Monthly Archives: November 2010

Bogus hypocrisy alert

Some liberals are pushing the idea that Republican members of Congress who campaigned against Obamacare are being hypocrites by accepting the health care plan provided to them, as U.S. legislators, by the federal government. This notion is idiotic even by hack leftist standards. Those who oppose Obamacare typically support the pre-Obamacare status quo, coupled with certain modifications, e.g., tort reform, the ability to purchase insurance across state laws, etc. Under »

Congressional democrats remind us why they needed a shellacking

The lame duck session of Congress should be focusing on the nation’s core business – passing a budget and deciding whether our tax rates will stay where they are beginning in January or increase for some or all of us. However, the Democrats seem focused instead on more peripheral matters that are of special interest to their special interest constituencies – namely the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” (for »

WikiLeaks’ Israel-related cables

In an email message, Josh Block writes that “one of the most interesting overall themes” in the stolen cables obtained by Wikileaks “is the restraint seen to typify the Israelis on Iran, in contrast to the typical Brzezinski, Scowcroft, Walt/Mearsheimer, Glenn Greenwald-Neo-prog, netroots claims Israel is trying to prod us to fight and bomb Iran for them.” Josh writes that “in the end, one of the most obvious takeaways from »

Let’s make a deal (Guantánamo edition)

In the New York Times’s overview of the 250,000 diplomatic cables stolen by Bradley Manning and subsequently transmitted to the Times and others, we are given this view of the Obama administration in action under the rubric of “Bargaining to empty the Guantánamo Bay prison.” When American diplomats pressed other countries to resettle detainees, they became reluctant players in a State Department version of “Let’s Make a Deal.” Slovenia was »

More Wikileaks

Newspapers around the world have started publishing some of the thousands of American diplomatic cables which they were given by Wikileaks. It has been reported that Wikileaks’ source was “a disenchanted, low-level Army intelligence analyst who exploited a security loophole.” While I haven’t seen anything definitive, that sounds like a description of Bradley Manning, the same malcontent who gave Wikileaks thousands of documents relating to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. »

CAIR: Unindicted, But Still A Co-conspirator

We have noted many times that the Department of Justice named the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a self-described civil rights group, as an unindicted co-conspirator in its prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation and others for providing support to the terrorist group Hamas. But we missed the fact (I did, anyway) that the federal courts have now affirmed DOJ’s designation of CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator. Initially, CAIR protested its »

Saving Liberals From Themselves

Byron York supplements Scott’s observations on, and questions about, the attempted terrorist attack on Portland immediately below by pointing out that “Politically correct Portland rejected feds who saved city from terrorist attack”: What is ironic is that the operation that found and stopped Mohamud is precisely the kind of law enforcement work that Portland’s leaders, working with the American Civil Liberties Union, rejected during the Bush years. In April 2005, »

What can we learn from Mohamed Mohamud?

The man who was arrested on Friday for seeking to detonate a car bomb at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland is described in the local press as “a Corvallis teenager,” perhaps not the most illuminating description of the suspect. We also learn from the story that the suspect’s name is Mohamed Mohamud. Mohamud is 19 years old. He is a native of Mogadishu, Somalia. He is a naturalized »

Another Michael Steele spending spree

The Washington Post reports that the Republicans, under the leadership of Michael Steele, have already spent more than $636,000 on their 2012 national convention, to be held in Tampa, Florida. Four years ago at about the same time, the Republicans had spent only $35,000 on the 2008 convention. David Norcross who chaired the RNC’s committee on arrangements for that convention says, “I can’t imagine what you’d spend $636,000 on at »

From Copenhagen to Cancun — Obama diminished

On Monday, the sixteenth “Conference of the Parties” to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will begin at the Mexican resort of Cancun. In a post just below this one, John exposes the redistributionist agenda that helps animate this conference. As John notes, Ottmar Edenhofer, who admits that international climate policy is economic rather than environmental policy, will co-chair the Working Group on “Mitigation of Climate Change” at »

Environmentalism A Fraud? Don’t Take My Word For It

Ottmar Edenhofer is one of the leaders of the international global warming movement: he is the deputy director and chief economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the joint chair of the IPCC’s Working Group 3, and will co-chair the Working Group “Mitigation of Climate Change” at the upcoming summit in Cancun. On November 14, he was interviewed by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. His explanation of the current »

Climate Sanity

On November 17, the House Committee on Science and Technology held a hearing on climate change. In a departure from past practice, a climate realist was included on each of the three panels. You can watch the entire hearing on C-Span. The witnesses’ statements are available at the committee’s site. One of the realist witnesses was Richard Lindzen of MIT, whose testimony is here. This brief excerpt sums up the »

Season’s Greetings From the Religion of Peace

In Portland, 19-year-old college student Mohamed Osman Mohamud was arrested last night as he tried to detonate a car bomb in a crowd at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony. As federal and local agents closed in on him, he shouted “Allahu Akbar!” This was the scene at Pioneer Courthouse Square: Mohamud was born in Somalia but is an American citizen. Apparently a rather typical home-grown jihadist, he became a radical »

Garry Wills then and now

The folks at National Review Online are culling the archives of National Review for highlights from years past. NRO’s weekly email with links to newly posted highlights from a given issue can be had simply for the asking. Readers can sign up for all of NRO’s newsletters here. This week’s email highlights the February 13, 1962, issue of NR. One of the selected highlights is Garry Wills’s review of the »

The Great Repudiation

From its forthcoming issue the Claremont Review of Books has posted Professor James Ceaser’s essay on the meaning of the mid-term elections. The morning after the elections I referred to them as “a stunning repudiation” of President Obama; Professsor Ceaser describes them as “The Great Repudiation.” Professor Ceaser writes: 2010 is the closest the nation has ever come to a national referendum on overall policy direction or “ideology.” Obama, who »

May all of Israel’s blessings be this “mixed”

From Hugh Hewitt, we learn of a piece in the New York Times which claims that “GOP and Tea Party gains are a mixed blessing for Israel.” The premise of the article is that “scores of Tea Party-backed candidates are entering Congress, many of whom favor isolationist policies and are determined to cut American foreign aid, regardless of its destination.” The extent to which an isolationist strand exists within the »

Barack Obama — dying for sins of an ungrateful left

President Obama tells Barbara Walters that he is “extraordinarily proud” of having enacted Obamacare. He should be. This has been a core left-liberal agenda item for decades. Obama got it done. Moreover, his decision to get it done was a courageous one. According to The Promise, Jonathan Alter’s book about Obama’s first year in office, the president’s advisers were opposed to pushing health care reform in 2009, given the parlous »