Obama Cartoons

After Orlando, Obama drops most partisan speech ever

Tuesday, our president came to us live from the Treasury Department. Allegedly, the purpose was to update Americans on the horrific Islamist terrorist attack at an LGBT club in Florida, as well as offer an update in the war against ISIS. But Obama reserved the second half of the speech for a vicious partisan diatribe. It would be as if FDR, partway through his “Day of Infamy” speech, began bashing Republicans for not supporting lend-lease.
The first sign that the president’s remarks were headed south came when he lapsed into yet another tired attempt to link effective counterterrorism with the debate on gun control.  Hijacking a tragedy to press a political agenda, however, is pure opportunism.
The Orlando attack is as much about a mass shooting as 9/11 was about a plane crash.
Terrorists use all kinds of weapons to kill. If government banned everything that can be used to kill people in great numbers, we would all have to live in empty rubber rooms.  Childproofing the world to make us safe from terrorists is not a responsible strategy.
If Obama wanted to debate gun control, and not look like a partisan hack, he would have chosen another time to make his case, and he would have started with the facts.
He could begin by explaining why data from Pew Research Center, the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention find that gun violence is at a 30-year low, even as gun ownership in America has expanded.
Obama saved his greatest invectives for attacking anyone who criticized him for not naming the enemy — and anyone using the term “radical Islam.” In the most superficial way, he is right. Mouthing those words doesn’t shift the calculus of war any more than calling the German war machine Nazis got GIs up the cliffs at Normandy.
But Obama’s verbal assault was pure bait and switch. What has Americans really upset is not whether he mouths particular words, but the belief that the debate over words reflects a deeper concern. Their concern is that Obama is not prosecuting a winning war. He ignores the fact that his counterterrorism strategy has been off course since 2010.
Worse, Obama implied that disagreeing was “un-American” and anti-Muslim. He ignored the fact that many who use the term “radical Islam” add the qualifier “radical” to differentiate the Islamist threat from the global Muslim community.
By labeling his detractors racist and know-nothings, he simply reinforces what many Americans already believe:  Obama is divider, not a uniter. 

The enemy is radical Islam, not the National Rifle Association

Over the past eight years - the Obama administration has never let a crisis go to waste. The Orlando terrorist attack was no different.
President Obama co-opted an Islamic radical terrorist attack and turned it into a campaign to ban “assault rifles” (their words, not mine).
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“We have to make it harder for people who want to kill Americans to get their hands on weapons of war that let them kill dozens of innocents,” the president declared.
So does he plan on confiscating our pressure cookers? What about fertilizer or cutlery or jetliners? Would that make us safer?
“Enough talking about being tough on terrorism,” the president said in a lecture to the nation on Tuesday. “Actually be tough on terrorism, and stop making it easy as possible for terrorists to buy assault weapons.”
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If the president really wanted to be tough on terrorism, he would actually acknowledge the real enemy and he would stop making it easy for the jihadists to cross our borders.
“Reinstate the assault weapons ban,” he demanded. “Make it harder for terrorists to use these weapons to kill us.”
How about making sure Americans have the tools necessary to defend themselves and their families against the jihadists? How about you stop being an apologist for the Islamists – and start being a Commander-in-Chief for the United States?
The mainstream media has been more than willing to take up the president's cause.
The New York Daily News leading the charge with a front page headline blaming the National Rifle Association for the Orlando massacre.
In today's edition - they accused NRA members of being traitors. Traitors.
“Thanks, NRA. Because of your continued opposition to an assault rifle ban, terrorists like this lunatic can legally buy a killing machine and perpetrate the worst mass shooing in U.S. history,” another headline screamed.
Can you believe people actually read this garbage?
The anti-gun crowd has become unhinged. Truth is, most of them would not be able to tell the difference between an AR-15 and a Super Soaker.
They do not understand this central truth: the Second Amendment protects all of the other Amendments.
What happened in Orlando was the work of a jihadist - not a law-abiding NRA member. It was an Islamic radical who slaughtered those people -- not a deer hunter.
Chris Cox, the executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, summed it up nicely in a USA Today editorial:
“It’s time for us to admit that radical Islam is a hate crime waiting to happen. The only way to defeat them is to destroy them – not destroy the right of law-abiding Americans to defend ourselves.”
The enemy is radical Islam, folks -- not the NRA.
Todd Starnes is host of Fox News & Commentary, heard on hundreds of radio stations. His latest book is "God Less America: Real Stories From the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values." Follow Todd on Twitter@ToddStarnes and find him on Facebook.

'Define the enemy': Republicans counter Obama's 'radical Islam' slam

Republicans roundly rejected President Obama’s rationale for refusing to use the term “radical Islam” in describing terror attacks, responding that: “You have to define the enemy to defeat it.”
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mike McCaul, R-Texas, led the charge a day after the president delivered a point-by-point denunciation of his critics from the White House podium.
McCaul said “Churchill didn’t dance around the Nazis, he called it fascism,” while Presidents Reagan and Kennedy similarly confronted Communism.
“Now we have a generational threat struggle called Islamist extremism,” he said Wednesday.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump also delivered an unsparing rejoinder during a rally in Greensboro, N.C.
“[Obama] was more angry at me than he was at the shooter,” Trump said. “… That’s the kind of anger he should have for the shooter.”
The pushback comes after Obama made his most extensive comments yet challenging critics who have been on his case for years over avoiding the term “radical Islam,” including after Sunday’s Orlando terror massacre where the shooter professed support for the Islamic State.
“Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. … There’s no magic to the phrase of radical Islam,” Obama said Tuesday. “It’s a political talking point.”
Obama went on to warn of a slippery slope in this debate, citing Trump’s call for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration – a proposal many in Trump’s party do not support, including House Speaker Paul Ryan.
“We don’t have religious tests here,” Obama said, without attacking Trump by name. But answering one of Trump’s most frequent accusations, the president said his reluctance to use the phrase “radical Islam” has “nothing to do with political correctness and everything to do with actually defeating extremism.”
He said groups like ISIS “want to claim that they are the true leaders of over a billion Muslims … who reject their crazy notions,” and a move to single out Muslims in America “betrays the very values America stands for.”
Trump has not backed down on that call, even as Ryan and others in the party have voiced concern about his rhetoric.
“It we don’t get tough, and we don’t get smart -- and fast -- we’re not going to have a country anymore. There will be nothing left,” Trump said Monday.
The Obama administration, though, has only accelerated the pace of Syrian refugee admissions in recent weeks – which is a program Trump and other Republicans have warned could pose a security risk.
Deputy National Security Advisor Avril Haines said Tuesday that the administration is speeding up the admissions process, while still taking the necessary security precautions. According to Haines, “we’ve admitted about 3,500 Syrian refugees—more in the last five weeks than in the past seven months.”

Democratic senator wages filibuster to push vote on gun control measures

A Democratic senator ended a nearly 15-hour-long filibuster on the Senate floor early Thursday, part of an effort to force a vote on gun control legislation following Sunday's terror attack in Orlando.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., yielded the floor at 2:11 a.m., 14 hours and 50 minutes after he began speaking. Murphy kept up his filibuster to a mostly empty chamber, save for 38 Democratic senators who joined him and made their own speeches throughout the day. Two Republican senators, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, also made remarks.
Democrats were seeking a vote on two amendments to an underlying spending bill. One, proposed by Murphy, would expand background checks. The other, proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would let the government bar sales of guns and explosives to people it suspects of being terrorists.
Republicans argue that Feinstein's bill denies due process to people who may be on the terror list erroneously and are trying to exercise their constitutional right to gun ownership.
Near the end of the filibuster, Murphy said that Senate leaders had promised "a path forward" for floor votes on the legislation, but did not elaborate further.
As he began to speak Wednesday morning, Murphy said he would remain on the Senate floor "until we get some signal, some sign that we can come together," and evoked the Newtown school shooting in his state in 2012.
"For those of us that represent Connecticut, the failure of this body to do anything, anything at all in the face of that continued slaughter isn't just painful to us, it's unconscionable," Murphy said.
Separately Wednesday, the National Rifle Association reiterated its support for a bill from Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, that would let the government delay firearms sales to suspected terrorists for up to 72 hours. Prosecutors would have to persuade a judge to block the transaction permanently, a bar Democrats and gun control activists say is too high.
The Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, was added to a government watch list of individuals known or suspected of being involved in terrorist activities in 2013, when he was investigated for inflammatory statements to co-workers. But he was pulled from that database when that investigation was closed 10 months later.

Efforts to compromise between the Cornyn and Feinstein bills collapsed within hours of surfacing in the Senate Wednesday, underscoring the extreme difficulty of resolving the divisive issue five months to the election.
Meanwhile, Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group backed by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, said it was working on a compromise with Toomey.
By the end of the day Wednesday, Toomey, who is facing a tough re-election race this fall, had introduced legislation that would direct the attorney general to create a new list of suspected terrorists who could be barred from buying weapons. But Democrats immediately rejected that idea, saying it would create too much of a backlog.

Sleazy Cartoons

Why Trump banned the Washington Post: Going nuclear over a bad headline?

Donald Trump launched his campaign one year ago, and has been running against the “dishonest” and “sleazy” media ever since.
Now he’s opened a new front by yanking the credentials of the Washington Post.
The tactic isn’t new: Trump has already barred Politico, the Des Moines Register, the Daily Beast and Buzzfeed, along with outlets that oppose him for ideological reasons, National Review and the Huffington Post. Sometimes it’s an offending story, sometimes an editorial.
In the Post’s case, it was a headline.
The fact that it was a bad headline doesn’t justify the ban. It was written by one person for the paper’s website. Trump has criticized other Post stories, but overall seems to have had cordial relations with the paper, and sat for a grilling with its editorial board, which has been harshly critical of him. Few reporters have talked to Trump as much as the Post’s Robert Costa.
Trump’s anger at the Post was on display after the paper questioned why some of his touted donations to veterans’ groups hadn’t been completed, and he called that news conference and teed off on the press.

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But the billionaire has been much harsher in denouncing the New York Times, especially after the story about his past conduct with women. He spent months fighting with Fox News, even skipping one of its debates, and now says CNN is distorting his remarks. He spent months appearing on “Morning Joe” but now says the Scarborough show has gone off “the deep end.”
The Post dustup began the morning after the Orlando massacre, when Trump phoned into “Fox & Friends.” He said that President Obama “is not tough, not smart, or he's got something else in mind. And the something else in mind, you know, people can't believe it.”
That led to this Post headline: “Donald Trump Suggests President Obama Was Involved With Orlando Shooting.” About 90 minutes later, the paper softened it to: “Donald Trump Seems to Connect President Obama to Orlando Shooting.”
Except that he didn’t. Under the worst interpretation of Trump’s comments, he was insinuating that the president sympathized with terrorists. Indeed, the Post story was well within bounds, saying that Trump “seemed to repeatedly accuse President Obama on Monday of identifying with radicalized Muslims who have carried out terrorist attacks.”  But the headline was not.
In announcing the ban, Trump said:  “We no longer feel compelled to work with a publication which has put its need for ‘clicks’ above journalistic integrity. They have no journalistic integrity and write falsely about Mr. Trump.” He went on to take his usual shot, without offering evidence, that the paper’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is using the Post as a political tool.
Marty Barton, the Post’s executive editor (and portrayed in the movie “Spotlight” as the crusading editor whose Boston Globe broke the church sexual abuse scandal), responded forcefully, calling the move “nothing less than a repudiation of a free and independent press. When coverage doesn’t correspond to what the candidate wants it to be, then a news organization is banished.” Baron said the Post, whose reporters are writing a book about The Donald, would continue to cover him “honorably, honestly, accurately, energetically and unflinchingly.”
It’s a common tactic for angry candidates to cut off interviews to offending news outlets, or feed scoops to their rivals. But revoking credentials gets the First Amendment movement up in arms.
Some folks have noted online that even at the height of Watergate, Richard Nixon didn’t attempt to revoke the paper’s credentials (which are awarded by the White House Correspondents Association). He did something worse, trying to get federal regulators to yank the company’s lucrative television license.
So what does Trump accomplish here? It’s not like the Post is going to stop covering him aggressively. The practical effect is that he makes it hard for the paper’s reporters to follow him around the country, and they have to try to walk into public events with the general crowd rather than being escorted into the press section. The Trump campaign has ejected a Politico scribe from reporting from the audience on at least one occasion.
What Trump does is send a message and score points with his base, which doesn’t like or trust the press. It is also something of a brushback pitch against other news outlets. The flip side is that he looks a bit thin-skinned.
The escalation comes as the media coverage of Trump turns more aggressive, more skeptical, and in some cases more tendentious.
A Washington Post news story offered a prime example on Monday:
“In a speech laden with falsehoods and exaggeration, Trump was antagonistic and pugnacious, in stark contrast with his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, who also spoke Monday about combating terrorism.”
The examples? Trump called the Orlando killer an “Afghan,” when he was born in Queens. He also said the U.S. is “not screening” refugees, who the paper says undergo a rigorous vetting process that can take up to two years.
And the Post said Trump “wrongly claimed that Clinton wanted to abolish the Second Amendment.” She does not, but does that fall into the category of embellished political rhetoric? Are the same standards applied to Clinton when she casts Trump’s positions in the worst possible light? Is his talk of temporarily banning Muslims capitalizing on a tragedy, while her talk of tougher gun control is reported as just plain common sense?
There are times when the media are unfair to Trump. There are also plenty of times when the media challenge Trump on the facts and he just doesn’t like it.
The Republican nominee, who has also called for looser libel laws, has every right to push back against what he views as unfair coverage. But this is a case where he overreacted to a terrible headline and gave the impression that he’s willing to block the press from doing its job.

Clinton defeats Sanders in DC primary; candidates discuss several topics in meeting

Presumptive presidential nominee Hillary Clinton defeated Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday in the Washington, D.C., Democratic primary -- marking the end of the presidential primary season and bringing the two candidates together for a face-to-face meeting to discuss what’s next for the party in the general election.
The Associated Press said with 99 percent of the precincts reporting, Clinton has 74,566 votes, compared to 19,990 for Sanders.
Neither candidate spoke to reporters Tuesday night after their roughly 90-minute meeting in a Washington hotel.
However, the campaigns released separate, but nearly identical statements saying that Clinton and Sanders had a “positive discussion” about their primary race, unifying the party and their mutual desire to stop presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump from winning in November.
The campaigns also said the candidates discussed issues in which they share common goals, including increasing wages for working families, eliminating undisclosed money in politics and reducing the cost of college.
The meeting, which included the candidates' campaign managers, concluded with the sides agreeing to continue to work on a shared agenda that includes developing a platform for the upcoming Democratic National Convention, each campaign said.

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Sanders said he’ll tell supporters his next steps Thursday via a live, online video.
“After today, the voting is done, but our political revolution continues,” Sanders said in an email Tuesday to supporters.
Clinton clinched the nomination last week by getting the requisite 2,383 delegates -- a combination of superdelegates and pledged delegates awarded to her in 56 primary and caucus wins, including those in Puerto Rico and six U.S. territories.
Sanders has so far refused to end his campaign despite pressure to do so, suggesting he will keep trying to persuade Clinton superdelegates to instead vote for him at the Democratic convention in July, in a long-shot bid to take the nomination.
However, the Sanders campaign has occasionally suggested that the candidate could end his bid if Clinton, and the entire Democratic Party, embrace key parts of his agenda including better universal health care, a $15-an-hour minimum wage and free tuition at state colleges and universities.
Clinton said earlier Tuesday in an interview with Telemundo that she was very much "looking forward to having (Sanders') support in this campaign, because Donald Trump poses a serious threat to our nation."
Democratic National Committee Chairman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said after the D.C. primary, "Democrats are ready to unify and take on both Trump and the Republican Party that he represents. At our convention in July, we’re going to nominate a qualified, capable candidate who will build on the hard-won progress of the last seven years."
“I think the time is now. In fact, the time is overdue, for a fundamental transformation of the Democratic party,” Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, said Tuesday on Capitol Hill. “We need a party which is prepared to stand up for the disappearing middle class.”
Before Tuesday, Clinton had 2,784 delegates, compared to 1,877 for Sanders.
On Sunday, Sanders told ABC News that the meeting with Clinton will be about “what kind of platform we have and … what kind of administration she will have.”
Sanders also told ABC that he wants Clinton to also specifically commit to a progressive tax system that makes big banks and corporations pay “their fair share of taxes.”
That Sanders, 74, even challenged the better-known and better-funded Clinton this far is a remarkable political feat.
The former first lady and secretary of state was expected to breeze through the primary. But Sanders, appearing to tap into voters’ frustrations with established candidates and money-driven politics, took the race until the second-to-last week of the Democratic primary season.
Along the way, Sanders won 21 primaries or caucuses, backed by legions of young voters and others excited by his promises of higher wages, free college and limiting the influence of “big money” in elections.
Sanders’ long-shot bid began with a key win in New Hampshire, an early primary that Clinton had won in her failed 2008 White House bid.
He showed his campaign was for real in March by managing seven straight victories, putting the Clinton campaign on its heels until late April, when Clinton won her home-state of New York.
Clinton nearly put the race out of reach with a series of early wins, including first-in-the-nation Iowa, and in delegate-rich states such as South Carolina, Georgia, Massachusetts, Texas and Virginia.
But Sanders scored a big comeback victory March 8 in Michigan that stopped Clinton’s decisive run across the South. However, he failed to sustain momentum, with Clinton winning the next seven state contests.