DATELINE: AmSpecBlog
SMOOT-HAWLEY BY STEALTH
Matthew Vadum: 'Looking up from their particular circle of Hell, Senator Reed Smoot (R-Utah) and Representative Willis C. Hawley (R-Oregon) must be laughing. They must realize that President Obama and congressional Democrats are infinitely clever Alinsky students, saying one thing in front of the TV cameras and then doing the opposite behind the scenes. Together, the Obama administration and liberal lawmakers have in a sense revived by stealth the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariff that exacerbated the Great Depression by encouraging other countries to erect trade barriers.'

DATELINE: The Corner
HEALTH CARE SHENANIGANS
Yuval Levin: 'The “clarification” of the agreement between health industry leaders and the White House offered by the American Hospital Association yesterday is really staggering. According to the story Kathryn links below, AHA president Richard Umbdenstock told his members that Obama had misstated the agreement: that it wasn’t to reduce the growth of health care costs by 1.5%  per year for ten years, but rather to reduce that growth by 1.5% in total over ten years. The White House earlier this week used the annual 1.5% figure to assert that the agreement would “save” $2 trillion over a decade, which would thereby magically allow the government to pay for the Democrats’ emerging health care plans. The savings would all have come from reductions in the rate of growth of costs, not actual savings, but it now seems that even that claim—with its layer upon layer of creative fiction—was not what the industry groups agreed to. What the groups have in mind is cutting a total of 1.5% off the rate of growth over 10 years, which would take a few drops of water out of the ocean of debt threatening to drown the federal budget. And of course even that much more modest goal is just a vague promise, with no plans or commitments behind it. More ominously for the Obama plan, the White House’s ham-handed use of the industry groups has made the industry nervous and caused the groups to start backing away.'

DATELINE: Red State
THE SKINNY ON OBAMA'S SUPPOSEDLY ‘WATERSHED' HEALTH CARE MEETING
Jeff Emanuel: 'What this supposedly “game-changing” move consists of is an Obama administration doing what Democrats accused George W. Bush of doing for eight years: jumping into bed with the insurance companies and so-called “Big Health Care.” In exchange for future considerations (read: more lenient treatment in pending legislation), the five major health care trade associations are colluding to squeeze up to $2T out of patients and providers over the course of the next several years. In an effort to help (and, in doing so, to remain on the notoriously vindictive administration’s good side), this new cartel of health care organizations is, in essence, offering to cut your access to health care (not to mention its quality) in order to satisfy the feds’ budgeting desires.'

DATELINE: National Review Online
TRICKLE-DOWN CORRUPTION
Jonah Goldberg: 'Some days you have to ask yourself: My God, what if these people were Republicans? Democrats took back Congress in 2006 and the presidency in 2008 in no small part because of their ability to bang their spoons on their high chairs about what they called the Republican “culture of corruption.” Their choreographed outrage was coordinated with the precision of a North Korean missile-launch pageant. And, to be fair, they had a point. The GOP did have its legitimate embarrassments. But that’s all yesterday’s news. Let’s look at the here and now. Barack Obama, who vowed he’d provide a transparent administration staffed with disinterested public servants with the self-restraint of Roman castrati, appointed an admitted tax cheat to run the Treasury Department — and he’s hardly the only one in the administration. But you know what? We ain’t seen nothing yet. For starters, the real corruption isn’t what the media are ignoring or downplaying as isolated incidents. It’s what the media are hailing as strokes of bold, inspirational leadership. The White House, as a matter of policy, is rewriting legal contracts, picking winners (mostly labor unions and mortgage defaulters) and singling out losers (evil “speculators”), while much of the media continue to ponder whether Obama is already a greater president than FDR.'

DATELINE: National Review Online
A DYING CONSTITUTION
Thomas Sowell: 'While Pres. Barack Obama has, in one sense, tipped his hand by saying that he wants judges with “empathy” for certain groups, he has in a more fundamental sense concealed the real goal — getting judges who will ratify an ever-expanding scope of federal-government power and an ever-declining restraint by the Constitution of the United States. This is consistent with everything else that Obama has done in office and is consistent with his decades-long track record of alliances with people who reject the fundamentals of American society. Judicial expansion of federal power is not really new, even if the audacity with which that goal is being pursued may be unique. For more than a century, believers in bigger government have also been believers in having judges “interpret” the restraints of the Constitution out of existence. They called this “a living Constitution.” But it has in fact been a dying Constitution, as its restraining provisions have been interpreted to mean less and less, so that the federal government can do more and more.'

DATELINE: The American Spectator
THE PRE-SCHOOL PRESIDENT
George Neumayr: 'Public life in America resembled a pre-school classroom this week: the President informed citizens to "wash your hands" and "cover your mouth when you cough," while alleged adults at CNN hoisted up letter-grade placards at the prompting of Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer: "What grade would you give President Obama for…?" Change your tires regularly, wear a condom, avoid Puerto Vallarta -- this administration is certainly looking out for the American people. But President Obama remains diffident about giving advice on the issue of abortion, at least advice that could save lives. Did his answer to the abortion question at Wednesday's press conference contain a single honest word? I wonder about even the thes and the ands. The more garbled his syntax, the more you know he is lying through his teeth: "You know, the -- my view on -- abortion, I think has been very consistent."'

DATELINE: Pajamas Media
NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN
Victor Davis Hanson: 'Rather than nitpick about Obama’s envisioned brave new world, I think it wiser to see it in the larger context of age-old divides over the nature of Western democratic and liberal society. Nothing that we have seen proposed since January 20 is novel; everything is merely the promise of the past outfitted with a new snazzier veneer of hope and change. Take his domestic policies. What overarching philosophy seems reflected in raising taxes, borrowing trillions to spend trillions more on new entitlements, creating a new health care bureaucracy, cap-and-trade, allotting trillions more for education, and the expectation of the appointment of more liberal judges? It’s old… In a word, it is adherence to the idea of equality of result rather than an equality of opportunity, the age-old debate that goes back to the Greeks.'

DATELINE: New York Post
CHRYSLER CUT-UP'S CONTRACT KILLERS
Irwin Stelzer: ''I'm saying that when the president does it that means it's not illegal," shouts Frank Langella's Richard Nixon at Michael Sheen's David Frost in "Frost/ Nixon." He was wrong, and so was President Obama when he said last week that he'd override the contractual and legal rights of Chrysler's senior lenders and carve up the company between the government and the United Auto Workers. Obama is pressuring the some 20 "speculators" who are holding out to accept the crumbs that he's offering. But there is more here at stake than the money immediately involved. As George Schultze, managing member of Schultze Asset Management, a hedge fund, told The Wall Street Journal, "This is about contract and bankruptcy law, and upholding agreements -- which is important in the grand scheme of things."'

DATELINE: The Weekly Standard
PREENING & POSTURING
William Kristol: '"We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history," President Obama said when he ordered the release of the Justice Department interrogation memos. Actually, no. Not at all. We were attacked on 9/11. We responded to that attack with remarkable restraint in the use of force, respect for civil liberties, and even solicitude for those who might inadvertently be offended, let alone harmed, by our policies. We've fought a war on jihadist terror in a civilized, even legalized, way. Those who have been on the front and rear lines of that war--in the military and the intelligence agencies, at the Justice Department and, yes, in the White House--have much to be proud of. The rest of us, who've been asked to do little, should be grateful. The dark and painful chapter we have to fear is rather the one President Obama may be ushering in. This would be a chapter in which politicians preen moralistically as they throw patriotic officials, who helped keep this country safe, to the wolves, and in which national leaders posture politically while endangering the nation's security. The preening is ridiculous, even by the standards of contemporary American politics and American liberalism. Obama fatuously asserts there are no real choices in the real world, just "false choices" that he can magically resolve. He foolishly suggests that even in war we would never have to do anything disagreeable for the sake of our security. He talks baby talk to intelligence officers: "Don't be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we've made some mistakes. That's how we learn."'

DATELINE: The London Daily Telegraph
WHY DOES PRESIDENT PANTYWAIST HATE AMERICA SO BADLY?
Gerald Warner: 'If al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the rest of the Looney Tunes brigade want to kick America to death, they had better move in quickly and grab a piece of the action before Barack Obama finishes the job himself. Never in the history of the United States has a president worked so actively against the interests of his own people - not even Jimmy Carter. Obama's problem is that he does not know who the enemy is. To him, the enemy does not squat in caves in Waziristan, clutching automatic weapons and reciting the more militant verses from the Koran: instead, it sits around at tea parties in Kentucky quoting from the US Constitution. Obama is not at war with terrorists, but with his Republican fellow citizens. He has never abandoned the campaign trail. ...President Pantywaist's recent world tour, cosying up to all the bad guys, excited the ambitions of America's enemies. Here, they realised, is a sucker they can really take to the cleaners. His only enemies are fellow Americans.'
[tip of the fedora to John Hinderaker]

DATELINE: The Weekly Standard
OH, THE CHANGES WE'LL SEE
Irwin Stelzer: 'Barack Obama is unhappy with much that preceded his occupation of the White House, and not only his predecessors conduct of foreign policy, for which he is a serial apologizer. Pre-Obama domestic policy also displeases him: any prosperity the nation enjoyed, he says, was built on a foundation of sand. That won't happen again: the trillions of debt he is loading on the nation's books will enable us to erect our post-recession house on solid rock, he says. Our world will never be the same again. In the end, Americans will live in smaller houses, drive cars more like those to which Europeans are accustomed, and will rely on European-style health care. In short, we will be more like countries using the social democratic model to which Obama wants to convert America.'

DATELINE: National Review Online
OBAMA'S INTERROGATION MESS
Andrew McCarthy: 'Obamateur Hour continues. The president is reeling because he sees his legislative agenda going up in smoke. In his inexperience, he reckoned that his base on the Left would somehow be sated by the mere disclosure of Bush-era methods, coupled with vague assurances that a day of reckoning for Bush administration officials might soon be at hand. His Republican opposition, he further figured, would be cowed by his moral preening on “torture.” This, he concluded, would mean smooth sailing ahead for the more pressing business of nationalizing the economy, starting with the health-care industry. But as George W. Bush might have warned his successor, anti-American ideologues are emboldened, not mollified, by concessions. The Left doesn’t want Bush officials exposed — they want blood, and anything less than that will be cause for revolt. Simultaneously, Obama has raised the ire of the Right.  In his solipsism, the president failed to foresee that the “torture” memos — memos that, as Rich Lowry shows, in fact document an assiduous effort to avoid torture — would not support his overblown rhetoric or substantiate the allegations of misconduct raised by politicized leaks from the International Committee of the Red Cross. Critics were not cowed. That, combined with Obama’s disingenuous strategy of exposing our tactics while suppressing the trove of intelligence they produced, ensured that the Right would push back aggressively.'

DATELINE: The American Spectator
CAN FREEDOM COME BACK?
David N. Bass: 'In the 1930s, politicians planned to sunset unprecedented government expansions (parts of Social Security, for example) at a later date. The Depression ended, and government kept and even expanded its power. Look for the same to happen today. It's easier to surrender freedoms in a panic, grow the size of government, and nationalize banks than to gain freedoms back, reduce the size of government, and privatize banks again. In few instances does government relinquish power back to the private sector. The current administration certainly has no plans along those lines. That's why the temptation to curb freedom during economic turmoil must be resisted. Power-hungry politicians, both Republican and Democratic, eagerly offer solutions, which conveniently put the citizenry more and more under the thumb of Big Brother. Americans can't let fear or anger do their thinking for them.'

DATELINE: Real Clear Politics
OBAMA'S FAULTY FOUNDATION
Charles Krauthammer: 'Franklin Roosevelt gave us the New Deal. John Kennedy gave us the New Frontier. In a major domestic policy address at Georgetown University this week, Barack Obama promised -- eight times -- a "New Foundation." For those too thick to have noticed this proclamation of a new era in American history, the White House Web site helpfully titled its speech excerpts "A New Foundation." As it happens, Obama is not the first to try this slogan. President Carter peppered his 1979 State of the Union address with five "New Foundations" (and eight more just naked "foundations"). Like most of Carter's endeavors, this one failed, perhaps because (as I recall it being said at the time) it sounded like the introduction of a new kind of undergarment. Undaunted, Obama offered his New Foundation speech as the complete, contextual, canonical text for the domestic revolution he aims to enact. It had everything we have come to expect from Obama....'

DATELINE: The American Spectator
LEADING FROM WEAKNESS
George H. Wittman: 'President Obama's highly publicized revival of the left's Cold War mantra of creating a nuclear free world by creating complex arms agreements provided an excellent cover for the testing of a far more practical and immediate strategic policy change. When the White House wanted to launch a policy trial balloon in the past it would drift a few suggestions in the direction of the Washington Post or the New York Times. The Obama administration under the guidance of chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, however, has introduced a little misdirection into that old political device. For Obama the new water carrier is the British-owned, internationally distributed, Financial Times. "US may cede to Iran's nuclear ambition," read the April 4/5 headline, well timed to follow their favorite American politician's self-proclaimed triumphal European tour and simultaneous with Obama's nuclear arms reduction speech. The "balloon" carried the very sensitive test message that, as the FT suggested, unnamed U.S. officials "are considering whether to accept Iran's pursuit of uranium enrichment." A policy review by the Obama White House supposedly is investigating if the U.S. has any choice but to accept Iran's position that it will not stop developing its capability to create weapons grade material. Now the White House sits back and waits to see if its new tack in international security affairs will gain any traction. First, the FT story has to be picked up by the international media. The American media can go along with the White House debutante-like silence until the clever boys of Al Jazeera pick up the story.'

DATELINE: AmSpecBlog
SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AN INTERNATIONAL TOUR
Philip Klein: 'Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Ezra Klein argues that we need not choose between the "awful extremes" of Canadian and British health care (with long wait lines) and American health care (which has millions of uninsured). He writes:

Moreover, surveys conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have found that most countries don't have waiting lines or the uninsured. Not Germany or France or Japan or Sweden, all of which have more of a mix of public and private options. But Canada is next door, and Britain speaks our language, so we tend to spend a lot of time comparing our system with these systems and not a lot of time thinking through the full range of options.

Okay, so let's do a tour of those other options Ezra mentions.'

DATELINE: Townhall
THE ULTIMATE ELECTION RIGGING
Michelle Malkin: 'I have seen the electoral future, and it is rigged. With fraud-prone, ideologically driven interest groups swarming the census-gathering process, the left is solidifying its chances of a permanent ruling majority. Lax immigration enforcement is the not-so-secret key to the Democrats' power grab. And the Obama administration is all too happy to aid and abet. At a meeting to mobilize volunteer trainees assisting with the decennial national headcount, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke encouraged the government's partners to spread the word that privacy rights of census-takers would not be violated, and that accuracy and fairness would be ensured. Locke assured the activists: "We all recognize what is at stake." But do you? The volunteer groups Locke is entrusting to protect accuracy and fairness include the voter registration con artists of tax-subsidized ACORN, the amnesty activists of Voto Latino and the labor bosses of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The fate of $300 billion in federal funding -- and, most importantly, the apportionment of congressional seats -- rest in their hands. As for "privacy rights," it's not your privacy rights they care about. It's the privacy rights of millions of illegal aliens, whose advocates have enshrined for them a sacred right never to be questioned about their immigration status.'

DATELINE: National Review Online
A ROOKIE PRESIDENT
Thomas Sowell: 'Someone once said that, for every rookie you have on your starting team in the National Football League, you will lose a game. Somewhere, at some time during the season, a rookie will make a mistake that will cost you a game. We now have a rookie president of the United States, and, in the dangerous world we live in, with terrorist nations going nuclear, just one rookie mistake can bring disaster down on this generation and generations yet to come. Barack Obama is a rookie in a sense that few other presidents in American history have ever been. It is not just that he has never been president before. He has never had any position in any kind of organization where he was personally responsible for the outcome. Other first-term presidents have been governors, generals, Cabinet members, or others in positions of personal responsibility. A few have been senators, like Barack Obama, but usually for longer than Obama, and not having spent half their few years in the Senate running for president. What is even worse than making mistakes is having sycophants telling you that you are doing fine when you are not. In addition to all the usual hangers-on and supplicants for government favors that every president has, Barack Obama has a media that will see no evil, hear no evil, and certainly speak no evil.'

DATELINE: Commentary
THE COMING WAR ON SOVEREIGNTY
John Bolton: 'Barack Obama’s nascent presidency has brought forth the customary flood of policy proposals from the great and good, all hoping to influence his administration. One noteworthy offering is a short report with a distinguished provenance entitled A Plan for Action, which features a revealingly immodest subtitle: A New Era of International Cooperation for a Changed World: 2009, 2010, and Beyond. In presentation and tone, A Plan for Action is determinedly uncontroversial; indeed, it looks and reads more like a corporate brochure than a foreign-policy paper. The text is the work of three academics—Bruce Jones of NYU, Carlos Pascual of the Brookings Institution, and Stephen John Stedman of Stanford. Its findings and recommendations, they claim, rose from a series of meetings with foreign-policy eminences here and abroad, including former Secretaries of State of both parties as well as defense officials from the Clinton and first Bush administrations. The participation of these notables is what gives A Plan for Action its bona fides, though one should doubt how much the document actually reflects their ideas. There is no question, however, that the ideas advanced in A Plan for Action have become mainstays in the liberal vision of the future of American foreign policy. That is what makes A Plan for Action especially interesting, and especially worrisome. If it is what it appears to be—a blueprint for the Obama administration’s effort to construct a foreign policy different from George W. Bush’s—then the nation’s governing elite is in the process of taking a sharp, indeed radical, turn away from the principles and practices of representative self-government that have been at the core of the American experiment since the nation’s founding. The pivot point is a shifting understanding of American sovereignty.'
[tip of the fedora to Instapundit]

DATELINE: National Review Online
CONTINGENCY! WHAT'S IT GOOD FOR?
Andrew McCarthy: '"Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.” That was Pres. Barack Obama’s inaugural proclamation to the throng assembled on the National Mall, and to the additional millions huddled around televisions throughout the world. As it turns out, that’s not exactly his position. Behind the scenes, the Pentagon has received orders from on high — which, in this administration, is the Office of Management and Budget — that war is out. The word “war,” that is. “This administration prefers to avoid using the term ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror,’” according to the guidelines, which were first reported in the Washington Post. Our warriors were curtly told, “Please use ‘Overseas Contingency Operation.’” That this “overseas contingency” on which we are “operating” has left a rather large hole in the ground in lower Manhattan apparently is beside the point. Or maybe that’s exactly the point. War is a powerful word, redolent of power, force, zeal, and national purpose. That’s precisely why the Left routinely invokes war in its beloved campaigns against poverty, obesity, and other abstractions. But real wars, the forcible defense of our nation and the pursuit of our interests, are to be avoided. As are real enemies. Thus, the complementary announcement that “enemy combatants” aren’t enemy combatants anymore. They are simply “individuals currently detained at Guantanamo Bay,” according to an affirmation filed in federal court by Attorney General Eric Holder.'

DATELINE: The American Spectator
THE 1966 ELECTION'S WARNING TO OBAMA
Jeffrey Lord: 'It was a historic tidal wave of rejection. Symbolized by, of all things, housewives boycotting supermarkets. And the active participation of seven future presidents of the United States. The 1966 "off year" or congressional elections should also serve as a political warning to the Obama White House as it pursues its strategy of pumping trillions of taxpayer dollars into the economy. In retrospect, 1966 turned out to be a rare moment in American political history. It was in fact the beginning of a realization by everyday Americans that massive government spending programs, the backbone of the New Deal, Truman's Fair Deal, JFK's New Frontier and LBJ's Great Society, must finally be paid for -- by them. In the cost of their groceries, their gas, their housing and everything else from clothes to college educations to steadily rising taxes. They were furious.'

DATELINE: Pajamas Media
OBAMA'S 'RESET' VIDEO FOR IRAN
Claudia Rosett: 'And now here he is in a White House video wishing happy new year to "the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran." ...Seriously, as foreign policy, Obama’s latest is not only nuts, but dangerous. Obama speaks as if he were campaigning in Peoria. The cadences are those of the Hope-and-Change stump: “The promise of a new day, the promise of opportunity for our children, security for our families, progress for our communities, and peace between nations…shared hopes… common dreams.” ...Obama in his message to the mullahs, mentions, delicately, that  “For nearly three decades relations between our nations have been strained.” … Well, yes. Years of Iranian-backed terrorist guns and bombs killing Americans and our allies have put a strain on the relationship.'

DATELINE: The Corner
OBAMA TO PROPOSE GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT OF EXECUTIVE PAY
Andrew McCarthy: 'Welcome to the U.S.S.A. "The Obama administration will call for increased oversight of executive pay at all banks, Wall Street firms and possibly other companies as part of a sweeping plan to overhaul financial regulation," according to government officials who spoke to the New York Times (emphasis added). Is there any evidence, since the government began nationalizing swaths of the economy last autumn, that Washington has a clue about what causes positive corporate performance or about what is in the financial interest of a business enterprise?  Yet the more value the Obama administration and the Democrat Congress destroy — their demagoguery and fiscally insane policies eviscerating the very tax base needed to pay for their exploding liabilities — the more control they get.'

DATELINE: Pajamas Media
OBAMA TURNS ON AMERICA'S VETERANS
Mr. Wolf: 'Back during the campaign, there were veterans that came out for Barack Obama saying that he would be the best person to represent veterans in the future. Still thinking that, are we? Over the last several days, we have seen exactly what President Obama thinks of veterans — and it isn’t much, from what I can tell. Culminating with his (failed) initiative to charge veterans’ insurance companies for such things as combat-related injuries, the current administration is showing that it is certainly not thinking of the best interests of veterans. Combining this gaff with his upcoming intention to eradicate and “un-fund” defense programs, on top of an almost-certain alteration of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) regulation, Obama is likely to become the most unpopular CinC since Carter.'

DATELINE: Red State
OBAMA, ILLEGALS, THE BORDER
Warner Todd Huston: 'According to reports, President Obama said it’s important to have a quick path to citizenship for illegal immigrants so that they can join unions to “get protection” from evil employers. ...Yet, even as he told Californians that he is an advocate of a tighter boarder, reports have emerged that his administration is going to take money away from immigration workplace enforcement programs allowing immigrants to more easily take jobs illegally in the U.S.'

DATELINE: NRO
DON'T BLAME DRUGS FOR HEALTH-CARE COSTS
Sally C. Pipes: 'At first glance, it’s understandable that some believe drug expenditures are inflating overall health-care costs. In 2007, the United States spent $286.5 billion on prescription drugs. To put that figure in perspective, it’s more than the entire GDP of Ireland. In isolation, that’s impressive. But one must remember that prescription drugs actually reduce medical spending by obviating the need for prolonged hospital stays and expensive surgeries. Among the biggest drivers of rising health-care spending are chronic diseases. Caring for people with chronic diseases now accounts for about 85 percent of all U.S. health-care spending. Thus, one of the most effective ways to lower overall health-care costs would be to control chronic diseases. And drugs have proven to be one of the most effective — and least expensive — ways to do that.'

DATELINE: Wizbang
OBAMA INTERVIEW: AN UNATTAINED CIVIL RIGHT
Steve Schippert: 'Speaking of the Warren Court its interpretation of the Constitution during the Civil Rights movement, Obama said, "It wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution. At least as it's been interpreted and more important interpreted in the same way that, generally, the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties; says what the states can't do to you, what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the state government or federal government must do on your behalf." Actually, it does. The federal government must provide for the common defense, a military to provide and ensure National Security. The "essential constraints" placed into the Constitution by the Founding Fathers was to ensure a limited government, not a pervasive and massive federal government providing all things to all people. Obama laments in the interview that the Warren Supreme Court failed to reinterpret the Constitution to read into it what was not there: Redistribution of wealth for "political and economic justice in this society."'
[tip of the fedora to Michael Ledeen]

DATELINE: National Review Online
THE GITMO FIVE'S BURN NOTICE
Jonah Goldberg: 'Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” That’s a line from the movie The Dark Knight. Maybe it’s because I’m just a comic-book-loving fool, but that’s the first thing that popped into my mind when I read the Gitmo Five’s statement. “We are terrorists to the bone,” the Guantanamo detainees proclaimed. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, and his four comrades consider the charges that they slaughtered nearly 3,000 Americans to be “badges of honor, which we carry with pride.” In a six-page document released by a military judge, the men swear that America will fall like “the towers on the blessed 9/11 day.” ...President Obama has concluded that the criminal justice system can handle terrorists just fine.'

DATELINE: The Washington Post
BLAME THE 'LOBBY'
The Editors: 'It wasn't until Mr. [Chas] Freeman withdrew from consideration for the job, however, that it became clear just how bad a selection Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair had made. Mr. Freeman issued a two-page screed on Tuesday in which he described himself as the victim of a shadowy and sinister "Lobby" whose "tactics plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency" and which is "intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government." Yes, Mr. Freeman was referring to Americans who support Israel -- and his statement was a grotesque libel. ...What's striking about the charges by Mr. Freeman and like-minded conspiracy theorists is their blatant disregard for such established facts. Mr. Freeman darkly claims that "it is not permitted for anyone in the United States" to describe Israel's nefarious influence. But several of his allies have made themselves famous (and advanced their careers) by making such charges -- and no doubt Mr. Freeman himself will now win plenty of admiring attention. Crackpot tirades such as his have always had an eager audience here and around the world. The real question is why an administration that says it aims to depoliticize U.S. intelligence estimates would have chosen such a man to oversee them.'
[tip of the fedora to Scott Johnson]

DATELINE: The American Spectator
SLICKNESS WITH A STRAIGHT FACE
Brett Joshpe: 'Clearly the Obama administration has not brought comfort to the markets in its initial weeks in office. The President and his team have also failed to bring clarity or coherence. Their massive agenda is not only ambitious, bold, and expensive, it is contradictory. Take the President's new budget proposal, for instance. In order to pay for the massive expansion of government spending, including $634 billion for health-care reform, Obama proposes to resort to the time honored populist tradition of "taxing the rich," meaning families making in excess of $250,000. Despite the administration's incessant cry that the government should prop up the housing market and increase home prices, the budget contains a provision that would reduce the amount of mortgage interest deductions "wealthy" families can take on their home payments. In other words, Obama would like to take the seemingly few remaining people in our society who can actually afford homes and reduce one of their biggest incentives for home ownership. Not surprisingly, the National Association of Realtors opposes the provision, saying it "will result in further erosion of home prices and home values."'

DATELINE: New York Post
'AIR NANCY': PLANE OUTRAGEOUS
Michelle Malkin: 'HOUSE Speaker Nancy Pelosi is the Jennifer Lopez of con gressional travel - fickle, demanding and notoriously insensitive to the time, costs and energy needed to accommodate her endless demands. On Tuesday, the indispensable government watchdog Judicial Watch released a trove of public records through the Freedom of Information Act on Pelosi's travel arrangements with the US military. As speaker, Pelosi is entitled to reasonable military protection and transport. But it's the size of the planes, the frequency of requests and last-minute cancellations, and the political nature of many of her trips that scream out for accountability. And, of course, it's the hypocrisy. There's the eco-hypocrisy of the Democratic leader who wags her finger at the rest of us for our too-big carbon footprints, and crusades for massive taxes and regulation to reduce global warming. Then there's the Bay Area hypocrisy of the woman who represents one of the most anti-military areas of the country soaking up military resources to shuttle her (and her many family members) across the country almost every weekend.'

DATELINE: Pajamas Media
THE TWO MOST FRIGHTENING THINGS OBAMA SAID
Roger Kimball: 'The second most frightening thing the President said at his televised “forum on heath care” yesterday was that “if we don’t tackle health care, then we’re going to break the bank.” That statement, reminiscent of his warning a few weeks ago that if we didn’t give him $800,000,000,000 right now, today, forget about bothering to read the bill, then the result would “catastrophe.” Well, we gave him the dough, and the result? Yesterday the Dow closed down another 280 points to about 6500. And this brings me to the even more frightening thing Obama said yesterday. There is, he said, “a moral imperative to health care.” Is there? What he meant was that if you agree with his proposal, you are an upstanding citizen who deserves the warm, self-regarding glow of moral infatuation. If you disagree with him, however, you are a greedy, selfish, unenlightened person who needs . . . well, the President hasn’t gotten around to that part of the scenario yet, except to note that anyone who is solvent can expect higher taxes.'

DATELINE: New York Post
WHAT'S BEHIND BARACK'S BRIT SNIT
Arthur Herman: 'Those eight [Churchill biography] volumes will plainly sit unread on the White House bookshelf - because Barack Obama clearly considers that legacy, like the Anglo-American alliance itself, to be outdated. Perhaps the president simply believes some other nation should replace Britain as our closest friend. (For a while, the Clinton administration meant to put Germany ahead of the UK.) Or perhaps Obama has a different view of the special relationship - one held by the likes of his onetime mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. These critics don't see a legacy of freedom going back to Magna Carta. They see a historical procession of self-serving white males. And Churchill is not the man who singlehandedly stood up against Hitler and who warned us all about the Soviet Union's iron curtain, but a white supremacist. In this view (which also sees an America steeped in racism, colonialism and greed, rather than a nation dedicated to the proposition of liberty under law), there is no need to preserve any precious British-born legacy. At times, of course, both the United States and the United Kingdom have fallen short of their shared ideals. But taken together their shows how the idea of liberty empowers human beings to resist and overthrow tyranny with a force unequaled in history.'

DATELINE: Frontpage Magazine
THE VOICE OF AMERICA SILENCED ON RADICAL ISLAM
Daniel Pipes: 'For the past year, there’s been a concerted push within the U.S. government to ban frank talk about the nature of the Islamist enemy. I’ve been wondering how this change in vocabulary actually occurs: is it a spontaneous mood shift, a group decision, or a directive from on high? The answer just arrived, in the shape of a leaked memo dated March 2 from Jennifer Janin, head of the Urdu service at the Voice of America.'

DATELINE: The American Thinker
MICHELLE OBAMA'S PATIENT-DUMPING SCHEME
David Catron: 'The First Lady helped create a notorious program that dumped poor patients on community hospitals, yet the national media ignore the story. Imagine if her husband were a Republican. The University of Chicago Medical Center has received a good deal of justly opprobrious press over its policy of "redirecting" low-income patients to community hospitals while reserving its own beds for well-heeled patients requiring highly profitable procedures. Substantial coverage was given to a recent indictment of the program by the American College of Emergency Physicians. ACEP's president, Dr. Nick Jouriles, released a statement suggesting that the initiative comes "dangerously close to ‘patient dumping,' a practice made illegal by the Emergency Medical Labor and Treatment Act, and reflected an effort to ‘cherry pick' wealthy patients over poor." Oddly absent from most of the unflattering press coverage of UCMC's patient-dumping scheme is any mention of the role our new First Lady played in devising the program.'

DATELINE: Pajamas Media
NO COUNTRY FOR BLACK MEN
Travis Rowley: 'The Coen Brothers’ 2007 film No Country for Old Men revolves around the tale of several young men engaged in a violent race for a satchel of cash. Tommy Lee Jones plays an aging sheriff investigating the depressing trail of bloodshed, markings that inform the old man that the customs and morals that guided his generation have decayed even faster than he has. Jones ends up as a depiction of the anguish experienced by people left without a country they can call home. Democrats remain on their quest to offer similar anguish to African-Americans, as liberals now embark on their fifth decade aimed at stripping these reliable party constituents of American nationalism. ...Because racial camaraderie has resulted in more than 90% of blacks predictably voting for Democrats, the advice to be more “inclusive” is oft delivered to the GOP. Replicate the way in which Democrats pander to minorities in order to attract blacks to the Republican Party. But safeguarding the feelings of minorities by adhering to liberals’ politically correct pap is precisely the cause of blacks’ adoption of big-government, anti-American liberalism. Do Republicans really want to be associated with such a philosophy? The advice is backwards. Blacks are the ones to make concessions. They must abandon their liberalism before the party of conservatism can consider their membership. A simple matter of principle.'

DATELINE: Politico
GROUP LAUNCHES HEALTH CARE OFFENSIVE
Jonathan Martin: 'Firing some of the first shots in the coming showdown over health care, a conservative group led by the former owner of the Hospital Corporation of America is beginning a multimillion-dollar campaign Tuesday in opposition to government-run coverage. Conservatives for Patients Rights is going on TV, radio and the Web in the same week President Barack Obama hosts a health care summit at the White House. The group’s leader, Richard Scott, is hoping a pro-free-market message will rally the right to join the fray on what may be the most hard-fought policy battle in the first year of the new administration. ...Scott, a major GOP donor, is pushing for four principles to any health care reform package: individual choice, competition between carriers, giving patients’ ownership over their own coverage and rewarding those who make healthy lifestyle choices.'
[tip of the fedora to Philip Klein]

DATELINE: The American Spectator
OBAMA'S ENEMIES LIST
Mark Hyman: 'In precedent-setting action, Obama moved his director of political affairs, a highly partisan post, from the Old Executive Office Building into the West Wing. Political operative Patrick Gaspard was given White House access not experienced by his predecessors. Obama official Shauna Daly, a non-lawyer and career opposition researcher described as a "partisan dirt-digger," was assigned to the White House counsel office. The move signals not only a new low in partisan activities, but suggests the office assignment may be intended to hide Daly's political activities under the guise of the counsel's attorney-client privileges. What America witnessed before the election and mere hours after Obama was sworn into office is just a sampling of what Americans can likely expect throughout an Obama presidency. One cannot help but reach the conclusion an Obama Enemies List is already being compiled and free speech restrictions are being considered. Fortunately for Obama he has no shortage of Congressional foot soldiers to help in his cause to muzzle critics and silence news outlets that refuse to adhere to Democratic talking points that are faxed directly into the network newscast teleprompters. ...Imagine the gross violations against political speech that may very well occur when there are no checks and balances from a sycophantic Congress and there is complicity from the national news gatekeepers.'

DATELINE: Real Clear Politics
OBAMA WON'T END THE CULTURE WARS
Rod Dreher: 'Will Barack Obama end the culture wars? He couldn't if he wanted. In America, the culture war will never die, only wax and wane across multiple battlefields. When you live in a large, diverse, pluralistic democracy, it comes with the territory. ...The idea here is that once their economic needs are met, these conservative voters' cultural concerns will evaporate. What such unimaginative liberals - especially those in the media, where their astigmatic vision utterly dominates - fail to grasp is that their way of seeing the world is not normative outside their circles. Shocking though it may seem, there really are people who believe that unborn children deserve constitutional protection. There really are people who believe that marriage is rightly limited to one man and one woman. There really are people who believe that there is nothing affirmative in discriminating against someone because of the color of their skin. And there really are people who believe these things are important enough to fight for.'

DATELINE: National Review Online
SENDING OBAMA TO REWRITE
Deputy Managing Editor Kevin Williamson: 'It’s often been remarked that President Obama’s speeches are much less interesting in print than when spoken. For all his reputation as a master communicator, Obama’s words fall flat when not borne aloft by his excellent oratory. As an example, his singularly unimpressive op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post is vague where it should be specific, and where specific, wrong. As a guide to Obama’s economic thinking, it is worrisome.'

DATELINE: The U.S. Senate
BILLIONS OF WASTEFUL SPENDING IN THE GENERATIONAL THEFT ACT AKA SENATE STIMULUS
Sen. Tom Coburn: '...I wanted to spend some time to make sure the American people know what is in this bill. I think once they know what is in this bill, they are going to reject it out of hand. Let me read for my colleagues some of the things that are in this bill. The biggest earmark in history is in this bill.'
[tip of the fedora to the NRO Staff]

DATELINE: The Corner
SEPTEMBER 10 AMERICA IS BACK
Andrew McCarthy: 'Maybe [Obama's] ultimate decision would be to transfer the war-crimes detainees for trial in civilian court, maybe it would be to ship them to some country willing to take them, or maybe it would be to continue detaining them without trial under some new legal system.  But you could bet the ranch that war crimes defendants would never again be charged in military commissions.  Obama's antiwar base, which rejects the premise that we are at war, cannot abide such military prosecutions.'

DATELINE: The Corner
WE PLAN TO LIVE UP TO OUR ETHICAL STANDARDS VERY, VERY SOON
Byron York: 'A number of bloggers are pointing out this ethics pledge on Barack Obama's campaign website:

Sunlight Before Signing: Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them. As president, Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.

Obama has now signed two bills into law — the Lily Ledbetter Act and SCHIP — and in neither case did he wait five days before signing.'

DATELINE: NRO
PRESIDENT HAMLET
Victor Davis Hanson: 'Obama, unlike Bush, is an adherent of the therapeutic mindset. The recession was caused by “them”—Wall Street greed mostly—and never “us,” we who borrowed too much for houses we could not afford and things we did not need. The solution will be the European socialist model, in which a few thousand well-trained elites, educated at our best Ivy League law and business schools, will form partnerships with private enterprise. These Guardians will make major economic decisions and redistribute wealth through high taxes and massive entitlements—albeit with the understanding that the managerial class in both business and government will enjoy lifestyles similar to those they led in the past.'

DATELINE: Contentions
GOT HIS E-MAIL ADDRESS?
Jennifer Rubin: 'The problem all presidents face is that people around them don’t tell them when they are saying silly things. President Obama wanted to keep his blackberry to prevent being sealed in the presidential bubble. Someone needs to email him — quick! — and urge him to stop underestimating how tuned in the American people are. If he keeps this up, he’ll tax the ability of the MSM to maintain the storyline that he is the smartest, savviest, least ideological president ever.'

DATELINE: The New Criterion
THE DEATH OF POLITICS
James Bowman: 'But the decision to close down the internment camp — for that is what it is — at Guantánamo Bay is an example of just that kind of wishful thinking, which appears to be all too common in our brave new, depoliticized world. Sooner or later we will have to learn that neither science nor morality can do the job that politics does, or once did, which is to produce something approaching a consensus about the way in which, as a society, we are to navigate around and between a never-ending series of hard choices between the least of many, many evils.'

DATELINE: The American Spectator
A NECESSARY WISDOM
Christopher Orlet: 'As a confirmed and committed cynic, I must be high on President Barack Obama's enemies' list. Certainly well ahead of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. One of Mr. Obama's first official acts was to launch an undeclared war on cynics. The president has demanded we shed our cynicism -- which he calls "a sorry kind of wisdom" -- or suffer the consequences. It's easy to see why. "A cynic," wrote Ambrose Bierce -- another damned cynic -- "is a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be." Mr. Obama wants us to close our eyes and imagine how things might be in some glorious future, after he and Hillary have sat down to tea with Chavez and Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong-Il. After his Merry Bureaucrats have robbed the rich and given what little is left -- after administrative costs -- to the poor. We cynics are in for four long years. Possibly more.'

DATELINE: The Washington Times
OBAMA'S 'BLANK SCREEN'
Tony Blankley: 'President Obama is a beguiling but confounding figure. As he has said of himself: "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” (”The Audacity of Hope.”) It is indeed audacious that he should proclaim this consciously disingenuous attribute. And, as one reads his inaugural address, it is hard not to conclude that it was shrewdly crafted to perpetuate such confusion. ... I believe that Mr. Obama intends to craft a new nationalism, using the disassembled timber of our traditional values to build a new, more collectivist - less individualistic - ship of state. The planks will look vaguely familiar, but the ship will be quite different. It is as if he would disassemble the warship Old Ironsides and build with its timbers a collectivist's Ark.'

DATELINE: Pajamas Media
THE OBAMA CULT OF PERSONALITY
Candace de Russy: 'Such glorification of Obama led even acolyte Paul Krugman to observe during the Democratic primary that his campaign appeared "dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality." Will this same cultishness continue to envelop the Obama presidency? Perhaps not, as the new president is forced to make Solomonic decisions that perforce offend one constituency or another, and if cracks begin to emerge in the mainstream media's worshipful bias in his favor.
   But it is also possible that this personality cult may endure and fructify, especially if the news media continue to suspend critical analysis of Obama's long-held views and programs. Also, one can ask whether he will choose to use, to cultish ends, the new, well-funded organization, Organizing for America, which he has fashioned from his vast grass-roots political machinery, and which is described in the Los Angeles Times as "an unprecedented standing political army that will await orders from a president."'

DATELINE: The New York Times
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: FREED FROM GUANTANAMO, MAN BECOMES AL QAEDA LEADER
Robert Worth: 'The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obamasigned Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year. The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabiain 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen. His status was announced in an Internet statement by the militant group and was confirmed by an American counterterrorism official.'
[tip of the fedora to Kathryn Jean Lopez]

DATELINE: Red State
OBAMA OUTRAGES ON HIS FIRST DAY IN OFFICE
Josh Painter: 'President Barack Obama, on his first full day in the office, has managed to draw the ire of family members of those killed on September 11, 2001, and in other terror attacks.  The rookie president’s executive draft  order Wednesday calls for closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility within a year and halting any war crimes trials in the meantime. ...on the first day of his watch Obama has begun the process of making our nation less safe, something his predecessor worked so hard for so many years to prevent. This is just one of the reasons why so many of us feared the elevation of Obama to the presidency. He doesn’t understand national security, nor does he realize the potential consequences of his words and deeds.'

DATELINE: The American Spectator
OBAMA'S RACE TO THE PAST
Peter Ferrara: '...Obama said: "But our general philosophy is….we don't have pride of authorship. There are a couple of basic principles I laid out. We've got to move quickly. We've got to make sure that any investments that we make have good long term benefits for the economy, not just short term….We can't have waste and abuse in it. We can't have earmarks in it….If people have better ideas on certain provisions, if they say, you know, this is going to work better than that, then we welcome that." That's all. Just good government principles. No ideological blinders here. We are completely open to whatever works. Or as his spokeswoman said last week, "We are guided by what works, not by any ideology or special interests." This is political propaganda coldly calculated to distract the public from Obama's highly ideological agenda that studiously avoids everything that would work, because Obama and his ultraliberal Democrats ideologically object to it, and studiously focuses only on what was tried and failed long ago, because Obama and the retro Ds are all ideologically so nostalgic for that.'

DATELINE: The London Spectator
I HAVE SEEN YOUR FUTURE, AMERICA, AND IT DOESN'T WORK
James Delingpole: 'In four, or more likely, eight years time, America is going to wake up one morning — rather as Britain did in the dog-end of the Blair years — with the most terrible hang- over, only to find its pockets empty, its savings gone, its property trashed to virtual worthlessness, its streets rife with crime and its traditional liberties circumscribed by nannying bureaucrats and pettifogging regulation, and it’s going to ask itself: ‘Huh? How did that happen? Did someone drug me? Why didn’t I see that one coming?’ As one who did and does see it coming, I find it hard to summon too much sympathy. It’s like Dr Faustus complaining when, having been granted his every earthly fantasy, the devil turns up at the end to steal away his soul. It’s like the citizens of Hamlyn complaining when, having welshed on their deal with the Pied Piper, he lures all their kids inside the mountain. You just want to give them all a good shake and say: ‘Did you think it was going to come free, this once-in-a-lifetime wonder deal you made with the mysterious dark stranger you met at the crossroads at midnight?’ In your dreams, America. In your dreams!'

DATELINE: Frontpage Magazine
THE VOICE OF AMERICA SILENCED ON RADICAL ISLAM
Daniel Pipes: 'For the past year, there’s been a concerted push within the U.S. government to ban frank talk about the nature of the Islamist enemy. I’ve been wondering how this change in vocabulary actually occurs: is it a spontaneous mood shift, a group decision, or a directive from on high? The answer just arrived, in the shape of a leaked memo dated March 2 from Jennifer Janin, head of the Urdu service at the Voice of America.'

DATELINE: The American Thinker
MICHELLE OBAMA'S PATIENT-DUMPING SCHEME
David Catron: 'The First Lady helped create a notorious program that dumped poor patients on community hospitals, yet the national media ignore the story. Imagine if her husband were a Republican. The University of Chicago Medical Center has received a good deal of justly opprobrious press over its policy of "redirecting" low-income patients to community hospitals while reserving its own beds for well-heeled patients requiring highly profitable procedures. Substantial coverage was given to a recent indictment of the program by the American College of Emergency Physicians. ACEP's president, Dr. Nick Jouriles, released a statement suggesting that the initiative comes "dangerously close to ‘patient dumping,' a practice made illegal by the Emergency Medical Labor and Treatment Act, and reflected an effort to ‘cherry pick' wealthy patients over poor." Oddly absent from most of the unflattering press coverage of UCMC's patient-dumping scheme is any mention of the role our new First Lady played in devising the program.'

DATELINE: Pajamas Media
NO COUNTRY FOR BLACK MEN
Travis Rowley: 'The Coen Brothers’ 2007 film No Country for Old Men revolves around the tale of several young men engaged in a violent race for a satchel of cash. Tommy Lee Jones plays an aging sheriff investigating the depressing trail of bloodshed, markings that inform the old man that the customs and morals that guided his generation have decayed even faster than he has. Jones ends up as a depiction of the anguish experienced by people left without a country they can call home. Democrats remain on their quest to offer similar anguish to African-Americans, as liberals now embark on their fifth decade aimed at stripping these reliable party constituents of American nationalism. ...Because racial camaraderie has resulted in more than 90% of blacks predictably voting for Democrats, the advice to be more “inclusive” is oft delivered to the GOP. Replicate the way in which Democrats pander to minorities in order to attract blacks to the Republican Party. But safeguarding the feelings of minorities by adhering to liberals’ politically correct pap is precisely the cause of blacks’ adoption of big-government, anti-American liberalism. Do Republicans really want to be associated with such a philosophy? The advice is backwards. Blacks are the ones to make concessions. They must abandon their liberalism before the party of conservatism can consider their membership. A simple matter of principle.'

DATELINE: Politico
GROUP LAUNCHES HEALTH CARE OFFENSIVE
Jonathan Martin: 'Firing some of the first shots in the coming showdown over health care, a conservative group led by the former owner of the Hospital Corporation of America is beginning a multimillion-dollar campaign Tuesday in opposition to government-run coverage. Conservatives for Patients Rights is going on TV, radio and the Web in the same week President Barack Obama hosts a health care summit at the White House. The group’s leader, Richard Scott, is hoping a pro-free-market message will rally the right to join the fray on what may be the most hard-fought policy battle in the first year of the new administration. ...Scott, a major GOP donor, is pushing for four principles to any health care reform package: individual choice, competition between carriers, giving patients’ ownership over their own coverage and rewarding those who make healthy lifestyle choices.'
[tip of the fedora to Philip Klein]

DATELINE: The American Spectator
OBAMA'S ENEMIES LIST
Mark Hyman: 'In precedent-setting action, Obama moved his director of political affairs, a highly partisan post, from the Old Executive Office Building into the West Wing. Political operative Patrick Gaspard was given White House access not experienced by his predecessors. Obama official Shauna Daly, a non-lawyer and career opposition researcher described as a "partisan dirt-digger," was assigned to the White House counsel office. The move signals not only a new low in partisan activities, but suggests the office assignment may be intended to hide Daly's political activities under the guise of the counsel's attorney-client privileges. What America witnessed before the election and mere hours after Obama was sworn into office is just a sampling of what Americans can likely expect throughout an Obama presidency. One cannot help but reach the conclusion an Obama Enemies List is already being compiled and free speech restrictions are being considered. Fortunately for Obama he has no shortage of Congressional foot soldiers to help in his cause to muzzle critics and silence news outlets that refuse to adhere to Democratic talking points that are faxed directly into the network newscast teleprompters. ...Imagine the gross violations against political speech that may very well occur when there are no checks and balances from a sycophantic Congress and there is complicity from the national news gatekeepers.'

DATELINE: Real Clear Politics
OBAMA WON'T END THE CULTURE WARS
Rod Dreher: 'Will Barack Obama end the culture wars? He couldn't if he wanted. In America, the culture war will never die, only wax and wane across multiple battlefields. When you live in a large, diverse, pluralistic democracy, it comes with the territory. ...The idea here is that once their economic needs are met, these conservative voters' cultural concerns will evaporate. What such unimaginative liberals - especially those in the media, where their astigmatic vision utterly dominates - fail to grasp is that their way of seeing the world is not normative outside their circles. Shocking though it may seem, there really are people who believe that unborn children deserve constitutional protection. There really are people who believe that marriage is rightly limited to one man and one woman. There really are people who believe that there is nothing affirmative in discriminating against someone because of the color of their skin. And there really are people who believe these things are important enough to fight for.'

DATELINE: National Review Online
SENDING OBAMA TO REWRITE
Deputy Managing Editor Kevin Williamson: 'It’s often been remarked that President Obama’s speeches are much less interesting in print than when spoken. For all his reputation as a master communicator, Obama’s words fall flat when not borne aloft by his excellent oratory. As an example, his singularly unimpressive op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post is vague where it should be specific, and where specific, wrong. As a guide to Obama’s economic thinking, it is worrisome.'

DATELINE: National Review Online
A WEALTH-EATER ADMINISTRATION
John Derbyshire: 'If professional investment advisors sometimes can’t make sense of the economy, how good do you think politicians and bureaucrats are at it? Right. They don’t have the beginning of a clue. Keep that in mind when you hear them talk about “stimulating consumption” and “creating jobs.” The congresscritters, paper-shufflers, and gubmint time-servers of Washington D.C. don’t have a freaking clue. They’re not wealth-creators; they’re wealth-eaters. That includes the new administration. Why would they have a clue? Very few of them have ever done anything an ordinary citizen would recognize as work. Here’s the Obama cabinet...'

DATELINE: The U.S. Senate
BILLIONS OF WASTEFUL SPENDING IN THE GENERATIONAL THEFT ACT AKA SENATE STIMULUS
Sen. Tom Coburn: '...I wanted to spend some time to make sure the American people know what is in this bill. I think once they know what is in this bill, they are going to reject it out of hand. Let me read for my colleagues some of the things that are in this bill. The biggest earmark in history is in this bill.'
[tip of the fedora to the NRO Staff]

DATELINE: The Corner
SEPTEMBER 10 AMERICA IS BACK
Andrew McCarthy: 'Maybe [Obama's] ultimate decision would be to transfer the war-crimes detainees for trial in civilian court, maybe it would be to ship them to some country willing to take them, or maybe it would be to continue detaining them without trial under some new legal system.  But you could bet the ranch that war crimes defendants would never again be charged in military commissions.  Obama's antiwar base, which rejects the premise that we are at war, cannot abide such military prosecutions.'

DATELINE: The Corner
WE PLAN TO LIVE UP TO OUR ETHICAL STANDARDS VERY, VERY SOON
Byron York: 'A number of bloggers are pointing out this ethics pledge on Barack Obama's campaign website:

Sunlight Before Signing: Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them. As president, Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.

Obama has now signed two bills into law — the Lily Ledbetter Act and SCHIP — and in neither case did he wait five days before signing.'

DATELINE: NRO
PRESIDENT HAMLET
Victor Davis Hanson: 'Obama, unlike Bush, is an adherent of the therapeutic mindset. The recession was caused by “them”—Wall Street greed mostly—and never “us,” we who borrowed too much for houses we could not afford and things we did not need. The solution will be the European socialist model, in which a few thousand well-trained elites, educated at our best Ivy League law and business schools, will form partnerships with private enterprise. These Guardians will make major economic decisions and redistribute wealth through high taxes and massive entitlements—albeit with the understanding that the managerial class in both business and government will enjoy lifestyles similar to those they led in the past.'

DATELINE: Contentions
GOT HIS E-MAIL ADDRESS?
Jennifer Rubin: 'The problem all presidents face is that people around them don’t tell them when they are saying silly things. President Obama wanted to keep his blackberry to prevent being sealed in the presidential bubble. Someone needs to email him — quick! — and urge him to stop underestimating how tuned in the American people are. If he keeps this up, he’ll tax the ability of the MSM to maintain the storyline that he is the smartest, savviest, least ideological president ever.'

DATELINE: The New Criterion
THE DEATH OF POLITICS
James Bowman: 'But the decision to close down the internment camp — for that is what it is — at Guantánamo Bay is an example of just that kind of wishful thinking, which appears to be all too common in our brave new, depoliticized world. Sooner or later we will have to learn that neither science nor morality can do the job that politics does, or once did, which is to produce something approaching a consensus about the way in which, as a society, we are to navigate around and between a never-ending series of hard choices between the least of many, many evils.'

DATELINE: The American Spectator
A NECESSARY WISDOM
Christopher Orlet: 'As a confirmed and committed cynic, I must be high on President Barack Obama's enemies' list. Certainly well ahead of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. One of Mr. Obama's first official acts was to launch an undeclared war on cynics. The president has demanded we shed our cynicism -- which he calls "a sorry kind of wisdom" -- or suffer the consequences. It's easy to see why. "A cynic," wrote Ambrose Bierce -- another damned cynic -- "is a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be." Mr. Obama wants us to close our eyes and imagine how things might be in some glorious future, after he and Hillary have sat down to tea with Chavez and Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong-Il. After his Merry Bureaucrats have robbed the rich and given what little is left -- after administrative costs -- to the poor. We cynics are in for four long years. Possibly more.'

DATELINE: The Washington Times
OBAMA'S 'BLANK SCREEN'
Tony Blankley: 'President Obama is a beguiling but confounding figure. As he has said of himself: "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” (”The Audacity of Hope.”) It is indeed audacious that he should proclaim this consciously disingenuous attribute. And, as one reads his inaugural address, it is hard not to conclude that it was shrewdly crafted to perpetuate such confusion. ... I believe that Mr. Obama intends to craft a new nationalism, using the disassembled timber of our traditional values to build a new, more collectivist - less individualistic - ship of state. The planks will look vaguely familiar, but the ship will be quite different. It is as if he would disassemble the warship Old Ironsides and build with its timbers a collectivist's Ark.'

DATELINE: Pajamas Media
THE OBAMA CULT OF PERSONALITY
Candace de Russy: 'Such glorification of Obama led even acolyte Paul Krugman to observe during the Democratic primary that his campaign appeared "dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality." Will this same cultishness continue to envelop the Obama presidency? Perhaps not, as the new president is forced to make Solomonic decisions that perforce offend one constituency or another, and if cracks begin to emerge in the mainstream media's worshipful bias in his favor.
   But it is also possible that this personality cult may endure and fructify, especially if the news media continue to suspend critical analysis of Obama's long-held views and programs. Also, one can ask whether he will choose to use, to cultish ends, the new, well-funded organization, Organizing for America, which he has fashioned from his vast grass-roots political machinery, and which is described in the Los Angeles Times as "an unprecedented standing political army that will await orders from a president."'

DATELINE: The New York Times
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: FREED FROM GUANTANAMO, MAN BECOMES AL QAEDA LEADER
Robert Worth: 'The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obamasigned Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year. The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabiain 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen. His status was announced in an Internet statement by the militant group and was confirmed by an American counterterrorism official.'
[tip of the fedora to Kathryn Jean Lopez]

DATELINE: Red State
OBAMA OUTRAGES ON HIS FIRST DAY IN OFFICE
Josh Painter: 'President Barack Obama, on his first full day in the office, has managed to draw the ire of family members of those killed on September 11, 2001, and in other terror attacks.  The rookie president’s executive draft  order Wednesday calls for closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility within a year and halting any war crimes trials in the meantime. ...on the first day of his watch Obama has begun the process of making our nation less safe, something his predecessor worked so hard for so many years to prevent. This is just one of the reasons why so many of us feared the elevation of Obama to the presidency. He doesn’t understand national security, nor does he realize the potential consequences of his words and deeds.'

DATELINE: The American Spectator
OBAMA'S RACE TO THE PAST
Peter Ferrara: '...Obama said: "But our general philosophy is….we don't have pride of authorship. There are a couple of basic principles I laid out. We've got to move quickly. We've got to make sure that any investments that we make have good long term benefits for the economy, not just short term….We can't have waste and abuse in it. We can't have earmarks in it….If people have better ideas on certain provisions, if they say, you know, this is going to work better than that, then we welcome that." That's all. Just good government principles. No ideological blinders here. We are completely open to whatever works. Or as his spokeswoman said last week, "We are guided by what works, not by any ideology or special interests." This is political propaganda coldly calculated to distract the public from Obama's highly ideological agenda that studiously avoids everything that would work, because Obama and his ultraliberal Democrats ideologically object to it, and studiously focuses only on what was tried and failed long ago, because Obama and the retro Ds are all ideologically so nostalgic for that.'

DATELINE: Pajamas Media
QUESTIONING OBAMA'S PATRIOTISM
Bernard Chapin: 'Over the years, Democrats have become acutely aware that a pervasive lack of patriotism is a major impediment to electoral achievement. Due to their paladins regarding the United States as being a racist, sexist state — one whose history can be summed up with the single word “oppression” — it is not immediately evident why any of their number would make for a suitable commander in chief. Promoting coat-and-tie radicals like Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta to the heights of power no doubt will intensify Obama’s prestige among foreign leaders. There’s nothing that foreign intelligence services appreciate more than the placement of total patsies as the overseers of America’s autonomy.'

DATELINE: Slate
MORE THAN A GOOD FEELING
Christopher Hitchens: 'Why are so many oligarchs, royal families, and special-interest groups giving money to the Clinton Foundation? Why should anyone doubt...that in small matters as well as in large ones, the old slogan from the 1992 election still holds true? As Bill so touchingly put it that year, if you voted for him, you got "two for one." What the country—and the world—has since learned is a slight variation on that, which I would crudely phrase as "buy one, get one free."'

DATELINE: ABC News
OBAMA REFUSES TO RULE OUT PROSECTUTION OF BUSH OFFICIALS
From the interview with Stephanopoulos: 'We’re still evaluating how we’re going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we’re going to be looking at past practices and I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.'
DATELINE: Red State
REACTION BY DAN SPENCER
'If Obama is truly interested in governing in a bipartisan fashion he should withdraw the nomination Holder to be Attorney General, rule out the political investigation of the Bush administration and thank President Bush for not investigating Holder’s involvement in President Clinton’s last minute pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich, whose wife, a Democratic fund-raiser, contributed $450,000 to Clinton’s presidential library foundation and more than $100,000 to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s U.S. Senate campaign.'
DATELINE: Red State
SCREW THEM. PARDON EVERYBODY.
Erick Erickson: 'By his unwillingness to use definitive language against prosecution of Bush administration officials, Barack Obama puts in jeopardy the future successes of this country against terrorism.'

DATELINE: Red State
CORRUPT DEMOCRATS PLAY TO TYPE
Dan McLaughlin: 'I argued during the general election campaign that the single most scandalously under-covered story of the campaign was Barack Obama’s thorough immersion in machine politics in Chicago. And I confidently predicted, on November 3, that Obama, if elected, would continue to be haunted in office by those and other ties to his Chicago past. But even I didn’t imagine that the continuing saga of Chicago political corruption and Obama’s role as a willing tool of machine politicians would explode so quickly that the Governor of Illinois would be arrested for trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat just five weeks after Election Day. Now, we have Bill Richardson withdrawing from his appointment as Obama’s Secretary of Commerce due to a federal grand jury investigation of pay-to-play practices in his administration in New Mexico. Of course, while the exact nature and timing of the Blagojevich and Richardson scandals came as a surprise, it was inevitable that the foul odor of political corruption - and not just from Chicago - was going to settle over Democrat-controlled Washington. It would have been shocking if it didn’t.'

DATELINE: Pajamas Media
OBAMA AND CAPGRASS SYNDROME
Roger Kimball: 'Capgras Syndrome? That’s the delusion, named for the French shrink Jean Marie Joseph Capgras, that “a close relative or friend has been replaced by an impostor, an exact double, despite recognition of familiarity in appearance and behavior.” How could Obama, who promised Change, assemble an administration virtually indistinguishable from that of Bill Clinton? How could he add insult to injury by asking Bob Gates, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, to stay on? How could he pick Lawrence Summers as his top economic advisor? Didn’t Obama know that Summers had trespassed on one of the most sacrosanct of prohibitions by offering an independent thought touching on what David Stove called “the intellectual capacity of women”? How dare he? Yes, it’s cognitive-dissonance time among the Obamaniacs, and I fully expect widespread sightings of Capgras Syndrome among the faithful.'

DATELINE: The Corner
GAZITIS
Victor Davis Hanson: 'Note likewise the growing silence from the incoming Obama administration and its supporters, who now have dropped much of the talk about the tragedy of not having an early ascension in November rather than January 20th. Gaza is a sore about which you cannot vote present, charm terrorists into disarmament, talk in platitudes of hoping and changing it, or simply keep blaming George Bush for not being "engaged." Instead, Obama must face the hard choices of either alienating traditional liberal pro-Israel supporters, or the powerful anti-Israeli fringe groups that have galvanized much of the Obama candidacy, here and abroad. UNing an asymmetrical war with terrorists with ostensible blame for both sides as equally culpable won't do either. The Middle East almost by definition requires an American President to be disliked as much as he is deemed necessary.'

DATELINE: Real Clear Politics
OBAMA MAY BE AN ALOOF PRESIDENT
Michael Barone: 'Barack Obama and his family are vacationing in his native Hawaii, far from the wintry snows of Chicago -- and far from almost every other American politician. There's a metaphor here for how I think Obama is going to conduct himself as president: He's going to try to keep his distance from other politicians, including his fellow Democrats. I see him trying to remain aloof from his party, much as Dwight Eisenhower did five decades ago. Like Eisenhower, I think he's drawn the conclusion that his party needs him more than he needs his party.'

DATELINE: Forbes
YOU LIKE US! BUT NOT FOR LONG
Matthew Kaminski: 'In the weeks since Barack Obama and his family walked out on that Grant Park stage, our euphoria about the world's euphoria must surely count as the most endearingly silly outcome of this election.One hates to spoil a good party, but here's a bet that's far safer these days than a U.S. Treasury bill: Even with Obama at the White House, they won't really like us any more than before. ...America is a useful enemy to nurture.'
[tip of the fedora to Instapundit]

DATELINE: The New York Times
FORCED TO CHOOSE?
Reuel Marc Gerecht: 'Mr. Obama will soon face the same awful choices that confronted George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and he could well be forced to accept a central feature of their anti-terrorist methods: extraordinary rendition. If the choice is between non-deniable aggressive questioning conducted by Americans and deniable torturous interrogations by foreigners acting on behalf of the United States, it is almost certain that as president Mr. Obama will choose the latter.'
[tip of the fedora to Andrew McCarthy]

DATELINE: The Corner
ITS THE 1972 SHOW!
Victor Davis Hanson: 'We are witnessing the police needing policing — all the while we are still waiting, waiting, waiting for still more "let me be perfectly clear" s about the Blagojevich mess. The Axlerod matter-of-fact, of-course-he-has, admission of initial talks between Obama and Blagojevich has already been rendered inoperative. And the initial sweeping Obama assurances about neither himself nor his staff involved in the process of bargaining and horse-trading for his Senate seat with the Governor are already in need of alteration. Last week's modified limited hang-out simply won't do.'

DATELINE: American Thinker
HAS ATLAS STARTED TO SHRUG?
C. Edmund Wright: 'When the jobs report for November came out last week, many so-called "experts" were shocked at the massive loss of an estimated 533 thousand jobs. I caused part of this job loss and I know precisely why; the election. The results portend big trouble for small business. Like many business owners, we are no longer willing to take all of the financial and legal risks and put up with all of the aggravation of owning and running a business. Not with the prospects of even higher taxes, more regulation, more litigation and more emboldened bureaucrats on the horizon.  Like others we know, we are getting out while the getting is, well, tolerable. Many who aren't getting out are scaling back.'