"You ever watch that TV series 'Mad Men?' " Clinton asked. "If I keep watching this program, will I ever find a happy person? Great television. Good drama. But a lot of really painful reminders in that show about how black people were supposed to run the elevators... were supposed to ask permission before they get on an elevator. The way women were treated is appalling, and only occasionally funny to me."

Thinking Anew—Security Priorities for the Next Administration

A coherent strategy to address 21st century threats to the United States, one that treats national and homeland security as a seamless whole, has yet to emerge... To help fuel this process, in April 2008 The George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute (HSPI) established the Presidential Transition Task Force, comprised of national and homeland security experts, policymakers and practitioners... The goal was to determine the top strategic priorities to advance the nation’s security in the coming decade...

Event Participants:

...Amanda Halpern
U.S. House of Representatives

Beth Hampton
Homeland Security Institute

Nidal Hasan
Uniformed Services University School of Medicine

Donald Hawkins
U.S. Department of Homeland Security

Eric Heighberger
Homeland Security Council...

That's quite the company for a deranged misfit loner whacko of no broader significance.

Innit?  [Oh boy, is this the Administration going to do everything in its power to play this fact down.]

-When retired Colonel Ralph Peters gets angry, watch out because deadly verbal bullets are going to fly:

When the terrorist posts anti-American hate-speech on the Web; apparently praises suicide bombers and uses his own name; loudly criticizes US policies; argues (as a psychiatrist, no less) with his military patients over the worth of their sacrifices; refuses, in the name of Islam, to be photographed with female colleagues; lists his nationality as "Palestinian" in a Muslim spouse-matching program, and parades around central Texas in a fundamentalist playsuit — well, it only seems fair to call this terrorist an "Islamist terrorist."

But the president won’t. Despite his promise to get to all the facts. Because there’s no such thing as "Islamist terrorism" in ObamaWorld.

And the Army won’t. Because its senior leaders are so sick with political correctness that pandering to America-haters is safer than calling terrorism "terrorism."

And the media won’t. Because they have more interest in the shooter than in our troops — despite their crocodile tears.

Maj. Nadal Malik Hasan planned this terrorist attack and executed it in cold blood. The resulting massacre was the first tragedy. The second was that he wasn’t killed on the spot.

Hasan survived. Now the rest of us will have to foot his massive medical bills. Activist lawyers will get involved, claiming "harassment" drove him temporarily insane. There’ll be no end of trial delays. At best, taxpayer dollars will fund his prison lifestyle for decades to come, since our politically correct Army leadership wouldn’t dare pursue or carry out the death penalty.

Maj. Hasan will be a hero to Islamist terrorists abroad and their sympathizers here. While US Muslim organizations decry his acts publicly, Hasan will be praised privately. And he’ll have the last laugh.

But Hasan isn’t the sole guilty party. The US Army’s unforgivable political correctness is also to blame for the casualties at Ft. Hood.

The heads of some Perfumed Princes should role, but Mr. Peters is correct—maybe one or two will for show, but people like General Casey will be like Ol' Man River: they'll jus' keep rollin' along.

-Pundette is spot-on and asks an important question:

What a demoralizing, foul-smelling mess. Innocent people are dead because . . . why, exactly? Systemic refusal to face reality? Fear of discrimination lawsuits? Incompetence? Negligence?

This revelation leads naturally to the question: Will Hasan be charged with treason? I'm no lawyer but based on that quaintly old-fashioned document, the US Constitution, it seems like a no-brainer:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

I'd say, at the very least, the Jihadist Hasan was adhering an awful lot.  The bastard should be hung.

-My fellow brothers and sisters in arms have all asked some very good questions, but Michelle Malkin has THE question of the moment:

Question: Why is it that we have to read British papers to get the unvarnished truths about the Ft. Hood Muslim mass murderer?

Answer: Blankout!

Obama believes in “the fierce urgency of now”, and fierce it is. That’s where all the poor befuddled sober centrists who can’t understand why the Democrats keep passing incoherent 1,200-page bills every week are missing the point. If “health care” were about health care, the devil would be in the details. But it’s not about health or costs or coverage; it’s about getting over the river and burning the bridge.It doesn’t matter what form of governmentalized health care gets passed as long as it passes. Once it’s in place, it will be “reformed”, endlessly, but it will never be undone.

Right now, they can trade anything — abortion, death panels, whatever. The trick is to plant the seed and let the ratchet effect of Big Government take care of the rest. I said on Rush's show on Friday that if Barack Obama had been Bill Clinton he'd have woken up on Wednesday morning and begun triangulating. Instead, Obama woke up and figured that he needed more fierce urgency, and right now. The short-term hit in 2010 is worth it for the long-term benefits: Obscure congressmen will be just as happy as obscure ambassadors or obscure chairmen of obscure agencies. And the prize of permanent irreversible statist annexation merits the risk: Governmentalized "health care"puts us on the fast track to Euro-sclerosis and redefines the relationship between citizen and state in ways that make genuine conservative politics all but impossible.

The Leftist can only implement his full plan if he achieves a large degree of power over the people he rules because they will never, ever allow it willingly.  This is STOP for the Left.

2) From his most recent weekly syndicated column:

Since 9/11, we have, as the Twitterers recommend, judged people by their actions — flying planes into skyscrapers, blowing themselves up in Bali nightclubs or London Tube trains, planting IEDs by the roadside in Baghdad or Tikrit. And on the whole we’re effective at responding with action of our own — taking out training camps in Afghanistan, rolling up insurgency networks in Fallujah and Ramadi, intercepting terror plots in London and Toronto and Dearborn.

But we’re scrupulously non-judgmental about the ideology that drives a man to fly into a building or self-detonate on the subway, and thus we have a hole at the heart of our strategy. We use rhetorical conveniences like “radical Islam” or, if that seems a wee bit Islamophobic, just plain old “radical extremism.” But we never make any effort to delineate the line which separates “radical Islam” from non-radical Islam. Indeed, we go to great lengths to make it even fuzzier. And somewhere in that woozy blur the pathologies of a Nidal Malik Hasan incubate. An army psychiatrist, Major Hasan was an American, born and raised, who graduated from Viriginia Tech and then received his doctorate from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, which works out to the best part of half a million dollars’ worth of elite education. But he opposed America’s actions in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and made approving remarks about jihadists on American soil. “You need to lock it up, Major,” cautioned his superior officer, Col. Terry Lee.

But he didn’t really need to “lock it up” at all. He could pretty much say anything he liked, and if any “red flags” were raised they were quickly mothballed. Lots of people are “anti-war.” Some of them are objectively on the other side — that’s to say, they encourage and support attacks on American troops and civilians. But not many of those in that latter category are U.S. Army majors. Or so one would hope....

...

But don’t worry: As the FBI spokesman assured us in nothing flat, there’s no terrorism angle.

That’s true, in a very narrow sense: Major Hasan is not a card-carrying member of the Texas branch of al-Qaeda reporting to a control officer in Yemen or Waziristan. If he were, things would be a lot easier. But the pathologies that drive al-Qaeda beat within Major Hasan too, and in the end his Islamic impulses trumped his expensive Western education, his psychiatric training, his military discipline — his entire American identity. One might say the same about Faleh Hassan Almaleki of Glendale, Ariz., arrested last week after fatally running over his “too Westernized” daughter Noor in the latest American honor killing. Or the two U.S. residents — one American, one Canadian — arrested a few days earlier for plotting to fly to Denmark for the purposes of murdering the editor who commissioned the famous Mohammed cartoons. But Noor Almaleki’s brother shrugs that’s just the way it is. “One thing to one culture doesn’t make sense to another culture,” he says.

Indeed. To infidels, Islam is in a certain sense unknowable, and most of us are content to leave it at that. The vast majority of Muslims don’t conspire to kill cartoonists or murder their daughters or shoot dozens of their fellow soldiers. But Islam inspires enough of this behavior to make it a legitimate topic of analysis. Don’t hold your breath. We’d rather talk about anything else — even in the Army.

What happened to those men and women at Fort Hood had a horrible symbolism: Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously. And that’s the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy — in Afghanistan and in Texas.

3) In his most recent column for Macleans, Mr. Steyn asks a question [who does Balloon Boy remind you of?] and defends—sort-of—Balloon Boy's father, Balloonhead:

C’mon, man. This isn’t difficult. CNN and Co. cut away to Balloon Boy in the middle of a live broadcast of the current president, one Barack Obama, talking, as is his wont. So let’s see: the whole of America goes bananas, mesmerized by a hot air balloon soaring into the stratosphere before coming down to earth and being revealed to be entirely empty. And you think it’s a metaphor for the first Bush term? It’s no wonder the New York Times is junk stock and laying off journalists faster than at any time in its history.

Any self-respecting cultural critic not trapped in the spring of ’03 ought to be able to do this in his sleep: there he was, Barack the Balloon Boy, wafted ever upwards on great gaseous clouds of hope and change, only to have his approval numbers crash farther faster than any president of the last 60 years. He found the reality TV show of campaigning more congenial than the reality of governing. He thought his multi-trillion-dollar ballooning debt could defy the laws of economic gravity but it just floated off over the far horizon and was never seen again.

You want a defence of the dad? Why begrudge Richard Heene wanting wall-to-wall TV coverage without doing anything to earn it when he’d just sat through a week of media fawning over Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize? The Norwegians concede the new president (in office for just 11 days before Nobel nominations closed) hasn’t actually advanced the cause of peace, but he just might, one day, and in the meantime, like young Falcon Heene, he’s cute and inspiring and we’re all rooting for him!

"I know that voting against the health care bill will probably be the death of my political career," Cao said, "but I have to live with myself, and I always reflect on the phrase of the New Testament, 'How does it profit a man's life to gain the world but to lose his soul.' "