Meanwhile in Tripoli and Benghazi ...

While the House Oversight Committee prepares to hear testimony from three whistleblowers that may expose a cover-up in the Obama administration, the Libyans have their own problems after the “liberation” provided by Barack Obama and NATO’s air campaign.  After a blockade of government offices in the capital of Tripoli by armed “militias” for more than [...]

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Connections.

Lots of familiar boxes being checked now. Terrorists accepting welfare while they’re busy plotting murder? Yep. Mosque they attended has links to “extremists”? Yep yep. Apologists grasping for theories to explain how “society” is really responsible for their degeneracy? A few, yeah, but that won’t hit full flush until the trial, when poor Dzhokhar describes [...]

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Terrific.

They’re not dropping it altogether, the way they did with “illegal immigrant.” They’re fine-tuning it to draw a distinction between jihadists, who wage war to spread rule by Islamic law, and people like Erdogan and Mohammed Morsi, who for strategic reasons favor spreading rule by Islamic law through political means. With occasional notable exceptions. Here’s [...]

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Smart power?

Egypt’s economy is in bad place, with an unemployment rate of around 13 percent and an even worse youth unemployment rate, and Morsi’s government has been negotiating with the International Monetary Fund about a $4.8 billion loan package to try to help stabilize the economy and get their budget in order. The IMF, however, would [...]

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Hmmmm.

Daniel Freedman thinks so, and even credits the Arab Spring — in a kind of backhand manner.  In yesterday’s New York Daily News, Freedman notes that incoming Secretary of State John Kerry has pledged to make Israeli-Palestinian peace talks a high priority, a traditional pledge that goes back for decades at Foggy Bottom.  Kerry has [...]

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Allies.

Meant to blog this last night but got sidetracked by the day-long Hagel clusterfark. The vote on Paul’s bill wasn’t close: 79-19, with more Republicans voting against it (26) than for it (19). Why? For the same reason McCain looked the other way at Morsi’s Jew-baiting and backed continued aid to Egypt. Namely, leverage: [T]he [...]

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Plus ça change ...

Hey, remember when the man who ran Egypt ruled as a dictator with the excuse of continuing “emergency decrees” and had the Army as his hatchet men?  Meet the new boss, same as the old boss: Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi declared a state [...]

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Meet the new boss.

Remember when the Egyptian army was supposed to be a check on the Brotherhood’s power, not an arm of it? As his proposed compromise faded and tensions mounted on Sunday, Mr. Morsi followed through on plans announced the day before to authorize the military to protect national institutions and polling places. His order, printed in [...]

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Toxic.

According to a video reportedly posted by the Free Syrian Army, the Syrian rebels have their own chemical weapons to match Bashar Al-Assad’s – and you get to watch two rabbits die to prove it. This link is to the video posted at YouTube.  But Breitbart has helpfully loaded the video to its post on [...]

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"The people want to topple the regime!"

Perhaps Mohamed Morsi thought that a show of strength and resolve in a nationally-televised speech to his Egyptian subjects would impress them enough to stop protesting his “temporary” seizure of dictatorial power.  If so, the President-turned-Pharaoh miscalculated — perhaps badly.  After a defiant speech in which Morsi accused protesters of being Mubarakites, the streets again [...]

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Meanwhile, at the White House ....

The protests in Egypt have turned violent, but so far the Egyptian army has remained mainly on the sidelines.  The Republican Guard deployed armored vehicles and elite troops to the presidential palace yesterday, but stood by while opponents to Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood attacked each other in the street.  Today, the army has [...]

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Inevitable.

What happens when you take a disillusioned electorate that has discovered it elected a would-be dictator, and the group that wanted a dictator all along?  Inevitably, you get what happened overnight in Cairo.  Clashes between growing legions of protesters and Muslim Brotherhood counterprotesters killed five people and wounded hundreds more, while Mohamed Morsi called in [...]

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"President Obama is supporting a terrorist."

The streets of Cairo have remained flooded with protestors ever since Mohamed Morsi issued decrees that “temporarily” maki him a dictator — or as some say, a pharaoh. Morsi pledged to end his decrees as soon as Egypt votes on the constitution drafted by his Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist allies, but that has not slowed [...]

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Pharaoh Morsi?

As expected, Egypt’s ad-hoc constitutional panel approved a draft that enraged all but the Islamists on the committee to the extent that they withdrew in protest earlier. The passage of the proposal hasn’t helped Mohamed Morsi this morning, as even clerics denounced him in Friday prayers as a new pharaoh. CNN expects even bigger protests [...]

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Democracy.

The political crisis in Egypt escalated over the last 24 hours, with moves on both sides showing a widening gulf between the promise of a democratic revolution and the reality of an Islamist power grab.  Mohamed Morsi’s constitutional assembly, controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist allies, voted this morning to boot 11 dissenting members [...]

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Deja vu.

Say, this has a familiar ring to it.  Protesters fill Tahrir Square to demonstrate against the head of state who uses an “emergency” to claim dictatorial powers, police deploy teargas, and rocks get thrown at the US Embassy.  The last time this happened, Barack Obama demanded the resignation of the Egyptian head of state. What [...]

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Patience.

Hillary called Egypt’s foreign minister today to “underscore U.S. hopes that Egypt’s political crisis can be resolved in a democratic manner,” but Morsi’s spokesman said this afternoon no changes have been made to the temporary decree he used to seize power. Or have they? President Mohamed Morsi agreed on Monday to limit the scope of [...]

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Allies.

The office of Egyptian President Mohammed Mursi has said that the decree giving him sweeping new powers is temporary and not intended to concentrate power in his hands… “The presidency reiterates the temporary nature of those measures, which are not intended to concentrate power, but to avoid … attempts to undermine democratically elected bodies and [...]

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Pharaoh.

The full statement from the State Department’s Victoria Nuland is below: The decisions and declarations announced on November 22 raise concerns for many Egyptians and for the international community. One of the aspirations of the revolution was to ensure that power would not be overly concentrated in the hands of any one person or institution. [...]

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What would a ground war look like?

Two days ago, John McCain nominated Bill Clinton as a US envoy to the Middle East as a way to dial down the war that Hamas initiated with Israel.  Instead, the other Clinton will shortly arrive in the region as efforts to cobble together a meaningful cease-fire continue to fail.  Hillary Clinton — the actual [...]

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"'Ally' is a legal term of art."

I’m not sure what this has to do with Romney’s gaffes, but I thought I’d toss it out there while we’re waiting on more gaffe news. Alternate headline: “‘Foreign-Policy President’ terrible at foreign policy.” “I don’t think that we would consider them an ally, but we don’t consider them an enemy,” Obama said. “They’re a [...]

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Plus, Muslim Brotherhood calls for all "national forces" in Egypt to protest on Friday.

In the confusion surrounding the murders of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya yesterday, the Libyan government — which exists due to the military intervention of the US and NATO — initially left the impression that loyalists to dead dictator Moammar Qaddafi conducted the assassinations.  CBS, however, now reports that the Libyan government has changed its [...]

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Counter-coup.

Such is the power of Ryanmania that only now are we getting around to this story. Remember how the military junta was going to keep Egypt’s new Islamist president on a tight leash? Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s president, has dismissed the head of the armed forces and defence minister, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, according to [...]

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Pass.

Via the Examiner, I understand why he punted here. His retort to Reid’s tax-evasion smear last night was that it’s an obvious, grotesque attempt to hand the media a new distraction from Obama’s record. He just got back from a foreign policy trip/photo op that was also submerged in distractions, most notably his Olympics comments [...]

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