NRO 

Andrew C McCarthy 

In October 2010, on the eve of the Islamic revolution that the media fancies as “the Arab Spring,” the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood called for jihad against the United States. 

You might think that this all but unnoticed bombshell would be of some importance to policymakers in Washington. It was not. It is not. This week, the Obama administration quietly released $1.5 billion in foreign aid to the new Egyptian government, now dominated by a Brotherhood-led coalition in parliament — soon to be joined by an Ikhwan (i.e., Brotherhood) luminary as president. 

It is not easy to find the announcement. With the legacy media having joined the Obama reelection campaign, we must turn for such news to outlets like the Kuwait News Agency. There, we learn that, having dug our nation into a $16 trillion debt hole, [Alleged] President Obama has nevertheless decided to borrow more money from unfriendly powers like China so he can give it to an outfit that views the United States as an enemy to be destroyed.

This pot of gold for Islamic supremacists is the spoils of a Brotherhood charm offensive. Given the organization’s unabashed goals and hostility towards the West, it was U.S. policy, until recently, to avoid formal contacts with the Brotherhood — although agents of the intelligence community and the State Department have long engaged in off-line communications with individual MB members. By contrast, the Obama administration from its first days has embraced the Ikhwan — both the mothership, whose leaders were invited to attend Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo despite its then-status as a banned organization under Egyptian law, and the Brotherhood’s American satellites, which have been invited to advise administration policymakers despite their notorious record of championing violent jihadists and repressive sharia.· 

Obama has overlooked the MB’s intimate ties to Hamas, which self-identifies as the Ikhwan’s Palestinian branch and is formally designated a terrorist organization under American law. Administration officials have absurdly portrayed the Brothers as “secular” and “moderate,” although the organization, from its founding in the 1920s, has never retreated an inch from its professed mission to establish Islam’s global hegemony. 

The administration further hailed the Brotherhood’s triumph in post-Mubarak legislative elections and made a point of abandoning the policy against formal MB contacts — though, in now-familiar Obama fashion, it simultaneously claimed that this “outreach” broke no new ground. And this week, the White House hosted a Brotherhood delegation to “broaden our engagement” with Egypt’s new political actors, as an administration spokesman put it. In this, Obama officials were quick to exploit the cover they’ve gotten from the transnational-progressive wing of the Republican party: The administration spokesman stressed that “Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham and others have met with members of the MB during their visits to Egypt.” 

The useful-idiot brigade also includes the “House Democracy Partnership,” a bipartisan cadre of congressmen that traipsed over to Egypt on its recent tour of the “Arab Spring” countries. On the agenda was a confab with Khairat el-Shater, the Brotherhood’s newly announced presidential candidate. 

Shater is Washington’s new darling. That much is clear from an unintentionally hilarious dispatch from the New York Times’ David Kirkpatrick, who portrays the Brotherhood as America’s “indispensable ally against Egypt’s ultraconservatives.” Sure, they may be the world’s leading exemplar of what Kirkpatrick gently calls “political Islam,” but our policy geniuses reckon the Brothers are much to be preferred over the “Salafis” — reputedly, the more hardcore Islamic supremacists. As the Times elaborates, the Obama administration is alarmed by the rise of a charismatic Salafist, Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, who has shot to second place in the polls. Shater, the theory goes, could overtake Ismail and lead Egypt in the Brotherhood’s more “pragmatic direction.”

Provided courtesy of the Peace Through Strength Institute

YNet

Yitzhak Benhorin

WASHINGTON - US [Alleged] President Barack Obama has signaled Tehran that the Washington would accept an civilian nuclear program in Iran if Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei can back up his recent claim that his nation “will never pursue nuclear weapons,” the Washington Post reported Friday.

According to the report, the verbal message was sent through Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who met with Khamenei last week. A few days prior to leaving for the trip, Erdogan held a two-hour meeting with Obama on the sidelines of the nuclear security summit in Seoul, in which they discussed what the Turkish leader would tell Khamenei about the nuclear issue.

Read this story at ynetnews.com ...

Hotair

Via Bryan Preston, your must-see clip of the day. But before you watch, re-read Ed’s posts from October 26 and October 29 of 2008. This isn’t the first time AVS protections have mysteriously disappeared from Team Hopenchange’s donations page, and it’s not just the missing security-code field that got them in trouble in 2008. Remember how they made a point of accepting money from untraceable prepaid credit cards then too? WaPo raised an eyebrow at the time:

Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor’s identity, campaign officials confirmed.

Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged. Instead, the campaign is scrutinizing its books for improper donations after the money has been deposited…

When asked whether the campaign takes steps to verify whether a donor’s name matches the name on the credit card used to make a payment, Obama’s campaign replied in an e-mail: “Name-matching is not a standard check conducted or made available in the credit card processing industry. We believe Visa and MasterCard do not even have the ability to do this…

Juan Proaño, whose technology firm handled online contributions for John Edwards’s presidential primary campaign, and for John F. Kerry’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee in 2004, said it is possible to require donors’ names and addresses to match those on their credit card accounts. But, he said, some campaigns are reluctant to impose that extra layer of security.

Republican Patrick Ruffini tested Obama’s AVS procedures at the time, attempting to donate five dollars by providing an address different from the one linked to the credit card he used. Result: Transaction accepted. Said Ruffini, who worked on online organizing for Bush’s campaign, “The ability to contribute with a false address, when the technology to prevent it not only exists but comes standard, is a green light for fraud.” Note the part too about AVS protections being “standard.” Mark Steyn checked the prefab template for his own little web store at the time and found that the defaults were all set for maximum verification. To make the system as lax as it was — and apparently still is — at BarackObama.com, you had to deliberately weaken its security checks. Which, per the staff’s own admission to WaPo, they did.

I recommend re-reading that old WaPo piece in its entirety as it cites the case of a retired insurance manager whose name had been stolen to donate $174,800 to Obama. In reality, the manager had never donated a cent. Team O claims that they catch all this stuff on the back end when they review the names and donations to look for suspicious activity, which is easy to do when the phony contribution came from “Bart Simpson” but not so easy to do when it came from “Paul Smith” or some other generic yet plausible (and possibly stolen) name. In fact, the end result of all this nonsense was an FEC discretionary review (i.e. audit) of the campaign. You would think, after that, that they’d do everything by the book this time. But when your fundraising’s going worse than expected, maybe your priorities change — assuming anti-fraud priorities were ever there to begin with.

Exit question: Should we be worried that these same guys are pioneering new ways to donate electronically?

Obama Donations - Anyone, Anywhere

Townhall 

David Limbaugh

You can't even casually surf the Internet on any given day without numerous reminders of just how radical [Alleged] President Obama is -- and this is during an election year, when it should be in his political interest to mask his radicalism. 

Minding my own business, I happened on an article by Jacob Laksin on FrontPageMag.com, titled "Obama's Pick for World Bank Hates Capitalism." I'd heard a bit about this before but hadn't yet studied it. I'm so used to Obama's extremism that such revelations hardly move me, much less surprise me. I know where he stands; I just wish everyone else did. 

Obama has nominated Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim to head the World Bank. In 2000, Kim edited a collection of studies under the title "Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor." 

The "book's radical central premise," writes Laksin, is that "capitalism and economic growth (are) bad for the poor across the world." Kim co-wrote the introduction, which includes the claim that the book shows "that the quest for growth in GDP and corporate profits has in fact worsened the lives of millions of women and men." It says that even in those instances in which free trade and free markets have led to economic growth, they've done so without benefiting "those living in 'dire poverty,' one-fourth of the world's population." Can't you just hear Obama himself in those words? 

One thing that helps the plight of the very poor, according to one chapter, is a socialized health care system, such as the one in Communist Cuba. The chapter's author touts that system because of the Cuban government's "commitment not only to health in the narrow sense but to social equality and social justice." As we opponents of Obamacare have said repeatedly, Obamacare is hardly just about making health care more affordable or more accessible, neither of which it will do in the end, but is a stealth vehicle to greatly expand governmental control over limitless aspects of our lives to enable the leftist central planners to effectuate "social equality and social justice" under the innocuous guise of providing health care. 

As with so many of its ideas, the left is wrong about the record of free markets on the poor, notes Laksin, who points to "overwhelming evidence" that economic growth raises income levels and reduces global poverty. But again, leftist ideologues aren't motivated by a desire to improve the lot of the downtrodden, domestically or globally, but by a burning passion for statism. 

This book is right out of Obama's playbook. Can you not see the common thread running through these alleged glories of the Cuban system and Obama's approach to health care and his war on oil, coal and gas, along with his corresponding commitment to green energy and his various stimulus bills, all of which increase our national deficits, debt and unemployment but greatly increase governmental control? 

Obama's nomination of Kim should be no surprise to anyone, considering his consistent record of radical associations and appointments, from Van Jones to transnationalist Harold Koh. For Obama, one's radicalism is not a deterrent to one's resume, but an enhancement. His appointment of Van Jones was not a mistake owing to the administration's failure to vet him as Obama's defenders later claimed once Jones' radicalism was exposed. Obama appointed Jones precisely because his administration was intimately familiar with Jones' views; indeed, the White House carved out a new position -- green energy czar -- specifically tailored for his worldview and then happily placed him in it. 

Tearing myself away from this uplifting article, I next encountered one detailing Obama's ongoing fulfillment of his promise to bankrupt the coal industry -- with his Environmental Protection Agency's issuance of new proposed rules on carbon emissions, which will please the goddess Gaia but won't do much for the production of energy, economic growth, jobs or the poor, for that matter. This was after watching a report on Fox News earlier that morning highlighting Obama's obstruction of oil shale production based on other dubious environmental doom-saying. 

Next, I saw John Fund's piece on National Review Online outlining Obama's background in the sordid community organizing tactics of famed leftist radical Saul Alinsky and Obama's close ties with the now fallen ACORN. According to New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor -- in her new book on Obama -- Obama still thought of himself as a community organizer when he was senator. He still does today, and, Fund warns, conservatives should be prepared for his Alinsky tactics in the 2012 campaign. 

Maybe this all wouldn't be so exasperating if Obama didn't hold himself out as a uniter, but he is the furthest thing from it, as he, if anything, is doubling down on his polarizing radicalism and his unswerving commitment to a statist agenda for America.

WorldNetDaily.com

Alan Keyes

This saps credibility from the notion that there is any starkly fateful difference between GOP Republicans and Obama-faction Democrats. They are opposite wings of the same elitist faction, flapping in unison as socialism takes flight. … (“Is Republican infighting a bad thing?”)

As I anticipated, “the elitist machinations of the sham party system are predictably moving America toward another false choice between an avowed socialist Democrat and a prevaricating socialist Republican.” Marco Rubio’s endorsement of Mitt Romney kicks off an orchestrated wavelet of “influential” endorsements, signaling an end to the sham competition that culminated in a not very credible “dramatic face-off” between Romney and one of his 2008 cheerleaders, Rick Santorum. After a brief flash of truthfulness in which Santorum admitted that the “choice” between Romney and Obama is a falsehood liable to be fatal to American liberty, the former U.S. senator has dutifully retracted it. Not only will he break out his briefly discarded Romney-for-President pompoms on cue, he manfully allows as how it would be his patriotic duty to consider serving as Romney’s VP if asked to do so.

Read this article at wnd.com ...

Provided courtesy of Tom Hoefling's 'Say NO to Socialism!'

CNS News

Terence P. Jeffrey

During oral arguments in the Supreme Court this week, Justice Stephen Breyer posed and answered the core question at issue in the controversy over the constitutionality of Obamacare’s mandate that individual Americans must buy government-approved health insurance policies: Can Congress order individuals to buy a good or service?

“Yes, of course they could,” said Breyer.

In the history of the nation, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government has never done this.

But Breyer, on Tuesday, stated his belief that the basic power of Congress to do such a thing was settled by the Supreme Court as early as 1819, in the case of McCulloch v. Maryland, in which the court decided Congress had the power to create a Bank of the United States.

Breyer explained his point of view after becoming impatient with the convoluted answers Solicitor General Donald Verrilli had offered up in response to questions from Justices Sam Alito and Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts.

Alito had asked Verrilli if Congress could force young people to buy burial insurance because everyone is going to die someday. Roberts asked Verrilli if Congress could force people to buy cell phones because it would facilitate contacting emergency services in the event of an accident. And Kennedy asked Verrilli: “Can you create commerce in order to regulate it.”

“I'm somewhat uncertain about your answers to, for example, Justice Kennedy,” said Breyer. He “asked, can you, under the Commerce Clause, Congress create commerce where previously none existed.

“Well, yes,” said Breyer, “I thought the answer to that was, since McCulloch versus Maryland, when the Court said Congress could create the Bank of the United States which did not previously exist, which job was to create commerce that did not previously exist, since that time the answer has been, yes.

-----When Breyer was confirmed to the Supreme Court, only 9 Republicans in the Senate voted against him.

Read this story at cnsnews.com ...

Provided courtesy of the Peace Through Strength Institute

The Foundry

Michaela Bendikova

After [Alleged] President Obama released his fiscal year 2013 budget, it became clear that the Administration reneged on its promise to fully fund the needs of the U.S. nuclear complex to the Senate pursuant to its advice and consent to the New Strategic Arms Control Treaty (New START). Thankfully, though, some in Congress are well aware of the value that U.S. nuclear weapons provide as the nation’s ultimate insurance policy.

Representative Mike Turner (R–OH), chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, recently introduced the Maintaining the President’s Commitment to our Nuclear Deterrent and National Security Act of 2012 (H.R. 4178). The bill addresses some of the key issues related to the funding for the nuclear weapons complex and links reductions of U.S. nuclear arsenal to proper appropriations for the nuclear weapons complex.

The Administration is reportedly moving to reduce the arsenal of operationally deployed nuclear warheads to as few as 300. Not only would these reductions be expensive—and funded from the already overstretched Department of Defense’s budget—but they are not based on a sound assessment of the international environment. The Administration is operating on the premise that if the U.S. reduces its nuclear arsenal, other countries will follow its lead. This is not going to happen, because countries have their own reasons why they acquire nuclear weapons that are not primarily derived from the number of U.S. weapons.

Turner’s bill would prevent these unilateral reductions by means of “a limitation that nuclear force reductions should be implemented in such a way as to assure Russia does not deploy nuclear force levels superior to those of the United States.”

Read this story at blog.heritage.org ...

CNSNews.com

By Terence P. Jeffrey

All student health care plans covering female college students in the United States must include coverage for free voluntary sterilization surgery, the Department of Health and Human Services announced late Friday afternoon. Women of college age who do not attend school will also get free sterilization coverage whether they are insured through an employer, their parents, or some form of government-subsidized plan.

Read this story at cnsnews.com ...

Examiner 

Jim Kouri

The chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said on Friday that he's still waiting for Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano to respond to a disturbing accusation that she and her underlings at DHS released deceptive and inaccurate information about illegal aliens sneaking across borders into the United States.  

Chairman Darrell Issa sent Napolitano a letter on March 1 saying it is investigating agency insiders’ tips that her department and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection “released false and misleading border crossing data.”  
  
“Without an accurate measurement of how many illegal entrants become ‘got-aways,’ there is no way to assess the safety and security of the southwest border,” said the Napolitano letter. 

“Got-aways” are border crossers who are not arrested or turned back when they enter the United States illegally, according to Issa. 
  
The National Border Patrol Council also says the report is misleading and that the increase in drug seizures actually means the Mexican cartels are more active and smuggling more drugs into the U.S. 
  
Apprehensions along U.S. borders were down more than 50 percent -- to about 350,000 -- since  2008. More than 87,000 of those apprehended had criminal histories. The decrease is due to a more secure border, which results in less people attempting to cross into the U.S. illegally, the Napolitano report said. 
  
However, the NBPC claims the figures used by Napolitano and her staff are deceptive and can be attributed to more and more illegal aliens being successful at evading border agents. Also, there's a movement within the Customs and Border Protection directorate to create a "kinder, gentler" border patrol force.

"During mandatory Cultural and Environmental Awareness training that all Border Patrol agents must take, we learn that illegal aliens are now referred to as "cross-border violators". We further learn that we should carry lots of garbage bags and assist the "cross-border violators" in hauling out their trash and disposing of it properly," officials stated on the NBPC blog.

Union officials point to further evidence that Border Patrol field operations have been hijacked by politically correct bureaucrats and politicians in Washington, DC.

Read this story at examiner.com ...

U.S. Clarifies Policy on Birth Control for Religious Groups

New York Times

ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration took another step on Friday to enforce a federal mandate for health insurance coverage of contraceptives, announcing how the new requirement would apply to the many Roman Catholic hospitals, universities and social service agencies that insure themselves.

In such cases, the administration said, female employees and students will still have access to free coverage of contraceptives.

The coverage will be provided by the companies that review and pay claims — “third-party administrators” — or by “some other independent entity,” it said.

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said the government would guarantee women access to contraceptives “while accommodating religious liberty interests.”

The new proposal escalates the election-year fight over the administration’s birth control policy.

President Obama had previously announced what he described as an “accommodation” for religiously affiliated organizations that buy commercial insurance but object, for religious reasons, to covering contraceptives and sterilization procedures. In these cases, the White House said, the insurer “will be required to provide contraception coverage to women free of charge.”

On Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services went a step further and said it would propose a similar requirement for group health plans sponsored by religious organizations that insure themselves.

The new proposal did not mollify Republicans in Congress.

“It’s a Washington accounting gimmick,” Representative Jeff Fortenberry, Republican of Nebraska, said Friday in an interview. “The administration is twisting itself in all directions to expand the ‘accommodation’ for faith-based institutions. Why is it the government’s role to decide who gets an accommodation? The White House is creating an unnecessary political firestorm.”

Mr. Fortenberry has introduced a bill to let certain employers and insurers opt out of the mandate for contraceptive coverage. More than 220 House members have signed on as co-sponsors.

Read this story at nytimes.com ...