This week, the Senate votes on President Obama’s nomination of District Court Judge David Hamilton to the Seventh Circuit.  Because of Hamilton’s fundraising activities for ACORN, his leadership positions with the Indiana branch of the ACLU, his statements supporting judicial activism, and most importantly, his rulings putting liberal ideology above the rule of law, he is the first and only Obama circuit nominee to draw heated opposition.

There are many examples of Judge Hamilton’s tendency towards liberal judicial activism.  However, the most bizarre and controversial instance is Hamilton’s 2005 ruling prohibiting prayers that mention Jesus Christ in the Indiana House of Representatives, but allowing prayers that mention Allah.  While troubling in any context, the religious double standard in Hamilton’s ruling is particularly deserving of close scrutiny in light of Major Nidal Hasan’s recent shooting rampage at Fort Hood. 

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Credit where credit is due. Obama, as I suggested he do a year ago, finally confronted his, and our Muslim issue.

The first 15 minutes of President Obama’s speech to the Muslim world was what I wanted to hear from candidate Obama a year ago. Had he given that portion of his speech during the presidential campaign much of the irrational fear of Obama as some sort of Muslim Manchurian candidate would have been relieved.

I found it Ironic that when Obama turned to democracy, religious freedom and women’s rights, the speech was reminiscent of the remarkable series of speeches President Bush gave about the advance of freedom.

This was one of President Obama’s more important speeches and he rose to the occasion and delivered a fine speech. There are numerous things about Obama’s speech to the Muslim world I could criticize, but I will save that for another article.

If you missed Obama’s speech you should invest the 30 minutes required to read, listen to, or watch the entire speech. Reading summaries, excerpts and critiques lets others do the thinking for you. Snippets can’t help you grasp the import, which you should have, especially if you want to disagree in a knowledgeable manner.

You can watch or read President Obama’s entire speech to the Muslim world here.

After spending three years running away from his past, Barack Hussein Obama is now nominally a Muslim again. At least that is the message that ABC’s Jake Tapper has discovered in the new, new way in which the Obama administration is presenting the president’s connections to Islam and his religious upbringing and heritage. Suddenly it’s A’OK to say that Obama has “experienced Islam” and remark about his “Muslim father” again. Rah, rah for Islam.

As Jim Geraghty so famously said that everything that Barack Obama says has an “expiration date,” because it isn’t long after he promises something or makes allusion to some policy direction that he chucks the idea under the bus and drives head-long on to the next “promise” to earnestly offer the American people. And it isn’t just his centrist positions he later conveniently reverses himself on, either, as several of his more extremist liberal ideas have gone under the tram, too — much to the chagrin of many lefties that voted for him.

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Rebranding America as “one of the largest Muslim countries” is not at all what I had in mind when I called for then candidate Obama to confront his Muslim issue head on.

In an interview with Laura Haim on Canal Plus, President Obama said the United States could be considered as “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world“:

And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.

You can watch the interview here (thanks to Richard Fernandez for the link). There is French dubbing on the video, but you can hear Obama brand America as “one of the largest Muslim countries” at the 2:25 mark of the video.

Obama may be technically correct. If you compare the “number of Muslim Americans” — 1.8 to 3.0 million — to the Muslim population of other countries, 55 of 175 countries have more Muslims than does the United States. Nevertheless, his convoluted argument reminds me of that old adage you can prove anything with statistics.

If you consider the same population numbers and look at them as percentages, the usual and more meaningful way to deal with demographic data, you find that only 53 of 175 countries have a smaller Muslim population than does the United States. Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.

Now that he is President, Obama is no longer hiding from his Muslim heritage.

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I will begin this right at the top by saying that I don’t care a whit if the appointment of any American official brings hope to Egyptians. After all, an American official should be concerned with America’s interests not Egypt’s. Not that I am saying that American officials or appointments should necessarily have as a chief criteria for appointment an interest in the denigration of any foreign land, but that what’s good for America should be any new official’s chief concern.

However, apparently the L.A. Times thinks that it is germane to U.S. interests that Egyptians are “rejoicing” that President Obama has appointed a female American Muslim to his administration. In, “Muslim woman’s appointment as Obama advisor draws cautious optimism” from April 22, Noha El-Hennawy is reporting from Cairo that Egyptians are happy with Obama’s purported outreach to Muslims.

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