Abu Wabu

Courtesy of Ace.

The so-called health care summit was another epic fail for Obama. Watch for his inner thug to take over now.

Oh and this is beautiful. If you want to know what Obama's Three Stooges are thinking during his shitkicking by Lamar Alexander, they're off checkin' the rafters while their Messiah is forced to look Alexander in the eye as the Republican veteran slices him like a hammer.

Funny how that middle finger always shows up on Obama's cheek when the going gets tough.

Pause it at 1:36 and you'll see this:



Here's the long form:


Oh yeah.

Thank you Senator Inhofe:

During the review of the Environmental Protection Agency budget in today’s Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing, both Senator Barbara Boxer — the chair of the committee — and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson distanced themselves from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).

Boxer and Jackson’s statements, in addition to being a striking change in policy, are problematic because U.S. climate science is very closely tied to the IPCC reports (as Christopher Horner showed in his recent PJM series on the NASA FOIA emails.)

The statements by Boxer and Jackson followed Senator Inhofe’s release (see the PJM exclusive report) in his opening statement of a minority staff report documenting many flaws in the IPCC report and the other evidence revealed in the Climategate files. (See the full hearing on CSPAN here; the exchanges with Senator Boxer and Inhofe, and Administrator Jackson begin at about 56 minutes into the video.)

Both Boxer and Jackson appeared to be trying to distance the EPA from the IPCC report.

Directions? No problem.

Just hang a right past the popcorn stand and go straight to the pudding aisle.

Senator James Inhofe has been under fire going on seven years for his fight to expose the global warming fraud. Now that it's all doing a Hindenberg Inhofe is calling for a comprehensive investigation into the various culprits, and that includes the IPCC and Algore. The implications are delicious, and if it doesn't happen before November it certainly will afterwards.

Algore's chickens. Are coming home. To roost.

I like this area very much.

Whatever.

That is to say, I like to think Big Dick is thinking just that about this latest episode.

Seriously, my prayers go out to Vice President Cheney and his family.

Via Jim Hoft

Via NRO:

Thank you to Jay and to Scott for those generous introductions. Both these men have made real contributions to our nation. It’s good to be back at CPAC. I can’t think of an audience I’d rather be addressing today.

I spent the weekend in Vancouver. As always, the Olympic Games were inspiring. But in case you didn’t hear the late-breaking news, the gold medal in the downhill was taken away from American Lindsey Vonn. It was determined that President Obama is going downhill faster than she is.

I’m not telling you something you don’t know when I say that our conservative movement took a real hit in the 2008 elections. The victors were not exactly gracious in their big win: Media legs were tingling. Time Magazine’s cover pictured the Republican elephant and declared it an endangered species. The new president himself promised change of biblical proportion. And given his filibuster-proof Senate and lopsided House, he had everything he needed to deliver it.

They won, we lost. But you know, you learn a lot about people when you see how they react to losing. We didn’t serve up excuses or blame our fellow citizens. Instead, we listened to the American people, we sharpened our thinking and our arguments, we spoke with greater persuasiveness, we took our message to more journals and airwaves, and in the American tradition, some even brought attention to our cause with rallies and Tea parties.

I know that most of you have watched intently as the conservative comeback began in Virginia and exploded onto the scene in New Jersey. But as a Massachusetts man, who, like my fellow Bay-staters, has over the years, been understandably regarded somewhat suspiciously in gatherings like this, let me take just a moment to exalt in a Scott Brown victory!

For that victory that stopped Obama–care and turned back the Reid-Pelosi liberal tide, we have something to that you’d never think you’d hear at CPAC, “Thank you Massachusetts!”

2009 was the President’s turn to suffer losses, and not just at the ballot box, but also in bill after bill in Congress, and most importantly, in his failure to reignite the economy. In how he has responded to these defeats, too, we have learned a great about him and about his team.

He began by claiming that he had not failed at all. Remember the B+ grade he gave himself for his first year? Tell that to the 4 million Americans who lost their jobs last year, and to the millions more who stopped looking. Explain that to the world’s financial markets who gaped at trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see. Square that with the absence of any meaningful sanctions against Iran even as it funds terror and races to become a nuclear nation. President Obama’s self-proclaimed B+ will go down in history as the biggest exaggeration since Al Gore’s invention of the internet!

Unable to convince us that his failure was a success, he turned to the second dodge of losing teams: try to pin the blame on someone else. Did you see his State of the Union address? First, he took on the one group in the room that was restrained from responding—the Supreme Court. The President found it inexplicable that the first amendment right of free speech should be guaranteed not just to labor union corporations and media corporations, but equally to all corporations, big and small. When it was all over, I think most Americans felt as I did: his noisy critique and bombast did not register as clear and convincingly as Justice Alito’s silent lips forming these words: “Not true!”

Next he blamed the Republicans in the room, condescending to lecture them on the workings of the budget process, a process many of them had in fact mastered while he was still at Harvard Law School. He blamed Republicans for the gridlock that has blocked his favorite legislation; but he knows as well as we do that he did not need one single solitary Republican vote in either house to pass his legislation. It was Democrats who blocked him, Democrats who said “no” to his liberal agenda after they had been home to their districts and heard from the American people. As Everett Dirksen used to say, “When they felt the heat, they saw the light.” God bless every American who said no!

Of course, the President accuses us of being the party of “no.” It’s as if he thinks that saying “no” is by definition a bad thing. In fact, it is right and praiseworthy to say no to bad things. It is right to say no to cap and trade, no to card check, no to government healthcare, and no to higher taxes. My party should never be a rubber stamp for rubber check spending.

But before we move away from this “no” epithet the Democrats are fond of applying to us, let’s ask the Obama folks why they say “no” —no to a balanced budget, no to reforming entitlements, no to malpractice reform, no to missile defense In Eastern Europe, no to prosecuting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a military tribunal, and no to tax cuts that create new jobs. You see, we conservatives don’t have a corner on saying no; we’re just the ones who say it when that’s the right thing to do!

And that leads us to who he has most recently charged with culpability for his failures: the American people. It seems that we have failed to understand his wise plans for us. If he just slows down, he reasons, and makes a concerted effort to explain Obama-care in a way even we can understand, if we just listen better, then we will get it.

Actually, Americans have been listening quite attentively. And they have been watching. When he barred CSPAN from covering the healthcare deliberations, they saw President Obama break his promise of transparency. When the Democrat leadership was empowered to bribe Nebraska’s Senator Nelson, they saw President Obama break his promise of a new kind of politics in Washington. And when he cut a special and certainly unconstitutional healthcare deal with the unions, they saw him not just break his promise, they saw the most blatant and reprehensible manifestation of political payoff in modern memory. No, Mr. President, the American people didn’t hear and see too little, they saw too much!

Here again, with all due respect, President Obama fails to understand America. He said: “With all the lobbying and horse-trading, the process left most Americans wondering, ‘What’s in it for me?’” That’s not at all what they were asking. They were asking: “What’s in it for America?”

America will not endure government run healthcare, a new and expansive entitlement, an inexplicable and surely vanishing cut in Medicare and an even greater burden of taxes. Americans said no because Obama-care is bad care for America!

When it comes to shifting responsibility for failure, however, no one is a more frequent object of President Obama’s reproach than President Bush. It’s wearing so thin that even the late night shows make fun of it. I am convinced that history will judge President Bush far more kindly—he pulled us from a deepening recession following the attack of 9-11, he overcame teachers unions to test school children and evaluate schools, he took down the Taliban, waged a war against the jihadists and was not afraid to call it what it is—a war, and he kept us safe. I respect his silence even in the face of the assaults on his record that come from this administration. But at the same time, I also respect the loyalty and indefatigable defense of truth that comes from our “I don’t give a damn” Vice President Dick Cheney!

I’m afraid that after all the finger pointing is finished, it has become clear who is responsible for President Obama’s lost year, the 10% unemployment year—President Obama and his fellow Democrats. So when it comes to pinning blame, pin the tail on the donkeys.

There’s a good deal of conjecture about the cause of President Obama’s failures. As he frequently reminds us, he assumed the presidency at a difficult time. That’s the reason we argued during the campaign that these were not the times for on the job training. Had he or his advisors spent even a few years in the real economy, they would have learned that the number one cause of failure in the private sector is lack of focus, and that the first rule of turning around any troubled enterprise is focus, focus, focus. And so, when he assumed the presidency, his energy should have been focused on fixing the economy and creating jobs, and to succeeding in our fight against radical violent jihad in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, he applied his time and political capital to his ill-conceived healthcare takeover and to building his personal popularity in foreign countries. He failed to focus, and so he failed.

But there was an even bigger problem than lack of focus. Ronald Reagan used to say this about liberals: “It’s not that they’re ignorant, it’s that what they know is wrong.” Too often, when it came to what President Obama knew, he was wrong.

He correctly acknowledged that the government doesn’t create jobs, that only the private sector can do that. He said that the government can create the conditions, the environment, which leads the private sector to add employment. But consider not what he said, but what he did last year, and ask whether it helped or hurt the environment for investment, growth, and new jobs.

Announcing 2011 tax increases for individuals and businesses and for capital gains, hurt.

Passing cap and trade, hurt.

Giving trial lawyers a free pass, hurt.

Proposing card check to eliminate secret ballots in union elections, hurt.

Holding on to GM stock and insisting on calling the shots there, hurt.

Making a grab for healthcare, almost 1/5th of our economy, hurt.

Budgeting government deficits in the trillions, hurt.

And scapegoating and demonizing businesspeople, hurt.

President Obama instituted the most anti-growth, anti-investment, anti-jobs measures we’ve seen in our lifetimes. He called his agenda ambitious. I call it reckless. He scared employers, so jobs were scarce. His nearly trillion dollar stimulus created not one net new job in the private sector, but it saved and grew jobs in the government sector— the one place we should have shed jobs. And even today, because he has been unwilling or unable to define the road ahead, uncertainty and lack of predictability permeate the private economy, and prolongs its stall. America is not better off than it was 1.8 trillion dollars ago.

Will the economy and unemployment recover? Of course. Thanks to a vibrant and innovative citizenry, they always do. But this president will not deserve the credit he will undoubtedly claim. He has prolonged the recession, expanded the pain of unemployment, and added to the burden of debt we will leave future generations. President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and their team have failed the American people, and that is why their majority will be out the door. Isn’t it fitting that so many of those who have contempt for the private sector will soon find themselves back in it?

The people of America are looking to conservatives for leadership, and we must not fail them.

Conservatism has had from its inception a vigorously positive, intellectually rigorous agenda. That agenda should have three pillars: strengthen the economy, strengthen our security, and strengthen our families.

We will strengthen the economy by simplifying and lowering taxes, by replacing outmoded regulation with modern, dynamic regulation, by opening markets to American goods, by strengthening our currency and our capital markets, and by investing in research and basic science. Instead of leading the world in how much we borrow, we will make sure that we lead the world in how much we build and create and invest.

We will strengthen our security by building missile defense, restoring our military might, and standing-by and strengthening our intelligence officers. And conservatives believe in providing constitutional rights to our citizens, not to enemy combatants like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed!

On our watch, the conversation with a would-be suicide bomber will not begin with the words, “You have the right to remain silent!”

Our conservative agenda strengthens our families in part by putting our schools on track to be the best in the world. Because great schools start with great teachers, we will insist on hiring teachers from the top third of college graduates, and we will give better teachers better pay. School accountability, school choice and cyber schools will be priorities. We will put parents and teachers back in charge of education, not the fat cat CEO’s of the teachers unions!

Strong families will have excellent healthcare. Getting healthcare coverage for the uninsured should be accomplished at the state level, not a one-size-fits all Pelosi plan. The right way to rein-in healthcare cost is not by making it more like the Post Office, it’s by making it more like a consumer-driven market. The answer for healthcare is market incentives not healthcare by a Godzilla-size government bureaucracy!

When it comes to our role in the world, our conservative agenda hews to the principles that have defined our nation’s foreign policy for over six decades: we will promote and defend the American ideals of political freedom, free enterprise, and human rights. We will stand with our allies, and confront those who threaten peace and destroy liberty.

There’s much more on our positive, intellectually rigorous conservative agenda. Not all of it is popular. But the American people have shown that they are ready for truth to trump hope. The truth is that government is not the solution to all our problems.

This year, I have taken the time to write a book that tells the truth about the challenges our nation faces, and about the conservative solutions needed to overcome them. I have titled it: No Apology: The Case for American Greatness. I’ve set up a booth outside so that you can buy a few hundred copies each. Well, maybe one or two.

Sometimes I wonder whether Washington’s liberal politicians understand the greatness of America. Let me explain why I say that.

At Christmas-time, I was in Wal-Mart to buy some toys for my grandkids. As I waited in the check-out line, I took a good look around the store. I thought to myself of the impact Sam Walton had on his company. Sam Walton was all about good value on everything the customer might want. And so is Wal-Mart: rock bottom prices and tens of thousands of items.

The impact that founders like Sam Walton have on their enterprises is actually quite remarkable. In many ways, Microsoft is a reflection of Bill Gates, just as Apple is of Steve Jobs. Disneyland is a permanent tribute to Walt Disney himself—imaginative and whimsical. Virgin Airlines is as irreverent and edgy as its founder. As you look around you, you see that people shape enterprises, sometimes for many years even after they are gone.

People shape businesses.

People shape countries.

America reflects the values of the people who first landed here, those who founded the nation, those who won our freedom, and those who made America the leader of the world.

America was discovered and settled by pioneers. Later, the founders launched an entirely new concept of nation, one where the people would be sovereign, not the king, not the state. And this would apply not just to government, but also to the American economy: the individual would pursue his or her happiness in freedom, independent from government dictate. Every American was free to be an inventor, an innovator, a founder. America became the land of opportunity and a nation of pioneers.

We attracted people of pioneering spirit from around the world. They came here for freedom and opportunity, knowing that the cost was incredibly high: leaving behind family and the familiar, learning a new language, often living at first in poverty, sometimes facing prejudice, working long and hard hours.

All of these pioneers built a nation of incomparable prosperity and unrivaled security.

After its founding, our national economy grew thanks to more pioneers—people like Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, William Procter and Robert Wood Johnson, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard and Thomas Watson. These are names we know—but the less well known are just as vital American innovators, and they number in the millions.

That American pioneering spirit is what propelled us to master the industrial age just as today we marshal the information age.

This course for America, chosen by the founders, has been settled for over 200 years. Ours is the creed of the pioneers, the innovators, the strivers who expect no guarantee of success, but ask only to live and work in freedom. This creed is under assault in Washington today. Liberals are convinced that government knows better than the people how to run our businesses, how to choose winning technologies, how to manage healthcare, how to grow an economy, and how to order our very lives. They want to gain through government takeover what they could never achieve in the competitive economy—power and control over the people of America. If these liberal neo-monarchists succeed, they will kill the very spirit that has built the nation—the innovating, inventing, creating, independent current that runs from coast to coast.

This is the liberal agenda for government. It does not encourage pioneers, inventors and investors—it suffocates them.

In a world where others have lost their liberty by trading it away for the false promises of the state, we choose to hold to our founding principles. We will stop these power-seekers where they stand. We will keep America, America, by retaining its character as the land of opportunity. We welcome the entrepreneur, the inventor, the innovator. We will insist on greatness from every one of our citizens, and rather than apologizing for who we are or for what we have accomplished, we will celebrate our nation’s strength and goodness. American patriots have defeated tyrants, liberated the oppressed, and rescued the afflicted. America’s model of innovation, capitalism and free enterprise has lifted literally billons of the world’s people out of poverty. America has been a force for good like no other in this world, and for that we make no apology.

Brian Reidl writing at NRO mounts a concise challenge to President Isolated Extremist's insane economic policies.

The idea that government spending creates jobs makes sense only if you never ask where the government got the money. It didn’t fall from the sky. The only way Congress can inject spending into the economy is by first taxing or borrowing it out of the economy. No new demand is created; it’s a zero-sum transfer of existing demand.

And therefore the confiscation and transfer of wealth, straight-up and to the extent that it will indenture future generations to the government treasury. Just as Alinsky envisioned it.

Good.

A senior official tells ABC News that "several days" ago U.S. and Pakistani intelligence captured the Taliban's Number 2, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, and he is providing intelligence.

"This operation was an enormous success," the official told ABC News. "It is a very big deal."

Baradar is second to only Mullah Mohammed Omar in the Afghan Taliban, and is the commander of the organization on a daily basis. The story of his capture was first reported by Mark Mazzetti and Dexter Filkins of the New York Times.

A U.S. counterterrorism official, while refusing to confirm the news of Baradar's capture, told ABC News that "if he were taken off the battlefield, it would deal a major setback to the Afghan Taliban and be a personal blow to Mullah Omar, who has relied heavily on him for years."

Baradar is essentially the man in charge of the Taliban. Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, the former Taliban regime's foreign minister, told Newsweek last summer that "Mullah Omar has put Baradar in charge. It is Mullah Omar's idea and his policy to stay quiet in a safe place, because he has a high price on his head, while Baradar leads."

Note to President Isolated Extremist: don't read the asshole his Miranda rights, m'kay?

What a transparent idiot. What a blowhard. Sheriff Joe Biden was on Larry King last night claiming credit for George W. Bush's victorious strategy in Iraq, the very same strategy that Slow Joe and Barack Hussein Obama vociferously denounced when Bush first implemented the Surge.

I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration.

Nice try, Joe. The only idiot who looks more pathetic making that claim is the woefully inexperienced and increasingly lost president, but let's remain focussed on Biden for a moment. Here are just a few of the destructive comments he made about the war in Iraq, about President Bush, and about General Petraeus:

Associated Press, December 26th, 2006:

"Biden Vows to Fight Any Iraq Troop Boost", in which reporter Anne Flaherty wrote, "Sen. Joseph Biden, the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he will fight President Bush if the administration decides to send more U.S. troops to Iraq. Biden, who has his eye on the Democratic presidential nomination, also warned that if congressional Republicans do not join him in speaking out against Bush that they -- not Democrats -- will suffer in the 2008 elections. 'I just think it's the absolute wrong strategy,' Biden said Tuesday of an increase in troops."

After a meeting with the President, Biden bragged that he had told Bush,

"Mr. President, this is your war."

Which remains true to this day, Joe, notwithstanding your recent hallucinations.

At a Democrat party barbeque on April 27th, 2007, a guest asked Biden, "When the president kills that bill on the first, what's going to be the next version of that bill that you are going to send him?" To which Sheriff Joe, whom nobody messes with, loudly replied,

The first thing I'm going to do is veto that bill and I'm going to take out that money for those MRAPs, those -- those vehicles to save lives over there. The idea we're not -- I gotta kid going over there -- the idea that we're not building new Humvees with the V-shaped thing is just crap, man! Kids are dying that don't have to die. The second thing we're going to do is shove it down [Bush's] throat.

But he wasn't finished, not by a long shot, no sir.

Tim Russert to Sheriff Joe on Meet the Press, September 9th, 2007: "General Petraeus said in a letter to his troops, 'My sense is that we have achieved tactical momentum, have wrested the initiative from our enemies in a number of years in Iraq. We are, in short, a long way from the goal line but we do have the ball and we're driving down the field.' Is that what you expect him to say tomorrow?" Biden's reply:

He's dead, flat wrong. The fact of the matter is that there is -- that this -- uh -- this idea of the security gains we made have had no impact on the underlying sectarian dynamic. None. None whatsoever. Can anybody envision a central government made up of Sunni, Shi'a, and Kurds that's going to gain the trust and respect of 27 million Iraqis? There have been some tactical gains, but they have no ultimate bearing at this point on the prospect of there being a political settlement in Iraq that would allow American troops to come home without leaving chaos behind.

In April 2007, Joe said in the Senate on the coming Surge,

Last night, like millions of my fellow Americans, I listened intently to the president of the United States lay out his new strategy for Iraq. We all hoped and prayed that the president would present us with a plan that would make things better. Instead, I fear, that what the president has proposed is more likely to make things worse.

On March 14, 2007, Biden screamed to his colleagues,

What happens after we surge these women and men? And, by the way, [President Bush] said president -- General Petraeus is -- is one who believes -- He may be the only one who believes this is a good idea! Virtually, no one else think it's a good idea!

Except it worked beautifully, so now it's Joe's Great Achievement.

Here's Joe's bottom line, his solemn pledge on Bush's Surge:

Ladies and gentlemen, the president's surge is not a solution. It is a tragic mistake, and I will do everything in my power to stop it.

Here he is screaming again, still before the Surge inexplicably morphed from Bush's Tragic Mistake into Sheriff Joe's Great Achievement:

This is a cycle of self-sustaining sectarian violence that 20,000, 30,000, 50,000, a hundred thousand Americans will not be able to stop!

Meanwhile, back down Memory Hole Lane, here's Deeply Intellectual Anti-War Candidate Barack Hussein Obama on January 10, 2007:

I am not persuaded that, duh, 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is gonna, duh, solve the sectarian violence there. In fact I think it will do the reverse. I think it takes pressure off the Iraqis to arrive at the sort of political accommodation that every observer believes is the ultimate solution, duh, to the problems we face there.

Really? "Every observer"? You got the names of all these "observers"? Because I'm pretty sure they didn't include President Bush, General Petraeus, the men and women on the ground in Iraq - you know: the adults. People who believe in victory rather than surrender.

Of course, Obama was just mouthing what the idiots wanted to hear from their Messiah.

Here's more from The One:

We cannot impose a military solution on what has effectively become a civil war. And until we acknowledge that reality, uh, we can send 15,000 more troops, 20,000 more troops, 30,000 more troops. Uh, I don't know any expert, uh, on the region or any military officer that I've spoken to, uh, privately that believes that that is going to make a substantial difference on the situation on the ground.

Funny how Obama can only find "experts" who agree with him; he seems entirely unable to find anyone whose "expert" opinion does not corroborate his beliefs. Me? I find 'em every day.

But I digress.

How about this, the crown jewel of Obama's God-like powers of reasoning:

Preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.

Let's read that again and savor its stunning inhumanity and cruelty;

Preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.

That's right: like all useful idiots, Obama would have preferred to leave the Iraqi people to rot in Saddam's hell, to be murdered by the hundreds of thousands every year. From the vantage point of today, that would have meant the slaughter of millions of souls in the name of the idiot left's "progressive" ideal of ruthlessly ideological pacifism.

And where is all that "progressive" idealism now? The same two idiots who did everything in their power to assure America's defeat in Iraq now take credit for the successful completion of George W. Bush's War, handed to them just as the military, led by Bush and General Petraeus, was already mopping up and preparing to draw down. This surely removes any lingering doubts about the abject shallowness of these pathological liars, these petulent, unworthy clowns who shamelessly blame all their many failures on Bush and, even more to their discredit, attempt to abscond with his, and the American military's, greatest success in the War on Islamofascism.

Really, November cannot come soon enough, for so many reasons.

HT Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft

Obama waterboy Blob Beckel attacked James O'Keefe on Hannity last week, attempting to marginalize O'Keefe and his fellow investigative journalist Hannah Giles, whom he called a "ho" and "a very convincing hooker".

Quoth Miss Giles writing at Big Journalism,

All I can say is, Beckel would know.

This isn’t the first time he has been befuddled by a young woman’s actions. In the summer of 2002 Beckel came to know 20-year old “Tiffany,” a professional hooker who, after establishing a business relationship with him, attempted to extort $50,000 in exchange for her not exposing their relationship to his ex-wife and employers.

Don’t believe it, don’t remember it, want to get the facts? Check the police report for the gory details:

And so I did. I followed Hannah's link to The Smoking Gun and found a quite fulsome account of Beckel's experience in judging a hooker's believability. So I don't wonder at Giles' closing remark:

If he had said I was a convincing hooker based on the fact that ACORN offices felt comfortable enough with me that they thought I could run a good underage brothel in their local communities, then things would be a little different. We find instead that he is creeping on my body, rather than condemning a corrupt organization.

A staggering hit, that, and well-deserved.

Although I have to say, what with my new appreciation for Blob Beckel, I do hope that Hannity keeps him on the show as this story becomes the 800-pound gorilla to Fox's viewers, who won't stand f'dat shit.

While we're on the subject of Blob Beckel's lack of integrity, will Sean Hannity please ask the Blobian One what he knew about the whole John Edwards affair and why he participated in the media blackout?

S'long, Blob.

Mmmm mmmm mmmm.

What a weekend. Glenn Reynolds reviews it at the Examiner.

Here is The Speech:


Watch CBS News Videos Online

Chris Wallace interviewed Palin on FNS.

It's always a pleasure to see an obnoxious prick like Rahm Emanuel get his comeuppance from a decent person, in this case Sarah Palin, who went after the little weasel with both barrels for his "f''n retards" slur reported last week. Ben Smith at Politico:

On Facebook, Sarah Palin launched today an unusual, personal attack on the chief of staff in response to a report that he'd dismissed progressives' attempts to pressure Senate centrists as "retarded."

Now, I've used that word myself on occasion, but I would never stoop so low as to insult the mentally challenged by comparing them to "progressives" - that's just uncalled for. Deadfish apologized for the remark, but don't ever think it's an act of contrition; to a weasel like this guy, it has nothing to do with decency and everything to do with political expediency.

UPDATE
Rahm Emanuel's brother Ezekial is the chief health care adviser to president Obama, and just one of the Obama administration's "bioethicists" who believe that medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those who are "irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens...an obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia"- in other words, he believes in euthanizing the less fortunate among us, as the Democrats and their leftist pals on the bench made sure happened to Terri Schiavo.

Is it likely those views are shared by Rahm? Hadley Arkes, the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst College and the architect of the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, has a few questions for Deadfish, and an observation:

Palin ought to be asking these questions:

—Would children like her son Trig be denied care under a government-run health-care system? Would their lives be considered less “worth living”?

—Does Emanuel think that women would be justified in aborting babies who were likely to be afflicted with Down’s syndrome? Would he respect their decision to have those abortions on the grounds that they do not think children with Down’s syndrome have lives worth living?

—Would Emanuel think it permissible to end the lives of people walking around, well out of the womb, who happen to have Down’s syndrome? If not, what is the difference? Surely it cannot be that those walking around have evaded or survived the prospect of abortion, for his own president became famous for refusing to protect infants who had survived an abortion.

Emanuel’s embarrassment involves more than just a slip of the tongue — it involves a deeply planted moral understanding. The greater embarrassment is that the real moral issue seems to have gone unnoticed, both by the journalists covering the story and by the people taking offense at Emanuel’s comment.

This could just be getting started, and eventually head in a direction that will lead to more trouble for Obama, more trouble for Obamacare and a resignation for one or both of the brothers Emanuel.

Via Power Line

First Reuters published a detailed assessment of Obama’s planned tax increases on the middle class (the folks he was going to protect from tax increases) that was devastating simply by virtue of the facts it contained. Then the White House apparently called to complain the story it was too honest and fulsome in its analysis, or something. So, good pro-Obama propagandists that they are, Reuters withdrew the story, promising a new, mo’ bettah one sometime later.

Here’s the text of Reuters’ original article:

The Obama administration's plan to cut more than $1 trillion from the deficit over the next decade relies heavily on so-called backdoor tax increases that will result in a bigger tax bill for middle-class families.

In the 2010 budget tabled by President Barack Obama on Monday, the White House wants to let billions of dollars in tax breaks expire by the end of the year -- effectively a tax hike by stealth.

While the administration is focusing its proposal on eliminating tax breaks for individuals who earn $250,000 a year or more, middle-class families will face a slew of these backdoor increases.

The targeted tax provisions were enacted under the Bush administration's Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001. Among other things, the law lowered individual tax rates, slashed taxes on capital gains and dividends, and steadily scaled back the estate tax to zero in 2010.

If the provisions are allowed to expire on December 31, the top-tier personal income tax rate will rise to 39.6 percent from 35 percent. But lower-income families will pay more as well: the 25 percent tax bracket will revert back to 28 percent; the 28 percent bracket will increase to 31 percent; and the 33 percent bracket will increase to 36 percent. The special 10 percent bracket is eliminated.

Investors will pay more on their earnings next year as well, with the tax on dividends jumping to 39.6 percent from 15 percent and the capital-gains tax increasing to 20 percent from 15 percent. The estate tax is eliminated this year, but it will return in 2011 -- though there has been talk about reinstating the death tax sooner.

Millions of middle-class households already may be facing higher taxes in 2010 because Congress has failed to extend tax breaks that expired on January 1, most notably a "patch" that limited the impact of the alternative minimum tax. The AMT, initially designed to prevent the very rich from avoiding income taxes, was never indexed for inflation. Now the tax is affecting millions of middle-income households, but lawmakers have been reluctant to repeal it because it has become a key source of revenue.

Without annual legislation to renew the patch this year, the AMT could affect an estimated 25 million taxpayers with incomes as low as $33,750 (or $45,000 for joint filers). Even if the patch is extended to last year's levels, the tax will hit American families that can hardly be considered wealthy -- the AMT exemption for 2009 was $46,700 for singles and $70,950 for married couples filing jointly.

Middle-class families also will find fewer tax breaks available to them in 2010 if other popular tax provisions are allowed to expire. Among them:

* Taxpayers who itemize will lose the option to deduct state sales-tax payments instead of state and local income taxes;

* The $250 teacher tax credit for classroom supplies;

* The tax deduction for up to $4,000 of college tuition and expenses;

* Individuals who don't itemize will no longer be able to increase their standard deduction by up to $1,000 for property taxes paid;* The first $2,400 of unemployment benefits are taxable, in 2009 that amount was tax-free.

It’s easy to understand why the White House wouldn’t want any of this to become common knowledge, since it portends, as Arthur Laffer has shown, the total destruction of the American economy. Just as Saul Alinsky planned it.

Charles Krauhammer delivered the Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture to the Heritage Foundation on January 19, 2010. Entitled The Age of Obama: Anno Domini 2, the Hammer's lecture brilliantly frames the delusions and ideology that define the virtual world from which Obama vainly struggles to affect the real one.

Abstract: In the real world, as opposed to what French President Nicolas Sarkozy calls President Barack Obama's "virtual world," America faces the reality of Iran's intransigence and aggressiveness; China's headlong pursuit of its own national, regional, and global interests; Russia's determination to regain its Near Abroad; the Arab states' refusal to accept any kind of a reasonable settlement of the kind that Israel has already offered under several governments; Syria's designs on Lebanon; and Hugo Chávez's designs on the weaker countries in Latin America. President Obama's foreign policy agenda of gradual American retreat will have inexorable consequences: When erstwhile allies see the American umbrella being withdrawn, they will have to accommodate themselves to those from whom we were protecting them. If Obama proves impervious to empirical evidence and experience, all these accommodations, the weakening of alliances, the strengthening of centers of adversarial power in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Caracas, and elsewhere will continue until we are awakened by some cataclysm.

Read Charles Krauthammer's The Age of Obama: Anno Domini 2

Watch the video, which includes an entertaining Q&A session:

About (Saving) Face by NRO contributors Bill Burck and Dana Perino lists eight reasons why the KSM trial will be moved back to Guantanamo Bay and a military tribunal. Obama and Eric Holder appear not to have considered any of these reasons, elsewise they simply would not have made a decision that is so STUPID on so many levels.

Here's the gist of just one:

It is impossible for the Obama administration to provide a coherent explanation as to why KSM needs to be tried in civilian court. They can’t say they believe civilian courts are more legitimate than military commissions, because that would undermine military commissions. They can hint, through unnamed sources, that they are sending the “slam dunk” cases to civilian court and the weaker ones to military commissions with their more flexible evidentiary standards, but they can’t say that in the open without appearing to acknowledge what many critics have charged — the civilian trials will serve little purpose other than as show trials of the obviously guilty, while the real work of determining guilt or innocence will happen in the military commissions. If they had the courage of their purported convictions that terrorists who wage war on the United States are entitled to the same protections as common criminals, the administration would abandon military commissions altogether, rather than channel the more difficult cases to them. Unwilling to take this step, and in the face of bipartisan opposition to civilian trials, the administration will be left with no choice but to fully embrace military commissions for all Guantanamo detainees whom they wish to put on trial, including KSM.

Eleganté.

BONUS ROUND

Behold, the incandescent brilliance of Attorney General Eric Holder as Senator Lindsay Grahamnesty peels him like a banana:



UPDATE
The Ninth Reason

The administration’s bungling has ensured that KSM can’t get a fair civilian trial.

Let’s see. Attorney General Holder, the nation’s top law-enforcement officer, has said KSM is guilty and should die. Check. The president has said more or less the same. Check. The entire political leadership of New York has announced that they cannot support trying him in New York City because of the disruption to the city and the sheer danger of holding KSM in downtown Manhattan. Check. The chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, has disclosed that the threat environment is such that trying KSM in New York City is just too dangerous. Check. The president’s chief spokesperson has said that no matter where KSM is tried, he “is going to meet his maker.” Check.

It’s difficult to imagine anyplace in the United States that would not be prejudiced by these types of statements.

The Obama administration cannot afford even the remote possibility that a federal judge will rule that KSM cannot receive a fair trial. Indeed, one suspects that the administration’s most recent guarantee of KSM’s execution, made by senior advisers on the Sunday talk shows, is a hint they are no longer concerned about pre-trial publicity because the decision to send the matter back to a military commission has already been made.

If the Obama administration is not at the very least that reasonable - and I don't believe they are - there's big trouble ahead. In fact, I maintain that the whole fiasco constitutes a case of providing aid and comfort to the enemy.

Via BigGovernment

Obama Recruiting Radicals in High Schools
by Pamela Geller

Barack Obama is using our public school system to recruit for his Alinsky-inspired private army. Organizing for America (OFA), formerly Obama For America, is recruiting in our high schools to “build on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering students across the country to help us bring about our agenda” – that is, his agenda of socialism for the United States of America.

Chuck, a reader of my website AtlasShrugs.com, has a daughter in the eleventh grade in a public high school, Perry Local in Massillon, Ohio. The teacher in her government class passed out a propaganda recruiting paper – headed with Obama’s distinctive “O” logo — asking students to sign up as interns for Organizing for America. You can see the entire intern recruiting form at AtlasShrugs.com.

And what will these “interns” be force-fed? The mother’s milk of the left — anti-war agitation, anti-capitalism, Marx, Lenin, Ayers, LGBT agenda promotion, global warming, pro-jihad, and illegal immigration. For starters. Maybe “Ellie Light,” who has in the last few weeks published the same Letter to the Editor supporting and defending Obama in over a dozen newspapers across the country, can give lessons in astroturfing.

The form carries a recommended reading list, including Rules for Radicals by the notorious hard left community organizer and Obama mentor Saul Alinsky; two Huffington Post articles by Zack Exley, “The New Organizers” and “Obama Field Organizers Plot a Miracle.” The first of those, published in October 2008, enthuses about “an insurgent generation of organizers” inside the Obama campaign that has, “almost without anyone noticing … built the Progressive movement a brand new and potentially durable people’s organization, in a dozen states, rooted at the neighborhood level.”

Read the rest here.

Don't miss Pamela Geller's report over at her blog Atlas Shrugs, where she has also published copies of the forms distributed to innocent students for induction into the Obama Youth.

Obama supporters have serially dismissed any notion that Obama has been deeply influenced by Alinsky and other radicals of his ilk; well, here's the proof they've been lying to protect the advancement of the radical "progressive" agenda.

This insidious attack on America's children for radical purposes has its roots in the German fascist Hitlerjugend or the Russian Communist Komsomol. Bill Ayers and Obama employed the same tactics as part of the Annenberg Challenge when they worked together in Chicago. It is also of a piece with Obama's selection of Kevin Jennings, founder and former Executive Director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, as his "Safe Schools Czar". The goal is to subvert the parent/child relationship in service to the "progressive" cause, with Obama as its leader and cult figurehead.

It is insidious and dangerous, and it must be stopped.

Obama Wants Porn In Your Schools

Washington Times Sets Sights On Obama's Child-Porn Czar

My Brother's Keepers: Media Madders Defends Kevin Jennings' Campaign To Hypersexualize Children