Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Mark Steyn on the absurdity of the Obami and big government.
…The Obama speechwriting team … seem(s) to be the last guys on the planet in love with the sound of his voice and their one interminable tinny tune with its catchpenny hooks. The usual trick is to position their man as the uniquely insightful leader, pitching his tent between two extremes no sane person has ever believed: “There are those who say there is no evil in the world. There are others who argue that pink fluffy bunnies are the spawn of Satan and conspiring to overthrow civilization. Let me be clear: I believe people of goodwill on all sides can find common ground between the absurdly implausible caricatures I attribute to them on a daily basis. We must begin by finding the courage to acknowledge the hard truth that I am living testimony to the power of nuance to triumph over hard truth and come to the end of the sentence on a note of sonorous, polysyllabic if somewhat hollow uplift. Pause for applause.”…
…The news this week that the well-connected Democrat pollster, Mark Penn, received $6 million of “stimulus” money to “preserve” three jobs in his public relations firm to work on a promotional campaign for the switch from analog to digital TV is a perfect snapshot of Big Government. In the great sucking maw of the federal treasury, $6 million isn’t even a rounding error. But it comes from real people – from you and anybody you know who still makes the mistake of working for a living; and, if it had been left in your pockets, you’d have spent it in the real world, at a local business or in expanding your own, and maybe some way down the road it would have created some genuine jobs. Instead, it got funneled to a Democrat pitchman to preserve three nonjobs on a phony quasi-governmental PR campaign. Big Government does that every minute of the day. When Mom’n'Pop Cola of Dead Skunk Junction gets gobbled up by Coke, there are economies of scale. When real economic activity gets annexed by state, and then federal, government, there are no economies of scale. In fact, the very concept of “scale” disappears, so that tossing six million bucks away to “preserve” three already-existing positions isn’t even worth complaining about.
At his jobs summit, Obama seemed, rhetorically, to show some understanding of this. But that’s where his speechifying has outlived its welcome. When it’s tough and realistic (we need to be fiscally responsible; there are times when you have to go to war in your national interest; etc), it bears no relation to any of the legislation. And, when it’s vapid and utopian, it looks absurd next to Harry Reid, Barney Frank & Co’s sleazy opportunism. For those of us who oppose the shriveling of liberty in both Washington and Copenhagen, a windy drone who won’t sit down keeps the spotlight on the racket. Once more from the top, Barack!
The country is on to them, The Rasmussen Daily Prez Poll is finding new depths. The poll tracks the difference between strongly approve and strongly disapprove. When he took office, it was +30. Today it set a new low of -19. Looking at the trends, 36 points of this 49 point decline came about in four separate periods of about one week. The first was in March right after Eric Holder declared when it came to race, we are a “nation of cowards.” Next at the end of June and beginning of July we saw Obama’s lack of interest in the protests in Iran . Then at the end of July came Gatesgate and the trashing of the Cambridge, MA police. The last period is 12/9 – today 12/13, when the index has moved from -10 to -19. Anybody think of notable Nobel reasons for that?
David Warren comments on the fraud being committed by the global warming crowd.
A good question for today would be whether a fraud on the scale of the one being consummated at the Copenhagen “Earth summit” has even been attempted before in human history. …
…This “man-made crisis” is the successor to many previous environmental scares, each designed as a means to shake down western taxpayers, and justify the creation of huge, intrusive, national and international bureaucracies for the benefit of their sponsors. One thinks of everything from the pioneering DDT scare of the early 1960s, forward — including the various Club of Rome forecasts from the 1970s, and even the “global cooling” scare of the previous generation, now conveniently buried in the mists of the world before Google. …
…As these frauds have been perpetrated by largely the same class of people, each environmental scare has benefited from experience gained in publicizing the previous one, through supine liberal media. “Environmentalism” has moreover ballooned since the fall of the Berlin Wall, as the Reds of this world, defeated in the ambition to impose socialism directly, have turned Green in pursuit of the same end: the creation of an international command economy, under their own “expert” direction. …
…The very premise is ludicrous: demonizing carbon dioxide as a “pollutant,” when it is a vital part of the Earth’s atmosphere, absolutely essential not only to plant life but everything that depends on plants.
This week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, under the usual radical Obama appointment (Lisa P. Jackson), did something that could be fairly described as insane. It declared carbon dioxide and five other benign atmospheric “greenhouse gases” to be threats to public health, thus awarding itself extraordinary regulatory power over the entire economy, beyond reach of the U.S. Congress. Yet this is only one of innumerable strange and unnatural acts, being performed under the veil of Copenhagen.
In National Review, Andrew McCarthy looks at the Attorney General Eric Holder playing politics with important issues.
‘This,” said Eric Holder, “is almost a ‘Trust me’ thing.” The attorney general of the United States was trying to reassure Alice Hoagland, whose 31-year-old son, Mark Bingham, lost his life with the other heroic passengers who wrested control of Flight 93 from four suicide hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001. Al-Qaeda’s likely target was the U.S. Capitol, and, eight years later, Holder was at that same Capitol, attempting to justify treating acts of war — the deadliest ever committed on U.S. soil — as mere crimes.
In November, Holder announced what he insists is his own decision to vest Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other jihadists with the constitutional rights once enjoyed by Mark Bingham and the nearly 3,000 other Americans they massacred. The Obama administration is transferring this al-Qaeda quintet from military custody at Guantanamo Bay, where they’ve been held as enemy combatants and charged as war criminals under the authority of a congressionally approved military commission. They will be brought to New York City, where, in what used to be the shadow of the Twin Towers, they will be swaddled in the Bill of Rights at a civilian trial in a majestic Manhattan courthouse. That courthouse is the epicenter of the law-enforcement approach to terrorism regnant in the 1990s while Holder served as the No. 2 official in the Clinton Justice Department — a time when nearly as many terrorists were pardoned as prosecuted, while al-Qaeda serially attacked U.S. interests.
Alice Hoagland had flown in from California to hear Holder explain himself to the Senate Judiciary Committee. She intercepted him as he was making his way out of the hearing room. After hours of Holder’s uneven, unconvincing, and occasionally uninformed testimony, Hoagland was badly in need of reassurance. Composed but clearly disturbed, she told the attorney general, “I take great exception to your decision to give short shrift to the military commissions.” So do dozens of the 9/11 victims’ family members, along with millions of Americans who have seen the video of Holder’s dreadful performance. …
…To further the myth of a fully detached Obama, the administration projects a fully engaged Holder, hitting the books, agonizing for long hours over the most difficult decision of his career. But at the hearing, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) exploded the myth by asking the most elementary legal question: What is the precedent? “Can you give me a case in United States history,” he asked, “where an enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?” After several seconds of excruciating silence, Holder stammered, “I don’t know, I’d have to look at that.” What, pray tell, has he been looking at, if not that? Senator Graham, an experienced Air Force lawyer, informed the nation’s top law-enforcement official that there has been no such case.
Holder was equally adrift on the policy implications of his decision. What happens, Senator Graham continued, if we capture Osama bin Laden tomorrow? Does he get Miranda warnings, a defense lawyer during his interrogation, and a civilian trial? A flustered Holder answered, “That all depends.” Even as he disputed Graham’s contention that he was “criminalizing the war,” Holder demonstrated that he was doing just that. The government, he explained, had neither “the desire [nor] the need” to question bin Laden because “the case against him at this point is so overwhelming.” It apparently did not occur to Holder that United States might have an interest in doing something with bin Laden other than prosecuting him — for instance, interrogating him about ongoing plots. That, presumably, is Dick Cheney stuff — the sort of thing that was done with KSM, with the result that many Americans are alive today who might otherwise have missed the spectacle of his civilian trial.
The elevation of politics over duty, coupled with a willingness to say almost anything in order to defend this elevation, is vintage Holder. …
David Harsanyi tells politicians to stay out of college sports.
…Barton (not entertaining) explained that this year’s testimony from college bigwigs had been “more cogent than four years ago and it is much more open about why the bowl system exists — and it is money.”
Really? Money, you say? College football generates millions of dollars and operates through interstate commerce. Isn’t that why Barton claimed to have a government interest in the BCS in the first place?
Of course it’s about money. Many bowls will feature strong teams that the public has a desire to watch. Now, I don’t mean to offend any sports fans, but there are schools that create anticipation and drive ratings across the country. And then there are teams from Utah. …
In USA Today, Dennis Cauchon has a really obscene story for us. Want to know where the stimulus money is going?
The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.
Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months — and that’s before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.
Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.
The highest-paid federal employees are doing best of all on salary increases. Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more increased from 1,868 in December 2007 to 10,100 in June 2009, the most recent figure available.
When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000. …