Tom Cotton, born and raised in rural Arkansas, is also a Harvard graduate (college and law school), an experienced lawyer and management consultant, and a U.S. Army veteran with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s a conservative with a grounding in political philosophy and a sense of humor. He’s running for the newly-open seat in Arkansas’s newly-redrawn fourth congressional district, which has a Cook rating of R+8.

In short: Tom Cotton is one of the best candidates running for Congress this election cycle–and possibly ever.

If he wins the Republican primary on May 22, 2012, he will likely go on to win the seat–and he will likely serve for a very long time. Given the fact that Cotton is only in his mid-30s, and with his impressive record, he is likely to be a force in Republican politics for many decades, shaping the future of the party and the country. (more…)

A recap of the Republican debate on national security and foreign policy, as seen through its best and worst moments.

Worst gaffe of the night: CNN, which mis-identified former Democratic presidential candidate Gen. Wesley Clark as a Republican in its pre-debate analysis.

Best comeback: Newt Gingrich to Ron Paul, on the need for the Patriot Act: “Timothy McVeigh succeeded. That’s the whole point.”

Worst neo-colonialism: Mitt Romney, channeling his inner Kipling by suggesting that we have to bring Afghanistan and Pakistan into “modernity.”

Best follow-up answer: (Tie) Michele Bachmann on the Patriot Act, who focused on Barack Obama’s eagerness to grant rights to terrorists, rather than taking the bait to attack fellow Republicans (that time, anyway); and Ron Paul, who highlighted problems with immigration and the war on drugs in answering a question about border security.

Worst attempted dodge: Rick Santorum, allowing Wolf Blitzer to back him into saying that Muslims should be profiled at airports.

Best nickname: Herman Cain wins for calling Wolf Blitzer, “Blitz.” Somehow, I think that’s going to stick.

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Tonight, eight Republican presidential candidates will take the stage at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., to share their foreign policy and national security views with the American people. The debate, hosted by The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, will be broadcast on CNN at 8PM ET.

The debate will focus on a number of crucial national security and foreign policy questions that will undoubtedly reach the President’s desk in the coming years. Ensuring our country’s defense is a fundamental responsibility of the federal government, as set forth in the Constitution. And it is up to the President to take the lead in crafting American foreign policy while also serving as commander in chief of the armed forces.

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Four years ago, Mitt Romney was the last, best hope of the conservative movement as a surging John McCain looked set to clinch the Republican nomination. Romney’s concession speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) (parts a, b, and c) cemented his bond with the delegates, who understood their ideals were about to yield to the compromise politics of the moderate–and ostensibly more electable–McCain.

Today, Romney is considered the compromise candidate, regarded with suspicion by the conservative base as the emissary of the Republican establishment. That is not, as the left (and David Frum) alleges, because the party has become more “extreme.” Rather, it is because Barack Obama’s far-left agenda has produced a strong desire for new leadership that will aggressively oppose the dramatic growth in the size and cost of government.

The Obama agenda was a challenge the Republican Party seemed unprepared, unable, and–at times–unwilling to resist in early 2009. That is why the Tea Party emerged–first in response to the Obama “porkulus,” then ObamaCare. It could not reverse those policies right away, but after the 2010 elections it ensured Republicans would refuse to raise taxes to close the deficit, or to approve bailouts of profligate state governments.

For the Tea Party, the next goal is to repeal ObamaCare and to pass entitlement and spending reforms that ensure the financial stability of the U.S. government, without raising taxes that will constrain economic growth. In so doing, Tea Party conservatives hope to do more than restrain the expansion of government, but to also restore the robust vision of individual freedom that enabled America’s rise as a global industrial power.

That is a different mission than the one many Republicans shared in 2008, when the unifying goal was to protect the military gains of the war on terror from the radical anti-war agenda that had seized the resurgent Democrats. McCain was a better fit for that agenda, and Romney is a weak standard-bearer for the new one, having supported big government interventions–albeit at the state level–in both health care and energy.

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A number of people have contacted me voicing their concern that my coming out against Mitt Romney by signing onto the Not Mitt Romney pledge isn’t helpful. Their argument is that we must ensure that Obama is not re-elected. I agree. America is at a serious crossroads.

If Mitt Romney nabs the nomination as Republican candidate for President of the United States, I will support him with every breath of my body. That said, Obama Lite is not the answer. Obama Lite will not defeat Obama. In the lead-up to the primaries, we should fight for a candidate with the most principled values. Political will and courage is what we are in dire need of.

John Bolton was my candidate. He didn’t run.

Rudolph Giuliani was next in line for me. He didn’t run.

Sarah Palin had my vote. She didn’t run.

Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, and Michele Bachmann are next.

Rick Perry? Please. I questioned his very bad judgment when I exposed his entire Islamic curriculum, dawah and proselytizing, to Texas school children. To this day he has never come clean about that. And the fact that he was Al Gore’s manager does not bode well.

Perry is a snake. Watch him. He is creepy. And his freak show speech in New Hampshire recently belonged in a Roger Corman film. (more…)

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, we’re joined by D.B. Grady, a correspondent for The Atlantic, author, paratrooper, and veteran of Afghanistan, to discuss the regional fallout from the death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

D.B. Grady’s Website
The Atlantic: Veteran’s Day
DC Examiner: Pakistan’s Role as Bin Laden’s Protector
RCW: Pakistan’s Osama Problem
RCW: In Osama’s Death, a Vindication of Obama’s Choices
RCW: Should Obama Have Captured Bin Laden?
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Well, you have to hand it to Obama, he is consistent in his extreme anti-Americanism. America is firing missiles into Libya just as the Telegraph reported that “statements of support for Libya’s revolution by al-Qaeda and leading Islamists have led to fears that military action by the West might be playing into the hands of its ideological enemies.”

Throughout Obama’s presidency and all of the Islamic revolutions sweeping the Middle East and Africa, he has sided with the Islamic supremacists at every turn. Taking his marching orders from the vile America-hater and Jew-hater, the devout Muslim Sheik Qaradawi, Obama is now paving the way for an Islamic state in Libya. Not that Libya has been good under Gaddafi — hardly. But there are degrees of evil. The situation can always be worse, and little matches the anti-human brutality of Islamic regimes in the twenty-first century.

It’s ironic that Obama has turned against Gaddafi, since Gaddafi has regarded him warmly, saying in April 2010: “Barakeh Obama is friend…He is of Muslim descent, his policy should be supported.” As meticulously documented in my book, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America, the ties between Gaddafi and Obama are close and extensive. Back in July 2008, Gaddafi endorsed Obama, going so far as to say: “All the people in the Arab and Islamic world and in Africa applauded this man. They welcomed him and prayed for him and for his success, and they may have even been involved in legitimate contribution campaigns to enable him to win the American presidency.”

And Obama’s spirtual svengali and former Nation of Islam adherent Jeremiah Wright went to Libya with Jew-hater Louis Farrakhan to see Gaddafi, as he recalled during the 2008 campaign: “When [Obama’s] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli to visit [Gaddafi] with Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.”

It didn’t, but it should have.

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All presidents take their share of lumps and tough breaks from the unpredictable nature of things in the world. Criticism, fair or not, is as much apart of the office of the presidency as Air Force One. President Obama is no different and has received his share. Considering healthcare and the hyper-partisan and corrupt way the debate was handled, his Department of Justice and its race baiting chief, Eric Holder, the economy and the associated stimulus, the several gaffes and political miscalculations; furthermore, holding the presidency during a time in which Americans view the country as divided and politics more partisan than ever before, President Obama has remained relatively popular. However, his total detachment or disinterest, or both, in what has gone on in Libya, and Egypt before that, and Iran even before that, is starting to make Obama look indecisive and unwilling to make tough executive decisions.

Certainly one could argue that President Obama is on the same side as the majority of Americans in not calling for a No-Fly Zone in Libya. I am in that camp myself. Not because I am anti-military action or American strength abroad, I am anti-dealing with and assisting the schizophrenic Middle East. President Obama’s predicament though is something different. He called for the Gadaffi to step down and, then later, ramped up the rhetoric and said he must go. To quote the President during his campaign, “Don’t tell me that words don’t matter.” They do matter and as President of the United States they matter a great deal. When a president fells to follow-up and act according to those words, he looks weak, unsure, and ineffective. If the president wanted to stay out of the fray and let Europe handle the matter, since Libya is in their backyard, fair enough than; but he should have stated his case exactly like that and carried on like a president.

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During President Obama’s first two years in office, we have seen him do nothing but fumble on the world stage.  He often seems to sit back and watch major changes occur – making no effort to be a part of the solution or reassert America’s position in the state of world affairs.

Bruce Thornton, a professor of classics and humanities, joins us to discuss his book, “The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama’s America.”

His ultimate advice for the President?  Listen to what Islamists say, and believe they meant it.  We cannot bribe them–with education, money or democracy–because they will never trade spiritual things for physical things.  Ultimately, he argues that there will be no resolution outside of force.

Thornton also discusses the downfall of the democratic city-states of Ancient Greece, who, because of the “destructive pursuit of short term self-interest,” were unable to unify against a common threat.  Thornton argues that for a democracy to survive it must maintain civic virtue – character that is worthy of freedom.

The topic of appeasement draws some disturbing parallels between Chamberlain and Hitler and many of our modern politicians.  Pacifism and internationalism weren’t just popular movements in the 1930s and 1940s.  Remember, internationalism is defined as the idea that it is possible to create harmony of interest and solve all problems through diplomacy.   Sound familiar?

Watch the full episode here:

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The Egyptian government may have blocked Egyptians’ access to the Internet, but it couldn’t block the Internet itself. Thanks to the likes of John Scott-Railton, voices of countless Egyptian protesters continue to wend through the web.

Once the government imposed muzzling began, the 27-year-old UCLA graduate student reached out to friends in Egypt by telephone, gathered updates, and posted them to his Twitter account @Jan25voices, named after the day the protests began.

Nearly 700 tweets later, Scott-Railton (who up until last week was a Twitter newbie) soon found himself in the midst of the Middle East revolt. In one week he has attracted 6,700 followers and counting and his audio clips of Egyptian voices have been played more than 3.5 million times.

Reason.tv caught up with Scott-Railton at his UCLA office.
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Today we’re giving you a special advance preview of Monday’s Coffee and Markets with an interview with Elliott Abrams, a former senior national security adviser to George W. Bush and assistant secretary of state for Ronald Reagan and a leading expert on politics and the Middle East. We’ll ask him about what the future holds for Egypt, whether President Obama has had the right response to the crisis, and whether other nations will soon follow.

We’re brought to you as always by Stephen Clouse and Associates. You can find our iTunes feed at CoffeeandMarkets.com. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Abrams: Bush Was Right About Freedom in the Arab World
Abrams: Lessons of January
Hamid: Obama Got Egypt Wrong
Muravchik: Three Scenarios in Egypt
RS: Egypt Approaches the Abyss
Abrams: Pressure Points Blog

Even as President Obama maintains close to 50,000 troops in Iraq and continues to escalate and expandthe war in Afghanistan, the antiwar movement in America continues to shrink (PDF).

So, what happened?

Reason.tv visited two antiwar protests—one left-leaning, one libertarian—in an attempt to answer that question. Author and historian Thaddeus Russell and Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty also weigh in.

War, it seems, is a bipartisan venture, which is reflected by the fact that Democrats have a favorable view of Obama’s foreign policy, despite its remarkable similarity to George W. Bush’s foreign policy. And though there have been rumblings of antiwar sentiment from some on the Right, Republicans remain strongly in favor of an interventionist foreign policy.

Although public sentiment is turning against the war in Afghanistan, the always-shifting withdrawal deadlines and the unwillingness to touch defense spending mean that this bipartisan war is likely to continue far into the future.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Joshua Stanton of One Free Korea to discuss the latest developments as tensions remain high in the dispute between South and North Korea.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

TNL: Overthrowing Kim: A Capitalist Manifesto (Part 1)
WikiLeaks: China weary of North Korea behaving like ’spoiled child’
S. Korea’s Fine Line: Talk Tough, Keep Finger Off Trigger
North Korea provokes neighbours with ‘new’ nuclear facility announcement
One Free Korea

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President Barack Obama’s now concluding trip to India seems to have turned out to be a failed or at the very least unhelpful effort. His false starts, unhelpful comments and bad policy moves mark this visit as a bit of a mess.

Obama made multiple gaffes not only for India but for his own party back home not to mention his nation. As his political party was delivered a severe blow and his agenda was cut off at the knees on election day he was seen dancing happily all across the continent with a lavish visit paid for at the taxpayer’s expense even as those same taxpayers were enraged at wild government spending sprees. As the Indians worried over Obama’s foreign policy he refused to call the those that attacked them in Mumbai terrorists and finally on his exit from the country he delivered yet another one of his digs at his own country saying that America is a nation in decline.

Things began going wrong for The One even as he first arrived in one of the most vibrant nations on earth. For one thing he arrived a lesser president than when he originally set up the trip. His party was delivered a stunning and historic blow as the GOP picked up over 60 seats in the federal seat of power and hundreds more in the state legislatures in the Nov. 2 election, a feat that hasn’t been repeated since WWII. So Obama arrived with his mandate splintered and his power diminished. He is a president with less power to help his Indian hosts do anything.

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President Obama seems to think that every global policy problem is a result of misunderstanding, miscommunication, or mixed signals perpetuated through the Bush presidency.  If we could just get the world to like the United States, Obama argues, these problems will solve themselves.  Multiple unenforced ultimatums for Iran and Obama’s inflated faith in personal diplomacy fail to instill much confidence for the future.

Uncommon Knowledge all-star, Victor Davis Hanson, is back in our latest episode to take a tour of the world with Peter Robinson, discussing current major foreign policy concerns.  The topics discussed range from Europe and the irrelevancy of the EU to Mexico and immigration to Asia and its nuclear future.

Regarding Mexico, VDH sees little hope for the future.  Mexico’s statist, nontransparent economy and class-bound, racist culture naturally breeds unrest.  As for the immigration debate, VDH provides his proposed solution (involving both assimilation and deportation), but recognizes that it is unlikely to come about.  Who’s at fault?  The Chicano elite here in the US.

When it comes to Iran there are no good choices, only bad and worse.  Iran will have the bomb within 18 months.  What can/should we do about it?

To hear more on a dying Europe, a nuclear Asia, the Chicano elite and immigration, our future with Russia and dealing with Iran, watch the full episode, embedded below.

Follow us on Twitter.  Find us on Facebook.

Our latest guest is Ambassador Charles Hill, former advisor to Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz.  Mr. Hill claims that US Presidents over the past two decades have been completely inept in foreign policy.  Bush 41 and Clinton tried to get international issues off their back in order to regain control of the news cycle and stake their claim as domestic policy presidents.  As a result, we lost our focus and understanding of our position in the world, completely missing the rise of Islam and now, failing to strategically face it.

Islamists are just like Communists, Hill argues, hoping to spread their way of thinking to the world, overtake the present world order, and set in place their values and structures.

Many will agree with Hill’s accusation that President Obama has no appreciation for American exceptionalism, meaning Mr. Obama must not actually understand America.  Everything about the history of the United States, its promotion of individual freedoms and democracy, is exceptional.

Hence Hill suggests a reading list for the President.  He insists the President read Virgil’s Aeneid, saying “Obama is like Aeneas – things happen to him, he doesn’t make things happen.”

Watch the full video below.

Follow @UncKnowledge on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

Alexander Litvinenko was a hero in the mold of Mosab Hassan Yossef, the so-called “Son of Hamas,” who the US is sickeningly threatening to deport.  In fact, their fates may be quite similar if this is to happen, as in 2006 Litvinenko as you may recall was poisoned with Polonium-210, an extremely rare radioactive substance, and essential ingredient to early nuclear bombs.

Why was he poisoned?  Litvinenko, a former KGB/FSB agent who left the service and defected to London was a staunch critic of the Putin regime, and apparently knew too much for the Kremlin to bare.  For Litvinenko implicated the Russian government in a variety of terrorist attacks, abroad for example through their training of Al-Qaeda #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri in 1998, and disgustingly at home through an attempted bombing of an apartment complex in 1999, and the infamous 2002 Moscow theater and 2004 Beslan school attacks.

I recently read his book Allegations, which in light of recent events is proving quite prescient.

One argument he makes that should resonate with all of us regards political resistance to the criminal Russian government:

There is no need to break any law, even most cruel one, in order to remain humans and citizens.  All we need to do is to take a civic stance, to demand that the authorities strictly obey the constitution.  Putin and his propaganda team know this, so they try to divide us, to set us against each other.  In doing so, the Kremlin strategists appeal to the lowest instincts, using every ethnic, religious or property differences we may have.  That is exactly why we must understand that our common enemy now is Putin’s regime (Allegations, 100).

Is this not precisely what we are witnessing today?  Our citizens are peacefully demanding a return to the Constitution, while our Progressive Putins try to spark racial and class warfare to divide and conquer us.

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Post updated with author’s note.

Author’s Note: This article includes three images that clearly denigrate Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. So there is absolutely no question about the provenance of these images, I would like to direct all readers to Wikipedia’s authoritative write-up on the matter. These images were included in a dossier that aggrieved imams living in Denmark took with them to the Middle East specifically to stoke outrage at a dozen cartoons published in September 2005 in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The images include an amateurish doodle identifying Mohammed as a pedophile, a dog humping a prostrate praying Muslim (with the caption, “This is why Muslim pray five times a day”), and a photocopy of a French comedian in a pig-squealing contest (with the phony caption, “Here is the real image of Mohammed”). It is nothing less than amazing that holy men decrying the desecration of their religion would create such foul images, but there you have it. It is as if the pope created “Piss Christ” and then passed it off as the work of critics of Catholicism. The images below may indeed give offense, not just to Muslims but also to people of all faiths and even atheists. If they do, remember who created and distributed

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The deadline for submitting work to Reason’s Everybody Draw Mohammed contest has passed; winners will be announced at Reason.com on Thursday, May 20.

All that remains is anticipation, both of the artwork that will be displayed and the possible threats of violence that will likely follow. Or should that be “the likely threats of possible violence”?

Before the calendar page turns to Thursday, it’s worth meditating on the whys and wherefores of the contest, which was inspired by a jihadist death threat against the creators of South Park and was originally suggested by Seattle artist Molly Norris. Soon after asking everyone to draw the Prophet in solidarity with the arguably millions of people repressed by threats of theologically justified violence, Norris herself went into ideological hiding, suggesting instead that everyone draw another target of South Park satire: former Vice President Al Gore.

While Gore, who likes to credit himself with understanding the architectonics of cyberspace (if not creating them) and who way back when convened Congressional hearings to discuss the dread menace of satanic heavy metal lyrics (via con diablo, Ronnie James Dio!), is certainly worthy of the sort of ongoing abuse that only a fully distributed Internets can deliver, the obvious reason that Norris changed her target is real and potential violence.

Who can blame her? People have been killed for representing Mohammed in ways that displeased Islamic terrorists. People have been punched and kicked and forced into hiding. No wonder, then, that Norris, like Galileo in front of a Catholic tribunal, apologized to ”everyone of the Muslim faith who has or will be offended” by her drawing (visible at the right). This conditionally unconditional language is the language of the forced penitent, of the prisoner in a totalitarian world, of the sad sack on the Catherine Wheel who will say anything, will confess anything to get off the rack. We all understand exactly why such language is being used: The threat of violence.

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Why is it that President Obama can travel to Cairo to promote the wearing of the hijab, but when presented with an opportunity to make a relevant statement on women’s rights issues in the Middle East, he and his Administration are silent?  It has been more than two weeks since Iran was handed a seat on the UN Commission on the Status of Women and still, not one word of condemnation from President Obama, Secretary Clinton, or UN Ambassador Rice.  Granted, we have become conditioned to expect world-sanctioned hypocrisy over at the United Nations, but this new appointment comes at a time which is especially dangerous to the women who actually live in Iran.

The women’s rights movement in the Islamic Republic has been building momentum for decades and in recent years has served as inspiration for human rights activists around the world.

Last summer in particular, women took to the streets of Iran in record numbers to peacefully protest what is widely considered to be a fraudulent Presidential election.  Activists in Iran have capitalized on this momentum and they continue to protest peacefully — now in an attempt to reform their government’s violent and oppressive laws against women.

This revitalized civil rights movement comes at a time when Iran is attempting to position itself as the leader of the Islamic world.  Emboldened women who seek to shift the Republic away from its stringent adherence to Islamic Shariah law pose a huge threat to the existing power structure of the ruling government and an even greater threat to Iran’s credibility in the entire region.  It is not the vague prospect of possible UN sanctions which is worrisome to the Iranian government, it is the empowerment of its own citizens — especially the ones in headscarves.

The result is a governmental crackdown on activists along with stricter, harsher laws and propaganda aimed against all women. It is no coincidence that we are witnessing more odd/troubling news coming from Iran — a cleric blames women for earthquakes and then days later a fatwa is issued against women with suntans.  News like this makes for catchy sound bites and headlines, but mainstream sources often overlook the harsher reality — women in the Islamic Republic lack even the most basic rights to personal freedom.  They have no right to choose their own husbands, have no right to divorce, cannot travel without the permission of their husbands, and are even barred from singing and dancing in public.  Activists in Iran face unimaginable odds, yet they are still rising up in peaceful protest — by doing so, they face the possibility of arrest, detention, torture, rape, and even death. (more…)

You think Obama has been a nightmare? You ain’t seen nothing yet. That was just the preview.

American business, the motor of the global economy, was dealt a deathblow by the Marxist putsch that the Democrat Party delivered in the form of the healthcare bill. Why wasn’t this made public before the vote? The numbers are staggering. It was revealed Friday that AT&T, the largest telephone company in the country, will take a one-billion-dollar hit in the current quarter as a result of this economic attack on America. The farm-equipment company Deere is looking at $150 million in new healthcare-related charges this quarter, and Caterpillar is facing  $100 million.

Who do you think will pay for this? We will pay. According to Reuters, “Verizon Communications, the second biggest U.S. phone company, told employees that tax burdens under the new law would likely filter down to employees.” Business is not something in the abstract, or the evil force the leftists and the communists deceptively smear it to be — business is work, business is people, it is jobs, it is production. When business pays, we pay. Jobs pay. Consumers pay.

And we will pay for more than that as well. Have you seen the commercials yet for people who have maxed out their credit cards, and have loans over ten thousand that they can’t pay back, urging them to apply for stimulus dollars? Are you one of those who played by the rules, worked hard, did the right thing? If so, you’re screwed. The man has you and your wallet and your kids’ wallet by the throat. Welcome to the era of the degenerate: they will be sucking your blood and your children’s blood and your children’s children’s blood for decades to come, or however long America lasts.

Notice how Obama bad news always drops on Friday nights. But the Democrats will not forever be able to keep quiet the reality and the consequences of Obama rule.

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