President Obama’s recently proposed White House health care meeting was immediately met with skepticism on Capitol Hill — Republicans are wary of the motives behind the move, while Democrats doubt the result will be any different than negotiations with the GOP over the past year.

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Our radio programming from February 6 is now posted at the link below. White House correspondent Bill Koenig gives insights on Obama’s first year, the predicted terror strike coming within six months, and many foreign policy issues.

http://www.olivetreeviews.org/radio/mp3/

To learn about podcasting via iTunes, visit this link:

http://www.olivetreeviews.org/radio/radioshows/subscribetopodcast.php

Would you hire the following people to give you advice?President Obama did.

c Anita Dunn, former White House communications director, is on record stating that Mao Zedong and Mother Teresa are her two favorite philosophers. She later defended the statement.

c Van Jones, the former “green jobs” adviser who claimed he became a Marxist while in prison, was ousted only after it became known that he had signed petitions claiming the George W. Bush administration had carried out the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

c Cass Sunstein, the regulatory czar who questioned the Second Amendment right to bear arms, wrote in his 2004 book, “Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions,” that animals should be permitted to bring lawsuits, with human beings as their representatives.

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Specialists say advice ignored

Almost two years before the deadly Fort Hood shooting by a radicalized Muslim officer, the U.S. Army was explicitly warned that jihadism — Islamic holy war — was a serious problem and threat to personnel in the U.S., according to participants at a major Army-sponsored conference.

The annual Army anti-terrorism conference in Florida in February 2008 included presentations on the threat by counterterrorism specialists Patrick Poole, Army Lt. Col. Joseph Myers and Terri Wonder.

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At first sight this may look like the work of an earnest waste cutter. It is, however, nothing of the sort. The $23 billion of “savings” is actually only about one half of one percent of the $3.84 trillion total.

A question for the president: Is one half of one percent all the waste you can find in the federal government? After all, it is an institution whose financial profligacy is legendary. Should we assume, Mr. President, that all of the remaining 99.5 percent is spent wisely and un-wastefully?

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FP: Dave Gaubatz, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to talk to you today about jihadi torture videos that have come into your possession and also about Islam’s child martyrs in America.

But first, give us some updates on your new research in terms of counter-terrorism.

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The Stalinist-show-trial aspect of the Geert Wilders “hate speech” trial in the Netherlands was thrown into sharp relief last week when the Amsterdam District Court refused to allow Wilders to call fifteen of the eighteen witnesses he had hoped to bring forward in his defense. Wilders in response was characteristically direct: “This Court is not interested in the truth. This Court doesn’t want me to have a fair trial. I can’t have any respect for this. This Court would not be out of place in a dictatorship.”

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Not long after the State of the Union address, the Congress voted to substantially worsen that state, delivering a one-two punch directly at the value of the U.S. dollar. Not light jabs, but crippling body blows that will leave the prosperity of the American people reeling. The damage this combination of monetary and fiscal hits will do is being telegraphed in advance: first the monetary blow, as the Senate confirmed Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke for another four-year term; next the fiscal blow, as both the House and Senate approved another increase in the statutory national debt ceiling. The new limit, a debt increase on steroids, adds $1.9 trillion to bring the ceiling to $14.3 trillion, an amount roughly equal the U.S. gross domestic product.

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If there is ever a contest to pick which word has done the most damage to people’s thinking, and to actions to carry out that thinking, my nomination would be the word “fair.” It is a word thrown around by far more people than have ever bothered to even try to define it.

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Conservatives understand that liberals often demonize their opponents rather than debate the merits of the issues because the tactic works. But you have to wonder whether another reason they lash out is that they are angry that reality doesn’t cooperate with their ideologically driven solutions and it’s easier to blame others than to face up to the unpleasant truth of their failed ideas.

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