DATELINE: The Weekly Standard
ERIC HOLDER'S JUSTICE DEPARTMENT: IT'S ALL POLITICS, ALL THE TIME
Jennifer Rubin: 'In the litany of criticisms leveled at President George W. Bush none was repeated more often than the accusation that he had "politicized the administration of justice." In endless television show appearances and congressional hearings, Democratic lawmakers like Senator Chuck Schumer railed against the politicization of the Justice Department, lecturing all who would listen about how Justice "is different than any other department. In every other department, the chief cabinet officer is supposed to follow the president's orders, requests, without exception. But the Justice Department has a higher responsibility: rule of law and the Constitution." Democrats loved to berate the often hapless Alberto Gonzales, who they claimed failed to uphold this standard as attorney general. Although the alleged offenses occurred primarily on the watch of Gonzales (who served only two and a half of Bush's eight years), the criticism stuck and lingered long after Gonzales departed. Inspector general investigations and oversight hearings maintained the drumbeat of accusations. And when the distinguished federal judge Michael Mukasey was nominated to replace Gonzales, he was peppered by Senators Joe Biden, Russ Feingold and Patrick Leahy, among others, with questions about just how badly the department had been "politicized." The average American couldn't help but conclude that something had gone terribly awry. It is therefore surprising that in the first seven months of the Obama administration, a series of hyper-partisan decisions, questionable appointments, and the inexplicable dismissal of a high-profile voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther party have once again fanned suspicions that the Justice Department is a pawn in partisan political battles. Both in Congress and among a number of current and former Justice Department employees is a growing concern that the Obama administration is politicizing the department in ways the Bush team never imagined. A former Justice employee cautions that every administration has the right and the obligation to set policy. "Elections have consequences," he affirms. But he thinks that the Obama administration has gone beyond policy reversals and is interfering with prosecutorial decisions, staffing the department with unqualified personnel, and invoking privilege to thwart proper congressional oversight and public scrutiny.'

DATELINE: No Sheeples Here
DISGRACED DINOSAUR DAN RATHER URGES, "SAVE THE PRESS"
Carol Hall: 'Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather called on President Barack Obama to form a White House commission to help save the press in an emotional speech at the Aspen Institute. At stake, he argued, is the very survival of American democracy. "A truly free and independent press is the red, beating heart of democracy and freedom. This is not something just for journalists to be concerned about, and the loss of jobs and the loss of newspapers, and the diminution of the American press' traditional role of being the watchdog on power. This is something every citizen should be concerned about," said Rather. Oh, we are Dan. We are gravely concerned. Ever since February 2007, when the inordinately protracted primary season began, the corporate-controlled media have been AWOL. That red, beating heart of democracy and freedom Rather spoke of was egregiously negligent in vetting one Barack Hussein Obama.'

DATELINE: Pajamas Media
OBAMA'S PATH NOT TAKEN
Victor Davis Hanson: 'In 1968 a divided country elected Nixon “to bring us together” in the mistaken notion that he was a Reaganesque conservative rather than a vindictive partisan. So too forty years later, mutatis mutandis, the country wanted to go a notch left, and ended up instead with a European socialist nursed in the politics of Chicago—and like Nixon, unless he changes, doomed to implode.'

DATELINE: The Other McCain
IN WHICH I PRAISE GLENN GREENWALD
Robert Stacy McCain: 'This is one of those left-right libertarian populist convergences. The Goldman Sachs bailout infuriates Greenwald because he hates greedy capitalists; it infuriates me because it shows how big government rigs the game, picking winners and losers. I've got nothing against capitalism, but the buddy-buddy cronyism where Congress, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve decide which companies are "too big to fail," and cuts special deals for politically-connect companies at taxpayer expense -- that's not capitalism, it's Wesley Mouch from Atlas Shrugged.'

DATELINE: FrontPage Magazine
AMERICANS ARE BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND THE LEFT
Dennis Prager: 'There is only one good thing about the Obama administration's attempts to nationalize most health care and to begin to control Americans' energy consumption through cap-and-trade: clarity about the left. These attempts are enabling more and more Americans to understand the thinking and therefore the danger of the left. The left has its first president -- with the possible exception of Franklin Delono Roosevelt -- and for the first time controls the Democratic Party and both houses of Congress. In the name of compassion for the sick and the poor and in the name of preventing worldwide environmental catastrophe, it is attempting to remake America.In so doing some principals of the left are becoming clearer to more Americans....'

DATELINE: Pajamas Media
DOES OBAMA RESEMBLE LINCOLN OR LINCOLN'S ADVERSARIES?
Jeffrey H. Anderson & Darren P. Guerra: 'President Obama likes to encourage comparisons to Abraham Lincoln. Emulating Lincoln, for his inauguration he took a train from Illinois to Washington, D.C., where at his request he took the oath of office with his hand on Lincoln’s bible. Many in the media have made the same connection. Newsweek pictured the two men together on its cover and also depicted a penny featuring Obama’s face in place of Lincoln’s. We too find ourselves frequently thinking of Lincoln when we hear Obama. But what strikes us is not the comparison but the contrast. True, both are lanky former lawyers with a connection to Illinois, and both spent all or part of just a single term in Congress before ascending to the White House. However, these similarities are relatively superficial, while the contrasts run deep. ...In speech, action, and deference to the Constitution and laws, the contrast between Lincoln on slavery and Obama on abortion could hardly be plainer. While Lincoln was clear in speech, moderate in action, and put the Constitution above his most cherished policy goals, Obama has been obfuscatory in speech, immoderate in action, and has put his personal policy goals above the Constitution — including letting those goals strongly influence whom to nominate to the Supreme Court.'

DATELINE: Pajamas Media
THE CONSTITUTION'S FINAL EDIT
Clayton E. Cramer: 'The first House of Representatives had 65 members. Every ten years, a growing population meant a growing House - until in 1911, there were 438 members, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for such a large legislative body to operate. Congress went ahead and set the maximum size at 435 members. From then on, the number of members stayed constant; the number of people per congressional district grew. Today, a member of the House represents almost 700,000 people. If 40,000 people per member of the House in 1787 was "insufficient security for the rights & interests of the people," why are we surprised that Congress is doing such a horrible job at seventeen times that ratio? Did Americans get seventeen times better at watching our Congresscritters between now and then?'

DATELINE: Red State
SAVING THE AMERICAN DREAM
Rep. Michele Bachmann: 'Over the past couple of weeks, I've spoken with the GM and Chrysler car dealerships from my district that have been targeted for total or partial closure by President Obama's Auto Task Force. They were given no reason, and really no recourse to challenge their closure. It is as if someone threw a dart at a dartboard to decide which dealerships would be given a pink slip. In fact, we still do not know the formula used to determine which dealers would remain open, and which ones would close. At one dealership in my district, the owner received an envelope from FedEx with a closure agreement inside, informing them that their highly profitable and nearly century-old business was slated for closure, and that they had twelve days to sign the agreement, or face the consequences. Unbelievably, if they chose not to sign the agreement by the prescribed date, GM would not offer a warranty on any of the remaining cars on their lot. If they challenged the contract in court, the dealers would not only have to pay for their own legal fees, but GM's as well, to the tune of $1,500 per hour - and that was whether they won or lost. And, even if they opted to sign the agreement, they were obligated to send GM their customer lists and service customer lists. It is a lose-lose deal for the owners who are taking it on the chin no matter what their decision. As the owners stressed to me - tactics like this are not the America they know and love. Columnist Michael Barone likened the actions of the Obama Auto Task Force to the tactics of a "gangster government," and I couldn't agree more.'

DATELINE: The Washington Times
WHO KILLED THE ACORN PROBE?
Matthew Vadum: 'Who told House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Michigan Democrat, to lay off the radical activist group ACORN? The 23-term congressman, who has been enamored of the aggressively partisan group for years, gave a truly odd explanation last week when he reaffirmed a May 4 statement that a probe of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) "appears unwarranted at this time." "The powers that be decided against it," he said Wednesday, refusing to elaborate. His spokesman Jonathan Godfrey later said Mr. Conyers was referring to himself as "the powers that be." Unless you believe that "the powers that be" is a novel variation of the editorial "we," it's clear Mr. Conyers wasn't referring to himself and that somebody "got" to him. Judiciary Committee member Steve King, Iowa Republican, doesn't believe Mr. Godfrey. "Who are the powers that be?" he asked Friday. "Speaker Pelosi or President Obama, who has been both an employee and employer of ACORN?" We may have been naive to believe that Mr. Conyers, whose famously obstreperous wife Monica, a Detroit City Council member, pleaded guilty Friday to felony bribery charges, really wanted to examine ACORN's underbelly. After all, Mr. Conyers is a longtime ACORN ally who until recently fought demands to investigate the group.'

DATELINE: The Washington Examiner
THE ADOLESCENT ANGST OF BARACK OBAMA
Michael Barone: 'There is a tendency for newly installed presidents, like adolescents suddenly liberated from adult supervision, to do the exact opposite of what their predecessors did. Presidents of both parties indulge in this behavior, though Democrats who campaign as candidates of hope and change are more likely to do so. Some of this is a legitimate response to the political process: Voters tend to elect presidents who seem to possess qualities and views they thought lacking in their predecessors. But some of it, and especially in the case of Barack Obama, seems to come from an adolescentlike confidence that everything done by those who came before is (insert your own generation’s expletive here). We have seen this spectacularly in the dozen days since the June 12 Iranian election. As parents know, it takes time for an adolescent to grow up.'

DATELINE: The Corner
AGAIN, WHY THE DIFFIDENCE?
Victor Davis Hanson: 'Obama — the Manichean? Of all the puzzling reasons one can adduce both for Barack Obama recent serial apologies abroad, and now his strange silence about human-rights abuses from Venezuela to Iran, I think one of the most likely is his Manichean notion of world affairs — one also reflected in most of the curricula of our major universities. ...Obama is almost more at ease with virulent anti-Westerners, whose grievances Obama has long studied (and perhaps in large part entertained), and whose estrangement alone offers opportunity for Obama’s sophisticated multicultural insight and singular narcissistic magnanimity.'

DATELINE: The Corner
UNDERSTANDING OBAMA ON IRAN
Andrew McCarthy: 'The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society. In this he is no different from his allies like the Congressional Black Caucus and Bill Ayers, who have shown themselves perfectly comfortable with Castro and Chàvez.  Indeed, he is the product of a hard-Left tradition that apologized for Stalin and was more comfortable with the Soviets than the anti-Communists (and that, in Soros parlance, saw George Bush as a bigger terrorist than bin Laden).  Obama has a preferred outcome here, one that is more in line with his worldview, and it is not victory for the freedom fighters. He is hanging as tough as political pragmatism allows, and by doing so he is making his preferred outcome more likely.  That's not weakness, it's strength — and strength of the sort that ought to frighten us.'

DATELINE: Pajamas Media
WHAT DO THESE FIRST SIX MONTHS MEAN?
Victor Davis Hanson: 'I think the Europeans, who, remember, caught Obamania quite early, thought they were going to get more of the bipartisan American security shield, albeit with a charismatic multicultural veneer that would resonate with their citizens: no more Texas. No more Christianity. No more twang. No more nuclur. No more Iraq. But same old NATO. Same old bad cop to their good cop. Same old wide open Ami economy. Same old chance for triangulation.  And? As we are seeing in the Middle East, in the case of Israel, with Turkey, on the recent Iranian upheaval, and during the South America visit, Obama is clearly to the left of Europe. He sees himself more as multicultural prophet born out of the Third World, foe of colonialism, angry at past imperialism, skeptical of capitalism, eager to showcase his non-traditional ancestry and tripartite nomenclature. By coming from the West, but separating himself from the history of his own country, Obama has become a citizen of the world, who polls far higher, as intended, in the Middle East, than does his own country. At no point does he suggest that the fact his father left Kenya for the U.S. and fathered at least one son who would grow up American rather than Kenyan was a great gift, as we see with the ordeal of many of the Obama half-siblings in Africa. Yes, he talks about change in America, but never tells the world exactly how an America of many races and faiths never descends into the hatred and violence we see most elsewhere in diverse societies. How, after all, does one apologize for success? (”I am sorry we are not killing as in the Balkans; so sad we do not follow the Rwandan model; schucks, no Kurd-Shiite-Sunni troubles here.”)'

DATELINE: National Review Online
RETREAT INTO APATHY
Mark Steyn: 'Willie Whitelaw, a genial old buffer who served as Margaret Thatcher’s deputy for many years, once accused the Labour party of going around Britain stirring up apathy. Viscount Whitelaw’s apparent paradox is, in fact, a shrewd political insight, and all the sharper for being accidental. Big government depends, in large part, on going around the country stirring up apathy — creating the sense that problems are so big, so complex, so intractable that even attempting to think about them for yourself gives you such a splitting headache it’s easier to shrug and accept as given the proposition that only government can deal with them. Take health care. Have you read any of these health-care plans? Of course not. They’re huge and turgid and unreadable. Unless you’re a health-care lobbyist, a health-care think-tanker, a health-care correspondent, or some other fellow who’s paid directly or indirectly to plough through this stuff, why bother? None of the senators whose names are on the bills have read ’em; why should you? And you can understand why they drag on a bit. If you attempt to devise a health-care “plan” for 300 million people, it’s bound to get a bit complicated. But a health-care plan for you, Joe Schmoe of 27 Elm Street, didn’t used to be that complicated, did it?'

DATELINE: Pajamas Media
IN DRESDEN, OBAMA DOES NOT DISAPPOINT...GERMANS
John Rosenthal: 'For his home audience in the United States, the focus of President Obama’s brief visit to Germany was, undoubtedly, Buchenwald. But for Germans, it was all Dresden. As discussed in my earlier PJM report [1] here, for Germans Dresden has become the symbol bar none of German suffering at the hands of the Allies and even of Allied “war crimes.” Dresden was the target of heavy Allied bombing in February 1945 and much of the city was destroyed in the attacks. Neo-Nazis make an annual pilgrimage to the city to commemorate the event, the most famous episode in what they describe as a “bombing Holocaust.” But the notion that the Allied raids constituted a “crime” against Germans and Germany is by no means the reserve of Nazis. It has, in the meanwhile, become part of the German mainstream.'

DATELINE: The Corner
'A MAJOR DECLINE IN HUMAN HISTORY'
Anne Bayefsky: 'President Obama’s Cairo speech was nothing short of an earthquake — a distortion of history, an insult to the Jewish people, and an abandonment of very real human-rights victims in the Arab and Muslim worlds. It is not surprising that Arabs and Muslims in a position to speak were enthusiastic. It is more surprising that American commentators are praising the speech for its political craftiness, rather than decrying its treachery of historic proportions. ...President Obama’s meticulously planned and executed Egyptian speech marks the lowest point in the U.S. presidency’s understanding and appreciation of the Jewish state, its history, and its people’s future. Added to his administration’s evident infirmity on Iran, the speech of June 4, 2009, by the supposed leader of the free world will be remembered as a major decline in human history.'

DATELINE: Pajamas Media
THE RECKONING
Victor Davis Hanson: 'Obama's make-over will have positive short-term effects, as he reminds the world ad nauseam that he is black, sorta, kinda from a Muslim family, and the son of an African who is more like the world than he like most Americans-and not George Bush and not a thieving capitalist and not a warmongering imperialist and not (fill in the blanks). (My favorite Cairo line was the apology on Gitmo where inmates have laptops and Mediterranean food, spoken to millions whose societies kill and maim tens of thousands in Gulags on a yearly basis.) He hits against human nature. Most of you readers-in business, law, the professions-don't continually praise your friends, competitors, and enemies (e.g., "Glad you got that job, Home Depot-we at Lowes didn't really need it; what a wonderful bid you submitted, Hilton, much better than ours here at the Four Seasons; it was my fault here at Goldman Sachs that I didn't match your better offer at Credit Suisse; I grew up working for the Royals, and can empathize why you Yankees don't like us; it's time we at Citibank apologized to Chase for our past cutthroat competition; we are just too arrogant over here at Delta and wanted to let you guys at United know that.") The world sadly does not work that way. If one were to do that, we know the outcome: a group of rival execs would say "Hmmm, time to steal market share from Citibank, or Hilton isn't really up to the arena anymore, let's move in on its Western region, etc." Only someone who has not been in the real world, but only marketed rhetoric without consequences (e.g., if Obama had a bad day organizing, or legislating, was he fired?) could believe such things. In short, Obama reminds me a little of myself-at 26.'

DATELINE: Pajamas Media
AMERICA'S FIRST POSTMODERN PRESIDENT, SUPREME COURT JUSTICE, TREASURY SECRETARY...
Victor Davis Hanson: 'One of the chief tenets of postmodernism is relativism - the notion that neither morality nor wisdom is absolute and definable, but instead simply predicated on what those with power and advantage say they are. In response, the postmodernist sees "competing truths" and "rival moralities" that are of at least roughly equal merit. Indeed, those marginalized often have a higher claim on truth and knowledge by the very fact of their prior exploitation that becomes a force multiplier of their more authentic ideas and empathetic beliefs. Those who disagree, and "privilege" a timeless, abstract truth or morality, can easily be "deconstructed" or "unpacked" to reveal a particular selfish agenda that involves the perpetuation of power and privilege. These canards are as old as the sophistic movement in ancient Athens, but they became popular again in the 1980s and 1990s in the academic world. And now we are beginning to see their emergence into the highest levels of government - which in the age of Obama is almost entirely comprised of those who learned their technocracy in our nation's elite universities.'

DATELINE: The Corner
HOLDER REVERSES MUKASEY RULING ON ALIENS' "RIGHT" TO COUNSEL IN REMOVAL CASES
Andrew McCarthy: 'The Legal Times is reporting that Attorney General Holder has reversed the ruling by Attorney General Mukasey that aliens in immigration removal proceedings have no right to effective assistance of counsel.  As Mukasey explained back in January, in a well-reasoned 34-page opinion which carefully analyzed the pertinent law, the Sixth Amendment right to counsel applies only to criminal cases. Thus, it does not apply to removal under the immigration laws, which is civil, not criminal, in nature. Immigrants in removal cases are allowed to have counsel if they wish, but they must retain lawyers on their own, at no expense to the taxpayers. About 20 years ago, however, immigration judges (who tend to have been immigration lawyers before becoming immigration judges) fabricated a right to effective assistance of counsel for removable aliens under — you guessed it — the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment (that bottomless reservoir of "our values" which, of course, guarantees no such thing).'

DATELINE: National Review Online
BURKE AND OBAMA
Thomas Sowell: 'The other day I sought a respite from current events by rereading some of the writings of the 18th-century British statesman Edmund Burke. But it was not nearly as big an escape as I had thought it would be. When Burke wrote of his apprehension about “new power in new persons,” I could not help thinking of the new powers that have been created by which a new president of the United States — a man with zero experience in business — can fire the head of General Motors and tell banks how to run their businesses. Not only is Barack Obama new to the presidency, he is new to running any organization. One of Burke’s fears was that “we may place our confidence in the virtue of those who have never been tried.” Neither eloquence nor zeal is a substitute for experience, according to Burke. He said, “eloquence may exist without a proportionate degree of wisdom.” As for zeal, Burke said: “It is no excuse for presumptuous ignorance that it is directed by insolent passion.”'

DATELINE: The American Spectator
TWO WORDS FOR ROD DREHER
Robert Stacy McCain: '[Rahm] Emanuel's tenure as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the 2006 election cycle is the model Republicans must attempt to reverse-engineer if they hope to regain power in Washington anytime soon. And Republicans are never going to succeed if they listen to those who tell them the reason they've been losing elections is that the GOP is too "mean-spirited." Ever since Rush Limbaugh spoke the Four Words Nobody Is Allowed to Say About Obama -- "I hope he fails" -- Republicans have heard a symphonic serenade from a chorus of critics who insist that blunt words and other such mean-spiritedness are the essential sources of their party's woes. Chief among the choirboys of niceness is Rod Dreher.... When a guy begins a fight by slamming a barstool into the back of your head, the Marquis of Queensberry rules do not apply. If you respond by ripping open his carotid artery with the jagged edge of a broken beer bottle, whose fault is that? ("He needed killing," as Texans like to say.)'

DATELINE: The Fox Forum
THE VAT TAX: BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID
Phil Kerpen: 'In today’s Washington Post, the White House floats a really scary trial balloon—a new national Value-Added Tax (VAT) to pay for out-of-control spending and a Washington take over of health care.  Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad appears to be on board.  So does Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, who has been hired by the White House budget office to help design the health care plan and whose book on health care uses a VAT to fund the new government program.  Obama economic adviser Paul Volcker is also on-board the VAT-train. What is the VAT?  It’s a type of national sales tax that is collected in pieces throughout the production chain, instead of being collected all at once at the cash register like a retail sales tax.  In theory, sales taxes like the VAT are pretty good taxes because they are broad-based, difficult to evade, and minimize economic distortions.  In practice, they are the ATM machine for runaway government growth, because they are largely invisible to the public and they can raise huge amounts of money in very small chunks, thus minimizing the effective political opposition that generally keeps taxes in check.'
[tip of the fedora to Matthew Vadum]

DATELINE: National Review Online
I'M ALL RIGHT, BARACK
Iain Murray: 'President Obama’s takeover of General Motors is a disaster in the making. What we now face is a nationalized car maker, with the government owning 51 percent of the company and the United Auto Workers (UAW) union holding a stunning 38 percent of shares. Bondholders, who normally have first claim on a company’s assets, receive only 10 percent instead, and the current stockholders get the remaining 1 percent. The GM nationalization ignores the lessons of history, and its terms are plainly unjust. The UAW, acting for its members who are former workers and GM pensioners, did indeed represent something like $20 billion worth of GM’s liabilities. So the idea that the union should get an equity stake in return for that is fair enough. However, the UAW is getting three times as much as the bondholders, who represent $28 billion of GM’s outstanding liability. When the bondholders protested, the administration refused to meet with them. Britain became the “sick man of Europe” because of the cozy relationship between free-spending government and labor unions. The phrase “I’m all right, Jack” came to symbolize the auto unions’ attitude toward those who suffered by their actions.'

DATELINE: The American Spectator
OBAMA THE DESTROYER
Quin Hillyer: 'If somebody were deliberately trying to undermine the very fabric of these United States, he would first vow not just to change its policies but to completely "change America," and then would do just about everything Barack Obama already has begun to do as president. In short, to undermine the United States, the president would, as fast as possible, create a massively debt-ridden, tax-ridden, regulation-ridden government whose prosecutors play political favorites but whose stances on the world stage are marked by weakness, self-criticism, and solicitousness towards one's enemies.'

DATELINE: The New Criterion
IT'S A DIFFERENT COUNTRY
James Bowman: '...today in America, we are also living in a different country. True, we have not yet brought our soldiers home for lack of money, though anyone looking at the rate at which our government is now spending borrowed money — always assuming that we can go on borrowing at the current, ruinous pace — would be a fool to assure himself that that won’t happen here, probably sooner rather than later. The withdrawal from world leadership, if and when it happens, will only be a symptom of a larger change, and one which became apparent last November when we elected Barack Obama.'

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...'

PHOTOS
of
 B.H.O.

OUR FEARLESS LEADER

Barack Hussein Obama

'Not that Obama considers himself divine. (He sees himself as merely messianic, or, at worst, apostolic.) But he does position himself as hovering above mere mortals, mere country, to gaze benignly upon the darkling plain beneath him where ignorant armies clash by night, blind to the common humanity that only he can see. Traveling the world, he brings the gospel of understanding and godly forbearance. We have all sinned against each other. We must now look beyond that and walk together to the sunny uplands of comity and understanding. He shall guide you....'
—Charles Krauthammer [12 June 2009]

WHAT? ME WORRY?

THE JOKER...

...But Take Him Seriously 'Cause He Means It