Reuters Canada reports:

 The United States views Russian threats to place tactical missiles in the Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad as provocative and misguided, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Thursday.

Russia made the move in response to U.S. plans for a missile defense system in Europe, which Moscow sees as a threat to its security. Washington says the system is needed against missile strikes from what it terms rogue states, notably Iran.

Gates, speaking after a NATO meeting with Ukraine, said the Russian threats were "hardly the welcome a new American administration deserved," referring to the fact they were made immediately after Barack Obama won the presidential election.

"Such provocative remarks are unnecessary and misguided," Gates told a news conference in the Estonian capital Tallinn.

At the same time, Washington would continue to seek a constructive and positive relationship with Russia, he said.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told French daily newspaper Le Figaro, in an interview published on Thursday, that Moscow could cancel its deployment of the Iskander missiles if Obama scrapped plans for the missile defense system.

"I don’t think that is a credible offer," Gates said, adding that Washington had put forward detailed proposals to Russia for partnering in missile defense.

"Quite frankly I am not clear what the missiles would be for in Kaliningrad. After all the only real emerging threat on Russia’s periphery is Iran and I don’t think the Iskander missile has the range to get there from Kaliningrad," he said.

"So, this is an issue apparently between ourselves and the Russians. Why they would threaten to point missiles at European nations seems quite puzzling to me," he added.

Could it possibly have something to do with these considerations?:

The actual ruler of Russia now is not President Medvedev, nor an elected parliament, but KGB man Vladimir Putin.

Putin longs to restore a Russian empire by bringing former Soviet territories back into Russian control.   

He therefore regards America, which under the presidency of George Bush planned to extend the protection of NATO to some of those territories, as the enemy of Russia.

He sees ignorance, naivete, conflict-phobia, indecisiveness and – in a word – weakness in President-Elect Obama, and plans to exploit that weakness.

 Footnote: We find it interesting that the Russians are calling their missile ‘Iskander’. It is the Arabic version of Alexander.

 Original as always, P.J.O’Rourke excoriates conservatives who failed conservatism. Here’s part of what he writes.  Read it all here.

In how many ways did we fail conservatism? And who can count that high? Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people’s business: abortion. Democracy–be it howsoever conservative–is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up. What if it’s rape? Some people truly have the courage of their convictions. I don’t know if I’m one of them. I might kill the baby. I will kill the boy.

The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we’re in favor of living. We consider people–with a few obvious exceptions–to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, and clothe them and to pick up the trash around their FEMA trailers and to make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources.

If the citizenry insists that abortion remain legal–and, in a passive and conflicted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so–then give the issue a rest. Meanwhile we can, with the public’s blessing, refuse to spend taxpayers’ money on killing, circumscribe the timing and method of taking a human life, make sure parental consent is obtained when underage girls are involved, and tar and feather teenage boys and run them out of town on a rail. The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani.

Our impeachment of President Clinton was another example of placing the wrong political emphasis on personal matters. We impeached Clinton for lying to the government. To our surprise the electorate gave us cold comfort. Lying to the government: It’s called April 15th. And we accused Clinton of lying about sex, which all men spend their lives doing, starting at 15 bragging about things we haven’t done yet, then on to fibbing about things we are doing, and winding up with prevarications about things we no longer can do.

When the Monica Lewinsky news broke, my wife set me straight about the issue. "Here," she said, "is the most powerful man in the world. And everyone hates his wife. What’s the matter with Sharon Stone? Instead, he’s hitting on an emotionally disturbed intern barely out of her teens." But our horn rims were so fogged with detestation of Clinton that we couldn’t see how really detestable he was. If we had stayed our hand in the House of Representatives and treated the brute with shunning or calls for interventions to make him seek help, we might have chased him out of the White House. (Although this probably would have required a U.S. news media from a parallel universe.)

Such things as letting the abortion debate be turned against us and using the gravity of the impeachment process on something that required the fly-swat of pest control were strategic errors. Would that blame could be put on our strategies instead of ourselves. We have lived up to no principle of conservatism.

… and how would it serve Hamas to lie?

David Hornik writes at PajamasMedia: 

In an interview published Tuesday in the London-based Al-Hayat, Dr. Ahmad Yousef, political adviser to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, said senior Hamas figures had held a secret meeting with advisers to Barack Obama in Gaza before the U.S. elections.

Throughout his campaign Obama’s official line was that he would “only talk with Hamas if it renounces terrorism, recognizes Israel’s right to exist, and agrees to abide by past agreements.”

Yet Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal responded to Obama’s win on an optimistic note, telling Australia’s Sky News on Saturday that his organization was “ready for dialogue with President Obama and with the new American administration with an open mind.”

On Saturday night, though, Obama’s senior foreign policy coordinator Denis McDonough seemed to hold the fort, deflecting Mashaal’s amiability by reiterating Obama’s three-part formula for making Hamas acceptable.

For those who don’t want America to have dealings with an Islamist terror organization like Hamas, that may have sounded reassuring. But now it seems it may be too soon to feel reassured.

According to Yousef in the Al-Hayat interview, the Obama-Hamas talks were already ongoing during the U.S. election campaign: “We were in contact with a number of Obama’s aides through the Internet, and later met with some of them in Gaza, but they advised us not to reveal this information as it may influence the elections or become manipulated by McCain’s campaign.”

Yousef also claimed he personally had friendly relations with some of Obama’s advisers and that “Haniyeh will draft a congratulatory letter to Obama for his victory.”

Yousef added: “The policy Obama will instate in the Middle East will differ from that of his predecessor George W. Bush, although it is clear that the region and the Palestinian issue will not be at the top of his agenda. [Obama] will focus more on the economic crisis, Iraq, and Afghanistan.”

A clash between Obama’s public, anodyne, mainstream statements and behind-the-scenes activities of a different nature would confirm the fears of those concerned about Obama’s history of association with radical people and ideologies.

 Jonathan Weil writes at  Bloomberg-com:

It’s hard to believe Barack Obama would even think of calling this change.

Take a good look at some of the 17 people our nation’s president-elect chose last week for his Transition Economic Advisory Board. And then try saying with a straight face that these are the leaders who should be advising him on how to navigate through the worst financial crisis in modern history.

First, there’s former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Not only was he chairman of Citigroup Inc.’s executive committee when the bank pushed bogus analyst research, helped Enron Corp. cook its books, and got caught baking its own. He was a director from 2000 to 2006 at Ford Motor Co., which also committed accounting fouls and now is begging Uncle Sam for Citigroup- style bailout cash.

Two other Citigroup directors received spots on the Obama board: Xerox Corp. Chief Executive Officer Anne Mulcahy and Time Warner Inc. ChairmanRichard Parsons. Xerox and Time Warner got pinched years ago by the Securities and Exchange Commission for accounting frauds that occurred while Mulcahy and Parsons held lesser executive posts at their respective companies.

Mulcahy and Parsons also once were directors at Fannie Mae when that company was breaking accounting rules. So was another member of Obama’s new economic board, former Commerce Secretary William Daley. He’s now a member of the executive committee at JPMorgan Chase & Co., which, like Citigroup, is among the nine large banks that just got $125 billion of Treasury’s bailout budget.

There’s More

Obama’s economic crew might as well be called the Bailout Bunch. Another slot went to former White House economic adviser Laura Tyson. She’s been a director for about a decade at Morgan Stanley, which in 2004 got slapped foraccounting violations by the SEC and a month ago got $10 billion from Treasury.

That’s not all. There’s Penny Pritzker, the Obama campaign’s national finance chairwoman. She was on the board of the holding company for subprime lender Superior Bank FSB. The Chicago-area thrift, in which her family held a 50 percent stake, was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in 2001. The thrift’s owners agreed to pay the government $460 million over 15 years to help cover the FDIC’s losses.

Even some of the brighter lights on Obama’s board, like Warren Buffett and former SEC Chairman William Donaldson, come with asterisks. Buffett was on the audit committee of Coca-Cola Co.’s board when the SEC found the soft-drink maker had misled investors about its earnings. Donaldson was on the audit committee from 1998 to 2001 at a provider of free e-mail services called Mail.com Inc. Just before he left the SEC, in 2005, the agency disciplined the company over accounting violations that had occurred on his watch.

So, by my tally, almost half the people on Obama’s economic advisory board have held fiduciary positions at companies that, to one degree or another, either fried their financial statements, helped send the world into an economic tailspin, or both.

There’s still more. We recommend that you read the whole thing. 

He has already begun to shape Obama’s Middle East policy. 

Who is he? What is his background? What is to be expected of his advice to the next president?  John Perazzo provides some answers in Front Page Magazine:   

Robert Malley was raised in France. His lineage is noteworthy. His father, Simon Malley (1923-2006), was a key figure in the Egyptian Communist Party. A passionate hater of Israel, the elder Malley was a close friend and confidante of the late PLO terrorist Yasser Arafat; an inveterate critic of “Western imperialism”; a supporter of various revolutionary “liberation movements,” particularly the Palestinian cause; a beneficiary of Soviet funding; and a supporter of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. According to American Thinker news editor Ed Lasky, Simon Malley “participated in the wave of anti-imperialist and nationalist ideology that was sweeping the Third World [and] … wrote thousands of words in support of struggle against Western nations.”

In a July 2001 op-ed which [Robert] Malley penned for the New York Times, he alleged that Israeli—not Palestinian—inflexibility had caused the previous year’s Camp David peace talks (brokered by Bill Clinton) to fall apart. This was one of several controversial articles Malley has written—some he co-authored with Hussein Agha, a former adviser to Arafat—blaming Israel and exonerating Arafat for the failure of the peace process.

Malley’s identification of Israel as the cause of the Camp David impasse has been widely embraced by Palestinian and Arab activists around the world, by Holocaust deniers like Norman Finkelstein, and by anti-Israel publications such as Counterpunch. It should be noted that Malley’s account of the Camp David negotiations is entirely inconsistent with the recollections of the key figures who participated in those talks—specifically, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, and then-U.S. Ambassador Dennis Ross (Clinton’s Middle East envoy).

Malley also has written numerous op-eds urging the U.S. to disengage from Israel to some degree, and recommending that America reach out to negotiate with its traditional Arab enemies such as Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah (a creature of Iran dedicated to the extermination of the Jews and death to America), and Muqtada al-Sadr (the Shiite terrorist leader in Iraq). 

In addition, Malley has advised nations around the world to establish relationships with, and to send financial aid to, the Hamas-led Palestinian government in Gaza. In Malley’s calculus, the electoral victory that swept Hamas into power in January 2006 was a manifestation of legitimate Palestinian “anger at years of humiliation and loss of self-respect because of Israeli settlement expansion, Arafat’s imprisonment, Israel’s incursions, [and] Western lecturing …”

Moreover, Malley contends that it is both unreasonable and unrealistic for Israel or Western nations to demand that Syria sever its ties with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or Iran. Rather, he suggests that if Israel were to return the Golan Heights (which it captured in the 1967 Six Day War, and again in the 1973 Yom Kippur War—two conflicts sparked by Arab aggression which sought so permanently wipe the Jewish state off the face of the earth) to Syrian control, Damascus would be inclined to pursue peace with Israel.

Malley has criticized the U.S. for allegedly remaining “on the sidelines” and being a “no-show” in the overall effort to bring peace to the nations of the Middle East. Exhorting the Bush administration to change its policy of refusing to engage diplomatically with terrorists and their sponsoring states, Malley wrote in July 2006: “Today the U.S. does not talk to Iran, Syria, Hamas, the elected Palestinian government or Hezbollah…. The result has been a policy with all the appeal of a moral principle and all the effectiveness of a tired harangue.”

This inclination to negotiate with any and all enemies of the U.S. and Israel—an impulse which Malley has outlined clearly and consistently—clearly has had a powerful influence on Barack Obama.

 Ninety years ago today, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the First World War came to an end. In Britain good men and women wear poppies in commemoration of that day, and of the ending of the Second World War. The poppy was chosen as a symbol of the sacrifice that the soldiers, sailors and airmen made because so many were buried in Flanders fields where the poppies grow among the graves. Annually the Queen lays a wreath of poppies at the foot of the Cenotaph in Whitehall on the nearest Sunday to the Day of Remembrance. There are parades of veterans. (Three from the First World War are still alive in Britain.) At exactly eleven o’clock in the morning, as Big Ben begins to strike the hour, a ceremonious minute of silence  is observed for those who died defending their country.

The wars ended in victory for Britain, with the indispensable help of America; and so, along with the mourning on this day, there was always a sense of pride among the multitudes at the Cenotaph, and throughout the country, among the descendants of the heroes who had died and of those who had survived. 

But not now. 

The country so many fought so valiantly for has given away its sovereignty, permitted occupation by aliens, been abandoned to criminals. The elected representatives of the people, the politicians, prompted and cheered on by intellectuals in the academies and the media, shrill ideologues of ‘human-rights’ and ‘political correctness’ and ‘multiculturalism’, have betrayed the British people and brought them to shame, impotent anger, bitterness and despair.    

Leo McKinstry writes in the  Daily Express about Britons asking, on this Day of Remembrance, ‘What was it all for?’  (Read the whole story here.)

The question was put to me with stark simplicity.

“What was it all for?” asked the elderly lady, a wistful look in her eyes. “The country that they died for has gone,” she continued, glancing down at the red poppy on her lapel. I had fallen into conversation with her on the steps of the Imperial War Museum in London. Against such a backdrop, dominated by two mighty naval guns at the main entrance, it was inevitable that our thoughts should turn to war and sacrifice. She explained that she had lost close relatives in both World Wars and as a teenager had endured the horrors of the Blitz. Mixed with her admiration for family heroes who had lost their lives in conflict, she also felt utter despair at the state of Britain and a profound sense of betrayal. Although her loved ones had given so much for their country, she now felt like an alien in her own land, living in constant fear of crime and surrounded by foreigners with whom she had no sense of mutual belonging or trust. Her insistent question –  “What was it all for?” – has also been echoing through my mind as I research a book about Bomber Command during the Second World War. It mounted perhaps the most bloody and dangerous British offensive of the conflict, as crews of the heavy bombers flew night after night over Germany through vicious flak from the ground and from Luftwaffe fighters.  Their long-term chances of survival were minimal. More than half of all men who served in air crews were killed in action. The courage required to step into those aircraft for the long journey in blackened night skies over enemy territory is almost beyond imagination.  Thousands of young Britons volunteered for this hellish role, motivated by their deep love of country and an abiding sense of a higher duty to others. They died for their nation but that nation barely exists any more. It has been destroyed by the politicians, its sovereignty handed over to an unelected continental bureaucracy, its economy sold off to foreign interests, its heritage traduced or ignored, its cities turned into modern Babels full of discordant tongues and wailing mosques. 

 Should Israel and American Jews be surprised that Obama lied?  This through Little Green Footballs:

According to a report on Middle East Newsline, President-elect Barack Obama has dispatched his "senior foreign policy adviser", Robert Malley to Egypt and Syria to outline Obama’s policy on the Middle East.
  
Malley reportedly relayed a promise from Obama that the United States would seek to enhance relations with Cairo and reconcile differences with Damascus.

"The tenor of the messages was that the Obama administration would take into greater account Egyptian and Syrian interests," an aide to Malley was quoted as saying. The aide said Obama plans to launch a U.S. diplomatic initiative toward Syria. Malley met both Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad "to explain Obama’s agenda for the Middle East."

Aides to Malley also said that Obama told Mubarak that the United States would maintain military and civilian aid and sell advanced F-16 aircraft to Cairo. Egypt has not ordered F-16s in nearly a decade.

Malley was an advisor to President Bill Clinton and played an active role in the Camp David summit with Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat. He later published an article in which he laid some of the blame for the failure of those talks on Israel’s doorstep.

International Crisis Group
In May 2008, Malley said in an interview that he had been in regular contact with Hamas, as part of his work for a conflict resolution think-tank called the International Crisis Group. This aroused ire and concern in pro-Israel circles, and prompted a spokesman for Obama to say that “Rob Malley has, like hundreds of other experts, provided informal advice to the campaign in the past. He has no formal role in the campaign and he will not play any role in the future.”

One of the sponsors of the International Crisis Group is billionaire George Soros, who sits on its board and its executive committee. Other members of the board include former United States National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and former general Wesley Clark, who called US support for Israel during the Second Lebanon War a "serious mistake" and said that "New York money people" – a phrase interpreted by many as a reference to Jews – were pushing the United States towards a confrontation with Iran.

 These were composed by a twelve-year-old satirist : 

1. Thou shalt not commit global warming

2. Thou shalt only eat organic food

3. Always claim that anything thou dost is for the poor

4. Remember that only whites are racist

5. Depend on the government to make thy decisions

6. Remember that anyone richer than thou is just being greedy

7. Feel good about thyself and thou needest not think well of anyone else

8. Recycle

9. Thou shalt not use more toilet paper than is strictly necessary

10. Ride the bus

11. Thou  shalt not smoke

12. Thou shalt not fatten

13.  Judge not that ye be not criticized

14. Remember that a cold house is a good house, but use not air-conditioning

15. See no war, hear no war, speak no war

16. Remember that marriage is a union between two or more living things

 Caroline Glick writes in the Jerusalem Post:

In certain respects, [Foreign Minister Tzipi] Livni’s … attempt to hide her far-left policies while presenting herself as a new sort of clean politician and engine of political renewal, echoes the strategy that Obama employed with such success in his bid for the White House. Like Obama, Livni wishes to convince the public to support her by not telling us who she is and what she intends to do, sufficing instead with her claim to be different from the other guys.

It is far from clear that Livni will be able to pull off an Obama-like victory. She lacks his charisma. Unlike Obama, she has a public record of far-left governance and policy failure going into the election. And unlike [American voters and] Sen. John McCain, Israelis trust Netanyahu more than they trust Livni to protect the country’s economy.

Moreover, Obama benefited from the public support that the Democratic Party enjoyed after eight years of Republican control of the White House. In contrast, between its failed leadership in the war with Hizbullah and the corruption probes and criminal convictions of its leaders, Livni’s Kadima is the discredited incumbent party. But still, all is not lost for Livni.

Like Obama, she enjoys the full support of the media in her bid for power. In the past, media collusion has repeatedly sufficed to bring leftists posing as centrists to power.

With all that is at stake in February’s elections, it must be hoped that Livni’s Obama strategy will fail her. Facing Iran on the one hand and a potentially hostile Obama administration on the other, Israel requires a leader like Netanyahu who understands that if preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons means butting heads with Obama, so be it. 

 From the Telegraph:

Children from Crarn accused of being witches and wizards, protesting outside the Governor’s headquarters. Photo: Mags Gavan, Redrebel Films

Ostracised, vulnerable and frightened, she wandered the streets in south-eastern Nigeria, sleeping rough, struggling to stay alive.

Mary [five years old] was found by a British charity worker and today lives at a refuge in Akwa Ibom province with 150 other children who have been branded witches, blamed for all their family’s woes, and abandoned. Before being pushed out of their homes many were beaten or slashed with knives, thrown onto fires, or had acid poured over them as a punishment or in an attempt to make them "confess" to being possessed. In one horrific case, a young girl called Uma had a three-inch nail driven into her skull.

Yet Mary and the others at the shelter are the lucky ones for they, at least, are alive. Many of those branded "child-witches" are murdered – hacked to death with machetes, poisoned, drowned, or buried alive in an attempt to drive Satan out of their soul.

The devil’s children are "identified" by powerful religious leaders at extremist churches where Christianity and traditional beliefs have combined to produce a deep-rooted belief in, and fear of, witchcraft. The priests spread the message that child-witches bring destruction, disease and death to their families. And they say that, once possessed, children can cast spells and contaminate others.

The religious leaders offer help to the families whose children are named as witches, but at a price. The churches run exorcism, or "deliverance", evenings where the pastors attempt to drive out the evil spirits. Only they have the power to cleanse the child of evil spirits, they say. The exorcism costs the families up to a year’s income.

During the "deliverance" ceremonies, the children are shaken violently, dragged around the room and have potions poured into their eyes. The children look terrified. The parents look on, praying that the child will be cleansed. If the ritual fails, they know their children will have to be sent away, or killed. Many are held in churches, often on chains, and deprived of food until they "confess" to being a witch.

The ceremonies are highly lucrative for the spiritual leaders many of whom enjoy a lifestyle of large homes, expensive cars and designer clothes.

Ten years ago there were few cases of children stigmatised by witchcraft. But since then the numbers have grown at an alarming rate and have reached an estimated 15,000 in Akwa Ibom state alone.

Some Nigerians blame the increase on one of the country’s wealthiest and most influential evangelical preachers. Helen Ukpabio, a self-styled prophetess of the 150-branch Liberty Gospel Church, made a film, widely distributed, called End of the Wicked. It tells, in graphic detail, how children become possessed and shows them being inducted into covens, eating human flesh and bringing chaos and death to their families and communities.

Mrs Ukpabio, a mother of three, also wrote a popular book which tells parents how to identify a witch. For children under two years old, she says, the key signs of a servant of Satan are crying and screaming in the night, high fever and worsening health – symptoms that can be found among many children in an impoverished region with poor health care.

 The preacher says that her work is true to the Bible and is a means of spreading God’s word. "Witchcraft is a problem all over Nigeria and someone with a gift like me can never hurt anybody," she says. "Every Nigerian wants to watch my movies." She denies that her teachings and films could encourage child abuse.