Monthly Archives: April 2009

Extraordinary redaction

Yesterday John asked why the Obama administration would not want the public to see detailed and previously undisclosed information about intelligence successes achieved through enhanced interrogation, especially when the administration is happy to give terrorists a road map to these interrogation techniques. Now Peter Baker reports on the private memo circulated by DNI Blair last week: President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that »

Does this mean he doesn’t respect the constitution?

During his run for the presidency, Barack Obama frequently referred to himself as “a constitutional law professor.” To cite one particularly obnoxious example, which turned out to be indicative of the president’s lack of class, Obama stated at a March 30, 2007 fundraiser that “I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president I actually respect the Constitution.” But now, Obama’s spokesman is denying that Obama was »

The Obama Administration Keeps A Secret

We’ve written many times about the valuable information that the CIA obtained through its enhanced interrogations of high-level al Qaeda detainees. We join former Vice-President Cheney in calling on the Obama administration, now that it has released the memos that assure any terrorists we may capture in the future that they won’t be harmed, to also declassify and release the memos that document the lives that were saved by using »

Criminalizing Conservatism

Many liberals don’t just want to defeat conservatives at the polls, they want to send them to jail. Toward that end, they have sometimes tried to criminalize what are essentially policy differences. President Obama hinted at another step in that direction when he said today that he is open to the idea of bringing criminal charges against the Justice Department lawyers who wrote opinions to the effect that waterboarding and »

Obama declines to take “yes” for an answer on detaining terrorists, Part Two

Yesterday, Jed Babbin reported that White House lawyers are refusing to accept the findings of an inter-agency committee that the Uighur Chinese Muslims held at Guantanamo Bay are too dangerous to release inside the U.S. Today, Thomas Joscelyn shows that a contrary finding would not only contradict the “inter-agency” conclusion, but would also be hard to square with the Treasury Department’s recent designation of Abdul Haq, the leader of the »

Pass the ammunition

We are in the midst of a national ammunition shortage. Provoked by an AP story attributing the shortage to military demand (i.e., President Bush), Bob Owens started writing about the shortage in 2007. Owens debunked the AP story claiming the military’s consumption of ammunition was responsible for police ammunition shortages in the United States. Owens revisited the subject in February of this year, reviewing possible causes of the current shortage. »

Who Are the Pirates?

As he so often does, Michael Ramirez nails the pirates who make off with far more of our wealth than the Somalian thieves could ever dream of; click to enlarge: This photo, courtesy of one of my Facebook friends, shows an elderly white male protester–as described by the Democratic Party and its shills–who takes a different but compatible view of what Congress is up to: »

Why Dawn Johnsen should not be confirmed — rendition

In my initial post arguing that Dawn Johnsen should not be confirmed as head of OLC, I said that Johnsen has called for an immediate end of renditions and, during her confirmation hearings, refused to comment on the legality of the Clinton administration’s rendition practices. In his response to my post, Professor Neil Kinkopf states that Johnsen has not called for an immediate end to all renditions, only “extraordinary rendition.” »

The Occult Meaning of “Controversial”

As the nation’s premier commentators on beauty pageantry, it is incumbent on us to note what happened last night in the Miss USA contest. Miss North Carolina won, with Miss California second. Miss California, Carrie Prejean, was, as you can see, a formidable competitor: At the eleventh hour, however, controversy erupted. One of the of the judges, the flagrantly gay Perez Hilton–put aside, for a moment, the question why he »

Public Approves of Tea Parties

This Rasmussen survey is the first I’ve seen on the tea party protests that have been held around the country, mostly last Wednesday. Rasmussen finds that 51 percent of Americans approve of the tea parties, with 33 percent disapproving. By far the largest group of respondents, 32 percent, is “very favorable” toward the protests. Almost equally interesting is that one in four Americans says that he or she personally knows »

“Fired for doing his job”

That is how the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) views Dartmouth College’s decision to boot Todd Zywicki off its board of trustees. ACTA’s president, Anne Neal, writes: What is unique about Zywicki is. . .that (unlike so many other trustees) he has been willing to raise problems openly and to seek solutions. It is a terrible shame that his reward for that — that is, for doing his »

Obama declines to take “yes” for an answer on detaining terrorists

Jeb Babbin reports that “White House lawyers are refusing to accept the findings of an inter-agency committee that the Uighur Chinese Muslims held at Guantanamo Bay are too dangerous to release inside the U.S.” After President Obama promised to close Gitmo, the White House ordered an inter-agency review of the status of all the detainees. Apparently, it believed that many of those held would be quickly determined releasable. If so, »

Dawn Johnsen — “prepared for political power,” Part Two

Last night, I argued, based on Dawn Johnsen’s own statements, that if confirmed as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, she can be expected to use that office to advance the “progressive” ideas she has developed in order to be “prepared for political power.” Her statements on this subject have been so clear that even Diane Feinstein questioned whether she can “give up” her “activism” as head »

A convenient pretext?

One of the lead stories in the forthcoming City Journal is Peter Huber’s blast of common sense on how subsidizing inefficient alternative energies is going to drive big energy users overseas to heavier polluting countries, hurting us economically and actually increasing carbon emissions globally. Huber’s article is Bound to burn.” Huber points out in the article that we don’t control the global supply of carbon. We don’t control the global »

For a dancer

Yesterday’s New York Times Arts section carried the story of the tragedy that befell the preeminent Chinese classical dancer Liu Yan two weeks before the Olympic games in Beijing last summer. On August 26 Liu “was supposed to give the performance of her life at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.” As the result of a horrible accident during rehearsal, however, Yan was left paralyzed from the waist down. »

Mahmoud Takes His Act to Geneva

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered the de facto keynote address at the UN’s “Durban II” conference on racism in Geneva today. It transpired exactly as could have been expected: Ahmadinejad said the same nasty things about Israel, and to a lesser degree the rest of the West, that he always does; some of those in attendance pretended to be surprised and walked out; many others cheered his remarks enthusiastically. I »

Dawn Johnsen — “prepared for political power”

I’ll continue commenting about Dawn Johnsen’s positions on legal issues relating to the war on terror as the week goes on. Tonight, though, let’s consider another primary objection to confirming Johnsen as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — the likelihood that, as a general matter, she will use that office to promote her “progressive” political agenda. That likelihood is established by her own statements. In October »