"President Pantywaist"

It can't be a good sign if even Euros are starting to notice your spinelessness:

Obama has done more to restore Russia’s hegemonial potential in Eastern and Central Europe than even Vladimir Putin. . . . If the word is out that America is in retreat, it will soon find it has no friends.

Obama's approval ratings are sinking here, but through the roof with our enemies!

Exposing the con

Kudos to Senator Orrin Hatch for attempting to insert the following amendment to the Senate Finance Committee markup of the Baucus bill:

The purpose of this amendment is simple. If the secretary of Health and Human Services certifies that more than 1 million Americans would lose the current coverage of their choice because of this bill, then this bill would not go into effect.

It seems like a very, very simple but perfect amendment for those of us who have integrity. This amendment is simply trying to safeguard President Obama's pledge to the American people, you'll get -- that you will get to keep what you have.

Not suprisingly, every Democrat on the committee voted "no."

As John at Powerline noted:

One of President Obama's mantras with regard to the Democrats' health care proposal (whatever it turns out to be) is that if you like your present health insurance coverage, you will get to keep it. More recently, when the fraudulent nature of that pledge was revealed, he changed the formula to "the bill won't require you to lose your coverage." That's right; it won't require you to lose your coverage, it will just cause you to lose your coverage.

And, to expand on that theme, it is designed to cause you to lose your coverage and have to rely on government for insurance, as well as cede government the power to make all of the health care decisions that were formerly yours.

Nobody seriously disputes that any of the proposed bills will cause 10's of millions to lose their insurance coverage. The divide now is between those who try to cover up that fact and those who try to expose it.

This is not about health care, never has been. It's about control, a massive transfer of wealth and power from the people to the federal government. People who are dependent on government for survival are easier to control, and their votes are easier to earn since all you have to do is buy them.

This whole debate, like so many others. is about government vs freedom. The people have come down squarely on the side of freedom. The question now is whether the politicians in power will accede to the will of the people, or whether their natural totalitarian instincts will rule the day.

How government works

Another example of what government is all about, and why I'm libertarian:

The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that four New Jersey congressmen and its own former commissioner unduly influenced the process that led to its decision last year to approve a patch for injured knees, an approval it is now revisiting.

The agency's scientific reviewers repeatedly and unanimously over many years decided that the device, known as Menaflex and manufactured by ReGen Biologics Inc., was unsafe because the device often failed, forcing patients to get another operation.

But after receiving what an F.D.A. report described as "extreme," "unusual" and persistent pressure from four Democrats from New Jersey — Senators Robert Menendez and Frank R. Lautenberg and Representatives Frank Pallone Jr. and Steven R. Rothman — agency managers overruled the scientists and approved the device for sale in December.

All four legislators made their inquiries within a few months of receiving significant campaign contributions from ReGen, which is based in New Jersey, but all said they had acted appropriately and were not influenced by the money.

The administration that keeps on giving

Lest you think that Carterian idiocy only emanates from the former president himself, I give you his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski (from a Daily Beat interview):

DB: How aggressive can Obama be in insisting to the Israelis that a military strike might be in America’s worst interest?

Brzezinski: We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?

DB: What if they fly over anyway?

Brzezinski: Well, we have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a Liberty in reverse.

Three decades later, it's still gives you chills to think that these people ran the country for four years.

Don't be fooled by the defunding votes

Instapundit reader Kevin O'Brien notices the elephant in the chamber:

It’s a typical these-voters-are-such-rubes stunt; the House and Senate voted to defund ACORN on different bills.

The Senate bill is a housing bill, the House bill the federal takeover of student loans. Each bill will wind up in conference committee where the ACORN ban can be quietly stripped out, behind closed doors and secure from prying eyes. Then the org can keep on doing its important work of voter fraud and pandering to presumed pedophiles.

The most useful principle to hold close when considering members of Congress: they’re all crooks.

I'm sure that portion of the media that still thinks child sex slavery is wrong will keep an eye on this, just reminding you not to buy into the hype.

The despicable Jimmy Carter

Will Collier nicely sums up the man who wakes up every morning thanking God that there was a James Buchanan to keep him from being the worst US president:

For everybody old enough to remember what life was like under Jimmy's stupefying mixture of sophomoric self-righteousness, boundless naivete and gobsmacking incompetence, shoving Mr. Peanut back under the spotlight in his bitter dotage does nothing to help Obama, who's been looking like Carter II since a few hours after his inauguration.

And for those too young to remember history's greatest monster (thanks, Glenn), Jimmah's empty slander is just another sign of the unbecoming moral vanity at the heart of the modern Left, to say nothing of its overweening intolerance for any hint of dissent. People know good and well that being opposed to socialized medicine or trillion-dollar deficits doesn't make them racist. Calling them ugly names isn't going to make them cower away in fear--it's going to make them more convinced than ever that they're in the right.

Except for the true believer DailyKos types, lefties must cringe every time Carter opens his mouth. He's been around too long to be a right wing plant, but he's certainly king of the useful idiots for the righty cause.

UPDATE 9/18/09: James Taranto comes up with an alternate explanation that would be believable if we thought Carter was that clever: "Carter may have a conflict of interest in attacking Americans on Obama's behalf. Perhaps he secretly hopes Obama fails so miserably as to supplant Carter as the worst president of the past century."

Time to revamp the HR Department

Ouch:

When SEIU folks are shown on video beating up a black man in a parking lot after your town hall, when you’re caught on tape giving a top secret press conference and you totally fumble when asked about said beating, when your party is implicated in calling in the muscle to stifle dissent, the last thing you do is, say, hire SEIU’s former media person.

Unless you’re Russ Carnahan.

Presidential hate

Jay Nordlinger takes on the (frankly absurd) notion that hate directed against the president is on the rise in this administration:

Let me make a couple of predictions: I predict that the chairman of the Republican National Committee will never say, “I hate the Democrats and everything they stand for. This [politics, basically] is a struggle of good and evil. And we’re the good.”

Howard Dean said that about the GOP: “I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for. . . .”

I predict that an editor of a conservative magazine will never write a piece called “The Case for Obama Hatred,” beginning, “I hate President Barack Obama.”

A New Republic editor did this, about Bush.

And there is increasing worry about assassination: that someone will take a shot, not just at the president, but at the first black president, which would be extra-catastrophic for the country. A few protesters have carried signs urging violence against Obama, or smacking of violence. Let me make some more predictions:

I predict that a network talk-show host will not show a video of President Obama giving a speech and put the following words on the screen: “SNIPERS WANTED.”

Craig Kilborn of CBS did that to George W. Bush.

I predict that U.S. senators will not joke about killing Obama.

In 2006, Bill Maher had a conversation with John Kerry. He asked Kerry what he’d gotten his wife for her birthday. Kerry said he had treated her to a vacation in Vermont. Maher said, “You could have went to New Hampshire and killed two birds with one stone.” Kerry replied, “Or I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone.” [...]

I predict that a New York official will not tell a graduating class about assassinating President Obama.

Also in 2006, comptroller Alan Hevesi said to students at Queens College that Sen. Charles Schumer, his fellow Democrat, would “put a bullet between the president’s eyes if he could get away with it.”

I predict that no columnist for a leading European newspaper, and leading world newspaper, will write, “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need you?”

Charlie Brooker of the Guardian did that to George W. Bush.

I predict that no major writer will write a novel debating the morality of killing President Obama.

Nicholson Baker did that to Bush, with Checkpoint.

I predict that no filmmaker will make a “fictional documentary” that fantasizes — and I’m afraid that is the word — about murdering President Obama.

Some Brits did that to President Bush with Death of a President.

Dear readers, I have made very, very safe predictions. If a CBS talk-show host pictured President Obama and said “SNIPERS WANTED,” he would lose his job, of course. He would never work in the media again. I wonder what else would happen to him.

I could go on, but you’ve heard enough. [...]

Regular readers may be sick of hearing this story — I think I’ve told it twice — but let me tell it again. I tell the story, not because the person featured in it is evil, but for the opposite reason: She is basically wonderful. She just had a fever, that hate-Bush, kill-Bush fever.

I was at an Upper East Side dinner party, and talk turned to 9/11. I mentioned that the “Pennsylvania plane” was apparently destined for the Capitol or the White House. My hostess said, “I wish President Bush had been killed that day.”

The school speech wasn't so innocent after all

I'm shocked, shocked to read this:

"When critics lashed out at President Obama for scheduling a speech to public school students this month, accusing him of wanting to indoctrinate children to his politics, his advisers quickly scrubbed his planned comments for potentially problematic wording."

Thus the claim that the only objectionable thing was the Department of Education's (later removed) indoctrinatory lesson plan is debunked.

Quote of the day

From Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation (via Don Surber) on the ACORN child prostitution aid scandal: “It should have been ‘60 Minutes’ doing this stuff — not two people whose combined ages are 45.”

Surber notes that Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward were 28 and 29, respectively, on the night of the Watergate break-in.

Line of the day

From a Powerline reader:

I had to chuckle when I read Van Jones's assertion that he "received encouragement from across the political spectrum to 'stay and fight.'"

Yeah, right, from the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks and even the Trotskyites!

Okay, it was really yesterday, humor me.

Another contender: An Inconvenient Truther.

Movies we'd like to see

Total Eclipse is rated PG-13 for violence, particularly graphic in some of the mass murder scenes, images of starving infants from Stalin's 1932 forced famine in the Ukraine, and the torture of dissidents. Director Steven Spielberg (Schindler's List) deftly cuts from the Moscow trials to the torture chambers of the Lubyanka. More controversial are the portrayals of American communists during the period of the Pact. They are shown here picketing the White House, calling President Roosevelt a warmonger, and demanding that America stay out of the "capitalist war" in Europe. Harvey Keitel turns in a powerful performance as American Communist boss Earl Browder, and Linda Hunt brings depth to Lillian Hellman, who, when Hitler attacks the USSR in September of 1939, actually did cry out, "The motherland has been invaded."

Painstakingly accurate and filled with historical surprises, this film is so refreshing, so remarkable, that even at 162 minutes it seems too short.

The only problem? It never was made.

The phenomenon of Communism somehow being considered more acceptable than Naziism, which recently reared its ugly head again with the Van Jones fiasco, has always fascinated and revolted me.

Communism IS Naziism, just with better PR.

It's not isolated, folks

Lest you think the despicable Van Jones' signing of a petition supporting 9/11 conspiracy theorists was his his only anti-American take on 9/11...uhh, no. He was publicly blaming the US on 9/12/01:

A recurring theme of the speakers was the brutal violence committed by or supported by the United States government on a daily basis. "The bombs the government drops in Iraq are the bombs that blew up in New York City," said Van Jones, director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, who also warned against forthcoming violence by the Bush Administration. "The US cannot bomb its way out of this one. Safety at home requires justice abroad."

Fallout of the minimum wage rate hike

From an NYT report:

"According to today’s job report [...] The teenage unemployment rate, however, is at 25.5 percent, its highest level since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping track of such data in 1948."

Wonder how many reporters will draw the (should be) obvious connection with the July increase in the minimum wage?

Providing cover

Byron York did a little experiment yesterday morning:

From a Nexis search a few moments ago:

Total words about the Van Jones controversy in the New York Times: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy in the Washington Post: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on NBC Nightly News: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on ABC World News: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on CBS Evening News: 0.

The New York Times, CBS and NBC are apparently still enforcing the Jones news blackout as of the time of this post.

It's good to be a Democrat, getting free PR and political cover from all of the largest media outlets. Sure, that only hides things like the despicable Jones from the uninformed segment of the population, but that is a core Democrat constituency, and keeping them uninformed is vital to their ability to win elections.

UPDATE 9/6/09
Mickey Kaus gets his wish: “I’ve been waiting for the day when a prominent pol resigns and for print MSM readers it appears to be out-of-the-blue, though everyone on the Web knows the whole story.”

This story truly is symbolic of the death of the mainstream media as a serious news source.

We're (almost) all neocons now

Jennifer Rubin:

“Politics is replete with irony but none greater than the sight of a president, who rose to power decrying the ultimately successful effort in one battlefield in the war on terror, looking now to those dreaded neo-con pundits and Republican lawmakers for support against the pre-9/11 mentality he was all too happy to promote on the campaign trail. . . . Maybe Obama should put aside the anti-Bush venom for a moment and give his predecessor a call—he might learn something about the lonely obligation of a commander in chief to resist the howls from the likes of Will, Hagel, and the netroots.”

I find it fascinating that the one issue on which he ran to the left is the one on which he has lurched right. On everything else, he ran as a faux centrist and governs as a hard leftist, but on Afghanistan he's downright neocon.

Of course this also means that he campaigned honestly on...well, nothing.

Bill of rights you have to work for

Sad but true:

It took $833.69, a total of 15 hours 50 minutes, four trips to the Metropolitan Police Department, two background checks, a set of fingerprints, a five-hour class and a 20-question multiple-choice exam. Oh, and the votes of five Supreme Court justices. They’re the ones who really made it possible for me, as a District resident, to own a handgun, a constitutional right [...]

Editors on strike?

How did this make it past the NYT's intrepid editorial staff?!?

Although the investigation began and largely ended during the Bush administration, top Obama administration officials held a news conference on Wednesday to celebrate the settlement, thank each other for resolving it and promise more crackdowns on health fraud.

Somebody's gonna get fired!

"Pass it for Ted!" Uhh, no

James Taranto exposes the foolishness of the idea that lawmakers should support a government health care monopoly as a tribute to a recently deceased politician who had advocated for it in the past:

Byrd and Pelosi propose to brush aside the public revolt against ObamaCare, seize control over one-sixth of the economy, and give government life-or-death powers over all Americans--all so that they can pay tribute to their dead colleague. Haven't they heard of a nonbinding resolution?

Ted Kennedy was not a cult leader. He was a lawmaker, democratically elected to represent his constituents. It's hard to imagine anything more outrageously self-indulgent than for his erstwhile colleagues to pay tribute to him by imposing on everyone an expensive, unpopular and potentially deadly scheme of social control. Could Washington be more out of touch?

George Nash draws a useful analogy:

On March 30, 1981, Pres. Ronald Reagan was nearly assassinated. What if he had died that day, before he had persuaded Congress to enact his signature program of tax cuts? Would his liberal opposition on Capitol Hill have given up their philosophical opposition to his agenda? Would they have stood silent if militant conservatives had tried to rush through sweeping tax-cut legislation as a monument to Reagan’s legacy?

Indeed, were a prominent Republican were to die today, would that be a good reason to pass a privatization of Social Security, even if the public were strongly opposed tto it? The Nancy Pelosis of the world would say yes, but color me old fashioned for thinking issues should be decided on their merits, not on peurile emotional appeals.

Those who don't learn from history...

This story is hard to believe, but it's true:

Three Duke University students were the victims of the highest-profile fraudulent rape claim in modern American history. That fact alone should make the University particularly sensitive to the dangers of false rape allegations, and the need for a firm commitment to due process in handling any allegation of sexual misconduct.

But Duke administrators seem to worry not about violating the due process of rights of their students but instead about running afoul of politically correct campus ideologues. So, starting this semester, the University has adopted a new “sexual misconduct” policy—a policy that even some Duke administrators fear will lead to an increase in false rape claims against Duke students.

Only in academia would a policy that encourages false rape claims in the name of political correctness make any sense.

Treason

The more you read about Ted Kennedy;s record, the worse he looks. From Peter Robinson:

Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.

"On 9-10 May of this year," the May 14 memorandum explained, "Sen. Edward Kennedy's close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow." (Tunney was Kennedy's law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) "The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov."

Kennedy's message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election.