How else can I title this post?

The Obama Administration has been anti-Israel from the outset and, as significantly, pro-Palestinian.

It would be one thing if there was any kind of even-handedness involved, but there simply is not.

Like most left-handed political bodies, the Obama Administration automatically assumes that the electorate is comprised almost entirely of citizens who only recently fell off the back of the banana truck, that we’re all incredibly stupid, so much so that Obama and his cadre can say one thing, do another and we won’t even begin to notice…

From CNS News

Secretary of State John Kerry in Turkey Sunday condemned the “cowardly terrorists” who killed a young foreign service officer in Afghanistan and referred to Kurdish terrorism against Turkey, but when asked minutes later about Hamas – the Palestinian terrorist group embraced by his Turkish hosts – he chose to comment only indirectly.

The incident provided a fresh example of the Obama administration’s reluctance to tackle Turkey’s Islamist government in public over its support for Hamas, even as it partners with Ankara in its centerpiece counter-terror initiative (which excludes Israel).

Finish reading the article here.

I mentioned above that the lefties in the White House and their fellow travelers believe we all fell off the back of said banana truck, right? Well, how is it that Jewish Americans who, naively supporting an enemy of Israel who also happens to be the President of the United States for the moment, continually take what he says seriously, believing him even as his actions deny his words?

From Jonathan Tobin via the Jewish World Review

In the aftermath of President Obama’s ringing affirmation of Zionism and Jewish rights during his visit to Israel last month, many of his liberal Jewish supporters are justifiably feeling vindicated. But after years of backing Obama and sniping at Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, some of them are having a little trouble fully understanding the administration’s moves.

While the president also called on Israeli students to pressure their government to make peace, he also reversed course on one of the key elements of his Middle East policy during his first term. When speaking with Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas, Obama pointedly said that settlements were not the obstacle to peace and that no preconditions should be expected of the Israelis in order to entice the PA back to the negotiating table.

These comments, which received far less play than the president’s Jerusalem speech about peace, represented a significant policy shift. After four years of demanding Israel freeze settlements as well as make other concessions prior to talks, Obama put himself on the same page as Netanyahu when it came to the question of Israel being asked to ante up and virtually guarantee that it would abandon its bargaining chips prior to negotiations.

Yet somehow many of the president’s backers haven’t quite assimilated this message.

That article is here.

When will they ever learn?

Yes, Bob Woodward is doing a journalist’s job here, reporting from a non-partisan perspective, but of course, since the people on the left side of the political equation don’t like to hear the truth (liberal propaganda is their version of “the news”), die hard lefties couldn’t help but become enraged.

The White House sure is…

Misunderstanding, misstatements and all the classic contortions of partisan message management surround the sequester, the term for the $85 billion in ugly and largely irrational federal spending cuts set by law to begin Friday.

What is the non-budget wonk to make of this? Who is responsible? What really happened?

The finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate last fall, on Oct. 22, when President Obama blamed Congress. “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.”

The White House chief of staff at the time, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during the negotiations that set up the sequester in 2011, backed up the president two days later.

“There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger,” Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It “was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure.”

The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.

Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.

Read the entire article here.

Remember when presidential candidate B. Hussein Obama and the rest of the leftists railed against then President George W. Bush for his homeland security policies regarding monitoring overseas telephone calls between suspected terrorism involvees and bank accounts/transactions of same, how heinous they made it all sound, as though the evil conservative POTUS was denying any semblance of privacy to we, the people, singling out little junior’s bank book and listening in on our most intimate telephone conversations?

Well, folks, all those exaggerated responses to logical security policies were mere bagatelles compared to what we now learn Obama’s tame attorney general, Eric Holder, has been up to.

From Wired dot Com:

Attorney General Secretly Granted Gov. Ability to Develop and Store Dossiers on Innocent Americans

In a secret government agreement granted without approval or debate from lawmakers, the U.S. attorney general recently gave the National Counterterrorism Center sweeping new powers to store dossiers on U.S. citizens, even if they are not suspected of a crime, according to a news report.

Earlier this year, Attorney General Eric Holder granted the center the ability to copy entire government databases holding information on flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and other data, and to store it for up to five years, even without suspicion that someone in the database has committed a crime, according to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story.

Whereas previously the law prohibited the center from storing data compilations on U.S. citizens unless they were suspected of terrorist activity or were relevant to an ongoing terrorism investigation, the new powers give the center the ability to not only collect and store vast databases of information but also to trawl through and analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior in order to uncover activity that could launch an investigation.

The changes granted by Holder would also allow databases containing information about U.S. citizens to be shared with foreign governments for their own analysis.

A former senior White House official told the Journal that the new changes were “breathtaking in scope.”

But counterterrorism officials tried to downplay the move by telling the Journal that the changes come with strict guidelines about how the data can be used.

Yeah, yeah, sure they do…

Just like all the other so-called “invasive” Bush policies Obama vowed to do away with while he was running for president (to maintain the votes from his liberal base), but only intensified once he’s become president.

Anyway, read the rest of the article here.

Liberals are very hard working people, having to do double the work every time they foist some new agenda on us.

First comes their success at pushing whatever the agenda du jour happens to be on the rest of us.

Then they have to work even harder to keep the fruits of their success from seeping into their own neighborhoods.

At any rate, there is that saying, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, but I guess that this depends whether or not either the goose or the gander is a P/C liberal.

From Godfather Politics:

Hate crimes are beginning to stack up. But determining what constitutes a “hate crime” is in the eye of the beholder. Actually, it’s in the eye of liberals who only see criminal activity when it’s leveled at one of their protected classes. Here’s the latest insanity. While California has been described as the “land of fruits and nuts,” New York is competing to be the fruitiest and nuttiest land of them all.

What did that dog say in the Beggin Strips commercial? Oh, yes: “Baccccooooonnnn!”

“Police are investigating an unusual bias crime on Staten Island. Muslims who gathered for prayer to celebrate the end of Ramadan in a city park found bacon scattered on the ground. . . . [B]efore most of the faithful arrived for Morning Prayer, it was discovered that someone had scattered a quantity of raw bacon on the field.”

This is, as they say, is Big News! Why?

“‘This has been determined to be a bias event on the part of our Hate Crimes Task Force,’ NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters.”

A bias event on the part of the hate crimes task force.

This, of course, is because that dastardly act was sure to offend Muslims.

It’s another matter entirely if you’re in, say, Saudi Arabia, an Islamic country, and find yourself under arrest for possession of a Bible, but here in this Judeo-Christian country, it’s fine to desecrate… well…

Where were our government officials when artist and photographer Andres Serrano unveiled his “Piss Christ”? It was a photograph of a “small plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist’s urine. The piece was a winner of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art’s ‘Awards in the Visual Arts’ competition, which is sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, a United States Government agency that offers support and funding for artistic projects.”

What was the response from the art community? Here’s one example:

“The art critic Lucy R. Lippard has presented a constructive case for the formal value of Serrano’s Piss Christ, which she characterizes as mysterious and beautiful. She writes that the work is ‘a darkly beautiful photographic image . . . the small wood and plastic crucifix becomes virtually monumental as it floats, photographically enlarged, in a deep rosy glow that is both ominous and glorious.’ Lippard suggests that the formal values of the image can be regarded separately from other meanings.”

I’m sure Mzzz. Lippard also feels that the above mentioned IslamoBaconGate affair was the most perverse, racist hate crime in modern history, or something to that effect, though she’s still rahther partial to “Piss Christ” (pinky extended as she sips at her chamomile tea).

Mzzz. Lippard likely pulled the handle for Obama in 2008, will again this November, and would probably purchase Pelosi and Reid bubble gum cards if they were available.

With a “snip!”

But it turns out that the bacon was left there for stray animals and had nothing to do with intimidating Muslims. The person who put the bacon in the park made these comments on a radio show:

“I had put the bacon there. It was going bad in my trunk and I put it out for the scavengers like the opossums and the raccoons and sea gulls, and I did not intend for that to cause anybody any problems.”

LOL! Mayhaps the NYPD should start doing something more constructive, like putting together an internal crime prevention unit: In the last several months (I wonder if it has anything to do with the “anti-racist” lowering of standards for recruitment) members of New York’s finest have been nabbed for everything from ticket fixing and DUI to smuggling slot machines, running guns, kidnaping and extortion, and stealing firearms from a police precinct house.

We here at Hard Astarboard have always been supportive, almost fanatically so, of the police, but things here in New York are getting just a little out of hand…

Maybe the police who were put on “bacon patrol” looking for a “hate” crime were the same officers who shot the nine bystanders near the Empire State Building last week.

The Godfather Politics article, by Gary DeMar, is here.

In my various and sundry meanderings through the news this morning I ran across a column by Rich Lowry that bears reading by anyone who even dreams that most of the remnants of our once (long, long ago) great and reasonably fair/ impartial news media are even worth the time to peruse them, let alone pay for any of their publications.

Remember how the MSM and that “Hope and Change” presidential candidate, Barack Obama, criticized (nastily and mercilessly) Prersident George W. Bush for every last thing he decided regarding the handling of terrorists that didn’t fit into our own judicial system’s policies of prosecuting criminals (like purse snatchers, dope dealers, litterbugs, drunk drivers and those who tore the “do not remove” tags off their new bed mattresses)? How waterboarding, raising a voice to or otherwise not providing every murderous terrorist with every courtesy of a visiting VIP was a dastardly event?

Well, here we now have good ol’ “Barry” Obama, the good, all American hypocrite-next-door, firming up his own assassination policies.

“This,” he and his assassination czar will now decide, “is whom we’ll have killed…”

Killing has never been so discriminating, so urbane, so cool.

The New York Times and Newsweek both ran long, largely admiring articles on how President Obama selects individual terrorists to terminate with extreme prejudice. The administration’s “smart power” isn’t working out so well, but smart killing is a smash success.

Obama’s national-security team — as well as his top political adviser, David Axelrod — gather on “Terror Tuesdays” to go over an expanding “kill list” that the president examines with the aid of capsule biographies of the terrorists, or “baseball cards.” Then the president decides who lives and who — if we get him in our sights — dies.

Needless to say, had Dick Cheney consulted “baseball cards” to decide in weekly meetings attended by Karl Rove who deserved to have close encounters with drone-fired missiles, Nancy Pelosi would have drafted the articles of impeachment herself.

The Obama killings vindicate the core premises of the Bush War on Terror: This is a war, and the protections of our criminal-justice system don’t apply to the enemy.

In light of the kill list, it’s a wonder anyone ever objected to Bush-era detentions or interrogations. If we can pick someone off a roster of names and sentence him to death without due process, surely we can capture and hold that same person.

If we can execute someone — and any of his associates who happen to be in the vicinity — from on high, surely we can keep him awake at night and otherwise discomfit him should he fall into our hands.

The Times notes that “Obama’s record has not drawn anything like the sweeping criticism from allies that his predecessor faced.” True enough. It hasn’t been subjected to a highly politicized assault at home and abroad by people desperate to put it in the worst possible light and even make it a war crime.

As they say, SNIP!

For most of the left, the highest principle of just war theory is licet si Obama id faciat — it’s OK if Obama does it. This is how Gitmo, formerly a standing repudiation of all that we hold dear as a nation, becomes an afterthought when it is owned and operated by one Barack H. Obama.

As it happens, the president holds exactly the same Obama-centric view. So long as the kill list is overseen by him as judge and executioner, it’s beyond reproach.

The press tends to agree. Newsweek reports, “The choices he faces are brutally difficult, and he has struggled with them — sometimes turning them over in his mind again and again.”

Really? He thinks about who he is deciding to kill? The nation is blessed to have such a scrupulous leader.

The Times maintains that the president parses the kill list as “a student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.” If no anecdotes have yet emerged about Obama justifying a particular kill with reference to the Summa Theologica, it’s probably only a matter of time.

In authorizing the strikes, Obama is to be commended for his coldbloodedness, although no tactic is perfect or without costs. The war in Yemen is sliding the wrong way’ relations with target-rich Pakistan are at a low ebb. But there should be no doubt now that the commander in chief possesses fearsome powers in the War on Terror. All it took for Democrats to accept that was for President Obama to begin exercising them.

I wonder when Barack Hussein will write an executive order commanding that all people refer to him as Obama Rex…

This one was in this morning’s Daily Caller.

Documents published online this month show that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an organization known for its uncompromising animal-rights positions, killed more than 95 percent of the pets in its care in 2011.

Well!

These concerned, peaceful humanitarians of the liberal persuation sure know how to practice what they preach, don’t they?

The documents, obtained from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, were published online by the Center for Consumer Freedom, a non-profit organization that runs online campaigns targeting groups that antagonize food producers.

Fifteen years’ worth of similar records show that since 1998 PETA has killed more than 27,000 animals at its headquarters in Norfolk, VA.

In a February 16 statement, the Center said PETA killed 1,911 cats and dogs last year, finding homes for only 24 pets.

“PETA hasn’t slowed down its slaughterhouse operation,” said Rick Berman, CCF’s executive director. “It appears PETA is more concerned with funding its media and advertising antics than finding suitable homes for these dogs and cats.”

In a statement, Berman added that PETA has a $37 million dollar annual budget.

His organization runs PETAkillsAnimals.com, which reports that in 2010 a resident of Virginia called PETA and asked if there was an animal shelter at the group’s headquarters. PETA responded that there was not.

I was recently at Bloomingdales (Lexington Avenue in Manhattan) and espied an anti-fur coat demonstration in front of the place, complete with pictures of skinned, bloody animals and the kind of slant to their message that almost suggested these animals were skinned alive, screaming in torment.

I wonder if these PETA creatures and their “progressive” friends would be offended were photographs to be posted publicly of aborted babies and piles of dead animals fallen victim to PETA’s slaughterhouse operation.

Of course they would! Liberals live on what they imagine is a one way street…

According to still another of Seth’s received emails, well, let’s read it together:

State Senator R.C. Soles (D - NC) Long time Anti-Gun Advocate State Senator R.C. Soles, 74, shot one of two intruders at his home just outside Tabor City , N.C. About 5 p.m. Sunday, the prosecutor for the politician’s home county said.

The intruder, Kyle Blackburn, was taken to a South Carolina hospital, but the injuries were not reported to be life-threatening, according to Rex Gore, district attorney for Columbus , Bladen and Brunswick counties.

The State Bureau of Investigation and Columbus County Sheriff’s Department are investigating the shooting, Gore said. Soles, who was not arrested, declined to discuss the incident Sunday evening.

“I am not in a position to talk to you,” Soles said by telephone. “I’m right in the middle of an investigation.”
The Senator, who has made a career of being against gun ownership for the general public, didn’t hesitate to defend himself with his own gun when he believed he was in immediate danger and he was the victim.

In typical hypocritical liberal fashion, the “Do as I say and not as I do” Anti-Gun Activist Lawmaker picked up his gun and took action in what apparently was a self-defense shooting. Why hypocritical you may ask? It is because his long legislative record shows that the actions that he took to protect his family, his own response to a dangerous life threatening situation, are actions that he feels ordinary citizens should not have if they were faced with an identical situation.
It has prompted some to ask if the Senator believes his life and personal safety is more valuable than yours or mine.

But, this is to be expected from those who believe they can run our lives, raise our kids, and protect our families better than we can.

Indeed.

“Hat Tip” to RIC.

One of the things that demonstrates the intolerance of the self styled “tolerant” left is their “either you agree with every last piece of doctrine we preach, not 1/4, 1/2 or even 90%, but all, or you are the enemy.”

Their rejection of Joe Lieberman, which didn’t work out as they’d hoped, was a prime example (deprived of the Democratic nomination after expressing views on Iraq that didn’t agree with the “party line,” he ran as an independent and was reelected to the Senate despite their pre-adolescent actions).

Or, try getting a foot in the door in the film industry, which is dominated by some of the most spacey left wing loons on earth, if it is known you are a patriotic American.

Here, we have Hard Astarboard’s all time favorite sheriff, Joe Arpaio; well, let’s let the Washington Times tell it…

Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph M. Arpaio is known as “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” but he has a secret that not many people outside Arizona know: He loves little critters, like puppies and kittens.

Honored for his humanitarian efforts by the Humane Society of the United States, he also received the lifetime achievement award from the nonprofit group In Defense of Animals for his work encouraging police agencies nationwide to take more seriously the crimes of animal cruelty.

He puts animal abusers in jail instead of giving them citations.

The sheriff even has dedicated an air-conditioned jail solely as a sanctuary for dogs, cats and other animals that have been removed by his deputies from abusive and neglectful homes. He began a training program for some of his female inmates to learn how to care for, groom and train those very animals.

So you might imagine how disappointed he was when President Becky Barnes of Guide Dog Users Inc. (GDUI) booted him as the keynote speaker for its July national convention in Phoenix because of his tough stance on immigration enforcement and the state’s pending immigration law.

“This group says it isn’t involved in politics. Well, clearly they are,” Sheriff Arpaio said. “The local group, Arizona Council of the Blind, petitioned the national board to have me removed, and for what, because they don’t want me to enforce Arizona’s immigration laws? They are out of step with our citizenry; shame on them.”

because of his tough stance on immigration enforcement and the state’s pending immigration law

That’s exactly what I mean. It doesn’t matter that the reason they originally invited him to speak had everything to do with his and their common interest in protecting animals from abuse and giving them good homes, not immigration enforcement issues, the hypocrites on the left believe that unless you agree one hundred per cent with their politics and act accordingly, you should be excommunicated from the human race.

Yeah, yeah, these pieces of feces can say that they have:

…concerns about the invitation based on their view of Sheriff Arpaio’s policies and perceived concerns over security at the event.

Security, right. Of course, if lefties didn’t lie, they’d have very little to say.

One of the things we hear a lot from the left, everywhere from Code Pink to the environmentalists, is references of the most ominous description in reference to “Big Oil”.

Evil, Profits at Any Price, Corrupt and Corrupting, enemy-of-the-planet, (Big) Oil.

Naturally, these opponents of that nasty menace to all that is “nice” and all that is “right” in the world are “progressives”, so there’s no way there could be any kind of hypocrisy afoot within their ranks, no way!

Then how could this be?

British Petroleum’s (BP) reputation has been marred by the April oil rig explosion and subsequent oil spill which is still gushing more than 40 days later. But according to The Washington Post, the reputation of some left-wing environmental groups has also been polluted by the incident.

“[T]he Nature Conservancy lists BP as one of its business partners. The Conservancy also has given BP a seat on its International Leadership Council and has accepted nearly $10 million in cash and land contributions from BP and affiliated corporations over the years,” Joe Stephens wrote for the Post May 24.

It’s not just Nature Conservancy either, the Post found $2 million in donations to Conservation International and relationships between BP and other lefty activist groups Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), Sierra Club and Audubon.

So once again, over there on the left, we learn that lucre can, and quite easily at that, replace “convictions”. Who’d have suspected?

“The crude emanating from BP’s well threatens to befoul a number of alliances between energy conglomerates and environmental nonprofits. At least one group, Conservation International, acknowledges that it is reassessing its ties to the oil company, with an eye toward protecting its reputation,” the Post said.

Conservation International is “reassessing its ties,” is it?, “with an eye toward protecting its reputation.”

Okey dokey, so what we may infer from this is that even though these leftist organizations rail against oil giants 24/7, some bribery doesn’t come amiss now and then, and let’s not play like “progressives” and call it anything else, as though gentle phraseology takes the harshness out of a harsh deed.

“Hey, you adorable little environmentalists, we at Big Oil really approve of your cause, in fact we love your cause so much that we’re bribing your corrupt liberal asses contributing ten million smackeroos to your cause — to you — and as a gift, bestowing upon you these hundreds of acres of prime virgin land that we will never drill on”.”

“That’s just great, sugarplum, y’all sweeties, you, and between you and me, we’re gonna misplace all the material we were gonna use to campaign against your company, that is, we were ’til we realized what a generous buncha’ cutiepies y’all really are.” (fluttering eyebrows).

So much for “progressives’” convictions.

This was front page news at The Post on May 24, but received only silence from other mainstream media outlets including the three broadcast networks. Even after the oil spill, when the networks interviewed experts from two of the groups that had partnered with BP, reporters failed to make the connection. In the past, the research of conservative organizations has been undermined by reporters for such corporate contributions.

So much for “honesty in the media”.

The Story’s Here.