Carol A. Taber at American Thinker:

Beyond the outrage felt by Governor Jan Brewer, whose move to protect Arizonans’ human rights was offered up as an example of an abuse of human rights by Mr. Obama’s State Department report (gotta protect those drug cartel murderers!), for many citizens, this report is a rank anti-American manifesto and the last straw. Many believe it to be outright evil, that there is no other word to encompass Obama’s disgraceful and indefensible decision. This odious report has placed America — us — on a list of human rights violators that includes Iran, North Korea, and Sudan. And Mr. Obama and his administration have done it purposefully, intentionally, and with malice aforethought.

Full story….

Q: Why is Hillary getting a free ride on this? After all, HER department — U.S. Department of State — prepared and sent the report to the UN-HRC.

You know by now that BHO zeroed out NASA’s budget for manned space flight, right?

Additionally, you know that he has been virtually silent on his vision for NASA’s future.

Well, it turns out that NASA administrator, Charles F. Bolden, Jr., has been busy carrying out “Obama’s Cairo Initiative.”

On the first anniversary of Obama’s speech in Cairo, Bolden followed up with a trip to the region and gave a long interview to Al Jazeera.

The AJ anchor opened the interview with, “Why are you here…?”

Bolden beamed that he was there (on the first anniversary of Obama’s Cairo speech) to further “Obama’s Cairo Initiative” of reaching out to the Muslim world.

Smitty, at The Other McCain, seems to think the interview and Bolden’s words are innocuous. I can’t agree. The video runs nearly 22 minutes but you don’t have to wait long (2 mins) to see Bolden’s enthusiasm and to hear his description of Obama’s “Initiative” and plans for the Muslim world.

Mark Steyn:

On April 18th 1980, the Union Flag came down in Harare and the last Governor of Southern Rhodesia, Lord Soames, transfered executive power to the first Prime Minister of independent Zimbabwe. On the thirtieth anniversary of Zimbabwean “freedom”, how’s it working out?

Zimbabwe didn’t have to be like this. “You have given me the jewel of Africa,” Robert Mugabe told Ian Smith, his notorious white racist predecessor, at independence in 1980. Actually, at one point Africa had quite a lot of jewels. But through the Sixties and Seventies decolonization delivered the continent into the hands of Afro-Marxist kleptocrats-for-life who reduced viable economies and some of the richest farmland on the planet to an impoverished coup-wracked dump. Mr Smith was a racist but he was not an incompetent and, a generation after Zimbabwe’s neighbors had achieved and squandered independence, he bequeathed (albeit reluctantly) a going concern to Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party.

Read the whole thing….

Judi McLeod in CFP:

Poland’s President Lech Kaczynski was leading a delegation of top Polish officials, including Gen. Franciszek Gagor, head of the army and chief of staff, to memorial ceremonies at Katyn, the site of a massacre of 22,000 Poles by Soviet agents 70 years ago. “The soul trembles to think that Katyn has taken new victims,” said Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the International Affairs Committee in Russia’s parliament.

[...]

“More than 90 souls, including many high officials of the Polish state” President Lech Kaczynski and his wife, MPs, the highest military, banking officers and many other people.”

Read the whole sad story….

Mark Steyn NRO:

[...]

Barack Obama … video address on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall: “Few would have foreseen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.”

Tear down that wall . . . so they can get a better look at me!!! Is there no one in the White House grown-up enough to say, “Er, Mr. President, that’s really the kind of line you get someone else to say about you”? And maybe somebody could have pointed out that Nov. 9, 1989, isn’t about him but about millions of nobodies whose names are unknown, who lead dreary lives doing unglamorous jobs and going home to drab accommodations, but who at a critical moment in history decided they were no longer going to live in a prison state. They’re no big deal; they’re never going to land a photoshoot for Vanity Fair. But it’s their day, not yours. It’s not the narcissism, so much as the crassly parochial nature of it.

Is it the only template in the White House speechwriters’ computer? “Few would have foreseen at the Elamite sack of Ur/Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow/the assassination of the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand/the passage of the Dubrovnik Airport Parking Lot Expansion Bill that one day I would be standing before you talking about how few would have foreseen that one day I would be standing before you.”

Some years ago, when Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian and ensuing episodes of her sitcom grew somewhat overly preoccupied with the subject, Elton John remarked: “Okay, we know you’re gay. Now try being funny.” I wonder if Sir Elton might be prevailed upon to try a similar pitch at the next all-star White House gala: Okay, we know you’re black. Now try being president. …

[...]

Continued….

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This headline tics me off:

U.S. military destroys soldier’s Bibles.

Sounds really bad, right? Well, there’s a slight problem. It should have read: “U.S. military destroys soldier’s religious contraband.”

Here’s why:

Reuters News says the Bibles were confiscated and destroyed after Qatar-based Al Jazeer television showed soldiers at a Bible class on a base with a stack of Bibles translated into the local Pashto and Dari languages.

It seems that somebody back home sent a batch of Pashto and Dari Bibles to an American soldier stationed at or near the Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, and he took them to a Bible study class as handouts to other soldiers to help them convert Islamic Afghans to Christianity.

U.S. military personal stationed overseas know they may not work to convert the natives from one religion to another. In other words, the U.S. military is religiously neutral.

The Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, told a Pentagon briefing Monday that the military’s position is that it will never “push any specific religion.”

The reason is obvious. Violators should be court-martialed and kicked out of the military.

Here’s the source »

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TheAge.com.au:

Obama’s stance worries Israelis

CAN Israel still call the United States its best international friend? Apparently not, if you believe the tone of the local media.

Watching the drama unfold inside Israel, the increasingly tense dialogue between US President Barack Obama and new Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is taking on all the trappings of a duel.

Almost every day brings news of another sore point between the two countries, a source of yet further inflammation of their once warm relations.

One could be forgiven for thinking that the more immediate threat to Israel’s national security lay across the Atlantic rather than from closer to home.

It is bad enough that President Obama uses almost every opportunity he can to set the parameters of a final peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. Now US officials are openly using Israeli anxiety over Iran’s fledging nuclear program as a bargaining chip to force Israel’s hand on giving up control of the West Bank Palestinian territory.

(more…)