Quips, Quotes & Tweets – 1/31/11

YES!! Florida judge voids whole ObamaCare mandate > Next Step > Supreme Court?

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Egypt and the Failure of the Obama Doctrine
  …The Obama Administration has been slow to embrace calls for liberty in Egypt is completely consistent with the Obama Doctrine as applied in the Middle East. When the Iranian people rose against the regime in Tehran in the wake of a disputed national election, Obama offered virtually no support for the cries for freedom. He was too committed to his engagement strategy with the Iranian regime, believing his “charm offensive” would be enough to deter them from pursuing nuclear weapons. Those efforts have completely failed. Nevertheless, the “playing nice initiative” with Tehran fell flat. Today, the regime is more aggressive than ever—backing a terrorist takeover of the government in Lebanon, snubbing Western nuclear negotiators, and promoting an Islamist agenda across the region.
  As Elliott Abrams, who coordinated the Bush Administration’s Middle East policy at the National Security Council, wrote in The Washington Post: “This has been the greatest failure of policy and imagination in the administration’s approach: Looking at the world map, it sees states and their rulers, but has forgotten the millions of people suffering under and beginning to rebel against those rulers. “Engagement” has not been the problem, but rather the administration’s insistence on engaging with regimes rather than with the people trying to survive under them.” Read it all…

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In tough 2012 Republican Senate primary, Adam Hasner may be [the]one to watch:
  …Hasner is a fierce partisan who has stood out in recent years for being among the earliest prominent Republican critics of Crist, for fighting a federal effort to help make unionizing easier, for vocally attacking a Muslim civil rights group (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) for alleged terrorist ties and for promoting electric cars in Florida.
  Nobody calls Hasner a leading contender at this point, but some Democratic strategists perceive him as a serious general election threat: an extreme right-winger who comes off as perfectly reasonable. Read it all…  [ Is this our next Tea Party movement guy? Probably! – JS ]

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The Case For Mercenaries in Somalia:
…In 1995, by contrast, the government of Sierra Leone hired Executive Outcomes to put down a savage rebellion by the brutal Revolutionary United Front. Within a year, the company had quelled the uprising and driven the rebels out. "Many in Sierra Leone, especially ordinary people, regarded these soldiers of fortune as national heroes," Newsweek observed.
  It may not be politically correct to suggest letting mercenaries deal with nightmares like Somalia and Darfur. But political correctness doesn't save lives. Sending in mercenaries would.
Read it all… [ I’ll bet it’s a lot cheaper and efficient than maintaining a national army. – JS ]

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"We should so work as if we were to be saved by our works; and so rely on Jesus Christ, as if we did no works." ~ Francis Asbury

"The urge to pass new laws must be seen as an illness, not much different from the urge to bite old women. Anyone suspected of suffering from it should either be treated with the appropriate pills or, if it is too late for that, elected to parliament [or Congress, as the case may be] and paid a huge salary with endless holidays, to do nothing whatever." Auberon Waugh

“It is not what we do that matters, but what a sovereign God chooses to do through us.  God doesn’t want our success; he wants us.  He doesn’t demand our achievements; he demands our obedience.  The Kingdom of God is a kingdom of paradox, where through the ugly defeat of a cross a holy God is utterly glorified.  Victory comes through defeat; healing through brokenness; finding self through losing self.” ~ Charles W. Colson