Wizblog

The Tressel File

Since I started covering OSU sports for TheClevelandFan.com more than three years ago, writing about the Buckeyes (and pretty much all sports) on the blog has dried up almost completely. Once you crank out a couple thousand words about a game...or about a scandal...over there...and say anything else that's left to say at the TCF message boards...the urge to say what you think is pretty much sated.

Genuinely curious and sincere friends and acquaintances of mine who know I cover the Buckeyes will ask what I think about the ongoing turmoil in Columbus, and I always have to resist the urge to say "go read the 12,000 words I've written about it over the last three months and then if you still have any questions, come talk to me". And that's mostly because I can't do justice to the issue in a 2-minute conversation, (even though I suspect what they want is the 2-minute version)

What I've been missing to this point is one link I can send to people who really want to read what I've written on the subject without sifting through links at my TCF archive to find what they want...and now I'll have one. Here's a summary of my related TCF articles since December when the players' violations were disclosed...most recent first...

(Updated 6/18) - Buckeye Leaves - 6/18 - How heavy will The Hammer be when it finally falls on OSU?

Buckeye Leaves - 6/11/11 - Fickell in, Pryor gone, and questions about who'll be coaching the offense.

OSU: Reaching For the Bottom - 6/4/11 - Tressel resigns and OSU fans wait to bottom out.

Buckeye Leaves - 5/28/11 - on the undisguised glee of the national media, and my errant prediction, two days before the resignation, that Tressel will fight on.

Buckeye Leaves - 5/1/11 - after the NCAA "notice of allegations" went public and the media feeding frenzy got restarted.

Buckeye Leaves 4/9/11 - thoughts on the impact of Tressel's 5-game suspension.

The Tainting of Tressel - 3/10/11 - my first article following the OSU press conference...contains links at the end to other reaction from various writers and pundits.

Sugar Bowl Preview - 1/4/11 - first coverage of the Tat5 player suspensions.

Idling

I'm feeling the urge to fire up this blog after keeping it in cyber-mothballs for about nine months. That's far and away the longest stretch of inactivity in its eight-year existence, and it's explainable by some combination of the laws of motion (once at rest, it tends to stay at rest), procrastination, laziness, Twitter-addiction, and perhaps frustration with writing it for no one. In any event, I'm going to get back to it as an outlet for taking note of things I find important, funny, outrageous or interesting. Feel free to join in with the spambots in the comments if you like.

The Fall of Bobby Lowder

My article on Bobby Lowder and Auburn athletics has been up just over 24 hours, and it's already one of the most widely read pieces ever at TheClevelandFan.com...

...and counting. We assume what we're experiencing is a Twitter-lanche.

UPDATE 12/9: Allen Barra quotes yours truly, and plugs TCF in his Wall Street Journal article today. My fifteen minutes counting down....

A week after the original article, I address the feedback: Reaction on Lowder and Auburn

Another follow-up piece: Auburn Revisited - 2/20/11

4/20/11 - Rumors of Lowder's Demise Greatly Exaggerated

5/12/11 - Alabama Senate Blocks Lowder's Reappointment

5/16/11 - Lowder Withdraws at Auburn

Nobody Wants To Hear About It

(...and what better place for nobody to hear about it than right here at this blog....)

The New Slavery: Sex Trafficking - Hudson New York

The above link is to the transcript of a truly moving speech given by Emma Thompson in New York this June on the ongoing global catastrophe that is human sex-trafficking. Longish, but hard to excerpt....please do RTWT.

More here, here, and here on Thompson and the Journey exhibit.

Remembering the Good Times

Iowahawk - Barack, Can We Talk?

Barack, can we, uh, talk for a few minutes?

Oh, nothing. It's just that it just seems we haven't had a chance to talk for a while. I mean, I know we've both been busy for the past year or so. You with your fundraisers and golfing and stuff, and me with all those appointments at the unemployment office. But you know I think it's important in a relationship like ours to keep the lines of communication open.

So anyway, I've been think that... look, this is really hard. God. Do you remember when we met at that big party in Denver back in 08? I mean when I saw you across that crowded convention floor, it was like, Oh My God. I don't think I ever saw anything like you before. I was on the rebound from a bad relationship and you were so tall and articulate and, well hot. And then I couldn't believe that of all the democracies in the room you picked me out.!

Read it all...but remember...nostalgia is not what it used to be.

Beyond Parody

From the New York Times editorial on the investigation of Tom Delay:

Mr. DeLay, the Texas Republican who had been the House majority leader, crowed that he had been "found innocent." But many of Mr. DeLay's actions remain legal only because lawmakers have chosen not to criminalize them.

Had those lawmakers known in advance what actions Delay would take, they could have passed laws criminalizing them. Think ahead a little bit next time, Democrats.

UPDATE: Taranto:

By the same logic, the New York Times editorialists are not in the dock only because "criminal stupidity" is a figure of speech and not an actual law.

Covering Their Fannie

Jim Geraghty, from Friday's Morning Jolt newsletter...

The fundamental problem with the [financial reform] legislation is that it doesn't address...the underlying problems with the mortgage market. It was the mortgage bubble, instigated by liberal social justice demands placed on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which caused the crisis, not a failure of securities rules and regulations. No mortgage market problems, no mortgage-backed securities problems; no mortgage-backed securities problems, no financial crisis. One of the greatest scams ever is the success of Democrats in distancing their mortgage policies from the financial crisis, and portraying the crisis as simply a matter of Wall Street greed and lack of regulation. . . . Reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac never is going to happen unless Democrats have no other choice. Not at least as long as Barack Obama is President or Democrats control all or part of Congress. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are off limits for Democrats, just as they were when the Bush administration warned of problems.

This was not a problem caused exclusively by one political party, but the ""mess we inherited" rhetoric by the White House necessitates reminding people that the Bush administration did warn of problems...and they did propose reforms...which were shot down and the need for them dismissed by Sens. Frank and Dodd...and as you can see here...

UPDATE 8/23: With an election looming, Barney Frank sees the light.

UPDATE 8/24: The Obama administration fesses up about who their HAMP program was designed to help.

Who's Unserious?

In the course of dismissing Mitt Romney as a viable GOP candidate for 2012, Dr. Zero articulates nicely my biggest concern about Republicans retaking political power...that they won't have the political courage to do what needs to be done...

Serious Human Beings

This election will not be fought over the fine details of a few specific pieces of legislation. It will not be a contest to find someone who can escort an unpopular Barack Obama from the White House, then trot back inside and continue shoveling trillions of dollars into the deficit furnace. We don’t need a national CPA to provide a lecture on deficit reduction during his inauguration, then return for a State of the Union speech in which he explains spending cuts are pretty much impossible, while forklifts roll in with massive new tax packages. We have no use for someone who thinks ObamaCare is an awesome machine that just needs a new transmission and some mag wheels to reach its potential.

We are about to conduct an election about the very philosophy of our government. It is our last chance to avoid the Great Crash which Obama has brought to our doorsteps… but which would have lurked twenty or thirty years in the future even without him. The Obama presidency has begun a fundamental transformation of the relationship between Americans and their government. The groundwork for this transformation was laid over many years, by politicians from both parties. Government bloat has accumulated for decades. The State isn’t really changing all that much under Barack Obama. It’s working to change us.

To reverse this process, we must reach farther back than the administrations of George Bush or Bill Clinton. We are being crushed by engines of regulation, taxation, and corruption that were designed in the first decades of the last century. We’re approaching the end of the story that began during the New Deal. It won’t be good enough to merely rewind the tape a few years. Even such a half-hearted measure, simply returning us to where George Bush left us, would be the most spectacular reduction of State power in our entire history… and it wouldn’t be good enough.

Horowitz on Hitchens - Hitch on Hewitt

David Horowitz reviews the new Christopher Hitchens memoir Hitch 22, in a two-part essay at NRO, and it's a must for admirers of either or both men. David says his friend Hitch hasn't really left the Left, and shows how Hitchens' loyalty to his Marxist revolutionary influences is hopelessly at odds with his proud Orwellian anti-totalitarianism. The result is "a moral incoherence" that is navigated by Hitchens in the book by omission of inconvenient facts.

Hitchens' apostasy from the Left wasn't nearly the abrupt and devastating "crucible of despair" endured and described by Horowitz, but David's message that "you can't have it both ways" is hammered home in countless examples for Hitchens. The larger point made by Horowitz is to show how powerful is the seductive appeal of the utopian fantasy...that such a lover of freedom as Christopher Hitchens cannot and has not rid himself of it. Pack a lunch.

"Second Thoughts" - Part One - Part Two

Also a very worthwhile read is this transcript of Hugh Hewitt's conversation with Hitchens last week. Another long one, but not to be missed by Hitch fans.

Here's the link to the Hitchens memoir. And here's to his successful treatment and speedy recovery.

He Calls It Community Organizing

Documentary Charges Obama Won 2008 Democratic Nod With Caucus State Dirty Tricks

It'll be interesting to see how the Democrats handle this issue in 2012. Pass the popcorn.

More Sportsguy

Post-decision thoughts by Simmons and his readers. Among them...

It's one thing to leave. I get it. You're 25. You don't know any better. You're tired of carrying mediocre teams. You want help. You want the luxury of not having to play a remarkable game every single night for eight straight months. You want to live in South Beach. You want to play with your buddies. I get it. I get it. But turning that decision into a one-hour special, pretending that it hadn't been decided weeks ago, using a charity as your cover-up and ramming a pitchfork in Cleveland's back like you were at the end of a Friday the 13th movie and Cleveland was Jason ... there just had to be a better way.

---

We are already fools for caring about athletes considerably more than they care about us. We know this, and we do it anyway. We just like sports. We keep watching for moments like Donovan's goal against Algeria, and we keep caring through thick and thin for moments like Roberts' Steal and Tracy Porter's interception. We put up with all the sobering stuff because that's the price you pay -- for every Gordon Hayward half-court shot, or USA-Canada gold-medal game, there are 20 Michael Vicks and Ben Roethlisbergers. Last night didn't make me like sports any less -- my guard has been up since 1996 -- it just reinforced all the things I already didn't like.

Well said. It didn't really help to have the Cavs owner respond immediately, sounding like a sixth-grader. ("The curse" moves to Florida? Really?) As much as some of his lines have generated applause in town, I'm thinking he really should have slept on it before penning his response.

The other thing that strikes me is that the NBA's reputation for being well-run by David Stern is in serious jeopardy. I suspect Stern will fine Gilbert for his outburst, and probably act to get his arms back around a system that used to require things like contracts being in place before players announced where they were going to play. There's a real sense now that the inmates are running the asylum, and Stern will have to act decisively to reassert control.

Meanwhile, I can go back to treating the NBA like I treated it before LeBron came to the Cavs....as my least favorite pro sport, and one where I'm too disinterested to ever watch a game start-to-finish until the Finals...maybe.

UPDATE: A pretty good column by Adrian Wojnarowski.

Simmons on LeBron

Reading Bill Simmons, five hours before LeBron announces, with his 23 thoughts on "The Decision". Let's face it. He's the best... Read it all, but here's a large slice of it...

Countdown to the LeBron James decision

19. I always thought the goal was winning rings. That's what Russell, Bird, Magic and Jordan taught us. That's what I grew up believing. But sports are different now. You're a brand as much as an athlete. In the past 72 hours, with the suspense building for his announcement, LeBron created a Twitter account, launched his own website and agreed with ESPN on a one-hour live selection show that, incredibly, was the exact same idea that a Columbus reader named Drew had in my Thanksgiving '09 mailbag … but I thought he was kidding. Now I think he's Nostradamus. Or even Nostradamu-SAS.

Drew from Columbus looked into the future, and here's what he saw: A world in which it was totally conceivable that an NBA superstar would sell an hour-long show in which he picked his next team and tainted his legacy in the process. I played along and pushed a "Bachelor"-type setup ("The LeBrachelor!") in which LeBron whittled 29 teams down to six, then four, then two, then one over the course of six episodes. Hell, have him hand out roses. Why not? It's not like this would actually happen, right?

20. Seven months later, it's happening. I can't wait to watch for the same reasons I couldn't turn away from O.J.'s Bronco chase or the Artest melee: it's Car Wreck Television. If LeBron picks anyone other than the Cavaliers, it will be the cruelest television moment since David Chase ended "The Sopranos" by making everyone think they lost power. Cleveland fans will never forgive LeBron, nor should they. He knows better than anyone what kind of sports anguish they have suffered over the years. Losing LeBron on a contrived one-hour show would be worse than Byner's fumble, Jose Mesa, the Game 5 meltdown against Boston, The Drive, The Shot and everything else. At least those stomach-punch moments weren't preordained, unless you believe God hates Cleveland (entirely possible, by the way). This stomach-punch moment? Calculated. By a local kid they loved, defended and revered.

It would be unforgivable. Repeat: unforgivable. I don't have a dog in this race -- as a Celtics fan, I wanted to see him go anywhere but Chicago -- but LeBron doing this show after what happened in the 2010 playoffs actually turned me against him. No small feat. I was one of his biggest defenders. Not anymore.

And here's where I really worry, because I don't think LeBron James has anyone in his life with enough juice to hurl his or her body in front of the concept of "I'm going to announce during a one-hour live show that I'm playing somewhere other than Cleveland." It's the best and worst thing about him -- he has remained fiercely loyal to his high school friends, but at the same time, he's surrounded by people his own age who don't stand up to him and don't know any better. Picking anyone other than Cleveland on this show would be the meanest thing any athlete has ever done to a city. But he might. Assuming he's not malicious, and that he's just a self-absorbed kid who apparently lost all perspective, that doesn't make him much different than most child stars who became famous before they could legally drink -- or, for that matter, Tiger Woods. That's just the way this stuff works. Too much, too fast, too soon. You don't lose your way all at once; just a little at a time. Then one day you look up and there's a TMZ photo spread with 15 of your mistresses, or you're agreeing to stab an entire city in the heart on a one-hour television show.

Scott Need Not Apply to CBC

John Steele Gordon:

Charleston, South Carolina, was the cradle of the Confederacy. And come next January, barring unforeseen developments, it and the rest of the 1st District will have a black Congressman for the first time since Reconstruction. Tim Scott defeated Paul Thurmond for the Republican nomination last night, and the district has been a safe Republican seat since 1981. It wasn’t even close, with Scott trouncing Strom Thurmond’s son by 61 to 39 percent.

That a black man could beat the son of the legendary segregationist so badly in a district where the Civil War began — the district where Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861 — is a measure of just how much the South has changed in the last 50 years, and the country’s politics and race relations along with it.

But assuming Scott is elected, he needn’t apply for membership in the Congressional Black Caucus, of course. It’s a measure of how little the left in American politics has changed in the last 50 years that the Black Caucus — devoted to race-based politics and victimology — admits only liberal Democratic members.

To be fair, it has been a while since there was such a thing as a black Republican Congressman for the Black Caucus to consider (J.C. Watts), and if elected, Scott will face the customary leftist smears of inauthenticity and Uncle Tomism endured by all blacks who stray from identity politics orthodoxy. If the past predicts the future, he will be called a "race traitor" and there will be no end to leftist attempts to marginalize and defame him.

May he have the courage and character to persevere until he is joined in Congress by many more black conservatives, and the poisonous and condescending idea that all blacks should be of one correct political persuasion is consigned to the scrap heap once and for all.

It is notable that Scott was endorsed by Sarah Palin, and won big in a majority white (66%) congressional district...all of which confounds and refutes the "Tea Partiers are racists" crowd...an inconvenient reality that they will doubtless ignore.

Weary of Last Year's Boy Band

Classic Steyn. Hilarious, right down to the new Hillary campaign slogan. (Yes, I'm in the Mark Steyn Fan Club...we have a secret handshake and everything)

Making it Personal: Barack:

From MEMRI - The Middle East Media Research Institute

American Al-Qaeda Operative Adam Gadahn Threatens More Anti-American Terror Attacks in a Personal Address to President Obama, and Concludes: Next Time We Might Not Show the Same Restraint and Self-control

Barack:

I know that as you slither snakelike into the second year of your reign as a purported president of change, you are finding your hands full with running the affairs of a declining and besieged empire and – in the process – proving yourself to be nothing more than another treacherous, bloodthirsty and narrow-minded American war president, what with your overseeing of the hasty overhauling of America’s compromised homeland security cordon, your brazen escalation of American aggression and interference in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and your removal of our captive brothers from detention facilities scattered around the globe to Muslim-only concentration camps in Illinois, Bagram and elsewhere, all in the name of protecting the American people from the threat of Muslim retaliation for American crimes, or what you insist on calling the threat of al-Qaida and al-Qaida inspired terrorism.

Click above for the rest.

Quite a catch for Al Qaeda and their sponsors...this American-born America-hater Gadahn. A useful tool for the leadership, for sure... the best possible P.R. man to trot out the company line. Unfortunately, it also means he likely has access to the ways and means to complement his own zeal for terror attacks. It comforts me to know that we have many missiles with Adam Gadahn's name on them, and when he screws up, in Karachi or elsewhere, he'll be vaporized by the U.S. military as the enemy he is.

No one can deny that Barack Obama has been making war on al Qaeda and their Taliban counterparts, but as Michael Ledeen and Andy McCarthy repeatedly point out, the disconnect of those anti-terror policies from the direct sponsorship of the terrorist organizations by Iran's mullahs, continues to make our policy incoherent. Predator drones for al Qaeda, and engagement for Tehran...and of course the disconnect, if not the engagement policy, long predates Obama.

Because it is Iranian IED's killing our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is Iran-funded Hamas bombing Israel from Gaza. The Hezbollah that blew up our African embassies and sits on Israel's borders is an Iranian creation. Iran harbors Osama bin Laden. Could they mock us any more openly? Yet their fraudulently-elected President is permitted to fly here and speak at the United Nations. Excerpting Ledeen:

...from time to time a military leader will stand up and tell the press or the Congress about the ongoing attacks against American military personnel from the Islamic Republic of Iran. These are very short-lived episodes. Neither our journalists nor our elected representatives demand to know more, because they really do not want to know more. If they knew more, if they added up all these episodes over many years they would have to recognize the pattern, that is to say, the war that is being waged against us.

McCarthy was asking in 2006, as Bush was kicking the can down the road..."How many Americans do they need to kill before we get the point?" This administration is still counting...and to make it worse, they're disinclined to do much to help the Iranian democracy movement, even rhetorically, lest we risk irritating our negotiating partners.

We talk because talking is an end in itself for the diplomatic class. Iran talks...or doesn't...depending on the day...because they don't quite have their nukes yet.

Obama Speech

Full text of Obama's speech on the Gulf oill spill.

I think quoting Olberman is unprecedented in this space, but his response immediately following the speech was apt..."it was a great speech if you've been on another planet the last 57 days".

Using the occasion to campaign for cap and trade energy taxation wasn't giving the people exactly what they wanted to hear either, I suspect, as McConnell says in the response (below)

The ever present strawmen were there...he's reforming an agency that operated on "a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility - a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves". Yep, that sounds like the Department of the Interior.

So the regulated shouldn't view their government regulators with hostility...but they shouldn't get too cozy with them either. Embrace your government overlords...just don't jump into bed with them. The relationship between government and the entities they regulate is too adversarial...and not adversarial enough. Got it.

I know of no one who thought the next step in cleaning up the Gulf mess should be an Obama speech....and I think turning it into a commercial for another huge tax increase was politically tone deaf and inappropriate. But hey...he's in the middle of the toughest year and a half of any year and a half since the 1930s, hadn't you heard?

Here's an excerpt from Sen. McConnell's response:

...day after day, as the oil continues to flow, what we hear about from the administration is how tough they plan to be with BP and now, apparently, how important it is that we institute a new tax that will raise energy costs for every single American but which will do nothing to plug the leak. Never has a mission statement fit an administration as perfectly as Rahm Emanuel’s “never allow a crisis to go to waste.” Climate change policy is important, but first things first.

Americans are saying two things at the moment: stop this spill and clean it up. So with all due respect to the White House, the wetlands of the Bayou, the beaches of the coast, and our waters in the Gulf are far more important than the status of the Democrats’ legislative agenda in Washington. Americans want us to stop the oil spill first. And until this leak is plugged, they’re not in any mood to hand over even more power in the form of a new national energy tax to a government that, so far, hasn’t lived up to their expectations in its response to this crisis.

Rejecting Apathy

Doctor Zero is still optimistic, because he rejects The Pillars of Apathy

I refuse to believe government programs launched in the Forties, Sixties, and Seventies are indestructible features of our lives, immune to repeal or reform. I don’t believe a nation with a 234-year history of courage and industry is destined to suffocate in a shallow pool of nanny-state cement, poured only a few generations ago. It will be difficult for the American giant to rise again… but history unfolds in the space between difficult and impossible.

There is no such thing as eternal legislation. Even the Constitution can be amended. It’s only a question of how much willpower it will take for us to cast aside the intolerable acts of our political class. We are descended from men who showed great vigor in resisting intolerable acts.

[...]

I reject the notion that politicians are universally corrupt and treacherous, leaving the voters with no meaningful power but to select the next batch of crooks to rob them blind. There are some men and women of true character and integrity in public offices throughout the land. There should be more of them. We should demand it. Throwing up our hands and accepting the notion that all of them are charlatans set the bar low enough for a useless “community organizer” with a shady past to stumble over it. It’s what got us trillion-dollar spending bills full of vague assumptions and lies, pushed by a government that has no serious plans beyond making itself larger. It’s how we ended up with a chief executive who only bothers to come into the office long enough to write himself a bigger budget, and looks honestly stunned when his country expects him to do something productive, or even take their side in an international debate.

Waiting in Line For Yourself

More Steyn...the guy is prolific.

Many Americans are beginning to pick up the strange vibe that, for Barack Obama, governing America is “an interesting sociological experiment,” too. He would doubtless agree that the United States is “the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.” But he doesn’t, not really: It is hard to imagine Obama wandering along to watch a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade until the job required him to. That’s not to say he’s un-American or anti-American, but merely that he’s beyond all that. Way beyond. He’s the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he’s condescending to the job — that it’s really too small for him and he’s just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along.

Congressional Sanity

Jen Rubin on what Congress is doing to pressure Obama on Israel, and to go around him to Netanyahu.

Related:

Scott at Power Line

Worst First - Alan Dershowitz

The Two-Tier Sisterhood

Mark Steyn talks about "The left’s strange hostility to Hirsi Ali"

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s great cause is women’s liberation. Unfortunately for her, the women she wants to liberate are Muslim, so she gets minimal support and indeed a ton of hostility from Western feminists who have reconciled themselves, consciously or otherwise, to the two-tier sisterhood: when it comes to clitoridectomies, forced marriages, honour killings, etc., multiculturalism trumps feminism. Liberal men are, if anything, even more opposed. She long ago got used to the hectoring TV interviewer, from Avi Lewis on the CBC a while back to Tavis Smiley on PBS just the other day, insisting that say what you like about Islam but everyone knows that Christians are just as backward and violent, if not more so. The media left spends endless hours and most of its interminable awards ceremonies congratulating itself on its courage, on “speaking truth to power,” the bravery of dissent and all the rest, but faced with a pro-gay secular black feminist who actually lives it they frost up in nothing flat.

The latest is Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. Reviewing Ayaan’s new book Nomad, he begins:

“She has managed to outrage more people—in some cases to the point that they want to assassinate her—in more languages in more countries on more continents than almost any writer in the world today. Now Hirsi Ali is working on antagonizing even more people in yet another memoir.”
That’s his opening pitch: if there are those who wish to kill her, it’s her fault because she’s a provocateuse who’s found a lucrative shtick in “working on antagonizing” people. The Times headlines Kristof’s review “The Gadfly,” as if she’s a less raddled and corpulent Gore Vidal. In fact, she wrote a screenplay for a film; Muslim belligerents threatened to kill her and her director; they made good on one half of that threat. This isn’t shtick.

As per usual with Steyn, read it all....

Another example of shooting the messenger who brings awkward and revealing tidings...David Horowitz attempts to elicit comment from Joshua Micah Marshall, leading light of the liberal blogosphere, on the deafening silence emanating from the left on the oppression of women and gays in Islam, and their failure to proudly (liberally?) stand up to Islamic totalitarianism as the enemy of America and the West that it is. The exchange is ably narrated and commented upon by David Swindle.

As far as I can tell from their correspondence, Marshall's answer is basically "it's not my job". Marshall has instead expended his progressive pixels ridiculing Horowitz for his tireless work championing the cause of women's rights under Islam on American college campuses. All Horowitz wants to know is where the self-professed liberals are. He'd like to think they'd have his back as he speaks out against the gay-lynching, woman-oppressing, Jew-hating theocratic culture of radical Islam. And he can't hear them.

Horowitz infuriates the left just as Hirsi Ali does...by rubbing the noses of self-styled liberals in their own illiberalism and incoherence. A feminist movement that ignores the oppression of women under Islam is not a movement worthy of the name. They'd rather point to other outcomes in society that offend them...not enough female CEO's, for example. Unlike Hirsi Ali's brand of courage, that sort of protest doesn't get one's throat slit in the street.

By the way, female CEO's are just fine...in theory....as a prop for political grievance. That is, until they have actual experience and success in the cruel, capitalist private sector....and then perhaps run for elective office as Republicans. Then they get icky all of a sudden...and they are fiercely opposed as the enemy by the same folks who fancy themselves advocates for women. That these smart, capable female CEO's might have acquired skills in...say, efficient management of large amounts of money...which might prove useful in government work....is a bug, not a feature, apparently. Hear them roar. But I digress in a big way...

As Christopher Hitchens (and no doubt others) has repeatedly said, no one deserves the label of liberal who is so indifferent as to whether people live in freedom or under tyranny. This is the hole that leftists dig for themselves when they allow their multicultural pieties (and their allergy to agreeing with conservatives) to trump their liberal principles. And they respond with indignant fury...and in Marshall's case, evasions and subject-changing...when true fighters for individual freedom like Hirsi Ali and Horowitz ask them..."What happened to your liberalism?"

A Saint Elsewhere

Dorothy Rabinowitz - The Alien in the White House

...it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans' leader, a man of them, for them, the nation's voice and champion.

[...]

A great part of America now understands that this president's sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.

[...]

The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.

They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America's moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands—something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.

The truth about that distance is now sinking in, which is all to the good.

Not a Parody

National Deficit-Reduction Commissioner, Andy Stern:

"America needs a 21st century economic plan because we now know the market-worshipping, privatizing, de-regulating, dehumanizing American financial plan has failed and should never be revived, worshipping the market again....It has failed America and everyone that works here."

Yes, Andy, the American system of capitalism and free enterprise that has produced the highest standard of living in human history, and is at the same time the most generous, charitable, freedom-enhancing nation on the planet, is an abject failure. Clearly we need to emulate more closely the European social democracies that are currently in a death spiral.

It's beyond a simple lack of patriotism with poseurs like Stern. After all, they think patriotism is out-dated...retrograde. There's nothing about America or its values that is worth defending...that is, until it is transformed by them, via raw state power, into something more admirable...less exceptional. Hubris on stilts.

Laffer - Incentives Matter, Turns Out

When the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of this year (it is not in Obama's DNA to extend them) the already struggling private economy "will collapse", according to Arthur Laffer. As weak as the 2010 numbers look, they are artificially strong, according to Laffer, as earners continue to declare income sooner (2010), rather than wait until tax rates jump after the first of the year.

Arthur Laffer: Tax Hikes and the 2011 Economic Collapse - WSJ.com

Kaus: Bribe Me

By acclaim, the conservative blogosphere's favorite Democrat...Mickey Kaus:

In an obviously effective attempt to attract free attention to his hopeless primary campaign against incumbent Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, California's Mickey Kaus has just announced the three backroom bribes that he would accept from the Obama administration to drop his challenge.

The California primary is Tuesday.

[...]

The candidate who claims to be no politician said he would accept no ordinary federal bureaucrat's job. However, he could be purchased by employment as:

--Head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement to push for an actual physical fence on the Mexico border to stop illegal immigrants and to end the "anointed incumbent...Boxer's obsessive talk of amnesty, sorry, 'a path to citizenship'" that actually acts as a powerful lure for even more illegal immigrants.

--Second, Kaus kindly offers, Obama could put him on the National Labor Relations Board so he could thwart "Big Labor's attempt to add to their dwindling memberships by avoiding secret ballots in union organizing drives."

--Finally, Kaus offered to accept an administration job offer to the Department of Education to write "a scathing report" on California teachers' unions and their deleterious impact on the state.

The Battle

Two great pieces this week by Arthur C. Brooks, President of AEI

WSJ - Slouching Towards Athens;The Obama agenda and the Europeanization of America.

Our friends across the Atlantic are fond of saying that Europeans work to live while Americans live to work. According to the data, they are basically right. Statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that while the average Italian, for example, enjoys 42 days of vacation per year, the average American has 16.

A predictable corollary: Many Europeans also expect others to work so they can live. The International Social Survey Programme asked Americans and Europeans whether they believe "It is the responsibility of the government to reduce the differences in income between people with high incomes and those with low incomes." In virtually all of Western Europe more than 50% agree, and in many countries it is much higher—77% in Spain, whose redistributive economy is in shambles. Meanwhile, only 33% of Americans agree with income redistribution.

Simply put, Europeans have a much stronger taste for other people's money than we do. This is vividly illustrated by the recent protests in the U.S. and Greece.

Why are citizens rioting and striking in Greece? Despite the worst economic crisis in decades, labor unions and state functionaries demand that others pay for the early retirements, lifetime benefits and state pensions to which they feel entitled. In America, however, the tea partiers demonstrate not to get more from others, but rather against government growth, public debt, bailouts and a budget-busting government overhaul of the health-care industry.

In other words, the tea partiers are protesting against exactly what the Greeks are demanding. It is an example of American exceptionalism if there ever was one.

And at NRO, an eloquent case for free enterprise, and what's at stake in its battle against big government...

Happy Now?

Reads like it might be essentially Chapter One of The Battle, Brooks' new book.

We Con the World

Beautiful.

UPDATE: I have replaced the original YouTube version of this video with a link from Eyeblast (via Ed Morrissey), because YouTube caved to a baseless copyright claim by Warner Bros and took down the video. "We Con the World" was obviously a parody of the original "We Are the World" song, and as such protected under the "Fair Use" rules, but then YouTube is gutless and avoids litigation at the expense of free speech principles, especially when the politics of the issue suit them. Weasels. More from Ed Driscoll.

See also:

Krauthammer:

The whole point of this relentless international campaign is to deprive Israel of any legitimate form of self-defense. Why, just last week, the Obama administration joined the jackals and reversed four decades of U.S. practice, by signing onto a consensus document that singles out Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons — thus de-legitimizing Israel’s very last line of defense: deterrence. The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, 6 million — that number again — hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists — Iranian in particular — openly prepare a more final solution.

Photos: The Horrifying Toll of the Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza

Behind the Headlines: The Israeli humanitarian lifeline to Gaza

UPDATE: Four Hamas rockets hit Israel from Gaza..

This is powerful...Free Gaza, indeed.

Worst First

Excerpting Alan Dershowitz' column.....RTWT

Singling Out Israel For "International Investigation"

In a world in which North Korea sinks a South Korean naval vessel killing dozens, Iran arms Islamic terrorists, who kill hundreds, Russia bombs Chechnya, killing thousands, and the United States and Great Britain, while targeting Al Qaeda and Taliban, kill an indeterminate number of civilians, only Israel is subjected to international "investigations" such as that conducted by Richard Goldstone and that being called for by the Security Council in the wake of the recent flotilla fiasco.

Why only Israel? Why is the United Nations silent about other situations that cry out for international investigations? Surely it's not because what Israel did was worse than what other member nations have done. Certainly it's not because Israel lacks self-criticism or mechanisms for internal investigation. Plainly it's not because the other "offenders" were provoked, while Israel was unprovoked.

There is only one answer--because Israel has long been singled out for public scrutiny and opprobrium by the United Nations in particular and the international community in general.

[...]

If the United Nations is to get into the business of ordering and conducting international investigations, it must establish neutral and objective criteria for when such an investigation is warranted. These criteria must be equally applicable to all nations, and not merely to the Jewish nation.

Primary among the criteria must be "the worst first." Under that rule, investigations must be conducted in the order of the seriousness of the offense, not the unpopularity of the offender. Israel's actions in enforcing its blockade ranks fairly low on the pecking order of offenses, compared to those that have never been subjected to a mandated international investigation. Until and unless North Korea, Iran, Russia and other nations are required to undergo international scrutiny, the demand that Israel do so is illegitimate.

McCarthy at Power Line

The new McCarthy book arrived yesterday, and I ripped through the first 100 pages last night. I wish the first chapter were available online, but for now, settle for McCarthy talking about the book at Power Line

The provocative sub-title will no doubt earn McCarthy instant outrage and dismissals from the left, but he doesn't suggest that the Alinskyite crowd in the White House is colluding or cooperating with the jihadists to sabotage America...just that they share a goal....the end of our capitalist social order and our culture of individual freedom. Argue the point if you can.

McCarthy stresses that while the numbers of violent Islamist terrorists is relatively low, a high percentage of Muslims do favor the implementation of sharia law, so just because they don't personally take part in blowing up skyscrapers, their more subtle efforts at undermining secular law are no less radical and no less a malign force in our society. Yet we define these people as "moderates"...and that's nuts. From the Power Line piece...

The point is that Islamist ideology - the modern version conceived by Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, refined by thinkers like Sayyid Qutb, and expounded by the likes of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, probably the most influential Sunni cleric living today - is very mainstream. Sure, it is an aberrant position to endorse the killing of Muslims who fail to adhere to a strict interpretation of Islam; but if the proposition at issue becomes, say, "I support the killing of Americans operating in Muslim countries," or "I would like to see the U.S. Constitution replaced by sharia law," we find the percentage of approving Muslims shoots skyward. Indeed, while much was made of Qaradawi's condemnation of the 9/11 attacks (a condemnation that was more tactical position than a moral one), the same Qaradawi issued a fatwa in 2004 calling for attacks on American troops in Iraq - and in so doing drew strong support from scholars at al-Azhar University.

The thrust of my book is that we need to come to terms with this in order to defend ourselves. There is a vibrant debate in the Muslim world about terrorism. We need to understand, though, that it is a debate about methodology. Islamist terrorists and other Islamists are in harmony about the endgame: they would like to see sharia installed and the West Islamicized. That a person is not willing to mass-murder non-Muslims in order to accelerate that process does not make him a moderate.

In the chapter about what to call the threat, I ultimately conclude that it is best to describe it as "Islamism" or the "Islamist" challenge. I do this as a hopeful nod to the millions of Muslims who both reject violence and do not want to live in sharia societies. But I do it with my eyes open. It may well be that these Muslims will not succeed in reforming their creed, in stripping from it the elements that cannot coexist with such core tenets of Western liberalism as freedom of conscience, the proposition that people have a right to make law for themselves, the proposition that freedom really is freedom rather than perfect submission, the equality of men and women and of Muslims and non-Muslims. Still, I think we have to support the reformist cause. I do not believe we can entice natural allies to our side by telling them their religion is irredeemable. They are trying to redeem it, and it is in our interest to help them - while recognizing that they may very well fail.

Seems to me far closer to "realism" than the folks who refuse even to utter the "I"- word when discussing terrorism.

More McCarthy in this concise statement of his case at the NY Post

Israelis Stop Hamas Blockade Run

J.E. Dyer at Contentions

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has a very good summary of points about the Hamas-backed attempt to break the maritime blockade of Gaza on May 31. The summary includes links on the Turkish “aid” group, Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH), and its associations with the Muslim Brotherhood and all the usual suspects of Islamist terror (including the Millennium bombing plot in 1999). There is convincing video footage of the fight mounted by the peace activists – using knives, metal pipe, handguns, stun grenades, and incendiary devices – against the Israeli commandos boarding M/V Mavi Marmara, the Turkish ferry used as the flotilla’s flagship. Probably the best compliment I can give Ed’s post is that it doesn’t adopt the credulous, pro-activist editorial perspective of virtually all the mainstream media outlets.

There is good reason not to. For one thing, the fingerprints of Hamas are all over this blockade-running attempt. IHH, a key organizer of the flotilla, has longstanding ties to Hamas that include establishing an IHH office in Gaza and setting up celebrated meetings between its leader, Bulent Yildirim, and Hamas leaders Khaled Meshal and Ismail Haniyeh. Moreover, British participation in the flotilla was organized by British Hamas leader Mohammed Sawalha, among other Hamas links to the European flotilla participants (laid out here).

Flotilla spokesmen told Islamic media repeatedly in the weeks before the attempt that their purpose was to break the blockade. Israel, of course, regularly allows aid convoys into Gaza; the Israelis offered to accept the humanitarian cargo in Ashdod and have it convoyed into Gaza over land. But IHH leaders stated that they hoped to widen the rift between Israel and Turkey by inciting Israel to take military action against the flotilla.

---

YnetNews.com report

A roundup at the Standard blog

Power Line has video and links

Miscellany 5/30

Dariusz Tolczyk - The New Criterion - Katyn: The Long Cover-up

Larry Elder - The Anti-Incumbency Myth

Mark Steyn - We're Too Broke to be This Stupid

Tom Joscelyn - Inside the Gitmo Task Force's Final Report. More here.

Doctor Zero on the reason lefties object to the term "Obamacare"

Jeffrey H. Anderson - Obamacare taking on water

Horowitz at UC San Diego

When Hitler comparisons are apt....

Text of David Horowitz' May 10 speech - The War Against the Jews

It is appropriate — and not coincidental of course — that I arrive here during “Israel Apartheid Week” or, as I prefer to call it, “Hitler Youth Week.” I use that reference because — as should be evident — what is going on here is part of a globally organized movement centered in the Arab Muslim Middle East to finish the job that Hitler started. Unlike the Nazis, who hid their “final solution” from ordinary Germans and the world at large, the Muslim radicals shout it from the rooftops, put it in their organizational charters and get applauded for doing so by millions of Muslims who want to see it happen. And the left does its job, as during the Cold War years, of conducting auxiliary campaigns to help the genocide along.

I dread the day David passes from the scene as an active force in political and social commentary. His intellect, courage, passion and wit, let alone his willingness to engage the modern day campus orthodoxies face to face, will be irreplaceable. Read it all, but here Horowitz takes apart the big lie...

...allow me to deal with some of the lies perpetrated by the Muslim Students Association and their “Israel Apartheid Week” on this campus. On the “apartheid” wall of hate funded by this university there is a map that pictures Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. It is labeled “occupied Palestine.” It is a lie.

There is no occupation of a country called “Palestine.” There were no Palestinian lands originally to be stolen. Israel was created in the same way that Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq were created – out of the ruins of the Turkish Empire. The Turks are not Arabs. They had ruled the entire region for 400 years since the 16th Century, until they joined the powers that were defeated in World War I.

At the end of the war, the victors – Britain and France — divided up the spoils, in this case the defeated Turkish empire. The “Palestine Mandate,” which was part of these Turkish spoils did not refer to a people but to a geographical region. The people in the region for the previous thousand years called themselves “Arabs” not “Palestinians.” The word “Palestine” is not even an Arab word. It is Roman in origin. When the Romans drove the Jews out of their homeland, Judea, in the first century CE, they renamed it after the Jews’ enemies, the Philistines, who were Europeans, not Arabs. Hence the name “Palestine.”

The claim that Israel is “occupied Palestine” is a lie of Hitlerian proportions and has the same genocidal intention.

Related:

Horowitz - "Why Israel is the Victim..." - 2002

Big Lies: Demolishing The Myths of the Propaganda War Against Israel - David Meir-Levi - with an introduction by David Horowitz - 2005

McCarthy - The Grand Jihad

Andy McCarthy's new book is out this week, which is reason enough for me to read it by next week.

Here's an interview of Andy on Bill Bennett's radio show...plus another interview with Big Journalism.

In a recent column at NRO, McCarthy reacts to the shameful specter of two-thirds of our Congress standing to applaud Mexican President Calderon as he condemned Arizona's legal attempts to control its border with his country. One theme of the new book is that the shared enemy of both the Islamists and the American left...the West's freedom culture...is under organized assault. Here's McCarthy sensing that his President doesn't value that priceless freedom culture as he and millions of others do.

The House Divided

A number of years ago, at some risk to myself and my family, I prosecuted savage jihadists who had made themselves enemies of the United States. I was lauded for doing so by the Clinton administration. Though I disagreed with that administration philosophically, and particularly with its conception of international terrorism as a crime problem, I praised the much-needed overhaul by which it put teeth in our counterterrorism laws. Our disagreement was over the best way to protect the country, not over the imperative that the country be protected. Our debate was the traditional Right-Left debate.

Moreover, as a New York lawyer who made no secret of having conservative views, I was a decided minority, even among my fellow prosecutors. But that only mattered in the occasional, friendly joust over a beer. Day to day, our politics had nothing to do with how we went about our jobs. At the office, I had friends across the ideological spectrum. Most of them were from the political left, but we liked and respected one another. The bond we shared, the sense that we were doing something good for the nation we all loved, was stronger than any ideological divisions.

Why does that matter now? Because, for the first time in our history, we have a president who would be much more comfortable sitting in a room with Bill Ayers than sitting in a room with me. We have a governing class that is too often comfortable with anti-American radicals, with rogue and dysfunctional governments that blame America for their problems, and with Muslim Brotherhood ideologues who abhor individual liberty, capitalism, freedom of conscience, and, in general, Western enlightenment. To this president and his government, I am the problem.

UN Audits Released

Claudia Rosett, who did the heaviest of the heavy lifting exposing the billion dollar Oil-for-Food scandal in the United Nations, says it's probably a coincidence....but I doubt it.

Just days after I queried the U.S. Mission to the UN about its commitment to UN transparency (Paging Ambassador Susan Rice), the Mission finally posted on its web site more than 130 previously secret UN internal audit reports. The UN, for all its endless promises about transparency and its ample enjoyment of other people’s money, does not release these reports to the public. It is only thanks to the U.S. that they are now seeing daylight at all — though it takes some trolling through the Mission’s web site to find them.

For anyone who cares about even minimal integrity in UN management and handling of taxpayer money, there’s a trove of bombshell material here. Together, the reports total hundreds of pages, but the typical report runs about 10-20 pages. They date from October, 2008 through August, 2009.

Again, Rosett is doing the legwork so we don't have to, though she encourages readers to browse the records for themselves. Based on her early assessment, it's hard to be encouraged that the relentless corruption at the U.N. will slow anytime soon. As Rosett says, audits are one thing, and action to bring about reform is something else again...and there is little appetite for the latter. The Obama people do deserve credit for this small step. Go for links and details.

Delusional Pap

For allowing themselves to be used by the White House to promote a piece of legislation, Mark Steyn says the least the family of Daniel Pearl deserved was a bit of honesty from President Obama. What they got instead was the same "delusional pap" we've come to expect from an administration trying to remove any reference to Islamic-inspired terrorism from the government lexicon.

Tom Blumer writing at Newsbusters, has the quotes and links, but here's the offending Obama line:

"And obviously the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is, and it reminded us that there are those who would go to any length in order to silence journalists around the world.

The Pearl family had been notified by the White House just four days before the bill's signing that they could be props at the ceremony for the legislation bearing Daniel's name. The bill is a "free press" matter, and while Pearl was clearly an advocate of that ideal, it seems to me cynical for the administration to make use of public sympathy for Pearl in the service of their latest legislative photo op, and then gloss over the real reasons why this particular journalist was "silenced".

The twisted version of events that served Obama's momentary purpose is that Pearl was beheaded on video for the entire world to see because he was a journalist....presumably silenced for seeking truth by forces opposed to its disclosure. The words of KSM, Pearl's confessed beheader, provide enough clarity for me to get the picture..."I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi." Truth-telling doesn't seem to have been a stumbling block for KSM here.

Interesting how the journalist thing doesn't come up. The murderers are at best just selective enemies of a free press...using the Internet to virally spread their murder video to a global audience, while denying free expression wherever they can.

As usual, Steyn is reacting more eloquently (and entertainingly) than the rest of us...

Now Obama's off the prompter, when his silver-tongued rhetoric invariably turns to sludge. But he's talking about a dead man here, a guy murdered in public for all the world to see. Furthermore, the deceased's family is standing all around him. And, even for a busy president, it's the work of moments to come up with a sentence that would be respectful, moving and true. Indeed, for Obama, it's the work of seconds, because he has a taxpayer-funded staff sitting around all day with nothing to do but provide him with that sentence.

Instead, he delivered the one above, which in its clumsiness and insipidness is most revealing. First of all, note the passivity: "The loss of Daniel Pearl." He wasn't "lost." He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video. He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp. And the circumstances of his "loss" merit some vigor in the prose. Yet Obama can muster none.

[...]

But what did the "loss" of Daniel Pearl mean? Well, says the president, it was "one of those moments that captured the world's imagination." Really? Evidently it never captured Obama's imagination because, if it had, he could never have uttered anything so fatuous. He seems literally unable to imagine Pearl's fate, and so, cruising on autopilot, he reaches for the all-purpose bromides of therapeutic sedation: "one of those moments" – you know, like Princess Di's wedding, Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, whatever – "that captured the world's imagination."

Read it all, naturally.

Via Jen Rubin, an interview with Judea Pearl at Haaretz.com

The Obama people cannot dodge forever the public spectacle of re-living 9/11 and its radical religious inspiration. Pearl's murderer, the 9/11 terrorist leader, awaits trial, and sooner or later they have to decide how and where to hold it. The vibe you get is that they don't want to dredge up all that nasty 9/11 carnage by trying its strategic mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. How is that going to impact the Obami outreach to the Muslim world? Or their radio silence on the connection of Islam to what they are now calling "violent extremism".

And if trying the terrorist mastermind for the crimes of 9/11 presents a troubling and badly-timed image problem for the administration, think how little they want to deal with Mullah Omar, the now-captured clerical ideologue who, along with Osama bin Laden, sent KSM on his murderous mission. So far, they refuse to acknowledge that he is even in custody, let alone say how they plan to bring him to justice.

I stumbled on an older piece by Judea Peal at danielpearl.org, and had to share. It doesn't seem dated half a decade out. From the top...

After Terror

In his speech of April 15, 2004, President George Bush linked the murder of my son, Daniel Pearl, to a global "ideology of murder." "The terrorist who takes hostages, or plants a roadside bomb near Baghdad" said Bush "is serving the same ideology of murder that kills innocent people on trains in Madrid, and murders children on buses in Jerusalem, and blows up a nightclub in Bali, and cuts the throat of a young reporter for being a Jew.

A week later, while engaging in a Jewish-Muslim dialogue in Williamsburg, Virginia, the first question reporters asked me was: "What is your reaction to the President's mention of your son?" My answer was:
"I agree with the President's observation that Daniel's tragedy is pivotal for understanding the current tide of madness." However, I consider Danny's legacy as a communicator and bridge builder to be equally pivotal in inspiring and revitalizing East/West dialogues, an effort to which I am devoting my energies.

The wave of violence now rocking the planet is of a fundamentally different character than anything this planet has known in the past few centuries. For the first time in recent history a friendly messenger is killed by calculated design, in front of millions of spectators, for the sheer purpose of transmitting a message to those it deems its enemies.

True, planet earth has known cruelty before, and on a much greater scale. Yet even the Nazis labored to hide their gruesome deeds, thus unveiling some inkling of shame, doubt or fear. Daniel's murderers, in shocking contrast, boasted openly in their cruelty, totally secured in faith and righteousness, triumphantly expecting spectators to rally in sympathy. More shocking yet, many of their spectators did rally in sympathy (according to reports from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) and, as the recent murders of Nicholas Berg and Fabrizio Quattrocchi indicate, message-transmission killing has become an increasingly acceptable practice in certain parts of the world.

Such brazen assault on the sanctity of human life marks a profound transgression in the evolution of human civilization, and we must ask ourselves what the origin of this transgression is, and whether it can be isolated, understood and controlled.

Pearl's moral clarity is refreshing, and his message of hope for eventual peaceful reconciliation makes this worth reading in full.

Healthcare Consequences

No, You Can't Keep Your Health Plan - Scott Gottlieb: WSJ.com

That was big lie number one. Number two was the projected cost savings benefits of Obamacare...remember? (older link). More from Ed at Hot Air

UPDATE: WSJ: Goodbye, Employer-Sponsored Insurance

Like Obama promises tend to do, those two have reached their expiration dates.

Related articles from the last three weeks or so, as the early effects of the legislation start to show....

Medicare and Medicaid’s Hidden Costs - The Agenda

Obamacare's Danger Signs - Critical Condition blog

Side Effects: Doctor Participation May Vary - Heritage

Side Effects: Physician-Owned Hospitals Face New Regulations, Limits on Growth - Heritage

Obamacare Mulligan - WSJ

In case you missed it last time:

REPEAL - Why and how Obamacare must be undone - Yuval Levin

UPDATE 5/24: Two good articles in last week's Weekly Standard: The first, Cash For Doctors, deals with the ways medical service providers are already devising ways to deal with, and in some ways circumvent, the new Obamacare realities. The second, Put the Patient in Charge, by Peter J. Hansen, is a more comprehensive plan for real reform, focused on leveling the playing field, by giving people who purchase their own healthcare plans the same tax treatment people under employer-sponsored plans receive.

Serial Contradictions

Victor Davis Hanson

This is the strangest presidency I have seen in my lifetime. President Obama gives soaring lectures on civility, but still continues his old campaign invective (“get in their face,” “bring a gun to a knife fight,” etc.) with new attacks on particular senators, Rush Limbaugh, and entire classes of people—surgeons, insurers, Wall Street, those at Fox News, tea-partiers, etc.

And like the campaign, he still talks of bipartisanship (remember, he was the most partisan politician in the Senate), but has rammed through health care without a single Republican vote. His entire agenda—federal take-overs of businesses, near two-trillion-dollar deficits, health care, amnesty, and cap and trade—does not earn a majority in the polls. Indeed, the same surveys reveal him to be the most polarizing president in memory.

His base was hyper-critical of deficit spending under Bush, the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan, and government involvement with Wall Street. But suddenly even the most vocal of the left have gone silent as Obama’s felonies have trumped Bush’s misdemeanors on every count.

All this reminds me of the LaLa land of academia. Let me explain.

Answering Questions No One's Asking

Of the treasure trove of documents from the Cold War era Soviet Union, smuggled out by dissidents at great personal risk, most still await translation into English. Shunned by publishers, they're still waiting for most anyone to care about them, let alone mine them for history.

There was no Nuremberg equivalent after the fall of the Soviet Union to assess and hold to account the regime that killed tens of millions of innocents, and to discredit communism as a social model once and for all. For many of the same reasons, I suspect, there's little appetite today in the media, the academy or among political elites in the U.S. or Europe, to dredge up the messy details about how collectivism works in practice. It hits too close to home.

Just a couple of excerpts from a fascinating City Journal piece by Claire Berlinski: A Hidden History of Evil, to get you to go read the whole thing.

In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

For evidence of this indifference, consider the unread Soviet archives. Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. He stole them in 2003 and fled Russia. Within living memory, they would have been worth millions to the CIA; they surely tell a story about Communism and its collapse that the world needs to know. Yet he can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation. In fact, he can’t get anyone to take much interest in them at all.

On Our Terms

I just revisited three longish essays that I had saved as a single post back in February because they shared the theme of "changing the narrative" in our political and public policy debates, and looked ahead toward governance by any coming center-right majority. Not sure why they never got posted back then, and I thought they held up pretty well 90 days out...so...better late than never. I'll spare you excerpts, since they can't do justice to the material...just a suggestion on the order in which to take it in.

Jeff Bergner hangs a definition on "The Narrative" and looks at the problems facing conservatives if they can't reshape the debate. What do you do when you're running things as the unapologetic "Party of No"? - Can Republicans Govern?.

Jennifer (J.E.) Dyer cites Bergner, and develops his challenge into her own ideas on a narrative for conservatives, along with a withering critique of the progressive mindset. America at the Crossroads; The Inner Life. (Read more J.E. Dyer at Contentions)

Chase all that with Doctor Zero - An Answer to Socialism. Plain talk on collectivism vs. individual liberty.

Collectivism, with it's blood-stained 20th century resumé in tow, has an address in American politics....and it is the Democratic Party, now with Obama as its proud vanguard. That this relentless statism is the polar opposite of individualism, that empowering American ideal, is one point the nascent center-right coalition should be stressing as a way to re-frame the debate.

Garden Variety?

At Commentary, a serious treatment of the question by Jonah Goldberg

What Kind of Socialist is Barack Obama?

Will Cain interviews Goldberg on this topic.

Why I'm Right

A few weeks ago, Matt Continetti had an item at TWS listing some of the books that had most shaped his thinking over the years, and he asked for input from readers on their influences. Aware that my conservatism owes itself to more than just repeated muggings by reality, I tried to walk it back in books. It's easy enough to trace it to a beginning point somewhere between Nixon's resignation, which I celebrated as a 21-year old, and Carter's weakness, which served as a wake-up call.

Limiting the influences to books per se is problematic in itself, since so much of what I've consumed in political thought over the last 20 years has been online, and in column or blog formats. Still, at the risk of appearing pretentious (I read them, so you should) or presumptuous (like someone cares), here are ten books that came to mind when I gave some thought to my own political influences...in no particular order...(all links to Amazon)

1984 - George Orwell

Witness - Whittaker Chambers

Radical Son - David Horowitz

The Gulag Archipelago - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Conservative Mind - Russell Kirk

The Vision of the Anointed - Thomas Sowell

Reagan: In His Own Hand - Skinner, et al (Editors)

The Black Book of Communism - Stephane Courtois, et al

The Road to Serfdom - Friedrich von Hayek

Liberal Fascism - Jonah Goldberg

---

A couple others by Horowitz might well make a hypothetical second ten...Destructive Generation, or the more recent compilation Left Illusions for example....as might another Sowell title or two...Basic Economics for sure. A few other "just missed" books like Tocqueville's Democracy in America or Common Sense by Thomas Paine got consideration, but if I start going there, it never ends.

Of the ten above, only two are of 21st century vintage, and since I can fairly be accused at times of bearing the imprint of the last person to sit on me, some more contemporary reading is worth citing too. So here are another 15 (published since about 1995) that informed or entertained or otherwise spoke to me, and that I can recommend as worthwhile reads...again, in no particular order..

The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright

Imagining the Future; Science and American Democracy - Yuval Levin

Willful Blindness - Andrew C. McCarthy

Bury the Chains - Adam Hochschild

Infidel - Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Red Hot Lies - Christopher Horner

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe; Immigration, Islam and the West - Christopher Caldwell

The Secret Life of Bill Clinton - Ambrose Evans Pritchard

The Rape of Nanking - Iris Chang

Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East :1776 to the Present - Michael Oren

The Age of Reagan - (Part II) - Steven F. Hayward

In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage - John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr

America Alone - Mark Steyn

Ex-Friends - Norman Podhoretz

The Skeptical Environmentalist - Bjorn Lomborg

Fighting Words for the Facebook Generation

NRO's Kathryn Jean Lopez interviews Mary Eberstadt, author of The Loser Letters ( see sample letter)

Here's another piece at First Things adapted from a talk Eberstadt gave about her book and its protagonist, and the New Atheism.

I somehow missed this when it was serialized at NRO in 2008. Haven't read the book yet, but it's in the mail.

Freedom To Be Stupid

Penn Gillette on the demise of the Hummer and the freedom to do stupid stuff...

Hummers are stupid and wasteful and if they go away because no one wants to buy one, that'll be just a little sad. It's always a little sad to lose some stupid. I love people doing stupid things that I'd never do—different stupid things than all the stupid things I do. It reminds me that although all over the world we humans have so much in common, so much love, and need, and desire, and compassion and loneliness, some of us still want to do things that the rest of us think are bug-nutty. Some of us want to drive a Hummer, some of us want to eat sheep's heart, liver and lungs simmered in an animal's stomach for three hours, some us want to play poker with professionals and some of us want a Broadway musical based on the music of ABBA. I love people doing things I can't understand. It's heartbreaking to me when people stop doing things that I can't see any reason for them to be doing in the first place. I like people watching curling while eating pork rinds.

But if any part of the Hummer going belly-up are those government rules we're putting in on miles per gallon, or us taking over of GM, then I'm not just sad, I'm also angry. Lack of freedom can be measured directly by lack of stupid. Freedom means freedom to be stupid. We never need freedom to do the smart thing. You don't need any freedom to go with majority opinion. There was no freedom required to drive a Prius before the recall. We don't need freedom to recycle, reuse and reduce. We don't need freedom to listen to classic rock, classic classical, classic anything or Terry Gross. We exercise our freedom to its fullest when we are at our stupidest.

A Cautionary Tale

Steven Malanga at City Journal

How public employees became members of the elite class in a declining California offers a cautionary tale to the rest of the country, where the same process is happening in slower motion. The story starts half a century ago, when California public workers won bargaining rights and quickly learned how to elect their own bosses—that is, sympathetic politicians who would grant them outsize pay and benefits in exchange for their support. Over time, the unions have turned the state’s politics completely in their favor. The result: unaffordable benefits for civil servants; fiscal chaos in Sacramento and in cities and towns across the state; and angry taxpayers finally confronting the unionized masters of California’s unsustainable government.

(The cartoon alone is worth the click over)

One of the challenges facing Republicans this fall and in 2012, is getting elected without minimizing the trouble we are in with our debt-spending-deficit crisis, and without sugar-coating the fact that the medicine we require will not taste good. I suspect most Americans realize that recovery from the mess both parties have gotten us into will not be pain-free, and most of them are willing to "tighten their belts". But only to the extent that they can credibly perceive government and the rest of the public sector to be doing the same thing. That's where the disconnect has been, and that's the basis for tea party activism, as far as I can see.

China's Girls

Peter Hitchens reports from China for the Daily Mail.

In the cruel old China, baby girls were often left to die in the gutters. In the cruel modern China, they are aborted by the tens of millions, using all the latest technology.

There is an ugly new word for this mass slaughter: gendercide.

Thanks to a state policy which has limited many families to one child since 1979, combined with an ancient and ruthless prejudice in favour of sons, the world's new superpower is beginning the century of its supremacy with an alarming surplus of males.

By the year 2020, there will be 30 million more men than women of marriageable age in this giant empire, so large and so different (its current population is 1,336,410,000) that it often feels more like a separate planet than just another country. Nothing like this has ever happened to any civilisation before.

[...]

All kinds of speculation is now seething about what might happen; a war to cull the surplus males, a rise in crime, a huge expansion in the prostitution that is already a major industry in every Chinese city, a rise in homosexuality.

Three things are for sure. It cannot now be prevented, and it is already beginning to be obvious in the schools. It is also stimulating a miserable trade in stolen children.

You'd hope that the scarcer women became, the more valued and revered they would be by a society. The picture Hitchens paints shows them instead disdained by their own families as "spilt water", stolen and trafficked in by criminal gangs, and exploited in the thriving prostitution trade or sold to elite families as mates for privileged males.

Meet your new superpower. A country with 30 million young men without prospective mates. This can't end well. Read it all of course.

UPDATE 4/12: Turns out The Economist had a cover story on the global "gendercide" last month, plus another related story.

Deep Thinker

Deepak Chopra: Sorry about that earthquake.

Buffoon, I believe, was the word Jonah Goldberg used earlier.

Maxine And Matthews

Do Maxine Waters and Chris Matthews simply lack intellectual honesty or self-awareness, or both?...or are they both just witless? I know, there has to be an "all of the above" option here.

Do the video...then read Taranto.

Here's Byron York exposing Matthews once again as cable's leading stooge.

The Definition of Chutzpah

James Taranto on the President's call for patience. Rich.

Our Debt Crisis

If you can, carve out some time to read Donald Marron's lead article from the current issue of National Affairs, entitled "America in the Red". It's informative without being overly wonkish, and communicates the seriousness of the fix we're in while holding out hope that we can recover...if, that is, we act decisively and soon on multiple fronts.

Another in the "we are so screwed" series, this one by Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post

UnderBriefed

Corporations are scrambling to deal with, and advise shareholders of adjustments to their long term health insurance liabilities for retirees owing to the passage of ObamaCare. The Obama people, stung by the bad press in the middle of their self-celebration, are calling CEO's to scold them and call them liars, all while coming off as if they have no real understanding of what they have wrought.

The American Spectator calls it Obama in Rude Denial

A White House legislative staffer is quoted as saying "These are Republican CEOs who are trying to embarrass the President and Democrats in general . "Where do you hear about this stuff? The Wall Street Journal editorial page and conservative websites. No one else picked up on this but you guys. It's B.S."

"Most of these people [in the Administration] have never had a real job in their lives. They don't understand a thing about business, and that includes the President," says a senior lobbyist for one of the companies that announced the charge. "My CEO sat with the President over lunch with two other CEOs, and each of them tried to explain to the President what this bill would do to our companies and the economy in general. First the President didn't understand what they were talking about. Then he basically told my boss he was lying. Frankly my boss was embarrassed for him; he clearly had not been briefed and didn't know what was in the bill."

[...]

On Friday White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett were calling the CEOs and Washington office heads of the companies that took the financial hits and attacked them for doing so. One Washington office head said that the White House calls were accusatory and "downright rude."

These are one-time write-downs, necessary because the bill takes away tax breaks that had incentivized companies to maintain their retirees on the companies' drug benefit plans rather than dumping them into Medicare. The short and long term result of the policy is predictable. More and more companies will say "see ya", and the public burden grows. Hate to use a tired blog cliché, but to the Obama people that's not a bug, it's a feature.

UPDATE 3/30: Lots of common sense and a persuasive case made here by Donald Marron, a former Bush aide, who says the bill did the right thing by closing this particular tax loophole, and sheds no tears for the corporations that won't be getting it any more. Of course that doesn't make the effect on these companies' benefits liabilities any less real.

Aftermath

Rounding up some links and some thoughts in the wake of Obamacare's passage.

Matt Continetti's op-ed is a good place to start- Obamacare's Consequence

The liberal line is that President Obama has secured his place in history by signing into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. And secured it he has. Henceforth Obama will be remembered as the man who accelerated America’s mad dash toward bankruptcy. He will be remembered as the leader who promoted a culture of dependency. He will be remembered as the figure who sacrificed a dream of national unity upon the altar of big government liberalism. It’s true: Obama is now a president of consequence. And almost all of those consequences are bad.

Polling in Florida reveals it to be bad medicine so far

The Obamacare Writedowns - "The corporate damage rolls in, and Democrats are shocked!"

It's been a banner week for Democrats: ObamaCare passed Congress in its final form on Thursday night, and the returns are already rolling in. Yesterday AT&T announced that it will be forced to make a $1 billion writedown due solely to the health bill, in what has become a wave of such corporate losses.

This wholesale destruction of wealth and capital came with more than ample warning. Turning over every couch cushion to make their new entitlement look affordable under Beltway accounting rules, Democrats decided to raise taxes on companies that do the public service of offering prescription drug benefits to their retirees instead of dumping them into Medicare. We and others warned this would lead to AT&T-like results, but like so many other ObamaCare objections Democrats waved them off as self-serving or "political."

Perhaps that explains why the Administration is now so touchy. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke took to the White House blog to write that while ObamaCare is great for business, "In the last few days, though, we have seen a couple of companies imply that reform will raise costs for them." In a Thursday interview on CNBC, Mr. Locke said "for them to come out, I think is premature and irresponsible."

As we've come to expect, no shortage of gall from the administration. All audacity, all the time. How dare those corporations spoil the celebration of our transformational achievement by bringing up these new taxes we're whipping on them? The irresponsible thing of course would have been to delay informing their shareholders of their financial condition as per the new legislation. But when bullying and character assassination are all you've got...that's what you use.

Several of Obama's health care promises are among the 33 broken ones compiled by Jim Geraghty. Clip and save.

Democratic lawmakers have occasionally been caught on video being honest about their means and their ends. But mostly what they've been trying to do is change the subject from the substance (and the consequences) of the fiscal train wreck they just foisted on the American people against their will...to the discussion of just what awful people the bill's opponents are. Racists, prone to violence, mostly...turns out.

As Ken Blackwell and Ken Klukowski write, the administration is now left with Demonizing Everyday Americans

This excerpt from Lori Byrd at Wizbang speaks to the new ugliness...the leftist smearing of regular folks...

Democrats have seen the pure, raw force of American freedom of expression. They have seen it rise up against them and they are scared spitless. They realize how unpopular they have become and they have to fight back to survive. It is hard to fight back against elderly people with walkers at town hall meetings, and mothers holding infants at tea party rallies, and peaceful, clean cut, tax paying American citizens. So they have to vilify them -- just like they have vilified Republicans all these years. It is just harder to do now that people have cell phone cameras and Twitter and blogs and YouTube and talk radio and Fox News, etc.

I predict this is gonna blow back on them big. Even with the help of those in the media, the reality of what is happening is getting to the people. The little people. And now instead of beating up* on rich Republican politicians, and fat cat CEOs, they are beating up* on the little people who don't give a crap about party or politics. They just want their voices to be heard. They care about their pocketbooks, their childrens' futures, their freedoms and the future of their country. They don't care what letter is behind your name. They want representatives in Washington who will listen to them. Vilifying those people, calling them names (such as teabaggers), questioning their motivations, accusing them of being racists and just generally beating up* on those people, just because they disagree with the Democrat/Obama agenda, is just downright ugly. So much so that not even the MSM will be able to spin it as anything but that. When I think about it in those terms, I begin to understand why the Democrats are doing what they are doing. It doesn't make it any less ugly, but at least it helps me to understand.

Erick Erickson on conservatives' alleged incitement to violence. More at Brutally Honest.

Andrew Breitbart sorts through the "evidence" of conservative racism, hatred and violence at their protests.

The PowerLine guys make regular sport of demolishing lame Paul Krugman columns (excuse the redundancy), and they do a number here on his fevered warning of Republicans' calls to shoot somebody...or something. Krugman throws out a challenge that took all of one minute with an Internet connection to meet...

Democrats had a lot of harsh things to say about former President George W. Bush -- but you'll search in vain for anything comparably menacing, anything that even hinted at an appeal to violence, from members of Congress, let alone senior party officials.

About halfway down this cornucopia of leftist hate from the Bush years, (you want menacing?...I've got your menacing!) we find John Kerry, who I believe qualifies as a senior party member, having been his party's candidate for President, being interviewed by the semi-literate Bill Maher....

Maher: You could have went to New Hampshire and killed two birds with one stone.

Kerry: Or, I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone.

Nothing remotely close...even in jest, as Kerry's crack surely was...has been uttered by any GOP politician. And there's nothing terribly "menacing" about that quip, is there?.....just as there's nothing terribly menacing about Sarah Palin's Facebook image putting crosshairs on a map of the U.S. (pop-up image) to show the political districts the GOP is "targeting" in the next election. But somehow one is a bon mot and the other a dangerous provocation...and unfortunately, not just to a nitwit like Krugman. He has readers who probably take him at his word that Palin put up "a map literally putting Democratic lawmakers in the cross hairs of a rifle sight." You'd think an established writer like Krugman would know what "literally" means. Alas...no.

I'm afraid that after seeing that map, some crazed right-winger will be provoked to go out and take a shot at Indiana.

UPDATE 3/31: Verum Serum did not search in vain.

For effect, let's compare violent imagery. Krugman has his hair on fire over Palin's menacing map. Then there are Democratic protests...not from the violent, riot-torn 60's...but from the second Bush term. Incitement? You tell me (pop-up image)

And even if John Kerry had been the only senior political leader caught on video fantasizing about killing the President, it surely wasn't because it was considered beyond the pale to address the subject in polite company. The popular culture of the time was positively fetishized on the idea of Bush's assassination. Why should the political class get their hands dirty with this trash when the video game manufacturers, authors of fiction, New York theater producers and documentary filmmakers were busy mainstreaming the idea of murdering their political nemesis. It always had something of a "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?" quality to it.

The fact is that nothing seen at any Tea Party comes close to the orgy of hate protest directed at Bush that we all witnessed for eight years, a small sample of which is documented at the zomblog post linked earlier. Back two years ago, when dissent was the highest form of patriotism, there was nothing provocative, let alone dangerously inciting, about a poster (displayed at a 2008 Los Angeles protest) depicting the President of the United States with a bullet hole in his forehead. (pop-up image). By the way...do you know that woman's name... the one in that protest photo? Do we know the first thing about her?

In order to illustrate the ridiculousness of the current hand-wringing by the left over largely exaggerated if not totally fabricated anecdotes of Tea Party violence, just consider what the reaction would have been to a poster similar to the one above...only this time at a Tea Party, with a woman carrying instead an image of Obama with the dripping red spot on his forehead. I guarantee you we would all know her name within two days, because she would have had a Time cover and a 60 Minutes exposé already. Hell, Joe the Plumber achieved instant and unwanted fame for daring to confront The One with a simple question.

Similarly, these bumper stickers aroused no concern on the Left at the time that someone might discern in them a call to violence. (You see any menacing? I don't see any menacing!)

It was just two or three years ago these things were the rage at all the chic Bush protests. Remember the outrage in the media and by the left about this hateful, violent imagery? Me neither. Were there prompt denunciations of these images by Democratic political leaders analogous to what we have seen in recent days by Republicans responding to even the hint of hatred by overheated and isolated conservative protesters? Nope. Again, just imagine the modern day GOP equivalent of the bumper sticker. Right. You simply cannot imagine it.

And returning once again to the zomblog post as partial documentation, violent imagery of the sort now imagined to exist on the right, has long been a staple of leftist protests of all sorts. (I didn't see any guillotines with the President's severed head in a basket at the Tea Parties, did you?...Come to think of it, it was a little leftist dust-up that popularized the real thing)

And if the Left had traditionally stopped at violent imagery alone, that might put their current ginned up outrage on somewhat firmer ground, but actual violence has often been more their style. The smashing of windows and other destruction of private (or public) property, the smearing of fake blood on people and property, the assault of counter-protesters...all have been part and parcel of leftist protests for years. That is, when they're not setting bombs. As Erickson wrote:

The Weather Underground was not a Republican insurgency at the Weather Channel.

---

A number of links to important and worthwhile reads on the way forward in the wake of Obamacare, and toward the goal of its eventual repeal....

Yuval Levin- Repeal: How and why Obamacare must be undone

Bill Kristol - Repeal and Defeat

Mark Steyn - Obamacare Dystopia

Victor Davis Hanson - We've Crossed the Rubicon

IBD - 20 Ways Obamacare Will Take Away Our Freedoms

WSJ - The Obamacare Crossroads

Peter Suderman at Reason - The Lie of Fiscal Responsibility

Jennifer Rubin at Contentions

---

"If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man." - C.S. Lewis

Self-Execution on Health Care

Byron York has an explanation of the "self-executing" House rules sleight of hand the Democrats are planning to use to pass the Senate health care bill, a transparently cynical way to try to avoid the accountability of voting on the measure as required by the Constitution. Such is the hole they have dug for themselves with their support of a health care bill opposed by a broad bipartisan majority of Americans, and the corrupt deal-making process they have used to get this far. UPDATE: Even the Washington Post thinks it's unseemly.

Their desperation to socialize American medicine is palpable. Their contempt for the will of the people of America is astonishing. The tactics they are using to bully people like Bart Stupak are despicable.

Stupack says that, in addition to other intimidation tactics, Democrats are threatening to file ethics complaints against him. This is the preferred harassment technique for modern day leftists. They used it on Newt Gingrich when he was the Speaker. They used it on Sarah Palin to run her legal bills into seven figures and prompt her to resign her office. It doesn't help the accused that the charges are baseless. They are expensive and troublesome to defend against, and there is no limit to the number of them that can be brought.

The Left continues to prove that absolutely nothing is beneath them in the pursuit of the destruction of their political opponents and the expansion of state power.

Here's the plan, for what Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) calls "their do or die moment"

Ryan says that, come Monday, Democrats “will bring a shell piece of reconciliation legislation” to the budget committee. “The reconciliation process has to begin there,” he says. “Here’s what they’ll do: They will take the House health-care bill and mark it up so that it can become a reconciliation vehicle. Republicans will make runs at this via motions to instruct, but since we’re outnumbered, their package will get through the committee. Then they’ll send that shell of a bill to the House Rules Committee. The rules committee will then gut the budget committee’s reconciliation bill and drop in all of the deals that Speaker Pelosi arranges with members who vote for the Senate health-care bill in the House.” Those deals, he adds, “will be hard to scrutinize, and we may never know their full extent, since many of them will be orchestrated outside of health-care legislation.”

Obstacles remain to passing this monstrosity....public opinion and citizen activism still mean something after all. But given enough time to corrupt a few more members of the House, they may still get their Rose Garden signing ceremony...if they have the nerve to convene one.

The President continues to distort and lie without compunction, shamelessly cooking the numbers to put a Potemkin front on the legislation. He flew to Cleveland today in order to prop up and exploit a pre-selected victim of the supposed cruelties of the existing health care system. The sob story quickly unraveled, but the photo-op had served its propaganda purpose.

In their unguarded moments, even the Democrats concede that the bill will increase premiums, raise taxes, kill jobs, and fail to control health care costs. Indeed the only remaining justifications for passage are that the President desperately needs a political victory, and that for Democrats, their 2010 electoral prospects can hardly get worse.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that an impotent President, especially one just one year into his term, is not a good thing for the country. Perhaps Obama should have considered that before outsourcing the health care and stimulus bills to the far-left wing of his party in Congress, with no more than a head fake toward bipartisanship.

In recent days, Obama has returned to bashing the greedy, heartless insurance companies in his campaign-style speeches. These would presumably be the same insurance companies he has crawled into bed with by mandating under the bill that all Americans buy their products under threat of fines and/or imprisonment. He never seems to run out of ways to insult the intelligence of the American people.

There's still time to call or email your Congressman....or someone else's.

Related:

Good article by Shikha Dalmia at Forbes...although I don't like the "wrong time" formulation...implying as it does that there might be a good time for a government takeover like this one.

Paul Ryan v. the President - WSJ

James Capretta - It's Not a $950 Billion Plan

Paul Ryan at the health care summit

Much, much more here and here.

UPDATE 3/16: Hypocrisy...thy name is Pelosi. When the "self-executing" rule was used by Republicans in 2005 to pass a routine budget measure...the use for which it was designed...Pelosi, Waxman and Slaughter backed the ACLU in going to court to contest its constitutionality. Andy McCarthy explains the rules, and the precedents

Newspaper editorial boards, including the reliably left-wing Akron Beacon-Journal and Seattle Times, turn on Obamacare

Why Newsweek Fails

This is worth a laugh or two.....Newsweek in 1995 - Why the Internet Will Fail

This excerpt gives you the flavor...

We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Yeah...that's one thing I really miss while I'm doing my shopping online.....salespeople.

Fat (Grey) Lady Singing

First the New York Times calls for Rangel's removal as Ways and Means Committee Chairman. Now Peter Beinart weighs in with "the photo that could doom the Democrats".

The plodding ethics investigation in the House hasn't even progressed yet to the tax evasion and campaign donation charges against the man who formulates tax policy for all U.S. citizens, and the Times is leading the charge to stop the bleeding. From the center-left, Beinart says Rangel's infractions are "petty, compared to the vast, legalized corruption" of the campaign finance system. But that's kind of beside the point.

What most citizens will be looking at as they become more aware of the ethics charges against Rangel is how his treatment compares to the way they would be treated by the law (or by their employers) in a similar circumstance...(i.e. failure to pay taxes on income from rental property). It would be an understatement to say that Americans' patience with tax cheats in the government is wearing thin.

The Democrats have been able to rid themselves of the downward pull of two of their Big Three corruption-compromised congressmen, with Dodd retiring and Murtha dead. Ironically, that makes Rangel all the more conspicuous. Beinart thinks the Democrats should act, ("since Pelosi won't nudge Rangel, it's time for Obama to nudge Pelosi") before the political damage gets any worse.

I suppose we can wait another week before getting back to the "Holder Must Go" campaign.

Dirty Jobs

John Hinderaker slices and dices Frank Rich. UPDATE 3/1: Ron Radosh pan fries him to a golden brown.

The Professor

The Telegraph speaks with admirable clarity about Obama and his health care reform.. RTWT, natch.

The televised event, dreamt up by the White House to create the desired "atmospherics" for an attempt to push his health-care bill through Congress by Easter, underlined the reality that Obama is not a leader or even really a politician – he is a professor.

Professor Obama is convinced of his own intellectual superiority. When his pupils fail to realise that he knows what is good for them, he simply repeats himself in the expectation that the simpletons will eventually understand.

As the astute psephologist Michael Barone has pointed out, Obama can be understood in large part by reflecting on where he spent his adult life before arriving at the White House – Los Angeles, New York, Cambridge and Chicago.

For almost three decades, he lived in liberal campus communities where he was insulated from the real world by comfortable consensus and shared assumptions.

[...]

Obama is becoming something of a victim of his own oratorical success.

The more he talks, the less people listen. We have heard so much from him that his words carry less and less weight. It is the law of diminishing returns.

And for all the reasonableness of what he had to say and the familiar high-minded calls to rise above politics, everyone knew that Obama had already decided to embark on the ironically-named process of "reconciliation" to force the health-care bill through.

[...]

...if he does prevail on Congress to do his bidding, he'll essentially have resorted to using a legislative loophole to force through something that most Americans oppose – and this from the man who vowed to banish cynicism from the conduct of politics.

He can't seem to grasp that voters don't want an expansion of government to cover health care. It's not a failure to understand the professor but a disagreement with the fundamentals of the lesson he's dictating.

Split-Screen

Mark Steyn says Greece is quite a bit farther down the road than the United States...but it's the same road.

We hard-hearted small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government: Once a chap’s enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and to hell with everyone else. People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense.

Rep. Ryan

If you weren't watching C-SPAN all day Thursday, at least don't miss Paul Ryan's performance. Krauthammer announced; "a star is born"

New Look For TCF

The Cleveland Fan just went live with a new site design yesterday. See what you think.

My latest Buckeye Leaves column gets into the meltdown at Michigan among other off-the-field football topics.

CNN Poll: 25% Support Obamacare

The new CNN Poll shows just 25% support for Obamacare.

It's time for all Democrats and Obama supporters to go on record for or against passing major systemic health legislation which has the support of just 25% of the American people, using procedural techniques not intended for the purpose.

Here's Michael Gerson in the Washington post, summing it up...

After a year of debate, Democratic leaders -- given every communications advantage and decisive control of every elected branch of government -- have not only lost legislative momentum, they have lost a national argument. Americans have taken every opportunity -- the town hall revolt, increasingly lopsided polling, a series of upset elections culminating in Massachusetts -- to shout their second thoughts. At this point, for Democratic leaders to insist on their current approach is to insist that Americans are not only misinformed but also dimwitted.

And the proposed form of this insistence -- enacting health reform through the quick, dirty shove of the reconciliation process -- would add coercion to arrogance.

Today in Health Care

So much for the administration's "pivot" to jobs, jobs, jobs...

Daniel Foster starts out his NRO piece with a brief summary of the new, re-hashed Obama health care proposal...

The White House this morning unveiled its health-care "compromise," a bill that at $950 billion is larger than its Senate predecessor and proposes broad new regulatory powers for the government to control health-care premiums.

The Obama plan increases subsidies for the purchase of individual insurance and expands funding for prescription medication in Medicare Part D. It replaces state-specific Medicaid deals such as the "Cornhusker Kickback" with increased Medicaid funding for all fifty states.

To fund these increases, the bill increases the Medicare payroll tax, applies it to unearned income such as capital gains, and expands cuts to Medicare Advantage. It also increases corporate taxes on the pharmaceutical industry by $10 billion and and raises penalties on businesses that don't offer insurance coverage.

As for the "Cadillac Tax," it expands exemption from unionized to all workers through 2018, and raises the threshold on taxable plans from $23,000 to $27,500.

The most significant addition to the plan is new regulations that would give the Secretary of Health and Human Services the power to review and potentially block insurance premium increases.

The CBO says they can't score the new proposal, since they haven't been provided sufficient detail by the White House

More from Grace-Marie Turner at NRO's Critical Condition blog.

The much-awaited health-care reform plan the White House released this morning is little more than an amalgamation of the taxing, spending, mandating, and regulating policies of the bills that passed the House and Senate last year.

Instead of offering a genuinely fresh approach, Mr. Obama split the difference between two bad bills that are hugely unpopular with the American people. He would continue to mandate that both individuals and employers pay for health insurance or face fines and penalties. He would expand Medicaid, the most dysfunctional health program in the country. And he would increase fees on insurers and other health companies — fees that will be passed along to consumers in the form of higher premiums.

The big new idea in the president’s plan is to federalize regulation of health insurance, creating a Health Insurance Rate Authority to conduct “reviews of unreasonable rate increases and other unfair practices of insurance plans.” This reflects the overall strategy to give more and more control over the health sector to Washington.

I stole the post title from this Matthew Continetti entry at the Weekly Standard blog

Obama's new, improved plan is more expensive than the Senate bill, does not address the concerns of pro-life House Democrats over the Senate's abortion language, maintains the tax exemption for the Democrats' union friends, and will effectively turn insurance companies into heavily regulated public utilities. Despite all this, it's highly possible these changes could win at least 50 votes in the Senate -- and with Joe Biden's tie-breaking vote, the bill could become law through the parliamentary measure known as reconciliation.

Seems there are 18 Senate Democrats on the record opposing an attempt to ram this bill through Congress using the reconciliation procedure.

For a better understanding of just what reconciliation is, and what Democrats face in trying to get Obamacare passed this way, check out this piece by Jeff Davis at a TNR blog, and also James Capretta, at NRO. UPDATE 2/23: New York Times Symposium on using reconciliation, featuring Ramesh Ponnuru, Megan McArdle, Norman Ornstein and others.

See also:

Michael Steele at Breitbart's Big Government

Heritage Foundation: A First Look...

House Minority Leader John Boehner Press Release

Contentions: The Latest Same Obamacare Bill

What we do know is that under ObamaCare’s latest incarnation, you really don’t get to keep your existing health-care plan. And we know that it seeks to federalize the regulation of the health-insurance industry. [...] And it seems that there are $136B worth of new taxes to be imposed on the people Obama said he’d never tax, namely those families making less than $250,000.

What we don’t know is why anyone who opposed the last version(s) of ObamaCare would accept this one. It is still a mammoth tax-and-spend bill and still seeks to federalize health care. If Nancy Pelosi has 218 votes for this, I’d be surprised. If Senate Democrats want to walk the plank for a retread of the bill that voters in Massachusetts sent Scott Brown to the Senate to oppose, I’d be surprised. But I suppose we’ll find out.

Five conservatives share their ideas for health care reform in Sunday's NYT.

UPDATE 2/23: Jeffrey H. Anderson - A Man With a Plan

Heritage: Can They Make Obamacare Worse? Yes They Can!

David Brooks - Into the Mire

Hot Air

WSJ Editors - Obamacare at Ramming Speed

Spring Training

Tribe opens at Goodyear, Arizona this week. Must be nice to have a completely new facility where the players want to be. Anthony Castrovince reports that everybody's there already.

Nearly every member of the 59-player spring roster (Branyan would make 60) is already here, even though position players aren't due to report until Wednesday and the first full-squad workout won't take place until Friday. "I'm excited," Acta said. "For me to show up a week before pitchers and catchers report and to see [Travis] Hafner, [Grady] Sizemore, [Shin-Soo] Choo and [Asdrubal] Cabrera on the field one week before they're supposed to be on the field excites me."

75-78 wins is about the limit of my optimism for the 2010 Indians. The pitching is just too young to expect anything better. But they have assembled a ton of very good young power pitchers, and Acta will put a pretty good hitting team on the field every day. A few of the young arms...Chris Perez, Justin Masterson and Carlos Carrasco will be around this season. Others names like Nick Hagadone, Hector Rondon, Jason Knapp and Alex White are coming.

It'll be fun to watch Brantley, LaPorta, Cabrera and Choo get a year better. You know what you're going to get from Jhonny Peralta, and hopefully by July you'll have Carlos Santana, one of the brightest young prospects in baseball, playing catcher. Sizemore and Hafner would both have to rebound physically and have big years for this team to overcome its shaky starting pitching and contend. The AL Central is mediocre, but probably not mediocre enough for that to happen.

In his Lazy Sunday column, Paul Cousineau takes a look at the shuffling at the top of the Indians' management team and how it affects the plans for 2011 and 2012. Having confidence about the future is a big part of being an Indians fan. A better day is always coming.

Paul links to Tribe Daily, where you'll find this nice Indians Spring Training preview.

Dad Says

I'm not quite the last person on the planet to hear about and follow the Twitter feed ShitMyDadSays, but I'm in the second million. The author is a 20-something who lives with his father, and just tweets things Dad says. It's hilarious...(your mileage may vary) and now it has landed him a contract for a TV show, which will star William Shatner as the dad.

I'm not terribly optimistic, though. Not only will they have to clean up the title for TV, but from the looks of it, everything else dad says too.

DOJ Witchhunt Put Down

The Holder Justice Department's shoddy, grandstanding attempt to criminalize policy disagreements with the previous administration is finally over...

Jen Rubin:

The Justice Department has finally closed a sorry chapter in its history — the attempt to criminalize the work of Department lawyers who rendered legal judgment on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques in the wake of the worst terrorist attack in American history. The Office of Professional Responsibility, as the Washington Post report notes, had doggedly pursued John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who as Justice Department lawyers authored memos providing advice and direction on enhanced interrrogation methods including waterboarding. In a Friday information dump (which tells you it does not aid the cause of the administration and those seeking Yoo’s and Bybee’s punishment), we got a glimpse at two drafts of OPR’s report, its final report, and then the recommendation of David Margolis, a career lawyer and Associate Deputy Attorney General.

Margolis’s report is 69 pages long. Margolis essentially shreds the work of OPR, finding no basis for a referral of professional misconduct for either lawyer. It is noteworthy that all throughout, Margolis adopts many of the criticisms of OPR’s work that outgoing Attorney General Michael Mukasey and his deputy Mark Filip rendered before leaving office at the end of the Bush administration.

At times the work of OPR itself seems to have violated the professional standards it was charged with enforcing. Sloppiness abounds. Margolis finds, for example, that OPR applied the wrong legal standard, the “preponderance of evidence” rather than the more stringent clear and convincing evidence” standard that state bar proceedings would utilize. (p. 11) Margolis also concludes that OPR’s findings ”do not identify violation of a specific bar rule.” ( p. 12) Margolis further notes that OPR’s analysis and legal standard shifted from draft to draft. (pp.13, 15-16)

[...]

The bottom line: Margolis finds the work of Yoo and Bybee “contained some significant flaws,” but that “the number and significance of them can now be debated.” (p. 68) What is clear is that there is no basis — and never was — for stripping these lawyers of their professional licenses, let alone criminally prosecuting them as many on the Left demanded. What is equally clear is that the work of OPR was shoddy, itself suspect, and ultimately rejected on many of the same grounds that Mukasey, Filip, Yoo, and Bybee raised — after years of inquiry and after certainly imposing much emotional and financial burden on Yoo and Bybee.

The Green Death

The estimable Doctor Zero revisits the DDT ban and the horrendous cost in human life that can result when politics corrupts science and good intentions trump real world consequences.

The Green Death

Who is the worst killer in the long, ugly history of war and extermination? Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? Not even close. A single book called Silent Spring killed far more people than all those fiends put together.

Published in 1962, Silent Spring used manipulated data and wildly exaggerated claims (sound familiar?) to push for a worldwide ban on the pesticide known as DDT – which is, to this day, the most effective weapon against malarial mosquitoes. The Environmental Protection Agency held extensive hearings after the uproar produced by this book… and these hearings concluded that DDT should not be banned. A few months after the hearings ended, EPA administrator William Ruckleshaus over-ruled his own agency and banned DDT anyway, in what he later admitted was a “political” decision. Threats to withhold American foreign aid swiftly spread the ban across the world.

The resulting explosion of mosquito-borne malaria in Africa has claimed over sixty million lives. This was not a gradual process – a surge of infection and death happened almost immediately. The use of DDT reduces the spread of mosquito-borne malaria by fifty to eighty percent, so its discontinuation quickly produced an explosion of crippling and fatal illness. The same environmental movement which has been falsifying data, suppressing dissent, and reading tea leaves to support the global-warming fraud has studiously ignored this blood-drenched “hockey stick” for decades.

Read it all, of course, and see related links...

August, 2003 - Wizblog: Bureaucracy Kills

July, 2003 - Front Page Magazine - Rachel Carson's Ecological Genocide

April, 2004 - NYT Magazine: What the World Needs Now is DDT

July 2002 - The DDT Ban Turns 30

Progress Marches

John Podhoretz at Contentions calls it "beyond all possibility of parody"...

Atlanta Progressive News fires reporter for trying to be objective

The editor, explaining why the reporter was canned...“because he held on to the notion that there was an objective reality that could be reported objectively, despite the fact that that was not our editorial policy at Atlanta Progressive News.”

Proudly making editorial policy indistinguishable from news policy...not exactly a novel practice, but something not usually admitted so forthrightly.

When you're right, you're right...so spin it all. It's the virtuous thing to do. The self-regard is breathtaking.

Kouwe Resigns

Proof that you can't continue working at the New York Times after being caught committing plagiarism...that is, unless your name is Maureen Dowd.

Fast Friends

On the lighter side....the hound and the orangutan...

(via Rodger at C&S)

At Least We're Not Simulating Drowning

When intelligence operatives present the White House with options to either capture or kill (via Predator drones) key terrorist targets, the administration has increasingly just opted to avoid troublesome prosecution decisions, and instead kill them where they sit.

Of course our military did a fair amount of this under Bush's leadership, and it's a viable way to remove dangerous terrorists with minimal risk to precious soldiers' lives. I've got no real problem with it as a war-fighting strategy. The down side is that terrorists can't provide any intelligence when you're scooping them up in pieces for the DNA confirmation.

My problem is with a commander-in-chief who orders these executions while at the same time preening about having ended "torture", and lamenting how under his predecessor, we "lost our way", because we occasionally captured combatants and poured water on their faces instead of simply incinerating them in their cars or living rooms along with whatever innocents happened to be around. It's not his conduct of the campaign...it's the self-righteous posturing that's unseemly...especially while he's continuing many of the Bush-era anti-terror policies he railed against as a candidate.

Miscellany 2/17

Around the web this week...

High unemployment is going to be with us for a while... In The Atlantic, How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America

This Esquire feature on Roger Ebert is guaranteed to have you counting your blessings. Talk about making lemonade.

Recently released aerial photos of the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11 are stunning, particularly this one (pop-up image) of one of the towers caught in mid-collapse. The photos, taken from an NYPD helicopter, are being released slowly by ABC after the network acquired them via a FOIA request. Why that was necessary after eight years is beyond me. The pilot comments here.

It's the first anniversary of the stimulus package, and there are lots of links at this roundup by Matthew Continetti. House Minority Leader John Boehner's office released their own report on the stimulus (pdf), complete with many examples of the bogus government accounting of the numbers of jobs "created or saved", along with stories of fraud and waste in the spending of the borrowed bucks. (Pssst...next time call it a "jobs bill"). UPDATE : More from Jen Rubin.

In the NYT Sunday Book Review, a short essay on Why Orwell Endures

Read this account of city government ineptitude, apathy, corruption and paralysis...but only till your head explodes...San Francisco...The Worst Run Big City in the U.S.

"School reform is neither a liberal or conservative issue"...Larry Sand writing in City Journal...We're All Right-Wing Bastards Now

Never Mind

World may not be warming, say scientists - Times Online

Phil Jones admits "no statistically significant" warming in last 15 years.

The Climategate scandals and the further discrediting of the IPCC have served to make it acceptable for scientists inside the establishment alarmist community to express the kinds of doubts and dissents that used to be suppressed or punished. It's incredible how much the mask has come off in about three months.

For longtime skeptics who have endured years of slander, ridicule and condescension from these folks, heartfelt apologies soon to follow, I'm sure.

UPDATE 2/17: WSJ - The Continuing Climate Meltdown

UPDATE 2/18: Climategate roundup at Ace

Strange Bedfellows

It may not be what Obama intended when he talked about fostering "unity", but he has succeeded in making Kristol and Krugman agree...no mean feat. (Guess which one comes off sounding like an excitable teenage girl...OMG)

"President Barack Obama said he doesn't 'begrudge' the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay. [...] 'I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,' Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday.

I guess the fact that the president knows those guys is what differentiates them from the evil, rapacious "fat cats" he has been ripping for a year as the exemplars of corporate greed and callousness to the concerns of Main Street. Small wonder this little bit of walk-back political theater has annoyed people on both the left and the right.

He Didn't Really Say That

Biden: Iraq "Could Be One of the Great Achievements of This Administration"

Trouble in Paradise

The freshly-unified Europe is barely out of the gate under the EU's Treaty of Lisbon, and they are already paralyzed by internal conflict over such weighty matters as which of their various leaders should be the recipient of the newly traditional bow from the President of the United States. In turn, The One declines to grace them with a visit until they get their ceremonial shit together.

Paul Belien at Brussels Journal:

At this point Europe is not even halfway its 100-day political “honeymoon” since the Treaty of Lisbon, which transformed the EU into a state in its own right, came into force. So far the honeymoon has been a nightmare. Since the beginning of the year, the EU’s currency, the euro, is on the brink of collapse; Greece has been placed under EU financial supervision to prevent it from going bankrupt. Now U.S. President Barack Obama has announced that he will not attend next May’s EU summit in Madrid. It was to have been Obama’s first visit to post-Lisbon Europe – the consecration of the new political order.

Washington informed Brussels last week that Obama is not coming because it is not clear who is his European counterpart. Since the Lisbon Treaty came into force on January 1st, Europe has its own President, Herman Van Rompuy. This former Belgian politician chairs the European Council, the assembly of the heads of government of the 27 EU member states. However, there is also José Manuel Barroso, a former Portuguese politician, who is the president of the European Commission, which is the EU’s executive body. And there is José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Spanish Prime Minister, who is hosting the Madrid meeting and as such co-chairs the summit meeting of the EU heads of government with Mr. Van Rompuy.

Messrs. Van Rompuy, Barroso and Zapatero all want to be the first to shake Mr. Obama’s hand and receive the deep bow which the American President is in the habit of making to foreign leaders. Because of the embarrassing intra-European squabble about who should have the honor, Obama has declined the invitation until the Europeans have figured out which of them is the most important.

Obama’s decision has come as an unexpected blow to the European leadership. It has upset them so much that they are considering postponing the summit to the autumn. Meanwhile, they have begun quarreling about who is to blame for the present debacle. The Europeans generally agree that the vainglorious Zapatero is mostly to blame, but others are damaged more. “The Spanish have made a mess of the summit but Van Rompuy and the post-Lisbon EU institutions will carry the can in the long term. The squabbling has damaged the EU in the eyes of the most powerful nation in the world,” a senior EU official said.

Haven't they heard? We're not interested in being the most powerful nation in the world anymore.

Miscellany - Super Sunday

Avoiding pre-game shows at all costs...here's some stuff I tagged in the last couple days...

George F. Will throws some weight behind Rep. Paul Ryan's proposals; - How to get the country to solvency on entitlements

A very long but entirely readable Weekly Standard cover story by Charlotte Allen: The New Dating Game. Who knew there was a phenomenon called seduction blogs? What was the maitre d's line in Ferris Buehler? ...."I weep for the future"

Margaret Wente in The Globe and Mail - The Great Global Warming Collapse

Examining liberal condescension in the Washington Post ?...Gerard Alexander

Christopher Sabatini in the Americas Quarterly - The 7 Things President Hugo Chavez Has Taught Me

New Bucks

Thoughts and links on the OSU football recruiting class over at The Cleveland Fan.

Not Getting Massachusetts

Haven't gone three weeks without posting in this blog's seven years of existence. No excuses...outside of the Twitter addiction. Prompting this interruption of my sloth were stellar columns this week by two of the ranking wordsmiths of the center-right, Charles Krauthammer and Mark Steyn. Excerpting the first few paragraphs of each, but get it all.

Krauthammer - The Electorate vs. Obama's Agenda

WASHINGTON -- "I am not an ideologue," protested President Obama at a gathering with Republican House members last week. Perhaps, but he does have a tenacious commitment to a set of political convictions.

Compare his 2010 State of the Union to his first address to Congress a year earlier. The consistency is remarkable. In 2009, after passing a $787 billion (now $862 billion) stimulus package, the largest spending bill in galactic history, he unveiled a manifesto for fundamentally restructuring the commanding heights of American society -- health care, education and energy.

A year later, after stunning Democratic setbacks in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address (a) pledging not to walk away from health care reform, (b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement, and (c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus, of course, another stimulus package, this time renamed a "jobs bill."

This being a democracy, don't the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don't they understand Massachusetts?

Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly. (the rest)

Mark Steyn - Unsustainable

At the National Prayer Breakfast, Barack Obama singled out for praise Navy Corpsman Christian Bouchard. Or as the president called him, “Corpseman Bouchard.” Twice.

Hey, not a big deal. Throughout his life, the commander-in-chief has had little contact with the military, and less interest. And, when you give as many speeches as this guy does, there’s no time to rehearse or read through: You just gotta fire up the prompter and wing it. But it’s revealing that nobody around him in the so-called smartest administration of all time thought to spell it out phonetically for him when the speech got typed up and loaded into the machine. Which suggests that either his minders don’t know that he doesn’t know that kinda stuff, or they don’t know it either. To put it in Rumsfeldian terms, they don’t know what they don’t know.

Which is embarrassingly true. Hence, the awful flop speeches, from the Copenhagen Olympics to the Berlin Wall anniversary video to the Martha Coakley rally. The palpable whiff given off by the White House inner circle is that they’re the last people on the planet still besotted by Barack Obama, and that they’re having such a cool time starring in their own reality-show remake of The West Wing they can only conceive of the public — and, indeed, the world — as crowd-scene extras in The Barack Obama Show: They expect you to cheer and wave flags when the floor-manager tells you to, but the notion that in return he should be able to persuade you of the merits of his policies seems entirely to have eluded them.(the rest)

Coakley's Record

Is Martha Coakley committed to justice?

Radley Balko asks that question in a Politico piece on the public track record of the Democratic candidate for the open Senate seat in Massachusetts. I hadn't heard before of her involvement as a district attorney in the infamous Amirault child abuse case in the 80's.

If you aren't familiar with the Amirault case, or would like a refresher, look no further. In a 2004 post I assembled links to the whole series of Wall Street Journal articles on the case by Dorothy Rabinowitz for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. If you're new to the story, prepare to be chilled to the bone.

Asked recently by the Boston Globe about Coakley's participation in the Amirault case, Rabinowitz replied:

“Martha Coakley was a very, very good soldier who showed she would do anything to preserve this horrendous assault on justice.”

Great....just what Americans are looking for in the next generation of U.S. Senators....good soldiers....who do what the higher-ups in the political hierarchy tell them to do.

Ace has lots more on Coakley's role in the Amirault aftermath, including this excerpt from a Coulter column....

Google-China

Google says they are reconsidering their relationship with China, based on cyber-attacks they have experienced, as well as regime attempts to target Chinese human rights and democracy activists.

But not everybody is convinced of Google's sincerity. I'm not as cynical as this guy. I don't think Google just realized that they call it totalitarianism for a reason. But I am inclined to believe they have learned some lessons in three years about the nature of the regime. They need not have any base, profit-driven motive for drawing a line in the sand for the Chinese government. It's not as though China is a huge revenue source for the company.

UPDATE 1/13: WaPo - Google China cyberattack part of vast espionage campaign

More at Hot Air

UPDATE 1/14: via Slashdot, a report that VeriSign researchers have determined that the cyberattacks were in fact carried out by "agents of the Chinese state or proxies thereof."

UPDATE 1/15: Another FP article says censorship may be an excuse for China to monopolize their Internet industry

An Arrest in Qom

An Arrest in Qom by John Hannah at FP.

On Jan. 12, several agents from the Islamic Republic's intelligence ministry raided the home of Mohammed Taqi Khalaji. They took Khalaji into custody and confiscated his computer, satellite receiver, and hundreds of notes, books and personal letters. The agents also seized the passports of Khalaji and members of his family, banning them all from leaving the country. Khalaji's family does not currently know where he is being detained and Iranian authorities are refusing to provide any information.

Khalaji is a prominent cleric in Qom, the center of Iranian Shiism. Since June 12, he has been a courageious critic of the Iranian regime's crackdown on peaceful protests and a supporter of the so-called Green Movement. Khalaji was known to be close to Iran's most prominent dissident cleric, the late Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, and is an ally of Ayatollah Sanei -- another well-known reformist cleric who has come under whithering attack from the regime following the massive Ashura demonstrations of Dec. 28. Clearly, Khalaji's arrrest is of a piece with the Islamic Republic's escalating -- though so far miserably unsuccessful -- efforts to crush all signs of peaceful opposition. Khalaji now joins hundreds, if not thousands, of other brave Iranians dragged from their homes and illegally detained for exercising their most fundamental rights of citizenship.

Read the rest. (via Martin Kramer)

"Game Change" Excerpt

If you haven't seen the excerpt from John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's "Game Change" , in New York Times Magazine yet....do it. It's the John and Elizabeth Edward-Rielle Hunter-2008 campaign story in all its train wreck detail. Incredible really, how his advisors were forced to contemplate outing him to save their party from potential disaster.

See if You Can Get a Job This Way

Pepper and Salt in the WSJ

Reid's Dance

The attention Harry Reid is getting for his 2008 comments about candidate Obama seems to defy the old adage that all publicity is good publicity. Even as he is forgiven by Obama, rallied around by his congressional soulmates, and excused by the usual suspects from the racial grievance industry, Reid's public image continues to sink like a stone.

Racial insensitivity aside, people have got to be asking the same question about Reid that I ask myself every time I see Robert Gibbs....can't we, as a nation, do better?

Don't do anything rash, Democrats. We like Harry Reid right where he is....at least for ten more months. Besides, he's hoping to get the benefit of the doubt that he has been unwilling to grant so many others in his long history of racial posturing. He doesn't cut a sympathetic figure for either side. Is there any question now that many Democrats wish Reid would do a "Dodd", and go away so they'd have a chance to save his Senate seat in November for the party?

I don't think I'm departing much from conservative talking points when I say I didn't think what Reid said was particularly insensitive. He made a candid observation about the candidate's electability, which lots of people did and still do agree with. I found the quote from Game Change attributed to Bill Clinton to be far more insulting and objectionable than what Reid said, and I'm a little surprised more people haven't reacted to that.

In the same way, I suppose, that black rappers are cool to use the n-word in their songs and videos without causing offense, I guess the first black President is permitted to say things like "a few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee", and get only a ripple of criticism.