Monthly Archives: March 2009

March 12, 2009 — John Hinderaker

The Difference Between Obama and Jesus

Jesus knew how to build a cabinet. That was too good not to steal. (Via InstaPundit.) Yet another would-be Treasury nominee has bitten the dust. This time it’s Rodgin Cohen, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell. Cohen was to be Deputy Treasury Secretary, but withdrew at the last minute because of “an issue that arose in the final stages of the vetting process.” It’s possible that Cohen didn’t pay his »
March 12, 2009 — Paul Mirengoff

What’s plan B?

Michael Steele in an interview with GQ: Question: Why do you think so few nonwhite Americans support the Republican Party right now? Steele: ‘Cause we have offered them nothing! And the impression we’ve created is that we don’t give a damn about them or we just outright don’t like them. And that’s not a healthy thing for a political party. I think the way we’ve talked about immigration, the way »
March 12, 2009 — John Hinderaker

The Winning Billboard is…

We ridiculed here the Democratic Party’s lame contest for an anti-Rush Limbaugh slogan to be put on a billboard near his home. The five “finalists” were, we thought, rather pathetic. Just this morning, the Democrats announced the winner; click to enlarge: This whole anti-Rush campaign is so patently silly, at a time when the Obama administration and its Congressional allies are obviously floundering, that I think it has become an »
March 12, 2009 — Paul Mirengoff

Baghdad in NPR’s parallel universe

The Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush has been sentenced to three years in prison. The sentence seems harsh to me (a fine might have been sufficient), but I’m the last person who would presume to judge a great Arab culture. The sentence also seemed stiff to NPR’s Baghdad correspondent (I didn’t catch her name), who plainly regards the shoe-tossing journalist as a heroic figure. According to »
March 12, 2009 — John Hinderaker

A Counterpoint, From Jeremiah

Actually it was Bill Otis who wrote this in response to the recession charts I posted last night, but he sounds a bit like Jeremiah. Which isn’t to say that I disagree with him: The current recession has a number of features that seem to me to make it considerably more worrisome than those in the past. As your second chart shows, it is, albeit by only a slight margin, »
March 11, 2009 — Paul Mirengoff

Understanding Dennis Blair

Fresh off his spirited but unsuccessful defense of Chas Freeman, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair has told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Iran has not decided whether to pursue the production of weapons grade uranium and the parallel ability to load it onto a ballistic missile. Blair also said that “the minimum time at which Iran could technically produce the amount of highly enriched uranium for a single »
March 11, 2009 — John Hinderaker

Amazing Facts of the Day

This is via The Corner; I think it’s one of the most astonishing things I’ve learned in a long time: two grandsons of President John Tyler are still alive. Yes, that John Tyler, of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” fame. John Tyler was born in 1790. That’s what you call good genes, I guess. Amazing. While we’re paying tribute to The Corner, here’s one more: Europe is proposing to tax cow »
March 11, 2009 — John Hinderaker

Liberal Hackers At It Again

At the end of January, a hacker broke into Senator Norm Coleman’s web site and gained access to information there about donors to the Coleman campaign. Coleman’s staff had a forensic analysis performed and were assured that the donor information had not been downloaded. It appears, however, that this conclusion was mistaken, as last night, a left-wing group called Wikileaks.org sent emails to Coleman’s donors that attached an Excel spread »
March 11, 2009 — Paul Mirengoff

The apologist’s apologist

It’s natural to feel relief over the demise of Chas Freeman’s appointment as National Intelligence Chairman. But this sentiment must be tempered by the knowledge that the man who selected Freeman, Dennis Blair, is our Director of National Intelligence. Indeed, that knowledge, coupled with Blair’s defense of Freeman, fully offsets the relief I otherwise would feel. It may be the case that Blair did not know the extent to which »
March 11, 2009 — John Hinderaker

The Recession in Context

Hysteria prevails in Washington, with “never let a crisis go to waste” the mantra. Loose talk about the present recession is so pervasive that many people don’t have a clear idea how it fits in the context of earlier downturns. The web site Calculated Risk prepared these helpful charts. This one shows the durations and percent decline on an annualized basis of the postwar recessions, with the current one showing »
March 11, 2009 — Paul Mirengoff

A Gitmo reunion in Afghanistan

Thomas Joscelyn reports that a former Gitmo detainee, Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, has become the Taliban’s chief operations officer in southern Afghanistan, where violence has been spiking in the last year. In response to that spike, thousands of U.S. troops are preparing to deploy to southern Afghanistan. Their task will be all the more dangerous because, according to The Times (UK), Rasoul is “responsible for increasingly sophisticated explosives attacks on British »
March 11, 2009 — Scott Johnson

Saudi/Manchurian candidate expurgated

In his article on the withdrawal of Chas Freeman from his pending appointment as National Intelligence Council chairman, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus provides an expurgated account of Freeman’s parting shot. According to Pincus, the rap on Freeman derived from “questions about his impartiality.” Here is Pincus’s account of Freeman’s parting shot: In an e-mail sent to friends yesterday evening, Freeman said he had concluded the attacks on him would »
March 10, 2009 — Scott Johnson

Saudi/Manchurian candidate speaks

As Paul notes immediately below, Chas Freeman leaves the stage with a parting shot. Freeman explains his withdrawal from his appointment as chair of the National Intelligence Council, pointing a finger at “unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country.” I trust that our readers can translate this disgusting statement for themselves. To say the least, Freeman’s statement reflects incredibly poorly »
March 10, 2009 — Paul Mirengoff

The Saudi-Manchurian candidate’s parting shot

Chas Freeman’s statement explaining the withdrawal of his prior agreement to chair the National Intelligence Council makes for good reading. Here is the most revealing part: I am not so immodest as to believe that this controversy was about me rather than issues of public policy. These issues had little to do with the NIC and were not at the heart of what I hoped to contribute to the quality »
March 10, 2009 — John Hinderaker

Too Bad He’s Not Commerce Secretary

It’s hard to understand why Barack Obama nominated Senator Judd Gregg to be Secretary of Commerce, or why Gregg ever thought he could fit in with the Obama administration. Still, viewing Gregg’s introductory comments at today’s Senate Budget Committee hearing, one can only regret that his voice of sanity has no place in the administration: I appreciate the chairman saying that, in the second five years of this budget, the »
March 10, 2009 — John Hinderaker

“An Unaccountable Secretive National Hedge Fund”

A reader sent in this provocative observation by mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein: Many of us who work in finance are even more horrified by what we see than the lay public appears to be. Some of us spoke publically for years about the dangers posed. Others published papers or books to spread the word. Curiously, however, our country’s laws would not even permit average families to voluntarily invest in »
March 10, 2009 — John Hinderaker

Democrats Sell Out African-American School Children, Part II

The Democrats sneaked a provision into the omnibus spending bill that cleared the Senate today which closes down the school choice program in Washington, D.C. Schoolmates of the Obama children benefit from the program, and, as we noted here, Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs was tongue-tied when asked about the President’s position on the issue. There was some hope that the Democrats, once the public started to become aware of »