In his first State of the State address on November 5, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced that the Kremlin would soon deploy short-range Iskander missiles right next to the Polish border, in order “to neutralize if necessary the antiballistic missile system in Europe.” On its face, the provocative move was a response to this August’s U.S./Polish missile deal, which the Kremlin has vocally opposed. But the timing of Medvedev’s announcement was transparently deliberate. It was a Russian-made test of mettle directed at America’s new president elect, Barack Obama.

Obama’s supporters were still celebrating his victory when Medvedev delivered a message designed not to congratulate the new president, but to put him on notice. Describing the speech as “belligerent,” The Economist reported that the date of the televised address “had changed twice before the Kremlin settled for November 5th. This timing was meant to show that Russia’s agenda is unaffected by such trivia as America’s presidential election. But it also smacked of rival attention-seeking: even as the world listened to Barack Obama’s victory speech, Medvedev was laying out a Russian version of democracy.”

In a notable breach of the usual niceties and protocols, Medvedev didn’t even acknowledge Barack Obama’s election win. Instead, he blamed the U.S. for “dragging the rest of the world down with it” during the recent economic crisis, and for supposedly “encouraging Georgia’s barbaric aggression,” a reference to the Russian war over South Ossetia this summer. “The August crisis only accelerated the arrival of the crucial moment of truth. We proved… that we are strong enough to defend our citizens and that we can indeed defend our national interests,” Medvedev said, adding ominously, “we are being tested to the limit.” Medvedev said that the era of American dominance after the collapse of the Soviet Union was over. “The world cannot be ruled from one capital,” he warned. “Those who do not want to understand this will only create new problems for themselves and others.”

Both the timing and the content of Medvedev’s address were “particularly odd,” said military analyst Alexander Golts, who noted this is the first time since the Cold War that Russia has raised the specter of military threat to the West. “Even Soviet hawks used to wait for six months after an American election to make big statements of military strategy,” Golts remarked.

David Satter of the Hudson Institute told FrontPage that Medvedev’s remarks were “essentially posturing, but posturing that is intended to push the new administration into abandoning” missile defense projects in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Satter explained that the Kremlin needs to “exploit the notion of a hostile West,” for domestic consumption, “the better to consolidate its own hold on power.”

Even non-expert observers couldn’t help but think back to some cryptic statements made by Obama’s vice presidential running mate, Senator Joe Biden, in the final weeks of the election campaign. In a speech to key donors, Biden warned that if elected, Barack Obama would face a serious “test” early in his first term. “Mark my words,” Biden said. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember, I said it standing here, if you don't remember anything else I said: Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

Obama’s supporters enjoy comparing him to JFK, without quite realizing that their slain hero experienced many embarrassing, costly failures. Biden is not so historically illiterate; in that candid statement to Obama donors, he was harkening back to President Kennedy’s fateful first meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev just a few months after taking office in 1961. The older, cagier Khrushchev took the measure of the new president and found him wanting. Kennedy himself admitted that during that uncongenial first encounter, Khrushchev “beat the hell out of me.” As for the Soviet Premier, he later recalled “feeling sorry” for his youthful American counterpart – but not so sorry that he would cut Kennedy any slack. Within weeks of that meeting, the Soviets erected the Berlin Wall. Within months, they’d installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, aimed at the United States. The result was the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war for thirteen days in October 1962.

When considering the comparison between Kennedy and Obama, it is important to note that unlike Obama, Kennedy was a decorated Navy veteran who’d seen combat in a shooting war. Kennedy had also served far longer as a U.S. Senator, and boasted a family background of high-level diplomacy. None of that adequately prepared him to deal with a ruthless Russian leader.

Doubts about Obama’s views on military affairs first arose during the campaign. For instance, his wavering response to the Russian invasion of Georgia left some voters doubting Obama’s leadership in times of crisis. In an August meeting with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, he vowed to uphold the new missile defense treaty. However, he expressed doubts about missile defense research during the primaries (claiming he’d support it if “it works and if it can be financially feasible,” according to one adviser) and was then accused of “flip flopping” on the issue. In one speech, he vowed, “I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending. I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems.”

In the same speech, Obama declared, “I will negotiate with Russia to take our ICBMs off hair-trigger alert, and to achieve deep cuts in our nuclear arsenals.” Of course, any such negotiations will have to wait until after his inauguration on January 20. In the meantime, the White House issued a statement on November 6, declaring their eagerness to sit down with Russia for a “robust dialogue” in “the next couple of weeks.”

Besides setting new limits on the size of Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals, the White House hopes to assuage Russian objections to the new European anti-missile system. Yet with President Bush now reduced to “lame duck” status, the Russians may well stall for time until they can meet with the next occupant of the Oval Office.

When that inevitable meeting occurs, says David Satter, Obama must avoid showing weakness at all costs. Agreeing to delay or even to cancel the Eastern European missile defense system would be interpreted by the Russians as a sign that “pressure on the U.S. works, even when it is a matter of American defense interests.” The Kremlin would make “new and more outrageous demands in the future."

In other words, Medvedev’s address may well be recorded by historians as Obama’s first crisis, the one his running mate warned Americans would come. How a President Obama responds when the time comes will determine whether more will follow.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008 should be remembered as a day when federal judicial arrogance descended to a new low.

Apparently, before being appointed to the federal bench by President Clinton, United States District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina (District of Columbia) learned somewhere along his career path—student at Georgetown University and its Law School, practitioner at the DC Public Defender’s Office, teacher at Howard University School of Law, judge at the DC Superior Court—that Articles I (legislative) and II (executive) of the United States Constitution must succumb to the arrogance of unelected, life-tenured Article III federal judges.

That’s because on October 7^th, Judge Urbina decided that the government’s power to hold seventeen Guantanamo detainees had “ceased,” that they were to be transferred to the District of Columbia within four days, that once there they were to be freed, that they were to be relocated in the greater DC area, and that the government better not use immigration laws to harass the illegally-here aliens.

Residents of the District of Columbia were not happy. The Wall Street Journal opined about The Terrorists Next Door. The White House was “deeply concerned by, and strongly disagree[d] with” Urbina’s ruling. Conservatives were outraged, especially at Urbina’s threat to the government that “I do not expect these Uighurs will be molested [!] by any member of the United States government,” arrogantly adding that “I’m a federal judge, and I’ve issued an order.”

Urbina believed he had the power to issue that order because of the Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 decision in the Boumediene v. Bush case, which held that alien unlawful enemy combatants have a constitutional right to use habeas corpus in American federal courts to challenge their detention.

In dissenting from, and lamenting, the majority opinion in Boumediene Chief Justice Roberts asked rhetorically, “So who has won?” His answer anticipated, in part, what Urbina did last week. Roberts wrote:

Not the detainees. The Court’s analysis leaves them with only the prospect of further litigation to determine the content of their new habeas right, followed by further litigation to resolve their particular cases, followed by further litigation before the [United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit] . . . . Not Congress, whose attempt to “determine— through democratic means—how best” to balance the security of the American people with the detainees’ liberty interests . . . has been unceremoniously brushed aside. Not the Great Writ [of habeas corpus], whose majesty is hardly enhanced by its extension to a jurisdictionally quirky outpost, with no tangible benefit to anyone. Not the rule of law, unless by that is meant the rule of lawyers, who will now arguably have a greater role than military and intelligence officials in shaping policy for alien enemy combatants. And certainly not the American people, who today lose a bit more control over the conduct of this Nation’s foreign policy to unelected, politically unaccountable judges. (My emphasis.)

Roberts’s prophesy about the likes of District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina raised yet another question: If the detainees didn’t win, if Congress didn’t win, if the principle of habeas corpus didn’t win, if the rule of law didn’t win, if the American people didn’t win—and, one can add, if the Commander-in-Chief didn’t win—who did?

Earlier in his dissent Chief Justice Roberts suggested the answer, writing that the Boumediene decision is “not really about the detainees at all, but about control of federal policy regarding enemy combatants,” and that “[a]ll that today’s opinion has done is shift responsibility for those sensitive foreign policy and national security decisions from the elected branches to the Federal Judiciary.”

Or, as Chief Justice Roberts put it: “unelected, politically unaccountable judges.” The Judge Urbinas of the federal bench!

Those of us who for years have had a bellyful of such judges and the damage they have done to our social, cultural, economic, political and military institutions today rightly fear that legions of Urbinas are waiting in the wings for appointment to federal courts following an election victory by Senate Democrats and Barack Obama.

Obama adheres to the doctrine of a “Living Constitution.” Those who subscribe to Living Constitution ideology believe that the founding principles of this Nation are passé, that the Declaration of Independence’s ringing endorsement of individual rights and limited government is outdated, that the Constitution’s creation of a representative republic is from a long past moment in history, and that the Bill of Rights is not a restraint on government but rather a source of newly invented “rights.”

If the federal judiciary, let alone the Supreme Court, falls into Obama’s hands (especially with a compliant Senate, let alone a filibuster-proof one), our Nation will surely be crippled, perhaps fatally, in its domestic battle against socialism and our foreign war against Islamofascism.

This is not a charge that I make lightly, but rather one rooted in the words of candidate Obama himself.

On July 17, 2007, Obama made a speech in Washington, D.C. to the country’s leading abortion-meister, “Planned Parenthood.” In the words of NBC reporter Carrie Dean Obama not only “leveled harsh words at conservative Supreme Court justices,” but “he offered his own intention to appoint justices with ‘empathy’.”

“Empathy,” according to Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, is “the projection of one’s own personality into the personality of another in order to understand him better; ability to share in another’s emotions or feelings.”

Thus, we have been unmistakably warned that president-hopeful Barack Obama will appoint Supreme Court justices who will not honestly interpret the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Fourteenth Amendment—let alone on the basis of what they say and meant to those who wrote them—but who, instead, will project their own personalities into others to understand them better; justices who can share in those others’ emotions or feelings.

And who might Obama’s empathy-receivers be?

Obama himself told us in that same 2007 Planned Parenthood speech: “We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.” (My emphasis.)

It couldn’t be clearer what this candidate for the presidency of the United States admittedly has in store for the federal judiciary and thus for our Nation.

So much for the classical liberal philosophy that was at the founding’s core and in its fundamental documents. From now on, constitutional interpretation Obama-style is to be through the eyes of whom he sees as society’s alleged victims.

Obama’s confession drops the notion of a Living Constitutionalism into yet a lower rung of hell. His confession reveals that while in the past the Living Constitution’s acolytes sought to achieve the amorphous goals of “social justice, brotherhood, and human dignity,” a President Obama will feed the beast with what’s left of individual rights and limited government, all in the name of “empathy”—a code word for something much darker: sacrifice of true constitutionalism to the needs of society’s perceived victims.

This perversion of America’s essence—individual rights and limited government—is collectivism/statism squared. While our Nation has so far been able to survive Living Constitutionalism—though with the recent Guantanamo decisions, especially Boumediene v. Bush, who knows?—we may not be able to survive Obama-appointed federal judges in the mode of Richardo M. Urbina.

Why Jews Against Obama?

The Jewish Task Force (JTF.org) is an organization of right wing Jews and righteous gentiles who follow the teachings of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. Thus we are opposed to Israel surrendering land for “peace.” We are also opposed to Islamic terrorism, which we believe is an integral part of Islam.

Unfortunately America has refused to win every single war she has fought after World War II. Our leaders have been more concerned about world opinion, sparing “innocent civilians” and “winning hearts and minds.” Israel has done the equivalent in her recent battle with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

This refusal to win wars is all due to the pernicious influence of the Left, which has gained a major foothold in the Democrat party in the U.S., as well as the European Union and Israel. Therefore, JTF is also opposed to domestic fifth columnists who attempt to undermine America’s and Israel’s will to defend themselves and to properly fight their wars. Barack Hussein Obama is an example of a fifth columnist. We have started Jews Against Obama to expose him as being just that.

• Obama’s father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., was a Muslim from Nyangoma-Kogel, Kenya and his step father was a Muslim from Indonesia.
• Obama’s childhood mentor was a communist.
• Obama attended Muslim Basuki School and a Catholic school in Indonesia and his religion was registered as Muslim in both schools. Despite this overwhelming evidence, Obama insists he was never a Muslim.
• Obama has promised that in his first year of office, he will invite Iranian terrorist dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the White House in order improve relations and relax trade restrictions with Iran. This would certainly lead to the sale of advanced American technology, which would enable Iran to develop nuclear bombs much more quickly.
• Obama is a supporter of Kenyan Muslim Raila Odinga, who recently lost in that country’s election, and who wants to institute Islamic Sharia law as the law of that land. Raila claims to be Obama’s first cousin.
• Obama wants Muslim terrorists in Guantanamo to have access to the American legal system. Note that these Guantanamo attorneys [who represent these terrorists pro bono] are supporting Obama.
• Obama’s foreign policy advisors from the Carter Administration are notoriously anti-Israel and antisemitic.
• A non-profit organization with Obama on its board gave money to the terrorist-supporting Arab American Action Network, which favors Israel's destruction and is completely against America enforcing any of her immigration laws.
• Obama helped raise money for Muslim terrorist refugee camps in the Middle East.
• Obama has been endorsed by communist Daniel Ortega (former head of the Weather Underground organization), communist Tom Hayden, Jesse Jackson, and Muslim racist and antisemite Louis Farrakhan.
• Obama’s National Campaign Cochairman is congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., a notorious racist and antisemite.
• Obama’s Pastor, who Obama claims is his mentor, traveled with Muslim racist and antisemite Louis Farrakhan to Libya in 1984 to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

These are only a few of many, many issues. Please join us in our fight against Barack Hussein Obama and help save America and Israel.

A middle school teacher has been suspended for posting a video of his Barack Obama-slogan chanting, arm-waving drill team on YouTube.

The report from Fox News said the teacher, whose name was being withheld by the school district, was suspended today for the video revealing his students chanting lines from Obama talking points and wearing military-style uniforms.

According to Fox News, the school learned about the posting of the video, called "Obama Youth – Junior Fraternity Regiment," and immediately took action.

The video is embedded here:

VIDEO:

It shows 10 black male students in 8th or 9th grades from the Urban Community Leadership Academy in Kansas City, a public charter school organized by the University of Central Missouri. They march in the room chanting, "Alpha, omega, alpha, omega."

Although the immediate source of the phrase "alpha omega" likely traces to the black fraternity step team tradition, the deeper source derives from the book of Revelation, which refers to God as the "Alpha and Omega," the first and last letters of the classical alphabet.

That chant soon yields to, "Yes we can."

School superintendent Joyce McGautha was not pleased. She did not approve and does not condone the video. Not only was the teacher suspended, further drill activities were halted.

(Story continues below)

"Taxpayers have every reason to be upset," she said.

The superintendent said because of the "legal action that we'll probably have to take against the teacher," his identity would be withheld at this point.

The Fox News report said the students studied Obama's economic plan with the teacher, and the superintendent did not know whether the teacher or the students scripted the routine. The group should have also studied Republican John McCain's economic plan, the superintendent said.

The superintendent said many of the school's activities are recorded, and the teacher had been warned in a letter not to put it on the Internet.

Anonymous forum participants on the Fox News site were disdainful of the Democrats.

"The Democratic Party has become taken over by distorted closet socialists," said one.

"Why does this not surprise me in the least, coming from an Obama supporter?" said another. "He deserves to be fired and NEVER allowed to teach again!"

WND reported just last week when nearby Missouri law officials, including public prosecutors, who were reportedly planning to "respond immediately" to any misleading advertisements against Obama if they "might violate Missouri ethics laws," said they were backing off the intimidating implications of that report, promising they have no intention of prosecuting anyone.

As WND reported, prosecuting attorneys Bob McCulloch and Jennifer Joyce originally announced on KMOV-TV in St. Louis their participation in Obama's "Truth Squad," pledging to defend the candidate from untruthful ads with an undefined "immediate" response.

"Whether it is directly attributable to the (McCain) campaign or to one of the soft money operations," McCulloch told the station, "if they're not going to tell the truth, somebody's got to step up and say, 'That's not the truth. This is the truth.'"

The move prompted Missouri's governor to object that the prosecutors were using "police state tactics" to squelch information hurtful to the Obama campaign.

"What Senator Obama and his helpers are doing is scandalous beyond words," wrote Gov. Matt Blunt in a statement. "The party that claims to be the party of Thomas Jefferson is abusing the justice system and offices of public trust to silence political criticism with threats of prosecution and criminal punishment."