Follow the link to read the old Soviet joke that provides the title: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGI5NGI2MDgwZTg3NTIwMDJkODU3M2YwYjNmOGY2Yjc= > This compulsion to attack his predecessor is as stale as it is > unseemly. Obama was elected a year ago. He became commander in chief > two months later. He then solemnly announced his own “comprehensive > new strategy” for Afghanistan seven months ago. And it was not an > off-the-cuff decision. “My administration has heard from our > military commanders, as well as our diplomats,” the president > assured us. “We’ve consulted with the Afghan and Pakistani > governments, with our partners and our NATO allies, and with other > donors and international organizations” and “with members of > Congress.”
>
> Obama is obviously unhappy with the path he himself chose in March. > Fine. He has every right — indeed, duty — to reconsider. But what > Obama is reacting to is the failure of his own strategy.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Power Line - Scozzafava sinking, Hoffman rising, Newt erring
In the special election for NY's 23rd congressional district, we have a liberal Democrat against a RINO (Scozzafava, nominated by local GOP insiders) and a Conservative running as a third-party candidate. Sarah Palin and many other big names have endorsed Hoffman. Newt Gingrich early on went with the nominal Republican. This post gives the latest polling numbers.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/10/024826.phpNewt Gingrich is a historic figure who is rightly proud of many accomplishments, but in this case he has made a mistake. His pride is preventing him either from seeing it or from acknowledging it. Message to Newt: Give it up!
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Executive Privilege: How former NC Gov. Easley abused his office
http://blogs.newsobserver.com/content/executive-privilege
The News & Observer has disclosed new information this year about the actions of Gov. Mike Easley, a Democrat and former state attorney general who served as governor from Jan. 2001 until Jan. 2009. The coverage has spurred state and federal investigations that are continuing, and led to the resignations or firing of several high officials, including the chancellor at N.C. State University.
More links to coverage here:
John Hood summarizes what's being investigated:
Among other things, he and top administration officials are accused of leaning on North Carolina State University to hire the First Lady for a very expensive make-work job. The Easley also appear to have received a sweetheart deal on a prime lot in a coastal development spearheaded by political allies who boasted of their special ability to expedite state permitting for the project. The Easleys have been driving private cars they didn’t pay for. They’ve flown dozens of times on state aircraft for personal business, as well as on private aircraft in ways that appear to be in violation of state campaign-finance laws and gift restrictions. The most interesting revelation from this week’s hearings before the state elections board is that the governor reportedly had one of his pilot friends finance repairs to a personal home, then had the friend submit a fake invoice for campaign flights to be reimbursed by the Easley campaign, as a way of reimbursing himself for the home repairs. Then Easley had the audacity to file an insurance claim on the repairs and keep all the money.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
The Politics of (In)Justice
It’s an outrageous objection by the Civil Rights Division to a voting change in the small town of Kinston, N.C. The case involved a referendum by the residents of Kinston to change the elections for city council from partisan to nonpartisan. The referendum passed overwhelmingly in November 2008. But the Justice Department recently refused to pre-clear it, claiming that it discriminates against minorities. [...]The attorneys in the Voting Section also increasingly use the Voting Rights Act as primarily a political bludgeon to protect and enhance the electoral successes of the Democratic party. Thus, in the Kinston objection letter, the Department stated that “it is the partisan makeup of the general electorate” that allows the winner of the Democratic primary to win in the general election. But of course, the VRA is supposed to protect voters, not majority parties. The fact that blacks are a controlling majority in the city is essentially deemed irrelevant.Disturbingly, the Civil Rights Division attorneys’ action rests on the presumption that blacks simply cannot be trusted to make their own decisions as to which individual candidates to support, and will be presumed to vote against their own self-interest unless candidates on the ballot have the “right” party label. This approach to enforcement stands the Voting Rights Act on its head and is anathema to all of our constitutional requirements for fair elections.
3,000 NHS staff get private care
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article6879553.ece
THE National Health Service has spent £1.5m paying for hundreds of its staff to have private health treatment so they can leapfrog their own waiting lists.
More than 3,000 staff, including doctors and nurses, have gone private at the taxpayers’ expense in the past three years because the queues at the clinics and hospitals where they work are too long.
In other news, government officials tend to avoid public housing and prefer to send their kids to private schools. Also, they like to take government jets when traveling rather than flying commercial. You can't afford to wait in line when you're doing the people's business, such as running a national health service. Someone has to look out for the little people.
Vatican offers a path for Anglican unification
In this Apostolic Constitution the Holy Father has introduced a canonical structure that provides for such corporate reunion by establishing Personal Ordinariates, which will allow former Anglicans to enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony. Under the terms of the Apostolic Constitution, pastoral oversight and guidance will be provided for groups of former Anglicans through a Personal Ordinariate, whose Ordinary will usually be appointed from among former Anglican clergy.
National Catholic Reporter:
In a move with potentially sweeping implications for relations between the Catholic church and some 80 million Anglicans worldwide, the Vatican has announced the creation of new ecclesiastical structures to absorb disaffected Anglicans wishing to become Catholics. The structures will allow those Anglicans to hold onto their distinctive spiritual practices, including the ordination of married former Anglican clergy as Catholic priests.
More Mao from an Obama Czar
I'm not so surprised that the Obama people find Mao enlightening, but I am astonished that they think it's clever to quote him in public.
Ron Bloom is the Manufacturing Czar. In the video he admits, “We kind of agree with Mao that power comes largely from the barrel of a gun.”
Monday, October 19, 2009
White House Urges Other Networks to Disregard Fox News
The White House stopped providing guests to "Fox News Sunday" after host Chris Wallace fact-checked controversial assertions made by Tammy Duckworth, assistant secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, in August.
Dunn said fact-checking an administration official was "something I've never seen a Sunday show do."
"She criticized 'Fox News Sunday' last week for fact-checking -- fact-checking -- an administration official," Wallace said Sunday. "They didn't say that our fact-checking was wrong. They just said that we had dared to fact-check."
"Let's fact-check Anita Dunn, because last Sunday she said that Fox ignores Republican scandals, and she specifically mentioned the scandal involving Nevada senator John Ensign," Wallace added. "A number of Fox News shows have run stories about Senator Ensign. Anita Dunn's facts were just plain wrong."
Fox News senior vice president Michael Clemente said: "Surprisingly, the White House continues to declare war on a news organization instead of focusing on the critical issues that Americans are concerned about like jobs, health care and two wars. The door remains open and we welcome a discussion about the facts behind the issues."
One has to wonder: What would Mao Zedong do?
Seriously, does the White House really want to go public with their war on Fox News? Is there anything better for ratings than the Government telling people that they shouldn't watch something? You can't buy publicity like this. Fox News -- the news that the White House doesn't want you to know!
Instapundit: Good news about Natural Gas
The most important thing about Natural Gas is that we have a lot of it, and it's not too expensive to get it.
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/86866/Instapundit points to an article about recent Natural Gas discoveries. A reader points out that:
Even if alternative energy were to meet a meaningful amount of our electricity needs, natural gas-fired power generation will be needed in large volumes because they are the only plants that can cycle up and down rapidly to keep maintain the integrity of the grid as the wind stops blowing or clouds pass over solar panels. Coal and nuclear are base load–meaning the size of the plants necessary for the economies of scale needed are not conducive to easily turning them on and off.
The point is, natural gas is the bridge fuel whether we acknowledge it or not.
Kimball - The Maoist explains herself: egg, face at the White House
Video (from Glenn Beck):
Extended transcript:
Anita Dunn speaking:
And then the third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers: Mao Tse Tung and Mother Teresa, not often coupled together, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is, you're going to make choices. You're going to challenge. You're going to say "why not." You're going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before.
But here's the deal — these are your choices. They are no one else's. In 1947, when Mao Tse Tung was being challenged within his own party on his plan to basically take China over, Chiang Kai Shek and the nationalist Chinese held the cities that had the army. They had the airport. They had everything on their side, and people said, "How can you win? How can you do this? How can you do this, against all the odds against you?" And Mao Tse Tung said, "You know, you fight your war, and I'll fight mine."
Roger Kimball comments:
http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball/2009/10/17/the-maoist-explains-herself-egg-face-at-the-white-house/2/This is the point: last November, the American people thought they were electing a “post-partisan,” “post-racial” President who would work to restore unity and self-confidence to the country. They woke up on November 5, however, to find that they had elected someone who was deeply ambivalent about America, who distrusted its founding principles of limited government, individual liberty, and local responsibility. Like his radical friends — Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Van Jones, Anita Dunn — Barack Obama wishes to transform the United States according to a model whose basic shape was supplied by the utopian schemes of the 1960s. That’s why Anita Dunn said that Mao was one of the thinkers she most often turned to for wisdom about big-think political problems. It’s not that she admires his penchant for industrial strength homicide: rather, she admires his success at fomenting an egalitarian revolution. It’s not what we bargained for when we elected Barack Obama. But that’s what we’ve got.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Krauthammer: Debacle in Moscow
Didn’t Obama say in July that Iran had to show compliance by the G-20 summit in late September? And when that deadline passed, did he not then warn Iran that it would face “sanctions that have bite” and that it would have to take “a new course or face consequences”? Gone with the wind. It’s the U.S. that’s now retreating from its already flimsy position of just three weeks ago. We’re not doing sanctions now, you see. We’re back to engagement. Just as the Russians suggest.Henry Kissinger once said that the main job of Anatoly Dobrynin, the perennial Soviet ambassador to Washington, was to tell the Kremlin leadership that whenever they received a proposal from the United States that appeared disadvantageous to the United States, not to assume it was a trick.No need for a Dobrynin today. The Russian leadership, hardly believing its luck, needs no interpreter to understand that when the Obama team clownishly rushes in bearing gifts and “reset” buttons, there is nothing ulterior, diabolical, clever, or even serious behind it. It is amateurishness, wrapped in naïveté, inside credulity. In short, the very stuff of Nobels.
What has become of America?
A little late, but I like the line from Daniels:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=34000Before President Obama even landed at Andrews Air Force Base, returning from his mission to Copenhagen to win the 2016 Olympic Games, Chicago had been voted off the island. Many shared the lamentation of Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, "What has become of America, when Chicago can't steal an election?"
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Diana West - Blackballing Conservatism
Limbaugh's critics were so desperate to make a racism charge stick, to tag Limbaugh as untouchably "controversial," that they resorted to demonstrable lies -- statements Limbaugh never made -- and purposely indemonstrable innuendo. Not that this mattered. As in all dictatorships, the charge itself suffices. It didn't even matter that the dictatorship's emissaries, the eternal charlatans Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who actively lobbied the NFL to oppose Limbaugh, are themselves serially discredited race hustlers. Again, the charge is all it takes to demonize and ostracize the opposition. And Rush Limbaugh -- as the leading voice against the radicalism of the Obama administration, one of the most forceful opponents of the totalitarian social engineering we know as "affirmative action," as one of the great communicators of basic conservative principles -- definitely counts as the opposition.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Noonan: A Wicked and Ignorant Award
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703746604574464083239280914.html
In one mindless stroke, the committee has rendered the Nobel Peace Prize a laughingstock, perhaps for as long as a generation. And that is an act of true destruction, because it was actually good that the world had a prestigious award for peacemaking.
The members of the committee have also put the young American president in a terrible place. They make it look like all the talk of "The One," the heartthrob of the European elite, the darling of the international left, is true. They make him look prefabricated and inauthentic, an empty structure held up by essentially silly people. Which puts him at a disadvantage in his own country, because Americans don't really like it when flaky European politicians tell them how they ought to see him or the world.
Gore can't take the heat on Global Warming errors
http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/article_dacf39c7-c2f8-5718-a5a0-d0cfb39f80bc.html
Gore has been criticized for not publicly debating his position since the release of his 2006 Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."In what organizers said was a rarity, Gore took half a dozen questions from journalists, including one from Phelim McAleer, an Irish filmmaker who asked Gore to address nine errors in his film identified by a British court in 2007.Gore responded that the court ruling supported the showing of his film in British schools. When McAleer tried to debate further, his microphone was cut off by the moderators.
Video:
Friday, October 09, 2009
Krauthammer: Decline Is a Choice
Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice. Two decades into the unipolar world that came about with the fall of the Soviet Union, America is in the position of deciding whether to abdicate or retain its dominance. Decline--or continued ascendancy--is in our hands.
One path leads to Nobel Peace Prizes, and the other leads to a stronger America and a safer world.
Change the name of the Nobel Peace Prize
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODIzNzJmOGQ0NGI4OTNlZjliOGVjMGY1OTBmMjY0OTA=
The transnational progressives who pass out these accolades believe America is the problem in the world, the main threat to peace, the impediment to "progress," etc. The award is a symbolic statement of opposition to American exceptionalism, American might, American capitalism, American self-determinism, and American pursuit of America's interests in the world. That is why Obama could win it based on only 10 days in office — merely by capturing the White House and the levers of power, he stands to do more for the Left's "knock America off its pedestal" program than any figure in history.
After a number of years, the NFL renamed its Super Bowl trophy after its most fitting recipient — it's now called the Vince Lombardi Trophy. I'd like to see the Nobel Foundation follow suit. If today's headlines said, "Barack Obama Wins Yasser Arafat Prize," that would be perfect.
Absurd decision on Obama makes a mockery of the Nobel peace prize
I thought it was an elaborate hoax when I saw the headline, but now it looks like they're serious.
OSLO (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for giving the world "hope for a better future" and striving for nuclear disarmament, in a surprise award that drew both warm praise and sharp criticism.
The decision to bestow one of the world's top accolades on a president less than nine months into his first term, who has yet to score a major foreign policy success, was greeted with gasps of astonishment from journalists at the announcement in Oslo.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised Obama for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."
The Times (in London) comments:
The award of this year’s Nobel peace prize to President Obama will be met with widespread incredulity, consternation in many capitals and probably deep embarrassment by the President himself.Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. It was clearly seen by the Norwegian Nobel committee as a way of expressing European gratitude for an end to the Bush Administration, approval for the election of America’s first black president and hope that Washington will honour its promise to re-engage with the world.Instead, the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace.
And then this happens:
Two U.S. spacecraft crashed on the moon Friday. On purpose. NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite dropped its Centaur upper-stage rocket on the lunar surface at 7:31 a.m. ET.
This prompted the Norwegian Nobel Committee to withdraw the Peace Prize for the "illegal and unwarranted attack on the Moon".
(Just kidding about the last part, which unfortunately isn't as funny as the first part.)
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