Tag Archives: Barack Obama

Missouri Republicans override governor’s veto to protect conscience rights and religious liberty

From Life Site News.

Excerpt:

Missouri Republicans override governor’s veto to protect conscience rights and religious liberty

Individuals, employees and employers in the state of Missouri, by the passage of this law, will not be required to participate in, provide, pay for, or provide referrals for any health plans or services or services that cover those services, nor will it be lawful for such persons to be discriminated against or penalized by any government agency.

The bill was vetoed by Governor Nixon on July 12, which surprised some in light of his record of allowing previous pro-life bills to pass without his signature by allowing the 45-day veto period to elapse.  It was in this way that Missouri’s late term abortion ban became law just last year.

In yesterday’s special veto session, the Senate voted 26-6 and the House 109-45 in defense of the bill, which was written in response to the federal HHS mandate issued by Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that took effect in August.  The narrow religious exemptions in the mandate left individuals and non-religiously-affiliated employers outside its purview and subject to complying with its controversial requirements.  Individual conscientious objectors, whether employer or employee in the state of Missouri, are now protected from the mandate unless possible federal court decisions rule otherwise.

Missouri governor Jay Nixon is, of course, a Democrat, and therefore opposes doctors and nurses having conscience rights. He also wants to force Christian businesses to subsidize abortion-causing drugs. He lost this time because the Republicans were there in force to stop his secular leftist fascism.

Al Qaeda chief suspect in Libya terrorist attack, Obama flies to Las Vegas fundraiser

From CNN. (H/T Bad Blue)

Excerpt:

A pro-al Qaeda group responsible for a previous armed assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi is the chief suspect in Tuesday’s attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya, sources tracking militant Islamist groups in eastern Libya say.

They also note that the attack immediately followed a call from al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri for revenge for the death in June of a senior Libyan member of the terror group Abu Yahya al-Libi.

The group suspected to be behind the assault — the Imprisoned Omar Abdul Rahman Brigades — first surfaced in May when it claimed responsibility for an attack on the International Red Cross office in Benghazi. The following month the group claimed responsibility for detonating an explosive device outside the U.S. Consulate and later released a video of that attack.

Noman Benotman, once a leading member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and now based at the Quilliam Foundation in London told CNN, “An attack like this would likely have required preparation. This would not seem to be merely a protest which escalated.”

“According to our sources, the attack was the work of roughly 20 militants, prepared for a military assault; it is rare that an RPG7 is present at a peaceful protest,” Benotman said.

“According to our sources, the attack against the consulate had two waves. The first attack led to U.S. officials being evacuated from the consulate by Libyan security forces, only for the second wave to be launched against U.S. officials after they were kept in a secure location.”

That analysis is supported by U.S. sources who say the attack on the consulate is believed to have been pre-planned. The sources say the attackers used the protest as a diversion to launch the attack, although the sources could not say if the attackers instigated the protest or merely took advantage of it.

I wrote before about he’s been skipping more than half his daily intelligence briefings. Well guess what? He skipped every intelligence briefing this week. That Obama would bungle our national security doesn’t surprise me one bit. He’s a Democrat. He’s like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. They don’t do anything about terrorism – they are afraid to offend terrorists.

Back to Obama: where is our master of foreign policy and national security now?

He has flown to Las Vegas to do some campaign fundraising:

On the day after the U.S. Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were killed in Benghazi, the White House on Wednesday morning released a schedule showing that President Obama would continue with his planned campaign trip to Las Vegas.

You can read the full list of Obama’s ten worst foreign policy blunders. Obama’s weak foreign policy (bowing to tyrants and hugging dictators) caused this attack. He’s too busy playing golf to think about national security and counter-terrorism.

Obama is skipping over half of his daily intelligence briefings (PDBs)

From the liberal Washington Post:

President Obama is touting his foreign policy experience on the campaign trail, but startling new statistics suggest that national security has not necessarily been the personal priority the president makes it out to be. It turns out that more than half the time, the commander in chief does not attend his daily intelligence meeting.

The Government Accountability Institute, a new conservative investigative research organization, examined President Obama’s schedule from the day he took office until mid-June 2012, to see how often he attended his Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) — the meeting at which he is briefed on the most critical intelligence threats to the country. During his first 1,225 days in office, Obama attended his PDB just 536 times — or 43.8 percent of the time. During 2011 and the first half of 2012, his attendance became even less frequent — falling to just over 38 percent. By contrast, Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.

I asked National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor about the findings, and whether there were any instances where the president attended the intelligence meeting that were not on his public schedule. Vietor did not dispute the numbers, but said the fact that the president, during a time of war, does not attend his daily intelligence meeting on a daily basis is “not particularly interesting or useful.”

Please see my previous post on Obama’s top 10 foreign policy failures.

Let’s review the most important one:

Failure #1: No Results In Slowing Or Stopping Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program

Today, Iran is on the cusp of nuclear weapons capability. Such a capability in the hands of the world’s top terrorist sponsoring state poses the greatest threat facing the United States and our friends and allies, and it risks sparking a nuclear arms race across the Middle East.

Despite promising to “do everything in his power” to stop Iran, four years of President Obama’s irresolute policies have failed to slow the progress of Iran’s program. In fact, that progress has sped up:

  • Fastest Rate Of Enrichment Ever. In 2009, Iran’s enrichment rate of low-enriched uranium was 56 kilograms per month.  That jumped to 116 kilograms per month from November 2011 to February 2012. The enrichment rate now stands at 158 kilograms per month, the fastest rate ever.[1]
  • More Spinning Centrifuges. The total number of spinning centrifuges has gone from 3,936 to 10,477 during Obama’s term. The growth rate of spinning centrifuges went from 112 centrifuges per month before Obama came into office to 152 centrifuges per month during his term.[2]
  • Fordow Underground Enrichment Facility Nearing Completion. The fortified underground facility is 70 percent complete. The number of centrifuges installed has gone from 1,064 in May to 2,140 today. The facility’s limit is 3,000 centrifuges.[3]

The Iranian program has gotten to this point because President Obama has squandered all credibility with the ayatollahs:

  • A Failed Engagement Policy. President Obama offered the ayatollahs “no preconditions” talks, which were rebuffed. The latest round of multilateral talks has produced no results.
  • Refrained From Supporting The Green Movement. When asked during a press conference, President Obama shamefully refused to voice support for Iranian dissidents in 2009 as they were being killed in the streets, saying he did not want to “meddle” in Iran’s affairs.
  • A Weak Sanctions Policy. President Obama opposed and sought to water down crippling sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank until he was forced into them by Congress and our European partners.[4] He then undermined those sanctions by issuing waivers to 20 of the top importers of Iranian oil, including China.[5]
  • Abandoned Missile Defense. He abandoned a European missile defense system meant to protect against Iranian missiles.
  • Undermined The Credibility Of The Military Option. His administration has given the Iranians no reason to believe it is serious about a military option. The administration has repeatedly talked down the effectiveness and advisability of the military option, and seems to have devoted more energy toward preventing an Israeli strike on Iran than toward preventing an Iranian nuclear weapons capability. Obama officials leaked that the administration has focused its efforts on explaining to Israel “the dangers of an Israeli attack” on Iran and has attempted to “make the decision to attack as hard as possible for Israel.”[6] And the President himself, after boldly stating to AIPAC that the United States “has Israel’s back,” changed his tune two days later by saying his statement was “not a military doctrine.”

In the face of such irresolution, the ayatollahs are pressing forward toward nuclear weapons capability without fear of repercussion because they do not believe we are serious.

And now we know why. He’s played golf over a 100 times. He’s in over his head.