President Barack Obama will be accompanied by his wife Michelle and daughters Malia, 12, and Sasha, nine, and are expected to stay at the historic Blue Heron Farm in Chilmark.

Bill Burton, the deputy White House press secretary, said that the US president was “going to spend a little time recharging his batteries” at the Massachusetts island ahead of the November midterm elections.

Obama Vacation

“There will be some hiking, some time at the beach, some time at the ice cream store – all the sort of things you do when you’re at Martha’s Vineyard. You enjoy the people and the good food.”

He is also expected to work on his swing at Mink Meadows golf club in Vineyard Haven and to work out every day, as he did when the First Family visited Martha’s Vineyard last year.

The tally of vacation days for an American president has become a contentious issue in recent years. President Bill Clinton conducted a poll about where best to holiday. President George W. Bush spent a total of 879 days on holiday in his eight years in office, according to Mark Knoller of CBS, the unofficial statistician of the presidency.

Mr Bush was usually working at his Prairie Chapel ranch in Texas, which was named the “Western White House” during his long summers there when he was accompanied by dozens of staff.

Mr Obama’s holidays have been particularly scrutinised in the last year, as he has come under fire for his handling of the US economy as well as the Louisiana oil spill. A poll released this week found that only four in 10 approve of his handling of the economy.

He was questioned last year for choosing to stay on the elitist Martha’s Vineyard during a severe recession, while in July he was criticised for taking his family to Maine rather than visit the Gulf of Mexico coast line. He subsequently took his family to Florida last weekend.

Although he appears to take more holidays than his predecessors, they have usually been very short. His five this year will total just 20 days – he did not accompany his wife and youngest daughter to Marbella, Spain. As well as Florida, Maine, and an 11-day stay in Hawaii over Christmas and New Year, he and his wife spent two days in Asheville, North Carolina in April.

His holidays also tend to be interrupted by major events. During the President’s first holiday of the year in his native Hawaii he spent much of his time grappling with the fallout from the failed terrorist attack by the Christmas Day “underpants bomber”. His last break in Martha’s Vineyard was interrupted by the death of Senator Edward Kennedy.

Source:  Telegraph

It is becoming apparent for all to see, that a man who made his name as a community organizer does not have the skills to be President of these United States. Maybe he could develop the requisite skills as a governor. Possibly, he could develop such skills were he to sit in the Senate for a couple of terms. Yet there are delicate sensitivities, the ability to listen, to stick by your guns, occasionally to remain reticent. These are the fundamentals of a leader, and President Barack Obama has demonstrated that he lacks all of them, most notably reticence. I now think it is clear even to Official Washington that President Obama is the worst president of modern times. President Jimmy Carter is redeemed.

Barack Obama is like Jimmy Carter

The other night at a White House dinner solemnizing the opening of Ramadan he leaped right in to endorse the building a mosque at Ground Zero. He — a man who has shown no religious fervor during his time in the White House — let out a ringing defense of religious liberty and tolerance. Of a sudden, he was at the center of a national controversy that was growing. It put me in mind of his inability to defuse the controversy over healthcare. Any sensible president would have relented, as opposition to healthcare grew to the majority position. He would have settled for some sort of compromise, but not the community-organizer-turned-president. He wanted it all. He lunged on and created among the electorate a row over national healthcare that divided the nation, and put some of us in mind of a civil war that continues to rage. What is more, he imperiled his party’s margins in both houses.

(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org …

Filmmaker Spike Lee appeared on MSNBC’s “Countdown” Tuesday night to discuss his new documentary on Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf oil spill and their effects on New Orleans. Unsurprisingly, he had some sharp critiques at the ready.

Obama Puppet for BP Says Spike Lee

Lee said that American greed stood to bring down the country: “We have people in office appointed and voted in and people in big business positions who only care about the dollar bill, and there are people [who] get harmed, people [who] die. They say that’s the cost of doing business.”

Lee also said that he thinks the U.S. government has been a puppet for BP.

(Excerpt) Read More Here

Yet the survey also revealed that many Americans harbor lingering animosity toward Muslims. Twenty-eight percent of voters do not believe Muslims should be eligible to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Nearly one third of the country thinks adherents of Islam should be barred from running for President — slightly higher than the 24% who mistakenly believe that the current occupant of the Oval Office is himself a Muslim. In all, just 47% of respondents believe Obama is a Christian; 24% declined to respond to the question or said they were unsure, and 5% believe he is neither Christian nor Muslim.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2011799,00.html#ixzz0×3JzuWSE

One of the more illuminating remarks during the health-care debate in Congress came when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told an audience that Democrats would “pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it, away from the fog of controversy.”

That remark captured the truth that, while many Americans have a vague sense that something bad is happening to their health care, few if any understand exactly what the law does.

President Barack Obama's Healthcare debacle looks worse upon further review.

To fill this vacuum, Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the top House Republican on the Joint Economic Committee, asked his staff to prepare a study of the law, including a flow chart that illustrates how the major provisions will work.

The result, made public July 28, provides citizens with a preview of the impact the health-care overhaul will have on their lives. It’s a terrifying road map that shows Democrats have launched America on the most reckless policy experiment in its history, the economic equivalent of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Before discussing what the law means for you, we have to look at what it does to government. That’s where the chart comes in handy. It includes the new fees, bureaucracies and programs and connects them into an organizational chart that accounts for the existing structure. It’s so carefully documented that a line connecting two structures cites the legislative language that created the link.

Ornate System

This clearly is a candidate for most disorganized organizational chart ever. It shows that the health system is complex, yes, but also ornate. The new law creates 68 grant programs, 47 bureaucratic entities, 29 demonstration or pilot programs, six regulatory systems, six compliance standards and two entitlements.

Getting that massive enterprise up and running will be next to impossible. So Democrats streamlined the process by granting Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius the authority to make judgments that can’t be challenged either administratively or through the courts.

This monarchical protection from challenges is extended as well to the development of new patient-care models under Obama’s controversial recess appointment, Donald Berwick, whom Republicans are calling the rationer-in-chief. Berwick will run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, where he can experiment with ways to use administrative fiat to move our system toward the socialized medicine of Europe, which he has at times embraced.

Closer to Home

A sprawling, complex bureaucracy has been set up that will have almost absolute power to dictate terms for participating in the health-care system. That’s what the law does to government. What it does to you is worse.

Based on the administration’s own numbers, as many as 117 million people might have to change their health plans by 2013 as their employer-provided coverage loses its grandfathered status and becomes subject to the new Obamacare mandates.

Those mandates also might make your health care more expensive. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that premiums for a small number of families who buy their insurance privately will rise by as much as $2,100.

The central Obamacare mechanism for increasing insurance coverage is an expansion of the Medicaid program. Of the 30 million new people covered, 16 million will be enrolled in Medicaid. And you could end up in the program whether you want it or not. The bill states that people who apply for coverage through the new exchanges or who apply for premium-subsidy credits will automatically be enrolled in Medicaid if they qualify.

Hurting the Elderly

To pay for this expansion, the bill takes $529 billion from Medicare, with roughly 39 percent of the cut coming from the Medicare Advantage program. This represents a large transfer of resources, sacrificing the care of the elderly in order to increase the Medicaid rolls.

For all this supposed reform, you, the American taxpayer, can expect a bill to the tune of $569 billion.

Front and center among the new taxes is the 40 percent excise tax on those lucky people with so-called Cadillac health plans. The higher insurance costs that are driven by the government mandates will push many more ordinary plans into Cadillac territory.

If the idea of taxing people with coverage deemed too good doesn’t bother you, maybe the new 3.8 percent tax on investment income will. That will apply even to a small number of home sales, those that generate $250,000 in profit for an individual or $500,000 for a married couple.

In vivid color and detail, Congressman Brady’s chart captures the huge expansion of government coming under Obamacare. Harder to show on paper is the pain it will cause.

(Kevin Hassett, director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is a Bloomberg News columnist. He was an adviser to Republican Senator John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Source

Last week, Barack Obama said that his administration had been “surprised, disappointed and angry” in August 2009 when the British government freed the Islamic jihadist Abdelbeset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi, who murdered 270 people by bombing Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988. But Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond said Sunday that while Obama’s expression of surprise, disappointment and anger was “a fair description of the American Government’s position,” as “they didn’t want al-Megrahi to be released,” nevertheless, “if he was to be released, they thought it was far preferable for compassionate release as opposed to the prisoner transfer agreement.”

In other words, the Obama administration, while ostensibly opposing any arrangement for al-Megrahi’s release, nonetheless favored releasing him over transferring him from a Scottish prison to a Libyan one. In a letter to Salmond written a week before al-Megrahi was released, Richard LeBaron, deputy head of the US embassy in London, wrote that “if Scottish authorities come to the conclusion that Megrahi must be released from Scottish custody, the US position is that conditional release on compassionate grounds would be a far preferable alternative to prisoner transfer, which we strongly oppose.” U.S. officials tried, but failed to keep LeBaron’s letter secret.

Why they opposed further prison time for al-Megrahi remains unexplained. At the time of his release, al-Megrahi, 58, had only served eight years for 270 counts of murder, but he was reported to be terminally ill with prostate cancer. Professor Karol Sikora, dean of medicine at Buckingham University and medical director of CancerPartnersUK, examined him and gave him three months to live. Al-Megrahi returned to his native Libya, where he was given a hero’s welcome, and has been in excellent health ever since.

Sikora later revealed that he gave his dire assessment of al-Megrahi’s condition under pressure from British officials, and that he knew al-Megrahi was not dying:

There was always a chance he could live for 10 years, 20 years … But it’s very unusual. It was clear that three months was what they were aiming for. Three months was the critical point. On the balance of probabilities, I felt I could sort of justify [that]….It is embarrassing that he’s gone on for so long.

It is embarrassing for more than just Sikora. In September 2009, the British Secretary of State for Justice, Jack Straw, admitted that al-Megrahi’s release had been tied to an oil deal with Libya – a manifest and shameful betrayal of the people al-Megrahi murdered in his jihad attack.

And so the key question that should be posed to Barack Obama today is why he believed that “compassionate” release was preferable for this remorseless mass murderer than time in a Libyan jail. And if his administration approved of al-Megrahi’s “compassionate” release, or at least had green-lighted it as a possibility before it occurred, why were U.S. officials “surprised, disappointed and angry” when it actually happened? Were any quid pro quos involved, either from Libya, whose strongman Muammar Gaddafi has lavishly praised Obama, or from Great Britain?

Obama should also be asked, if the White House press corps were not so anxious to further the President’s agenda, why this monster deserved any kind of compassion whatsoever, even if the reports about his terminal cancer had been true. Why should Abdelbeset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi, of all people, not die in prison for his pitiless crime of blowing an airplane out of the sky four days before Christmas and killing everyone on board? Isn’t even the contemplation of “compassionate release” for such a man a miscarriage of justice for those who were killed, and an indication of a moral myopia staggering in its severity on the part of British authorities and Obama?

Given Obama’s oft-repeated desire to establish relations with the Islamic world on the basis of a “mutual respect” that remains ever-elusive from the Islamic side, as shown in the new book I have written with Pamela Geller, The Post-American Presidency, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that he directed U.S. officials to approve of al-Megrahi’s “compassionate release” as yet another gesture of good will toward the Islamic world. Yet these gestures of good will remain unreciprocated. Al-Megrahi is free, his crime unpunished. Will anyone ask Barack Obama why?

Source

Scottish officials say US memo giving grudging support to freeing Abdelbaset al-Megrahi undermines president’s criticisms

Barack Obama is under growing pressure to release a letter that reveals the US grudgingly supported freeing the Lockerbie bomber on compassionate grounds.

The letter was sent to Scottish ministers by a senior diplomat at the US embassy in London last August, eight days before Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was released from prison because he was dying from inoperable prostate cancer.

Obama’s administration has refused to allow publication of the letter, in which the US says allowing Megrahi to live at home in Scotland would be “far preferable” to sending him back to Libya under the prisoner transfer deal brokered by former prime minister Tony Blair in 2007.

(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk …

The four Democratic U.S. senators probing the early release of the Libyan convicted in the Lockerbie bombing believe there were links to a BP oil deal, but their inquiry may have the unintended consequence of raising questions about just how strongly the Obama administration opposed the Libyan’s release.

Abdel Baset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was the only person convicted of the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing in which 270 people were killed. Sentenced to life in prison, he was freed and sent home last summer “on compassionate grounds,” after medical experts said he was dying of prostate cancer.

Scottish government ministers, stung by accusations that they released Megrahi to ease a massive oil exploration contract in Libya, are pointing out that it is the U.S. government that is blocking the release of two documents relating to the decision.

One of the documents is a demarche and letter to Scottish First Minister Salmond from deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in London, Richard LeBaron, dated August 12, 2009, eight days before Megrahi was released.

Leaked to London’s Sunday Times this week, the letter reportedly argues that Megrahi should remain in custody – but goes on to say that if Scotland concludes he must be released, then doing so on compassionate grounds would be “far preferable” to his repatriation under a prisoner transfer agreement (PTA) which Britain negotiated with Libya in 2007.

LeBaron reportedly wrote that freeing Megrahi from custody – remaining in Scotland, not returning to Libya – would mitigate some strong U.S. concerns.

The text, if corroborated, appears to call into question at least part of President Obama’s assertion last week that “all of us here in the United States were surprised, disappointed, and angry” about Megrahi’s release.

The U.S. Embassy in London issued a statement Sunday saying that the U.S. “strongly and consistently opposed in all its exchanges with Scottish and British officials the release or transfer under any scenario” of Megrahi.

“The August 12, 2009 letter to Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond reiterated that unchanged position and underscored in particular our deep opposition to any outcome which permitted Megrahi’s return to Libya,” it said. “To our grave disappointment, the Scottish government’s decision to release Megrahi to Libya disregarded these clearly stated views.”

The second document which Scotland says the U.S. is withholding permission to make public is a note of a telephone conversation between Scottish justice minister Kenny MacAskill and Attorney General Eric Holder, apparently on June 26, 2009. The contents of that note remain secret.

Edinburgh says the two documents – the LeBaron letter and the MacAskill-Holder note – were both “part of the package of advice” MacAskill had before him when he made the decision to send Megrahi home last August.

At the height of last August’s controversy, Scotland made public its correspondence relating to the matter. On August 26, it asked the U.S. government for permission to include the two documents in those it was releasing – offering to do so in redacted form if necessary.

But in a written reply on Sept. 1, LeBaron declined. “Consistent with its standard and long-standing practice of holding in confidence government-to-government communications, so as to facilitate the ability of the United States to have frank and open communications with other governments, the United States Government is not prepared to authorize the release at this time of the details or contents of its diplomatic exchanges in this matter,” he wrote. “In accordance with this understanding, the United States Government does not grant permission for these documents to be published.”

CNSNews.com last Thursday asked the U.S. Embassy whether, with the administration pressing the British and Scottish authorities to review the Megrahi decision, it would now release the two documents, but received no reply.

CNSNews.com also asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee whether it would request that the administration make the two documents available for its hearing into the matter, scheduled for Thursday. In response, spokesman Frederick Jones merely said the committee did not have the documents in its possession.

Edinburgh law professor Robert Black, an expert on the Lockerbie case, opined on his blog that if the LeBaron letter effectively accepted Megrahi’s release on compassionate grounds as preferable to transfer under the prisoner transfer agreement, “it is unlikely – in a mid-term election year – that the U.S. government would consent to its release or that Democrat senators would seriously try to persuade it to do so.”

The four senators pushing for the Lockerbie inquiry are New Jersey Sens. Frank Lautenberg and Bob Menendez, and Sens. Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. A large number of the Lockerbie victims came from the two states.

Menendez is due to chair Thursday’s hearing.

Scotland’s ruling Scottish National Party called Sunday for the Obama administration to release the documents to the Senate inquiry. “The families of victims on both sides of the Atlantic deserve to know the full position of the U.S. government on this issue,” it said in a statement.

Invitations declined

Foreign Relations Committee spokesman Jones said the witness list for Thursday’s hearing had yet to be announced.

So far the committee has had little success in that area: Scotland has turned down its request to make MacAskill and Scottish Prison Service medical chief Dr. Andrew Fraser available; former British justice secretary Jack Straw has also declined to participate, saying the release had been a decision for Scotland’s devolved government, not the British government.

Salmond has, however, offered to send the committee copies of all correspondence relating to the Megrahi decision, and on Sunday repeated his call for the U.S. government to declassify documents including the LeBaron letter.

Salmond again denied that Scotland had come under any pressure from BP, telling Sky News there had been “absolutely no discussion, whatsoever, with BP.”

BP executives have acknowledged that, in late 2007, the company lobbied the British – not the Scottish – authorities about the PTA that was then being negotiated. It was concerned that delays in finalizing the agreement “might have negative consequences” for its exploration deal, which Libya had yet to ratify.

But Scotland, which opposed the PTA in the first place, says it turned down a Libyan application to transfer Megrahi to a Libyan prison under the terms of the PTA. Its subsequent decision to release him on compassionate grounds was not related to the PTA, it insists.

At the time MacAskill sent Megrahi home “to die,” medical specialists concluded that it was a “a reasonable estimate” that he would be dead within three months. To the government’s embarrassment, he remains alive almost a year later.

His unexpected longevity, and BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill, prompted the four senators to launch their campaign.

Potential witnesses not called

Potential witnesses not known to have been called by the committee include:

– Tony Blair, the former British prime minister whose 2007 visit to Libya included an agreement on a PTA and the signing of “the single largest exploration commitment in BP’s 100-year history.”

– British Ambassador to the U.S. Nigel Sheinwald, who as a foreign policy advisor to Blair accompanied him on two key visits to Libya.

– Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of the Libyan leader, who played a key role in Tripoli’s political and trade negotiations with Britain. (He has traveled to the U.S. before, and met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the State Department in late 2008.)

– Graham Forbes, chairman of the independent Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which after a four-year investigation concluded in 2007 that there “may have been a miscarriage of justice” and recommended that Megrahi be allowed to an appeal.

– Prof. Robert Black, the law expert who designed the unusual format under which the Lockerbie trial was held in the Netherlands under Scottish law. Black in 2005 called Megrahi’s conviction “the most disgraceful miscarriage of justice in Scotland for 100 years.”

Source

He was giving the key note speech at a Washington Institute For Near East Policy and started it out with a “joke” that borders on anti-Semitic, teaching the crowd that Jews are just greedy merchants in the same vein as Shakespeare’s Shylock…

From Yid With Lid Blog

Barack Obama Plays Race Card for 2010 Election

Obama speaks with unusual demographic frankness about his coalition in his appeal to “young people, African-Amerins, Latinos, and women who powered our victory in 2008 [to]  stand together once again.”

Watch Video Here

Source:  Politico