Crossposted from Flopping Aces

Good news….

The captain of the Maersk Alabama was freed Sunday after being held captive since Wednesday by pirates off the coast of Somalia, a senior U.S. official with knowledge of the situation told CNN.

The official said Capt. Richard Phillips is uninjured and in good condition, and that three of the four pirates were killed. The fourth pirate is in custody. Phillips was taken aboard the USS Bainbridge, a nearby naval warship.

Earlier Sunday afternoon Maersk Line Limited, owner of the Maersk Alabama, said the U.S. Navy informed the company that it had sighted Phillips in a lifeboat where pirates are holding him.

Phillips was spotted another time earlier in the day, the Navy said.

A man who answered the door at Phillips home in Underhill, Vermont, told CNN’s Stephanie Elam that the family has known the news for hours. He said details would have to come from Virginia, apparently referring to the home base of Maersk Line Limited, based in Norfolk, which owns the ship.

On Saturday, the FBI launched a criminal investigation into the hijacking of the U.S.-flagged cargo ship by Somali pirates, two law enforcement officials told CNN. The probe will be led by the FBI’s New York field office, which is responsible for looking into cases involving U.S. citizens in the African region, the officials said.

The Maersk Alabama reached port in Mombasa, Kenya, on Saturday. Crew members aboard the freed cargo ship described how some of their colleagues attempted to “jump” their pirate captors.

A scuffle ensued and one of the sailors stabbed a pirate in the hand in the battle to retake the container ship, one of the sailors told CNN.

Apparently the Captain jumped overboard again but this time there were Navy SEALS in the water who then took the pirates out. Good job Navy!

Also:

Reviews of Obama’s World Wide Apology Tour are In!

And they’re not great!

I doubt anyone will be surprised that I discovered a surfeit of critical commentary on Obama’s world apology tour. After all, few can recall a President going overseas and doing more groveling, bowing, blaming his own country and then coming back with nothing to show for it. Not even a lousy t-shirt like we got from his July 2008 tour.

You can read glowing and gushing media commentary on Obie’s big tour just about everywhere so it’s time for an application of the Mike’s America Fairness Doctrine. Let’s start with my favorite from a writer in the United Kingdom underwhelmed by Obie’s big show in his country:

Barack Obama: President Pantywaist – new surrender monkey on the block
By: Gerald Warner
U.K. Telegraph
April 10, 2009

President Barack Obama has recently completed the most successful foreign policy tour since Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. You name it, he blew it.

Then came the dramatic bit, the authentic West Wing script, with the President wakened in the middle of the night in Prague to be told that Kim Jong-il had just launched a Taepodong-2 missile. America had Aegis destroyers tracking the missile and could have shot it down. But Uncle Sam had a sterner reprisal in store for l’il ole Kim (as Dame Edna might call him): a multi-megaton strike of Obama hot air.

“Rules must be binding,” declared Obama, referring to the fact that Kim had just breached UN Resolutions 1695 and 1718. “Violations must be punished.” (Sounds ominous.) “Words must mean something.” (Why, Barack? They never did before, for you – as a cursory glance at your many speeches will show.)

President Pantywaist is hopping mad and he has a strategy to cut Kim down to size: he is going to slice $1.4bn off America’s missile defence programme, presumably on the calculation that Kim would feel it unsporting to hit a sitting duck, so that will spoil his fun.

Watch out, France and Co, there is a new surrender monkey on the block and, over the next four years, he will spectacularly sell out the interests of the West with every kind of liberal-delusionist initiative on nuclear disarmament and sitting down to negotiate with any power freak who wants to buy time to get a good ICBM fix on San Francisco, or wherever. If you thought the world was a tad unsafe with Dubya around, just wait until President Pantywaist gets into his stride.

Next up, Ralph Peters, who is always a good read had this to say:

O’S AMATEUR HOUR
APPEASING ISLAMISTS IN TURKEY
By Ralph Peters
New York Post
April 8, 2009

…Obama means well. Just as Jimmy Carter, his policy godfather, meant well. But the road to embassy takeovers and strategic humiliation is paved with good intentions — coupled with distressing naivete.
…
Which brings us to the even bigger problem: Obama has no idea what’s going on in Turkey. By going to Ankara on his knees, he gave his seal of approval to a pungently anti-American Islamist government bent on overturning Mustapha Kemal’s legacy of the separation of mosque and state.

Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, the AKP, means headscarves, Korans, censorship and stacked elections. The country’s alarmed middle class opposes the effort to turn the country into an Islamic state. Obama’s gushing praise for the AKP’s bosses left them aghast.

Obama’s embrace of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (now orchestrating show trials of his opponents) was one step short of going to Tehran and smooching President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
…
Obama went to Turkey, undercut secular political parties, infuriated the Europeans — and disclaimed our country’s Judeo-Christian heritage. (Did Turkey’s leaders respond by denying Islam’s importance to them? Naw.)

In Turkey, Obama got . . . nothing we didn’t already have.

Then he went to Iraq and told its prime minister that Iraq would get nothing.

I believe that our president wants to do the right thing. But he doesn’t have a clue how. For now, he’s enraptured by the applause. But he hasn’t tried to charge his fans for their tickets. And they’ve already made up their minds they won’t have to pay.

Another must read is Charles Krauthammer:

It’s Your Country Too, Mr. President
By Charles Krauthammer
Real Clear Politics
April 10, 2009

I’m not against gift-giving in international relations. But it would be nice to see some reciprocity. Obama was in a giving mood throughout Europe. While Gordon Brown was trying to make his American DVDs work and the queen was rocking to her new iPod, the rest of Europe was enjoying a more fulsome Obama gift.

Our president came bearing a basketful of mea culpas. With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own people for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness, for genocide, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantanamo and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.

And what did he get for this obsessive denigration of his own country? He wanted more NATO combat troops in Afghanistan to match the surge of 17,000 Americans. He was rudely rebuffed.

He wanted more stimulus spending from Europe. He got nothing.

From Russia, he got no help on Iran. From China, he got the blocking of any action on North Korea.

And what did he get for Guantanamo? France, pop. 64 million, will take one prisoner. One! (Sadly, he’ll have to leave his swim buddy behind.) The Austrians said they would take none. As Interior Minister Maria Fekter explained with impeccable Germanic logic, if they’re not dangerous, why not just keep them in America?

When Austria is mocking you, you’re having a bad week. Yet who can blame Frau Fekter, considering the disdain Obama showed his own country while on foreign soil, acting the philosopher-king who hovers above the fray mediating between his renegade homeland and an otherwise warm and welcoming world?

After all, it was Obama, not some envious anti-American leader, who noted with satisfaction that a new financial order is being created today by 20 countries, rather than by “just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy.” And then added: “But that’s not the world we live in, and it shouldn’t be the world that we live in.”

It is passing strange for a world leader to celebrate his own country’s decline. A few more such overseas tours, and Obama will have a lot more decline to celebrate.

What explains this desire on the part of Obama and liberals to trash their own country and make futile appeals to extra-territorial entities for help? Former Senator Rick Santorum has the answer:

The Elephant in the Room: Obama vs. United States
The president is contemptuous of American values. And one key nominee prefers the judgment of other countries and global elites.By Rick Santorum
Philadelphia Inquirer
Apr. 9, 2009

Watching President Obama apologize last week for America’s arrogance – before a French audience that owes its freedom to the sacrifices of Americans – helped convince me that he has a deep-seated antipathy toward American values and traditions. His nomination of former Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh to be the State Department’s top lawyer constitutes further evidence of his disdain for American values.
…
What is indisputable is that Koh calls himself a “transnationalist.” He believes U.S. courts “must look beyond national interest to the mutual interests of all nations in a smoothly functioning international legal regime. …” He thinks the courts have “a central role to play in domesticating international law into U.S. law” and should “use their interpretive powers to promote the development of a global legal system.”

Koh’s “transnationalism” stands in contrast to good, old-fashioned notions of national sovereignty, in which our Constitution is the highest law of the land. In the traditional view, controversial matters, whatever they may be, are subject to democratic debate here. They should be resolved by the American people and their representatives, not “internationalized.” What Holland or Belgium or Kenya or any other nation or coalition of nations thinks has no bearing on our exercise of executive, legislative, or judicial power.

Koh disagrees. He would decide such matters based on the views of other countries or transnational organizations – or, rather, those entities’ elites.

Unsurprisingly, Koh is a strong supporter of the International Criminal Court, which could subject U.S. soldiers and officials to foreign criminal trials for their actions while fighting for our security. He has recommended that American lawyers work to “undermine” official American opposition to the court.

If only Koh’s transnationalism ended there. Our Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment? Koh believes it should be reinterpreted in light of foreign and international law to pay “decent respect to the opinions of humankind.”

Old fogies like me believe we ought to pay more attention to the opinions of the Founders who wrote the Constitution and the people who have lived under it. If Americans want to end the death penalty, they can do so through their elected state representatives.
…
Koh tops the list of Obama’s potential Supreme Court nominees. Is this what Sen. John Kerry meant when he once suggested that American policy must pass a “global test”? Or what Barack Obama meant when he said last week that we have failed to “appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world”? Or when he spoke of “change we can believe in”? And just who are “we”?

Transnationalism is by it’s very definition unAmerican. It defies any idea of American exceptionalism and national sovereignty. It’s pretty clear that after 20 years of listening to Rev. Wright’s sermons where “America’s chickens coming home to roost” Obama learned his lessons well.

Everything the right said about Obama during the campaign was true. And I don’t mind telling the namby-pambies who insisted we give him a chance that WE TOLD YOU SO!

Also:

Replacing God

While speaking in Ankara, Turkey this week, President Obama made an astonishing proclamation. He claimed, “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation.” Instead, he said, “We are a nation of citizens”, essentially assigning fealty to ‘the state’ over fealty to God. The world listened, and nodded.

Back home in the U.S., Newsweek editor Jon Meacham welcomed The End of Christian America: “The decline and fall of the modern religious right’s notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life.”

I guess its settled. God is now outdated, at least among our political and media elite. In their world view, what they sneeringly call the religious right is now merely a fringe group. America itself has evolved to a higher plane. A more progressive plane, if you will.

The overwhelming majority of Americans who profess faith in God are being told that the times have changed. Christianity, our ruling elite inform us, is only one of many religions, all of which are equal.

In case we don’t get it, President Obama, while abroad, expressed a deep appreciation for the Islamic faith while, here at home, he appointed a gay-rights activist to the federal government’s faith-based initiative. Said activist described Pope Benedict XVI and certain Catholic bishops as “discredited leaders.” Get it?

The election of Barack Obama has ushered in a new era in the war for hearts and minds in America. Obama, representing the left, believes that man, not God, is omnipotent, thus paving the way for man (Obama) to take control of every facet of life in America. Obama and the government know best. They are now in charge.

President Obama is asking for your blind faith, the faith usually reserved for God. Without any record of achievement, he asks that you believe in him, that you follow his dictates. That you allow him to lead us from the wilderness.

What Obama is doing has been done before. Successfully. In the former Soviet Union, churches operated only with permission of the state. In China, the crackdown continues on underground churches. The ‘state’ knows it must have supremacy over God in order to effectively rule (subjugate) its citizens.

Pol Pot knew this. Lenin knew this. Mao Tse Tung knew this. Any dictator who conquers a country through force knows this. And Obama knows this.

In order for the state to be supreme, fealty to God, to family and to communities, must be replaced with fealty to the state. This strategy is now being implemented in America, with increasing success.

The traditional family, the backbone of our nation, is being redefined as we speak. The institution of marriage is being undermined by the creeping acceptance of gay marriage. Faith in God is being replaced with faith in Mother Earth.

Its no mistake that the Obama administration is jumping aboard the environmental bandwagon. They recognize the basic human desire to believe in a cause or ideal greater than ourselves.

By making the environment the new religion, all those higher feelings may be directed and manipulated by the state. And all that money, formerly called tithing, may now be directed towards supposed efforts by the government to ‘save the planet.’ In other words, God can’t save the planet, only man can.

Liberalism frees man from pesky moral restraints and abolishes sin in favor of the celebration of self. Guilt may now be assuaged by advocating for environmental purity. Best of all, total redemption is available for those who care enough to become ‘carbon neutral.’

In order for this to work, government has to get God out of the way. And they’re doing a bang-up job. The ACLU has terrorized cities across the country with threats of lawsuits for allowing the barest hint of religion into state policy.

The secularist media portrays anything smacking of Christianity as totally beyond the pale. Newspapers, magazines and television are of one mind, depicting any show of faith in God as a fringe mentality, as unseemly as picking one’s nose in public.

God is now passe, at least according to those elites who set the agenda in our country. Environmentalism is the new religion for all right thinking people. And if you don’t agree, well, it doesn’t matter. Obama won, haven’t you heard? He has claimed a mandate, and, so far, no one is challenging it. We voted for it. We got it.