A rather surprising finding from the newly released CNN poll. Question three on the national survey of 1,136 adults (which includes an oversample of African-Americans) asks, "Do you consider the first six months of the Obama administration to be a success or a failure?" Thirty-seven percent (37%) said they believe the Obama administration is a "failure," while 51% consider it a "success" and 11% say it's still "too soon to tell." An identical question was asked of the Bush administration in an August 2001 CNN/Gallup/USA Today survey. At the time, 56% said the Bush administration was a "success" while only 32% considered it a "failure." (Link)Thursday, August 06, 2009
http://joshuapundit.blogspot.com/
Obama's Theme Song....
I think you all know the words and the music, don't you? ( hat tip Laer)
', '
Obama Approval at 50% - And Dropping
And that's using polls that over sample Democrats by as much as 15%:
President Barack Obama’s approval rating is falling amid concerns about the U.S. economy and his push to revamp the U.S. health-care system, a Quinnipiac University poll shows.
Exactly half of the registered voters surveyed from July 27 to Aug. 3 by Quinnipiac said they approve of the job Obama is doing, compared with 42 percent who disapprove. That’s down from 57 percent approval and 33 percent disapproval in a poll taken in late June, according to results released today.
Americans are upset about rising unemployment and worried that health-care plans making their way through Congress will add to the U.S. budget deficit, said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Hamden, Connecticut-based polling institute. The combination has helped drive down the president’s ratings.
A “willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt is, among some voters, evaporating,” Brown told reporters in Washington yesterday.
The poll found that voters disapprove of the way Obama is handling the economy by 49 percent to 45 percent. On his effort to overhaul of the health-care system, 52 percent disapprove of his handling of the issue while 39 percent approve.
It gets better. According to CNN of all places, more Americans consider Obama's presidency a failure after six months than felt that way about George W. Bush:
Rasmussen, which polls likely voters rather than registered voters and is thus more accurate has the Chosen One at 49%.
People are starting to awaken to exactly what they bought last November. Can you say buyer's remorse?
Couldn't happen to a more deserving president.
But you can't say I didn't give him a chanceWednesday, August 05, 2009
Devaluing American Citizenship
There have been two instances of American citizens being detained against their will recently...and both provide an interesting lesson for us on how small pieces of the puzzle fit into a larger picture.
On August 1 in Iran, three hikers who were visiting Iraq as tourists apparently strayed or were forcibly taken across the border between Iran and Kurdistan in an area where the border isn't very clearly marked.
They're being interrogated and have been described on Iranian state-run TV as 'spies.'
At the same time, two reporters working in North Korea were releasedafter ex-president Bill Clinton made a special trip over there to negotiate their freedom.They'd been imprisoned since March 17th.This is being hailed as a 'diplomatic victory', and in a sense it is. But in a very real sense these incidents underline how much the inherent protection of a US passport has deteriorated.
From the earliest days of our Republic, the protection of American citizens abroad was sacrosanct. This is a carryover from our direct predecessors, the Romans, who made Roman citizenship something to be desired and sought after because of the inherent rights and protections it entailed.
In it's earliest history, America actually fought two wars over this principle, the War of 1812 with Britain and our War with the Barbary pirates.
In 1849, the US Navy sent a whole squadron to Smyrna and gained the release of an American citizen who had been seized and imprisoned by local officials.In fact, all through the 19th century, the US Navy and Marines were dispatched to protect the lives and property of US citizens or to take retaliation for violence and theft suffered by them in places like Panama, Nicaragua, Columbia, Fiji, China, Columbia, Mexico and Korea, among others.
In more recent times, US forces performed the same sort of missions in Grenada, Libya, Côte d'Ivoire, Albania, and even in Italy. In 1985 US Navy pilots intercepted an Egyptian airliner and forced it down in Sicily because it was carrying the Arab hijackers of the Italian cruise ship Achille Laurowho had shot wheelchair bound American citizen Leon Klinghoffer during the hijacking and tossed him overboard on the direct orders of Yasir Arafat.
Since the beginning of the Clinton Administration, that kind of hands on response to US citizens being threatened, mistreated, robbed, imprisoned or murdered abroad has become rare to the point of non-existence. As a matter of fact, the last real instance happened on President Obama's watch oddly enough. After his initial restraint on pirate hijackings off the coast of Somalia merely intensified the hijackings, Obama finally allowed our navy to rescue an American hostage and take out 3 of his pirate captors - although there remains some question about the president's actual part in this.
It might also be noted that however it went down, the forceful response appears to have worked.You don't hear much about American ships being hijacked off Somalia these days.
Ahh, I can already read your mind...'Rob, how can you compare a bunch of raggedy ass pirates with North Korea and Iran?'
Simple. They share the same mentality.As a matter of fact, a forceful response works even better because the Mullahs and the Norks have more to lose.
You can attempt to negotiate and buy people like this off, and the US has certainly done it in the past. We attempted to buy off the Barbary Pirates originally. And recently we saw American journalist Roxana Saberi released from Iran after being convicted of a trumped up spying charge..after which five Iranian Qods force operatives captured fighting against our troops in Iraq were released in exchange. It remains to be seen what the North Korans got for releasing their hostages, but I guarantee you they didn't do it for free.
The problem doing deals with people like that is two fold. Aside from increasing their contempt for you, understandings like this never work in the long run and it simply encourages not only more of the same but an escalation.
These things follow a common pattern. What starts out as trivial insults gradually morphs into disrespect, than into hostage taking and blackmail, and finally into actual hostility and military assaults.
People like the Norks and the mullahs don't understand 'diplomacy' and nuance.They understand strength and real world consequences...just like the pirates.
Even countries not prepared to let things degenerate into open hostilities get influenced by this aura of disrespect and normally maintain an attitude of contempt toward a country that seems not to be able to protect its citizens. Anyone who's traveled in Mexico lately can tell you that, and I can testify personally that it didn't used to be that way at all.
Iran's a good lesson. Keep in mind that the Islamic Republic started out their 'relationship' with America by getting away with doing something no other country in history had pulled off - the forcible taking of our embassy and imprisoning of our diplomats.That was a clear and unmistakable act of war.
Anyone who doesn't recognize that their success at doing this with impunity has influenced their subsequent behavior,(and the behavior of others) I honestly think hasn't been paying attention.
Another point - while it still works in many situations, it isn't necessary to risk blue water ships for gunboat diplomacy in our modern era.It was Soviet leader Kosygin who said in 1979 that if the Iranians had taken a Soviet embassy, their people would have been released in 48 hours or Tehran would have been reduced to a blackened crater.
I think the mullahs would have understood that the Soviets were serious if they had been on the receiving end of a choice like that from the Soviets - or from us, for that matter. Instead, we got Jimmy Carter.
North Korea is a slightly different case. The reason North Korea is being allowed to behave in the manner it does is simply because of their relationship with China, not any military strength they possess. But that knife cuts both ways. China owns a lot of our debt, but we also own a lot of China's money and the key to the continued growth of their economy. There's a mutual dependence here, and thus mutual levers to make things happen. I doubt China's going to go to war over the likes of North Korea, and a forceful response would likely go a long way to discourage the Norks from future transgressions. Instead, we continue to essentially reward them for their thuggish behavior.
A point could be made that anyone stupid enough to go to North Korea is simply looking for trouble, but once again it all comes down to that little green passport and what it symbolizes. And that symbolism speaks volumes - disrespect and mistreat a country's nationals, disrespect and mistreat a country. We seem to have lost sight of that principle.
Our government's disinclination to protect its citizens abroad, our open borders and a tendency in some elite circles in America to defer to multiculturalism and 'the international community' seems to be part of a general failure on the part of our government to be willing to assert our national sovereignty.
That's something that's going to have increasingly serious consequences down the line unless it changes.Atlas Shrug's Pam Geller At NewsMax!!
My blogpal the one and only Pam Geller is moving into the big time with her first column over at NewsMax, "Obama Birth Certificate issue Causing needless Distractions."
Give it up, click over to her column a time or two and show her some love...she deserves it.Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Mirage: Obama's Middle East Strategy
When Barack Hussein Obama started out as president seven months ago, it all looked so simple.
Obama felt he had a handle on the entire Middle East situation. Having managed to finesse a good majority of American Jews, a core Democrat constituency, into voting for him, he figured he had the leverage he needed to ingratiate himself and America with the Muslim world by pressuring Israel to make far reaching concessions in line with the Saudi peace plan, pulling us out of Iraq as soon as possible and presenting that famous 'open hand' to the mullahs in Iran.
He expected everything to fall neatly into place, especially after his al Arabiya interview, his apologetic speech in Turkey and his Lap Dance of the Seven Veils in Cairo.
As anyone with even a little knowledge of the Middle East could have predicted, the Chosen One got blind sided by the players, largely because of his own arrogance.
The first mistake Obama made was to assume that the Israelis were basically just like the Leftist American Jews in his immediate circle, and that even if they weren't, they were susceptible to being pressured to knuckle under. Accordingly, he had the Pentagon change the rules on military aid to restrict how the IDF could use it, made blatantly anti-Israel appointments to his cabinet and his advisers, and explicitly violated the Road Map by endorsing the Saudi 'peace' ultimatum and reneging on the Bush Administration's agreement with Israeli PM Ariel Sharon on Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria(AKA the West Bank) that were supposed to remain part of Israel in any settlement. He then decided to turn up the heat by insisting that Jews were not entitled to build anythingin the so-called settlements, including Jerusalem.
All this had several effects he hadn't counted on. Obama, a self-described 'student of history' apparently didn't realize that the vast majority of Israelis had taken a lesson from Lebanon, Oslo and Gaza that appeasing the Arabs and giving up strategic concessions involved a dangerous price in blood to pay. He also apparently forgot that most Israelis remember what it was like when the Arabs controlled East Jerusalem as a Jew-free zone, and that attempting to turn the clock back to a division of the city was a red line that even the most dovish Israelis were unwilling to embrace. Essentially, Obama united the Israeli electorate behind the current center-right government in a way he never intended.
His toadying to the Arabs and his blatant disregard for the previous agreements between Israel and the US had another consequence.The Israeli government across the board now regards Obama with distrust and feels that his word or any guarantees he makes are essentially worthless. And the lesson wasn't just noted by the Israelis. People have long memories in this part of the world, and reputations persist.
There were similar missteps when it came to the Arab world. In Cairo, Obama made the usual pro forma remarks about US ties to Israel, but he accepted the Arab positions in almost every other respect, including the Arab narrative that the Jews got foisted on the Middle East only because of the Holocaust and that the Palestinian nakba was the equivalent of what the Jews endured.
After all that, the Arabs expected Obama to deliver. Based on what he was saying, surely the US should take the side of the Arabs in this conflict, cut off all aid and ties to Israel and even intervene on the Arab's behalf to correct this injustice, shouldn't they?
Having little experience with democracy and how Congress works in our society, the Arabs can be forgiven for not understanding that while Obama could (and did) take certain hostile steps towards Israel, a lot of the US Congress wouldn't go along with a total rupture of ties; they have constituents to answer to. The Arabs didn't understand that Obama wasn't free to unilaterally destroy the US-Israel relationship overnight.
Again, this has had effects the Chosen One didn't count on.
Believing that Obama was on their side, the Arabs, instead of becoming more amenable to negotiations with Israel have become even more intransigent. The Palestinians, enjoying largess from the American taxpayers and a sympathetic US government they haven't ever seen before have become content to put off negotiations of any kind with Israel indefinitely. Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas is more than happy to wait until the Obama Administration forces the Jews to bend to his will - and why not ? While he waits, the Americans under General Keith Dayton spend additional millions to equip and train an army for him.
As for the other Arab states, they could barely contain their astonishment when their ally Obama asked them for reciprocal concessions towards Israel. Obama, after all, had endorsed the Saudi peace plan. Didn't he realize that to the Arabs, the Saudi plan was a take it or leave it offer with no concessions or negotiations allowed? Didn't he understand that unless the Israelis knuckled under and pulled back to the 1948 lines, displaced half million of their own people, agreed to redivide Jerusalem and allowed what was left of Israel to be flooded with Palestinian 'refugees', no 'normal relations' were possible? Did he actually expect the Arabs to violate their notion of honor by reneging on that pledge?
Needless to say, the Arabs told Obama to pound sand.
Perhaps Obama's most serious blunder involves Iran.
Being appallingly ignorant of the basic nature of the Iranian regime,Obama made sure that the mullahs understood that he was willing to do almost anything to negotiate.Obama's predecessor George W. Bush had also pursued negotiations with Iran almost as avidly, but because of whom he was,the Mullahs were never entirely sure that he wouldn't suddenly decide that it was time to pull the plug on a nuclear Iran, or let the Israelis do it. But President Obama made it quite clear they had nothing like that to worry about.
As a consequence, they stepped up their nuclear development and became increasingly hard line, to the point where Iran is likely only six months to a year away from having nuclear weapons.
Obama had always figured on his 'open hand' strategy combined with his outreach to the Muslim world to be a real winner with Iran,to the point where he seems not to have made any real contingency plans if things didn't work out. I think he was genuinely shocked when the Mullahs and Ahmadinejad essentially reacted to his open hand with a clenched fist.
The recent strong arming of the Iranian dissidents by the regime also obviously came as a surprise to the president. After all, it wasn't so long ago that he and other prominent Democrats were talking about what a vibrant democracy Iran is !
Obama also didn't take into consideration how the Sunni Arab autocracies he was so fond of were going to react to his non-policy on Iran.Instead of seeing Obama as an ally, the Arabs saw him as ineffectual and untrustworthy. Obama's accelerated pullout from Iraq, leaving an Iran -friendly Shiite Islamic republic in place with a US trained army also became a source of discord, especially with the Saudis, who have their own Shiite underclass to deal with in the oil bearing eastern part of their country.
At this point, Obama has gotten close enough to reality to start to see that the oasis he though the was moving towards is just another sand dune.It remains to be seen what he plans to do about it.
Obama tried to pick up the pieces on Iran by sending SecDef Robert Gates to Israel to meet with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and reassure him that the US was committed to a non-nuclear Iran. Israel's response at this could be expected.Having seen how trustworthy this president is, they're continuing to prepare to deal with Iran themselves.
If nothing happens with Iran, Gates told the Israelis that the US was planning to muster international support for tougher sanctions at the end of September, especially on refined petroleum products like gasoline that Iran imports.
This is improbable for several reasons.The 'international support' part of it is problematical. Russia, China and likely elements of the EU will not honor them, and will likely veto any UN action. We've already seen how this worked with Oil For Food and the sanctions on Saddam's Iraq.
Second, assuming the US decides to implement this on its own, that's going to mean sending our navy to blockade Iran's ports. Aside from the fact that this is an act of war, is Obama likely to allow our navy to stop and search Russian, french or German ships on their way to Iran? Especially if they haven't signed on to the embargo? That doesn't sound like the Obama I've come to know.
However, having stepped on his own equipment a number of times, the president is retreating to what he knows best...rhetoric. He apparently has a new speech upcoming in which he's going to outline a brand spankin' new Middle East peace plan.
I can't wait. Simple Video - How 'Universal Care' Really Works
Not to be missed.
Thursday, 6 August 2009
Another superb job from Political Math. He compares health care costs and the length of time to see a doctor in Georgia with that of Massachusetts, which has 'universal coverage' and many of the provisions of ObamaCare already in place....using Leggos!
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