By Gabor Steingart

US President Barack Obama is back in the US after an Asian trip that produced few results.

When he entered office, US President Barack Obama promised to inject US foreign policy with a new tone of respect and diplomacy. His recent trip to Asia, however, showed that it’s not working. A shift to Bush-style bluntness may be coming.

There were only a few hours left before Air Force One was scheduled to depart for the flight home. US President Barack Obama trip through Asia had already seen him travel 24,000 kilometers, sit through a dozen state banquets, climb the Great Wall of China and shake hands with Korean children. It was high time to take stock of the trip.

Barack Obama looked tired on Thursday, as he stood in the Blue House in Seoul, the official residence of the South Korean president. He also seemed irritable and even slightly forlorn. The CNN cameras had already been set up. But then Obama decided not to play along, and not to answer the question he had already been asked several times on his trip: what did he plan to take home with him? Instead, he simply said “thank you, guys,” and disappeared. David Axelrod, senior advisor to the president, fielded the journalists’ questions in the hallway of the Blue House instead, telling them that the public’s expectations had been “too high.”

The mood in Obama’s foreign policy team is tense following an extended Asia trip that produced no palpable results. The “first Pacific president,” as Obama called himself, came as a friend and returned as a stranger. The Asians smiled but made no concessions.

Lost Some Stature

Upon taking office, Obama said that he wanted to listen to the world, promising respect instead of arrogance. But Obama’s currency isn’t as strong as he had believed. Everyone wants respect, but hardly anyone is willing to pay for it. Interests, not emotions, dominate the world of realpolitik. The Asia trip revealed the limits of Washington’s new foreign policy: Although Obama did not lose face in China and Japan, he did appear to have lost some of his initial stature.

In Tokyo, the new center-left government even pulled out of its participation in a mission which saw the Japanese navy refueling US warships in the Indian Ocean as part of the Afghanistan campaign. In Beijing, Obama failed to achieve any important concessions whatsoever. There will be no binding commitments from China to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A revaluation of the Chinese currency, which is kept artificially weak, has been postponed. Sanctions against Iran? Not a chance. Nuclear disarmament? Not an issue for the Chinese.

The White House did not even stand up for itself when it came to the question of human rights in China. The president, who had said only a few days earlier that freedom of expression is a universal right, was coerced into attending a joint press conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao, at which questions were forbidden. Former US President George W. Bush had always managed to avoid such press conferences.

Relatively Unsuccessful

A look back in time reveals the differences. When former President Bill Clinton went to China in June 1998, Beijing wanted to impress the Americans. A press conference in the Great Hall of the People, broadcast on television as a 70-minute live discussion, became a sensation the world over. Clinton mentioned the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, when the government used tanks against protestors. But then President Jiang Zemin defended the tough approach taken by the Chinese Communists. At the end of the exchange, the Chinese president praised the debate and said: “I believe this is democracy!”

Obama visited a new China, an economic power that is now making its own demands. America should clean up its government finances, and the weak dollar is unacceptable, the head of the Chinese banking authority said, just as Obama’s plane was about to land.

Obama’s new foreign policy has also been relatively unsuccessful elsewhere, with even friends like Israel leaving him high and dry. For the government of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, peace is only conceivable under its terms. Netanyahu has rejected Obama’s call for a complete moratorium on the construction of settlements. As a result, Obama has nothing to offer the Palestinians and the Syrians. “We thought we had some leverage,” says Martin Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel under the Clinton administration and now an advisor to Obama. “But that proved to be an illusion.”

Even the president seems to have lost his faith in a genial foreign policy. The approach that was being used in Afghanistan this spring, with its strong emphasis on civilian reconstruction, is already being changed. “We’re searching for an exit strategy,” said a staff member with the National Security Council on the sidelines of the Asia trip.

‘A Lot Like Jimmy Carter’

An end to diplomacy is also taking shape in Washington’s policy toward Tehran. It is now up to Iran, Obama said, to convince the world that its nuclear power is peaceful. While in Asia, Obama mentioned “consequences” unless it followed his advice. This puts the president, in his tenth month in office, where Bush began — with threats. “Time is running out,” Obama said in Korea. It was the same phrase Bush used against former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, shortly before he sent in the bombers.

There are many indications that the man in charge at the White House will take a tougher stance in the future. Obama’s advisors fear a comparison with former Democratic President Jimmy Carter, even more than with Bush. Prominent Republicans have already tried to liken Obama to the humanitarian from Georgia, who lost in his bid to win a second term, because voters felt that he was too soft. “Carter tried weakness and the world got tougher and tougher because the predators, the aggressors, the anti-Americans, the dictators, when they sense weakness, they all start pushing ahead,” Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker in the House of Representatives, recently said. And then he added: “This does look a lot like Jimmy Carter.”

And for those whom need a little reminder…

Carter was elected over Gerald Ford and Eugene McCarthy in 1976. His tenure was a time of continuing inflation and recession, as well as an energy crisis. On January 7, 1980, Carter signed Law H.R. 5860 aka Public Law 96-185 known as The Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act of 1979 bailing out Chrysler Corporation. He led the plan to deregulate the airline industry. He canceled military pay raises during a time of high inflation and government deficits. He declared amnesty to Vietnam draft dodgers. He encouraged energy conservation, installed solar panels in the White House and wore sweaters while turning down the heat. While attempting to calm various conflicts around the World, most visibly in the Middle East resulting in the signing of the Camp David Accords, giving back the Panama Canal and signing the SALT II nuclear arms reduction treaty with the USSR, the final year of his administration was marred by the Iran hostage crisis which contributed to his loss in his 1980 campaign for re-election to Ronald Reagan.

Can we all not see that the Obama Administration may have the same ending… Americans losing their lives due to a WEAKENED stance throughout the world? Don’t worry folks, we got Bush to blame, relax and take another drink of that kool-aid your sippin on.

This week, both the websites of CafePres.com and Zazle.com decided to stop selling merchandise that featured the latest right-wing craze: the slogan “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8.” However, Cafe Press then changed its mind and told ThinkProgress that it was reinstating the merchandise, which fell within “fair political commentary.”

Whether it’s “fair political commentary” was quickly questioned. While 109:8 reads, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office,” the next line is, “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow,” suggesting far more violent rhetoric than simple criticism. Diana Butler Bass at Beliefnet has explained that Psalm 109 is “considered one of the most difficult of all the psalms — full of violent images of vengeance and death.”

This From the POLITICALPYRO.Blog

The new item is more to the point… so to speak. Shown here by Speaker of the House D-Nancy Pelosi, the new item gives the “American voter a view of how we are going to stick it to them”, exclaimed a worked-up Pelosi.

“Sales are through the bottom and up to the roof” said a light hearted and gay unnamed source at contributors.blogsome.com. “We never expected that this item would bring so much pleasure to so many, it was truly unexpected joy and an uplifting moment for us.”

The portion of the Psalm 120:2 that the Pelosi strap-on is speaking too is verse 2:

Deliver my soul,
O LORD, from lying lips,
From a deceitful tongue.

Sources outside the White House said that the “Forgive Obama’s Lies” strap-on incorporated the big three (Religion, Politics and Sex) where the Bear and Button only had just two. The sources went on to say…” Any time you can merge those three things, you have what we deem here in Washington the ‘Bill Clinton Tri-fecta’.”

I leave it up to you… A cuddly bear, or a Pelosi and her strap-on…

SEIU has been engaged in a fire-fight with the National Union of Health Workers. For SEIU, it isn’t enough that workers are unionized, but they must be unionized AND their dues flow into the purple political machine. The video features SEIU official David Regan, who ran the union’s voting campaign. Keep in mind, again, the “opponents” he mentions aren’t Republicans or businesses, but another labor union.

Watching this insane lunatic reminds me of a scene from Godfather III… Calo whispers to Lucchesi, “Power wears out those who do not have it”, then fatally stabs Lucchesi through the throat with his own glasses.

Obama and his thugs should remember… “Power wears out those who do not have it”

There was to much common sense in Lindey’s words… I gota go watch some CNN to get myself real again…

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton first announced on Oct. 14 that the U.S. had changed its stance and would support negotiations of an Arms Trade Treaty to regulate international gun trafficking, a measure the Bush administration and, notably, former Permanent U.S. Representative to the United Nations John Bolton opposed for years.

Two weeks ago, in another reversal of policy, the U.S. joined a nearly unanimous 153-1 U.N. vote to adopt a resolution setting out a timetable on the proposed Arms Trade Treaty, including a U.N. conference to produce a final accord in 2012.

“Conventional arms transfers are a crucial national security concern for the United States, and we have always supported effective action to control the international transfer of arms,” Clinton said in a statement. “The United States is prepared to work hard for a strong international standard in this area.”

Gun rights advocates, however, are calling the reversal both a dangerous submission of America’s Constitution to international governance and an attempt by the Obama administration to sneak into effect private gun control laws it couldn’t pass through Congress.

‘Shooting Back’ tells of lives saved from attackers. Learn the Bible’s defense of bearing arms from a man who defended his church from terrorists

Bolton, for example, told Ginny Simone, managing editor of the National Rifle Association’s NRA News and host of the NRA’s Daily News program, “The administration is trying to act as though this is really just a treaty about international arms trade between nation states, but there’s no doubt – as was the case back over a decade ago – that the real agenda here is domestic firearms control.”

He continued, “There’s never been any doubt when these groups talk about saying they only want to prohibit illicit international trafficking in small arms and light weapons, it begs the whole question of what’s legal and what’s not legal. And many of the implications of these treaty negotiations are very much in their domestic application. So, whatever the appearance on the surface, there’s no doubt that domestic firearm control is right at the top of their agenda.”

Brian Wood, disarmament expert for Amnesty International, explained in a Bloomberg report why his organization and others are pushing for the U.S. to join Arms Trade Treaty talks. Wood said the U.S. is the largest conventional arms trader in the world and the unregulated trade of conventional arms “can fuel instability, transnational organized crime and terrorism.”

“All countries participate in the conventional arms trade and share responsibility for the ‘collateral damage’ it produces – widespread death, injuries and human rights abuses,” said Rebecca Peters, director of the International Action Network on Small Arms in an Agence France-Presse interview. “Now finally governments have agreed to negotiate legally binding global controls on this deadly trade.”

But Bob Barr, a former U.S. representative and presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party, explained in a separate interview with the NRA’s Simone how a treaty that looks like it’s all about fighting international crime will necessarily lead to erosion of Second Amendment gun rights:

“Even though [treaty advocates] all say, ‘We are not going to involve domestic laws and the right to keep and bear arms, that won’t be affected by all this,’ that’s nonsense,” Barr said. “There’s no way that if you buy into something like this and a treaty is passed regulating to ensure that firearms transfers internationally don’t fall into the hands of people that the U.N. doesn’t like, there’s no way that that mechanism will work unless you have some form of national regulation and national tracking.”

Bolton not only agrees with Barr’s assessment but also sees the treaty as an Obama administration end-run around the Constitution:

“After the treaty is approved and it comes into force, you will find out that it has this implication or that implication and it requires the Congress to adopt some measure that restricts ownership of firearms,” he said. “The administration knows it cannot obtain this kind of legislation purely in a domestic context. … They will use an international agreement as an excuse to get domestically what they couldn’t otherwise.”

Clinton’s October statement of support for the treaty negotiations was filed with a caveat that the Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty operate under the consensus rule of decision-making, essentially that its provisions be adopted unanimously.

“Consensus is needed to ensure the widest possible support for the treaty,” she stated, “and to avoid loopholes in the treaty that can be exploited by those wishing to export arms irresponsibly.”

But Bolton warned gun owners not to think the consensus rule will stop the treaty from passing.

“Consensus at the U.N. is a way of saying unanimity, everybody agrees, but in fact, the U.N. in the last eight years could have been very close to consensus on exactly this kind of treaty but for the Bush administration,” Bolton said. “So I don’t think her comment about consensus offers Second Amendment supporters any consolation, because absent the United States, nobody is really going to put up an objection to this.”

Citizens wishing to speak out on the issue can contact the State Department or the National Rifle Association.

The in fact this was from Memorial day 2009.

And this…

In what world is this acceptable? Unbelievable!

And this video makes his -Obama- efforts even more deplorable.

Seeing my dog the day I got back from Afghanistan

Even a dog knows how to show appreciation.

An Open Letter to Glen Beck

Dear Glen ~ for the first time in my 69 years I am on a roll in politics! And I know it’s our Lord prodding for me to keep writing to you and talking to anyone I meet about this governments corruption. I did yesterday to the hospital staff while having a two-hour MRI on my spine~ the Holy Spirit inside this lady would NOT just shut up! And I cannot even vote ~ yet! I do believe email to you from the public is being checked for I was having a hard time this past week writing to Fox News.

Glen ~ you need to address why obama does not salute for “Fallen Americans and to the Pride of the American Flag”. Go back to every event he has ever attended as President ~ please check this out. He will bow for Emperors ~ but he had no such respect for the Queen of Great Britain.

Please come on an address obama’s True Faith. One cannot be a Christian/Muslim embracing all religions ~ you are either a Christian or a Muslim. Obama would Never have got into power had he declared this fact: I am of Muslim faith. Obama IS A MUSLIM. That is why NO one in the media wants to talk or check into his background on this topic. And another question: why is his past erased from the internet?

I’d like to see the proof that he is a US citizen with his birth certificate. Also, you could trace back from his passport information on what his status was when he first entered the US. He lived and went to school in a country ~ where you had to be a Muslim to attend.

Where does he go to church now and how often? There seems to be a good deal of unnecessary nervousness on this topic and the media are just too afraid to discuss his “muslim” faith ~ because of political correctness! I’d like to know why Obama is protecting the terrorists from 9/11 and the recent terrorist who shot our troops at Fort Hood.

He does not want to protect Israel and Poland or Europe - he wants to bankrupt the US and then take over the United Nations ~ who have at least 200 dictators who will fall into line. He wants One World Order - One common currency ~ and full control of all peoples.

Many see him as the Messiah - obama is is NOT the Messiah the appointed one! He is anti-christ - could well be the coming anti-christ. Glen ~ you need to act on your faith and bring about the disclosure of his true identity. That is why he is in with Communist countries and these other dictators world wide.

Also, because he is a Muslim ~ this is why he is dithering and has not yet sent any more troops overseas to protect the US and British troops already there. The troops moral is already very low over his lack of action. Please keep harping on this topic ~ he will use “this country cannot afford to send hardly any troops because of our present economy and the Health Care Bill reform” yet it is Obama that has taken this country into debt ~ not Bush.

Our Lord Jesus gave me a clear message this Sunday morning that Glen Back is His warrior for truth and a symbol of courage and defiance during these extraordinary times ~ for this present government is All about power and greed and running this Great Nation bankrupt.

Glen, you are young and possess the strength to jealously guard this once powerful Nation. As President you could use the power of High Office to bring back God into schools and government. Have the banners flying and run for: “One Nation Under God”. Please run for office ~ the White House needs to be free of radicals and their greed.

Glen, you were blessed by God with an open heart and spirit . . . that is why our Lord is using you this way . . . He uses sinners. There is Not one person on this planet who has not sinned against the Living God ~ and that is why he gets you to open up and talk about your past ~ so openly ~ this is why the viewers relate to Glen Beck. So please Just keep on telling the truth as it is.

Jeanie

Olbermann Is the Obama Administrations Bukaki Queen…

And supporting Video

The black man Bowing to even a lower common denominator. He makes me SICK!

Here is the Link : KSH

It has yet to be confirmed, but sources inside several militant Muslim groups throughout the Middle East and as far west as China have been working together in an effort -proposed by the Muslim faction of the Obama adminastration- to bring about this “World Pandemic Scare and Panic”.

“The ends justify the means,” a person close inside the N1H1 Network Scare said yesterday. “We see this as a way for Obama, and all Muslims… to take control of the US government by Executive Order and forgo the whole legislative process,” The source further added, “If you look at the way they (US) handled 9-11, this risk of a Global Pandemic will have legislators hands in cuffs and Obama’s pen running dry,” -With all the Executive Orders he will sign- “By the end of November.”

There is also that little “bone” that they threw Obama for his compliance. HealthCare and the pending legislation. “If you look at it,” -HealthCare Legislation- “He -Obama- could have had a little piece early or right after he was elected, but he -Obama- wanted it all, so we suggested that he use the H1N1 scare we were working on as the hammer, and told him to wrap it all in one nice bundle.”

Reports throughout the world continue to tell us of thousands of deaths as the virus spreads like wildfire across the continent of Eurasia. But here in the US, the death rate does not match the scare rate and that has many US citizens puzzled. “If you look at it, he -Obama- has already got his toes wet with a couple Executive Orders that deal with managing the control of the outbreak, imagine what he will be able to do once we get things to fevered pitch.”

An unnamed source close to the Obama administration added today, “There is no doubt that we as Americans have a mindset that we can fix the world, no doubt. And now with all our efforts coming to fruition, the administration can now pull out the rubber stamp and make America a socialist country.”

Marion Valentine added…

It could very well be true, anything to further the progress towards Global Socialist Government. Isn’t it strange that Ft. Rucker whose labs develop countermeasures to Biochemical warfare, and develop vaccines was missing several “vials” of an undisclosed virus and 3 days later 20 polo ponies from Mexico at a match in Florida dropped dead… and then a few days later, even though it was not flu season, H1N1 broke out…..hmmmmmm