Is there nothing that Obama can’t do?

As the Iranian government’s murderous repression of the Iranian people continues, critics right and left agitate over the deafening silence of an American president who, as a candidate, derided the Bush administration’s ambitious democracy promotion as too timid. They speculate as to why Barack Obama won’t speak out: Why won’t he condemn the mullahs? Is he daft enough to believe he can charm the regime into abandoning its nuclear ambitions? Does the self-described realist so prize stability that he thinks it’s worth abandoning the cause of freedom — and the best chance in 30 years of dislodging an implacable American enemy?
In truth, it’s worse than that. Even as the mullahs are terrorizing the Iranian people, the Obama administration is negotiating with an Iranian-backed terrorist organization and abandoning the American proscription against exchanging terrorist prisoners for hostages kidnapped by terrorists. Worse still, Obama has already released a terrorist responsible for the brutal murders of five American soldiers in exchange for the remains of two deceased British hostages.
Prepare to be infuriated.

Via Canadian Sentinel

Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
February 4th – “The bill signed by Obama aims to increase the number of children covered by SCHIP to 11 million from the 7.4 million currently enrolled. The expansion is being paid for by raising the federal tax on cigarettes to $1 per pack from the current 39 cent-per-pack tax. Taxes on cigars and other tobacco products will also rise.”
June 23rd – “Tampa will lose part of its cigar heritage in August when Hav-A-Tampa shuts its factory near Seffner and lays off about 495 employees, closing a factory that has been operating since 1902.”

“This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and the bubbles in the sodas began to defizzle…”

“At a time of great fiscal challenges, this legislation [Waxman-Markey] is paid for by the polluters who currently emit the dangerous carbon emissions that contaminate the water we drink and pollute the air we breathe.”

*

A President at his non-meddlesome best;

The United States said Monday its invitations were still standing for Iranian diplomats to attend July 4 celebrations at US embassies despite the crackdown on opposition supporters.

Another Ramirez masterpiece. (Via)
More: One dictator’s Revolutionary Guard is another President’s debating team!

Just snap your fingers and fix the USA!

Related: Rasmussen

You scare me”.
An open letter from Lou Pritchett, former vice-president of Proctor & Gamble
h/t Joe B.

When I got to the language quoted above, especially when Obama seems to have confidence that the Iranian government is really looking into irregularities, and points out our lack of international observers, I swear I thought Jim was going to reveal at the end that this was an exceedingly clever parody of President Obama. Sadly, no.

Go see the quote for yourself (and keep reading).
(Via)

But that’s ok. Before he became President, Obama didn’t know anything about governing, either, and look how well that’s turning out?
Via Drudge
Related (yes, it very much is)…

‘We spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama,” declared Andy Stern last month, and the president of the Service Employees International Union wasn’t exaggerating. The SEIU and AFL-CIO have been spending so much on politics that they’re going deeply into debt.
That news comes courtesy of federal disclosure forms that unions file each year with the Department of Labor. The Bush Administration toughened the enforcement of those disclosure rules, but under pressure from unions the Obama Labor shop is slashing funding for such enforcement. Without such disclosure, workers wouldn’t be able to see how their union chiefs are managing their mandatory dues money.

Via The Atlantic

More: US Loses Most Jobs At Fastest Rate In History
Related: House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer and Reps. Chris Van Hollen and Daniel Maffei are circulating a letter…

… to Obama expressing “growing concern” with the closures of GM and Chrysler dealerships across the country. The lawmakers say they’re asking for a “compelling justification as to how closing healthy dealerships will make the automakers more financially sound.

h/t

… that developed the order of algebra, our magnetic compass and tools of navigation, our mastery of pens and printing, our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires, timeless poetry and cherished music, elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation. And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.”*

Related:
The Cairo disaster
The great Cairo grovel

h/t PhilM

Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Obama at Buchenwald, June 5: “This place teaches us that we must be ever-vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time, that we must reject the false comfort that others’ suffering is not our problem, and commit ourselves to resisting those who would subjugate others to serve their own interests.”
Obama in Cairo, June 4: “So let me be clear: No system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.”
(nice catch by Brian J.)

Is there nothing that Obama can’t do?

On the surface Obama seemed to scold the Muslim world for its all-pervasive Holocaust denial and craven Jew hatred. By asserting that Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism are wrong, he seemed to be upholding his earlier claim that America’s ties to Israel are “unbreakable.”
Unfortunately, a careful study of his statements shows that Obama was actually accepting the Arab view that Israel is a foreign — and therefore unjustifiable — intruder in the Arab world. Indeed, far from attacking their rejection of Israel, Obama legitimized it.
The basic Arab argument against Israel is that the only reason Israel was established was to sooth the guilty consciences of Europeans who were embarrassed about the Holocaust. By their telling, the Jews have no legal, historic or moral rights to the Land of Israel.
This argument is completely false. The international community recognized the legal, historic and moral rights of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel long before anyone had ever heard of Adolf Hitler. In 1922, the League of Nations mandated the “reconstitution” — not the creation — of the Jewish commonwealth in the Land of Israel in its historic borders on both sides of the Jordan River.
But in his self-described exercise in truth telling, Obama ignored this basic truth in favor of the Arab lie. He gave credence to this lie by stating wrongly that “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history.” He then explicitly tied Israel’s establishment to the Holocaust by moving to a self-serving history lesson about the genocide of European Jewry.
[…]
But as disappointing and frankly obscene as Obama’s rhetoric was, the policies he outlined were much worse. While prattling about how Islam and America are two sides of the same coin, Obama managed to spell out two clear policies. First he announced that he will compel Israel to completely end all building for Jews in Judea, Samaria, and eastern, northern and southern Jerusalem. Second he said that he will strive to convince Iran to substitute its nuclear weapons program with a nuclear energy program.

“Amateur”.
Mona Charen;

The idea of handing over the West Bank to the Palestinians has lost favor in Israel after Gaza was evacuated (at considerable pain) in 2005, because the area became a launching pad for missiles aimed at the Israeli heartland. But President Obama has a solution to that. It’s nothing much — just the wholesale reversal of Palestinian political culture.

h/t Revnant Dream

Welcome to the Just-Makes-Shit-Up Presidency.

… while Obama is busy “not running GM” he still has time to make calls to the mayor of Detroit to assure him that GM’s headquarters won’t be moving to Warren, Mich., as it was offered to, but that it will be staying in Detroit.

Associated Press: “President Barack Obama suggested that Iran may have some right to nuclear energy”
Pew Research: “No Decline in Belief That Obama is a Muslim”
Nice timing! “[giving] Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a huge victory just ten days before the Iranian election.”

Is there nothing that Obama can’t do?
h/t Martin P.

Is there nothing that Obama can’t do? “White House moves to restrict criticism of stimulus projects”.

Who could have seen this coming?

For the first time since another Democrat occupied the White House, investors from Beijing to Zurich are challenging a president’s attempts to revive the economy with record deficit spending. Fifteen years after forcing Bill Clinton to abandon his own stimulus plans, the so-called bond vigilantes are punishing Barack Obama for quadrupling the budget shortfall to $1.85 trillion. By driving up yields on U.S. debt, they are also threatening to derail Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s efforts to cut borrowing costs for businesses and consumers.
The 1.5-percentage-point rise in 10-year Treasury yields this year pushed interest rates on 30-year fixed mortgages to above 5 percent for the first time since before Bernanke announced on March 18 that the central bank would start printing money to buy financial assets. Treasuries have lost 5.1 percent in their worst annual start since Merrill Lynch & Co. began its Treasury Master Index in 1977.
“The bond-market vigilantes are up in arms over the outlook for the federal deficit,” said Edward Yardeni, who coined the term in 1984 to describe investors who protest monetary or fiscal policies they consider inflationary by selling bonds. He now heads Yardeni Research Inc. in Great Neck, New York. “Ten trillion dollars over the next 10 years is just an indication that Washington is really out of control and that there is no fiscal discipline whatsoever.”

Captain Ed;

Right now, the United States has responded to a lack of demand for its Treasuries through a questionable and disturbing method: we’re buying our own debt. That allows the yields to remain low, but buying our own debt is somewhat akin to creating your own credit card. Eventually, you have to acknowledge that the money you create on the books never really existed, unless the United States plans to simply print money to pay off all the bonds. That would create a level of inflation not seen in the West since the Weimar Republic, and will effectively force the rest of the world to avoid U.S. currency and investments as unsound. It would, for the first time in decades, put the United States on the financial sideline.

Meanwhile, over at the Toronto On-Another-Planet, the headline item under “News|World” is titled “Was Bush on a mission from God?”

From the Associated Press’ John Rogers (who is a man);

He was tall and stunningly good looking, a guy who could appear pensive and serious one moment and then, with smoke from an unfiltered cigarette swirling around his face, morph into the hippest looking dude this side of James Dean.

h/t OttRob