So Who Forgot to tell Mother Nature about Global Warming?

Snow falls in western ND, in June

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Walmart is Creating Jobs!!

Via(Yahoo News)

Wal-Mart says it will create 22,000 jobs in 2009

BENTONVILLE, Ark. – As Wal-Mart Stores Inc. opens about 150 new or expanded stores in the U.S. in 2009, the company expects to hire about 22,000 people for new positions.

Those positions include plenty of cashiers and stock clerks, but the world’s largest retailer will also be adding store managers, pharmacists and personnel workers.

Wal-Mart is holding its annual shareholders meeting on Friday, and employees from its stores around the world are spending the week in Bentonville at company headquarters.

Wal-Mart, still the target of criticism from union-backed groups for its pay and benefits, has improved its health insurance coverage and opened it to full- and part-time employees. The company says 94 percent of its employees have health coverage, either through Wal-Mart or another family member.

“At Wal-Mart, we offer competitive pay and benefits and real opportunities for our associates to advance and build careers,” Wal-Mart Vice Chairman Eduardo Castro-Wright said. “Job creation is just one way in which we’re working hard every day to help people across this country live better.”

Other employee benefits include a 401(k) plan, stock purchases and discounts for workers making in-store purchases.

The company has touted its generic drugs program in which Wal-Mart is selling $4 prescriptions for many popular medicines. Competitors, such as Kroger Co., have matched the price for some prescriptions.

“During this difficult economic time, we’re proud to be able to create quality jobs for thousands of Americans this year,” Castro-Wright said.

Earlier this year, the company shared more than $2 billion with its workers through bonuses, profit sharing and payments into the company 401(k) plan.

Wal-Mart has more than 2.1 million employees in the U.S. and abroad. The company had sales last fiscal year of $401 billion.

Well at least we have jobs being made for some in this country.

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

American Flag, Offensive??

Via(CBS 11 News Mansfield, TX)

This is NEVER OFFENSIVE!!

Supervisor Asks Woman To Take Down American Flag

Is it okay to show your patriotism at the office?

For one Arlington woman, the answer was “no” after she hung an American flag in her office just before the Memorial Day weekend.

Debbie McLucas is one of four hospital supervisors at Kindred Hospital in Mansfield. Last week, she hung a three-by-five foot American flag in the office she shares with the other supervisors.

When McLucas came to work Friday, her boss told her another supervisor had found her flag offensive. “I was just totally speechless. I was like, ‘You’re kidding me,'” McLucas said.

McLucas’ husband and sons are former military men. Her daughter is currently serving in Iraq as a combat medic.

Stifling a cry, McLucas said, “I just wonder if all those young men and women over there are really doing this for nothing.”

McLucas said the supervisor who complained has been in the United States for 14 years and is formerly from Africa. McLucas said that supervisor took down the flag herself.

“The flag and the pole had been placed on the floor,” McLucas said. But McLucas also said hospital higher-ups had told her some patients’ families and visitors had also complained.

“I was told it wouldn’t matter if it was only one person,” she said. “It would have to come down.”

McLucas said hospital bosses told her as far as patriotism was concerned, the flag flying outside the hospital building would have to suffice.

Rest of the story here:

Well looks like the hospital is treating to do major damage control.  The story doesn’t jive at all.

Read the Kindred Damage Control Press Release here:

You can also email them your thoughts here:

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Kindergarteners NO/ Pittsburgh Steelers YES!

Via(NewsBusters.org)

Omission Watch: Obama White House Snubs Sobbing Kindergartners for Steelers Event

Via Greg Pollowitz at NRO Media Blog, we learn from the local Washington NBC affiliate that a group of kindergartners from Stafford County, Virginia were turned away at the gate on Thursday morning for being too late for their White House tour.

Parents say they were just 10 minutes late for the scheduled tour. School officials say White House staff said they needed to get ready for the president’s event with the Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers, so they couldn’t come in.

“Here we have President Obama and his administration saying, ‘Here we are for the common, middle class people,’ and here he is not letting 150 5- and 6-year-olds into the White House because he’s throwing a lunch for a bunch of grown millionaires,” Stine said.

The person who headed this White House trip up came out and said, ‘I’m sorry, the White House tour’s off.’ There were a lot of crying kids,” parent Barbara Stine said….

Paty Stine said the White House staff should have made an exception. She feels the kindergarteners were snubbed for the Steelers.

Organizers of the visit from Conway Elementary said they left the school at 8:30, but ran into heavy traffic and were ten minutes late for a 10:15 appointment. White House officials told the local NBC affiliate a different story, that the students were expected at 9:30.

Anyone who lives in northern Virginia knows it would be foolish to only budget an hour to travel Interstate 95 in the morning rush hour from the northern outskirts of Fredericksburg and hope to arrive in downtown Washington. The White House story sounds fishy, although the school probably should have allowed even more time for the commute.

As the White House plans to reschedule after the small amount of embarrassing publicity, school officials are sounding very unperturbed by the snub. A quick Nexis search finds no national network coverage, not even NBC, and nothing in the Washington Post or Washington Times.

But when the smallest Bush boo-boo (like trying to open a locked door in Beijing) can be a major story, skipping this kind of story would demonstrate that network morning shows who love stuffing their broadcasts with light stories of interest to young moms are taking a pass to protect all the gooey Obama family public relations they’ve offered in the first 100 days and more.

—Tim Graham is Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

New TV Channel, Obama/WhiteHouse Channel!

Via(PoliticalPunch)

Do You Want Your OTV?

On April 27, President Obama welcomed the University of Connecticut Lady Huskies, who had just won the NCAA women’s basketball championship.

After the event, President Obama went to the White House basketball court to shoot hoop with the Lady Huskies.  The White House press corps was not allowed to attend.

Reads the print pool report from that day: “After shaking hands with the team’s parents and members of Congress who showed up, the president walked the team over to his basketball court and shot hoops. The pool was held back from the stroll down the drive and around the corner, and couldn’t see the court. Poolers could hear periodic cheering coming from the other side of the bushes.”

Read the TV pool report: “Your Pool was not allowed to go over and shoot POTUS with the team shooting hoops.  We protested loudly.” Now we know why: Obama White House officials decided to do their own media report on the visit, complete with cuts, interviews, and chyrons identifying who’s speaking.

Also, just like a network, they have their own little logo!

Cute!

It’s perfectly fine, of course, for the White House to put out its own version of events — but is it right to do so by preventing actual reporters from covering something? (Even something like a pickup basketball game).

Do Obama White House officials think their media coverage isn’t flattering enough?

Is the goal to ultimately replace the pesky photographers who film what they want to and not what they’re told to (not to mention the annoying reporters who ask uncomfortable questions about, say, detainee policy and bank bailouts)?

Do you want your OTV? (I’ll bet there are a few takers out there.)

– jpt

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Humans Hibernating??

Via(CNSNews)

Federal Research is Exploring Potential for ‘Human Hibernation’

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a $2,227,500 grant to explore the possibility of inducing a hibernation-like state in “non-hibernating mammals” such as humans.

Cheng Chi Lee, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston, is the main man behind the research.

Lee discovered that a particular molecule–the 5-prime adenosine monophosphate (5’-AMP) molecule–can induce a short hibernation-like state in mammals that do not normally hibernate. He said he is now trying to find ways to maintain that state long enough to perform major surgeries that could save human lives.Although he is currently conducting the research on mice, Lee told CNSNews.com that he eventually wants to translate his findings to clinical practice.

“That’s what I think all scientists’ goals are, basically,” he said.

When an animal hibernates, he explained, its cells are deprived of the oxygen it receives during its waking hours. The cells can better endure this low-oxygen state when the animal reaches a state of hypothermia and its metabolism slows.

Similarly, a heart attack or stroke starves an organ of its oxygen. According to Lee, physicians have long been using cooling procedures to help human cells survive these conditions.

“If you follow the ambulance services now in response to heart attack–the first response when you reach a heart attack patient is to bring the body temperature down as quickly as possible while the patient is being transported to the hospital,” Lee said.

“If you cool the body temperature down, then you expand the window of preventing ischemia [oxygen-shortage] damage. It’s really simple, because if the cell is cooled, it needs less oxygen.”

Lee said the same principle applies to organ transplants. When the organ donor and recipient live in different parts of the country, the organ is preserved in an ice cooler or other refrigeration system during transport.

“It’s purely in a cool state, and the reason is that, as you cool the cells down, the need for oxygen decreases dramatically,” Lee said.

“This has been going on for a long time,” he told CNSNews.com. “Doctors have recognized this wonderfulness of the cooling process, but the catch in this area is that the cooling process is very difficult. It’s not very efficient.

“My hope is that by looking at how the body responds to the ability to cool, we can, down the road, provide a system to enhance the process,” Lee said.

In essence, Lee’s research may make hypothermia and human “hibernation” into clinical tools.

“The induction of hypometabolism in cells and organs to reduce ischemia damage holds enormous clinical promise in diverse fields, including treatment of stroke and heart attack,” Lee wrote in the Annual Review of Medicine in 2008.

The NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, which is funding this research, awards $500,000 annually to each researcher for five years. By 2011, this project will have cost $2.5 million. Lee said he hopes to apply for more NIH grants to fund his research for at least five or 10 more years.

“It takes some time for any tools to become common practice,” Lee explained. “If we can get something to clinical usage within five years, then I think we have done very well. That would be my dream. Even 10 years, it will be a very good achievement.”

Continue Article here:

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Obama-Care: Killing Off Grandma and Grandpa & Cost-Savings?

Via(SteveMaloneyGOP)

Barack Obama’s Culture of Death

The biggest issue that lies before America is Barack Hussein Obama’s version of national health care. Obama claims that increasing demands on the health care system, which his plan surely will do, is somehow going to lower costs while increasing quality.

Based on the experiences of other countries, including Canada and European nations, Obama-care eventually may lower unit costs modestly (mainly through rationing). On the minus side, it will decimate the quality of care. It will make the world’s gold standard in health care — the U.S. — start to resemble your local Department of Motor Vehicles (“take a number please”).

I’ll be writing on this subject for the next week to 10 days, and I hope you’ll follow along.

One way Obama wants to control health costs is by increasing the number of abortions, both in the U.S. and worldwide. The basic concept is that dead embryos don’t incur any additional health costs. I’ll write more about that later.

For now, however, I want to focus on the severely infirm and/or “terminally ill” elderly. Here’s what Obama recently said about them. He admitted he wants the government to decide what health care Americans receive.

“There’s always going to be an asymmetry of information between patient and provider,” he said. “And part of what I think government can do effectively is to be an honest broker in assessing and evaluating treatment options.” In other words, the federal government would be a middle-man, basically usurping a doctor’s determination what treatment is appropriate.

Continue Reading here:

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Photo Ops more Important for White House!

Via(WallStreetJournal)

A ‘Classified’ Photo Op Turns Into a Soaring Blunder for the White House

Mission to Get Beauty Shots of Presidential Jet at Statue of Liberty Panics 9/11-Wary New York

By SUZANNE SATALINE, JONATHAN D. ROCKOFF and CHRISTOPHER CONKEY

As secret missions go, this one was a flop.

On Monday morning, one of the 747s used to ferry around the U.S. president was dispatched to the Statue of Liberty, escorted by a fighter jet. Assignment: Get some fresh glamour shots of the plane.

The Air Force said the flight needed to remain confidential. So while New York police knew about it, as did at least one person in the mayor’s office, regular New Yorkers remained in the dark.

As a result, to onlookers Monday all across downtown Manhattan — where the World Trade Center once stood — the photo shoot looked like a terrorist attack. People watched in horror as a massive aircraft, trailed closely by an F-16 fighter jet, banked and roared low near the city, in a frightening echo of the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

Fearing the worst, thousands of people streamed out of the skyscrapers and into the streets. Some buildings ordered evacuations. “Oh God, it was mayhem in here, just mayhem,” says Rubin Shimon, manager of Styling Haircutters, a barbershop near Ground Zero. Many people took shelter in the shop to call loved ones on their cellphones.

It was all over in a half-hour or so. Then the finger-pointing began. “I’m annoyed — furious is a better word — that I wasn’t told,” said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg at a news conference. He’d been scheduled to talk about a swine-flu outbreak at a Queens school, but also sounded off at the federal government for its “badly conceived” flyover plan.

He chastised his own office for its role in keeping the flyover secret. On Thursday night, city officials say, a junior mayoral aide had been alerted to the flyover by the Federal Aviation Administration, which requested that it be kept secret. Someone in City Hall alerted the New York Police Department, but no public announcement was made.

Marc Mugnos was reprimanded for not apprising the mayor, and a disciplinary letter was placed in his file, a spokesman said. Mr. Mugnos couldn’t be reached for comment.

The email sent to City Hall describes a “flying photo op” — government-speak for a publicity photo — to include two or possibly three passes over the area. The email, sent by an FAA official and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, lists flight patterns and specifies a photo-op altitude of 1,000 to 1,500 feet.

The email specifies that the information “only be shared with persons with a need to know” and “shall not be released to the public.” It also says that, “Due to the possibility of public concern regarding [Department of Defense] aircraft flying at low levels, coordination with Federal, State and Local law enforcement agencies…has been accomplished.”

The email’s author, James J. Johnston, of FAA air traffic, declined to comment.

An Obama administration official said the mission was “classified” by the military and that the FAA, which controls much of the airspace over Manhattan, did what the military asked. “The mission was to send [the aircraft] up to get a picture of it flying around the Statue of Liberty,” this person said. “They said they needed to update their photo files.” President Obama wasn’t aboard.

The New York photo shoot wasn’t the only one planned. The White House had scheduled a follow-up session on May 5 or May 6 in Washington, D.C., according to two government officials. The D.C. flyover has now been canceled, a government official said.

Louis Caldera, a former Secretary of the Army who runs the White House Military Office, took the blame. “While federal authorities took the proper steps to notify state and local authorities in New York and New Jersey, it’s clear that the mission created confusion and disruption,” he said. “I apologize and take responsibility for any distress that flight caused.”

Mr. Caldera met Monday afternoon with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina “to hear the president’s displeasure,” an official said.

It was a beautiful spring day in the Big Apple — perfect for picture taking. The aircraft, painted in White House livery, was trailed by one F-16 fighter jet. The aircraft had flown from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, across New Jersey, down the Hudson River and then circled the Statue of Liberty before heading off.

For many who witnessed the maneuver, it stirred dark memories. Andrew Wybolt, who works for Barclays PLC in a skyscraper that borders the Hudson, said people rushed for the windows when they heard the planes. “They just started sprinting and freaking out,” he said.

Thousands of workers from Merrill Lynch, American Express and other companies in the buildings that ring the former World Trade Center site hustled for the exits. Many stood outside their offices, nervously looking up into the sky, while hundreds of others walked north, along the West Side Highway, as thousands of people had done the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

“To do something like this to all these people who have already been through 9-11 is just wrong,” said Greg Forman, a broker at the New York Mercantile Exchange, which is located in a building along the Hudson river, across the street from the World Trade Center site.

One block north, construction workers on the 43-story Goldman Sachs Group Inc. tower said they had a close-up view of the low-flying plane. “I saw that thing coming and ran down the stairs,” said Eddie Navedo, who was clearing construction debris on the 23rd floor of the new building when he spotted the plane flying low over the river, then banking sharply to the west. “Everybody was saying, it’s a terrorist attack.”

Not everyone lost his cool. Mr. Shimon, the manager of the barbershop where people fled on Monday, was present for the attacks in 2001, and in fact at that time worked in a shop even closer to the World Trade Center than his current one. He watched the towers fall that day.

So did the events of Monday scare him? “To tell you the truth, not really,” Mr. Shimon said. “I didn’t think it was such a big deal. I’m a New Yorker.”

—Jonathan Weisman, Alex Frangos and Michael Corkery contributed to this article.

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Thank You Condoleezza Rice!!

As Bush Adviser, Rice Gave OK to Waterboard

As national security adviser in the Bush White House, Condoleezza Rice verbally OK’d the CIA’s request to subject top Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah to waterboarding in July 2002.

WASHINGTON — As national security adviser to former President George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice verbally approved the CIA’s request to subject high-ranking Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah to waterboarding in July 2002, the earliest known decision by a Bush administration official to OK use of the simulated drowning technique.

Rice’s role was detailed in a narrative released Wednesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee. It provides the most detailed timeline yet for how the CIA’s harsh interrogation program was conceived and approved at the highest levels in the Bush White House.

The new timeline shows that Rice played a greater role than she admitted last fall in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The narrative also shows that dissenting legal views about the severe interrogation methods were brushed aside repeatedly.

The Intelligence Committee’s timeline comes a day after the Senate Armed Services Committee released an exhaustive report detailing direct links between the CIA’s harsh interrogation program and abuses of prisoners at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in Afghanistan and at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.

Both revelations follow President Barack Obama’s release of internal Bush administration legal memos that justified the use of severe methods by the CIA, a move that kicked up a firestorm from opposing sides of the ideological spectrum.

According to the new narrative, which compiles legal advice provided by the Bush administration to the CIA, Rice personally conveyed the administration’s approval for waterboarding of Zubaydah, a so-called high-value detainee, to then-CIA Director George Tenet in July 2002.

Last fall, Rice acknowledged to the Senate Armed Services Committee only that she had attended meetings where the CIA interrogation request was discussed and asked for the attorney general to conduct a legal review. She said she did not recall details. Rice omitted her direct role in approving the program in her written statement to the committee.

A spokesman for Rice declined comment when reached Wednesday.

Days after Rice gave Tenet the nod, the Justice Department approved the use of waterboarding in a top secret Aug. 1 memo. Zubaydah underwent waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002.

In the years that followed, according to the narrative issued Wednesday, there were numerous internal legal reviews of the program, suggesting government attorneys raised concerns that the harsh methods, particularly waterboarding, might violate federal laws against torture and the U.S. Constitution.

But Bush administration lawyers continued to validate the program. The CIA voluntarily dropped the use of waterboarding, which has a long history as a torture tactic, from its arsenal of techniques after 2005.

According to the two Senate reports, CIA lawyers first presented the plan to waterboard Zubaydah to White House lawyers in April 2002, a few weeks after he was taken into custody in 2002 in a Pakistani safe house.

Tenet wrote in his memoir that CIA officers themselves originated the idea.

In May 2002, Rice, along with then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales met at the White House with the CIA to discuss the use of waterboarding.

The Armed Services Committee report says that six months earlier, in December 2001, the Pentagon’s legal office already had made inquiries about the use of mock interrogation and detention tactics to a U.S. military training unit that schools armed forces personnel in how to endure harsh treatment. A former intelligence official said Wednesday the CIA officers also based their proposed harsh interrogations on the mock interrogation methods used by the unit.

He declined to be identified because the CIA had not authorized the disclosure of the information.
In July 2002, responding to a follow-up from the Pentagon general counsel’s office, officials at the training unit, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, detailed their methods for the Pentagon. The list included waterboarding.

But the training unit warned that harsh physical techniques could backfire by making prisoners more resistant. They also cautioned about the reliability of information gleaned from the severe methods and warned that the public and political backlash could be “intolerable.”

“A subject in extreme pain may provide an answer, any answer or many answers in order to get the pain to stop,” the training officials said in their memo.

Less than a week later, the Justice Department issued two legal opinions that sanctioned the CIA’s harsh interrogation program. The memos appeared to draw deeply on the survival school data provided to the Pentagon to show that the CIA’s methods would not cross the line into torture.

The opinion concluded that the harsh interrogation methods would be acceptable for use on terror detainees because the same techniques did not cause severe physical or mental pain to U.S. military students who were tested in the government’s carefully controlled training program.

Several people from the survival program objected to the use of their mock interrogations in battlefield settings. In an October 2002 e-mail, a senior Army psychologist told personnel at Guantanamo Bay that the methods were inherently dangerous and students were sometimes injured, even in a controlled setting.

“The risk with real detainees is increased exponentially,” he said.

Nevertheless, for the next two years, the CIA and military officials received interrogation training and direct interrogation support from JPRA trainers.

Last week, the Obama administration’s top intelligence official, Dennis Blair, privately told intelligence employees that “high value information” was obtained through the harsh interrogation techniques. However, on Tuesday, in a written statement, Blair said, “The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means.”

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Hey Obama, America needs give NO APOLOGIES!!

The President’s Apology Tour

Great leaders aren’t defined by consensus.

By KARL ROVE

President Barack Obama has finished the second leg of his international confession tour. In less than 100 days, he has apologized on three continents for what he views as the sins of America and his predecessors.

Mr. Obama told the French (the French!) that America “has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive” toward Europe. In Prague, he said America has “a moral responsibility to act” on arms control because only the U.S. had “used a nuclear weapon.” In London, he said that decisions about the world financial system were no longer made by “just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy” — as if that were a bad thing. And in Latin America, he said the U.S. had not “pursued and sustained engagement with our neighbors” because we “failed to see that our own progress is tied directly to progress throughout the Americas.”

By confessing our nation’s sins, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that Mr. Obama has “changed the image of America around the world” and made the U.S. “safer and stronger.” As evidence, Mr. Gibbs pointed to the absence of protesters during the Summit of the Americas this past weekend.

That’s now the test of success? Anti-American protesters are a remarkably unreliable indicator of a president’s wisdom. Ronald Reagan drew hundreds of thousands of protesters by deploying Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe. Those missiles helped win the Cold War.

There is something ungracious in Mr. Obama criticizing his predecessors, including most recently John F. Kennedy. (“I’m grateful that President [Daniel] Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old,” Mr. Obama said after the Nicaraguan delivered a 52-minute anti-American tirade that touched on the Bay of Pigs.) Mr. Obama acts as if no past president — except maybe Abraham Lincoln — possesses his wisdom.

Mr. Obama was asked in Europe if he believes in American exceptionalism. He said he did — in the same way that “the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism.” That’s another way of saying, “No.”

Mr. Obama makes it seem as though there is moral equivalence between America and its adversaries and assumes that if he confesses America’s sins, other nations will confess theirs and change. But he won no confessions (let alone change) from the leaders of Venezuela, Nicaragua or Russia. He apologized for America and our adversaries rejoiced. Fidel Castro isn’t easing up on Cuban repression, but he is preparing to take advantage of Mr. Obama’s policy shifts.

When a president desires personal popularity, he can lose focus on vital American interests. It’s early, but with little to show for the confessions, David Axelrod of Team Obama was compelled to say this week that the president planted, cultivated and will harvest “very, very valuable” returns later. Like what?

Meanwhile, the desire for popularity has led Mr. Obama to embrace bad policies. Blaming America for the world financial crisis led him to give into European demands for crackdowns on tax havens and hedge funds. Neither had much to do with the credit crisis. Saying that America’s relationship with Russia “has been allowed to drift” led the president to push for arms negotiations. But that draws attention away from America’s real problems with Russia: its invasion of Georgia last summer, its bullying of Ukraine, its refusal to join in pressuring Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions, and its threats of retaliation against the Poles, Balts and Czechs for standing with the U.S. on missile defense.

Mr. Obama is downplaying the threats we face. He takes comfort in thinking that Venezuela has a defense budget that “is probably 1/600th” of America’s — it’s actually 1/215th — but that hasn’t kept Mr. Chávez from supporting narcoterrorists waging war on Colombia (a key U.S. ally) or giving petrodollars to anti-American regimes. Venezuela isn’t likely to attack the U.S., but it is capable of harming American interests.

Henry Kissinger wrote in his memoir “Years of Renewal”: “The great statesmen of the past saw themselves as heroes who took on the burden of their societies’ painful journey from the familiar to the as yet unknown. The modern politician is less interested in being a hero than a superstar. Heroes walk alone; stars derive their status from approbation. Heroes are defined by inner values; stars by consensus. When a candidate’s views are forged in focus groups and ratified by television anchorpersons, insecurity and superficiality become congenital.”

A superstar, not a statesman, today leads our country. That may win short-term applause from foreign audiences, but do little for what should be the chief foreign policy preoccupation of any U.S. president: advancing America’s long-term interests.

Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie