Syrian civil war may provide answer to Saddam’s missing WMDs

Dead children in the aftermath of Saddam’s 1988 attack on Halabja (Sayed/Wikimedia)

Secretary of State John Kerry’s formal accusation today that Syria has used chemical weapons against rebel forces and civilians sounds somewhat similar to Bush Administration charges against the regime of Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq a decade ago.  Saddam had used his chemical weapons numerous times against Iraqi minorities and was all but ignored by the world.

 

When the U.S. led a coalition of nations to depose Saddam in 2003, the belief that Iraq possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons as well as a nascent nuclear weapons program was a major justification for the invasion.  Failure to locate large stocks of the weapons led to charges that President George W. Bush had lied to lead the United States into an unnecessary war.

Read the rest on Atlanta Conservative Examiner

GOP’s future may be tied to immigration reform

CHZZ/Wikimedia

The immigration reform bill is headed to the House of Representatives and an uncertain future.  The Senate passed the bill overwhelmingly on Thursday with a 68-32 vote.  Fourteen Republican senators joined the entire Democratic caucus to pass the bill.

 

The immigration reform bill is likely to face strong Republican opposition in the House, but many conservatives argue that passage of the bill will be a boon to Republicans.  As previously reported by Examiner, Republicans lost an embarrassing percentage of the Hispanic and Asian vote in 2008 and 2012.  The GOP won only 31 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2008 and did even worse in 2012 with 27 percent.  Likewise, the percentage of Asians voting for the GOP declined from 35 percent in 2008 to 26 percent in 2012.

 

It wasn’t always this way.

Read the rest on  National Elections Examiner

 

 

Obama vs. Bush

In the campaign for his re-election, President Obama often points to the fact that the country was in a deep recession when he took office. Obama’s reasoning is that the country was in such a dreadful state in 2008 that it is taking much longer than he originally thought to restore it to prosperity.

It can be instructive to look at the results of the policies of both President Bush and President Obama and compare them side by side. One common criticism of President Obama is his administration’s spending habits. When he recently claimed that “Federal spending since I took office has risen at the slowest pace of any president in almost 60 years,” CNS News and many other outlets fact checked the claim and found it to be untrue.

 

Read the rest of this article on Examiner.com:

Economy

http://www.examiner.com/article/bush-vs-obama-on-the-economy

Foreign policy

http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-vs-bush-on-foreign-policy

The looming Obama tax increases

Will the Bush tax cuts soon be the Obama tax increases?

There has been much talk recently of extending the Bush tax cuts. These tax cuts were passed during President Bush’s administration in 2001 and 2003 to fight the recessions that resulted from the tech stock bubble and the 9/11 terror attacks. To get the votes needed to pass the tax cuts, an expiration date of December 31, 2010 was written into the law.

Read the rest of this article at:
http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-atlanta/the-looming-obama-tax-increases