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Friday, March 7, 2014

Huckabee: Obama's Weakness Exploited by Putin sad thing is no one arrest obama they keep letting him do this

Huckabee: Obama's Weakness Exploited by Putin

Friday, 07 Mar 2014 12:21 PM

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Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee slammed the White House for its weakness on foreign policy, saying the United States' standing in the world has diminished under President Barack Obama and its next leader faces a tough task in rebuilding America's might.

He pointed to the current situation in Ukraine during his 10-minute speech at the Conservative Political Action Committee gathering in Maryland, and blasted Obama for allowing Russian President Vladimir Putin to take advantage of our weakness.

I know the only time that Vladimir Putin shivers is when he takes his shirt off in the cold Russian winter," Huckabee said spawning laughter among CPAC attendees.

Urgent: Do You Approve Or Disapprove of President Obama's Job Performance? Vote Now in Urgent Poll

He said, "no one trusts us, no one listens to us, no one respects us, no one fears us."

Huckabee, who is weighing a possible presidential campaign in 2016, says the United States has reduced its military power and other nations have taken advantage of it.
Huckabee spoke at the second day of CPAC.

Huckabee stuck to well-tested topics in the speech, moslty focusing on Obama's foreign policy mistakes and those of his administration.

He also threw down the gauntlet at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, suggesting that it is fair game to question her actions while in office as part of a future presidential run.

“Bill Clinton is not going to be on the ballot in 2016 or 2014. It’s very possible that his wife will. What she said, what she did, how she has served both as a senator, as secretary of state that’s all fair play,” he told reporters after his speech.

Huckabee also brought a message of traditional conservative values that led to mild applause from the audience when he spoke of providing better services for veterans and members of the armed forces.

Urgent: Do You Approve Or Disapprove of President Obama's Job Performance? Vote Now in Urgent Poll

President Obama has bungled his negotiations with Vladimir Putin.

By Fred Kaplan

179598037-in-this-handout-image-provided-by-host-photo-agency — President Obama has had two long phone calls with President Putin in recent days, but as long as he insists on preconditions for renewed diplomacy, Putin has no reason to comply.

The most startling thing about the crisis in Ukraine is how horribly all the actors have played their hands.

First, the Ukrainian parliament, after stepping up to power, drastically overstepped its bounds, dissolving the courts and ousting President Viktor Yanukovich by fiat rather than through legal processes of impeachment—thus giving Russian President Vladimir Putin the sliver of an excuse to declare the new leaders “illegitimate” and to intervene under the pretense of restoring “order.”

Then, Putin went overboard, not merely bolstering the security of Russia’s naval base on the coast of Crimea (an autonomous republic of Ukraine that once belonged to Russia) but mobilizing 30,000 troops to occupy the entire enclave. This was unnecessary, since Putin already, in effect, controlled Crimea. It may also prove stupid, as the move’s violence has further alienated Ukrainians, raised suspicions among Russia’s other ex-Soviet neighbors, and roused resistance from otherwise indifferent Western nations.

Fred Kaplan is the author of The Insurgents and the Edward R. Murrow press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Which leads to President Obama, who has responded to the aggression by imposing sanctions—a cliché of foreign policy that usually has no effect, but in this case will almost certainly make things worse.

Sanctions only work (and, even then, rarely) when they are universal, when they truly hurt the regime being targeted, and when they coincide with—or prompt—political change. Russia fits none of these categories. Too many European nations are too dependent on Russian gas supplies or bank deposits to make sanctions bite or endure. None of the sanctions under discussion are knockout blows; no conceivable sanctions would compel Putin (or any Russian leader) to surrender Ukraine. And regime change in Moscow is hardly on the horizon.

This crisis will be settled by making things somehow right with Ukraine—keeping it secure from further encroachments and ensuring that its government reflects the will of its people. The path toward both goals runs through the upcoming elections in May. And neither goal can be accomplished—no free and fair election can take place—without Russian involvement. That is a simple fact. Russia’s ties to Ukraine run long and deep. Any new Ukrainian government, even one wishing closer ties to the European Union, will have to renew ties with Russia as well. The EU can’t (and certainly won’t) solve all of Ukraine’s economic ailments. Nor will some surge of American gas exports (a fantasy to begin with) pry Ukraine loose from its dependence on Russian energy.

Earlier this week, Secretary of State John Kerry seemed to acknowledge this. At a press conference in Kiev, he proclaimed American solidarity with Ukraine’s aspiring democrats. But he also acknowledged that Russia has vital interests in Ukraine, waived any desire for confrontation, and called for mutual “de-escalation.”

But then, President Obama announced sanctions against Russia, banning travel of key officials, freezing assets, and suspending international forums. The question that no one appeared to acknowledge, much less ask or answer: How is it possible to do escalation and de-escalation at the same time?

Yes, there are situations where a shrewd combination of “sticks and carrots” can prod an adversary into action, but this isn’t one of those situations. The sticks are too flimsy, and there are no carrots.

More to the point, if Putin had been looking for some way out of this mess, he certainly wouldn’t be looking any longer, because de-escalating now would make it seem that he was backing down under Western pressure. Obama has had two long phone conversations with Putin in recent days, but as long as he insists on preconditions for renewed diplomacy (Putin must return his troops to their base, he must sit down with Ukrainian officials), Putin has no reason to comply. Russia has deeper interests in Ukraine than the West does—and more localized sources of pressure to make those interests felt.

That being the case, Putin can sit and wait. He has the upper hand in this game—and the more the West plays on his terms, the stronger his hand will seem. Sanctions won’t change his behavior, except to stiffen it—and once that becomes clear, Putin will seem stronger, the West will seem weaker, and a solution to the Ukraine crisis will recede in the distance.

Already, Putin has doubled down, calling for a referendum on whether Crimeans want to rejoin Russia (they will almost certainly vote “yes” by a large margin) and promising other rejoinders, such as freezing Western assets inside Russia. None of this will work to his benefit in the long run, but he can feel good about himself in the short run—just as Americans in Congress (who have pushed Obama in this direction) can feel good about voting for additional sanctions as well (and then, no doubt, shrug off all the consequences if things fall apart).

Sanctions do have a place in this sort of confrontation, but Obama got the sequencing wrong. The “costs” and “consequences” of Russia’s actions should have been laid out on the table as measures that he would take if Russia didn’t take steps to wind down the crisis. If possible (and maybe it isn’t anymore), this warning could have been conveyed in private, and in any case there should have been no public demands on precisely what winding-down steps the Russians must take. Whatever leverage we might have had is lost, once the chips are already spent—and are shown to have no value.

There are other steps the United States and NATO can take, and, in fact, Obama has taken them. Most notably, he’s beefed up defenses around the Baltic nations and Poland. In part, this complies with security guarantees to fellow NATO members; in part, it sends a warning to Putin not to make further incursions into southern or eastern Ukraine—though it’s hard to say what we would do if Putin did.

After the Cold War, when NATO expanded eastward to take in the more western-leaning members of the former Warsaw Pact at a moment of extreme Russian weakness, some thought was given to adopting Ukraine as well. President Bill Clinton decided against it, for two reasons: first, polls suggested that the Ukrainian people didn’t want to join NATO (in fact, they’re now evenly divided about joining even the European Union); second, it seemed a stretch to declare that the NATO nations would regard an attack on Ukraine as an attack on themselves. (George W. Bush came to the same conclusion, and for the same reason didn’t invite Georgia to join NATO even after Russia’s invasion.)

When this crisis got underway two weeks ago, it seemed absurd that the United States and Russia might go to war over the fate of Ukraine. But both of their leaders have stumbled and bumbled so badly in the meantime, and the exit-ramp is so littered with bombs and barricades, nothing seems impossible.

Saudis Declare MB as a Terrorist Organization

March 7, 2014 | Filed underBreaking News,Terror | Posted by SUAadmin

UPDATE – 6pm Eastern – In addition to the article below, our friends at BareNakedIslam wanted to inform you of the following:

Look at all the [Illinois/Indiana Chicagoland] Representatives who support [the] terror-linked Muslim Brotherhood front group CAIR:

Senator Dick Durban (D)

Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL 2nd)

Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL 5th)

Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-IL 7th)

Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL 8th)

Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN 7th)

Read the entire list of attendees and supporters statements here, and look at the event as well.

Look at the former members:

It is interesting that the event features Siraj Wahhaj, Sherman Jackson, Suhaib Webb, and Aisha El-Amin…You be the judge!
Editor’s Note – Now that our allies in Saudi Arabia have declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, can we finally dispense with the ruse here in the USA that all these Islamic advisors and PACs who are linked to the MB are peaceful, legitimate people and organizations? Can we also dispense with supporting them in places like Egypt, Syria, and anywhere else?
We must follow suit behind Saudi Arabia and list them on the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization List. This then means that any member of the government who employs anyone with a Muslim Brotherhood tie must fire them and expel them from the country. This includes the White House, the Defense Department, the State Department and any other tax-payer funded positions.
All relationships, contracts, and interactions with the likes of CAIR, MSO, etc., must be severed. People like Huma Abedin, the former advisor to Hillary Clinton among them, and advisors to Senator McCain as well must be excised from any formal or informal relationships, after-all, it is a crime to support, aid, and abet any terrorist organization.

Muslim-Brotherhood-White-House-Obama-Morsi1-e1376862029662

Saudi Arabia designates Muslim Brotherhood terrorist group

(Reuters) - Saudi Arabia has formally designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, in a move that could increase pressure on Qatar whose backing for the group has sparked a row with fellow Gulf monarchies.
The U.S.-allied kingdom has also designated as terrorist the Nusra Front and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, whose fighters are battling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the Interior Ministry said in a statement published by state media.
Friday’s move appeared to enforce a royal decree last month in which Riyadh, which backs some rebel groups in Syria with money and arms, said it would jail for between three and 20 years any citizen found guilty of fighting in conflicts abroad.
It underscored concern about young Saudis hardened by battle against Assad coming home to target the ruling Al Saud royal family – as has happened after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Saudi Arabia’s Islamic religious authorities have spoken out against Saudi fighters going to Syria, but the Interior Ministry estimates that around 1,200 Saudis have gone nonetheless.

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Last month’s decree said a committee would be set up to determine the groups to be outlawed. The ministry’s statement on Friday said the groups mentioned were those the committee had agreed on and that had been approved by the authorities.
Riyadh fears the Brotherhood, whose Sunni Islamist doctrines challenge the Saudi principle of dynastic rule, has tried to build support inside the kingdom since the Arab Spring revolutions.
In an unprecedented move, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain recalled their ambassadors from Qatar on Wednesday, saying Doha had failed to abide by an accord not to interfere in each others’ internal affairs.
GULF DISPUTE
Saudi Arabia and the UAE are fuming over Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood, and resent the way Doha has sheltered influential cleric Yusuf Qaradawi, a critic of the Saudi authorities, and given him regular airtime on its pan-Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera.
The Interior Ministry said on Friday the royal decree would apply to both Saudis and foreign residents who joined, endorsed or gave moral or material aid to groups it classifies as terrorist or extremist, whether inside or outside the country.
The statement also said “those who insult other countries and their leaders” or “attended conferences or gatherings inside and outside (the country) that aim to target the security and stability and spread sedition in the society”, would be punished by law.
In Egypt, the Brotherhood, which won every election following the toppling of veteran leader Hosni Mubarak in 2011, has been driven underground since the army deposed President Mohamed Mursi, a member of the group that also endured repression in the Mubarak era.
The army-backed government in Cairo designated the Brotherhood as a terrorist group in December after accusing it of carrying out a suicide bomb attack on a police station that killed 16 people. The Brotherhood condemned that attack and denies using violence.
On Friday, Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Badr Abdelatty said Cairo approved of Riyadh’s move to declare the Brotherhood a terrorist organization.
“We hail it, we welcome it,” he said. “It is in the right direction.”
The Saudi Interior Ministry also listed as terrorist Yemen’s Shi’ite Houthi movement and Hezbollah, a radical Shi’ite group in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province which authorities say is linked to Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah.
(Reporting by Rania El Gamal in Dubai; additional reporting by Maggie Fick and Omar Fahmy in Cairo; editing by Andrew Roche)

Saudis: Muslim Brotherhood a terror group

Michael Winter, USA TODAY 5:26 p.m. EST March 7, 2014

Two al-Qaeda-affiliated groups fighting with Syrian rebels also targeted.

Saudi Arabia declared Friday that the banned Muslim Brotherhood and two al-Qaeda-linked groups fighting with Syrian rebels are terrorist organizations, promising stiff prison terms for Saudis who join, fund, endorse or fight with them.
The designations follow a royal decree last month that mandated imprisonment up to 20 years for for Saudis belonging to terrorist groups or fighting abroad. A committee then drew up a list of banned groups, which King Abdullah approved, the Interior Ministry said Friday in an announcement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency.
The statement identified the other terrorist groups as al-Qaeda's branches in Yemen and Iraq, the Syrian al-Nusra Front, Saudi Hezbollah and Yemen's Shiite Hawthis. All Saudi citizens and foreign residents fighting with those groups were ordered to return within 15 days or face imprisonment.
"It should be noted that included also are any similar organizations with similar ideologies, discourses, and actions along with all those groups and factions noted on the lists of the Security Council and international bodies and are identified as terroristic and committed to violence," the Interior Ministry added.
The new law bans meetings of the groups inside or outside of the kingdom and covers comments made online or to media outlets. Amnesty International said Saudi authorities could use the law to suppress peaceful political dissent.
The Brotherhood condemned the Saudi action.
"It is one of the founding principles of the group not to interfere in matters of other states, and this new position from the kingdom is a complete departure from the past relationship with the group, since the reign of the founding king until now," the group said in a statement.
The House of Saud and other Gulf monarchies see the Brotherhood as a threat to their royal dynasties since the Islamists gained power and influence after the so-called Arab Spring.
Egypt banned the Muslim Brotherhood in December, five months after Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, a leading member, was deposed by the military and arrested. Since then, Gulf nations have cracked down on the organization, which is backed by Qatar.
In an unprecedented move Wednesday, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain recalled their ambassadors from Qatar.
Authorities worry that hundreds of young, radicalized Islamist fighters will return home and try to topple the royal regimes. But in Syria, the Saudi kingdom also backs some rebel groups with money and weapons.

Report: UN officials hid overblown global warming estimates

Daily Caller News Foundation

Report: UN officials hid overblown global warming estimates

2:38 PM 03/07/2014

Michael Bastasch

The United Nations doesn’t want you to know the facts about global warming, according to a new report out of Europe.
Over the years climate scientists have been reducing their estimates of how much global warming will occur over the next 70 to 100 years if atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were doubled — an estimate called “climate sensitivity.”
But readers of the most recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment would be ignorant of this, according to a report by the UK’s Global Warming Policy Foundation.
The IPCC’s fourth climate assessment in 2007 estimated that the Earth would warm 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century — this estimate was in a range of warming from 2 to 4.5 degrees Celsius. But as the 2000s wore on and little warming occurred, climate scientists began to lower their climate sensitivity estimates from 3 to 2 degrees Celsius in a century and only 1.5 degrees of warming in the next 70 years.
But this revelation was only hinted at in the IPCC’s 2013 climate assessment. Instead of lowering their central climate sensitivity measure down from 3 degrees Celsius, the IPCC simply did not give a central estimate and just reduced its lower-bound warming estimate from 2 to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Now the IPCC’s warming range for the next hundred years is 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius.
“Good empirical evidence of both long-term warming and that over a seventy year period now imply very different expectations of future warming than do climate models — some 40% to 50% lower to 2081-2100,” according to the study by independent UK climate scientist Nic Lewis and Dutch science writer Marcel Crok.
“This is almost certainly the most important finding of climate science in recent years, particularly since there are good reasons to doubt the reliability of climate model forecasts,” the authors continue.
“However, in its report the IPCC only alludes to this issue in an oblique fashion,” the authors add. “Moreover, rather than reducing its best estimate of climate sensitivity in the light of the new empirical estimates, it simply reduced the lower bound of the uncertainty range and omitted to give a best estimate, without adequately explaining why it had been necessary to do so.”
The IPCC only added a paragraph on why they did not give central climate sensitivity estimate in the technical summary of its final report — published in January 2014, four months after the report’s initial release.
Climate sensitivity is used by policymakers to predict global temperature increases and economic costs, and therefore is a crucial estimate to nail down. In the U.S., the Obama administration is using the UN’s climate sensitivity measures to come up with its “social cost of carbon” (SCC) estimate, which applies monetary damages to each ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere.
Last year, the Obama administration raised the SCC from from $21 per ton to $37 per ton before the president went public with his plans to cut U.S. emissions 17 percent by 2020. Raising the SCC inflates the benefits of policies that reduce carbon emissions, therefore, giving more justification to Obama’s fight against global warming.
“The shift to a cleaner energy economy won’t happen overnight, and it will require tough choices along the way,” Obama said in his 2014 State of the Union Address. “But the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact. And when our children’s children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say, ‘Yes, we did.’”
But the recent GWPF report casts doubt on Obama’s justification for raising the SCC to $37 per ton, as it was based on the UN’s misleading climate assessment. If the IPCC can no longer give a central climate sensitivity estimate, can the Obama administration credibly peg a price to carbon dioxide emissions?
“It should be obvious that no SCC estimates should be published until a credible climate sensitivity probability distribution is developed,” wrote attorney Francis Menton in his comments to the White House on the SCC changes. “This multi- agency effort has relied on the IPCC work, but IPCC’s own results imply that the U.S. government should stop publishing any estimates of SCC until such a credible distribution exists.”
The Obama administration, however, has showed no indication that it intends to scale back its SCC estimate or scrap it altogether.
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Tags: Global Warming, United Nations

Obama charged with blocking IRS probe, breaking promises to help

By Paul Bedard | MARCH 5, 2014 AT 12:01 PM

Topics: Washington Secrets Barack Obama Treasury Tea Party IRS Dave Camp Conservatism Cincinnati Lois Lerner

A House chairman probing the IRS scandal on Wednesday said that President Obama has reneged on a promise to have his aides cooperate with the investigation, forcing the Ways and Means Committee to conduct a dragnet for emails and documents needed to smoke out the truth.
Rep. Dave Camp also revealed that federal agents conducting an investigation into the Internal Revenue Service's bid to punish Tea Party and conservative critics of the president have yet to talk to a single target of the scandal.
Camp, whose committee is one of several looking into the 2010-2013 scandal, put the blame for the drawn out investigations on Capitol Hill at the president’s feet.
“I don’t fully understand why it’s taken them so long given that the president promised,” Camp said at a media roundtable hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. “He promised that he would have quick action and we still don’t have the documents from an agency that is in this administration."
His committee has been frustrated with the administration's failure to cough up emails from Lois Lerner, who ran the IRS department that blocked Tea Party groups from winning the typically quick approval of tax exempt status. Lerner was on Capitol Hill Wednesday where she refused to testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
“I still don’t have all of her emails. I still don’t have all of the documents that I’ve requested. The administration promised a quick action, and I’m still waiting for her emails,” said Camp, a Michigan Republican. “I need all of those, before I can conclude.”
By refusing to make good on his promise, Camp said that Obama and his administration is to blame for dragging out the investigations. Had Lerner not refused to testify to his committee earlier, Camp said “we probably would be at the bottom of what this is all about.”
He also expressed disgust that the Tea Party victims of the scandal, many of whom have been identified and even testified before his panel, are being ignored by the administration’s probe.
“As far as I know, I don’t know that Justice has spoken to any of the victims. I have not got information that they have even contacted the witnesses that came before the Ways and Means Committee,” said Camp.
While the scandal has taken a back seat to other issues, Camp said that his probe has uncovered several new elements to be included in a final report. “We found that the targeting was more widespread than they had admitted. We found that it wasn’t just agents in Cincinnati that were rogue agents, this actually originated in Washington, D.C.,” he said. “I don’t think a lot of the public knows that,” he added.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com.

Russia and the United States Are Acting a Whole Lot Like They Did in Cold War

By Eileen Shim 8 hours ago

russia, and, the, united, states, are, acting, a, whole, lot, like, they, did, in, cold, war, — Russia and the United States Are Acting a Whole Lot Like They Did in Cold War

President Barack Obama may insist that Ukraine is not a pawn in "some Cold War chessboard," but the picture is starting to look a lot like it. Even as the U.S. and Russia hold talks to find a solution for the growing crisis in Crimea, both countries are holding military exercises around Ukraine, giving off the familiar vibe of the good-old days of Cold War brinkmanship.
The two countries's repeated calls for peace and stability, for one, are simply incongruous with their actions. On Thursday, Russia held its "largest ever" air defense exercises about 280 miles from the Ukrainian border. For its part, the U.S. sent six F-15 fighter jets to Lithuania and has announced that it will send 12 F-16 fighter jets and 300 service personnel to Poland next week for training. A Navy destroyer will also be deployed to the Baltic Sea to take part in a routine exercise.
Although Russia's military intervention in Ukraine has not yet resulted in any casualties, it looks as though the country is playing the long game. On Wednesday a Ukrainian official said that Russian forces sank a submarine in the Crimean harbor, creating an obstacle to prevent Ukrainian ships from leaving the base. The bay has also been blocked by 10 Russian vessels, effectively trapping the Ukrainian ships inland.

Image Credit: AP
Much like the Cold War, the Ukrainian crisis playing out not as a series of military engagements, but as tension-filled diplomatic maneuvers. Last week, the U.S. suspended all military ties with Russia, warning that economic and diplomatic sanctions would follow if President Vladimir Putin continues escalating the country's occupation of Ukraine. A White House executive order has frozen U.S.-based assets of certain Russian officials, while the State Department is denying visas to Russian and Ukraine officials who were involved in the military takeover.
Still, Obama has insisted on finding a diplomatic solution and called Putin on Thursday to discuss a peaceful settlement. "In the course of the discussion there emerged differences in approaches and assessments of the causes which brought about the current crisis and the resulting state of affairs," the Kremlin said in a statement after the call. "Vladimir Putin, for his part, noted that this had occurred as a result of an anticonstitutional coup which does not have a national mandate."
But on a slightly more conciliatory note, the statement added that bilateral ties "should not be sacrificed for individual — albeit rather important — international problems."

Image Credit: AP
These "international problems" have situated Ukraine as the unfortunate middle-man between the West and the East, caught in an increasingly passive-aggressive game of tug-of-war. But neither side will own up to it. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Putin is insisting that Russia has not invaded Ukraine, and that the heavily armed forces in Crimea are simply pro-Russian volunteers. In response, Secretary of State John Kerry accused Russia of "falsehoods, intimidation and provocations" — all the while building up American military presence in the Baltics.
And for a bloodless takeover, it is already proving to be rather effective. Ukrainian forces have reported that Russian troops on the ground have been pressuring them to defect. The new head of Ukrainian navy has already sworn allegiance to the Russian-controlled Crimean navy, leading the Ukrainian government to charge him with treason.
But that's just how this familiar tune goes. The situation in Crimea is no longer just a civil conflict regarding regional autonomy; it's a global power struggle. Once Russia crossed the border, it set the clock back by twenty years. Now Ukraine and the surrounding Baltic countries are holding out their hands for help in the middle of the crossfire, while the chessmasters — the U.S., Russia, NATO, EU — figure out their next move.