Obama: “Iran Has a Right to Be Nuclear”
Well, there you have it folks – it’s settled. Not only is Obama expected to give a speech where he said he will reach out to the Muslim world, Thursday, in Cairo, Egypt, but he is also stating that Iran may have a right to nuclear power.
President Barack Obama suggested that Iran may have some right to nuclear energy _ provided it proves by the end of the year that its aspirations are peaceful.
In a BBC interview broadcast Tuesday, he also restated plans to pursue direct diplomacy with Tehran to encourage it set aside any ambitions for nuclear weapons it might harbor.
Iran has insisted its nuclear program is aimed at generating electricity. But the U.S. and other Western governments accuse Tehran of seeking atomic weapons.
“What I do believe is that Iran has legitimate energy concerns, legitimate aspirations,” Obama said, adding that the international community also “has a very real interest” in preventing a nuclear arms race.
The president has indicated a willingness to seek deeper international sanctions against Tehran if it does not respond positively to U.S. attempts to open negotiations on its nuclear program. Obama has said Tehran has until the end of the year to show it wants to engage with Washington.
“Although I don’t want to put artificial time tables on that process, we do want to make sure that, by the end of this year, we’ve actually seen a serious process move forward. And I think that we can measure whether or not the Iranians are serious,” Obama said.
Iran is now a friend and ally!?, never-mind Ahmadinejad’s incendiary remarks during the UN race summit or his previous statements about the West and Israel, they do mean well and really only want nukes for energy purposes. A third world country always wants to go right to nuclear energy not start with the basics./sarc!
President pantywaist sure is giving us change – sometimes I’m not sure if he is doing this on purpose or not but it sure is starting to look suspicious. I’m sure Obama’s scary, hollow rhetoric will really make those Iranian leaders shake in their boots!
I also noted above that Obama is reaching out to the Muslim world. I have to question why his administration continues to reach out to Muslims and not the Arab world. The Arab world is much greater and encompasses the entire region, whereas Muslims do make up a majority, they are not the only citizens living there. Israeli’s are still considered Arab and there are other individuals who do not technically classify themselves as Muslim. Please pay attention to his words. Obama stated that he does not want any further settlement in Israel and Netanyahu has fervently disagreed with such remarks and requests, while Obama tries to make amends (which I think are completely unnecessary for what the Muslim world has done not only to Israel, but to us, to Europe, etc.) with those trying to destroy the West.
So long to our one and only ally in the Middle East, Israel. I’m sure Netanyahu is taking notes as well as umbrage at Obama’s words and actions. He knows that the U.S. is no longer supporting Israel the way we used to. At some point this probably has to happen, but not when you have all these rogue countries acting up, one of which is Israel’s prime enemy, who has called for the extinction of Jews on multiple occasions.
A couple of other random notes/thoughts:
Iran can have “nuclear power” (so says Obama) but the United States when it comes to energy policy, cannot…
Iran needs nuclear power when it already sits on tons of oil?
Liberals are congenitally incapable of comprehending the fact that there are some people on this Earth who are unreasonable and with whom you cannot negotiate and reasonably expect to achieve anything but your own defeat. Barack Obama is the leader of this chronically naive cadre. He is incapable of comprehending the truth about people like Kim Jong Il and Ahmadinejad.
Liberals, or at least Democrats, will hopefully, one day face the fact that not everyone on this earth is good and decent. Human nature can be very dark at times – but it is only through that darkness that anybody truly knows light. It’s important and imperative to separate the two.
Recruiter Shooter Was Recent Convert to Islam, Abdul Muhammad
Details are trickling out regarding the shooter of the two soldiers yesterday in Arkansas. Carlos Bledsoe, at only 24 years old, recently converted to Islam possibly on a trip to Yemen. He changed his name upon his conversion to Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad. Abdul will be charged with 15 counts of terrorism and capital murder.
Little Rock Police Chief Stuart Thomas says Muhammad intentionally targeted military personnel.
23-year-old Private William Long, of Conway, died as a result of his injuries.
18-year-old Private Second Class Quinton Ezeagwula, of Jacksonville, was also shot. Chief Thomas says he is in stable condition and will recover.
Police say Muhammad opened fire because of his religious beliefs. He was a recent convert to Islam.
“We have no indication that the suspect did act alone and of his own accord, and it’s our belief he acted with a specific intent to target military personnel and did so unilaterally and did so with intent today and today only,” Thomas said.
Police say Muhammad had never met his victims.
The following was also learned of the man in custody:
I have learned from a well-placed source that Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, who killed one soldier and wounded another at a a Little Rock military recruiting center today, and who faces charges of terrorism as well as first-degree murder, has recently returned from Yemen, where he studied jihad with an Islamic scholar there.
Apparently the Islamic scholar under whom this American convert to Islam studied was yet another misunderstander of Islam’s true, peaceful teachings.
Another interesting point to note regarding the name of the criminal is his chosen middle name, Mujahid. Mujahid means ‘One who fights the Jihad’ or ‘Holy Fighter.’ The plural is Mujahadin and the translation is basically the one who kills and fights in the name of religion.
I wonder when Obama will come out with a statement of outrage condemning this deadly, violent act as he did with the Dr. Tiller murder… 14 hrs. later and still counting… crickets*
The fact that, in Janet Napolitano’s (JaNo) words, we had a home grown man-made disaster, of all places, in the south, that should raise some major alarms and Americans should be made aware of it. We hadn’t been attacked for 7.5 years and within the past couple weeks we had a terrorist plot intercepted in NYC and a failed interception of this young man who murdered a U.S. soldier and injured another. I hope the military personnel takes note of how much Obama really cares about them!
The liberally biased media should be ashamed of itself for covering this story up from the public!
Did You Catch the Goode Family?
WWAGD? or What Would Al Gore Do? This new cartoon aired last night on ABC. It’s a political satire show that finally pokes fun at all the politically correct, environmentally friendly, ignorant, cranio-rectal challenged liberals… I love it!
More About Sotomayor (So-Toe-My-Or)
Conservatives are discovering more details on Sotomayor as the days tick on. She is quite an accomplished woman and had been on the fast track to becoming a leading national judge (at least by the pace at which she was moving up the ranks). However, she already had various critics back in 1997 like Rush Limbaugh who saw her coming a mile away and knew she could one day be nominated for SCOTUS. Limbaugh, in 1997, warned listeners that this woman was extremely progressive and liberal in her judgments and leanings.
The president of the National Organization of Women (NOW) has even made an official statement that Sonia is in fact “very progressive.”
The Republicans in the senate are focusing on Sotomayor’s speech that she gave at the University of California, Berkeley (School of Law) back in 2001. Her lecture at Berkeley was published in La Raza Journal, which made a blatant racist remark when comparing one race over another as to which of those races would make better decisions. 29 Republicans in 1998, when Sotomayor was nominated for the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, voted against her for this very reason, as well as her tendency to legislate and be an activist from the bench.
For a little more information on the extremism of La Raza go here.
Newt Gingrich has been on the attack with this one nomination and it is something he apparently feels very strongly about – it may have to do with the history of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals when she was nominated back in 1998 while Newt was still Speaker of the House. Newt has called Sonia Sotomayor an outright racist and has asked for her to withdraw her name from the SCOTUS nod.
I personally think that when it comes to measuring somebody’s merit and ability – personal feelings aside, what really matters is their record - and this final detail that has come to fruition is incredibly important. Her opinions have a 60% reversal rate…
Three of the five majority opinions written by Judge Sotomayor for the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals and reviewed by the Supreme Court were reversed, providing a potent line of attack raised by opponents Tuesday after President Obama announced he will nominate the 54-year-old Hispanic woman to the high court.
“Her high reversal rate alone should be enough for us to pause and take a good look at her record. Frankly, it is the Senates duty to do so,” said Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America.
The most frustrating aspect of this entire nomination is the media playing it up to be the first ever Hispanic nominated to the Supreme Court – which just isn’t true. We could go back in history and technically find that Cardozo per the article yesterday, was the first, but even if that is questionable there is Miguel Estrada, who was nominated by a Republican and was a Conservative. Democrats did not care about his remarkable history, growing up in Honduras and legally immigrating to the United States without being able to speak English and breaking through barriers to go to Columbia University and then onto Harvard Law School. The Democrats demoralized this man because he was a Conservative and didn’t fit the Conservative mold – he had to be destroyed – the same thing happened to Clarence Thomas – another from humble beginnings, who was a black man and a Conservative. We could go back through time, but why? We had an example of this very thing with the past election; Sarah Palin. A female who came from the lower middle class, if that, who had to pay her way through college, lived in a state that truly is the last frontier, and still isn’t all that developed, worked her way up politically by working hard and never giving up. But to liberals, a Female, a Black, and a Hispanic should only be democrats, not republicans – those who go against the mold need to be destroyed before anyone else; they are the biggest threats. The liberals want to make this nomination into this historically wonderful thing, bamboozling the dumbed down masses, attempting to brainwash them into thinking that Sonia truly is the first of her kind to be nominated, when that is an out and out lie. Ann Coulter talks about this in greater detail on Good Morning America.
Empathy and Identity Politics; The Dems’ Gravy Train
The Democrats really know how to play the identity politics card and it would appear that Obama does it better than any leader of the liberal party has in a long time!
No longer does it matter to liberals whether or not you are technically qualified for a position based on past job experience, intelligence, background knowledge of the constitution, etc. – nope, what matters now is that you can empathize with races, genders, religions, or any multitude of things that would otherwise be characterized as superficial traits.
Sonia Sotomayor was nominated as Obama’s first choice to replace Chief Justice Souter as a Supreme Court judge. Sonia, however, has not issued an opinion of importance in over 10 years and she has quite a reputation. One tends to lean towards the fact that the only reason she was even nominated was due to her Hispanic background and her gender. This is affirmative action at its finest, and then people wonder why those who are promoted really aren’t qualified and mistakes are made at organizations and companies… Let’s get back to the merit of a candidate rather than the color of their skin/ethnicity (quotas).
What upsets me is not the fact that this woman came from very humble beginnings, really worked her way up to become more successful than most, even with a head start, but the fact that Democrats exploit these facts and use these things about people to gain constituents and voters. This is a ploy used to win the Hispanic vote, which is becoming increasingly important when deciding future elections.
In a presentation that will likely lean heavily on style over substance, Sotomayor’s background will allow the administration to again play class warfare with their presentation of her biography. The daughter of Puerto Rican parents growing up in the South Bronx, her father was a manual laborer and her mother a nurse. Her father died when she was 9.
Sotomayor went on to attend Princeton and then Yale Law School before working as a New York assistant district attorney. Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan worked a confirmation deal with the first President Bush to nominate Sotomayor to the Second Circuit.
In one of the biggest sources of the coming Sotomayor controversy, is her conduct in the New Haven, Connecticut firefighter case that’s now on appeal to the Supreme Court.
And I’m sure many reading this are curious to find out what the controversy of the case really was – well here is the long and short of it:
In Ricci v. DeStefano, Sotomayor sided with the City of New Haven that was alleged to have used racially discriminatory practices to deny promotions to firefighters. Sotomayor joined a per curiam opinion that went so far as to bury the white firefighters’ crucial claims of unfair treatment. Judge Jose Cabranes, a Clinton appointee, chastised her in writing for apparently missing the entire host of Constitutional issues that were before the court.
According to Judge Cabranes, Sotomayor’s opinion “contains no reference whatsoever to the constitutional claims at the core of this case” and its “perfunctory disposition rests uneasily with the weighty issues presented by this appeal.”
(To judge just how bad the Ricci opinion is, even liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, wrote of his dissatisfaction with the case, stating, “Ricci is not just a legal case but a man who has been deprived of the pursuit of happiness on account of race.”
Ironically, Sotomayor’s dreadful decision in Ricci is under review at this time by the Supreme Court with an opinion expected by the end of June when David Souter, the justice Sotomayor is nominated to replace, has announced his retirement.
So the official decision is still technically pending… It would be nice to know what the outcome of that case is before nominating this person as a SCOTUS justice.
This was not the first episode of judicial extremism or liberal activism from this individual…
In another example of her radical judicial philosophy, Sotomayor stated in a 2002 speech at Berkeley that she believes it is appropriate for a judge to consider their “experiences as women and people of color,” which she believes should “affect our decisions.” In the same speech, Sotomayor went on to say, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” She restated her commitment to that unlawful judicial philosophy at a speech she gave in 2005 at Duke Law School when she reiterated that the “Court of Appeals is where policy is made.”
The Obama administration has made claims in the media that Sotomayor would be the first Hispanic on the court, which is not entirely accurate. Benjamin Cardozo, a Sephardic Jew of Hispanic ancestry, served on the Supreme Court from 1932-1937. Cardozo traced his ancestry to Portugal, yet there is a mixed bag of which government agencies consider Portugal to fall under the Hispanic umbrella. It is accurate to say Sotomayor, should she be confirmed, would be the first Hispanic woman on the court.
Heaven forbid conservatives or anyone else who questions this woman’s qualifications to really uphold the law of the land, will be labeled a bigot. This is the new campaign of the left, which is entirely ironic/humorous if it wasn’t so sad at the same time. So many of color and gender play into this nonsense and believe that the liberals are the party of the common man and that of the minority – when in history, and even to this day, they are anything but. One would think that when race, ethnicity, religion, and gender are used as a means to an end, that would be considered racist, however, the indoctrinated or brain-washed masses do not understand that. The simple fact is the party who advocates individual freedoms and liberties is the party of freedom, the party that associates and segregates by race, gender, religion, etc., is the party of oppression and “plantation” politics. Keep people down so you have voters – it’s the carrot and stick philosophy that you give a little bit to entice the voter, but then you pull it away to keep them coming back for more, never letting them get the entire carrot, because they will no longer be hungry. At that point they will want their own personal liberties and freedoms – if they ever become successful they won’t require affirmative action, welfare, or government in their lives to help them… therefore Democrats will no longer have a voting bloc.
To use an example of this SCOTUS candidate, as to what I just discussed above, we can look at one of her quotes she provided in a public forum.
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
So accustomed have we become to identity politics that it barely causes a ripple when a highly touted Supreme Court candidate, who sits on the federal Appeals Court in New York, has seriously suggested that Latina women like her make better judges than white males.
Indeed, unless Sotomayor believes that Latina women also make better judges than Latino men, and also better than African-American men and women, her basic proposition seems to be that white males (with some exceptions, she noted) are inferior to all other groups in the qualities that make for a good jurist.Any prominent white male would be instantly and properly banished from polite society as a racist and a sexist for making an analogous claim of ethnic and gender superiority or inferiority.
Imagine the reaction if someone had unearthed in 2005 a speech in which then-Judge Samuel Alito had asserted, for example: “I would hope that a white male with the richness of his traditional American values would reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life” — and had proceeded to speak of “inherent physiological or cultural differences.”
But the crux of the matter has more to do with the battles in which the GOP should choose. The opposition of this nomination may unfortunately cause quite a hiccup for republicans in future elections with Hispanics. I do not believe that Sotomayor should be confirmed, that’s my opinion, based on the activism portrayed in several of her decisions and speeches, as well as some off-the-cuff comments made that, by any objective reader, would be considered racist in nature – or at least holding some type of antipathy/grudge towards white males in particular. However, I’m not so sure this is one of those battles that the GOP should choose to commit to.
The liberals know how to instigate a crisis or a distraction on the other side of the aisle, meanwhile passing/creating other, and more substantive legislation and policies. Some of the items that may be more useful than arguing over Sotomayor are the upcoming decision in California regarding gay marriage, where democracy and votes no longer count and a state supreme court could trump the will of the people, cap-and-trade is still on the table, health care reform, immigration reform (which has been tabled until the fall), and Obama’s horrible foreign policy experience, as evidenced in the recent North Korea nuke tests. Obama leans on the United Nations and the rest of the world, because he does not have a backbone of his own to condemn another nation or stand up to it as, for example, Reagan did. The philosophy of the liberals is “look over there, not over here.”
Sotomayor is an intelligent woman, but she is a radical who does not believe in the constitution. She would not be on my shortlist of judicial picks, but this appointment will not be much different than the justice she would be replacing; Souter. The next SCOTUS pick will most likely tend to be more critical than this one…
