J

ust in case you are casting about today for more evidence of the self-serving immorality and unethical behavior of the labor union movement, look no further than the usually union-loving NY Times, which reports from the middle of nowhere:

When a company called Ausra filed plans for a big solar power plant in California, it was deluged with demands from a union group that it study the effect on creatures like the short-nosed kangaroo rat and the ferruginous hawk.

By contrast, when a competitor, BrightSource Energy, filed plans for an even bigger solar plant that would affect the imperiled desert tortoise, the same union group, California Unions for Reliable Energy, raised no complaint. Instead, it urged regulators to approve the project as quickly as possible.

One big difference between the projects? Ausra had rejected demands that it use only union workers to build its solar farm, while BrightSource pledged to hire labor-friendly contractors.

As California moves to license dozens of huge solar power plants to meet the state’s renewable energy goals, some developers contend they are being pressured to sign agreements pledging to use union labor. If they refuse, they say, they can count on the union group to demand costly environmental studies and deliver hostile testimony at public hearings.

If they commit at the outset to use union labor, they say, the environmental objections never materialize.

Come to think of it, this is also a wonderful example of how environmental laws are exploited by special interest groups – unions, NIMBYs, environmentalists – for reasons that have nothing to do with the environment.

Always ready to tell real thigh-slappers for his client’s benefit, Marc Joseph, a lawyer for California Unions for Reliable Energy, told the NYT:

“We’ve been tarred and feathered more than once on this issue.  We don’t walk away from environmental issues.”

Uh huh.  The chairman of the union group was more frank:

“You only have so much land that can accept solar power plants.  So the question is, should that land be used for low-paid jobs or should that land be used for high-paid jobs?”

How about using it for jobs that will allow the project to be profitable, and that are gained fairly, not through regulatory extortion?  How about not burdening potential future employers with 144 data requests,  as the union group did recently with one company that refused to sign a union labor agreement. The requests asked questions like how many man-hours would be dedicated to tracking desert tortoise, and which role each individual on the tracking team played – all matters of great interest to any union.

For every charge of “astroturf” community relations campaigns by corporations, there are a dozen “greenmailing” schemes like these – but greenies, NIMBYs and union thugs usually get away with them. Kudos to the NYT for covering the story.

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ush hatred runs deep, burns bright and lasts long; it pumps up the American Left like the taste of blood enrages a pitt bull.  Witness the latest coldhearted hatred, from that sump of leftist hate, Salon:

In May, the U.S. economy lost 345,000 nonfarm jobs, pushing the unemployment rate from 8.9 percent to 9.4 percent. According to official statistics, 14.5 million Americans are now looking for work and, as a recent headline at Time.com put it, “The jobs aren’t coming back anytime soon.” In fact, a team of economists at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank recently reported that “the level of labor market slack could be higher by the end of 2009 than at any other time in the post-World War Two period.”

The news, however, is not altogether grim. While times are especially tough for teenagers (22.7 percent jobless rate) and blacks (14.9 percent jobless rate), one group is doing remarkably well. I’m talking about former members of the Bush administration who are taking up prestigious academic posts, inking lucrative book deals, signing up with speakers bureaus, joining big-time law firms and top public relations agencies and grabbing spots on corporate boards of directors.

What a shock! The free market economy still exists despite all Obama has done in the last six months to destroy it, and the very best of the last eight years have found a market for their skills. America should be ashamed!

The author, appropriately monikered Nick Turse, sums up the Bush years, and the efforts of those around the president for those years, as “high-priced wars, ruinous economic policies and shredding of economic safety nets.” Obama has spent more and committed us to more in six months that Iraq cost us through the Bush years. His economic policies have taken the ruin Bush started to new catastrophic levels. And I have no idea what Turse even means by shredding safety nets. Are people starving in the street? Unable to get health care?

I guess when the president you worship is performing disasterously, the best cover is to go back and attack the Bush administration. It keeps the ol’ heart pumping, maintains the vitality of all those dark insults, and distracts one’s attention from the running fiasco that is Obama’s Washington.

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f there is one thing the people of Iran have learned since the “glorious” Islamic revolution, it’s to take the words of the supreme ayatollah seriously.

Yesterday, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned that he’d had enough of this liberty and fair vote crowd and would be clamping down, pronto. And today, the crowds that were reported to be as high as one million yesterday, shrunk to 3,000, according to the Times (UK).  And here’s what they were met with:

Police in Tehran used teargas, metal batons and water cannons on protesters who continue to challenge the recent presidential elections.  …

Earlier today thousands of black-clad riot police were deployed to nearly every public square in the city, outnumbering those on the streets.

They completely blocked off Tehran’s Enghelab ‘Revolution’ Square after Mousavi supporters arranged to meet there.

Those who tried to gather were confronted by officers from all sections of Iran’s security services including the revolutionary guard, military police and religious paramilitaries called the Basij.

Smoke was seen rising from the square as tear gas was deployed on the protesters heard chanting ‘death to the dictator’ and crowds were dispersed with water canons.

Yes, I’ve tinted my avatar green on Twitter in solidarity with Iran’s freedom-hungry people, but that doesn’t mean I’ve ever given this little revolution any chance of succeeding.  I’ve seen totalitarianism at work, with faint memories of the Hungarian revolution when I was five, then Prague’s Velvet Revolution, then the Chinese dictators’ bloody suppression of Tianenmen, and the fade-out of the Azerbaijani revolution, the quick suppression of uprisings in Myanmar and in an encore, the Chinese dictators’ slaughter of monks and citizens in Tibet, Olympics or no Olympics.

Totalitarianism is a bear, a vicious, powerful bear. American presidents should always speak in favor of freedom, promote our system and our ideals, and speak out strongly against the actions of despots. They should pledge America’s strength towards diplomatic and economic actions. But they need to be very cautious when offering encouragement or succor, because history proves that totalitarians are in total control and will kill, torture and imprison to stay that way.

Obama is right not to say anything to encourage the Iranians to take to the street, because if they do and are massacred, he is not prepared to do anything in support of them.  (I’m not saying he’s right not to do anything to support them; only that since he’s not going to help, he shouldn’t encourage them to put themselves in a situation where they may need his help.)

But he didn’t go far enough in condemning Iran’s leaders, not by a long shot. It is not difficult to find the right position in a matter like his – especially if the president puts America’s role as the light for freedom throughout the world ahead of his own ludicrous desire to be photographed sitting next to Mah- I’m in the -moud for some serious head bashin’ Ahmadinejad (rhymes with “Hanging chad? We don’t need no hanging chad!”)  The president is, we’re told endlessly, brilliant. He’s supposed to be so good with words, so fresh diplomatically. 

He’s showing none of it … and the supreme ayatollah is showing us this (caution, upsettingly graphic):

Meanwhile, the NYT reports Obama is steadfastly resisting pressure to step up his rhetoric:

Mr. Obama, officials said, was determined to react to events as they unfold, rather than make statements that might play well politically but hinder his longer-term foreign-policy goals. The administration still hopes to pursue diplomatic engagement with Iran on its nuclear program.

Still, one senior official acknowledged that a bloody crackdown would scramble the administration’s calculations.

It looks increasingly that the bloody crackdown is happening in real time, right now. Will it scramble Obama’s calculations – or will he continue to put his desire to talk to Ahmadinejad, the recipient of the benefits of the corrupt election, ahead of America’s role as the world’s foremost advocate for human dignity and freedom?

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t seems like only yesterday we were looking at nominee #3 for this year’s C-SM “Most Ridiculous” award (actually, it was Tuesday), and here we are again so soon with #4 – a second nominated article from the nearly always ridiculous Gary Kamiya of Salon.

Kamiya easily checks off all the requirements for consideration for this august (if ridiculous) honor:  He is a serious writer, writing about a serious subject in all seriousness, yet he goes far beyond the sublime, settling heavily into the imbecilic.

His piece, Night of the Living Neocons, The shameless fools whose Iraq folly empowered Iran’s hard-liners are back, smearing Obama as an appeaser, is typical Kamiya: Blind to all the Left’s faults, while accusing the right of exactly those faults … oh, and being utterly unable to forgive or forget George W. Bush, who he sees as the primordial presidential ooze from which all things evil evolved.

Let’s start with a rundown of the derrogatory words he uses for neocons:  Rasputin-like, unhinged, disgraced, braying, raving, unreconstructed, lunatic, Visigothic, idiotic, ludicrous, paper-pushing pundits ensconced in comfy right-wing think tanks, supposedly “idealistic,” and cavalier.  A little later on he belittles neocons for belittling Obama.  The pot is allowed to call the kettle black, but the kettle gets no such rights in Kamiyaland.

As the piece’s title hints, Kamiya believes it’s Bush who created Iran’s hard-line regime, and that Obama is right to appease use carefully considered words, because just three words – axis of evil – are behind all that’s wrong in Iran.

That these neoconservative pundits have the gall to talk about Iran at all, let alone pose as defenders of the Iranian people, would be stunning if it were not so familiar. For it was their own policies that were largely responsible for the rise of the hard-liners in Iran. … And of those U.S. actions, none was more consequential than the very “axis of evil” statement that the neocons are now tumbling over each other to glorify.

Kamiya quotes Islamic affairs scholar Malise Ruthvin:

“The build-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq provided them with strong public support. In the local council elections of February 2003 — one month before the invasion — conservatives regained nearly all the seats they had lost in 1999 at the peak of the reformist movement. This was not a rigged poll: for unlike the parliamentary and presidential races, candidates for municipal elections are not vetted for ‘Islamic suitability.’ The right-wing victory was sealed two years later with Ahmadinejad’s election as president.”

It’s simplistic to blame the results of elections in Iran on the actions of America. Economic issues at home and tribal alliances and conflicts also matter greatly, and whatever America does or does not do is grossly distorted by the state-controlled Iranian media – which didn’t cover Obama’s Cairo speech and reported his recent milquetoast comments as if they were incendiary. Be that as it may, haven’t events borne out the fact that Iran is indeed evil? It has ruthlessly repressed its people, called for the destruction of free, Democratic Israel, tried to strip Lebanon of democracy, killed our soldiers, and thumbed its nose at the world.

Oh, and we need not mention Jimmy Carter’s contribution to the mess in Iran, or Bill Clinton’s.  We need not mention that Democratic presidents have had their visions for progress in the Middle East destroyed by Islamists just as much as Republican ones have.  Kamiya just won’t talk about that – he just is interest in the failure of Republicans.

Kamiya than attacks the Iraq war, familiar ground for him indeed:

And, of course, the entire Iraq war greatly empowered Iran by removing its greatest enemy, Saddam Hussein, and shifting power to Iran’s coreligionist Shiites.

He ignores the fact that the war also created a functioning (for better or worse) Muslim democracy next door, something the Tehraniacs have fought tooth and nail since the neocons first started working towards bringing it about. We didn’t remove Hussein and leave a vacuum; we did it and left a form of government that threatens Tehran to its core. How many of the demonstrates on the Iranian streets are there because they saw fair elections happen next door, and they want them now, too? Most of them!

At this point, Kamiya must have stopped writing and fired up a big, fat doobie because what follows appears to be some kind of drug-induced hallucination:

One of the things the neocons would like the rest of us to forget is that they were the most ardent proponents of invading the very country whose people they now piously claim to support. Back in the heady “Mission Accomplished” days, the neocon slogan was “Wimps go to Baghdad — real men go to Tehran.” Leaving aside the fact that the neocons were a bunch of paper-pushing pundits ensconced in comfy right-wing think tanks who never “went” anywhere that didn’t have room service, the point is that they have been burning to attack Iran for years — an attack that would inevitably result in the slaughter of tens or hundreds of thousands of Iranians. Yes, some of them claimed that invading Iran would be a cakewalk, that the long-suffering Iranian people would welcome Americans as liberators, and so on. (Some of them even managed to keep a straight face while saying this.) And if you believe them, there’s a bridge in Fallujah I’d like to sell you.

Have any of you ever heard any of us call for any sort of ground attack on Iran that would slaughter hundreds of thousands of Iranians? I sure haven’t, although I’ve heard plenty of calls for limited attacks on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Have any of you heard that “Real men go to Tehran” slogan? I sure haven’t. Have any of you heard anyone idiotic to say attacking Iran would be a cakewalk? To the contrary, I’ve heard neocons explain that Iraq was selected as a target because a war with Iran would be exponentially more difficult. Look at all the straw dogs barking at the neocons!

As if you haven’t guessed by now, the next target of Kamiya’s angst is Israel:

Beneath their talk of spreading freedom and democracy, the neocons have always hated and feared Iran. There are several reasons for this, including the state of enmity between Iran and America spurred by the Khomeini revolution and the 1979 hostage crisis, but the main one is that Iran is Israel’s most dangerous enemy. Removing Iran as a threat to Israel is the main strategic goal of the neoconservatives, and that goal is far more important to them than “liberating” the Iranian people.

That’s it. Really. There’s no mention of holocaust denial or pledges to wipe Israel off the map. There’s no mention that Israel is a democracy. And there is certainly no mention of the regional destabilization a nuclear Iran would present, or the threat to America posed by Iran providing terrorists with nuclear weapons or materials for dirty bombs. It’s just that we have this curious strategic goal to protect Israel.

The most tragic and pathetic statement by Kamiya follows.

For the truth is that the neocons’ supposed “idealism” was and is in fact a fig leaf covering utter, cavalier indifference to the massive death and destruction their reckless — but so “principled” — policies caused.

He apparently has avoided any contact with information about what happened in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos after his side won and we ended all that neocon silliness about domino theories in Southeast Asia. Millions died, were tortured or forced into state-sanctioned slavery, and that’s all just hunky dory with Kamiya – just don’t ask him to consider how hundreds of thousands were executed by Hussein, but that doesn’t happen any more … well, it happens in Iran, but not Iraq.

And what of Obama’s position in all this?  Why, it’s just brilliant, of course!

The situation in Iran is a tricky moving target, but so far, Obama has played it exactly right on. He has expressed deep concern about the election and the regime’s violent response to peaceful demonstrators, but added that “it is not productive, given the history of US-Iranian relations to be seen as meddling — the U.S. president, meddling in Iranian elections.”

Since when is calling for fair elections “meddling?”  Since when is sympathizing with freedom-loving people “meddling.”  I know meddling when I see it:  Owning 60 percent of GM or canning its CEO; that’s meddling. But Kamiya is convinced in a meddle-free foreign policy:

It should be amply clear by now that America’s ability to influence events in the Middle East is severely limited. Indeed, as the Bush years showed, U.S. actions in the region tend to result in the exact opposite of their intended consequences.

He then turns around and says:

The success of the March 14 Alliance in Lebanon, a major victory for the U.S., is widely attributed to the “Obama effect.”

Which is it? Is he saying the Cairo speech led to the riots in Iran as the exact opposite of its intended consequences?  Or is he saying that Obama should speak very strongly in favor of democracy in Iran because there’s an “Obama effect” that can really make things happen?  I am so confused.  But that’s something that happens frequently when I consider the ridiculous things said by Liberals.

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e learn this morning from the left-wing mag The Nation that the man who won the election in Iran is the “radical right” candidate Mah – I’m in the - moud - for re-election Ahmadinejad (rhymes with “Two-to-one margins make me glad”).  That comes as a surprise to me; I always saw him as a leftist.

After all, he likes a big central government upon which the people are dependent, and he’s a fan of government control of the economy rather than a free market.  Here in America, that would define the leftist Obama, not any “radical right” party.

I’m backed up by Ken Ballen of Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion, and Patrick Doherty of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, who report the results of their May 11-20 polling in Iran in today’s WaPo. (The main thrust of their article is that their polling proves Ahmadinejad won the election by a two-to-one margin, fairly or not.  Yes, they say they prove it, but that’s them talking, not me.)

Ballen and Doherty also found that university students and the highest income Iranians were the only groups largely opposed to Ahmadinejad.  University students in Tehran have been fighting for less government control for years, and you know those rich people – voting conservative from polling stations set up in their country clubs.

The pollsters also found that a free press and free elections were the top priorities of Iranians, followed by a free economy.  The powers that be in Iran support none of the above – but does that make them radical rightists?  Here in America, leftists support the Fairness Doctrine to repress a free press, the radical left-wing ACORN group is rewarded by Obama with millions in grants for its efforts to suppress free elections, and we’re left shaking our heads and saying “What free market?” after just six months of Obama.

The evidence is clear.  It’s a radical left-winger who’s back in power in Iran.  Maybe that’ll give Ahmadinejad and Obama something to talk about if our president ever succeeds in grovelling his way into talks with his counterpart in Tehran.

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Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.

But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.

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hat’s the lead of Paul Krugman’s column in the NYT today – a column you just knew was coming.  You can imagine the gleeful smirk on his face as his fingers smashed away at his keyboard.  But Krugman’s just turning over his liberal outrage engine; the howling rpms build from there, as he rushes to build the “conservative political establishment” as junior Von Brunns:

There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.

Interestingly, Krugman’s column is almost identially mirrored by Alex Kingsbury in U.S. News:

A month before a suspected white supremacist walked into the Holocaust Memorial Museum in downtown Washington and opened fire, the Department of Homeland Security warned that domestic right-wing extremism was the most pressing domestic terrorist threat that the country faced.

Conservatives were outraged that the DHS analysts had singled out antiabortion and antitax radicals for scrutiny. But the report was part of a series that DHS compiles on domestic dangers from all sides of the political spectrum, an area that’s taken a back seat to overseas threats.

A series of recent incidents shows the prescience of those reports and illustrates the worrying reality that terrorism often comes from inside the homeland.

And that’s hardly the end of it.  Just check out the piling on by the Left at Memeorandum.

While Kingsbury mentions the assassination of Pvt. William Long, an act of terror most mainly marginalized media managed to report without mentioning the word “Islam,” Krugman fails to mention Long at all.  To his credit, Kingsbury approached the subject pretty fairly and didn’t go on to condemn mainstream Republicans, as Krugman did.  I thought this excerpt from Kingsbury’s piece was particularly even-handed:

In another recent high-profile incident, George Tiller, a Kansas doctor who performed legal abortions, was shot and killed last Sunday as he stood in the aisle of his church. Scott Roeder, the man charged in Tiller’s murder, echoes the DHS report on right-wing extremism. Believed to have been a member of an antigovernment militia in Montana during the mid-1990s, Roeder had a history of railing against taxes and abortion, according to news reports. “We can see from these incidents that the U.S. is not immune from these types of attacks and that a lone gunman or cell can kill just as effectively,” says Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. “But it also shows that those operating outside an organized terrorist network lack the training and tradecraft to make their attacks either sustained or a systemic threat.” After the killing, the U.S. Marshals Service was instructed to increase security at the country’s abortion clinics.

There was no call to reinforce security at military recruiting stations, however, after Abdulhakim Muhammad allegedly shot two soldiers smoking cigarettes in the parking lot of an Army center in Arkansas. Pvt. William Long was killed and another soldier was wounded. Muhammad was reportedly angry over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On Tuesday, he pleaded not guilty to murder charges.

Kingsbury should have reported that Muhammed has said his act was jihad, and he (Muhammed) should not be deemed guilty because Islam requires such actions.  Still, he’s no Krugman.  Here’s the NYT columnist’s evidence that we are dangerous:

Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that “some” called Dr. Tiller “Tiller the Baby Killer,” that he had “blood on his hands,” and that he was a “guy operating a death mill.” But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House.

Where was Krugman for the last eight  years?  Where was his concern when the Left called Bush a baby killer? When they launched conspiracy theories from Haliburton being behind the war in Iraq to Bush being behind 9/11 – the same whacked out theory that was part of Von Brunn’s lunacy? Did he condemn the film about Bush being assassinated?

No. When the Left attacks the Right, it’s all good, justified and exactly the sort of thing Jefferson was thinking about when he wrote that a little revolution is good and necessary from time to time.  Let Code Pink harrass military recruiters and block the entrance to recruiting stations, but never, never, allow abortion protesters to be anywhere near an abortion clinic.  This is logic, leftist style.

Krugman has particular villification for Glenn Beck, but probably has never written a critical word of Keith Olbermann.  He says Rush Limbaugh has “joined hands with the lunatic fringe.” He accuses the R.N.C. of of somehow being unstable because it wants to change the leadership of the nation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  So he’s a hypocrite.  So he can’t stand looking in mirrors.  So he trumps up fear where no fear need be.  No matter.  He’s got a trump card:

What will the consequences be? Nobody knows, of course, although the analysts at Homeland Security fretted that things may turn out even worse than in the 1990s — that thanks, in part, to the election of an African-American president, “the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years.”

And that’s a threat to take seriously.

Oh, yeah.  We’re all racists and we wouldn’t be so angry if Obama were just white.  What a masterful example Krugman has given us of the Left’s ability to use hate speech in order to ignore the issue at hand – whether it was global jihad under Bush, or unconstitutional economic lunacy under Obama.

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s I understand it, here’s the Obama/Clinton State Dept’s take on how they will win what we used to call the war on terror:  The problem between the U.S. and the jihadists is that we just haven’t been likable enough. We’ will win over Islam if we spend less on the military and more on fish sticks for orphans.

That was the gist of Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Judith A. McHale’s talk to the Center for a New American Security today.  (I thought the old Bush security was just fine, by the way, since no Americans were killed by jihadists on American soil during his watch, post 9/11.)  Here’s some excerpts:

Whether we are strengthening old alliances, forging new partnerships to meet complex global challenges, engaging with citizens and civil society, or charting new strategies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, our national interests depend on effective engagement and innovative public diplomacy. The stakes could not be higher. We must get this right…This is not a propaganda contest — it is a relationship race. And we have got to get back in the game.

Enhanced public diplomacy is a key component of the President’s new strategy in the region…To achieve the President’s aims, we are launching a multi-faceted strategy to provide platforms for local moderate voices, support democratic institutions and civil society, and position the United States as a long-term partner working to create opportunities and enable the people of the region to chart the futures of their own countries.

We are responding to requests from the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan to help meet the needs of their people. Secretary Clinton recently announced more than $100 million in humanitarian support for the people of Pakistan. And Ambassador Holbrooke just announced another $200 million. Since 2002, the United States has provided a total of more than $3.4 billion to alleviate suffering and promote economic growth, education, health, security and good governance in Pakistan. [Oh, wait! You mean Bush tried this to the tun of $3.4 billion and they're still trying to kill us? No matter; just apply the Universal Obama Solution - throw lots of money at it.]

Yet we have a credibility gap with many in the region — some have called it a ‘trust deficit.’ So part of our task is reassuring the people that our aim in the region is to support their own aspirations. We need to do a better job of getting the word out about what we are doing to help Pakistan and Afghanistan become more stable and prosperous, both through the local media and by communicating directly with people.”

It is not about getting the word out, or the trust deficit, but it is most definitely about the aspirations of the people of the region.  A significant percentage of them have a deeply imbedded aspiration to bring pain, suffering and death to the Great Satan, and no amount of communication or prosperity is going to change that.  Only rewriting the Q’ran will change that.

Islam has nurtured radicals since the dawn of the religion, through times of great wealth and times of great poverty alike.  Radical Muslims abound in Lebanon, where Democracy still hangs on. And education? Cairo University, where Obama spoke to the Muslim world last week (except for Iran, of course, where the state didn’t broadcast it), has spawned its share of very well educated Islamo-savages.

McHale concluded her comments with a bizarre historical reference:

A few days after I started at the State Department, I moved into George Marshall’s old office. General Marshall saw a world beyond our shores devastated by war and reeling from economic crisis. He knew that our fates and our fortunes were intertwined and that America had to engage with the world to ensure our future. So he launched one of the most far-reaching engagement efforts in history. And today we are still reaping the rewards of that investment in mutual prosperity and security. From Cairo to Kabul, from quiet villages to crowded cities, America is once again reaching out a hand of friendship and seeking new relationships. We know it is the right thing to do and we know, like General Marshall did, that our future depends on it.

Yeah, but back then Europe was a Christian continent. And the enemy was broken, broke and starving – a point we’ll never get to if the administration can’t even admit that we’re fighting terrorists.  There is a role for public diplomacy – what we used to call foreign aid – but alone, it will have no measurable effect on the level of jihadist violence against us.

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avid Letterman has apologized for suggesting that Sarah Palin’s daughter “got knocked up” by Alex Rodriguez during the 7th inning stretch at a Yankee game.  For those of you who have been visiting Pyongyang, here is the original, er, joke:

The fact that Willow, 14, attended the game, not Bristol, 18, was highly publicized on New York media and was common knowledge from New York to SoCal – but Letterman would like us to think that the Palin-bashers on his writing team were unaware, explaining:

We were, as we often do, making jokes about people in the news and we made some jokes about Sarah Palin and her daughter … and now they’re upset with me….  These are not jokes made about her 14-year-old daughter. I would never, never make jokes about raping or having sex of any description with a 14-year-old girl…. Am I guilty of poor taste? Yes. Did I suggest that it was okay for her 14-year-old daughter to be having promiscuous sex? No.

He then says he hopes he’s “cleared part of this up,” and graciously extends an invitation to Sarah Palin to be a guest on his show.  Why Sarah? Why not Bristol? Or Willow?

Let’s trust the flamingly liberal Letterman at his word (just pretend we’re fools who have suspended all knowledge of liberal behavior). Then we have to accept that making fun of the young (18) children of political candidates is acceptable.  Sasha and Malia, watch out; you could be next! Not. Ever. Redirecting the joke after the fact to Bristol protects Letterman from being a verbal pedophile, but it does not extend any modicum of good taste or decency to the man.

It’s hard to accept that no one on the Letterman team knew it was Willow at the game. This is almost certainly a weasley lie to cover up dispicable behavior – behavior that got a lot of laughs from his similarly dispicable audience.

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“I don’t know anything about cars.” – Edward E. Whitacre, Jr., Newly Annointed Chairman Of GM

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really can’t believe I’m in America, reading in American media what an American president is doing to an American enterprise.  But I am.  It is true.  The government has named a new chairman for General Motors.  Not the GM board of directors, not the shareholders, but Steven Rattner, Obama’s car czar, who knows about as much about cars as the new chairman, Edward Whitacre.

This is far more radical than anything I thought Obama would be able to pull off, even in eight years, let alone 14 weeks.  Following on yesterday’s SCOTUS decision which said, basically, a contract is no longer a contract so investors can expect no protections, the critical condition of glorious American capitalism could not be more apparent.  I worry that it will not survive until 2010′s mid-term elections.

Whitacre was picked for two reasons.  The published one is that he guided AT&T through the transition from land-based wire telephone carrier to a leader in the wireless industry.  The Obamaites see a similar future for GM, with it transforming from a market-driven car company to a government-driven car company, manufacturing cars Big Brother wants us to drive, whether we want to or not.

The unspoken reason for his selection is because Whitacre can be counted on to do what government tells him to do, as was evident when he quickly (and rightly) acquiesced to government pressure to open AT&T’s hardware to the feds for post-9/11 surveillance purposes.  Not all telcom CEOs folded so quickly to government pressure, and since folding to government pressure is what’s in store for GM, Whitacre will make an ideal Obama-era chairman for the company.

The appointment should infuriate the Left.  Besides being a lackey to George Bush’s gestapo security machine, Whitacre received a peon-snubbing $158.8 million retirement package from AT&T and was involved in some pretty brutal corporate downsizings (probably in no small part due to shifting jobs overseas).  Oh, and let’s not forget that under his tenure AT&T censored (oops!) a Pearl Jam concert right when the band was blasting George Bush.

But Daily Kos has nothing posted on him as of his hour.  Democratic Underground? Mum.  [By the way, I typed "democraticunderground" instead of "democraticunderground.com," and was redirected to one of those stupid sponsored-link pages.  Guess who came out on top?  Barbara Boxer!] As for Huffington Post, which as I predicted in a tweet earlier today leads with how Homeland Security foresaw today’s attack on the Holocaust Museum in its report on right-wing radicalism, it also couldn’t find a reason to cover – let alone criticize – Whitacre’s appointment.

Of course not.  They know what’s going on.  Their long-awaited revolution is happening and they don’t want to crow about it too early because suddenly they’re very concerned about the enemy getting wind of our intentions.  Not al-Qaeda – tell them anything - they don’t want their enemy, normal Americans, to wake up to what’s going on.  No, they want to be much further down the road to economic ruin in the name of wealth redistribution before they haul out the red flags and have a victory parade.

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f you’re not interested in buying that bridge in Brooklyn, perhaps I could interest you in some stark, middle-of-nowhere desert land that’s ideal for the energy of tomorrow – solar! Yes, friends, imagine this dreary wasteland glimmering with solar panels as far as the eye can see! And what else glitters, friends? Gold! Yes, there’s gold to be made buying up desert land for the inevitable solar revolution! Step right up!

Er, before you whip out that checkbook, allow me to introduce you to Mr. Greenie, who loves alternative energy – unless, of course, someone proposes to actually build an alternative energy facility anywhere. As the amazingly appropriately named Sandy Bahr, director of the Sierra Club in Phoenix told the Phoenix Business Journal:

We are very supportive of a mix of renewable generation. But we’re not in favor of paving the desert with mirrors.

Here’s a story about environmentalists concerned about a desert solar plant’s impact on pupfish.  It’s all pretty frustrating, says the governor of CahLEEforNEEa in Capitalism Magazine:

As Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger put it, “But, I mean, if we cannot put solar power plants in the Mojave Desert, I don’t know where the hell we can put it.” The answer, Governor, is nowhere, according to many environmentalists. A group called the Alliance for Responsible Energy Policy, discussing the plans for arrays in the desert, argues that this portends the “permanent destruction of hundreds of thousands of acres of pristine public lands . . . [this is] wilderness killing.” Despite lip-service to human needs, protecting “pristine nature” is their goal, and “pristine nature” means nature undefiled by any human presence—even a footprint in the desert.

The NY Times succeeded in actually finding some desert residents who don’t like the idea of productive use of their woebegone climes:

But it is also home to the Mojave ground squirrel, the desert tortoise and the burrowing owl, and to human residents who describe themselves as desert survivors and who are unhappy about the proliferation of solar projects planned for their home turf.

“We’re tired of everyone looking at the desert like a wasteland,” said Donna Charpied, who lives with her husband, Larry, in Desert Center, Calif., where they have been farming jojoba, a native shrub cultivated for its oil, for 27 years. She is also the policy advocate for the Desert Communities Protection Campaign of the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice.

Wait a minute! Some desert rat is also an environmental justice radical who just happens to have a hotline to the NYT?  What are the chances?!  You got to hand it to those NYT reporters – if there’s a radical leftist to quote, they’ find ‘em, even in the remotest of places.  Don’t be deceived by that highfalutin’ “Desert Center” name – the hardscrabble place has a population of 125.

Even if you succeed in overcoming environmentalist opposition and get your incredibly difficult permits from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which will be watching out for every bush and bunny, you’ll still have to figure out how to get your power to anywhere, since Greenies are fighting the new power line corridors that would bring electricity to metropolitan areas from the desert.

But let’s say you get past that hurdle.  Now, let me introduce you to the rather formidable Diane Feinstein.

In a move that could pit usual allies — environmentalists and the solar and wind industries — against each other, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is preparing legislation that would permanently put hundreds of thousands of acres of desert land off limits to energy projects. The territory would be designated California’s newest national monument. …

“It’s frustrating. We really do have competing national priorities here,” said Paul Whitworth, whose San Diego-based LightSource Renewables hopes to put in a solar project on about 6,000 acres near Amboy. “We spent a lot of time researching the desert, and consulting with the BLM to make sure we didn’t apply on top of an area of critical environmental concern, or area with other issues. . . . Now, there’s uncertainty on whether these projects will go ahead.” [LA Times]

My advice?  Buy oil.

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