Quick hits 12/15

Some short notes, links and thoughts:

John Hinderaker repeats what I have been stressing: “Having the far left in control of both the executive and legislative branches is a terrible thing, but on the plus side, it is clarifying: people actually have to think about where they stand on the big issue of freedom vs. socialism. Or, in other words, freedom vs. slavery.”

John Edwards: not only a sleazebag, but a common criminal.

Some who live on confiscated money hypocritically do not allow their own to be confiscated.

Ann Althouse: “The strategy for avoiding the label ‘death panel’ is: present the treatments as deadly. Voila: life panels! Now, here’s your blue pill.”

Al Gore busted lying...again.

Big Hollywood: “What’s the Difference Between the Mafia and a Hollywood Leftist? …the Mafia doesn’t go after your family.”

Incompetence update: more uninvited guests get to Obama. This is scary, at some point they won’t be quite so friendly if this continues.

Worst restaurant names ever

Calling Obama a socialist seems a bit overheated, but it does hold up to scrutiny; this is a president who has sought to restructure about 35% of the economy from the top down: health care (17% of GDP), energy (9.8%), and financial services (8%). Socialism is a Utopian fantasy of the academic class, and most of his administration is staffed with academics, so this is not exactly a surprising development.

Always remember: If you don't know who the mark is, you are the mark.

How cool is this?

Stem cell fact: Restrictions on embryonic stem cell research originated with Congress, which, each year since in 1996, has forbidden the use of federal financing for any experiment in which a human embryo is destroyed. What, you thought it was George W. Bush?

Charles Krauthammer:

Forget for a moment the economic effects of severe carbon chastity. There’s the matter of constitutional decency. If you want to revolutionize society — as will drastic carbon regulation and taxation in an energy economy that is 85 percent carbon-based — you do it through Congress reflecting popular will. Not by administrative fiat of EPA bureaucrats.

Congress should not just resist this executive overreaching, but trump it: Amend existing clean-air laws and restore their original intent by excluding CO2 from EPA control and reserving that power for Congress and future legislation.

Do it now. Do it soon. Because Big Brother isn’t lurking in CIA cloak. He’s knocking on your door, smiling under an EPA cap.

Gaming the CBO numbers.

It didn’t take long for people to long for the competence of the second Bush administration, did it?

Martin Kramer makes the superb point that there is really no difference between Bush’s infamous “Bring ‘em on” challenge and Obama’s America deprecation in that each is “effectively an open invitation to America’s adversaries, and even its allies, to elude, evade, defy and confront the United States”.

He also correctly notes that “Middle Eastern states bend in response to displays of power, although as soon as they perceive weakness, they snap back to default position.”

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.”

Quick hits

Some things I've run across, with limited commentary, combined to avoid a bunch of really short posts:

Thomas Donlan: “Once a government gets the idea that it can control the economy, or at least smooth off the rough edges of the business cycle, there's trouble ahead."

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Bizarre statement by Obama in a speech in Africa: "No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top".

He’s correct, but what on earth is he talking about? In this country the government skims off about double that, and the president is trying to GROW the government.

What a hypocrite.

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What a difference a few years makes. Under Bush, we famously had jobless recovery for a while. Under Obama, we have job-loss recovery.

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Dick Morris: “Obama’s health care proposal is, in effect, the repeal of the Medicare program as we know it. The elderly will go from being the group with the most access to free medical care to the one with the least access.”

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John Roberts echoes my own beliefs on “empathy” and the role of a judge in this quote from his confirmation hearing in 2005: “If the Constitution says that the little guy should win, the little guy's going to win in court before me. But if the Constitution says that the big guy should win, well, then the big guy's going to win, because my obligation is to the Constitution.”

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Indiana governor Mitch Daniels refers to Obama’s domestic programs as “shock and awe statism.” Perfect.

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President Bush (43) gets too much abuse from some quarters and too much of a pass from others, but one thing that we should not forget: the man did more for the people of Africa than anybody who has ever lived.

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Dems unintentionally let us in on how they really feel about Cap and Tax with the unemployment provision that provides 70% of your salary (in addition to any other standard unemployment benefits) is you lose your job because of the bill. That’s a clear admission that they realize it will destroy a lot of jobs.

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Mark Steyn: "Both the secular Big Government progressives and the political Islam recoil from the concept of the citizen, of the free individual entrusted to operate within his own societal space, assume his responsibilities, and exploit his potential."

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More Steyn, on what our future may look like with a government health care takeover: "Under Britain's National Health Service, for example, smokers in Manchester have been denied treatment for heart disease, and the obese in Suffolk are refused hip and knee replacements. Patricia Hewitt, the British Health Secretary, says that it's appropriate to decline treatment on the basis of 'lifestyle choices.' Smokers and the obese may look at their gay neighbor having unprotected sex with multiple partners, and wonder why his 'lifestyle choices' get a pass while theirs don't. But that's the point: Tyranny is always whimsical."

Better late than never

I was heartened to see the outgoing president make one of his final acts commuting the sentences of two border patrol agents:

On January 19, in one of his final acts as president, George W. Bush commuted the prison sentences of Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, two former Border Patrol agents who were convicted of shooting a fleeing Mexican drug dealer near the U.S. border while trying to apprehend him. (New York Times, January 19, 2009).

Republican and Democratic lawmakers had urged the President to pardon the agents. In response to the commutation, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) said: "This is not just a day of celebration for the families but it is a victory for all Americans, while acknowledging our system is flawed, to see that if they are involved, if they speak up and utilize their freedom, injustices can be corrected." (Rohrabacher Press Release, January 19, 2009).

A presidential pardon would have vacated Ramos and Compean's sentences whereas the commutation merely cuts short their sentences without vacating the conviction itself. The effect of the commutation will allow the two Border Patrol agents to be released in the next few months. (Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) Press Release, January 19, 2009).

That these become his signature pardons, while his predecessor's signature pardon was sold to a tax cheat for almost a million dollars, speaks volumes about our last two presidents.

Who said it?

See if you can guess who gave a speech that included the following:

"I do ask every publisher, every editor, and every newsman in the nation to reexamine his own standards, and to recognize the nature of our country’s peril. In time of war, the government and the press have customarily joined in an effort, based largely on self-discipline, to prevent unauthorized disclosures to the enemy.

[...] today no war has been declared — and however fierce the struggle may be, it may never be declared in the traditional fashion. Our way of life is under attack. Those who make themselves our enemy are advancing around the globe. The survival of our friends is in danger. And yet no war has been declared, no borders have been crossed by marching troops, no missiles have been fired.

If the press is awaiting a declaration of war before it imposes the self-discipline of combat conditions, then I can only say that no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of “clear and present danger,” then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent.

[...]

[This war] requires a change in outlook, a change in tactics, a change in missions — by the government, by the people, by every businessman or labor leader, and by every newspaper. For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence — on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day.

For the facts of the matter are that this nation’s foes have openly boasted of acquiring through our newspapers information they would otherwise hire agents to acquire through theft, bribery, or espionage; that details of this nation’s covert preparations to counter the enemy’s covert operations have been available to every newspaper reader, friend and foe alike; that the size, the strength, the location, and the nature of our forces and weapons, and our plans and strategy for their use, have all been pinpointed in the press and other news media to a degree sufficient to satisfy any foreign power; and that, in at least one case, the publication of details concerning a secret mechanism whereby [communications were tracked] required its alteration at the expense of considerable time and money.

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On many earlier occasions, I have said — and your newspapers have constantly said — that these are times that appeal to every citizen’s sense of sacrifice and self-discipline. They call out to every citizen to weigh his rights and comforts against his obligations to the common good. I cannot now believe that those citizens who serve in the newspaper business consider themselves exempt from that appeal.

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I am asking the members of the newspaper profession and the industry in this country to reexamine their own responsibilities, to consider the degree and the nature of the present danger, and to heed the duty of self-restraint which that danger imposes upon us all.

Every newspaper now asks itself, with respect to every story: “Is it news?” All I suggest is that you add the question: “Is it in the interest of the national security?"

So who is it? President Bush chiding the New York Times for exposing yet another covert US program to the enemy?

Ummm, no. These are excerpts from a speech given to the American Newspaper Publishers Association, on April 27, 1961 by President Kennedy.

Can you imagine how much JFK would be hated by the left today? Don't forget that this was a president who, in addition to aggressively confronting US enemies, pushed through major cuts in marginal tax rates and wanted defense spending to be 50% of the federal budget. His assassination would be the subject of unadulterated glee on DailyKos and MoveOn.

Barack Obama is often compared to JFK, but it would be hard to imagine two politicians more different.

Random stuff

I could not prouder to live in Dallas, but every village has its idiot. Our continual source of embarrassment is County Commissioner John Wiley Price, one of the country’s most despicable and consistent racists. His latest escapade, complaining when a fellow commissioner said that the central collections office "has become a black hole," was typical of his career, but this one made the national news. That Judge and fellow ignorant bigot Thomas Jones demanded an apology was just piling on, we were already ducking our heads in shame.

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Apparently NBC now stands for No Barack Criticism.

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According to a recent World Bank study, biofuels have forced up global food prices 75% while only negligibly reducing worldwide oil demand. Can we stop this nonsense immediately before it drives people back into poverty faster than the growth of global capitalism and trade lifts them out of it? Biofuel research and production should be strictly limited to non-food sources. Not that we'd expect greens to care about easing poverty or anything - it's antithetical to their mission.

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Was it really Raul Castro that said "Socialism means social justice and equality, but equality of rights, of opportunities, not of income. Equality is not egalitarianism."? When a Castro brother makes more economic sense than one of our own presidential candidates…should I be happy for Cubans or fearful for my own countrymen?

I think the answer is “yes.”

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Terrorist Mohammed Siddique Khan, ringleader of the 2005 London subway suicide bombers, made a farewell video to his infant daughter on which he said "I love you to bits."

I guess he wants to also see her die in an explosion some day?

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I could not agree more with this from Jay Nordlinger:

While in Japan, President Bush placed a message on a “wishing tree.” Apparently, this is an old tradition. (Is that a redundancy?) Bush’s message: “I wish for a world free from tyranny: the tyranny of hunger, disease; and free from tyrannical governments. I wish for a world in which the universal desire for liberty is realized.”

That is what I would have expected from him — and one reason I admire him so much. Most people, it seems certain, would have wished for “peace.” Bush is a man who recognizes that genuine peace comes from freedom.

And this, from the same column:

Was talking to a friend of mine back home in Michigan. Bright guy, well educated, very successful. And very much a liberal Democrat. He said we had to have Obama in November — because “we can’t have Big Oil running the government any longer.”

I ask for the millionth time: How can perfectly normal and non-crazy people believe that stuff?

I ask myself the same question of so many people in so many settings. How is it that otherwise educated people can lose (or never gain) the ability to think critically in the area of politics? Can it be as simple as university brainwashing?

There are some fascinating psychological research possibilities here, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for any such studies.

Talk to you soon, or at least sooner than last time I hope.

Hearts and minds

I was thrilled to hear this from newly elected (in the greatest landslide in South Korea’s short democratic history) South Korean president Lee Myung-bak:

"I assure you there will be a change from the past government's practice of avoiding criticism of North Korea and unilaterally flattering it."

It is an article of faith on the left that our alliances have weakened since the beginning of the Iraq front of the War on Terror; all of the Democrat presidential candidates (and their husbands!) have echoed the theme countless times. Thus it bears repeating that as least as many governments friendlier to President Bush and the US have been elected (France, Germany, Canada, and now South Korea) as have been ousted (Spain, Italy and Australia). Great Britain and Japan have not moved in either direction, remaining staunch allies.

Reaction in the Muslim world has been mixed, with favorable public opinions of the US having dropped in Turkey (30% to 9%) and Jordan (25% to 20%) but having risen in Lebanon (35% to 47%), Pakistan (10% to 15%) and Egypt (6% to 21%) between 2002 and 2007 according annual surveys conducted by to the Pew Global Attitudes Project. There has been a sharp decline in Muslim support for suicide bombings and al Qaida, an extremely positive development.

The bottom line here is that the standard narrative that President Bush’s foreign policies, in particular in Iraq, have weakened our alliances and perception throughout the world is unfounded. It's just garden variety partisan spin, an attempt to fool the uninformed.

Bush NIEd

What to make of the NIE report that that the president received November 28 and was made public December 4, suggesting that Iran suspended (not disbanded, although it will often be spun as such) its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003?

Well, if it’s true then it is great news for the world in general and the US in particular. Iran is a nation whose leaders are insane and which has been waging war against the US in various capacities for almost three decades, most recently the hot war in Iraq. Anything that would even temporarily make them less dangerous is a very good thing.

Of course, that’s the rub – if it’s true. The US really has very little intelligence capability left, having seen it weakened by a series of stupid policy decisions ranging from the Church Committee’s work to the Torricelli Principle and post-Cold War budget cuts. Human intelligence in the areas where we most need it is all but nonexistent, leading us to rely on informants (whose motivations and loyalties are often questionable at best) as primary sources. And on our end we get fuzzy analysis of this dubious data by domestic bureaucrats, who we have seen are often driven by their own political agendas. Intelligence gathering is a difficult task even if the employees are loyal to their boss and organization; when rouge agents are openly hostile to a sitting president and official US policy you get a chaotic mess.

Thus the infamous “slam dunk” of stockpiles of Iraqi WMD, which gave ammunition to anti-American demagogues around the globe (and, sadly, at home). And the current state of Iranian nuclear intelligence, where a 2007 report, by all accounts based on the word of a single defector, directly contradicts the 2005 report based on the totality of then-existing fuzzy data and analysis. Pardon me if my confidence in pronouncements which change 180 degrees in two years is not even “moderate,” much less “high.”

Adding to the doubt is a Wall Street Journal report that “the NIE's main authors include three former State Department officials [Tom Fingar, Vann Van Diepen and Kenneth Brill] with previous reputations as ‘hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials.’" CIA officials have in the (very recent) past shown a willingness to undermine US policy and endanger the lives of Americans for nothing more than scoring cheap political points against the president, so it’s not like more sabotage would be out of character.

Others share my skepticism. A senior IAEA official said "To be frank, we are more skeptical. We don't buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran." Israeli is also far from convinced, but then again their very survival probably depends on keeping Iran from going nuclear, so they have a vested interest in erring on the side of caution.

I should probably mention the political spin, which (as usual) reads like something from The Onion. The basic premise is that the president “lied” when he followed past NIE’s, and that he again “lied” because he…uhh, here’s where it gets murky, but apparently because he did not have a clairvoyant vision of what was to come in this one in the months leading up to November 28, when he actually saw the document for the first time. I will give Bush Derangement Syndrome sufferers credit here, they may be fundamentally unserious but they are extremely creative and produce some genuinely hilarious stuff. If only they would channel that creativity into something useful, like trying to figure out how college football could determine their champion by playing football games.

In summary, I fear that we are overcompensating for previous intelligence mistakes by becoming timid and risk-averse, which is even more dangerous. Or that this whole thing is just another attempt by the CIA/State axis to undermine the president. I would dearly love for this report to ultimately be proven correct, especially if the program is still in hiatus today and remains so well into the future. But I’ve heard boy crying wolf so many times that I remain somewhere between anxious and terrified of the Mad Mullahs and their insane figurehead.

Scattershooting

Scattershooting while wondering whatever happened to Chico Salmon:

News you may have missed, as most US media tried to ignore or bury it: the latest BLS report shows that September 2007 is the 49th consecutive month of job growth, setting a new record for the longest uninterrupted expansion of the U.S. labor market, and that more than 30 percent of the nation's net worth has been added since the President's 2003 tax cuts. The effect of presidential policies and actions on the economy is almost always overstated (cf the Clinton mythology), but to the degree they do matter President Bush has objectively been a godsend for the US economy.

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High def may be the future, but it still isn’t the present. When an NFL game on CBS, in this case Houston at Atlanta on September 30, is not in HD while at the same time a women’s college soccer game on the Big Ten Network is, you realize this whole thing still isn’t ready for prime time.

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Just when you think you can no longer be shocked…19% of Democrats think that the world would be better off is the US loses in Iraq and another 20% are not sure? Seriously? That’s about an order of magnitude higher than I would have expected even from a group so infested with anti-American sentiment. It is shocking that such a significant group of Americans, perhaps one in ten overall, could be so fundamentally ignorant of the world around us. Our schools must, sadly, have been doing a terrific job of brainwashing young Americans to hate their country in the past couple of decades.

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And lest you think that brainwashing youth is purely an American phenomenon, recall this story from the Great White North:

“First it was his world history class. Then he saw it in his economics class. And his world issues class. And his environment class. In total, 18-year-old McKenzie, a Northern Ontario high schooler, says he has had the film An Inconvenient Truth shown to him by four different teachers this year.”

Sadly for the “educators” involved, even after so many repetitions of this propaganda the message still did not take with young McKenzie. It takes a strong-minded kid to get through school these days and retain the ability to think critically.

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Here’s some footage of Wilt Chamberlain at age 17. Money quote from narrator Marty Glickman: “Remember the name, Wilt Chamberlain - It will probably make big sports copy for years to come."

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Did Barack Obama really say “I’m going to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great”?!? Is he unfamiliar with the first 231+ years of our history? Shouldn’t understanding why this country IS great be a bare minimum prerequisite for presidential candidates?

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James Taranto notes that Paul Krugman stole the exact title to his new book from the late Senator Paul Wellstone, who had in turn stolen it in 2001 from former Connectivut governor Chester Bowles, who had in turn had in 1962 co-opted the idea from Barry Goldwater. The idea of Krugman stealing from, ultimately, Barry Goldwater, would be enough fun for some days but I bring the whole thing up to quote Taranto’s genius introduction:

"Remember Paul Krugman? Once a promising young economist, he ran into hard times in the 1990s, when he served as an adviser to Enron, an ill-fated energy company. Subsequently he was reduced to writing angry op-eds for the New York Times. In 2003 he published a memoir, and two years later he mysteriously disappeared from public view. But last month he resurfaced, still writing his Times column."

Hammernailhead.

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I figured that this week’s matchup of unbeatens between New England and Dallas was unusual, but I had no idea it was this unusual…hope you had the dog and the under in that Buffalo-Akron tussle.

NFL Games in which both teams were unbeaten with 5+ wins:

Date Teams - Result
11/13/21 Buffalo All-Americans (6-0) at Akron Pros (7-0) - BUF 0, AKR 0
11/04/23 Canton Bulldogs (5-0) at Chicago Cardinals (5-0) - CAN 7, CHI 3
10/28/73 Los Angeles Rams (6-0) at Minnesota Vikings (6-0) - MIN 10, LA 9
10/24/04 New York Jets (5-0) at New England Patriots (5-0) - NE 13, NYJ 7
10/14/07 New England Patriots (5-0) vs. Dallas Cowboys (5-0)

6 years of safety

I've certainly had a lot to criticize* with President Bush's job performance over the first 6 1/2 years - his refusal to even attempt to rein in runaway government spending, his disinterest in pushing for entitlement (particularly social security) reform, and much of the strategic execution on the Iraq front between the removal of Saddam and the beginning of the surge.

But on this most sacred of days, I feel compelled to point out that he has gotten the most important thing right, and I mean spectacularly right. Recall the mood on and in the days/weeks/months following 9/11. Go back and read some contemporary opinion pieces or blog posts if your memory needs jogging. The one thing about which there was unanimity, from left and right, hawk and dove, Republican and Democrat, Hatfield and McCoy, is that there would be more (successful) terrorist attacks on US soil. Maybe immediately, maybe not for a few weeks or months, but as sure as death and taxes they were coming. And likely to be bad.

Well, 2191 days later and it still has not happened, despite the obsessive desire of al Qaeda and other global terrorist organizations to hit us again. There can be no denying that our anti-terror policies, combined with our aggressive prosecution of the multi-front and asymmetric war on Islamic Fascism, have worked better than we could possibly imagined. And this despite a determined movement of anti-American useful idiots at home (mostly) unwittingly attempting to undermine and obstruct those efforts.

Yes, for this, by far the most important task at hand, George W. Bush has been a rousing success. It's a remarkable accomplishment, and I can't let this day pass without acknowledging it.

* A necessary tangent, while I'm on the subject - if one cannot find a bunch of things to like and a bunch of things to dislike about each and every president's performance in office, he is either incapable of, or unwilling to practice, critical thinking and should thus be ignored.

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I also can't let this day pass without pointing to Popular Mechanics' thorough debunking of the "theories" of the insane movement that thinks 9/11 was some kind of US and/or Israeli inside job. These despicable human beings are small in number, but they scream loud enough and will be given enough attention by a sympathetic media near this and every anniversary that they still need to be issued a virtual smackdown on general principle.

UPDATE 9/12/06: A touching 9/11 memorial.

Scattershooting

Scattershooting while wondering whatever happened to John Q. Trapp:

It seems to be easier for me to find time to add quick hits to a file and post them later than to actually sit down and compose a blog post, so I think I’ll try it again.

With Hurricane Katrina having been in the news a lot lately in the wake of its second anniversary, it’s worth noting a Reason series detailing three of the most common associated myths:

Myth Number One: The main impediment to rebuilding the Gulf Coast is a lack of federal money.

Myth Number Two: "New Orleans" and "the Gulf Coast" are synonymous.

Myth Three: The Gulf Coast is suffering from a lack of leadership.

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2007 is very much like 1943 in that all of the war movies being made are just propaganda. The difference, of course, is for which side Hollywood is propagandizing – now it’s for our enemies.

While on the subject, I recently saw the brilliant The Lives of Others, which should be required viewing for anybody interested in history between World War II and the end of the Cold War. It is the most honest onscreen portrayal of life under communism I have yet seen, and since Hollywood has obviously blacklisted such projects it is all the more valuable.

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In a hagiographic essay on how history will view President Bush, Karl Rove slips in an important point right at the end:

I have come to understand true leadership leans into the wind. It tackles big challenges with uncertain outcomes rather than taking on simple, sure tasks. It does what is right, regardless of what the latest poll or focus group says.

This is an underreported aspect of modern politics. Whoever the next president may be, I hope he/she does address the big stuff – the continuing terrorist threat, the looming entitlement crisis – and doesn’t just kick the can down the road as we saw with Bush 41 and Clinton in the former case and Clinton and the contemporary Republican Congress in the latter.

And I hope that whatever he/she does, whether I might agree with it or not, is done out of sincere principle as opposed to polls and political calculation. Bush 43 has done much better in that regard than the image-obsessed Clinton, but he has also fallen short in some aspects – immigration comes to mind. I want any president not to be afraid to be unpopular during his/her time in order to do what he/she believes is best for this country. Again, this has been a particular strength of Bush 43.

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ABC is not being allowed to release The Path to 9/11 miniseries on DVD because Hillary Clinton is running for president. Would you have expected any different? The docudrama was critical of both the Clinton and Bush administrations’ failures during the nine year series of smaller attacks and other foreboding events that led to the attacks. Expect a lot more of these little instances of censorship over the next 14 months in Hollywood and the New York publishing houses.

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Speaking of the Clinton Machine...If a Clinton is running for president, you know there’s a ton of illegal campaign financing involved. But this particular scandal (of which you’re hearing as much as you did Abramoff, right? No? Why can that be?) is delicious in that it has no need for another tired “-gate” moniker. For this one, “Hsu-nami” or “Hsu-icide” works just fine. “A Boy Named Hsu” might be taking it a bit too far.

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Labor Day sparked an interesting series of material on the overt racism of the American Labor movement from its inception all the way through the Jimmy Carter years. Suffice it to say that unions fought as vigorously against the civil rights movement as any southern politician. First was Paul Moreno’s WSJ article detailing some of the history and how unions’ refusal to comply with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 led to the first “affirmative action” laws.

Paul from Power Line added some detail, and Scott from the same site expanded the discussion to note that “despite the legal mandate of equal treatment, for the past 30 years many of America's educational institutions have blatantly violated the law in the name of affirmative action and diversity. In reality these terms are extremely misleading euphemisms for the practice of gross racial discrimination.” This is fascinating stuff, and an extremely valuable service as it is exactly kind of history that academia is constantly attempting to rewrite and censor, much like the real history of Communism as noted above.

As a bonus, Scott also includes a hilariously hysterical letter from Society of American Law Teachers (SALT), an “ardent left-wing organization that is committed to the practice of racial discrimination in law school admissions,” which is alone worth the click.

In G.W. Bush

The 'G' stands for "Green":

The 1.3 percent drop in CO{-2} emissions marks the first time that U.S. pollution linked to global warming has declined in absolute terms since 2001 and the first time it has gone down since 1990 while the economy was thriving. Carbon dioxide emissions declined in both 2001 and 1991, in large part because of economic slowdowns during those years.

This tees up some fun trivia:

Who is the the only of the last three US Presidents not to cut carbon emissions in a growing ecomnomy in any year of his presidency?

Or the even more fun:

Who is the the only of the last three US Presidents not to cut carbon emissions in any year of his presidency?

In either case, you'd better give your victims three guesses...

The thing with the whole global warming movement is that some practice, while some just preach.

Scared sensible

Another confirmation of that old saying, the definition of a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged:

It's funny how a gun can instantly change your perspective on things, make you wish you could rewrite history.

State Rep. Michael DeBose, a southside Cleveland Democrat, discovered this lesson the night of May 1, when he thought he was going to die. That's the night he wished he had that gun vote back.

[...]

DeBose twice voted against a measure to allow Ohioans to carry concealed weapons. It became law in 2004.

DeBose voted his conscience. He feared that CCW permits would lead to a massive influx of new guns in the streets and a jump in gun violence. He feared that Cleveland would become the O.K. Corral, patrolled by legions of freshly minted permit holders.

"I was wrong," he said Friday.

"I'm going to get a permit and so is my wife.

"I've changed my mind. You need a way to protect yourself and your family.

"I don't want to hurt anyone. But I never again want to be in the position where I'm approached by someone with a gun and I don't have one."

DeBose said he knows that a gun doesn't solve Cleveland's violence problem; it's merely a street equalizer.

"There are too many people who are just evil and mean-spirited. They will hurt you for no reason. If more people were packing guns, it might serve as a deterrent.

Narcissism

With the State of the Union a few minutes away, this note from the January 2007 Harper's Index is instructive.

Average number of times that President Bush has used the pronoun "I" in his State of the Union addresses: 36

Average number of times that President Clinton used that pronoun in his addresses: 103

That pretty accurately sums up the biggest difference between the two men.