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POPSMessiah Lies About His Senate Committee Assignment John explains the rest: But Obama is not a member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. Obama just made that up so he could count the committee's action as one of "my deeds." If committed by a Republican, this would be a gaffe of historic proportions. Even a Senator as inattentive to his duties as Obama certainly knows what committees he serves on. For him to fabricate the claim, out of whole cloth, that the Senate Banking Committee is " committee," strikes me as another sign of Obama's megalomania. That, plus more evidence that he is totally at sea without a teleprompter. Illinois Senator's Record Of Inaction Leaves Him Discredited WASHINGTON, July 14 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The following is being issued by the Republican National Committee: As Chairman Of The Subcommittee With NATO Oversight, Obama Has Failed To Hold Any Hearings On Afghanistan:
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POPSNow Bush Is Appeasing Iran joined envoys from France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany in talks with Saeed Jalili -- Iran's nuclear negotiator and an Ahmadinejad confidant -- about incentives to give to Tehran. ven with record oil prices, mismanagement has driven the Iranian economy into the ground. On July 14, the Ministry of Housing reported an "historical" 125% rise in housing prices. The same day, Tabnak, a news Web site run by a former head of the IRGC, admitted foodstuff inflation had reached 50% annually. On July 8, 2008, a National Iranian Oil Company executive acknowledged in the Iranian press that, without significant investment in infrastructure, Iranian oil production would decline each year by 300,000 barrels a day. In the past month alone, Iranian workers have struck for unpaid wages at the Khodro automotive plant (which assembles Peugeots), the Alburz Tire Company, and the Haft Tapeh Sugar Cane factory.
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POPSMaliki's Bet Mr. Obama, he is also placing one on Mr. McCain, which is that in the event the Republican is elected, he will place principle and the national interest over politics and petty vindictiveness. For our part we see the emergence of an Iraq making its own choices in these matters rather than having them dictated by the American ambassador or American generals as yet another sign of victory in the Battle of Iraq. The Iraqis want America as their friends whether Mr. Obama or Mr. McCain is president. For all the talk by critics of how the Iraq War supposedly alienated America from the world, here is an administration in Baghdad maneuvering for a friend in the White House.
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POPSRussian Bombers Could Be Deployed To Cuba It was unclear if the source was suggesting that Russia would reopen a base in Cuba or merely use an airfield there for stopovers by the bombers, Tu-160s and Tu-95s, which are already capable of reaching the United States from bases in Russia. Russian strategic bombers, long mothballed, resumed worldwide patrols last year under orders from then-President Vladimir Putin. The flights have continued under his successor, Dmitry Medvedev. Aircraft from the NATO alliance have repeatedly scrambled as the bombers approached but did not enter the airspace of alliance countries. The Russian bombers also buzzed low over the USS Nimitz, an American aircraft carrier, in the Pacific Ocean this year. The United States says it wants to deploy tracking radar in the Czech Republic and 10 missile interceptors in Poland as a defensive measure against missiles that might be fired from countries such as Iran.
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POPSHezbollah Brigades Propaganda Specialist Captured In Baghdad Shia terror groups have launched a handful of IRAM attacks on US and Iraqi outposts in Baghdad. http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2008/06/mahdi_army_uses_flyi.php Hezbollah Brigades also posted video of an attack on a US patrol with an Iranian-supplied, armor-piercing, explosively formed projectile, or EFP. The capture of the Hezbollah Brigades propaganda expert is the latest in a series of raids against Shia terrorists. Scores of Special Groups operatives have been captured over the past month, including senior leaders, weapons smugglers, financiers, trainers, and cell leaders.
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POPSMiddle East Minefield For Barack Obama But Israeli officials - with whom he's reportedly meeting on Tuesday - will press him to define his policies about nuclear power and Iran, experts said. "The Israelis are going to have real questions about Iran, and about how he views taking out nuclear facilities there - if they haven't done it already themselves by the time Bush leaves," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. "That topic will come up, on both sides. He'll get asked about it," said former State Department Mideast analyst Graeme Bannerman. "He's got to remember he's speaking to Americans - he's in a campaign, after all - even if that means he has to say things that make the locals very nervous."
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POPSWill Washington Betray Anti-Regime Iranians? and I believe that that should lead to a review of whether they are still a terrorist organization or not." Since then, an interagency group of the U.S. government, led by the FBI, has exonerated the Iranians at Ashraf of terrorism. After a British court ruled that the group was not "concerned in terrorism," the U.K. government in June removed the group from its terrorist list. The Iranian regime is determined to destroy its main opponent and, with some success, has pressured the Iraqi government to disband Camp Ashraf and turn MEK members over to Iran. Then, on July 9, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said that the Iraqi government had decided to expel members of the MEK. The Iranian ambassador to Iraq, Hassan Kezemi-Qomi, specified that the Iraqi cabinet had agreed quickly to expel the MEK from Iraq. Iranian television reported on July 6 that "American military forces have announced their readiness to hand over" Camp Ashraf to Baghdad.
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POPSFeckless To Reckless, Pelosi Should Resign But she's not fooling anyone. In playing politics with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the speaker has moved beyond the incompetence and irresponsibility that have characterized her leadership to date. President Bush, however, isn't about to be suckered into releasing the reserves just long enough for pump prices to fall by Election Day, thereby saving Democrats' skins so they can carry on their drill-nothingism for an additional two years. The president needs to do two things with Pelosi's proposal: First, tell her "no," unless she comes up with a plan to open up more drilling. Second, expose it for what it is — a bid to paint Bush as the problem to distract from her own sorry record. borders on recklessness, something we cannot tolerate in such dangerous times.
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POPSSilent No More: Iranian Student Sentenced To Death
The protests Mr Batebi took part in nine years ago frightened Iran’s rulers. The students were angry about censorship, the persecution of intellectuals and the thugs who beat up any student overheard disparaging the regime. Mr Batebi thinks Iran could well turn solidly democratic some day. In neighbouring states, religious extremism is popular. In Iran, he says, the government is religiously extreme, but the people are not. He is cagey about how exactly he escaped. But he says he used a cellphone camera to record virtually every step of his journey, and will soon go public with the pictures and his commentary. Meanwhile, he seems to be enjoying America. He praises the way “people have the opportunity to become who they want to be”. Shortly after he arrived, he posted a picture of himself in front of the Capitol on his Farsi-language blog,* with the caption: “Your hands will never touch me again.” http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-KjyoxDgwc6uQN8Q8PTn1n8dj8oA-?cq=1
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POPSVienna-Based Investigators Getting Tough On Iran Now Why the emphasis now on sins Iran may have committed in the past? Wasn’t the finding that warhead design stopped in 2003 reassuring enough? No, say nuclear experts inside and outside the international agency. Candor about Iran’s progress in designing a weapon matters because Tehran’s scientists continue to move forward on a related front. They are learning how to make uranium fuel. And if they already have a good warhead design in hand, the lack of fuel may be the one thing standing between them and the ability to make a bomb. The American finding last December that Iran suspended its weapon-design work in 2003 created a classic case of a glass that could be seen as either half full or half empty. That does not mean they have a workable design for the most frightening kind of bomb in today’s world — one miniaturized to about one ton so it can sit atop a missile, which is much faster and harder to stop than any plane
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POPSRussia Objects To US-Czech Shield: Iran Flexes It's Missiles What a missile defense system in Europe would do is restore the ambiguity inherent in the American deterrent posture even in the event Iran has nuclear weapons. If the Ayatollahs cannot rely on their missiles penetrating the defense, they are faced with possibility that America could actually destroy it utterly, leaving no time for Teheran to even deploy shipping container bombs, in response to any attack Washington considered sufficiently offensive. The Ayatollahs could persuade themselves that Washington mightn’t but it would have to admit that it could. And that doubt might make all the difference. Because of the value that comes from the ambiguity of what the US may do to an adversary if the acts we seek to deter are carried out, it hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed. ‘This essential sense of fear is the working force of deterrence. That the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked
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POPSMahmoud The Fauxtographer Update: This image, part of a framegrab from an Al Alam television broadcast of the launch (apparently taken at approximately the same time from a slightly higher elevation) makes it pretty clear which missile was conjured from borrowed pixels.
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POPSDefinition Of Patriotism: "Happiness When The US Defeats The Enemy" They have lost their supposedly divine endorsement; why would Allah have called them to action, just to see them destroyed by the infidels? The sheer bloodthirstiness of their actions in Iraq have exposed them as drug-driven demons, not righteous jihadists. While Barack Obama and the Democratic party run around shouting to every microphone they can find that “Al-Qaeda is stronger today than it was on 9/11″ have challenged the core assumptions of Al-Qaeda’s motivating philosophy, that Allah is on their side and they cannot fail, and in doing so have crushed the spirit of Al-Qaeda’s followers and assured that recruiting into “Allah’s army” is far more difficult that it would have been if otherwise. Al Qaeda itself is telling a different story. Al-Qaeda leaders admit: 'We are in crisis. There is panic and fear' http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article3346386.ece
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POPSIran Announces Bid For UN Security Council Seat Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki announced his country's bid today for a seat on the United Nations Security Council, a candidacy that U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad immediately rejected. U.S. opposition would be based on the unwritten rule at the UN that nations under Security Council sanctions aren't elected to the panel. The council has adopted three resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran over its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment as part of its nuclear program.
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POPSMcCain vs. Obama On National Security that espouses the destruction of the State of Israel as its fondest wish and pledges undying enmity to the United States to possess the weapons to advance their malevolent ambitions." He also rejects "unconditional dialogues" with Iran. Obama has delivered messages on Iran that were more mixed. But that only makes diplomacy more important. If we must use military force, we are more likely to succeed, and will have far greater support at home and abroad, if we have exhausted our diplomatic efforts." In the same speech, however, Obama promised: "aggressive, principled diplomacy without self-defeating preconditions....Obama missed a vote on a controversial amendment offered by Sen. Jon Kyl and Lieberman that proposed labeling Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization . Obama called the amendment a repeat of the mistakes that led to war in Iraq; however, he had cosponsored an earlier bill declaring the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization
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POPSFair-Weather Civil Libertarians In January, Greenwald reports, Olbermann delivered an unhinged rant in which he called the immunity provision a "shameless, breathless, literally textbook example of fascism"--and in case you thought he meant the nongenocidal Italian kind, he also likened proponents of immunity to "the bureaucrats of the Third Reich." "But that was five whole months ago" Greenwald observes: Now that Barack Obama supports a law that does the same thing--and now that Obama justifies that support by claiming that this bill is necessary to keep us Safe from the Terrorists--everything has changed. . . . Olbermann invited Newsweek's Jonathan Alter onto his show to discuss Obama's support for the FISA. There wasn't a word of rational criticism of the bill. Instead, the two media stars jointly hailed Obama's bravery and strength--as evidenced by his "standing up to the left" in order to support this important centrist FISA compromise.
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POPSAn Iranian "Embassy" In Boston [mullahs lobby machine] Two year ago when Maleki came to Harvard, Sadegh Kharrazi, a close friend and collaborator of his, told Shargh newspaper in Tehran (May 28, 2006): "There is actually an Iranian lobby in US which illustrates itself occasionally…. should remain non-governmental, but the government could support it, promote it and rely on it". Maleki's goal has been to turn this "occasional" lobby to a full time and large scale machine of influence and misinformation. It is now apparent that the policy of United States on Iran over the past has been packed with confusion and shortsightedness. It is certainly not a mere security oversight to allow so many former officials enter the United States. Almost certainly, the United States’ goal is to create a back door channel to the mullahs in Iran, a de facto Iranian embassy. Nevertheless, this “embassy” is acting more like a Trojan horse than an ambassadorial channel.
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POPSSufism, Sophistry And Politics from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean. Would the Pakistanis or the Moroccans burn their homeland by joining "the ball of fire" because Khomeinism is denied the bomb? The "ball of fire" is a poetic expression, and I wondered where it came from. Would Turks and Algerians jump on the "ball of fire" to show solidarity with a regime that has helped terror groups against them for decades? Even the Syrian rulers are unlikely to risk their survival by trying to jump on El-Baradaei's "ball of fire" to please the mullahs. They like the mullahs' money, not the mullahs themselves. Despite Tehran's massive handouts in recent years, one doubts even Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood in general would take risks to show solidarity with a regime that, while generous, has been trying to impose ideological control. That leaves the branches of the Hezbollah, especially the largest and best-financed Lebanese one. But then, as always what Hezbollah does will be decided in Tehran not Beir
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POPSFeds Charge Two With Conspiracy To Export Aircraft Parts To Iran Federal agents executed a search warrant at Bujduveanu's home and business immediately after his arrest. Agents found boxes of military aircraft parts stored on Bujduvenau's property, including hundreds of parts for the C-130, the F-5, and other military aircraft. "Today's defendants are charged with illegally selling US military equipment to Iran, thus helping that country build up its military strength," said R. Alexander Acosta, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. "We owe it to the many service men and women who defend us to vigorously prosecute illegal exports of American military equipment." "Disrupting illegal procurement networks that attempt to circumvent our sanctions against Iran is a top priority of the Bureau of Industry and Security," said Special Agent in Charge, Michael Johnson. "This case demonstrates the importance of team work in preventing diversion of sensitive US goods," he added.
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POPS Suicidal Mystics With Nukes After more UN sanctions were threatened, Ahmadinejad stated: As God promised, the oppressors will have their noses rubbed in the dirt. Now they are fulfilling this promise by themselves... Let it be known that in whatever we do, I see the hand of God and the hidden imam at every moment. The expansion is driven by an apocalyptic vision: that Shiite Islam's long-hidden 12th Imam, or Mahdi, will soon emerge -- possibly at the mosque of Jamkaran -- to inaugurate the end of the world. The man who provided $20 million to prepare the shrine for that moment, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has reportedly told his cabinet that he expects the Mahdi to arrive within the next two years.
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POPSThe Lava Lamp Candidate ElBaradei's New Brief, Same as His Old Brief The buzz circulating now is that IAEA Director Mohammed ElBaradei said on al-Arabiya that Iran could be months away from producing a nuclear weapon, as noted by AllahPundit at Hot Air and Jeff Stein at Congressional Quarterly. What's more, just about all analyses completely ignore Iran's pursuit of a plutonium -based weapon through external acquisition and production beyond Iran's borders and beneath the IAEA and Western international radar. Syria is only now entertaining the idea of limited and restricted IAEA inspections of the nuclear facility destroyed by Israel last September 6. This "only line of defense" claim comes from the same UN "nuclear watchdog" that has no enforcement mechanism and the same one that failed to detect and/or deter North Korea, India, and Pakistan from developing nuclear weapons. http://tank.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTg2MjNmOTc1YTkzMGI4YjA1YWE0MTYyN2Q0YzNiMjc=
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POPSObama: It's Only About Winning But here's what's scary: For all of Kerry's reputed smoothness and Eastern intellect, he often tied himself in knots trying to reconcile his absurdly opposing positions. Obama can flip and flop with unmatched alacrity and facility and with the absence of self-consciousness and accountability of an accomplished sociopath . This guy doesn't even acknowledge he's changing positions; he does it without breaking a sweat and never looks back. I ask you to consider the common thread underlying these turnarounds his nearly immediate backtracking on whether Iran poses a serious threat to America; his progressive position shifts on Iraq from "don't go in, stay in, and get out"; and his vigorous defense then abandonment of both his pastor and his church. The common thread, in a word, is expedience. It is not toughness; it is not savvy; it is not gravitas; and by all means, it is not admirable. Barack Obama is every bit as politically calculating as Bill Clinton but twice as smooth.
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POPSThe Israeli "Dry Run"On Iran's Nuclear Facilities Looks like there would be a side benefit from an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities: the blind, toothless UN atomic "watchdog" -- Mohamed El Baradei -- promised to resign if Iran is targeted. US officials reported on Friday that more than 100 Israeli F-16s and F-15s staged a complex operation over the Mediterranean during the first week of June. The aircraft traversed more than 900 miles, about the distance from Israel to Iran's Natanz nuclear enrichment facility; the exercise also tested the refueling of planes and helicopters tasked with rescuing downed pilots. El Baradei wasn't pleased. He warned that any attack on Iran would turn the entire Middle East "into a fireball." Russia's response: as Iran's preeminent nuclear technology supplier, Russia is concerned with its cash flow. It also warned Israel not to attack. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov instructed Israel not to use force, claiming there is no proof Iran is trying to acquire atomic weapons.
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POPSThe Failed Environmentalists' Bans The editorial, "How to cut foreign oil imports" by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune is a masterful piece of propaganda straight from Barack Obama's talking points. How about we continue to do what the environmentalists want, even though it hurts us economically, but also do the following: What if we lift the ban on drilling for oil in ANWR, the Outer Continental Shelf and the Gulf of Mexico? What if we explore and drill for our own oil at a greater pace? What if we begin mining the trillions of gallons of liquid oil contained in the shale in the Bakken Formation? What if we build new refineries to produce more gasoline? If we did these things we would increase supply! When you increase supply the price comes down. We would stop sending our money overseas and create jobs and wealth here in America rather than in Saudi Arabia and Iran. We would stop being held hostage to the whims of OPEC. We would stop supporting Communist regimes like that of Hugo Chavez.
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POPSThe New Soft Underbelly Of Europe if Iran is able to continue a very transparent nuclear policy to its logical conclusion. Looking at Germany, then, Iran sees a country with nothing to counter the pressure of merely an implied nuclear threat. Jihadists see the linchpin of Europe, easy of access and inadvertently hospitable to operations, that will hardly punish those who fall into its hands, and that can neither accomplish on its own a flexible expeditionary response against a hostile base or sponsor, nor reply in kind to a nuclear strike. Thus the German government should be especially nervous about cargos trucked overland from the east. For its own protection, and thus that of Europe, Germany could more closely integrate and where appropriate reintegrate itself into the expeditionary and nuclear retaliatory structures of the U.S., Britain, and France, without moving nuclear weapons forward to German soil; embrace limited missile defense against potentially nuclear-armed Iranian IRBMs
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POPSIran Supplying Equipment To Taliban To Fight British Evidence found by UK special forces is understood to concern the supply of the same bomb-making equipment Iran provides to insurgents in Iraq, namely components for explosively formed projectiles, or EFPs. It is not clear whether the bomb that last week killed four British SAS reservists in Helmand province was such a device, although British military commanders fear that increasing Iranian involvement in Afghanistan may render irrelevant attempts to increase the number of armoured vehicles in the conflict. Yesterday four coalition soldiers were killed by a bomb in the province of Kandahar. Meanwhile, as investigations continue into the use of Snatch Land Rovers in southern Afghanistan in which the four UK troops died last week, new figures obtained by The Observer reveal that more than 700 armoured vehicles that could be deployed to protect British personnel in Helmand are out of action.
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POPSThe New Meaning Of "Politics Of Change" * Obama repeatedly vowed to meet with various heads of terror states - most notably Ahmadinejad of Iran - "without preconditions." Then, with the nomination in sight, he zigzagged: "There's no reason why we would necessarily meet with Ahmadinejad. He's not the most powerful person in Iran." * In October, he supported NAFTA expansion. In March, campaigning in the Ohio primary, he called for a "reopening" of the trade pact's terms. This week, he called his own primary rhetoric "overheated" and said NAFTA has had a positive effect on the US economy. Change, yes. But "change we can believe in"?
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POPSUS Diplomacy On Iran Amid Reported Israeli Attack Exercise "I can certainly understand that, given the fact that the president of Iran has talked about wiping Israel off the map," he said. "So Israel does see Iran as an existential threat. But again, I am going to have to kick any questions about what was intended by this exercise, what its purpose was, what they hoped to accomplish, to the Israeli government. They're the competent officials to talk about those issues." Israel staged a long-range air strike to destroy an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1980, and last September it bombed a facility in northern Syria said by some analysts to have been a reactor being built with North Korean help. Iran insists its nuclear program is entirely peaceful, but Israel and key Bush administration officials, among others, believe it is seeking a weapons capability.
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POPSSound Bites And Sloganeering Just Won’t Cut It Anymore even including such environmentally sensitive countries as the United Kingdom, Norway and France—to limit oil and gas exploration to this extent. Gulf of Mexico that hold billions of barrels of oil and gas are inaccessible for purely political reasons. Appeasing Florida’s real-estate and tourism industries has been more important than U.S. energy security. In addition, politicians throw red meat to the crowd by promising to punish the oil industry for its huge profits, overlooking the small problem that much of this profit is not even made in the United States. In fact, it is not the oil companies, but producing countries like Venezuela, Mexico, Iran and Russia that are provoking the pending production crunch through lack of investment. National oil companies now control nearly 80 percent of worldwide reserves, leaving major Western multinationals with full access to only 6 percent.
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POPSUK Security Breach: New Batch Of Terror Files Left On Train It wants Iran to criminalise the financing of terrorism and stop illicit money being diverted to its nuclear programme. The watchdog says this is a significant vulnerability within the international financial system. It is negotiating with countries such as China, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Burma and the Comoros on their anti-terrorism policies. In 2000, an MI6 officer left a laptop in a taxi after a night drinking in a bar. Another was snatched when an MI5 officer put it down while buying a ticket at a Tube station. A Royal Navy laptop was stolen in Manchester in 2006, and an Army laptop containing data on 500 people was stolen from a recruiting office in Edinburgh in 2005.
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POPSObama and Iran:The Democrats Modern-Day McGovern Judging from last week's address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Sen. Barack Obama doesn't want voters to see him as soft on Iran and its genocidal President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Iranians "understand - sometimes, it seems, better than a lot of Americans do - that if American power collapses in Iraq, if we abandon our allies" then "our position throughout the region will become much weaker and Iran's position much stronger," Lieberman added. The Senate - including well over half of the Democrats - voted for the amendment, which passed 76-22. Obama, who was absent, said he opposed the amendment because it could be used as pretext to invade Iran. Obama denounced Kyl-Lieberman as "reckless" and criticized his chief rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for supporting it. However tough he tries to sound when talking to AIPAC, Barack Obama's real sympathies are with the George Soros/MoveOn.org wing of the Democrat Party.
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POPSObama's Plan For Defeat But Obama and the Democrats would forfeit every one of these successes to a declared policy of fixed and unconditional withdrawal. The disconnect between what Democrats are saying about Iraq and what is actually happening there has reached grotesque proportions. Obama will keep pulling out his 2002 speech opposing the war. But McCain's case is simple. Is not Obama's central mantra that this election is about the future not the past? It is about 2009, not 2002. Obama promises that upon his inauguration, he will order the Joint Chiefs to bring him a plan for withdrawal from Iraq within 16 months. If McCain cannot take to the American people the case for the folly of that policy, he will not be president. Nor should he be.
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POPSSaudis Pushing U.N. Démarche Against Israel The dispute over oil appears to be part of a larger rift between the two countries, with a London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi reporting recently that relations have reached their lowest point in years. The Saudis seek strong American backing against Iran," Mr. Gold, a former Israeli U.N. ambassador who has written extensively on the kingdom, said. "They don't want to hear from Condi Rice about diplomatic progress between Abbas and Israel. They want to know what America is doing about Iran." The Saudis, he said, base their policies on their strong alliance with America — or on Arab consensus. When the Israeli government earlier this month announced that it was planning to build nearly 900 new housing units in Jerusalem, ecretary-General Ban issued a strong statement: Israel's "continued construction in settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory" violates international law and Israel's obligations under the road map and the Annapolis process.
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