The Senate moves ahead to do what the administration has failed to do: come up with a viable game plan for pressuring Iran to give up its nuclear weapons program.
Cliff May is puzzled: why is Obama so much more solicitous of our enemies than our friends? “President Obama was quick to denounce Zelaya’s ouster and — echoing Chávez, Castro, and Ortega — demand that he be reinstated. Senior White House officials threatened sanctions if Honduras’s legislature, courts, and military refuse to do as told. More than $18 million in military and development assistance already has been suspended. Contrast that with the White House response to the massive election fraud that recently took place in Iran: President Obama said he did not want to be seen as ‘meddling.'” The Poles and the Czechs are wary the same will hold true of Obama’s Russia policy. And all that’s before we even get to Israel.
Meanwhile, in another “what is wrong with this picture” story, Claudia Rosett reports on our State Department’s efforts to welcome 1,300 Palestinians, former guests of Saddam, into the U.S. with only the most perfunctory concern for Americans’ security. The Arab states want nothing to do with these people, of course.
Our esteemed Speaker of the House: “Insurance companies are out there in full force carpet bombing, shock and awe, against a public option.” Actually, I think it’s 50 or so members of her own caucus and every Republican who oppose it.
Meanwhile, 50 House liberals won’t accept the Blue Dog deal.
Kimberley Strassel on the deposed chairman John Dingell’s right to feel a bit of “health-care schadenfreude” given the hash his successor Henry Waxman has made of things. “The Waxman-Pelosi strategy has also reverberated beyond the House. The hammering that House Democrats received on cap-and-trade has only further discouraged senators from tackling that legislation. Mr. Obama has felt compelled to say nice things about this early House product, tying the White House to reckless legislation, and further raising the left’s hopes. Mr. Waxman and Mrs. Pelosi head into recess with one comatose climate bill and one wounded health-care project. Now comes the long hot summer month where the nation gets to think about this some more. If the speaker wants to make use of her vacation, she could always get on the phone to Michigan. Mr. Dingell might have some advice.”
Sen. Max Baucus professes to be undecided on Sotomayor. Hmm. Perhaps the NRA scoring and her evasions on the Second Amendment really have him in a quandary. Or maybe he is just stalling.
The unspinnable Mickey Kaus listens to Obama recapping his White House discussions on health care and thinks: “Sounds like a man in a bubble to me, listening to McKinsey guys tell him how right he is.”
