In the first year of his papacy, Francis has shifted the Catholic conversation toward Obama’s side of the court, lowering the heat on culture-war battles like gay marriage in favor of an emphasis on the least fortunate...In 2009, Obama met with Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. The two talked for a little less than half an hour, nearly double the 15 minutes that had been allotted. In a conversation that seemed to be a search for common ground, the two discussed immigration, the global economic crisis and the peace process in the Middle East. Benedict raised the issue of abortion, and Obama pledged to do everything in his power to reduce their numbers.
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| You shall not...commence? |
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, already at odds with the U.S. over a vital security pact, snubbed western leaders once again by joining the likes of Syria and Venezuela in backing Russia's annexation of Crimea.Karzai's office released a statement over the weekend saying Afghanistan "respects the free will of the people of Crimea to decide about their own future."The statement said "we respect the decision the people of Crimea took through a recent referendum that considers Crimea as part of the Russian Federation."Karzai weighed in on the Ukraine crisis shortly before President Obama flew overseas for meetings with European partners. The Obama administration and European allies have described the Crimea referendum, and Russia's decision to annex the peninsula, as "illegitimate."
WASHINGTON — Am
erican officials have long considered Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, a security threat, blocking it from business deals in the United States for fear that the company would create “back doors” in its equipment that could allow the Chinese military or Beijing-backed hackers to steal corporate and government secrets.But even as the United States made a public case about the dangers of buying from Huawei, classified documents show that the National Security Agency was creating its own back doors — directly into Huawei’s networks.The agency pried its way into the servers in Huawei’s sealed headquarters in Shenzhen, China’s industrial heart, according to N.S.A. documents provided by the former contractor Edward J. Snowden. It obtained information about the workings of the giant routers and complex digital switches that Huawei boasts connect a third of the world’s population, and monitored communications of the company’s top executives.One of the goals of the operation, code-named “Shotgiant,” was to find any links between Huawei and the People’s Liberation Army, one 2010 document made clear. But the plans went further: to exploit Huawei’s technology so that when the company sold equipment to other countries — including both allies and nations that avoid buying American products — the N.S.A. could roam through their computer and telephone networks to conduct surveillance and, if ordered by the president, offensive cyberoperations.
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| Self interest. |
Rathbun (2008) compares three separate themes in conservative policies since the 1980s: conservatism, neoconservatism, and isolationism. These approaches are similar in that they all invoked the mantle of "realism" and pursued foreign policy goals designed to promote national interests. Conservatives, however, were the only group that was "realist" in the academic sense in that they defined the national interest narrowly, strove for balances of power internationally, viewed international relations as amoral, and especially valued sovereignty. By contrast, neoconservatives based their foreign policy on nationalism, and isolationists sought to minimize any involvement in foreign affairs and raise new barriers to immigration.[26] Former Republican Congressman Ron Paul favored a return to the non-interventionist policies of Thomas Jefferson and frequently opposed military intervention in countries like Iran and Iraq.
Hillary Clinton may be the early conventional wisdom frontrunner for 2016, but the American people don't seem eager to be party to an unquestioning coronation. A nationwide survey conducted by Bloomberg shows that a majority of voters do not believe the former Secretary of State's claim that she was unaware of denied security requests ahead of the 2012 Benghazi massacre...
Illinois Republicans opted to nominate Susanne Atanus as their party’s choice in the primary for that state’s 9th district by a margin of almost five percentage points. Earlier this year, Atanus drew attention by telling The Daily Herald newspaper that as a “God-first conservative Republican” she believes many of the plights of the last several decades, including droughts, tornadoes and diseases like autism and dementia are God’s punishment for gay marriage and legalized abortions.“God controls the weather,” Atanus said definitively in January. “God is angry. We are provoking him with abortions. We are provoking him with same-sex marriage, gay rights, civil unions.”
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| It's called backbone. Try it some time. |
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| This is how I plan to fly below the radar...swish. |
The official D.C. premiere of “Cesar Chavez” will be held at the Newseum on Tuesday night. But on Wednesday the film’s director and stars will head down the street to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. for a private White House screening. The biopic’s director, Diego Luna, told The Wrap that he hoped the president would tweet about the movie.
C.S.O., under the leadership of Los Angeles leftist President Ed Roybal (father of current congresswoman Lucille Roybal-Allard, mentor to far left congressman Xavier Becerra) and organizer Fred Ross, and with the financial backing of independent Chicago radical Saul Alinsky, became a major force in “progressive” politics in Los Angeles in the 1940s.C.S.O. created the first broad-based organization within the Los Angeles Mexican-American community. It had also established ties to organized labor, the Catholic Church, the Jewish community and to individuals in both the Democratic and Progressive parties, creating a broad based coalition that succeeded in electing Ed Roybal to the Los Angeles City council and then later to the U.S. Congress.C.S.O. pioneered, with the assistance of Saul Alinsky, the type of multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalition that would elect Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency some 60 years later.Both Ed Roybal and Cesar Chavez worked closely with a leading Los Angeles Communist Party USA member and Democratic Party activist, Bert Corona.
...But many commentators immediately said that the measures — which targeted senior officials including Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, Federation Council speaker Valentina Matviyenko, and longtime Kremlin aide Vladislav Surkov — would not deter the Kremlin from reversing course in Ukraine.President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov indicated the same attitude, saying that Western criticism was "not a reason for any kind of adjustments" to Russia's foreign policy, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported late Sunday.
Some pro-Kremlin pundits said the sanctions could even have the opposite of the intended effect, saying they would help fight corruption by officials who are banned by law from having assets abroad and that broader trade sanctions, if imposed, could stimulate economic reforms in Russia.
Ballots were being counted, and the first numbers from the referendum on whether Ukraine's Crimea region should join Russia or become an independent state were expected in a matter of hours after polls closed Sunday night, an election official said.Crimean Electoral Commission head Mikhail Malyshev said more than 80% of voters had cast ballots by the time polls closed at 8 p.m. local time (2 p.m. ET). Preliminary results will be announced at 10:30 p.m. local time (4:30 p.m ET) Sunday.The United States has already said it expects the Black Sea peninsula's majority ethnic Russian population to vote in favor of joining Russia. Moscow has strongly backed the referendum. The White House released a statement that said the vote was "administered under threats of violence and intimidation from a Russian military intervention that violates international law."
Republican David Jolly defeated Democrat Alex Sink on Tuesday in a Tampa-area House district where President Barack Obama's health care overhaul got its first test ahead of November's midterm elections and both sides spent millions auditioning national strategies.With almost 100 percent of the vote counted, Jolly had 48.5 percent of the vote to Sink's 46.7 percent. Libertarian Lucas Overby had 4.8 percent. The election was to replace 42-year Republican Rep. CW Bill Young, who died in October of cancer, and the evenly divided district had been considered a toss-up.
After almost $9 million in outside spending, a storm of attacks and counterattacks and endless speculation about its implications for the midterms, voters will cast their ballots in the Florida special congressional election on Tuesday.The stakes are particularly high for Democrats. The party has bet big on Alex Sink, Florida’s former chief financial officer and the Democrats’ 2010 gubernatorial nominee, in the race for the swing 13th Congressional District, which encompasses part of the St. Petersburg area. A win, Democrats hope, will deflate the conventional wisdom that 2014 is destined to go south for them.For the GOP, the race has been an opportunity to test-drive attacks on Obamacare, which are certain to be the centerpiece of its argument in this year’s midterm elections. And while national Republicans complain that their candidate, former Washington lobbyist David Jolly, has been lackluster, public polling suggests the race is tight.The two candidates are vying to replace GOP Rep. Bill Young, who died in October after representing the seat for more than four decades.
Days before Vladimir Putin's troops invaded Ukraine, National Security Adviser Susan Rice dismissed suggestions that Russia was about to pounce. "It's in nobody's interest," she said. Days later, President Obama declared the invasion to be illegal. "In 2014," he said, "we are well beyond the days when borders can be drawn over the heads of democratic leaders."Two things strike me about those quotes. First, they were right. From the viewpoint of the United States and its allies, invading Crimea made no sense, legally or strategically. Second, it didn't matter: Putin plays by his own set of rules, and it's dangerously naive not to realize that.Ukraine is illustrative of a flaw in Obama's worldview that consistently undermines his agenda, both foreign and domestic. He thinks being right is good enough. From fights with Congress over the federal budget and his nominations, to gun control, immigration reform, health care, and Syria, the president displays tunnel-vision conviction, an almost blinding righteousness. I'm right. They're wrong. Why isn't that enough?
With such certitude, Obama finds it hard to see why anybody would oppose him, which makes it almost impossible to earn new allies. He's also slow to realize when some fault lies with him. The result is Obama's legacy of "Right, but …" moments.
“What are you going to do, send the 101st Airborne into Crimea?” says Terry McCarthy, the president of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. “The way Republicans are dumping on the president, saying anything short of Armageddon shows that he’s weak, is silly. It’s kind of shocking that foreign policy, which used to be nonpartisan, now becomes partisan so quickly.”
More calculating conservatives pounced. Trying to rehabilitate himself, Marco Rubio told a CPAC audience here that America must “stand up to the spread of totalitarianism.”Sarah Palin, who seems ever more viperish, deployed her Yoda syntax with Sean Hannity: “People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil. They look at our president as one who wears mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates.”
Hillary Clinton showed more signs of flexibility Wednesday on how Obamacare is implemented, but she insisted the law is too important to “turn the clock back.”In a question-and-answer session following a lecture at UCLA, Clinton suggested she’s open to different ways of achieving the health law’s goals. She praised Arkansas — the state where she and her husband rose to political fame — for carrying out a new approach to expanding Medicaid coverage, by using the federal money to buy private health insurance for more than 100,000 low-income residents....“I think it’s important for people to realize what’s been accomplished. There’s been an enormous amount of, frankly, misinformation and disinformation,” Clinton said.She also used a line of defense that other Democrats have encouraged: Obamacare will help end “job lock,” in which people hang on to a job they don’t like because they’re afraid their health problems will prevent them from getting insurance again if they move. “I have said many times that if we were starting from scratch, we wouldn’t have built an employer-based system,” Clinton said. But since that’s the system we have, she said, it’s important to make it work.
This update is from Gallup polling conducted between Feb. 28 and March 2, just prior to the Obama administration's announcement this week that insurance companies will be able to delay until next year the requirement that they cancel or replace policies that don't conform to the provisions of the law often referred to as "Obamacare."The 23% who feel the law has hurt them is the highest percentage for the question since Gallup began asking Americans about it in 2012, and is up from 19% in previous polling.
The Black Sea is Russia's only warm-water port.Though Crimea is recognized worldwide as a part of Ukraine, the Russian Navy has kept its Black Sea Fleet stationed at a naval base in Sevastopol (in southern Crimea) since the late 1700s. In 2010, Russia negotiated an agreement that allows the country to share the all-important Sevastopol naval base through 2042, in exchange for deep discounts of about $40 billion on natural gas from Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia had every right to intervene in Ukraine if Russian-speaking people there asked for help, but he denied any plans to invade.But both President Obama and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in separate news conferences today said Russia was violating Ukraine’s sovereignty and called for Russia to “de-escalate” the situation.
