Honduras Outrage

Barack Obama is pursuing "change" in our foreign affairs: he is punishing our friends and coddling up to thuggish regimes.

From pushing Israel to stop settlement activity to help the Palestinians, imposing trade restraints to help unions, and ending the missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic to help Russia, the Obama administration has decided it is easier to get "progress" on its diplomatic efforts by hurting our friends and helping our enemies.

No where is that more evident than Honduras. Mary Anastasia O'Grady of the Wall Street Journal has done yeoman's work on the Obama administrations efforts to pressure Honduras to overturn its constitution to force its former president back in office (see here and here). The administration has even threatened not to recognize the victor in the November presidential election, all the more stunning since the ousted president wasn't constitutionally allowed to run again.

The beneficiary of Obama's efforts is the Venezuelan dictator, Hugo Chavez.

Nice trade: out with the Honduras constitution, in with Chavez authoritarianism.

The Cat's Out of the Bag

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner this weekend, in response to questions about whether the Obama administration would increase taxes on the middle class, said that, "We're going to do what's necessary."

Lawrence Summers, Obama's head economic policy coordinator, made similar comments.

Consider this a trial balloon, and a signal that Obama is planning to violate his campaign vow not to raise taxes on the middle class. Instead, it suggests Obama is planning to seek large tax increases to pay for the Democrats spending spree.

For those who wanted change, you should be pleased: such plans would lead us toward the lower growth, higher unemployment world of Europe.

Nanny State

Under the new credit card law that goes into effect next year, people under 21 will need their parents to be responsible for the credit card unless they can demonstrate sufficient income to qualify for the credit card on their own.

The theory is that kids will pile up debts because of the existence of the credit cards, so by putting parents on the hook for credit card spending, fewer young adults will have credit cards or will have their bill picked up by their parents.

The law makes it harder for young adults to build a credit history. And since a credit history is important to engaging in other credit-oriented transactions, such as renting an apartment, young adults will have a harder time becoming financially independent.

As such, in the name of "helping" kids, the law will hurt those who use credit responsibly, while those who abuse credit will probably find other ways to run into financial problems.

I wonder if all the young adults who voted for Obama counted on his treating them as children?

The Enabler-in-Chief

The Obama administration's actions regarding Honduras are aiding Hugo Chavez's attempts to install socialist dictatorships throughout Latin America

Manuel Zelaya is supported by Venezuela tyrant Hugo Chavez, following his playbook for gradually taking control of a country through steps that individually don't provoke international outrage but collectively amount to a coup. Zelaya had ordered Honduran broadcasters to air two hours a day of pro-government propaganda, as example.

Zelaya's latest effort to enhance his power came from his desire to re-write the constitution to allow himself to run for the presidency again. When the Honduras supreme court ruled against his efforts, he sought to get ballots printed by the Chavez's regime distributed anyway.

The Honduras supreme court ordered Zelaya arrested, which the military did. His arrest and deportation is supported by the leaders of his own political party, including the interim president, Roberto Micheletti.

So what is Barack Obama's response to this effort to maintain freedom in Honduras? Naturally, it is to support Hugo Chavez's efforts to have his ally Zelaya returned to power.

I think we have a new nickname for Obama: Enabler-in-Chief for tyrants. Obama had a hard time coming to the defense of the Iranian people as its regime crackdown on protests against rigged elections; he has reached out to the tyrants in Syria; he has cozied up to the Putin regime in Russia; and he won't or can't speak against Chavez's efforts to undermine freedom in Latin America.

Photo Flap

The secret flyover of New York by Air Force One, intended as a photo op, terrified thousands of New Yorkers who feared a replay of 9/11.

Barack Obama says he didn't know beforehand of this. That's is certainly plausible, since you'd like to think the president doesn't micromanage such matters.

But that doesn't absolve Obama, or senior administration figures, from responsibility.

Louis Caldera heads the White House Military Office. It serves an important function, since it coordinates the military units that assist the president. George Bush made the position, previously a political one, into a professional one held by an active-duty admiral given the enhanced security needs post 9/11.

Obama instead filled the position with a political appointee, presumably to reward a supporter. And in return, we shouldn't be surprised his appointee sought ways to make Obama look good with a photo op.

Terrifying New Yorkers, and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, is what we get from this "change" by the Obama administration.

It Was Nice While It Lasted

Barack Obama's decision to release the memos on the CIA interrogation techniques means we will get much less useful information from terrorists, who now know we won't even scare them into telling us useful information.

We are led to believe that putting harmless insects in enclosed spaces, while leading the prisoner to believe the insects are dangerous, is bad. But it is OK to launch missile strikes on suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In other words, scaring terrorists is bad, killing them is good.

As bad as all that is for our security, it is possibly not the worst aspect of this.

By not firmly and decisively rejecting prosecutions and investigations into Bush administration officials, Obama has exposed as a joke that he wanted to heal the partisanship wounds in Washington. To consider criminalizing policy differences is a new low in our politics.

The peaceful transition of power, from one party to another, is one of the great achievements in American history. It rests on the premise that the defeated party only loses political power - the members of that party don't lose their freedom or lives. So losing an election is bad, but not that bad.

Now Obama and the Democrats are raising the specter that this great principle and tradition is at risk. And it is critical that it be a tradition, so that each party has confidence it won't be prosecuted when it leaves office.

I wonder how many Obama voters thought the change they were voting for included putting at risk America's unprecedented history of peaceful transitions of power?

Blowback

The Wall Street Journal reports that two AIG employees in Paris have resigned, which is causing AIG to find replacements to avoid defaulting on $234 billion of derivatives contracts.

An AIG default on these contracts will force its counterparties, other banks, to raise capital - further exacerbating the financial crisis.

Who doubts that these two employees, who worked in a profitable division of AIG, left out of dismay and fear? How easy do you think it will be to find replacements given the threats that have been made against AIG employees?

These are just some of the consequences of the political, media, and activist assault on AIG.

Barack Obama sure has changed the political culture of the country.

Cult of Sacrifice

Barack Obama has been saying that sacrifices are needed in the time of our economic troubles.

I don't see much sacrifice by those advocating higher government spending; by those pursuing a costly and deadly creeping nationalization of our health care system; by those seeking to impose draconian costs on power producers, companies, and all consumers in the pursuit of a radical environmental agenda; or by labor unions who want to pass card check legislation to make it much easier for them to coerce employees into unionizing an employer.

Instead, Obama's calls for sacrifice entail: the imposition of higher taxes on individuals and companies and the multiple burdens that Obama's reforms will produce.

Obama is seeking to make people feel guilty for their success, to weaken their resolve in opposing his plans to take their money to give it to him to spend as he wishes.

France Gives Obama the Heisman

France's defense minister has refused for now to increase his country's military presence in Afghanistan.

For years we heard that America wasn't getting more help in international affairs because other nations didn't like George Bush, and that Barack Obama would usher in a new era in this regard.

This a wake up call for those who think international politics is personality driven. It is mostly driven by a government's perceived interests. Those perceived interests aren't always just, or even correct, and we can lament France doesn't see the situation differently.

Barack Obama's presidency won't change that.

Department of Injustice?

Eric Holder, Barack Obama's nominee for Attorney General, was questioned heavily this week in his Senate confirmation hearings about his role in Bill Clinton's scandalous pardon of Marc Rich. The Rich pardon raises issues of the degree to which Holder is beholden to political pressure in his work in the Justice Department. Given Obama's connection to Illinois and the corrupt political culture in that state, this is disturbing enough.

But Holder's greatest sin in his previous Justice Department role is what's called the Holder Memorandum. This memo said federal prosecutors could use a corporate defendant's waiver of attorney-client privilege to help determine if the corporation was cooperating sufficiently with prosecutors to avoid prosecution.

Since indictments of companies often lead to their immediate collapse, as happened with Arthur Andersen which resulted in 28,000 jobs being lost, this memo gave prosecutors the legal equivalent of a "weapon of mass destruction" in seeking convictions of individuals alleged to have committed crimes in their business dealings.

Attorney-client privilege has been a bulwark of our legal rights and to overthrow it because it was politically expedient to enhance prosecutors' cases against white collar defendants subverts the very meaning of justice by changing the rules after the fact - companies and employees assumed based on prior law that attorney-client privilege was applicable and then later saw the rules changed. As it turned out, many of the prosecutions secured under such threats were overturned on appeal, showing that abusive legal tactics produced unjust outcomes.

The left would prefer to extend extra legal protections to terror detainees at Guantanamo than preserve long standing rights to American citizens who happen to be white collar defendants.

This is the kind of Change We Need?

Promises Made, Promises Broken

Last night in a CBS News interview, Barack Obama said that isolating Osama Bin Laden, but not killing him, was a satisfactory outcome.

In contrast, during the presidential campaign, Obama said that killing Bin Laden should be our biggest priority. Moreover, Obama said the war in Iraq was a distraction from going after Bin Laden, using this line of attack to demonstrate his toughness in foreign affairs.

Obama continues to retreat from policies and views expressed in the campaign. After eight years of clarity and consistency from President Bush, I guess this is part of the "change" an Obama administration is bringing to the country.