Finally, someone is addressing the pertinent question about Obama: if he's so smart, why isn't he doing a better job? The assumption has always been that his Ivy League degrees and his inspirational speeches were all the proof anybody needed, but his thought processes have never impressed me. So much of what many find impressive strikes me as liberal cant.

What I found intriguing from early in his campaign was his chosen profession, community organizing. I had never heard of it as a career choice and wasn't sure what it meant, although it had a vague labor union, revolutionary feel. The more I read about it, the more it became associated with attacking the system and obtaining power for radicals, more involved with tearing down than actually running enterprises like a job-creating business or government. He seemed to know the language of change, but his understanding of the actual processes of administration and economics seemed kind of two dimensional. He understood economic stimulus only to the extent that it means big spending bills, but not how it supposedly creates jobs.

But I digress. Read Jennifer Rubin's post linked above.

I watched V last week. I missed the first episode, but it's on-line. My reaction: not enough Morena Baccarin. Of course, that could just be left-over yearning for more seasons of Firefly.

Restoring our standing with the International community: “There’s a growing worry everywhere in Europe that we have the first U.S. president since 1945 to show no interest in what’s happening on this side of the relationship.”

Including even George W. Bush? I guess so.

First pacifist President? Yes. First Pacific President? Nauseatingly cute. I wish he'd quit talking about himself. He's way too needy to be the leader of a Superpower.

Ann Coulter: MUSLIM SUFFERS BRUISED EGO IN FORT HOOD TRAGEDY

President Obama honored the victims by immediately warning Americans not to "jump to conclusions" -- namely, the obvious conclusion that the attack was an act of Islamic terrorism. As conclusions go, it wasn't much of a jump.

But the mainstream media waited for no information -- indeed actively avoided learning any information -- before leaping to the far less obvious conclusion that the suspect's mass murder was set off by "stress."

She is often obnoxious, but here she's right on, and it's really impossible to be too sarcastic about the Army, the President and the media in this case.

Mark Steyn adds this angle:

Shortly after 9/11, there was a lot of talk about how no one would ever hijack an American airliner ever again – not because of new security arrangements but because an alert citizenry was on the case: We were hip to their jive. The point appeared to be proved three months later on a U.S.-bound Air France flight. The "Shoebomber" attempted to light his footwear, and the flight attendants and passengers pounced. As the more boorish commentators could not resist pointing out, even the French guys walloped him.

But the years go by, and the mood shifts. You didn't have to be "alert" to spot Maj. Nidal Hasan. He'd spent most of the past half-decade walking around with a big neon sign on his head saying "JIHADIST. STAND WELL BACK." . . .

Ezra Levant, my comrade in a long battle to restore freedom of speech to Canada, likes to say that the Danish cartoons crisis may one day be seen as a more critical event than 9/11. Not, obviously, in the comparative death tolls but in what each revealed about the state of Western civilization. After 9/11, we fought back, hit hard, rolled up the Afghan camps; after the cartoons, we weaseled and equivocated and appeased and signaled that we were willing to trade core Western values for a quiet life. Watching the decadence and denial on display this past week, I think in years to come Fort Hood will be seen in a similar light. What happened is not a "tragedy" but a national scandal, already fading from view.

Andrew Pavelyev is already downplaying GOP prospects for 2012. Cancel him for your victory celebrations.

JammyWearingFool:

On Friday Barack Obama and Eric Holder made the fateful decision to turn 9/11 into political theater, as that's exactly what will become of the New York City trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and company.. . .

Today Obama has the gall to say this about the terrorist attack at Fort Hood:

Obama . . . pleaded for lawmakers to "resist the temptation to turn this tragic event into the political theater." He said those who died on the nation's largest Army post deserve justice, not political stagecraft.

"The stakes are far too high," Obama said . . ..

I guess he figures his voters in NYC haven't learned to appreciate our system justice yet. After the trials of the conspirators in the first WTC bombing, it came out that the testimony revealed classified sources and methods information, such as the fact that the government had been able to eavesdrop on bin Laden's satellite phone calls, after which he promptly quit using a satellite phone.

What is Holder planning on publicizing in the KSM trial? I'm sure he'll want Bush and Cheney demonized by having the evidence obtained at Gitmo excluded by the court, but if that wins Obama any lift in his performance polling, I'd be gobsmacked. I fervently hope that the American people aren't that stupid.

Every trial lawyer knows the gut wrenching suspense at the end of a trial when the jury is deliberating, realizing that in spite of your best efforts, the verdict could very well go against you for reasons that you never considered seriously. If Holder doesn't know that, he's a fool.

I can't imagine any jury in New York voting to acquit, but there are an awful lot of people in NYC from all sorts of backgrounds, and that point is precisely why any defense counsel would vehemently oppose having the case tried there. The venue seems to have been chosen precisely to get jury hostile to the defendants.

Sarah's book is about to hit the stores, and the hate pieces have begun. The AP assigned 11 reporters to fact check the book and produced a story so blatantly hostile that you know what it'll be like before you read it. So it was 1 fact "checked" per reporter, plus one to write up the story. Some are nothing more than different people remembering things differently. Some are willful misinterpretations of her statements. All are about as damaging as Obama's statement that he had visited all 57 states.

CBS's story is more objective, but reports: "The 413-page book with 16 pages of color photos but no index comes out Tuesday, Nov. 17." I quit reading there. Is noting the number of color photos and the presence or absence of an index a standard feature in CBS stories about new books? I doubt it. What's the point? Smart people don't read or write books without indices? I'm not stupid and I resent pseudo-intellectual posturing.

I don't know whether Palin has any plans to run for office again soon, but everybody seems to be assuming that she's consumed with presidential fever. I don't see it. Why resign as governor if you're looking to run in 2012? Has she established a committee to organize a campaign or raise money? I haven't heard about it. I like Sarah. I don't know if I'd vote for her in a Presidential election--not right now certainly, but she's bright and has a lot of charisma and could get there by 2016. I've had a vigorous debate with my son in whom she seems arouse contempt. He says she's wasn't qualified to run for VP. I thought she could certainly do as well as Harry Truman or LBJ, were she to be suddenly placed in the presidency. He emailed me the "Fact Check" article as proof of what he meant. To me, it just said that the news media is hostile toward her. I think we over-estimate the intellectual qualities required for the office. Leadership and common sense count for more than egg-headedness and she has both.

She scares liberals in the press worse than anything I've ever seen. They're positively Sara-phobic. It's not just calm criticism. It's more like "We have to kill this in its crib!" I think of Barney Fife snapping "Nip it in the bud!" And what are they afraid of? Maybe the fact that she can rally hordes of admirers with a post to her Facebook page. But so what?

Why insult the people you presumably want in your audience? Probably because they know it's too late to get them back. Newsweek has lost 66,000 newsstand sales per issue. All of print media except the WSJ are nosing toward bankruptcy or drastic downsizing. They're going to have to give up paper and ink eventually and figure out a new business model, yet they continue to pull into their shells of anti-conservative resentment. The smart news scribes have already switched to blogging.

America is in what I call a constitutional moment. It's a test we had better not fail.

I don't have a troll problem since hardly anybody comments here. But Althouse, call her "a dirty libtard pirate whore" and she gets four posts and 600 comments out of it. And makes herself look hot doing it.

I'm not worthy.

Leaks? In Washington? In the military? I'm shocked! Shocked!

45% of likely voters rate Obama's handling of the economy "poor." And consumer confidence continues to fall.

I used to think that most presidents really have little to do with how the economy performs, but now I'm convinced that overspending really can drive it down and that tax cuts are where the real stimulus is. Obama and the Dems seem to have had childlike faith that merely hemorrhaging money would spark the economy back to life, but people are realizing that he's really swinging in the dark.

I guess I'm wrong about the reasoning, if any there be, behind the decision to try the top five detainees behind the 9/11 attacks in New York. From James Taranto:

But not all the terrorists at Guantanamo are coming to New York:

[Quoting from the WaPo]

Administration officials say they expect that up to 40 of the 215 detainees at Guantanamo Bay will ultimately be tried in either federal court or military commissions--possibly including federal courts in the District [of Columbia] or Alexandria [Va.]. Approximately 90 others have been cleared for repatriation or resettlement in a third country, according to an administration official.

That leaves up to 75 individuals remaining at Guantanamo who could continue to be held under the laws of war because they are deemed too dangerous to release, but cannot be prosecuted because of evidentiary issues and limits on the use of classified material.

Holder also said Friday that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of orchestrating the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000 when it was docked in a port in Yemen, and four other detainees will be tried by a military commission. Officials have said military commissions for detainees will be located within the United States, not at Guantanamo, although no location has yet been officially designated.

So here's a question: What happens if KSM is acquitted? An administration cheerleader called Steve Benen suggests that this is a silly question, because prosecuting him will be a cakewalk:

From what I gather, the case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed should be pretty easy to make in court, and securing a conviction is likely to be pretty easy. By giving this suspected monster a fair trial, we can prove to the world the strength of American values and the integrity of the American system.

So if they get acquitted, can they come and stay with Mr. Benen? Why does he think we owe anybody proof of "the strength of American values and the integrity of the American system." I find this "What will people say?" decision-making really offensive. It implies that Republicans have no scruples, and since more people now consider themselves Republican or conservative than liberals, it implies that most of us condone mistreating prisoners, and I use the term "mistreat" advisedly in the sense of being harsher than they deserve.

It's a violation of professional ethics to promise a client a specific outcome. Holder subtly promised a conviction of these 5 terrorists, as a justification for his decision to try them in a civilian criminal court, giving the the full panoply of rights any other defendant would be entitled to. Of course, he knows the evidence that hasn't been released so far, but it had better admissible and legally compelling.

I don't understand the distinction between these five, the ones to be tried before military commissions or federal courts in the vicinity of Washington, the 90 to be repatriated or resettlement, and the 75 who are too dangerous to release. If they're that dangerous, why can't that be determined by a military commission and order them executed? They seem to be drawing a distinction between assaults on civilian targets (9/11) and military ones (the Cole). If so, it's absurd. These were acts of war, all of them, by illegal combatants and their co-conspirators. If the Geneva Conventions can't recognize that, then they ought to be abrogated, because they're not doing anything to protect Americans captured by the terrorists.

David Brooks made an important point on The News Hour tonight, that terrorism is not mere crime, it's a means of warfare, and therefore should be treated as such rather than just another crime. It's also an illegal form of war, in that it uses the techniques of espionage and sabotage, fighting without uniforms, for which people are usually summarily shot or hanged.

The Administration will try KSM and other terrorists held at Gitmo in a New York federal court. This is truly bizarre. Holder is so sure that they'll convict these guys, but it's idiotic to make a bet with such a huge downside. I don't think anybody really has realized all the ramifications of this.

The FHA has run out of money by helping to inflate the housing bubble. And nondiscretionary spending has increased 11%. And the Dems are trying to shove a $1,200,000,000,000.00 health care bill. (Heard on Your World with Neil Cavuto.)

Steven Stark: "In reality, Obama peaked the night he was elected."

Uh-oh. The NY-23 special election hasn't been certified yet, and recanvassing is showing that Hoffman's votes were under-counted. He's down 3,026 with about 10,000 absentee and military ballots yet to be counted. And the recount/lawsuits won't begin until the certification is done.

First-time candidates, let this be a lesson to you. Don't concede until the election is certified! And make sure you've retained plenty of lawyers.

What was it they called it--"the doctor fix?" Nobody mentioned the lawyer fix, until now. The next time they hold a meet your congress-thing gathering in Washington, everybody should bring eggs and not for flu vaccine.

Anger is rising. Daniel Henninger:

The only good news out of the Fort Hood massacre is that U.S. electronic surveillance technology was able to pick up Major Hasan's phone calls to an al Qaeda-loving imam in Yemen. The bad news is the people and agencies listening to Hasan didn't know what to do about it. Other than nothing.

The sad thing is that it doesn't really seem to matter who's President. These people have careers to protect, butts to cover, responsibilities to avoid. They're all so worried about political correctness that they can't move. The gun-free policy on Army bases goes back to 1993. How asinine is that? I guess 13 lives' worth.

Our troops deserve better than this and so do we.

Making the United States a more equitable country, a phrase from New Yorker writer John Cassidy, got me thinking. It seems to me that the way the Democrats propose doing this is a lot like the way you make a hedge level. You trim back all the new growth back.

I guess you've got to be highly educated to be this dumb. James Taranto recalls the contemporaneous press coverage of John Allen Muhammad, the "D.C. sniper" of autumn 2002, and notes the contrasting willingness to attribute his crimes to terrorism at the time, compared to the stubborn resistance to the idea that Nidal Hasan could have be motivated by sympathy with Muslim terrorists. The line he quotes from the A.P. report on Governor Kaine's refusal to stay Muhammed's execution ("I think crimes that are this horrible, you just can't understand them, you can't explain them,") is destined to become a classic:

The motive for the shootings . . . remains murky.

Whether one calls it the Devil, Shaitan or just Evil, we seem to be in denial into the highest reaches of academia, government and the military, not to mention the press. Who'd have ever thought that it would be a sign of education and sophistication to be so resistant to saying what everybody thinks? Bill O'Reilly had Sally Quinn on this evening and it took him forever to get her to acknowledge that the Fort Hood shooting was an act of terrorism. It truly illustrates why Victor Davis Hanson calls this the Therapeutic Society.

Nothing is wrong, evil, wicked or just bad anymore, unless it's calling something wrong, evil, wicked or bad. Yet we have to fight back constant efforts to pass "hate crimes" laws, and people who believe in sin and the need for repentance are belittled and reviled in the grossest terms in the popular media, as if merely condemning sinful behavior, they were violating the rights of others.

The most Strangelovian fact in all of this:

Among President Clinton’s first acts upon taking office in 1993 was to disarm U.S. soldiers on military bases. In March 1993, the Army imposed regulations forbidding military personnel from carrying their personal firearms and making it almost impossible for commanders to issue firearms to soldiers in the U.S. for personal protection.

"Gentlemen, you can't carry guns here! This is an ARMY base!" Considering the Clinton and Bush administrations' lousy performance in realizing the threat Al Qaeda represented and doing something until 9/11, it seems hideously negligent that nobody since then has thought to change that policy.

When Obama wants something, there's no time to even read the bill, let alone debate it. So why does it take him so long to make up his mind on his general's recommendations? It's as if he WANTS to boost Cheney's credibility when he calls this dithering. How long doe it take us to figure out that we win wars faster when we go all out to win, instead of letting bad situations suppurate?

Well, this is a relief!

Nature abhors a Higgs boson?

Physics keeps making religion look not all that strange after all.

Extra-terrestrial life? Mormons have believed that from early on. There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter.

Obama Still Can Save His Presidency But do we want him to?

When actors try to think. Hollywood's tragedy.

Is the GOP going to repeat its NY-23 mistakes in Florida? I don't know anything about Armando Gutierrez, Jr., but it seems to me that this much might get the Tea Party to back him:

. . . GOP operatives in Washington and the district say he is running a destructive primary campaign, and national and local leaders are doing just about anything they can to avoid having him as their nominee.

“He’s offending a lot of people,” said attorney Will McBride, who opted out of the race last week. “He’s rubbing people the wrong way. He needs to be a little more professional in his approach to reaching out to local leaders in our party.”

Numerous others confirmed the widespread bristling at Gutierrez’s early maneuvers.

“He’s pissing people off a lot,” said a leading local GOP operative. “He’s very pushy and is an unknown commodity, and people are jealously guarding their prerogatives.”

How can he be running a destructive primary campaign when he's the only one running so far?

Malaise is back. Pew Research: "The mood of America is glum. Two-thirds of the public is dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country."

But it's an ill wind that blows no good. Gallup's generic congressional voting poll has Republicans up 48-44.

Fiends!

David Brooks explains Nidal Hasan's rampage as the effect of a "malevolent narrative."

This narrative is embraced by a small minority. But it has caused incredible amounts of suffering within the Muslim world, in Israel, in the U.S. and elsewhere. With their suicide bombings and terrorist acts, adherents to this narrative have made themselves central to global politics. They are the ones who go into crowded rooms, shout “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” and then start murdering.

Delicately written, as though he were offering a careful psychological explanation to someone severely afflicted with political correctness.

It sounds like Chrysler and its government overseers got scammed by Fiat.

Ben Smith after noting that Obama's campaign fed the media the story about John Edward's $400 haircut:

It's also worth noting, when the pianos start falling on Mitt Romney, that a top Obama researcher, Shauna Daly, is now the DNC's research chief.

And you know that the media will help them fall.

Patrick Poole predicted earlier this year that: "The military can’t and won’t do what it needs to about jihadism, and we are going to see body bags coming out of our recruiting centers and military bases for the foreseeable future." I still can't believe that no one in that hall besides the lone nut was armed.

Just had a spirited debate with my older son, the PhD from Harvard. So now I feel like I have to give more equal time. Marc Ambinder: The Best Speech Obama's Given Since...Maybe Ever.

Today, at Ft. Hood. I guarantee: they'll be teaching this one in rhetoric classes. It was that good. My gloss won't do it justice. Yes, I'm having a Chris Matthews-chill-running-up-my-leg moment, but sometimes, the man, the moment and the words come together and meet the challenge.

Gag me with a spoon.

But Althouse has a more favorable response to the President's speech at Fort Hood today, than she's had to earlier remarks and speeches. So do I, to the speech, but not to Ambinder's practically wetting himself in ardor.

I think the President's remarks show an appreciation for our military volunteers that he hasn't expressed before. I can't gauge his sincerity, because I never listen to speeches like this.

I hope that he has been changed by this atrocity. (I can't call it a tragedy, because I reserve that term for events that couldn't be prevented.) I hope that this is his 9/11 and that he understands better now that people who think like Major Hasan are in control of Iran and other countries, and that making concessions or offering your open hand to them will not change their intentions. I hope that he now get it that they have to be prevented from completing the evil to which they are committed.

Wha? Utah is the happiest state in the union? It's interesting that there are only eight points between the top and the bottom. I'd be surprised if that's statistically significant. I also note that a lot of the intermountain states are in the upper half of the list.

Mona Charen:

The backlash trope is trotted out after every episode of terrorist violence. But it is as false as it is dangerous. This image of a nation on a hair trigger for violence against Muslims is a calumny. Even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, though millions were inflamed by grief and outrage, there was no broad-based "backlash" against Muslim Americans. There were a handful of crimes including the murder of a Sikh who may have been mistaken for a Muslim, a few broken windows, some insults, and some hurt feelings. But the overwhelming majority of Americans did not seek out scapegoats, nor engage in vigilantism.

The repeated invocation of this libel has had an effect, though. It has succeeded in intimidating many Americans about the proper bounds of discussion. Gen. Casey reinforces this timidity when he frets that "our diversity" may be a casualty of the attack at Fort Hood. He and the Obama administration are obscuring the real challenge Americans face.

Our challenge is not to transcend the demons of vengeance clawing at our souls. Our challenge is to deal intelligently with a threat that arises from religious convictions. Non-bigoted observers can see that while the vast majority of the world's Muslims are not extremists, a significant minority are. And it matters what people believe.

We don't want to make a mountain out of a molehill, but when you see molehills, you ought to do something to get rid of the moles.

The arrogance of power, Obama style.

ACORN keeps getting more and more shameless. It's a tumor on the Democratic Party which created and nourishes it.

Psychiatrists must be the most politically correct beings on earth. Even Army psychiatrists didn't report his moonbat ravings, apparently.

Colleagues had expected a discussion on a medical issue but were instead given an extremist interpretation of the Koran, which Hasan appeared to believe.

Fellow doctors have recounted how they were repeatedly harangued by Hasan about religion and that he openly claimed to be a "Muslim first and American second."

On the other hand, maybe it's the Army itself that was crippled by PC:

One Army doctor who knew him said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim soldier had stopped fellow officers from filing formal complaints.

Apple rejects an app with caricatures of members of Congress by a MAD Magazine artist. The comment is obvious: I guess there isn't an app for that.

ABC's Rick Klein:

The health care bill has become an abortion bill -- and an immigration bill, and a tax bill, and a jobs bill, and a spending bill -- not to mention the most significant re-working of the nation's health care system in half a century.

Democrats are revolting:

As health care legislation moves toward a crucial airing in the Senate, the White House is facing a growing revolt from some Democrats and analysts who say the bills Congress is considering do not fulfill President Obama’s promise to slow the runaway rise in health care spending.

Obama ex machina.

Two Dots Don't Make a Political Map Congressional Democrats should keep telling themselves that.

I guess Democrats don't pay taxes:

Instead, their response is: If you don't like what we're offering, we'll give you more of it. Far more Americans oppose Obamacare than support it. Yet Democratic representative Gerald Connolly of Virginia said he "concluded" from last week's election that "we've got to pass health care . . . [and] give Democrats something to be excited about." It's "a matter of tangibles being delivered," said Democratic representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois.

Or they count on those who do pay taxes to think it's their patriotic duty.

I thought that CheapShots.org was the original choice of name for the site, until they learned it was taken and picked MediaMatters instead.

Dr. Zero:

Maybe this time, we can roll a titanic new government program across the fruited plains, without squashing the fruit. Among the most dangerous delusions of liberals and moderates is the belief they can unleash a blizzard of taxes and spending without radically altering other aspects of their lives… the belief they can blow the better part of $3 trillion taking over an industry, but everything else will stay exactly the same. They don’t appreciate how quickly the economic depression from huge taxes and industrial takeovers will destroy the income stream fueling the program, requiring increasingly high taxes in a vicious cycle resembling the collapse of a star into a black hole. They underestimate the damage to the national psyche that will result from hooking the middle class into a welfare program it can never escape. They’ve grown to take our fantastically advanced medical science for granted, and don’t realize how much less they’ll be expected to settle for, when doctors and corporations flee from a nationalized health care industry, the way many doctors currently refuse to accept Medicare. I don’t think enough people appreciate how far we have to fall, from the A+ health care we enjoy today, to the C- that will be good enough for government work.

I don't worry for myself, since I expect to die before things collapse, but I worry about my wife and sons and grandson who will get stuck with the taxes this evil scheme will impose.

May I suggest an inscription for the memorial of the dead from the Fort Hood massacre? It's from Anwar al-Awlaki, Nidal Malik Hasan's favorite imam:

America failed to defeat the mujahedeen when it gave its president unlimited support, how can it win with Obama who is on a short leash? If America failed to win when it was at its pinnacle of economic strength, how can it win today with a recession--if not a depression--at hand?

The simple answer is: America cannot and will not win. The tables have turned and there is no rolling back of the worldwide Jihad movement.

Translated by MEMRI

And today on his website, al-Awlaki declares Hasan's murders heroic:

"Nidal Hassan is a hero. He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people. This is a contradiction that many Muslims brush aside and just pretend that it doesn't exist. Any decent Muslim cannot live, understanding properly his duties towards his Creator and his fellow Muslims, and yet serve as a U.S. soldier."

"How Can There Be Any Dispute About the Virtue of What He Has Done?"

Got that? He was born in America, but only radical Muslims are "his people." Those fellow-Americans he shot down were the enemy, despite the oath he had taken to defend this nation.

Perfect headline: The Lords of Entitlement

OK, it's a meme now. President Obama is phlegmatic, cool, emotionally subdued, whatever. It's part of his job to give voice to our collective outrage, pain and indignation, not just tell us to withhold judgment. George W. Bush did that after 9/11 and in his public speeches until the last couple of years of his presidency, even if he drove the Dems nuts. Part of the reason he won in 2004 was that John Kerry's literally stentorian speaking style just wasn't believable. Clinton did the job very well after the Oklahoma City bombing, but then he didn't have to sidestep the Muslim question. Obama's reaction to Fort Hood came across like a news anchor caught joking with the crew before reading a grisly news item. For a moment his mask slipped.

Then there's his inapt comparison of Fort Hood to the upcoming vote in the House on Health Care. The only way that works is if you admit that a lot of the Dems won't be there again in two years, but falling on one's sword for Madame Speaker isn't the same thing as being ambushed by a crazed Jihadi nut.

But mostly it's the progressive arrogance, the attitude that this isn't really a system where the will of the people should control, but the schemes of the best and the brightest, whose political enemies are "tea baggers," a disgusting sexual slur; un-American and violence prone. Does anybody really feel like he's "our President" these days? I guess that's how the Dems felt about Bush, but he never belittled all those people who were parading with posters of him in an SS uniform and a Hitler mustache or called them dirty names. Obama is still the radical organizer fighting against The Man. He doesn't seem to get that we're his fellow Americans not the enemy he's trying to unseat.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Instead of all this, what if the President of the United States had not called for a Saturday night vote on health care, in which he used the outrage over the Fort Hood horror to win back wavering votes, while slurring his enemies. What if instead he had said something like, “Let’s have the debate and vote take place in prime afternoon time, to encourage the American people to follow the proceedings. And let us conduct the entire process without calling each other names.” . . .

What emerges from this week’s presidential observations is a troubling image of a highly partisan, often disingenuous President—who, for some strange reason, is far more eager to castigate political enemies than he is a terrorist who inflicted mayhem against our own American soldiers.

As I said, he's a political operative, not a president.

If I were a German, I'd be celebrating this anniversary, but as an American, I feel as though Nancy Pelosi and friends have just lowered an iron curtain over our economy.

Pfizer abandons the Kelo property.But at least it established a principle.

Don't trust anybody under thirty.

OK, Michael Barone doesn't exactly say that, but it sort of follows from his piece:

This is a generation accustomed to making its own choices and shaping its own world. They listen to their own iPod playlists, not someone else's Top 40; they construct their own Facebook pages rather than enlisting in the official Elvis Fan Club.

Democrats' policies are not in sync with this mentality. They seek a government-run health care regimen, in which young Americans will be forced to sign up for expensive insurance to subsidize older people with more health problems. They seek to jam employees into labor unions, who will insist on 5,000 pages of work rules and rigid seniority systems.

And yet Obama still won their votes. Conservatives have the better case, but they can't paint hope and change like Obama did. That's why finding another person like Reagan is vital. He gave us visions of the greatness of this country and our role in history that were more powerful that Obama's because they were true, despite all of our flaws. Maybe their slogan should be "Change for the better. Hope for a debt-free future."

For good clear writing, go here and read some Byron York. It's all good. Not as sharp and witty as Mark Steyn, but very good reporting. For me, that's much higher praise than "journalism."

This is the most encouraging thing I've read since the vote on the Pelosi bill:

It will be remembered as the high point of their unswerving efforts to demand government solutions to every big problem.

It was their most daring stab, deepest into enemy territory.

And the creeks will fill with the political blood of the dead who charged blindly into the angry enemy fire.

Long from now, gauzy-eyed liberals will tear up at the memory of those who pressed forward through the mindless carnage despite knowing full well the sure fate staring back at them.

For years, they will reminisce about which way who voted and how they were never the same after that.

And, like Gettysburg and the Confederacy, the vote will mark the beginning of the end for Pelosi and her doomed crew.

I hope he's right, but I remember Jimmy Carter's administration too well. The double digit inflation and interest rates, the nightly countdown of how long our hostages had been held in Iran, the gas lines and scarcity. After that and the first two years of Clinton, when Hillarycare was pressed and rejected, one would have thought that we'd never be so stupid as to give these people power again. Yet, we re-elected Clinton and now, we've given the Dems an almost filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a huge majority in the House and elected a radical as President. Will we never learn? Not as long as we leave it to the political parties to come up with candidates. All they care about is winning. We should care most about character and core beliefs.

Anwar al Awlaki: “Nidal Hassan Did the Right Thing”

Going Muslim?

The integration compact depends on a broad trust that the immigrant's desire to be American can happily co-exist with his other forms of racial/cultural/religious identity. Once that trust doesn't exist, America faces a problem in need of urgent resolution.

Have we reached that point of breakdown in trust? Not yet, I think, and not by some distance; but a few more murderous incidents of the Maj. Hasan variety--a few more shouts of "Allahu Akbar" as Americans are shot dead--will push many Americans on to a dangerous cusp.

I prefer to think of it as "going jihadi," but the Muslims mainstream in America can't continue to excuse people like Hasan while calling the rest of us intolerant. They must do more to rid themselves of the radical preachers and advocates of war with the West, and to assist our government to protect us all from further violence. Just as we should be aware of signs of going postal, we should likewise feel an obligation to report suspicious behavior by anyone, regardless of race or religion.

Muslims are in danger of wearing out America's good will if they continue to appeal to political correctness and criticize the rest of us without admitting that they have a problem.

I'm afraid for the future of America. We have turned our back on God and made it a moral crime to speak of him or mention sin and wickedness. We're not yet down to the few good men who would have saved Sodom and Gomorrah, but a lot of us would react to Angels as did the people of those cities. All sorts of scriptural warnings come to mind, but the main one is this: Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand!

We are in thrall to the blindness of Satan, denying the greatest threats to our own safety, and laying up for ourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. I am not condemning anyone, because there is still time to save ourselves if we humble ourselves and seek to find God and follow his promptings. We have his words before us to study and pray about, and all people have the capacity to feel his spirit and guidance. I write about the Book of Mormon often because it contains the best parallels to our own time and shows how societies prosper through humility and obedience to God and decline and destruction of those which rely on the "solutions" of man, abuse their freedoms and give themselves over to contention, anger and violence.

So assume that the Senate passes a bill as wildly unpopular as the House's, and next year the control of both houses of Congress flips back to Republicans or Conservatives (I'm not predicting it, just postulating.) and Congress wishes to repeal these absurd spending bills and cut spending. Without 60 votes in the Senate, such a repeal can't happen, and without a two-thirds majority in both houses, the President's veto power would prevent repeal. Thus we give those who vote to spend recklessly what I call the ratcheting power to pass laws that will eventually result in default on the nation's obligations.

Iranian student stuns nation by criticizing the Supreme Leader. And he survived.

Perhaps most surprising, the young math whiz has so far suffered no repercussions from the confrontation at a question-and-answer session between Khamenei and students at Tehran's Sharif Technical University.

In fact, Iran's clerical leadership appears to be touting the incident as a sign of its tolerance – so much so that some Iranians at first believed the 20-minute exchange was staged by the government, though opposition commentators are now convinced Vahidnia was the real thing.. . .

"In the past three to five years that I have been reading newspapers, I have seen no criticism of you, not even by the Assembly of Experts, whose duty is to criticize and supervise the performance of the leader."

I can understand the skepticism. If an MSM (the U.S. equivalent of the Assembly of Experts) reporter or Democratic consultant had appeared on Fox News, I wouldn't expect this much restraint from our Supreme Leader.

While Democrats celebrate the government's takeover of a seventh of the economy, they're doing squat to get the economy to produce the jobs to pay for it. Of course, they don't have a clue about what really creates jobs, so they'll probably vote for more "stimulus."

At least someone at The Atlantic Monthly doesn't have his head in the sand. Nobody I know of has suggested a violent backlash against Muslims, but I think that the "we don't know Hasan's motives" crowd make that more likely than less with their just-ignore-it reaction.

Meanwhile the proof that Hasan's motives were tied to radical nihilist Islam continues to pile up.

Is history repeating itself?

Organizing for America will need lots of cash for the Senate battle.

Why not just buy health insurance for all those uninsured?

Well, the Republicans did it first! So does that excuse this kind of riding rough-shod over minorities and going back on your word for political expediency? I thought that's why Tom Delay and other Republicans got voted out of office.

I suspect that we could go back to the Washington administration and find similar games-playing in Congress. It certainly was going on in the Congress when the Constitution was being drafted. Each negro slave was counted as 3/5 of a person, yet wasn't given citizenship.

So precedents should only apply to fair practices of the psst, not to abuses cited as an excuse for repeating them.

Marian Tupy:

Unlike the Germans after the World War II, the people in ex-communist countries were never forced to face their demons. As a consequence, communist rule has not acquired the moral opprobrium of Nazism. As long as that remains the case, socialist economics will continue to enjoy an aura of plausibility.

Maybe that's ahead for the Democrats who just brought us a big step closer to socialism. Or maybe the country will have to go broke to prove that government money isn't an infinite commodity.

Mark Steyn:

Brave soldiers trained to hunt down and kill America’s enemy abroad were killed in the safety and security of home by, in essence, the same enemy — a man who believes in and supports everything the enemy does.

And he’s a U.S. Army major.

And his superior officers and other authorities knew about his beliefs but seemed to think it was just a bit of harmless multicultural diversity — as if believing that “the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor” (i.e., his fellow American soldiers) and writing Internet paeans to the “noble” “heroism” of suicide bombers and, indeed, objectively supporting the other side in an active war is to be regarded as just some kind of alternative lifestyle that adds to the general vibrancy of the base.

Ouch!

Just as those victims of the Fort Hood massacre sacrificed themselves, so Congress members should be willing to sacrifice their seats for the good of the country. Or words to that effect. President Classy.

I guess it's up to the rest of us to make sure that their sacrifice is accepted.

He's not interested in being President. He only really cares about spreading the wealth to his clientele.

Life is full of mysteries, but chief among them in this Marine wife's mind at the moment is, "Just how stupid does this White House think we are?" If the events of the past few months have shown us anything, it's that Barack Obama has little enthusiasm for - nor interest in - one of the most important duties of an American President: his role as Commander in Chief of the nation's armed forces.

Or maybe it's just that he's phlegmatic.

Thanks is in order to all Democratic Congressmen who voted against Pelosi's bill to add trillions more to the national debt and who knows how much in new taxes. I find it chilling that the New York Times would publish all the information about them needed for left wing activists to target them for defeat. Maybe that will be their excuses for losses in 2010.

Orwellian is a term I use advisedly, since it's been overused to the point of meaninglessness. But this is one case that reminds me of Orwell's 1984:

Here’s Obama’s “media diversity czar,” Mark Lloyd:

It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.

I've long thought that the left has picked up on the totalitarian habit of naming things propagandistically, and "Media Diversity" is the exact opposite of what Obama's White House seems interested in.

This week I've read reports of the White House threatening a Democratic consultant who had the temerity to appear on Fox New Channel. Media Diversity! Minitrue!

It's official. The lemmings are headed toward the fjord. Be sure to watch the opinion polls on the popularity of the bill they passed. It's bound to come up later.