Obama administration

Last week, Syrian security forces withdrew from Zabadani, a town near Damascus where defectors from the army and other antiregime elements had been exchanging heavy fire with the army. In Lebanon, some democracy activists believe that an opposition victory in a major Syrian city will energize Bashar al-Assad’s enemies, dooming his regime at last.

Politico reports:

A House panel investigating Solyndra voted Thursday to subpoena internal White House documents on the failed California solar company.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that the Department of Energy has approved loan guarantees for two solar energy projects:

One deal, a $737 million loan guarantee for Solar Reserve LLC, paves the way for construction of the 110-megawatt Crescent Dunes Solar Energy facility, which will use an array of mirrors to focus the sun's heat and power a steam generator.

On July 28, the Treasury Department designated six al Qaeda operatives involved in shipping money and men from the Persian Gulf to senior al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The move targets a node of the global terror network that is critical to its overall strength, freezing any of its financial assets under U.S. jurisdiction and prohibiting any transactions with the operatives. Of the many conduits for al Qaeda funds and personnel across the world, the U.S.

Attorneys who formerly represented al Qaeda members detained at Guantánamo now labor at the Justice Department representing the United States and shaping policy regarding treatment of those detainees. Yet the attorney general refuses to disclose the names of those who worked closely on detainee matters before joining the Obama administration.

The omens are everywhere. Iran is close to obtaining nuclear weapons. The eurozone is in crisis. The U.S. unemployment rate is near 10 percent. America’s social insurance programs threaten to bankrupt the country. And—most unusual—the Washington Nationals are above .500.

After his 1851 coup d’état, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the real Napoleon, pronounced himself Napoleon III. It was the rise to power of this great-man-wannabe that prompted the famous opening of Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis-Bonaparte: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice.

On January 20, the day after Scott Brown’s upset victory in the Massachusetts Senate race, Barack Obama suggested that he might just have to settle for a more modest health care reform package than the one Democrats had been pushing for a year.

Lee Smith: A Middle East Without American Influence? That's the logical outcome of the Obama administration's current policies.

Israel's image in America falls. Abe Greenwald takes a look. 

The Foreign Policy Initiative has released "Foreign Policy 2010," a compilation of analysis and commentary on critical foreign policy and national security issues for use by members of Congress and congressional candidates.

Over at Heritage, Ariel Cohen and Helle Dale dive into anti-Americanism in Russia. Apparently it's reaching Cold War levels, with no shortage of government encouragement.

On the Russian domestic front, the United States as "the enemy" is used as a scapegoat for unsuccessful policies and to lend legitimacy to Putin's leadership. For example, the Kremlin has blamed the current economic crisis, which has hit Russia harder than many other countries, on perfidious American policies. Likewise, in foreign policy, anti-Americanism is used to unite countries against the common enemy and to promote a multipolar world vision in which Russia, China, India, and authoritarian states, such as Iran and Venezuela, would check U.S. influence.