President Barack Obama’s former mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, compared the United States with apartheid South Africa during a seminar in Chicago last week and claimed the civil rights movement was about “becoming white”, according to Newsmax.

The comments were part of a five-day class Obama’s former pastor taught at the Chicago Theological Seminary, according to Fox News and The New York Post.

In the seminar, Wright reportedly told those in the class they will never “be a brother to white folk,” describing racial divisions in the country as entrenched — as he did as pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ.

The civil rights movement “was always about becoming white,” Wright said at the seminar.

At another point, he said: “White folk done took this country. You’re in their home and they’re going to let you know it.”

Wright also alleged that the American education system is built to poorly educate black students “by malignant intent” and criticized civil rights leader Martin Luther King for advocating nonviolence, the Post reported.

“We probably have more African-Americans who’ve been brainwashed than we have South Africans who’ve been brainwashed,” he said.

Obama left Wright’s church during the 2008 presidential campaign, after his fiery sermons shook up the Democratic primary race and compelled Obama to distance himself from the pastor.

The Air Force is set to deliver the first of 18 new F-16 Fighting Falcon jet fighters to the Pakistani air force in a sign of deepening relations between the United States and Pakistan, according to AFPS’ Lisa Daniel and Donna Miles.

Three F-16s are scheduled to arrive in Pakistan on June 26, with 15 more to be delivered later this year and next, Air Force Maj. Todd Robbins, the Pakistan country director in the office of the undersecretary of the Air Force for international affairs, said in an interview with American Forces Press Service.

“This is the most visible part of a strong and growing relationship between the two air forces that will benefit us both near-term and long-term,” Robbins said.

This sale of F-16s to Pakistan renews new aircraft sales that existed between the United States and Pakistan in the 1980s, but were halted in the 1990s. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and other U.S. military and civilian leaders have spoken out about “not repeating the mistakes” of the U.S. halt in relations with Pakistan in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In March, the United States and Pakistan held their first ministerial-level strategic dialogue here, co-chaired by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Pakistan Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi. High-level officials from both governments participated in the dialogue, including Gates and Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Gates said then that the talks included discussion of “how we can help Pakistan in dealing with the security challenges that face them, but also face us and NATO as well.”

The two countries held follow-up meetings in Pakistan in early June that focused on improving military-to-military relations and security cooperation, officials said.

Relations with Pakistan improved after Sept. 11, 2001, Robbins said, “and this is just one very tangible example of the currently strong and growing relationship between the U.S. Air Force and the Pakistan air force and, in the larger context, between the United States and Pakistan.”

The F-16 is a multirole jet fighter sold to 24 countries around the world, according to its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin. The 18 being sold to Pakistan are the Block 52 versions of the aircraft, Robbins said, which will give Pakistan new capabilities, including day-night, all-weather and precision-attack capabilities.

“They’ve not had [these capabilities] before, so this is a major milestone in the U.S. providing this capability, which older models [of F-16s] don’t have,” he said. “This will enable them to strike terrorists within their borders while helping them to avoid collateral damage. It’s an increase in capabilities that are beneficial to us all.”

Pakistan is paying $1.4 billion for the 18 new aircraft, in addition to $1.3 billion in upgrades to its existing F-16 fleet, which are to begin being delivered in 2012, Robbins said.

The Air Force also is training Pakistan air force pilots. The first eight recently completed training with the Arizona National Guard in Tucson, with additional training done by Lockheed Martin, Robbins said. The Air Force also is training Pakistanis in night-attack training and recently completed training for four instructors and five flight leads, he said.

The military-to-military aspect of U.S. relations with China has lagged behind progress in other areas and falls short of what the leaders of both countries have said they want, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said here today, reports AFPS’ John D. Banusiewicz.

Shortly before arriving in Singapore to attend the “Shangri-La Dialogue” Asia security conference, Gates told reporters traveling with him that he had hoped to visit China while he was in the region, but that Chinese officials said it isn’t a good time.

He said he’d heard rumors for weeks that the potential visit wasn’t going to happen, but that he’d waited for formal word from the Chinese during the recent security and economic dialogue before the trip was removed from plans for his itinerary.

“I did not want to take a step that made it look like I was cancelling the visit,” he said, “and so I waited until we got something more official from the Chinese side.”

Gates said he believes a more-open dialogue with the Chinese about military modernization programs and about the two nations’ strategic views of the world would be constructive.

“We have had such a dialogue with Russia for over 30 years,” he said, “and I think it helps to prevent miscalculations and misunderstandings and creates opportunities for cooperation. So I’m disappointed that the [People’s Liberation Army] leadership has not seen the same potential benefits from this kind of a military-to-military relationship as their own leadership and the United States seem to think would be of benefit. So we’ll just wait and see.”

Asked whether he believes China is trying to make a point about U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, Gates pointed out that those arms sales have been going on for 30 years and were part of the process toward normalization of relations between the two countries.

“Central to our ability to go forward with normalization in 1979,” he said, “was the passage of the Taiwan Relations Act, which mandated that the United States maintain the defenses of Taiwan, and we have sold weapons to Taiwan ever since.

“This is not new news to the Chinese,” he continued. “And the sales under the Bush administration and under the Obama administration in both cases were carefully calibrated to keep them on the defensive side. So it depends on whether the Chinese want to make a big deal of it or not, but the reality is these arms sales go back to the beginning of the relationship, and were one of the conditions that came through the Congress as part of the normalization process.”

Gates said the arms sales have not inhibited development of the political and economic relationships between the United States and China.

“If they want to single out the military side of the relationship as the place where they want to play this out, then so be it,” the secretary said. “But it has not impeded the development of the relationship in other areas.”

Gates noted that President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao have advocated a “sustainable and reliable” relationship between their nations’ militaries.

“I think they mean a relationship that doesn’t move in fits and starts and isn’t affected by every change in the political weather,” he said, “and that’s where I would like to see this relationship go.”

The secretary said he believes the People’s Liberation Army could do more to advance its military-to-military relationship with the United States.

“I would just express it as my opinion that the PLA is significantly less interested in developing this relationship than the political leadership in the country,” he said.

While the global financial system remains transfixed by the problems of Greece and several other European countries risking default over their massive debts, the real threat is whether the credit standing and currency stability of the world’s biggest borrower, the United States, will be jeopardized by its disastrous outlook on deficits and debt.

That’s the fear raised in a devastating Op-Ed on the Financial Times website written by Roger Altman, a former deputy U.S. Treasury secretary under President Clinton who is now chairman of Evercore Partner, a leading global advisory and investment firm.

“America’s fiscal picture is even worse than it looks,” Altman writes. “The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office just projected that over 10 years, cumulative deficits will reach $9.7 trillion and federal debt 90 percent of gross domestic product – nearly equal to Italy’s.

“Global capital markets are unlikely to accept that credit erosion,” Altman says. “If they revolt, as in 1979, ugly changes in fiscal and monetary policy will be imposed on Washington. More than Afghanistan or unemployment, this is President Barack Obama’s greatest vulnerability.”

The financial outlook for the United States is frightening. The CBO projects the size of the federal debt to increase by nearly 250 percent over 10 years, from $7.5 trillion to a whopping $20 trillion.

The only remote comparison to such a debt load occurred during World War II, a global conflict that killed 50 million people, Altman and other analysts have written.

But there is no real comparison even in the 1940s and ’50s for such a rise in indebtedness – nothing remotely like it has occurred since record keeping began in 1792, Altman writes.

“It is so rapid that, by 2020, the Treasury may borrow about $5 trillion per year to refinance maturing debt and raise new money; annual interest payments on those borrowings will exceed all domestic discretionary spending and rival the defense budget,” Altman writes in Financial Times.

“Unfortunately, the healthcare bill has little positive budget impact in this period.

“Why is this outlook dangerous? Because dollar interest rates would be so high as to choke private investment and global growth,” Altman points out.

Altman makes clear that this mess is not entirely Obama’s doing. But the massive spending programs his administration proffers have taken a potential catastrophe in the making and made it much worse.

The severe fiscal decline during the past year reflects a continuation of the Bush deficits and the lower revenue and countercyclical spending triggered by the recession. Obama’s own initiatives are responsible for only 15 percent of the deterioration.

But Obama now owns this crisis. The economy is simply too weak right now to handle a severe deficit reduction plan, Altman says. And the budget commission Obama has appointed to study deficit reduction will not report until December, meaning much of 2011 could by consumed by further debate with little tough action.

But Altman says the solution is clear to everyone: “The deficit/GDP ratio must be reduced by at least 2 percent, or about $300 billion in annual spending. It must include large spending cuts, such as to entitlements, and new revenue.”

Altman says it also must come from higher taxes on income, capital gains and dividends, or a new tax, such as a progressive value-added tax (VAT).

But that clearly will be anathema to fiscal conservatives, especially in the wake of the enactment of the largest piece of social spending legislation in the past half century, the Obama healthcare law.

But to do nothing is unthinkable, Altman writes. “The second possible course is the opposite: government paralysis and 10 years of fiscal erosion. Debt reaches 90 percent of GDP. Interest rates go much higher, but the world’s capital markets finance these needs without serious instability.

“History suggests a third outcome is the likely one: one imposed by global markets. Yes, there may be calm in currency and credit markets over the next year or two. But the chances that they would accept such a long-term fiscal slide are low. Here, the 1979 dollar crash is instructive. The Iranian oil embargo, stagflation and a weakening dollar were roiling markets. Amid this nervousness, President Jimmy Carter submitted his budget, incorporating a larger than expected deficit.”

That triggered a plunge in the dollar that destabilized markets, forcing Carter to resubmit a tighter budget and the Fed to raise interest rates. Both actions harmed the economy and severely injured his presidency.

“America’s addiction to debt poses a similar threat now,” Altman concludes. “To avoid an imposed and ugly solution, Obama will have to invest all his political capital in a budget agreement next year. He will be advised that cutting spending and raising taxes is too risky for his 2012 re-election. But the alternative could be much worse.”

Why is President Barack Obama so obviously humiliating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?

Why is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton negating everything she said when she represented New York state and piling on the Jewish state?

They want Netanyahu out. Specifically, they want him to feel such pressure that he dumps his right-wing coalition partners and forms a new government with the center-left party Kadima, headed by former Prime Minister Tzipi Livni, according to Dick Morris.

Livni, who thinks nothing of trading land for peace, no matter how flawed the peace might be, will then hold Netanyahu’s government hostage and force it to bend to the will of Washington and sign a deal with the Palestinians that cedes them land in return for a handful of vague vapors and promises, none of which will be kept.

On March 3 Livni said, in a Knesset debate, that since Netanyahu took control “Israel has become a pariah country in the world.”

She is trying to use Obama’s and Clinton’s rejection of Netanyahu’s course to force her way into the government. And Obama and Clinton are intent on helping her do so by publicly humiliating Netanyahu.

Netanyahu insists that he’d be happy to negotiate a peace accord. But, as he told me last year, “I just don’t have a peace partner with whom to negotiate.”

The Palestinians are expert at playing “good cop/bad cop” with Israel. The good cop — the Palestinian Authority — wants to negotiate a peace deal and insists on signs of Israeli good faith in order to do so.

Meanwhile, the bad cop — Hamas — fires missiles at Israel from Gaza, land Israel ceded to the Palestinians in order to promote the peace process earlier in the decade.

Any peace deal with the Palestinian Authority will not be binding on Hamas, and the pattern of Gaza will likely play out again: First, Israel cedes land to the Palestinian Authority. Second, Hamas seizes the newly ceded land through elections or military action. Third, Hamas refuses to recognize the peace deal and uses the newly acquired territory as a base from which to launch further attacks against Israel.

Insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome each time.

When Hillary Clinton and President Obama explode in indignation against Israel for building apartments in East Jerusalem, they deliberately miss the point: There is no reason for Israel to catalyze peace negotiations when there is no single entity that is both committed to peace and speaks for the entire Palestinian people.

Without a peace partner, negotiations are either a trip to nowhere or a slippery slope to more Gaza-like concessions that do nothing but strengthen the enemies of Israel without providing any advancement to the cause of peace.

The merits of building in East Jerusalem or the need for a moratorium on all settlement construction are quite irrelevant as long as a substantial body of Palestinian opinion wants a war with Israel and the prevailing political authority in Gaza insists on the Jewish state’s eradication.

So why are Obama and Clinton so intent on raising the profile of the construction issue and publicizing it?

One suspects an effort is afoot to link Israeli resistance to the peace process with the ongoing loss of American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, if not to the global terrorism of al-Qaida.

Gen. David Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples [in the region] … Enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the area of responsibility.” In other words, blame Israel.

And ultimately, the administration’s agenda may be to explain its withdrawal of support for Israel by blaming its stubborn insistence on housing construction.

One can well see the Obama administration learning to live with an Iranian nuclear weapon, all the while blaming Israel for fomenting Iranian hostility by building housing.

Meanwhile, through American aid to Gaza, the Obama administration is helping Hamas to solidify its position in Gaza and lengthen its lease on political power — the very power it is using to torpedo the peace process.

The Defense Department’s FY 2010 Supplemental Budget Request calls for 33 billion dollars, most of it for operations in Afghanistan.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates says it’s too early to tell whether President Obama’s new way forward in Afghanistan is working.

Commander, U.S. Pacific Command Admiral Robert Willard says, although the U.S. remains the pre-eminent power in the Asia-Pacific, China’s rising influence is creating new challenges.

The U.S. and the Republic of Korea recently completed the ”Key Resolve/Foal Eagle 2010” training exercise.

The U.S. and Russia have reached an agreement on cutting nuclear arms.

A group of ”Wounded Warriors” is on a therapeutic bike ride across Texas.

Conservatives and national security experts are condemning the Obama Administration’s missteps and mishandling of the valuable U.S.-Israeli relationship.

One Republican leader, former GOP presidential candidate Gary Bauer claims President Barack Obama displays an “outrageous hostility toward the only reliable democratic friend we have in the Middle East.”

Bauer, an influential Christian conservative known for his work on behalf of Israel, had an itinerary very similar to Vice President Biden’s last week. Bauer’s itinerary included meeting with Israel’s leadership, as he has many times before. He was in Israel as the current escalation in flawed U.S.-Israeli relations began with the announcement of a new building project in Jerusalem, Israel’s capital.

The president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families made the following statement: “It is obvious that in recent days the Obama administration has manufactured a crisis with Israel and is doing everything it can to humiliate our ally and weaken the Israeli government on the eve of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

“We shouldn’t lose sight of what set off the administration’s tirade. It was the on-going process of authorizing homes to be built in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel for its people. No other nation in the world runs its housing decisions by the Obama administration, but Israel is expected to do so, leading to numerous Obama officials denouncing our ally and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calling Israel’s behavior ‘insulting,’” said Bauer.

During the 1980’s, then-leftist lawyer Hillary Rodham Clinton served on the board of the New World Foundation, which funneled money to the Palestine Liberation Organization, at a time when the PLO was officially recognized by the United States as a terrorist organization.

“[I]t is an insult to Israeli sovereignty to suggest that it must get the Obama administration’s permission to build homes for Israeli Jews. The homes are not the reason peace has been elusive in the Middle East. There is no peace because Israel’s enemies refuse its right to exist at all,” said Bauer.

What is particularly telling is that this is a president who bowed to a Saudi king, who has repeatedly held his hand out to Iran only to have his face slapped in response and who has regularly suffered the slings and arrows of insults from Russia, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, to name a few. For whom does he reserve his anger, toughness and vehemence? For Israel, the only reliable ally we have in the Middle East, say many national security experts.

Even in the last few weeks, the Obama Administration weakly responded to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s insult of accusing the U.S. of ‘colonialism,’ and publicly apologized to Moammar Gadhafi for allegedly treating him with less than the appropriate level of respect after Libya called for a ‘jihad’ against peaceful Switzerland.

“Last week a Gallup poll showed support for Israel among the American people at 64%. When President Obama attacks Israel, he may gain the applause of Middle East thugs, but he will not get the support of the American people,” Bauer said.

Critics are upset over Obama’s “Middle East Peace” team such as Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell. In her early days as an attorney, Clinton was quite vocal regarding her support for the Yassir Arafat and the PLO. In addition, she uttered anti-Israeli accusations. In May 1998, she told a youth conference on Middle East peace in Villars, Switzerland, that she supports the eventual creation of an independent Palestinian state.

Then, in November 1999, while on a purported State visit to the Middle East, she publicly appeared with Yasser Arafat’s wife Suha. With Hillary at her side, Suha Arafat made the deliberately false allegation that “Our [Palestinian] people have been submitted to the daily and intensive use of poisonous gas by the Israeli forces, which has led to an increase in cancer cases among women and children.” Mrs. Arafat also accused Israel of contaminating much of the water sources used by Palestinians with “chemical materials” and poisoning Palestinian women and children with toxic gases.

Instead of reacting with outrage, Hillary Clinton sat by silently and gave her a hug and a kiss when she finished speaking. Later, many hours after the event, and only after a media furor put her on the spot for what many view as a bit more than a mere political “faux pas”, Mrs. Clinton called on “all sides” to refrain from “inflammatory rhetoric and baseless accusations” – including Israel, whose leaders made no such accusations. 

Similarly, in February 1996, Hillary hosted a reception at the White House for leaders of Hamas-supporting groups such as the American Muslim Council and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. And in January, 1998, Hillary hosted another White House reception honoring Muslim leaders and the Muslim Public Affairs Council who defended militant Islamic fundamentalism and also supported radical Islamic groups.