A friend sends along the following chart from a J.P. Morgan research report. It examines the prior private sector experience of the cabinet officials since 1900 that one might expect a president to turn to in seeking advice about helping the economy. It includes secretaries of State, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Energy, and Housing & Urban Development, and excludes Postmaster General, Navy, War, Health, Education & Welfare, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security—432 cabinet members in all.
When one considers that public sector employment has ranged since the 1950s at between 15 percent and 19 percent of the population, the makeup of the current cabinet—over 90 percent of its prior experience was in the public sector—is remarkable.
Check out all the posts on the idiots at ACORN being taken down one office at a time by Andrew Breitbart and company. This is beautiful to see stupidity finally rewarded – ACORN document dump
That’s the story we’re thinking of today as we see the White House announce a lavish state dinner with a Hollywood Who’s Who of liberaldom in attendance, at a time when not only most Americans are struggling to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads, but when Dr. Utopia and his fashion icon wife have decided that Jews are not worth spending the normal Hannakhah budget on.
The White House gutted the annual Hannakhah party by half.
They claimed they needed to cut costs and could not afford to throw a lavish party with that many guests.
Yet, the Utopias are throwing one of the most lavish, extravagant, spendthrift celebrations Washington has seen in YEARS to delight the multimillionaire spoiled children of Hollywood (which will have more guests than the Hannakhah party would have). The premise is a state dinner for India; the reality is that it’s an overblown, Mrs. Utopia-inspired, “let them eat curry”, tented bougie affair using India as an excuse to have all of Hollywood fly in on private jets, carbon footprints be damned.
Normally, a state dinner like this would be held inside the White House itself, without a tent. But, what’s a big Hollywood party without a tent? Oprah always has a tent at her parties in Montecito, and that’s just the Muumuu she wears to the breakfast trough hours before the actual party begins.
If you’re not a global warming geek, the point of the material is that we have apparent — and I only say apparent at this point — written admissions of cooking the books, among other nastiness, by the leading names in the global warming alarmist movement.
You have less than 48 hours to contact your senators and tell them to oppose Harry Reid’s Health Care Abomination:
I knew that there is a manifest, marked distinction, which ill men with ill designs, or weak men incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding, that is, a marked distinction between change and reformation. The former alters the substance of the objects themselves; and gets rid of all their essential good, as well as of all the accidental evil, annexed to them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot be certainly known beforehand. Reform is, not a change in the substance, or in the primary modification, of the object, but, a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all is sure. It stops there; and, if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was. – Edmund Burke
Now that we’ve covered the jihad-related red flags that were missed, we can start in with the professional red flags that were missed. How horrible was this guy at his job? So horrible that private shrinks tell NPR they wouldn’t have hired him even if they were desperate for people. He was, quite seriously, a hazard to his patients long before he ever picked up a gun. And the Army knew it, and sent him to Fort Hood anyway — along with the radioactive evaluation. Unbelievable:
The memo ticks off numerous problems over the course of Hasan’s training, including proselytizing to his patients. It says he mistreated a homicidal patient and allowed her to escape from the emergency room, and that he blew off an important exam…
“There are all kinds of warning signs, flashing red lights, that, in terms of just this paragraph, you’d say, ‘Oh, no, this is not somebody that we would take a chance on.’ ”
Sharfstein says that in the 25 years he has been supervising and hiring psychiatrists, he has seen only a half-dozen evaluations this bad…
Broder says that soldiers seeking therapy may be falling apart, filled with rage and a distrust of authority. What those soldiers need, she says, is a psychiatrist they can trust completely — not a therapist who fails to show up and abandons his patients.
“This kind of behavior could, in fact, set off a stress reaction” in a patient, she says. “It could be a trigger to a post-traumatic stress reaction.”
Another possible warning sign: Sometimes he didn’t answer his phone when … he was on call for emergencies. The easy explanation here is that the military’s so strapped for psychiatrists to treat people that even this turd made the cut…
This may explain why the Statists in the government are in such a rush to take over health care in our country:
As Congress debates a possible major expansion of health insurance in the United States, Gallup finds 38% of Americans rating healthcare coverage in this country as excellent or good, the highest by eight percentage points in the nine-year history of this question, and 12 points above last year’s level.
Attorney General Holder has several times offered a spirited defense of federal prosecutors — including expressions of confidence that KSM and the other jihadists will be convicted. This is a strawman: There’s no reason to defend people who are not being attacked, and conviction is not the issue…
It’s not whether the government wins the litigation; it’s whether the national security of the United States has been harmed more by having the trial than it would have been harmed by handling the detainees in a different manner.
What made the United States most vulnerable in the Nineties was our enemies’ perception that they were at war and we were not. They gave us bombs, we gave them rights. That encouraged them to attack us more often and more audaciously — which is exactly what they did.
Further, if we are going to have military commissions at all (and Holder says we will continue to have them), it makes no sense to transfer the worst war criminals to the civilian system. Doing so tells the enemy that they will get more rights if they mass-murder civilians.
The question is not whether the prosecutors are able, whether they’ll do a spectacular job, and whether they’ll get these guys. They are extraordinarily competent, they will perform at a very high level, and I’ll be shocked if they don’t win the case. The issue is: What damage will we sustain by doing things this way, and is there a way we could do them without sustaining that much damage?
As the dean of Harvard Medical School I am frequently asked to comment on the health-reform debate. I’d give it a failing grade…
There are important lessons to be learned from recent experience with reform in Massachusetts. Here, insurance mandates similar to those proposed in the federal legislation succeeded in expanding coverage but—despite initial predictions—increased total spending. – JEFFREY S. FLIER
So, leaking characterizations is bad? Someone call the New York Times, The One does not approve of leaks. I am sure they don’t have anything in the works but it would be wise to warn the allies in the MSM.
Can anyone show me where Obama was ever concerned about the leaks during the Bush administration that actually put people in danger and compromised national security? I can wait.
Obama, speaking to CBS in Beijing, says he’s “furious” about the stream of leaks characterizing the Afghanistan deliberations.
THE PRESIDENT: “I think I am angrier than Bob Gates about it, partly because we have these deliberations in the Situation Room for a reason – because we are making decisions that are life-and-death, that affect how our troops will be able to operate in a theater of war. For people to be releasing information during the course of deliberation — where we haven’t made final decisions yet — I think is not appropriate.”
CHIP REID: “Firing offense??”
THE PRESIDENT: “Absolutely”
What’s odd about this is that many of the leaks (though certainly not all) have seemed deliberate, in tandem with Flickr photo releases from the meetings and in line with a message that Obama is considering deeply. And indeed, leaking has been a signature of the transition from the Plouffe/campaign era to a governing era run by Rahm Emanuel, who talks frequently to the press and whose hiring was one of the first major Obama leaks. Leaks from more senior officials make lower-level staffers, in turn, feel that it’s not actually a firing offense.
Reviewing books and holding public figures accountable is at the core of good journalism, but the Associated Press’ treatment of Palin’s book seems an unprecedented move at the wire service.
Sarah Palin is no normal politician, and at the Associated Press, apparently “Going Rogue” is no normal book.
When the former Republican vice presidential candidate and former Alaska governor wrote her autobiography, the AP found a copy before its release date and assigned 11 people to fact check all 432 pages.
The AP claims Palin misstated her record with regard to travel expenses and taxpayer-funded bailouts, using statements widely reported elsewhere. But it also speculated into Palin’s motives for writing “Going Rogue: An American Life,” stating as fact that the book “has all the characteristics of a pre-campaign manifesto.”
Palin quickly hit back on a Facebook post titled “Really? Still Making Things Up?”
“Imagine that,” the post read. “11 AP reporters dedicating time and resources to tearing up the book, instead of using the time and resources to ‘fact check’ what’s going on with Sheik Mohammed’s trial, Pelosi’s health care takeover costs, Hasan’s associations, etc. Amazing.”
[...]
Reviewing books and holding public figures accountable is at the core of good journalism, but the treatment Palin’s book received appears to be something new for the AP. The organization did not review for accuracy recent books by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, then-Sen. Joe Biden, either book by Barack Obama released before he was president or autobiographies by Bill or Hillary Clinton. The AP did more traditional news stories on those books.
I am sure the victims of this traitor/terrorist appreciate the Army’s sensitivity and concern for the Major and his overt, but protected, beliefs:
Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s military superiors repeatedly ignored or rebuffed his efforts to open criminal prosecutions of soldiers he claimed had confessed to “war crimes” during psychiatric counseling, according to investigative reports circulated among federal law enforcement officials…
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) – Iran has sentenced five people to death over the unrest that followed the country’s disputed June presidential election, state television reported Tuesday.At least three others caught up in the turmoil have received death sentences previously.
Iran began a mass trial in August of prominent opposition figures and activists, accusing them of a range of charges from rioting to spying and plotting what authorities have called a “soft revolution” to topple the country’s Islamic rulers.
The opposition led massive street protests and clashed with security forces in the weeks following the disputed June 12 presidential election. The opposition claimed fraud after election authorities declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner of a second term and their anger unleashed the most serious internal unrest in Iran in the 30 years since the Islamic Revolution.
The Iranian people thank you for your support, Mr. Obama. They are happy to know you don’t give a crap about promoting liberty and freedom for those oppressed by religious nut-job dictators.
At least they know that now…
Ever notice how his majesty, er, our President can’t go a week without interjecting himself into the speeches and media appearances he makes? Many have…
John J. Pitney Jr. comments on a recent moment of ego-centrism on the part of Dear Leader:
“As America’s first Pacific president,” said President Obama in Tokyo, “I promise you that this Pacific nation will strengthen and sustain our leadership in this vitally important part of the world.”
It is true that the president was born in Hawaii (sorry, birthers), lived from ages six to ten in Indonesia, and attended a Honolulu prep school. But he is not our first Pacific president. Richard Nixon was born in California in 1913, and spent much more of his life in the Pacific region than the current president has. Moreover, while Barack Obama made his career in Chicago and Springfield, Ronald Reagan made his in Los Angeles and Sacramento.
And the incumbent is hardly the first chief executive to have lived in another Pacific Rim country. William Howard Taft was governor-general of the Philippines. Dwight Eisenhower had military postings in the Philippines and the Panama Canal Zone. Herbert Hoover worked as a mining engineer in Australia and China; he even learned to speak Mandarin. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Bush 41 all served in the Pacific during the Second World War. What they did as adults was perhaps more consequential than what Obama did as a child.
But Obama was born there so nothing else matters, right?
‘This is a prosecutorial decision as well as a national security decision,” President Barack Obama said last week about the attorney general’s announcement that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al Qaeda operatives will be put on trial in New York City federal court.
No, it is not. It is a presidential decision—one about the hard, ever-present trade-off between civil liberties and national security.
Trying KSM in civilian court will be an intelligence bonanza for al Qaeda and the hostile nations that will view the U.S. intelligence methods and sources that such a trial will reveal. The proceedings will tie up judges for years on issues best left to the president and Congress.
Whether a jury ultimately convicts KSM and his fellows, or sentences them to death, is beside the point. The treatment of the 9/11 attacks as a criminal matter rather than as an act of war will cripple American efforts to fight terrorism. It is in effect a declaration that this nation is no longer at war…
Now, however, KSM and his co-defendants will enjoy the benefits and rights that the Constitution accords to citizens and resident aliens—including the right to demand that the government produce in open court all of the information that it has on them, and how it got it.
Prosecutors will be forced to reveal U.S. intelligence on KSM, the methods and sources for acquiring its information, and his relationships to fellow al Qaeda operatives. The information will enable al Qaeda to drop plans and personnel whose cover is blown. It will enable it to detect our means of intelligence-gathering, and to push forward into areas we know nothing about.
This is not hypothetical, as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has explained. During the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (aka the “blind Sheikh”), standard criminal trial rules required the government to turn over to the defendants a list of 200 possible co-conspirators.
In essence, this list was a sketch of American intelligence on al Qaeda. According to Mr. McCarthy, who tried the case, it was delivered to bin Laden in Sudan on a silver platter within days of its production as a court exhibit.
Bin Laden, who was on the list, could immediately see who was compromised. He also could start figuring out how American intelligence had learned its information and anticipate what our future moves were likely to be…
KSM’s lawyers will not save the government from itself. Instead they will press hard to reveal intelligence secrets in open court. Our intelligence agents and soldiers will be the ones to suffer.
Then again, that may be exactly what the President and his Attorney General wish to happen.
It’s not as if the President has been truthful or consistent during his occupancy of the White House on these serious matters. Just look at his previous comments on trying terrorists:
History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. – Dwight David Eisenhower
President Obama and his merry band of Statists idiots have failed. They have failed – again and again, and it will continue.
At some point you chowder-heads who voted for this amateur are going to see the damage he is doing to the country. He’s created more debt than EVERY PRESIDENT WHO CAME BEFORE HIM COMBINED.
I don’t expect you O-bots to understand the damage he is doing to our military, maybe because you don’t care. I don’t know.
I know the president doesn’t really care about our service men and women and their mission. He doesn’t care the same way other presidents cared about our men and women in uniform at home or abroad. He showed it before the campaign. He pretended to be something else during the campaign. He has faked and postured his way from Dover to Arlington to Fort Hood attempting to convince the nation that he has their best interests in mind and supports their mission.
And now as ‘His Ditherness’ struggles to find the lint in his bellybutton, our finest, our bravest, our most patriotic sit, wait, bleed, and die while the “smart power” you voted in as your new ‘American Idol’ makes a f’ing decision about the “necessary war”, the central front on the War on Terror, that he chided President Bush and John McCain over. You know the war that Candidate Obama thought was sooo important:
“His plan comes up short. There’s not enough troops, not enough resources and not enough urgency. What President Bush and Senator McCain don’t understand is that the central front in the War on Terror is not in Iraq and never was. The central front is in Afghanistan and Pakistan where the terrorists who hit us on 9-11 are still plotting attacks seven years later.”
I am sure the ripples of HOPE® and CHANGE® are reaching our troops here and across the ocean in the dusty military posts, forts, and bases knowing that Barack Hussein Obama – mmm, mmm, mmm – is on his way to save the day with his own plan.
Morale has fallen among soldiers in Afghanistan, where troops are seeing record violence in the 8-year-old war, while those in Iraq show much improved mental health amid much lower violence, the Army said Friday…
Though findings of two new battlefield surveys are similar in several ways to the last ones taken in 2007, they come at a time of intense scrutiny on Afghanistan as President Barack Obama struggles to craft a new war strategy and planned troop buildup.
Obama “struggles” because he has no f’ing backbone and no clue about fighting for anything more than a community center or the Olympic Games.
He struggles because he doesn’t trust his military leaders. The people in our country who have led lives of substance, sacrifice, and purpose for decades already.
Obama’s never done anything of substance beyond be a lawyer and politician – two of the lowest professions possible falling in right next to prostitutes and thieves, but wait, I repeat myself.
It takes more to be a member of today’s military and face the uncertainties of war than it does to demagogue to the likes of SEIU, ACORN, Organizing for America, Egyptians, Germans, and guilty white Americans, when you yourself have stated you have not done anything of measure.
click for larger
So, it comes as no surprise our Commander-in-Chief is already looking to run away instead of fighting against evil ruthless radical religious zealots who torture and terrorize innocents in the name of Allah:
President Barack Obama’s strategy for Afghanistan will include a plan for “how we’re going to get folks out” after a secure environment can be passed to the Afghan government, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters aboard Air Force One on Thursday.
“We have been there for eight years. And we’re not going to be there forever,” Gibbs said. “It’s important to fully examine not just how we’re going to get folks in but how we’re going to get folks out.”
Gibbs spoke en route to Alaska, where the president stopped at an Air Force base in Anchorage before traveling on to Tokyo for his maiden trip to Asia, which will take him to Japan, Singapore, China and South Korea.
The president “has asked for, and will want, benchmarks to evaluate our progress,” Gibbs said. “That’s part of his desire to get a sense of where we are rather than committing to an open-ended conflict.”
But whatever the reason, this man is making a mockery of our country and our military. He is destroying our economy. He is destroying our way of life. He is rewarding failure and taking away our liberty. He is destroying 230+ years of real human progress. And he intended to do it ever since he fell in with the pathetic refuse that surrounds him.
Osama bin Laden was right when he called the America a “Paper Tiger” in his declaration of war against our nation, he knew more about the majority of us than we would like to believe.
The impressionable useful idiots in our nation who believe HOPE® and CHANGE® are actually something more than novelty.
As long as the Democrats, Statists, Liberals, Progressives, and sheep of this nation lead us, a paper tiger is all we will be and we will continue our decline because of them.
There’s been plenty of debate about President Barack Obama’s omission of the word “terrorism” when he spoke Tuesday at Fort Hood to honor the 13 Americans shot to death and dozens wounded last week by a Muslim army psychiatrist, Nidal Hasan. More broadly troubling to my mind is a word that Obama did use: “incomprehensible.”
[...]
“These Americans did not die on a foreign field of battle. They were killed here, on American soil, in the heart of this great state and the heart of this great American community. This is the fact that makes the tragedy even more painful, even more incomprehensible.”
That might be language appropriate for a private conversation with the bereaved, whose interests may well center on the unfathomable ways of death and loss. But Obama was not holding a private conversation. Onstage at Fort Hood, he was speaking not only to the immediate survivors, but to the nation.
In that context, the death dealt out on a routine day, in deepest America, by the hand of someone yelling “Allahu Akbar,” is not only comprehensible, but a predictable feature of this war against the United States. [emphasis added - jcrue] We may not know exactly where or on which day the next attack will occur, or with what weapons. But this is a war of many dimensions, in which ideas preached in one part of the globe can translate swiftly into murder–more aptly known as terrorism–in another…
If that truth seems too obvious to bear repeating, then why, at a freighted emotional moment, in a speech watched by the world, does it elude the president of the United States? [I have an opinion on that but if you have ever been here before, I don't need to explain it - jcrue]
[...]
President Bush understood this, and during his first term pushed the frontlines of this war back from New York, Washington and skies over Pennsylvania to the home turf of America’s enemies. He toppled two of America’s most aggressive and brutal foes–Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the al-Qaida-hosting Taliban in Afghanistan. He cowed and harassed their despotic brethren with his push to promote their worst nightmare: freedom for their own people.
Political correctness is a disease and one of the most debilitating agendas in our military.
It can be argued that fear of the backlash allowed the terrorist traitor Major Hasan to be able to murder his fellow soldiers. It can also be argued that it impedes our military leaders in their decision-making and their grasp of reality. It adversely affects those in charge of troops for fear of being investigated for discrimination when a promotion is denied or punitive actions are taking against others of a different race, religion, or background.
Worst it prevents our Commander-in-Chief and other politicians like him from being honest with the American people about the threats we face both foreign and domestic. It allows them to hide behind vague statements and cowardly rhetoric in their speeches – where no mention of terrorism, terrorists, terrorist acts, Muslims, or Islam are included for fear of what backlash these accurate, but touchy, subjects may cause.
We are cowards in our own country.
Here are a few examples of the political correction BS in our nation that is going on starting with the little know and moving to the big topic at hand:
An insufficiently colorful color guard? (via Powerline)
How deep does the culture of political correctness run in the military and the service academies? We’re getting some idea in the case of Major Nidal Malik Hasan. The Hasan story has rightly overwhelmed the news. Evidence of the red flags preceding his murder spree continues to accumulate and enrage. One inevitably sees in the disregarded red flags a case of political correctness run amok.
The story of the Naval Academy’s insufficiently colorful color guard has not quite broken out yet, and perhaps it won’t, but it provides additional context to the case of Nidal Hasan. It appears that Naval Academy senior commanders decided during the World Series to remove two Midshipmen from the color guard that appeared. What was their offense? The color guard was deemed too white and too male. There was accordingly a push to make the color guard more “diverse.” (more…)
On Thursday afternoon, a radicalized Muslim US Army officer shouting, “Allahu akbar!” (“God is great!”) committed the worst act of terror on American soil since 9/11. And no one wants to call it an act of terror or associate it with Islam.
What cowards we are. Political correctness killed those patriotic Americans at Fort Hood as surely as the Islamist gunman did. And the media treat it like a case of nondenominational shoplifting.
Hours after the Fort Hood massacre, a grieving nation looked to the president for consolation and leadership. Instead, it got light banter and a “shout-out” before President Obama read a perfunctory statement. The president has always had a reputation for coolness, but in this case, he was utterly detached. He can’t blame the scriptwriter for his astonishing lack of empathy.
Mr. Obama was scheduled to speak at the Tribal Nations Conference hosted by the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. Rather than canceling the photo op or addressing the tragedy from another venue, the president chose to open with the kind of obligatory thanks and recognitions that would be appropriate in any other circumstance but not this one. The emotional shift was jarring and confusing. It was as though he were an actor switching scripts heedless of the emotional content of the event he was addressing.
Mr. Obama recently came under criticism, chiefly from liberals, for visiting New Orleans but declining to view the damage from Hurricane Katrina. One local blogger dubbed it the “tinkle-stop tour.” “Not even a flyover,” one resident complained, referring to President George W. Bush’s aerial tour of the ravaged city, which many mark as the beginning of his decline in popularity.
Mr. Bush also suffered his critics’ ire for reading “The Pet Goat” to a group of schoolchildren at Emma E. Booker Elementary School after he was informed of the aircraft hitting the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. He was charged with being out of touch, indecisive, tuned out. He was said to be unable to grasp the significance of the events unfolding around him.
The new president’s performance on Thursday afternoon was similar. As an anxious nation looked for reassurance, it saw a president conducting business as usual, seemingly unaware of the magnitude of the tragedy. By the time he got to his statement, the damage was done. It was Mr. Obama’s “Pet Goat” moment.
The man accused of killing 13 people and wounding 29 at Fort Hood is able to talk, a hospital spokesman said Monday, but it’s unknown when investigators might take advantage of his improving health to press forward with their probe into the shooting spree….
Sixteen victims remained hospitalized with gunshot wounds, and seven were in intensive care.
How can there possibly be liberty and justice for all, when, in the name of justice, people claim rights to income, food, housing, education, health care, transportation, ad infinitum? We can’t. Positive rights to receive such things, absent an obligation to earn them, must violate others’ liberty, by taking some of their income without their consent. They are really just wishes, convertible into benefits for some only by employing the government to violate others’ rights not to have what is theirs taken. –Prof. Gary Galles of Pepperdine University
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." - The 10th Amendment of the United States Constitution
