S

ometime tomorrow between corn chowder, cranberry and Gorgonzola bruschetta, turkey and trimmings and pumpkin pie, I’m really going to enjoy reading this brain stuffing fare from this week’s Watcher of Weasels blogfest:

Council Submissions

• Mere Rhetoric - Obama’s Top NSA And CIA Picks: Harsh On Israel, Sympathetic To Iran And Hezbollah
• Soccer Dad - Well, duh
• The Colossus of Rhodey - Culture of Whine (a rant)
• The Glittering Eye - Official History
• Joshuapundit - Zero Hour…Iran Now Has Material For First Nuclear Bomb
• Cheat-Seeking Missiles - Sunday Scan
• The Provocateur - Some Perspective on PNC, Fraud, and the Bailout
• Bookworm Room - Halting the Schism

Non-Council Submissions

• Submitted By: Mere Rhetoric – Defense Tech - The Big Three/National Security Risk Myth
• Submitted By: Soccer Dad – Israelly Cool - The despicable Lauren Booth
• Submitted By: The Colossus of Rhodey – Times Higher Education - Nine out of ten dogmas
• Submitted By: The Glittering Eye – Serendipitous altruism - American troops in Afghanistan through the eyes of a French OMLT infantryman
• Submitted By: Joshuapundit – Serendituous Altruism - American troops in Afghanistan through the eyes of a French OMLT infantryman
• Submitted By: Cheat-Seeking Missiles – National Review Online - Party of Privilege
• Submitted By: The Provocateur – The Daily Beast - No Stimulus From Government Spending
• Submitted By: Bookworm Room – Jewish World Review - Why Reporters — and Judges and Professors — are Biased

Council members will vote tomorrow night – if the turkey naps don’t get in the way – and the results will be posted right here Friday, thanks to the Watcher of Weasels.

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The latest news tonight from The Times of India has six foreigners dead among the 101 killed by the Mumbai terrorists, and up to 40 Brits and other foreign nationals as hostages. Faced with this,

President-elect Barack Obama on Wednesday condemned the Mumbai attacks and said the United States must work to strengthen ties with India and other nations to “root out and destroy terrorist networks.”

“These coordinated attacks on innocent civilians demonstrate the grave and urgent threat of terrorism,” Obama’s chief national security spokesperson, Brooke Anderson, said in a statement.

“The United States must continue to strengthen our partnerships with India and nations around the world to root out and destroy terrorist networks.”

I’m all for closer ties with India; it’s a must-do.  The problem is, these attacks could well pit India against Pakistan – that’s clearly a strong possibility for the ultimate rationale behind the attacks.  India uncovers ties between the terrorists and Pakistan’s closet jihadist intelligence agency behind the attacks, things heat up, more evidence, more attacks, more heat.

And so it may quickly come down to India and Pakistan looking to Obama and asking, “Who’s side are you on?”

If Obama wants to keep his one macho card, his one rattling saber, his commitment to more war in Afghanistan, he’s going to have to go with Pakistan.  No Pakistan, no route for materiel to Afghanistan.  So working to strengthen ties with India is a nice idea but a dangerous bit of wording that won’t fly far in Islamabad.

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L

et’s return now to Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School), with two more lies from this solid review of what liberal history profs are doing to revise the past and pollute the minds of the next generation.

Lie #11 – No Terrorists or Weapons of Mass Destruction were Hiding in Iraq

A systematic search found no active production facilities or stockpiles for chemical, nuclear, or biological weapons of mass destruction, refuting one of the basic justifications for the war. – David Goldfield et al., The American Journey

Did the failure to find “active” WMD evidence in Iraq really refute one of Bush’s three justifications for the war? Ever heard of a murder conviction that came without a murder weapon or a body? Of course you have, but David Goldfield et al. would rather ignore the complex and hang on the simplistic – as would many of his colleagues.

First, the lib revisionists need to deal with who else was involved in the WMD “deception” – the French, British, Spanish, Australian, Japanese, German, Israeli intelligence services, the Egyptian and Russian presidents, the king of Jordan, and the United Nations Security Council, all of whom stated that Hussein had or was pursuing weapons of mass destruction.

Then, of course, you’d have to overlook his gassing of the Kurds, which led Hans Blix of the UN to state Hussein had 6,500 WMDs. And there were Saddam’s two sons in law, who during their brief defection testified about Iraqi WMD programs. They were executed upon their foolish return to Iraq. (So foolish that I’ll go ahead and accept that their testimony may be discounted since they were obviously idiots.)

Then there’s little niggles like this:

In 2003, a UN weapons inspector confidently stated that Ira had an ongoing nuclear program, and that he knew personally of uranium reporcessing at a facility six miles from Tarmiya. A twenty-gallon barrel found in northern Ira tested positive for Sarin, and another tested positive for mustard gas.

And Goldfield et al. conveniently ignore the tape recordings found of Hussein discussing his WMD program, and the need to hustle the evidence out of Iraq prior to an invasion – and the 56 “sorties” ‘of commercial jetliners, their seats removed, between Iraq and Syria prior to the war.

As for terrorists in Iraq, Schweikart runs through the same sort of sources – our own State Dept., evidence found in Iraq, respected publications like Janes and less respected news sources like CBS, etc. – to prove that Hussein was supporting terrorists in general and al-Qaeda in particular.

There’s plenty more in this chapter; real, hard evidence, as opposed to cute “Bush Lied, People Died” sloganeering.

Lie #12 – The Founders Envisioned a “Wall of Separation” Between Church and State, Keeping Religious Influence out of Government

The Founding Fathers did not intend to establish the United Sttes of America as a Christian nation [and] the assertion that the United States … was founded as a “Christian Nation” is itself a myth. – Mark Weldon “Whitten, The Myth of Christian America

I found myself using my Kindle’s highlighting function multiple times on every page of this chapter because its stuffed full of rebuttal of the vapid claims of the separation of church and state fanatics. If, for example, America’s founding fathers didn’t see America as a Christian nation, how come the colony’s own constitutions saw it as one. Here’s Virginia’s:

We, greatly commending, and graciously accepting of, their Deisres for the Furtherance of so noble a Work … in propagating the Christian Religion to such People [native Americans] as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true knowledge and Worship of God [establish the colony of Virginia.

The Charter of New England (1620) stated that the main objective of the colony was "the enlightenment of the Chrisitan religion, to the Glory of God Almighty."

Why, if America was not a Christian nation, did some colonies have statutes requiring attendance at church? (The sort of thing correctly precluded by a proper interpretation of separation of church and state.)

In 1812, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment allowed Christianity to "receive encouragement from the state, so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience, and freedom of religious worship." In 1892, SCOTUS found unanimously:

Our laws and institutions necessarily are based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind ... [In] this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian. … This is a Christian nation.

And it remains one to this day, if you check any national polling or any compilation by government or religious organizations.

The Chapter also delves into Jefferson’s letter, which is the basis of fraudulent interpretations of separation of church and state, effectively dismissing the arguments as misinterpretations or outright frauds.

The Lies They Teach: #9 and #10
The Lies They Teach – #8
The Lies They Teach: #6 And #7
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
The Lies They Teach: #1 – #3

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Y

ou’d expect better from a state supreme court justice, but apparently Washington State Supreme Court Justice Richard Sanders is pretty comfortable with shouting down the Attorney General shortly before Michael Mukasey collapsed at a speaking engagement last week.

Sanders, miffed that President Bush’s policy on detainment of jihadists didn’t align perfectly with his own Pollyanna position, stood at the dinner and loudly shouted, “Tyrant! You are a tyrant.” Mukasey collapsed long enough later that it’s probable the events were unrelated – but it was clearly a violation of judicial conduct, as the Seattle PI pointed out today:

The state’s Code of Judicial Conduct requires judges to be “dignified” toward those they deal with “in their official capacity.”

Asked if his outburst might violate that code, Sanders said: “Well, it’s so open-ended and vague, maybe someone would think that it could apply. I don’t know. I think it’s a free-speech activity. In my mind this had nothing to do with my role as a judge.”

Sanders had nothing remotely approaching an apology to Mukasey – and an apology, even if the shout-down and the fall-down may not have been at all related, would be the dignified thing for a judge to do. But all he had to apologize for is poor word selection.

Sanders said he now regrets what he did: “If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t.”

Alternatively, he wishes he had said “Tyranny” instead of “Tyrant,” “because in my mind, these policies can lead to tyranny.”

Correct. But oh, so wrong.

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B

igotry, hatred and intolerance from the gay marriage set has finally hounded Los Angeles Film Festival director Richard Raddon from his job. Raddon, a Mormon, had expressed his first amendment freedom of speech to support Prop 8, California’s gay marriage ban proposition, through activism and financial contributions.

Gay marriage bigots, who demand tolerance from us, showed Raddon no tolerance:

After Raddon’s contribution [of $1,500 to Prop 8] was made public online, Film Independent was swamped with criticism from “No on 8″ supporters both inside and outside the organization. Within days, Raddon offered to step down as festival director, but the board, which includes Don Cheadle, Forest Whitaker, Lionsgate President Tom Ortenberg and Fox Searchlight President Peter Rice, gave him a unanimous vote of confidence.

Yet, the anti-Raddon bile continued to bubble in the blogosphere, and according to one Film Independent board member, “No on 8″ supporters also berated Raddon personally via phone calls and e-mails. The recriminations ultimately proved too much, and when Raddon offered to resign again, this time the board accepted. (LA Times)

Raddon had taken the extraordinary step of actually apologizing for his actions, which are thoroughly legitimate and aligned with the opinion of a strong majority of California’s voting citizens. The apology should come from the gay bigots who are utterly, thoroughly, repulsively intolerant. Someone should bitch-slap every last one of them for the hate crime of the economic lynching of a straight man.

Michelle Malkin links to Variety’s coverage.

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S

orry I’ve had no posts today.  The crisis communications project I’m working on post-Yorba Linda fires continues …

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It may not rank up there with the selection of a Secretary of State, but in today’s communications-driven world selection of White House Communications Director is big news in itself – especially when it signals that the president elect, who is running to the center with other nominations, has selected the voice of the radical pro-abortion agenda for the position.

Ellen Moran comes to the position from EMILY’s List, where she served as executive director. EMILY’s List raises money early in the election cycle for women who are pro-abortion and claims to have helped elect a who’s who of far-Left congresswomen.  Says Discover the Networks:

In August 2006, the EL website stated, “Since our founding, we have helped elect 61 pro-choice Democratic women members of Congress, 11 senators, and eight governors.” These figures do not include the hundreds of local candidates whose campaigns EL has supported over the years. Among the notable recipients of EL funding have been Cynthia McKinney, Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barbara Boxer, Patty Murray, Dianne Feinstein, Jan Schakowsky, Barbara Lee, Hilda Solis, Diane Watson, Lynn Woolsey, Rosa DeLauro, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Nydia Velazquez, and Tammy Baldwin. Many of these are members of the Progressive Caucus.

Besides fundraising to keep abortion going, Moran led the AFL-CIO’s campaign to keep low priced goods out of the hands of working families, a.k.a. it’s anti-Walmart efforts and has been a heavy-lifter for the Dem party. Here’s her bio.

Into her hands goes the task of crafting the messages in support of Obama’s policy initiatives.  Her appointment underscores the fact that Obama intends to be pro-union, anti-corporate and most definitely anti-pre-borns.

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A

couple weeks after the election, all is good for the Libs. They won; we lost, and by a margin beyond even ACORN’s ability to produce. Given their emotional bent, it’s not surprising they’re crowing as if this were a permanent mandate, as Ben Cohen wrote yesterday in The Daily Banter:

With a new political era looming, veterans of the old political arena will scramble to redefine themselves in order to make a living. Politicians, media commentators and analysts may be ill equipped to deal with the changing electorate, increased power of the blogosphere and massive discontent with the status quo. Who will survive in the modern epoch?

He lists 10 conservative voices that he says should not: William Kristol, Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, Dick Morris, Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney, Alan Greenspan, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and (big surprise here) George W. Bush.

With most of the names, I can’t say I’m too outraged, really. I started reading the piece prepared to get in a snit, but in the end, you have to admit that if you take a high profile and lose, you’ve opened yourself to criticism. And it’s not just these 10; it’s’ the entire GOP. We should all go away – but only to figure out how to come back stronger.

The pundits Cohen listed – Kristol, Malkin, Morris, O’Reilly and Hannity – are going to have to prove their staying power in the Obama era. What Cohen fails to acknowledge, however, is that the Obama era is just beginning, and all the folks who sided up against him still may ultimately be proven right.

Kristol is condemned, for example, because of his position on the war. But Obama’s not done with the war yet, and neither is al-Qaeda, Iran or Iraq. The question now isn’t what Kristol and other conservatives got right or wrong about Bush’s approach to the war; it’s whether Obama’s position is right or not, and we need people beside his fawning acolytes to consider that question. Whether it will be Kristol or not depends on the market.

The same goes for all the other pundits. Of the bunch, I think Hannity has the most to answer for, since he led the charge against Obama’s radical friends. If Obama does end up governing like a Centrist, Hannity will look the hysteric – not because of his concern, but because of the tenor of his concern.

The other group Cohen lists is politicians – Palin, Cheney, Romney and Bush. Throw Greenspan in this group too.

He dismisses a governor who’s fought corruption, crossed the aisle and garnered incredible favorables in her home state with:

Former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin is the poster child of vacuous Republican imagery – hollow, loud and crass with no discernable talents other than an ability to attract stupid middle American house wives.

With Stevens losing his Senate seat, Palin will serve out her term and it’s up to her to put Cohen in a position where people will be calling for him to go away. Palin does have some loudness and crassness about her that served her well in the election but probably will have to be moderated with clearer statements of her position if she is to succeed. It’s not Cohen’s call; Palin resonates with the GOP, and if they want her and she’s capable, she’ll stay. But she’d better stop letting them tape her in front of a guy who’s manhandling turkeys.

All the rest – Romney, Cheney, Bush – who cares? Romney proved that he didn’t have what it took to attract GOP voters, huge cash accounts notwithstanding, and the GOP have already judged Bush and Cheney. Count the total number of campaign appearances they made – I think it was 6.3 between the two of them. They will not be forces in the party any time soon.

I bring the piece to your attention not because Cohen has anything interesting to say. His column is about as interesting as listening to a rooster crowing. I bring it to you because it utterly lacks perspective. Its basis is this: Today is Obama’s day and it’s a new day and it’s a new world and it will be forever. But Clinton and Nixon proved that even disgrace isn’t forever. Dan Rather weathered many more storms than W. before he finally fell – and people still pay to hear him speak. Both parties have bounced back, or crawled back, from ignoble defeat, and if the old voices weren’t part of it, the new voices were.

Certainly, conservative commentators and politicians have much to be reflective about and will have to work hard to find a way out of this defeat. But if the liberals follow Cohen and are dismissive of our beliefs and our numbers, they will be on someone’s “should go away” list not too many years from now.

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As progressives moan that they’ve done the unthinkable – elected a centrist – the depth of radicalism at the core of Prez-elect Obama’s health care initiative is coming to light.  The Wall Street Journal reads the tea leaves (“The Obama Health Plan Emerges“) and foresees trouble; lots of trouble.

It all comes down to two words:  Max Baucus.  The Montana senator, as Senate Finance chair, controls the pursestrings that will have to be ripped open for a universal (or universal-ish) plan, and also recently released a health care policy blueprint.  It’s close to Obama’s plan and it’s close to the heart of the money-man, so let’s take a look:

First, Democrats want the government to create a national insurance exchange, or marketplace, in which all comers could buy into a range of heavily regulated private policies at group rates. These private plans would then “compete” with a new public insurance option, i.e., a program managed by the government and modeled after Medicare. Lower-income earners would get subsidies to make coverage “affordable.” Businesses that didn’t cover their employees would pay a tax on some portion of their payroll.

The last cog is the “individual mandate.” This requirement that everyone buy coverage has grabbed most media scrutiny of the Baucus plan, because Mr. Obama opposed it during the campaign. But the many moving parts don’t work together unless the young and healthy foot the bill for care of the older and sicker — one reason Hillary Clinton kept nagging Mr. Obama about the individual mandate during the primaries.

The campaign over, reality strikes.  Interestingly, the WSJ sees the public component, not the mandate, as the more radical element of the Baucus proposal.  It says the plan would be “extraordinarily” expensive because it would lead to growth in government’s share of health care spending – and there’s a lot of potential growth here, as health care represents over 17 percent of the US economy.

How extraordinarily expensive will it be?  The draft ballparks the “investment” at as much as $150 billion a year, and WSJ says that’s conservative, since subsidies would go to families earning up to 400% of the federal poverty level. That’s 61.5% of Americans, or about 184 million people — less those already on Medicare and Medicaid.

Medicare is currently $36 trillion short of meeting its obligations, and its board acknowledges that the actual number, given current trends, is probably several trillions higher.  But, the WSJ points out, the Baucus plan “doubles down” on the Medicare option nonetheless:

The Obama-Baucus solution to this slow-motion catastrophe is to add tens of millions more people to the federal balance sheet. Because the public option will enjoy taxpayer sponsorship, it will offer generous packages to consumers that no private company could ever afford or justify. And because federal officials will run not only the new plan but also the “market” in which it “competes” with private programs — like playing both umpire and one of the teams on the field — they will crowd out private alternatives and gradually assume a health-care monopoly.

So, without ever calling it universal health care, the plan would eventually accomplish it by making the government plan the only alternative, whether it’s fiscally viable or not.  One wonders if there’s enough high income and business tax income to be generated to fund the plan.

Is the Baucus plan the Obama plan?  Since it is the more economically realistic of the two, it’s probably closer to what the Dem-dominated Congress will pass if Obama continues to push his health care proposal.

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Hot! Hot! Not!

I

t’s one of those cognitive dissonance moments: They tell you this October was the hottest October ever recorded – excuse the pandering Paris photo – and you’re asking yourself, “Yeah, but wasn’t I freezing my fanny off for most of the month?” Yes you were, and you should believe your fanny, not Warmie “scientists,” who live to feed bogus data into the global warming industrial machine.

Fortunately, they don’t get away with this malarkey like they used to. Here’s Christopher Booker from the UK Telegraph, with emphasis added by Okie:

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

As the Okie says,

Innocent error, or intentional manipulation of the data sets because the reality of the situation just doesn’t fit into the Anthropogenic Climate Change catechism? Shoot, I don’t know. But, the Global Warming proponents have been willing to use funny numbers before. At the very least it’s sloppy work that went unnoticed by GISS because the information was exactly what they wanted to see.

Yup. And there’s much, more more. Read the Okie’s post. Continue Reading »

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