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It can be a difficult task to describe the irrationality that confronts us from the Left, but Roger Simon does a wonderful job of it. We use him to kick off today’s Pickings where the theme is the growing realization in the media they made a mistake pushing the kid over the top. Who you ask? How about Howard Fineman, Doyle McManus, the Washington Post, and Bob Schieffer. Read on. They’re all here.

Only last September, Sam Tanenhaus – editor of The New York Times Book Review – published a book entitled The Death of Conservatism. …

…Well, that’s the danger of topical political books. I feel sorry for Tanenhaus, in a way. How could he have known (well, maybe he should have) when writing his book nine or ten months ago that Barack Obama would now be manufacturing conservatives at a clip unparalleled in history? Our President is a veritable conservative mass production factory. And those conservatives, despite what Tanenhaus wrote, are Hell bent on conserving the traditional values of our society, including taxation with representation (thanks!), a common sense health care system, some modicum of transparency, and, now most clearly, honesty in national defense. (Treating Islamic radicalism as if it were house breaking is moronic behavior verging on national and cultural suicide. You don’t need to be “conservative” to see that.).

Perhaps Tanenhaus should have written “The Death of Liberalism,” because that is what is going on all around us. And it is his own media that is creating its death, their own death, because it is they that created Barack Obama, bringing out of obscurity a man less qualified to be president than the proverbial “my dead grandmother.” …

…I don’t know if the terms conservative and liberal in general are useful anymore, but Obama is certainly simplifying that conundrum but destroying the latter.

Rasmussen Reports compiled a year end review of their Strongly Approve/Strongly Disapprove poll. It is a devastating look at the country’s understanding  that a group of amateurs have the reins of the executive branch.

The president’s Approval Index ratings fell three points in December following two-point declines in both October and November. …

…As Congress has drawn closer to achieving the president’s goals on health care, unemployment also has been rising, and Obama’s ratings have reflected the turmoil.

The number who Strongly Disapprove of the president’s performance inched up a point to 41% in December. The number who Strongly Approved fell two more points to 26%. That leads to a Presidential Approval Index rating of -15, a new low for Obama.

Also in December, the president’s total approval dropped two points to 46%. His total disapproval gained a point to 53%. It’s worth noting that the Approval Index ratings have generally proven to be a good leading indicator of the president’s overall approval ratings.

In Politico, Alex Isenstadt reports on the reasons liberals dislike Rasmussen’s current polling.

…In August, for example, Rasmussen asked respondents whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement “It’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.”

“Why stop there, Rasmussen? Why not add a parenthetical phrase about how tax cuts regrow hair, whiten teeth, and ensure that your favorite team will win the Super Bowl this year?” responded Daily Kos blogger Steve Singiser, who frequently writes about polls. …

…Rasmussen, for his part, explained that his numbers are trending Republican simply because he is screening for only those voters most likely to head to the polls — a pool of respondents, he argues, that just so happens to bend more conservative this election cycle. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on the liberal criticisms of the Obami on this past Sunday’s Face the Nation.

On Face the Nation, there was some serious talk as to why the Christmas Day bombing is so perilous for the Obama team. It is not simply that once again Democrats may be perceived as weak on national security. There is a more basic issue now rumbling through not just conservative circles but also in the mainstream media: can these people be trusted to do much of anything? Jan Crawford took up the competency angle:

The reason that’s an issue for Obama is that it goes to the bigger question of the competency of his government and the trust that people have in that government. You look at polls. Polls show that the trust in government is an all time low. Domestically, obviously, stimulus plan hasn’t worked. Unemployment is high. And so now we have a situation where a terrorist can get on an airplane, seemingly could have  been caught if some officials had just done a basic Google search of the database. And the Homeland Security secretary is insisting the system worked.

…Bob Schieffer, not exactly a fire-breathing conservative, really laid into the Obami. The problem is not only competence but also trust. …

…When government officials insult us with spin they’re doing it on our dime, which is supposed to be used to operate the government, not to hold news conferences to tell us what a fine job people on the public payroll are doing. … Real security is built on trust in government. That requires truth, which should be the beginning of government presentations, not the fallback position. …

Yowser. Now that’s a narrative that should concern the Obami. Unfortunately, one wonders if they know what to do with a problem not solvable by spin and attack-dog tactics. At some point you really have to govern. Sadly, that is not their strong suit.

Toby Harnden reviews Underpantsgate.

…But the violence wasn’t senseless, it had a calculated objective – just as Abdulmutallab was not, as Obama described him, an “isolated extremist”. No wonder many Americans want to grab Obama by the lapels and scream: “It’s the Jihad, stupid.” Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, clearly struck a nerve when he charged last week that Obama was “trying to pretend we are not at war”.

The White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer eagerly descended into the political fray, responding to Cheney with the obligatory jibe about Iraq and also a litany of examples of Obama’s “public statements that explicitly state we are at war”.

It’s a sure sign that you’re losing the argument when you have to research quotes from your boss’s speeches to prove that he gets it that America is at war. The problem for Obama is that people are now judging him by his actions as well as his words.

The incompetence of the US intelligence bureaucracy is not the only thing that makes Underpantsgate so damaging for Obama. More serious is his failure to understand or acknowledge the nature of the enemy – and to view war as mere politics.

Doyle McManus guest blogs in the LA Times, and gives Obama a very limited thumbs up for his first year.

…Take the $787-billion economic stimulus plan that Obama muscled through Congress as his first item of business in February. It was big, bold and ambitious — but in political terms, it’s been a failure. Most economists say the stimulus has saved at least half a million jobs, but Obama hasn’t convinced most voters that the impact is real.

A program to save homeowners from foreclosure has mostly been a bust. The most visibly successful piece of the administration’s economic rescue plan has been its bailout of Wall Street — a favor investment bankers repaid by awarding themselves huge bonuses.

A Pew poll this month (Dec.) found that only 30% of respondents believed Obama’s policies had made the economy better. A president who made his name as a gifted speechmaker has fallen into a spectacular failure in communicating. He might have served himself better by making fewer trips to Scandinavia and more to construction sites in Middle America. …

David Gardner of the Daily Mail, UK, reports on the open resentment that the CIA has for Obama’s criticisms.

…‘One day the President is pointing the finger and blaming the intelligence services, saying there is a systemic failure,’ said one agency official. ‘Now we are heroes. The fact is that we are doing everything humanly possible to stay on top of the security situation. The deaths of our operatives shows just how involved we are on the ground.’ But CIA bosses claim they were unfairly blamed at a time the covert government agency has been stretched further than ever before in Afghanistan and Pakistan. …

…The base targeted by Wednesday’s suicide bomber was a control centre for a covert programme overseeing strikes by remote-controlled aircraft along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. ‘Those who fell were far from home and close to the enemy, doing the hard work that must be done to protect our country from terrorism. We owe them our deepest gratitude,’ CIA Director Leon Panetta said.

Some CIA officials are angry at being criticised by the White House after Abdulmutallab, 23, was allowed to slip through the security net and board a US-bound flight in Amsterdam despite evidence he was a terror threat. The president complained that a warning from the former London engineering student’s father and information about an al Qaeda bomb plot involving a Nigerian were not handled properly by the intelligence networks. But CIA officials say the data was sent to the US National Counterterrorism Centre in Washington, which was set up after the 9/11 attacks as a clearing house where raw data should be analysed. Agents claim that is where the dots should have been connected to help identify Abdulmutallab as a threat.

In Newsweek, Howard Fineman thinks Obamacare is a bad idea.

…Nothing unusual about a little fawning in the Oval, but it prompts questions. Given the urgency of those challenges, underscored by the Nigerian bomber, was it wise for the president to spend most of his first year and political capital on a monumentally complicated overhaul of the nation’s health-care system? And will the results of that gamble—not fundamental reform, but rather an expensive set of patches, bypasses, and trusses bolted onto the existing system—improve the lives of Americans enough to help him or his fellow Democrats politically?

Put me down as skeptical. …

…Democrats fret that they will be blamed for those increases in the 2010 elections. Some regulations on the industry kick in immediately, but most don’t begin until at least 2013. And yet, to allow the bill to “save” money in the first decade, most new taxes and fees go into effect immediately. “We’re collecting money before we’re giving all the benefits!” lamented a Democratic senator facing reelection. “That is a political disaster.”…

In the Streetwise Professor, Craig Pirrong comments on an article in WaPo about lack of communication regarding the Afghanistan strategy.

The foundation of any military plan or strategy is The Objective.  All details of implementation are directed towards achieving it.  Any strategy that lacks a clear objective as its foundation runs extreme risks, and is likely to result in confusion, and work at cross purposes by those in charge of developing and implementing it.  If you don’t have an objective, you’re never going to achieve it.  And if you do have an objective, but don’t spell it out, you can’t count on anybody devising or implementing a strategy to achieve it.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Obama Afghanistan strategy suffers from this fundamental defect.  But don’t believe me.  Believe that right wing rag, the Washington Post.  In an article conveniently (for the administration) buried on the Saturday after Christmas, and overshadowed by the junkbomber fiasco, the Post paints a devastating picture of strategic confusion traceable directly to Obama’s complete failure to state unambiguously his objective …

…The primary job of the commander in chief is to identify the nation’s interests and specify strategic objectives intended to advance those interests.  The Post piece makes it clear that Obama is failing in that task.  Failing completely.  His seeming allergy to the very idea of victory will be self-fulfilling, because by refusing to identify an objective (i.e., what would victory look like?) he will ensure that victory by any measure is virtually impossible. …

Cliff May posts in The Corner about his joke that offended some liberal media types.

…I suggested that the Obami could have their cake and eat it, too, if they released the terrorists to Yemen and then attacked them in the baggage claim area at Sanaa International. (If it’s anything like Dulles or JFK, it’s a place they are likely to have to linger for a rather long time. Can’t you imagine the former detainees watching the bags go around the carousel? “Hey, Hamid, isn’t that your suitcase? The one with the smiley face on the luggage tag?” “No, no, Mahmoud. I always use a rainbow strap. Avoids confus — ” Kaboom.)

For this, Andrew calls me a “neo-fascist.” (To Andrew, is that worse than a neo-conservative?) …

…I also suspect people of Greenwald and Sullivan’s persuasion believe conservatives have no business emplying irony, satire, and parody. After all, If there are jokes to be made, there are qualified people on the left who can make them! …

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Fouad Ajami looks back at a disastrous year in American foreign policy, and some of the consequences.

With year one drawing to a close, the truth of the Obama presidency is laid bare: retrenchment abroad, and redistribution and the intrusive regulatory state at home. This is the genuine calling of Barack Obama, and of the “progressives” holding him to account. The false dichotomy has taken hold—either we care for our own, or we go abroad in search of monsters to destroy or of broken nations to build. …

…It is different today, there is a cold-bloodedness to American foreign policy. “Ideology is so yesterday,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed not long ago, giving voice to the new sentiment.

History and its furies have their logic, and they have not bent to Mr. Obama’s will. He had declared a unilateral end to the “war on terror,” but the jihadists and their mentors are yet to call their war to a halt. From Yemen to Fort Hood and Detroit, the terror continues. …

…Under Mr. Obama, we have pulled back from the foreign world. We’re smaller for accepting that false choice between burdens at home and burdens abroad, and the world beyond our shores is more hazardous and cynical for our retrenchment and our self-flagellation.

Marty Peretz says that Obama may not be able to look past his ideological bias, but the American people will.

…I believe that it is Obama’s perception of Abdulmutallab as an “isolated extremist” that is the real source of the intelligence calamity so dramatically revealed in this case. It is true, of course, that this dispiriting intelligence failure goes back to the Clinton and Bush years, even though Bush did almost uniquely grasp the very essence of the holy Muslim terror. But what the president has done is to wrap the Islamic orbit in a sweetly scented cashmere afghan (if you’ll permit this ironic choice of words) that disguises the reality of the real Islam of this world. Obama has done this grandly several times, most especially with his addresses in Istanbul and Cairo, but also in his more quotidian remarks. The failure of the CIA and the other alphabet agencies to connect the dots is a methodological failure. The president’s failure to grasp the realities is an ideological and psychological failure. In a top-down structure, the top always has the advantage.

It is a thorny matter to design grand tactics for both the world as it is and the world as Obama imagines it. Yes, the president’s representatives and, to some extent, he himself are now talking factual essentials. Already during the campaign, he liquidated the war on terrorism. It was not apt. It was diversionary. And, oh, what a relief this was to his ecstatic crowds.

But for what are we mobilizing in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and apparently now also in Yemen, other than war against the terrorists of Islam? In Pakistan, in a little village called Shah Hassan Khel, the Taliban struck a volleyball game–an innocent volleyball game, for God’s sake–played and attended by altogether harmless and guiltless men and boys. Deutsche Presse Agentur says that no fewer than 95 dead were left on the ground. …

In the Corner, Andy McCarthy posts on several aspects of the latest terrorist “case”.

…Finally, behold, yet again, the folly of President Obama’s law-enforcement approach to terrorism. Not only has the assignment of counsel in the criminal case denied us whatever intelligence Mutallab could be giving us about Yemen. The criminal case is complicating the President’s ability to do his jobs as president and commander-in-chief.  This morning, Obama declared flatly that Mutallab conspired with al Qaeda in a heinous attempted terrorist attack. It was refreshing to hear the president not hedge with “alleged” this and “alleged” that. FDR never suggested that the “fear itself” we needed to fear was “alleged.” But, of course, defense counsel will now claim the president is hopelessly prejudicing Mutallab’s ability to get a fair trial — in Detroit or anyplace else — by smearing him in the press and eviscerating the presumption of innocence.  The usual judicial reaction to such claims is not to dismiss an indictment but (a) to postpone the trial indefinitely until the negative (to the defendant) publicity dies down, and (b) to direct the executive branch to stop making statements that prejudice the case (on pain of having the indictment dismissed due to “government misconduct”).

The Mutallab case is an unnecessary, insignificant distraction from the real business of protecting the United States. And it is all so unnecessary.  It will be forever until we can have a trial of Mutallab, anyway:  From here on out, everytime something happens in Yemen, Mutallab’s lawyers will try to use it to their litigation advantage, repeating that the president has so tied Mutallab to terrorism in Yemen that there is no prospect of a fair trial.  So why not transfer him to military custody as an enemy combatant, detain and interrogate him for as long as it is useful to do so, and then, in a year or three, either charge him with war crimes in a military tribunal or, if you insist, indict him the criminal justice system? There is no reason to have a criminal case pending right now — it will only tie the president’s hands and be grist for judicial criticism of Obama while he has a war to fight. He doesn’t need that in his life right now.

Mark Steyn comments on Andy McCarthy’s post and adds his thoughts.

…Whom should the traveling public thank for these impositions? The 9/11 killers were mostly Saudi. But the Shoebomber was a British subject. So were the Heathrow plotters. And the Pantybomber was educated in British schools – first in Togo; then at University College, London – and there is plenty of evidence he was radicalized while in the UK. So three of the four circles of homeland security hell with which the public are tortured are British in origin. …

…Even if that’s true (and it’s by no means clear that it is), is that enough? I said a few years back that Britain had been so hollowed out by Islamic radicals that it was becoming Somalia with chip shops. Mr Abdulmuttalab supposedly got the ol’ jihad fever while at university. I see The New York Times reports the remarkable statistic that one-fifth of students at British universities are Muslim. As Professor Garton Ash would say, most British Muslims most of the time will be most unlikely to self-detonate over most American cities. So that’s okay, right? Up to a point. A poll by the Centre for Social Cohesion found that one-third of Muslim students in Britain believe killing in the name of religion is justified and are in favor of a global caliphate. That’s a lot of potential airline tickets.

And perhaps the saddest comment of all on America’s principal supplier of transformative terrorist incidents is this – from my old colleagues at The Spectator in an aside on that New York Times story:

There is a lot in the article that is worth commenting on. But sadly Britain’s libel laws make discussion of the contents of this article almost impossible.

If you can’t even discuss a problem, what are the chances you can fix it?

Jennifer Rubin discusses how the Obami’s rebranding of the war is not playing well, even with the Obami faithful.

As this Politico story notes, the Christmas Day bombing plot has shaken the Obama administration and his supporters, leaving the latter flummoxed. They can’t seem to understand the president’s clueless reaction, which verged on peevish resentment over the interruption to his vacation:

Over the course of five days, Obama’s reaction ranged from low-keyed to reassuring to, finally, a vow to find out what went wrong. The episode was a baffling, unforced error in presidential symbolism, hardly a small part of the presidency, and the moment at which yet another of the old political maxims that Obama had sought to transcend – the Democrats’ vulnerability on national security – reasserted itself.

…Arrest him, book him, Mirandize him, call the FBI — what’s the big deal? It is not a mystery at all as to why Obama behaved as he did. This is his anti-terror policy on full display. What we now see (and what the “shocked, shocked to see there is cluelessness” crowd is reacting to) is what that bizarre stance toward the war on terror looks like up close and in real time when played out in the context of actual events. Think it’s odd for the president to call Farouk Abdulmutallab a “suspect”? Think it’s weird that the terrorist isn’t being interrogated but has lawyered up? Well, that’s the Obama anti-terror policy. It isn’t supposed to be a big deal when these events occur. For if it were, we wouldn’t be treating the terrorists like criminal suspects.

It turns out that the Obami’s approach is entirely off-putting and inappropriate to virtually everyone. That the media has finally clued in to just how politically untenable it is, tells us something about the media’s own willingness to ignore the implications of Obama’s declared policy and previous rhetoric. The solution is not to make sure after the next incident that the president puts on a tie, drops the grumpy-guy demeanor, and orders Janet Napolitano to stay off the air (although all that would be swell): it is to get a new policy on the war on terror – a policy that regards these incidents with the gravity they deserve and employs responses appropriate to the war in which we are engaged.

In Powerline, Paul Mirengoff posts on a welcome change from one branch of the government. Chief Justice John Roberts isn’t asking for any more of your money.

Among the many excellent qualities of Chief Justice John Roberts is his judiciousness, not a bad quality for any judge to possess. It was on display again in his annual report on the state of the federal judiciary.

According to the Washington Post, every year since 1970, the Chief Justice’s annual report has called for bigger salaries for federal judges. In my opinion, it’s a more than reasonable recommendation; federal judges are significantly underpaid by the standard of their profession and of their employer.

Obviously, judges can’t be paid what partners at major law firms make, even though their work is more important and they are often better lawyers. But they can and should be paid more than junior associates at these firms, government trial lawyers and senior government bureaucrats, and senior law professors.

Unfortunately, they are not. Moreover, their salaries have declined in real terms by 25 percent since 1969. During this period, real compensation for lawyers has risen substantially.

This year, however, Chief Justice Roberts declined to renew what is presently a futile plea for an increase in judge’s salaries. He wrote:

In the past few years, I have adhered to the tradition that Chief Justice Burger initiated and have provided my perspective on the most critical needs of the judiciary. . . This year, however, when the political branches are faced with so many difficult issues, and when so many of our fellow citizens have been touched by hardship, the public might welcome a year-end report limited to what is essential: the courts are operating soundly, and the nation’s dedicated federal judges are conscientiously discharging their duties.

As far as I can tell, the state of the economy — i.e., of “our fellow citizens” — has not caused many in the private or public sector to shy away from special pleading, including special pleading that lacks justification. We are fortunate to have a Chief Justice who has the decency and good judgment to provide an exception.

In the Washington Examiner, Mark Tapscott blogs about another area where Obami marketing has failed.

End-of-year media pieces tend to be boring rehashes but occasionally a thoughtful person will use the opportunity for some genuinely original and useful thinking about the most recent past. Such is Micah Sifry’s powerful and significant post on Personal Democracy Forum’s Tech President, “The Obama disconnect: What happens when myth meets reality.”

Remember how the Mainstream Media endlessly told us in 2008 that the Obama campaign was blazing new trails by raising millions of dollars of campaign donations and creating the first-ever bottom-up, people-driven Internet-focused presidential campaign apparatus?

Sifry’s post is a must-read for those across the political spectrum who seek to understand why the truth about the Obama campaign in 2008 was almost exactly the opposite of that mythic rendition at the heart of the conventional Mainstream Media wisdom. …

Houston Chronicle has a good piece on climategate.

Now that Copenhagen is past history, what is the next step in the man-made global warming controversy? Without question, there should be an immediate and thorough investigation of the scientific debauchery revealed by “Climategate.”

If you have not heard, hackers penetrated the computers of the Climate Research Unit, or CRU, of the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia, exposing thousands of e-mails and other documents. CRU is one of the top climate research centers in the world. Many of the exchanges were between top mainstream climate scientists in Britain and the U.S. who are closely associated with the authoritative (albeit controversial) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Among the more troubling revelations were data adjustments enhancing the perception that man is causing global warming through the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Particularly disturbing was the way the core IPCC scientists (the believers) marginalized the skeptics of the theory that man-made global warming is large and potentially catastrophic. …

Investor’s Business Daily provides us with another cartoon review. These are all by Michael Ramirez. He picks his favorite ten.

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A sobering story from the Mid-East.

JERUSALEM — He can be impulsive. She has a touch of bossiness. Next-door neighbors for nearly a year, they talk, watch television and explore the world together, wandering into each other’s homes without a second thought. She likes his mother’s eggplant dish. He likes her father’s rice and lamb.

Friendship often starts with proximity, but Orel and Marya, both 8, have been thrust together in a way few elsewhere have. Their playground is a hospital corridor. He is an Israeli Jew severely wounded by a Hamas rocket. She is a Palestinian Muslim from Gaza paralyzed by an Israeli missile. Someone forgot to tell them that they are enemies. …

In fairness to the administration, they can hardly be blamed for the fact the Christmas bomber boarded an airplane in Holland. What is really beyond comprehension though, is granting to him an American’s full constitutional rights. Victoria Toensing writes on this for WSJ.

On the third day after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner, President Barack Obama finally interrupted his Hawaiian vacation to announce that our government “will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable.” But how are we going to do that now that the terrorist is lawyered up and is even challenging what should be a legal gimme: giving the government a DNA sample?

It was not wise to try enemy combatants such as Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker in the 9/11 attacks, in our regular criminal courts. And it is unwise that Mr. Obama has decided to try some Guantanamo detainees in New York City. Never in our country’s history prior to 2001 have we done so, for good reason.

The constitutional protections designed to ensure a person is not wrongfully convicted have no relevance to wartime military needs. The argument that our system is strong enough to try a terrorist is a non sequitur. It equates to the argument that if a person is in excellent health, she can withstand being set ablaze. …

Charles Krauthammer says, “Mega Dittos.”

… The logic is perverse. If we find Abdulmutallab in an al-Qaeda training camp in Yemen, where he is merely preparing for a terror attack, we snuff him out with a Predator — no judge, no jury, no qualms. But if we catch him in the United States in the very act of mass murder, he instantly acquires protection not just from execution by drone but even from interrogation.

The president said that this incident highlights “the nature of those who threaten our homeland.” But the president is constantly denying the nature of those who threaten our homeland. On Tuesday, he referred five times to Abdulmutallab (and his terrorist ilk) as “extremist[s].”

A man who shoots abortion doctors is an extremist. An eco-fanatic who torches logging sites is an extremist. Abdulmutallab is not one of these. He is a jihadist. And unlike the guys who shoot abortion doctors, jihadists have cells all over the world; they blow up trains in London, nightclubs in Bali and airplanes over Detroit (if they can); and are openly pledged to war on America.

Any government can through laxity let someone slip through the cracks. But a government that refuses to admit that we are at war, indeed, refuses even to name the enemy — jihadist is a word banished from the Obama lexicon — turns laxity into a governing philosophy.

More of the same from Mark Steyn.

On Christmas Day, a gentleman from Nigeria succeeded (effortlessly) in boarding a flight to Detroit with a bomb in his underwear. Pretty funny, huh?

But the Pantybomber wasn’t the big joke. The real laugh was the United States government. The global hyperpower spent the next week making itself a laughingstock to the entire planet. First, the bureaucrats at the TSA swung into action with a whole new range of restrictions.

Against radical Yemen-trained Muslims wearing weaponized briefs? Of course not. That would be too obvious. So instead they imposed a slew of constraints against you. At Heathrow last week, they were permitting only one item of carry-on on U.S. flights. In Toronto, no large purses.

Um, the Panty bomber didn’t have a purse. He brought the bomb on board under his private parts, and his private parts weren’t part of his carry-on (although, if reports of injuries sustained in his failed mission are correct, they may well not have been part of his carry-off). But no matter. If in doubt, blame the victim. The TSA announced that for the last hour of the flight no passenger can use the toilets or have anything on his lap – not a laptop, not a blanket, not a stewardess, not even a paperback book. I can’t wait for the first lawsuit after an infidel flight attendant confiscates a litigious imam’s Koran as they’re coming into LAX.

You’re still free to read a paperback if you’re flying from Paris to Sydney, or Stockholm to Beijing, or Kuala Lumpur to Heathrow. But not to LAX or JFK. The TSA were responding as bonehead bureaucracies do: Don’t just stand there, do something. And every time the TSA does something, you’ll have to stand there, longer and longer, suffering ever more pointless indignities. …

David Harsanyi says we’re losing our freedoms, one piece of clothing at a time.

… A passenger may not, for instance, carry “Box Cutters” on a plane. “Axes/Ice Picks”? No. “Meat Cleavers”? No. “Sabers”? No. “Bows and Arrows”? No. How about “Hatchets”? Nope. Thankfully, someone at the TSA took the time to let everyone know that “Realistic Replicas of Explosives” are not permissible carry-on items.

A real explosive, like pentaerythritol tetranitrate, though, is a different story — although, apparently, it is only permissible if you’ve traveled to Republic of Yemen a couple of times and your father has alerted U.S. authorities that you may be a jihadist.

Janet Napolitano, the homeland security director, now says that the bombing attempt by this — thankfully — incompetent terrorist was a failure of the nation’s entire aviation security system. The president has ordered a full review of the situation.

But if someone like Abdulmutallab can circumvent security, why are you being shaken down over a shampoo bottle?

As Bob Poole, director of transportation policy at Reason Foundation, recently wrote, this failure reflects the flawed thinking of aviation security policy, namely a fixation “on keeping bad things — as opposed to bad people — off of airplanes.” …

David Warren thinks this century might have started in the 1970′s.

… Not that even today we know everything that needs to be known about the 1970s; nor ever will, in this life. There is no journalist, and no historian, who can write in possession of “all the facts.”

Let us consider Watergate as a good, 1970s example of this. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we now know who did what to whom in the finest detail; and the fallout from it was always there for everyone to see. That Richard Nixon was brought down as president is an incontrovertible fact of history.

But to begin to understand the 1970s, we must further explain how this happened; must understand how a president who had almost certainly done fewer and lesser crooked tricky things behind the scenes than, say, the media-sainted John F. Kennedy — and who had certainly not stolen an election — could have been brought down.

I remember a “Bulletin de l’étranger” from Le Monde in those days — a perfectly leftist, anti-American paper with an indisputable abhorrence for Nixon — expressing an almost unconsciously amazed puzzlement at his resignation. To their “progressive” yet knowing view, no French president could ever have dreamed of resigning for such piddling offences, nor any French legislature dreamed that they could impeach him. What on earth was going on in America?

And then we had Gerald Ford as president. That was silly enough; but then we had Jimmy Carter. And through almost all of that decade, a prime minister up here named Pierre Trudeau. Believe it or not, these men were taken seriously. We can only begin to see what a strange era that was, only begin to appreciate the flakiness into which public life had descended, at this distance. …

Michael Barone says things are looking up in your economy … if you work for government.

It looks like a happy new year for you — if you’re a public employee.

That’s the takeaway from a recent Rasmussen poll that shows that 46 percent of government employees say the economy is getting better while just 31 percent say it’s getting worse. In contrast, 32 percent of those with private-sector jobs say the economy is getting better, while 49 percent it is getting worse.

Nearly half, 44 percent, of government employees rate their personal finances as good or excellent. Only 33 percent of private-sector employees do.

It sounds like public- and private-sector employees are looking at different Americas. And they are.

Private-sector employment peaked at 115.8 million in December 2007, when the recession officially began. It was down to 108.5 million last November. That’s a 6 percent decline.

Public-sector employment peaked at 22.6 million in August 2008. It fell a bit in 2009, then has rebounded back to 22.5 million in November. That’s less than a 1 percent decline. …

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Dave Barry is back with his end of the year review.

… land a US Airways flight safely in the Hudson River after it loses power shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia. Incredibly, all 155 people on board survive, although they are immediately taken hostage by Somali pirates. …

… The Academy Awards are a triumph for Slumdog Millionaire, which wins eight Oscars, only to have them stolen by Somali pirates.

… This will stimulate the economy by creating millions of jobs, according to estimates provided by the Congressional Estimating Office’s Magical Estimating 8-Ball. …

… In foreign affairs, former president Bill Clinton goes to North Korea to secure the release of two detained American journalists who purely by coincidence happen to be women. …

… But the big story in October, the story that grips the nation the way a dog grips a rancid squirrel, is the mesmerizing drama of a silver balloon racing through the blue skies above central Colorado, desperately pursued by police, aviation and rescue personnel who have been led to believe that the balloon contains O.J. Simpson.

No, that would have been great, but the authorities in fact have been led to believe that the balloon contains 6-year-old Falcon Heene, the son of exactly the kind of parents you would expect to name a child “Falcon.” …

… In sports, the New York Yankees, after an eight-year drought, purchase the World Series. But the month’s big sports story involves Tiger Woods, who, plagued by tabloid reports that he has been hiking the Appalachian trail with a nightclub hostess, is injured in a bizarre late-night incident near his Florida home when his SUV is attacked by golf-club-wielding Somali pirates. …

… The International Space Station is taken over by Somali pirates. …

Pickerhead had meant to keep today to David Barry and a cartoon review from Slate. But, events intrude. However, we will have nothing to do with any commentators who criticize the president for his vacation. The way he thinks, we’d be happy if he vacationed 50 weeks a year. Congress too.

We’ll have three serious items. Toby Harnden of the Daily Telegraph, UK, gives Obama an F for protecting Americans.

There is no more solemn duty for an American commander-in-chief than the marshalling of  “every element of our national power” – the phrase Obama himself used on Monday – to protect the people of the United States. In that key respect, Obama failed on Christmas Day, just as President George W. Bush failed on September 11th (though he succeeded in the seven years after that).

Yes, the buck stops in the Oval Office. Obama may have rather smugly given himself a “B+” for his 2009 performance but he gets an F for the events that led to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarding a Detroit-bound plane in Amsterdam with a PETN bomb sewn into his underpants.  He said today that a “systemic failure has occurred”. Well, he’s in charge of that system.

The picture we’re getting is more and more alarming by the hour. Here are some key elements to consider: …

And Dianne Ravitch in Politico takes the administration to task.

… In short, the Obama administration has woven a web of confusion, rhetoric, and illogic that will entangle it for years to come, as it attempts to defuse, de-escalate and minimize the terrorist threat. The reason this strategy is politically foolish is that the terrorist threat is real. It can’t be assuaged by words or dissipated by turning the other cheek. No matter what the president says, no matter how many civilian trials he promotes, the terrorists are not going away. Sooner or later, they will get lucky, they will bring down a jetliner or blow up a rail terminal, and the American people will be very angry. They will see the strategy of de-escalation not as wise but as dangerous. Appeasement didn’t work in the 1930s. It won’t work now.

Another column for us from Maureen Dowd? Did she let her brother write another? Nope! She is on the subject of Obama’s reactions to the Christmas Day bombing attempt. She closes with, “Heck of a job, Barry.”

… W.’s favorite word was “resolute,” but despite gazillions spent and Cheney’s bluster, our efforts to shield ourselves seemed flaccid.

President Obama’s favorite word is “unprecedented,” as Carol Lee of Politico pointed out. Yet he often seems mired in the past as well, letting his hallmark legislation get loaded up with old-school bribes and pork; surrounding himself with Clintonites; continuing the Bushies’ penchant for secrecy and expansive executive privilege; doubling down in Afghanistan while acting as though he’s getting out; and failing to capitalize on snazzy new technology while agencies thumb through printouts and continue their old turf battles.

Even before a Nigerian with Al Qaeda links tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines jet headed to Detroit, travelers could see we had made no progress toward a technologically wondrous Philip K. Dick universe.

We seemed to still be behind the curve and reactive, patting down grannies and 5-year-olds, confiscating snow globes and lip glosses.

Instead of modernity, we have airports where security is so retro that taking away pillows and blankies and bathroom breaks counts as a great leap forward. …

Slate picked 65 cartoons as their favorites for the year. We culled out 34.

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Nile Gardiner blogs in the Telegraph, UK, about Obama’s disappointing comments about the Iranian revolution.

…Obama made no direct challenge to the illegitimate authority of the Iranian government, and spoke of its actions “apparently resulting in injuries, detentions and even deaths.” He was careful not to use the word freedom in describing the ultimate goal of the protesters, nor did he name any of the people detained. There was no mention of any consequences for Iran’s rulers or a shift in US policy.

As Charles Krauthammer eloquently observed on Fox News last night (transcribed here at NRO’s The Corner), referring to the president’s less than convincing statement:

…He talks about aspirations. He talks about rights. He talks about justice in the statement he made. This isn’t about justice. It isn’t about a low minimum wage. This isn’t about an absence of a public option in health care. This is about freedom. This is a revolution in the streets.
Revolutions happen quickly. There is a moment here in which if the thugs in the street who are shooting in the crowds stop shooting, it’s over and the regime will fall. The courage of the demonstrators and their boldness isn’t only a demonstration of courage, it is an indication of the shift in the balance of power. The regime is weakening.

This is a hinge of history. Everything in the region will change if the regime is changed. Obama ought to be strong out there in saying: It is an illegitimate government. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the people in the street. He talks about diplomacy. He should be urging our Western allies who have relations [with Iran] to cut them off, isolate the regime, to ostracize it. He ought to be going in the U.N. — at every forum — and denouncing it. This is a moment in history, and he’s missing it. …

…If he is serious about the plight of the Iranian people, Barack Obama must have a Reagan moment, where he makes it clear that the United States stands shoulder to shoulder with the brave dissidents who are laying down their lives for freedom, and will do all in its power to help tear down the walls of oppression that enslave them. This is not an opportunity for more dithering and endless political calculation, but a time for real strength and leadership from the American President.

Tony Blankley discusses the reaction to Obama’s policies over the past year, including the emergence of the Tea party.

…But all is not solidity on the right. In one of the more remarkable entrances into American politics, the tea-party movement, which did not exist until spring, already has gained a second-place affiliation status in Scott Rasmussen’s poll last month: Democratic Party, 36 percent; tea party, 23 percent; Republican Party, 18 percent. …

…Keep in mind: They have no national leaders – no billionaire Ross Perot-type nor nationally admired Barry Goldwater-type. Of course, individuals are stepping up across the country to help organize, but they are the purest example of what Thomas Jefferson might have called an aroused yeomanry (back then, the small freeholders who cultivated their own land). They are a reaction (in the very best sense of the word) to the ongoing attempted power grab by Washington of a free people’s wealth and rights.

In the aftermath of the economic collapse and the election of a glamorous new, young president who seemed to many people as a fresh force, unentangled with entrenched special interests (emphatically not my view, during the election or afterward) – the country could have gone one of two ways: Fearing the rigors of economic hard times, people could have sought shelter under the wing of a stronger government (as Americans did during the Great Depression), or, fearing the power of government, they could seek shelter in freedom – come what may economically.
It may turn out to be one of the most important facts of the 21st century that the American people – as exemplified by, but not limited to, the tea-party fighters – came down on the side of freedom over fear. I don’t know if there is another people on the planet who would have had a similar impulse and judgment. …

Richard Epstein, in Forbes, responds to a New Yorker article from Atul Gawande which posits that the government can use the same interventions used in agricultural markets to support health care reform.

…Worse, by far, is how Gawande ignores the disastrous policy mistakes in the economic regulation of agricultural markets over the past 100 years. The standardization of agricultural commodities could have facilitated the rapid emergence of efficient competitive markets. Alas, the commoditization of agricultural goods allowed Congress to cartelize and subsidize the industry at the worst possible time.

Section 6 of the Clayton Act largely immunized agricultural cooperatives from the antitrust laws. When these broke down, the U.S. passed a string of Agricultural Adjustment Acts during the 1930s that allowed the U.S. to limit quantities for production in order to keep commodity prices at their high levels during the bounty years of 1910-14. “Excess crops” were often destroyed, put into storage facilities or sold off at bargain prices outside the U.S., even as the caloric consumption for welfare families in U.S. sunk to dangerously low levels during the dark days of the depression. At the same time, foreign agricultural economies were wrecked by the importation of subsidized U.S. goods. …

…These dreadful agricultural reforms are cut from the same cloth as the Democratic health care bill that will shortly become law. But Harry Reid’s hodgepodge legislation contains every gimmick imaginable to regulate the services sold and the prices charged in health care markets. As I have argued elsewhere, it is a disaster of constitutional proportions to run a system that pumps up the demand for health care services with huge subsidies only to strangle firms by closely regulating the services they must supply and limiting the profits that they can earn. Our lawmakers have learned all to well from their forays into agricultural markets. Far from encouraging Congress to tighten the noose on health care markets, Gawande should have urged a removal of many of the senseless barriers to entry that systematically impede the operation of health care markets. David Hyman and I have pushed hard on this libertarian approach, which tragically has fallen on deaf ears. All too predictable, given the spirit of the age.

Thomas Sowell clarifies Congress’ and Obama’s disregard of the will of the American people.

…What does calling this medical care legislation “historic” mean? It means that previous administrations gave up the idea when it became clear that the voting public did not want government control of medical care. What is “historic” is that this will be the first administration to show that it doesn’t care one bit what the public wants or doesn’t want.

In short, this is not about the public’s health. It is about Obama’s ego and his chance to impose his will and leave a legacy.

…Legislation is not the only sign of this administration’s contempt for the intelligence of the public and for the safeguards of democratic government.

The appointment of White House “czars” to make policy across a wide spectrum of issues — unknown people who get around the Constitution’s requirement of Senate confirmation for Cabinet members — is yet another sign of the mindset that sees the fundamental laws and values of this country as just something to get around, in order to impose the will of an arrogant elite.

That some of these “czars” have already revealed their own contempt for the values of American society in the things they have said and done only reinforces the point. In a sense, this administration is only the end result of a long social process that includes raising successive generations with dumbed-down education in schools and colleges that have become indoctrination centers for the visions of the left. Our education system has turned out many people who have never heard any other vision and who can only learn what is wrong with the prevailing vision from bitter experience. …

Maureen Dowd gives her column over to her brother, Kevin, for a Christmas present to all conservatives.

…Here are some reflections for 2009:

To President Obama: Thank you for saving the Republican Party and for teaching all of us that too much of anything is a bad thing.

To Bill Clinton: You did too much work on Northern Ireland for the Nobel committee. Next time, do nothing.

To Harry and Nancy: “The Twilight Zone” once had an episode where the town got the exact opposite of what it wanted. Farewell, Harry!

To John McCain: Thank you for your chivalry in banning Palin attack dogs — including my sister — from the campaign plane.

To Sarah Palin: Keep up the good work. Anyone who annoys Keith Olbermann that much is a friend to all of us.

To Glenn Beck: Thanks for being the only journalist interested in stories that used to win Pulitzer Prizes. …

Ed Koch responds to Jimmy Carter’s letter to the Jewish community asking for forgiveness.

Former President Jimmy Carter recently sent a letter to the JTA, which is a wire service for Jewish newspapers. The letter was made public by the JTA on December 21st, along with the following statement:

“Jimmy Carter asked the Jewish community for forgiveness for any stigma he may have caused Israel. In a letter released exclusively to JTA, the former U.S. president sent a seasonal message wishing for peace between Israel and its neighbors, and concluded: ‘We must recognize Israel’s achievements under difficult circumstances, even as we strive in a positive way to help Israel continue to improve its relations with its Arab populations, but we must not permit criticisms for improvement to stigmatize Israel. As I would have noted at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but which is appropriate at any time of the year, I offer an Al Het for any words or deeds of mine that may have done so.’ ‘Al Het’ refers to the Yom Kippur prayer asking G-d forgiveness for sins committed against Him. In modern Hebrew it refers to any plea for forgiveness. Carter has angered some U.S. Jews in recent years with writings and statements that place the burden of peacemaking on Israel, that have likened Israel’s settlement policies to apartheid, and that have blamed the pro-Israel lobby for inhibiting an evenhanded U.S. foreign policy.”

Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, a leading advocate for the Jewish community, responded as follows: “We welcome any statement from a significant individual such as a former president who asks for Al Het. To what extent it is an epiphany, time will tell. There certainly is hurt which needs to be repaired.”

Having known Jimmy Carter when I was a Congressman and Mayor, I have a minimum of high regard for him. I believe that he has often used his position — most recently as a writer of books – to damage the State of Israel, and in doing so, he has injured the Jewish community worldwide. …

…My advice to Jimmy Carter is to come clean. I believe that we Jews are a forgiving people, but we are also a people who, having been brutalized through the centuries, are suspicious of those who at the end of their lives wish to make amends but have not demonstrated any repentance. What does President Carter intend to do with the balance of his life to remedy the harm and injury to the Jewish people that he has inflicted over the years?

Gerald Warner blogs in the Telegraph, UK, about political correctness that has run amuck once again.

Some help, please, for the latest victim of cretinous municipal politically correct tyranny. John Sayers, aged 75, is the bingo caller at a weekly charity event at Sudbury town hall in Suffolk. Now council officials have told Mr Sayers, a former mayor of Sudbury, that terms such as “Legs Eleven” are sexist, and “Two Fat Ladies” could offend obese players and these phrases have been banned, for fear of litigation.

So Mr Sayers now just calls the numbers by themselves, which players are denouncing as “boring”. Clearly, a new lexicon of politically correct bingo calls will have to be produced. We could start the ball rolling with “88 – crime of hate”; “Number 10 – Gordon’s Den”; “Number 2 – civil duo”; “47 – Aneurin Bevan”; “62 – for the many, not the few”… And so, tediously, on.

There is now no area of life, however trivial or frivolous, that is not controlled by the Thought Police. And whose fault is that? Ours, of course. Our fault for not snuffing out this tyrannical nonsense at its first manifestation. Our fault for submitting to it. Our fault for voting for any of the mainstream political parties, all of which subscribe to this madness. Our fault for not ejecting from office the jobsworths who enforce it. Our fault for tolerating the legislative busybodies in the House of Commons. First New Year resolution for 2010: Make Political Correctness History.

Richard Brookhiser reflects on the bagpipe after a recent encounter on a New York City street.

…The piper has taken up his position in the direction I am going anyway, but my steps quicken, as they always do when I hear a bagpipe. When I draw alongside him, I can’t see much. His legs are trousered (too cold for a kilt). If he has an open instrument case — immemorial stimulus fund of New York City street musicians — on the pavement in front of him, it is hidden in the shadows. He displays no sign (not that you could read one) and he is too busy blowing to make any pitch. So, within the limits of the urban cheek-by-jowl, he respects my privacy, and I do the same, hanging back to listen with the decorum and the thrill of a voyeur.

I have heard him a few times before, and I will hear him again after tonight, though when I have seen him in the light I realize he is multiple: one time he was a young man; on other occasions, he is pepper and salt, with a beard. Whatever his age, he plays a traditional Highland pipe. With the blowpipe in his mouth he fills the bag; the air he squeezes from the bag with his arm exits by four pipes, which make the music: three pipes above the bag like a marlin’s fin, two short (the tenor drones), one long (the bass drone); one pipe (the chanter) hanging from below, like an artificial teat. Fingers on the chanter pick out the melody; the drones produce the hypnotizing hum.

Bagpipe melodies have lots of tweedle-dee, imposed in part by the mechanism itself: Since the air leaves the bag in a steady stream, it is impossible to repeat a note without intervening grace notes. So even marches take on the swing of jigs. What stirs my innards is the drone. The drone turns a lone piper into an army. It adds distance to the sound, and therefore motion: We are coming. It also adds time, and therefore pathos: We have been here; you have heard us. …

Click here to hear the pipes.

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WSJ takes a look at the war on drugs and Mexico.

In the 40 years since U.S. President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” the supply and use of drugs has not changed in any fundamental way. The only difference: a taxpayer bill of more than $1 trillion.

A senior Mexican official who has spent more than two decades helping fight the government’s war on drugs summed up recently what he’s learned from his long career: “This war is not winnable.” …

Christopher Hitchens wonders what new travel horror the public safety goobers are going to dream up for us.

It’s getting to the point where the twin news stories more or less write themselves. No sooner is the fanatical and homicidal Muslim arrested than it turns out that he (it won’t be long until it is also she) has been known to the authorities for a long time. But somehow the watch list, the tipoff, the many worried reports from colleagues and relatives, the placing of the name on a “central repository of information” don’t prevent the suspect from boarding a plane, changing planes, or bringing whatever he cares to bring onto a plane. This is now a tradition that stretches back to several of the murderers who boarded civilian aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001, having called attention to themselves by either a) being on watch lists already or b) weird behavior at heartland American flight schools. They didn’t even bother to change their names.

So that’s now more or less the routine for the guilty. (I am not making any presumption of innocence concerning Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.) But flick your eye across the page, or down it, and you will instantly see a different imperative for the innocent. …

Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff posts twice on the problems Obama has communicating with his generals.

… Lawyers sometimes write deliberately ambiguous passages. Their purpose is to avoid being pinned.

This may well be Obama’s purpose when it comes to Afghanistan. Like many politicians, Obama likes to tell people what they want to hear. Constituencies important to Obama want to hear divergent things about Afghanistan. His base wants to hear, at a minimum, that we will be out of that country soon. A critical mass of mainstream voters wants to hear that he we won’t be there for a lengthy period of time. The military wants to hear that we will fight to win.

After Obama’s West Point speech announcing that some sort of a drawdown would begin no later than July 2010, various administration officials articulated (in some cases through leaks) various glosses on the speech that seemed designed to placate the various constituencies mentioned above. I assumed that Obama was responsible for the resulting ambiguity, which not only appeases competing viewpoints but leaves him with flexibility as July 2010 approaches.

I did not assume that the competing pronouncements about what will happen in July 2010 (and what will dictate what happens then) were standing in the way of clear instructions to the military about how to fight in Afghanistan now. Yet, the Washington Post’s reporting indicates that this has, in fact, become a problem.

If so, it is is inexcusable. It is one thing (though not desirable) for a president to confuse the public; it’s another thing for a president to confuse his generals. One cannot wordsmith one’s way around the difficult decisions associated with conducting a war. I suspect only a lawyer would think of trying.

John Steele Gordon in Contentions tips us to Michael Barone’s piece on population shifts.

The Census Bureau has come out with its annual state-by-state head count and it makes for interesting reading. There is no one better than Michael Barone at the art of looking at numbers and bringing them to life. He notes that Texas had the highest population gain (and third highest in percentage terms) and thinks he knows why: …

And here’s Mr. Barone. He thinks the big winner is Texas.

… No. 3 in percentage population growth in 2008-09 was giant Texas, the nation’s second-most-populous state. Its population grew by almost half a million and accounted for 18 percent of the nation’s total population growth. Texas had above-average immigrant growth, but domestic in-migration was nearly twice as high.

There may be lessons for public policy here. Texas over the decades has had low taxes (and no state income tax), low public spending and regulations that encourage job growth. It didn’t have much of a housing bubble or a housing price bust.

Under Govs. George W. Bush and Rick Perry, it has placed tight limits on tort lawsuits and has seen an influx of both corporate headquarters and medical doctors.

Bush’s late job ratings may have been low, and Perry may be a wine that doesn’t travel. But their approach to governing may not be lost even in Washington.

Polidata Inc. projects from the 2009 estimates that the reapportionment following the 2010 Census will produce four new House seats for Texas, one for Florida, Arizona, Utah and Nevada, and none for California for the first time since 1850. Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Illinois are projected to lose one each and Ohio two. Americans have been moving, even in recession, away from Democratic strongholds and toward Republican turf.

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Roger Simon wonders how Janet Napolitano keeps her job.

… But perhaps you are a perfect match for our reactionary narcissist president who continues to say not a word as the brave demonstrators in Iran again risk their lives to overcome their brutal Islamic regime. What’s interesting about Obama and Napolitano is that they pretend to be “progressive,” but they are actually heartless.

Nile Gardiner asks in his Telegraph blog, ‘where’s Obama when the protesters in Iran need him.’

… once again huge street protests have flared up on the streets of Tehran and a number of other major cities, with several protesters shot dead this weekend by the security forces and Revolutionary Guards, reportedly including the nephew of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, and dozens seriously injured. And again there is deafening silence from the Commander-in-Chief as well as his Secretary of State. And where is the president? On vacation in Hawaii, no doubt recuperating from his exertions driving forward the monstrous health care reform bill against the overwhelming will of the American public and without a shred of bipartisan support.

This is not however a time for fence-sitting by the leader of the free world. The president should be leading international condemnation of the suppression of pro-democracy protesters, and calling on the Iranian dictatorship to free the thousands of political dissidents held in its torture chambers. Just as Ronald Reagan confronted the evils of Soviet Communism, Barack Obama should support the aspirations of the Iranian people to be free. The United States has a major role to play in inspiring and advancing freedom in Iran, and the president should make it clear that the American people are on the side of those brave Iranians who are laying down their lives for liberty in the face of tyranny.

John Fund knows why the Obami don’t want us to see the health care bill.

… It’s no wonder Congress and the White House are so determined to hide their handiwork from the public while the House and Senate versions are “reconciled.” President Obama has said the negotiations will take place in the West Wing and he will be actively involved. But when ABC’s Jake Tapper asked White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about the president’s campaign pledge to “have the [health care] negotiations televised on C-SPAN,” Mr. Gibbs dodged the question and took refuge in his talking points, insisting that voters already “have a pretty good sense of who is battling on behalf of thousands of lobbyists that are trying to protect drugs profits and insurance profits, and who’s fighting on behalf of middle-class Americans.”

In other words, no one in the White House wants the public to be looking on as this Frankenstein monster is finally stitched together.

Mark Steyn columns on climate fads.

… As I always say, if you’re 30 there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school after a lifetime of eco-brainwashing, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. None. After the leaked data from East Anglia revealed that Dr. Phil Jones (privately) conceded this point, Tim Flannery, one of the A-list warm-mongers in Copenhagen, owned up to it on Aussie TV, too. Yet, when I reprised the line in this space a couple of weeks back, thinking it was now safe for polite society, I was besieged by the usual “YOU LIE!!!!!!!” emails angrily denouncing me for failing to explain that the cooling trend of the oughts is in fact merely a blip in the long-term warming trend of the nineties.

Well, maybe. Then again, perhaps the warming trend of the nineties is merely a blip in the long-term ice age trend of the early seventies. I doubt many of my caps-lock emailers are aware of the formerly imminent ice age. It was in Newsweek and the New York Times, and it produced the occasional bestseller. But, unlike today’s carbon panic, it wasn’t everywhere; it wasn’t, in every sense, the air that we breathe. Unlike Al Gore’s wretched movie, it wasn’t taught in schools. TV networks did not broadcast during children’s time apocalyptic public service announcements that in any other circumstance would constitute child abuse. Unlike today, where incoming mayors announce that as their ?rst act in office they’re banning bottled water from council meetings, ostentatious displays of piety were not ubiquitous. It was not a universal pretext for recoiling from progress: back in the seventies, upscale municipalities that now obsess about emissions standards of hot-air dryers were busy banning garden clotheslines on aesthetic grounds. There were no fortunes to be made from government grants for bogus “renewable energy” projects. Unlike Al Gore, carbon billionaire, nobody got rich peddling ice offsets. …

A couple of days ago we featured a piece from The Nation by Alexander Cockburn. It was an item from a left publication acknowledging the importance of the climategate revelations. Jonathan Tobin posts on that extraordinary event in Contentions.

There are some people who are so odious that when you find yourself on the same side of an issue with them, your first instinct must be to question whether you were right in the first place. Alexander Cockburn is certainly such a person. He is a rabid leftist, apologist for totalitarians and a vicious hater of Israel. From his perch as editor of his own rag CounterPunch and as a columnist for the Nation, he has spewed forth nonsense and bile for a long time. But like the proverbial blind squirrel, it appears as though even Cockburn is capable of finding an acorn. That is the only way to explain the utterly rational and completely on-target attack on the Copenhagen Global Warming jamboree and the entire Climategate cover-up that he has written for the Nation and which can be read for free at RealClearPolitics.com. …

Michael Barone wrote on the similarity between the recent Senate battle for health care and the one fought in 1854 for the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Turns out a blogger had made the comparison a few days before him, so Barone pays obeisance in another post. Of course, we have that blog post from Streetwise Professor. The three items are a good history lesson.

It’s time to blow the whistle on two erroneous statements that opponents and proponents of the health care legislation being jammed through Congress have been making. Republicans have been saying that never before has Congress passed such an unpopular bill with such important ramifications by such a narrow majority. Barack Obama has been saying that passage of the bill will mean that the health care issue will be settled once and for all.

The Republicans and Obama are both wrong. But perhaps they can be forgiven because the precedent for Congress passing an unpopular bill is an old one, and the issue it addressed has long been settled, though not by the legislation in question.

That legislation was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Its lead sponsor was Stephen A. Douglas, at 41 in his eighth year as senator from Illinois, the most dynamic leader of a Democratic Party that had won the previous presidential election by 254 electoral votes to 42. …

Here’s Barone’s second post.

I thought my comparison of Democratic health care legislation with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 in my Wednesday Examiner column was an original idea. After all, even David Broder and Lou Cannon weren’t around to cover Stephen Douglas’s brilliant floor managing of this disastrous legislation. But fewer of our ideas are original than we suppose. Blogger Streetwise Professor, who in non-blog life is Craig Pirrong, a professor at the University of Houston’s Bauer College of Business. …

And, introducing … The Streetwise Professor as he tries to find something to compare to the Senate bill.

… I struggle to find a historical parallel.  The closest thing that comes to mind is the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.  Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas was fixated on the creation of a transcontinental railroad.  Southern senators blocked the advancement of Douglas’s dream, so he proposed a bill that, to gain Southern support, completely undermined the careful (and yes, imperfect) compromises over slavery and the territories that had been crafted in the previous two generations (extending back to the Missouri Compromise of 1820).  In so doing, he set in motion a train of events (no pun intended) that culminated in the Civil War.

Perhaps you consider the parallel hyperbolic.  And no, I am not forecasting civil war.  But if this bill, or anything close to it, passes, the results will convulse the country.  The fault lines will not be sectional, as they were in the 1850s, but generational and socio-economic.  And perhaps the most important fault line will be between citizen and state as it will completely revolutionize the relationship between the government and the governed. …

WSJ has an interview with Robert Morgenthau.

In the criminal justice system, the people of Manhattan have been represented for 35 years by New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. This is his story.

Mr. Morgenthau, who inspired the original D.A. character on the television program “Law and Order,” will retire on Thursday at age 90. Much of the barely fictitious drama is set in his office in Manhattan’s Criminal Courts Building. This week, amid half-filled boxes and scattered personal mementos, he sat down to discuss his life’s work.

Even though he knows I’m wearing a wire—actually an audio recorder placed on the table between us—America’s D.A. speaks candidly, including about his public blowups with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Mr. Morgenthau says this is the first mayor he hasn’t gotten along with, and that the relationship went south when his office started investigating the city’s role in the death of two of New York’s bravest in an August, 2007 fire. Among other mistakes, city inspectors had failed to note that the water had been turned off at the old Deutsche Bank building opposite Ground Zero. The blaze resulted in 33 “mayday” calls from firefighters, and the D.A. is amazed that only two lost their lives.

Mr. Morgenthau soon got a call from a city lawyer telling him that “the mayor wanted me to tell you that he’s surprised that you’re looking at the Deutsche Bank case.” Mr. Morgenthau says he told the mayor’s minion, “You tell the mayor that I’m surprised that he’s surprised.”

Why would the mayor encourage such a call? Because, says Mr. Morgenthau, Mr. Bloomberg “thinks all lawyers work for him” and “doesn’t want anybody around who doesn’t kiss his ring, or other parts of his body.” …

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A topical note from Mark Steyn concerning the failed Christmas Day bomber in Detroit.

… So once again we see the foolishness of complaceniks who drone the fatuous clichés about how “in this struggle, scholarships will be far more important than smart bombs“. The men eager to self-detonate on infidel airliners are not goatherds from the caves of Waziristan but educated middle-class Muslims who have had the most exposure to the western world and could be pulling down six-figure salaries almost anywhere on the planet. And don’t look to “assimilation” to work its magic, either. We’re witnessing a process of generational de-assimilation: In this family, yet again, the dad is an entirely assimilated member of the transnational elite. His son wants a global caliphate run on Wahhabist lines.

Jennifer Rubin follows on the story of the Nigerian terrorist trained in Yemen.

… reality is complicating the Obama administration’s war on terror policies. It must be maddening to the Obami that they are presented once again with inconvenient evidence that their insistence on emptying Guantanamo of dangerous people is mind-bogglingly inane. …

Charles Krauthammer says, as regards Iran …

… We lost a year. But it was not just any year. It was a year of spectacularly squandered opportunity. In Iran, it was a year of revolution, beginning with a contested election and culminating this week in huge demonstrations mourning the death of the dissident Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri — and demanding no longer a recount of the stolen election but the overthrow of the clerical dictatorship.

Obama responded by distancing himself from this new birth of freedom. First, scandalous silence. Then, a few grudging words. Then relentless engagement with the murderous regime. With offer after offer, gesture after gesture — to not Iran, but the “Islamic Republic of Iran,” as Obama ever so respectfully called these clerical fascists — the United States conferred legitimacy on a regime desperate to regain it.

Why is this so important? Because revolutions succeed at that singular moment, that imperceptible historical inflection, when the people, and particularly those in power, realize that the regime has lost the mandate of heaven. With this weakening dictatorship desperate for affirmation, why is the United States repeatedly offering just such affirmation? …

Jennifer Rubin agrees.

… Because the policy of engagement is so nonsensical one is left wondering whether the end game is and has always been some form of  “nuclear containment,” which is itself quite preposterous when it comes to a revolutionary Islamic state that has already announced its regional aspirations (including the elimination of the Jewish state) and compiled a track record of terror sponsorship. But it does explain the Obami’s effort to be inoffensive, talk down military options, and defer sanctions until the time line on halting the mullahs’ nuclear program collapses on itself. (Too late!)

These two explanations are, of course, not mutually exclusive. The Obami’s may have thought they’d give engagement their best shot, with the “back up” plan of learning to live with a nuclear-armed Iran. (Do you feel safer yet?) Regardless, we are in a far worse position at the end of 2009 because we were practicing engagement at the exact moment we should have been pressing for regime change. It was a colossal misjudgment, one which will be viewed, I suspect, (along with the decision to give KSM a civilian trial) as among the worst national-security calls by any president.

Mark Steyn warns what is in store for us in ObamaCare.

Last week, during a bit of banter on Fox News, my colleague Jonah Goldberg reminded me of something I’d all but forgotten. Last September, during his address to Congress on health care, Barack Obama declared:

“I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.”

Dream on. The monstrous mountain of toxic pustules sprouting from greasy boils metastasizing from malign carbuncles that passed the Senate on Christmas Eve is not the last word in “health” “care” but the first. It ensures that this is all we’ll be talking about, now and forever.

Government can’t just annex “one-sixth of the US economy” (ie, the equivalent of annexing the entire British or French economy, or annexing the entire Indian economy twice over) and then just say: “Okay, what’s next? On to cap-and-trade…” Nations that governmentalize health care soon find themselves talking about little else.

In Canada, once the wait times for MRIs and hip surgery start creeping up over two years, the government distracts the citizenry with a Royal Commission appointed to study possible “reforms” which reports back a couple of years later usually with recommendations to “strengthen” the government’s “commitment” to every Canadian’s “right” to health care by renaming the Department of Health the Department of Health Services and abolishing the Agency of Health Administration and replacing it with a new Agency of Administrative Health Operations which would report to a reformed Council of Health Policy Administrative Coordination to be supervised by a streamlined Public Health Operations & Administration Assessment Bureau. This package of “reforms” would cost a mere 12.3 gazillion dollars and usually keeps the lid on the pot until the wait times for MRIs start creeping up over three years. …

Peter Schiff has similar thoughts.

As business owners undergo the yearly ritual of passing through eye-popping health insurance premium increases to their employees, it’s easy to understand why any attempt at health insurance reform would be met with some degree of hope. Unfortunately, President Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress are about to take a very bad system and make it unimaginably worse.

While ramming their new legislation through Congress, the Democrats have taken great pains to point out that they do not intend to “socialize medicine.” But make no mistake, that’s where we’re headed. Even if some naïve centrists believe that their efforts have denied the Left a total victory, the practical implications of the current legislation sow the seeds for complete capitulation. …

Some of the grownups in the Dem party are getting the message. Bill Daley, brother to the mayor, and former Clinton Commerce Secretary says it is time to trim their far-left sails.

… All that is required for the Democratic Party to recover its political footing is to acknowledge that the agenda of the party’s most liberal supporters has not won the support of a majority of Americans — and, based on that recognition, to steer a more moderate course on the key issues of the day, from health care to the economy to the environment to Afghanistan.

For liberals to accept that inescapable reality is not to concede permanent defeat. Rather, let them take it as a sign that they must continue the hard work of slowly and steadily persuading their fellow citizens to embrace their perspective. In the meantime, liberals — and, indeed, all of us — should have the humility to recognize that there is no monopoly on good ideas, as well as the long-term perspective to know that intraparty warfare will only relegate the Democrats to minority status, which would be disastrous for the very constituents they seek to represent.

The party’s moment of choosing is drawing close. While it may be too late to avoid some losses in 2010, it is not too late to avoid the kind of rout that redraws the political map. The leaders of the Democratic Party need to move back toward the center — and in doing so, set the stage for the many years’ worth of leadership necessary to produce the sort of pragmatic change the American people actually want.

Jennifer Rubin makes the same point less obtusely.

… And if the Democrats refuse to heed the voters and their own nervous members? Then we will have a major course correction on Election Day 2010. It is now conceivable that the House may fall back into Republican hands and that the Democrats will lose their filibuster-proof majority. And that will be the end of the untrammeled experiment in Obamaism, which can loosely be described as the endeavor to campaign as a moderate and race as far Left as possible until the voters notice.

We will see in 2010 whether the Democrats pull back from that precipice, or whether the voters shove a good number of them over it. Either way, 2010 will be the beginning of a new phase in the Obama presidency. Polls indicate that the public will be relieved, whether that new beginning comes from a voluntary course adjustment or a tidal wave election.

Reiha Salam, in Forbes, provides a review, of sorts, of James Cameron’s new movie Avatar.

… In a sense, capitalism is the villain of Avatar. Yet what Cameron fails to understand is that capitalism represents a far more noble and heroic way of life than that led by the Na’vi. As Abraham Lincoln noted in 1858, the unique thing about the industrial revolution wasn’t that humans invented steam-power and other ingenious inventions. In fact, a steam engine was manufactured in ancient Alexandria without ever being used. But that society didn’t value the invention and spread of labor-saving devices. Instead, it valued physical courage and martial valor. The truly revolutionary thing about the industrial revolution was the rise of entrepreneurship. An entrepreneurial society doesn’t value the ability to murder mammoths or members of the neighboring tribe above all else. It values the ability to develop useful ideas and devices and practices that had never been seen before. …

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A couple of items on global warming. First Debra Saunders.

… — Enough with the worst-case scenarios. Al Gore has a penchant for repeating the most dire predictions on global warming – and not always accurately. As the Times of London reported last week, Gore told a Copenhagen audience, that according to a Dr. Wieslaw Maslowski, “there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

Except Maslowski told the Times he had no idea where Gore got that idea. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Polls show Americans are cooling on global warming. It could be that voters don’t buy into the all-bad scenarios predicted by Gore and company.

More surprising than Saunders, is a piece by Alexander Cockburn in The Nation, one of the most obnoxiously liberal magazines in the country.

The global warming jamboree in Copenhagen was surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasizing since the fourth-century Christian bishops assembled in 325 AD for the Council of Nicaea to debate whether God the Father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and the Holy Ghost.

Shortly before the Copenhagen summit the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the web more than a thousand e-mails either sent from or received at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, headed by Dr. Phil Jones. The CRU was founded in 1971 with funding from sources including Shell and British Petroleum. Coolers transmuted into Warmers, and it became one of the climate-modeling grant mills supplying tainted data from which the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concocted its reports.

Deceitful manipulation of data, concealment or straightforward destruction of inconvenient evidence, vindictive conspiracies to silence critics, are par for the course in all scientific debate. But in displaying all these characteristics the CRU e-mails graphically undermine the claim of the Warmers that they command the moral as well as scientific high ground. It has been a standard ploy of the Warmers to revile the skeptics as whores of the energy industry, swaddled in munificent grants and with large personal stakes in discrediting AGW. Actually, the precise opposite is true. Billions in funding and research grants sluice into the big climate-modeling enterprises and a vast archipelago of research departments and “institutes of climate change” across academia. It’s where the money is. Skepticism, particularly for a young climatologist or atmospheric physicist, can be a career breaker. …

Spengler covers events in Central and South Asia.

History speaks of a Pax Romana, a Pax Britannica, and a Pax Americana – but no other namable eras of sustained peace, for the simple reason cited by Henry Kissinger: nothing maintains peace except hegemony and the balance of power. The balancing act always fails, though, as it did in Europe in 1914, and as it will in Central and South Asia precisely a century later. The result will be suppurating instability in the region during the next two years and a slow but deadly drift toward great-power animosity. Those who wanted an end to US hegemony will get what they wished for. But they won’t like it.

“No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation,” US President Barack Obama told the United Nations on September 23. “No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold.” Having renounced hegemony as well as the balance of power, Obama by year-end chose to prop up the power balance in the region with additional American and allied soldiers in Afghanistan. Obama chose the least popular as well as the least effective alternative. The US president’s apparent fecklessness reflects the gravity of the strategic problems in the region.

There is one great parallel, but also one great difference, between the Balkans on the eve of World War I and the witch’s cauldron comprising Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and contiguous territory. The failure of the region’s most populous state – in that case the Ottoman Empire, in this case Pakistan – makes shambles out of the power balance, leaving the initiative in the hands of irredentist radicals who threaten to tug their sponsors among the great powers along behind them. But in 1914, both France and Germany thought it more advantageous to fight sooner rather than later. No matter how great the provocation, both India and China want to postpone any major conflict. The problem is that they may promote minor ones. …

… The Obama administration has antagonized India in the hope of mollifying Pakistani irredentism, just as it has antagonized Israel with the dubious argument that if Israel makes concessions to the divided, ineffectual Palestine Authority, it will be able to mollify Iran. Nothing will assuage the Palestinians, who are failed before coming a state, nor the Pakistanis, whose failure is ineluctable.

As I argued in Asia Times Online on October 20 (When the cat’s away, the mice kill each other), the net effect of America’s fecklessness is to give the Russian Empire an opportunity to stretch a hand out of the geopolitical grave and grasp a last, great opportunity. Russia faces a slow demographic death, but it remains a great power in terms of military technology: its surface-to-air missile systems are as good as anything American can field, and its newest system, the as yet undeployed S-500, may be better, according to a senior American aviation executive. …

Christopher Hitchens draws our attention to South Central Asia also.

… This will continue to get nastier and more corrupt and degrading until we recognize that our long-term ally in Asia is not Pakistan but India. And India is not a country sizzling with self-pity and self-loathing, because it was never one of our colonies or clients. We don’t have to send New Delhi 15 different envoys a month, partly to placate and partly to hector, because the relationship with India isn’t based on hysteria and envy. Alas, though, we send hardly any envoys at all to the world’s largest secular and multicultural democracy, and the country itself gets mentioned only as an afterthought. Nothing will change until this changes.

One reason the Pakistani army coddles the Taliban in Afghanistan is because it has recently been told that the United States will not be deploying there in strength for very much longer. Who can blame them for basing their future plans on this supposition and continuing to dig in for a war with India that we are helping them to prepare for? Meanwhile, though, it is the Afghans who get the lectures about how they need to shape up. “Lots of luck in your senior year” was the breezy way in which the vice president phrased his message to Kabul as I watched. (I wonder how that translates into Pushtun.) Speed the day when the Pakistanis are publicly addressed in the same tones and told that the support they so much despise is finally being withdrawn.

Jimmy Carter’s grandson is running for state legislative office in Georgia. The district encompasses many Jews. Jimmy is now making nice to them. Is there anybody more disgusting than him? Jonah Goldberg has the story in a Corner post.

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In the WSJ, Julia Vitullo writes about Kings College Chapel at Cambridge and some of its surprising features.

Praised by the poet William Wordsworth in 1820 as “this immense and glorious work of fine intelligence,” King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, England, is the product of an extraordinary combination of royal commitment, turbulent religious politics, violent civil wars, vicious labor disputes, superb medieval craftsmanship, and engineering that has never been replicated and is still not fully understood today. The historian Francis Woodman, author of “The Architectural History of King’s College Chapel,” calls it “the English building of the late Middle Ages, every element capturing the artistic and political revolution of its time.”

The chapel is indeed immense, with an outside measurement of 310 feet from turret to turret, each of which is 146 feet high. The interior—289 feet long and 40 feet wide—is dominated by the celebrated fan vault ceiling, whose equidistantly spaced curved ribs radiate up and away, forming a series of huge half cones. The largest fan vault in the world and estimated to weigh 1,875 tons, it is “an unfathomable piece of beautiful technology,” Mr. Woodman says. Modern engineers have not been able to work out how the master-mason John Wastell put the fan vault into place, though Mr. Woodman says “we know he built it from the top down.” Wordsworth poetically described the engineering feat as “that branching roof self-poised.”

Each side of the chapel has 12 large stained-glass windows that are said to constitute, along with the eastern window of Golgotha, the most important collection of pre-Reformation windows in Britain, often prompting the question of why they were not destroyed by Oliver Cromwell’s men in the 1640s. The presence of defaced porcelain saints, decapitated statues and erased brasses makes it clear that the Iconoclasts had indeed been through. But then, perhaps survival of the windows is not surprising, since the chapel had itself been conceived in the midst of dynastic struggles and blood-thirsty conflicts, says Carola Hicks, author of “The King’s Glass: A Study of Tudor Power and Secret Art.” …

John Bolton tells us why Dick Cheney is the Human Events’ Conservative of the Year.

…How is it, therefore, that someone who has no political ambitions can cause so much angst at the White House and in the mainstream news media? The irrefutable answer is that what Cheney is saying, primarily on foreign policy, defense and anti-terrorism, makes sense to more and more American citizens growing increasingly worried by the Obama Administration’s insouciance when U.S. national interests are threatened, both at home and abroad. Since the only real, long-term way to deal with persuasive positions on substantive policy matters is to refute them with sounder policy arguments, it is not hard to understand why the Obama White House is near panic. Where are they going to go to find a better policy inside his administration? …

…Perhaps most importantly of all, Cheney knows that the personal attacks on him, as offensive as they are, in reality constitute stark evidence that Obama and his supporters are simply unable to match him in the substantive policy debate. An old lawyers’ cliché says: “If the law is against you, pound on the facts; if the facts are against you, pound on the law; if the law and the facts are against you, pound on the table.” Obama and his supporters are doing the political equivalent of continuous table-pounding, because that’s basically all they have to offer. Cheney’s unwillingness to be deterred by the media assaults on his character, his judgment and his performance in office are therefore his most impressive force multiplier with the general public. Outside-the-Beltway Americans see him for exactly what he is: a very experienced, very dedicated patriot, giving his fellow citizens his best analysis on how to keep them and their country safe.

Cheney’s quiet, inner-directed motivation is simply impervious to the attacks orchestrated against him by the Chicago machine-style politicians at the White House, a fact also plainly visible to his fellow citizens. And it is yet another important reason to have confidence that Cheney’s solid policy analysis will yet prevail in the national political arena. Of course he is the conservative of the year!

While we’re watching ObamaCare, the administration is weakening our country elsewhere too.  Andy McCarthy provides details on some of the Gitmo detainees release to Yemen, Afghanistan and Somaliland. Makes you yearn for Cheney.

… At least one of the released terrorists, a Somali named Abdullahi Sudi Arale (aka Ismail Mahmoud Muhammad), was released notwithstanding the military’s designation of him as a “high-value detainee” (a label that has been applied only to top-tier terrorist prisoners — and one that fits in this case given Arale’s status as a point of contact between al-Qaeda’s satellites in East Africa and Pakistan).

And then there is the appearance of impropriety. As Tom Joscelyn explains, the Justice Department has taken the lead role in making release determinations — the military command at Gitmo has “zero input” and “zero influence,” in its own words. DOJ is rife with attorneys who represented and advocated for the detainees, and, in particular, Attorney General Holder’s firm, represented numerous Yemeni enemy combatants. Does Justice not appreciate not only how perilous but how unseemly it appears under the circumstances for it to be leading the charge to release the Yemeni detainees? And could anyone really believe that the supposedly noxious symbolism of Gitmo is more dangerous to Americans than is deporting terrorists to the places where terrorism thrives?

John Stossel gives us the lowdown on the pork the Senate leadership had to hand out to buy the votes they needed for Obamacare.

So, how exactly did Senate leadership persuade the few remaining Democrats who were dragging their heels? By appealing to their principles, of course. FoxNews.com reports:

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., won between $100 million and $300 million in additional federal aid for her state’s Medicaid population. The deal, secured before she cast her critical vote in favor of bringing the health bill to the floor, was immediately dubbed the “Louisiana Purchase,”  though the actual Louisiana Purchase was considerably cheaper.

… Florida, New York and Pennsylvania — where five of six senators are Democrats — will have their seniors’ Medicare Advantage benefits protected, even as the program sees massive cuts elsewhere.

… Nebraska’s [Sen. Ben Nelson] won permanent federal aid for his state’s expanded Medicaid population, a benefit worth up to $100 million over 10 years. Other states get the federal aid for three years, but Nebraska’s benefit is indefinite.

If the health care bill were really about life and death, it wouldn’t take earmarks to get votes. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on the political partisanship that has characterized the making of Obamacare.

On Sunday, the New York Times fessed up:

“Nasty charges of bribery. Senators cut off mid-speech. Accusations of politics put over patriotism. Talk of double-crosses. A nonagenarian forced out after midnight for multiple procedural votes.In the heart of the holiday season, Senate Republicans and Democrats are at one another’s throats as the health care overhaul reaches its climactic votes, one of which is set for 1 a.m. Monday. A year that began with hopes of new post-partisanship has indeed produced change: Things have gotten worse.”

Well, yes they have. How did we get to this point? Well, for starters, Obama, who ran on his determination to transcend partisan divisions, remained a passive and aloof figure when it came to the drafting and the details, allowing partisan passions to run wild. His sole concern was winning, not building a broad-based coalition for revolutionary legislation. Indeed, he contributed to partisan furies by labeling opponents as confused and misinformed and by repeating a series of partisan and baseless accusations against Republicans (the principal one — that they had “no alternative” — was easily disproved by the plethora of conservative plans and proposals). Obama had a reason for proceeding in this way — he wanted to rely on the muscle of large Democratic majorities to obtain the most liberal bill he could get. …

In the New York Daily News, Michael Goodwin voices what many are thinking.

I am a baby boomer, which is to say my life has coincided with turbulent and awesome times. From the Cold War to Vietnam, from Watergate to Monicagate, through the horrors of 9/11 and the stunning lifestyle advances, my generation’s era has been historic and exciting.

Yet for all the drama and change, the years only occasionally instilled in me the sensation I feel almost constantly now. I am afraid for my country.

I am afraid — actually, certain — we are losing the heart and soul that made America unique in human history. Yes, we have enemies, but the greatest danger comes from within.

Watching the freak show in Copenhagen last week, I was alternately furious and filled with dread. The world has gone absolutely bonkers and lunatics are in charge.  …

George Will reviews Copenhagen and Obamacare.

It was serendipitous to have almost simultaneous climaxes in Copenhagen and Congress. The former’s accomplishment was indiscernible, the latter’s was unsightly.

It would have been unprecedented had the president not described the outcome of the Copenhagen climate change summit as “unprecedented,” that being the most overworked word in his hardworking vocabulary of self-celebration. Actually, the mountain beneath the summit — a mountain of manufactured hysteria, predictable cupidity, antic demagoguery and dubious science — labored mightily and gave birth to a mouselet, a 12-paragraph document committing the signatories to . . . make a list.  …

Thomas Sowell notes the lack of media interest in climategate. When it comes to whistleblowers, it depends whose ox is gored.

…When a business accused of fraud begins shredding its memos and deleting its e-mails, the media are quick to proclaim these actions as signs of guilt. But, after the global warming advocates began a systematic destruction of evidence, the big television networks went for days without even reporting these facts, much less commenting on them.

As for politicians, Senator Barbara Boxer has urged prosecution of the hackers who uncovered and revealed the e-mails! People who have in the past applauded whistleblowers in business, in the military, or in Republican administrations, and who lionized the New York Times for publishing the classified Pentagon papers, are now shocked and outraged that someone dared to expose massive evidence of manipulations, concealment and destruction of data — and deliberate cover-ups of all this — in the global warming establishment. …

…People who talk about the corrupting influence of money seem to automatically assume that it is only private money that is corrupting. But, when governments have billions of dollars invested in the global warming crusade, massive programs underway and whole political careers at risk if that crusade gets undermined, do not expect the disinterested search for truth.

Among the intelligentsia, there have always been many who are ready to jump on virtually any bandwagon that will take them to the promised land, where the wise and noble few — like themselves — can take the rest of us poor dummies in hand and tell us how we had better change the way we live our lives. …

Roger Simon was in Copenhagen. He had some thoughts on the way back.

… Yes, it’s comical, but it’s quite worrisome, if you examine the true game afoot. Copenhagen was intended as an important advance toward world governance. On the face of it, it’s a beautiful idea. When I was younger, I was highly attracted to it. But my up-close-and-personal encounters with the UN have turned that attraction to near revulsion. It’s very clear that under global government – because of its size and natural inefficiencies – accountability is nigh on to impossible, transparency nothing but a distant dream, very often not even desired. In short, it’s 1984. And COP15 was just that – legions staring at world leaders on Jumbotrons as they blathered platitudes, while negotiations were conducted behind closed doors. (That’s bad enough in our Congress, but on a global scale…?)

Well, now jet lag is setting in, so I’m going to shut down for the moment. But I will add that, perhaps fortuitously, my long voyage home (9 1/2 hours from Copenhagen to Atlanta, another 4 from Atlanta to LA) finally gave me ample undisturbed time to finish a book I had wanted to read for a long time – F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. How apropos it turned out to be. Hayek had a lot of this figured out in 1944. I recommend to all who haven’t taken the time. It’s just a sign of my own indoctrination that I had read Marx, Marcuse, Gramsci, etc., etc. first

Scrappleface says we’re gonna cut carbon with ‘cash for cardigans.’

President Barack Obama has acknowledged that his new $23 billion weatherization subsidy program will merely slow the leakage of heat from homes.

So today the president introduced what the White House calls “phase II” of an overall program to completely eliminate carbon emissions from residential buildings.

//

The $37 billion “cash for cardigans” program will help homeowners to pay for sweaters, cardigans, housecoats, even Snuggies (the blanket with sleeves, As Seen on TV), so that they can dial back the thermostat to a setting that would require combustion of fossil fuels “only during the most frigid episodes of global cooling.” …