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Happy 22nd Birthday Liza. Click on About. She is the little girl in the first picture. Calls herself Number Six.
Jennifer Rubin on the verdict in New York.
The acquittal of Guantanamo detainee Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani yesterday on all but one of 285 counts in connection with the 1998 Al Qaeda bombings of the U.S. embassies in Keyna and Tanzania has once again demonstrated that the leftist lawyers’ experiment in applying civilian trial rules to terrorists is gravely misguided and downright dangerous. The soon-to-be House Chairman on Homeland Security Peter King issued a statement blasting the trial outcome and the nonchalant response from the Justice Department:
“I am disgusted at the total miscarriage of justice today in Manhattan’s federal civilian court. In a case where Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was facing 285 criminal counts, including hundreds of murder charges, and where Attorney General Eric Holder assured us that ‘failure is not an option,’ the jury found him guilty on only one count and acquitted him of all other counts including every murder charge. This tragic verdict demonstrates the absolute insanity of the Obama Administration’s decision to try al-Qaeda terrorists in civilian courts” …
And John Podhoretz.
The horrendous result in the trial of the al-Qaeda participant in the 1998 embassy bombings is a revelation. What it reveals is just how feckless and irresponsible the policies of this administration have proved to be in the administration of the war on terror. The fact is that, over the course of the Bush administration, a legal regime was established to govern the of this administration in dealing with the legal complexities of the war on terror. The regime came under withering assault from liberals, but it was consistent, predictable, and had underlying logic. Now, almost certainly, we’re spinning off into complete improvisation — Gitmo remaining open when the administration has declared its intention to close it, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad about to be detained indefinitely under war terms his detainers in this administration have rejected. What the Bush people did was far more considered than it was given credit for being at the time, and now the people who claimed it was acting lawlessly are on the verge of true lawlessness — which is what law is when it is inconsistently and improvisationally applied.
Peter Wehner says the prez is in denial.
“Campaigning is different than governing,” President Obama told reporters during his return flight from Asia this weekend. When asked about his meeting with GOP leaders later this week, Obama said: “They are flush with victory after a campaign of just saying ‘No.’ But I’m sure the American people did not vote for more gridlock.”
In fact, the exit polling shows the public did exactly what the president denies. The midterm elections were as close to a plebiscite as we have ever seen in a midterm election. It was, in large measure, a referendum on Obama and his policies — on Obamaism — and the public stood awthart history yelling, “Stop!” …
John Podhoretz tells us what happened to Dem congresspersons who voted with the toxic president.
… So you can assign a 30-seat loss to economic woes for which Obama was not responsible. If Dems had only lost 30 seats, they’d still control the House. But they lost more than 60. Thus, Obama must still bear responsibility for the loss of the House.
And more besides. For it was the 20-plus seats lost due to Obama’s liberal policies that turned the election from a wave into a tsunami — a wholesale rejection of his party fearsome in its intensity and destructiveness (an astounding 680 Democratic state legislators lost their jobs on Nov. 2).
The Stanford analysis (by professor David Brady, also deputy director of the Hoover Institution) addresses the effect on individual House members who voted both for health-care reform and the cap-and-trade bill.
Democrats who voted for both bills and whose districts went for John McCain rather than Obama in 2008 were wiped out. So were the ones in districts that Obama essentially split with McCain 50-50.
Perhaps even more interesting is this: A Democrat in one of these “50-50″ districts who voted no on both health-care and cap-and-trade ended up with a 71 percent chance of getting re-elected — while one who voted yes on both bills had only a 6.5 percent chance of holding on. …
David Harsanyi has some fun.
The White House says it has a “messaging” problem when it comes to health care reform. As in, a “you’re-not-buying-our-message” problem. And this week’s news, to say the least, was no help.
You’ll remember that one of the most common and potent rationales for passing reform was the claim that insurance companies routinely deny coverage to innocent Americans with pre-existing conditions.
Obamacare features a $5 billion program designed to stem this profit-ridden epidemic. And to ensure vibrant participation — by both those legitimately in need and those who couldn’t quite grasp the theory behind “insurance” — 65 percent of premiums are subsidized by taxpayers.
But as The Wall Street Journal reported this week, even with generous inducements, since July only 8,000 people — rather than the White House’s projected 375,000 — have signed up for a national program that is theoretically going to add another 400,000 citizens in each upcoming year.
Perhaps advocates confused their own dismal view of American ingenuity with reality. But I’m not worried. If this administration excels at anything, it’s giving away stuff. No messaging problem there. And the Department of Health and Human Services has promised to cut premiums by 20 percent more and enhance benefits to encourage enrollment.
Or, in other words, we have another $5 billion relentlessly searching for a problem. …
Joel Kotkin continues the Texas/California dichotomy.
In the future, historians may likely mark the 2010 midterm elections as the end of the California era and the beginning of the Texas one. In one stunning stroke, amid a national conservative tide, California voters essentially ratified a political and regulatory regime that has left much of the state unemployed and many others looking for the exits.
California has drifted far away from the place that John Gunther described in 1946 as “the most spectacular and most diversified American state … so ripe, golden.” Instead of a role model, California has become a cautionary tale of mismanagement of what by all rights should be the country’s most prosperous big state. Its poverty rate is at least two points above the national average; its unemployment rate nearly three points above the national average. On Friday Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was forced yet again to call an emergency session in order to deal with the state’s enormous budget problems.
This state of crisis is likely to become the norm for the Golden State. In contrast to other hard-hit states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada, which all opted for pro-business, fiscally responsible candidates, California voters decisively handed virtually total power to a motley coalition of Democratic-machine politicians, public employee unions, green activists and rent-seeking special interests. …
George Gilder with more on California’s problems.
California officials acknowledged last Thursday that the state faces $20 billion deficits every year from now to 2016. At the same time, California’s state Treasurer entered bond markets to sell some $14 billion in “revenue anticipation notes” over the next two weeks. Worst of all, economic sanity lost out in what may have been the most important election on Nov. 2—and, no, I’m not talking about the gubernatorial or senate races.
This was the California referendum to repeal Assembly Bill 32, the so-called Global Warming Solutions Act, which ratchets the state’s economy back to 1990 levels of greenhouse gases by 2020. That’s a 30% drop followed by a mandated 80% overall drop by 2050. Together with a $500 billion public-pension overhang, the new energy cap dooms the state to bankruptcy. …
Jennifer Rubin says follow the successful states.
… These budget balancers and spending cutters are successful Republican governors, all of whom have been mentioned as 2012 presidential contenders. And in the 2010 midterms, their ranks expanded with Republicans elected in New Mexico, Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Kansas, Oklahoma and Tennessee. That’s a lot of GOP governors who have the opportunity to lead on fiscal discipline.
Not only does this dispel the liberal myths that we need massive taxes to balance our books or that the public won’t accept reduced services; but is provides Republicans with a wealth of talent for the 2012 and future presidential races. The country seems poised to get serious on tax and budget reform and has grown weary of a president whose not much into governance. That suggests a unique opportunity for these GOP governors — provided they stick to their sober approach to governance.
And on the other hand, we have the example of California which has yet to get its spending and public employee unions under control. It’s the beauty of federalism — 50 labratories in which we can see what works and what doesn’t. So far a lot of GOP governors are showing how to do it right.
Howard Kurtz interviews Roger Ailes. We have both parts.
… Ailes brushes aside suggestions that journalists have been much harder on the president as his sliding popularity has led to a Republican takeover of the House. He is far more sympathetic to Obama’s predecessor:
“This poor guy, sitting down on his ranch clearing brush, gained a lot of respect for keeping his mouth shut. I literally never heard an Obama speech that didn’t blame Bush.”
None of this is personal, you understand. Ailes says he likes Obama, who was gracious to him during last year’s Christmas party, and David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett. He recently had breakfast with Axelrod to discuss Fox’s coverage. But Ailes took an unprovoked swipe at Robert Gibbs, saying the press secretary “is a little big for his britches” and “will end up like that little shithead who worked for Bush”—meaning Scott McClellan, the onetime loyalist who wrote a book criticizing his former boss. Gibbs and the White House declined to respond.
Fox was the favorite network of the Bush White House, the default channel on its television sets and the go-to guys for big interviews. The Obama White House, by contrast, declared rhetorical war on the network last year and rarely provides top officials as guests.
The steady barrage of criticism from the opinion folks, led by Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, has lifted Fox’s ratings, although Ailes says he sees no connection. Fox is averaging 11 million viewers this year, an 8 percent jump in Nielsen numbers over 2008, while CNN has dropped 37 percent and MSNBC 15 percent. Unlike two years ago, Fox is averaging more viewers than its two cable rivals combined. …