Ron James

Here is brilliant Barry wowing the audience once again:

…Let’s start with an excerpt of the President speaking today at the National Prayer Breakfast, cut number nine:

B[arry] H[ussein] O[bama]: One such translator was American of Haitian descent, representative of the extraordinary work that our men and women in uniform do all around the world. Navy Corpseman Christian Bouchard, and lying on a gurney aboard the USNS Comfort, a woman asked Christopher where do you come from? What country? After my operation, she said I will pray for that country. And in Creole, Corpseman [sic] Bouchard responded in Tanzini.

HH: All right, stop for a second. Mark Steyn, I’m glad he’s recognizing the corpsman, but he can’t pronounce corpsman. And not only that, it makes me think he never, ever rehearses anything.

M[ark] S[teyn]: No, I think that’s true. I mean, I think corpseman is the new zombie superhero, isn’t he, coming out in the big James Cameron movie. That’s what corpseman is. But this guy, I think you’re right. He wings everything. And that’s why he spends so much time speaking to so little good. I mean, this is, apart from the fact that it’s kind of revealing culturally in a broad sense, it typifies the Obama method. I said about that appearance of his with Martha Coakley a couple of days before the Massachusetts election, I said he went to the trouble of flying in to phone it in, which is what he did. He went to the trouble of going all the way to Massachusetts, but then he had nothing to say when he got there. It’s the same thing in Copenhagen with his pathetic Olympics pitch. And I think it does come to this thing where he just says fire up the teleprompter, and I’ll come in and wing it…

Here’s the video. He actually says “corpseman” twice! Do you think we’ll see a book of Barry malapropisms? Don’t hold your breath.

Jennifer Rubin on the now obvious debt of gratitude we owe the previous administration (Bush and Cheney) for establishing Guantanamo and military trials for terrorists:

…Until the public could see the alternative to Bush policies played out before their eyes, they did not fully appreciate just how rational were the choices made by those charged with keeping the country safe in the months and years following 9/11. It is all the more remarkable that the Bush team got it right on the big calls, considering that, unlike the Obami, they did not have any recent experience to guide them. They relied on common sense, on historical precedent, and on the conviction that the highest priorities were to protect the public and deny any advantage to our enemy, not curry favor with international opinion. They have been vindicated in that judgment by none other than the moral preeners who ran for office on the specious argument that the Bush team had betrayed American values and actually made us less safe. Nothing could be further from the truth. It has taken a mere year for two thirds of the public to agree.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has done serious if not fatal damage to Barry’s effort to suck up to the international left by trying 9/11 mastermind KSM in lower Manhattan:

The Obama administration on Wednesday lost its most prominent backer of the plan to try the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks in Lower Manhattan when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the trial should not be held in New York City.

The mayor’s reversal was a political blow to the White House’s efforts to resolve a landmark terror case a few blocks from where Al Qaeda hijackers rammed planes into the World Trade Center, a trial that the president saw as an important demonstration of American justice.

Mr. Bloomberg said that a more secure location, like a military base, would be less disruptive and less costly. His remarks echoed growing opposition from Wall Street executives, the real estate industry and neighborhood groups, who have questioned the burdens that such a trial would bring to a heavily trafficked area of the city.

Also:

…Congressional Republicans are threatening a financial maneuver to block the trials from being held in New York and are certain to seize on the mayor’s remarks. On Tuesday, six senators wrote to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and urged him to abandon the idea.

The letter, signed by Senators Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut; John McCain, Republican of Arizona; Blanche L. Lincoln, Democrat of Arkansas; Susan M. Collins, Republican of Maine; Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia; and Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, read, in part, “You will be providing them one of the most visible platforms in the world to exalt their past acts and to rally others in support of further terrorism.”…

“Financial maneuver” in timesspeak means withhold funding. Looks like Barry (and Eric) will have to stiff the loony left on this one as well.

Michael Barone on the poor “boobs” who voted for Scott Brown:

… Members of “the educated class” may have heard of Edmund Burke, but they take the very un-Burkean view that those with elite educations can readily rearrange society to comport with their pet abstract theories. These often secular Americans have a quasi-religious faith in government’s ability to, in Barack Obama’s words to Joe the Plumber, “spread the wealth around” and to recalibrate the energy sector to protect against climate dangers they are absolutely sure are impending.

Ordinary Americans, even in Massachusetts, may not have heard of Edmund Burke, but they share his skepticism that self-appointed experts can reengineer institutions in accordance with abstract theories…

In other words, as Orwell wrote: “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals could believe them. No ordinary person would.”

And the Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick on Barry’s foreign policy:

…Given the congressional backlash to the Massachusetts election, it is possible that Obama will be compelled to put aside his domestic initiatives, or at least to repackage them. US presidents have only a limited capacity to unilaterally implement massive changes on the domestic front. Congressional support is required for most major endeavors. Today, it seems likely that many Democratic lawmakers will refuse to fall on their swords for Obama. So his health care initiative, like his environmental and immigration agendas, may well be buried in committee.

On the other hand, the US Constitution gives the president a much freer hand in foreign affairs. And here we are likely to see a full-court presidential press to force through his radical agenda on everything from nuclear weapons to counterterrorism to appeasement of the Islamic world. Given the prominence Obama has already given to his anti-Israel posture, it can be assumed that Israel will be the focus of even more intense pressure from the White House in the months and years to come…

I watched Meet the Press this morning where I heard liberals opine that the Massachusetts election (and the almost certain demise of Obamacare) was due to a failure to communicate the wisdom and logic of the Democratic program. In other words, Obamacare is wise and logical, but the poor shlubs out there aren’t smart enough to get it, so we have to explain it better.

My view is that if Jesus Christ himself had decided to devote his Sermon on the Mount to explaining Obamacare, Christianity would have remained a tiny cult confined to university faculties.

Last night on Jim Lehrer’s show the idiotic old hack Mark Shields said the following:

… I – first of all, all great revolutions are led by aristocrats. That is the reality of history.

So, the idea that [Barry] went to Harvard Law School does not in any way preclude his leading a populist revolution…

Actually the “great revolutions” he’s talking about are always led by intellectuals, not aristocrats, and those intellectuals are usually the kind that philosopher Eric Hoffer described as “two-bit” meaning they “read a book.”

These are the kind of whom Dostoyevsky wrote:

If these great modern professors are given the full and utter possibility of abolishing the old society in order to reconstruct it anew, it will result in such gloom, in such utter chaos, something so gross, so blind and so inhuman that every building will collapse under the curses of humanity, even before they have a chance to finish construction.

Mark Steyn on Barry’s wacky spin:

…"The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” said Obama. “People are angry, and they’re frustrated, not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

Got it. People are so angry and frustrated at George W. Bush that they’re voting for Republicans. In Massachusetts…

Presumably, the president isn’t stupid enough actually to believe what he said. But it’s dispiriting to discover he’s stupid enough to think we’re stupid enough to believe it…

And Conrad Black:

…this president seems overwhelmingly confident, strangely detached, and, as Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s leading speech-writer, and now one of the leaders of the Obama Buyers’ Remorse Movement, wrote, ‘cold and faux eloquent.’ He is fluent and sonorous, but rather vapid. And now, Maureen Dowd, foxy doyenne of New York Times columnists and pin-up girl of the D.C. Democratic establishment, niece of FDR’s top fixer, former co-leader, with Michelle, Caroline Kennedy and Oprah Winfrey, of the Obama massed, synchronized cheerleaders, has apostacized and reviled the president as a nasty egotist. When A Democratic president has lost Ms. Dowd and the Kennedys’ Senate seat, it is time to return to the drawing boards…

Barry said in an interview with ABC News:

“Here’s my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts but the mood around the country — the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” Mr. Obama said. “People are angry and they are frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

Brit Hume deftly analyzes Barry’s preposterous spin:

Floating in the river of commentary on the Massachusetts senate election is the claim that it mostly reflects an anti incumbency mood and that Bay state voters are just as angry at Republicans as Democrats. Well if that’s true they have a peculiar way of showing it. Scott Brown is no watered down greened up Republican-lite. On the economy, he campaigned for across the board tax cuts, the Ronald Reagan kind. And against the current wave of big spending on defense he wants a military quote second to none and no constitutional protection for enemy captives. He’s even asserted waterboarding is not torture. On the environment, he’s skeptical man is warming the planet and he flatly opposes the cap and trade bill being pushed by the president. And of course he’s against the centerpiece of the Obama agenda, the health care reform bill. Those positions you might expect from a Republican running in a conservative state. But Scott Brown ran on them in liberal Massachusetts and won convincingly because tens of thousands of people who normally vote D voted R. President Obama said today that the anger that elected Brown is the same anger that elected him and it goes back eight years. In other words Massachusetts has elected its first Republican senator since the 1970s because it was still mad about the Bush Administration.

More wise observations by Mark Steyn.

Excerpt from Hugh Hewitt radio program:

HH: …Very few people have traveled as far around the globe as Mark. Mark, have you ever seen anything remotely approaching this Haiti thing?

MS: No, because I think Haiti is, certainly in the Western Hemisphere, as near as you can get to an entirely non-functioning state. By the standards of the Caribbean, it’s a failure and a disaster before the earthquake strikes. If an earthquake had happened to strike the Bahamas, or even the Turks And Caicos, it would not have looked like this. And that’s why although earthquakes are indiscriminatory, and the earthquake certainly doesn’t have any preferences to whether Haiti or the Dominican Republic, is either side of the border line, the impact of the earthquake is certainly very different according to what side of the line you’re on.

HH: Mark Steyn, I know, I assume, and I think I’m right about this that you’ll agree with me in rejecting Pat Robertson’s analysis of why this happened. But why is it that Haiti is such a basket case?

MS: Well, for a start, it was a French colony rather than a British colony. I mean, we can make that comparison almost anywhere in the world. I’m a bit of an old school British imperialist, and I know obviously the majority of your listeners for very good historical reasons will have a different view on that, but generally, and it’s a good guide in the world, even in the worst parts of the world, that if you’re trying to do business, it’s easier to do business in Malaysia, say, than Indonesia. And if you’re trying to do business, obviously, you’re better off in Jamaica than Cuba, and you’re certainly better off in Jamaica than in Haiti. And I think what it is, is that no nation was ever really built there. It’s always very moving to me when you go to the British Caribbean, if you go to Barbados or the Bahamas, or wherever, and you go into those little parliaments, which are like little, mini Westminsters, you see the speaker with his wig, and the mace, and hansard, just like in London or Ottawa or Canberra, whatever one feels about imperialism, functioning societies were built there. There has never been a functioning civil society or public infrastructure in Haiti. And so when a natural phenomenon strikes, it’s devastating there, not just by comparison with an earthquake in California, but even by the standards of an earthquake in Iran, for example…

Noemie Emery on Barry and the “educated classes":

David Brooks notes that in the last year, something dire has happened: The public has turned decisively against the “educated classes” and all of their works. At the same time, it has also moved against Barack Obama, who began his term with approval ratings that bumped up against 70, and have now sunk to the high to mid-40s, with “strongly disapprove” ratings that rival those of George W. Bush at his worst.

It has also moved strongly against his – and the educated classes’ – ideas. It is more pro-life, more anti-climate change, more free market, less statist, more inclined to favor “harsh” measures against terrorism suspects, more in favor of “waterboarding” the terrorist caught in the brief-bombing effort, more opposed to the closing of Guantanamo Bay.

While the liberal Left controls the White House along with both houses of Congress, the country it governs has moved to the Right. These phenomena are all interrelated: The country is moving Right in reaction to Obama’s theories of governance, and Obama and the educated class are one and the same.

He epitomizes that class and was sold by that class to the country, which purchased the product and has come to regret it. It now wants its money returned…

In a sense, Obama has never been more than his education (Columbia, Harvard), which for some people was more than enough. When Brooks met Obama in 2005, the new senator had no experience and no accomplishments, but he was perfectly briefed in the requisite talking points…

People in newsrooms all over the country decided that someone who talked the way they did was the cure for what ailed the country, and are stunned to find out it is not.

His cosmopolitan cool hasn’t defanged the terrorists, who still want to kill us, disarmed North Korea or derailed Iran’s bomb. His knowledge of Burke hasn’t united the country, which is now more divided and angry than ever.

Obama, Brooks concedes, has “recoiled” the country, but seems at a loss to say why.

Could it be that The One has misjudged both the times and the country?; that he made a strategic mistake in pushing for health care (and a tactical one in trusting the Congress)?; that he created a nightmare for most in his party, who face epic losses this year? Heaven forfend.

To acknowledge this is to indict their own judgment, to face the fact they themselves may be less than insightful, that “talking like us” means next to nothing, and that writing for magazines doesn’t equip one for greatness, or leadership. In fact, it only equips one to write for more magazines.

And what does this say? That our “educated class” is educated beyond its intelligence, and mistakes mastery of its patois and attitude for wisdom and competence.

It is full of itself, and values too highly its skill sets, which are entertaining, but not on the optimum level of consequence. On this optimum level are resolution, moral clarity, and an ability to understand and connect with a great many people, things for which the chattering class is not known.

Or as Harry Reid might have put it, he’s a light-skinned Negro who talks like us. Who could ask for more?

Mark Steyn on Barry’s “Islamoschmoozing":

…Barack Obama has spent the past year doing big-time Islamoschmoozing, from his announcement of Gitmo’s closure and his investigation of Bush officials, to his bow before the Saudi king and a speech in Cairo to “the Muslim world” with far too many rhetorical concessions and equivocations. And at the end of it the jihad sent America a thank-you note by way of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s underwear: Hey, thanks for all the outreach! But we’re still gonna kill you.

According to one poll, 58 percent of Americans are in favor of waterboarding young Umar Farouk. Well, you should have thought about that before you made a community organizer president of the world’s superpower. The election of Barack Obama was a fundamentally unserious act by the U.S. electorate, and you can’t blame the world’s mischief-makers, from Putin to Ahmadinejad to the many Gitmo recidivists now running around Yemen, from drawing the correct conclusion…

And Steyn on liberal racism:

…To those of us who find identity politics repugnant, it would seem to confirm that an unhealthy obsession with “anti-racism” eventually becomes so condescending it’s indistinguishable from racism — or, at any rate, the micro-classifications of apartheid — to the point where bigtime Dem honchos are sitting around saying, “What we need here is a clean octoroon.” “Well, this high yaller from Chicago might do the trick."…

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Barry’s irrelevant rhetoric:

…Well-deserved mockery has already been heaped on the move-along-folks-nothing-to-see-here tone of the administration’s initial pronouncements—from Janet Napolitano’s “the system worked,” to President Obama’s statement that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was an “isolated extremist.” This week brought little improvement.

The president acknowledged that the plot had been hatched in Yemen, but not without adding the misleading statement that Yemen faces “crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies.” That Yemenis have to cope with “crushing poverty” is irrelevant here. Abdulmutallab is the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker. Other jihadists, including the physician who blew himself up and killed seven CIA agents in Afghanistan last week, and indeed the millionaire Osama bin Laden, prove that poverty does not beget terrorists. “Deadly insurgencies” is a half-truth, which omits the fact that the Yemeni government itself has supported al Qaeda and continues to harbor at least two people—Jamal Ahmed Mohammed Ali al-Badawi and Fahad Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso—involved in the bombing of the USS Cole…

What the gaffes, the almost comically strained avoidance of such direct terms as “war” and “Islamist terrorism,” and the failure to think of Abdulmutallab as a potential source of intelligence rather than simply as a criminal defendant seem to reflect is that some in the executive branch are focused more on not sounding like their predecessors than they are on finding and neutralizing people who believe it is their religious duty to kill us. That’s too bad, because the Constitution vests “the executive power"—not some of it, all of it—in the president. He, and those acting at his direction, are responsible for protecting us…

Bret Stephens discusses the limits of “virtue":

…a civilization becomes incompetent not only when it fails to learn the lessons of its past, but also when it becomes crippled by them. Modern Germany, to pick an example, has learned from its Nazi past to eschew chauvinism and militarism. So far, so good. But today’s Multikulti Germany, with its negative birth rate, bloated welfare state and pacifist and ecological obsessions is a dismal rejoinder to its own history. It is conceivable that within a century Germans may actually loathe themselves out of existence.

…Our … incompetence stems from an inability to recognize the proper limits to our own virtues; to forget, as Aristotle cautioned, that even good things “bring harm to many people; for before now men have been undone by reason of their wealth, and others by reason of their courage.”

Thus we reject profiling on the commendable grounds that human beings ought not to be treated as statistical probabilities. But at some point, the failure to profile puts innocent lives recklessly at risk. We also abhor waterboarding for the eminently decent reason that it borders on torture. But there are worse things than waterboarding—like allowing another 9/11 to unfold because we recoil at the means necessary to prevent it. Similarly, there are worse things than Guantanamo—like releasing terrorists to Yemen so they can murder and maim again (and so we can hope to take them out for good in a “clean” Predator missile strike).

Put simply, we do not acquit ourselves morally by trying to abstain from a choice of evils. We just allow the nearest evil to make the choice for us.

And so it goes. We can be proud of how deeply we mourn the losses of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. But a nation that mourns too deeply ultimately becomes incapable of conducting a war of any description, whether for honor, interest or survival. We rightly care about the environment. But our neurotic obsession with carbon betrays an inability to distinguish between pollution and the stuff of life itself. We are a country of standards and laws. Yet we are moving perilously in the direction of abolishing notions of discretion and judgment.

One of life’s paradoxes is that we are as often undone by our virtues as by our vices. And so it is with civilizations, ours not least.

Heather MacDonald demolishes the left’s favorite cliche, the so-called “root causes” (aka, poverty and joblessness) theory of crime.

A brief excerpt:

…The recession of 2008-09 has undercut one of the most destructive social theories that came out of the 1960s: the idea that the root cause of crime lies in income inequality and social injustice. As the economy started shedding jobs in 2008, criminologists and pundits predicted that crime would shoot up, since poverty, as the “root causes” theory holds, begets criminals. Instead, the opposite happened. Over seven million lost jobs later, crime has plummeted to its lowest level since the early 1960s. The consequences of this drop for how we think about social order are significant.

… by the end of 2009, the purported association between economic hardship and crime was in shambles. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, homicide dropped 10% nationwide in the first six months of 2009; violent crime dropped 4.4% and property crime dropped 6.1%. Car thefts are down nearly 19%. The crime plunge is sharpest in many areas that have been hit the hardest by the housing collapse. Unemployment in California is 12.3%, but homicides in Los Angeles County, the Los Angeles Times reported recently, dropped 25% over the course of 2009. Car thefts there are down nearly 20%.

The entire article is worth reading.

From Commentary>>Contentions, the reliably liberal Bob Schieffer blasts team Obama:

…But [Janet Napolitano] was just following the modern bipartisan public relations template in this age of information management. First, play down the problem. Second, emphasize what did not go wrong. Assure us that those in charge are investigating, and most important, emphasize no one in any position of responsibility is at fault. It’s not lying. But it’s not exactly the whole truth, certainly not the whole story. All she left out was that part about asking us to respect the privacy of those involved. Oh, I’m sorry. I got the government spin mixed up with the Tiger spin. Here is the difference. Tiger can hire as many people as he wants to make his excuses. It maydo him no good but it’s his money to spend as he wishes. When government officials insult us with spin they’re doing it on our dime, which is supposed to be used to operate the government, not to hold news conferences to tell us what a fine job people on the public payroll are doing. As we learned during Katrina, self-serving spin at the first sign of crisis does not help the situation. It makes it worse. Because it makes it harder to believe anything the government says. Real security is built on trust in government. That requires truth, which should be the beginning of government presentations, not the fallback position…

An Ann Coulter gem:

…Since Muslims took down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, every attack on a commercial airliner has been committed by foreign-born Muslim men with the same hair color, eye color and skin color. Half of them have been named Mohammed.

An alien from the planet “Not Politically Correct” would have surveyed the situation after 9/11 and said: “You are at war with an enemy without uniforms, without morals, without a country and without a leader – but the one advantage you have is they all look alike. … What? … What did I say?”

The only advantage we have in a war with stateless terrorists was ruled out of order ab initio by political correctness.

And so, despite 5 trillion Americans opening laptops, surrendering lip gloss and drinking breast milk in airports day after day for the past eight years, the government still couldn’t stop a Nigerian Muslim from nearly blowing up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day.

The “warning signs” exhibited by this particular passenger included the following:

His name was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

He’s Nigerian.

He’s a Muslim.

His name was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

He boarded a plane in Lagos, Nigeria.

He paid nearly $3,000 in cash for his ticket.

He had no luggage.

His name was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Two months ago, his father warned the U.S. that he was a radical Muslim and possibly dangerous.

If our security procedures can’t stop this guy, can’t we just dispense with those procedures altogether? What’s the point exactly?…

Democrats are counter-attacking critics of Barry’s response to the recent unpleasantness on a Delta Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. They point to the fact that the Bush administration released Gitmo inmates to Saudi Arabia who then turned up in Yemen and are almost certainly behind the underpants bomber.

The Democrats are quite right to criticize Bush who came out for the closing of Gitmo.

It’s now abundantly clear that Bush, the “compassionate conservative,” was infected with the political correctness of sucking up to Muslims who supposedly adhere to, in his words, a “religion of peace.”

In recent interviews, Dick Cheney makes clear that he argued for a more clear-headed, if politically incorrect, policy of toughness which held that it is dangerous to close Gitmo just to appease the international pacifist left that still claims that the Gitmo terrorists are really peaceful shepherds who were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Cheney’s statement:

…As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of 9/11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.

He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core al Qaeda trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency – social transformation—the restructuring of American society. President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war…

Ron Radosh congratulates Barry:

…President Obama said the following: “As the plane made its final approach to Detroit Metropolitan Airport, a passenger allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device on his body, setting off a fire.” (my emphasis) The language is that of courtroom legalese, carefully indicating that a suspect is only “allegedly” guilty of anything, until such time as a jury is convinced by a trial that he was indeed the party responsible for the crime committed.

But as the world knows, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was indeed very guilty, and only because a Dutch filmmaker sitting near him interceded and subdued him, helping put out the fire at the same time, was the plot unsuccessful. Rather than treat the culprit as a foreign national who became converted in London to the doctrines of radical Islam by mullahs at his local mosque, evidently the decision has been made to treat him as a defendant in a criminal case, with a subsequent trial in which his guilt is not to be prejudged. Although he is a foreign national, evidently he will be treated as if he were an American citizen.

Perhaps that is why at present, the government has not been able to obtain necessary DNA samples from him, since Abdulmutallab clearly does not want to voluntarily acquiesce in giving a sample to the FBI. Coercion and rough treatment, including serious interrogation about the involvement of others, could be used against the government in any ensuing trial…

…later in his statement, President Obama, while pledging to “use every element of our national power to disrupt, to dismantle and defeat the violent extremists who threaten us,” continued to say that the quick action taken on the plane to disable the potentially dangerous bomb from detonating showed “that an alert and courageous citizenry are far more resilient than an isolated extremist.” (my emphasis)…

Dan Riehl on the current Secretary of Homeland Security’s loony imcompetence:

If Barack Obama wants to convince America he takes the “protect and defend” portion of his oath of office seriously, it’s well past time for Janet Napolitano to go.

Given the lowlights of Janet Napolitano’s brief — though perhaps too long — career at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), she appears to be a woman-caused disaster in the making for Obama. Recent statements by Napolitano on the Sunday news talk shows are at least the third strike for the secretary. One has to wonder how many strikes she’ll be given before her politics and focus, if not her actual incompetence, result in al-Qaeda successfully striking America at home.

This is a woman with a mindset that suggests Islamic terrorism doesn’t actually exist…

…Napolitano made the rounds of the nation’s talk shows [on Sunday]. In the aftermath of the recent incident, she claimed “the system worked.”

Ann Coulter on “how Obamacare will save money":

…Instead of being honest and telling us that their plan is to make health care worse and more expensive – but fairer! – liberals have recently begun claiming that providing universal health care will actually save money. Overnight, they went from wailing about basic human needs being “more important than bombs” to claiming: “Our plan will be cheaper!”

Hmmm, I didn’t make any notes to debate the manifestly insane points. But I’m pretty sure that extending full medical benefits to 30 million people who don’t currently have them – 47 million once the federal health commission rules that illegal aliens are covered – will not be less expensive than the current system.

You can say – mistakenly – that the liberals’ plan is more compassionate. You can say – also incorrectly – that it will be fairer. On no set of facts can you say it will be cheaper.

Democrats keep citing the Congressional Budget Office’s “scoring” of their bills as if that means something.

The CBO is required to score a bill based on the assumptions provided by the bill’s authors. It’s worth about as much as a report card filled out by the student himself.

Democrats could write a bill saying: “Assume we invent a magic pill that will make cars get 1,000 miles per gallon. Now, CBO, would that save money?”

The CBO would have to conclude: Yes, that bill will save money.

Among the tricks the Democrats put into their health care bills for the CBO is that the government will collect taxes for 10 years, but only pay out benefits for the last six years. Will that save money? Yes, the CBO says, this bill is “deficit neutral"!

But what about the next 10 years and the next 10 years and the next 10 years after that? Will the health care plan continually pay benefits only in the last six years of every 10-year period? I think their plan assumes we’ll all be dead from global warming in a decade…

And Victor Davis Hanson:

…What Barack Obama advocates is as old as Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics, the agenda of the classical dêmos and Roman turba.

It is why the French Revolution emphasized égalité and fraternité, while the Founding Fathers instead championed the freedom of the individual from the despotism of the state. In short, equality of result doctrine ignores the role of markets, of skills, of tragedy itself that renders some of us ill, others in perfect health, some born gifted, others less so, some evil by nature, others good, and instead promises that the state can even us all out through its power of material redistribution. Give us all the same amount of money and perks at the end of the day, and then utopia reigns under the benevolent watch of Ivy-League professors and organizers…