Another Milestone Day For Obama: The Monstrous Mistake Of Trying Foreign Terrorists Like U.S. Citizens

I didn’t used to believe in anything special about “Friday the 13th.”  It was just another day.  Turns out I was wrong.

Obama has brought about yet another “change.”

Friday the 13th now features a new monster – the President of the United States of America – as the Creature Who Made Terrorists Feel Right At Home.  I know the name doesn’t sound as scary as “Jason Voorhees,” the hockey-masked hacker-slasher, but believe me, this is a monster that can kill more Americans than Jason Voorhees ever did.

Under Obama, we’re undermining our CIA.  We’re mirandizing terrorists captured on foreign battlefields.  And now we’re trying mass-murdering terrorists like American citizens in our justice system.

And, of course, when a terrorists actually guns down more than two score unarmed soldiers on a military base, he denies the man is even a terrorist in a rush to whitewash lest the revelation somehow undermine our “diversity.”

Hope you terrorist-murderers feel at home.  If there’s anything else we can do for you, please let us know.  Our president will go to any lengths to make you as comfortable as possible.

And don’t you mind that whole “slaughtering” thing.  We’re really like sheeple now; we don’t mind.  Murder 3,000 of us, or 3,000,000; we’re fine with it.  Really.

Why are we going to put the 9/11 mastermind and four of his fellow murderers on trial in civilian court?  Because Barack Obama is more righteous and wonderful than our despicable presidents of the past – such as Abraham Lincoln and the admittedly less-righteous FDR – have ever been.  Honest Abe was actually DIShonest Abe because he had military tribunals.

NYC trial of 9/11 suspects poses legal risks

By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer Devlin Barrett, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 33 mins ago

WASHINGTON – In the biggest trial for the age of terrorism, the professed 9/11 mastermind and four alleged henchmen will be hauled before a civilian court on American soil, barely a thousand yards from the site of the World Trade Center’s twin towers they are accused of destroying.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced the decision Friday to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to trial at a lower Manhattan courthouse.

It’s a risky move. Trying the men in civilian court will bar evidence obtained under duress and complicate a case where anything short of slam-dunk convictions will empower President Barack Obama’s critics.

The case is likely to force the federal court to confront a host of difficult issues, including rough treatment of detainees, sensitive intelligence-gathering and the potential spectacle of defiant terrorists disrupting proceedings. U.S. civilian courts prohibit evidence obtained through coercion, and a number of detainees were questioned using harsh methods some call torture.

Holder insisted both the court system and the untainted evidence against the five men are strong enough to deliver a guilty verdict and the penalty he expects to seek: a death sentence for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people who were killed when four hijacked jetliners slammed into the towers, the Pentagon and a field in western Pennsylvania.

“After eight years of delay, those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September the 11th will finally face justice. They will be brought to New York — to New York,” Holder repeated for emphasis — “to answer for their alleged crimes in a courthouse just blocks away from where the twin towers once stood.”

Holder said he decided to bring Mohammed and the other four before a civilian court rather than a military commission because of the nature of the undisclosed evidence against them, because the 9/11 victims were mostly civilians and because the attacks took place on U.S. soil. Institutionally, the Justice Department, where Holder has spent most of his career, has long wanted to reassert the ability of federal courts to handle terrorism cases.

Lawyers for the accused will almost certainly try to have charges thrown out based on the rough treatment of the detainees at the hands of U.S. interrogators, including the repeated waterboarding, or simulated drowning, of Mohammed.

The question has been raised as to whether the government can make its case without using coerced confessions.

That may not matter, said Pat Rowan, a former Justice Department official.

“When you consider everything that’s come out in the proceedings at Gitmo, either from the mouth of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others or from their written statements submitted to the court, it seems clear that they won’t need to use any coerced confessions in order to demonstrate their guilt,” said Rowan.

Held at Guantanamo since September 2006, Mohammed said in military proceedings there that he wanted to plead guilty and be executed to achieve what he views as martyrdom. In a letter from him released by the war crimes court, he referred to the attacks as a “noble victory” and urged U.S. authorities to “pass your sentence on me and give me no respite.”

Holder insisted the case is on firm legal footing, but he acknowledged the political ground may be more shaky when it comes to bringing feared al-Qaida terrorists to U.S. soil.

“To the extent that there are political consequences, I’ll just have to take my lumps,” he said. But any political consequences will reach beyond Holder to his boss, Obama.

Bringing such notorious suspects to U.S. soil to face trial is a key step in Obama’s plan to close the military-run detention center in Cuba. Obama initially planned to close the prison by next Jan. 22, but the administration is no longer expected to meet that deadline.

Obama said he is “absolutely convinced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be subject to the most exacting demands of justice. The American people will insist on it and my administration will insist on it.”

After the announcement, political criticism and praise for the decision divided mostly along party lines.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said bringing the terrorism suspects into the U.S. “is a step backwards for the security of our country and puts Americans unnecessarily at risk.”

Former President George W. Bush’s last attorney general, Michael Mukasey, a former federal judge in New York, also objected that federal courts were not well-suited to this task. “The plan seems to be to abandon the view that we are at war,” Mukasey told a conference of conservative lawyers. He said trial in open court “creates a cornucopia of intelligence for those still at large and a circus for those being tried,” and he advocated military tribunals instead.

But Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said the federal courts are capable of trying high-profile terrorism cases.

“By trying them in our federal courts, we demonstrate to the world that the most powerful nation on earth also trusts its judicial system — a system respected around the world,” Leahy said.

Family members of Sept. 11 victims were also divided.

“We have a president who doesn’t know we’re at war,” said Debra Burlingame, whose brother, Charles Burlingame, had been the pilot of the hijacked plane that crashed into the Pentagon. She said she was sickened by “the prospect of these barbarians being turned into victims by their attorneys.”

From McClatchey:

Congressional Republicans, however, promptly accused the Obama administration of trying to return to a pre-Sept. 11 mentality of criminalizing the war on terrorism.

Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas warned that “bringing these dangerous individuals onto U.S. soil needlessly compromises the safety of all Americans.”

House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio said the possibility that the accused terrorists “could be found not guilty due to some legal technicality just blocks from Ground Zero should give every American pause.”

Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder – who actually has a track record for PARDONING AND FREEING TERRORISTS had this to say:

A big obstacle could be whether an impartial jury can be impaneled so close to where the twin towers of the World Trade Center once stood.

Holder said that a careful jury selection process should dispel those concerns.

“I would not have authorized the bringing of these prosecutions unless I thought that the outcome … would ultimately be successful,” he said. “I will say that I have access to information that has not been publicly released that gives me great confidence that we will be successful in federal court.”

But what happens if you thought wrong, Holder?  What happens then?

What happens if these guys are found not guilty?  Are we supposed to just let them go?

What happens if the five terrorists draw a liberal activist judge who wants to make “torture” and issue, rather than “terrorism” and “3,000 murdered Americans”?  Is Obama and his Justice Department at work to circumvent the system relating to the assigning of judges to particular cases and guarantee that “the right” judge hears the case?  Wouldn’t that be tantamount to the very worst that Obama has claimed he wants to avoid in the first place?  Wouldn’t that amount to a show trial?

Obama is either taking a giant chance, a literal roll of the dice, or he’s already stacked the deck.

What happens if a Muslim is on the jury pool?  That one’s kind of interesting.  A single juror can hang the jury and lead to a mistrial.  Do we want to take a chance that a sympathizer throw a monkey wrench into the system?  Is the Obama team that so values “diversity” going to try to prevent Muslims from serving on the jury?

What about a change of venue?  Surely a judge would HAVE to grant such an obvious petition, given the fact that the attacks occurred in New York, virtually every adult was impacted, and “New York” is hardly the best place to find an untainted jury pool for the 9/11 attack on the “World Trade Center attack in New York”?  And yet New York has this mulit-million dollar high tech courthouse complex to deal with them.

I mean, again, if you grant the change of venue, people will justifiably become enraged.  And if you DON’T grant the change of venue, people will justifiably think that the fix is in.

A military tribunal of KSM and his terrorist buddies at Gitmo would have been a ho-hum affair.  A civilian trial in a lower Manhattan courthouse with the press swarming over every detail like cockroaches would be the trial of the century.

Propaganda forum?  You bet.  Journalists will cover every remark that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his merry band of mass murderers offers.  Including the words of solidarity with other jihadist murderers.  Including words of encouragement to any who would murder Americans anywhere on the planet.  This is hardly the message that the American media should be broadcasting, but rest assured we’ll be broadcasting every word of it.

Terrorists are different from jewel thieves and even from gang bangers: every single thing they do is directed toward spreading a message.

These terrorists want a big stage.  And Barack Obama and Eric Holder want to make sure they have that stage.

And what happens if the trial – whether it’s held in New York or somewhere else – stimulates more terrorist attacks?  It’s one thing if terrorists try to attack Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, quite another if they launch an attack in New York, Los Angeles, or wherever else.

And assuming (no guarantee anymore) that these terrorist monsters go to prison, you can bet in the age of Gitmo (which is actually a model prison) being shut down under Obama that these guys will end up in the U.S. civilian system.  And they will be welcomed like rock stars.

Authorities are becoming increasingly alarmed over the radicalized Muslim population coming out of the U.S. prison system:

“Over the past 30 years, Islam has become a powerful force in the U.S. prison system, with some estimates that up to 20% of the inmate population is now Muslim.  Terrorism experts are increasingly concerned that disaffected inmates drawn to radical Islam could become a source of homegrown terrorist activity.”

Authorities are seeing more and more “homegrown jihadists” coming out of the prison system.  Just two weeks ago, federal authorities were confronted by radicalized Muslims coming out of the U.S. prison system and organizing a cell that was claiming “that the government was the enemy and they must be willing to take on the FBI — even if it meant death.”  And thanks to this brain dead decision by Barack Hussein, we’re going to start seeing a lot more of this.  Putting these terrorists into the U.S. prison system is tantamount to putting crack cocaine in the hands of addicts.  It will not end well.

This is a truly stupid idea on every level imaginable.

My question is, what are we gaining from taking what Obama’s Justice Department ADMITS is a risk?  That we were “open”?

There’s the obvious question, “You know what?  This thing could backfire.  I mean these guys could be acquitted.”  And MSNBC Justice Department Correspondent Pete Williams has this to say, based on his sources:

“No.  They’ve got a drawer full of other charges that they could bring against these defendants.  There are already indictments pending against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for other crimes, so they will just re-arrest them and charge them with something else.”

The thing about a fair game is that either team could actually win.  This isn’t a fair game.  And everyone in the world is going to know that, no matter where it is held.  This isn’t going to be any kind of demonstration about how “open” we are.  People who didn’t believe it before won’t start believing it now – unless and possibly even including that we allow the five terrorists to walk out of court free men.

A National Review article entitled, “Holder’s Hidden Agenda,” reminds us of how Obama’s people just ripped into the CIA and started pulling out every wire and diode they could.  They demanded an investigation and just plain released all kinds of previously classified information that made the US and the CIA look as bad as they possibly could.  To what end?

This summer, I theorized that Attorney General Eric Holder — and his boss — had a hidden agenda in ordering a re-investigation of the CIA for six-year-old alleged interrogation excesses that had already been scrutinized by non-partisan DOJ prosecutors who had found no basis for prosecution. The continuing investigations of Bush-era counterterrorism policies (i.e., the policies that kept us safe from more domestic terror attacks), coupled with the Holder Justice Department’s obsession to disclose classified national-defense information from that period, enable Holder to give the hard Left the “reckoning” that he and Obama promised during the 2008 campaign. [...]

So: We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda’s case against America. Since that will be their “defense,” the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and — depending on what judge catches the case — they are likely to be given a lot of it. The administration will be able to claim that the judge, not the administration, is responsible for the exposure of our defense secrets. And the circus will be played out for all to see — in the middle of the war. It will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America’s defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts. And the intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.

Like I said.  The new Friday the 13th monsters revealed today as Barack Obama and his AG Eric Holder are far more dangerous to Americans than Jason Voorhees ever was.

Update, November 14: TEN jihadists terrorists are coming to the U.S. to stand trial in civilian court, rather than the five that Obama and Holder claimed.

Update, November 14: Barack Obama, on September 27, 2006, in the debate concerning “The Military Commissions Act of 2006,” assured America that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and those like him would face MILITARY justice, and that he would NOT get “all kinds of rights.”  Obama is, as usual, a documented liar.

 

Democrats Sinking Down To Crazy Town In Polls

From Real Clear Politics:

November 11, 2009

Why Things Don’t Look Good For Dems In The Midterms

Independent political observers and Democrats themselves have been saying for months that 2010 is shaping up as a bad year for Democratic candidates, and the latest Gallup generic congressional ballot test only reinforces the point. Not only do Republicans lead 48 percent to 44 percent, but independents now favor the GOP by 52 percent to 30 percent.

Although generic Republican candidates hold just a 4-point lead, the GOP’s perpetual turnout advantage means their lead would likely be higher if the midterm elections were today. Even a single-digit lead for Democrats in Gallup’s testing often only means the two parties will be competitive, as more registered voters identify with the Democratic Party but more Republicans go to the polls on Election Day.

In the final Gallup survey before the 1998 midterms, Republicans trailed by 9 points but still went on to win a small majority of House seats. In the 2002 midterms, Republicans were down 5 points just before the election but again kept a slim majority in the House.

A year before the 2006 midterm elections –when Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress — generic congressional ballot testing forecast the shifting mood of the country. An August 2005 Gallup survey found Democrats leading by 12 points — one of the widest margins between the parties Gallup had found since the GOP took back Congress in 1994.

That survey was far from the only one to show a shifting mood. This is the first Gallup survey to show Republicans leading this cycle, and while a year is a long time in politics, the poll falls in line with other signs pointing in the GOP’s direction.

“It’s better to look at a series of these polls than one of them, but the fact is Republicans haven’t led the generic ballot since the stone ages,” said David Wasserman, who analyzes House races for the Cook Political Report. “Any sort of deficit is dangerous for Democrats because their support is more heavily concentrated within a few base districts.”

The last time Republicans led was September 2008, just after the Republican National Convention. The poll was an outlier, as no other generic ballot test by any other polling firm had shown Republicans leading in at least four years. None did soon after, either, and Democrats went on expand their majority to more than 75 seats in the House.

Further significance in the poll is the shift among independent voters. The 22-point advantage for Republicans is a far cry from July, when the two parties were statistically tied. The migration of independents toward the GOP mirrors what occurred in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections last week, when a Republican knocked off the incumbent governor in the Garden State and the GOP nominee won by nearly 20 points in the Old Dominion.

The independent swing shows in the new Pew Research survey also released today. It found incumbents — most of which are Democrats these days — in a perilous place, with just 52 percent saying they want their representative re-elected and only 34 percent say most representatives should be re-elected.

“Both measures are among the most negative in two decades of Pew Research surveys,” Pew reports. “Other low points were during the 1994 and 2006 election cycles, when the party in power suffered large losses in midterm elections.”

The latest Gallup survey was conducted Nov. 5-8 of 894 registered voters with a margin of error of +/- 4 percent. The Pew poll was taken Oct. 28-Nov. 8 of 1,644 registered voters.

First of all, let’s look at how the Democrats have “progressed” in a single picture from Gallup:

You’ve got a 10 point swing in the four months that Democrats have fixated on Obamacare, with Democrats losing 6 points, and Republicans gaining 4 points.

And when you see independents now trending Republican over Democrat by more than 20 points, all you can say is WOW.

Obama currently has an approval of -9 (meaning that 9% more voters strongly disapprove of him than strongly approve.  And only 47% of voters at least somewhat approve of him.  That according to the best pollster, Rasmussen, which nailed the results of the 2008 election.

Humorist Dennis Miller, commenting following the disastrous-for-Democrats 2009 off year-election, said that Obama has “smaller coattails than a naked midget.”  If Democrats are counting on Obama to win them re-election, they’d better think some more.

Just keep drinking that Kool-aid, Democrats.  And if it tastes like it has cyanide in it, don’t trouble yourselves.

The current Democrat fairy tale is that the reason Democrats took such a historic pounding in 1994 was because Democrats had failed to pass their massive government takeover of health care.  But the fact is that they got driven out of office because they’d TRIED to pass such an evil monstrosity, and the public didn’t want any more of their poison.

And now here we are again.  And the 2009 off-year elections actually shows Republicans having even greater success than they did at the 1993 off-year elections, which preceded and anticipated the massive rejection of Democrats in 1994.

The funny thing is that during the last two elections from 2006 and 2008, it was Republicans ignoring or explaining away the polls.  Now it’s Democrats.

Go ahead and be the proverbial ostrich, Democrats – or worse yet be this guy

- but the way things are going, you won’t like the “change” you’ll be confronted with when you finally pull your heads out.

 

Obama Promise To Transcend Political Divide His Signature Failure And Lie

Back in March of 2008, the New York Times correctly identified what they described as the CORE of Barack Obama’s promise to the American people, and they correctly identified why reasonable people should be skeptical:

WASHINGTON — At the core of Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is a promise that he can transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years, end the partisan and ideological wars and build a new governing majority.

To achieve the change the country wants, he says, “we need a leader who can finally move beyond the divisive politics of Washington and bring Democrats, independents and Republicans together to get things done.”

But this promise leads, inevitably, to a question: Can such a majority be built and led by Mr. Obama, whose voting record was, by one ranking, the most liberal in the Senate last year?

Anyone who possessed more reason than their dog or cat, of course, should have known that the answer to the last question would be a resounding “NO!”  If Obama had wanted to be a “unifier,” he wouldn’t have been the most liberal (and radical) member of the U.S. Senate.

And of course, anyone who truly possessed even a shred of bipartisanship wouldn’t have spent 23 seconds in Jeremiah Wright’s demagogic, racist, anti-American, Marxist church, let alone 23 years.

In other words, any reasonably intelligent person should have known that Obama’s core promise as candidate was in actuality a cynical deception from a fundamentally dishonest politician who was cravenly willing to pass off any deceit to get himself elected.

Did Obama even attempt to live up to his core promise?  Not even close.

“Don’t come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis,” he admonished in a speech.

That speech – with that hard core partisan attack – was delivered within less than THREE WEEKS of his taking office.  Obama was claiming that Republicans didn’t even have a right to present their ideas, much less have any of their ideas or contributions considered.  Some attempt at “bipartisanship.”

It nearly immediately became obvious that Obama’s “transcending the ideological wars” was a cynical marketing gimmick offered by people who had no intention of living up to their campaign rhetoric.

Republicans reacted angrily to the president’s change in tone. Mr. Obama and the Democrats were talking eloquently about bipartisanship, they said, without letting the Republicans have any real influence.

“There is a disconnect between the tone of what I’ve been hearing, from the White House and the Democratic leadership, and the substance of what I’ve been hearing,” Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.) said on the Senate floor Friday. “We thought what [bipartisanship] meant is that the president would define an agenda and then we’d sit down together and put forth our best ideas.”

If Republicans such as Lamar Alexander actually thought that way, they were as gullible as the American people who swallowed Obama’s lies much the same way that fish in a pond gobble up obnoxious kids’ spit.  Like those disgusting snot-filled lougies, Obama’s core promise of transcending the partisanship was something that the American people were so hungry for that they rushed to thoughtlessly gobble up even the most disgusting substitute.

Here’s what Obama recently said to Democrats, again as reported by the New York Times:

Mr. Obama, during his private pep talk to Democrats, recognized Mr. Owens’s election and then posed a question to the other lawmakers. According to Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who supports the health care bill, the president asked, “Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit” Democratic voters “and it will encourage the extremists.”

Note to world: Obama is talking about his own citizens.  And his hatred for them drips out like venom.

Not only is this caustic remark in no way close to anything even faintly resembling “bipartisanship,” but it is in fact diving to the bottom of the partisan, idelogical watters where the most loathsome bottom feeders reside.

Obama has demonized George Bush, demonized Wall Street (after having cynically taken more campaign contributions from Wall Street firms than anyone), demonized banks, demonized American citizens for exercising their rights at tea party events, demonized car manufacturers, demonized health insurance companies (whom he demagogued as “filling the airwaves with deceptive and dishonest ads” even as HIS administration and party trotted out lie after lie against them), demonized doctors (whom he claimed amputated diabetics’ feet and yanked out childrens’ tonsils just to pad their fees), repeatedly demonized and attempted to undermine Fox News, demonized the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and demonized anyone else who disagreed with his radical agenda.

George Bush never even came close to being such a demagogue.  I frankly don’t believe that even NIXON was such a demagogue.

I have never seen such constant demagogic and demonizing rhetoric – against American citizens and American businesses – from a U.S. president of either political party in my adult lifetime.

That divisive demagoguery, in spite of his many promises to heal the divide and restore bipartisanship, is Obama’s biggest failure.  And his biggest lie.

Obama Continues Rampant Dishonesty With Stimulus ‘Jobs ‘

Want to see how Obama “created or saved” all the jobs he’s claiming?  Here’s how:

In June, the federal government spent $1,047 in stimulus money to buy a rider mower from the Toro Company to cut the grass at the Fayetteville National Cemetery in Arkansas. Now, a report on the government’s stimulus Web site improbably claims that that single lawn mower sale helped save or create 50 jobs.

I bought a new watch the other day; that’s got to be good for at least ten jobs saved or created.

Do you seriously trust these people to run your healthcare?  Are you that idiotic?  I mean, dang.

A newspaper editorial just damns Obama’s dishonesty and deceit the way it deserves to be damned.

Note: I added the html links to the other newspaper articles.

Union-Tribune Editorial

Stimulus dishonesty

Job numbers keep proving to be exaggerated

Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 12:43 a.m.

First it was The Associated Press refuting the Obama administration’s claims for jobs saved or created nationwide by February’s $787 billion economic stimulus measure. Then it was The Sacramento Bee refuting the claims that state agencies had made for California. Then it was the Chicago Tribune refuting the claims that state agencies had made for Illinois.

The errors were not of a minor or technical nature. They were egregious.

AP reported that “some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two, three, four or even more times.” The Bee reported that California State University said “the $268.5 million it received in stimulus funding through October allowed it to retain 26,156 employees” – more than half its statewide work force. The Tribune reported that Illinois education officials grossly inflated job-saved numbers, sometimes saying school districts had saved more jobs than their total number of employees.

This is a scandal and should be treated as such. It’s not government as usual. Instead, it appears to reflect a decision to distort government data collection to support explicitly political agendas.

With U.S. unemployment now topping 10 percent, the Obama administration is struggling more than ever to fashion credible counterarguments to the assertion made by this editorial page and many pundits and economists that the massive stimulus measure was a poorly thought-out pork fest that wouldn’t work. What’s the easiest way to defend the stimulus? Make up claims about its glorious results.

Politics also appears to be driving state agencies in their willingness to prop up this bogus narrative. It helps them make the case that they should get even more borrowed money from the federal government that they never will have to repay.

Such dishonesty should be completely unacceptable – especially at the federal level. We trust the Office of Management and Budget to provide honest figures on the size of the deficit and the national debt. We trust the Labor Department to provide honest statistics on unemployment and job gains and losses by sector. We trust the Commerce Department to provide honest numbers on monthly imports and exports and the gross domestic product. We trust the Environmental Protection Agency to provide an honest accounting of air and water pollution levels.

All of these statistics end up helping shape the public debate on the most crucial issues of the day. If these numbers can’t be trusted, we can’t have an honest debate. When it comes to the economic stimulus package, it sure looks like the Obama White House doesn’t want an honest debate. Instead, it is going to relentlessly push the very dubious claim that the stimulus was a huge success – no matter what.

We are struck yet again by the contrast between the hopeful and idealistic tone of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and the bare-knuckles Chicago-style politics of his White House. If this hardball approach goes beyond the usual arm-twisting to the routine twisting of government statistics for political purposes, that will be a grim day for America.

The first thing to do is congratulate the editorial board of the Union-Tribune for standing up for the truth.  That hasn’t happened a whole lot in the swooning, “thrill going up my leg” coverage of Obama.

Next, I’d like to begin by citing the complete paragraph that the Union-Tribune cites from AP:

The AP review found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.

Then I’ll provide the quote from the Sacramento Bee in its context, which makes it an even more damning indictment:

Up to one-fourth of the 110,000 jobs reported as saved by federal stimulus money in California probably never were in danger, a Bee review has found.

California State University officials reported late last week that they saved more jobs with stimulus money than the number of jobs saved in Texas – and in 44 other states.

In a required state report to the federal government, the university system said the $268.5 million it received in stimulus funding through October allowed it to retain 26,156 employees.

That total represents more than half of CSU’s statewide work force.  However, university officials confirmed Thursday that half their workers were not going to be laid off without the stimulus dollars.

“This is not really a real number of people,” CSU spokeswoman Clara Potes-Fellow said. “It’s like a budget number.”

And then I’ll provide the context for the Chicago Tribune findings:

Gov. Patrick Quinn on Wednesday dispatched officials from a new accountability office to investigate errors in a state database detailing stimulus-funded school jobs promoted by the Obama administration, a day after the Tribune raised questions about the job numbers’ accuracy.

The officials have asked the Illinois State Board of Education to verify the number of jobs created and retained in school districts detailed in the report, said Ashley Cross, a spokeswoman for Quinn’s office. Any necessary adjustments will be incorporated into the next quarterly report on the federal stimulus, she said.

Matt Vanover, a spokesman for board of education, said the flawed database actually had been washed of some glaring errors before being included in the official tabulation, which claimed 14,330 school jobs in Illinois had either been saved or created thanks to $1.25 billion in federal funds.

But the Tribune found that the database claimed far more jobs had been saved in some local school districts than actually existed on district payrolls.

Which is to say that, as egregious as the errors were that the Tribune reported for this story, the school board spokesman said they had actually been much, much more egregious before the Tribune was able to get its hands on the actual data.

When the Union-Tribune editors say:

This is a scandal and should be treated as such. It’s not government as usual. Instead, it appears to reflect a decision to distort government data collection to support explicitly political agendas.

You should recognize that we are talking about historic levels of dishonesty that match this administrations’ historic levels of spending and historic levels of debt.

And when they point out that:

Politics also appears to be driving state agencies in their willingness to prop up this bogus narrative. It helps them make the case that they should get even more borrowed money from the federal government that they never will have to repay.

Such dishonesty should be completely unacceptable – especially at the federal level.

You should realize that – counter to the Obama administration’s and Democrat Party’s demagogic attacks against businesses such as our health insurance companies (which make only modest profits, contrary to the frankly evil attacks repeatedly made by the left) – there is no greater or more powerful or more dishonest “special interest” than big government.

If you’re opposed to special interest, then whatever the HELL you do, don’t let the federal government take over health care.

And this garbage of deceit and lies about jobs and the fact that Obama has done NOTHING to create more of them is going on all over the country.

The Boston Globe says, “Stimulus job boost in state exaggerated, review finds.”  And it is simply damning.

While Massachusetts recipients of federal stimulus money collectively report 12,374 jobs saved or created, a Globe review shows that number is wildly exaggerated. Organizations that received stimulus money miscounted jobs, filed erroneous figures, or claimed jobs for work that has not yet started.

The Globe’s finding is based on the federal government’s just-released accounts of stimulus spending at the end of October. It lists the nearly $4 billion in stimulus awards made to an array of Massachusetts government agencies, universities, hospitals, private businesses, and nonprofit organizations, and notes how many jobs each created or saved.

But in interviews with recipients, the Globe found that several openly acknowledged creating far fewer jobs than they have been credited for.

One of the largest reported jobs figures comes from Bridgewater State College, which is listed as using $77,181 in stimulus money for 160 full-time work-study jobs for students. But Bridgewater State spokesman Bryan Baldwin said the college made a mistake and the actual number of new jobs was “almost nothing.’’ Bridgewater has submitted a correction, but it is not yet reflected in the report.

In other cases, federal money that recipients already receive annually – subsidies for affordable housing, for example – was reclassified this year as stimulus spending, and the existing jobs already supported by those programs were credited to stimulus spending. Some of these recipients said they did not even know the money they were getting was classified as stimulus funds until September, when federal officials told them they had to file reports.

“There were no jobs created. It was just shuffling around of the funds,’’ said Susan Kelly, director of property management for Boston Land Co., which reported retaining 26 jobs with $2.7 million in rental subsidies for its affordable housing developments in Waltham. “It’s hard to figure out if you did the paperwork right. We never asked for this.’’

The federal stimulus report for Massachusetts has so many errors, missing data, or estimates instead of actual job counts that it may be impossible to accurately tally how many people have been employed by the massive infusion of federal money. Massachusetts is expected to receive an estimated $1 billion more in stimulus contracts, grants, and loans.

When Obama was elected, unemployment was at 6.6%.  He promised that his stimulus would prevent unemployment from reaching 8%.  And now it’s 10.2%.

His plan completely failed.  His massive $3.27 trillion stimulus porkulus (according to what the CBO reported Obama’s stimulus would actually cost) did nothing more than create a bunch of pork projects and create a Democrat war chest of slush funds to buy the votes it needs.

Don’t believe me about the slush fund?

To get as far as the bill did so far, it appears the administration might have spread some money around. California Rep. Jim Costa was wavering but told a local newspaper last week that his vote could be contingent on getting some federal money for a new medical school in his district along with help for local hospitals.

When a constituent named Bob Smittcamp e-mailed him to complain about his vote for the House bill, the congressman explained he’d been offered the dollars he was looking for — $128 million in federal money.

“He responded to me by basically saying that he did not like many of the elements there were in the legislation. However, he was able to procure $128m for the University of California medical school in Merced,” Smittcamp told Fox News.

Democrats now have in excess of a trillion dollars in federal money to buy itself the votes it needs to impose the liberal agenda.Rather than actually fix the economy, all Obama has done is a) focus entirely on putting even more of the economy under government control through Obamacare rather than focus on creating jobs; b) make up a bunch of patent lies to make believe his policies are doing anything other than dismally failing; and c) keep blaming Bush for everything.

It’s not working out, Obama.  YOU’RE not working out.

Democrats In Process Of Checkmating Themselves

Great article from Forbes:

Democrats Checkmate Themselves

November 10th, 2009

Liberals are fond of calling Republicans “the stupid party.” That might need revision. It appears to me that Democrats have checkmated themselves. Here is the logic:

If Obamacare makes it through the Senate, American small businesses will continue to shrink their payrolls to avoid the awful choice of paying higher health care insurance premiums or the 8% added payroll tax. Unemployment is sure to rise. The Dems will face the November 2010 elections with 12% unemployment … closer to Depression levels of 20% by the so-called broader measures.

If Obamacare fails to pass, the left-wing base will be so demoralized as to not show up at the polls in 2010. Or they will be so angry that they might start a 1968-like interparty war.

My Checkmate Theory is based on small-business fear of Obama’s signature issues–health care, cap-and-trade and union card check. Health care is at the plate now. The fate of health care in the U.S. Senate will set the passage odds for cap-and-trade and union card check next year. All three of Obama’s signature issues are opposed by most small businesses, including the American Chamber of Commerce.

Here are two revealing stories reporting the economic struggles and political fears of small businesses:

USA Today

Small businesses often lead the nation out of recession. Not this time.

The unemployment rate jumped to 10.2% in October from 9.8% in September, and economists say a big reason is small businesses. With sales weak, they’re still slashing jobs and faring worse than their larger rivals.

“Small business tends to lead the way out, and that’s just not happening here,” says Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com.

The Wall Street Journal

W. Michael Brown has scaled back hiring plans in his Virginia auto-parts stores. Carl Redman halted an expansion project at his Oregon contracting business. Bill Hammack is preparing layoffs at his road-construction company in Georgia.

The economy remains unsteady 22 months after the recession began, with banks restricting credit and consumers hunkering down. For these small businesses, and many others across the country, there’s an additional dark cloud: uncertainty created by Washington’s bid to reorganize a wide swath of the U.S. economy.

If American small businesses stay hunkered down, unemployment will stay up. That’s because small businesses historically have created the majority of net jobs in any economy. They’ve created almost all net jobs in the first two years of a recovery. But not this time. Not yet.

The liberal writer Michael Lind is happy to see government put the screws to small businesses. In Lind’s opinion, small businesses are nothing more than a collection of Scrooges and Marleys. No doubt his opinion of small business is shared by many in the Democratic Party’s activist wing:

The solution may be corporatism or corporate paternalism–by which I mean the mandatory universalization of private employer benefits. If the politics of ethnic diversity makes movement in a universalist, social democratic direction impossible in the U.S., then the alternative might be to mandate that all employers provide certain benefits to all employees, with no exceptions. The costs of such unfunded mandates might drive some small businesses out of existence. But small-business owners are the most vocal opponents of wage and benefit reform in the U.S. The replacement of Scrooge & Marley by a smaller number of bigger private and public employers who treat Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim better would not necessarily be a tragedy.

Not a tragedy? Don’t be so quick, Democrats. You can’t have it both ways. Stick it to small businesses (through higher payroll taxes, cap-and-trade and union card check) and the assaulted will trim their payrolls until conditions clear, if ever. But if you don’t stick it to small businesses, your party’s activist base will go nuts.

You have checkmated yourselves, Democrats.

I know Democrats thought that pure arrogance and power hunger would be attractive ingredients, but it doesn’t seem to be working out for them.

If ObamaCare passes, small businesses know that they will be forced to pay high costs for every employee on their payroll.  Ergo sum, they aren’t too eager to hire new workers until the coast is clear and Obamacare has finally gone away.

If it doesn’t pass, the Kool-aid liberal base will go even more nuts than they already are and start a war within the Democrat Party.

The horns of a giant dilemma begin to take shape.

Obama Administration Continues To Set Records In Incompetence

This is rather surprising – and that’s coming from a guy who is convinced that the Obama administration is a ship full of fools moronically leading us into every iceberg in their path.

Behind Schedule

Nearly 200 top positions in the administration remain vacant a full year after President Obama was elected. USA Today reports the backlog puts President Obama behind his predecessors in terms of the amount of time taken to fill key jobs.

The Senate has confirmed 366 Obama nominees, compared with 421 at this point for President George W. Bush and 379 for President Clinton. New York University professor Paul Light, a federal bureaucracy expert, says: “Obama is well on pace right now to set a new record in terms of lateness.”

There is no one permanently in charge of Medicare or Medicaid at a time when the president is pushing health care reform in Congress. Mark McClellan, a former administrator for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, says the timing isn’t good, “without a permanent administrator in place.”

Obama has czars coming out of his ears.  He’s got more democracy-ignoring czars than 19th century Russia.  But apparently no time to appoint the people whom he actually SHOULD have appointed.  Go figure.

Given the fact that he has larger margins of control in the Senate than anybody since Jimmy Carter hamstrung the country in 1976, it is appalling that he has been so unable to send quality nominees to a body that would quickly rubber stamp them.

I mean, they even confirmed John Holdren, the guy who wants to put sterilants in your drinking water and forcibly abort your children under the population-control laws he wants to impose.  And I kid you not.

The biggest joke of all is in the last paragraph.  I mean, think about it: Barack Hussein is so eager to totally transform the health care system into the next apparatus of the Marxist state he’s dreaming about that he hasn’t bothered to actually put anyone in charge over the government health care that we already HAVE.

This should be a further tip-off that Obama is disinterested in running the country.  He’d much rather radically change it altogether.

Pretty appalling stuff from a pretty pathetic leader.

Islam And The Crisis Posed By A Religion That Traces Itself To Mohammad

The Bible says of Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arab people:

“He shall be a wild ass of a man, his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen” (Genesis 16:12).

We are constantly fed a fiction today concerning an issue that is growing larger and larger: Islam is a religion of peace, which a relative few crazed fanatics are trying to subvert.  The problem with this view is that it is a fiction.  The Muslims who support acts of religious violence against infidels (unbelievers) to their religion have a far stronger case to offer from the Koran and from the Hadith than do those Muslims who wish to have peace with the West.

The most terrifying problem of all is that the jihadists/terrorists are interpreting their Korans and their Islamic traditions more accurately than the Muslim contextualizers who are trying to make their religion compatible with Western values.  Why?  Because if the above is true, the problem becomes Islam itself, rather than a “few” (a few who nevertheless amount to tens of millions) “nutjobs.”

It is obvious why we would prefer the “few nutjobs” theory to be true, rather than the theory that Islam is a militant religion bent on conversion and expansion by force.  Who wouldn’t rather the former be true?  And yet it is also obvious why it is important to see the world as it really is, rather than merely as we wish it would be.

We are constantly told that Islam is a religion of peace.  It is not, and never has been; it is a religion of submission.  And problems arise whenever people in the Islamic sphere do not submit:  Women are oppressed.  Religious freedom is totally denied.  Anyone converting from Islam is killed.  We are also constantly told that Mohammad the Prophet of Islam was a man of peace; but history shows the exact opposite.

Mohammad was a man of violence who committed acts of genocide.  Most historians say that Mohammad led at least 27 military campaigns before his death in 632.  Many Muslims claim that the number was actually far higher – as many as 80.  And Mohammad had dozens more military campaigns planned at the time of his death.  Mohammad was a man of violence, a man who seized caravans and killed all the men, and enslaved all the women and children.  The Koran records his words to that effect: “I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them. …And slay them wherever ye catch them….”

As you read the above words from Mohammad, realize that the Koran and Islamic tradition are quite clear that the Prophet is the supreme example of behavior for Muslims to follow.

Mohammad’s life can be divided into two phases: the Mecca phase and the Medina phase.  During the Mecca phase, Mohammad was greatly outnumbered and militarily weaker than his opponents.  We see his calls for peace during this phase.  But he left Mecca and subsequently grew strong in Medina – strong enough to ultimately seize Mecca by force.  During this phase, we find the increasingly violent calls to subdue the infidel by any means necessary.  This second and later phase has set the standard for Islam.

You do not find peace in Mohammad, or the religion which he founded.

You DO find it in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth and Christianity as being lived out as Jesus lived.  Unlike the paradigm of Mohammad, no one professing to be a Christian can credibly argue that Jesus, the Prince of Peace, taught violence, or anything that contradicted His precepts that those who live by the sword shall die by the sword (Matthew 26:52).

One hundred years after the death of Jesus, Christians were – and had been – dying as martyrs by the hundreds of thousands under some of the cruelest and most vicious persecutions the world has ever seen under the Roman emperors.  They sealed their testimony in their blood, proving their faith in Christ Jesus with their deaths, just as the Apostles had done with their deaths by martyrdom before them.

One hundred years after the death of Mohammad Muslim conquerors had long since set out with the scimitar.  They had poured across Arabia, poured across Africa, with violence in their hearts.  Christian communities in Africa and then Spain were eradicated.  And a vast Muslim army poured all the way across Europe killing and plundering, only to finally be stopped by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours near Poitiers in France.

Christians are frequently confronted with their crimes during the Crusades.  What is largely ignored are the four centuries of unrelenting Islamic violence that preceded the Crusades, or that the Crusades began when the Christian emperor of the Christian Byzantine Empire at Constantinople called upon the Pope for aid to protect the empire from the threat posed by an attacking Islam.

This is not to say that self-professing Christians didn’t commit many evils during the Crusades, or during other times.  I merely point out that Islam had a long-standing tradition of continual violence that Christendom ultimately had to respond to.  Just as Western civilization needs to respond to the violence posed by Islam today.  Christians today – partly because of the Crusades – realize that there is no “Kingdom of Heaven” on earth; and the Christian’s ultimate kingdom is with Christ in heaven, rather than some geographical location at Jerusalem or any other place on earth.  We were wrong for believing we needed to go to war to claim Jerusalem for Christendom.

Allow me to contrast the Christian view of territory with the Islamic one:

According to the Muslim way of thinking, the world is divided into two areas: Dar al-Islam is the area already conquered by Islam. Dar al-Harb is the area of war, which the Arabs are commanded to conquer until it is turned into Muslim territory. After a certain territory has been conquered by Islam, it is declared as holy Muslim territory, which is forbidden to be relinquished under any circumstances.

[See here for more].

We need to face up to many theological and historical issues within Islam itself in order to come to some understanding as to how to begin to solve the obviously growing problem of violence.

Robert Spencer put it this way:

“If Mohammad taught violence, if Mohammad taught a doctrine of required holy war against infidels, if Mohammad conflated religion and government it will change mujahedin around the world not one bit to pretend otherwise; they will continue to invoke what they believe to be his authentic teachings in order to justify their actions.  The fact that truths are difficult is no reason to choose unreality and ‘polite fictions.’”

I would agree with any Muslim who says that terrorism is not an essential part of Islam.  Of course it isn’t.  As human beings, we are not automatons, we are free-willed human beings who make our own choices – and who are held responsible for the choices we make.

But I would also confront any Muslim who wants to see true peace with the rest of the world to account for the fact that virtually all of the hundreds of thousands of violent terrorist acts in the world resulted from Islamic theology, by men who screamed “Allahu Akbar!” as they murdered.

And I would confront Muslims to quit blaming the existence of Israel for violence and finally look at themselves instead.  Many Muslims demand that the Jews surrender the land that they “stole” from Palestinians.  I disagree that the Jews did any such thing, but let me agree with the premise for the sake of argument.  Fine.  Let every Muslim first surrender every square inch of land that Islam has seized, just to show that they are not hypocrites who demand standards from others that they would never be willing to put upon themselves.

And I would similarly point out that Jews have not been the source of violence and death in the Muslim world.  The fact is rather that:

“some 11,000,000 Muslims have been violently killed since 1948, of which 35,000, or 0.3 percent, died during the sixty years of fighting Israel, or just 1 out of every 315 Muslim fatalities. In contrast, over 90 percent of the 11 million who perished were killed by fellow Muslims.”

Today, tens of millions of Muslims live in fear of criticizing their fellow Muslims who are willing to employ violent jihad for fear that they will become the next victims of such Muslim violence.

And herein lies the rub.  If only a few “nutjobs” are “highjacking” (actually a very good word indeed given that we are talking about terrorism) a good and noble and peaceful religion, then let the hundreds of millions of Muslims who do not support the use of terrorism rise up as one man and deal with the clearly-growing crisis of violence that has been growing for decades inside their very own house.  Rather than standing by on the sidelines in fear and apathy, if you moderate Muslims REALLY speak for “true Islam,” then please finally stand up and DO so.  Put your money where your mouth is, so to speak.

Don’t allow armed murderers to hide themselves among you, only to kill and murder before concealing themselves once more among you, and then claim that you aren’t responsible.  You moderate Muslims ARE responsible for what is happening all around you.

Islam is and will continue to be a religion of terrorist violence unless you moderate Muslims stand up and make it something different.

It’s time to take a side between “Islam, the religion of violence,” and “Islam, the religion of peace.”

Christians, Jews, and Muslims actually can stand in agreement on a great many things.  While we clearly disagree on the nature of God and His revelation, we nevertheless are people who believe in God and believe in divine revelation.  And therefore we agree that there are objective transcendent moral values.  There are a great many things we could agree upon, if we put our minds and our hearts to it.

Obama’s Political Correctness The Gateway Drug To Terrorism

Political correctness is running amok like a massive wildfire set by a pack of raving arsonists.  And that wildfire claimed the lives of 14 people at Fort Hood, in addition to some 38 others who were wounded.

We find out things like this:

Danquah assumed the military’s chain of command knew about Hasan’s doubts, which had been known for more than a year to classmates at the Maryland graduate military medical program.  His fellow students complained to the faculty about Hasan’s “anti-American propaganda,” but said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim student kept officers from filing a formal complaint.

Of course, I myself am quite used to encountering “anti-American propaganda.”  I watch the mainstream media.

Initially, the FBI wouldn’t even consider the possibility that Nidal Hasan was a terrorist.  They immediately came out saying there “was no terrorism nexus” with a Muslim shooter who repeatedly shouted “Allahu Akbar!” as he fired more than 100 rounds at unarmed soldiers.  A Muslim shooter whom they KNEW had tried to contact al-Qaeda.

ABC reported as follows:

ROBIN ROBERTS, ABC: We’re going to turn now to the attack at Fort Hood. Authorities are actively investigating whether the suspected gunman, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, had links to any terrorist organizations. Our chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross has learned that Hasan was most-likely trying to just do that, forge that kind of link?

BRIAN ROSS, ABC: Indeed, Robin. As Major Hasan’s road to increased radicalization becomes clearer, ABC News has learned that U.S. intelligence agencies became aware months ago that he was attempting to make contact with people connected to al Qaeda. Two American officials who have been briefed on classified information say it’s not known whether the military was ever told by the CIA or others that one of its majors was making efforts to communicate with figures under electronic surveillance by the U.S. Congress has now asked the CIA and other intelligence agencies to preserve all documents that relate to Hasan, as it appears a full investigation is now likely into whether the warning signs were missed.

Kind of makes you wonder just what you have to do to have the Obama administration call you a “terrorist” these days.  Besides voting Republican or working at Fox News, I mean.

This is now the SECOND successful domestic terrorist-jihadist attack – Oops, I’m sorry, Domestic Contingency Operation – that the United States has suffered under the Obama administration.  And there is little question that it will not be the last.

And even NBC reported that Obama’s reaction to it was just plain weird, in addition to being an example of “frightening insensitivity.”  Among other things, Obama’s first words to the American people consisted in giving a “shout out” to a “Congressional Medal of Honor” winner who has never been awarded such an honor.  Rather, President Obama HIMSELF awarded the guy a Medal of Freedom.  Big diff – and you’d expect a one-tenth-way competent commander-in-chief to know that obvious difference.

And if that isn’t horrible enough, we find out that the Obama administration recruited Nidal Hasan – whom we now know was a terrorist – to write a propagandist ideological Department of Homeland Security report fearmongering “rightwing extremists.”

It should therefore come as no surprise that we find the Army chief-of-staff under Commander-in-Chief Obama being sent out to TV land to say that his greatest worry is some kind of backlash against Muslims, because God – I’m sorry for my intolerance - Allah forbid that ANY of them so much as get their feelings hurt as their community launches so many terror attacks worldwide that nobody even bothers to keep statistics any more.

Well, at least General Casey and his commander-in-chief aren’t worried about something silly, such as the fact that a bunch of his unarmed soldiers just got gunned down on their own base in the USA by a guy yelling “Allahu Akbar!”

Consider how politically correct the U.S. military has become under the Barack Hussein administration: this guy was actually promoted to major, in spite of the fact that he was telling his colleagues that infidels (that’s you and me) should die, and in spite of the fact that he was trying to contact al Qaeda to find out what he could do to help their cause.

Doug Ross at  DirectorBlue located one of Hasan’s internet postings comparing a soldier diving on a grenade to save his buddies with a terrorist blowing himself up to kill non-Muslims (and, of course, “bad” Muslims):

There was a grenade thrown amongs [sic] a group of American soldiers. One of the soldiers, feeling that it was to late for everyone to flee jumped on the grave with the intention of saving his comrades. Indeed he saved them. He inentionally [sic] took his life (suicide) for a noble cause i.e. saving the lives of his soldier. To say that this soldier committed suicide is inappropriate. Its more appropriate to say he is a brave hero that sacrificed his life for a more noble cause. Scholars have paralled [sic] this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers. If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory. Their intention is not to die because of some despair.

Here’s another “in his own words” take on Nidal Hasan available at NPR:

[DANIEL] ZWERDLING: Earlier today, I spoke to a psychiatrist who worked very closely with Hasan and knows him very well. And he said, you know, from the beginning -and Hasan was there for four years – the medical staff was very worried about this guy. He said the first thing is he’s cold, unfriendly. At least that’s who he came off. He did not do a good job as a psychiatrist in training, was repeatedly warned, you better shape up, or, you know, you’re going to be in trouble. Did badly in his classes, seemed disinterested.  But second of all – and this is, perhaps, you know, more relevant. The psychiatrist says that he was very proud and upfront about being Muslim. And psychiatrist hastened to say, and nobody minded that. But he seemed almost belligerent about being Muslim, and he gave a lecture one day that really freaked a lot of doctors out.

They have grand rounds, right? They, you know, dozens of medical staff come into an auditorium, and somebody stands at the podium at the front and gives a lecture about some academic issue, you know, what drugs to prescribe for what condition. But instead of that, he – Hasan apparently gave a long lecture on the Koran and talked about how if you don’t believe, you are condemned to hell. Your head is cut off. You’re set on fire. Burning oil is burned down your throat.

The ironically funny thing is that Nidal Hassan – after enjoying the fruits of his million dollar education, anyway – ostensibly wanted out of the military.  But because he was a protected member of the cherished liberal class, he couldn’t do anything that could actually offend anybody enough to kick him out.  He could be professionally incompetent; he could tell his colleagues that they should die; he could try to indoctrinate returning veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq into radical Islam; he could post violent terrorist internet comments; he could actually try to contact al Qaeda.  And it didn’t matter.  Not only did he remain an officer and a “gentleman,” but he got PROMOTED.

This is rather like Montgomery Burns promoting Homer Simpson at the Springfield nuclear power plant.  Only in this case, Homer Simpson is a raving jihadist terrorist as well as an incompetent buffoon.

The federal authorities knew all this prior to Nidal Hasan going out and buying an $1100 gun.  Apparently, we have quite a few “Homers” in our ranks these days.

Don’t want to appear like you’re discriminating or anything.

After all, hasn’t Obama already apologized to our enemies enough as it already is? And hasn’t he apologized enough to the Muslim world? Do you want to give him something ELSE to feel that he should apologize for, such as yanking a Muslim radical out of the Army as a terrorist threat before he became a terrorist mass murderer?

Of course, had “Captain Hasan” been a white evangelical Christian who told his colleagues that openly declared gays shouldn’t be allowed to serve in the military, he would have been drummed out faster than you could say, “Out, damn’d spot!”  And he certainly would NEVER have been allowed to become “Major Hasan.”  Especially in Barack Obama’s Army.

Being politically correct is not merely a naive attempt to make people feel better; it’s a much larger, much more coordinated, and much more sinister effort to change Western culture as we know it.  Progressives designed this game plan decades ago – following the previous success that Marxists enjoyed after employing the same stratagem – and liberals continue to execute the same game plan today: to shape the debate and control the argument by controlling the language.  All they need to succeed is an oversensitive public that is ignorant of history and morality.

What may be most interesting of all is how liberalism becomes the useful idiot of jihadist terrorism, apart from that thing about liberals being “so open-minded their brains fall out.”

As just one of many examples of liberals brains having fallen out, how about the liberal view that Nidal Hasan was mentally ill rather than a terrorist?  Because, as we all know, terrorists are the epitome of mental health, and being the former must therefore rule that latter out.

And yet here we have Evan Thomas, editor-at-large with Newsweek saying:

I cringe that he’s a Muslim. I mean, because it inflames all the fears. I think he’s probably just a nut case. But with that label attached to him, it will get the right wing going and it just — I mean these things are tragic, but that makes it much worse.

And again, we have this morally deranged Newsweek ideologue essentially saying that it’s those right wingers who are the REAL terrorists.  We have a moral idiot burying his head in the sand while using every possible opportunity to demonize his political adversaries.

All of this is par for the course in the Brave New World of Barack Hussein.

This is a great time for a replay of an American Thinker article entitled, “Islam’s Useful Idiots.”  It reads in part:

Islam enjoys a large and influential ally among the non—Muslims: A new generation of ‘Useful Idiots,’ the sort of people Lenin identified living in liberal democracies who furthered the work of communism. This new generation of Useful Idiots also lives in liberal democracies, but serves the cause of Islamofascism—another virulent form of totalitarian ideology.

Useful Idiots are naive, foolish, ignorant of facts, unrealistically idealistic, dreamers, willfully in denial or deceptive. They hail from the ranks of the chronically unhappy, the anarchists, the aspiring revolutionaries, the neurotics who are at war with life, the disaffected alienated from government, corporations, and just about any and all institutions of society. The Useful Idiot can be a billionaire, a movie star, an academe of renown, a politician, or from any other segment of the population.

Arguably, the most dangerous variant of the Useful Idiot is the ‘Politically Correct.’ He is the master practitioner of euphemism, hedging, doubletalk, and outright deception.

The Useful Idiot derives satisfaction from being anti—establishment. He finds perverse gratification in aiding the forces that aim to dismantle an existing order, whatever it may be: an order he neither approves of nor he feels he belongs to.

The Useful Idiot is conflicted and dishonest. He fails to look inside himself and discover the causes of his own problems and unhappiness while he readily enlists himself in causes that validate his distorted perception.

Understandably, it is easier to blame others and the outside world than to examine oneself with an eye to self—discovery and self—improvement. Furthermore, criticizing and complaining—liberal practices of the Useful Idiot—require little talent and energy. The Useful Idiot is a great armchair philosopher and ‘Monday Morning Quarterback.’

The Useful Idiot is not the same as a person who honestly has a different point of view. A society without honest and open differences of views is a dead society. Critical, different and fresh ideas are the life blood of a living society—the very anathema of autocracies where the official position is sacrosanct.

Even a ‘normal’ person spends a great deal more energy aiming to fix things out there than working to overcome his own flaws and shortcomings, or contribute positively to the larger society. People don’t like to take stock of what they are doing or not doing that is responsible for the conditions they disapprove.

But the Useful Idiot takes things much farther. The Useful Idiot, among other things, is a master practitioner of scapegoating. He assigns blame to others while absolving himself of responsibility, has a long handy list of candidates for blaming anything and everything, and by living a distorted life, he contributes to the ills of society.

The Useful Idiot may even engage in willful misinformation and deception when it suits him. Terms such as ‘Political Islam,’ or ‘Radical Islam,’ for instance, are contributions of the Useful Idiot. These terms do not even exist in the native parlance of Islam, simply because they are redundant. Islam, by its very nature and according to its charter—the Quran—is a radical political movement. It is the Useful Idiot who sanitizes Islam and misguides the populace by saying that the ‘real Islam’ constitutes the main body of the religion; and, that this main body is non—political and moderate.

[Continue reading].

And so here we are, “speculating” over whether a terrorist mass murderer is actually a “terrorist” (a now banned retranslation of the politically correct “Overseas Contintency Operation” that itself idiotically fails to understand that terrorists can come from right here, too.

Weakness is provocative, as Don Rumsfeld said.  And boy oh boy are we ever “provocative” these days.

Do you want to hear the “politically incorrect” truth?  We are at a crisis such as history has never before seen in the form of jihadist Islam.  And we are making it far worse by burying our heads in the sand and refusing to recognize the dilemma until long after it is too late to do anything to address it.

 

House Democrats Pass Worst Bill Ever To Destroy U.S. Health Care, Economy

Congratulations, America.  This is what you’ve “won”:

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

The Worst Bill Ever
Epic new spending and taxes, pricier insurance, rationed care, dishonest accounting: The Pelosi health bill has it all.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has reportedly told fellow Democrats that she’s prepared to lose seats in 2010 if that’s what it takes to pass ObamaCare, and little wonder. The health bill she unwrapped last Thursday, which President Obama hailed as a “critical milestone,” may well be the worst piece of post-New Deal legislation ever introduced.

In a rational political world, this 1,990-page runaway train would have been derailed months ago. With spending and debt already at record peacetime levels, the bill creates a new and probably unrepealable middle-class entitlement that is designed to expand over time. Taxes will need to rise precipitously, even as ObamaCare so dramatically expands government control of health care that eventually all medicine will be rationed via politics.

Yet at this point, Democrats have dumped any pretense of genuine bipartisan “reform” and moved into the realm of pure power politics as they race against the unpopularity of their own agenda. The goal is to ram through whatever income-redistribution scheme they can claim to be “universal coverage.” The result will be destructive on every level—for the health-care system, for the country’s fiscal condition, and ultimately for American freedom and prosperity.

•The spending surge. The Congressional Budget Office figures the House program will cost $1.055 trillion over a decade, which while far above the $829 billion net cost that Mrs. Pelosi fed to credulous reporters is still a low-ball estimate.  Most of the money goes into government-run “exchanges” where people earning between 150% and 400% of the poverty level—that is, up to about $96,000 for a family of four in 2016—could buy coverage at heavily subsidized rates, tied to income. The government would pay for 93% of insurance costs for a family making $42,000, 72% for another making $78,000, and so forth.

At least at first, these benefits would be offered only to those whose employers don’t provide insurance or work for small businesses with 100 or fewer workers. The taxpayer costs would be far higher if not for this “firewall”—which is sure to cave in when people see the deal their neighbors are getting on “free” health care. Mrs. Pelosi knows this, like everyone else in Washington.

Even so, the House disguises hundreds of billions of dollars in additional costs with budget gimmicks. It “pays for” about six years of program with a decade of revenue, with the heaviest costs concentrated in the second five years. The House also pretends Medicare payments to doctors will be cut by 21.5% next year and deeper after that, “saving” about $250 billion. ObamaCare will be lucky to cost under $2 trillion over 10 years; it will grow more after that.

• Expanding Medicaid, gutting private Medicare. All this is particularly reckless given the unfunded liabilities of Medicare—now north of $37 trillion over 75 years. Mrs. Pelosi wants to steal $426 billion from future Medicare spending to “pay for” universal coverage. While Medicare’s price controls on doctors and hospitals are certain to be tightened, the only cut that is a sure thing in practice is gutting Medicare Advantage to the tune of $170 billion. Democrats loathe this program because it gives one of out five seniors private insurance options.

As for Medicaid, the House will expand eligibility to everyone below 150% of the poverty level, meaning that some 15 million new people will be added to the rolls as private insurance gets crowded out at a cost of $425 billion. A decade from now more than a quarter of the population will be on a program originally intended for poor women, children and the disabled.

Even though the House will assume 91% of the “matching rate” for this joint state-federal program—up from today’s 57%—governors would still be forced to take on $34 billion in new burdens when budgets from Albany to Sacramento are in fiscal collapse. Washington’s budget will collapse too, if anything like the House bill passes.

• European levels of taxation. All told, the House favors $572 billion in new taxes, mostly by imposing a 5.4-percentage-point “surcharge” on joint filers earning over $1 million, $500,000 for singles. This tax will raise the top marginal rate to 45% in 2011 from 39.6% when the Bush tax cuts expire—not counting state income taxes and the phase-out of certain deductions and exemptions. The burden will mostly fall on the small businesses that have organized as Subchapter S or limited liability corporations, since the truly wealthy won’t have any difficulty sheltering their incomes.

This surtax could hit ever more earners because, like the alternative minimum tax, it isn’t indexed for inflation. Yet it still won’t be nearly enough. Even if Congress had confiscated 100% of the taxable income of people earning over $500,000 in the boom year of 2006, it would have only raised $1.3 trillion. When Democrats end up soaking the middle class, perhaps via the European-style value-added tax that Mrs. Pelosi has endorsed, they’ll claim the deficits that they created made them do it.

Under another new tax, businesses would have to surrender 8% of their payroll to government if they don’t offer insurance or pay at least 72.5% of their workers’ premiums, which eat into wages. Such “play or pay” taxes always become “pay or pay” and will rise over time, with severe consequences for hiring, job creation and ultimately growth. While the U.S. already has one of the highest corporate income tax rates in the world, Democrats are on the way to creating a high structural unemployment rate, much as Europe has done by expanding its welfare states.

Meanwhile, a tax equal to 2.5% of adjusted gross income will also be imposed on some 18 million people who CBO expects still won’t buy insurance in 2019. Democrats could make this penalty even higher, but that is politically unacceptable, or they could make the subsidies even higher, but that would expose the (already ludicrous) illusion that ObamaCare will reduce the deficit.

• The insurance takeover. A new “health choices commissioner” will decide what counts as “essential benefits,” which all insurers will have to offer as first-dollar coverage. Private insurers will also be told how much they are allowed to charge even as they will have to offer coverage at virtually the same price to anyone who applies, regardless of health status or medical history.

The cost of insurance, naturally, will skyrocket. The insurer WellPoint estimates based on its own market data that some premiums in the individual market will triple under these new burdens. The same is likely to prove true for the employer-sponsored plans that provide private coverage to about 177 million people today. Over time, the new mandates will apply to all contracts, including for the large businesses currently given a safe harbor from bureaucratic tampering under a 1974 law called Erisa.

The political incentive will always be for government to expand benefits and reduce cost-sharing, trampling any chance of giving individuals financial incentives to economize on care. Essentially, all insurers will become government contractors, in the business of fulfilling political demands: There will be no such thing as “private” health insurance.
***

All of this is intentional, even if it isn’t explicitly acknowledged. The overriding liberal ambition is to finish the work began decades ago as the Great Society of converting health care into a government responsibility. Mr. Obama’s own Medicare actuaries estimate that the federal share of U.S. health dollars will quickly climb beyond 60% from 46% today. One reason Mrs. Pelosi has fought so ferociously against her own Blue Dog colleagues to include at least a scaled-back “public option” entitlement program is so that the architecture is in place for future Congresses to expand this share even further.

As Congress’s balance sheet drowns in trillions of dollars in new obligations, the political system will have no choice but to start making cost-minded decisions about which treatments patients are allowed to receive. Democrats can’t regulate their way out of the reality that we live in a world of finite resources and infinite wants. Once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, medical rationing is inevitable—especially for the innovative high-cost technologies and drugs that are the future of medicine.

Mr. Obama rode into office on a wave of “change,” but we doubt most voters realized that the change Democrats had in mind was making health care even more expensive and rigid than the status quo. Critics will say we are exaggerating, but we believe it is no stretch to say that Mrs. Pelosi’s handiwork ranks with the Smoot-Hawley tariff and FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act as among the worst bills Congress has ever seriously contemplated.

In 2008, America voted for national suicide, whether they understood it or not.  While it is increasingly obvious that Americans are rethinking their suicide pact with the Democrat Party, and beginning to change their minds, Democrats are nevertheless racing ahead to finish the job of destroying the country while they still can.

Think Cloward-Piven.  The Democrats believe that they are creating a “win we win, lose we win” stratagem.  If by some increasingly unlikely miracle our massive unprecedented debt-financed spending doesn’t cause the entire economic structure to implode, Democrats will be in a position to claim credit for their “success.”  If, far more likely, the economy self-destructs under the weight of the mind-boggling debts and economic hamstringing foisted upon us by the liberal agenda, Democrats are counting upon the fact that hungry, desperate, panicking people will turn to massive government structures to feed them and help them from the very problems that massive government structures caused in the first place.

Obama’s Frightening Disconnect Following Ft. Hood Massacre

This is something.  And, for the record, it’s not the evil Fox News, but the evil NBC telling us that something is seriously wrong with our president:

Obama’s Frightening Insensitivity Following Shooting
A bad week for Democrats compounded by an awful moment for Barack Obama.
By ROBERT A. GEORGE
Updated 9:18 AM CST, Fri, Nov 6, 2009

Updated 9:18 AM CST, Fri, Nov 6, 2009

Getty Images

President Obama didn’t wait long after Tuesday’s devastating elections to give critics another reason to question his leadership, but this time the subject matter was more grim than a pair of governorships.

After news broke out of the shooting at the Fort Hood Army post in Texas, the nation watched in horror as the toll of dead and injured climbed. The White House was notified immediately and by late afternoon, word went out that the president would speak about the incident prior to a previously scheduled appearance. At about 5 p.m., cable stations went to the president. The situation called for not only his trademark eloquence, but also grace and perspective.

But instead of a somber chief executive offering reassuring words and expressions of sympathy and compassion, viewers saw a wildly disconnected and inappropriately light president making introductory remarks. At the event, a Tribal Nations Conference hosted by the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian affairs, the president thanked various staffers and offered a “shout-out” to “Dr. Joe Medicine Crow — that Congressional Medal of Honor winner.”  Three minutes in, the president spoke about the shooting, in measured and appropriate terms. Who is advising him?

Anyone at home aware of the major news story of the previous hours had to have been stunned. An incident like this requires a scrapping of the early light banter. The president should apologize for the tone of his remarks, explain what has happened, express sympathy for those slain and appeal for calm and patience until all the facts are in. That’s the least that should occur.

Indeed, an argument could be made that Obama should have canceled the Indian event, out of respect for people having been murdered at an Army post a few hours before. That would have prevented any sort of jarring emotional switch at the event.

Did the president’s team not realize what sort of image they were presenting to the country at this moment? The disconnect between what Americans at home knew had been going on — and the initial words coming out of their president’s mouth was jolting, if not disturbing.

[Continue reading]

The NBC article concludes by saying:

“Democrats across the country have real reason to panic.”

Well, Nancy Pelosi doesn’t have any reason to panic.  But then again, Nancy Pelosi doesn’t have any reason.  Period.

When Obama was elected, unemployment was at 6.6%.  His adminstration promised that his stimulus would prevent unemployment from reaching 8%.  And now it’s 10.2%.  That’s a huge problem.  And their only answer seems to be 1) blame Bush – as though the American people wanted a demagogue rather than a president who would man-up and start actually taking responsibility for the country’s problems – and 2) present a ton of false statistics to “prove” the unprovable (that his stimulus “saved” jobs).

Last Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” David Gregory pointed out that little fact during his interview with Turbo Tax Tim Geithner:

GREGORY:  OK.  What is a saved job?  How do you measure that?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  A, a saved–well…

GREGORY:  It’s not something an economist recognizes as an actual fact.

Note to Gregory: “Actual facts don’t matter to the Obama administration.”

David Gregory had previously put up a quote from an economist at Carnegie Mellon University:

“One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called `jobs saved.’ It doesn’t exist for good reason:  how can anyone know that his or her job has been saved?”

Reality isn’t important to the Obama administration, and neither is history.  What matters is rhetoric, demagoguery, and propaganda.

The giant $3.27 trillion porkulus was every bit the abject failure that conservatives predicted it would be.

And analyst Meredith Whitney – who was one of the few voices predicting the catastrophe we suffered last year – is saying that our joblessness is nowhere NEAR over.  She is predicting that unemployment will rise to 13% OR HIGHER.  Because NOTHING Obama has done has even come close to dealing with the REAL problems that are dragging down our economy.

Get behind that, America.  Obama’s “solution” for Afghanistan is his solution for America: namely, dithering is “change.”

But let us get back to Obama’s bizarre behavior.  First he chose to ignore what was going on in the country, how the people were expressing their mood and their views, and instead narcissistically decided to spend election night watching HIMSELF.

The Obama White House can’t acknowledge the obvious fact that we just suffered the second successful jihadist terrorist attack on our soil since he became our commander-in-chief.  And if even our soldiers on their secure base aren’t safe from these people, just who the hell is?

And now he’s just plain whackjob inappropriate giving “shout outs” only a short time after a dozen of our soldiers are murdered and over 30 more are wounded in that aforementioned terrorist attack.

Obama’s behavior seems to continue the trend with other socialist demagogues: seize power, showing a rare level of understanding of popular demagoguery, and then sink into bizarre behavior as his incompetence to lead becomes increasingly apparent.

The tragic thing is that it isn’t just Democrats who have cause to worry.  Americans have cause to worry that this inexperienced radical is nowhere even CLOSE to being the person we needed to lead us back to prosperity.