David Horowitz, The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama

From David Horowitz, at Amazon, The Black Book of the American Left — Volume VII: The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama.

Why Trump is Wise to Refer to 'Radical Islamic Terrorism' (VIDEO)

Here's Robert Spencer:

President Trump Fires 46 Obama Administration Holdovers at the Justice Department

Hey, right on!

At the New York Times, via Memeorandum, "Trump Abruptly Orders 46 Obama-Era Prosecutors to Resign."

Also at Twitchy:

YOU'RE FIRED: Donald Trump just told all 46 Obama-era US Attorneys to resign and Dems are LOSING IT https://t.co/OO3M34Nz6u

— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) March 10, 2017

BONUS: At FrontPage Magazine, "David Horowitz on Hannity: 'Purging the Deep State' (VIDEO)."

Tough Resistance to GOP's #ObamaCare Overhaul

Ann Coulter's pretty tough, and she hates it!

Heh.

But see the Los Angeles Times, "Obamacare overhaul faces resistance in Congress from right and left":

Who wrote this piece of crap Obamacare replacement bill? Please be specific.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) March 7, 2017

I have to give full identifying info as each health ins co goes bankrupt. What are names of the brain trust that wrote this piece of crap?

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) March 7, 2017

Also, I would like every person involved in the writing of this Obamacare replacement POS to take a ten-minute IQ test. Transparency!

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) March 7, 2017

House GOP leadership faced mounting opposition Tuesday after introducing an Obamacare repeal and replace bill that was rejected by small government conservatives, panned by Republican moderates and given only lukewarm support from President Trump.

One day after unveiling the GOP’s long-promised effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better, the new American Health Care Act already appears to be on life support, unlikely to survive the onslaught of friendly fire unless Trump personally rallies his party.

But Trump’s intervention looks uncertain. While the president embraced “our wonderful new healthcare bill” in an early morning tweet, he also suggested it’s just a starting point “for review and negotiation” — opening the floodgates to alternative ideas and proposals that could take weeks to sort out.

Later, in a White House meeting with House Republicans, he offered a stronger endorsement, saying he was "proud to support" their plan and expected it to pass “very quickly.”

At the same time, though Trump is also accepting back-channel calls from conservative Republican opponents — including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — who are warning him off legislation they view as nothing more than a revamped federal entitlement program. Conservative lawmakers are being backed by the Koch network, whose supporters rallied outside the Capitol on Tuesday, and other influential groups including Heritage Action and Club for Growth. They dismiss the GOP leadership’s bill as “Obamacare 2.0” or “Obamacare lite.”

“This is not the Obamacare repeal bill we’ve been waiting for,” said Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who is leading the GOP opposition with Paul and the House Freedom Caucus. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has also raised objections.“We promised the American people we would drain the swamp and end business as usual in Washington. This bill does not do that,” Lee said. “This is exactly the type of backroom dealing and rushed process that we criticized Democrats for, and it is not what we promised the American people.”

For seven years Republicans have promised to end Obamacare, and after winning repeated congressional elections on their promise to repeal and replace the law, they were confident Democrats would have no choice but to join them.

But Democrats have shown no interest in the GOP bill, saying it would drop millions of Americans from healthcare coverage without offering them viable alternatives. Rather than being spooked by their November election losses, Democrats have been buoyed by the outpouring of support for Obamacare by constituents and protesters flocking to lawmakers’ town hall meetings across the country...

David E. Bernstein, Lawless

At Amazon, David E. Bernstein, Lawless: The Obama Administration's Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law.

BONUS: Bernstein, Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights against Progressive Reform.

Let's Remember Just How Bad the Obama Presidency Was

Well, how can anyone forget? Heh.

At Post-Libertarian, "The Obama Presidency Was Bad":

We’re already caught up in how terrible the Trump presidency is, but over the next four years, it will be important to remember just how bad the Obama presidency was. When overcome with frustration at the current administration, I would urge readers to come back to this post and remember that the last president was also quite terrible. In his farewell speech, Obama tried to make the argument for his presidency’s accomplishments, but many of them were simply court cases that were decided while he was president, or decisions that were nice but had little real policy impact.

There have been plenty of reflections on the Obama presidency, but I think a high level overview of everything Obama did would put in perspective just how awful he’s been, especially as we experience the incompetency and horrible policy decisions of the current administration. I’ve done this by letter grades A through F.

Actually, I'm quite enjoying the current administration, thank you.

But keep reading.

National Park Service Retweets Far-Left-Wing Inauguration Posts on Twitter

Federal agencies are prohibited from partisan activities, particularly political support or agitation for one party or another (although rules on employee political contributions have been trimmed by court rulings).

So this looks improper, to say the least, via Hadas Gold:

National Parks Service …. 👀https://t.co/J5mtu3Anit pic.twitter.com/0CjAGcBvqD

— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) January 20, 2017

New Regime

A great post, yesterday, from Mark Steyn:

A New Dawn, A New Don https://t.co/sFY6nCXFsH #SteynOnAmerica #TheMarkSteynShow pic.twitter.com/68LgPw34Hx

— Mark Steyn (@MarkSteynOnline) January 20, 2017

#Inauguration Day

The photo's from November 9th at the West Wing.

For some reason, it's just now going viral. But my god, look at those smug sum-bitchs, lol.

Click on the tweet to see the hilarious responses. I swear if Donald Trump's even a one-term president the schadenfreude's going to last a lifetime.

Photo of the Decade, right here pic.twitter.com/yC7EqDf9zy

— The H2 (@TheH2) January 20, 2017

Laura Ingraham Reacts to Leftist Tantrums Over Trump's Inauguration, Bradley Manning's Commutation (VIDEO)

From Hannity last night:

Charles Krauthammer on President Obama's Commutation for Bradley Manning (VIDEO)

A great segment.

Dr. K. just nails it.

From this afternoon, with Martha MacCallum:

Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah al-Ansi, Bodyguard to Osama bin-Laden, Sprung in Obama's Latest Guantánamo Release

I'm shaking my head.

Seriously.

From Thomas Jocelyn, on Twitter:

1. DOD finally named 10 #Guantanamo detainees transferred to Oman.

9/10 previously deemed "high" risk by JTF-GTMO.https://t.co/iEgGkx81ye

— Thomas Joscelyn (@thomasjoscelyn) January 17, 2017

4. *BREAKING* One transferred GTMO detainee was Bin Laden bodyguard, may have been selected to take part in aborted 9/11 hijackings: pic.twitter.com/NDh7awWVLd

— Thomas Joscelyn (@thomasjoscelyn) January 17, 2017

Obama Commutes Sentence of Puerto Rican Terrorist Oscar López Rivera

I had to look this guy up, at Wikipedia:

Oscar López Rivera (born January 6, 1943) is a Puerto Rican nationalist and one of the leaders of the FALN. In 1981, López Rivera was convicted and sentenced to 55 years in federal prison for seditious conspiracy, use of force to commit robbery, interstate transportation of firearms, and conspiracy to transport explosives with intent to destroy government property. In 1988 he was sentenced to an additional 15 years in prison for conspiring to escape from the Leavenworth federal prison. Lopez solicited unincarcerated supporters to obtain weapons, grenades, and C-4 explosives for use in breaking him and fellow inmates – to whom Lopez had boasted about his leadership role in the FALN – out of prison. President Obama commuted Oscar Lopez Rivera's sentence on January 17, 2017. At the time he was the longest-incracerated member of the FALN.

López Rivera was among the 14 convicted FALN members offered conditional clemency by U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1999, but rejected the offer. His sister, Zenaida López, said he refused the offer because on parole, he would be in "prison outside prison. Resident Commissioner, Pedro Pierluisi, has stated that "the primary reason that López Rivera did not accept the clemency offer extended to him in 1999 was because it had not also been extended to fellow FALN prisoner Carlos Torres and Cordero Nananin." According to New York Times writer John Broder, López Rivera "refused to accept the President's offer to commute their sentences. Mr. Clinton demanded as one of the conditions of their release that the jailed Puerto Ricans renounce the use of terrorism to achieve their aim of independence for the Caribbean commonwealth." Torres and Nananin were subsequently released from prison in July 2010...

And further:

At the time of their arrest, López Rivera and the others declared themselves to be combatants in an anti-colonial war against the United States to liberate Puerto Rico from U.S. domination and invoked prisoner of war status. They stated that U.S. courts did not have jurisdiction to treat them as criminals, and petitioned for their cases to be handed over to an international court that would determine their status. The U.S. Government, however, did not recognize their request...

Well, you can see why the dude's getting sprung. Obama loves terrorists, especially left-wing revolutionary terrorists. O probably idolized this guy. López Rivera has never expressed remorse for his "anti-colonial war against the United States." His terrorist group, the FALN (Armed Forces of National Liberation) was closely allied the Fidel Castro and the Cuban Communist regime. Indeed, Charles Krauthammer suggested on Fox News just now that the release of López Rivera may have been part of a quid pro quo in the Cuban normalization deal. This is a presidential administration that normalizes terrorism.

Thank God we have less than three days until this hated regime, this reviled Obama regime, is driven from office.

Also at the Guardian U.K., FWIW, "Obama commutes sentence for political prisoner Oscar López Rivera: López Rivera, whose commutation was announced with 208 others, has been incarcerated for 35 years for his role in fighting for Puerto Rico’s independence."

Pity the Sad Legacy of Barack Obama

It's brother Cornel West, at the Guardian U.K., "Our hope and change candidate fell short time and time again. Obama cheerleaders who refused to make him accountable bear some responsibility":

Eight years ago the world was on the brink of a grand celebration: the inauguration of a brilliant and charismatic black president of the United States of America. Today we are on the edge of an abyss: the installation of a mendacious and cathartic white president who will replace him.

This is a depressing decline in the highest office of the most powerful empire in the history of the world. It could easily produce a pervasive cynicism and poisonous nihilism. Is there really any hope for truth and justice in this decadent time? Does America even have the capacity to be honest about itself and come to terms with its self-destructive addiction to money-worship and cowardly xenophobia?

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville – the two great public intellectuals of 19th-century America – wrestled with similar questions and reached the same conclusion as Heraclitus: character is destiny (“sow a character and you reap a destiny”).

The age of Barack Obama may have been our last chance to break from our neoliberal soulcraft. We are rooted in market-driven brands that shun integrity and profit-driven policies that trump public goods. Our “post-integrity” and “post-truth” world is suffocated by entertaining brands and money-making activities that have little or nothing to do with truth, integrity or the long-term survival of the planet. We are witnessing the postmodern version of the full-scale gangsterization of the world.

The reign of Obama did not produce the nightmare of Donald Trump – but it did contribute to it. And those Obama cheerleaders who refused to make him accountable bear some responsibility.

A few of us begged and pleaded with Obama to break with the Wall Street priorities and bail out Main Street. But he followed the advice of his “smart” neoliberal advisers to bail out Wall Street. In March 2009, Obama met with Wall Street leaders. He proclaimed: I stand between you and the pitchforks. I am on your side and I will protect you, he promised them. And not one Wall Street criminal executive went to jail.

We called for the accountability of US torturers of innocent Muslims and the transparency of US drone strikes killing innocent civilians. Obama’s administration told us no civilians had been killed. And then we were told a few had been killed. And then told maybe 65 or so had been killed. Yet when an American civilian, Warren Weinstein, was killed in 2015 there was an immediate press conference with deep apologies and financial compensation. And today we still don’t know how many have had their lives taken away.

We hit the streets again with Black Lives Matter and other groups and went to jail for protesting against police killing black youth. We protested when the Israeli Defense Forces killed more than 2,000 Palestinians (including 550 children) in 50 days. Yet Obama replied with words about the difficult plight of police officers, department investigations (with no police going to jail) and the additional $225m in financial support of the Israeli army. Obama said not a mumbling word about the dead Palestinian children but he did call Baltimore black youth “criminals and thugs”.

In addition, Obama’s education policy unleashed more market forces that closed hundreds of public schools for charter ones. The top 1% got nearly two-thirds of the income growth in eight years even as child poverty, especially black child poverty, remained astronomical. Labor insurgencies in Wisconsin, Seattle and Chicago (vigorously opposed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a close confidant of Obama) were passed over in silence.

In 2009, Obama called New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg an “outstanding mayor”. Yet he overlooked the fact that more than 4 million people were stopped-and-frisked under Bloomberg’s watch. Along with Carl Dix and others, I sat in a jail two years later for protesting these very same policies that Obama ignored when praising Bloomberg.

Yet the mainstream media and academia failed to highlight these painful truths linked to Obama. Instead, most well-paid pundits on TV and radio celebrated the Obama brand. And most black spokespeople shamelessly defended Obama’s silences and crimes in the name of racial symbolism and their own careerism. How hypocritical to see them now speak truth to white power when most went mute in the face of black power. Their moral authority is weak and their newfound militancy is shallow.

More.

PHOTO: That's me and brother Cornel, at Long Beach City College, October 21, 2016.

President Obama Led the U.S. in Endless Wars, After Being the Most Antiwar Senator in 2007

O's biggest pitch back in 2007 was that he never voted for the Iraq war. (Of course, he wouldn't have, since he wasn't in Congress at the time, but still.)

I wrote about it back in 2012, "As the Nation Remembers This Memorial Day, Don't Forget That Barack Obama Was Most Antiwar Candidate for President Since George McGovern."

Except for folks on the very far left (think wackos like Code Pink and International ANSWER), progressive-leftists gave him a pass.

Today, Obama leaves office amid an unprecedented expansion of America's wars, which now rage across the Central Asia and Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and Central and North Africa.

Yay!

At LAT, "President Obama, who hoped to sow peace, instead led the nation in war":

Before he took office in 2008, Barack Obama vowed to end America’s grueling conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. During his second term, he pledged to take the country off what he called a permanent war footing.

“Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” he said in May 2013. “But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. It’s what our democracy demands.”

But Obama leaves a very different legacy as he prepares to hand his commander-in-chief responsibilities to Donald Trump.

U.S. military forces have been at war for all eight years of Obama’s tenure, the first two-term president with that distinction. He launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.

Yet the U.S. faces more threats in more places than at any time since the Cold War, according to U.S. intelligence. For the first time in decades, there is at least the potential of an armed clash with America’s largest adversaries, Russia and China.

Obama slashed the number of U.S. troops in war zones from 150,000 to 14,000, and stopped the flow of American soldiers coming home in body bags. He also used diplomacy, not war, to defuse a tense nuclear standoff with Iran.

But he vastly expanded the role of elite commando units and the use of new technology, including armed drones and cyber weapons.

“The whole concept of war has changed under Obama,” said Jon Alterman, Middle East specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonprofit think tank in Washington.

Obama “got the country out of ‘war,’ at least as we used to see it,” Alterman said. “We’re now wrapped up in all these different conflicts, at a low level and with no end in sight.”

The administration built secret drone bases and other facilities in Africa and the Middle East, and added troops and warships in the western Pacific. It also moved troops and equipment to eastern Europe to counter a resurgent Russia.

Along the way, Obama sometimes quarreled with his top military advisors. After they left the Pentagon, Obama’s first three secretaries of Defense — Robert M. Gates, Leon E. Panetta and Chuck Hagel — accused the Obama White House of micromanaging the military.

Obama’s political rise famously began with a speech he gave in Chicago in October 2002, when he announced he was “opposed to dumb wars,” referring to the planned invasion of Iraq by the George W. Bush administration.

But as president, Obama found himself caught in the fierce cross currents of the so-called Arab Spring uprisings that roiled much of the Middle East and North Africa in 2011, leading to harsh crackdowns across the region. Only one country, Tunisia, ultimately saw a transition to democracy.

He reluctantly approved a NATO air campaign in Libya initially aimed at preventing massacres of civilians by strongman Moammar Kadafi.

Determined to avoid the kind of nation building that pulled the U.S. into Iraq’s civil war, he withdrew after Kadafi was killed — only to see the oil-rich country collapse in conflict and become a magnet for terrorist groups.

The danger was clear after members of the Islamic militant group Ansar al Sharia stormed a U.S. diplomatic compound and nearby CIA base in Benghazi, in eastern Libya, in September 2012, killing U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

The messy aftermath in Libya made Obama realize the limitations of military power in achieving U.S. goals, and that shaped the rest of his presidency...

Still more.

President Obama Surprises Vice President Joe Biden with Presidential Medal of Freedom (VIDEO)

Biden was generally surprised.

He truly thought it was a farewell ceremony, and that folks were mostly going to say good things about each other, blah, blah. And then the president announced the award.

I'll be glad when this administration is gone, and I frankly don't remember so much glad-handing, back-slapping, and mutual encomiums when the G.W. Bush administration left office. I think O's taken narcissism to a whole new level.

Still, I gotta admit this moment was pretty amazing. That's genuine emotion coming from the vice president (who, I believe, is a decent man, despite his far-left proclivities).

The story's at USA Today.

And at CNN, which I had going live in real time:

Farewell, Radical-in-Chief

From Matthew Vadum, at FrontPage Magazine, "Obama says goodbye to a nation he despises":

Farewell, Radical-in-Chief | Frontpage Mag https://t.co/ChVLU6vMsf

— Ƭαвιтнα Ɓℓιѕѕ ❤ (@BlissTabitha) January 11, 2017

President Barack Hussein Obama bid farewell last night to the nation he despises in what was, for him, a mercifully brief speech.

“America is a better, stronger place than it was when we started,” he said in all apparent seriousness.

After sending aid and comfort to an Islamic supremacist dictator in Egypt, he falsely claimed to have pulled the rug out from the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear weapon program. The Nobel Peace Prize winner left out how his illegal war destabilized Libya and the fact that the U.S. military deeply distrusts him.

He pretended the economy is going gangbusters while leaving out the fact that nine days away from his departure from the Oval Office, his signature legislative accomplishment, Obamacare, is collapsing as insurers run away from the so-called insurance exchanges. He acted as if fighting alleged manmade global warming was more important than just about everything.

It some ways it wasn’t much different than the warm and fuzzy victory speech the Divider-in-Chief gave in Chicago in 2008, except in this speech he got to lie about his record while throwing in cheap shots against his critics and the incoming president. (A transcript of Obama’s final great oratorical atrocity is available here.)

In a forum resplendent with the echo-acoustics our megalomaniacal president prefers, the pathologically dishonest Obama tried last night to cast himself as a unifying figure:

It falls to each of us to be those anxious, jealous guardians of our democracy; to embrace the joyous task we’ve been given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours. Because for all our outward differences, we in fact all share the same proud title, the most important office in a democracy: Citizen. Citizen.

So you see that’s what our democracy demands. It needs you. Not just when there’s an election, not just when your own narrow interest is at stake, but over the full span of a lifetime. If you’re tired of arguing with strangers on the Internet, try talking with one of them in real life.

A life form that just arrived from Alpha Centauri might have been moved as Obama tried to whitewash the unmitigated catastrophe his presidency has been.

Deploying all the usual tired old left-wing smears against conservatives, the lawless 44th president recited a long series of America-boosting sayings most of which he has never believed in. He said nice things about the dead white men much-derided by the Left whom we call the Founding Fathers, along with the government-restraining Constitution he has spent so much of his life spitting on. With a straight face this despotic destroyer of the rule of law called the Constitution “a remarkable, beautiful gift.”

Of course Chicago was an appropriate locale for the goodbye address. It’s a violent one-party city that is collapsing under the weight of its own corruption. He gave the speech at Lakeside Center at McCormick Place in Chicago, not too far from storied Hyde Park and the site of the future Obama Presidential Center.

The Windy City is where community organizing guru Saul Alinsky, whose teachings on tactics deeply influenced Obama, learned his craft from the Al Capone crime gang. Obama got his start in nasty Alinsky-style community organizing with the assistance of groups like the Developing Communities Project, Catholic Campaign for Human Development, and the Gamaliel Foundation.

Chicago is where young Obama cut his organizing teeth running the successful get-out-the-vote drive for ACORN-affiliated Project Vote in 1992 that elected the awful one-term senator, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois. She was a friend of Communist Cuba and African dictators who worked closely with agitator Heather Booth of the Midwest Academy, Democratic Socialists of America, and the Communist Party USA, all of which Obama welcomed into his political coalition.

Chicago is where the half-black Obama whose purported father was from Kenya learned to portray himself as what the Left calls “authentically” black, soaking up vile racist hatred while sitting in the pews of Jeremiah Wright’s sinister Nation of Islam-like church.

Chicago is where unrepentant terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn launched his career in electoral politics by hosting a living room fundraiser for his Illinois State Senate campaign. Although his presidential campaign vehemently denied Obama was close to Ayers, the former Weather Underground leader admitted years later that “we served on a couple of boards together.” Chicago is also where Michelle Obama worked at the same law firm as Dohrn.

Giving the speech in Chicago was also appropriate on a symbolic level. Chicago (like Detroit) epitomizes Obama’s failed, bankrupt left-wing ideology, and lack of leadership...

Still more.

Manhunt Still Underway for Suspect Accused of Murdering Orlando Police Officer: Reward Raised to $100,000 (VIDEO)

We should be having nationwide protests against the demonic murderers of police officers, especially black police officers.

This is horrific. The suspect's still on the loose.

At the Orlando Sentinel, "Orlando police killer reward raised to $100,000; suspect still on run."

Chicago Facebook Beating and Torture Video: Window Into a Depraved Culture

I though of Heather Mac Donald almost immediately when the story broke.

No one's got this beat nailed down better than she does.

At City Journal, "A Window Into a Depraved Culture."

There's no easy block quotes, so read it all at the link.

And don't forget Ms. Heather's wonderful book, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.

A Window Into a Depraved Culture https://t.co/LNDiVXRV9E

— Manhattan Institute (@ManhattanInst) January 10, 2017

Race-Baiter-in-Chief

Ain't it the truth?

From Ben Garrison:

The Final Countdown! 12 Days till the "Race Baiter in Chief" is out of the Oval Office! #Obama #ObamasLegacy #Soros https://t.co/Oj98iIxEAZ pic.twitter.com/kYJnCm5xfK

— BenGarrison Cartoons (@GrrrGraphics) January 7, 2017