Obama Against Obamacare….in the graduate student’s own Obamawords

 

I’ll give you a couple of hints. First, he’s a famous Constitutional scholar.  Second, he’s rumored to be the smartest elected official evah.  Third, he, er, obviously doesn’t take his own advice.  Gretchen Carlson from Fox & Friends introduces this clip that shows Barack Obama almost eerily framing the very argument that Judge Robert Vinson used to overturn Obama’s signature legislation, from an appearance in February 2008 on Ellen DeGeneres’ daytime talk show (via Greg Hengler, h/t Vayapaso):

Obama was specifically rebutting the individual mandate in Hillary Clinton’s health-care proposal:

She’d have the government force every individual to buy insurance, and I don’t have such a mandate because I don’t think the problem is that people don’t want health insurance.  It’s that they can’t afford it

Well, if things were that easy, I could mandate everybody buy a house, and that, you know, and that would solve, you know, the problem of homelessness.  It doesn’t.

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/02/01/video-guess-who-predicted-the-obamacare-ruling/

Obama Knew He Had to Say Something about Egyptian Crisis So He Gave Us Obamatalk……

 ……lots of words, well pronounced, from well-pressed suit….. ‘signifying nothing’!

Video: Obama somehow manages to say nothing meaningful in Egypt statement. 

Posted by Allahpundit at HotAir

“The money line that’s being picked up by news outlets and touted on Twitter is, “an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now.” But what does “now” mean? Didn’t Mubarak already begin the transition process today by agreeing not to run again in the fall? Didn’t he do precisely what Obama asked him to do, in fact? To listen to this, you’d think the White House was somehow displeased by his recalcitrance even though he’s following the advice they’ve given him. But then that’s the game we’re playing right now, I guess: On the one hand, be as gentle as possible behind the scenes in easing Mubarak out so as not to offend other Sunni leaders around the region, and on the other hand, call publicly for restraint by the Egyptian army and assure the protesters that their voices are being heard. Protesters can listen to this and assume that when Obama says “now,” he’s working hard to push Mubarak out. And allies can listen to it and assume that we’re still on track for a nice “orderly transition,” provided the Egyptian public is willing to tolerate it.

I have to say, I’m amazed that he had the balls to toss the following lines in there. Remember, we’ve backed Mubarak for 30 years, through administrations led by both Republicans and Democrats, precisely because we knew he’d keep the fanatics among the Egyptian electorate out of power:

After his speech tonight, I spoke directly to president Mubarak. He recognizes that the status quo is not sustainable and that a change must take place. Indeed all of us who are privileged to serve in political positions of power do so at the will of our people. Through thousands of years Egypt has known many moments of transformation. The voices of the Egyptian people tell us this is one of those moments; this is one of those times…

To the people of Egypt, particularly the young people of Egypt, I want to be clear. We hear your voices. I have an unyielding belief that you will determine your own destiny and seize the promise of a better future for your children and your grandchildren.

If I were Egyptian, I’d feel grievously insulted that this guy would dare pay lip service to democracy and self-determination after his country looked the other way at fascism for more than a generation. But who knows? Hopefully it’ll work, at least well enough to maintain a little American leverage over whatever comes next.

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/02/01/video-obama-somehow-manages-to-say-nothing-meaningful-in-egypt-statement/

Hugh Hewitt’s Fear of the Muslim Brotherhood Explained

February 1st, 2011

What does the Muslim Brotherhood want? And why do some discount it?

Ever since the turmoil in Egypt began, I’ve been saying that no one knows what will happen there. That is still my position.

But amidst all the speculation, I think we discount the possibility of an Islamist state at our peril—and, to speak bluntly, those who discount it are fools, no matter how learned they may be.

The Muslim Brotherhood—the Islamist fundamentalist group based in Egypt—is such a fine name. Who could be against brotherhood (well, a few feminists; but you know what I mean)? The history of the group is a chilling one, however. And it is no accident that 9/11’s Mohammed Atta and Ayman al Zawahiri were highly educated Egyptians (note that al Zawahiri joined the Brotherhood at the ripe old age of fourteen).

Sayyid Qutb was another Egyptian. He became a leading voice of the “spiritual” wing of the Brotherhood in the 50s and 60s. This was his advice to the Muslim world:

Qutb…taught that Muslims and Muslim rulers who fail to implement God’s laws are takfir [apostate], they live in a state of jahiliyya [ignorance] and must be opposed…This idea has influenced the rise of contemporary takfiri militants who use this doctrine to legitimize the killing of Muslim by Muslim for alleged apostasy. In contrast to Abul Ala Mawdudi [1903-1979], who advocated the establishment of “Allah’s law in Allah’s land” by a gradualist methodology of infiltration into both secular and nominal Muslim lands, Qutb declared direct, immediate action against jahili and takfiri states…and gave such jihadis legitimization for the killing of Muslim by Muslim for alleged apostasy.

The Brotherhood wasn’t all talk and no action. Here’s some of the group’s influence on Egyptian political affairs:

The Society of Muslim Brothers, the oldest and most influential fundamentalist group in Egypt, instigated an uprising against the British, whose lingering occupation of the Suez Canal zone enraged the nationalists. In January, 1952, in response to the British massacre of fifty Egyptian policemen, mobs organized by the Muslim Brothers in Cairo set fire to movie theatres, casinos, department stores, night clubs, and automobile showrooms, which, in their view, represented an Egypt that had tied its future to the West. At least thirty people were killed, seven hundred and fifty buildings were destroyed, and twelve thousand people were made homeless…In July of that year, a military junta, dominated by an Army colonel, Gamal Abdel Nasser, packed King Farouk onto his yacht and seized control of the government, without firing a shot. According to several fellow-conspirators who later wrote about the event, Nasser secretly promised the Brothers that he would impose Sharia—the rule of Islamic law—on the country…

It quickly became obvious to Nasser that Qutb and his corps of young Islamists had a different agenda for Egyptian society from his, and he shut down [the Brotherhood’s] magazine after only a few issues had been published. But the religious faction was not so easily controlled. The ideological war over Egypt’s future reached a climax on the night of October 26, 1954, when a member of the Brothers attempted to assassinate Nasser as he spoke before an immense crowd in Alexandria. Eight shots missed their mark. Nasser responded by having six conspirators executed immediately and arresting more than a thousand others, including Qutb. He had crushed the Brothers, once and for all, he thought….

I have quoted at length because I would imagine most of us are unfamiliar with the finer points of Egyptian history, and it’s important to get some historical perspective on what’s happening now.

What’s more, these events from the 50s and 60s have had a direct affect on us before, notably in regard to 9/11:

One line of thinking proposes that America’s tragedy on September 11th was born in the prisons of Egypt. Human-rights advocates in Cairo argue that torture created an appetite for revenge, first in Sayyid Qutb and later in his acolytes, including Ayman al-Zawahiri [later to become al Qaeda’s second in command]. The main target of their wrath was the secular Egyptian government, but a powerful current of anger was directed toward the West, which they saw as an enabling force behind the repressive regime. They held the West responsible for corrupting and humiliating Islamic society.

But let’s go back a bit, and see what transpired between Nasser and Qutb:

In 1964, President Abd al-Salaam Arif of Iraq prevailed upon Nasser to grant Qutb parole, but the following year he was arrested again and charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government…Qutb received a death sentence. “Thank God,” he said. “I performed jihad for fifteen years until I earned this martyrdom.” Qutb was hanged on August 29, 1966, and the Islamist threat in Egypt seemed to have been extinguished. “The Nasserite regime thought that the Islamic movement received a deadly blow with the execution of Sayyid Qutb and his comrades,” Zawahiri wrote in his memoir. “But the apparent surface calm concealed an immediate interaction with Sayyid Qutb’s ideas and the formation of the nucleus of the modern Islamic jihad movement in Egypt.” The same year Qutb was hanged, Zawahiri helped form an underground militant cell dedicated to replacing the secular Egyptian government with an Islamic one. He was fifteen years old.

While we’re looking at history, let’s not ignore the events surrounding the assassination of Anwar Sadat:

In January 1977, a series of ‘Bread Riots’ protested Sadat’s economic liberalization and specifically a government decree lifting price controls on basic necessities like bread. Dozens of nightclubs on the famous Pyramids Street were sacked by Islamists. Following the riots the government reversed its position and re-established the price controls.

Islamists were enraged by Sadat’s Sinai treaty with Israel, particularly the radical Egyptian Islamic Jihad. According to interviews and information gathered by journalist Lawrence Wright, the group was recruiting military officers and accumulating weapons, waiting for the right moment to launch “a complete overthrow of the existing order” in Egypt. Chief strategist of El-Jihad was Aboud el-Zumar, a colonel in the military intelligence whose “plan was to kill the main leaders of the country, capture the headquarters of the army and State Security, the telephone exchange building, and of course the radio and television building, where news of the Islamic revolution would then be broadcast, unleashing – he expected – a popular uprising against secular authority all over the country.”

In February 1981, Egyptian authorities were alerted to El-Jihad’s plan by the arrest of an operative carrying crucial information. In September, Sadat ordered a highly unpopular roundup of more than 1500 people, including many Jihad members, the Coptic Orthodox Pope, Bishop, and highly ranked clergy members, but also intellectuals and activists of all ideological stripes.

The round up missed a Jihad cell in the military led by Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli, who succeeded in assassinating Anwar Sadat that October.

And now please take a look at the following remarks made yesterday by Fareed Zacharia in an interview with Elliot Spitzer, and then some commentary on them by Andrew McCarthy which occurred on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show. First, Zacharia and Spitzer:

FZ: The Brotherhood, even the Muslim Brotherhood, does not have the aspirations of the Iranians to create a kind of Islamic state…

ES: You said the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t have the aspirations to create a theocracy. Do they not have the aspirations? Or do they not have the power to do it at this point?

FZ: For the last thirty years or so, the Muslim Brotherhood seems to have moved in the direction of wanting to be a conservative, socially religious organization that wants to institute some greater element of Sharia. Now to understand what that means, a lot of that is social welfare stuff. Some of it is things like the veil. Some of it is court procedures in which unfortunately, women would have fewer voices. But it’s not some kind of totalitarian dictatorship. They seem to have accommodated themselves to the idea of democracy, and they have done so for decades now.

Do you think this is likely, after having read the earlier history right up to the early part of the present century? Or do you think we have a fine old bridge in Brooklyn to sell Mr. Zacharia?

I don’t know whether the Brotherhood will succeed in finally taking over after all these long decades of trying. But those who don’t think they still want desperately to do so, and have instead become social workers, are what might be called useful idiots.

And that’s the best thing we can call them. I’m with Andrew McCarthy on this one:

I just think that is willfully closing your eyes and your ears to what they say and what they write. I mean, look, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood, just a few months ago, gave a raging speech calling for jihad. I think Mr. Zacharia is paying attention to what the Brotherhood says to their rapt, English audience, and not a whole lot of attention to what they say, either when they think no one’s listening to them, or in the Arabic press, which tends to be virulently anti-American and anti-Israeli, and does aspire to the creation of a theocracy. What more do you need to know than that their slogan, their motto remains to this day the same. The Koran is our law, jihad is our way, dying in the way of Allah is our highest aspiration.

This willful, hopeful closing of the eyes and ears of a large part of the intelligentsia is inexplicable to me, and yet it happens time and again. It happened with Hitler. It happened with Castro. It happened in Iran with Khomeini, whom the left thought it could control and co-opt. It happened with the West and Yassir Arafat, their revolutionary darling turned pussycat. I don’t know how many people agree with Zacharia about the Brotherhood (here’s an influential one), but I fervently hope their numbers are small, and that they do not include our own president and State Department—although I fear they might.

[NOTE: This post is already very long, but I must add a link to Andrew McCarthy’s excellent article covering some of this same territory. I just noticed it, after having written my post; if I’d seen it earlier I might have saved myself the trouble of writing this and just linked to McCarthy!

If you don’t feel like plowing through the McCarthy piece, however, I’ll just quote the end, which bears on the ending of my post as well:

The Obama administration has courted Egyptian Islamists from the start. It invited the Muslim Brotherhood to the president’s 2009 Cairo speech, even though the organization is officially banned in Egypt. It has rolled out the red carpet to the Brotherhood’s Islamist infrastructure in the U.S. — CAIR, the Muslim American Society, the Islamic Society of North America, the Ground Zero mosque activists — even though many of them have a documented history of Hamas support. To be sure, the current administration has not been singular in this regard. The courting of Ikhwan-allied Islamists has been a bipartisan project since the early 1990s, and elements of the intelligence community and the State Department have long agitated for a license to cultivate the Brotherhood overtly. They think what Anwar Sadat thought: Hey, we can work with these guys.

There is a very good chance we are about to reap what they’ve sown.  We ought to be very afraid.

from HughHewitt

College Grad Obama (the president) Welcomes Muslim Brotherhood

 There is really  only one  culture  college-graduate-student, U.S. president Barack Hussein Obama seems confortable in is at university in the world of the graduate student.  There he can lord it over those matriculating behind him on the time charts……telling this and testing them on that…..or, better yet, simply doing what he does best….lecturing with what he does best….the teleprompter.

Here is the video of his graduate school presentation about the Egyptian crisis:

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/02/01/video-obama-somehow-manages-to-say-nothing-meaningful-in-egypt-statement/

Totally inexperienced in managing anything….totally….this graduate student student is at his worst in this Egyptian crisis surpassing his faux pas of his Cairo debut to the world embarrassment two years ago.

It is a good thing  for Mr. Obama  that most Americans have no memories at all. 

Scott W. Johnson at PowerLine  wrote the following article:

“I haven’t seen it noted much, but the Los Angeles Times reported the position of the Obama administration this past Monday on the participation of the Muslim Brotherhood in a future Egyptian government:

The Obama administration said for the first time that it supports a role for groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned Islamist organization, in a reformed Egyptian government.

The organization must reject violence and recognize democratic goals if the U.S. is to be comfortable with it taking part in the government, the White House said. But by even setting conditions for the involvement of such nonsecular groups, the administration took a surprise step in the midst of the crisis that has enveloped Egypt for the last week.

The New York Times adds that White House staff members have “made clear that they did not rule out engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood as part of an orderly process” of transition to a new government after the departure of Mubarak. The Times helpfully explains that the Muslim Brotherhood “renounced violence years ago.” Funny that the Brotherood’s Hamas branch (i.e., “one of the the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine”) hasn’t gotten the word.

If you want to get a fix on the Muslim Brotherhood that will take you beyond the useful idiocy of the Times (and the Obama administration), you can check out the Hamas charter, or Andrew McCarthy’s “Fear the Muslim Brotherhood.”

UPDATE: Dore Gold has more on the Muslim Brotherhood,as does Neo-Neocon.

Comment:     Regarding any remarks about the Muslim Brotherhood’s role in anything in Egypt at any time, it might be good to remember that sometimes no mouth is better than bad mouth.  

I don’t think this graduate student sitting in  the White House  has reached that level of adult experience  yet.    Whoever is representing the best interests of the Egyptian  government at this point in the turmoil doesn’t need any Marxists on this side of the ocean to puff about who should be included in the power broking.   Mr. Obama has a hard enought time staying alert to the issues  America faces……apparently not yet realizing that there was an election last November in which his gang of big spenders lost.

He hasn’t yet awakened to the news.

---

It’s Turning Ugly in Egypt…..

From the Wall Street Journal:    “Mubarak Supporters Battle Protesters”   by Charles Levinson and  Summer Said

“The political unrest gripping Cairo turned ugly Wednesday, as groups of supporters of President Hosni Mubarak charged antigovernment protesters, underscoring the difficulty of a smooth democratic transition to a post-Mubarak Egypt.

Bloody clashes in the city’s main square escalated through the day, after Mr. Mubarak said Tuesday night he would step down after elections this year—angering protesters who demanded his immediate resignation after 29 years in power.

 The two groups faced off, chanting slogans at each other, fighting and hurling missiles. Protesters at two entrances to Tahrir Square—by the Egyptian Museum and the route from downtown Cairo—came under attack from men heaving rocks and running into them with horses and camels.

The clashes marked a dangerous new phase for the confrontations. Earlier Wednesday, an army spokesman appeared on state television to ask protesters to return home to help restore order. The army said one soldier died Wednesday, and the Health Ministry said 403 were injured, according to statements on state television.

The Obama administration condemned the violence spurred by pro-Mubarak forces. “We are deeply concerned about attacks on the media and peaceful demonstrators,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a statement.

Israel’s prime minister said Iran wants to take advantage of the chaos to create “another Gaza” in Egypt, run by Islamic fundamentalists.

Speaking before the Israeli parliament, Benjamin Netanyahu said he expects any new government in Egypt to honor its three-decade-long peace agreement with Israel, the Associated Press reported. But he warned that Islamic groups have already taken over by democratic means in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza.

In Cairo, Mubarak supporter Sayed Mohammed Sayed, 37 years old, said the protesters pushed things too far by refusing to back down after the president agreed to pursue reforms and eventually step down.

“The situation is unacceptable,” the air-conditioner technician said. “The majority of protesters are young people and aren’t aware of their actions and consequences.”

Mohamed ElBaradei, the leader of the opposition’s loose coalition, said in an interview that he had heard government supporters were sending men to Tahrir Square to attack protesters and warned against acts of violence. Attacks on demonstrators, he charged, would make it difficult to conduct negotiations with “a regime that is a bunch of thugs.”

At the downtown entrance to the square, groups of Mubarak supporters started organizing charges, running up and down the street creating mayhem. Protesters responded by forming a human barrier three to four people deep to keep the Mubarak supporters out.

Mohamed Abdu, a 22-year-old graduate of Helwan University and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an opposition group, grew visibly shaken as the men began hurling rocks over the human barricade. One man on the protesters’ side pulled out a pair of large light bulbs from his backpack and threw them at the Mubarak supporters. He was quickly shouted down by protesters chanting “peace.”

Ibrahim Saadouni, 47, a lawyer who joined the protests, said he believed the violence was started by the thugs for hire that are a standard feature of Egyptian electoral politics. “They’ve come to create a civil war,” Mr. Saadouni said. “They’re doing this to make war so the army will step in to end the demonstrations, because we won’t leave.”

There were no signs of intervention by the police or military even when a number of men marched to Tahrir Square on camels and horseback and began running into people, as well as hitting and whipping them. A few minutes later, they were stopped by protesters opposed to the president.

“They forced the people to get off the horses and the camels, and they have beaten them badly,” said Muhammad Khalifa, a translator.

Other witnesses said pro-Mubarak protesters tore down banners denouncing the president as they advanced across Tahrir Square.

Some witnesses said they saw members on both sides hitting each other with sticks. Some came away injured, with their heads bleeding.

In some areas, reporters were attacked by those who believe that the long-time ruler deserves to remain power.

The clashes in Cairo were a reminder of the high stakes for the many Egyptians who have benefited from the regime and rely on it for work or status. Many pro-Mubarak demonstrators also expressed skepticism about the motives of the opposition and its leaders.

We don’t want ElBaradei or any American agent,” said Hisham Zain, 38. “We want to continue with Mubarak until stability is formed and the end of his presidency. We want the presidency to be changed in a peaceful and smooth way.”

The scene was dramatically than the almost carnival-like atmosphere that prevailed in Tahrir Square on Tuesday. Some 250,000 protesters turned out for a rally, many with their families in tow.

In Alexandria, Egypt’s conservative second city, thousands of supporters of Mr. Mubarak displaced antigovernment protesters from around the Ibrahim mosque in the center of the city Wednesday, a gathering place for recent protests. But furious arguments and pushing and shoving hadn’t come to blows by evening.

The two sides clashed late the night before, after Mr. Mubarak’s televised speech, when witnesses said dozens of his supporters began throwing rocks at the antigovernment crowd. The army fired shots into the air in an effort to break up that fighting. On Wednesday, the two sides largely avoided each other as they criss-crossed the city through the afternoon.

“There won’t be calm until Mubarak is gone. Take Mubarak out and Egypt will be stable again,” said Samir Mohammed, a 45-year-old manager of a pharmaceuticals factory. “Wait until Friday,” he added. “Friday’s demonstration will be huge.”

—Margaret Coker, Marc Champion, Matt Bradley, Tamer El-Ghobashy and Christopher Rhoads contributed to this article.

New York Times Article Reviews Washington’s Moves Dealing with Egypt’s Agony

As twisted as much ot the printing on the ‘newspages’ of the New York Times has become over the past decade, there still remain many articles  worth reading for gathering important incites into the big issues of the day.   I believe this is one of them…..

“Diplomatic Scrambles as Ally is Pushed to the Exit!”           New York Tmes

“Last Sunday at 2 p.m., a blue-and-white Air Force jet left Andrews Air Force Base bound for Cairo. On board was Frank G. Wisner, an adroit ex-diplomat whom President Obama had asked hours before to undertake a supremely delicate mission: nudging President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt out of power.

What exactly Mr. Wisner would say was still in flux as he flew to Egypt, administration officials said Tuesday; he talked with senior officials in Washington several times during the nearly 14-hour flight. By the time Mr. Wisner met with the Egyptian leader on Tuesday, the diplomat knew what message he would deliver. And Mr. Mubarak had already lost the backing of his other crucial pillar of support: the Egyptian military, which declared it would not open fire on the demonstrators who were demanding his ouster.

The story of how Mr. Mubarak, an Arab autocrat who only last month was the mainstay of America’s policy in a turbulent region, suddenly found himself pushed toward the exit is first and foremost a tale of the Arab street.

But it is also one of political calculations, in Cairo and Washington, which were upset repeatedly as the crowds swelled. And it is the story of a furious scramble by the Obama White House — right up until Mr. Obama’s call Tuesday night for change to begin “now” — to catch up with a democracy movement unfolding so rapidly that Washington came close to being left behind.

“Every time the administration uttered something, its words were immediately overtaken by events on the ground,” said Robert Malley, Middle East and North Africa program director for the International Crisis Group. “And in a matter of days, every assumption about the United States relationship with Egypt was upended.”

In Cairo, the protests prompted Mr. Mubarak to surround himself even more closely with current and former military leaders, including his new, hastily named vice president, prime minister and deputy prime minister.

But instead of protecting him, there is increasing evidence that over the last three days the military establishment — one of the most respected institutions in Egyptian society, and the crucial factor in deciding control of the streets — may have been moving toward pushing Mr. Mubarak out.

The first sign of the military’s deteriorating support came Saturday when rank-and-file troops ordered to buttress the retreating police instead began to cheer on the protesters. Then on Monday night, the military leadership appeared to break away, announcing that the military respected the people’s legitimate demands and that it would not use force against peaceful demonstrators.

A short time later, Mr. Mubarak’s closest aide, Omar Suleiman, the chief of Egyptian intelligence and the newly named vice president, invited opposition groups to negotiate over constitutional reforms.

Back in Washington, the administration was struggling to balance its ties to Mr. Mubarak, its most stalwart ally in the Arab world, with its fear of ending up on the wrong side of history.

But days of watching the protests mushroom on the streets of Egyptian cities convinced administration officials — some facing their first national security crisis in these roles — that Mr. Mubarak probably would not weather the political storm.

Former President George Bush, whose ties to Mr. Mubarak were cemented by the Egyptian leader’s commitment to supply Arab troops during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, called Mr. Mubarak, on his own initiative, to discuss the crisis, officials said. It was not clear what Mr. Bush told Mr. Mubarak.

At a two-hour meeting at the White House last Saturday, Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser; William M. Daley, the White House chief of staff, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta; and other officials coalesced around a strategy to start trying to ease Mr. Mubarak out, an official said.

Mrs. Clinton, officials said, suggested that the administration send Mr. Wisner, a former ambassador to Egypt who knows Mr. Mubarak well, to deliver a message directly from Mr. Obama to the Egyptian leader. Officials said Mr. Wisner urged Mr. Mubarak to declare publicly that he would not run for re-election. But Mr. Wisner has extended his stay in Cairo, officials said, and may have a follow-up meeting with Mr. Mubarak if events seem to demand a quicker exit.

At the Saturday meeting, the officials also agreed that Mrs. Clinton would start calling for “an orderly transition” when she taped a round of interviews for the Sunday talk programs. Administration officials were already smarting from not coming out more fully in support of the protesters earlier. In particular, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had been criticized for an interview with “NewsHour” on PBS on Thursday, in which he answered “no” when the host, Jim Lehrer, asked if the time had come for Mr. Mubarak to go.

“They took a little while to catch up, but by Sunday morning they understood that it was over, and since then, they’ve understood how to make it happen,” said Martin S. Indyk, the director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

Still, administration officials were grappling with their public message versus their private message. Senior officials say that as Mr. Wisner traveled to Egypt, Obama officials in Washington were working on his message to Mr. Mubarak: to announce that he would not run for re-election (he did that), and to promise that his son would not run for election (he did not do that).

No one wanted it to seem as if we were pushing him out,” one administration official said. “That would not serve American interests. It was important for President Mubarak to make the decision.”

Two hours after Mr. Wisner’s plane left Andrews Air Force Base, White House officials sent an e-mail to more than a dozen foreign policy experts in Washington, asking them to come in for a meeting on Monday morning. “Apologies for the short notice in light of a very fluid situation,” the e-mail said.

The Roosevelt Room meeting, led by Benjamin Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, and two other National Security Council officials, Daniel Shapiro and Samantha Power, examined unrest in the region, and the potential for the protests to spread, according to several attendees.

Significantly, during the meeting, White House staff members “made clear that they did not rule out engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood as part of an orderly process,” according to one attendee, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to talk publicly about the meeting. The Muslim group had been suppressed by Mr. Mubarak, and Bush administration officials believed it was involved in terrorist activities. It renounced violence years ago.

Several times, two other attendees said, White House staff members said that Mr. Obama believed that Egyptian politics needed to encompass “nonsecular” parties: diplomatic-speak for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Adding to the pressure against Mr. Mubarak, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, called on the president to bow out gracefully and “make way for a new political structure,” in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times. Mr. Kerry did not coordinate his message with the administration, an official said, but the White House welcomed his initiative.

On Tuesday morning, Mr. Donilon was hunkered over a sprawling spreadsheet on his desk, crossing out names of more than 100 leaders and other officials in the Middle East and the United States. The spreadsheet — “matrix,” one White House aide called it — was full of Mr. Donilon’s notations and asides, as he went through which person at the State Department, the Pentagon, and White House was to call which foreign counterpart.

Mr. Obama himself spoke to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, among other leaders.

American officials had also been in close contact with Vice President Suleiman, who may be playing a particularly pivotal role in managing the transition of power. American and Egyptian officials who know him well describe him as both a cunning operator and Mr. Mubarak’s closest aide. He is also considered the figure with the largest base of support in Egypt’s security forces because his work as intelligence chief built him deep ties with the internal security police and the military.

The momentous events in Cairo leave many questions. Will the protesters tolerate Mr. Mubarak’s staying on, even in a lame-duck capacity? Early indications were negative. How will Egypt prepare for credible elections, after nearly 30 years in which the political opposition was ruthlessly suppressed?

As Stephen P. Cohen, a Middle East expert, put it, “How can you have a transitional government that is acceptable to both the military and the people in the streets, and that is not a coronation for the Muslim Brotherhood?”

Also, how will an extended period of turmoil in a country at the heart of the Arab world affect stability across a region already being rocked by unrest from Yemen to Jordan? And for the United States, can an Egypt without Mr. Mubarak serve American interests in the Middle East?

On Tuesday night, that too remained unanswered. But Mr. Obama, addressing the nation from the White House after a 30-minute phone call with Mr. Mubarak, said, “What is clear, and what I indicated tonight to President Mubarak, is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now.”

Mark Landler and Helene Cooper reported from Washington, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo.”

Dennis Prager Writes: America is in the Grip of Leftwing Censorship!

“The most common left-wing objection to the right is that it wants to control others’ lives. But, both in America and elsewhere, the threat to personal liberty has emanated far more from the left.

In the past generation, the left has controlled so much speech and behavior that these controls are now assumed to be a normal part of life.

Through the use of public opprobrium, laws and lawsuits, Americans today are less free than at any time since the abolition of slavery (with the obvious exception of blacks under Jim Crow).

Public opprobrium is known as political correctness, and it has suppressed saying anything — no matter how true and no matter how innocent — that offends left-wing sensibilities.

“Merry Christmas” offends leftist views on multiculturalism. So, it’s largely gone.

Honest discussion of male-female differences is also largely gone — a lesson the former president of Harvard Larry Summers painfully learned when he simply asked if fewer women succeed in math and science because of innate differences between men and women.

Discussion of disproportionate rates of black violence is not allowed, no matter how well intentioned — unless it is to “prove” how racist America is because of the high number of black men in prison.

In Europe — and in all likelihood coming to America — Christians who, citing the Bible, argue for a heterosexual ideal are arrested.

Thanks to the left, students at colleges get speech codes. They learn early in life that much speech is not permitted.

One may not favorably compare Western or American culture with that of any other. Led by Jesse Jackson, leftists chanted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go” at Stanford University. And away it went.

The left owns the language. Married women are not to be referred to as “Mrs.” but as “Ms.” And the words “lady,” “feminine” and “masculine” have largely gone to their graves. High school and college teams with American Indian names must drop those names because by definition, according to the left, they offend American Indians.

(This last example has always perplexed me. Why does the name Florida State Seminoles offend Indians? One caller to my radio show once responded to that question by asking me how I would feel as a Jew if some team took the name “Jews.” I told him that I would be thrilled. For nearly 4,000 years, Jews have been looking for fans.)

Back to leftist controls on speech: One can only speak of male-female differences if the difference shows the female as superior. Thus to say women are innately more intuitive is perfectly acceptable, but to say men are innately more likely to excel at math is “sexist.”

A woman may reveal as much of her body as she wishes. But if a man is perceived by a woman as looking too long at what she reveals, or if he comments on what she reveals, he may be fired from his job and/or sued for “sexual harassment.” A woman may wear a miniskirt and crop-top, but a man may not have a calendar of women wearing miniskirts and crop-tops on his desk at work. That constitutes sexual harassment and a “hostile work environment.”

Graphic torture and frontal nudity may be shown on screen, but smoking cigars or cigarettes may not. A Churchill museum in London has removed the cigars from wartime Churchill photographs, FDR has had his ubiquitous cigarette holder removed from his photographs, and the cigarettes have been removed from the Beatles’ hands in the famous photo of them crossing Abbey Road.

The list of forbidden words and behaviors due to Leftist activism is quite extensive.

The latest example is the left’s war on any words or imagery that come from the worlds of war or guns.

Already, “crusade” has been removed from Americans’ vocabulary — lest it offend Muslims. Overnight, the left effectively banned the use of a perfectly legitimate word that usually described an admirable preoccupation with doing good — “that newspaper is on an anti-corruption crusade.”

Now, the left has announced that words such as “target” and “cross hairs” are offensive — on the idiotic pretense that such imagery causes people to murder. If I were the CEO of Target stores, I would be concerned — will my company be sued because of its name and logo?

Will the word “war” be next? Perhaps “war on poverty” caused murder. And how about “war on cancer” — only God knows how much killing that caused. Perhaps we should now say “project to eliminate cancer.” But, then again, doesn’t “eliminate” have genocidal overtones?

It was understandable but mistaken for Sarah Palin to take down her map of congressional districts in cross hairs. There was absolutely nothing wrong with that map. Only the totalitarian left argues that it caused the murders in Tucson or anywhere else.

So what’s the answer?

If you love liberty, you must target the left and put its totalitarian tendencies in your cross hairs. We must shoot down political correctness and wage a crusade for truth and liberty. All those ladies and gentlemen who cherish personal and societal freedom must fight like great Indian chiefs, braving secondhand smoke if need be, in affirming a masculinity that has been under relentless attack. And yes, we must even endure the taunts of our foes and, at the appropriate time of the year, wish fellow Americans a “Merry Christmas.”

Then, and only then, will we be able to vanquish lies, defeat the foes of liberty, and once again be able to proudly sing a national anthem that affirms that “the bombs bursting in air gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.”

If we don’t, that line in “The Star-Spangled Banner” will go the way of “Merry Christmas.”

The above article by Dennis Prager is a reprint from Townhall.com.

Bernard Chapin Measures up the Snobby Left and Its Mental Issues

Conservatives regularly observing members of the political left will sometimes feel like zoologists. Our opponents are a craven and animated lot. All their antics, bizarre posturing, moronic moralizing, rage, and mindless dedication to avoiding rational argument call to mind the behaviors of a baboon troop in a Guinea forest.

Conversely, leftists pay no heed to conservatives. This is true both for our beliefs and the words we actually say. They prefer to deal with bogey men of their own construction.

Straw men are easier to set on fire than reality-based propositions. Our foes mischaracterize, accusing us of being mean, greedy, or slave to whatever -ism pops into their head on a Sunday morning. Logical fallacies are their preferred response and they continuously project their deficiencies upon us. Red herrings, straw men, and appeals to conformity abound. A variation of the latter — the “everybody knows” gambit — was recently analyzed here by Herbert London. Another sacred line of anti-reasoning is the “appeal to sophistication.”

The Democratic Party’s faux aura of refinement is an integral tool behind their attempts at indoctrination. This was evident with Sarah Palin, who quickly became their bête noire.

Palin’s positive traits — kindness, happiness, beauty, domestic tranquility, and gratefulness to God — infuriated them with the way she made their own emotionally chaotic, depressed, statist feminists rank in comparison. They depicted her as “ignorant, uneducated, a hick,” and a fool. Standard! The same slanders are applied to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck on a daily basis.

These tactics may or may not work with adults old enough to know better, but polling data suggests that they have succeeded wonderfully with the young (college students in particular).

Allen Ginsberg’s prediction — “We’ll get you through your children!” — was highly prescient. Your average sophomore and freshman at a university know very little about history, current events, political science, human nature, and economics — perfect clay for the Democratic Party to mold into drones.

Statist professors present the ignorati with Manichean interpretations of complex issues. They begin by denying that a political spectrum exists. Were they to do otherwise then conservatives rejecting a neo-socialist like Barack Obama would be non-remarkable. Yet as opposed to nuance (purportedly their thing), the kids only hear “it is people like us who are enlightened and who care” while those on the other side…do not.

Democrats make politics easy for neophytes. This is ideal for both parties. Quick and obvious solutions appeal to young adults who do have not the life experiences to fathom the billions of things they do not know.

Moronic slogans remove argumentative ground altogether. Members of the political left are described as the embodiment of Plato’s Guardians. Democrats are our society’s intelligent and thoughtful elite.

Their good is contrasted with the right’s evil. We are nothing but a ramshackle horde of obese tea baggers, haters, racists, and Neanderthals. A kid soon internalizes that only rubes listen to Republicans. After all, no conservative could pass a polygraph test if he maintained that youthful cadres are “the ones we’ve been waiting for!” No thanks.

Educated folks do not vote Republican, and it will surprise no one that your run-of-the-mill ethnic studies major regards himself as a very educated person indeed. Besides, nearly all of the fashionable people tilt left.

In just a couple of semesters, college students get equipped with all the knowledge they need to psychoanalyze the political right. Even less time is needed to glean that those who oppose the gay lobby are stricken with “homophobia.”

Conservative objections to the demands of gay activists are illogical and a product of finding them “icky.” Sadly, our criticism of policy changes amounts to “anti-gay hysteria.” Linguistic terms also predetermine later affiliation. Leftists are “progressive” which means that those who oppose them must hate progress.

Republicans are more likely to believe in God so leftist atheists are “brights” by default. Global warming? Two words: “it’s science.” Those of us who question it are stupid “flat-earthers.”

For yokels alarmed by the heavy-handed and spasmodic growth of the federocracy there is another term: “tenthers.” Think the Constitution is the highest law of the land? You are a sick individual displaying a pathological fetish.
Everyone with an ounce of schooling intuits that the Constitution is a “living, breathing document,” and a deeply flawed one at that. Any over-promoted community organizer could tell you that it addresses only negative liberties and is confusing to boot. What’s worse, it was “written more than a hundred years ago.”

Eighteen-year-olds can easily meld their minds to this kind of malarkey…and not much else. The genius is in its snark and simplicity. Should a student’s parents be Republican then the myth of sophistication becomes hypnotic. A child’s superiority over his mom and dad matches his earliest assumptions.

Al Gore confirmed this to a group of youths when he proclaimed that “there are some things about our world that you know that older people don’t know.” What high school lad after observing his father’s taste in ties would disagree?

Young people gravitate to the left and transfer their ignorance to election tallies. As the leftist ages he continues to chase the wayward dragon that was his early delusions of eminence. He continues to regard the right as a tribe of primitives who dwell, both literally and figuratively, in “Jesusland.”

The haughty reaction of leftists to conservative ideas is something we all endure at one time or another. It’s no easy task to re-program a true believer, especially one with the countenance of a college sophomore.

Everything’s only too clear to him as it always is when you know practically nothing. Conservative exchanges with the opposition are scripted and remedial. For example, the most common enemy posting on my YouTube channel is “redneck.”

Explaining to those critics that I reside in Chicago — a locale that brims with shady characters but few rednecks — fails to persuade. The left’s answer to every problem is “more government,” so they are astounded as to why we just don’t get it. Clearly, no one who isn’t a 6^th grade dropout would articulate what we do here at Pajamas Media.

In his superb 2008 book, The Tyranny of Liberalism, James Kalb stated that the “nature of advanced liberalism can be inferred from those who support it. Throughout the West the most well-placed and respectable men and institutions are regularly liberal, while those who reject liberalism are tagged as ignorant, provincial, and lower-class.” [p. 90]

When we point out that government is inefficient, irresponsible, corrupt, and that its debts are breaking the American taxpayer, they blame George W. Bush. After that, they blame him some more. That Bush’s deficits paled in comparison to Obama’s treasury busting spending spree is not something they deign to acknowledge.

Great intellectuals are unconcerned by debt, the unemployment rate and inflation. Only commoners worry about that stuff. It’s 2009 Beaujolais in comparison to the audacity of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

The universality of the sophistication non-sequitur astounds. Time magazine employed it last spring after discerning that gold’s over-performance functioned as a critique of a hyper-Leviathan their pages helped to construct.

In the name of proving accurate the phrase “state-run media,” Time diminished the noble metal’s value via urbane critique. They conceded that the element had done well but rationalized that “…it is not nearly as powerful an economic tool as the more abstract forms of money that have taken its place.”

Ah, so gold’s not worthy due to its lack of abstraction? Tell that to the world during a global currency war amid the dollar’s “race to the bottom.” Only a broke journalist and/or leftist termite would be dim enough to buy the notion that being “more abstract” makes for a better investment vehicle.

Democratic Party panjandrums are as bored as Time by the federocracy’s impact. They prefer to use their self-touted brains as a mechanism for fabricating links between Sarah Palin and a schizophrenic madman. Even more fulfilling is when they express sanctimonious rage over “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Why bother stressing over Obama-ville? Washington, D.C., can simply print money and bankroll everything — which is precisely what they are doing. Admittedly, to deny reality in the manner of a Democrat is no small imaginative feat.

Like a preschooler, the leftist is addicted to emotion. He cannot live without feeding his fragile ego with prefab claims of ascendance. Democrats will never abandon the trope that there is something learned and sublime about their auto-statism. To do so would make the vin ordinaire that is their thoughtworld sound like the cheap table wine it actually is..”

Bernard Chapin at Pajamas Media

Comment:  It is simpler.   The Left is the female side of the human political spectrum….fiction, romance, dreams, story telling, hysteria,  feelings driven, candle light,  clean rooms, and security and plenty of time for ‘touch up’.   The conservative is the builder, the risk taker,into  reality, facts and non-fiction problem solver, the one the Left calls upon whenever  there is trouble, BIG TIME….when big decisions have to be made when name-calling and crying don’t work.

Malaria Can Be Easily Controlled by DDT

DDT Still Critical in Fight against Insect-Borne Diseases

Through a mix of environmental fervor, self-interest and disregard for evidence-based policy, United Nations (UN) agencies are misleading the public about the insecticide DDT — mistakenly claiming it is not needed and can be eliminated globally by 2020, says Donald Roberts, emeritus professor of tropical medicine at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Roger Bate, the Legatum Fellow in Global Prosperity at the American Enterprise Institute, and Richard Tren, the executive director of Africa Fighting Malaria.

• UN agencies are misleading the public by claiming that malaria can be controlled without insecticides, notably DDT; the stated aim is to stop DDT use globally by 2020.
• UN agencies are committing scientific fraud by deliberately and incorrectly interpreting data on malaria control using noninsecticide methods.

While DDT is no panacea, it is still a critical weapon in the battle against malaria and other insect-borne diseases, say Roberts, Bate and Tren.

Source: Roger Bate, Donald Roberts and Richard Tren, “The United Nations’ Scientific Fraud against DDT,” American Enterprise Institute, January 21, 2011.

Above information came from the National Center of Policy Analysis

Dennis Prager regularly reminds his listeners that many tens of thousands of lives can be saved by approving DDT uses in certain areas in Africa.

Politicized Science: More on the ‘Erin Brokovich’ Chemical Story

“If you believe the Environmental Working Group’s latest “study,” your drinking water might be contaminated with dangerous levels of a chemical that the group has conveniently dubbed the “Erin Brockovich chemical” — aka chromium-6. By hyping risks and by capitalizing on Hollywood sensationalism created by the 2000 film Erin Brockovich, the group has begun to build pressure for expensive regulations that could drain the already strained budgets of small towns and cities across America.

EWG’s “study” has captured headlines, the attention of policymakers on Capitol Hill and at the Environmental Protection Agency, and it is the subject of hearings before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee this week.

EWG claims to have found harmful levels of hexavalent chromium (aka., chromium-6) in the drinking water of 35 U.S cities, and it is calling for swift federal regulatory actions. The group timed their study to coincide with the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) routine review of its drinking water standard for chromium — but the EPA review doesn’t support EWG’s claims.

The evidence of significant risk from chromium in U.S. drinking water is weak. EPA’s draft risk assessment on chromium-6 (September 2010) states, “The epidemiologic data are not sufficient to establish a causal association between exposure to hexavalent chromium by ingestion and cancer.”

It is true that some studies have linked chromium-6 to lung cancer among workers who inhaled high levels of chromium-6 over a relatively long time period, but those studies are not very relevant to ingestion of trace levels in drinking water.

Still, EWG says the chemical is dangerous because it has produced tumors in rodents. But those studies, which were conducted by the National Toxicology Program in 2007 and 2009, involved rodents that ingested relatively high levels — between 5,000  to 180,000 parts per billion — of the chemical in drinking water over two years, a long time frame in the life of a rat.

These very high, long-term exposures of rodents to chromium tell us little about impacts on humans who are periodically exposed to levels that are thousands of times lower. For example, the amounts of chromium-6 that EWG found in U.S. drinking water averaged at just 0.18 parts per billion, with the highest rate of 12.9 parts per billion in Norman, Oklahoma.

EWG exclaims that the levels in Norman are “200 times” higher than a proposed California standard – as if that warrants panic.  But the proposed standard in California is absurdly low at 0.06 parts per billion. EPA’s safe level for total chromium is 100 parts per billion.

EWG dismisses EPA’s total chromium standard, saying: “EPA has not set a legal limit for hexavalent chromium [chromium-6] in tap water nationally and does not require water utilities to test for it.” In reality, EPA’s standard for total chromium assumes that all chromium found in drinking water samples is chromium-6, according to a recent EPA press statement. In other words, the standard deems water containing up to 100 parts per billion of chromium-6 as safe to drink, and regulations ensure levels do not exceed that amount.

Despite these realities, the EWG scare campaign has gained many headlines in part because of chromium-6’s notoriety from the film, Erin Brockovich. It featured Julia Roberts as a sassy legal secretary who pushes her boss to sue Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) for contaminating the drinking water of the small town of Hinkley, California. Based on a true story, the lawyers filed a class action lawsuit alleging that the company allowed chromium-6 to leach into the water and cause a cancer cluster.

However, like EWG’s claims, Brockovich’s case against chromium-6 didn’t hold water. If chromium-6 caused cancer in Hinkley, one would expect to find the specific types of cancers and exposures associated with the chemical. As noted, studies have found associations between chromium-6 and two types of cancer — lung and nasal — among workers who inhaled large amounts.  Yet Hinkley did not suffer from an elevated number of lung or nasal cancers, and residents were exposed to much lower levels by ingestion rather than inhalation.

Instead, the bulk of Hinkley plaintiffs had a number of different unrelated aliments — breast cancer, prostate cancer, arthritis, the flu, and club feet — likely caused by a variety of different sources rather than a single chemical, let alone chromium-6.

Moreover, researchers have never found evidence of any kind of cancer cluster in Hinkley. Recent research has again confirmed that cancer rate for the area is actually lower than that of other, similar areas.

Nonetheless, because the company didn’t want to continue a protracted legal battle, it settled with 650 litigants for $333 million. The trial lawyers took $133 million of the winnings off the top and gave Brockovich $2 million.

If EPA imposes an onerous chromium-6 standard because of activist pressures, public health benefits are likely to be zero. The compliance costs could be high, particularly for relatively poor, rural communities that have few resources to waste.”    

The above article was written by Angela Logomasini at Pajamas Media.