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…)

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Pejman Yousefzadeh and Kevin Holtsberry are joined by Ken Ballen to discuss his book Terrorists in Love: The Real Lives of Islamic Radicals, which provides case studies of individual extremists, their life histories, and their personal perspectives, in the context of showing how the United States can better understand the Islamic world.

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:

Buy Terrorists in Love: The Real Lives of Islamic Radicals on Amazon
Terrorists in Love
TerrorFreeTomorrow.org

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The hosts and guests of Coffee and Markets speak only for ourselves, not any clients or employers.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by John Yoo, former Department of Justice official under President George W. Bush to discuss how enhanced interrogation techniques lead to Osama bin Laden’s death, how Bush administration policies have helped the war on terror, and what missteps lie ahead for Obama.

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:

Robert Gates on America’s Role in the World
Robert Gates: ‘If America Declines to Lead in the World, Others Will Not’
John Yoo: Tough interrogations worked
From Guantanamo to Abbottabad
Libya and the War Powers Abdication
John Yoo’s Book – Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush
John Yoo at AEI

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It would be the ultimate irony if the one courageous and decisive act by President Obama turned out to be yet another liability. Quite frankly, it would not be surprising either.

Questions about how the death and burial of Osama bin Laden came about are mounting. It is becoming increasingly evident that the White House is now backing off, changing details, and spinning to its political advantage an event that should primarily celebrate a decade of U.S. policies of intelligence-gathering and military strategy, as well as the strength and competence of the best-trained military in the world.

CIA Chief, Leon Panetta, now appears to be at odds with the White House, regarding both the release of photos of bin Laden’s body and whether waterboarding was used to extract intelligence information from detainees of Guantanamo.

White House spokesman Jay Carney, and now the president himself, has said that the White House is reluctant to release the photos of the body because of concern about “sensitivities.” The question is, whose “sensitivities?” Other radical jihadists who may be enraged further with the United States? American citizens who have already witnessed gruesome photos of dead civilians- courtesy of the main stream media- in Iraq and Afghanistan? Or, the liberal base of the Democratic party, who can’t quite get their heads around the fact that their president- who is supposedly of such superior moral character, and has already done such a thorough job of apologizing to the world for the “transgressions” of the United States- actually made a decision to kill the apparently unarmed terrorist within sight of his wife (or child), to defend and preserve American freedom and security?

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Yesterday, Eyeblast wrote a post on Nir Rosen, a fellow at NYU’s Center for Law and Security, and his outlandish comments he made of the sexual assault of CBS correspondent Lara Logan- which was posted on here. Jim Geraghty from National Review and Steve Nelson at the Daily Caller did the same.

Rosen’s comments were most likely directed at Lara Logan in retaliation to her defending General Stanley McChrystal last year after a controversial Rolling Stone interview. After looking into what he has done in the past and given his past statements, it is actually not surprising that he would make such horrendous comments. He has appeared on many TV shows essentially defending Al Qaeda against the United States.

Here is Rosen appearing on Russia Today saying that Al Qaeda’s threat to the U.S. is a lie.

Oh, and this little tidbit as well: (h/t diggrbiii)

Good for Dave Dilegge for speaking out in Small Wars Journal about the October issue of Rolling Stone magazine, wherein Nir Rosen, an American reporter, described his visit with Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Rosen left no doubt about his active cooperation with the Taliban fighters. “They have promised to take me to see the Taliban in action: going out on patrols, conducting attacks,” he wrote, “…. once we are on the road we should take the batteries out of our phones, to prevent anyone from tracking us.”

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Cameron Poe is back, and he’s getting an enhanced pat down (just like you).

This holiday travel season, we’re all convicts.

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You’ve heard about the passenger who opted out of a full-body scan (a.k.a. “a virtual strip search”) and was subjected to an intrusive and humiliating pat down. “If you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested,” passenger John Tyner told Transportation Security Administration workers in San Diego.

Well, rest easy, John—and other passengers offended by both full-body scans and hands-on searches.

TSA won’t touch your junk—or your breasts or buttocks. If they begin to strip search passengers as if they’re prison inmates, they’ll do just what correctional officers do: They’ll make you do all the nasty work.

What follows is an excerpt from a training video for prison guards on how to make sure that inmates aren’t hiding contraband.

The video makes for extremely uncomfortable watching and viewer discretion—and outrage—is advised. After all, this may well be the next step in how the TSA, one of the least effective and efficient government agencies of all time, goes about its daily business.

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Last night I read the front-page Washington Post story on Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars. Frankly the article gave me nightmares. The revelations about Obama’s naive views on terrorism and his lack of a firm commitment to the Afghan War  was nothing really new, they simply confirmed many of the worst fears about our President and the War on Terror. But Obama’s priorities, hes desire to place politics before victory was both surprising and upsetting.

The book details how Obama is not trying to win the war as much as he was desperately trying to placate his progressive base, regardless of the safety of American citizens. At one point the POTUS tells Woodward directly:

“We can absorb a terrorist attack. We’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever . . . we absorbed it and we are stronger.”

Holy Cow!! Tell that to the families of the terrorist attack’s victims.

Even worse the book reports that President Obama did not even want to hear about many of the terrorist threats:

During a daily intelligence briefing in May 2009, Mr. Blair [former Director of Intelligence] warned the president that radicals with American and European passports were being trained in Pakistan to attack their homelands. Mr. Emanuel afterward chastised him, saying, “You’re just trying to put this on us so it’s not your fault.” Mr. Blair also skirmished with Mr. Brennan about a report on the failed airliner terrorist attack on Dec. 25. Mr. Obama later forced Mr. Blair out.

Obama’s Wars,  covers last fall’s agonizingly slow Afghanistan strategy review last fall. One of the reasons for the snail-like pace for developing a plan was Obama seemed more interested in mapping out an exit plan than winning the war. The book makes it clear that the U.S. military has been asked to achieve its goals in Afghanistan without the level of troops they requested and in an unrealistic time frame.

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I extend my sincerest apology for this profile. It was a mistake reflecting poor judgment and should never have happened. Throughout my career, I have lived by the principles of personal honor and professional integrity. What is reflected in this article falls far short of that standard. I have enormous respect and admiration for President Obama and his national security team, and for the civilian leaders and troops fighting this war and I remain committed to ensuring its successful outcome.”
-General Stanley McChrystal, 6/22/2010

The interview of General McChrystal and his in Rolling Stone was not an accident, it’s a perfect  example of suicide by interview.  The General knew that every criticism would be “on the record.”  He also knew that the President will have no choice but to relieve the General of his command after their meeting tomorrow. The Military Code of Justice  provides that a General does not criticize the Commander-in-Chief publicly however,  the General criticized  Obama in a major way and even picked the perfect vehicle to do it in the most visible of ways.

McChrystal’s statements clearly point to the fact that he believes the war cannot be won under the President’s parameters, a tepid escalation to protect the president from his political supports. McChrystal  is clearly frustrated by  Barack Obama and his administration and finds it necessary to protect his men. He finds himself having to take radical steps to protect his troops in the face of an administration trying to fight a war on a half-assed basis.

According to Fox, Some of the highlights of the up-coming article include:

• Although McChrystal voted for Obama, the two failed to connect from the start. Obama called McChrystal on the carpet last fall for speaking too bluntly about his desire for more troops. The President did not want to hear his advice. “I found that time painful,” McChrystal said in the article, on newsstands Friday. “I was selling an unsellable position.”

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Since the early twentieth century, periods of real or perceived national emergency have been “critical episodes” in the growth of government’s size, scope, and power in the United States and in many other countries. Hence, the concise conceptualization: Crisis and Leviathan (the main title of my 1987 book on the growth of government in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century).

In the past century, the first five such critical episodes in the United States were: World War I; the Great Depression; World War II; a multi-faceted set of crises associated with the civil-rights revolution and the Vietnam War, roughly coincident with the presidencies of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon; and the post 9/11 events associated with the so-called War on Terror and the U.S. attacks on and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. We are now amid another such critical episode, which springs from the housing bust that began in 2006, the economic recession that began late in 2007, and the financial debacle that reached its climax in September 2008.

The current troubles are complex and raise a multitude of questions. Many books and articles no doubt will be written to analyze these various issues in scholarly depth and detail, and certainly anything we might say today must be regarded as preliminary, at best. I focus here on a few aspects of the present episode that relate closely to my own research on the growth of government, a field of study to which I have returned again and again over the past thirty years.

I

The current recession has elicited many comparisons with earlier business downturns, especially with the Great Depression. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is often described as an expert on the Great Depression who takes its lessons, as he understands them, deeply into account as he formulates and implements Fed policies. Likewise, many other economists have revisited the Great Depression recently in search of lessons applicable to current policy-making. In all of these reflections, the mainstream economics profession in general has distinguished itself by an astonishing superficiality of historical knowledge and lack of theoretical prowess.

The swiftness with which a great many mainstream economists have reverted to the simplistic “vulgar Keynesianism” that had its heyday from the late 1940s to the late 1960s has been nothing short of shocking, given that by the end of the 1970s such old-fashioned Keynesianism seemed to have been completely discredited and superseded in the leading echelons of the mainstream economics profession. Now it has come roaring back.

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Senator Evan Bayh’s decision not to seek re-election this November makes him just the latest among numerous Democrats who announced they are quitting. They have looked at the Obamacare debacle, the crippling debt, the millions of lost jobs, and the looming national security disaster heralded by the increase in jihad terror attacks on American soil, and they’re getting out. They know that Americans are waking up to how the big government policies of the Democrats are continuing to hurt our economy, and are ruinous for America.

Swindling Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) will not seek re-election; the drug-addled Congressman Patrick Kennedy will not be seeking re-election in Rhode Island; Arkansas Congressman Marion Berry and Senator Byron Dorgan are leaving. Then there’s Michigan Democratic Lt. Governor John Cherry’s decision to end his floundering bid for governor. Colorado Governor Bill Ritter is also retiring. Not to mention the stunning late December party switch by freshman Alabama Representative Parker Griffith — just to mention a few.

And in Bayh’s whiny withdrawal speech, he made sure to take parting shots at the Republicans under the guise of the well-worn canard of their “lack of bipartisanship.” As if the Democrats worked with Bush.

The Party of No? Hardly. It’s the Save-America party, it’s the Say No to Communism party. Bayh didn’t speak of the irreparable damage the Democrats are doing to this country. He whimpered that only the Republicans said no to a jobs bill (although the government doesn’t create jobs, the private sector does) and that the Republicans wouldn’t sign off on another bloated, useless, cost-prohibitive commission to investigate bloated, useless, cost-prohibitive government spending. Funny how even a Democrat who is thought of as honorable and measured showed no honor in his parting remarks. He went out like an ankle-biting Democrat, pathetic and small.

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From the New York Daily News:

The White House ordered the Justice Department to consider other places to try the 9/11 terror suspects after a wave of opposition to holding the trial in lower Manhattan.

The White House took the action hours after Mayor Bloomberg called Attorney General Eric Holder to say he would “prefer that they did it elsewhere.”

“It would be an inconvenience at the least, and probably that’s too mild a word for people that live in the neighborhood and businesses in the neighborhood,” Bloomberg told reporters.

“There are places that would be less expensive for the taxpayers and less disruptive for New York City.”

State leaders have railed against a plan to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in Manhattan federal court since Holder proposed it last month.

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Following up on our post yesterday, the Workforce Fairness Institute has this video asking SEIU boss Andy Stern which Senators does he think are terrorists.

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Lost in the pre and post-election analysis out of Massachusetts has been the major policy differences between Martha Coakley and Scott Brown over foreign policy and defense.  The issue garnered some attention briefly during their final debate, when Coakley erred saying terrorists “were gone from Afghanistan.”  But then the attentions of the media quickly turned back to the health care debate.

In campaigning with Brown in the final days, Rudy Giuliani mapped out the battle lines: “This election will send a signal, and a very dramatic one, that we are going in the wrong direction on terrorism, and we need to change it, and change it now.”  Giuliani added: Scott’s background in the military speaks volumes about his understanding of what we face.  And frankly his opponent’s ignorance about the issues facing us is astounding.”

From the start candidate Brown was unequivocal on defense matters.  A 30-year Veteran of the National Guard, still serving as a lt. colonel, Brown unashamedly backed the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.    It’s notable that not once did he seek to separate himself from the Bush foreign policy agenda.

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“I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”

When President George W. Bush spoke through a bullhorn to emergency rescue workers at Ground Zero just two days after 9/11, he put the world on notice: We are coming to get those who did this, and we will not stop until we do.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 underscored the gravity of threats posed by international terrorist organizations. Responding to the attacks, on October 7th President Bush declared a “war on terror” and identified Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network responsible. Within weeks, as opposed to our current Commander in Chief’s dithering for months, a US-led coalition launched air-strikes against targets in Afghanistan, where Bin Laden was believed to be sheltered by the Taliban regime.

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For those who were expecting the election of Barack Obama to yield a peace dividend in the war on terror, the resurgence of Al-Qaeda has come as a surprise. Obama’s obsequious diplomacy was supposed to be a tonic to the aggressions of the Bush years, but his appeasement seems to have only encouraged more war. Rather than calm the Islamic world, Obama’s passivity has invited attack.

As in the Cold War, the current battle of ideology takes place in proxy wars. Unlike in the Cold War, the war on terror is largely fought through symbolic actions. Islamists do not make tactical attacks. They do not bomb Boeing factories or destroy highways and rail lines. Instead they destroy iconic buildings, trains, and airplanes. They use the spectacle of destruction, carried out in a diabolical way by suicide agents, as their means of waging war. That is the definition of a terror campaign.

The proper response to terror is not appeasement but counterattack. Islamists wage their terror campaigns in order to cow American influence abroad, especially in the Gulf. The answer to such attacks, if we hope to avoid them in the future, is to increase American involvement in Muslim countries both through soft influence and force of arms. Such a strategy was one of the best but least articulated justifications for the Second Gulf War.

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[Note: This is the latest segment in an ongoing series about Code Pink and its co-founder Jodie Evans. Click here to read earlier articles.]

The name of Obama funder and terrorist sympathizer Jodie Evans turns up twice in recently released White House visitor logs.

Buffy Wicks, center, 2008 photo by St. Louis Argus

The logs show that a ‘Jodie Evans’ met with Buffy Wicks, the Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement (OPE) on June 19, 2009. The meeting came just days after Evans’ group, Code Pink, visited the terrorist group Hamas in Gaza from May 28th to June 14th and was given a letter by Hamas to deliver to President Barack Obama.

On December 30th, the Obama administration released 25,000 records of visitors to the White House complex from the latter half of September. Mixed in those records were visits from other dates, including two by ‘Jodie Evans’ in June.

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On the foreign policy front, the Democrats for years have blamed America for the actions of rogue nations and dictators.  Indeed, as Mona Charen pointed out at length, in her book Useful Idiots, the Democrats have been all too willing to Blame America First for the actions of others.  So the storyline goes, when Russia armed itself, it was a justified response to the American arms buildup – as if Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev were otherwise peace loving souls.

No mere academic cheer for Democrats, they have campaigned on their Blame America First theme for years.  In the minds of those Democrats, rather than display arrogance, America must be more humble, except blame for World troubles and not seek to impose its view on the world.  The latest iteration of that, of course, was Obama’s campaign.

According to Obama, following 9/11:

Millions around the world were ready to stand with us. They were willing to rally to our cause because it was their cause too – because they knew that if America led the world toward a new era of global cooperation, it would advance the security of people in our nation and all nations.” According to Obama, however, the Bush Administration “squandered that opportunity . . . [and]  . . . World opinion has turned against us.

What is the cure for such “mistakes,” according to Obama? As we have seen, it is to apologize on his world tours for American actions, to promise to talk directly to dictators, to abandon missile systems, to speak softly in the face of phony Iranian elections and crack downs on dissent, to bow in front of dictators, wear a thin mustache in front Middle Eastern leaders in Egypt, preach global responsibility, promise to close Guantanamo, give rights to Interpol over US territory, and on and on.

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From Politico:

From the time he launched his campaign for president three years ago, Barack Obama had to consider how he would react to the first serious act of terrorism during the campaign, or if he won, on his watch. His fellow Democrats had been thinking about the moment even longer – since the September day in 2001 when attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon defined George W. Bush’s presidency and gave Republicans a decisive advantage on a defining political issue.

And yet the White House’s response to last week’s attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit could rank as one of the low points of the new president’s first year. Over the course of five days, Obama’s Obama’ reaction ranged from low-keyed to reassuring to, finally, a vow to find out what went wrong. The episode was a baffling, unforced error in presidential symbolism, hardly a small part of the presidency, and the moment at which yet another of the old political maxims that Obama had sought to transcend – the Democrats’ vulnerability on national security – reasserted itself.

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Americans fancy the idea that while we might have been asleep prior to 9/11/2001, now our eyes are wide open and we are on alert. This is a pipe dream.

If people’s eyes were truly open, they would be closely examining the path Gitmo detainee Said Ali al-Shihri took to Yemen, where we are now learning he helped plan the Christmas Jihad.

Said reportedly left Gitmo, went through “rehabilitation” in Saudi Arabia, then moved to Iran before ending up as a leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen.

For example, Said Ali al-Shihri left Gitmo in 2007 and became a patient in Saudi Arabia’s terrorist rehabilitation program. Upon graduation, he went to Iran, and then became the deputy leader of Al-Qaeda in Yemen. Abdullah al-Qarawi following a similar path, also traveling to Iran after finishing the program, where he know oversees over 100 Saudi Al-Qaeda operatives. Mohammed al-Oufi, a former Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula commander, also was released from Gitmo. Luckily, he defected later and informed the Saudis about Iran’s secret involvement with Al-Qaeda in Yemen and a plot to bomb the Saudi oil infrastructure. [READ MORE...]

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