[Washington Post] Senior Obama administration officials are debating how to address a potential terrorist threat to U.S. interests from a Somali extremist group, with some in the military advocating strikes against its training camps. But many officials maintain that uncertainty about the intentions of the al-Shabab organization dictates a more patient, nonmilitary approach.

Al-Shabab, whose fighters have battled Ethiopian occupiers and the tenuous Somali government, poses a dilemma for the administration, according to several senior national security officials who outlined the debate only on the condition of anonymity.

The organization’s rapid expansion, ties between its leaders and al-Qaeda, and the presence of Americans and Europeans in its camps have raised the question of whether a preemptive strike is warranted. Yet the group’s objectives have thus far been domestic, and officials say that U.S. intelligence has no evidence it is planning attacks outside Somalia.

Gee, isn’t international waters “outside Somalia?” No matter. Team Obama is “mulling” their response. We can all take comfort in that. As can the families of victims terrorized and captured by Somali pirates. By “mulling” of course I mean weakness, which only encourages more acts of piracy. Obama is making Jimmy Carter look down right hawkish.

“The shores of Tripoli” isn’t just a rhyme in a patriotic song, it’s a solution President Thomas Jefferson offered his era’s piracy problems.

Wonder over what other events the Obama team is mulling?

Iran perhaps?

“Today, with the grace of God, Iran is a country controlling the entire nuclear fuel cycle,” proclaimed Iranian “President” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “Iran now controls the entire cycle for producing nuclear fuel with the opening of a new facility to produce uranium fuel pellets,” according to the Associated Press. It’s reportedly the last step in creating nuclear fuel.

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia successfully test-fired a Topol intercontinental ballistic missile on Friday as part of checks needed to extend its service life for up to 22 years, Russian media reported.

So much for Obama’s new arms control era.

And of course North Korea. It’s recent missile launching is “turning into an early test of the Obama administration’s U.N.-focused multilateralism.” In other words, Team Obama isn’t getting any further along with U.N. cooperation than Bush before him (or Clinton before him, and so on), did.

Just a few months ago Obama ridiculed his presidential opponent for needed to do more than one thing at a time. It’s a little harder when one is president though.

“Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something.”

So declared President Obama Sunday in Prague regarding North Korea’s missile launch, which America’s U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice added was a direct violation of U.N. resolutions. At which point, the Security Council spent hours debating its nonresponse, thus proving to nuclear proliferators everywhere that rules aren’t binding, violations won’t be punished, and words of warning mean nothing.

– Wall Street Journal. Read the rest.

[Fox News] A United Nations document on “climate change” that will be distributed to a major environmental conclave next week envisions a huge reordering of the world economy, likely involving trillions of dollars in wealth transfer, millions of job losses and gains, new taxes, industrial relocations, new tariffs and subsidies, and complicated payments for greenhouse gas abatement schemes and carbon taxes — all under the supervision of the world body.

Those and other results are blandly discussed in a discretely worded United Nations “information note” on potential consequences of the measures that industrialized countries will likely have to take to implement the Copenhagen Accord, the successor to the Kyoto Treaty, after it is negotiated and signed by December 2009. The Obama administration has said it supports the treaty process if, in the words of a U.S. State Department spokesman, it can come up with an “effective framework” for dealing with global warming.

Can you blame them? If the Obama Administration can spend $4 trillion in a just a few months (which is 8 times as much as it took the Bush administration to spend in 8 years!), the U.N. must figure they can get a piece of that action too. And now that Obama is in office, the Global Warming fearmongers are no longer — ahem — afraid to show that their intentions were always about wealth redistibution and never about the environment. That was just a ruse bought up by the Day After Tomorrow Hollywood fools.