The Discerning Texan

Outstanding commentary from SMU's own Ben Voth:

A public figure openly called for Palin to be raped during the campaign. Months after the losing campaign was over, a major comedian joked about the fictitious rape of one of her daughters. Immediately after the election, her church was burned. It's fairly difficult to reconcile this 'heat' as something conventional in politics. In fact, there might be some good reason to collectively indict Palin critics for their silent complicity.

This would go a long way to explain why many in the public seem more drawn to Palin after the resignation and the absurd media reactions to it. Keep in mind that these incidents remain unrepented public attacks. The media refused to offer much comment on the burning of Palin's church -- a silence which conveyed an implied endorsement of that attack. Imagine if Obama had lost the election and Jeremiah Wright's church had been burned. Where would the punditry be?

Given the peculiar failure of pundits to "understand" her July 3 statement, it is useful to return to the actual text of her statement. With such attention we can discover some of the possible confusion of pundits and reveal the largely ignored messages contained in Governor Palin's statement. Most interesting is the discussion about her children:

In fact, this decision comes after much consideration, and finally polling the most important people in my life -- my children (where the count was unanimous... well, in response to asking: ‘Want me to make a positive difference and fight for ALL our children's future from OUTSIDE the Governor's office?' It was four "yes's" and one "hell yeah!" The "hell yeah" sealed it - and someday I'll talk about the details of that... I think much of it had to do with the kids seeing their baby brother Trig mocked by some pretty mean-spirited adults recently.) Um, by the way, sure wish folks could ever, ever understand that we ALL could learn so much from someone like Trig -- I know he needs me, but I need him even more... what a child can offer to set priorities RIGHT -- that time is precious... the world needs more ‘Trigs', not fewer.

The mocking of a disabled child, Trig Palin, must stand out as one of the most uniquely cruel and despicable contemporary trends of American politics. Could this be what Bill Clinton envisioned when he asked the nation to bring to an end the politics of personal destruction in the 1990s? It is clear that the entire Palin family would like to broaden their advocacy beyond the borders of Alaska. What is also clear is that pulsing at the center of Media contempt toward Palin is not simply stated positions on abortion but real life actions that are so striking and meaningful that they enrage a pretentious political community feigning interest in "women's rights."

You will want to read the entire thing.

It is quite obvious that the Democrats are scared to death of her; unfortunately so are too many Republicans. She is a great gift, yet many fools in our own party can only see through their thickly coated MSM/pop culture lenses. What a shame. What a commentary of where we are as a country.

Nero should have been so lucky.

Day by Day by Chris Muir (click to enlarge)

Ann Coulter titled her column this week "Forgetting Sarah". But what I think what the column is really about is "Getting" Sarah:

Sarah Palin has deeply disappointed her enemies. People who hate her guts feel she's really let them down by resigning.

She's like the ex-girlfriend they're SO over, never want to see again, have already forgotten about -- really, it's O-ver -- but they just can't stop talking about her.

Liberal: Ha, ha ... Sarah who? She's over, she's toast, a future Trivial Pursuit answer, nothing more.

Normal person: Whatever. How about the North Korean missiles?

Liberal: Can you believe she just resigned the governorship like that? What a quitter!

Normal person: Speaking of quitting, how's work?

Liberal: Did you hear she might get a TV show? There's no way Sarah Palin's getting a TV show! No way! I can't believe stupid Sarah Palin could get her own stupid TV show now. Well, I'm sure not gonna watch it -- that's for sure!

Normal person: Have you seen all the Michael Jackson coverage on TV?

Liberal: How does she think she can run for president in 2012 if she can't finish her term as governor of a Podunk state? She's finished.

Normal person: OK, then! You won't have to vote for her.

Liberal: I was never going to vote for her! But now I'm not going to vote for her twice. And I will never watch her TV show. I am so over her.

Reporters had already written their stories on Palin's press conference -- "rambling!" "incoherent!" -- before she even stepped to the podium.

Whatever you think of Palin, her argument for resigning was the opposite of "rambling" and "incoherent."

Palin's basketball analogy couldn't have been clearer, even to prissy liberal pundits who get uncomfortable when the subject turns to sports: She decided to destroy the other team's game plan, which has been to obsessively focus on her, by resigning.

Read the whole thing.

Matt Welch goes yard over at Reason (h/t Glenn Reynolds):

That ugliness has made the California budget, like those in most of the other 49 states, less efficient and more bloated. Government spending, unlike spending in the private economy, is a zero-sum game—especially on the state level, since governors can’t print money. Every dollar spent gilding a pension is a dollar not spent funding an orphanage. Naturally, the same elite outlets that were busy blaming voters after the election spent even more time detailing the horrors of the “annihilating cuts,” as the Los Angeles Times called them in a news article, that were coming down the pike. (In early June, the paper invited readers to be shocked that a high school with 3,200 students would have to make do with just three guidance counselors.) Bloated pension costs and the increasingly inefficient provision of state services received a fraction of the coverage.

The federal government is now run by a president and Congress more responsive to union concerns than any in at least two decades. The same bloat currently bogging down statehouses and city halls is being duplicated in boomtown Washington, D.C. President Barack Obama even brought Andy Stern in to help warn Schwarzenegger that federal stimulus money would not be disbursed to California unless the governor rescinded some proposed state job cuts. Though that threat was later withdrawn, Schwarzenegger at press time was pushing for a measly work force reduction of 2 percent.

But there’s another interpretation of California’s rebellion, one with far sunnier implications for those of us who prefer our governments constrained. Faced with a political class that ignored bureaucratic inefficiency, that demanded higher taxes, that filled the newspapers with scare stories about people who will literally die as a result of budget cuts, the citizens of one of the bluest states in the nation collectively said we just don’t believe you anymore. If even California’s famous fruits and nuts can call the statists’ bluff, there may be hope for the rest of the country.

That may be the most (genuinely) optimistic sentence of the year. Read the whole thing

With apologies to the Governator and the aparatchiks in the rotten-to-the-core California Assembly: Back to the drawing board!

(Don't be surprised if Obama asks the rest of us to bail out his California unions... and don't be surprised if by next year Obama's approval numbers are in the teens...)

The new, "improved" socialized medicine bill is advertised as less expensive--but in reality it is even more dishonest and equally destructive:

So how does the new, apparently leaner Kennedy-Dodd bill cut the subsidy costs?

Part of the answer is a scaling-back from an outlandishly expansive starting point. The original version of Kennedy-Dodd contemplated subsidizing households with incomes all the way up to 500 percent of the poverty line. Even House Democrats found that to be too much. So Kennedy-Dodd 2.0 now sets the income limit at 400 percent of poverty.

But, beyond the lower income threshold, Senate Democrats, including Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, have also discovered the budgetary virtues of heavy-handed government decrees. If you want to expand insurance coverage, you can simply make people sign up for a plan — whether they want to or not. And to keep costs down for the government, you subsidize only those who get insurance outside of the workplace — and then write rules that make it nearly impossible for anyone to fall into that category. Presto! Government-run health-care paid for with the hidden taxes of government mandates.

According to the Census Bureau, there are about 102 million Americans under age 65 living in households with incomes between 150 and 400 percent of the poverty line — the presumed target population for subsidized insurance in the Kennedy-Dodd bill. But CBO said only about 20 million people in 2014 would get the subsidies under the revised version of the legislation. That’s because the authors sought to create a so-called “firewall” to prevent most workers from getting insurance outside the workplace if their employer offered a plan. And, of course, the bill would also impose severe, per-worker penalties on any employer that didn’t offer approved coverage. Only workers who would have to pay more than 12.5 percent of their income for a job-based plan could opt to get their insurance through the subsidized insurance arrangements, which CBO apparently assumes will be a relatively small number of people.

What’s ironic is that mandating enrollment in job-based insurance is about the most regressive way possible to expand coverage. Despite the perceptions, employment-based health insurance is financed by workers, not firms. The premiums for coverage implicitly reduce the cash compensation workers take home. In most companies, workers pay the same implicit premium for health insurance regardless of their age or health status or salary. That means the cost of enrolling in job-based coverage falls more heavily on low-wage workers than higher-salaried employees, which is why such a large percentage of the uninsured are in households that have access to a plan but chose not to enroll.

Democrats used to be sympathetic to the financial strain these workers are under. But that was before CBO said their sympathy would be expensive. So now the emerging plan is to make tens of millions of Americans pay more than they do today for government-approved insurance organized by their employer. That’s really their only choice. If they don’t take it, they will face a large financial penalty. Great deal, huh?

Congressional Democrats are between a rock and a hard place. They desperately want to pass a bill they can label “universal coverage,” but they have no coherent plan for making health-care provision more efficient and less costly. Thus, expanding coverage with new federal subsidies for a large segment of the population in the current cost environment is prohibitively expensive. Presented with these facts, the lead Democratic Senators could have chosen to write a more sensible reform plan focused first on building a functioning marketplace in which cost-conscious consumers would drive out unnecessary costs. But, instead, they have decided to plow ahead with their “universal coverage” plan, only now they want to impose the high cost of it on struggling workers. Their only hope is that the bill will pass before the public discovers what they are up to.

This Congress is made up of perhaps the greatest single collection of con artists in the history of planet Earth. Here is hoping that the public is quickly waking up to that fact.

Putting American and Iraqi lives in greater jeopardy, even as he visits the troops.

And of course, nothing about the historic role America played in setting up a functioning democracy in the center of the Arab world.

Thank you President Bush. Happy 4th.

Bill Quick has some great advice for Sarah Palin, assuming she is still interested in the Presidency...

Caveat: What follows is based on the notion that Palin will continue her political career, and is setting herself up for a run for the White House in 2012.

1. Start putting her national team together now. Recruit from the best and the brightest of real conservatism.

2. Ignore her enemies, both in the MSM, and in the liberal wing of the GOP. Define herself on her own terms. No more chat-fests with the likes of Katy Couric.

3. Set out to remake the GOP in her image. This means identifying strong conservative candidates for both the House and the Senate, then supporting them with fundraisers, public appearances, the expertise of her team, and clout with the party itself.

4. In the process, she should define herself by attacking Obama’s policies without ceasing, and offering real conservative solutions. This doesn’t mean “conservative lite,” or “new conservative” or whatever other euphemisms are currently being pushed for a “conservatism” that is actually liberalism in disguise. She should also make clear that she can work with that wing of the party, but doesn’t support, and will not try to advance, the dogmas of the “moderate conservative” hacks.

5. If she does this right, she can turn the election of 2010 into a referendum on the failed policies and agendas of Obama and the Democrats. If successful - that is, if she helps to greatly reduce or eliminate the Democrat majorities in Congress - she will have set herself up as the savior of the GOP, as the only politician to defeat Obama, and will thus foreclose challenges from other GOP figures.

6. Spend the next year after that building a huge war chest, honing her campaign and her own talents, and then take it directly to Obama himself from late 2011 on.

And here’s an interesting possible side effect: If Palin is successful in leading a GOP revolution in 2010, look for Hillary Clinton to resign in preparation for her own prexy bid as “the only Democrat who has a chance to beat Palin.”

Spot on. I hope she is listening.

It's the Government, Stupid (emphasis mine):

The stimuli plans were supposed to be job plans. The auto/bank bailouts cum nationalizations were supposed to be about saving jobs, not 'Wall Street'. So given two record breaking stimuli within two years, why isn't America hiring?

America isn't hiring precisely because of government policy. Small business owners, who are usually the first into and the first out of the job pool, are standing by the fence and watching. They are paralyzed by regulatory uncertainty. If they hire someone who ends up doing poorly, will they be able to fire that person? Will they have to pay their health care bills after they've been terminated? If so, for how long? Who will pay for all these stimulus checks? If it will turn out to be small business, why would they hire instead of keeping costs low to prepare for the big tax bill? Where will the market move? Are you in the right business or are your clients in a politically disfavored industry? Are your clients in health care (being nationalized), autos (already nationalized), banking (somewhat nationalized) or any energy production process which uses carbon (pulverized)? Until you know, you don't grow, and until you grow your market, you don't grow your payroll.

Jobs aren't languishing despite the government's best efforts. They're languishing because of them.

And this from CNBC, no less! Has the pressure on Immelt by stockholders made a difference, or is Immelt just waiting for the opportunity to play hardball again.

One gets the feeling that the worm is turning; Rasmussen's latest polls show that I am not the only one feeling this way.

... whether the media and the Obamunists have the stones to admit it or not.
(Cartoon by Michael Ramirez--click to enlarge)

The Sultan of Faux Smug, the ever-incompetent Robert Gibbs, kept implying yesterday--when grilled by Helen Thomas and CBS Newsman Chip Reid about Obama's "staged" town hall meetings--that the proof would be in the pudding.

Nice try, idiot.

Chamberlain (Labour Party..), Hitler and Mussolini: Munich, 1938. "Peace in our time." Right.
(click to enlarge)

... when you are dealing with mass-murdering monsters.

Cartoon by Michael Ramirez--with apologies to James Joyce (click to enlarge)

Move along: nothing to see here.

How NOT to show leadership of the Free World (even after Canada, France, the UK and Germany already have) courtesy of the always entertaining, highly literate ex-Leftist Christopher Hitchens:

... [traditional examples of mistrust of the West by Iranians] sound mild when compared with the ravings and gibberings that are now issued from the Khamenei pulpit. Here is a man who hasn't even heard that his favorite conspiracy theory is a long-standing joke among his own people. And these ravings and gibberings have real-world consequences of which at least three may be mentioned:

1. There is nothing at all that any Western country can do to avoid the charge of intervening in Iran's foreign affairs. The deep belief that everything—especially anything in English—is already and by definition an intervention is part of the very identity and ideology of the theocracy.
2. It is a mistake to assume that the ayatollahs, cynical and corrupt as they may be, are acting rationally. They are frequently in the grip of archaic beliefs and fears that would make a stupefied medieval European peasant seem mentally sturdy and resourceful by comparison.
3. The tendency of outside media to check the temperature of the clerics, rather than consult the writers and poets of the country, shows our own cultural backwardness in regrettably sharp relief. Anyone who had been reading Pezeshkzad and Nafisi, or talking to their students and readers in Tabriz and Esfahan and Mashad, would have been able to avoid the awful embarrassment by which everything that has occurred on the streets of Iran during recent days has come as one surprise after another to most of our uncultured "experts."

That last observation also applies to the Obama administration. Want to take a noninterventionist position? All right, then, take a noninterventionist position. This would mean not referring to Khamenei in fawning tones as the supreme leader and not calling Iran itself by the tyrannical title of "the Islamic republic." But be aware that nothing will stop the theocrats from slandering you for interfering anyway. Also try to bear in mind that one day you will have to face the young Iranian democrats who risked their all in the battle and explain to them just what you were doing when they were being beaten and gassed. (Hint: Don't make your sole reference to Iranian dictatorship an allusion to a British-organized coup in 1953; the mullahs think that it proves their main point, and this generation has more immediate enemies to confront.)

There is then the larger question of the Iranian theocracy and its continual, arrogant intervention in our affairs: its export of violence and cruelty and lies to Lebanon and Palestine and Iraq and its unashamed defiance of the United Nations, the European Union, and the International Atomic Energy Agency on the nontrivial matter of nuclear weapons. I am sure that I was as impressed as anybody by our president's decision to quote Martin Luther King—rather late in the week—on the arc of justice and the way in which it eventually bends. It was just that in a time of crisis and urgency he was citing the wrong King text (the right one is to be found in the "Letter From a Birmingham Jail"), and it was also as if he were speaking as the president of Iceland or Uruguay rather than as president of these United States. Coexistence with a nuclearized, fascistic theocracy in Iran is impossible even in the short run. The mullahs understand this with perfect clarity. Why can't we?

Why, indeed?

On so many levels Obama is little more than an inexperienced version of Jimmy Carter--albeit with a deeper voice, a more telegenic presence, more savvy (almost Albert Speer-like) propagandists handling him, and a full-time crutches teleprompters to rely on to keep him "on message"--even in press conferences (which of course consist primarily of tough softball questions from reporters fulfilling their role to bring us the truth Obama's adoring acolytes in Big Media...).

But all of his handlers' pre-planned, orchestrated message-management notwithstanding, Obama thus far has easily been as indecisive and hesitant to lead as the inept Carter was handling whenever unexpected "challenges" confronted him, e.g. the Iran Hostage crisis.

Obama has thus far been unwilling to project America's influence for anything other than prostrating his country before the world begging for forgiveness. Besides being ABSURD (does saving the West in two World Wars and staring down the Soviet menace, freeing hundreds of millions of Eastern Europeans, and liberating millions of MUSLIMS in Bosnia and Kuwait and Iraq count for nothing??), he is supposed to be the leader of our country; besmirching our country abroad at every opportunity to score points with his leftist base is not leadership--it is cowardice.

Many Americans who voted for Obama refused to believe that he was a hard-left ideologue; indeed he ran most of his fall campaign tacking to the Right of McCain--and a lot of fools actually bought it (of course Obama immediately distanced from these "promises" upon assuming office). Many of us saw what was coming, but many more were fooled by the smooth talk and the false promises bold-faced lies.

And now we are seeing the result: a President whose pronouncements--including that abortion of a speech in Cairo, in which he apologized to the "Islamic Republic" for the CIA's role 55 years ago in the installation of the Shah--gave the evil Iranian regime legitimacy at exactly the wrong place and wrong time. Rather than standing up to despots, dictators and tyranny, he chose instead to go cap in hand begging for forgiveness and telling the whole world how horrible the US had been. (Except compared to every other corner of the planet...)

The same week, Obama also invited representatives of this murderous regime to a 4th of July Bar-B-Que, which of course now is a complete embarassment, in light of what these totalitarian thugs have done since. And--as Jake Tapper reports--when Obama was asked today if he was rethinking his invitation to these murderous tyrants, he acted as if he was more anxious than ever to knock back some Hummus and Chicken with people who have just been complicit in murdering and beating its own college students to a pulp:

Note the phrasing. "There's no thought" to rescinding the invites. Not even a thought! Not even "under review."

Well we would not want to piss off our good friends Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. Who cares about the will of the Iranian people when we can have Bar-B-Que and a good photo op, right?

If ever there were an exception to American exceptionalism, it has been the disgraceful inaction of this deer-in-the-headlights President in facing down our sworn enemies. Besides his blowing golden opportunities in the Iran uprising, he continues to show weakness elsewhere: so far we have refused to confront and board a North Korean ship that is likely carrying WMD technology to our enemies. And I'm betting that he will not even attempt to take down the upcoming NK IRBM (unless it is heading directly for Hawaii). If I were Japanese, I might be thinking about an Australian vacation right about now.

All in all, Obama's primary mission seems to be to take a 180 degree about face from the examples of prior Presidents and to CODDLE these tyrants while simultaneously enraging our traditional friends (see: Merkel, Sarkozy, Netanyahu, Brown et. al.)

Meanwhile his mad scientist approach to our economy is causing the World to second-guess whether the Dollar is where they should be parking their dwindling earnings; and it is hard to blame them.

President Obama is a far, far cry from a President with REAL courage: one facing down a country with thousands of nuclear missiles pointed at his country, supporting Polish Solidarity and daring his adversary to "Tear Down This Wall". Or even one who blockaded Cuba and forced the Soviets to turn their ships around.

He might get lucky and get some good satellite images of that rogue NK ship (or its cargo) that the Navy is tracking. But it is near-impossible for me to picture BHO having the cojones to let the Navy board that ship, even as the NK blow-hards continue their 57 year diatribe of empty threats and bluster. If "The One" can't even stand up to a hostile anything short of a softball question in press conferences, it is hard to imagine him successfully facing down greater challenges. I suppose "The One" can always take any satellite photos of the WMD's as they are unloaded at their destination to the UN so they can then take REAL action...

So never fear, America's Pontious Pilate is on the job! In between Broadway shows, Ice cream photo ops and golf outings, that is... Pass the Ambien, please.

How far we have come.

Krauthammer is ON FIRE in his latest WaPo column:

Millions of Iranians take to the streets to defy a theocratic dictatorship that, among its other finer qualities, is a self-declared enemy of America and the tolerance and liberties it represents. The demonstrators are fighting on their own, but they await just a word that America is on their side.

And what do they hear from the president of the United States? Silence. Then, worse. Three days in, the president makes clear his policy: continued "dialogue" with their clerical masters.

Dialogue with a regime that is breaking heads, shooting demonstrators, expelling journalists, arresting activists. Engagement with -- which inevitably confers legitimacy upon -- leaders elected in a process that begins as a sham (only four handpicked candidates permitted out of 476) and ends in overt rigging.

Then, after treating this popular revolution as an inconvenience to the real business of Obama-Khamenei negotiations, the president speaks favorably of "some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election."

Where to begin? "Supreme Leader"? Note the abject solicitousness with which the American president confers this honorific on a clerical dictator who, even as his minions attack demonstrators, offers to examine some returns in some electoral districts -- a farcical fix that will do nothing to alter the fraudulence of the election.

Moreover, this incipient revolution is no longer about the election. Obama totally misses the point. The election allowed the political space and provided the spark for the eruption of anti-regime fervor that has been simmering for years and awaiting its moment. But people aren't dying in the street because they want a recount of hanging chads in suburban Isfahan. They want to bring down the tyrannical, misogynist, corrupt theocracy that has imposed itself with the very baton-wielding goons that today attack the demonstrators.

Read the whole thing. I am trying to think of the last time I disagreed with Krauthammer; the man can drive a point home with laser like intensity and accuracy.

Sadly, this pretty much IS what Obama is saying to the People of Iran.

Ed Morrissey (and Dan Riehl) document the latest firing of a "non-partisan" IG position by The One Whose Arrogance Narcissism and Shame Knows No Limits:

The firing of Gerald Walpin as Inspector General was not an isolated incident, as the Chicago Tribune reports today. Two more IGs have been dismissed in the past two weeks, and Senator Charles Grassley has started demanding answers. The sudden push to rid the government of independent watchdogs appears to coincide with Barack Obama’s plans to use government spending to get control over more aspects of American life, such as with stimulus spending, the financial sector, and volunteer organizations (via Dan Riehl):

He was appointed with fanfare as the public watchdog over the government’s multi-billion dollar bailout of the nation’s financial system. But now Neil Barofsky is embroiled in a dispute with the Obama administration that delayed one recent inquiry and sparked questions about his ability to freely investigate.

The disagreement stems from a claim by the Treasury Department that Barofsky is not entirely independent of the agency he is assigned to examine — a claim that has prompted a stern letter from a Republican senator warning that agency officials are encroaching on the integrity of an office created to protect taxpayers. …

The dispute comes as Grassley, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is looking into the abrupt firings within the last week of two other inspectors general ¿ one of whom was fired by the White House and the other by the chair of the International Trade Commission.

Both inspectors general had investigated sensitive subjects at the time of their firings.

Grassley is now concerned about whether a pattern is emerging in which the independence of the government’s top watchdogs — whose jobs were authorized by Congress to look out for waste, fraud and abuse — is being put at risk.

The positions themselves indicate where the White House wants to go with its efforts. Barofsky ruffled feathers in April when his watchdog report showed that the Obama administration had placed insufficient safeguards on Porkulus spending. This later caused Joe Biden to shrug and tell the media, “Some people are being scammed already,” as if it wasn’t the job of the administration to stop it from happening. Barofsky now has a leash around his neck, with the White House insisting that he answers only to Treasury.

Much more on the outrageous Walpin firing here and here.

From Ralph Peters' most excellent column today:

This is madness. There is no chance -- zero, null, nada -- that negotiations with the junta of mullahs will lead to the termination (or even a serious interruption) of Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. Our president's faith in his powers of persuasion is beginning to look pathological. Is his program of negotiations with apocalypse-minded, woman-hating, Jew-killing fanatics so sacrosanct that he can't acknowledge human cries for freedom?

Is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright a better role model than Martin Luther King? It's a damned shame that our first minority president wasn't a veteran of our civil-rights struggle, rather than its privileged beneficiary.

An ugly pattern's emerging in our president's beliefs:

He's infallible. This is rich, given all the criticism of the Bush administration's unwillingness to admit mistakes. We now have a president with Jimmy Carter's naivete, Richard Nixon's distaste for laws, Lyndon Johnson's commitment to the wrong war, and Bill Clinton's moral fecklessness.

Democracy isn't important. Our president seems infected by yesteryear's Third-World-leftist view that dictatorships are essential to post-colonial development -- especially for Muslims.

Look where Obama has gone and who he supports: the pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, his groveling speech in Egypt, his embrace of Hamas, his hands-off approach to the gory regime in Sudan -- and now his dismay at the protests in Iran.

Strict Islam is true Islam. This is bewildering, given Obama's childhood exposure to the tolerant Islam practiced in most of Indonesia. The defining remark of his presidency thus far was his Cairo demand for the right of Muslim women to wear Islamic dress in the West -- while remaining silent about their right to reject the hijab, burqa or chador in the Middle East.

History's a blank canvas -- except for America's sins. Of course, we've had presidents who presented the past in the colors they preferred -- but we've never had one who just made it all up.

Obama's ignorance of history is on naked display -- no sense of the brutality of Iran's Islamist regime, of the years of mass imprisonments, diabolical torture, prison rapes, wholesale executions and secret graves that made the shah's reign seem idyllic. Our president seems to regard the Iranian protesters as spoiled brats.

Facts? Who cares? In his Cairo sermon -- a speech that will live in infamy -- our president compared the plight of the Palestinians, the aggressors in 1948, with the Holocaust. He didn't mention the million Jews dispossessed and driven from Muslim lands since 1948, nor the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Christians from the West Bank.

Now our president's attempt to vote "present" yet again green-lights the Iranian regime's determination to face down the demonstrators -- and the mullahs understand it as such.

Read the whole thing.

Kudos to Boston.com for posting these brilliant photographs of the Uprising in Iran. This is not a "law enforcement" matter or a "man-caused disaster". These are pictures of people desparately craving freedom rising up against their oppressors. And these are their "tweets".

And meanwhile, Obama does NOTHING and says NOTHING. Disgraceful.

Come to think of it, the man has a point:

So it wipes out your bank accounts. What’s in there? I mean, really. The average American household is carrying $121,953 in personal debt. What would be so bad if something goofy happened and all the meters got reset to zero? And Joe Schmoe’s credit card debt is as nothing compared to what the government’s signed him up for: USA Today recently calculated that the average American household is on the hook for $546,668 in federal debt—i.e., not including state and municipal. The Atlantic crunched the numbers further and reckoned that, to pay off the federal/personal debt over half a century at three per cent, the average household would have to write an annual cheque for $25,971. U.S. median household income is 50 grand, before taxes—and that $26,000 cheque assumes no further increase in federal or personal liabilities.

Critics of USA Today’s methodology say they’ve conflated two separate things—hard government debt, and the rather more amorphous obligations of Medicare, social security and other unsustainable entitlement programs. But, insofar as that’s a distinction with a difference, it’s the entitlements that are harder to slough off. A couple of decades down the road, Greece’s public pensions liabilities will be approaching 25 per cent of GDP: for the political class, it’s easier to default on foreign debt and risk unknown consequences than to renege on social commitments and ensure the certainty of violent insurrection. As attractive as it might be to tell ingrate geezers to go eat dog food, it’s not politically feasible in a democracy in which they’re the most electorally vindictive demographic group.

Besides, in a society that’s all but eliminated the concept of moral hazard, who isn’t entitled to government largesse? The North American auto industry pays its workers so much that it’s unable to make a car at a price anyone’s prepared to pay for it. So naturally it’s been delivered into the corporate control of the very same unions who demanded those salaries. Under the hilarious Canadian bailout, “social justice” requires that auto workers who make $70 per hour be subsidized by taxpayers making less than a third thereof. If it’s unreasonable to expect a guy on 70 bucks an hour to make provision for lean times, why should anyone else? The advanced Western democracy has, in effect, jumped the bounds of temporal and spatial reality: America lives beyond the means of its 300 million citizens to pay for it, so passes the check to its children and grandchildren. Most of the rest of the West does likewise, but demographically has no kids to stick it to.

Professor Glenn Reynolds, America’s Instapundit, noted that USA Today figure of $668,621 federal/personal debt per household and observed tersely: “Debts that can’t be repaid won’t be repaid.” Or to extend the old saw: if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem. If you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem. If everyone owes a million dollars, civilizational survival has a problem. When I first heard about EMP a few years back, the big worry was that in a split-second it would vaporize trillions of dollars of wealth. From the perspective of 2009, vaporizing trillions of dollars of debt has something to commend it.

Read the whole thing.

Unbelievable. In a show of stupidity rivaling Jimmy Carter's disgraceful legitimization of the election stolen by Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez, Iran botches its "election" about as badly as an election can be botched, yet President Barack Obama responds by completely screwing the pooch on what would have been a golden opportunity to show some statesmanship--just for once.

Like that was gonna happen...

Allah comments on the latest atrocity:

Steve Hayes had better not hold his breath waiting for that Obama speech. The White House says it’s full speed ahead on “dialogue.”

The Obama administration is determined to press on with efforts to engage the Iranian government, senior officials said Saturday, despite misgivings about irregularities in the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad…

“This is the worst result,” said Thomas R. Pickering, a former under secretary of state. “The U.S. will have to worry about being perceived as pandering to a president whose legitimacy is in question. It clearly makes the notion of providing incentives quite unappetizing.”

Presumably the thinking here is that public outrage in Iran will weaken the mullahs’ hand against the U.S. and force them to accept some grand bargain, in which case Obama’s basically offering them legitimacy in exchange for denuclearization. The more likely outcome, though, is that the regime will continue to jerk him around while it builds a bomb and then count on its announcement that Iran has become a nuclear state to stoke national pride and win over its disaffected public. In which case Obama will have given them legitimacy in exchange for nothing. Terrific.

Meanwhile, the looney left is having a canyption fit over this, as documented by The Rhetorician:

Maybe it’s just too painful to see the Obama Effect backfiring in the foreign policy arena after it’s already failed to deliver in the economic policy one; but, at any rate, the Lefties are in fine form tonight:

Andrew Sullivan is equating Karl Rove and Sarah Palin to Iranian thuggery.

Meanwhile, CBS News and TNR are calling Ahmadinejad “Iran’s George W. Bush”.

What’s going on here? Does the American Left – after eight years of whining about make-believe tyranny – not know how to react to actual tyranny when it sees it in action?

It’s time to stand in solidarity with the people of Iran, not to try to score cheap political points. But, as I’ve noted before, the Left can’t help themselves when tragedy strikes.

As we speak, the BBC is reporting that the Islamic Republic is still being "challenged"; if freedom does prevail it will be no thanks to President Obama.

UPDATE: Rick Moran weighs the possibilities.

Making it up as he goes along...

(Victor Davis Hanson is hardly a hyperbolic writer; when even he sees the pattern clearly, you can be pretty sure that everyone else can too):

In the first six months of the Obama administration, we have witnessed an assault on the truth of a magnitude not seen since the Nixon Watergate years. ...

Read the whole thing.

Remember those Chinese Uigurs who were trained by Al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Well according to the BBC, the King of the World decided to wait until it was all but too late to inform our longtime allies the Brits that his Holiness was about to release them to Bermuda, with no charges. Via Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

Pressed on whether the US had told the British government, an unnamed state department official was quoted as saying: “We did talk to them before the Uighurs got on the plane.”

Now a senior US official has told the BBC it was a deliberate decision not to consult London on the resettlement, after other countries came under pressure from China not to accept the Uighurs.

In a highly unusual move, a senior US official said Washington opted to keep details of the deal from London until the last minute to enable Britain to deny all knowledge of the deal and thus avoid China’s anger, says the BBC’s Washington correspondent Kim Ghattas.

They talked to them “before the Uighurs got on the plane”? Well, that was certainly sweet of them. Did they mention on which flight they’d be coming to Bermuda, or did they make the Brits guess that, too?

It’s a highly unusual move, all right. I don’t recall the last time an ally sent trained terrorists into a territory for which the other ally had responsibility for security without their permission. Why? Because it hasn’t ever happened before now.

So, to our British friends: how does it feel to have Obama make security decisions about your territory without bothering to consult you at all? The liberal press in the UK used to deride Tony Blair as George Bush’s poodle; what does that make Gordon Brown in relation to Barack Obama? It’s a good thing that arrogant Bush isn’t running things in Washington any more, huh?

Megan McArdle makes an excellent case:

Well, we knew this. But how do we FIX it?

When you couple this with Krauthammer's commentary on Special Report last night (no link available yet), you begin to wonder how long it will take for Obama to set the Guinness World Record for most lies spoken per utterance. I swear if you listen to this guy talk, there is a lie every 30 seconds or less. He makes Nixon and Clinton look like Catholic saints in comparison.

I had embedded the 2009 Heritage Foundation video of Writer/Comedian Evan Sayet, but the quality of the video (especially the Audio) was wanting so I am going to revert to Sayet's original appearance at The Heritage Foundation, which remains one of the best and most powerful lectures I have ever seen.

Spec-freaking-trekcular.

Stanley Fish--without actually saying so himself--has a column in today's New York Times which makes as good a case for Obama's malignant narcissism as I have seen in a while--especially from the NYT:

... restraint and modesty also mark the victory speech delivered in Grant Park, Chicago, on Nov. 4. The key note is struck early: “This is your victory.” When he promises, the promise is made not to the people, but on their behalf: “I promise you, we as a people will get there.” It is a short sentence, but by the end of it the self assertion of the “I” has been entirely dissipated. Repeatedly, agency and power are transferred to the audience. Change “cannot happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.” And, of course, the repeated refrain, “Yes we can.”

Everything alters in the inaugural address (Jan. 20, 2009). The promises are now made to an America that is asked only to stand by while they are fulfilled. “Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. “But know America” — or, in other words, “hear me” — “…they will be met.” And later, when he says, “We will build the roads and bridges… We will restore science to its rightful place… We will harness the sun and winds,” the “we” is now the royal we: just you watch, “All this we will do.”

By the time of the address to the Congress on Feb. 24, the royal we has flowered into the naked “I”: “As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress.” “I called for action.” “I pushed for quick action.” “I have told each of my cabinet.” “I’ve appointed a proven and aggressive inspector general.” “I refuse to let that happen.” “I will not spend a single penny.” “I reject the view that says our problems will simply take care of themselves.” “I held a fiscal summit where I pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term.” That last is particularly telling: it says, there’s going to be a second term, I’m already moving fast, and if you don’t want to be left in the dust, you’d better fall in line.

There’s no mistaking what’s going on in the speech delivered last week. No preliminary niceties; just a rehearsal of Obama’s actions and expectations. Eight “I”’s right off the bat: “Just over two months ago I spoke with you… and I laid out what needed to be done.” “From the beginning I made it clear that I would not put any more tax dollars on the line.” “I refused to let those companies become permanent wards of the state.” “I refused to kick the can down the road. But I also recognized the importance of a viable auto industry.” “I decided then…” (He is really the decider.)

Accompanying the “I”’s are a bevy of “my”’s, which reach out to embrace the universe. The third time he says “my auto task force,” it sounds as if he were referring to a lap dog. Ditto the mention of Karen Mills, “my Small Business Administration” chief. When he thanks Canada and Germany for doing their part, it is as if those sovereign nations were doing him a personal favor to which he was entitled. When he invokes “my administration” you might think he was talking about some prized possession. (My daughter…my ducats.) It is always “I couldn’t in good conscience,” “I became convinced,” “I wanted to ensure,” “I instructed,” “I recognized,” “I want” (three times), “I’m calling on Congress.” At least he doesn’t say “my Congress,” although that is certainly implied.

Read the whole thing.

Via Glenn Reynolds, Snopes has verified that a former VP at Proctor & Gamble did indeed write this letter to Obama. (actually he wrote it to the NYT, who of course did not publish it... but it has definitely made its way around the Internet). I have seen it floating around, but Glenn's mention of it in itself makes this instant news: I expect that the number of Internet hits will now explode exponentially. That is a good thing.

The best thing about this letter: there is not one item in it which has not crossed my mind about Obama. Not one.

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA

You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any of the others, you truly scare me.

You scare me because after months of exposure, I know nothing about you.

You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support.

You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.

You scare me because you have never run a company or met a payroll.

You scare me because you have never had military experience, thus don't understand it at its core.

You scare me because you lack humility and 'class', always blaming others.

You scare me because for over half your life you have aligned yourself with radical extremists who hate America and you refuse to publicly denounce these radicals who wish to see America fail.

You scare me because you are a cheerleader for the 'blame America' crowd and deliver this message abroad.

You scare me because you want to change America to a European style country where the government sector dominates instead of the private sector.

You scare me because you want to replace our health care system with a government controlled one.

You scare me because you prefer 'wind mills' to responsibly capitalizing on our own vast oil, coal and shale reserves.

You scare me because you want to kill the American capitalist goose that lays the golden egg which provides the highest standard of living in the world.

You scare me because you have begun to use 'extortion' tactics against certain banks and corporations.

You scare me because your own political party shrinks from challenging you on your wild and irresponsible spending proposals.

You scare me because you will not openly listen to or even consider opposing points of view from intelligent people.

You scare me because you falsely believe that you are both omnipotent and omniscient.

You scare me because the media gives you a free pass on everything you do.

You scare me because you demonize and want to silence the Limbaughs, Hannitys, O'Relllys and Becks who offer opposing, conservative points of view.

You scare me because you prefer controlling over governing.

Finally, you scare me because if you serve a second term I will probably not feel safe in writing a similar letter in 8 years.

Lou Pritchett

Sensational. Pure gold from historian Victor Davis Hanson today (emphasis mine):

Obama Versus the Way of the Universe

I wish the President well, but he is butting up against human nature. And that is a fight one cannot win. If one runs up nearly a $2 trillion annual deficit, and then persists in such red-ink to the point of adding another $9 trillion, all to reach an aggregate $20 trillion national debt, there are not too many options. If there were, everyone-both states and individuals-would simply spend, call it stimuli, and then find academics to offer contorted explanations why it was OK and the money need not really have to be paid back. Does Obama think his debt is like buying a house in a down market with an up market inevitable?–that is, we borrow to the max and then count on our equity to come to bail us out? But houses do not always go up, and we can’t quite sell off the US to capture our speculative profit.

So we all know the old rules, because the universe works according to time-honored precepts: we either must tax all of us (there are not enough of those evil “they” who make between $200-500K or even enough of the noble generous rich who make over $10 million a year and think Obama should increase inheritance taxes so that their children get only $1 billion instead of $2, while the hardware store owner’s kids sell the business) in insidious ways; OR simply cut government expenditures elsewhere to pay the annual interest payments, OR print money and screw the Chinese, European, etc. , debtors, inflating our way out via the late 1970s.

Sorry, there are no other real alternatives.

The only mystery? How the choice of payment is rhetoricized in the hope and change mode.

Deficit Foreign Policy Too

So it is with foreign policy as well. Obama’s make-over will have positive short-term effects, as he reminds the world ad nauseam that he is black, sorta, kinda from a Muslim family, and the son of an African who is more like the world than he like most Americans-and not George Bush and not a thieving capitalist and not a warmongering imperialist and not (fill in the blanks). (My favorite Cairo line was the apology on Gitmo where inmates have laptops and Mediterranean food, spoken to millions whose societies kill and maim tens of thousands in Gulags on a yearly basis.)

But in the long run?

He hits against human nature. Most of you readers-in business, law, the professions-don’t continually praise your friends, competitors, and enemies (e.g., “Glad you got that job, Home Depot-we at Lowes didn’t really need it; what a wonderful bid you submitted, Hilton, much better than ours here at the Four Seasons; it was my fault here at Goldman Sachs that I didn’t match your better offer at Credit Suisse; I grew up working for the Royals, and can empathize why you Yankees don’t like us; it’s time we at Citibank apologized to Chase for our past cutthroat competition; we are just too arrogant over here at Delta and wanted to let you guys at United know that.”)

Sorry

The world sadly does not work that way. If one were to do that, we know the outcome: a group of rival execs would say “Hmmm, time to steal market share from Citibank, or Hilton isn’t really up to the arena anymore, let’s move in on its Western region, etc.”

Only someone who has not been in the real world, but only marketed rhetoric without consequences (e.g., if Obama had a bad day organizing, or legislating, was he fired?) could believe such things.

There is much more; read the whole thing.

Yes, Al, that would be snow falling in JUNE.

Just make that taxpayer check out to: Barack Obama Special Interests, Inc.

We are living a Kafkaesque nightmare.

Classical Values wonders when will it be time to call a Socialist a Socialist.

Hidden in Barack Obama's usual hair-splitting rhetoric the other day were some pretty ominous signs, especially if you grew up loving cars:
I have also heard that Obama plans to ban the importation of small cars from other countries at some point. This is blatant protectionism, and would only invite retaliation in kind. It has often been argued that the two worst things that Herbert Hoover did to prolong and deepen the Great Depression were: the enactment of the Smoot-Hawley Tarrif Act during a recession--effectively turning the recession into a depression and creating a wordwide phenomenon that arguably raised worldwide tensions to the point of World War, especially when coupled with; 2) Roosevelt's unprecedented spending, taxing, and socialist programs (e.g. farm subsidies)--some of which were found unconstitutional, but most of which extended the actual depression until the late 1940's.

But FDR seems to be child's play compared to what Barack Obama has undertaken during our deep, deep recession.

On the heels of that last rant, it seems an appropriate time for some sane reasoning and passion from the great Bill Whittle. Watch it. Then watch it again.

As the Chinese consider whether or not their enormous investment in the United States is worth throwing good money after bad, the US is sending all the Kings Men (and Nancy Pelosi) to beg and plead with China to (please) keep buying our T-Bills.

Geithner was over there yesterday, speaking to a serious group of Chinese business students (students of Capitalism) about the viability of the dollar under the Obama Administration's "plan". And what did these students do?

They laughed at him. Not with him AT him.

More on the Geithner visit via Jim Hoft:

China To Geithner: It Would Be Helpful If You Could Show Us Some Numbers

Geithner told China yesterday that the Obama Administration was committed to bringing down the US deficit.
Really?

Barack Obama will quadruple the deficit this year.

Geithner also told China that Team Obama wants to bring down the deficit next year from 12.9% of GDP this year to 3% of GDP next year (a near impossibility)...
Or, in other words, back into Bush territory.

In response, China told Geithner to show them some numbers!
Bloomberg reported, via Bizblogger:

In an interview with Bloomberg Television May 21, Geithner said the administration’s goal is to cut the budget shortfall to 3 percent of gross domestic product or smaller. That would be down from a projected 12.9 percent this year.

Seventeen of 23 Chinese economists polled in connection with Geithner’s visit said holdings of Treasuries are a “great risk” for the nation’s economy, according to a Chinese state media report yesterday. Still, the majority argued against quickly cutting them, the Beijing-based Global Times reported.

Geithner, 47, needs to show how the U.S. can prevent the value of China’s investment from being eroded by a weaker dollar or by the inflation that might be stoked by the stimulus money being pumped into the U.S. economy, according to Yu.

“It will be helpful if Geithner can show us some arithmetic,” he said.

...The Treasury released a transcript May 30 of a briefing Geithner gave last week at the Foreign Press Center in Washington. In it, he said he will stress with Chinese officials that he’s intent on maintaining the dollar’s strength.

“I will, of course, make it clear that we are committed to a strong dollar, that we are committed to bringing our fiscal deficits down over the medium term to a sustainable place, to a sustainable level,” Geithner said in the briefing May 27. “We believe in a strong dollar. A strong dollar is in the U.S. interest.”

This doesn't sound good at all.
No wonder China is concerned.

The US has lost 16,000 jobs each day since Obama signed the Spendulus Bill and sunk the US economy further into debt.

More... Geithner to China—Trust Me—Pigs Really Can Fly!

When you couple this humiliating performance with the Pravda (yes, THAT Pravda) story which appeared on their online site yesterday, well you begin to get the picture of powerful nations who are rubbing their hands in glee at the incompetence and destructiveness of these aparatchiks--and looking forward to exploiting the Democrats' cronyism and incompetence by doing business with countries who understand business and know how capitalism and profit works.

(That used to be us, folks.)

Here is the Pravda story, for those who missed it. Emphasis is mine:

American Capitalism Gone with a Whimper

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.
First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blindeth the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the "winning" side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America 's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the sheer volumes. Should we congratulate them?

These men, of course, are not an elected panel but made up of appointees picked from the very financial oligarchs and their henchmen who are now gorging themselves on trillions of American dollars, in one bailout after another. They are also usurping the rights, duties and powers of the American congress (parliament). Again, congress has put up little more then a whimper to their masters.

Then came Barack Obama's command that GM's (General Motors') president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of "pure" free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.

So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a "bold" move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too. Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK's Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our "wise" Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride.

Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper...but a "freeman" whimper.

So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democratically controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would give the American Treasury department the power to set "fair" maximum salaries, evaluate performance and control how private companies give out pay raises and bonuses? Senator Barney Frank, a social pervert basking in his homosexuality (of course, amongst the modern, enlightened American societal norm, as well as that of the general West, homosexuality is not only not a looked down upon life choice, but is often praised as a virtue) and his Marxist enlightenment, has led this effort. He stresses that this only affects companies that receive government monies, but it is retroactive and taken to a logical extreme, this would include any company or industry that has ever received a tax break or incentive.

The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left.

The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.

My God. The very people who had been oppressed by the Sovs are now busy ridiculing us in the Former CAPITAL of Marxism. And with good reason!

This is what happens when a clueless communitiy organizer--a Marxist ideologue anti-Constitutionalist, who has never run any enterprise for profit in his entire life--now finds himself running two of the three largest auto companies in the United States and what was once the envy of the world. And when he takes a $240,000 "date night" to Broadway with his wife on the taxpayers tab, all they can do is to cheer this destroyer of everything good about this country.

If we do not wake up fast, Moscow or Beijing might become really good alternatives to our own country. Barack Obama, his drones in Congress and the Press are flushing the rest of us down the cesspool of Socialism--which has NEVER engendered prosperity ANYWHERE--while they use the Greatest Experiment that has ever existed as a test lab for their own sick and discredited ideology.

I am beyond mad now; I am ashamed of my fellow citizens who were stupid enough to vote for this charlatan. Yes, I use that word purposefully: STUPID. Mentally lazy. Sheep (to use our Russian friend's word). Drones marching in lock step to a sick culture and a sicker media beat.

Generations from now--if we do not act to derail this oncoming freight train soon--we will be the generation blamed for turning the United States into a third world country, in the name of some utopian pipe dream of "fairness for all". The Russians well know the result of this dream; they know how it sucks the very life force out of an economy, the will to succeed, compete, and innovate, and ultimately, the will to live. Ask someone in East Berlin about Socialism and the STASI. Ask a Romanian or a Pole or a Czech citizen who lived under that pipe dream. We were their light in the darkness of oppression. We were their hope. Ronald Reagan stood there and said "tear down this wall". And then he forced them to do it. And now we have a President who seems destined to build a "do not enter, ye who want to prosper" wall around our own country.

Disgusting. Sickening.

Over half of our country has been sleeping and watching the freaking View while their country is systematically being destroyed by this President. And it is not like this is not happening in slow motion. This is reminiscent of the Atlee destruction of Great Britain after WWII.

After passing the Obama Porkulus budget, the United States, whose national debt had accumulated to a point from the birth of the Republic until January 20, 2009--will see that entire debt DOUBLE over the next 10 years. What Barack Obama has done to this country and this economy is not merely irresponsible, it is criminal. And, personally, I think he is doing it on purpose in a sick, pathetic attempt to make every single American dependant on Government and only Government from cradle to grave. They will decide when if and how you live and when if and how you die. Welcome to the New East Germany, folks! And you voted for it!

Meanwhile, the other half of the country--those who were not fooled by this narcissist--don't seem to be too terribly upset (nor organized) either. And McCain was not that great an alternative. But in retrospect, the choice was not even close...

It is time to change all that. We need a person now who is the anti-McCain. We need a visionary--a Reagan or a Churchill if you will--to lead us out of this darkness. But we need to start first by flushing this Congress into the cesspool next year. And that is going to require off-year organization like never before.

Otherwise we can kiss it goodbye. Future generations will suffer like none before them have suffered. And it will be our fault.

...why are Conservatives so "mean"?

So when do the storm troopers arrive here?

More on the attempt by the Obamunists to silence any criticism from Captain Ed Morrissey (bold emphasis is my own):

Mark Tapscott notices an interesting blog post by Norman Eisen, who works for Barack Obama as Special Counsel to the President on Ethics and Government Reform. Anticipating a deluge of criticism over the thus-far ineffectual spending plan, Eisen has a straightforward plan to deal with criticism. He’ll simply use the power of the federal government to silence it. Problem solved!

“First, we will expand the restriction on oral communications to cover all persons, not just federally registered lobbyists. For the first time, we will reach contacts not only by registered lobbyists but also by unregistered ones, as well as anyone else exerting influence on the process. We concluded this was necessary under the unique circumstances of the stimulus program. [emphasis mine -- Ed]

“Second, we will focus the restriction on oral communications to target the scenario where concerns about merit-based decision-making are greatest –after competitive grant applications are submitted and before awards are made. Once such applications are on file, the competition should be strictly on the merits. To that end, comments (unless initiated by an agency official) must be in writing and will be posted on the Internet for every American to see.

“Third, we will continue to require immediate internet disclosure of all other communications with registered lobbyists. If registered lobbyists have conversations or meetings before an application is filed, a form must be completed and posted to each agency’s website documenting the contact.”

Silencing dissent and criticism is “necessary under the unique circumstances of the stimulus program”? Gee, what “unique circumstances” might those be? Perhaps the fact that it costs more than the Moon shot, and has yet to halt the economic skid. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the stimulus package doesn’t actually stimulate anything except doctrinaire liberal dreams and the pens that check off the items from the Democratic wish list.

Remember when the Left took to the streets to declare dissent “patriotic” during wartime? I didn’t have a problem with dissent then, but apparently the Left has a curious definition of “patriotism”. Now, suddenly, the federal government can silence their critics at will, not to protect critical national-security programs or keep from undermining a war effort, but to protect a Democratic president intent on seizing control of private industry across a wide swath of the nation. Suddenly, that kind of dissent threatens America.

Check out what the White House is trying to sneak under the radar (via Mark Tapscott, emphasis mine):

A new White House policy on permissible lobbying on economic recovery and stimulus projects has taken a decidedly anti-First Amendment turn. It's a classic illustration of Big Government trying to control every aspect of a particular activity and in the process running up against civil liberty.

Check out this passage from a post on the White House blog by Norm Eisen, Special Counsel to the President on Ethics and Government Reform (emphasis added):

"First, we will expand the restriction on oral communications to cover all persons, not just federally registered lobbyists. For the first time, we will reach contacts not only by registered lobbyists but also by unregistered ones, as well as anyone else exerting influence on the process. We concluded this was necessary under the unique circumstances of the stimulus program.

"Second, we will focus the restriction on oral communications to target the scenario where concerns about merit-based decision-making are greatest –after competitive grant applications are submitted and before awards are made. Once such applications are on file, the competition should be strictly on the merits. To that end, comments (unless initiated by an agency official) must be in writing and will be posted on the Internet for every American to see.

"Third, we will continue to require immediate internet disclosure of all other communications with registered lobbyists. If registered lobbyists have conversations or meetings before an application is filed, a form must be completed and posted to each agency’s website documenting the contact."

For the full blog post by Eisen, go here.

The key passage is the reference to expanding regulation from registered lobbyists to "anyone else exerting influence on the process. We concluded this was necessary under the unique circumstances of the stimulus program."

This is the Camel's nose under the tent, being poked because of special circumstances. Let government restrict political expression - i.e. lobbying of government officials regarding policy - in one small, supposedly specialized area and not long after the specialized area starts expanding. Eventually, all political expression regarding all policy will become subject to government regulation.

More on this as it develops. And trust me, it will develop.

Astounding.

Take it from those who know what they are talking about.

UPDATE: Jay Nordlinger:

Have you read this article in Pravda? It avers that “the American descent into Marxism is happening with breathtaking speed.” You know what I really appreciate about that statement? The word “descent.”

Exactly. Even the Russians know which was is up and which way is down.

Obama and the Democrats' have made a colossal error in judgment in quadrupling our deficit; and the markets are reacting accordingly.

The Obama Administration continues to BLATANTLY violate Federal Law, while the Democrats in Congress get away with unheard-of corruption with nary a discouraging word from the Dem-run "show trial" kangaroo courts (aka "Congressional Investigations").

They are running this country like Mayor Daley runs Chicago. Only on a more massively corrupt scale.

Where is the #@$%!*%#! outrage??? This President is trampling on the Constitution and our laws. I find myself agreeing with Mark Levin that Barack Obama is the closest thing to a dictator (or at least a dictator wannabe) that America has ever had.

Meanwhile, the media, led by General Electric-owned NBC/MSNBC, continues to march to Obama's beat, and (other than Fox) has pretty much ignored or else laughed at every single violation of American law to date, as evidenced by this bit via Michelle Malkin:

As I’ve stated from the beginning, there is still much to be researched on this issue. Given Obama’s Chicago gangland propensities, anything corrupt is possible.

Some professional journalists, however, have shown obstinate unwilligness to get to the bottom of the decision-making process.

The Washington Post’s business columnist Steven Pearlstein was asked about the story yesterday in an online Q&A. He scoffed:

Boonsboro, Md.: A bit off the topic, but have you or anyone at the Post investigated this? Chrysler dealers shut down in Obama bankruptcy are mostly Republican? It seems a crosscheck of dealerships to be closed versus donations shows almost all the dealers to be closed donated to Republicans. http://hotair.com/

Steven Pearlstein: Oh, please. What percent of all auto dealers are Republican? I bet its (sic) pretty high.

Well, why don’t you use all your professional journalism training and find out the answer, Mr. Pearlstein? And why don’t you look at the flip side of the question — as “amateur” bloggers have been doing — and investigate the circumstances of the protected dealers?

From Google News:

In answering a question from a student about how Pelosi was going to get Americans to cut back on their carbon emissions, the leading Democratic lawmaker said it was important to educate children on how to conserve energy and for citizens to build more environmentally friendly homes.

"We have so much room for improvement," she said. "Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory ... of how we are taking responsibility."

This from a partisan Lizzie Borden who is busy trying to deflect the coverage of her own serial lying about the CIA briefings; for Pelosi to lecture anyone about "taking responsibility" is so replete with sickening irony that she ought to be quarantined from opening that botox-streched mouth of hers.

Have we had enough yet?

She'll get confirmed. Probably. But it will likely come at a high price to Team Obama in the long run... that is if the sleepwalking Republicans play this one right.

If you think of the term "progressive", its root meaning suggests progress. As opposed to its synonyms "Marxist" and "Socialist", both which connotate misery and failure.

With this in mind, Jay Nordlinger's words today rang particularly true, lending much more irony to the notion that the ideology of the so-called "progressives" can lead to anything other than regression--and ultimately, chaos and anarchy:

If I had my way, they would all say, “I don’t care what her sex is or where her parents or ancestors came from. I care about what she thinks.” We have had a lot of talk recently about what the differences between the parties should be. Should we be Tweedledum and Tweedledee (or Tweedledumber)? Or should the parties offer distinct, contrasting views?

One of the reasons I became a Republican, long ago — and that was an unlikely conversion — is that I was appalled by the racialism of the Democrats. In my time and place, the Republicans were the party of One America: E pluribus unum. And the Democrats were the party of constant, obnoxious race-consciousness — running around with clipboards, putting everyone in a box. Race is destiny, they said (in effect).

Baloney.

It’s not very fashionable now to quote Condoleezza Rice — was it ever? — but I remember well what she said at the 2000 convention. She said that she was glad to belong to a party that “sees me as an individual, not as part of a group.” That, ladies and gentlemen, is what Republican music should be — at least in my opinion.

UPDATE: Also from The Corner, Veronique de Rugy contrasts what should be to what actually is:

David is right. Surely, the anti-tax-shelter rhetoric of the Obama administration provides the final incentive for former U.S. companies incorporated abroad to never return to the U.S.

But it will get worse. Obama's international tax policy will not only stop foreign companies from incorporating in America, but it will also force some U.S. companies to leave the U.S., following the steps of Accenture and many others. The "loopholes" that righteous Obama is targeting are what corporate executives consider to be life-saving features of an otherwise punishing U.S. corporate tax code: permission to indefinitely defer paying U.S. taxes on income earned overseas and the "check-the-box" rules which give companies some latitude in deciding where exactly their subsidiaries should be taxed.

Those rules are here for a reason. For years, rather than do the right thing and reform the corporate income tax, lawmakers put these rules in place so U.S. companies could compete with foreign companies. In other words, they reduce tremendously the cost of doing business abroad. There is no doubt that they have encouraged companies to place their offshore subsidiaries in low-tax haven countries, but that’s because companies can’t afford not to do it.

The corporate tax is a nightmare. First, the rate is too high. Today, the rate (federal plus state) of 40 percent is the second highest in the 30-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Second, the United States taxes corporations on their worldwide income. That means, for example, that the profits of a U.S.-owned computer plant are subject to U.S. tax whether the plant is located in Texas or Ireland. Most other major countries do not tax foreign business income as aggressively as does the United States. In fact, about half of the OECD nations have “territorial” tax systems that tax firms on domestic income only. The combination of high rate and a worldwide system makes the U.S. corporate tax system extremely punishing.

I never understood why the Bush administration didn’t reform it. Conservative economists have long been asking for it (check out their work on the subject here). But at least the Bush administration never threatened to make it unbearable for U.S. firms to do business abroad.

Finally, years ago I wrote this short paper explaining corporate inversion. It's only going to get worse.

Wow. The average Constitutional IQ level on the court just dropped by 25 points--and that is saying a lot considering she would be replacing Souter. For Obama it is a good strategic pick though--doubtful there are enough Republicans and Blue Dogs out there who would dare oppose a female hispanic, qualifications be damned.

Cartoon by Glenn Foden (click to enlarge)

Glenn Reynolds notes perhaps the biggest story of the weekend; not that our financial black hole is really news to the informed... but the fact that Obama openly admitted "we are out of money"--and this one month after his "emergency" bill effectively quadrupled our budget over the next 8 years, and to put the rest of us in the hole for at least $10 Trillion (that was Obama's conservative estimate) by then.

So how did that auto bailout go, Mr. President? How are Chrysler and GM doing after handing them all those billions of our tax dollars?

Glenn is not usually one for hyperbole, so when he sees it (emphasis mine), it is a good bet that one hell of a lot of independents are seeing things the same way:

WE’RE OUT OF MONEY:

In a sobering holiday interview with C-SPAN, President Obama boldly told Americans: “We are out of money.”

C-SPAN host Steve Scully broke from a meek Washington press corps with probing questions for the new president.

SCULLY: You know the numbers, $1.7 trillion debt, a national deficit of $11 trillion. At what point do we run out of money?

OBAMA: Well, we are out of money now. We are operating in deep deficits, not caused by any decisions we’ve made on health care so far. This is a consequence of the crisis that we’ve seen and in fact our failure to make some good decisions on health care over the last several decades.

So we’re out of money because we don’t have national health care? Bogus. I think, instead, that it has something to do with the fact that Obama has been pouring money down a crony-statist rathole at absolutely astronomical and unprecedented rates. Yep, here’s that graphic again. Note that it doesn’t support Obama’s claim at all — but it does support mine.

“I’ve bankrupted the nation, so now your only hope is to pass my healthcare plan.” That goes beyond chutzpah to the edge of pathological dishonesty. Except, I guess, that it’s not pathological if you get away with it. And so far, he has.

UPDATE: Related: US bonds sale faces market resistance. “The US Treasury is facing an ordeal by fire this week as it tries to sell $100bn (£62bn) of bonds to a deeply skeptical market amid growing fears of a sovereign bond crisis in the Anglo-Saxon world. . . . The Obama administration needs to raise $2 trillion this year to cover the fiscal stimulus plan and the bank bail-outs. It has to fund $900bn by September.” And, in the Chrysler and GM cases, it’s already shown a deep disrespect for the rights of bondholders. That’s not likely to breed enthusiasm among investors.

Something tells me the Brits won't be the only ones.

Q: In just over 100 days: worst President ever??

What a great time for Obama, his Defense-Cutting, Appeasnik Administration and his "yes man" Gates to mothball the construction of additional Missile Defense launch platforms at Ft. Greeley Alaska, even though the taxpayers have already paid for and built the missiles. Earth to ostriches: the US is not going to lose an all-out conventional war to anyone; but it only takes one missile that gets through our defenses at high altitude to have a catastrophic EMP effect that could result in millions of American deaths within 6 months:

• The xenophobic madmen running N.Korea launch missiles and explode a Hiroshima nuke--on Memorial Day (on purpose). This is a complete "in your face" to Obama and his lofty idealism, and to all previous efforts to cut deals with these liars.
  
• Iran is on a collision course with similar nuclear and missile capabilities, has launched Surface to Surface missiles this week and has reiterated its intentions to vaporize Israel; meanwhile our President has shown relative disdain and irritation at Netanyahu; my guess is that his message regarding Iran was: 'you are on your own'.
  
• Obama seems to think the UN or the "International Community" will actually take action that would stop either Iran OR NK from moving forward (or...at least he pretends to think so for his political base). This, of course is a complete joke.
  
• Iran just sent warships into the Gulf of Aden--on Memorial Day, perhaps putting them in a better position to cut off the world's Oil supply should Israel or anyone else attack it.
  
• The Russians are threatening to install surface to surface missiles on the Polish border, and have pretty much issued an ultimatum directed at any Eastern European country that strengthens its ties with the US.

Do you feel safer today than you did with President Bush? Be truthful.

I will admit it: I have always been staunchly conservative, but have never agreed with this whole "war on drugs" thing. I would rather have people smoking weed on the streets while murderers and child molesters spend more time in overcrowded jails instead of being set free to make room for the thousands of drug offenders. It takes the profit motive out of the Mexican Black Market, and thereby deprives the Drug Lords from funds to promote their increasing violence (just like ending prohibition did for stopping all the violence surrounding the Liquor smuggling trade in the 1930's...does the name Capone come to mind? And do you see people killing each other over alcohol sales today?).

Today Tom Tancredo came out for common sense (watch the videos!); the very same common sense that the great William F. Buckley, Jr. spent years arguing for: one of the best examples can be found here. Every single essay is worth your time. It made such an impact that I still have the magazine.

This is not a Left/Right issue. It is a Liberty issue, and also a free markets issue. Count me in for Liberty.

Our law enforcement and military dollars could go to much better use. There would be lots more prison space for the really bad guys, and it also frees up the courts. You tax the drugs just like you tax alcohol sales--shoot, you could use the proceeds for addiction rehab.

It just makes too much sense. If people want drugs they are going to find a way; so why bankroll the thugs in the black market to boot?

Even the NYT-owned Boston Globe gets it. From a PR perspective, game over:

It now seems clear that top Democratic leaders like Pelosi knew about the policy, and chose not to challenge it.

After participating in the secret briefings, Pelosi apparently saw little way to change course until Democrats took control of Congress and the White House. Still, it would be nice to see if CIA notes on those confidential briefings showed her at least raising private doubts about those techniques.

The country should have access to all explanatory memos and other backup information about the interrogation policy. That way Americans will know exactly what Bush officials were thinking and what lawmakers - Republicans and Democrats - were told. The country needs to hear the truth.

And that goes for the results of those interrogations too, including the attacks prevented and estimates of lives saved.

The bottom line is that the Dems (nor our President) still don't get it about the fanaticism of our enemies and the mindset we are up against.

BHO has apparently told Netanyahu that he his on his own with the Iranian zealots. I hope Bibi has the guts to do what must be done. If so, and if Obama abandons Israel completely as many predict he would, his re-election is doomed. I think he would (reluctantly) have to cave to Israel.

Bibi needs to call his bluff... and the sooner the better--before all this health care and cap and tax nonsense gets too far along.

The money behind the mythology. And it isn't just Al Gore who stands to benefit. Billions will flow into General Electrics' coffers. You know them--the parent of MSNBC and NBC news. Biased? No way!

Plus Mark Levin quotes a telling passage from Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, in which the Marxist Revolutionary urged the use of "pollution" as a strawman catalyst to prime the people for more sweeping "revolutionary change". (as usual, Levin's entire show is worth a listen)

George Will suggests that we should expect the worst (emphasis is mine):

Now California's mostly Democratic political class will petition Washington for a bailout to nourish the public sector that is suffocating the state's dwindling -- and departing -- private sector. The Obama administration, which rewarded the United Auto Workers by giving it considerable control over two companies it helped reduce to commercial rubble, will serve the interests of California's unionized public employees and others largely responsible for reducing the state to mendicancy.

These factions will flourish if the state becomes a federal poodle on a short leash held by the president. He might make aid conditional on the state doing things that California Democrats and their union allies would love to be "compelled" to do: eliminate the requirements of two-thirds majorities of both houses of the legislature to raise taxes and pass budgets, and repeal Proposition 13, which voters passed in 1978 to limit property taxes. These changes would enable the legislature (job approval rating: 14 percent) to siphon away an ever-larger share of taxpayers' wealth and transfer it to public employees. Such as prison guards, whose potent union is one reason California's cost-per-inmate (about $49,000) is twice the national average.

Read the whole thing.

You ever wonder what Barack Obama did back in the days when he was doing all of that "community activism", using the tactics of one Saul Alinsky?

Welcome to the future.

From Tom McGuire, the aftermath of the California Tax Revolt:
Obviously the MSM hates the story. As it should be. No wonder they are all going bankrupt.

Today I heard an interesting suggestion from Mark Levin: if California can pass its own emissions standards, thus holding automakers in other states and countries hostage to its trade unionists and screwball chicken little "Climate scientists", then--rather than bowing to their insane "demands"-- automakers should reply by treating California like Cuba--i.e. they should only sell to states who do not have such draconian standards and let the Californians either drive the old cars or make their own. Furthermore (Levin continued), using the same Interstate Commerce Clause that the California legislature is invoking to impose its emissions standards, then why shouldn't other States like Texas and Louisiana and West Virginia--which are exploring and drilling their own oil or mining their own coal--use the same Interstate Commerce Clause to just tell the other states, as their prices rise for gasoline and electricity: "you are on your own."

I am paraphrasing, but you get the idea. If enough State Legislatures were to stand up to Washington and say "enough is enough", what started out as tea parties and now has morphed into a full-scale tax revolt in the bluest of Blue states, could turn into a full scale Federalist wildfire. All the fire needs is for the people in the other States to step up and say "enough".

South Carolina's Governor, Mark Sanford, has set a good example towards this end by vetoing large portions of the State budget rather than accept Federal bailout money--and the Federal mandates that go with that money. Maybe it is time to encourage State legislators in our respective States to take similar action.

Now if only some real Republicans would get out in front of this movement at a national level, maybe we would really get somewhere.