Monthly Archives: October, 2009

Happy Halloween 2009–

I took these with my phone in front of the Tivoli Theater in St. Louis before the doors opened for the Halloween viewing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
It was sold out.

Does the self-described "Nation's Newspaper" -- er, make that the nation's second newspaper -- have a MoveOn mole as a headline writer?

The paper's headline at its report on Thursday's government announcement that the nation's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) came in at an annualized 3.5% after four consecutive quarters of decline was not only over the top. Its message went directly against an admonishment by an economist quoted in Paul Davidson's underlying report, which was to not "get carried away by the really strong number."

Many commentators, while gratified that GDP growth occurred, have cautioned that the growth was influenced heavily by government programs that either have already run their course with debatable long-term impact (e.g., Cash for Clunkers), or are probably not going to last much longer even if extended (e.g., the first-time homebuyers' credit), simply because the government is running trillion-dollar annual deficits and can't afford them.

Get a load of the story's headline, and how it contrasts with Davidson's generally pretty good reporting (bold is mine):

Economy grew at torrid 3.5% rate in 3Q; stocks jump

News that the economy grew at a 3.5% pace in the third quarter, its best showing in two years, sent stocks soaring Thursday.

.... The growth in GDP, fueled by government-supported spending on cars and homes, was the strongest signal yet that the longest, deepest downturn since the Great Depression is ending.

But a second report out Thursday showed the number of people claiming jobless benefits for the first time dropped only slightly in the latest week, evidence that the labor market remains weak.

.... Many economists believe that while the recession that began in December 2007 is history, the third-quarter spurt was largely fueled by government incentives and industry trends that will fade, leaving a wobbly economy.

"Don't get carried away by the really strong number," says economist Patrick Newport of IHS Global Insight. "The economy is still losing jobs and it's still fundamentally weak in a lot of places."

.... Newport .... says (that) almost half the growth stemmed from a rise in consumer spending that was juiced by the government's expired cash-for-clunkers program, which ended in August.

"Torrid" was not a word that was frequently applied to the U.S. economy during the Bush presidency, even though several quarters came in above 4% as originally reported (the government has since done a comprehensive adjustment that reduced some of them to below 4%. This Google News Archive search on ["torrid GDP "economic growth"] (typed exactly as indicated between brackets) covering 2007, a year when both second- and third-quarter growth came in above 4% before that comprehensive adjustment, returns 61 results, with very few of them directly relating to the U.S. economy.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

"The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom have what Palin once called the 'actual responsibilities' of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity."

So wrote New York Times columnist Frank Rich in a piece that won't appear in print until Sunday, but was clearly intended to scare the Dickens out of the Times' few conservative readers on Halloween.

After all, in his "The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York," Rich unapologetically said no matter who wins in Tuesday's election for a House representative from New York's 23rd district, "the Republicans are the sure losers":

No matter what the results in that race on Tuesday, the Republicans are the sure losers. This could be a gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats through 2010, and perhaps beyond. [...]

That this pastoral setting could become a G.O.P. killing field, attracting an all-star cast of combatants led by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, William Kristol and Newt Gingrich, is a premise out of a Depression-era screwball comedy. But such farces have become the norm for the conservative movement — whether the participants are dressing up in full “tea party” drag or not.

Imagine that. The New York Times has a columnist that actually gets paid to tell readers no matter what happens, Republicans lose.

Talk about a gift that keeps on giving for liberals! Makes you wonder if the Times has someone in the sports section that will tell New Yorkers the Yankees won the World Series no matter what happens on the field.

Sadly, Rich was just getting warmed up:

The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom have what Palin once called the “actual responsibilities” of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity.

Wow. Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck "would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity?"

Actually, in the past two major election cycles, the Republican Party has died on the cross of liberalism as it gave back the White House and both chambers of Congress foolishly thinking a steady move to the left would benefit it.

Now that real conservatives are standing up to take back the reins of a Party in decline since George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004, liberal media members just can't stand it:

The right’s embrace of Hoffman is a double-barreled suicide for the G.O.P. On Saturday, the battered Scozzafava suspended her campaign, further scrambling the race. It’s still conceivable that the Democratic candidate could capture a seat the Republicans should own. But it’s even better for Democrats if Hoffman wins. Punch-drunk with this triumph, the right will redouble its support of primary challengers to 2010 G.O.P. candidates they regard as impure. That’s bad news for even a Republican as conservative as Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose primary opponent in the Texas governor’s race, the incumbent Rick Perry, floated the possibility of secession at a teabagger rally in April and hastily endorsed Hoffman on Thursday.

Amazing. Conservatives across the fruited plain cheered Saturday's announcement by Scozzafava, but Rich saw this as a defeat for the Right:

The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year...Writing in 1964 of that era’s equivalent to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.

The same could be said of Beck, Palin and their acolytes. Though they constantly liken the president to various totalitarian dictators, it is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode. They drove out Arlen Specter, and now want to “melt Snowe” (as the blog Red State put it).

What astounding nonsense. Specter became a Democrat because he had no chance of getting re-elected next November as a Republican. As such, he wasn't driven out. He left to save his own political career. 

As for Snowe, calling her a RINO on Halloween is an insult to RINOs who don't need costumes to confuse the likes of Rich and his colleagues:

Only in the alternative universe of the far right is Obama a pariah and Palin the great white hope. It’s become a Beltway truism that the White House’s (mild) spat with Fox News is counterproductive because it drives up the network’s numbers. But if curious moderate and independent voters are now tempted to surf there and encounter Beck’s histrionics for the first time, the president’s numbers will benefit as well. To the uninitiated, the tea party crowd comes across like the barflies in “Star Wars.”

There is only one political opponent whom Obama really has to worry about at this moment: Hamid Karzai. It’s Afghanistan and joblessness, not the Stalinists of the right, that have the power to bring this president down.

Keep thinking that, Frank. Better yet, keep telling your readers that, for it's exactly this kind of cocky arrogance from liberal media elites like yourself that allowed conservatives to take back the House and the Senate in 1994.

One final comedic note from Rich:

This column has been updated from the version that appears in print to reflect the fact that Ms. Scozzafava suspended her campaign on Saturday morning.

Strategist/communicator Frank Luntz released a study this week filled with advice for opponents of the Democrats’ nationalized health care legislation. The study concluded that more Americans believe we will discover life in outer space than believe the current healthcare plan will be deficit neutral.

Our research this month shows that:

• Individuals believe this will add to – not reduce – their personal health care costs. We’re not alone. That NBC/WSJ poll is only the most recent to uncover this painful perception. The margin is HUGE: 47% think their costs will go up thanks to “Barack Obama’s healthcare plan,” while only 13% think their costs will go down. This is NOT a good sign for legislation that’s been sold as beneficial for the economy and promised to reduce health spending. Various public and private cost reports have clearly seeped into the national consciousness, despite Democrats’ frantic efforts to discredit them. The longer the debate goes, the more likely people are to see healthcare costs rising, not falling.

• Claims of deficit-neutrality are roundly rejected and even ridiculed. No one believes that the government will enact a massive new entitlement without costing Americans more money. In fact – and quote this – by an incredible 61% to 14% margin, more people believe scientists will discover life in outer space than believe the current healthcare plan won’t add a penny to the deficit. The President has clearly diminished his credibility by claiming this won’t add “one dime” to the deficit.

• The intensity is with the opponents of the current legislation. Fully 25% of those surveyed said they would “actively work to defeat” members of Congress who vote for a government insurance plan, while only 8% said they would work to support them. • Overall opposition to the Congressional healthcare plan generally – and specifically to any kind of government-run insurance — is, predictably, more intense in the states of centrist Democrats.

• Seniors are soundly against the current plans. They aren’t buying that $400 billion in cuts aren’t really cuts and they really don’t like the idea that Congress appears to be paying for health reform on their backs.

• This legislation may have been more tolerable to Americans months ago, before the various stimulus, bailouts, etc. – but now it is much too much. Americans are deeply concerned that Congressional Democrats are over-reaching and heaping too much on the table at the risk of bankrupting the country. The sense of fragility about the current “jobless recovery” is palpable – and you see it in the just-released consumer confidence numbers – but some people aren’t listening.

The bottom-line is that pushing through major economy-altering legislation in the absence of any bi-partisan support is a recipe for disaster – either now or later. The fact that for most Americans the result of the legislation is expected to be higher taxes, higher premiums, and/or reduced services is not likely to engender great good-will after the fact.

Rush Limbaugh took it a step further and said Pelosi is a liar, thief and should go to jail for her bogus claims about this government takeover of health care.

Byron York has more on this study by Luntz.

More… Dante adds:

There is a better chance that Obama will call Rev. Wright to come live with him in the White House than the HELLthcare bill not add to the deficit.

Read this post »

“Burn in hell Pelosi”

Nancy Pelosi competed with a heckler at her private unveiling of the democrat’s nationalized health care plan this week. The heckler interrupted her speech chanting “Burn in hell Pelosi.” In response to the heckler Pelosi took a jab at the evil profit-driven US insurance companies.

Later that morning FOX and Friends mocked the Speaker:

Via Breitbart

How angry are ultraliberal talk show hosts over Joe Lieberman’s opposition to a government "competitor" in the health insurance system, the so-called "public option"? Ed Schultz was mad enough Wednesday to get very personal with Hadassah Lieberman, the senator’s wife, who has worked for several DC lobbying firms. Schultz suggested she was a "whore." He said:

Now, the pillow talk in the Lieberman household in the sack had to be rather interesting, OK? You have got the wife working on behalf of the industry that's lining the pockets of the senator who has now come out against the public option. OK, look, how dumb are we? Is this a coincidence?

He asked: Does the word 'whore' apply? Are we there yet?

Mrs. Lieberman’s interests in the health debate are nebulous, according to left-wing journalist Joe Conason at Salon.com:  

The Lieberman family's financial ties to the health industry are no secret, yet their full extent remains unknown. During her husband's 2006 reelection campaign, Hadassah Lieberman's employment as a "senior counselor" to Hill & Knowlton, one of the world’s biggest lobbying firms, briefly erupted as an issue, especially because the clients she served were in the controversial pharmaceutical and insurance sectors. Exactly what she did for those clients has never been disclosed.

Schultz was also angry with CNBC host Larry Kudlow, who criticized him for hosting a segment on Wall Street with Ralph Nader and Barney Frank and no conservatives: "And by the way, what middle classer do you represent? You're a Wall Street pig and have been for a long time."

Schultz also fulminated on Wednesday about the need for a special prosecutor to investigate CIA lying to Congress. Schultz even nominated Ken Starr for the job:

Now I have to ask the Obama administration. I know you got a lot on your plate and I know you got a lot going on. How much evidence do you need, Mr. Holder? How much evidence do you need before you have the Justice Department decide, you know, where there's smoke there's fire. We're going to get Ken Starr and we're going to give him a $40 million budget to go find out exactly what the hell was going on!

“Sarah Palin, using her unique sense of timing, one week ago became the biggest name of in-prime party leaders to endorse Hoffman. [...] Read the rest »

All seven Senate Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee will boycott the work session next week essentially stalling the democrat’s cap-&-tax junk science bill.
Reuters reported:

All seven Republicans on the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee plan to boycott next week’s work session on a climate-change bill, an aide said on Saturday, in a move aimed at thwarting Democratic efforts to advance the controversial legislation quickly.

“Republicans will be forced not to show up” at Tuesday’s work session, said Matt Dempsey, a spokesman for Republican senators on the environment panel.

Under committee rules, at least two Republicans are needed for Chairwoman Barbara Boxer to hold the work sessions that would give senators an opportunity to amend the controversial legislation and then vote to approve it in the panel, which is controlled by President Barack Obama’s fellow Democrats.

But Republicans are demanding more detailed economic analysis of the bill by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — a task that could take more than a month — before agreeing to participate in the work sessions that are called “mark ups.”

The seven Republicans have not indicated they ultimately would vote for the bill, which Boxer wants to move through her committee before December’s international climate-change summit in Copenhagen.

The democrat’s cap and trade policies will likely cost Americans $700 to $1,400 dollars per family per year. The Department of Energy estimated GDP losses would be between $444 billion and $1.308 trillion over the 21-year period. Cap and trade also could cost the US 4 million jobs.

Congressman Earl Pomeroy (photo) of North Dakota, a supposed Blue Dog Democrat fiscal hawk, demonstrated his peculiar brand of "hawkishness" this week when he quickly announced his support of Nancy Pelosi's health care bill. Perhaps worried about the appearance of his less than stellar reputation on fiscal responsibility, Pomeroy issued this invitation to the North Dakota media:

        ** MEDIA ADVISORY **

Pomeroy to Hold Press Conference Call on House Health Care Reform Bill

Washington, DC - Congressman Earl Pomeroy will hold a press availability in Grand Forks and then a press conference call for media statewide this afternoon to discuss the details of the health care reform bill that was unveiled yesterday.
    All media are invited to participate.
    WHO:    Congressman Earl Pomeroy
            
    WHAT:  Press availability and conference call on   House health care reform bill

    WHEN:  Today, Friday, October 30, 2009

Got that? All media were invited to participate. So Rob Port of the Say Anything blog who lives in Minot, ND and hosts a show on WZFG radio decided to participate in the conference call. Port explains what happened next:

Today a friendly member of the traditional North Dakota media, one who values alternative media, forwarded to me an email about a press teleconference Rep. Earl Pomeroy was going to be holding about his decision to support the Pelosi health care bill, complete with a public option.  Since the issue is of great interest to me, and also my readers and listeners to my radio show, I decided to call in and listen.  Perhaps ask a question too.

...At the appointed time I called in to the teleconference and put in the offered pass code.  Then, when prompted by Pomeroy staffer Sandra Salstrom I identified myself as Rob Port from SayAnythingBlog.com.  Other members of the media identified themselves as well, including an Associated Press reporter from Fargo, a reporter from KFYR, a reporter from a Carrington newspaper and one Adam Blomeke from the liberalNorth Dakota blog NorthDecoder.com.

I was pleased to learn of the presence of another blogger on the call as, whatever the ideological bent, I think alternative media is important.

Before Pomeroy came on Sandra Salstrom joked around with the AP reporter about his Porsche and also with Blomeke about his recent move from North Dakota to Chicago.  It became apparent that Salstrom was familiar with Adam on a personal level and that he was certainly welcome on the call.

After the banter died down, Rep. Pomeroy joined the call.  He gave a speech lasting a few minutes about his decision to support this health care bill, then was followed up with a speech from an Obama administration member in favor of the bill as well.  Then he opened it up for questions.  The first one came from the KFYR reporter, asking about how the government would negotiate “public option” rates with private insurers.  Then Pomeroy asked for another question.  There was a few seconds pause, so I decided to jump in.  

Uh-oh!

And the Congressman was not at all pleased that I did.  Here’s an audio recording of the exchange.  I’m still working on the full audio copy of the entire call, but in this you can hear my question and the Congressman’s irate response at a member of thealternative media daring to question him:

You can hear the audio on Rob's blog. And now the angry reaction from the Duke of Earl over being questioned by a non-approved blogger peon:

The Congressman twice accused me of being an “arm of the North Dakota Republican party,” which comes as a bit of a surprise to me as I think I’m actually quite critical of North Dakota Republicans.  I am perhaps Republican Governor John Hoeven’s biggest critic in the state.  But I’ll admit that I am, certainly, a conservative political commentator.

But even so, as you can hear, my question was a fair one about how exactly forcing Americans to buy their health care through a government health care exchange was going to promote competition.  Pomeroy didn’t have a good answer, and chose to attack the questioner instead.

The peasants are revolting...they stink on ice! 

Finally a pertinent observation from Port:

What surprised me about the call almost as much as Pomeroys aggressive, agitated reaction to my question was how few questions the other reporters on the call asked.  Aside from my question, there were only two other questions asked.  Apparently the reporters on the call were satisfied with just taking down whatPomeroy told them.

Which is maybe why Pomeroy was so angry when I dared to ask a question.

It looks like Pomeroy doesn't like taking incisive questions from an independent media source. Only affirmative rubberstamping from the approved media list of his decision to burden the taxpayers with budget busting ObamaCare will do.

And does anybody else out there think that the Duke of Earl may be changing his domain after next year in large part because of independent minded North Dakotans like Rob Port?

At the National Review Institute "future of conservatism" panel, I made the off-the-cuff point that conservatives generally should have embraced The Wire far more than we did. It's funny, the show obviously has bipartisan fans, but it was something of a favorite among liberals. Of course, most no doubt liked it in no small part for the same reasons I did: it was brilliantly written, wonderfully acted and almost perfectly directed.  And yet, one also got the sense that liberals also endorsed its focus on the underclass and its effort to "raise awareness" about the plight of inner cities and the like. [...]

But look at it through the eyes of a conservative. This is a Democratic city, run almost uniformly by liberals. While many of the problems most prominently on display can certainly be traced back to racism, racism itself is not a central issue in The Wire (nor is racism an inherently or historically conservative phenomena). These drug gangs and the poor souls in their orbit, are not trapped by racism so much as by a dysfunctional culture.

I think David Simon would agree with this conclusion, but not about the source of the dysfunction. Conservatives watch The Wire and nod: Sow dependency and reap the disintegration of the traditional family. Put your faith in government, and prepare to be disappointed.

But Simon's target isn't the welfare state. To the contrary, Simon views the show as an indictment of capitalism. It makes no difference to him that liberal reformers fill the ranks of city government. In a capitalist system, reformers are bought, sold, or crushed by the money men.

Speaking generally, conservatives watch The Wire and see a part of America that has been failed by some really terrible ideas about how to fight poverty. Liberals watch The Wire and see America, full stop. Simon believes that the world depicted in The Wire is the logical endpoint of a system that (in his view) treats people like commodities. His vision doesn't require him (or us) to contemplate the alternative -- a system that (in my view) treats people like slaves.

Why bring this up now? Because the entirely predictable Harvard class on The Wire has arrived, and it's everything we thought it would be:

Harvard students will be able to watch the “The Wire” for class credit next year.

At a panel last night, stars of the HBO hit series joined Harvard professors in discussing the applications of the show—which depicts the struggles of urban life in Baltimore—in understanding and combating real urban social issues.

“‘The Wire’ has done more to enhance our understanding of the systemic urban inequality that constrains the lives of the poor than any published study” Sociology Professor William J. Wilson said.

We're near the point where a student can fill four years of college with classes built around TV shows. I'm interested to see the logical endpoint of that.

 — Marco Rubio is a Republican running for the U.S. Senate in Florida.

Totally true, and precisely Gingrich’s point in endorsing Hoffman so quickly after Team Dede threw in the towel this morning. [...] Read the rest »

Now that the Obama administration is attempting to take a victory lap on the U.S. economic recovery, claiming the $787-billion stimulus passed earlier this year was what did the trick, despite a cost of $160,000 per 'stimulus' job, as ABC's Jake Tapper pointed out, it has come at the cost of the U.S. dollar.

Since then, the stock market has rebounded nicely. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) is off a March low of 6,547 points, even topping the 10,000-mark recently. But what has caused this nearly 50-percent jump? According to CNBC's Larry Kudlow - loose monetary policy by the Federal Reserve, with low interest rates, has made it possible for the markets to rise, with the 'loose' money going into the market.

"The funny thing is, Steven, it has gone into stocks - I mean the stock market guys ... there's no real multiplier for the economy, right?" Kudlow said on his Oct. 30 CNBC program. "But it has gone into stocks and the stock market crowd wants to see the Fed to keep pouring the money in no matter what happens to the U.S. dollar."

And CNBC's senior economics reporter Steve Liesman agreed. But he warned that if policymakers were to intervene to shore up a weakening U.S. dollar, it would send the stock market down. However, Kudlow explained that a stable dollar would put confidence back in the U.S. economy - and that it would be good for stocks in the long run, while not causing the inflationary response associated with propping up a fragile economy by devaluing the U.S. dollar.

"Rick Santelli, what Steve's got wrong is in the long run, a solid economy, a balanced economy, a non-inflationary economy with a solid dollar - doesn't have to rise, just solid, stable - would be great for stocks."

"Solid dollar, good fiscal discipline - the dollar and stocks would go up," CNBC CME floor reporter Rick Santelli said.

Liesman, who has championed these interventionist policies by the federal government, insisted that propping up the economy this way would lead to a strengthening dollar.

"You both have it backwards - a solid economy will give you a solid dollar," Liesman said.

That's smoke and mirrors, according to Santelli. The fact that the market is rising in value means little, unless an individual is actually vested in the market. There are other indicators that show the health of the U.S. economy isn't where it needs to be - unemployment approaching 10 percent and inflationary signs like the rise in the price of commodities like gold and oil.

"Exactly - and you're not going to have a solid economy without the government creating a façade through the equity markets and diluted dollars that everything is OK," Santelli said. "Because 50 percent of America, especially those that don't own stocks or are unemployed - they know what's going on."

Liesman maintained the Obama and Bush administrations' line - that under circumstances, loose monetary policy at the cost of the value of the U.S. dollar, is necessary and without it, the economy would be in much worse shape. Santelli disagreed with that argument.

"Just like if we wouldn't have had all the bailouts, we would have had a Depression," Santelli said. "I'm not buying any of it."

And it's not a matter of political affiliation, as Kudlow explained. Both President George W. Bush and Obama got it wrong. Who got it right? Presidents Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and Ronald Reagan, a Republican.

okay, i saw a kid trick or treating as octomommy. what the hell going on in this country?about 1 hour ago from web

Hillary Clinton continued her farcical visit to Pakistan today by blaming Obama's failure to make any progress with respect to Israeli-Palestinian relations on George W. Bush. Clinton told a group of Pakistani journalists

I think that, look, we all know that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is one that is a very serious and difficult problem that we are working hard also to try to resolve. We inherited a lot of problems. If you remember, when my husband left office, we were very close to an agreement because he worked on it all the time. The next administration did not make it a priority and did not really do much until toward the end. And unfortunately, we are trying to make up for some lost time, in my opinion.

Clinton's statement goes beyond the usual, ungracious Obama administration mantra that everything is Bush's fault. Here, Clinton has affirmatively misstated history. Thus, her comments are much closer to the administration's patently false claim that the Bush White House did no planning regarding Afghanistan.

It is true that Israel and the Palestinians appeared to be close to an agreement during the tail end of the Clintion administration. But the appearance of closeness does not even count in horseshoes. When Clinton left office, the parties were not only nowhere near an agreement, the Palestinians were conducting a robust terror campaign inside the state of Israel. This was the fruit of Clinton's years, which culminated with Arafat, Clinton's peace partner, unleashing the terror on the theory, or perhaps the pretext, that Clinton had not extracted more concessions from Israel than he had.

In short, Bush inherited a mess (as the Obama folks like to say) from his predecessor -- at least from the perspective of those who care about the security of Israel, as Hillary has claimed, at times, she does.

Bush, though, didn't publicly blame Bill Clinton for this parlous state of affairs. Instead, he supported the government of Israel in its eventually successful efforts to end the Palestinian terror campaign.

In addition, as Rick Richman points out, Bush endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state if the Palestinian Authority would renounce terrorism; developed the "road map" to peace; urged Israel to withdraw from Gaza (which it did); and helped arrange for the election of a successor to Arafat, one regarded by Clinton and Obama as a moderate and a viable peace partner.

All of this happened in Bush's first five years in office.

Frankly, I regard Bush's steps towards "peace" as a mixed bag, at best. But it is simply not true that Bush "did not really do much until toward the end." Nor is it true that "we were very close to an agreement" when Bill Clinton left office.

President Obama doesn't understand much when it comes to foreign policy. However, he appears to understand that Hillary Clinton is not ready for prime time diplomacy. Let's hope he acts on this insight.

I think my predictions for the special election in New York's 23rd district are pretty safe now:

Republican Dede Scozzafava has suspended her bid in next Tuesday’s NY 23 special election, a huge development that dramatically shakes up the race. She did not endorse either of her two opponents -- Conservative party candidate Doug Hoffman or Democrat Bill Owens.

The decision to suspend her campaign is a boost for Hoffman, who already had the support of 50 percent of GOP voters, according to a newly-released Siena poll, and is now well-positioned to win over the 25 percent of Republicans who had been sticking with Scozzafava.

Heh. Dierdre "Dede" Scozzafava must have been reading Big Lizards. In our previous post, I made my predictions quite explicit:

You may or may not have read it here first, but I think I might have been the first among all those blogs I personally follow -- that would be three, counting Big Lizards -- to flatly predict that:

• The race will, in the next couple of days, come down to a two-way between Doug Hoffman and Bill Owens;
• And that Hoffman will win -- and win convincingly. Perhaps not with an outright majority, unless Scozzafava sees the "mene mene" on the wall and drops out; but a solid victory of 5-8 points over Owens, with Scozzafava in third by double-digits.

As usual, when Big Lizards predicts, we invite everyone to track our predictions and see if we know what we're talking about... or whether we fall flat on our egg.

Cross-posted to Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Kathryn,  that picture is nothing new to the few Republican families who live on Capitol Hill.  I can tell you true horror stories about the welcoming liberals who live up there.  A few years back on Halloween one house had a sign up that said “No Candy for Little Republicans.”  I once made the mistake of letting my two kids wear “W” shirts I picked up at the 2004 convention.  The “W” shirt was a superman shirt but instead of an S in the middle there was a W.  My boys loved them since they thought it was Superman.  I thought it was pretty subtle.  Not for the women at the park.  We were accosted by fellow Moms.  Insults were thrown not only at my little ones but at me and my parenting abilities.  

My most favorite was when our car was bumper stickered!  Someone actually went into our alley, into our driveway and placed anti-Republican bumper stickers ON our car.  We didn’t have any pro-Republican signs up so I have to assume it was one of our very kind neighbors who actually knew us.

As NewsBusters reported Friday, conservative talk radio host will be appearing on "Fox News Sunday":

Host Chris Wallace traveled to Palm Beach, Florida to record the interview with Limbaugh today.

List of air times, by city, for the program on Fox broadcast stations at various times on Sunday morning.

For those champing at the bit, here's a brief sneak preview including Limbaugh claiming that if ObamaCare passes, "It's gonna be the biggest snatch of freedom and liberty that has yet occurred in this country" (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t Breitbart TV):

This is not about insuring the uninsured. This is not about healthcare. This is about stealing one-sixth of the U.S. private sector and putting it under the control of federal government. And when they get this healthcare bill, if they do, that's the easiest, fastest way for them to be able to regulate every aspect of human behavior, because it'll all have some related cost to healthcare: what you drive, what you eat, where you live, what you do. And it will be penalties for violating regulations. It's gonna be the biggest snatch of freedom and liberty that has yet occurred in this country.  

Fox Television must be getting nervous about keeping "The Simpsons" fresh now that it’s in season 21. This show is so old it’s just about drinking age. But Fox tarted it up in the headlines with nudity and impiety. They put cartoon mom Marge Simpson on the cover of Playboy magazine and mocked Christians by comparing them to cannibalistic zombies.

The Playboy issue came out on October 16. The suggestive "Devil In Marge Simpson" cover isn’t much to write home about – other than the mainstreaming of porn and the sickening corporate symbiosis, with Fox Television lending one of its signature cartoon brands to Playboy, whose circulation is tanking. The "pictorial" inside the issue is a little more pornographic, with one picture giving Marge Simpson a very three-dimensional, anatomically correct chest in a see-through nightie.

Did anyone really "need" this? Other than Hugh Hefner and his declining business?

Two days after the Playboy hit the stands, Fox aired their annual "Treehouse of Horror" episode of "The Simpsons," which is usually the darkest and goriest show of the year. It’s also one of the most-watched: more than eight and a half million people watched this show.

Everyone who’s watched and enjoyed "The Simpsons" know they haven’t typically engaged in religion-bashing. Their satire of the Ned Flanders family, like much of their satire, has a sympathy wrapped inside it. But when it’s time for the "Treehouse of Horror," even Flanders has been transformed into the devil.

This season, in a segment titled "Don’t Have a Cow, Mankind," the people of Springfield become zombies after eating tainted hamburgers. It takes on a religious tone when young Bart Simpson eats a hamburger and isn’t affected. He’s named the "Chosen One" and the Simpsons drive off to find the safe zone where the uninfected are hiding.

When they arrive, a guard says, "Welcome, son. To survive, all we must do is eat your flesh." Marge holds up a rifle and protests, "What kind of civilized people eat the body and blood of their savior?" In case viewers didn’t get the Last Supper-mocking joke, the next shot is the Reverend Lovejoy character tugging nervously at his collar. The segment ends with the antidote solution: Bart sitting naked in a vat of soup.

A few minutes before, as the Simpsons escape zombies in a pickup truck driven by Apu, the vegetarian Kwik-E-Mart merchant, a zombified woman breaks through the windshield. Apu tells Marge to shoot her. "I can’t shoot her. She’s Lisa’s godmother." Apu says: "You can apologize in Hell!" So Marge replies: "I guess I could." With her sense of manners somehow restored – Marge accepts she’s going to Hell? – Marge shoots her.

Fox’s Sunday night animation bloc is now dominated by 90 minutes of militant atheist Seth McFarlane’s cartoons, so it shouldn’t be surprising that "The Simpsons" might try to keep up with the atheist God-mockers next door. So much for keeping the Lord’s day holy.

Some might say the cartoon is merely being "irreverent." But irreverent toward what? Some ideas are treated reverently, like vegetarianism. Within the same cartoon, the hamburgers are tainted because in some twisted satire on meat-eaters, the cows who were made into hamburgers were fed on hamburgers, making them hamburger "squared." Lisa Simpson exclaimed "Cows eating cows! That’s an abomination!" The local news anchor then tells the audience to come down and sample "this delicious crime against nature." There was even a campaign slogan in the title: "Don’t Have a Cow, Mankind."

Vegetarians don’t complain about "The Simpsons." In 2004, the radical vegetarians at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) honored Lisa Simpson by putting her number two on their list of "The Most Animal-Friendly TV Characters of All Time." In a 2006 episode, Lisa actually joined PETA and threw blood on Krusty the Clown for wearing a fur coat.

Lisa’s earnest vegetarianism came straight from the stars. "It’s actually Paul McCartney who was responsible for another permanent change," said David Mirkin, "Simpsons" executive producer. "When I asked him to do the vegetarian episode, he agreed but made me promise to keep Lisa as a vegetarian – and I was happy to comply with that, because I’m a vegetarian too!"

Last year’s "Treehouse of Horror" episode included a crude knockoff of the 1966 cartoon "It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown." The child character Milhouse replaced Linus in believing in the Grand Pumpkin. In the original, Linus compared the Pumpkin to Santa Claus, but "The Simpsons" conflated it to Christianity. Even after Bart Simpson told Milhouse he made the legend up just to mess with him, Milhouse said his "faith" could be tested, and then proclaimed a mangled version of the Apostle's Creed: "I believe in the Grand Pumpkin, almighty gourd, who was crustified over Pontius pie plate and ascended into oven. He will come again to judge the filling and the bread."

So again and again, Jesus and his followers can be satirized. But when Milhouse told Lisa she had a nice witch costume, she protested, "I’m a Wiccan. Why is it when a woman is confident and powerful, they call her a witch?" Hollywood’s willingness to engage in "irreverence" is a very selective thing. On Fox, Christians are mocked, but Wiccans, vegetarians, and feminists aren't mocked. They get their talking points offered.

Mark Steyn is hilarious and brilliant today, as always. He talks about Larry David’s pissing-on-Christ shtick. “Oh, those brave transgressive artists!” he says. They just love to scandalize the Christers. But what if they were “to start urinating in a more Mecca-ly direction”? Reminded me of something I wrote in Impromptus, way back in 2002 (here). This may seem like ancient history -- you may have forgotten the movie -- but here goes: “How much money would you pay to see the makers of The Last Temptation of Christ make a similar film about the Prophet Muhammad? How long would they be alive? An hour? An hour and fifteen minutes?”

Plus ça change, plus ça doesn’t change at all.

On Friday afternoon, President Obama met with the Joint Chiefs to discuss, according to the New York Times, “how sending more forces might affect the health of the military.” Apparently not satisfied with what he heard, he’s called the Chiefs back for another meeting next week.

Meanwhile, everyone in Washington is trying to ascertain what the president’s decision will be and when it will be announced. That same Times article hinted that an announcement may not even come until after President Obama’s trip to Asia in mid-November, raising the specter that the country, our allies, our enemies, and the men and women fighting and dying in Afghanistan on a daily basis may not know the level of U.S. commitment to success in Afghanistan for weeks to come.

In perhaps the best column on Afghanistan this week, David Brooks hit the nail on the head, focusing less on the debates about military strategy but analyzing what President Obama’s public wavering (some prefer dithering) says about our wartime commander in chief. Brooks notes the widespread uncertainly about how committed the president is to winning in Afghanistan and writes:

So I guess the president’s most important meeting is not the one with the Joint Chiefs and the cabinet secretaries. It’s the one with the mirror, in which he looks for some firm conviction about whether Afghanistan is worthy of his full and unshakable commitment. If the president cannot find that core conviction, we should get out now. It would be shameful to deploy more troops only to withdraw them later. If he does find that conviction, then he should let us know, and fill the vacuum that is eroding the chances of success.

The president’s defenders are correct to point out that he bears a burden that those of us on the outside do not (as evidenced by his trip this week to Dover Air Force Base), but the president is discovering that the presidency is not solely about remaking American society and electing more members of your party to Congress. Making tough decisions to protect the nation, decisions which will likely result in the deaths of young American men and women in uniform, is what he is paid to do. This is something he should have realized when he ran for president. 

In the preface to the first volume of his memoirs, Pres. Harry Truman wrote:

The presidency of the United States carries with it responsibility so personal as to be without parallel.  Very few are ever authorized to speak for the President.  No one can make decisions for him.  No one knows all the processes and stages of his thinking in making important decisions.  Even those closest to him, even members of his immediate family, never know all the reason why he does certain things and why he comes to certain conclusions.  To be President of the United States is to be lonely, very lonely at times of great decisions.

President Obama is now entering his third month of public agonizing over Afghanistan. He should make the decision to support the recommendations of his commanders and the entire military leadership and he should make that decision now.

 — Jamie M. Fly is executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative.

A not so minor detail from the crosstabs to this morning’s earthquake poll, overlooked by many but not by Nate Silver. [...] Read the rest »

My initial concern about the Micheletti-Zelaya accord has been mostly allayed. The first press reports, from the MSM were in error, not surprisingly. (Most U.S. and Latin media have been partial to Zelaya, or uninformed, or both). This may well result in a victory for Honduran democracy and a defeat for Zelaya, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and their supporters. It is also an embarrassing setback for this administration’s diplomacy, which ended accepting a deal it could have accepted several months ago had it not been vetoed by neophytes and ideologues at the White House and NSC.  

Contrary to press reports, Zelaya is not in any way automatically returned to office by the accord. First, there must be a vote by the entire Honduran congress on whether Zelaya is fit to return to office. Prior to that, the Honduran supreme court, which ruled against Zelaya in June by a vote of 15 to 0, must issue an opinion on the same.  

In other words, Zelaya must pass two big tests which he failed before: a judicial review by the highest court in the land, and approval by the legislature. While Zelaya’s Liberal party has the largest faction in the congress, it is also the party of Micheletti. According to my Honduran sources, there is no way that Zelaya can win a free and transparent ballot. At the present time Zelaya can count on less than 25 percent of the congress. In June, the same legislative body voted 122 to 6 against him. There will doubtless be a battle this time, and the anti-Zelaya forces fear that Hugo Chavez will try to buy votes for Zelaya. They are also concerned that the U.S. government not involve itself in the legislative process, especially U.S. Ambassador Hugo Llorens, who is widely seen as favoring Zelaya. The accord was facilitated when Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon reportedly promised Micheletti that Llorens will not attempt to influence the vote.  

The bigger danger is Chavez, who is not constrained by scruples, decency or financial limits. Chavez will try to put his ally Zelaya back into office, even for a few weeks prior to the transfer of power, and preferably before the presidential election in November, so as to intimidate the opposition and claim a victory of sorts. The U.S. must do all it can to prevent the Venezuelans and their enforcers the Cubans from interfering.

Finally, we must thank the leaders and people of Honduras for having had the courage to resist the undue pressure of the Obama White House. In spite of threats, the cancellation of U.S. economic assistance, revocations of the visas of political and business leaders, and other sanctions previously reserved for our enemies and not for a friend like Honduras, that small country resisted the bullying of the Obama administration. 

— Otto J. Reich served President Bush from 2001 to 2004, first as assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere and later in the National Security Council. He now heads his own international government-relations firm in Washington.

Unfortunately, in the run up to the planned event, it had also become apparent that certain right-wing/anti-Islamic organisations had become intent on preventing the march from going ahead, using threats of physical violence, including bomb and death threats to any member of the Muslim community who happened to attend the march.

In light of this, organisers of the March4Shariah campaign, after careful consultation, have decided to relocate the march in favour of securing the safety of the hundreds of Muslims who may have attended the march to voice their support for the Deen of Haq (Truth).

"Right-wing" organizations? Well, don't look at me. There seems to be some confusion as to precisely why Anjem Choudary, Principal Lecturer at the London School of Shariah, called off the big event. There was some thought that he didn't want to risk the humiliation of a low turnout. In any event, when I swung by, there were only a few counter-protestors, including one chap who'd reworked Choudary's "Islam Will Dominate The World" slogan into "Free Speech Will Dominate The World." Nevertheless, the dream will never die:

Finally, we would like to say that indeed we will never stop calling for the implementation of the Shari'ah in the UK, and that we will continue in our struggle to make the Deen of Allah (SWT) dominate all over the world.

It seems a shame to postpone it given the immensely detailed plans of Islam4UK. I especially liked their remodeling of Buckingham Palace as Buckingham Masjid, the headquarters of the Islamic States' Supreme Leadership, which apparently won't include Her Majesty The Queen.

I was struck by this passage:

Peter-Ali Almaleki said he loves his sister and that should she not have to be suffering her injuries. But he added that the family lives by different cultural values.

“One thing to one culture doesn’t make sense to another culture,” he added.

This would be a less ludicrous argument if Mr. Almaleki hadn't run down his daughter in a Jeep Grand Cherokee. It's all a bit culture à la carte, isn't it? Infidel motor vehicles, fine. Infidel guarantees on individual rights, no way. Maybe when you're such a sorry excuse of a believer that you're incapable of pulling off your lousy "honor killing" without resorting to a Grand Cherokee, you're the one who's becoming "too westernized."  

On Friday, the Justice Department released reams of newly declassified documents on the CIA interrogation program.  Among the documents is a revised, October 2009 version of the Justice Department Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s involvement in detainee interrogations.  

This report proves, once and for all, that FBI interrogator Ali Soufan lied about his role in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. 

Soufan has become the hero of the left for his public assault on the CIA interrogation program.  Critics cite him as proof that we could have gotten the same information from al-Qaeda terrorists without resorting to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.

Exhibit A in their case is the claim that Soufan and a fellow FBI interrogator (known by the alias “Agent Gibson”) used traditional FBI “rapport building” techniques to get information that led to the arrest of al Qaeda terrorist Jose Padilla, as he arrived in the United States on a mission from Khalid Shiehk Mohammed to blow up apartment buildings using natural gas.

As Soufan put it in a New York Times op-ed in April 2009:

Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned [Zubaydah] from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August.  Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence. We discovered, for example, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla…” (emphasis added).

As I noted in a post in July, Soufan’s story began falling apart earlier this year, when a Washington Post story showed that the information on Padilla was obtained only after enhanced interrogation techniques had begun.  The Post reported that there had been a struggle over Zubaydah’s interrogation:

Agency officials decided to let the FBI back into the interrogations, but on the condition that forced nudity and sleep deprivation be allowed to continue. . . . Under FBI questioning, Abu Zubaydah indentified an operative he knew as Abdullah al-Mujahir, the alias, he said, of an American citizen with a Latino name. An investigation involving multiple agencies identified the suspect as Jose Padilla.

It turns out this is wrong.  The information on Padilla was not obtained “under FBI questioning.” According to the Justice Department IG’s report, it was the CIA - not Soufan - that got the information on Padilla from Abu Zubaydah. 

And the IG’s source is Soufan’s own partner, Agent Gibson.

Gibson continued to participate in Zubaydah’s questioning once the CIA took over, and according to the IG “CIA personnel assured him that the procedures being used on Zubaydah had been approved ‘at the highest levels’ and that Gibson would not get in any trouble.” 

The IG report then declares that “Gibson stated that during the CIA interrogations Zubaydah ‘gave up’ Jose Padilla and indentified several targets for future al-Qaeda attacks, including the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty” (emphasis added).

In other words, Soufan’s claims that a) he got the information on Jose Padilla, and b) he did so before enhanced interrogation techniques were applied, are both lies.

As for the techniques the CIA used to get the information, Soufan’s partner, Agent Gibson, told the IG that he “did not have a ‘moral objection’ to being present for the CIA techniques because the CIA was acting professionally and Gibson himself had undergone comparable harsh interrogation techniques as part of U.S. Army Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training.”

While working on my forthcoming book on the CIA interrogation program, I made repeated requests to Soufan for an interview to explain these discrepancies.  He refused.  Now we know why.

As they say at the Justice Department: Case closed.

 -- Marc Thiessen is at work on a book on the CIA interrogation program, which will be published by Regnery in January 2010.

After a pattern of attacking Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, on a nightly basis, one of the strategies is becoming apparent - MSNBC is in need of a boogeyman to give a face to the opposition of these radical steps being undertaken to fundamentally change health care in the United States.

So rather than attack where the opposition is wrong on a policy level, MSNBC "Countdown" fill-in host Lawrence O'Donnell is going to apply one of the tactics from Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" to promote a dramatic shift in the U.S. health care system - "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

"In our number five story on the countdown tonight, the Congressional Budget Office finds that it would leave 18 million people uninsured and the government-run health insurance plan will probably charge consumers premiums that are quote, ‘Somewhat higher, higher than average premiums for the private plans,' end quote," O'Donnell said on the Oct. 30 broadcast of "Countdown." "This is a devastating conclusion for a plan being sold not just as a low-cost option for consumers, especially poor consumers, but as somehow driving private insurance premiums lower."

The target: The usual MSNBC obsession, Bachmann - and they went out of their way with this one, proving they'll go to any length to villainize her.

"First the politics - Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann responded to the House bill today," O'Donnell said. "The full-screen graphic you will see with the question about Joe Lieberman and the word surprise, "surprised" misspelled is courtesy of the interviewers, not the ‘Countdown' staff," O'Donnell said. "The Michael Jackson reference is all Bachmann."

Bachmann explained that this is the path to "socialization" and encouraged people to call their member of Congress to slow down the Democratic leadership's efforts to force this so-called health care reform into law.

"This is socialization of America if this bill goes through," Bachmann said. "And after next Friday, it'll be too late to talk to your member of Congress, so now is the time."

The interviewer asked Bachmann about two Democratic senators that have hinted at siding with the Republican opposition to some of the radical things this health care reform would do to the system. Bachmannd said this was the time to slow its momentum, by making a pop culture reference, which for whatever reason O'Donnell thought he should draw attention to.

"You know I'm not because Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson are hearing from people back home - real people," Bachmann said. "And that's what we're going to show the rest of these members of Congress next week when people, normal American people who love this country, get in their cars and actually come here next week because the American people realize this is it, just like that brand-new Michael Jackson movie that came out, ‘This is It.' This is it for freedom."

O'Donnell showed he disapproved of the term "socialization" to describe this, with an attempt to be "snarky."

"Regarding Bachmann's objection to quote, ‘The socialization of America,'" O'Donnell said. "Note to Bachmann's staff - Dictionary.com."

Acting on behalf of Bachmann's staff, a look at the Dictionary.com reveals one of the definitions of "socialization" Bachmann wasn't that far off:

Dictionary.com shows "the act or process of making socialistic: the socialization of industry." And by definition, the action the Democratic leadership in Congress is wanting the government to take - to increase its presence and interrupt the market forces - is "the act of process of making socialistic."

And if O'Donnell and his ilk at MSNBC want to continue to dismiss the notion that this isn't part of a long term strategy put in place to develop a single-payer health care system in the United States, just take a look at President Barack Obama in his own words from 2003.

"I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program," Obama said. "I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that's what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan - and that's what I'd like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House."

Joining Rachel Maddow on her MSNBC show Thursday to vent about that pesky wabbit Joe Lieberman was Fire Dog Lake blogger Jane Hamsher.

Democrats wield considerable leverage over Lieberman, Hamsher opined, to keep him from joining a GOP filibuster of ObamaCare or punish him if he does --

MADDOW: ... I think you're right to point out that other senators sort of gently expressing their disapproval of his proverbial toplessness at this point is a bigger deal than it would be in the real world, that their words do actually sort of calibrate differently. But what leverage can they really bring to bear on him in order to get him to get in line?

HAMSHER: Well, as you say, there are people who do have influence over Joe Lieberman. Joe has his committee chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee, that's his power base in the Senate. He's a very vain man and were that to be stripped from him, he would be like Rumpelstiltskin putting his foot through the floor. And the Democrats have the power to do that. So again, the Harkin, Conrad comments today were to the effect of, you know, let's, let's remember, you're here at our good graces, Joe.

But, you know, he also needs the sub base at Groton, which is, you know, the submarine version of the F-22, in order to stay in the good graces of Connecticut's citizens while he does stuff like this, and that's something that could, you know, potentially go as well.

Silly me, thinking such decisions, you know, should be based on national security considerations and not, you know, vindictive partisan politics. You know?

Hamsher does deserve credit, however. At least she's willing to state aloud what Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod will utter only behind closed doors.

Earlier in the segment, Hamsher made a revealing slip that suggests where she sees herself in the order of the universe --

HAMSHER: Well, I think it's a mistake to think of the Senate as an august body, possibly the most powerful deliberative body in the world, and instead think of us as it being in day four of a beauty pageant.

What's this "us" stuff, paleface?

Day four of a beauty pageant in which the blinding blonde stumbles off the catwalk.

An interesting clip, not because it’s an actual “gamechanger” but because of what it suggests about Palin’s relationship with the party these days. [...] Read the rest »

Republican-endorsed Dierdre Scozzafava has suspended her campaign for New York's 23rd district Congressional seat, "releas[ing] those individuals who have endorsed and supported my campaign to transfer their support as they see fit." She evidently has not endorsed Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman.

Recent polling has shown Scozzafava's support collapsing, while the race between Hoffman and Democrat Bill Owens is too close to call. It is not clear that that Scozzafava's withdrawal will help Hoffman, as by this point most of her support may well be coming from voters who are more closely aligned, ideologically, with Owens. Still, if Hoffman can win on Tuesday, it will be viewed as a watershed movement in the resurgence of conservatism.

UPDATE: If this polling, out today, is accurate, it may not matter: Public Policy Polling has Hoffman running away with the race. Let's hope it's true.

Aside from everything else, if Hoffman wins, this means the Conservative Party is a player again on the NY political scene.  Ironic that Pataki endorsed Hoffman at the Conservative dinner the other night, for it was under Pataki that the state GOP began to tilt left and favor candidates like Dede.  Pataki himself was pro-choice and very union-friendly, endorsing a version of card check for unions in NY.

The Senate Republicans had headed in the same direction.  Indeed, one reason the state Senate is now narrowly controlled by Democrats is that the Republicans nominated a relatively liberal Assembly member (Will Barclay), the scion of a wealthy upstate family, to run against a relatively conservative Democrat who was a farmer (Darrel Aubertine) in a special election last year.   (The GOP's back-up candidate in that race was Dede.)  Barclay was endorsed by leading public employee unions, including the teachers, after tailoring his legislative positions to avoid offending them.   A lot of good it did him.

The good news: the state's new GOP chairman, Ed Cox, is much more willing to work with Conservatives and much less inclined to the simplistic view that Republicans need to sound more like Democrats. Rather, he thinks the party should actually strand for something.

It's not a new golden age for the Conservative Party, though.   Some of their key local committees are controlled by hacks allied with one or another of the major parties, or even (in the case of Schenectady County) the local police union.    In Westchester, a very strong Republican candidate for county executive, Rob Astorino, would have a better shot at unseating an entrenched Democratic county executive if the county's Conservative Party had not, incredibly, endorsed the decidedly non-conservative incumbent.  If Astorino somehow wins, in combination with a Hoffman victory, it will be really, big shot in the arm and shove in the right direction for the NY GOP.

You guys will dump on him as a johnny-come-lately, but (a) his support for Scozzafava was always strategic, driven more by stopping the Democrats next year than stopping Hoffman and (b) as her most prominent Republican supporter, this is the most important endorsement Hoffman could have right now aside from Scozzafava’s (or maybe Snowe’s or Collins’s). [...] Read the rest »

Early Saturday morning, 7Online.com, the website for ABC's New York affiliate WABC-TV, reported the previous night's arrest of Jason Shih, an alleged campaign worker for Governor Jon Corzine (D-NJ) charged with "possession of a controlled narcotic and paraphernalia that is used for distribution."

Although the headline "Corzine campaign worker arrested" shows up in a Google News search, the page is no longer available: "We are sorry, but the URL you requested could not be found. The page you are looking for may have been renamed, moved, or deleted."

A search of "Jason Shih" and "Corzine" at 7Online.com did not produce a new article concerning Shih's arrest.

[UPDATE, 1pm EDT: According to the New York Post: "Corzine spokeswoman Elisabeth Smith said Shih is not on the payroll of the campaign or the New Jersey Democratic State Committee, and that the campaign doesn't know who he is."]

Fortunately, the website Drug Policy Central captured the 7Online report for its readers (h/t Twitter follower NYfitter):

US: Corzine campaign worker arrested

Found: Sat Oct 31 06:33:06 2009 PDT
Webpage: http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=...
Newshawk: http://drugpolicycentral.com/bot/

Corzine campaign worker arrested Corzine campaign worker arrested - 10/31/09 - New York News and Tri-State News - 7online.com

WABC-TV New York, NY

Eyewitness News

Politics & Elections

Corzine campaign worker arrested

New Jersey Senate President Richard J. Codey, right, D-West Orange and Assembly Speaker Joseph J. Roberts Jr., D-Camden, listen as Gov. Jon S. Corzine, center, delivers his State of the State address to a joint session of the Assembly and Senate in the Assembly chambers of the Statehouse Tuesday Jan. 13, 2009, in Trenton, N.J. During his annual address, the Democratic governor also braced the Democratic-controlled Legislature for a new round of budget cuts on top of $1.4 billion already cut this fiscal year. (AP Photo/Mel Evans)

EAST RUTHERFORD, NJ (WABC) -- Jason Shih, an Assistant Deputy Director to the campaign of NJ Gov. Jon Corzine was arrested last night on drug charges.

East Rutherford police say they pulled over the 25-year-old on Route 17 for driving while using a cell phone.

Police say they found 19 ecstasy pills and several hundred glassine envelopes.

He was charged with possession of a controlled narcotic and paraphernalia that is used for distribution.

Story continues below

He was released on $15,000 bail.

(Copyright (c)2009 WABC-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved.)

For the record, the New York Post has also reported Shih's arrest, with a denial from a Corzine spokeswoman of his employment by the campaign:

Corzine spokeswoman Elisabeth Smith said Shih is not on the payroll of the campaign or the New Jersey Democratic State Committee, and that the campaign doesn't know who he is.

The 7Online report said Shih was "an Assistant Deputy Director."

If that's not the case, should they have removed the article completely or issued a correction?

Stay tuned. 

*****Update: Someone posted this 7Online piece at the message board of the website Broker Outpost. 

When Assemblywomen Dede Scozzafava suspended her campaign because it appeared that her Conservative-party opponent, a Republican, stood a better chance to win on Tuesday she noted that she was a proud Republican. What she demonstrated was more than that.  She showed she had the integrity and humility to step aside so the team, the Republican/conservative (small “c”) party would have a better chance to be victorious. Clearly she was not a conservative and she took a beating from national conservatives, including me, for it. However, her announcement today is a lesson to all of us -- that even those in our party who may not agree with us on many of our core principles and positions not only still want to be on our team, but want us to win.  

Over a week ago I announced my support for the Conservative Doug Hoffman stating that I was a Republican before I was a conservative and that I had never before endorsed a third-party candidate in a general election against a Republican. I did so not only because Hoffman was more conservative, but I saw that coming down the stretch Hoffman had the best chance of winning against the Democrat.

We are faced with another three-way race for the governorship of New Jersey. The state of New Jersey is in a free fall under the inept leadership of Jon Corzine. Would I ever consider supporting the Independent candidate Chris Daggett there? Perhaps, if I thought, in these final days, the situation there were anything like it was in NY-23. But it is not. If you take a look at the Real Clear Politics poll average, Daggett is at 12 percent while Corzine and Christie are tied at 41 percent. What has been clear in all of the polls is that Corzine can’t break out of the low 40s in support.

Daggett, meanwhile, isn’t a Libertarian or a Socialist. He isn’t carrying the banner for a cause or a party that he has embraced. He is running, I suspect, because he knows that another four years of Corzine would be a continuing train wreck for New Jersey and he thinks he could do a better job than Chris Christie.

Like Scozzafava, Daggett was a liberal Republican in the Tom Kean mold (Daggett worked for Kean) in New Jersey. Unlike Scozzafava, he left the party to join another cause, his own. Like Scozzafava, Daggett is not going to win the election on Tuesday. Scozzafava withdrew because she put what is best for her district and her country above her personal aspirations. Let’s see if Daggett can exhibit the same selflessness.

 -- Rick Santorum, fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a former United States senator from Pennsylvania. He is the regular guest host on Fridays on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America radio show.

Here is the final poll for the Best Commenter on the Belmont Club. I’ve tabulated the data from the nominations in a table shown below the Read More. Some of the nominations were ambiguously stated, but I did my best to decipher them.

I’d like to congratulate Leo on his well deserved victory in the commenter poll.  He is a teacher in the best sense and hose are rare. Our schooldays, which may have gone on for decades probably contains only a few of them. We pick can pick them out in our memories from among the hundreds.  They have the ability to make what was dumb in us speak. It is when we marvel at what has been awoken in ourselves that we recognize what great teaching is, and I suppose what a great comment is.

Attorney General Eric Holder yesterday invoked the state secrets privilege in connection with a case titled Shubert, et al. v. Barack Obama, et al.. The Shubert case is pending in federal district court in San Francisco. Assuming the court agrees with the Obama administration's position, the case will be dismissed on the ground that it cannot proceed without a danger that vitally important national security secrets will be revealed.

Many commentators have noted that this is one more instance where the Obama administration, now that it is in possession of the facts and charged with responsibility for the nation's security, has acted in full concert with much-reviled policies of the Bush administration. That's a valid point, and Holder's press release on the subject, which you can read here, is almost humorous in its labored attempt to create the impression that use of the state secrets privilege by the Obama administration is somehow different from the identical use of the identical privilege by the previous administration. Holder even invokes "transparency," which seems ludicrous in light of the broader record of the Obama administration and the nature of the privilege itself. Actually, the Obama administration's motion to dismiss based on the state secrets privilege is a renewal of a motion the Bush administration originally brought in 2007.

But the administration's decision merits a closer look because of the nature of the Shubert case. In that action, the plaintiffs, purporting to represent a class of aggrieved parties, allege that "the Bush administration engaged in wholesale dragnet surveillance of ordinary Americans in which they were unjustly caught because they regularly made phone calls and sent emails to individuals outside the U.S....." Plaintiffs are referring to the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program, which became a flash point for the Left's attacks on the Bush administration after its existence was leaked to the New York Times.

We and many others denounced that leak, and the Times' decision to publish information about the Terrorist Surveillance Program, on the grounds that they were illegal and were dangerous to national security. Sadly, neither the leakers nor the Times reporters and editors who blew the program's secrecy ever went to jail. On the contrary, Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau won a Pulitzer Prize for disclosing the existence and nature of the Terrorist Surveillance Program to our enemies.

In Shubert, the plaintiffs seek to recover damages for what they allege was illegal surveillance of them carried out under the NSA's program. The Obama administration's submission in support of its motion to dismiss the case makes clear that the Bush administration (and we, for that matter) were right all along about the importance of the program and the potential for injury to our national security posed by leaks about it. Here are some of the factual allegations in an affidavit submitted in support of the motion by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair. You can read the declaration in its entirety here:

3. ...[I]t is my judgment that sensitive state secrets are so central to the subject matter of the litigation that any attempt to proceed in the case will substantially risk the disclosure of classified privileged national security information described herein and will therefore risk exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States. ...

13. First, I am asserting privilege over information that would reveal whether particular individuals, including the named plaintiffs in this lawsuit, have been subject to the alleged NSA intelligence activities. Disclosure of such information would cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security. The NSA cannot publicly confirm or deny whether any particular individual is subject to surveillance activities. ...

14. Second, I am also asserting privilege over any other facts concerning NSA surveillance activities, sources, or methods that may relate to or be necessary to adjudicate the plaintiffs' claims, including, but not limited to, allegations that the NSA, with the assistance of telecommunications companies, has indiscriminately intercepted the content and obtained large quantities of communications records as part of the Program authorized by the President after 9/11. ... As noted above, my privilege assertion encompasses (1) facts concerning the operation of the now-defunct Terrorist Surveillance Program, including any facts needed to demonstrate that the TSP was limited to the interception of the content of one-end foreign communications reasonably believed to involve a member or agent of al Qaeda or an affiliated terrorist organization, and that the NSA does not otherwise conduct a dragnet of conduct surveillance as the plaintiffs allege; and, to the extent relevant, (2) information concerning whether the NSA obtains communication transactional records from the telecommunication companies.

15. As the NSA indicates, ... the NSA's collection of the content of communications under the TSP was directed at international communications in which a participant was reasonably believed to be associated with al Qaeda or an affiliated organization. Thus, as the Government has previously stated, plaintiffs' allegation that the NSA has indiscriminately collected the content of millions of communications sent or received by people inside the United States after 9/11 under the TSP is false. I concur with the NSA that to the extent it must demonstrate in this case that the TSP was not the content dragnet plaintiffs allege, or demonstrate that the NSA has not otherwise engaged in the alleged content dragnet, highly classified NSA intelligence sources and methods about the operation of the TSP and other NSA intelligence activities would be disclosed or at risk of disclosure which would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security.

Note the propositions that are stated or implied by Admiral Blair's declaration and by the Obama administration's motion to dismiss: 1) The NSA's Terrorist Surveillance Program was vital to our national security. 2) The TSP was carefully targeted, as the Bush administration maintained all along, at international communications that involved a person reasonably believed to be a member or agent of al Qaeda. 3) The Bush administration could not defend itself in detail against the false claims that were made about the TSP because doing so would have disclosed vitally important secrets about our means and methods of fighting terrorists. 4) Leaks about the NSA program threatened to compromise a program that was vital to our national security. 5) While the TSP in its original form is now "defunct," the NSA's current programs--referred to as "other NSA intelligence activities" by Admiral Blair--are so closely related (I suspect they are virtually identical) that disclosures about the TSP would still imperil our security.

The only possible conclusion, I think, is that Barack Obama (who criticized the NSA program during the campaign), James Risen, Eric Lichtblau, Bill Keller, the Pulitzer Prize committee and countless other liberals owe the Bush administration an apology.

Thanks to Washington's best reporter, Jake Tapper, who tracked down the administration's filings in the Shubert case.

 One thing is for certain - the impact of the NY-23 saga on the fate of the GOP will have far more long-reaching effects than the simple question of who wins on Tuesday. The Republican establishment that at least pretended to speak to all Americans is deeply, deeply wounded, and a wild-eyed, exclusionist, birther religio-beast is taking its place.

@BradThor Conservatives don't need a 3rd party, they just need to take back the GOP - and that is exactly what seems to be beginning

I'm not a big contemporary-thriller reader (Michael Walsh a recent exception), but I'm thinking I might try some Thor.

He adds on FB:

New York 23 is the shot heard 'round the GOP. It is the Lexington and Concord of the revolution w/i the Republican Party.

Imagine Barack Obama’s economic policies as if they applied to …trick or treat.  Steven Crowder pulls a Clutch Cargo vibe in his latest video while highlighting the Captain Planet silliness of the current administration’s policies.  All of this makes me remember what the costume I really wanted for this evening … [...] Read the rest »

Just talked to Conservative Party chairman Mike Long. He says (quoting a little roughly) Scozzafava's suspension "proves what we've been saying from Day 1, that this is a race between Owens and Hoffman. But we believe this is still going to be a very tight race and we have a lot of work to do over the weekend. Her decision came as a very big surprise. I didn't think she'd suspend at all. But her funding was drying up, and it became evident to the congressional committee that her campaign was finished. All the polls were showing it a two-man race. But it's not a victory yet. We haven't won it yet. A lot of Republicans in the district will now come over to our side and it's very imperative that we have that support. I just talked to Gov. Pataki who is going up there to campaign with Hoffman this weekend. We can't buy any more TV. We've been fortunate to be able to go full-bent on radio and TV. Hoffman is going to have to spend a lot of time reaching out to Republican leaders in the district and getting them to rally behind him. He's going to need to have a press conference seeing who will stand with him. I believe most will fold and go with him. He'll spend a good part of today doing that as well as campaigning. He needs to get those eleven county chairmen with him and reach out to state chairman Ed Cox and make this a clear victory."

UPDATE AT END OF POST: Scozzafava's statement to supporters.

Dede Scozzafava, the Republican and Independence Parties' candidate for the 23rd Congressional District of New York state, announced Saturday that she is suspending her campaign and releasing all her supporters.

So reported the Watertown Daily Times moments ago:

"Today, I again seek to act for the good of our community," Ms. Scozzafava wrote in a letter to friends and supporters. "It is increasingly clear that pressure is mounting on many of my supporters to shift their support. Consequently, I hereby release those individuals who have endorsed and supported my campaign to transfer their support as they see fit to do so. I am and have always been a proud Republican. It is my hope that with my actions today, my party will emerge stronger and our district and our nation can take an important step towards restoring the enduring strength and economic prosperity that has defined us for generations."

Ms. Scozzafava told the Watertown Daily Times that Siena Research Institute poll numbers show her too far behind to catch up - and she lacks enough money to spend on advertising in the last three days to make a difference. Mr. Owens has support from 36 percent of likely voters in the poll, with Mr. Hoffman garnering 35 percent support. Ms. Scozzafava has support from 20 percent of those polled. [...]

The state Assemblywoman has not thrown her support to either Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate, or Bill Owens, the Democratic candidate.

*****Update: The Watertown Daily Times has published Scozzafava's statement to supporters.

“You’ve got two Republicans running in that race. My upside is that one of them will likely win,” Steele said. “We want to be supporting the one that wins.”

“I don’t split the party into conservative or not,” he said. “I’m looking as the national chairman to walk out of there one way or the other with a win.”

Hoffman is actually not the Republican. He's running because the Republican is a bit of a disaster. That's a problem for Republicans. One the chairman probably needs to address. Why was there the need for a Hoffman in the first place?, is a question he should probably be addressing. Rather than pretending all is well and NY-23 and in the party.

And if you haven't, read our editorial here.

As Darin says– “RINO Season Opens With a Bang”
SCOZZAFAVA SUSPENDS CAMPAIGN!

FOX News reported:

Republican state Assemblywoman Dierdre Scozzafava has suspended her campaign for upstate New York’s 23rd Congressional seat, leaving Democratic nominee Bill Owens and Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman in the race that will conclude Tuesday, Fox News has confirmed.

The move comes on the heels of a new poll that showed Scozzafava had fallen behind her two competitors in a race too close.

The Siena College poll has Owens picking up 36 percent of the vote, while Hoffman has 35 percent. Scozzafava has 20 percent, with nine percent of voters undecided.

It’s a turnaround from the first Siena poll on the race in September, which had Scozzafava leading, followed by Owens and Hoffman.

The special election is Tuesday.

RINO Season opens.
We bagged ours.

UPDATE: Here’s Scozzafava making the announcement–

Good for Dede.

Dump Dede has more.

Rep. Michelle Bachman released a statement on Dede’s resignation.

Kathryn --

Remember all those socialist-hollering, Glenn Beck-worshiping, tea party wing nuts from this summer's town hall meetings? If Sarah Palin gets her way, one of them could soon be a member of Congress.

Next week marks one year since President Obama was elected. The amount of money we have in the bank will be used as an instant referendum on his first year.

With Sarah Palin out there raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to stack Congress with those tea party lunatics, the media is watching to see how Grassroots Democrats respond.

Help us raise $500,000 in response to Sarah Palin's fundraising for the tea party nut jobs. For every dollar you give before Midnight Tuesday, a group of Democrats will match it with $2 of their own, tripling your impact.

Tuesday night's deadline is a critical test of our muscle.

I've been getting calls all week from media pundits asking me if Palin's fundraising means that all those tea partying members of the right-wing fringe finally have the upper hand in their fight to bring back the George Bush days of disaster.

I need you to help us respond in the strongest possible terms.

Help us raise $500,000 in response to Sarah Palin's fundraising for the tea party nut jobs. For every dollar you give before Midnight Tuesday, a group of Democrats will match it with $2 of their own, tripling your impact.

Send a message to Sarah Palin and those tea party nutcases who think they can retake Congress. But we only have until Midnight Tuesday to act.

Thanks,

James Carville

I’m torn on this clip. [...] Read the rest »

The Center for Security Progress published a recent report on Obama’s flawed Honduran Strategy. To no surprise, the top radical advising Obama, Dan Retrepo, was weaned at the Far Left Soros-funded Center for American Progress run by strategist John Podesta.

Dan Restrepo meeting with ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya.

Honduras’ ousted President Manuel Zelaya, center, speaks to Thomas Shannon, second from left, U.S Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Hugo Llorens, left, U.S ambassador to Honduras, Dan Restrepo, second right, the director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the White House and Craig Kelly, right, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs before a meeting at Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2009. (AP)

Who’s behind the Obama Honduras policy?

The Obama Administration has made serious mistakes in its handling of the crisis in Honduras where it supports the return of the deposed president, Mel Zelaya. The Administration categorized the removal of Zelaya as a coup when, in fact, the Honduran military has had no role in governing the country. The Honduran Congress and Supreme Court abided by their Constitution and rule of law and ousted Zelaya because he had violated the law. As a result, the crisis in Honduras today is almost unmanageable. So what does this behavior reveal about Mr. Obama’s respect for the separation of powers, as Mary Anastasia O’ Grady from the Wall Street Journal accurately points out, that he would instruct Secretary of State Clinton to punish an independent court because it did not issue the ruling he wanted? [1] Is this administration forcing a foreign nation to violate its own laws?

It astonishes legal experts and independent observers that President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton and their advisors have chosen to ignore a serious factual report filed at the Library of Congress by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) that states “Available sources indicate that the (Honduran) judicial and legislative branches applied constitutional and statutory law in the case against President Zelaya in a manner that was judged by the Honduran authorities from both branches of the government to be in accordance with the Honduran legal system,” [2] writes CRS senior foreign law specialist Norma C. Gutierrez in her report.

Why is this administration siding with Zelaya and his main supporter, Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez? Chavez is known to be hostile towards the U.S while working closely with Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is on the brink of obtaining a nuclear weapon and has established a bank in Venezuela with Chavez to avoid the sanctions already imposed against Iranian financial institutions responsible for transferring funds to Tehran’s nuclear program. Actually, the Obama Administration and the Chavez regime sponsored a UN resolution that condemned the government of Honduras for legally removing Chavez’s puppet “Mel” Zelaya.

What is even worse, the State Department has suspended $30 million in aid to Honduras for standing by their constitution and has stripped current President Roberto Micheletti and fourteen members of the Supreme Court who ruled against Zelaya of their U.S. visas…

The Obama Latin America Team is composed of: Thomas Shannon, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs; Frank Mora, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Western Hemisphere Affairs and most importantly Dan Restrepo, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Western Hemisphere Affairs at The National Security Council… Since assuming the presidency in January of 2009, the Obama White House mainly follows the expertise of Mr. Daniel Restrepo on issues pertaining to Latin America.

Dan Restrepo and The Center for American Progress

Prior to moving to the National Security Council, Dan Restrepo was the director of the Americas Project at the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank, whose President and Chief Executive Officer is John Podesta, who served as chief of staff to then President Bill Clinton. This think tank has become so influential making personnel appointments in the Obama Administration that Time Magazine recently declared “there is no group in Washington with more influence at this moment in history.” [8]

One of CAP’s main contributors is billionaire speculator, George Soros. In fact, some independent groups that are more transparent, such as the Sunlight Foundation and the Campaign Legal Center, criticize the Center’s failure to disclose its contributors, particularly since it is so influential in appointments to the Obama administration.

Dan Restrepo, Honduras and Chavez

Restrepo’s complete lack of judgment with respect to issues in Latin America, especially with regards to Chavez, put the region, the US and its interests at risk. He actually thinks Chávez is only a nuisance and not a national security threat, despite the fact that Chávez said during a recent visit to Iran — his eighth since taking office — that he is discussing with Iran the creation of a “nuclear village” in Venezuela, which he claimed will be for “peaceful purposes.” And there are recent claims made by New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau that Iran may be using Venezuela for “building and storing” weapons of mass destruction. So what does Restrepo think about the Iran-Venezuela nuclear cooperation? He actually “hopes that all countries in the Americas respect international rules, and their international responsibilities regarding nuclear energy.” So, according to him, the U.S. should keep hoping and do nothing in the meantime.

There’s more at the Center for Security Progress.
Hat Tip NND

I wrote about the tribute paid by National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman to President Obama in "Rocco's Modern Life." Landesman hailed Obama as "the first president that [Ed.: ouch!] actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln[.]" Seeking to move Obama to an even more world-historic plane, Landesman also saluted Obama as "the most powerful writer since Caesar." I noted that It would be hard to pack so much ignorance into one short paragraph if one were really trying. .

After we wrote about it here, Landesman's speech drew a lot of attention and commentary. Now Rocco responds:

First, my comments about the President as author and the references to Teddy Roosevelt, Lincoln, et al. I'm vulnerable here and probably just wrong. [Ed.: Apparently he hasn't had time to check it out yet!]. Barack Obama wrote, on his own, the manuscript for his first book and went looking for a publisher. [Ed.:Not exactly, but let it pass.] Other presidential works have very different provenances. [Ed.: Well said!] One important one, it is generally accepted, was written by a ghostwriter without credit. [Ed.: He's so discreet!] Others were written with heavy staff input in the way of researchers and editors. [Ed.: Again, well said!] That being said, to state that these other presidents did not write their own books is unprovable and in several cases, probably incorrect. [Ed.: Probably!] And for what it's worth, yes, Grant wrote a great book, and Lincoln, an excellent writer, never wrote a whole book per se, his writings were rather collected in one. [Ed.: When you get a chance, refresh yourself on run-on sentences.] Score one for the prosecution.

If we're keeping track, I think it's more like "score ten for the prosecution." Rocco isn't much of a writer and, like the guy in the Sam Cooke song, he doesn't know much about history. But he knows Obama! And like the guy in the Sam Cooke song, he does know that he loves him.

Rocco is not done yet. He also returns to his comparison of Obama with Caesar. Rocco suggests he was misunderstood; he was just funnin':

As for Julius Caesar? I made a deliberately outlandish remark, with the delicious (for me, anyway) twist that the last thing people think of with Julius Caesar is that he was a writer. I enjoyed the conceit and never imagined that it would be taken literally. If I have to edit every remark I make because someone somewhere might misunderstand, I'm going to become very dull very fast.

So a comparison of Obama with Adolf Hitler would have served Rocco as well as the comparison with Caesar. It's a funny thing. The last thing people think of "with" Hitler is his work as an autobiographer.

Rocco really need not fear the lack of an editor. My guess is that Rocco is about as capable an editor as he is a writer. It's the bootlicking, the ignorance, and the higher illiteracy that are Rocco's problems, not the lack of an editor.

He need not worry about our losing interest in his pensées either. Those of us concerned about the politicization of the federal cultural agencies and intrigued by the phenomenon of Obama worship will continue to find Rocco of interest. Even if he loses his taste for delicious twists.

JOHN adds: At risk of piling on, this guy really is a dope. "[T]he last thing people think of with Julius Caesar is that he was a writer"? Unlike Scott, I never studied Latin, but even I know that Caesar is widely regarded as one of the greatest Latin prose writers, and that generations of Latin students have plowed through his Commentaries: "All Gaul is divided into three parts," and so on. When you talk about political leaders who were also great writers, Caesar really is the gold standard. Rocco heads the National Endowment for the Arts? Unbelievable.

PLUS, two updates to this story: IowaHawk, a comic genius, channels Julius Caesar's reaction to Landesman's comparison, in highly profane rapper-jive style. And I learned today that Rocco Landesman's aunt is lyricist Fran Landesman, who wrote the words to "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most." I'm guessing Scott didn't know that, or he might have taken it easier on Rocco.

For some mysterious reason, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams augmented his tour of Afghanistan with an interview with The Huffington Post, where most bloggers think of the American presence as comparable to cancer, or maggots. One spot in his interview with Danny Shea suggested that the Americans weren't so welcome in Afghanistan:

SHEA: There's all this talk of making the cities more secure. Is there any sense that the people in the cities want the foreign troops there?

WILLIAMS: Whereas some of the locals in Iraq (depending on the circumstances) will often be comforted to see U.S. dismounted infantry patrols, (in ways they were not until fairly recently) and will ask them for help and to stay with them, the situation here in Afghanistan is different. The two societies are vastly different.

It is not helped by the fact that U.S. forces often take a very aggressive posture -- arriving in small towns in massive armored vehicles with machine gun turrets, each infantryman with his hands on his M-4 rifle in front of him...and often on the trigger with the safety off.

Of course there's a reason for this: they get shot at and killed, and they are soldiers in an unforgiving place -- surrounded by an enemy they often can't see. So it's a Catch-22 of sorts. It made big news here when Gen. McChrystal started the practice of removing his body armor while on walkabouts, or when meeting with local leaders. By his reasoning, the locals aren't wearing such armor. It should also be pointed out that he gets around in a massive, armored SUV with security vehicles in tow, dismounted infantry flanking him and able to unleash fearsome amounts of suppressing fire, and air support overhead whenever he is out and about.

But this part didn’t translate well. Why would "good" be in quotes, or in air quotes?

Even when U.S. troops are handing out something "good" -- food supplies, medicine, school supplies for the Afghan children, its not as if local villagers tending to their goats on a Thursday afternoon sit around thinking, "If only a dismounted platoon of heavily-armed American soldiers would come visit us today, preferably accompanied by an armored mechanized column..."

You think when the college football schedule was set up months ago they had any idea both Texas vs. OSU AND USC vs. Oregon would be such big games at the same hour? Anything else you're watching in this schedule?

Maybe more important, who is praying the Phillies beat the Yanks this series?

Anything else on your sports mind today?

Steve Hayes writes:

Frustration and anger have been building but there had not been an obvious target for those feelings. That may have changed late Friday afternoon with the news that the Pentagon has offered to give swine flu shots to detainees and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Major Diana Haynie, a spokesman for the Joint Task Force at Gitmo, explained the decision this way.

"Detainees at JTF Guantanamo are considered to be at higher risk and therefore they will be offered the H1N1 vaccination."

Really? Higher risk than who? Pregnant women are six times more likely than others to have a fatal bout of swine flu -- and yet some of them have been unable to get a shot. The shortage is so severe that state and local health officials have been forced to cancel and reschedule vaccination clinics, and to adjust their strategies abotu who gets a shot and when.

Read this post »

Dede Scozzafava, the Republican and Independence parties candidate, announced Saturday that she is suspending her campaign for the 23rd Congressional District and releasing all her supporters.

The state Assemblywoman has not thrown her support to either Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate, or Bill Owens, the Democratic candidate.

"Today, I again seek to act for the good of our community," Ms. Scozzafava wrote in a letter to friends and supporters. "It is increasingly clear that pressure is mounting on many of my supporters to shift their support. Consequently, I hereby release those individuals who have endorsed and supported my campaign to transfer their support as they see fit to do so. I am and have always been a proud Republican. It is my hope that with my actions today, my party will emerge stronger and our district and our nation can take an important step towards restoring the enduring strength and economic prosperity that has defined us for generations."

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: The White House visitors list.

Let's dig through this baby and find some of the gems. Clearly, William Ayers HAS to jump out at you...but don't say Obama's been palling around with him!

The new issue of the Weekly Standard carries my article "The flying imams win." In the article I take a brief look back at Judge Montgomery's July decision denying official immunity to the law enforcement officers who detained and questioned the flying imams at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. In her decision Judge Montgomery held that no competent law enforcement officer could reasonably have thought his behavior was legal.

Judge Montgomery's ruling did not conclude the case, but rather allowed the case against USAirways and the law enforcement officers to proceed before her. Rulings denying government officials immunity in federal civil rights cases are subject to immediate appeal. The law enforcement defendants therefore had the right to appeal Judge Montgomery's ruling to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.

When they filed the appeal, Judge Montgomery set the case for a settlement conference before Magistrate Judge Arthur Boylan. The settlement conference resulted in the resolution of the case involving the payment of an undisclosed money to the imams and their attorneys by defendants including USAirways and the law enforcement defendants. The settlement of the case moots the defendants' appeal to the Eighth Circuit and leaves Judge Montgomery's July ruling as the last word on the law applicable to the case.

At the time of the events giving rise to the flying imams' lawsuit, the imams were returning to Phoenix after a national imams' conference in suburban Minneapolis. On the last day of their conference, Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison reportedly addressed the conference on the subject of "Imams and Politics." In her decision, Judge Montgomery states: "Asking Plaintiffs about the reason for their visit to Minneapolis would likely have informed the officers about the three-day NAIF conference, which would help explain why the six imams were together and the lack of checked baggage."

I wonder. Would law enforcement have been obligated to take the imams at their word? Should their story of attendance at a national imams' conference have allayed concerns? As I note in the Weekly Standard article, it wouldn't have taken much digging to discover that one of the six imams was Omar Shahin, a former representative of and fundraiser for the Muslim charity KindHearts, shuttered by the Treasury Department as a Hamas front in February 2006. (Shahin claims he "had no clue what they were doing.")

CAIR has been intimately involved in the case from the get-go, staging press conferences and publicizing the incident as an outrage against Muslims. Omar Mohammedi of CAIR's New York chapter was one of the imams' attorneys in the Minnesota lawsuit. CAIR of course achieved special notoriety when the government named it an unindicted co-conspirator of the convicted Hamas front known as the Holy Land Foundation. See my article "Coming clean about CAIR."

In the wake of the settlement USA Today devoted a good editorial to the case, but Judge Montgomery's decision has drawn surprisingly little scrutiny. I fear the likely impact of Judge Montgomery's decision on law enforcement in future cases and think it deserves another look, which is what I try to give it in the Standard article.

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