A background in communicating...

Poor Peggy has a piece about how she's starting "to worry about the basic competency of the administration, its ability to perform the most fundamental duties of executive management." I told her that was coming back in 2009, but did she listen?

Incompetence - Peggy Noonan's Blog - WSJ:

...People who run big businesses learn these facts of executive leadership early on. So do leaders of small businesses and great nonprofit organizations, and local political leaders in charge of local agencies whose success or failure can be charted.

Most of the Obama people just don't have a background in executing. They have a background in communicating, not doing. That's where their talent is--it's where their boss's talent is--and it's a good talent, but not one that will in itself force a government to work well....

They took a 46-year old who had never accomplished anything, never run anything in his life, and put him in charge of the whole shebang. And then people are surprised when he turns out to be more of a talker than a doer?

And "A background in communicating" can be useful... as long as you are communicating Truth.

Hollow men...

Roger L. Simon , The Rise of Al-Qaeda and Why the Administration Lied about Benghazi:

...Lately, Obama has incurred the ire -- with some justification, I think -- of new Egyptian military strongman al-Sisi for going against the wishes of the Egyptian people in favor of a kind of desperate nostalgia for Morsi and the Brotherhood. (Forget the rapes and the rest of it.)

So what accounts for Obama's weird attraction for this "Muslim revivalism," despite all its Medieval tenets and near-psychotic behaviors?

No, he is not a Muslim. I repeat NOT (just to be absolutely clear). Nor is the president a Christian, unless you count Reverend Wright as such, which is ridiculous (and we all know he's under the bus anyway).

Obama is a postmodern agnostic par excellence. But like so many schooled in post-modernism and cultural relativism, he has an immediate and intense enmity for anything that smacks of imperialism -- and an equally intense desire to be seen as supportive of (although certainly not to live like) the downtrodden of the Earth....

Sorry, but I don't think "enmity for imperialism" explains much. It's just an often-useful excuse to attack what really bugs them. Lefties don't really care much about those post-colonial countries. They only take notice of them when the US or Israel impinges on them somehow. Obama has never given Kenya the time of day, though his father and brother are from there.

And if they cared about colonialism you would see lots of focus on the UK, France, Russia, Spain and Portugal. Do you see much of that?

People like Obama, and there are a lot of them now, are hollowed out. They have lost belief in anything. In anything bigger than themselves. And they know deep down something is wrong. They lack belief, so anything that smacks of belief irritates and pains them. They hate America and Israel, because those two countries are the only ones that command belief. They are symbols of belief, and this stuff works at the level of symbols perceived by the unconscious.

Other things that symbolize belief include our military, firearms and self-defense, traditional marriage, and the sanctity of life. Plus of course orthodox Christian and Jewish faith. (so of corse they find Islam attractive. A fake religion that works as a shield against God's Truth.) ALL of these things irritate lefties like Obama, as I can tell you, living as I do in über-liberal SF.

People like Obama do not in fact even believe in their leftism. They are never found dying in any revolution. They just wear leftism (or pacifism or some times libertarianism) as a disguise. And they are currently happily intertwined with Wall Street in a way that clearly shows they aren't of the Left. (The Wall-Streeters are hollow men too. None of them believes in capitalism or economic freedom. Only self.)

"What is the true state of our union?"

Charlene recommends this, Sarah Palin, on the State of the Union address, #SOTUGottaBKiddingMe | Facebook:

...We heard the same recycled rhetoric, and we heard his Orwellian declaration that the cornucopia of new federal programs he proposed, as well as his intention to eradicate world poverty, wouldn’t “increase our deficit by a single dime.”  

Of course, he glossed over the inconvenient facts. He boasted about job creation, but didn’t mention that real unemployment is higher today than when he took office. He touted all those still undiscovered “clean energy” jobs without mentioning the tens of thousands of real jobs the Keystone Pipeline will create if he would simply allow it to be built. He sang of new energy development, but didn’t mention that new offshore leases for oil and natural gas drilling have declined a decimating 61% under his administration.  

He talked about “helping” to build “a thriving middle class,” but didn’t address how the middle class is actually faring under his economic stewardship. This is important – his deception must be addressed: under his leadership, middle class families have seen the average price per gallon of gas increase 96%, the average cost of family health care premiums rise 24%, the annual cost per household from federal regulations rise to over $15,000, and real median household income decline $4,520. If this is what happens when he “helps” the middle class, then please, Mr. President, we implore you to stop “helping” us....


...What is the true state of our union? Though this may sound harsh, I’ll speak the truth here. We are a country going bankrupt to fund a bloated, distant, and often corrupt federal government led by venal politicians more concerned with paying off their campaign cronies and consolidating their own power than in preserving the constitutional republic that so many have fought and died for (including our brave men and women in uniform who were barely mentioned last night)...

I sort of post this for old time's sake. I've been mostly disappointed with Sarah since the 2008 election. She grew from city councilwoman to mayor to governor like a natural. But she doesn't seem to have grown into presidential timber.

This post is very clear and concise on Benghazi...

Recommended by Charlene...

J O S H U A P U N D I T:

...It gets even worse. The men in the consulate contacted the White House by phone at 10 PM Libya time, 4 PM Washington time when the attack began, and the White House was able to communicate with them and watch the attack in real time while it was occurring, thanks to a drone overhead.

The president could have ordered F-18s to fly overhead on afterburners and even fire into the mob, something that's worked in the past when it comes to dispersing attackers. They could have been there in an hour. He could have immediately ordered a full contingent of Special Operations Forces to fly in from the U.S. military base in Sigonella, Sicily. They could have been on the ground in less than three hours.

The president did nothing except to belatedly order a 22 man force to proceed from our embassy in Tripoli, about the same distance away as Sigonella. They did not arrive at Benghazi airport until 4 AM Libya time, six hours after the attack began.

By that time, Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans were dead.

They died because they were not treated as American personnel under attack who needed to be rescued, but as a situation to be managed so as not to offend Muslim sensibilities. And after their deaths, they became a political problem to be handled so as not to embarrass this president. So a scenario was concocted about a spontaneous protest aggravated over a video.It was a scenario that everyone directly from President Obama on down knew was false.

These e-mails and other information about the Benghazi debacle would likely not have surfaced if it hadn't been for President Obama's insistence that the White House was 'not informed', and his blaming the entire fiasco on the State Department and the intelligence community. Apparently some of the people involved in this didn't take kindly to that.

For President Obama, there's no cover, no spin and no excuses possible any more, although I'm sure the attempt will be made. What happened in Benghazi was the culmination of his failed foreign policy in the Middle East,and his reacting as he did a perfect example of his weakness and lack of character.

It was the ultimate appeasement in a failed presidency....

Yeah. And they were probably calculating what effect action would have on those cowardly hermaphrodites, the "undecided voters," may they have a special circle in hell allotted to them. Which is also presumably why Romney didn't blast Obama over this in the last debate.

Well, he is like Jesus. Because...

Michelle Obama: 'This President Has Brought Us Out of the Dark and Into the Light' | The Weekly Standard:

...Michelle Obama made a remarkable claim when talking up her husband, President Barack Obama, at a campaign event earlier today in Nashville, Tennessee.

"I am so in," Michelle Obama said toward the end of her remarks. "I am going to be working so hard. We have an amazing story to tell. This president has brought us out of the dark and into the light."

The crowd of nearly 450 folks applauded as the first lady likened her husband to a Jesus-like figure....

...They both have the same middle initial.

A work of fiction...

Charlene recommends: Part One — The Fiction and Non-Fiction of Obama, by Glenn Beck:

...With this in mind, Glenn Beck dedicated his Thursday evening broadcast to reviewing the staggering array of inconsistencies, embellishments and “manufactured lies” perpetuated by the president over the course of his political career.

“His life is complete fiction,” Beck said. Let’s review the non-fiction version before we go any further:...

Me, I don't think Obama actually exists. He's a sort of golem or shadow thrown up by the unconscious wish fulfillment needs of the nihilist left. One of these days he'll just go "Poof," and vanish and leave everyone scratching their heads and wondering if he was really here at all...

"Optics"

Solyndra: Politics infused Obama energy programs - The Washington Post:

Loathsome animals. But you knew that. What's amazing is how divorced they are from reality. Having government "pick winners" and direct investment into "socially beneficial" industries has always failed. But they seem oblivious.

Partly of course because every failure is just dropped down the memory hole. The Chinese high-speed rail project is now collapsing in scandal and and waste and gross failure. But will Tom Friedman apologize for repeatedly lauding this project and wishing the same on us? No, it will just be dropped and forgotten. The real world isn't real to these people. The 'optics" are reality.

...The documents reviewed by The Post, which began examining the clean-technology program a year ago, provide a detailed look inside the day-to-day workings of the upper levels of the Obama administration. They also give an unprecedented glimpse into high-level maneuvering by politically connected clean-technology investors.

They show that as Solyndra tottered, officials discussed the political fallout from its troubles, the "optics" in Washington and the impact that the company's failure could have on the president's prospects for a second term. Rarely, if ever, was there discussion of the impact that Solyndra's collapse would have on laid-off workers or on the development of clean-energy technology....


....Political calculus was especially on display in an e-mail early this year between administration staffers who calibrated the damage that could result from pushing back Solyndra's collapse by a few months at a time.

"The optics of a Solyndra default will be bad whenever it occurs," an OMB staff member wrote to a colleague. "If Solyndra defaults down the road, the optics will arguably be worse later than they would be today. . . . In addition, the timing will likely coincide with the 2012 campaign season heating up."

Solyndra executives and investors were attuned to the value of playing politics. Memos from Solyndra's lobbying firm, McBee Strategic Consulting, stressed the need to "socialize" with leaders in Washington and to mobilize a lobbying effort described variously as quiet, surgical and aggressive.

Beyond the West Wing, the documents provide a vivid glimpse into high-level machinations inside the world of clean-energy entrepreneurs.

Solyndra's strongest political connection was to George Kaiser, a Democratic fundraiser and oil industry billionaire who had once hosted Obama at his home in Oklahoma. Kaiser's family foundation owned more than a third of the solar panel company, and Kaiser took a direct interest in its operations.

With the 2010 midterm elections just days away, Kaiser flew to Las Vegas to help the party cause. He was a guest at a private fundraising dinner for Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), but the real attraction at the event was its headliner — Obama. Realizing he might have an opportunity to talk with the president, Kaiser's staff prepped him with talking points about Solyndra.

Kaiser did not have to angle for Obama's attention. Organizers seated him next to the world's most powerful man — for two hours.

"The abject lawlessness and contempt for humanity of the Marxist Obama regime..."

I have nothing to add to this. It speaks for itself all too well...

Ann Barnhardt:

...Dear Clients, Industry Colleagues and Friends of Barnhardt Capital Management,

It is with regret and unflinching moral certainty that I announce that Barnhardt Capital Management has ceased operations. After six years of operating as an independent introducing brokerage, and eight years of employment as a broker before that, I found myself, this morning, for the first time since I was 20 years old, watching the futures and options markets open not as a participant, but as a mere spectator.

The reason for my decision to pull the plug was excruciatingly simple: I could no longer tell my clients that their monies and positions were safe in the futures and options markets – because they are not. And this goes not just for my clients, but for every futures and options account in the United States. The entire system has been utterly destroyed by the MF Global collapse. Given this sad reality, I could not in good conscience take one more step as a commodity broker, soliciting trades that I knew were unsafe or holding funds that I knew to be in jeopardy.

The futures markets are very highly-leveraged and thus require an exceptionally firm base upon which to function. That base was the sacrosanct segregation of customer funds from clearing firm capital, with additional emergency financial backing provided by the exchanges themselves. Up until a few weeks ago, that base existed, and had worked flawlessly. Firms came and went, with some imploding in spectacular fashion. Whenever a firm failure happened, the customer funds were intact and the exchanges would step in to backstop everything and keep customers 100% liquid – even as their clearing firm collapsed and was quickly replaced by another firm within the system.

Everything changed just a few short weeks ago. A firm, led by a crony of the Obama regime, stole all of the non-margined cash held by customers of his firm. Let's not sugar-coat this or make this crime seem "complex" and "abstract" by drowning ourselves in six-dollar words and uber-technical jargon. Jon Corzine STOLE the customer cash at MF Global. Knowing Jon Corzine, and knowing the abject lawlessness and contempt for humanity of the Marxist Obama regime and its cronies, this is not really a surprise. What was a surprise was the reaction of the exchanges and regulators. Their reaction has been to take a bad situation and make it orders of magnitude worse. Specifically, they froze customers out of their accounts WHILE THE MARKETS CONTINUED TO TRADE, refusing to even allow them to liquidate. This is unfathomable. The risk exposure precedent that has been set is completely intolerable and has destroyed the entire industry paradigm. No informed person can continue to engage these markets, and no moral person can continue to broker or facilitate customer engagement in what is now a massive game of Russian Roulette.

I have learned over the last week that MF Global is almost certainly the mere tip of the iceberg. There is massive industry-wide exposure to European sovereign junk debt. While other firms may not be as heavily leveraged as Corzine had MFG leveraged, and it is now thought that MFG's leverage may have been in excess of 100:1, they are still suicidally leveraged and will likely stand massive, unmeetable collateral calls in the coming days and weeks as Europe inevitably collapses. I now suspect that the reason the Chicago Mercantile Exchange did not immediately step in to backstop the MFG implosion was because they knew and know that if they backstopped MFG, they would then be expected to backstop all of the other firms in the system when the failures began to cascade – and there simply isn't that much money in the entire system. In short, the problem is a SYSTEMIC problem, not merely isolated to one firm...

(There's more, if you can stomach it.)

This was a bit of a surprise to me...

I'm way too close to Silicon Valley to be terribly impressed by the political wisdom or general wisdom of tech entrepreneurs. Especially Baby-Boomers like Steve. But here's some wisdom...

Steve Jobs Biography Reveals He Told Obama, 'You're Headed For A One-Term Presidency':

...Jobs, who was known for his prickly, stubborn personality, almost missed meeting President Obama in the fall of 2010 because he insisted that the president personally ask him for a meeting. Though his wife told him that Obama "was really psyched to meet with you," Jobs insisted on the personal invitation, and the standoff lasted for five days. When he finally relented and they met at the Westin San Francisco Airport, Jobs was characteristically blunt. He seemed to have transformed from a liberal into a conservative.

"You're headed for a one-term presidency," he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where "regulations and unnecessary costs" make it difficult for them.

Jobs also criticized America's education system, saying it was "crippled by union work rules," noted Isaacson. "Until the teachers' unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform." Jobs proposed allowing principals to hire and fire teachers based on merit, that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year....

Of course if Jobs had been really awake, he would have realized that Obama wants Americans to be stupid and poor. As someone once said, "Liberals want America weak, and government strong."

Schadenfreude strikes deep. Into your life it will creep...

I hope candidate Palin acknowledges that Obama has accomplished one good thing...

Planet Healer Obama Calls It: In 2008, he declared his presidency would result in 'the rise of the oceans beginning to slow' -- And By 2011, Sea Level Drops! | Climate Depot:

...President Barack Obama can take a bow. As Obama struggles with poor polling numbers, persistent high unemployment, the possibly of a primary challenge within his own party and a stagnant economy saddled with massive deficits and debts, one area where he can claim success is his prediction that he would slow sea level rise.

Obama -- in similar fashion to baseball legend Babe Ruth calling his home run during the fifth inning of Game 3 of the 1932 World Series -- called it successfully on sea level rise.

Obama declared in a June 8, 2008 speech, that his presidency will be "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Obama's prognostication occurred during his victory speech in St. Paul for the Democratic Party nomination.

Climate Depot can now announce it is official. Earlier this month, the European Space Agency's Envisat monitoring, global sea level revealed a "two year long decline [in sea level] was continuing, at a rate of 5mm per year."

In August 2011, NASA announced that global sea level was dropping and was "a quarter of an inch lower than last summer." See: NASA: 'Global sea level this summer is a quarter of an inch lower than last summer'...

To see the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) hoax unravelling is sweet sweet sweet. Alas none of the lefties will re-think. Al Gore will flip, from one day to the next, to warning about the apocalyptic dangers of Global Cooling, and all the little Chumskys will all flip with him. And all condemn those wicked capitalists and Republicans who are failing to pump enough Carbon into the atmosphere...

You are what you DO

Charlene recommends this piece by Richard Fernandez, Bayes and Nice People:

...Peretz, Brooks, and Noonan are intelligent, well-educated people. Nobody has seriously suggested they are either perverse or evil. Now they see the truth. But once upon a time they didn’t have a clue. So the disturbing question is: how did they get it wrong? Setting aside for a moment the fact that someone slipped past, the most pressing problem is to determine why the system failed. Because as someone at Andrew Klavan’s blog said, “the republic can survive a Barack Obama; it is far less likely to survive the multitude of fools who made him president.”

The fact they are now getting it right is a good thing. John Maynard Keynes once wrote, “when the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?”  But Keynes was not not quite correct.  What he should have said was that “when new information comes to light, I change my opinion about what I saw. What do you do, sir?”

The first person to rigorously understand how this process worked was Thomas Bayes....

Fernandez thinks that people like Brooks were fooled by Obama, and Edwards, because they are "nice" people who don't come into contact with con-men and sharps. That's probably a lot of it. Charlene, for instance, deals with plaintiff's lawyers every day. She was totally not taken in by that slime-animal Edwards. She's seen those pretty boys a thousand times.

I was armored against the wiles of Obama in various other ways. One of them is the old battles I had concerning President Bush. So much of what was said about him was simply stupid, and I kept butting my head against the wall trying to explain it. The principle is very simple. You are what you DO. Not what you say, or hope, or aspire to, or dress like. (Bush, for instance, acted as president almost exactly as he did as governor of Texas. And his Texas business life was much of a piece with that. So the people who said that he was a preppy Ivy-Leaguer type were being brain-dead stupid.)

My dad, who was a very smart guy about life and people, once said to me when I was young, "By the time a man is 40, he is where he wants to be in life." It seemed like an odd and severe judgement to me at the time, but I haven't encountered any exceptions.

I remember telling people, "Obama has never accomplished anything. He's not going to change at his age." I was right.

I'll give you my piece of sage advice—take it, you're welcome, no extra charge—which I took from NRO's Jay Nordlinger: "You pretty much know all you need to know about a person if you know their positions on abortion and Israel."

Oh, and here's another guy who was right...

Postrel on Glamour...

Virginina Postrel, Obama Glamour Can't Fix Charisma Deficit - Bloomberg:

...What's the difference? Charisma moves the audience to share a leader's vision. Glamour, on the other hand, inspires the audience to project its own desires onto the leader (or movie star or tropical resort or new car): to see in the glamorous object a symbol of escape and transformation that makes the ideal feel attainable. The meaning of glamour, in other words, lies entirely in the audience's mind.

That was certainly true of Obama as a candidate. He attracted supporters who not only disagreed with his stated positions but, what is much rarer, believed that he did, too. On issues such as same-sex marriage and free trade, the supporters projected their own views onto him and assumed he was just saying what other, less discerning voters wanted to hear...

...He was the political equivalent of the seductive high heels described by Leora Tanenbaum in her book "Bad Shoes": "When you see a pair of stilettos on display in a department store or featured in a fashion magazine, you can imagine yourself wearing them and becoming the kind of person who lives a magical life, gliding around gracefully with no need for sensible, lace-up shoes. The fantasy just might become realizable by stepping into the shoes and inhabiting them." That's glamour...


....Glamour is a beautiful illusion -- the word "glamour" originally meant a literal magic spell -- that makes the ideal seem effortlessly attainable. Glamour hides difficulty and distractions, creating a false and enticing sense of grace. We see the dance, not the rehearsals; the beach resort, not the luggage and jet lag. There are no bills on the kitchen counter, no freckles on the pale-skinned star, no sacrifices in the promise of change.

This illusion is hard to maintain for more than an escapist moment. Even the most beautiful shoes are never as glamorous once you've worn them and discovered they give you blisters or, at best, didn't transform your life. The same is true of presidents. Familiarity breeds discontent...

I well remember trying to argue with people about Obama, using... logic. What a joke. I can see now that a lot of people were looking forward to the whole country being Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. When you are under the spell, then the whole point is that all those tedious dragging things are not going to matter. Gravity will hardly pull at all.

Drill baby, drill....

Somebody's vindicated...:

WASHINGTON, May 14 (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama, under pressure from Republicans and the public to bring down gasoline prices, announced new measures on Saturday to expand domestic oil production in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.

High fuel prices have dented Obama's ratings in opinion polls and threaten to dampen the economic recovery that is critical to his re-election in 2012....

What fun to see those horrid America-hating weaklings cave in when there's pressure.

Of course Democrat promises are worth nothing, and they will soon find technicalities to avoid any serious expansion of American strength. That goes without saying. But we sure have the wind at our backs.

"There never was a there there."

Roger Simon, President Boring:

...But what is it about Obama that makes him so boring? I submit it is something quite simple — he has nothing to say. He is a boring person, the quintessential "hollow man" in the T.S. Eliot sense. He is kind of a socialist, kind of a liberal, kind of a multi-culturalist, kind of an environmentalist, kind of globalist, kind of a budget cutter — but none of them with any real commitment. Basically, he's a vague and uncommitted person pretending to be otherwise. He is the man that voted "present," now in the presidency. The fact that he never specified the targets of “hope” and "change"� during his election was far from a campaign ploy and more typical than we ever dreamed. There never was a there there. And now, I strongly suspect, there never will be....

I remember trying to point out to Obama fans that if a guy is in his mid-forties, and hasn't accomplished anything... he isn't going to start accomplishing things even if you make him President of the US. People show what they are. You cant help it. If there was anything to Obama, he would have already done something exciting with his life.

He's really the ultimate condemnation of "affirmative action."

The Iron Lady comments on Obama and Egypt...

Experience shows that if you lack a coherent set of beliefs and principles, you will flounder. You must know already what you want, and why, and broadly how best to attain it, if you are ever to deal effectively with the thousand-and-one crises that face you in government."
    -- Margaret Thatcher

That's just so true. Every would-be politician should have it tattooed on their elbow, to keep it in mind. Actually it's true about whatever you do. Life will always throw you curve-balls, and you need have general principles that can guide you in the unexpected situation.

On the same subject...

My truth must be firm, and who will love you if you veer and change your loves every day, and what will become of your great schemes? Continuity alone will bring your efforts to ripeness.
--Saint-Exupery

Or better yet, Chesterton...

..But there are some people, nevertheless — and I am one of them — who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them...
    -- from Heretics

What did anyone expect?

Obama Said to Fault Spy Agencies' Mideast Forecasting - NYTimes.com:

WASHINGTON — President Obama has criticized American spy agencies over their performance in predicting and analyzing the spreading unrest in the Middle East, according to current and former American officials....

Let me spell this out in words even a community organizer can understand.

YOU, Barry Obama, are the poster child for the idea that government can understand and manage complex and subtle issues and problems.

That idea is STUPID. Your philosophy is rotten at the core. It is absurdity. That idea almost made sense in the Industrial Age. In the Information Age it is ludicrous to imagine that centralized bureaucracies can be nimble and creative enough to keep up with a world that is changing at a mad pace...

A quote for Election Day...

Jennifer Rubin:

...There is a dreary predictability about Obama. Take outmoded liberal dogma. Double down on it. Ignore empirical evidence. Deride and bully opponents. And when the dogma fails, blame those who resisted. Whether we are talking about health care, economic policy, or the Middle East, the pattern is the same. It is not simply that Obama is wrong on the merits on these issues (although surely he is). It is that Obama's self-image as the "smartest man in the room" prevents him from learning from errors, absorbing the experience of alternative policy choices, and showing grace and magnanimity toward friends and foes. No wonder Obama has become a sour figure, and the public has soured on him.

Friction and intelligence...

Michael Gerson - What Election Day will bring:

...Some, Cook says, "are told all their lives that they are the most brilliant people on the planet. They don't get less bright, but hubris kicks in. [They DO get less bright. Literally.] [Obama] just assumed that he was going to be a success, as he had always been in life." [Liberals did to Obama the worst thing they could do. They deprived him of the friction that everyone needs, in order to grow and mature.]

According to Cook, this reflects a lack of experience. "Experience is not an end, it is a means to an end: judgment." Cook said that a few years in the Senate "don't give an understanding of institutions and their dynamics. If [Obama] had been in the Senate six or eight years, he might have accumulated the wisdom to match the intelligence." [Actually, being in the Senate also makes you less bright. Most Senators are surrounded by staffers who tell them they are wonderful. That destroys intelligence.]...

It's much better to run something than to be a Senator. Governors and Mayors tend to be much wiser than Senators and Congressmen. It's like Newman wrote somewhere, "it's the whole man that thinks." Not just the brain. Not just the logical facilities.

Probably the best preparation for leadership any of our current crop of leaders has had is Sarah Palin being mayor of a smallish town. People used to call her up in the middle of the night because they had a complaint, or because there was a pothole in their street. Priceless experience.

Biter bit...

Michael Barone, Dems turn on Obama over Iraq, Afghanistan, Gitmo:

...It was a lot of fun while it lasted, up to election night 2008 and Inauguration Day 2009. But then Obama had to govern. Knowing little of military affairs, he retained Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has loyally served presidents of both parties. Understanding even if not admitting the great headway Americans had made in Iraq, Obama declined to throw it all away.

Appreciating that Afghanistan was critical to protecting Americans, he made a commitment to increase troop levels there in May 2009, reconsidered it from August to November, then restated it Dec. 1, with a commitment to begin withdrawals in July 2011...


...In so doing, Obama implicitly confessed that the view of the world held with quasi-religious fervor by the Democratic left was delusional all along. Bush didn't lie, we didn't go into Afghanistan and Iraq without allies and against their wishes, we didn't carry out policies of torture, etc. The effort to cast Iraq as another Vietnam and America under Bush as an oppressive rogue power were perhaps emotionally satisfying but unconnected to reality

Without saying so, Obama has found himself having to teach this lesson to the Adam Serwers of the world. They don't like hearing it. They're keeping their ears plugged up and their eyes defiantly shut. Their MyObama Web pages are inactive and their checkbooks are closed. They've tuned out of the campaign and many of them won't even vote. The president they helped elect -- and the world -- have turned out not to be what they thought.

Though I hate much of what has Leftists have done since 9/11, at least I get to also savor the dilemma "liberals" have put themselves in by living as liars. Especially the exquisite torment President Bush prepared for them by taking them up on their nasty lies about how they were "anti-fascist." They had to scramble about pretending they'd been "pacifists" all along, and pretend they "hate war," though they like it well enough if America or Israel looks like losing.

And Obama. What mad incoherence he's trapped in. Trapped by his lies really. Like so many Lefties he bashed the Iraq Campaign by claiming that Afghanistan was being neglected--now they are all being justly punished by being given responsibility for... Afghanistan.

Crazy. The anti-American now runs America; the anti-military Leftist is Commander in Chief. Ha ha. Meanwhile we can remember how real Americans act...

Your past is what you are...

This is kind of a silly article,. About political "scientists" gathering in conclave to reveal portentious revelations I could have told them two years ago... Early on, Obama was more polarizing than we knew:

One of the puzzling questions about Barack Obama's presidency is how the post-partisan candidate of 2008 became the polarizing chief executive of 2010. The answer may be surprising. He was far more polarizing from the start than many recognized. His choices in office and his opponents' responses have only hardened that divide....

There's nothing puzzling about it. Little old Random Jottings pointed out way back when that Obama in his political career had never done anything that could be labeled "bi-partisan" or "post-partisan." Therefore it was a near-certainty that he would not act that way as President. Anyone with a lick of sense could have seen it. That's how people are. You don't act one way all your life and then in your 40's act in a different way.

I remember my dad saying that his dad liked to say that: "If a man doesn't save at $20 a week, he won't save when he's earning $200 a week." (Adjust for inflation, of course) And it's true.

...During the campaign, Candidate Obama talked about the need to put the partisan divisions of the past behind. His victory fostered discussion about whether the country had turned a corner after years of bitter partisanship. In the glow of his inauguration, some people heralded a new era in American politics.

Such notions appear badly off the mark at this point in his presidency. A closer look at the time would have rendered such conclusions questionable at best. Equally questionable was the expectation that he could break the grip of partisan polarization in the country. [He never even tried.]

That, at least, is the conclusion of a number of scholars who have undertaken an early examination of the Obama presidency and whose work was presented at this weekend's meeting of the American Political Science Association...

Sorry guys, there's no "there" there...

I'm just doodling here. Nothing important...

Dems urge Obama to take a stand - John F. Harris and James Hohmann - POLITICO.com:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs's recent complaint about the ingratitude of the "professional left" is a small symptom of a larger problem for President Barack Obama: He has left wide swaths of the Democratic Party uncertain of his core beliefs. [I doubt if the swaths have any more "core" than Barry Obama does.]

In interviews, a variety of political activists, operatives and commentators from across the party's ideological spectrum presented similar descriptions of Obama's predicament: By declining to speak clearly and often about his larger philosophy — and insisting that his actions are guided not by ideology but a results-oriented "pragmatism" [It would be harder to say a sillier thing. You can't avoid the deep questions by being "results-oriented," because you must decide first which results you favor. Which is something your philosophy must ultimately say.]— he has bred confusion and disappointment among his allies, and left his agenda and motives vulnerable to distortion by his enemies. [Ha ha. Couldn't happen to a more deserving Party. ]

The president's reluctance to be a Democratic version of Ronald Reagan, who spoke without apology about his vaulting ideological ambitions, has produced an odd turn of events: Obama has been the most activist domestic president in decades, but the philosophy behind his legislative achievements remains muddy in the eyes of many supporters and skeptics alike. There is not yet such a thing as "Obamism." [Sure there is, that's what Obama believes when he looks in the mirror]

The ability to transcend ideological divides and unite disparate parts of the electorate was a signal strength of his candidacy in 2008. [Only because his campaign was a total lie.] But that has given way to widespread — if often contradictory — complaints about his agenda (too radical or too cautious?) and the political tactics (too partisan or too conflict averse?) he uses to pursue it.

At first blush, it is a mystery: How could a political leader preside over nearly $1 trillion dollars in stimulus and other spending, and pass overhauls of the health care and financial services sectors, but still leave many of his own supporters uncertain of his larger aims? [They are not sure of their own "larger aims." ]

"He hasn't sought, I think, to bring coherence to the achievements of the last 20 months," said former Democratic senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart, adding that "it would not hurt" to do so soon. [Uh, did Gary Hart ever bring any coherence to Gary Hart?] ...

Wising up...

Public Policy Polling: Obama on the Trail:

Illinois voters say they would be negatively influenced if a candidate was endorsed by Barack Obama. And if his support isn't an asset in his home state it's hard to imagine where it is....

My position on the 2008 election has always been that what is important is not that people make mistakes, but whether they learn from them. So items like this one I find very interestin'.

The important thing about Obama is not the guy himself, but that he was a stealth candidate. His skin color and moderate stances on the campaign trail were a big lie. He's a white left-wing academic elitist.

For about 50 years Americans have not wanted to elect northern liberal Democrat senators president. Democrat southern governors yes, northern senators no. Obama was slipped in by slight-of-hand. My guess is that it will be another 50 years before we make that mistake again...

Charlene's calling the Gulf an impeachable offense...

I'd say probably yes. Won't happen, but it's nice to think about...

It’s Day 73 of the Gulf Oil Spill Disaster–
There is now clear evidence that the negligence by the Obama Administration caused the destruction of the Gulf coastline.

** The feds only accepted assistance from 5 of 28 countries.
** It took the Obama Administration 53 days to accept help from the Dutch and British.
** It took them 58 days to mobilize the US military to the Gulf.
** The feds shut down crude-sucking barges due to fire extinguisher concerns.
** The Obama Administration ignore oil boom manufacturers that have miles of product stockpiled in their warehouses.
** They only have moved 31 of 2,000 oil skimmers to the disaster area off of Florida.
** Florida hired an additional 5 skimmer boats to operate off its coast due to federal inaction.
** There are no skimmer boats off the coast of Mississippi.
** The massive A-Boat skimmer won't be allowed to join the cleanup effort until the Coast Guard and the EPA figure out whether it meets their standards.
** The feds shut down sand berm dredging off the Louisiana coast.
** The president continues to hit the golf course, ball games, hold BBQ’s and party while the crude oil washes up on shore.

Now there’s this… Obama Administration lied about cleanup efforts of Gulf oil spill.
CNS News reported:

Billy Nungesser, president of New Orleans' Plaquemines Parish, sensed that a chart showing 140 oil skimmers at work — a chart given to him by BP and the Coast Guard — was "somewhat inaccurate." So, Nungesser asked to fly over the spill to verify the number.

The flyover was cancelled three times before those officials admitted that just 31 of the 140 skimmers were actually deployed.

The incident is detailed in a report released Thursday by Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Republicans say the report provides evidence that the Obama administration misrepresented the assets devoted to the cleanup, misrepresented the timing of when government officials knew there was an oil spill and misrepresented the level of control the government had over the matter. It also claims the Obama administration seemed more interested in public relations than cleaning the mess and plugging the hole.

The report, which relies on interviews with several local officials in Louisiana, goes on to quote Nungesser, who had been on local and national television enough so that the White House became concerned. Two White House officials visited him on Father's Day and said, "What do we have to do to keep you off TV?" His answer was, "Give me what I need."

You could add lax supervision of BP, which just happened to give more donations to Obama that to any other politician. And the lies about the engineers report to justify shutting down drilling in the Gulf, which will kill about 120,000 jobs. And threatening criminal prosecutions to the very BP people who are tasked with fixing the problem. (sort of like threatening a surgeon during an operation.)

Any other suggestions?

What I've been telling you...

The Unengaged President - Mark Steyn - National Review Online:

...Raising the problem, Senator Lemieux found the president unengaged and uninformed. "He doesn't seem to know the situation about foreign skimmers and domestic skimmers," reported the senator.

He doesn't seem to know, and he doesn't seem to care that he doesn't know, and he doesn't seem to care that he doesn't care. "It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama's foreign policy is no heart at all," wrote Richard Cohen in the Washington Post last week. "For instance, it's not clear that Obama is appalled by China's appalling human rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia. . . . The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.

"This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?"

Gee, if only your newspaper had thought to ask those fascinating questions oh, say, a month before the Iowa caucuses....

There ARE no core beliefs! That's what I keep writing, over and over. And our oh-so-wise pundits keep touching lightly on questions like: "Who is this Obama chap? What are his core beliefs?" If they read Random Jottings they would know precisely what's going on. [Link to my blog-posts on the subject of nihilism.]

Most liberals, especially the "activist" types, have no core beliefs. Nothing. It's all drained away. What are Nancy Pelosi's "core beliefs?" There are none. (Except they all have the belief that government must grow. But that's a "belief" only in the way the addict believes in Heroin.)

I feel like a combination of that boy who said the emperor has no clothes, and Cassandra. Although in this case the clothes have no emperor! Like Cassandra, I keep saying, "You damn fools, you just that wooden horse be!" but nobody listens...

And I keep telling you all that China and Russia are not real to our liberal nihilists. In their view of the world, only America and Israel exist. Why? Because these are the two countries that are beliefs. Are ideas. And belief is an irritant and an affront to the person who has no beliefs. The rest of creation only exists when touched by America or Israel. We see this every day, yet people won't "see" it. For instance the "Palestinians" only exist for Western liberals when Israel does something to them. Arab countries do far worst things to them than Israel does, yet those are invisible.

China's appalling human rights record means absolutely nothing to most leftists. But if I, an American, went to China with my ice cream cart and sold ice cream cones to Chinese children... and they got belly-aches... That would be a big deal! China would suddenly exist! We see this all the time. And if you listen to me, it will make perfect sense to you. (How's that for hubris! It doesn't matter; no one will notice ol' Cassie.

You're a racist if you even read this...

Excerpts from President Obama media doubles down on doublespeak - BostonHerald.com:

...Criticizing Bush - the highest form of patriotism. Criticizing Obama - hate speech. Who caused Bush's problems? - Bush. Who causes Obama's problems? - Bush.

Cindy Sheehan under Bush - a future recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Sheehan under Obama - give it up already, you old bag.

Bush playing a rare round of golf - complete video coverage, showing his utter indifference to the suffering of the American people.

Obama playing one of his endless rounds of golf - only still photos allowed, yet another glowing indication of our dashing president's youth and physical fitness.

Media reviews of Bush's handling of Katrina - he hates black people. Media reviews of Obama's handling of the oil spill - Halliburton did it.

Bush on Air Force One - junkets, fund-raising for GOP fat cats. Obama on Air Force One - fact-finding missions, reassuring the American people of his tireless FDR-like commitment to them.

Two hundred-point midday drops on the Dow under Bush - ominous plummet. Same drops under Obama - the market is seeking direction.

Democrat women elected under Bush - a triumph of feminism. Republican women elected under Obama - a setback for feminism...

Worse than we can imagine?

The Oil Drum — Deepwater Oil Spill - A Longer Term Problem:

...First of all...set aside all your thoughts of plugging the well and stopping it from blowing out oil using any method from the top down. Plugs, big valves to just shut it off, pinching the pipe closed, installing a new bop or lmrp, shooting any epoxy in it, top kills with mud etc etc etc....forget that, it won't be happening..it's done and over. In fact actually opening up the well at the subsea source and allowing it to gush more is not only exactly what has happened, it was probably necessary, or so they think anyway.

So you have to ask WHY? Why make it worse?...there really can only be one answer and that answer does not bode well for all of us. It's really an inescapable conclusion at this point, unless you want to believe that every Oil and Gas professional involved suddenly just forgot everything they know or woke up one morning and drank a few big cups of stupid and got assigned to directing the response to this catastrophe. Nothing makes sense unless you take this into account, but after you do...you will see the "sense" behind what has happened and what is happening. That conclusion is this:

The well bore structure is compromised "Down hole".

That is something which is a "Worst nightmare" conclusion to reach. While many have been saying this for some time as with any complex disaster of this proportion many have "said" a lot of things with no real sound reasons or evidence for jumping to such conclusions, well this time it appears that they may have jumped into the right place...

This makes me queasy. We may be at just the beginning of the problem.

To every lefty environmentalist wacko who blocked drilling in ANWR or blocked extraction of tar sands or oil shale, who blocked development of nuclear energy...we've left a pistol and whiskey in the study.

Kick the little guy, bow to the bully...

In reference to this:

...April 4 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner delayed a scheduled April 15 report to Congress on exchange-rate policies, sidestepping a decision on whether to accuse China of manipulating the value of the yuan....

Charlene passes this on to you...

(Thanks to Hope n' Change Cartoons)

We are all Israel now...

William A. Jacobson, We Are All Bibi Netanyahu Now:

The reaction to Obama's treatment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ("Bibi") Netanyahu was as strong if not stronger than I have seen in the comments here and elsewhere in the blogosphere on any other issue. (I didn't let through a number of over-the-top comments.)

Why this reaction? I bet a lot of the people having this reaction only had heard of Bibi Netanyahu in passing on the news.

Who would care if our President left a foreign leader to wait in the White House while the President supposedly went to have dinner with his family? Who would care if our President broke protocol by refusing to be photographed and hold a press conference with a foreign leader? Who would care if that foreign leader left tail tucked between his legs, humiliated at home at the treatment by the leader of the free world?

Part of it certainly is that the foreign leader in question was the leader of Israel, which is tremendously popular with Americans. In Israel the clear majority of Americans see a democratic nation surrounded by implacable enemies who also are our enemies, doing what it takes to survive and thrive. In so many historical, religious and political ways Israel is our kindred spirit, more than just one among many nations....

It's more than just being a "kindred spirit." Israel is us. Israel and the United States are the only two countries that are ideas. Anyone who "gets" America's idea as expressed in the founding documents, is an American. As much so as someone whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower. If I say someone is "un-American," you would not imagine that I'm criticizing their skin color, or accent, or lack of long residence in our country.

It's much the same with Israel. Jews from obscure corners of the world, with all sorts of languages and skin colors can make Aliyah and become Israelis.

Both countries have been refuges for the oppressed. And both have been founded by those who fled the control of their "betters" in the European elites. Fled and used only their own strength and courage to build a country from nothing. Both countries were toughened by fighting against savages, and by taming a harsh landscape.

Both countries are hated by Leftists, because Leftism is about taming people, and putting them under control of self-styled elites.

But there is a deeper similarity. It is my suspicion that much of what people believe and do is not because of rational thought, but is a reflection of spiritual struggles fought on a mostly unconscious level of symbols. We are all on a sort of path that can only be travelled in two directions: Towards God, or away from God and towards self-worship. And both America and Israel symbolically represent movement towards God. Not only in the religious elements of both country's formation, but symbolically in their demand that we consider an idea to be something bigger than ourselves; something for which we might even have to sacrifice our lives.

As I've bored you by mentioning before, I think that most "Leftism" today is not really Leftism at all, that the quasi-religious beliefs such as socialism or liberalism that were the old core of Leftist thinking have drained away, leaving nothing. Leftism today is mostly nihilism. The old-time Left didn't automatically hate America or Israel, because they considered it normal to believe in an idea—they just had a different idea. To the nihilist, belief is an affront!

And more than an affront. Almost an assault. They know somewhere deep in their hearts that they were made for something bigger, and the knowledge angers them.

Thought for today...

James Taranto:

...One sign that ObamaCare is both bad and unpopular is that since its enactment--indeed, since just before its enactment--its supporters have been laboring mightily to change the subject. They're eager to talk not about their great legislative and social achievement, but about how violent, racist and all-around crazy ObamaCare opponents are....

Must read...

American Thinker: Dear Mr. President: Why We Are Not Hiring:

...But first, I must add that every time you step up to the microphone -- for example, your impromptu presser on Tuesday -- the painful decision to shut down my business of eighteen years is validated by your words. And I should thank you for that.

For the record, that decision was formalized on November 5, 2008. Check your calendar.

Some fifteen months later, I can say that it was the best business decision I have ever made. With your hands on the levers of the government and the economy, I wanted to have as little at risk as possible.

Don't get me wrong -- it was a torturous and gut-wrenching decision that went against every fiber of my being. I had to betray deeply rooted entrepreneurial instincts and set some more mundane material goals. And while it might seem extreme, I think my mindset speaks to the real reason businesses are not hiring now.

So what is that mindset?

It's not complicated. I am neither a swooning David Brooks enamored of your pant crease nor a silver-spoon trust-fund baby like Christopher Buckley. I've simply had some twenty-five entrepreneurial ventures -- with a good number of strikeouts to be honest -- and real-world experience told me exactly who you are and exactly what the business climate under your rule would be like....

This piece is just dead-on right. I can say that as one who grew up in an entrepreneurial family and worked in the family business. And Charlene and I are both small business owners (very small, to be sure). And both of us are averse to hiring people, for various reasons that mostly have some connection with government.

One of the structural weakness of the modern world is that many businesses are so big that the people who work in them have little sense of being "in business." They are just doing a job in a big organization—many of could easily move to government or a non-profit or a university and do the same job. A file clerk at Microsoft does not think of herself as part of free enterprise or capitalism; probably does not even make the connection.

Detached from reality...

Charlene recommends this piece by Peter Wehner on the SOTU, A Self-Reverential State of the Union Address (Thanks to Alan):

...What made the speech a bit bizarre, and somewhat alarming, is how detached from reality the president is. After having spent much of his time blaming his predecessor for his own failures, he said he was "not interested in re-litigating the past." Barack Obama lamented waging a "perpetual campaign" – even though that is what the president, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, Robert Gibbs and others in his employ do on a daily basis. He said, "Washington may think that saying anything about the other side, no matter how false, is just part of the game" – yet his White House has played that very game with zest and delight.

Having gone on a spending spree that is unprecedented in American history, the president castigated the political class for "leaving a mountain of debt" to future generations. Having helped to create the worst fiscal situation in our lifetime, he says he will "refuse to pass the problems on to another generation of Americans." He says, "If we do not take meaningful steps to rein in our debt, it could damage our markets, increase the cost of borrowing, and jeopardize our recovery" – despite the fact that future generations will have to work to undo the deficit and debt he had done so much to increase.

It was as if we were being lectured on marital fidelity by John Edwards or Mark Sanford....

It's turned out like we predicted...

I remember arguing with Obamanoids, saying to them, "HOW can you vote for someone who's never run so much as a pop-stand to run the country??" You can imagine the non-responses I got. Now it is becoming obvious even to Leftists that that wasn't a smart idea. But the conservative criticism has not changed a bit. That's the point in this piece. (I confess to being wrong in the way I guessed that Obama would soon learn to triangulate skillfully like Clinton did. No sign of it yet.)

Jim Geraghty, Obama-mania Skeptics Understood This Man Before Anyone Else - :

I continue to hear a lot of talk among liberals that the reason their health-care reform effort is in trouble, the reason Obama has mediocre-to-lousy approval ratings (particularly on the economy and health care), the reason Democrats are losing big races, and the reason 2010 is looking like an impending political bloodbath is essentially right-wing "misinformation campaigns."

Look, conservatives spent much of 2007 and 2008 arguing that Obama was a pleasant, charismatic man with few legislative accomplishments, no experience as a manager, few concrete results in any area where he had worked, some naïve beliefs hidden by extraordinary eloquence, and no idea of just how hard the job of the presidency is. He underestimated the intractability of certain problems (Middle East peace), wildly overestimated the effectiveness and efficiency of government programs (stimulus spending), had a bad eye for talent (Biden, Geithner, Richardson, Daschle, Napolitano), often had bad first instincts ("I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother"), seemed to trust those who didn't deserve it (Iran), and had sailed along in the world of politics because up until now, everyone was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Throughout that time, a large percentage of the American people rejected that argument. "He seems to know what he's doing. His campaign was a well-run ship. Look at that calm temperment. He was editor of Harvard Law Review. He'll be fine, and he'll probably be great," they concluded.

From 2007 to now, the arguments of the Right haven't changed; what has changed is that now the evidence to support the Right's initial perception — collected by watching this president in action — is becoming more and more compelling by the day.

Well, he finally has an enemy to lead America against...

Now He's Preparing a Combative Response? - Jim Geraghty:

Politico: "President Barack Obama plans a combative response if, as White House aides fear, Democrats lose Tuesday's special Senate election in Massachusetts, close advisers say."

Well, we didn't really expect humility, did we?

Great to know, Mr. President, that Iran shot protesters dead in the streets, beat the hell out of young kids, North Korea's firing off missiles so regularly you can set a clock to them, al-Qaeda tries to blow up a plane on Christmas, al-Qaeda's Yemeni branch is winning "Franchise of the Year", China's hacking Google until every search brings back at least one smiling Mao photo, Kabul's blowing up, our southern border looks like a war zone, and after a year of outreach, reset buttons, "changing the tone" and 364 days of kumbaya we finally get to see a "combative response" from you... to a Republican winning a race.

I look forward to his Oval Office address announcing that the electorate has deeply disappointed him, and that he expects more of us.

Today's quote...

Seen at Instapundit:

...Meanwhile, Dr. George Milonas writes: "If Obama thinks Bush is such an incredible incompetent, why did he send Bush to help rescue the Haitians? Does he hate black people that much that he is willing to inflict Bush on them?"...

If Democrats really believed the crap they lay on us, they would send Ray Nagel.

Kill Americans and win valuable concessions...

Andy McCarthy , It's Not Yet Friday, But It Is New Year's Eve -- What Better Time to Release an Iran-Backed Terror Master Who Murdered American Troops?:

...Today, New Year's Eve, while everyone's attention is understandably on family and friends, we learn (thanks to the ever alert Bill Roggio, reporting on the Standard's blog) that the administration has now released Qais Qazali, Laith's brother, [released previously by Obama] who is the head of the Iran-backed terror network, in addition to a hundred other terrorists. In violation of the long-standing, commonsense policy against capitulating to kidnappers and terrorists because it just encourages more hostage-taking and murder, the terrorists were released in exchange for a British hostage and the remains of his three contract guards (whom the terrorists had murdered).

So, as the mullahs, America's incorrigible enemies, struggle to hang on, we're giving them accommodations and legitimacy. And the messages we send? Terrorize us and we'll negotiate with you. Kill American troops or kidnap civilians and win valuable concessions — including the release of an army of jihadists, and its leaders, who can now go back to targeting American troops....

He's on the other side.

Keep this outrage in mind when "moderates" deride us extremists for suggesting that Obama's not a loyal American, or not willing to fight the War on Terror.

Is this a valid complaint?

President Obama takes the heat President Bush did not - - POLITICO.com:

Eight years ago, a terrorist bomber's attempt to blow up a transatlantic airliner was thwarted by a group of passengers, an incident that revealed some gaping holes in airline security just a few months after the attacks of Sept. 11. But it was six days before President George W. Bush, then on vacation, made any public remarks about the so-called "shoe bomber," Richard Reid, and there were virtually no complaints from the press or any opposition Democrats that his response was sluggish or inadequate.

That stands in sharp contrast to the withering criticism President Barack Obama has received from Republicans and some in the press for his reaction to Friday's incident on a Northwest Airlines flight heading for Detroit....

There's one big difference. President Bush, on September 11, 2001, had the moral clarity recognize, and to say, that we were at war. No one knows whether Mr Obama has the same moral clarity. (I strongly suspect that he has never given the underlying question serious thought.)

That's something the President has to say. It's not his job to lead in battles, other people do that. But seeing clearly and speaking clearly about what the deep problem is, is what a President does. That's what America is still waiting to hear from Obama, and why we are frustrated at his insipid response to Ft Hood, and now to the close call with the "knickerbomber."

Watch this video, if you've forgotten....

"horrible desiccated complacency"

Mark Steyn :

...Putting aside the stuff that was just plain wrong (this guy's an "isolated extremist" - oh, yeah?), the President's remarks had a horrible desiccated complacency. "Alleged..." "suspect..." "charged..." - because this is no different from a punk holding up a gas station, right? In all their alleged allegedness, this Administration has an allergy to the concept of war, and thus to the tools of war, including strategy and war aims. In essence, they've accepted a Fort Hood model for this challenge: every so often, something will happen and people will die, and we'll seal off the crime scene and take the alleged suspect into alleged custody. But it's reactive, and it cripples our ability to prevent the death of innocents.

There's a difference between an alleged suspect (which is what he is is the President's fantasy) and an enemy combatant (which is what he is in reality). If this were a war, we would question him about who he hooked up with in Yemen, who did he meet with in London, and maybe get a lead on attacks to come. Instead, the authorities, having issued the Knickerbomber a multi-entry visa, having permitted him to board the plane, and having failed to detect his incendiary underwear, now allow him to lawyer up and ensure that we'll never know who he knew in Yemen or anywhere else.

This would be a big enough gamble in the best of circumstances. Up against the broader background Derb discusses, it makes disaster inevitable....

"The Knickerbomber!" Perfect.

It's treasonous not to be water-boarding this guy right now. But they can't do so because that would be to admit that we are the good guys, at war with monsters. And most Leftists can't admit that, because they are self-worshippers, and it would be admitting that there are things more important than themselves.

So many horrid things, you can't even keep track of them all, much less oppose them...

Andy McCarthy, Why Does Interpol Need Immunity from American Law?:

...Interpol is the shorthand for the International Criminal Police Organization. It was established in 1923 and operates in about 188 countries. By executive order 12425, issued in 1983, President Reagan recognized Interpol as an international organization and gave it some of the privileges and immunities customarily extended to foreign diplomats. Interpol, however, is also an active law-enforcement agency, so critical privileges and immunities (set forth in Section 2(c) of the International Organizations Immunities Act) were withheld. Specifically, Interpol's property and assets remained subject to search and seizure, and its archived records remained subject to public scrutiny under provisions like the Freedom of Information Act. Being constrained by the Fourth Amendment, FOIA, and other limitations of the Constitution and federal law that protect the liberty and privacy of Americans is what prevents law-enforcement and its controlling government authority from becoming tyrannical.

On Wednesday, however, for no apparent reason, President Obama issued an executive order removing the Reagan limitations. That is, Interpol's property and assets are no longer subject to search and confiscation, and its archives are now considered inviolable. This international police force (whose U.S. headquarters is in the Justice Department in Washington) will be unrestrained by the U.S. Constitution and American law while it operates in the United States and affects both Americans and American interests outside the United States.

Interpol works closely with international tribunals (such as the International Criminal Court — which the United States has refused to join because of its sovereignty surrendering provisions, though top Obama officials want us in it). It also works closely with foreign courts and law-enforcement authorities (such as those in Europe that are investigating former Bush administration officials for purported war crimes — i.e., for actions taken in America's defense).

Why would we elevate an international police force above American law? Why would we immunize an international police force from the limitations that constrain the FBI and other American law-enforcement agencies? Why is it suddenly necessary to have, within the Justice Department, a repository for stashing government files which, therefore, will be beyond the ability of Congress, American law-enforcement, the media, and the American people to scrutinize? [My emphasis]....

Quote of the day...

Rich Lowry on Obam's speech:

...Yes, it would've been better if Obama hadn't sounded at times like a premature Nobel Peace Prize winner shoved uncomfortably into a role of wartime leader. But, as Don Rumsfeld might say, you go to war with the president you have.

Utter contrast...

I thought last year that the 2008 presidential election was really between Obama and Palin, with McCain and Biden just place-holders in nice suits. Everything that has happened since just seems to confirm that. And the pattern is always that Obama is given every possible advantage, and ought to simply outshine Governor Palin...... and yet it never happens! If someone had written this story as a novel it would be dismissed as "too contrived."

In the story below there is a line about how the press didn't fact-check Obam's books because "they likely feared what they would find" Wow, isn't that just the pattern of so much we see on the Left? Isn't that exactly why they keep insisting that the "science is settled?" Wasn't that the Bush-Kerry military service clash? The Left lives in fear. We need to understand that. That's what "political correctness" is; a whole bunch of "don't go there signs." Don't discuss, don't fact-check, don't criticize. Fear.

I recommend this piece by Jack Cashill in American Thinker, The Competing Narratives of Barry and Sarah:

...In 1992, while an anxious Obama dithers in an office that the University of Chicago has given him to write Dreams, half of his $150,000 advance already cashed, Palin is pulling her babies, Track and Bristol, along on a sled as she goes door-to-door seeking votes in her run for Wasilla city council.

Not yet thirty, Palin settles upon the philosophy that will guide her political career: reducing taxes "and redefining government's proper role." Like few Republicans this side of Ronald Reagan, Palin will adhere to these principles throughout her political ascent.

Not surprisingly, Palin's tenacity makes enemies among those who have cashed in their Republican heritage for the perks and power of office. Palin's perseverance in the face of this resistance makes for compelling political drama. That she is a woman challenging the good old boys of backroom Alaska heightens that drama.

Yet despite pushing the boundaries of female accomplishment throughout her career -- as sports reporter, as commercial fisherman, as councilwoman, as mayor, as oil and gas commissioner, as governor, as vice-presidential candidate -- Palin never loses her sense of the feminine. Having five children surely helps. So does living in an environment where manly virtues still matter.

An exchange with the larger-than-life Todd helps clarify Alaskan reality. Todd is a four-time winner of the Iron Dog competition, a 2,200 mile snowmobiling marathon. One night, Sarah expresses interest in competing. Says Todd:

Can you get the back end of a six-hundred-pound machine unstuck by yourself with open water up to your thighs, then change out an engine at forty below in the pitch black on a frozen river and replace thrashed shocks and jury rig a suspension using tree limbs along the trail?

When Sarah answers "Nope," Todd replies, "Then go back to sleep, Sarah." Todd lives his Eskimo heritage. He does not just dream about it, let alone exploit it...

...While Palin is slugging through Alaska's political morass like a determined Iditarod musher, Obama is cruising through Illinois politics on skids greased by his Chicago cronies. In his 2004 run for U.S. Senate, both his chief primary opponent and his expected general election opponent are undone by damaging personal information leaked to the media. Obama wins both elections easily.

The combination of his black genes and white upbringing makes the famously "articulate and bright and clean" Obama an irresistible choice to keynote the race-conscious 2004 Democratic convention. "I mean, that's a storybook, man," alleges the inimitable Joe Biden.

The story told in Dreams will become a huge bestseller in the wake of the 2004 convention. The lofty, lyrical style of the book will seal the Ivy-educated Obama's reputation as a genius, and its much-celebrated narrative would serve as a foundational myth for Obama's ascent to the White House.

Said NEA chairman Rocco Landesman just last month, reiterating the accepted wisdom of the chattering classes, "This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln."

The establishment will not be so kind to Palin. In the week of Going Rogue's release, the New York Times house conservative David Brooks will call her "a joke." Dick Cavett, the Norma Desmond of TV talk, will dismiss her as a "know-nothing." Ex-con Dem fundraiser Martha Stewart will brand Palin "a dangerous person." And literally thousands of lesser liberal lights will deride her as "stupid," an "idiot," or a "moron" (8.5 million Google hits and counting for "Palin" "moron").

In that same week, Chris Matthews was worrying out loud that Obama was "too darned intellectual," and author Michael Eric Dyson was celebrating Obama's "sexy brilliance." But while the Associated Press was sending a platoon of reporters to fact-check Palin's book, neither the AP nor any other media outlet dared check either Dreams or Audacity of Hope.

They likely feared what they would find -- namely that Obama's genius depends solely on his willingness to lie about it. "I've written two books," Obama told a crowd of teachers in Virginia last year. "I actually wrote them myself." He did no such thing. He had massive help with both books....

Remember this when people chirp about Palin's RNC campaign clothing expenses...

The Associated Press: First lady wears Naeem Khan gown to state dinner:

...Designer Khan is no stranger to helping women make a grand entrance; he has become a fixture on the Hollywood red-carpet circuit, dressing Beyonce, Carrie Underwood, Katherine Heigl and even Queen Noor of Jordan. Mrs. Obama's gown took three weeks at the designer's family workshop in India — with 40 people working on it — to complete, Khan said....

40 people, working three weeks. I struggle with complex math, but that looks to me like 120 man-weeks. Which is, ummm, a bit over 2 man-years. (I suppose I should say "person-years.) For one dress.

But it would be racist of me to criticize...

My prediction: More terror attacks...

I recently read an interesting book, The Battle: A New History of Waterloo. It was very useful in explaining something about 18th Century battles that I vaguely knew, but hadn't focused on. Those battles never started with a big all-out attack. Rather, two armies would start grinding at each other here and there in a small way. Like a fire in damp grass that flares up and then dies down, as Clausewitz put it. In those days each commander could see the enemy forces in the distance, and could draw conclusions from how they reacted to artillery fire or probing attacks. (And of course the officers involved in the attacks would report back on what they were seeing—and they would often get close enough to "see the whites of their eyes!") There was a kind of "body language" to armies and their various divisions and battalions that could convey weakness or resolve.

Napoleon watched the allied lines at Waterloo, waiting for flinching or wavering. That would be his moment to launch a powerful attack against that point. And Wellington, who was on the defensive, watched for the same thing, and would shore up weak sections of his line with battalions from his reserve. (On a modern battlefield things are very different. If you peek out and actually see other people, probably nothing much is happening. If you see no one, duck!)

The funny thing is that war we are in—if war it should be called—has brought us back to the time when our "body language" of aggression or weakness is being watched, scrutinized, by cold and bitter eyes. The slaughter by Major Hasan was a probing attack. It doesn't matter whether Major Hasan was formally a terrorist or totally a nut-job one-man-show. The effect is the same.

And Obama flinched. That's the simple fact. He has just told the world that he is weak, and doesn't want to fight. He's doing the same thing with Afghanistan. So he—and all of us—are going to be hit.

Terrorists do things for a purpose. One of the things they want is to force us out of Afghanistan. Therefore the correct response to Hasan's attack would have been to announce that we are sending an extra 5,000 troops to Afghanistan forthwith. (And we should take Anwar Al Awlaki's scalp, of course.) But instead Obama has chosen to do what will cause more people, including Americans, to be killed. He should have said that if you mess with Americans you're gonna get a poke in the eye with his eye-poking stick. Instead he has told them clearly that violence will get them things they want.

On of the odd things about Joe Biden's political Tourette's Syndrome is that he sometimes blurts out the truth... without being taken seriously of course. Remember this?...

Barack's been tested, and has failed...

Correct response:

Update: This is just armchair theorizin', but I think that if Bush were still President, Major Hasan would not have "gone Muslim." My guess is that he's totally in tune with jihadi thought patterns, whether or not he gets direct input. And that it's 'in the air" right now that Obama's looking like a weak sister, and isn't going to hit back. I don't think they thought like that about Bush at all. He's a man, and showed it in Afghanistan, Iraq, and especially with the Surge, doubling down when things got tough. Even if Hasan is crazy, well, living in the big city one notices that crazies usually aren't as crazy as they look. They never seem to harass the guy who's going to punch them in the nose!

"A House majority that is caught in amber circa October 2008"

Rich Lowry has a great piece on how our Constitution is designed to prevent demagogues from ramming through legislation in the heat of the moment:

...The Democrats enjoy such a large House majority thanks partly to an accident of timing. The election was held in uniquely disastrous circumstances for the Republicans, in the immediate wake of the collapse of Lehman and the ensuing financial panic. Piled on top of the other causes of Republican woe (some of them quite well-deserved), the crisis allowed Democrats to run up the score. But in a matter of months public opinion began snapping back to its center-right state. So we have a House majority that is caught in amber circa October 2008 when the nation's mood has already moved on.

Hey, you might say, such is the dumb luck of timing in elections. True. But in their wisdom our Founders devised a check to keep a majority augmented by temporary circumstances from running amok. It's called the Senate.

The House stands for election all at once, capturing public opinion at one moment in time. In contrast, only one-third of the Senate stands for election at once. Originally, its members were selected by state legislatures, further shielding it from public opinion (a feature done away with by the Seventeenth Amendment, of course)....

Seventeenth Amendment, bad move....

...If Obamacare is so necessary and wise, there's no true need to hurry. If it fails to pass the Senate, Democrats should campaign on it around the country. They should keep talking of its wonders, and build up public support for it, turning around the polls. They should enhance their majority in the House and the Senate, bringing new Obamacare Democrats to Washington. That's how you build toward passing historic legislation in a system such as ours naturally resistant to large-scale change...

The Dems know it's a steaming pile of you-know-what. If you have a clean conscience, you don't rush bills through before anyone has had time to read them.

My personal opinion is that their consciences are a lot muckier that most people guess, and a more honest nickname for this legislation would be "Screwtapecare."

Pathetic. Obamba's a girly-man.

Reuters : One year on, Obama cites struggle with Bush legacy:

...MADISON, Wis. — A year after his historic election, President Barack Obama sought to remind Americans on Wednesday the biggest problems he is grappling with — from the economy to the war in Afghanistan — are the legacy of his predecessor, George W. Bush....

Ya'know, Brrack old chap, President Bush left you another legacy as well. He left you a splendid example of how a MAN deals with tough situations. You may have forgotten, but he also inherited an economic recession. The Dot.Com bust happened just before he was inaugurated. And 9/11—a legacy of shocking Clinton neglect—dealt us another heavy economic blow a few months later.

Did you ever hear him whining that Clinton had left him a bucket of worms? No, he never did. Not once. He never complained or pointed fingers, he just rolled up his sleeves and started fixing the problems. That's what grownups do.

Oh, and legacy #3. He fixed his economic problems. Tip: Start by cutting taxes. Wait one year. Cut again. Lather, rinse, repeat as necessary. It works.

"Chilling from the standpoint of freedom"

Good stuff, by Thomas Sowell:

Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many "czars" appointed by the President, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent?

Did you think that another "czar" would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers— that is, to create a situation where some newspapers' survival would depend on the government liking what they publish?

Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called "experts" deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments?

Scary as that is from a medical standpoint, it is also chilling from the standpoint of freedom. If you have a mother who needs a heart operation or a child with some dire medical condition, how free would you feel to speak out against an administration that has the power to make life and death decisions about your loved ones?...

That last bit is very interesting. Suppose I was in a big hassle with the IRS or some other government agency. And I had to drive to their office and go to meetings that might have dire consequences for me.

I would probably scrape the Republican bumper stickers off my car!

It would just make sense. Most government employees are liberal Democrats. And a large percentage of them are not committed to high ideals of fairness and impartiality. We know this, we can see it. Just think back to when "Joe the plumber" embarrassed Obama in the 2008 campaign, and government employees in Ohio instantly leaked Joe's records to the press.

And the really ugly thing was that none among liberals and Democrats seemed to be ashamed! None of them hung their heads in shame and apologized for this disgusting behavior. And now it is being proposed to give these people control over us in our most weak and vulnerable moments...

Evil deeds come back to bite them...

Victor Davis Hanson: Whom is Barack Obama Afraid of?—Another Barack Obama 

One of the reasons why President Obama may be hesitating to commit fully to a renewed Afghan front is that he is worried that political opportunists might seek to gain advantage by loud rhetoric that unfairly simplifies the bad and worse choices, that he, like all other presidents in time of war, are confronted with.

In other words, he fears someone very much like an on-the-rise Barack Obama himself—who in 2007 in loud fashion demanded that all combat brigades leave Iraq by March 2008 and then flat-out declared to the nation that "the surge is not working" (a mantra for months posted on his website until Trotskyized in summer 2008). Ditto all that with Guantanamo, elements of homeland security, and Iran—and one can see that Obama knows first-hand the opportunities for demagogic and unprincipled political ankle-biting that a decisive wartime President invites. After all, what President, after making a tough decision to surge into Afghanistan, wants a young charismatic rival barnstorming the nation, without evidence assuring the public that "the surge is not working!"

It certainly would be poetic justice. Scoundrels like Obama trashed our country's noble efforts in Iraq while pretending—with limitless pomposity—to want to fight the good fight in Afghanistan. Now the loathsome liars are caught in their own trap.

Maybe I'll add this to my already cluttered sidebar...

Missed opportunity...it really is too bad.

Ross Douthat, in the NYT...Heckuva Job, Barack:

This was Barack Obama's chance.

Here was an opportunity to cut himself free, in a stroke, from the baggage that's weighed his presidency down — the implausible expectations, the utopian dreams, the messianic hoo-ha.

Here was a place to draw a clean line between himself and all the overzealous Obamaphiles, at home and abroad, who poured their post-Christian, post-Marxist yearnings into the vessel of his 2008 campaign.

Here was a chance to establish himself, definitively, as an American president — too self-confident to accept an unearned accolade, and too instinctively democratic to go along with European humbug.

He didn't take it. Instead, he took the Nobel Peace Prize.

Big mistake....

In honor of the great honor given our president...

Imagine some people who have had a wild drunken party, and now they are starting to sober up... and the sun is coming up, and they are sitting in the squalid mess. Ugh... and they pour one more round of drinks, to try to keep the party alive... That's what I think this "Nobel Prize" idiocy is like.

Musings of a psychotherapist, Robin of Berkeley:

...Even out here, things are starting to feel spooky. While it's always weird central in Berkeley, now there's a malaise in the air.

Yes, there are plenty of people so far into the communist schtick, they would gladly sacrifice their children, their granny, and their life savings for the Left.

But most liberals still want their houses, jobs, Hondas and iPods. When they voted for Obama, they weren't giving a thumbs up for the country to go the way of Ché.

So there's a strange, foreboding vibe in these parts; that creepy feeling you get when you know there's bad news ahead.

Many liberals look dazed and confused because they have no language, no information, no way of understanding what in the world is going on.

Interestingly, there's this eerie silence about Obama. You don't hear a peep about him. Or course, liberals are still foaming at the mouth about Sarah Palin, tea baggers, birthers, and all things conservative.

But adulation for Obama: Missing in Action. A telling sign: the life size black and white cardboard doll of Obama in a storefront near my office has been taken down. Where did it go -- to the local recycling center with other discarded Obamabilia?

Because I'm a psychotherapist, I'm intrigued by what goes on inside and outside. People not only suffer because of neurotic minds, but because of what people do to us when they abuse their power.

The family dramas, problems at work, or dysfunction in D.C. unnerve us. As Presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis, indelicately put it, "Fish rots from the head down." ...

A march of a thousand miles begins with...

I was thinking about the Obamanoids dressing their tame doctors up in identical white doctor suits to make a photo op... and just then I encountered this...

I wish I had the skills to computer-animate marching armies like they do in the movies, with Imperial storm troopers, Orcs, etc, . Doctors goose-stepping past the giant posters of The One would be very funny. Especially the corps of psychiatrists with identical beards and tweed jackets...

No plan, just wishful thinking...

No Master Plan at All, by Jennifer Rubin...

...Could it be that there is less to Obama and his team of geniuses than we were led to believe? Maybe Obama's domestic and foreign-policy agenda is all based on wishful thinking: a cost-neutral health-care plan will emerge from Congress, talks with Iran will produce results, sweet-talking the Russian bear will pan out, there is some magic pill to achieve victory in Afghanistan that has escaped the nation's leading counterinsurgency gurus, and private-sector jobs will return despite the anti-employer policies flowing from Washington.

Could it be that Obama is not, in fact, a sophisticated analyst and astute policy wonk but merely has led a charmed political life, benefiting from a series of inept opponents (think Alan Keyes, the snarling infighters in Hillaryland, and the McCain gang-that-couldn't-shoot-straight), a sycophantic media, and an electorate willing to give him every benefit of the doubt? It might just be that neither he nor his advisers have thought through much of anything because they convinced themselves that they had the secret weapon, the gravity-defying political colossus. Obama could get away with doing seemingly inexplicable things (e.g., picking a fight with Israel over the nonstarter settlement freeze, backing the lunatic Manuel Zelaya, allowing the left wing in Congress to write his agenda) because this charismatic leader would inevitably defy the odds (not to mention public opinion, geopolitical realities, and common sense) and get results that mere mortal politicians could not.

The IOC rebuff may turn out to be Obama's man-behind-the-curtain moment, straight out of the Wizard of Oz. It may be that the whole Hope and Change routine has been little more than a lot of cheesy special effects—and a cynical game to convince the public that the great and powerful leader really is worthy of awe.

Flaily, flaily. Poor Obama's never faced a stiff political fight in his life. (Or held a real job.) He's the ultimate poster-boy for the spiritual evil of Affirmative Action, which was designed by "liberals" to destroy the souls of blacks and other favored minorities, and keep them addicted to big government and the blood-suckers of the Dem Party.

Don't look back, Barry. Somebody somebody might be gaining on ya. Somebody who can shoot straight...

Never again.

Charlene recommends this piece by Robin of Berkeley in American Thinker, Sympathy for the Devil. It's very much a "read the whole thing" thing. But I will quote a line that struck me...

...We have a man who has been privileged with the greatest honor, the Presidency, and what does he do? Does he demonstrate an ounce of gratitude or humility?

No, he betrays us in the most profound way possible: by not protecting and defending us....

And defending us means defending Israel. Israel is part of us. Part of our DNA, as Spengler put it. A sibling, in a way no other country is. An almost invariable marker of the sickness of Leftism is ice-heartedness towards both America and Israel.

Thanks to Roger Simon for these...

And this...

AFP: Israel gets two more German submarines:

...JERUSALEM — Israel has taken delivery of two German submarines ordered four years ago, a military spokesman said on Tuesday.

"We have received two Dolphin-class submarines built in Germany," he said, on condition of anonymity. The submarines, called U212s, can launch cruise missiles carrying nuclear warheads, although when it confirmed the sale in 2006 the German government said the two vessels were not equipped to carry nuclear weapons. The subs were ordered in 2005 and delivery was initially expected in 2010.

Including the two new ones, Israel has five German submarines -- the most expensive weapon platforms in Israel's arsenal.

Germany, which believes it has a historic responsibility to help Israel because of the mass murder of Jews in World War II, donated the first two submarines after the 1991 Gulf War....

It'll be Bush's fault...

That's what Charlene said as we were driving this morning listening to Rush talk about Obama's wipe-out in Copenhagen. What a debacle!

It's really the fault of the Gasping Media. They've been repeating their garbage about Obama having "amazing powers of persuasion" since 2004. And the poor boobie has apparently believed it, even though he's never actually persuaded anyone to do anything they didn't want to do anyway.

Rush thinks this will be one of those defining moments of weakness, like Dukakis in the tank, or Jimmy Carter and the killer-rabbit....

Update: Charlene ahead of the crowd...

Top 10 Reasons Chicago Didn't Get the Olympics - Rich Lowry - The Corner on National Review Online:

An e-mail:

10. Dead people can't vote at IOC meetings
9. Obama distracted by 25 min meeting with Gen. McChrystal
8. Who cares if Obama couldn't talk the IOC into Chicago? He'll be able to talk Iran out of nukes.
7. The impediment is Israel still building settlements.
6. Obviously no president would have been able to acomplish it.
5. We've been quite clear and said all along that we didn't want the Olympics.
4. This isn't about the number of Olympics "lost", it's about the number of Olympics "saved" or "created".
3. Clearly not enough wise Latina judges on the committee
2. Because the IOC is racist.
1. It's George Bush's fault.

Speaks for itself...

ThreatsWatch.Org: Commentary: General Silence:

...David Martin, CBS: How often have you talked to the President?

Gen. McChrystal: I've talked to the president since I've been here once on a VTC [Video Tele-Conference via secure satellite communications].

David Martin, CBS: ...You've talked to him once in 70 days.

Gen. McChrystal: That's correct.

David Martin, CBS: Do you expect to be talking to him more than that? It seemed the theater commander spoke with President bush on a weekly basis.

Gen. McChrystal: Well I don't think I lack for guidance or an understanding of his intent, but it would certainly be up to him on the frequency. ...

McChrystal is an honorable officer who won't criticize the Commander in Chief if he can possibly avoid it. But we can fill in the dots. And we can remember those foul lying leftists, including Obama, who excoriated Bush for supposedly neglecting the "central front" in the WoT. Just 'till they got power, of course. Now their true natures are coming out, in horrid betrayals of our troops and those countries who made the mistake of trusting us...

Obama explained... National Review Online

This is from a great piece by Victor Davis Hanson, Barack Obama, College Administrator. He shows how Obama's weirdness makes perfect sense, if you understand that he's known little except academic life, and is acting like the president of a college...

...Some wonder where Obama got the idea that constant exposure results in persuasion. But that too comes from the talk-is-everything mindset of a university president. Faculties are swamped with memos from deans, provosts, and presidents, reiterating their own "commitment to diversity," reminding how they would not "tolerate hate speech," and in general blathering about the "campus community." University administrators instruct faculty on everything from getting a flu shot, to covering up when coughing, to how to make a syllabus and avoid incorrect words....

....Czars are a university favorite. Among the frequent topics of the daily university executive communiqués are the formulaic "My team now includes . . . ," "I have just appointed . . . ," "Under my direction . . . " (that first-person overload is, of course, another Obama characteristic), followed by announcement of a new "special" appointment: "special assistant to the president for diversity," "acting assistant provost for community affairs and external relations," "associate dean for curriculum enhancement and development."

Most of these tasks are either unnecessary or amply covered by existing faculty, department chairs, and deans. Czars, however, proliferated on campuses for fairly obvious reasons. First, they are spotlights illuminating the university administration's commitment to a particular fashionable cause by the showy creation of a high-profile, highly remunerative new job. When loud protests meet the university's inability to create a new department or fund a trendy but costly special program, administrators often take their loudest critics and make them czars — satisfying the "base" without substantial policy changes.

Second, czars are a way to circumvent the usual workings of the university, especially faculty committees in which there is an outside chance of some marginalized conservative voting against putting "Race, Class, and Gender in the Latina Cinema" into the general-education curriculum....

Satire no longer possible...

Obama's message to Abbas, Bibi: 'I'm losing patience':

President Obama's central message to the Israeli and Palestinian leaders in New York today was simple, a U.S. official said: He's running out of patience.

"The President of the United States is impatient," said the senior U.S. official. "That's what he told them."

"There's a limited window of opportunity here, and he's determined, but he's also impatient and we need to get going," the official said....

Because, you know, he's this amazing "communicator"

Hilarious. Right after the trumpeted speech to a Joint Session of Congress! His own party is scratching their heads and wondering what he means...

Dems find what Obama wants on healthcare still anything but clear - TheHill.com:

Democrats hope President Barack Obama will use his multiple Sunday show appearances to clarify his demands for healthcare reform....

Didn't Obama keep talking about "my plan" in the big speech? I think some Republicans leaders ought to file a Freedom of Information Act request for a copy of Obama's plan! I mean, there has to be one. We've been told in no uncertain terms that calling the President a liar is "racism." So his claim to have a plan can't be a lie, therefore he actually has a plan...

So let's see it!

My response to the notion that opposition to Obama is "racism"...

We can all learn from the politesse of the Left...

President Obama says the angry scenes on televised town halls represents a "coarsening of our political dialogue." [link]

You will need a "government permit to live."

James Taranto:

...Most criticisms of ObamaCare have focused on its cost in terms of money and lives, but it's worth noting that in exchange for spending trillions of dollars in taxpayer money to set up a system that will inevitably ration care, President Obama proposes a fundamental curtailment of your individual freedom.

In his speech to a joint session of Congress last night, the president offered what presumably was meant to sound like an innocuous, or at least reasonable, analogy:

Unless everybody does their part, many of the insurance reforms we seek--especially requiring insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions--just can't be achieved. And that's why under my plan, individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance--just as most states require you to carry auto insurance.

In fact, no state requires individuals to carry auto insurance. The owner of a car, which may be either an individual or a corporate entity, is required to carry insurance as a condition for a government permit allowing the car to be driven on public roads. Individual drivers, of course, are also required to obtain a government license, which requires fulfilling other conditions.

Driving is such a central part of most Americans' lives that the cliché that "driving is a privilege" seems a bit nonsensical. It feels like a right. There even is a constitutional right to travel--an unenumerated one, but one whose existence is not in serious dispute. Yet here is how Justice John Paul Stevens described that right in Saenz v. Roe (1999):

The "right to travel" discussed in our cases embraces at least three different components. It protects the right of a citizen of one State to enter and to leave another State, the right to be treated as a welcome visitor rather than an unfriendly alien when temporarily present in the second State, and, for those travelers who elect to become permanent residents, the right to be treated like other citizens of that State.

The right to travel is not a right to drive, but if a state were to require visitors to provide proof of insurance when arriving by train, plane or bus, on foot, or as a passenger in a private car, this would clearly violate the first two components of the right to travel.

Obama's proposal to coerce all Americans into buying health insurance is even more intrusive than our hypothetical state requirement would be. The ObamaCare mandate would violate not only the right to travel but the right to remain at rest. The implication of the auto-insurance analogy is that the president believes Congress has the authority to require Americans to obtain a government permit to live.... [Thanks to Bookworm]

It's been Palin v. Obama since 8-29-08...

...Biden and McCain were just the comic sidekicks...

David Horowitz:

...But perhaps the most remarkable moment of the speech — and certainly the most politically bone-headed — was to single out Sarah Palin and call her a liar because she has dramatized the indisputable fact that when you have government-controlled health care you have rationing, and when you have rationing you inevitably create a government bureaucracy which will encourage and then force elderly and infirm people to premature deaths. Palin's image of "death panels" to capture what is the undeniable truth about the Democrats' plans (Greta Van Susteren actually read, on-camera, the passage from the bill which justifies Palin's claim) was a politically brilliant stroke. In singling her out and defaming her tonight, the president made her the symbol of the opposition to the steamroller he is driving. And that's the fight she wants and anyone opposed to the Democrats' socialized scheme should want, too.... (Thanks to C4P)

It's hard to realize how strange this is. Sarah was unknown a year ago. She lost as VP, quit as governor (for good reasons, but most people don't know them). She's a private citizen, who made a post on FaceBook. To which the President of the United States has just replied in an address to a joint session of Congress! Incroyable! Stupefying! What an amazin' time to be alive, if you are a conservative! The collectivists have WON! They control the White House and Congress. We should be in despair. They should be on cloud nine. And yet they are flummoxed! By a chick from Alaska no one had heard of one short year ago! Sweet. Sweet! SWEET! Sarah Palin, I love you forever! If only for the pain you are inflicting on those frauds!

And there was a recent quote from one of these Obam guys—Axelrod or Emmanuel—claiming they don't sit around in the white House worrying about Palin. HAH! How many times has Obam defended himself against Romney, or Steele, or Pawlenty or Gingrich?

By the way, It's not just old people that are nudged over the edge. I've read at least three news stories about Canadian women being sent to the US to get care for prematurely-born babies. The Canadians have far fewer neonatal ICU beds than we do (per capita).

WHY? Because some government committee decide not to spend money on such a low-return investment. And what do you call that committee? Well, "death panel" is a logical fit, is it not?

Charlene and I know about this subject because our oldest son was born with a lung problem, and spent 7 weeks in the ICU. If he'd been born in Canada, well, who knows?

I second this: Afghanistan Is Not "Obama's War"

I have utter contempt and hatred for the scoundrel dogs who claimed that the Iraq Campaign was "Bush's War." The Iraq Campaign was voted for by Congress. That makes it America's war! No American citizen has the right to stand aside and sneer. All Americans owe a solemn duty to give warm-hearted, generous-hearted support for our troops and our country's objectives. (NO, I'm not saying that one can't make constructive criticisms.)

Likewise with Afghanistan. It is America's fight. No Republican has the right to oppose it just to hurt Obama or the Democrats. That would be despicable.

Dan Senor and Peter Wehner: Afghanistan Is Not 'Obama's War' - WSJ.com:

...We also believe supporting the president's Afghanistan policy is politically smart for Republicans. For one thing, isolationist tendencies don't do well in American politics. Even in a war as unpopular as Vietnam, George McGovern's "Come Home, America" cry backfired badly. So has every attempt since then. There is no compelling evidence that the congressional GOP was politically well served in the 1990s by opposing intervention in the Balkans.

In addition, indifference or outright opposition to the war would smack of hypocrisy, given the Republican Party's strong (and we believe admirable) support for President Bush's post-9/11 policies, its robust support for America's democratic allies, and its opposition to rogue regimes that threaten American interests. Republicans should stand for engagement with, rather than isolation from, the world. Strongly supporting the president on Afghanistan would also be a sign of grace on the part of Republicans. We know all too well how damaging it was to American foreign policy to face an opposition that was driven by partisan fury against our commander in chief. Republicans should never do to President Obama what many Democrats did to President Bush.

Mr. Obama's policies shouldn't be immune from criticism; far from it. Responsible criticism is a necessary part of self-government. And we are particularly concerned about reports that retired Marine Gen. James Jones, Mr. Obama's national security adviser, told Gen. McChrystal earlier this summer not to ask for more troops and that the Obama White House is wary to offer what Gen. McChrystal says he will need to succeed.

We do believe, however, that Republicans should resist the reflex that all opposition parties have, which is to oppose the stands of a president of the other party because he is a member of the other party. In this instance, President Obama has acted in a way that advances America's national security interests and its deepest values. Republicans should say so. As things become even more difficult in Central Asia, it's important to keep bad political patterns we have seen before from re-emerging.

Sarah one year ago today...

Can she call 'em, or can she call 'em? (Thanks to C4P)

"This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting and never use the word 'victory' except when he's talking about his own campaign...........

"But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed.....when the roar of the crowd fades away.....when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot.....When that happens, what is our opponent's plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he's done turning back the waters and healing the planet?

• "The answer is to make government bigger.......
• "And take more of your money..........
• "To give you more orders from Washington...........
• "And reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world...........
• "America needs more energy...........our opponent is against producing it.
• "Victory in Iraq is finally in sight.........he wants to forfeit.
• "Terrorist states are seeking nuclear weapons without delay..........he wants to meet them without preconditions.
• "Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America........he's worried that someone won't read them their rights?
• "Government is too big........he wants to grow it.
• "Congress spends too much money.......he promises more.
• "Taxes are too high........he wants to raise them. His taxes are the fine print in his economic plan, and let me be specific: The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise income taxes.......and raise payroll taxes........and raise investment income taxes.......and raise the death tax.......and raise business taxes.......and increase the tax burden on American people by hundreds of billions of dollars."

Toldja. And remember, Obama ran as a sort of moderate. Orrin Judd has a great post on how Bush as President worked to pass the very things he campaigned on. And how Obama in office is not at all like Obama on the campaign trail.

Here's an ad from the lying Obama presidential campaign:

Can we say "bait and switch?" Tooooo bad, all you "independents" and "moderates" who voted for hopey changey. You were suckered. You were played for fools. You should have been reading Random Jottings. [Link, link, link, link.] But NOOOOO. That would be tacky. Fad and fashion and wishful thinking are much more important than truth.

And all you "Progressives" and far leftists who assumed that Obama was a vicious liar who would say anything to get elected, but would then come home to his real self, taught by Ayers and Wright? You were right! You win! Your prize will be big "Democrat" Party losses in 2010! And maybe a President Palin in 2012. Ha ha ha. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of commie creeps.

The leader is going to speak to the children!

On September 8! (Here's the scoop.)

...On the "Activities for grades PreK-6" document, the Department of Education has lined up some ideas on what teachers can do with their 4-14 year olds in the classroom. What is odd about the list is that all of the ideas revolve around Obama, not about the students or the country.

"Teachers can build background knowledge about the President of the United States and his speech by reading books about presidents and Barack Obama..." is the tip for what to do before Obama's speech. Why is it so important to know about him? Is is really appropriate for schools to have students read all about Obama as a standalone project and not encourage and more in-depth civics lesson as part of the curriculum? Teachers should be careful with the suggested reading and make sure their 2nd grade class doesn't get to read all about how Obama tried cocaine, as he admitted in "Dreams From My Father."

Throughout the speech, teachers are asked to encourage students to think about many things... mostly relating to Obama himself:

"As students listen to the speech, they could think about the following: What is the President trying to tell me? What is the President asking me to do? What new ideas and actions is the President challenging me to think about?" (emphasis added).

"Students could discuss their responses to the following questions: What do you think the President wants us to do? Does the speech make you want to do anything? Are we able to do what President Obama is asking of us? What would you like to tell the President? "...(emphasis added).

Stephen Green: It's not mere education — it's learnyness!

The gal from Harvard (Glacier)....

This piece is good, and funny. Every "Czar" should get such a smack-down: American Thinker: Sarah Palin vs. Dr. Death:

Ezekiel Emanuel is upset. The president's health care czar sees the growing resistance to his vision, to his brave new world of government-run "communitarian" health care in which politicians and bureaucrats control one-sixth of the economy and 100% of our bodies. He doesn't quite understand how it all came apart on him, but he does know who started the unraveling: Sarah Palin.

Where does she get off attacking him? Sarah Palin, it seems forever Sarah Palin. And he wonders, as have so many others, what it takes to put a stake through her heart? People should listen to him, not Sarah Palin. He is the philosopher king of Democrat health care. And he went to Harvard, you know.

One day he was vacationing in the Italian Alps, a top-level government bureaucrat and Democrat insider enjoying the fruits of his labors on behalf of the common good. Government health care was cruising and Zeke was the guy Time magazine predicted will build the most "equitable and ethical" health care system north of Cuba. Marty Peretz, his friend and publisher of The New Republic, described him as quintessential Harvard, "very impressive" and stuffed with "gravitas."

And then he got the call: Sarah Palin had done the unthinkable. She had read the health care bill. Mainstream journalists hadn't read the bill. Congress hadn't read its own bill. But Sarah Palin did. Sarah Palin! He has a medical degree and doctorate in political philosophy from Harvard. The only Harvard she's knows is the chunk of ice off Prince William Sound, Harvard Glacier....

I'm just holding my breath waiting for "communitarian" health care!

Oh how I miss Laura...

AOG:

Pay levels for First Lady Michelle Obama's staff which totals out near $1.3M/year. Puts the whole "Palin's fancy clothes" thing in perspective.

Lordy, I hate to think of the pardons that will have to be sold to keep this up post-White House. She's gonna make Hillary look good by comparison...

Obama the post turtle...

(Thanks to a commenter at Fresh Bilge)

Obama the post turtle:

While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75 year old Texas rancher, whose hand was caught in a gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man.

Eventually the topic got around to Obama and his bid to be our President.

The old rancher said, 'Well, ya know, Obama is a 'post turtle'.'

Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a 'post turtle' was. The old rancher said, 'When you're driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a 'post turtle'.'

The old rancher saw a puzzled look on the doctor's face, so he continued to explain.

'You know he didn't get up there by himself, he doesn't belong up there, he doesn't know what to do while he is up there, and you just wonder what kind of a dumb ass put him up there!'

Just another one of my imaginary conversations...

Pay it no mind. Just fisking some person named Eleanor Clift in some web-site called Newsweek.com:

The first duty of a political party in retreat is to find something its people can rally around, and saying no to Obamacare is working nicely for the Republicans. [Lots of independents and even Dems are not liking it either.] They've managed to hold together in the House and Senate with no real leadership and no real message except to block Obama. [Fairly true. We need Sarah!] Despite all the advantages Democrats enjoyed at the start of this year, the responsibility of being in the majority and actually legislating is causing fissures between the party's dominant wing of progressives and the much smaller group of conservative, self-described blue dogs from the swing districts that gave Democrats control of the House. [So you admit it's NOT the Republicans who are blocking Pelosi-Care.]

Republicans are united, but that shouldn't be confused with victory. Republicans stood together against Social Security and Medicare, [This is a flat-out LIE. Both those had large Republican support.] and when those programs proved popular, opposing them left a residue of distrust for the GOP. President Obama has pushed his bipartisan shtik about as far as it will go, [shtik is the word. It was never sincere.] and if Republican recalcitrance means the Democrats have to go it alone on health care, Obama should embrace the new reality and cry all the way to the signing ceremony. [So DO IT! Shut up and do it. I double-dog dare you.]

Getting Republicans to support health-care reform is a lost cause. [Well, duh. A far-Left massive expansion of government, and she's surprised Republicans aren't on board? How stupid is that?] Other than the two women senators from Maine, there aren't any moderates left for the president to partner with in the GOP. Obama campaigned on his fabled ability to bring people together. [Something he's never actually DONE in his political life. It's just gas.] Voters loved the idea of everybody getting along in Washington, but seven months into the Obama presidency, we know it's a mirage.

The White House needs to find ways to leverage the huge tactical and strategic advantages Democrats had coming out of the 2008 election to advance legislation in Congress. [Hey, I gotta wild and crazy idea. How about legislation that ordinary Americans would approve of? You know, those untermensch who shop at Walmart. I know that's not the Dem tradition, but why not give it a try?] Instead, Obama has played the same old inside game of currying favor with power brokers on Capitol Hill who for the most part, like Senate Finance chair Max Baucus of Montana, represent sparsely populated rural states and respond more to their corporate benefactors than to White House pressure.

Obama won the election because his campaign had a great ground game and they had him, a super communicator who made the media swoon. [How about: "Obama won the election because he made the media swoon."] In the White House, the once crack team was slow to organize while opponents of health-care reform ran roughshod over the message and dominated the debate. All the White House has to counter the opposition is Obama, ['cause the TRUTH is really ugly. You can't use that.] and he's not enough. The magic has waned. People don't line up for miles to see him the way they did in the campaign. And judging by the anxiety showing up in the polls, voters don't trust Obama enough on health-care reform to set aside their historic distrust of government. [This may be too advanced for a journalist to understand, but trust in Obama is irrelevant! He's not writing the legislation, and he's not going to be administering it. (Unless there's a secret cloning project we don't know about. Maybe 100,000 mini-Obamas will run things and sit on the Death Panels, and reproduce themselves forever. In that case "trust in Obama" would have some point here.)]

The '08 campaign was such a searing experience that Obama and his key aides tend to view everything through that prism. [Why was it more "searing" than any other Presidential campaign? It was a picnic compared to 2000, but Bush calmly started achieving real things from his first day in office. With no snivelling about being "seared."] There were the early days when Obama seemed bored and his interest in the campaign lagged, along with his standing in the polls. Then came his heady win in Iowa followed by a humbling loss in New Hampshire, then the period when it all could have slipped away, when Rev. Jeremiah Wright taunted white America and Obama was torn between defending his minister and recovering his candidacy. If there's a campaign analogy to where Obama is now, this is the Reverend Wright period, when the prize hangs in the balance. [This is a very odd analogy. Obama should cynically toss something under the bus? But what? Or who? Or does Wright = health care reform? What joy, we can not only get rid of useless people, we can be JUDENREIN!] Opponents of reform won the first part of summer. Now it's up to Obama to regain the momentum. He prides himself on being a good clutch player, someone who can perform when the pressure's on. [I haven't seen it.] "Just give me the ball," he said to David Axelrod as he stood waiting to go onstage for his first presidential debate with John McCain.

Republican strategist Karl Rove was known for zeroing in on an opponent's strength, destroying John Kerry, a war hero, by portraying him as weak. [He's a weakling and a cad. And only a "war hero" in the descriptions of the press. His fellow vets made it clear they know he's a total jerk.] ....

Flaily flaily...

Rich Lowry:

The Obama team is saddled with a foundering health-care strategy. But it has a fallback plan — relying on the sheer dimwitted gullibility of the American public. How stupid do they think we are?

Stupid enough to think that a new $1 trillion health-care entitlement is just the thing to restore the country to fiscal health.

Stupid enough not to know that almost every entitlement known to man has cost more than originally estimated, with a congressional committee in 1967 underestimating by a factor of ten Medicare's cost by 1990. 

Stupid enough not to realize that it is through budget trickery — the taxes begin immediately, the spending is put off for a few years — that the program in the House shows "only" a $239 billion deficit over the first ten years.

Stupid enough not to focus on how the gap between the House plan's revenue and spending steadily grows after the first ten years, making it a long-term budget buster.

Stupid enough to think increased preventive care will save the government money, just because Pres. Barack Obama constantly repeats it, despite all the independent studies to the contrary.

Stupid enough to believe that a program with no cost controls that can be discerned by the Congressional Budget Office will control costs....

I'm feeling cranky. It's time to say "Toldja"

Michael Goodwin in the NY Daily News, Health care debate confirms this is not the Barack Obama we elected:

...Where have you gone, Barack Obama? Where is the sunny-side-up young man who promised to inspire and unite an unhappy nation? [It was just an ACT. If you want to know what people ARE, you fool, you look at what they've DONE. Obama never "inspired or united" ANY normal americans in his mini-career.]

Gone into the partisan sinkhole of Washington, that's where. [From the sweet concord of Chicago politics. Right.] Like some novice swimmer too confident of his own ability, Obama is suddenly finding himself in water over his head. [We TOLD YOU. But of course you can't listen to conservatives. That would be tacky.]

His flailing, including a foul habit of demonizing dissent, is not pretty. [Flaily flaily. Obama said OPENLY that he was an acolyte of Sol Alinsy--so what the hell did you THINK was coming? Fool.] And that brief foray into e-mail tracking of critics showed a win-at-any-cost side. [Toldja.]

Where is the appealing man we elected? Where is that Barack Obama? [He never existed! We TOLD you.]

Let's find him quick because the whole nation is paying the price for this impostor's irrational exuberance. Or hubris. [SO, Mr Goodwin, isn't it time you said "sorry" to us conservatives? Hmm? "Sorry, you were right, we were wrong, and now we have a dime-store Sol Alinsky for President?"]

Americans, more of them every day, are growing disenchanted with the expansion of government and the massive pile of debt. [YOU mush-brains elected a far-Leftist, and now you are...surprised? Disenchanted?] Yet the President, certain he can change their minds if only he talks to them again, keeps trying to sell bigger as better. [I bet you are STILL hoping he'll work the deception on you again.]

The public's not buying it. And as a measure of the nation's mood, a recent poll was practically cruel: Nearly half think the President is on television too much. Ouch.

Obama fatigue occasionally surfaced during the campaign, but this is different. [No, it's the SAME. We repeatedly pointed out during the campaign how overdoses of Obama made people queasy. YOU wouldn't listen.] He's the President, and if the country tunes him out, there is no Plan B. He's the rock star-turned-salesman, and everything in his administration depends on his stage act. [Trusting "rock stars" is STUPID.]

That the novelty is wearing thin is obvious. The danger is that the health care fiasco turns him into an unpopular and ineffective President... [He was ineffective from the git-go. For pity's sake, the guy has never run so much as a pop stand in his life! OF COURSE he's ineffective. We told you so. AND we told you the only candidate of the four who WAS qualified was Palin, who has actually run a city and a state successfully. I'm sure you are STILL too shit-stupid to acknowledge this obvious fact. ].

THIS is what Sarah was writing about...

There was some confusion about what Sarah Palin meant when she used the phrase "death panels," thereby causing guilty-conscience-convulsions on the Left. She wasn't writing about the end-of-life planning mandated in the bills; she was referring to rationing. The "death panel" she meant doesn't say "You must die," it says stuff like the following....

Fraser Health Authority confirms cutbacks to surgeries, services:

The Fraser [British Columbia] Health Authority confirmed Thursday it intends to cut surgeries, seniors' programs and services for the mentally ill to help deal with a budget shortfall of up to $160 million.

However, it said the emergency department at Mission Memorial Hospital will stay open.

Confirmation of the cuts, expected for some time, came as the authority's board of directors met in Mission Thursday. The board said 10 to 15 per cent of elective surgeries will be cut in the latter part of the 2009-10 fiscal year, with slowdowns already scheduled for the Olympic period.

MRIs will be limited to the same number done last year, and programs for seniors, the mentally ill and people suffering domestic violence will be cut....[Thanks to Mark Steyn]

...and then people die, or suffer unnecessarily, but IT'S NO ONES FAULT. Everyone is doing the best they can with scarce resources. We'll put you on a waiting list.

That's always how it is with government health care. Or government anything.... They cut back the number of crews fixing potholes, but no one decides that a certain pothole won't be fixed. It's just that fixing them takes longer and longer. (And government never cuts back on the number of supervisors and bosses.)

I thought this was pretty funny...

Megyn Kelly of Fox tries to pin down White House spokesman Bill Burton on what's going to happen to those e-mails they've solicited reporting "fishy things." The poor goop desperately wants to avoid admitting that they are keeping the e-mail addresses of those who have been reported for having wrong thoughts... but in fact Federal law requires that they all be kept.

Squirm, squirm squirm...

All your body are belong to us...

Serving as I am as an embedded journalist in Pelosiville, I have never had the slightest doubt that Obama intends to destroy private health care. Obama is just a golem. He doesn't exist except as a physical projection of the collective psyche of the far left.

And they want a "single-payer" system so badly they are drooling. Not because it would help the poor or provide better medicine, but for the power it will give them. Government bureaucrats are overwhelmingly leftish, and they are going to be in charge of us at our weakest and most vulnerable moments. Think about it.

This video is great! You want to know what they are thinking? Watch...

Think about a future where you scrape the Palin bumper-sticker off your car before you go beg for a CAT scan or MRI...

Midget president...

Washington Times - Obama still cashing in on Bush's failings:

Facing the first real rough patch of his presidency, President Obama and his supporters are once again resorting to a tried-and-true tactic: attacking George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

In his White House press conference last week, Mr. Obama referred to the Bush era at least nine times, three times lamenting that he "inherited" a $1.3 trillion debt that has set back his administration's efforts to fix the economy.

With the former president lying low in Dallas, largely focused on crafting his memoirs, Mr. Obama has increasingly attempted to exploit Mr. Bush when discussing the weak economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the difficulty closing the military prison at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

As he took power, Mr. Obama promised a "new era of responsibility" that would transcend partisan politics....

President Bush, as I recall, never whined or finger-pointed over the problems he inherited from Clinton, such as the dot-com recession. Especially, he never played the blame game over 9/11, although he very obviously could have. He is a gentleman. All man. Obama is a nasty little creep.

I'll just add this to my list of Bush accomplishments...

Roll over the rotting log...

Michelle Malkin, investigating what it might mean when administration officials say, "We'll just let the science decide."

....Well, I did indeed read one of [Obama Administration "science czar"] Holdren's recent works that reveals his clingy reverence for, and allegiance to, the gurus of population control authoritarianism. He's just gotten smarter about cloaking it behind global warming hysteria. In 2007, he addressed the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. Holdren served as AAAS president; the organization posted his full slide presentation on its website.

In the opening slide, Holdren admitted that his "preoccupation" with apocalyptic matters such as "the rates at which people breed" was a lifelong obsession spurred by scientist Harrison Brown's work. Holdren heaped praise on Brown's half-century-old book, "The Challenge to Man's Future," then proceeded to paint doom-and-gloom scenarios requiring drastic government interventions to control climate change.

Who is Holdren's intellectual mentor, Harrison Brown? He was a "distinguished member" of the International Eugenics Society whom Holdren later worked with on a book about — you guessed it — world population and fertility. Brown advocated the same population control-freak measures Holdren put forth in Ecoscience. In "The Challenge to Man's Future," Brown envisioned a regime in which the "number of abortions and artificial inseminations permitted in a given year would be determined completely by the difference between the number of deaths and the number of births in the year previous."

Brown exhorted readers to accept that "we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that artifical means must be applied to limit birth rates." If we don't, Brown warned, we faced a planet "with a writhing mass of human beings." He likened the global population to a "pulsating mass of maggots."...

One of the promises of the "Enlightenment" was that if people threw off the shackles of "superstition," the result would be happiness and progress. This assumed that the "real person" inside us was born good, and any badness we manifest was learned. But various peculiar things happened when those hoary old superstitions were discraded. One of them was the rise of a considerable number of people who think that "happiness and progress" depend not on enlightening people, but in simply eliminating them!

Guys like Stalin and Mao and Hitler and Pol Pot worked in round numbers of tens of millions. Today's "scientists" consider them pikers trying to nickle-and-dime it. Now we get the "big vision," expressing the numbers of people to be eliminated in nice tidy "billions!"

That's the "real us" that emerges without the "shackles" of traditional "superstition." The "real me" for that matter; I can easily look at the maggot-like masses swarming the city and think, "How much better things would be if the bottom 20% we eliminated." How much happier. How much cleaner!

"Woolly internationalist notions"

Krauthammer's Take - NRO Staff - The Corner on National Review Online:

...But Obama compounded it because he is a man who spoke about how he is going to unite the world, and has all these woolly internationalist notions. He goes to the summit of the G-8. He precedes it by trying to ram a cap-and-trade energy tax through the Congress which he knows is going to hurt the American economy in the name of climate change, in the name of demonstrating American leadership, and what does he get at that summit? No support from any of our allies.  

The Russians explicitly say they're not going to do anything on climate change if it impinges on their economy. And the Chinese and Indians say that as well, which means that anything he does at home on cap-and-trade will hurt us and do nothing about the emission of greenhouse gases....

You have to be brain-dead to think "internationalism" is ever going to work, but that's what liberals are. Or rather, what they make themselves. The alternative might be to acknowledge that their own liberal principles (which they no longer believe) mean that they owe a profound debt of gratitude and duty to this great nation, which is the very fountain of freedom and progress in the world.

It's much better to give yourself a lobotomy of the critical thinking lobes than admit that. It would compromise ones "autonomy!"

The little tick-boxes give structure to life...

Orrin Judd:

...Sure, it's a failed presidency, but on the bright side we got a do-nothing president and crossed "elect a person of color" off our to-do list.

Anybody sayin' "Yes We Can" these days?

Roger L. Simon, Storm Clouds on the Fourth of July:

...Obama is already over. In six short months the now-spattered bumper stickers with "Hope and Change" seem like pathetic remnants from the days of "23 Skidoo," the echoes of "Yes, we can" more nauseating than ever in their cliché-ridden evasiveness. Although they may pretend otherwise, even Obama's choir in the mainstream media seems to know he's finished, their defenses of his wildly over-priced medical and cap-and-trade schemes perfunctory at best. Everyone knows we can't afford them. His stimulus plan - if you could call it his, maybe it's Geithner's, maybe it's someone else's, maybe it's not a plan at all - has produced absolutely nothing. In fact, I have met not one person of any ideology who evinces genuine confidence in it.

On the foreign policy front, it's more embarrassing. He switches positions every day, such as they are, while acting like a petit-bourgeois snob with our allies and then, when people with genuine passion for democracy emerge on the scene (the courageous Iranian protestors), behaves like a cringeworthy, equivocating creep. Enough of Obama....

Sounds about right to me. Of course Obama can still do tons of damage, but he's a young guy with old ideas. Old and moldy. Ideas that have failed a thousand times.

There's also this, which, sorry Roger, I think is malarky:

...No, my suggestion is even more radical. We should junk the liberal and conservative orthodoxies that have divided - and blinded - us for so long and go back not to Eighteenth Century America, but Nineteenth, to the days of that most American of philosophies - pragmatism. "The pragmatists rejected all forms of absolutism and insisted that all principles be regarded as working hypotheses that must bear fruit in lived experience." Now there's a thought that might brighten even grumpy me on the Fourth of July...

Pragmatism was and is bullshit. Along with all the other invented philosophies and moralities of modernity. Why? Because they all lack any fixed and immutable yardstick to measure anything by. The Pragmatist says: "principles...must bear fruit in lived experience." OK, so who defines "fruit?" The original Pragmatists seem to have assumed that the world was destined to be run by people like them—educated well-to-do white gentlemen of northern European Protestant extraction. And therefore everyone would continue to define "the good" the way they would. How has that worked out?

Most of them were, by the way, Eugenicists, and the "fruits of wise policy" they envisioned included the elimination of inferior people and inferior races. Which probably included Roger Simon's poor raggedy Jewish ancestors. And blacks and Hispanics of course.

Every man-made philosophy or or morality or system for living faces the problem of drift. The world changes, and the philosophy is rigid and can't change with it. Or the philosophy is flexible, but then who can say exactly which flexes are the right ones? Who decides? What's the yardstick? And if you really could invent an immutable yardstick for your philosophy, it still wouldn't work, because the very meanings of words and concepts are always changing.

Only one philosophy, one institution, has solved this problem. And it isn't "man-made."

"State-sanctioned terror against its own..."

Victor Davis Hanson, Sorta Sums It All Up:

From today's news: "Reacting to Obama's comment Tuesday that he is 'appalled and outraged' by crackdowns in Iran, Ahmadinejad said, 'Mr Obama made a mistake to say those things . . . our question is why he fell into this trap and said things that previously Bush used to say.'"

This revelation of theocratic hurt, surprise, and hubris actually explains a lot: Iran — given the six months (or longer?) of Obama's both backdoor and overt efforts to normalize relations — believes (a) that it has an understanding now with the Obama administration that normal relations with the U.S. trump all other American concerns, and more or less gives the regime a green light to do what it wishes — hence Ahmadinejad's shock at Obama's belated and unexpected criticism; (b) this was quite different from the past administration, which made it clear the U.S. was nauseated by Iran's nefarious activities and didn't care much to normalize unless and until it reentered the family of nations and ceased being a terrorist state (at home and abroad); (c) Iran doesn't much care what the U.S. has said, now or in the past, and apparently assumes that Obama acted out of his accustomed character ("a mistake") and will soon "express ... regret." I suppose all our videos, apologies, and global addresses to the Muslim world at least achieved an Iranian admission that America now has acted out its new character and is beginning to resemble its old character, which translates into something like "Bush was tough on us, you aren't — so what's going on with this 'appalled' stuff?"

Meanwhile, as the mullahs begin the long, drawn-out work of hunting down and doing away with dissidents in the wee hours of the night, how can an American president be seen with, talk to, or reach out toward a police state in the systematic process of state-sanctioned terror against its own?...

Good question...

Doggie diplomacy...

Hoy. Funny, but kinda misses the point...

Another bit that came out of today's press conference was President Obama's refusal to rescind invitations to Iran's diplomats across the globe to July 4 celebrations at U.S. embassies — aptly described as "weenie diplomacy."

All of this, of course, raises a major issue: Are the hot dogs real, American-style hot dogs which are typically made with — pork!? If the embassies are serving all-beef hot dogs, are they Oscar Meyer or are they Hebrew National? Would an Iranian theocrat diplomat eat a Hebrew National hot dog?

Has the White House thought through this very important issue?...

We could be roasting babies in our various embassy gardens, and everybody would understand that that's what leaders need to do to appease the swining masses so they can get on with the real business of running the world.

[Link]

I think this is about right..

Andy McCarthy Understanding Obama on Iran:

...The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society. In this he is no different from his allies like the Congressional Black Caucus and Bill Ayers, who have shown themselves perfectly comfortable with Castro and Chàvez. Indeed, he is the product of a hard-Left tradition that apologized for Stalin and was more comfortable with the Soviets than the anti-Communists (and that, in Soros parlance, saw George Bush as a bigger terrorist than bin Laden).

Because of obvious divergences (inequality for women and non-Muslims, hatred of homosexuals) radical Islam and radical Leftism are commonly mistaken to be incompatible. In fact, they have much more in common than not, especially when it comes to suppression of freedom, intrusiveness in all aspects of life, notions of "social justice," and their economic programs. (On this, as in so many other things, Anthony Daniels should be required reading — see his incisive New English Review essay, "There Is No God but Politics", comparing Marx and Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb.) The divergences between radical Islam and radical Leftism are much overrated — "equal rights" and "social justice" are always more rally-cry propaganda than real goals for totalitarians, and hatred of certain groups is always a feature of their societies.

The key to understanding Obama, on Iran as on other matters, is that he is a power-politician of the hard Left : He is steeped in Leftist ideology, fueled in anger and resentment over what he chooses to see in America's history, but a "pragmatist" in the sense that where ideology and power collide (as they are apt to do when your ideology becomes less popular the more people understand it), Obama will always give ground on ideology (as little as circumstances allow) in order to maintain his grip on power....

Quote for today...

Commentary—Blog Archive—Obama's New Historic First: Indifference to Revolution:

Abe Greenwald: ...Pundits speak as if only hawkishness can become dogmatic, but the U.S. is dealing itself out of an anti-Khomeinist revolution because of the administration's fanatical "realism."...

Revolutions are for Americans and other freedom-loving types. What possible interest could a reactionary Alinsky-ite like Obama have in one?

Must-read. Makes sense of what we see...

Highly recommended. Joshua Muravchik has a long piece putting together all the evidence of a general theme of The Abandonment of Democracy by the Obama administration...:

The most surprising thing about the first half-year of Barack Obama's presidency, at least in the realm of foreign policy, has been its indifference to the issues of human rights and democracy. No administration has ever made these its primary, much less its exclusive, goals overseas. But ever since Jimmy Carter spoke about human rights in his 1977 inaugural address and created a new infrastructure to give bureaucratic meaning to his words, the advancement of human rights has been one of the consistent objectives of America's diplomats and an occasional one of its soldiers.

This tradition has been ruptured by the Obama administration...

Am I the only one who notices that what we are doing is INSANE?

North Korea has announced that it will shoot a missile in the direction of Hawaii. So what do we do? We take defensive measures! Arrrghhh!

I mean, like, if a 400lb crazy brute is harassing people, you do want to be a wee bit cautious about how you handle the situation. But suppose a two-foot tall midget lunatic is wandering around whacking people with a golf club. And we react...How? By being very careful not to provoke him, and by trying to bribe him not to express his feelings. And by advising people to wear shin-guards, just in case.

And by searching our consciences to find out what we've done to deserve these blows. And by declaring that stopping this pint-sized juggernaut would be un-Chistian. And that even talking about doing so is evidence that one is dangerously bellicose, and not to be trusted.

And then when we learn that he's trying to build a machin e gun, we...do what? Why, redouble our efforts to be pacifistic and non-judgemental.

And if I point out that he has people imprisoned in his basement, and is torturing them and starving them to death.... Why, that means I'm some kind of neo-con imperialist! A bad person, obviously!

Mark Steyn, on the Hugh Hewitt Show...

...HH: Now let me play for you an extraordinary, historic bit of tape, Mark Steyn. Earlier today, Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense:

RG: We do have some concerns of they were to launch a missile to the West in the direction of Hawaii. I've directed the deployment again of THAD missiles to Hawaii, and the SBX radar has deployed away from Hawaii to provide support.

HH: Mark Steyn, he's talking about North Korea shooting missiles in the general direction of Hawaii.

MS: Yeah, and this has been a slow-motion train wreck, I think, for American credibility in the world. Ostensibly, they're not supposed to have the capability to do this. Again, the Washington bigwigs used to mock the rumors that were, going back now to I think 1998-1999. There was a rumor that the North Koreans were planning on firing a nuke at Vancouver or Montreal because it would demonstrate to the Americans that they were serious, but without inviting their own nuclear retaliation. And the State Department mocked it as preposterous. Now flash forward ten years later, and we have the Secretary of Defense of the United States making a serious, sober statement about protecting Hawaii from a nuclear attack by a state that has a lower GDP per capita than Zimbabwe. This is deeply damaging to American credibility in the world today....

They wouldn't have tried this on Bush...

Reporters get 12-year terms in N. Korea - CNN.com:

Two U.S. journalists who were detained in North Korea while covering the plight of defectors living along the China-North Korea border have been sentenced to 12 years in labor prisons, the country's state-run media said Monday....

The correct response is war.

The even more correct response is to have been so war-like in the past that crazy tyrants don't even dream of trying this kind of thing. America should always be the "crazy unilateralist cowboy" that Bush was falsely accused of being. That's how you get peace.

Pacifism causes war. Pacifism makes diplomacy futile. Diplomacy only works as an alternative to war.

Alas, what I'm sure we are going to get in the current situation is "negotiations" and bribes to free people who never deserved to be imprisoned. In other words, paying ransoms to kidnappers.

What happens if you pay ransoms? You get more kidnappings! AND, it's much harder to stop once the habit of kidnapping becomes established. It is far wiser to to totally tough when the first kidnapping occurs. That first victim may die, but there won't be any more victims.

The analog in foreign policy is to be ready to fight over the slightest insult. It sounds "war-like" but it's actually the true pacifism.

All those who harshly criticized Bush for issuing "signing statements..."

You are, are you not, going to criticize Obama now that he's doing the same thing?

Hmmm? I'm waiting..........

(And Clinton too, of course. Somehow people never got around to that one.)

"Equidistant Position"

David Frum is very good Obama's speech... (Thanks to Hugh Hewitt.)

...The president's Cairo speech: worse than feared. Let's itemize the ways.

President Obama likes to position himself as an intermediary, explaining two conflicting parties each to the other. He did so in his race speech in Philadelphia, he did so when he spoke about abortion at Notre Dame

In Cairo, he took a similar position between the United States and the Islamic world. He urged Americans to take a positive view of Islam, and urged Muslims to take a positive view of the United States.

But whereas in Philadelphia and Notre Dame Obama was explaining two groups of Americans to each other, in Cairo he exhibited the amazing spectacle of an American president taking an equidistant position between the country he leads and its detractors and enemies. It is as if he saw himself as a judge in some legal dispute, People of the Islamic World v. United States. But the job to which he was elected was not that of impartial judge, but that of leader and champion of the American nation...

There's plenty more worth reading.

Of course that "equidistant position" is exactly how leftists like Obama talk. I hear it here in San Francisco. "Americans are... militaristic/racist/crude/Walmart/greedy...whatever" Said as if the speaker is not part of that horrid crowd.

Slippery and dishonest...

Obama has belatedly, and quietly, issued a statement about the shooting of two soldiers in Arkansas:

... "I am deeply saddened by this senseless act of violence against two brave young soldiers who were doing their part to strengthen our armed forces and keep our country safe. I would like to wish Quinton Ezeagwula a speedy recovery, and to offer my condolences and prayers to William Long's family as they mourn the loss of their son."

It makes an interesting contrast with the statement he made about the murder of the abortionist...

I am shocked and outraged by the murder of Dr. George Tiller as he attended church services this morning. However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence....

For one thing, it's the Tiller killing that is a "senseless act of violence," since all pro-life groups and leaders explicitly condemn vigilante attacks. It was done by someone who had lost his senses.

The shooting of the soldiers, on the other hand, was NOT senseless. The number of Islamic groups and leaders who endorse or encourage such violence is legion. (That's why "pacifists" and "anti-war" activists like them so much.) The attack made perfect "sense" to a large subset of the world's Muslims.

And notice how the second sentence of the abortionist statement implies, in the slippery dishonest way one expects from Leftists, that "Americans" are resolving our differences by acts of violence. This is a dirty lie. One very reminiscent of the deceptious way that Clinton linked the Oklahoma City bombing to conservatives. (And refused to investigate the connections the bombers had to radical Islam, by the way.) [Link, link]

On the other hand, it would NOT have been a lie if it had been applied to the Muslim who shot our soldiers!

But mostly it's the different tone of the two statements that is telling. I live among lots of people who think like Obama does. I have no doubt that they reacted just like Obama did. The murder of s soldier was not important to them, but the murder of an abortionist provoked "shock and outrage." (And ooohhh yes, instant political calculation.)

If Dems didn't have Bush they'd have to invent him...

I think it's really low-class and creepy the way Obama continues to take every opportunity to slam the Bush Administration. It is contrary to American tradition, and un-Presidential. George W Bush, being a gentleman and a decent American, has not answered back. Obama is trying to cover up the emptiness of his Leftist soul, and his lack of any positive vision.

Chris Stirewalt notes Obama's ugly use of Memorial Day for politicking, instead of making this a day for all Americans to share appreciation of our honored dead: Obama takes swipe at Bush in Memorial Day message | Washington Examiner:

And he includes this little gem...

...It gets little notice, but even to this day Bush makes calls on wounded veterans at military hospitals, corresponds with families of fallen servicemembers and gives his own money to veterans charities. In office, Bush hugely increased funding for veterans programs and worked relentlessly to improve the lot of ordinary troops....

Try to imagine liberals, especially Mr Obama, doing that! I'd bet Obam never has and never will give one penny of his own money to veterans charities...