The Obama Presidency-One Year In

My fellow Americans:

This address could and should be the equivalent to a convention speech. I am not a politician, I’m not part of a party, and I’m not running for anything - I’m too young.

I come to you at the early years of a Presidency yet at a turning point of our nation’s collective soul.

On January 20^th of 2009 America made history by electing the first black President of the United States. This moment was historic… for the 20^th of January only. I have and will continue to judge this man, Barack Obama on the content of his character, not the color of his skin or the historic nature of his election.

The content of his governance over the past year has been nothing short of lackluster. His economic recovery plans have, by his own measure, failed. His laughable diplomatic efforts threaten our standing as the leader of the free world. Today I ask what another man asked at a similar point, are you better off than you were one year ago?

I assume the answer to be no. And if the President wants to know why we believe this, let me take him to school. However, this time he won’t be able to grade himself.

After voting, as a Senator to bail out big businesses, and backing the bailout of America’s auto industry, the President began his term as President with an executive order about 24 hours in. He would close the Military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba by that time the next year. In that year however, his administration has had nothing short of a heck of a time finding a state in this great country to take the most dangerous people on planet Earth. Was he shocked by the fact that the American people don’t want terrorists down the street? Is he shocked to find that Americans oppose giving the rights we hold as law abiding U.S. citizens, to non-U.S. enemy combatants bent on our very destruction?

On the last point, he either didn’t know or didn’t care. During this year his Attorney General announced their master plan for prosecuting the mastermind of an attack that killed nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001. Barack Obama’s justice department will try Khalid Sheik Muhammad in lower Manhattan, just blocks from the very towers he helped bring down, in a city where his attack butchered over 2700 people. If this sick irony is supposed to comfort the people who lost loved ones, this White House needs a new moral compass.

The truth is that decision as well as the closure of Guantanamo Bay is as reckless and irresponsible as anything in the war on terror to date-if that’s what we call it anymore. It is not right legally or morally to grant non-U.S. citizens, American rights.

As to our defense overseas, Iran continues on an unobstructed path toward nuclear weapons. However, this year the administration was given a gift on this front. The June reelection of their President sparked massive protests because of their elections being rigged in favor of the incumbent. As the protests grew, the more violent the government treated the protesters. As men, women and children were being cracked down upon for practicing their inherent human rights, this President said nothing. An innocent woman known as “Neda” is murdered on camera and President Obama can only blame both sides for the conflict’s escalation. For a man who leads the free world, he was buying ice bream in Northern Virginia when oppressed people needed an advocate. It took nearly 8 days for our President to condemn the obviously cruel actions by the Iranian government.

While we’re on the topic of overseas relations, this President spent more time in the air and overseas than any other President in his first year. I guess we can excuse his jet setting and own environmental hypocrisy if he came away with anything from all of the conferences, summits, and trips.

Twice he went to Copenhagen in order to achieve lofty goals. But, he failed to win his hometown the 2016 Olympics and failed to get India and China to agree to hamstring their economies along with our own on climate change.

His famous apology tour took him to Europe, where he got a smattering of troops for the war in Afghanistan and a whole one Guantanamo detainee. To the Middle East, where his efforts provided the United States with more foiled attacks by that part of the world, and Israel with a continued barrage of rockets into their country.

He also flew to Russia, where he promptly stabbed our allies Poland and the Czech Republic in the back when he gave up the much needed missile defense that would’ve been housed in those brave nations. For this dramatic change of policy, the United States received nothing and demanded nothing in return from the Putin/Medvedev regime.

On the topic of allies, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahou was left to his own country’s defense at the United Nations. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was snubbed by the White House and given unusable DVD’s as an official gift.

These events would be comical if they weren’t so detrimental to our country.

I would be remise, however, if I didn’t mention the Commander in Chief’s decision to send much needed reinforcements to America’s war in Afghanistan. What he didn’t realize is the commanding general he put in charge in that country Gen. Stanly McChrystal had deemed time to be of the essence in our efforts and if we didn’t act in 12 months we would lose. The President promptly spent one fourth of that time pondering a decision that should have been right in front of him all along. In the end, he will send up to the 40,000 troops the General asked for, but on a strict timetable, which is another piece of lunacy. Did General Eisenhower have a timetable after D-Day? Did Grant? Or Washington? No, because wars end not when the President’s political capital runs out, it’s when the troops win the war and achieve the goals they were sent on their mission to achieve. We can only hope the timetable is only a political stalling measure, designed to fool his left wing base.

Domestically this President is fond of boasting about the sour economy he inherited from George W. Bush. That excuse may have been viable early on, but not anymore. After one year, the economy is worse off than last year. Unemployment last year was 7%. Now it is 10%. Big business may be back, but small business isn’t and that’s the backbone of this economy. The day the President owned this situation is the day he waited 3 days in a self-titled “crisis” to sign the stimulus bill. Many claimed this bill was only about one thing, a three-letter word as Vice President Biden put it, J-O-B-S, jobs. After assuring us that “nobody messes with Joe” the President essentially placed 787 Billion dollars in the Vice President’s lap. The result? He promised the unemployment rate wouldn’t go above 8%. It peaked at 10.2%. Money was shown to have gone to over 1000 congressional districts, even though there are only 435 of them. It seemed the type of jobs were akin to paying one man to dig a hole, and paying another man to fill in back up. It prompted many to ask, where are the jobs? Good question. We still don’t know. Maybe they fell in the new and completely make believe category for “saved jobs”.

Good news erupted though, when, after the House passed a Cap and Trade tax, the measure fell on deaf ears. Even so, the Environmental Protection Agency deemed the very substance we breathe out of our bodies as pollution.

But the reason energy taxes were put on the back burner was because the American people were to busy trying to read up on healthcare. We had a lot of reading all right. Each bill from the House and Senate seemed to grow larger and larger. 1000 page legislation began to look small as each attempt to put the government’s hands further on American’s healthcare grew bigger, bad-er, and more bogus. Senators and Congressman openly saw reading the bill to be an unnecessary task. While, at the same time badgering those who only ask that the bills be read openly on the floor once. After Nancy Pelosi jammed it through the House by five votes, the Senate lowered itself to out and out legalized bribery to pass their bill. Any Senator that had a loud objection to the final product was given a payoff, a kickback, or another personal incentive to vote in favor of this legislation. In the process we also saw the spine of so called moderate Senators. The truth is, they have no spine at all.

And even as we end 2009, the President will not have a healthcare bill on his desk until at least late January of next year. So what will be the lasting legacy domestically in 2009 for President Obama? Deficits. While the President still claims he inherited that too, the truth is he took a 1 trillion dollar deficit and multiplied it by four. He plopped more money on our national debt to the point that the federal government is in danger of losing its AAA bond rating. He’s printing money so fast that the world community he panders too is openly discussing moving to another currency and away from the dollar as its standard. All of this happens amid the President’s call for fiscal responsibility in 2010. Pardon us if we ask where you’ve been for the past 12 months Mr. President? Pardon us if we question the audacity of Barack Obama. We know he had it in his book, but this nerve is almost jaw dropping. Message to President Obama in 2010: “You’ve run out of our money”.

What a record for 12 months? How sad is it that we have to go through three more years of this. Well, we may not have to. Slowly but surely the American people are waking up. The President’s approval rating has plummeted from near 70% to the mid 40’s-in one year. Tea Party protests have become widespread. There are elections for Congress in November of 2010, and of course the President’s reelection in 2012. We must collectively make our voices clear on these occasions, because that is the only way we can make a difference. We need to tell the President, we don’t need him to be audacious, we need him to be right.

Thank you, God Bless you, and God Bless America.

Terror Year, Terror Decade...

Instead of doing a year in review - or a decade in review - I would like to focus on the unquestioned number one story of the decade: Terrorism-and how we can prevent the next decade from being engrossed in it.

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In reading the “year in review” articles from around the media and blogosphere, I came upon a trend that may be shocking when put all together in a list: Joe Biden was right… in some ways.

Biden predicted that the world would test the new President. We conservatives took that as proof Obama was weak on foreign policy, but during this year it wasn’t a world crisis that faced Obama, it was terrorism right here on American soil.

For all of Homeland Security Sec. Janet Napolitano’s edicts early on in the year about “right wing extremists”, it was REAL terrorists that tried time and time again to attack and kill Americans this year.

(From a Time Mag article)

• In January, Bryant Neal Vinas, a Long Island convert to Islam, plead guilty to helping al-Qaeda in a plot to blow up a train in Penn Station.

• Late in 2008, Shirwa Ahmed, a Somali-American college student from Minneapolis, became the first American suicide bomber on record when he killed 29 people in an attack in Somalia. Earlier in the year, the FBI had revealed that at least 20 Somali-Americans from the Minneapolis area had traveled to Somalia to join al-Shabaab, a radical militia tied to al-Qaeda. Five Somali-Americans are believed to have died in fighting there this year, and Somali officials say at least one more unnamed American citizen has become a suicide bomber on behalf of al-Shabab.

• In June, Abdulhakim Muhammed, an Arkansas convert to Islam, was accused of killing one soldier and wounding another in an attack at a military recruitment center in Little Rock.

• In September, an Illinois man, Michael Finton, who converted to Islam in prison, was accused of trying to blow up a Federal building in Springfield.

• In October, David Coleman Headley, a Chicago businessman, was arrested for allegedly plotting a terrorist attack on a Danish newspaper that had published controversial cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammed. (Tahawwur Rana, a Pakistani-Canadian resident of Chicago was also arrested in connection with the same plot.) Headley was later additionally charged with abetting the Mumbai terrorist attack of November 2008.

• In November, Maj. Nidal Hasan, the son of Palestinian immigrants who had grown up in the U.S., was accused of going on a shooting spree at Fort Hood, killing 13 and wounding 30.

• Also in November, eight Somali-American men from Minnesota were charged with terrorism-related counts involving al-Shabaab. Six other had been charged previously. Most of the men were charged in absentia because they remain in Somalia, along with dozens of Somali-Americans who are believed to have joined the Qaeda-linked militia.

• And earlier this month, five men from the Washington, D.C., area were detained in Pakistan, where local officials say they had been trying to join the fight against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Ramy Zamzam, said to be the leader of the group, is a Howard University dental student; two others are sons of businessmen.

• Some other cases involve legal residents who are not U.S. citizens, such as Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan suspect arrested in Denver and charged with a plot to bomb targets in New York, and Jordanian Hosam Smadi, arrested in Dallas, accused of trying blow up a skyscraper.

And then on Christmas Day, another attempted attack on an airliner from Amsterdam to Detroit. Thankfully the attack failed due to the incompetence of the terrorist and the courage of the passengers.

This caps off a decade that redefined the word terrorism, and finally tasked us with substantively fighting it for the first time.

However, it seems over the past year and the post 9-11 decade that terrorists connected or homegrown will find any weakness and exploit any good will Americans have. They can recruit in ever evolving ways to evade our security. They will discover new and more devious ways of killing themselves and other that will be harder and harder to catch. They’ll continue to set up camps to train others that will be in more remote or more radical countries. Tighter security isn’t the ultimate answer. The shoe bomber forced all of us to take our shoes off after 2002. So the revelation that the Detroit plane bomber had explosive underwear beckons me to draw a line in the proverbial anti-terror sand. Fighting war after war, building up pre-industrial nation after nation is not the end game. So are we damned to a never-ending game of cat and mouse, murder and retaliation for decades to come?

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How do we win, then? While it’s an inevitability that this war on terror will last decades, we’d hope it could be tamped down in the second decade of the fight. Here’s my hypothesis… and I’ll warn you, it will be very philosophical.

As a stated by many others, even calling the fight a war on “terrorism” isn’t accurate, but I’ll use it out of consistency and to make a point. There is a point to be found in the announcement of a “war” on a tactic. That’s how we fought it for 7 ½ years and even more so today. Hence the “we catch a shoe bomber, everyone take off your shoes” mentality. Even more broadly the “If there’s a terrorist in your country we’ll invade” mentality. Not to say that we should do away with either because in the short term they do accomplish goals. The issue is they don’t end the conflict.

They way to end this war, after changing your own mindset, is to change the targets of radicalization. The truth is there are limited amounts of committed recruiters to the radical form of Islam but a large population of possible converts. It’s easy to deal with the committed people at the top, they must be killed or captured, period. But to prevent a generational conversion and thus a generational conflict is to fight on the same battlefield as the radicals, the mind.

There is an ideology that, regardless of your religion, one can latch onto and favor: freedom…Freedom to be a Muslim, or Jew, or Christian, or an atheist, freedom to wear a Hijab (headscarf) or not, etc. That underlying assertion, freedom, should convert into democratic governments and an overall more tolerant populace. This would give them the power to reject the arm of radicalism and/or throw off a ruling radical tyrant. All of this could lead up to a world in which American troops don’t have to defend against terror, we don’t have to keep them on the run. It will be second nature to everyone to resist tyranny physically or psychologically. This would make the few radicals left without recruits and without a base of support. That is where the war ends.

Now don’t get me wrong, a process like this could take years of commitment from multiple American and world leaders, but it would ensure that the next generation of the Muslim world doesn’t end up as bait for Osama bin Laden’s acolytes.

Also, don’t assume I’m imposing my will on anybody. I’m not advocating a forced move, just a support, on our side, of freedom loving people around the world. Showing even token support furthers the notion that opting for freedom is better than the alternative.

Muslim-American groups should also embrace this effort. If there is as they say, no radical elements in the Koran, it should be a simple transition in mindset for both Muslim and non-Muslim.

The simple reality is this is an ideological struggle that has manifested itself into a physical war because of the mental radicalization that has happened over the past centuries. To push back, we must not allow the ideological battlefield to remain a home to radicalism. We’ve got to fight the ideological war with greater intensity than the physical one. Only then can we see a real light at the end of the tunnel. Then we can see an end to terrorism-the tactic, and the ideology.

Merry Christmas

Wishing you and yours a Merry Christmas!!!

To commemorate the day... I'll link my Christmas show from last year... just a quick 15 minute thoughts and reflection show.

The Review: Going Rogue by Sarah Palin

From the start, I was impressed by the structure of the book. The subtitle “An American Life”, wasn’t a cliché. The book literally goes through her life.

While the first chapter was interesting, it really read like a cutesy, stories from one’s childhood kind of memoir. No offense to Palin, I was just waiting for the meat.

Things began to pick up the subsequent chapters. It began to read like a political drama turned real, which I enjoyed. I got the sense that she was, from the beginning, taking a common sense approach to politics. She didn’t care about the intangibles or the spin. She was attacked and dumped on routinely by everyone all the time. Yet, when her name was on the ballot, the people were always her vindication.

Once I got to the campaign chapter, my first impression, which stayed with me throughout the chapter, was this: if the McCain Campaign was this disorganized, backstabbing, petty, and all around horrendous… how would a McCain Administration fair? At every turn, the campaign treated her like a novelty that they could wind up, feed with talking points and let her go. They obviously knew facts and dirt on her, but they never figured out how dynamic she was and what an asset they had. The picture that was painted by the media of this low-life, Alaska bimbo wasn’t all the media’s fault. It seemed the McCain people believed that very notion from the beginning and they treated her as such. The people most exposed as negatives in the campaign were Steve Schmidt, and the elusive “headquarters” that Palin spoke of. The positives in her eyes were the people close to her (aka, the people that KNEW her), and Senator McCain himself. By all accounts, McCain was a fantastic person who simply put his campaign’s trust in the wrong people, mainly Schmidt.

As I waded into the fifth chapter I was skeptical of Rush Limbaugh’s assertion that Palin’s book was a great policy read. No offence, but that’s one thing I didn’t see as of yet. However, chapter five provided not only the justification for her resignation, but some great personal stories that dovetailed into broad economic policy points of less government and individual freedom. I also finally understood her resignation. I rationalized like this- no matter what Sarah Palin did the media would dump on her. A normal person would want to take their ball and go sit in a hole. But I’m sure if Palin did that, the media would criticize the location and depth of the hole. She couldn’t win. So she eluded the Alinsky tactics and is making a bigger impact outside the Governor’s mansion. Not to mention her name isn’t holding the state’s agenda back anymore. When you read into it, the resignation was a win-win.

The policy portions of the 5^th chapter became a symphony in the 6^th. Palin’s “way forward” included what she officially dubbed “Commonsense Conservatism”. Personally, I much prefer that to being a Bush “Compassionate Conservative”. She artfully and swiftly tore into President Obama’s policies and explained core planks of Commonsense Conservatism. This chapter was the shortest of them all, but it packed a lot in.

Overall, I saw this book as Palin’s re-coming out and reintroduction to the American people. She needed to do this because her first intro was bungled by a bunch of elite campaign buffoons. Now, if she wants to make a run at the White House, she’s got to write another book that’s all policy. She’s laid out a philosophy, but now she must apply Commonsense Conservatism to common problems.

Finally, let me say that I am not now, or ever was, a Palin lover (or “Palinista”). I liked her choice as John McCain’s VP. I also liked Mitt Romney in the 2008 primaries and might go for him again in 2012. But the more I hear and read about Sarah Palin, minus the McCain campaign, the more I like her. If she becomes viable by 2011, she will be high on my list of possible endorsements.

(BTW--- I noticed in her acknowledgments she thanks "2012 Draft Sarah Committee"...HMMMM!!!)

My Conversation with Sarah Palin

After waiting over 13 hours in line, I got to meet Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin at the Fairfax BJ's bulk food store.

After shaking hands with the Governor's husband Todd, I shook hands and spoke briefly with Gov. Palin.

We had about a ten second conversation--- here's a transcript...

Me: Nice to see you Governor.

Palin: Thanks, what's your name?

Me: Curtis Kalin, it's like your name, but with a K.

Palin: Good! You going to school?

Me: Yes, George Mason University.

Palin: What are you studying?

Me: Government.

Palin: Great!!! We need more the good guys guys out there. Thanks for coming out.

Me: Thank you, keep fighting.

Palin: I will.

At times the snow and bitter cold would make me think, "Why am I doing this?" But after that moment, I knew my time was worth it. Gotta say, it was pretty cool.

-My Twitter feed had many tweets from the signing throughout the night and morning.

I'll try to find videos and news reports of the event. I'll link them below when I find them...

- Book signing in the Washington Post... (video in article)

-Greta has 5 pics,--- I'm in the last pic (5 of 5)

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- redvirginiarailroad has massive coverage-pics and vids

-So does NoVa Tea Party Patriots.

-Liberty's Lamp coverage.

- CNN, too.

-ABC 7's coverage.

-WUSA 9, as well.