Obama Could Address Muslims From Top Mosque

The grand mufti of Egypt has invited President Obama to address Muslims around the globe from one of the most important mosques in the Islamic world.

The invitation to speak from Egypt’s Al Azhar mosque follows an announcement over this past weekend that Obama will travel to Egypt next month to deliver his promised address to the Muslim world.

According to Al-Masri Al-Yawm, a state-run Egyptian newspaper, Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa and other scholars from Egypt’s Al Azhar University invited Obama to use the mosque as venue for the president’s upcoming visit, explaining it would promote a culture of dialogue between Islam and the West.

Al AZhar University is the most respected Sunni Islamic learning center in the world and is the second oldest degree-granting school in the world. Clerics at the university’s attendant mosque decide Islamic sharia law matters for Sunni Muslims internationally.

via Obama could address Muslims from top mosque.

Vatican Blocked Caroline Kennedy Appointment

Vatican sources told Il Giornale that their support for abortion disqualified Ms Kennedy and other Roman Catholics President Barack Obama had been seeking to appoint.

Mr Obama was reportedly seeking to reward John F Kennedy’s daughter, who publicly gave her support to his election bid. She had been poised to replace Hillary Clinton as New York senator, but dropped out amid criticism that she lacked enough experience for the job.

The Italian paper said that the Vatican strongly disapproved of Mr Obama’s support for abortion and stem cell research. The impasse over the ambassadorial appointment threatens to cloud his meeting with the Pope during a G8 summit in Itay in July.

Ms Kennedy, 53, has said that she supports abortion. Raymond Flynn, a former US ambassador to the Vatican, said earlier this week that Ms Kennedy would be a poor choice.

“It’s imperative, it’s essential that the person who represents us to the Holy See be a person who has pro-life values. I hope the President doesn’t make that mistake,” he told the Boston Herald. “She said she was pro-choice. I don’t assume she’s going to change that, which is problematic.”

The White House refused to comment.

Source

US Religious Right Concedes Defeat

Editors Note- The defeat is only temporary, if you read the back of The Book, ultimately we win…

Leading evangelicals have admitted that their association with George W. Bush has not only hurt the cause of social conservatives but contributed to the failure of the key objectives of their 30-year struggle.

James Dobson, 72, who resigned recently as head of Focus on the Family – one of the largest Christian groups in the country – and once denounced the Harry Potter books as witchcraft, acknowledged the dramatic reverse for the religious Right in a farewell speech to staff.

“We tried to defend the unborn child, the dignity of the family, but it was a holding action,” he said.

“We are awash in evil and the battle is still to be waged. We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say we have lost all those battles.”

Despite changing the political agenda for a generation, and helping push the Republicans to the Right, evangelicals have won only minor victories in limiting the availability of abortion. Meanwhile the number of states permitting civil partnerships between homosexuals is rising, and the campaign to restore prayer to schools after 40 years – a decision that helped create the Moral Majority – has got nowhere.

Though the struggle will go on, the confession of Mr Dobson, who started his ministry from scratch in 1977, came amid growing concern that church attendance in the United States is heading the way of Britain, where no more than ten per cent worship every week.

Unease is rising that a nation founded – in the view of evangelicals – purely as a Christian country will soon, like northern Europe, become “post-Christian”.

Source – Read Full Article

New World Order – Tony Blair Set To Become First President of EU

Recent convert to Catholicism, Tony Blair has emerged as the leading candidate to become the first permanent president of the European Union after Gordon Brown gave his grudging blessing to the plan. The former prime minister has stepped up his campaign for the job, which he wants to use to build a bridge between Europe and the new Obama administration.

His return to the global stage would be a shock to his critics over the Iraq war and dismay many in Europe.

But The Independent on Sunday has learnt that Mr Brown has accepted that his old rival should be in pole position for the appointment, on the basis that Britain needs to have a key figure in the architecture of the “new world order”.

A senior British official said: “He [Brown] will have to swallow hard to sit down in meetings once again with Blair. But he accepts that there needs to be someone from the UK in the new global architecture. There is no opposition to the plan. Things have moved on, people have moved on.”
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Is This The End of America?

Helicopter Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve is dropping trillions of fresh paper dollars on the world economy, the President of the United States is cracking jokes on late night comedy shows, his energy minister is threatening a trade war over carbon emissions, his treasury secretary is dithering over a banking reform program amid rising concerns over his competence and a monumentally dysfunctional U.S. Congress is launching another public jihad against corporations and bankers.

As an aghast world — from China to Chicago and Chihuahua — watches, the circus-like U.S. political system seems to be declining into near chaos. Through it all, stock and financial markets are paralyzed. The more the policy regime does, the worse the outlook gets. The multi-ringed spectacle raises a disturbing question in many minds: Is this the end of America?

Probably not, if only because there are good reasons for optimism. The U.S. economy has pulled out of self-destructive political spirals in the past, spurred on by its business class and corporate leaders, the profit-making and market-creating people who rose above the political turmoil to once again lift the world out of financial crisis. It’s happened many times before, except for once, when it took 20 years to rise out of the Great Depression.

Past success, however, is no guarantee of future recovery, especially now when there are daily disasters and new indicators of political breakdown. All developments are not disasters in themselves. The AIG bonus firestorm is a diversion from real issues , but it puts the ghastly political classes who make U.S. law on display for what they are: ageing self-serving demagogues who have spent decades warping the U.S. political system for their own ends. We see the system up close, law-making that is riddled with slapdash, incompetence and gamesmanship.

One test of whether we are witnessing the end of America is how many more times Americans put up with congressional show trials of individual business people and their employees, slandering and vilifying them for their actions and motives. And for how long will they tolerate a President who berates business and corporations as dens of crime and malfeasance? If the majority of Americans come to accept the caricatures of business as true, then America is closer to the end of its life as a global leader, as a champion of markets and individualism.

But America is at risk in other ways, especially in the technical business of setting and executing policy. The presidency of Barack Obama has set out on a course that has no precedent in U.S. history. Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal transformed the U.S. economy during the Great Depression, pushed America off on a sharply different political and ideological course. The Obama administration is different in many ways, not least in its supreme self-confidence in its methods and objectives.

Reform of health care, environmental policy, education, energy, banking, regulation — every nook and cranny of the U.S. economy has been put on alert for major change. Expansion of government spending, plunging the U.S. into unprecedented deficits, is without parallel. In economic policy, through regulation and control of energy output, financial services and monetary expansion, the U.S. government has embarked on a fundamental reshaping of America. It is designed, in short, to bring on the end of America.

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Sen. Gregg says Obama Budget Will Bankrupt US

The top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee says the Obama administration is on the right course to save the nation’s financial system.

But Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire also says President Barack Obama’s massive budget proposal will bankrupt the country.

Gregg says he has no regrets in withdrawing his nomination to become commerce secretary. He pulled out after deciding he could not fully back the administration’s economic policies.

The senator said Obama’s spending plan in the midst of a prolonged recession would leave the next generation with a country too expensive to live in.

Gregg appeared Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Source

North Korea Threatens Retaliation

North Korea ordered its armed forces on standby and warned Monday it will retaliate against anyone seeking to block its planned satellite launch, which many fear will disguise a missile test.

The threat was the North’s latest attempt to escalate tensions on the divided peninsula and a strong sign that the communist nation intends to push ahead with the launch despite mounting international pressure to drop the plan. Analysts say Pyongyang is trying to grab President Barack Obama’s attention as his administration formulates its North Korea policy.

Monday’s warning came hours before United States and South Korea kicked off annual war games involving tens of thousands of troops, which the communist nation has condemned as preparations for an invasion.

The joint drills across South Korea began as concerns mounted that Pyongyang could be gearing up to test-fire a long-range missile capable of reaching U.S. territory. North Korea says it plans to launch a communications satellite, but neighboring governments believe it is a cover for a missile test.

Analysts have said a launch could come late this month or in early April when the North’s new legislature, chosen in Sunday’s election, is expected to convene its first meeting to confirm Kim Jong Il as leader.

Source

America What Have You Done

President Obama has had, by general consent, a torrid First Fortnight. To put it another way, it has taken precisely two weeks for the illusion that brought him to power to be exposed for the nonsense that it so obviously was. The transformational candidate who was going to sweep away pork-barrel politics, lobbyists and corruption has been up to his neck in sleaze, as eviscerated here by Charles Krauthammer. Despite the fact that he came to power promising to ‘ban all earmarks’, his ‘stimulus’ bill represents billions of dollars of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections — which have nothing to do with kick-starting the economy and everything to do with favouring pet Democrat causes.

He has been appointing one tax dodger, lobbyist and wheeler-dealer after another. After appointing one official,Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who had unaccountably forgotten to pay his taxes, he then watched his designated Health Secretary Tom Daschle fall on his sword because he too had taken a tax holiday. Daschle was furthermore a prominent actor in the world of lobbying and influence-peddling. Leon Panetta, Obama’s nominee for Director of the CIA has also, according to the Wall Street Journal, consulted for prominent companies and sat on the board of a public affairs firm that lobbies Congress. The Weekly Standard reports that Secretary of Labour nominee Hilda Solis was not only involved with a private organization lobbying her fellow legislators on a bill that she helped sponsor, but she apparently kept her involvement secret and failed to reveal a clear conflict of interest.

via The Spectator.

Bloody Monday: U.S. Cut 50,000 Jobs In One Day

From drugs to computer chips, top companies announced Monday that they are laying off nearly 50,000 employees as a reeling economy took a heavy toll on the already strained job market.

Monday’s efforts to downsize companies included layoffs and buyouts across the economic spectrum, and top economists predict that the job picture will worsen as the year goes on. The departures also come as negotiations continue in Washington, D.C., on the size and shape of an economic stimulus package — a priority for President Barack Obama, in office for barely a week.

Caterpillar, the world’s largest manufacturer of construction equipment, announced that its fourth-quarter profit dropped 32 percent, a symptom of the worldwide economic slowdown. Because of the drop, the company will eliminate 20,000 jobs, about 18 percent of its work force, through layoffs and buyouts, Caterpillar announced.

Drugmaker Pfizer, which announced it will acquire rival Wyeth for $68 billion, said it will cut about 8,000 jobs from its current work force. Once the companies are merged, another 15 percent of the work force, nearly 19,000 jobs, could be eliminated, Pfizer spokesman Ray Kerins said in a telephone interview.

Home Depot, the nation’s largest home-improvement retailer, announced it will cut about 2 percent of its work force, or 7,000 jobs. It said it will eliminate about four dozen stores, including all of its specialty Expo Design Center stores.

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Is Obama the Most Famous Living Person Ever?

No. That honor goes to  Jesus Christ.

Barack Obama is the most famous living person in the history of the world.

I’m not trying to induce an acid flashback to John Lennon’s infamous 1966 comment, “The Beatles are more popular than Jesus.” But whether you measure fame in terms of saturation or sheer numbers, it seems indisputable to me that more people know at least something about the new American president than anyone alive, at this point—or any—in the planet’s existence.

Who else could it be? One friend suggest Muhammad Ali, another Princess Diana, and a third said Bill Clinton. Surely all are global brands with enormous reach and broad appeal. But all fall short of the man-meets-the-moment frenzy unleashed by Obama.

To be sure, the digital revolution has made this feat of fame possible. Not only has it helped the son of an erstwhile Kenyan goatherd to become president, it has allowed a current Kenyan goatherd to follow the former’s journey. And he is not alone. Exponential growth in access to the Internet, satellite television and radio, cell phones, and P.D.A.’s means that breaking news now reaches virtually every corner of the globe. At the same time, population continues to grow; there are now some 6.7 billion men, women, and children on earth, an historic high.

Read Full Article – Vanity Fair.

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• The post-election Obama euphoria will fade soon enough, but let’s enjoy it while it lasts. (slate.com)

Dick Morris On The Obama Presidency

2009-2010 will rank with 1913-14, 1933-36, 1964-65 and 1981-82 as years that will permanently change our government, politics and lives. Just as the stars were aligned for Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson and Reagan, they are aligned for Obama. Simply put, we enter his administration as free-enterprise, market-dominated, laissez-faire America. We will shortly become like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, or Sweden — a socialist democracy in which the government dominates the economy, determines private-sector priorities and offers a vastly expanded range of services to many more people at much higher taxes.

Obama will accomplish his agenda of “reform” under the rubric of “recovery.” Using the electoral mandate bestowed on a Democratic Congress by restless voters and the economic power given his administration by terrified Americans, he will change our country fundamentally in the name of lifting the depression. His stimulus packages won’t do much to shorten the downturn — although they will make it less painful — but they will do a great deal to change our nation.

In implementing his agenda, Barack Obama will emulate the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Not the liberal mythology of the New Deal, but the actuality of what it accomplished. When FDR took office, he was enormously successful in averting a total collapse of the banking system and the economy. But his New Deal measures only succeeded in lowering the unemployment rate from 23 percent in 1933, when he took office, to 13 percent in the summer of 1937. It never went lower. And his policies of over-regulation generated such business uncertainty that they triggered a second-term recession. Unemployment in 1938 rose to 17 percent and, in 1940, on the verge of the war-driven recovery, stood at 15 percent. These data and the real story of Hoover’s and Roosevelt’s missteps, uncolored by ideology, are available in The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, copyright 2007.

via TheHill.com .

Israel Ready to Strike Iran

Informed sources in Washington tell Newsmax that Israel indeed will launch a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities soon – possibly in just days as President George W. Bush prepares to leave office.

The reason: The time clock has begun to run out. Iran is close to acquiring a nuclear device under the control of its radical president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said in June that Iran would have a nuclear weapon in as little as six months.

That six-month period has passed.

Reports of Israel’s decision to imminently launch strikes, although unconfirmed, would seem to contradict the Bush stance outlined in a front-page New York Times story last week, which asserted that Bush rejected a plea from Israel last year to help it raid Iran’s main nuclear complex.

The Times said Israel was rebuffed after it requested from the U.S. specialized bunker-busting bombs that it needs to attack Iran’s nuclear complex at Natanz. The U.S. also reportedly nixed permission to the Israeli warplanes to fly over Iraqi territory to reach Iran.

Israel’s requests to the U.S. for military assistance came as the Jewish state was reportedly angry over a U.S. intelligence assessment in late 2007 that concluded Iran had effectively suspended its development of nuclear weapons.

But an investigative report circulated by IAEA chief ElBaradei late last year disclosed that Iran was continuing to carry out uranium enrichment and had already established 6,000 centrifuges for enriching uranium, of which 3,800 were then in operation.

American intelligence officials now estimate that the figure is 4,000 to 5,000 centrifuges, enough to produce about one weapon’s worth of uranium every eight months or so, according to the Times.

The IAEA report estimated that Iran has obtained two tons of enriched uranium since its enrichment program was restarted at Natanz two years ago.

Last year 100 Israeli jets took part in an exercise over the eastern Mediterranean that was interpreted as a dress rehearsal for a possible attack on Iran.

And on Sept. 6 Israel launched an air attack against a site in Syria believed to be a nuclear-related facility containing material delivered by North Korea.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton predicted that Israel would stage a raid against Iran’s nuclear facilities if Barack Obama won the presidential election.

via Source – Newsmax.com
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President Bush – Situation Could Have Been Worse Than Great Depression

U.S. President George Bush said Monday President-elect Barack Obama hasn’t asked him to seek the second half of the funds designated for economic recovery.

“I don’t intend to make the request” for $350 billion of the $700 billion package approved to help unfreeze credit markets unless Obama asks, Bush said in a wide-ranging, candid and final news conference of his presidency.

Bush said he and Obama, who takes over Jan. 20, have discussed the matter. “I told him that if he felt that he needed the $350 billion, I would be willing to ask for it — in other words, if he felt like it needed to happen on my watch,” Bush said.

Reflecting on the recession that is ending his tenure, Bush said, “I inherited a recession and I am leaving on a recession.”

“I readily concede I chucked aside my free-market principles when I was told … the situation we were facing could be worse than the Great Depression,” Bush said. “(But) we’ve taken extraordinary measures to deal with frozen credit markets (that) have helped thaw the credit market.”

He said he was pleased the financial markets have begun to move because of the $350 billion already spent and that he would be supportive of Obama’s administration working out a plan “that best suits him.”

His administration moved aggressively by taking actions “all aiming to prevent the financial system from cratering.”

Source

Experts Warn Of Massive Dollar Collapse

Peter Schiff warns of imminent collapse of  the US dollar and dire days ahead for US.   Watch The Video

Bank of England policymaker Willem Buiter says Americans should prepare now.

———————–

Americans must prepare themselves for a massive collapse in the dollar as investors around the world dump their US assets, a former Bank of England policymaker has warned.

The long-held assumption that US assets – particularly government bonds – are a safe haven will soon be overturned as investors lose their patience with the world’s biggest economy, according to Willem Buiter.

Professor Buiter, a former Monetary Policy Committee member who is now at the London School of Economics, said this increasing disenchantment would result in an exodus of foreign cash from the US.

The warning comes despite the dollar having strengthened significantly against other major currencies, including sterling and the euro, after hitting historic lows last year. It will reignite fears about the currency’s prospects, as well as sparking fears about the sustainability of President-Elect Barack Obama’s mooted plans for a Keynesian-style increase in public spending to pull the US out of recession.

Writing on his blog , Prof Buiter said: “There will, before long (my best guess is between two and five years from now) be a global dumping of US dollar assets, including US government assets. Old habits die hard. The US dollar and US Treasury bills and bonds are still viewed as a safe haven by many. But learning takes place.”

Source

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