Sharp Knife

IT'S TUESDAY

...and that means it's time for MNN's Weakened Update, with your hosts Robert MacNeil and Jim Lerrer Larah Lhera L'Error Cronkite:

*(Sled Neck, Denmark) Pres. Obama reached a decision on Afghanistan today. His decision was to fly to Denmark before the new unemployment numbers come out.

Once there, he will press Chicago's case for the 2016 Olympics, in much the same way as Al Capone once pressed Chicago's case for speakeasies and bathtub gin.

Obama has personally choreographed the Opening Ceremony, where he will light the Olympic Torch with flames emanating from his eyes. He will then compete solo in the high dive, the 100 yd. dash, the luge, the triathlon, the biathlon, the questioning-athlon and all synchronized swimming events. He will also play all positions on the American basketball team, leading the team/himself to a stunning victory solution over powerhouse Honduras.

He will also be the sole judge, the play-by-play announcer and will present all the medals while playing all the national anthems from memory on his kazoo, before taking the up torch in the Closing Ceremony and retiring to Mt. Olympus.

*(Oak Park, Ill.) ACORN will conduct a performance review of its field offices, to be headed by a Mr. Roman Polanski of Zurich. Results will be announced 30 years later.

(NBC Studios, the White House) President Obama has held more meetings on Afghanistan with David Letterman than with Gen. McChrystal.

The president explained "I don't think most people appreciate the subtle yet comprehensive geopolitical worldview David possesses. He was one of the very few analysts who correctly identified the true emerging threat facing America: Sarah Palin's fertile uterus."

*(Squeaky Wheeling, Tenn.) Al Gore received a $529 million government loan for his new car company. "That's because private investors aren't smart enough to put up their own money," said Gore. "We hope that one day, this company will reach the pinnacle of industry success; being taken over by the government."

The company will produce the Eco-friendly "Karma", starting at $89,000. "We wanted to keep the price high, because, lets face it, only the wealthy should be allowed to drive, fly, boat or heat their pools," said Prince Albert in Cannes. Let him out.

For lower-income serfs, Gore will produce the more modest "Instant Karma", aka "a bicycle". Providing he gets another government loan.

*(Somewhere, Who Cares, Really?) Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, currently attending the Fall Sewage Treatment and New Wallpaper Festival in Hovel, East Mudhutistan, was asked what her husband think$ about the housing crisis in West Mudhutistan. Her response reportedly peeled the paint off the walls, which was helpful.

UPDATE: Breaking News News: A court has ruled against Dan Rather's claim that CBS benched him unfairly to "pacify the White House". In its unanimous ruling released today, the court wrote "Rather never identified a single opportunity with specified terms that was actually available to him and which he declined to accept because of CBS' actions."

Instead of accepting the court's original document, Rather rather released his own version of the court's ruling, which said "Old Dan's righter than rain on a Laredo parking lot. If a frog had side pockets, he'd carry a handgun. Florida Slim just left town with Lassie and Timmy. I'm hotter than a Times Square Rolex, shakier than cafeteria Jell-O and tighter than the rusted lug nuts on a '55 Ford."

Rather's personal psychiatrist, Dr. Lucy Ramirez, said "The road back will be long but Dan is expected to make a full recovery...and I've got the documents here to prove it!"

HAVEN'T YOU "HELPED" ENOUGH?

A reporter who got off his ass and did some reporting, Joseph Neff:

In 2004, U.S. Rep. David Price inserted a $10 million program into the federal budget, sending the money to UNC-Chapel Hill for a new effort to help deployed soldiers of the National Guard and Army Reserves.

Five years later, the Citizen Soldier Support Program has spent $7.3 million, but the money has accomplished little for the people it was supposed to help. One-quarter of the money has gone to the university for overhead, and a large part of the rest has been spent on well-paid consultants, six-figure salaries and travel.

It looks like they created about 10 jobs for $10 million dollars--and as awful as that is, it's actually about 10 times better than most of these programs.

But didn't He say 'equal work for equal pay'? It seems to me the soldiers are doing the equal work and the paper-pushers are getting all the equal pay.

The head of the N.C. National Guard, Major Gen. William Ingram, has worked with the program since its inception. He said he has experienced many meetings, lots of discussion and stacks of paperwork.

"We're feeding you ideas, we're working with you, but we're not seeing any results," Ingram said in an interview. "We're not seeing a whole lot of action; there's a lot of discussion, but....no results."

Ingram said that after four years, the National Guard recently received the first tangible service from the program: a database of North Carolina mental health providers experienced with the military and problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury.

Which they could have looked up in the Yellow Pages.

In all, 16,000 members of the N.C. Guard have been deployed, some of them two or three times.

I'm not a math genius like those guys up in Congress or them perfessers in Chapel Hill, but my puny math skilz tell me that for $10 mil, we could have given each of those 16,000 soldiers a Christmas bonus of $625. Sure, they deserve more--but they sure don't deserve this.

Price, a Chapel Hill Democrat, saw a need, and he used a controversial method to address it. He inserted an "earmark," an appropriation for a specific project that a member of Congress can include in the budget.

Ah; there's you're problem; you elected a Democrat and he funded the Bureaucraty/Academical Complex instead of the troops.

The program was to help soldiers in the North Carolina National Guard and Army Reserves, with the idea that it could serve as a model and eventually be expanded to other states.

"model"?--this should be banned in other states.

Liberal academics are always going on and on about how damaged our troops are--practically psychopaths, really--and how Bush exploited them. Yet the first chance they get, the know-it-alls loot the program designed to help them like it was a vulnerable Coke machine in a midnight parking lot. If the Hegelian Dialectic holds.

(Via Hot Air)

I WILL EDUCATE, NOT INDOCTRINATE. I WILL EDUCATE, NOT INDOCTRINATE. I WILL EDUCATE, NOT INDOCTRINATE. I WILL EDUCATE, NOT INDOCTRINATE. I WILL EDUCATE, NOT INDOCTRINATE. I WILL EDUCATE, NOT INDOCTRINATE. I WILL EDUCATE, NOT INDOCTRINATE...

The reason Leftist educators go after young children is not just to warp their minds from a young age. They profile and stalk the young because they can't fight back. It's a kind of bullying. They are violating their own bullying standards.

In the classic style of bullies everywhere, they won't pick on someone their own size--or in LiberalSpeak, they "exploit the power imbalance".

The film "The Story of Stuff" is being used in some classrooms even though it is a pure Green Party screed: we're raping the earth, stealing from the Third World, the Government is all-caring except for the military which is evil, etc.

It is inflicted on young kids uncritically as fact. By people who pride themselves as "critical thinkers".

The kids at Bernice Johnson Elementary were forced into child labor, singing Obama campaign chants at less than Davis/Bacon wages. Aren't children in show business supposed to have tutors so they don't miss out on their education? Sample lyric:

Mm, mmm, mm!
Barack Hussein Obama

He sends his kids to private school
so they don't have to sing this drool
Mmm, mmm, mm!
Barack Hussein Obama

His Harvard thesis gone from view
Hey; the dog ate his homework, too!
Mmm, mmm, mm!
Barack Hussein Obama

Okay, okay--I got it off the internet.

The principal at the school is upset they got caught, not mad that they did it. Although its refreshing in a sense to see the return of School Prayer, the lady who wrote these hymns, a Harvard classmate of the president's, is now trying to say that the children wrote the lyrics. The lyrics include the word "doth", as in "Thou doth be joking, lady."

And for the record, "Mmm, mmm, mm!" is not a lyric; it's the sound Sandy Berger makes in his pants at the National Archives.

UPDATE: Doc Zero:

Besides the understandable anger parents feel when their children are used as political props, the Bernice Young sing-along is grating because it’s another aspect of the Obama omnipresence. The guy is everywhere, all the time.

He's not just "More Cowbell!"--he's like a 25-minute Iron Butterfly "Inna-Gadda-da-Vida" album-cut drum solo consisting only of pure, sweet cowbell.

People who are intelligent enough to spend half the income of a vast country better than its citizens will naturally seem like fitting subjects for songs of praise, to their most dedicated admirers. Why shouldn’t your children be made to learn those songs?

For the same reason we shouldn't criminalize neighbors watching neighbor's kids without a Federal Permit: because the Jealous State has no business trying to crowd out all the other "little platoons" that make a society work, whether its your local school, your bowling league, your charities or your family.

And Personality Cults are for Loser Nations. We didn't do it for truly great presidents like Washington, Lincoln and Reagan and we're certainly not gonna do it for this poseur.

But the Doctor knew that.

(CORRECTION: "THE 25.5 PERCENTERS")

"WHERE'S MY JOB, DUDE?"

The NY Post:

The unemployment rate for young Americans has exploded to 52.2 percent -- a post-World War II high, according to the Labor Dept. -- meaning millions of Americans are staring at the likelihood that their lifetime earning potential will be diminished and, combined with the predicted slow economic recovery, their transition into productive members of society could be put on hold for an extended period of time.

A "a post-World War II high"? Finally--BHO trumps FDR!

Angrisani said he believes that Obama's economic team, led by Larry Summers, has a blind spot for small business because no senior member of the team -- dominated by academics and veterans of big business -- has ever started and grown a business.

"The Reagan administration had people who knew of small business," he said.

Gain rather than lose a quarter-million jobs per month? The deuce you say!:

During the 90-month Reagan expansion, an average of more than 240,000 jobs were created each month.

Just one more inside-out, upside-down, bass-ackwards Adventure in the Land of Bizarro President.

UPDATE WITH CORRECTION: It looks like the reporter confused "unemployment rate" with the "employment-population ratio". Senior economist Bob Stein:

"...the jobless rate is 25.5% for teenagers, not the 52.2% reported by the Post. No idea where they got their figure."

However, the Bureau of Labor Statistics still says "the proportion of young people who were employed in July was 51.4 percent, the lowest July rate on record for the series, which began in 1948."

And independent of the story is the fact that Ronald Reagan grew jobs by pursuing exactly the opposite policies as we are following now, including 66 consecutive months of over a quarter-million jobs created. By contrast, Obama has been shedding a quarter-million jobs per month.

On the bright side, those receiving government checks can expect a little something extra to help them. No--I don't mean Social Security or Veterans checks; there's no cost-of-living increase coming this year. I mean if you receive a government paycheck as a congressman--in that case, you'll be getting a $4,700 raise to help tide you over! Because the Pirates of Pelosi have done such a wonderful job and all.

IMPEACH THIS

"In short, Hillary is Nixon in a dress, or more appropriately Nixon in a pant suit. Without Sarah Palin's beguiling and endlessly fertile uterus."--Andy S., N.Y., N.Y., N.Y.

Dear Comunista Hegemon de Coloso del Norte,

"Whether you wish us well or not, we will pay any price, we will bear any burden, we will take on any difficulty, we will support any friend and oppose any enemy to ensure the survival and the success of liberty and democracy in our country."--Honduran Interior Minister Oscar Raul Matute in a letter to Madame Hillary Rodham Ceauşescu.

You see, impeaching corrupt presidents and removing them from office isn't just for rich, white American liberals like Hillary anymore. And she's having trouble getting her mind around the concept that little brown people also have rights under their constitutions!

Hillary helped get rid of Richard Nixon without being called a "coup-plotter", but now wants to deny that same Constitutional process to her lessers. Obama, of course, treats all people equally--as puny mortals.

Say--anybody remember this?

In July 1974, as the House Judiciary Committee was reviewing the tapes and earmarking Nixon's supposed crimes, two young staffers were assigned by the committee's chief counsel, Jerome Zeifman, to research the protocols for impeachment. John Labovitz and another young lawyer, just 26 years old with the ink barely dry on her Yale law degree, began the arduous task of poring over constitutional archives. Labovitz's partner was Hillary Diane Rodham.

And research done by Labovitz and Rodham became the roadmap for three articles of impeachment reported out of the House Judiciary Committee that promptly destroyed any remaining congressional support for Nixon. Before the full House vote on the articles of impeachment, three senior Republican senators apprised Nixon of the handwriting on the wall. The Nixon presidency ended on Aug. 8, 1974.

The House Judiciary Committee’s former chief counsel, Jerome Zeifman, waited 22 years to unleash his bombshell, which would reveal that the deck was stacked against Nixon by none other than the wife of the man who now faces a similar fate. It was Hillary Clinton who rigged the proceedings against the 37th president, as Zeifman revealed in a little-noticed passage of his 1996 book, "Without Honor: The Impeachment of President Nixon and the Crimes of Camelot."

Zeifman quoted his own 1974 diary, which reports that just four days after Nixon resigned "John Labovitz came to my office and apologized for having participated to some extent to conceal from me the work that was being done. Some months ago, he and Hillary lied intentionally to me and told me there were no drafts of proposed rules of procedure for the [Nixon] impeachment inquiry."

The Daily News reported:

If the United States was going to topple its own president, rules were important, Zeifman told us Friday. "Suppose we were going to have the World Series next week and suddenly one of the team managers says, 'We want to change the rules to two strikes and you're out.'"

That's basically what [Hillary] Clinton and Labovitz did, Zeifman claims. In other words, they drew up new impeachment protocols to replace those in existence since Jefferson's day -- and then denied it. Congress -- and the country -- would have been completely polarized if it had seemed Nixon was being railroaded out of office with new rules, Zeifman said."

I have had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Zeifman on two or three occasions. He told me that Hillary Rodham tried to convince the committee to deny legal counsel to Nixon for impeachment. Had the committee agreed to that, Zeifman was prepared to resign.

So it is not the Hondurans, but our own Secretary of Statism who can't conduct an honest and lawful impeachment.

Both Hillary and Obama subscribe to the rusty old Soviet Ratchet: "Once a government goes Socialist, it stays Socialist forever." And the concomitant Soviet bargaining position: "What's ours is ours; what's yours is negotiable."


And speaking of disgraced and impeached presidents:

Bill Clinton says a vast, right-wing conspiracy that once targeted him is now focusing on President Barack Obama. ...Bill Clinton was asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" whether the conspiracy is still there. He replied: "You bet. Sure it is. It's not as strong as it was because America has changed demographically. But it's as virulent as it was."

Ah; the Vast White-Wing Conspiracy again. Funny, Obama used to call the Clintons racists, too. I guess that statement expired like all the others.

What the Clintons call a "conspiracy", most people call a "two-party system". This administration barely pretends to tolerate it here in America.

In Honduras, they don't have to pretend anymore. They are little, they're brown and they're a faraway country of which we know little. The mask is off.

"ACORN is one of the few enemies of the American taxpayer that wasn’t invited to speak before the United Nations on Wednesday."--Doctor Zero

BRING IT ON

**This video is funny. Also sad. And funny. I used to hang around there and tell a few jokes back in the day; alas, no more. Hat-tip to The Other McCain. And note that Pamela Geller is on fire. In a good way:

If we purged the illegals, the dead, and the fraudulent from the voting rolls, this would be a different country, with honest leadership that reflected the real landscape of this great nation — look at the tea parties, for example. But if we did that, it would be the end of Obama’s ACORN, and possibly of Obama’s reign.

ACORN is a racketeering criminal organization whose specialty is sedition — overthrowing the good governance of this great nation. Why hasn’t it been stripped and rendered illegal like La Cosa Nostra? What’s the difference, except that the mafia was patriotic?

**This vid is funny, too, at least before the Evironmental Book-Burners start pushing people around to silence them. I liked the part where Contessa Carbon admits her carbon crimes, but sniffs that unlike herself, pesky little brown people just aren't important enough to fly.

Also funny; Jim Geraghty:

Yesterday, "Vice President Joe Biden delivered a rousing review of the government’s economic stimulus plan in a conversation with the nation’s governors. 'In my wildest dreams, I never thought it would work this well,' he said. 'Thank you, thank you.'"

Apparently Joe Biden's wildest dreams can only be described as apocalyptic.

Let's take Nevada as an example: $35 million to Nevada's state Office of Energy: They've created three jobs.

Apparently Biden's wildest dream was that the $35 million would create two jobs.

It must be a full time job to keep Joe away from scissors, microphones and squirrels.

YOU'RE FIRED

"We here at the Times didn't notice when it was on Glen Beck.

We didn't notice when it was on Rush Limbaugh.

We didn't notice when it was all over the Blogosphere.

We didn't notice when it was in other newspapers.

We didn't notice when it was on network news.

We didn't notice when the Senate voted on it.

We didn't notice when the House voted on it, too.

We didn't notice when the president talked about it.

We didn't notice when the New York City Council froze all its ACORN funding.

And we didn't notice when the Brooklyn D.A. opened a criminal investigation.

Sorry--all our reporters were in Augusta, covering the vital "female golfers banned from the Masters"-story. So can I interest you in a subscription to the New York Times?"

"Hello? Hello?"

SUPER CALLOUS FRAGILE TWITS EXEMPLIFY "OFFICIOUS"

"Arrest Mary Poppins! Seize Her!"

If Mary Poppins showed up in Britain today, the British State would demand "Your papuzz, please, Fraulein."

The State doesn't even trust two of its own policewomen to care for each other's children:

But the mothers, both 32, have now been told by Ofsted that surveillance teams will spy on their homes to make sure they are not continuing to care for each other’s daughter.

For the past two-and-a-half years, one looked after both of the girls while the other worked a ten-hour shift. Both worked two days a week.

But in July, after a complaint believed to be from a neighbour, Det. Constable Shepherd received a surprise visit from an Ofsted inspector, who accused her of running an ‘illegal childminding business’.

Under these guidelines, if the policewomen rescued a child from a burning building, that child would have to be returned to the building after two hours. "Sorry your kid got burned--but at least we protected him from the horrors of rogue baby-sitters!"

If only this Statist lunacy were confined to England. As Darleen notes, it happens here, too.

Maybe we could put an ankle monitor on each child to make sure they don't spend too much time at the neighbors. And just to be sure, we can put a camera on every street corner. And if we really want to be safe and free, we can deputize half the population and assign them a personal surveillance target from the other half.

Or as we say in America, "The price of eternal vigilance is freedom."

UPDATE: More Anglo-folly-a from the elegant Mr. Pryce-Jones:

Shirley Chaplin has been a nurse for some three decades. She is a committed Christian and wears round her neck a small silver cross, about one inch big. Her employers, the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, warns her that she must remove this cross or be fired, in effect forcing her to choose between her faith and her job. Muslim nurses, however, are allowed to wear the hijab. [...]

On yet another front, the civil servants of the Home Office — in charge of domestic affairs — have been warned not to eat in front of Muslims during Ramadan. Operating officially within the department, it turns out, is a Home Office Islamic Network, paid for by the taxpayer, and it has inspired what it calls this “sensitivity” to Muslims. However, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, established to promote Islamic interests, has put out a statement that “We don’t care how much non-Muslims eat in front of us,” — which is very kind, perhaps even sensitive, of them.

How bad is it when even the sharia-favoring Muslims are more tolerant of British subjects than is the British State? At least the Muslims won't have a baby-sitting problem--they're allowed to have multiple wives by the State, where others are not. That's big of you, Big Bigamy.

WHILE THERE'S STILL A DIFFERENCE TO VIVE

"...Once upon a time “the Other” was a relatively sophisticated Hegelian concept. Now it’s the feeblest trope from Social Psychology For Dummies. “Fear of the Other” can be hung around the neck of anyone who disagrees with you—because they don’t really “disagree” with you, do they? They just have a kind of mental illness..."--The "Other" Mark Steyn


Mona Charen:

"In this hall, we come from many places, but we share a common future." You don't say? That's right up there with Warren Harding's declaration that "the future lies before us."

"On my first day in office, I prohibited without exception or equivocation the use of torture by the United States of America. I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed." The audience, composed in part of regimes that pluck out the eyeballs of political enemies and hack off the hands of suspected thieves, applauded vigorously.

Rich Lowry:

Obama's mistake is in believing "the interests of nations and peoples are shared." They aren't. Georgia has an interest in becoming a strong nation capable of defending itself; Russia has an interest in quashing it. China has an interest in dominating all of East Asia; Japan and other neighbors have an interest in containing it. Iran has an interest in gaining a nuclear weapon; Israel -- and the United States -- has an interest in stopping it.

The president isn't wrong to talk sweepingly of peace. Ronald Reagan did the same thing, although with a concomitant emphasis on freedom. But Reagan realized the world wouldn't lead itself, at least not where we should want it to go.

Look no further than the United Nations, that incoherent collection of the world's finest democracies and most dismal dictatorships. At the end of his speech, Obama said the United Nations could be "a place where we indulge tyranny, or a source of moral authority."

Immediately afterward, Moammar Khadafy took the podium for a rambling, 90-minute address. Even a first-time Model UN student might have noted the incongruity.

Mark Steyn expands on his theme of differences he mentioned on 'Rush' the other day:

"I have been in office for just nine months – though some days it seems a lot longer. I am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world. These expectations are not about me. Rather, they are rooted, I believe, in a discontent with a status quo that has allowed us to be increasingly defined by our differences."

Forget the first part: That's just his usual narcissistic "But enough about me, let's talk about what the world thinks of me" shtick. But the second is dangerous in its cowardly evasiveness: For better or worse, we are defined by our differences – and, if Barack Obama doesn't understand that when he's at the podium addressing a room filled with representatives of Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Venezuela and other unlovely polities, the TV audience certainly did when Col. Gadhafi took to the podium immediately afterward. They're both heads of state of sovereign nations. But, if you're on an Indian Ocean island when the next tsunami hits, try calling Libya instead of the United States and see where it gets you.

This isn't a quirk of fate. The global reach that enables America and a handful of others to get to a devastated backwater on the other side of the planet and save lives and restore the water supply isn't a happy accident but something that derives explicitly from our political systems, economic liberty, traditions of scientific and cultural innovation and a general understanding that societies advance when their people are able to fulfill their potential in freedom. In other words, America and Libya are defined by their differences.

You know, I'm tired of Leftists and Third World dictators hogging all the good "Other"-ness; I want to be the Other for a change.

Truth is, Americans are History's "Others". We insisted that power flows from We, the People, and we loan government a small portion of our God-given rights, instead of vice versa. 'We took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.'

That belief has set us apart from the very beginning, and even though it's taken a helluva beating recently, it is still at our core. But if we ever lose that, we'll be no different than the rest.

NO GULAGS, JUST GHOULS

The WaPo, with translation:

White House Counsel Gregory B. Craig, who initially guided the effort to close the prison and who was an advocate of setting the deadline, is no longer in charge of the project, two senior administration officials said this week.

"Have a seat, Greg. No, not there--here, under the bus."

Craig said Thursday that some of his early assumptions were based on miscalculations, in part because Bush administration officials and senior Republicans in Congress had spoken publicly about closing the facility. "I thought there was, in fact, and I may have been wrong, a broad consensus about the importance to our national security objectives to close Guantanamo and how keeping Guantanamo open actually did damage to our national security objectives," he said.

Turns out, it's closing Guantanamo that damages our national security objectives, but you keep on Blaming Bush--it's really attractive.

"It seemed like a bold move at the time, to lay out a time frame that to us seemed sufficient to meet the goal," one senior official said. "In retrospect, it invited a fight with the Hill and left us constantly looking at the clock."

"It's hard out there for a demagogue!"

Senior administration officials said the central roadblock during those early months was the condition of the detainee files, which had been left in disarray by the previous administration. "We assumed that for each detainee there was going to be a file somewhere," one senior administration official said.

Assume makes an ass out you and, well, you.

After news reports that some detainees -- Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs -- were going to be moved to the Virginia suburbs, lawmakers balked.

They didn't balk--they counted. They found that bringing terrorists to America polled worse than, say, eating roadkill off the asphalt without the proper dinner fork or fresh-milled pepper. And realized they were about to become unemployed thanks to their own moral grandstanding.

Then in May, the Senate decided, by an overwhelming vote of 90 to 6, to block funding for shutting Guantanamo Bay -- Obama's first major legislative setback as president.

Finally--the bipartisanship Obama promised!

After the congressional setbacks, Craig orchestrated the release of four of the Uighurs... The transfer produced a diplomatic rift. British and U.S. officials said the Obama administration gave Britain two hours' notice that the Uighurs were being sent to Bermuda. "They essentially snuck them in, and we were furious," said a senior British official. The move also caused friction between Britain and China, which seeks the Uighurs for waging an insurgency against the Chinese government.

Your brilliant FAIL! Diplomatic Strategery angered both our friends and our enemies...but Code Pink was pleased, and that's what really counts.

One administration official was more effusive. "Greg Craig is a hero," the official said. "He took responsibility for this policy from the beginning, and he has guts and character. If we can't get it done by the deadline, then at least we'll have done as much as we can as smoothly as we could have."

Translation: "FAIL!"

Craig is a hero, alright--to Fidel Castro. He was Fidel's fixer during Elian Gonzales' Extraordinary Rendition.

And now they want to rend these killers to your communities, even though they are being held in perfect safety in Gitmo, where, incidentally, no prisoner has ever been tortured, ever. They don't even do loud music anymore and haven't for many years.

It would not even surprise me to see the prisoners conduct a hunger strike against Obama when they learn they'll lose all the amenities of Gitmo.

This "Gee--nobody told us there were dangerous psychopaths down here!"-defense is wearing thin. They'll probably try re-branding next: "Six Flags Over Cuba".

These idiots are creating a dangerous new right to a jury trial for individual POWs. We would still be adjudicating cases from WW II if FDR had done that. Provided we won the war.

This was never about anything else but smearing Bush and smearing America in order to regain power. They won in the dirtiest kind of way and now it's blown up in their faces.

And it couldn't happen to a nicer gang of political grifters.

Update: In his famous "Letters From a Mayberry Jail", Otis the Town Drunk asks:

"Gee, your Honor; do I have to stay in jail with these terrorist freaks?"
"Of course not, Otis. Deputy Fife--release Abdul and Achmed at once!"

Cully Stimson:

It is becoming increasingly clear that this administration is trying to create the appearance of a tough national-security policy regarding the detention of terrorists at Guantanamo, yet allow the courts to make the tough calls on releasing the bad guys. Letting the courts do the dirty work would give the administration plausible cover and distance from the decision-making process. The numbers speak for themselves.

Of the 38 detainees whose cases have been adjudicated through the habeas process in federal court in Washington, 30 have been ordered released by civilian judges. That is close to an 80 percent loss rate for the government, which argued for continued detention. Yet, how many of these decisions has this administration appealed, knowing full well that many of those 30 detainees should not in good conscience be let go? The answer: one.

Letting the courts do it for him gives the president distance from the unsavory release decisions. It also allows him to state with a straight face, as he did at the Archives speech, “We are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security, nor will we release detainees within the United States who endanger the American people.”

No, the president won’t release detainees; he’ll sit back and let the courts to do it for him.

Runaway courts are a greater long-term threat to our freedom than terrorists. Courts call their usurpations "the rule of law", whereas terrorists tell you straight up they want to enslave you.

Liberal Judges and Ayatollahs both want these terrorists released. But that's the job of the Ayatollahs--our judges just volunteered.

TAKE A CHANCE ON AMERICA

How many times have we heard the president say this:

"If you like your current plan, you can keep it."

Trouble is, he was talking to Iran:

President Obama knew that if the magnitude of the Iranian threat were revealed yesterday, the emptiness of his resolution would have been embarrassingly obvious and his cover blown. In public, at the highest levels of the U.N, he heralded generalities as significant. In private, he was petitioning lower levels of the U.N. to act on startling specifics of the Iranian threat.

Why did the president not present this same evidence to the Security Council, the body with “the authority and the responsibility to respond”? Why did he not challenge world leaders to deal with the same Iranian threat that he privately was pressing upon U.N. bureaucrats?

There is only one possible answer: President Obama does not have the political will to do what it takes to prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb.

You think?

Reporter: What kind of sanctions, at all, would have bite with Iran?

Obama: This isn’t a football game, I’m not interested in victory, but solving the problem.

What kind of twisted, screwed-up world-view do have to be infested with in order to think an American victory is a problem, not a problem solved?

BEANS ARE PEOPLE, TOO!

Mark Krikorian:

Take a look at this pdf of the questionanire for next year's census — more than half the space for each person is taken up by questions on race and ethnicity (I measured it). So, your federal government wants to know if you're Puerto Rican or White or Alaska Native or Guamanian or Chamorro, but not if you're an American! Erect a wall of separation between race and state and you'll free up all kinds of space for questions that actually matter.

When James "Huggy Bear" O'Keefe was a student at Rutgers, he got tired of the unrelenting Mandatory Bean-Counting and, to make the point, he confronted the administration about the searing, soul-wrenching anti-Irish bigotry of...Lucky Charms! No Blarney!

Not all Irishmen are three foot-tall elves, you see, and the sterotype was scarring him, scarring him for life. Proving their cluelessness, the Man relented under the Gaelic Pride onslaught and banned Lucky Charms from the university menu.

And Howard Kurtz wonders why Grown-Up Journalists should indulge young James here; of course you should, Howie--because it's magically delicious!

The real question is why should O'Keefe and Giles mess with the Dumbstruck Media.

Speaking of the Census, let me say a word about the census worker found dead in Kentucky; first, Rest in Peace, sir. From what I gather, the man, Bill Sparkman, was an Eagle Scout and an asset to his community.

If, on the outside chance that this was a murder perpetrated by an allegedy "right-wing" buck-toothed hillbilly with a bad attitude and murder in his heart (as some have already joyfully assumed), you may hang the sonofabitch forthwith, after a trial by a jury of his peers, of course. And I don't mean twenty years from now, either.

Despite the fact that the census has been known to ask questions like "How many bowel movements did you have today and would you describe them as firm, moderately firm or as squishy as Jimmy Carter in a national crisis?", no conservatives I know will abide a murderer.

Unlike the Left, we will not be interested in giving the killer a five-weeks-to-life jail term, assigning him to sensitivity classes, hearing about his bad childhood, releasing him from prison early because the politicians spent all the money on hookers and bad mortgages, nor in providing him culturally-appropriate meals of corn pone, fatback and collard greens.

And we certainly will not give him millions of dollars of Other People's Money and a board position on a foundation with the next president of the United States or provide him and his sociopathic wife with cushy professorships and access to Other People's Children.

That's a census you can count on.

"When 'arf of your bullets fly wide in the ditch,
Don't call your Martini a cross-eyed old bitch;
She's human as you are -- you treat her as sich,
An' she'll fight for the young British soldier.
Fight, fight, fight for the soldier..."
--Rudyard Kipling, 'The Young British Soldier'

Byron York:

McChrystal began the meeting with a show of sympathy for those who had been killed or wounded. The general didn't get very far before he was interrupted by the provincial council chairman, Ahmadullah Wardak.

The security situation has been getting worse in Kunduz, Wardak told McChrystal. American and NATO troops haven't been aggressive enough in pursuing and killing the Taliban. In Wardak's view, the bombing of the fuel tankers, rather than a mistake, was the right thing to do.

"If we do three more operations like was done the other night, stability will come to Kunduz," Wardak said, according to the Post account. "If people do not want to live in peace and harmony, that's not our fault."

Chandrasekaran reported that McChrystal "seemed caught off guard." Wardak clarified a bit more: "We've been too nice to the thugs," he said.

So instead of receiving an angry lecture on America's disregard for Afghan life, the general received an angry lecture on America's hesitance to go after the enemy.

Cut from that scene to a letter written to Sen. Susan Collins last July. It was from a New Portland, Maine, man named John Bernard, father of Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard, then serving with the Marines in Afghanistan.

John Bernard, himself a 26-year veteran of the Marines, was enraged by the military's new, restrictive rules of engagement in Afghanistan. The rules are "nothing less than disgraceful, immoral and fatal for our Marines, sailors and soldiers on the ground," Bernard wrote. Under those rules, U.S. forces "without reinforcement, denial of fire support and refusal to allow them to hunt and kill the very enemy we are there to confront are nothing more than sitting ducks."

The letter, disturbing at the time, became heartbreaking three weeks later, when Joshua Bernard was killed fighting the Taliban in Helmand province.

His death became national news when the Associated Press published a clearly inappropriate photo of Bernard as he lay wounded. But the bigger news should have been his father's concerns about the rules of engagement.

You Three-Card Monty-'Crats swore this was the "Good War"--but now you Professional Losers are Hiding the Prize under a different shell again.

You people aren't going to "Vietnam" me again. Either get them the hell out of there or let them win. Either one. But do it Today.

And while you're at it, Free Army Ranger 1st Lieutenant Michael Behenna.

And Stop the insane War on Warriors.

(Hat-tip: Goldstein & Co.)

IT'S BIBI, BABY

And baby, it's cold inside that building (excerpts):

Nearly 62 years ago, the United Nations recognized the right of the Jews, an ancient people 3,500 years-old, to a state of their own in their ancestral homeland.

The United Nations was founded after the carnage of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust. It was charged with preventing the recurrence of such horrendous events. Nothing has undermined that central mission more than the systematic assault on the truth.

Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium. To those who refused to come here and to those who left this room in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity and you brought honor to your countries.

But to those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency? A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies that the murder of six million Jews took place and pledges to wipe out the Jewish state.

What a disgrace! What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations! Perhaps some of you think that this man and his odious regime threaten only the Jews. You're wrong.

History has shown us time and again that what starts with attacks on the Jews eventually ends up engulfing many others. It pits civilization against barbarism, the 21st century against the 9th century, those who sanctify life against those who glorify death.

It took us centuries to get from the printing press to the telephone, decades to get from the telephone to the personal computer, and only a few years to get from the personal computer to the internet.

What seemed impossible a few years ago is already outdated, and we can scarcely fathom the changes that are yet to come. We will crack the genetic code. We will cure the incurable. We will lengthen our lives. We will find a cheap alternative to fossil fuels and clean up the planet.

I am proud that my country Israel is at the forefront of these advances - by leading innovations in science and technology, medicine and biology, agriculture and water, energy and the environment. These innovations the world over offer humanity a sunlit future of unimagined promise.

But if the most primitive fanaticism can acquire the most deadly weapons, the march of history could be reversed for a time. And like the belated victory over the Nazis, the forces of progress and freedom will prevail only after an horrific toll of blood and fortune has been exacted from mankind. That is why the greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction.

Above all, will the international community stop the terrorist regime of Iran from developing atomic weapons, thereby endangering the peace of the entire world?

The people of Iran are courageously standing up to this regime. People of goodwill around the world stand with them, as do the thousands who have been protesting outside this hall. Will the United Nations stand by their side?

Ladies and Gentlemen, the jury is still out on the United Nations, and recent signs are not encouraging. Year after year, as these missiles were deliberately hurled at our civilians, not a single UN resolution was passed condemning those criminal attacks. We heard nothing – absolutely nothing – from the UN Human Rights Council, a misnamed institution if there ever was one.

Over seventy years ago, Winston Churchill lamented what he called the "confirmed unteachability of mankind," the unfortunate habit of civilized societies to sleep until danger nearly overtakes them. Churchill bemoaned what he called the "want of foresight, the unwillingness to act when action will be simple and effective, the lack of clear thinking, the confusion of counsel until emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong."

In the spirit of the timeless words spoken to Joshua over 3,000 years ago, let us be strong and of good courage. Let us confront this peril, secure our future and, God willing, forge an enduring peace for generations to come.

Hey, somebody's got to lead the Free World. Somebody's got to speak truth to powers and principalities. Somebody's got to make the bold case for Western Civilization and freedom. Our guy certainly didn't.

AND NOT A DROP OF "THINK"

Max Schulz:

Not surprisingly, global warming is being blamed for California's drought. California's drought was regularly invoked on Capitol Hill as Congress debated cap and trade legislation this summer. Energy Secretary Steven Chu gave this storyline a boost in February when he warned that drought will cause California's vineyards and farms to vanish by the end of the 21st century if we fail to combat warming. "We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California," he told the Los Angeles Times.

The only problem with the idea of drought driving California's misery is that it is largely a fiction. There has been very mild drought in recent years, but not enough to account for the current massive cuts in water to Central Valley farmers. This spring, the state's Department of Water Resources revealed that the mountain snowpack feeding California reservoirs was at 80 percent of normal levels, while precipitation in the northern and southern Sierra was 90 percent of average. This prompted California's chief hydrologist to tell reporters writing about the supposedly epic conditions that while, sure, there had been some drought, it was "not the worst we ever had." By the conventional definitions his office employs, he said, 2007 and 2008 barely qualified as drought years at all.

Drought isn't the reason the Central Valley's farmers aren't getting water. "There's plenty of water," says congressman Devin Nunes, a Republican who represents part of the Central Valley. "But the courts say it can't be touched, so it's flowing out to sea under the Golden Gate Bridge."

The false drought meme has conveniently allowed policy makers as well as the media to sidestep the uncomfortable issues surrounding Endangered Species Act regulation. It permits them to avoid confronting what Nunes refers to as "the fundamental wrongness of choosing fish over people." And it permits them to avoid taking responsibility for the consequences of government policies and regulations that have tremendously adverse impacts on ordinary people's lives. When cornered, blame the weather.

The dirt-worshippers who sued to let the water flow out to sea also sue to stop any new dams or reservoirs from being built. And even when the water is out at sea, they sue to stop desalinization plants.

Even though it doesn't exist, Global Warming is going to be hard to get rid of. That's because it's quickly becoming the new "racism"; the scapegoat politicians use to blame all their other failed policies on.

And that's a lot of blame.

THE OPPOSITE OF SCIENCE:

"Take my word for it."

It's been a long time, but I still remember being taught about the Scientific Method: you observe a phenomenon, you posit a hypothesis and prove or disprove it by conducting experiments that other scientists can duplicate, thus confirming your conclusion.

Ace:

Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist ...politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones’ response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

Now since then, FOIA requests for the data have been filed, and an increasing number of scientists have been curious to see precisely what exactly the evidence is of the much-heralded 0.6 degree Centigrade rise in temperature this century we've heard so very much about.

The new answer?

We lost all the old data so we can't provide it to you.

"The dog ate my Global homework...but she'll vouch for me! Lassie, come here, girl; if the Hockey Stick is accurate, bark once!"
"Arf!"
"See--that proves it!"
"Arf!"
"What's that, Lassie? What are you trying to say, girl? 'Timmy's fallen down a well'? No? 'There's a storm coming'? No? 'Some baby raccoons are trapped in a forest fire'? No? Oh--'Garbage In, Garbage Out'."

The reason "why" you should "make the data available" is because BY DEFINITION, THAT'S WHAT SCIENCE IS!

Even making it available to skeptics. Especially to skeptics. If they get the same results, BAM!--you win.

Here's the good news, though; because you say it's rock-solid science...you should be able to duplicate the result again!

And not to rub it in, but if had shared your research, you would still have a copy today. Or you can always sift through Lassie's stools. We'll take your word for what it says. Again.

"We respect [North Korea and Iran's] rights as members of the community of nations."..."The United Nations can either be a place where we... indulge tyranny, or a source of moral authority."--from the same speech, if you can believe it.

Mark Steyn did a great job on Rush today. He made the point that regimes, not nukes are the problem; no one cares when a New Zealand gets a nuke. When Obama says "No longer do we have the luxury of indulging our differences", those differences, Steyn said, are what gives us free speech, free elections and a free press (even if we don't use it much.)

Michael Goldfarb (who, it must be said, has been on fire of late) hits a similar lick here:

"Are we not friends of the persecuted Coptic Christian in Egypt? Are we not friends of the North Koreans enslaved in the gulag? Are we not friends of the repressed Cuban or Iranian democracy activist?" Those were the questions asked by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) on the floor of the House yesterday.

But we are not, and we cannot possibly be. Obama said so at the UN:

"No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional division between nations of the south and north makes no sense in an interconnected world. Nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long gone Cold War."

We are equidistant arbiters between Coptic Christians and the Mubarak regime, between gulag prisoners and the Kim regime, between Cubans and Castro, between democracy activists and Ahamadinejad.

Why is Wolf still clinging to antiquated concepts such as America's "friends"? Do we want to be, as Obama put it yesterday, "remembered as a generation that chose to drag the arguments of the 20th century into the 21st"?

(Sorry to steal the whole post--it was too good to excerpt.)

Obama uses that "same old tired argument"-thing here at home, too. For instance, being pro-life or pro-traditional marriage or against Socialized Medicine is "bickering" and "indulging in the divisions of the past". It is merely a cheap rhetorical parlor trick to dismiss opponents by preemptively declaring victory for the Leftist position.

We don't need nuclear non-proliferation per se; we need tryanny non-proliferation.

It's like gun control. We don't need to stop law-abiding citizens from owning guns. We need to stop criminals. Just as Liberals emphasize the mean gun and coddle the criminal who uses one, they worry about the nuke while minimizing the nature of dictators.

And ask yourself this: if you were a Saudi Arabia or Japan, would you trust Obama to put you under America's nuclear umbrella and protect you from a rogue state? Or would you want to have your own nuclear deterrent? It's difficult enough to picture Obama defending America.

I wish Obama's unilateral disarmament were only grandiose and foolish. But it's dangerous, too.

DISSENT IS THE HIGHEST CRIME AND MISDEMEANOR

The Committee will now allow you to speak:

"As we continue our research into this issue, we are instructing you to immediately discontinue all such mailings to beneficiaries and to remove any related materials directed to Medicare enrollees from your Web sites," said a notice from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.

"It is wholly unacceptable for insurance companies to mislead seniors regarding any subject — particularly on a subject as important to them, and to the nation, as health care reform," Baucus said Monday, disclosing the HHS investigation. [...]

"The health care reform bill we released ... strengthens Medicare and does not cut benefits," said Baucus. "From lower prescription drug costs, to free preventive care, to better treatment for chronic conditions, seniors have so much to gain from health reform — and I'm not going to let insurance company profits stand in the way of improving Medicare for seniors." [...]

An "investigation"? An "INVESTIGATION"? REALLY? That has the stink of totalitarians about it. What's to "investigate"? Somebody said something you didn't like--big deal! It happens to everybody else every day. Suck it up, sugar, and move on! Damn.

Where do these Soviet sovereigns get the "right" to tell a private company what it can and can't say to its customers?

Try this thought experiment: let's say Humana supports health care reform and Senator Baucus and the HHS are adamantly opposed; can they still silence them?

I've been around a while but I've never seen political censorship like this in America, except perhaps when Negroes were still being lynched.

Insurance companies can suck. They can be wrong. And so can governments. But only government can send armed law enforcement to silence you. That's why we need free speech.

It's not about the merits of the positions; it's about the right to take a position without asking King Max Baucus' permission.

UPDATE: How come HHS and Baucus don't get to censor Sen. Rockefeller?

"This [new tax on expensive plans] will mean higher premiums for coal miners who are getting very good health care benefits for a very good reason. That is, like steelworkers and others, they are doing about the most dangerous job that can be done in America."

"So that’s not really a smart idea," Rockefeller continued. "In fact, it’s a very dangerous idea, and I’m not even sure the coal miners in West Virginia are aware that this is what is waiting if this bill passes."

Of course, Rockefeller is such a free speech extremist, he believes in leaking top secrets to the Times. But how come he gets to object but Humana doesn't?

And catch this lede paragraph:

"The Obama administration warned insurance companies Monday they face possible legal action for allegedly trying to scare seniors with misleading information about the potential for lost benefits under health care legislation in Congress."

Are you kidding me?

Democrats have been "trying to scare seniors with misleading information about the potential for lost benefits under health care legislation in Congress" SINCE BEFORE I WAS BORN! That's been their bread and butter for decades and decades! They're just jealous some one else is committing their patented "crime"!

All this turns the Constitution on its head. Free Speech is a core principle of a free people, not a Party favor to be handed out by officials to supporters and denied to opponents.

The First Amendment was written to protect the rights of citizens to challenge government officials, not to empower a ruling class alone with free speech rights. And certainly not to give them the right to silence citizens for disagreeing with the legislation they plan to shove down our throats. Exactly backwards.

Like everything else since we elected these arrogant jackasses.

THE MASTER'S VOICE

Good Morning, everyone. I've put together this conference call because as artists, you personally owe Barack Obama a favor. After all, he hasn't nationalized your studios and given them to ACORN for their BrothelAmerica Outreach Program, has he?

And as creative people, you know that nothing really good is created unless the deft, lighter-than-air hand of government is there with its selfless and endlessly fertile imagination.

I just first of all want to thank everyone for being on the call and just a deep, deep appreciation for all the work you all put into the campaign for the 2-plus years we all worked together.

EVERYBODY: "Wh...What?"

Oh--didn't you know? We've been using your art for years without your permission. Or paying royalties. Now let's move on.

We won. I’m actually in the White House and working towards furthering this agenda, this very aggressive agenda. We’re going to come at you with some specific "asks" here. And by "ask", I mean "tell". I hope you guys are ready. Obviously a big area is health care. Second was energy and the environment.

Mr. Da Vinci; We like this "Mona Lisa"-but is there any reason Ms. Lisa can't be wearing a campaign button? In fact, the Committee to Re-Elect the Prince Yerbouti (CREEPY) wants her to wear a 2008 button, a 2012 button and 2016 button--that's when the president issues his Executive Order proclaiming a bonus 2-yr. presidential term extension. And the vice-president's office wants a "Biden in 2018!" button.

Mr. Whistler, everyone here likes the portrait of your mother. However, we feel there is room for a thought balloon over her head. She could be thinking "I hope the President takes away my MedicarePlus policy...it's just a big giveaway to insurance companies!"--something like that.

And Mr. Van Gogh; we'll be using your "Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear" to illustrate the way the uninsured are clogging our emergency rooms. I'm sorry you object. But frankly, Vince, that's the problem; when I talk to you, it goes in one ear and stays there.

Grandma Moses, your art is fine just the way it is. But could you change your name to "Grandma Ishtar" or something like that for diversity's sake? Do it for Warren, hon. And Michelangelo; one our our corporate sponsors, Benetton, has paid us for the rights to put a sweater on your sculpture "David". And Calvin Klein will be paying us handsomely not to put pants on it. Thanks for your cooperation, Mick.

Now, Mr. Cezanne, for our School Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Midnight Snack Program you will see that we've taken your masterpiece "Apples and Oranges" and painted in some green stuff which we now call "Apples and Oranges and Organic Free-Range Arugula". And Rembrandt, we've taken the liberty of placing a giant "Look For the Union Label"-banner over your "Syndics of the Clothmakers' Guild". We knew you'd approve.

Mr. Leutze, your painting "Washington Crossing the Delaware" is just the sort of jingoistic propaganda we here in Washington disapprove of. A slave-holding militarist leading a boat full of bitter-clingers on their way to wreak inappropriate violence on their European betters--and without even sending an attorney ahead to warn them of their rights! But the rubes like it, so I suppose, with a few changes, it might work.

First, Green Jobs Czar Van Jones has asked that you give the boat a solar-powered Evinrude outboard. What's that...fired? Yes, he was fired. But what does "fired" really mean, anyway? He's a czar: he was never really hired in the first place.

I don't think I like your attitude, Mr. Leutze. Let me remind you that Gov. Corzine and New Jersey Game and Fish says your boat was unregistered. And Port Authority says Gen. Washington has been operating an unlicensed ferry. They say you owe them 237 years of back fines--I don't know how much longer I can hold them off if you don't get with the program.

Next up is Mr. Warhol--but I see that our 15 minutes are up. Let me just say that it's been a pleasure doing art with you all.

I've know you've enjoyed our little chat about the state of art...and the Art of the State! Or as Socrates put it in his immortal "Stuff Lincoln Said To Jefferson--George Jefferson":

"so that Art of the Government, by the Government and for the Government shall not perish from the earth."

Have a nice day! Say--does anybody know who designed that smiley-face thing...

SAID CAB CALLOWAY

I took a shot at George Snuffleupagus here, and it turns out that Old Snuffy screwed up the nerve to ask a couple of tough questions of the king. In a noble effort to not be so RACIST!, I apologize to all Greek dwarfs. Except Arianna.

It was funny to see Obama insist that what the bill calls "an excise tax" is, in fact, not a tax. And it was even funnier to hear Obama insist that looking up words in the dictionary is to twist their definitions.

But here's the real issue: I think it was the great Country Western legend René Descartes who said "If I ever have a son, I think I'm gonna name him Bill or George! Anything but René! I still hate that name!"

And he also said "I think, therefore I am." But Obama is saying "You exist, therefore you're taxed."

This crosses a philosophical Rubicon. We've always had taxes. But if you didn't want to pay a sales tax, you didn't purchase. If you didn't want to pay income tax, you could not work. And if you wanted to not work, you could always move to Michigan. But until Obama, we've never had a tax based just on existing, just on being alive. Which is good news for Steven Seagal's career.

Fellow Country Western legend and pinko Jean-Paul Sartre would be proud. If he ever really existed. His greatest hit was 1976's chart-topping "An Existential Tax on Being and Nothingness". I hear Willie Nelson is doing a cover version. He's a big IRS fan, too.

But not as big as Mr. Big.

"You may call me selfish if you will, conservative or reactionary, or use any other harsh adjective you see fit to apply, but an American I was born, an American I have remained all my life. I can never be anything else but an American, and I must think of the United States first, and when I think of the United States first in an arrangement like this I am thinking of what is best for the world, for if the United States fails, the best hopes of mankind fail with it."--Senate Majority Leader Henry Cabot Lodge, Aug. 12, 1919

BUT ENOUGH ABOUT ME...

What do UN UN you think about me?

It is my honor to address you for the first time as the 44th President of the United States. (Applause.) I come before you humbled by the responsibility that the American people have placed upon me, mindful of the enormous challenges of our moment in history, and determined to act boldly and collectively on behalf of justice and prosperity at home and abroad. I have been in office for just nine months — though some days it seems a lot longer. I am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world.

Me, me me, me, me, me, you, me, me, me, me, me, me... I take it back. We need Government Health Care; it's the only kind big enough to treat this level of megalomania.

I took office at a time when many around the world had come to view America with skepticism and distrust.

"...And if they didn't, I kept explaining it to them until they did."

America has acted unilaterally, without regard for the interests of others.

Only 33 seconds to issue his first apology for America--a new land speed record!

On my first day in office, I prohibited — without exception or equivocation — the use of torture by the United States of America. (Applause.) I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed, and we are doing the hard work of forging a framework to combat extremism within the rule of law.

Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, Bush, me, me, me, Terrorists Rights Movement, me, me, me...

In Iraq, we are responsibly ending a war.

No, as Janitor-in-Chief, you are merely sweeping up after better men have already won the victory.

I have outlined a comprehensive agenda to seek the goal of a world without nuclear weapons.

Me, me, me, me, me, me, BOOM!, me, me, me...

Upon taking office, I appointed a Special Envoy for Middle East Peace

Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, Hurry up!, me, me, me...

We've also re-engaged the United Nations. We have paid our bills. We have joined the Human Rights Council.

"...lending our moral credibility to the Human Rights abusers who run it."

We have signed the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. We have fully embraced the Millennium Development Goals.

I'm afraid to even Google it.

Now, if we are honest with ourselves,

You needn't worry.

No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.

In the original Farsi: "Enjoy those shiny new nukes, Iran!"

We must remember that the greatest price of this conflict is not paid by us. ...It's paid for by the Palestinian boy in Gaza who has no clean water and no country to call his own.

He has no country because Arafat wanted blood, not land. Because we coddled Arafat. Because Arafat stole all the money. And because the UN stuck the kid in a refugee camp making him a "CITIZEN OF THE WORLD". Just like a public toilet belongs to "The World"-- it turns what should have been a brief problem into a Permanent Toxic Waste Site.

The danger posed by climate change cannot be denied.

I deny it. See--it's easy!

I believe that the people of the world want this future for their children.

I also believe the children are our are future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside. And keep them the hell away from the UN, which is the geopolitical equivalent of Bobby Brown's crack crib.

Sixty-five years ago, a weary Franklin Roosevelt spoke to the American people in his fourth and final inaugural address. ..."We have learned," he said, "to be citizens of the world, members of the human community."

And ninety-nine years ago, a vigorous Teddy Roosevelt spoke this:

"Experience teaches us that the average man who protests that his international feeling swamps his national feeling, that he does not care for his country because he cares so much for mankind, in actual practice proves himself the foe of mankind; that the man who says that he does not care to be a citizen of any one country, because he is the citizen of the world, is in fact usually and exceedingly undesirable citizen of whatever corner of the world he happens at the moment to be in."

I'll take Teddy over Franklin--especially with over a half century of seeing the UN in "action".

We call on all nations to join us in building the future that our people so richly deserve.

"our people", o, King of the World? How come when liberals talk about America, it's the "peoples" of America--but when they talk about the world, it's "people"?

And remember; if we all work together, this will be the best yearbook ever! Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are! Miami Beach audiences are the best audiences in the world! Hey...who's been messin' with my teleprompter?

Guilty.

czars, cars, students, artists, newspapers, networks, banks, billions, doctors, patients, community organizers--okay, he isn't claiming them right now--but like so much else, he is claiming America's nukes as his personal property:

"Obama is now driving this process. He is saying these are the president's weapons, and he wants to look again at the doctrine and their role."

The move comes as Obama prepares to take the rare step of chairing a watershed session of the UN security council on Thursday. It is aimed at winning consensus on a new grand bargain: exchanging more radical disarmament by nuclear powers in return for wider global efforts to prevent further proliferation.

Obama is not the first president to abhor weapons--although he's the first to have his monogram stenciled on them at the same time.

Eisenhower: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

Of course, Eisenhower freed Western Europe, whereas Obama has only freed some Gitmo terrorists and Andrew Sullivan.

JFK: Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to keeping the peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles - - which can only destroy and never create - - is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace. Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace - - based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions - -on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned.

But he was no squish, either. After all, this was a guy who did his part to free Asia from Japanese militarists and while Ted swam away from duty, Jack swam for miles with his crewman in tow:

I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of universal peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do not deny the values of hopes and dreams, but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal. ...I wish to make one point clear. We are bound to many nations by alliances. These alliances exist because our concern and theirs substantially overlap. Our commitment to defend Western Europe and West Berlin for example, stands undiminished because of the identity of our vital interests. The United States will make no deal with the Soviet Union at the expense of other nations and other peoples, not merely because they are our partners, but also because their interests and ours converge.

And then there's the president who finished winning WW II by liberating Eastern Europe, Ronald Reagan:

SDI stands for our Strategic Defense Initiative, the high-tech defense we're investigating to protect America and its allies against ballistic missile attack.


When I met with General Secretary Gorbachev in Geneva in 1985 and in Reykjavik, Iceland, last year, he exerted every bit of pressure he could to try to make us give up SDI. Well, I, of course, had to disappoint him each time. Building a defense against nuclear weapons is a moral as well as strategic imperative, and we will never give it up. Our bottom line on SDI is simple: We will research it; we will test it. And when it is ready, we will deploy it.

The Soviets have persisted in efforts to limit our vital testing in this area. But providing a strategic defense is too important to restrict the promise it holds for future generations. Defense, not just offense -- that is the promise SDI holds. The fact is -- and I'm afraid most of us in this country aren't fully aware of this fact -- the United States presently has to rely on a policy in which our nations hold each other hostage to nuclear terror and destruction. This is an intolerable situation. We will move forward with SDI; it is our moral duty.

ICBMs, and ICBO--but I don't see how BO will stop the BMs without a SDI.

The "Reality-Based Community's" cartoon-based caricature of Reagan was, as usual, exactly backwards. He was anti-nuke...in 1945! He was so against nuclear war, for months and months he wouldn't even let the military teach him all the various options on the nuclear football. He got rid of more nukes than any other person in history. He drove some aides crazy when he spoke of building a Missile Shield...and then drove other aides crazy when he talked of sharing it with the Soviets!

But he did it all from a position of strength, and a rock-solid core that said America was the Good Guy and absolutely worth defending.

Reagan saw SDI as a way of eliminating nukes--but Obama is defunding both SDI and our nuke program, while apologizing for America in a posture of weakness. Not to mention canceling the F-22, imposing dangerous Rules of Engagement which affect morale, hounding interrogators, paroling terrorists and offending our allies--a "Coalition of the Willing" still beats a "Coalition of Screw You". This is all a recipe for disaster.

Those other presidents knew that the Disarmament Craze of the 30's was inexorably followed by World War II. They hated war more than Obama, but they weren't about to do anything crazy to invite the next one.

All Obama seems to know is what Bill Ayers has told him.

And that It's All About Obama.

THEY CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!

"...[H]atred and bitterness...has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.”--Supreme Court Chief Justice & Philosopher-King Earl Warren, blaming conservatives for what Communists did.

'Tis the Summer of our Discontentulation, and now is the perfect time to re-read Ed Driscoll's brilliant review of James Piereson's brilliant new book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism.

What happens to a nation when a world-changing event occurs of such tremendous magnitude that half the population can't process who caused it?

September 11? Try the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. As James Piereson recently told me, "If Kennedy had been killed by a right winger with the same evidence that condemned Oswald, there never would have been any talk about conspiracies. It would have fit neatly into the moral framework of 1950s and '60s-style liberalism. And the liberals would have been off and running with it, and no one would have talked about conspiracies."

That's the subject of Piereson's new book...in which he argues both that Kennedy was a victim of the Cold War, and that the repression of his killer's ideology caused tremendous psychological damage to the collective health of the nation. [...]

It was during the 1950s and early '60s that that liberal elites declared America's nascent and disparate conservative movements to be a greater threat to the nation than the Soviet Union, as illustrated by films of the day such as Dr. Strangelove and The Manchurian Candidate. And the subtext of those films was very much based upon "a vast literature that developed in the '50s and early '60s about the threat from the far right," Piereson says, specifically mentioning Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style In American Politics, and Daniel Bell's The Radical Right.

As Piereson writes, leading up to Kennedy's fateful trip to Dallas, there was a remarkable amount of violence in the south, caused by a backlash against the civil rights movement. In October of 1963, Adlai Stevenson, the Democrats' presidential candidate in the 1950s who had been appointed the ambassador to the UN by Kennedy, traveled to Dallas for a speech on United Nations Day. Stevenson is heckled, booed, spat upon, and hit over the head with a cardboard sign. Stevenson says publicly, there's a "spirit of madness" in Texas. And Kennedy's White House staffers believe that he should cancel his already announced November visit to Dallas.

Thus, at the beginning of November 1963 a framework has been established that the far right is the threat to American democracy, "and that they've moved from heated rhetoric to violent act," Piereson says.

At least no one bit his finger off.

"So when the news spreads that Kennedy has been killed, the immediate response is that it must be a right winger who's done it," Piereson notes. And while the Birch-era right definitely had severe issues, JFK's assassin on November 22, 1963 had, of course, a polar opposite ideology. "When the word is now spread that Oswald has been captured, and that he has a communist past, and they start running film of him demonstrating for Castro in the previous summer, there is a tremendous disorientation at this."

The shock that Kennedy was in reality a victim of the Cold War simply did not compute on a national level. This was in stark contrast to the narrative that framed the death of Abraham Lincoln a century prior. "When Booth shot Lincoln, everybody knew that Booth was a southern partisan, and they could easily understand why he wanted to kill Lincoln," Piereson says. "Northerners blamed the south for this, and you assimilate it into the moral framework of the Civil War."

In contrast, "Liberals had great difficulty assimilating this idea that a communist would kill Kennedy. It made sense to them that an anti-civil rights person might do it, or an anti-communist might do it, but not a communist."

But that's exactly who Oswald was, having defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and then spending two and a half years there, and attempting to denounce his American citizenship along the way. Piereson says that his April 1963 attempt to kill Edwin Walker, former army general, anti-civil rights leader, and head of the John Birch Society in Texas says much about Oswald as well. In addition to his anti-civil rights action, Walker also gave frequent speeches calling for the overthrow of Castro. Piereson believes that Oswald's attempt to kill Walker sheds light on why he killed Kennedy: his policies towards Cuba and his leading the nation's other Cold War actions of the time.

John Birchers didn't kill Kennedy--Oswald was trying to kill them too--and for the same reason he killed JFK: it's what Fidel wanted.

"However, that is not how the Kennedy assassination was interpreted," Piereson says, with enormous understatement. Instead, a sense of collective guilt is imposed on the nation through its liberal elites and media. "And this is really the first time that you get on the liberal-left this idea that America is guilty. But this however now becomes a metaphor for the left for everything that happens moving on in the 1960s." [...]

"First, we Blame America First!"

"So how do you get, really, from this place in 1963, where Kennedy is shot by a communist, to '68 where communists like Castro are heroes to the left?"

Piereson believes this could have only happened due to the cultural disorientation caused by the airbrushing of Kennedy's assassination and the attempt to "view it as a civil rights event, instead of a Cold War event."

The conspiracy theories were also fueled by propaganda generated by the Soviet Union and Cuba, Piereson adds. The Soviet Union itself "was very quickly out of the box on November 23, 1963. TASS claimed that Oswald was being setup; and that the real assassins were Klansmen, rightists and 'Birchists' as they called them. They all claimed that it was a right wing conspiracy which brought Kennedy down. And some of them said that Barry Goldwater was responsible."

Which seems to neatly foreshadow the wild conspiracy theories that reached their zenith in Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK, which paints Oswald as a near-completely innocent victim and pins Kennedy's assassination on virtually everyone from the mafia to LBJ. Stone's 1995 follow-up, Nixon, would, not surprisingly, also implicate its title character in Kennedy's assassination as well.

He implicates everybody...everybody except his partner-in-art Fidel Castro, even though a Castroite pulled the trigger.

Here's my theory: After they listened to their Vaugn Meader albums backwards (Meader the famous Kennedy impersonator, second only to Teddy), a 13-yr.-old Stone teamed up with shadowy Communists in the Peace Corps named "Chris Matthews" to get rid of JFK because he shook Bill Clinton's hand without sanitizer and brought Barack Obama's father to America during the famous Mboya Airlift of Extra Vowels--hey; let's make a movie!

But such conspiracy theories actually began almost immediately after the Warren Commission report was issued in 1964. As Piereson writes in Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, conspiracy theorists used the Warren Commission as their guide to understanding the assassination, even while simultaneously concocting reasons why everything in the report was in error. Pierson places this into context by noting that a sort of flip-over had begun to occur in the mid-1960s, with the left increasingly sounding like the paranoid Birchers of the 1950s.

This was a trait that a few journalists had spotted even before the far left's recent attempts had gotten started to conflate 9/11 into a conspiracy theory involving President Bush, the Pentagon, and presumably everyone in the federal and local governments.

Hey, Van Jones; Jack Ruby called--he wants his conspiracy theories back. If you're done with them. Which you're not.

Similarly, the overheated language of the modern left, such as Al Gore's attempt to demonize his critics as "Digital Brownshirts" begins to grow out of this mid-1960s period. "Just as the Birch Society had accused Eisenhower of being a communist," Piereson says, "by the late sixties, the liberals and leftists were accusing everyone else with being Nazis and fascists. That, and anti-Americanism. These now became features of the left."

"Pelosi"-what? "Reid"-who? Can you say "Ripped from Today's Headlines!"?

The psychological discord in the wake of JFK's assassination also destroyed the line that had previously separated New Deal-style liberals with the more extreme hard left. "The anti-Americanism and the conspiracy theorizing and the rough political language characterized by the left now enters into liberalism," Piereson says. [...]

"Oswald turned out to be one of the most consequential assassins in history," Piereson says. "He's a communist who shoots the president of the United States. You would think that there would be a reaction against communism. But there is no reaction against communism in the United States after Kennedy's killed. In fact, communism is the vogue," particularly on college campuses...Just look for the Ché T-shirt on a college kid—or his professor.

And there was no reaction against Arafat when an Arafatist killed Bobby Kennedy. Well--there was one reaction: First Pal Bill Ayers dedicated his book to Sirhan. I mean Ayers' first book, before he wrote "The Audacity of Hope".

Which may be the most curious element of Kennedy's death: Oswald may have been the ultimate "liberal in a hurry," as communists were often called during the Cold War. But Kennedy's death and the left's reaction to it caused many sixties and seventies liberal ideas to become seemingly frozen in amber. Which is the final remarkable paradox for a group that likes to call itself "progressive" these days.

It's an odd kind of "progress" that views everyday as Sept. 10, 2001--or worse yet, Nov. 21, 1963. And further, takes from those events that the bad guys are CIA interrogators and conservatives, not terrorists and communists.

IN THE RIGHT MEASURE

David Harsanyi:

Instead, here at home, stilted House rules dictate that a congressperson may not refer to the government as "something hated, something oppressive." Its members shall not call any unnamed officials "our half-baked nitwits handling foreign affairs" no matter how true the statement may be. And they never, ever can describe the president as a "liar," a "hypocrite" or claim he is "intellectually dishonest."

It's a miracle anything is discussed, actually. [...]

Neither does a hammered celebrity rapper making an idiot out of himself on the MTV (the exemplar of proper etiquette, no?) Video Awards. Yes, I too yearn for the bygone era of hip-hop chivalry, but those days, sadly, have passed.

This new focus on civility is meant to cloud another issue. Let's not confuse personal civility with political civility. A "civil" citizenry can mean a pliable citizenry, waiting — sometimes forever — to speak their minds.

We have no duty to say "please" and "thank you" to elected officials. Not yet.

Mark Steyn puts it this way:

As to not "muddying" a "reasonable" debate with "polarizing hyperbole", why do you think Judge Hadjis caved and issued a ruling in the Lemire case entirely at odds with the one he issued in the Beaumont case? Precisely because Ezra Levant and I and a few others clobbered Canada's "human rights" regime with "polarizing hyperbole". If we hadn't done, Section 13 would still be a goer, and Mr Lemire would have been convicted. It's only because we went Magna Carta on Jennifer Lynch's medieval ass that we succeeded in dragging received opinion, inch by painful inch, away from this racket. Being "reasonable" about an abomination only makes it respectable - as Section 13 was until two years ago. Left to the likes of all the "reasonable" types, Canadian liberty would drift incrementally but remorselessly off the cliff.

I felt kinda' bad about stickin' it to Wolf for his Jeopardy performance. After all, the guy was playing for charity. Maybe you should stick to "Lingo" with Chuck Woolery, Wolf. There's no shame--Jeopardy's not for everybody. Then work your way up to "Wheel of Fortune"--Pat's a great conservative. Hanging out with him and Vanna would be good for you. And there'd be no more jokes from your boss about "The Situation Room with Andy Richter".

I try to be fair. For one thing, if we convince somebody, I want them to stay convinced. So we can't copy every moral shortcut of the Left. We don't believe in censoring the news. Or in trying to palm off doctored quotes as serious news. Or getting too personal. And certainly not siccing union thugs on those we disagree with.

But we can state the case for liberty in strong language, even if it makes Frank Rich a little gassy and write columns. The country will somehow survive. The columns.

AS IN

"Are you now or have you ever been?"

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said yesterday she is clueless about an amendment to prohibit government funds for embattled ACORN, although it overwhelmingly passed the Senate Monday and the White House is calling for the group to be held accountable.

“I don’t even know what they passed,” Pelosi told The Post yesterday. “What did they do? They defunded it?”

Who Will Tell the Speaker that the House has also passed an ACORN defunding bill? Not me--I don't think she could bear it!

I hope you're happy now, Charlie Gibson. Your reporting is so bad, public officials know less about ACORN with each passing day!:

STEPHANOPOULOS: How about the funding for ACORN?

OBAMA: You know, it’s — frankly, it’s not really something I’ve followed closely. I didn’t even know that ACORN was getting a whole lot of federal money.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Both the Senate and the House have voted to cut it off.

OBAMA: You know, what I know is, is that what I saw on that video was certainly inappropriate and deserves to be investigated.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you’re not committing to — to cut off the federal funding?

OBAMA: George, this is not the biggest issue facing the country. It’s not something I’m paying a lot of attention to.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you used to work for ACORN. Your campaign gave them a huge amount of money.

OBAMA: "ACORN? ACORN...No, can't say as I recall working for any ACORN."

STEPHANOPOULOS: "But...Oh, yeah, I get it. ACORN? Who's ACORN? Let's talk about the real issues, Mr. President. How's your puppy?"