunition from the air into Syria, ostensibly for unnamed Arab groups fighting ISIS. That, supposedly, was the last assistance those people were going to get.
A few days later, various anti-ISIS Syrian Arabs issued a collective, huh?
Operation Empty Chair
Frederic Hof, former special advisor for transition in Syria at the U.S. State Dep’t;
[A]s Syria began to descend into the hell to which Assad was leading it, I did not realize that the White House would see the problem as essentially a communications challenge: getting Obama on “the right side of history” in terms of his public pronouncements. What the United States would do to try to influence Syria’s direction never enjoyed the same policy priority as what the United States would say. […]
Having failed miserably as a prophet in 2011 does not deter me from predicting the following: Obama will bequeath to his successor a problem of gargantuan dimensions if he does not change policy course now. Left to the joint ministrations of Assad and the Islamic State, Syria will continue to hemorrhage terrified, hungry and hurt human beings in all directions while terrorists from around the globe feast on the carcass of an utterly ruined state. Western Europe now reaps a whirlwind of desperate and displaced humanity it thought would be limited to Syria’s immediate neighborhood.
A chilling, and necessary read.
If You Like Your Winnings, You Can Keep Your Winnings
The Illinois Lottery’s slogan is “Anything’s Possible,” and, for some winners of its state-run games of chance, that phrase now carries a double meaning.
On Wednesday, officials said payouts for winnings over $600 will be delayed because the lottery’s coffers are empty.
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In reality Putin’s young bombing campaign has hit very few Islamic State targets. Yes, aircraft have flown and bombs have been dropped, but the Russians have no ground intelligence in place to identify targets any more than the United States has, except in those rare occasions when black-flagged vehicles are actually seen driving around in broad daylight–which is why the Islamic State has expanded ever since the U.S. bombing started. But Putin must certainly be innocent of the accusation that his air force has bombed the U.S.-trained “pro-democracy” freedom fighters, because the trainers themselves have admitted that the first lot on which one-tenth of the budget has been spent, i.e., $50 million, are exactly five in number, the rest having deserted after receiving their big family-support signing bonus and first paycheck, or after they were first issued with weapons (which they sold), or after first entering Syria in groups, when they promptly joined the anti-American Jabhat an-Nuṣrah, whose Sunni Islam they understand, unlike talk of democracy. That guarantees Putin’s innocence: All five extant U.S.-made freedom fighters are reportedly alive and well, though one may have defected since the last count. (It would really be much cheaper to hire Salvadoran contract gunmen and fit them out in Arab head-dresses.)
Update: White House Is Weighing a Syria Retreat